4774	----	This eBook was produced by Tony Adam. THE MERRY DEVILL OF EDMONTON (DRAMATIS PERSONAE.) Sir Arthur Clare. Sir Richard Mounchensey. Sir Ralph Jerningham. Henry Clare. Raymond Mounchensey. Frank Jerningham. Sir John [a Priest]. Banks [the Miller of Waltham]. Smug [the Smith of Edmonton]. Bilbo. [Blague the] Host. Brian. [Raph, Brian's man.] [Friar Hildersham.] [Benedick.] [Chamberlaine.] [Coreb, a Spirit.] Fabel [the Merry Devil]. Lady Clare. Millisent. Abbess. Sexton. Nuns and Attendants. The Prologue. Your silence and attention, worthy friends, That your free spirits may with more pleasing sense Relish the life of this our active scene: To which intent, to calm this murmuring breath, We ring this round with our invoking spells; If that your listning ears be yet prepard To entertain the subject of our play, Lend us your patience. Tis Peter Fabell, a renowned Scholler, Whose fame hath still been hitherto forgot By all the writers of this latter age. In Middle-sex his birth and his abode, Not full seven mile from this great famous City, That, for his fame in sleights and magicke won, Was calde the merry Friend of Emonton. If any here make doubt of such a name, In Edmonton yet fresh unto this day, Fixt in the wall of that old antient Church, His monument remayneth to be seen; His memory yet in the mouths of men, That whilst he lived he could deceive the Devill. Imagine now that whilst he is retirde From Cambridge back unto his native home, Suppose the silent, sable visagde night Casts her black curtain over all the World; And whilst he sleeps within his silent bed, Toiled with the studies of the passed day, The very time and hour wherein that spirit That many years attended his command, And often times twixt Cambridge and that town Had in a minute borne him through the air, By composition twixt the fiend and him, Comes now to claim the Scholler for his due. [Draw the Curtains.] Behold him here, laid on his restless couch, His fatal chime prepared at his head, His chamber guarded with these sable slights, And by him stands that Necromanticke chair, In which he makes his direfull invocations, And binds the fiends that shall obey his will. Sit with a pleased eye, until you know The Commicke end of our sad Tragique show. [Exit.] INDUCTION. [The Chime goes, in which time Fabell is oft seen to stare about him, and hold up his hands.] FABELL. What means the tolling of this fatal chime? O, what a trembling horror strikes my heart! My stiffned hair stands upright on my head, As do the bristles of a porcupine. [Enter Coreb, a Spirit.] COREB. Fabell, awake, or I will bear thee hence Headlong to hell. FABELL. Ha, ha, Why dost thou wake me? Coreb, is it thou? COREB. Tis I. FABELL. I know thee well: I hear the watchful dogs With hollow howling tell of thy approach; The lights burn dim, affrighted with thy presence; And this distemperd and tempestuous night Tells me the air is troubled with some Devill. COREB. Come, art thou ready? FABELL. Whither? or to what? COREB. Why, Scholler, this the hour my date expires; I must depart, and come to claim my due. FABELL. Hah, what is thy due? COREB. Fabell, thy self. FABELL. O, let not darkness hear thee speak that word, Lest that with force it hurry hence amain, And leave the world to look upon my woe: Yet overwhelm me with this globe of earth, And let a little sparrow with her bill Take but so much as she can bear away, That, every day thus losing of my load, I may again in time yet hope to rise. COREB. Didst thou not write thy name in thine own blood, And drewst the formall deed twixt thee and me, And is it not recorded now in hell? FABELL. Why comst thou in this stern and horrid shape, Not in familiar sort, as thou wast wont? COREB. Because the date of thy command is out, And I am master of thy skill and thee. FABELL. Coreb, thou angry and impatient spirit, I have earnest business for a private friend; Reserve me, spirit, until some further time. COREB. I will not for the mines of all the earth. FABELL. Then let me rise, and ere I leave the world, Dispatch some business that I have to do; And in mean time repose thee in that chair. COREB. Fabell, I will. [Sit down.] FABELL. O, that this soul, that cost so great a price As the dear precious blood of her redeemer, Inspired with knowledge, should by that alone Which makes a man so mean unto the powers, Even lead him down into the depth of hell, When men in their own pride strive to know more Then man should know! For this alone God cast the Angels down. The infinity of Arts is like a sea, Into which, when man will take in hand to sail Further then reason, which should be his pilot, Hath skill to guide him, losing once his compass, He falleth to such deep and dangerous whirl-pools As he doth lose the very sight of heaven: The more he strives to come to quiet harbor, The further still he finds himself from land. Man, striving still to find the depth of evil, Seeking to be a God, becomes a Devil. COREB. Come, Fabell, hast thou done? FABELL. Yes, yes; come hither. COREB. Fabell, I cannot. FABELL. Cannot?--What ails your hollownes? COREB. Good Fabell, help me. FABELL. Alas, where lies your grief? Some Aqua-vitae! The Devil's very sick, I fear he'll die, For he looks very ill. COREB. Darst thou deride the minister of darkness? In Lucifer's dread name Coreb conjures thee To set him free. FABELL. I will not for the mines of all the earth, Unless thou give me liberty to see Seven years more, before thou seize on me. COREB. Fabell, I give it thee. FABELL. Swear, damned fiend. COREB. Unbind me, and by hell I will not touch thee, Till seven years from this hour be full expired. FABELL. Enough, come out. COREB. A vengeance take thy art! Live and convert all piety to evil: Never did man thus over-reach the Devil. No time on earth like Phaetontique flames Can have perpetual being. I'll return To my infernall mansion; but be sure, Thy seven years done, no trick shall make me tarry, But, Coreb, thou to hell shalt Fabell carry. [Exit.] FABELL. Then thus betwixt us two this variance ends, Thou to thy fellow Fiends, I to my friends. [Exit.] ACT I. SCENE I. The George Inn, Waltham. [Enter Sir Arthur Clare, Dorcas, his Lady, Milliscent, his daughter, young Harry Clare; the men booted, the gentlewomen in cloaks and safeguards. Blague, the merry host of the George, comes in with them.] HOST. Welcome, good knight, to the George at Waltham, my free-hold, my tenements, goods and chattels. Madam, here's a room is the very Homer and Iliad of a lodging, it hath none of the four elements in it; I built it out of the Center, and I drink ne'er the less sack. Welcome, my little waste of maiden-heads! What? I serve the good Duke of Norfolk. CLARE. God a mercy, my good host Blague: Thou hast a good seat here. HOST. Tis correspondent or so: there's not a Tartarian nor a Carrier shall breath upon your geldings; they have villainous rank feet, the rogues, and they shall not sweat in my linen. Knights and Lords too have been drunk in my house, I thank the destinies. HARRY. Pre' thee, good sinful Innkeeper, will that corruption, thine Ostler, look well to my gelding. Hay, a pox a these rushes! HOST. You Saint Dennis, your gelding shall walk without doors, and cool his feet for his masters sake. By the body of S. George, I have an excellent intellect to go steal some venison: now, when wast thou in the forest? HARRY. Away, you stale mess of white-broth! Come hither, sister, let me help you. CLARE. Mine Host, is not Sir Richard Mounchensey come yet, according to our appointment, when we last dined here? HOST. The knight's not yet apparent.--Marry, here's a forerunner that summons a parle, and saith, he'll be here top and top- gallant presently. CLARE. Tis well, good mine host; go down, and see breakfast be provided. HOST. Knight, thy breath hath the force of a woman, it takes me down; I am for the baser element of the kitchen: I retire like a valiant soldier, face point blank to the foe-man, or, like a Courtier, that must not shew the Prince his posteriors; vanish to know my canuasadoes, and my interrogatories, for I serve the good Duke of Norfolk. [Exit.] CLARE. How doth my Lady? are you not weary, Madam? Come hither, I must talk in private with you; My daughter Milliscent must not over-hear. MILLISCENT. Aye, whispring; pray God it tend my good! Strange fear assails my heart, usurps my blood. CLARE. You know our meeting with the knight Mounchensey Is to assure our daughter to his heir. DORCAS. Tis, without question. CLARE. Two tedious winters have past o'er, since first These couple lov'd each other, and in passion Glued first their naked hands with youthful moisture-- Just so long, on my knowledge. DORCAS. And what of this? CLARE. This morning should my daughter lose her name, And to Mounchenseys house convey our arms, Quartered within his scutcheon; th' affiance, made Twist him and her, this morning should be sealed. DORCAS. I know it should. CLARE. But there are crosses, wife; here's one in Waltham, Another at the Abbey, and the third At Cheston; and tis ominous to pass Any of these without a pater-noster. Crosses of love still thwart this marriage, Whilst that we two, like spirits, walk in night About those stony and hard hearted plots. MILLISCENT. O God, what means my father? CLARE. For look you, wife, the riotous old knight Hath o'rerun his annual revenue In keeping jolly Christmas all the year: The nostrils of his chimney are still stuft With smoke, more chargeable then Cane-tobacco; His hawks devour his fattest dogs, whilst simple, His leanest curs eat him hounds carrion. Besides, I heard of late, his younger brother, A Turkey merchant, hath sure suck'de the knight By means of some great losses on the sea, That, you conceive me, before God all is naught, His seat is weak: thus, each thing rightly scanned, You'll se a flight, wife, shortly of his land. MILLISCENT. Treason to my hearts truest sovereign: How soon is love smothered in foggy gain! DORCAS. But how shall we prevent this dangerous match? CLARE. I have a plot, a trick, and this is it- Under this colour I'll break off the match: I'll tell the knight that now my mind is changd For marrying of my daughter, for I intend To send her unto Cheston Nunry. MILLISCENT. O me accurst! CLARE. There to become a most religious Nun. MILLISCENT. I'll first be buried quick. CLARE. To spend her beauty in most private prayers. MILLISCENT. I'll sooner be a sinner in forsaking Mother and father. CLARE. How dost like my plot? DORCAS. Exceeding well; but is it your intent She shall continue there? CLARE. Continue there? Ha, ha, that were a jest! You know a virgin may continue there A twelve month and a day only on trial. There shall my daughter sojourn some three months, And in mean time I'll compass a fair match Twixt youthful Jerningham, the lusty heir Of Sir Raph Jerningham, dwelling in the forest- I think they'll both come hither with Mounchensey. DORCAS. Your care argues the love you bear our child; I will subscribe to any thing you'll have me. [Exeunt.] MILLISCENT. You will subscribe it! good, good, tis well; Love hath two chairs of state, heaven and hell. My dear Mounchensey, thou my death shalt rue, Ere to my heart Milliscent prove untrue. [Exit.] SCENE II. The same. [Enter Blague.] HOST. Ostlers, you knaves and commanders, take the horses of the knights and competitors: your honourable hulks have put into harborough, they'll take in fresh water here, and I have provided clean chamber-pots. Via, they come! [Enter Sir Richard Mounchesney, Sir Raph Jerningham, young Frank Jerningham, Raymond Mounchesney, Peter Fabell, and Bilbo.] HOST. The destinies be most neat Chamberlains to these swaggering puritans, knights of the subsidy. SIR MOUNCHESNEY. God a mercy, good mine host. SIR JERNINGHAM. Thanks, good host Blague. HOST. Room for my case of pistolles, that have Greek and Latin bullets in them; let me cling to your flanks, my nimble Giberalters, and blow wind in your calves to make them swell bigger. Ha, I'll caper in mine own fee-simple; away with puntillioes and Orthography! I serve the good Duke of Norfolk. Bilbo, Titere tu, patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi. BILBO. Truly, mine host, Bilbo, though he be somewhat out of fashion, will be your only blade still. I have a villanous sharp stomach to slice a breakfast. HOST. Thou shalt have it without any more discontinuance, releases, or atturnement. What! we know our terms of hunting and the sea-card. BILBO. And do you serve the good duke of Norfolk still? HOST. Still, and still, and still, my souldier of S. Quintins: come, follow me; I have Charles waine below in a but of sack, t'will glister like your Crab-fish. BILBO. You have fine Scholler-like terms; your Coopers Dixionary is your only book to study in a celler, a man shall find very strange words in it. Come, my host, let's serve the good duke of Norfolk. HOST. And still, and still, and still, my boy, I'll serve the good duke of Norfolk. [Exeunt Host and Bilbo.] [Enter Sir Arthur Clare, Harry Clare, and Milliscent.] JERNINGHAM. Good Sir Arthur Clare! CLARE. What Gentleman is that? I know him not. MOUNCHESNEY. Tis Master Fabell, Sir, a Cambridge scholler, My son's dear friend. CLARE. Sir, I intreat you know me. FABELL. Command me, sir; I am affected to you For your Mounchensey's sake. CLARE. Alas, for him, I not respect whether he sink or swim: A word in private, Sir Raph Jerningham. RAYMOND. Me thinks your father looketh strangely on me: Say, love, why are you sad? MILLISCENT. I am not, sweet; Passion is strong, when woe with woe doth meet. CLARE. Shall's in to breakfast? after we'll conclude The cause of this our coming: in and feed, And let that usher a more serious deed. MILLISCENT. Whilst you desire his grief, my heart shall bleed. YOUNG JERNINGHAM. Raymond Mounchesney, come, be frolick, friend, This is the day thou hast expected long. RAYMOND. Pray God, dear Jerningham, it prove so happy. JERNINGHAM. There's nought can alter it. Be merry, lad! FABELL. There's nought shall alter it. Be lively, Raymond! Stand any opposition gainst thy hope, Art shall confront it with her largest scope. [Exeunt.] SCENE III. The same. [Peter Fabell, solus.] FABELL. Good old Mounchensey, is thy hap so ill, That for thy bounty and thy royall parts Thy kind alliance should be held in scorn, And after all these promises by Clare Refuse to give his daughter to thy son, Only because thy Revenues cannot reach To make her dowage of so rich a jointure As can the heir of wealthy Jerningham? And therefore is the false fox now in hand To strike a match betwixt her and th' other; And the old gray-beards now are close together, Plotting it in the garden. Is't even so? Raymond Mounchensey, boy, have thou and I Thus long at Cambridge read the liberall Arts, The Metaphysickes, Magicke, and those parts Of the most secret deep philosophy? Have I so many melancholy nights Watch'd on the top of Peter-house highest Tower? And come we back unto our native home, For want of skill to lose the wench thou lov'st? We'll first hang Envill in such rings of mist As never rose from any dampish fen: I'll make the brind sea to rise at Ware, And drown the marshes unto Stratford bridge; I'll drive the Deer from Waltham in their walks, And scatter them like sheep in every field. We may perhaps be crost, but, if we be, He shall cross the devil, that but crosses me. [Enter Raymond and young Jerningham and young Clare.] But here comes Raymond, disconsolate and sad, And here's the gallant that must have the wench. JERNINGHAM. I pri'thee, Raymond, leave these solemn dumps: Revive thy spirits, thou that before hast been More watchful then the day-proclaiming cock, As sportive as a Kid, as frank and merry As mirth herself. If ought in me may thy content procure, It is thine own, thou mayst thy self assure. RAYMOND. Ha, Jerningham, if any but thy self Had spoke that word, it would have come as cold As the bleak Northern winds upon the face Of winter. From thee they have some power upon my blood; Yet being from thee, had but that hollow sound Come from the lips of any living man, It might have won the credit of mine ear; From thee it cannot. JERNINGHAM. If I understand thee, I am a villain: What, dost thou speak in parables to thy friends? CLARE. Come, boy, and make me this same groning love, Troubled with stitches and the cough a'th lungs, That wept his eyes out when he was a child, And ever since hath shot at hudman-blind, Make him leap, caper, jerk, and laugh, and sing, And play me horse-tricks; Make Cupid wanton as his mother's dove: But in this sort, boy, I would have thee love. FABELL. Why, how now, mad-cap? What, my lusty Franke, So near a wife, and will not tell a friend? But you will to this geere in hugger-mugger; Art thou turned miser, Rascall, in thy loves? JERNINGHAM. Who, I? z'blood, what should all you see in me, that I should look like a married man, ha? Am I bald? are my legs too little for my hose? If I feel any thing in my forehead, I am a villain: do I wear a night-cap? Do I bend in the hams? What dost thou see in me, that I should be towards marriage, ha? CLARE. What, thou married? let me look upon thee, Rogue; who has given out this of thee? how camst thou into this ill name? What company hast thou been in, Rascall? FABELL. You are the man, sir, must have Millescent: The match is making in the garden now; Her jointure is agreed on, and th' old men, Your fathers, mean to lanch their busy bags; But in mean time to thrust Mountchensey off, For colour of this new intended match, Fair Millescent to Cheston must be sent, To take the approbation for a Nun. Ne'er look upon me, lad, the match is done. JERNINGHAM. Raymond Mountchensey, now I touch thy grief With the true feeling of a zealous friend. And as for fair and beauteous Millescent, With my vain breath I will not seek to slubber Her angel like perfections; but thou know'st That Essex hath the Saint that I adore. Where ere did we meet thee and wanton springs, That like a wag thou hast not laught at me, And with regardless jesting mockt my love? How many a sad and weary summer night My sighs have drunk the dew from off the earth, And I have taught the Niting-gale to wake, And from the meadows spring the early Lark An hour before she should have list to sing: I have loaded the poor minutes with my moans, That I have made the heavy slow passed hours To hang like heavy clogs upon the day. But, dear Mountchensey, had not my affection Seased on the beauty of another dame, Before I would wrong the chase, and overgive love Of one so worthy and so true a friend, I will abjure both beauty and her sight, And will in love become a counterfeit. MOUNTCHENSEY. Dear Jerningham, thou hast begot my life, And from the mouth of hell, where now I sate, I feel my spirit rebound against the stars: Thou hast conquerd me, dear friend, in my free soul; Their time nor death can by their power controul. FABELL. Franke Jerningham, thou art a gallant boy; And were he not my pupil, I would say He were as fine a mettled gentleman, Of as free spirit, and of as fine a temper As is in England; and he is a man That very richly may deserve thy love. But, noble Clare, this while of our discourse, What may Mounchensey's honour to thy self Exact upon the measure of thy grace? CLARE. Raymond Mounchensey, I would have thee know, He does not breath this air, Whose love I cherish, and whose soul I love More than Mounchensey's: Nor ever in my life did see the man Whom, for his wit and many vertuous parts, I think more worthy of my sister's love. But since the matter grows unto this pass, I must not seem to cross my Father's will; But when thou list to visit her by night, My horses sadled, and the stable door Stands ready for thee; use them at thy pleasure. In honest marriage wed her frankly, boy, And if thou getst her, lad, God give thee joy! MOUNTCHENSEY. Then, care, away! let fates my fall pretend, Backt with the favours of so true a friend! FABELL. Let us alone, to bussell for the set; For age and craft with wit and Art have met. I'll make my spirits to dance such nightly jigs Along the way twixt this and Totnam cross, The Carriers jades shall cast their heavy packs, And the strong hedges scarse shall keep them in: The Milk-maids Cuts shall turn the wenches off, And lay the Dossers tumbling in the dust: The frank and merry London prentises, That come for cream and lusty country cheer, Shall lose their way; and, scrambling in the ditches, All night shall whoop and hollow, cry and call, Yet none to other find the way at all. MOUNTCHENSEY. Pursue the project, scholler: what we can do To help indeavour, join our lives thereto! [Exeunt.] ACT II. SCENE I. Waltham: The house of Banks. [Enter Banks, Sir John and Smug.] BANKS. Take me with you, good Sir John! A plague on thee, Smug, and thou touchest liquor, thou art founderd straight. What, are your brains always water-mills? must they ever run round? SMUG. Banks, your ale is a Philistine fox; z'hart, there's fire i'th tail on't; you are a rogue to charge us with Mugs i'th rereward. A plague of this wind; O, it tickles our catastrophe. SIR JOHN. Neighbour Banks of Waltham, and Goodman Smug, the honest Smith of Edmonton, as I dwell betwixt you both at Enfield, I know the taste of both your ale houses, they are good both, smart both. Hem, Grass and hay! we are all mortal; let's live till we die, and be merry; and there's an end. BANKS. Well said, Sir John, you are of the same humor still; and doth the water run the same way still, boy? SMUG. Vulcan was a rogue to him; Sir John, lock, lock, lock fast, Sir John; so, sir John. I'll one of these years, when it shall please the Goddesses and the destinies, be drunk in your company; that's all now, and God send us health: shall I swear I love you? SIR JOHN. No oaths, no oaths, good neighbour Smug! We'll wet our lips together and hug; Carrouse in private, and elevate the hart, and the liver and the lights,--and the lights, mark you me, within us; for hem, Grass and hay! we are all mortall, let's live till we die, and be Merry, and there's an end. BANKS. But to our former motion about stealing some venison; whither go we? SIR JOHN. Into the forest, neighbour Banks, into Brian's walk, the mad keeper. SMUG. Z'blood! I'll tickle your keeper. BANKS. Yfaith, thou art always drunk when we have need of thee. SMUG. Need of me? z'hart, you shall have need of me always while there's iron in an Anvil. BANKS. Master Parson, may the Smith go, think you, being in this taking? SMUG. Go? I'll go in spite of all the belles in Waltham. SIR JOHN. The question is, good neighbour Banks--let me see: the Moon shines to night,--there's not a narrow bridge betwixt this and the forest,--his brain will be settled ere night; he may go, he may go, neighbour Banks. Now we want none but the company of mine host Blague at the George at Waltham; if he were here, our Consort were full. Look where comes my good host, the Duke of Norfolk's man! and how? and how? a hem, grass and hay! we are not yet mortall; let's live till we die, and be merry; and there's an end. [Enter Host.] HOST. Ha, my Castilian dialogues! and art thou in breath still, boy? Miller, doth the match hold? Smith, I see by thy eyes thou hast been reading little Geneva print: but wend we merrily to the forest, to steal some of the king's Deer. I'll meet you at the time appointed: away, I have Knights and Colonels at my house, and must tend the Hungarions. If we be scard in the forest, we'll meet in the Church-porch at Enfield; ist Correspondent? BANKS. Tis well; but how, if any of us should be taken? SMITH. He shall have ransom, by the Lord. HOST. Tush, the knave keepers are my bosonians and my pensioners. Nine a clock! be valiant, my little Gogmagogs; I'll fence with all the Justices in Hartford shire. I'll have a Buck till I die; I'll slay a Doe while I live; hold your bow straight and steady. I serve the good duke of Norfolk. SMUG. O rare! who, ho, ho, boy! SIR JOHN. Peace, neighbor Smug. You see this is a Boor, a Boor of the country, an illiterate Boor, and yet the Citizen of good fellows: come, let's provide; a hem, Grass and hay! we are not yet all mortall; we'll live till we die, and be merry, and there's an end. Come, Smug1 SMUG. Good night, Waltham--who, ho, ho, boy! [Exeunt.] SCENE II. The George Inn. [Enter the Knights and Gentlemen from breakfast again.] OLD MOUNTCHESNEY. Nor I for thee, Clare, not of this. What? hast thou fed me all this while with shalles. And com'st to tell me now, thou lik'st it not? CLARE. I do not hold thy offer competent; Nor do I like th' assurance of thy Land, The title is so brangled with thy debts. OLD MOUNTCHESNEY. Too good for thee; and, knight, thou knowst it well, I fawnd not on thee for thy goods, not I; Twas thine own motion; that thy wife doth know. LADY. Husband, it was so; he lies not in that. CLARE. Hold thy chat, queane. OLD MOUNTCHESNEY. To which I hearkned willingly, and the rather, Because I was persuaded it proceeded From love thou bor'st to me and to my boy; And gav'st him free access unto thy house, Here he hath not behaved him to thy child, But as befits a gentleman to do: Nor is my poor distressed state so low, That I'll shut up my doors, I warrant thee. CLARE. Let it suffice, Mountchensey, I mislike it; Nor think thy son a match fit for my child. MOUNTCHENSEY. I tell thee, Clare, his blood is good and clear As the best drop that panteth in thy veins: But for this maid, thy fair and vertuous child, She is no more disparaged by thy baseness Then the most orient and the pretious jewell, Which still retains his lustre and his beauty, Although a slave were owner of the same. CLARE. She is the last is left me to bestow, And her I mean to dedicate to God. MOUNTCHENSEY. You do, sir? CLARE. Sir, sir, I do, she is mine own. MOUNTCHENSEY. And pity she is so! Damnation dog thee and thy wretched pelf! [Aside.] CLARE. Not thou, Mountchensey, shalt bestow my child. MOUNTCHENSEY. Neither shouldst thou bestow her where thou mean'st. CLARE. What wilt thou do? MOUNTCHENSEY. No matter, let that be; I will do that, perhaps, shall anger thee: Thou hast wrongd my love, and, by God's blessed Angell, Thou shalt well know it. CLARE. Tut, brave not me. MOUNTCHENSEY. Brave thee, base Churle! were't not for man-hood sake-- I say no more, but that there be some by Whose blood is hotter then ours is, Which being stird might make us both repent This foolish meeting. But, Harry Clare, Although thy father have abused my friendship, Yet I love thee, I do, my noble boy, I do, yfaith. LADY. Aye, do, do! Fill the world with talk of us, man, man; I never lookt for better at your hands. FABELL. I hop'd your great experience and your years Would have proved patience rather to your soul, Then with this frantique and untamed passion To whet their skeens; and, but for that I hope their friendships are too well confirmd, And their minds temperd with more kindly heat, Then for their froward parents soars That they should break forth into publique brawles-- How ere the rough hand of th' untoward world Hath moulded your proceedings in this matter, Yet I am sure the first intent was love: Then since the first spring was so sweet and warm, Let it die gently; ne'er kill it with a scorn. RAY. O thou base world, how leprous is that soul That is once lim'd in that polluted mud! Oh, sir Arthur, you have startled his free active spirits With a too sharp spur for his mind to bear. Have patience, sir: the remedy to woe Is to leave what of force we must forgo. MILLISCENT. And I must take a twelve months approbation, That in mean time this sole and private life At the years end may fashion me a wife: But, sweet Mounchensey, ere this year be done, Thou'st be a frier, if that I be a Nun. And, father, ere young Jerningham's I'll be, I will turn mad to spite both him and thee. CLARE. Wife, come, to horse, and huswife, make you ready; For, if I live, I swear by this good light, I'll see you lodged in Chesson house to night. [Exeunt.] MOUNTCHESNEY. Raymond, away! Thou seest how matters fall. Churle, hell consume thee, and thy pelf, and all! FABELL. Now, Master Clare, you see how matters fadge; Your Milliscent must needs be made a Nune. Well, sir, we are the men must ply this match: Hold you your peace, and be a looker on, And send her unto Chesson--where he will, I'll send me fellows of a handful hie Into the Cloysters where the Nuns frequent, Shall make them skip like Does about the Dale, And with the Lady prioress of the house To play at leap-frog, naked in their smocks, Until the merry wenches at their mass Cry teehee weehee; And tickling these mad lasses in their flanks, They'll sprawl, and squeak, and pinch their fellow Nuns. Be lively, boys, before the wench we lose, I'll make the Abbas wear the Cannons hose. [Exeunt.] SCENE III. The same. [Enter Harry Clare, Frank Jerningham, Peter Fabell, and Milliscent.] HARRY CLARE. Spight now hath done her worst; sister, be patient. JERNINGHAM. Forewarned poor Raymonds company! O heaven! When the composure of weak frailty meet Upon this mart of durt, O, then weak love Must in her own unhappiness be silent, And winck on all deformities. MILLISCENT. Tis well: Where's Raymond, brother? where's my dear Mounchensey? Would we might weep together and then part; Our sighing parle would much ease my heart. FABELL. Sweet beauty, fold your sorrows in the thought Of future reconcilement: let your tears Shew you a woman; but be no farther spent Then from the eyes; for, sweet, experience says That love is firm that's flattered with delays. MILLISCENT. Alas, sir, think you I shall ere be his? FABELL. As sure as parting smiles on future bliss. Yond comes my friend: see, he hath doted So long upon your beauty, that your want Will with a pale retirement waste his blood; For in true love Musicke doth sweetly dwell: Severed, these less worlds bear within them hell. [Enter Mounchensey.] MOUNCHENSEY. Harry and Francke, you are enjoined to wain Your friendship from me; we must part: the breath Of all advised corruption--pardon me! Faith, I must say so;--you may think I love you; I breath not, rougher spight do sever us; We'll meet by stealth, sweet friend,--by stealth, you twain; Kisses are sweetest got with struggling pain. JERNINGHAM. Our friendship dies not, Raymond. MOUNCHENSEY. Pardon me: I am busied; I have lost my faculties, And buried them in Milliscent's clear eyes. MILLISCENT. Alas, sweet Love, what shall become of me? I must to Chesson to the Nunry, I shall ne'er see thee more. MOUNCHENSEY. How, sweet? I'll be thy votary, we'll often meet: This kiss divides us, and breathes soft adieu,-- This be a double charm to keep both true. FABELL. Have done: your fathers may chance spy your parting. Refuse not you by any means, good sweetness, To go unto the Nunnery; far from hence Must we beget your love's sweet happiness. You shall not stay there long; your harder bed Shall be more soft when Nun and maid are dead. [Enter Bilbo.] MOUNCHENSEY. Now, sirra, what's the matter? BILBO. Marry, you must to horse presently; that villainous old gouty churl, Sir Arthur Clare, longs till he be at the Nunry. HARRY CLARE. How, sir? BILBO. O, I cry you mercy, he is your father, sir, indeed; but I am sure that there's less affinity betwixt your two natures then there is between a broker and a cutpurse. MOUNCHENSEY. Bring my gelding, sirra. BILBO. Well, nothing grieves me, but for the poor wench; she must now cry vale to Lobster pies, hartichokes, and all such meats of mortality; poor gentlewoman, the sign must not be in virgo any longer with her, and that me grieves full well. Poor Milliscent Must pray and repent: O fatal wonder! She'll now be no fatter, Love must not come at her Yet she shall be kept under. [Exit.] JERNINGHAM. Farewell, dear Raymond. HARRY CLARE. Friend, adieu. MILLISCENT. Dear sweet, No joy enjoys my heart till we next meet. [Exeunt.] FABELL. Well, Raymond, now the tide of discontent Beats in thy face; but, er't be long, the wind Shall turn the flood. We must to Waltham abbey, And as fair Milliscent in Cheston lives, A most unwilling Nun, so thou shalt there Become a beardless Novice; to what end, Let time and future accidents declare: Taste thou my sleights, thy love I'll only share. MOUNCHENSEY. Turn friar? Come, my good Counsellor, let's go, Yet that disguise will hardly shroud my woe. [Exeunt.] ACT III. SCENE I. Cheston Priory. [Enter the Prioress of Cheston, with a Nun or two, Sir Arthur Clare, Sir Raph Jerningham, Henry and Francke, the Lady, and Bilbo, with Millisent.] LADY CLARE. Madam, The love unto this holy sisterhood, And our confirmd opinion of your zeal Hath truly won us to bestow our Child Rather on this then any neighbouring Cell. PRIORESS. Jesus daughter, Mary's child, Holy matron, woman mild, For thee a mass shall still be said, Every sister drop a bead; And those again succeeding them For you shall sing a Requiem. FRANK. The wench is gone, harry; she is no more a woman of this world: mark her well, she looks like a Nun already. What thinkst on her? HARRY. By my faith, her face comes handsomely to 't. But peace, let's hear the rest. SIR ARTHUR. Madam, for a twelvemonths approbation, We mean to make this trial of our child. Your care and our dear blessing in mean time We pray may prosper this intended work. PRIORESS. May your happy soul be blithe, That so truly pay your tithe: He who many children gave, Tis fit that he one child should have. Then, fair virgin, hear my spell, For I must your duty tell. MILLISCENT. --Good men and true, stand together, and hear your charge. PRIORESS. First, a mornings take your book, The glass wherein your self must look; Your young thoughts, so proud and jolly, Must be turnd to motions holy; For your busk, attires, and toys Have your thoughts on heavenly joys; And for all your follies past You must do penance, pray, and fast. BILBO. --Let her take heed of fasting; and if ever she hurt her self with praying, I'll ne'er trust beast. MILLISCENT. --This goes hard, berladye! PRIORESS. You shall ring the sacring bell, Keep your hours, and tell your knell, Rise at midnight at your matins, Read your Psalter, sing your latins, And when your blood shall kindle pleasure, Scourge your self in plenteous measure. MILLISCENT. --Worse and worse, by Saint Mary. FRANK. --Sirra Hal, how does she hold her countenance? Well, go thy ways, if ever thou prove a Nun, I'll build an Abbey. HARRY. --She may be a Nun; but if ever she prove an Anchoress, I'll dig her grave with my nails. FRANK. --To her again, mother! HARRY. --Hold thine own, wench! PRIORESS. You must read the mornings mass, You must creep unto the Cross, Put cold ashes on your head, Have a hair cloth for your bed. BILBO. --She had rather have a man in her bed. PRIORESS. Bid your beads, and tell your needs, Your holy Avies, and you Creeds; Holy maid, this must be done, If you mean to live a Nun. MILLISCENT. --The holy maid will be no Nun. SIR ARTHUR. Madam, we have some business of import, And must be gone. Wilt please you take my wife into your closet, Who further will acquaint you with my mind; And so, good madam, for this time adieu. [Exeunt women.] SIR RALPH. Well now, Francke Jerningham, how sayest thou? To be brief,-- What wilt thou say for all this, if we two, Her father and my self, can bring about, That we convert this Nun to be a wife, And thou the husband to this pretty Nun? How, then, my lad? ha, Francke, it may be done. HARRY. --Aye, now it works. FRANCKE. O God, sir, you amaze me at your words; Think with your self, sir, what a thing it were To cause a recluse to remove her vow: A maimed, contrite, and repentant soul, Ever mortified with fasting and with prayer, Whose thoughts, even as her eyes, are fixd on heaven, To draw a virgin, thus devour'd with zeal, Back to the world: O impious deed! Nor by the Canon Law can it be done Without a dispensation from the Church: Besides, she is so prone unto this life, As she'll even shriek to hear a husband named. BILBO. Aye, a poor innocent she! Well, here's no knavery; he flouts the old fools to their teeth. SIR RAPH. Boy, I am glad to hear Thou mak'st such scruple of that conscience; And in a man so young as in your self, I promise you tis very seldom seen. But Franke, this is a trick, a mere devise, A sleight plotted betwixt her father and my self, To thrust Mounchensey's nose besides the cushion; That, being thus behard of all access, Time yet may work him from her thoughts, And give thee ample scope to thy desires. BILBO. --A plague on you both for a couple of Jews! HENRY. --How now, Franke, what say you to that? FRANCKE. --Let me alone, I warrant thee.-- Sir, assured that this motion doth proceed From your most kind and fatherly affection, I do dispose my liking to your pleasure: But for it is a matter of such moment As holy marriage, I must crave thus much, To have some conference iwth my ghostly father, Friar Hildersham, here by, at Waltham Abbey, To be absolude of things that it is fit None only but my confessor should know. SIR RAPH. With all my heart: he is a reverend man; And to morrorw morning we will meet all at the Abbey, Where by th' opinion of that reverend man We will proceed; I like it passing well. Till then we part, boy; aye, think of it; farewell! A parent's care no mortal tongue can tell. [Exeunt.] SCENE II. Before the Priory Gate. [Enter Sir Arthur Clare, and Raymond Mounchensey, like a Friar.] SIR ARTHUR. Holy young Novice, I have told you now My full intent, and do refer the rest To your professed secrecy and care: And see, Our serious speech hath stolen upon the way, That we are come unto the Abbey gate. Because I know Mountchensey is a fox, That craftily doth overlook my doings, I'll not be seen, not I. Tush, I have done: I had a daughter, but she's now a Nun. Farewell, dear son, farewell. MOUNTCHENSEY. Fare you well!--Aye, you have done! Your daughter, sir, shall not be long a Nun. O my rare Tutor! never mortal brain Plotted out such a mass of policy; And my dear bosom is so great with laughter, Begot by his simplicity and error, My soul is fallen in labour with her joy. O my true friends, Franke Jerningham and Clare, Did you now know but how this jest takes fire-- That good sir Arthur, thinking me a novice, Hath even poured himself into my bosom, O, you would vent your spleens with tickling mirth! But, Raymond, peace, and have an eye about, For fear perhaps some of the Nuns look out. Peace and charity within, Never touch't with deadly sin; I cast my holy water pure On this wall and on this door, That from evil shall defend, And keep you from the ugly fiend: Evil spirit, by night nor day, Shall approach or come this way; Elf nor Fairy, by this grace, Day nor night shall haunt this place. Holy maidens! [Knock.] [Answer within.] Who's that which knocks? ha, who's there? MOUNTCHENSEY. Gentle Nun, here is a Friar. [Enter Nun.] NUN. A Friar without, now Christ us save! Holy man, what wouldst thou have? MOUNTCHENSEY. Holy maid, I hither come From Friar and father Hildersome, By the favour and the grace Of the Prioress of this place, Amongst you all to visit one That's come for approbation; Before she was as now you are, The daughter of Sir Arthur Clare, But since she now became a Nune, Call'd Milliscnet of Edmunton. NUN. Holy man, repose you there; This news I'll to our Abbess bear, To tell her what a man is sent, And your message and intent. MOUNTCHENSEY. Benedicite. NUN. Benedicite. [Exit.] MOUNTCHENSEY. Do, my good plump wench; if all fall right, I'll make your sister-hood one less by night. Now happy fortune speed this merry drift, I like a wench comes roundly to her shrift. [Enter Lady, Milliscent.] LADY. Have Friars recourse then to the house of Nuns? MILLISCENT. Madam, it is the order of this place, When any virgin comes for approbation,-- Lest that for fear or such sinister practise She should be forced to undergo this veil, Which should proceed from conscience and devotion,-- A visitor is sent from Waltham house, To take the true confession of the maid. LADY. Is that the order? I commend it well: You to your shrift, I'll back unto the cell. [Exit.] MOUNTCHENSEY. Life of my soul! bright Angel! MILLISCENT. What means the Friar? MOUNTCHENSEY. O Milliscent, tis I. MILLISCENT. My heart misgives me; I should know that voice. You? who are you? The holy virgin bless me! Tell me your name: you shall, ere you confess me. MOUNTCHENSEY. Mountchensey, thy true friend. MILLISCENT. My Raymond, my dear heart! Sweet life, give leave to my distracted soul, To wake a little from this swoon of joy. By what means camst thou to assume this shape? MOUNTCHENSEY. By means of Peter Fabell, my kind Tutor, Who in the habit of Friar Hildersham, Franke Jerningham's old friend and confessor, Helped me to act the part of priestly novice, Plotted by Franke, by Fabell and my self, And so delivered to Sir Arthur Clare, Who brought me here unto the Abbey gate, To be his Nun-made daughter's visitor. MILLISCENT. You are all sweet traitors to my poor old father. O my dear life! I was a dream't to night That, as I was a praying in mine Psalter, There came a spirit unto me as I kneeled, And by his strong persuasions tempted me To leave this Nunry; and me thought He came in the most glorious Angel shape, That mortal eye did ever look upon. Ha, thou art sure that spirit, for there's no form Is in mine eye so glorious as thine own. MOUNTCHENSEY. O thou Idolatress, that dost this worship To him whose likeness is but praise of thee! Thou bright unsetting star, which through this veil, For very envy, mak'st the Sun look pale! MILLISCENT. Well, visitor, lest that perhaps my mother Should think the Friar too strickt in his decrees, I this confess to my sweet ghostly father: If chast pure love be sin, I must confess, I have offended three years now with thee. MOUNTCHENSEY. But do you yet repent you of the same? MILLISCENT. Yfaith, I cannot. MOUNTCHENSEY. Nor will I absolve thee Of that sweet sin, though it be venial; Yet have the penance of a thousand kisses, And I enjoin you to this pilgrimage: That in the evening you bestow your self Here in the walk near to the willow ground, Where I'll be ready both with men and horse To wait your coming, and convey you hence Unto a lodge I have in Enfield chase. No more reply, if that you yield consent-- I see more eyes upon our stay are bent. MILLISCENT. Sweet life, farewell! Tis done: let that suffice; What my tongue fails, I send thee by mine eyes. [Exit] [Enter Fabell, Clare, and Jerningham.] JERNINGHAM. Now, Visitor, how does this new made Nun? CLARE. Come, come, how does she, noble Capouchin? MOUNTCHENSEY. She may be poor in spirit, but for the flesh, Tis fat and plump, boys. Ah, rogues, there is A company of girls would turn you all Friars. FABELL. But how, Mountchensey? how, lad, for the wench? MOUNTCHENSEY. Sound, lads, yfaith; I thank my holy habit, I have confest her, and the Lady Prioress Hath given me ghostly counsel with her blessing. And how say ye, boys, If I be chose the weekly visitor? CLARE. Z'blood, she'll have nere a Nun unbagd to sing mass then. JERNINGHAM. The Abbot of Waltham will have as many Children to put to nurse as he has calves in the Marsh. MOUNTCHENSEY. Well, to be brief, the Nun will soon at night turn tippit; if I can but devise to quit her cleanly of the Nunry, she is mine own. FABELL. But, Sirra Raymond, What news of Peter Fabell at the house? MOUNTCHENSEY. Tush, he's the only man; A Necromancer and a Conjurer That works for young Mountchensey altogether; And if it be not for Friar Benedick, That he can cross him by his learned skill, The Wench is gone; Fabell will fetch her out by very magick. FABELL. Stands the wind there, boy? keep them in that key. The wench is ours before to-morrow day. Well, Hal and Frank, as ye are gentlemen, Stick to us close this once! You know your fathers Have men and horse lie ready still at Chesson, To watch the coast be clear, to scout about, And have an eye unto Mountchensey's walks: Therefore you two may hover thereabouts, And no man will uspect you for the matter; Be ready but to take her at our hands, Leave us to scamble for her getting out. JERNINGHAM. Z'blood, if all Herford-shire were at our heels, We'll carry her away in spite of them. CLARE. But whither, Raymond? MOUNTCHENSEY. To Brian's upper lodge in Enfield Chase; He is mine honest Friend and a tall keeper; I'll send my man unto him presently T' acquaint him with your coming and intent. FABELL. Be brief and secret. MOUNTCHENSEY. Soon at night remember You bring your horses to the willow ground. JERNINGHAM. Tis done; no more! CLARE. We will not fail the hour. My life and fortune now lies in your power. FABELL. About our business! Raymond, let's away! Think of your hour; it draws well of the day. [Exit.] ACT IV. SCENE I. Enfield Chase. [Enter Blague, Smug, and Sir John.] BLAGUE. Come, ye Hungarian pilchers, we are once more come under the zona torrida of the forest. Let's be resolute, let's fly to and again; and if the devil come, we'll put him to his Interrogatories, and not budge a foot. What? s'foot, I'll put fire into you, ye shall all three serve the good Duke of Norfolk. SMUG. Mine host, my bully, my pretious consull, my noble Holofernes, I have been drunk i' thy house twenty times and ten, all's for that: I was last night in the third heavens, my brain was poor, it had yest in 't; but now I am a man of action; is 't not so, lad? BANKS. Why, now thou hast two of the liberall sciences about thee, wit and reason, thou maist serve the Duke of Europe. SMUG. I will serve the Duke of Christendom, and do him more credit in his celler then all the plate in his buttery; is 't not so, lad? SIR JOHN. Mine host and Smug, stand there; Banks, you and your horse keep together; but lie close, shew no tricks, for fear of the keeper. If we be scared, we'll meet in the Church-porch at Enfield. SMUG. Content, sir John. BANKS. Smug, dost not thou remember the tree thou felst out of last Night? SMUG. Tush, and 't had been as high as the Abbey, I should nere have hurt my self; I have fallen into the river, coming home from Waltham, and scapt drowning. SIR JOHN. Come, sever, fear no sprits! We'll have a Buck presently; we have watched later then this for a Doe, mine Host. HOST. Thou speakst as true as velvet. SIR JOHN. Why then, come! Grass and hay, etc. [Exeunt.] [Enter Clare, Jerningham, and Milliscent.] CLARE. Franke Jerningham! JERNINGHAM. Speak softly, rogue; how now? CLARE. S'foot, we shall lose our way, it's so dark; whereabouts are we? JERNINGHAM. Why, man, at Potters gate; the way lies right: hark! the clock strikes at Enfield; what's the hour? CLARE. Ten, the bell says. JERNINGHAM. A lies in's throat, it was but eight when we set out of Chesson. Sir John and his Sexton are at ale to night, the clock runs at random. CLARE. Nay, as sure as thou liv'st, the villanous vicar is abroad in the chase this dark night: the stone Priest steals more venison then half the country. JERNINGHAM. Milliscent, how dost thou? MILLISCENT. Sir, very well. I would to God we were at Brians lodge. CLARE. We shall anon; z'ounds, hark! What means this noise? JERNINGHAM. Stay, I hear horsemen. CLARE. I hear footmen too. JERNINGHAM. Nay, then I have it: we have been discovered, And we are followed by our fathers men. MILLISCENT. Brother and friend, alas, what shall we do? CLARE. Sister, speak softly, or we are descried. They are hard upon us, what so ere they be, Shadow your self behind this brake of fern, We'll get into the wood, and let them pass. [Enter Sir John, Blague, Smug, and Banks, one after another.] SIR JOHN. Grass and hay! we are all mortall; the keepers abroad, and there's an end. BANKS. Sir John! SIR JOHN. Neighbour Banks, what news? BANKS. Z'wounds, Sir John, the keepers are abroad; I was hard by 'am. SIR JOHN. Grass and hay! where's mine host Blague? BLAGUE. Here, Metrapolitane. The philistines are upon us, be silent; let us serve the good Duke of Norfolk. But where is Smug? SMUG. Here; a pox on ye all, dogs; I have kild the greatest Buck in Brians walk. Shift for your selves, all the keepers are up: let's meet in Enfield church porch; away, we are all taken else. [Exeunt.] [Enter Brian, with his man, and his hound.] BRIAN. Raph, hearst thou any stirring? RAPH. I heard one speak here hard by, in the bottom. Peace, Maister, speak low; zownes, if I did not hear a bow go off, and the Buck bray, I never heard deer in my life. BRIAN. When went your fellows out into their walks? RAPH. An hour ago. BRIAN. S'life, is there stealers abroad, and they cannot hear Of them: where the devil are my men to night? Sirra, go up the wind towards Buckleyes lodge. I'll cast about the bottom with my hound, And I will meet thee under Cony ocke. RAPH. I will, Sir. BRIAN. How now? by the mass, my hound stays upon something; hark, hark, Bowman, hark, hark, there! MILLISCENT. Brother, Frank Jerningham, brother Clare! BRIAN. Peace; that's a woman's voice! Stand! who's there? Stand, or I'll shoot. MILLISCENT. O Lord! hold your hands, I mean no harm, sir. BRIAN. Speak, who are you? MILLISCENT. I am a maid, sir; who? Master Brian? BRIAN. The very same; sure, I should know her voice; Mistris Milliscent? MILLISCENT. Aye, it is I, sir. BRIAN. God for his passion! what make you here alone? I lookd for you at my lodge an hour ago. What means your company to leave you thus? Who brought you hither? MILLISCENT. My brother, Sir, and Master Jerningham, Who, hearing folks about us in the Chase, Feard it had been sir Ralph and my father, Who had pursude us, thus dispearsed our selves, Till they were past us. BRIAN. But where be they? MILLISCENT. They be not far off, here about the grove. [Enter Clare and Jerningham.] CLARE. Be not afraid, man, I heard Brian's tongue, That's certain. JERNINGHAM. Call softly for your sister. CLARE. Milliscent! MILLISCENT. Aye, brother, here. BRIAN. Maister Clare! CLARE. I told you it was Brian. BRIAN. Who's that? Maister Jerningham: you are a couple of hot-shots; does a man commit his wench to you, to put her to grass at this time of night JERNINGHAM. We heard a noise about her in the chase, And fearing that our fathers had pursued us, Severd our selves. CLARE. Brian, how hapd'st thou on her? BRIAN. Seeking for stealers are abroad to night, My hound stayed on her, and so found her out. CLARE. They were these stealers that affrighted us; I was hard upon them, when they horst their Deer, And I perceive they took me for a keeper. BRIAN. Which way took they? JERNINGHAM. Towards Enfield. BRIAN. A plague upon 't, that's that damned Priest, and Blague of the George, he that serves the good Duke of Norfolk. [A noise within: Follow, follow, follow.] CLARE. Peace, that's my father's voice. BRIAN. Z'ownds, you suspected them, and now they are here indeed. MILLISCENT. Alas, what shall we do? BRIAN. If you go to the lodge, you are surely taken; Strike down the wood to Enfield presently, And if Mounchensey come, I'll send him t'yee. Let me alone to bussle with your father; I warrant you that I will keep them play Till you have quit the chase; away, away! [Exeunt all but Brian.] Who's there? [Enter the Knights.] SIR RAPH. In the king's name, pursue the Ravisher! BRIAN. Stand, or I'll shoot. SIR ARTHUR. Who's there? BRIAN. I am the keeper that do charge you stand; You have stolen my Deer. SIR ARTHUR. We stolen thy Deer? we do pursue a thief. BRIAN. You are arrant thieves, and ye have stolen my Deer. SIR RAPH. We are Knights; Sir Arthur Clare, and Sir Raph Jerningham. BRIAN. The more your shame, that Knights should be such thieves. SIR ARTHUR. Who, and what art thou? BRIAN. My name is Brian, keeper of this walk. SIR ARTHUR. O Brian, a villain! Thou hast received my daughter to thy lodge. BRIAN. You have stolen the best Deer in my walk to night. My Deer! SIR ARTHUR. My daughter! Stop not my way! BRIAN. What make you in my walk? you have stolen the best Buck in my walk to night. SIR ARTHUR. My daughter! BRIAN. My Deer! SIR RAPH. Where is Mountchensey? BRIAN. Where's my Buck? SIR ARTHUR. I will complain me of thee to the King. BRIAN. I'll complain unto the King you spoil his game: Tis strange that men of your account and calling Will offer it! I tell you true, Sir Arthur and Sir Raph, That none but you have only spoild my game. SIR ARTHUR. I charge you, stop us not! BRIAN. I charge you both ye get out of my ground! Is this a time for such as you, Men of your place and of your gravity, To be abroad a thieving? tis a shame; And, afore God, if I had shot at you, I had served you well enough. [Exeunt.] SCENE II. Enfield Churchyard. [Enter Banks the Miller, wet on his legs.] BANKS. S'foot, here's a dark night indeed! I think I have been in fifteen ditches between this and the forest. Soft, here's Enfield Church: I am so wet with climing over into an orchard for to steal some filberts. Well, here I'll sit in the Church porch, and wait for the rest of my consort. [Enter the Sexton.] SEXTON. Here's a sky as black as Lucifer. God bless us! here was goodman Theophilus buried; he was the best Nutcracker that ever dwelt in Enfield. Well, tis 9. a clock, tis time to ring curfew. Lord bless us, what a white thing is that in the Church porch! O Lord, my legs are too weak for my body, my hair is too stiff for my night-cap, my heart fails; this is the ghost of Theophilus. O Lord, it follows me! I cannot say my prayers, and one would give me a thousand pound. Good spirit, I have bowled and drunk and followed the hounds with you a thousand times, though I have not the spirit now to deal with you. O Lord! [Enter Priest.] PRIEST. Grass and hey, we are all mortall. Who's there? SEXTON. We are grass and hay indeed; I know you to be Master Parson by your phrase. PRIEST. Sexton! PRIEST. I, sir. PRIEST. For mortalities sake, What's the matter? SEXTON. O Lord, I am a man of another element; Master Theophilus Ghost is in the Church porch. There was a hundred Cats, all fire, dancing here even now, and they are clomb up to the top of the steeple; I'll not into the belfry for a world. PRIEST. O good Salomon; I have been about a deed of darkness to night: O Lord, I saw fifteen spirits in the forest, like white bulls; if I lie, I am an arrant thief: mortality haunts us--grass and hay! the devils at our heels, and let's hence to the parsonage. [Exeunt.] [The Miller comes out very softly.] MILLER. What noise was that? tis the watch, sure; that villanous unlucky rogue, Smug, is tain, upon my life; and then all our villeny comes out; I heard one cry, sure. [Enter Host Blague.] HOST. If I go steal any more venison, I am a Paradox: s'foot, I can scarce bear the sin of my flesh in the day, tis so heavy; if I turn not honest, and serve the good Duke of Norfolk, as true mareterraneum skinker should do, let me never look higher then the element of a Constable. MILLER. By the Lord, there are some watchmen; I hear them name Maister Constable; I would to God my Mill were an Eunuch, and wanted her stones, so I were hence. HOST. Who's there? MILLER. Tis the Constable, by this light; I'll steal hence, and if I can meet mine host Blague, I'll tell him how Smug is tain, and will him to look to himself. [Exit.] HOST. What the devil is that white thing? this same is a Church- yard, and I have heard that ghosts and villenous goblins have been seen here. [Enter Sexton and Priest.] PRIEST. Grass and hay! O, that I could conjure! we saw a spirit here in the Church-yard; and in the fallow field there's the devil with a man's body upon his back in a white sheet. SEXTON. It may be a woman's body, Sir John. PRIEST. If she be a woman, the sheets damn her; Lord bless us, what a night of mortality is this! HOST. Priest! PRIEST. Mine host! HOST. Did you not see a spirit all in white cross you at the stile? SEXTON. O no, mine host; but there sate one in the porch; I have not breath ynough left to bless me from the Devil. HOST. Who's that? PRIEST. The Sexton, almost frighted out of his wits. Did you see Banks or Smug? HOST. No, they are gone to Waltham, sure: I would fain hence; come, let's to my house: I'll ne'er serve the duke of Norfolk in this fashion again whilst I breath. If the devil be amongst us, tis time to hoist sail, and cry roomer. Keep together; Sexton, thou art secret, what? let's be comfortable one to Another. PRIEST. We are all mortal, mine host. HOST. True; and I'll serve God in the night hereafter afore the Duke of Norfolk. [Exeunt.] ACT V. SCENE I. An Inn opposite the George, Waltham. [Enter Sir Arthur Clare and Sir Ralph Jerningham, trussing their points as new up.] SIR RAPH. Good morrow, gentle knight. A happy day after your short nights rest. SIR ARTHUR. Ha, ha, sir Raph, stirring so soon indeed? Birlady, sir, rest would have done right well; Our riding late last night has made me drowsy. Go to, go to, those days are gone with us. SIR RAPH. Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, care go with those days, Let 'am even go together, let 'am go! Tis time, yfaith, that we were in our graves, When Children leave obedience to their parents, When there's no fear of God, no care, no duty. Well, well, nay, nay, it shall not do, it shall not; No, Mountchensey, thou'st hear on't, thou shalt, Thou shalt, yfaith! I'll hang thy Son, if there be law in England. A man's Child ravisht from a Nunry! This is rare! Well, well, there's one gone for Friar Hildersam. SIR ARTHUR. Nay, gentle Knight, do not vex thus, It will but hurt your health. You cannot grieve more then I do, but to what end? But hark you, Sir Raph, I was about to say something--it makes no matter. But heark you in your ear: the Friar's a knave; but God forgive me, a man cannot tell neither; s'foot, I am so out of patience, I know not what to say. SIR RAPH. There's one went for the Friar an hour ago. Comes he not yet? s'foot, if I do find knavery unders cowl, I'll tickle him, I'll firk him. Here, here, he's here, he's here. Good morrow, Friar; good morrow, gentle Friar. [Enter Hildersham.] SIR ARHTUR. Good morrow, father Hildersham, good morrow. HILDERSHAM. Good morrow, reverend Knights, unto you both. SIR ARTHUR. Father, how now? you hear how matters go; I am undone, my child is cast away. You did your best, at least I think the best; But we are all crost; flatly, all is dasht. HILDERSHAM. Alas, good knights, how might the matter be? Let me understand your grief for Charity. SIR ARTHUR. Who does not understand my griefs? Alas, alas! And yet ye do not! Will the Church permit A nun in approbation of her habit To be ravished? HILDERSHAM. A holy woman, benedicite! Now God forfend that any should presume To touch the sister of a holy house. SIR ARTHUR. Jesus deliver me! SIR RAPH. Why, Millisent, the daughter of this Knight Is out of Chesson taken the last night. HILDERSHAM. Was that fair maiden late become a nun? SIR RAPH. Was she, quotha? Knavery, knavery, knavery; I smell it, I smell it, yfaith; is the wind in that door? is it even so? doost thou ask me that now? HILDERSHAM. It is the first time that I ere heard of it. SIR ARTHUR. That's very strange. SIR RAPH. Why, tell me, Friar, tell me; thou art counted a holy man; do not play the hypocrite with me, nor bear with me. I cannot dissemble: did I ought but by thy own consent? by thy allowance? nay, further, by thy warrant? HILDERSHAM. Why, Reverend knight-- SIR RAPH. Unreverend Friar-- HILDERSHAM. Nay, then give me leave, sir, to depart in quiet; I had hoped you had sent for me to some other end. SIR ARTHUR. Nay, stay, good Friar; if any thing hath hapd About this matter in thy love to u, That thy strickt order cannot justify, Admit it be so, we will cover it. Take no care, man: Disclaim me yet thy counsell and advise, The wisest man that is may be o'erreacht. HILDERSHAM. Sir Arthur, by my order and my faith, I know not what you mean. SIR RAPH. By your order and your faith? This is most strange of all: Why, tell me, Friar, Are not you Confessor to my Son Francke? HILDERSHAM. Yes, that I am. SIR RAPH. And did not this good knight here and my self Confess with you, being his ghostly Father, To deal with him about th' unbanded marriage Betwixt him and that fair young Millisent? HILDERSHAM. I never heard of any match intended. SIR ARTHUR. Did not we break our minds that very time, That our device of making her a Nun Was but a colour and a very plot To put by young Mountchensey? Ist not true? HILDERSHAM. The more I strive to know what you should mean, The less I understand you. SIR RAPH. Did not you tell us still how Peter Fabell At length would cross us, if we took not heed? HILDERSHAM. I have heard of one that is a great magician, But he's about the University. SIR RAPH. Did not you send your novice Benedic To persuade the girl to leave Mountchensey's love, To cross that Peter Fabell in his art, And to that purpose made him visitor? HILDERSHAM. I never sent my novice from the house, Nor have we made our visitation yet. SIR ARTHUR. Never sent him? Nay, did he not go? And did not I direct him to the house, And confer with him by the way? and did he not Tell me what charge he had received from you, Word by word, as I requested at your hands? HILDERSHAM. That you shall know; he came along with me, And stays without. Come hither, Benedic! [Enter Benedic.] Young Benedic, were you ere sent by me To Chesson Nunnery for a visitor? BENEDIC. Never, sir, truly. SIR RAPH. Stranger then all the rest! SIR ARTHUR. Did not I direct you to the house? Confer with you From Waltham Abbey unto Chesson wall? BENEDIC. I never saw you, sir, before this hour. SIR RAPH. The devill thou didst not! Hoe, Chamberlen! [Enter Chamberlaine.] CHAMB. Anon, anon. SIR RAPH. Call mine host Blague hither! CHAMB. I will send one over to see if he be up; I think he be scarce stirring yet. SIR RAPH. Why, knave, didst thou not tell me an hour ago, mine host was up? CHAMB. Aye, sir, my Master's up. SIR RAPH. You knave, is a up, and is a not up? Dost thou mock me? CHAMB. Aye, sir, my M. is up; but I think M. Blague indeed be not Stirring. SIR RAPH. Why, who's thy Master? is not the Master of the house thy Master? CHAMB. Yes, sir; but M. Blague dwells over the way. SIR ARTHUR. Is not this the George? Before God, there's some villany in this. CHAMB. Sfoot, our signs removed; this is strange! [Exeunt.] SCENE II. The George Inn. [Enter Blague, trussing his points.] BLAGUE. Chamberlen, speak up to the new lodgings, bid Nell look well to the baked meats. [Enter Sir Arthur and Sir Raph.] How now, my old Jenerts bauke my house, my castle? lie in Waltham all night, and not under the Canopy of your host Blague's house? SIR ARTHUR. Mine host, mine host, we lay all night at the George in Waltham; but whether the George be your fee-simple or no, tis a doubtful question: look upon your sign. HOST. Body of Saint George, this is mine overthwart neighbour hath done this to seduce my blind customers. I'll tickle his Catastrophe for this; if I do not indite him at next assisses for Burglary, let me die of the yellows; for I see tis no boot in these days to serve the good Duke of Norfolk. The villanous world is turned manger; one Jade deceives another, and your Ostler plays his part commonly for the fourth share. Have we Comedies in hand, you whoreson, villanous male London Letcher? SIR ARTHUR. Mine host, we have had the moylingst night of it that ever we had in our lives. HOST. Ist certain? SIR RAPH. We have been in the Forest all night almost. HOST. S'foot, how did I miss you? hart, I was a stealing a Buck there. SIR ARTHUR. A plague on you; we were stayed for you. HOST. Were you, my noble Romans? Why, you shall share; the venison is a footing. Sine Cerere and Baccho friget Venus; That is, there's a good breakfast provided for a marriage that's in my house this morning. SIR ARTHUR. A marriage, mine host? HOST. A conjunction copulative; a gallant match between your daughter and M. Raymond Mountchensey, young Juventus. SIR ARTHUR. How? HOST. Tis firm, tis done. We'll shew you a president i'th civil law fort. SIR RAPH. How? married? HOST. Leave tricks and admiration. There's a cleanly pair of sheets in the bed in Orchard chamber, and they shall lie there. What? I'll do it; I'll serve the good Duke of Norfolk. SIR ARTHUR. Thou shalt repent this, Blague. SIR RAPH. If any law in England will make thee smart for this, expect it with all severity. HOST. I renounce your defiance; if you parle so roughly, I'll barracado my gates against you. stand fair, bully; Priest, come off from the rereward! What can you say now? Twas done in my house; I have shelter i'th Court for't. D'yee see yon bay window? I serve the good duke of Norfolk, and tis his lodging. Storm, I care not, serving the good Duke of Norfolk: thou art an actor in this, and thou shalt carry fire in thy face eternally. [Enter Smug, Mountchensey, Harry Clare, and Milliscent.] SMUG. Fire, s'blood, there's no fire in England like your Trinidado sack. Is any man here humorous? We stole the venison, and we'll justify it: say you now! HOST. In good sooth, Smug, there's more sack on the fire, Smug. SMUG. I do not take any exceptions against your sack; but it you'll lend me a pick staff, I'll cudgle them all hence, by this hand. HOST. I say thou shalt in to the Celler. SMUG. S'foot, mine Host, shalls not grapple? Pray, pray you; I could fight now for all the world like a Cockatrices ege; shals not serve the Duke of Norfolk? [Exit.] HOST. In, skipper, in! SIR ARTHUR. Sirra, hath young Mountchensey married your sister? HARRY CLARE. Tis Certain, Sir; here's the priest that coupled them, the parties joined, and the honest witness that cried Amen. MOUNTCHENSEY. Sir Arthur Clare, my new created Father, I beseech you, hear me. SIR ARTHUR. Sir, Sir, you are a foolish boy; you ahve done that you cannot answer; I dare be bound to seize her from you; for she's a profest Nun. MILLISCENT. With pardon, sir, that name is quite undone; This true-love knot cancels both maid and Nun. When first you told me I should act that part, How cold and bloody it crept o'er my heart! To Chesson with a smiling brow I went; But yet, dear sir, it was to this intent, That my sweet Raymond might find better means To steal me thence. In brief, disguised he came, Like Novice to old father Hildersham; His tutor here did act that cunning part, And in our love hath joined much wit to art. CLARE. Is't even so? MILLISCENT. With pardon therefore we intreat your smiles; Love thwarted turns itself to thousand wiles. CLARE. Young Master Jerningham, were you an actor In your own love's abuse? JERNINGHAM. My thoughts, good sir, Did labour seriously unto this end, To wrong my self, ere I'd abuse my friend. HOST. He speaks like a Batchelor of musicke, all in numbers. Knights, if I had known you would have let this covy of Patridges sit thus long upon their knees under my sign post, I would have spread my door with old Coverlids. SIR ARTHUR. Well, sir, for this your sign was removed, was it? HOST. Faith, we followed the directions of the devill, Master Peter Fabell; and Smug, Lord bless us, could never stand upright since. SIR ARTHUR. You, sir, twas you was his minister that married them? SIR JOHN. Sir, to prove my self an honest man, being that I was last night in the forrest stealing Venison--now, sir, to have you stand my friend, if that matter should be called in question, I married your daughter to this worthy gentleman. SIR ARTHUR. I may chance to requite you, and make your neck crack for't. SIR JOHN. If you do, I am as resolute as my Neighbour vicar of Waltham Abbey; a hem, Grass and hay, we are all mortall; let's live till we be hangd, mine host, and be merry, and there's an end. [Enter Fabell.] FABELL. Now, knights, I enter; now my part begins. To end this difference, know, at first I knew What you intended, ere your love took flight From old Mountchensey; you, sir Arthur Clare, Were minded to have married this sweet beauty To young Franke Jerningham; to cross which match, I used some pretty sleights; but I protest Such as but sate upon the skirts of Art; No conjurations, nor such weighty spells As tie the soul to their performancy. These for his love, who once was my dear pupil, Have I effected. Now, me thinks, tis strange That you, being old in wisdom, should thus knit Your forehead on this match, since reason fails; No law can curb the lovers rash attempt; Years, in resisting this, are sadly spent. Smile, then, upon your daughter and kind son, And let our toil to future ages prove, The devil of Edmonton did good in Love. SIR ARTHUR. Well, tis in vain to cross the providence: Dear Son, I take thee up into my heart; Rise, daughter; this is a kind father's part. HOST. Why, Sir John, send for Spindles noise presently: Ha, ert be night, I'll serve the good Duke of Norfolk. PRI. Grass and hay, mine Host, let's live till we die, and be merry, and there's an end. SIR ARTHUR. What, is breakfast ready, mine Host? HOST. Tis, my little Hebrew. SIR ARTHUR. Sirra, ride strait to Chesson Nunry, Fetch thence my Lady; the house, I know, By this time misses their young votary. Come, knights, let's in! BILBO. I will to horse presently, sir.--A plague a my Lady, I shall miss a good breakfast. Smug, how chance you cut so plaguely behind, Smug? SMUG. Stand away; I'll founder you else. BILBO. Farewell, Smug, thou art in another element. SMUG. I will be by and by; I will be Saint George again. SIR ARTHUR. Take heed the fellow do not hurt himself. SIR RAPH. Did we not last night find two S. Georges here? FABELL. Yes, Knights, this martialist was one of them. CLARE. Then thus conclude your night of merriment! [Exeunt Omnes.] FINIS 
61380	----	THE FIVE HELLS OF ORION BY FREDERICK POHL Out in the great gas cloud of the Orion Nebula McCray found an ally--and a foe! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] His name was Herrell McCray and he was scared. As best he could tell, he was in a sort of room no bigger than a prison cell. Perhaps it was a prison cell. Whatever it was, he had no business in it; for five minutes before he had been spaceborne, on the Long Jump from Earth to the thriving colonies circling Betelgeuse Nine. McCray was ship's navigator, plotting course corrections--not that there were any, ever; but the reason there were none was that the check-sightings were made every hour of the long flight. He had read off the azimuth angles from the computer sights, automatically locked on their beacon stars, and found them correct; then out of long habit confirmed the locking mechanism visually. It was only a personal quaintness; he had done it a thousand times. And while he was looking at Betelgeuse, Rigel and Saiph ... it happened. The room was totally dark, and it seemed to be furnished with a collection of hard, sharp, sticky and knobby objects of various shapes and a number of inconvenient sizes. McCray tripped over something that rocked under his feet and fell against something that clattered hollowly. He picked himself up, braced against something that smelled dangerously of halogen compounds, and scratched his shoulder, right through his space-tunic, against something that vibrated as he touched it. McCray had no idea where he was, and no way to find out. Not only was he in darkness, but in utter silence as well. No. Not quite utter silence. Somewhere, just at the threshold of his senses, there was something like a voice. He could not quite hear it, but it was there. He sat as still as he could, listening; it remained elusive. Probably it was only an illusion. But the room itself was hard fact. McCray swore violently and out loud. It was crazy and impossible. There simply was no way for him to get from a warm, bright navigator's cubicle on _Starship Jodrell Bank_ to this damned, dark, dismal hole of a place where everything was out to hurt him and nothing explained what was going on. He cried aloud in exasperation: "If I could only _see_!" He tripped and fell against something that was soft, slimy and, like baker's dough, not at all resilient. A flickering halo of pinkish light appeared. He sat up, startled. He was looking at something that resembled a suit of medieval armor. * * * * * It was, he saw in a moment, not armor but a spacesuit. But what was the light? And what were these other things in the room? Wherever he looked, the light danced along with his eyes. It was like having tunnel vision or wearing blinders. He could see what he was looking at, but he could see nothing else. And the things he could see made no sense. A spacesuit, yes; he knew that he could construct a logical explanation for that with no trouble--maybe a subspace meteorite striking the _Jodrell Bank_, an explosion, himself knocked out, brought here in a suit ... well, it was an explanation with more holes than fabric, like a fisherman's net, but at least it was rational. How to explain a set of Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?_ A space-ax? Or the old-fashioned child's rocking-chair, the chemistry set--or, most of all, the scrap of gaily printed fabric that, when he picked it up, turned out to be a girl's scanty bathing suit? It was slightly reassuring, McCray thought, to find that most of the objects were more or less familiar. Even the child's chair--why, he'd had one more or less like that himself, long before he was old enough to go to school. But what were they doing here? Not everything he saw was familiar. The walls of the room itself were strange. They were not metal or plaster or knotty pine; they were not papered, painted or overlaid with stucco. They seemed to be made of some sort of hard organic compound, perhaps a sort of plastic or processed cellulose. It was hard to tell colors in the pinkish light. But they seemed to have none. They were "neutral"--the color of aged driftwood or unbleached cloth. Three of the walls were that way, and the floor and ceiling. The fourth wall was something else. Areas in it had the appearance of gratings; from them issued the pungent, distasteful halogen odor. They might be ventilators, he thought; but if so the air they brought in was worse than what he already had. McCray was beginning to feel more confident. It was astonishing how a little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his courage flowed back when he could see again. He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago--subjectively it seemed to be minutes--he had been aboard the _Jodrell Bank_ with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee. Item, apart from being shaken up and--he admitted it--scared damn near witless, he did not seem to be hurt. Item, wherever he was now, it became, not so much what had happened to him, but what had happened to the ship? He allowed that thought to seep into his mind. Suppose there had been an accident to the _Jodrell Bank_. He could, of course, be dead. All this could be the fantasies of a cooling brain. McCray grinned into the pink-lit darkness. The thought had somehow refreshed him, like icewater between rounds, and with a clearing head he remembered what a spacesuit was good for. It held a radio. He pressed the unsealing tabs, slipped his hand into the vacant chest of the suit and pulled out the hand mike. "This is Herrell McCray," he said, "calling the _Jodrell Bank_." No response. He frowned. "This is Herrell McCray, calling _Jodrell Bank_. "Herrell McCray, calling anybody, come in, please." But there was no answer. Thoughtfully he replaced the microphone. This was ultrawave radio, something more than a million times faster than light, with a range measured, at least, in hundreds of light-years. If there was no answer, he was a good long way from anywhere. Of course, the thing might not be operating. He reached for the microphone again-- He cried aloud. The pinkish lights went out. He was in the dark again, worse dark than before. For before the light had gone, McCray had seen what had escaped his eyes before. The suit and the microphone were clear enough in the pinkish glimmer; but the hand--his own hand, cupped to hold the microphone--he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting moment of study, his chest. McCray could not see any part of his own body at all. II Someone else could. Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic--and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that _may_ contain food. Suppose you call him "Hatcher" (and suppose you call it a "him.") Hatcher was not exactly male, because his race had no true males; but it did have females and he was certainly not that. Hatcher did not in any way look like a human being, but they had features in common. If Hatcher and McCray had somehow managed to strike up an acquaintance, they might have got along very well. Hatcher, like McCray, was an adventurous soul, young, able, well-learned in the technical sciences of his culture. Both enjoyed games--McCray baseball, poker and three-dimensional chess; Hatcher a number of sports which defy human description. Both held positions of some importance--considering their ages--in the affairs of their respective worlds. Physically they were nothing alike. Hatcher was a three-foot, hard-shelled sphere of jelly. He had "arms" and "legs," but they were not organically attached to "himself." They were snakelike things which obeyed the orders of his brain as well as your mind can make your toes curl; but they did not touch him directly. Indeed, they worked as well a yard or a quarter-mile away as they did when, rarely, they rested in the crevices they had been formed from in his "skin." At greater distances they worked less well, for reasons irrelevant to the Law of Inverse Squares. Hatcher's principal task at this moment was to run the "probe team" which had McCray under observation, and he was more than a little excited. His members, disposed about the room where he had sent them on various errands, quivered and shook a little; yet they were the calmest limbs in the room; the members of the other team workers were in a state of violent commotion. The probe team had had a shock. "Paranormal powers," muttered Hatcher's second in command, and the others mumbled agreement. Hatcher ordered silence, studying the specimen from Earth. After a long moment he turned his senses from the Earthman. "Incredible--but it's true enough," he said. "I'd better report. Watch him," he added, but that was surely unnecessary. Their job was to watch McCray, and they would do their job; and even more, not one of them could have looked away to save his life from the spectacle of a creature as odd and, from their point of view, hideously alien as Herrell McCray. * * * * * Hatcher hurried through the halls of the great buried structure in which he worked, toward the place where the supervising council of all probes would be in permanent session. They admitted him at once. Hatcher identified himself and gave a quick, concise report: "The subject recovered consciousness a short time ago and began to inspect his enclosure. His method of doing so was to put his own members in physical contact with the various objects in the enclosure. After observing him do this for a time we concluded he might be unable to see and so we illuminated his field of vision for him. "This appeared to work well for a time. He seemed relatively undisturbed. However, he then reverted to physical-contact, manipulating certain appurtenances of an artificial skin we had provided for him. "He then began to vibrate the atmosphere by means of resonating organs in his breathing passage. "Simultaneously, the object he was holding, attached to the artificial skin, was discovered to be generating paranormal forces." The supervising council rocked with excitement. "You're sure?" demanded one of the councilmen. "Yes, sir. The staff is preparing a technical description of the forces now, but I can say that they are electromagnetic vibrations modulating a carrier wave of very high speed, and in turn modulated by the vibrations of the atmosphere caused by the subject's own breathing." "Fantastic," breathed the councillor, in a tone of dawning hope. "How about communicating with him, Hatcher? Any progress?" "Well ... not much, sir. He suddenly panicked. We don't know why; but we thought we'd better pull back and let him recover for a while." The council conferred among itself for a moment, Hatcher waiting. It was not really a waste of time for him; with the organs he had left in the probe-team room, he was in fairly close touch with what was going on--knew that McCray was once again fumbling among the objects in the dark, knew that the team-members had tried illuminating the room for him briefly and again produced the rising panic. Still, Hatcher fretted. He wanted to get back. "Stop fidgeting," commanded the council leader abruptly. "Hatcher, you are to establish communication at once." "But, sir...." Hatcher swung closer, his thick skin quivering slightly; he would have gestured if he had brought members with him to gesture with. "We've done everything we dare. We've made the place homey for him--" actually, what he said was more like, _we've warmed the biophysical nuances of his enclosure_--"and tried to guess his needs; and we're frightening him half to death. We _can't_ go faster. This creature is in no way similar to us, you know. He relies on paranormal forces--heat, light, kinetic energy--for his life. His chemistry is not ours, his processes of thought are not ours, his entire organism is closer to the inanimate rocks of a sea-bottom than to ourselves." "Understood, Hatcher. In your first report you stated these creatures were intelligent." "Yes, sir. But not in our way." "But in _a_ way, and you must learn that way. I know." One lobster-claw shaped member drifted close to the councillor's body and raised itself in an admonitory gesture. "You want time. But we don't have time, Hatcher. Yours is not the only probe team working. The Central Masses team has just turned in a most alarming report." "Have they secured a subject?" Hatcher demanded jealously. The councillor paused. "Worse than that, Hatcher. I am afraid their subjects have secured one of them. One of them is missing." There was a moment's silence. Frozen, Hatcher could only wait. The council room was like a tableau in a museum until the councillor spoke again, each council member poised over his locus-point, his members drifting about him. Finally the councillor said, "I speak for all of us, I think. If the Old Ones have seized one of our probers our time margin is considerably narrowed. Indeed, we may not have any time at all. You must do everything you can to establish communication with your subject." "But the danger to the specimen--" Hatcher protested automatically. "--is no greater," said the councillor, "than the danger to every one of us if we do not find allies _now_." * * * * * Hatcher returned to his laboratory gloomily. It was just like the council to put the screws on; they had a reputation for demanding results at any cost--even at the cost of destroying the only thing you had that would make results possible. Hatcher did not like the idea of endangering the Earthman. It cannot be said that he was emotionally involved; it was not pity or sympathy that caused him to regret the dangers in moving too fast toward communication. Not even Hatcher had quite got over the revolting physical differences between the Earthman and his own people. But Hatcher did not want him destroyed. It had been difficult enough getting him here. Hatcher checked through the members that he had left with the rest of his team and discovered that there were no immediate emergencies, so he took time to eat. In Hatcher's race this was accomplished in ways not entirely pleasant to Earthmen. A slit in the lower hemisphere of his body opened, like a purse, emitting a thin, pussy, fetid fluid which Hatcher caught and poured into a disposal trough at the side of the eating room. He then stuffed the slit with pulpy vegetation the texture of kelp; it closed, and his body was supplied with nourishment for another day. He returned quickly to the room. His second in command was busy, but one of the other team workers reported--nothing new--and asked about Hatcher's appearance before the council. Hatcher passed the question off. He considered telling his staff about the disappearance of the Central Masses team member, but decided against it. He had not been told it was secret. On the other hand, he had not been told it was not. Something of this importance was not lightly to be gossiped about. For endless generations the threat of the Old Ones had hung over his race, those queer, almost mythical beings from the Central Masses of the galaxy. One brush with them, in ages past, had almost destroyed Hatcher's people. Only by running and hiding, bearing one of their planets with them and abandoning it--with its population--as a decoy, had they arrived at all. Now they had detected mapping parties of the Old Ones dangerously near the spiral arm of the galaxy in which their planet was located, they had begun the Probe Teams to find some way of combating them, or of fleeing again. But it seemed that the Probe Teams themselves might be betraying their existence to their enemies-- "Hatcher!" The call was urgent; he hurried to see what it was about. It was his second in command, very excited. "What is it?" Hatcher demanded. "Wait...." Hatcher was patient; he knew his assistant well. Obviously something was about to happen. He took the moment to call his members back to him for feeding; they dodged back to their niches on his skin, fitted themselves into their vestigial slots, poured back their wastes into his own circulation and ingested what they needed from the meal he had just taken.... "Now!" cried the assistant. "Look!" At what passed among Hatcher's people for a viewing console an image was forming. Actually it was the assistant himself who formed it, not a cathode trace or projected shadow; but it showed what it was meant to show. Hatcher was startled. "Another one! And--is it a different species? Or merely a different sex?" "Study the probe for yourself," the assistant invited. Hatcher studied him frostily; his patience was not, after all, endless. "No matter," he said at last. "Bring the other one in." And then, in a completely different mood, "We may need him badly. We may be in the process of killing our first one now." "Killing him, Hatcher?" Hatcher rose and shook himself, his mindless members floating away like puppies dislodged from suck. "Council's orders," he said. "We've got to go into Stage Two of the project at once." III Before Stage Two began, or before Herrell McCray realized it had begun, he had an inspiration. The dark was absolute, but he remembered where the spacesuit had been and groped his way to it and, yes, it had what all spacesuits had to have. It had a light. He found the toggle that turned it on and pressed it. Light. White, flaring, Earthly light, that showed everything--even himself. "God bless," he said, almost beside himself with joy. Whatever that pinkish, dancing halo had been, it had thrown him into a panic; now that he could see his own hand again, he could blame the weird effects on some strange property of the light. At the moment he heard the click that was the beginning of Stage Two. He switched off the light and stood for a moment, listening. For a second he thought he heard the far-off voice, quiet, calm and almost hopeless, that he had sensed hours before; but then that was gone. Something else was gone. Some faint mechanical sound that had hardly registered at the time, but was not missing. And there was, perhaps, a nice new sound that had not been there before; a very faint, an almost inaudible elfin hiss. McCray switched the light on and looked around. There seemed to be no change. And yet, surely, it was warmer in here. He could see no difference; but perhaps, he thought, he could smell one. The unpleasant halogen odor from the grating was surely stronger now. He stood there, perplexed. A tinny little voice from the helmet of the space suit said sharply, amazement in its tone, "McCray, is that you? Where the devil are you calling from?" He forgot smell, sound and temperature and leaped for the suit. "This is Herrell McCray," he cried. "I'm in a room of some sort, apparently on a planet of approximate Earth mass. I don't know--" "McCray!" cried the tiny voice in his ear. "Where are you? This is _Jodrell Bank_ calling. Answer, please!" "I _am_ answering, damn it," he roared. "What took you so long?" "Herrell McCray," droned the tiny voice in his ear, "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding to your message, acknowledge please. Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray...." It kept on, and on. McCray took a deep breath and thought. Something was wrong. Either they didn't hear him, which meant the radio wasn't transmitting, or--no. That was not it; they _had_ heard him, because they were responding. But it seemed to take them so long.... Abruptly his face went white. Took them so long! He cast back in his mind, questing for a fact, unable to face its implications. When was it he called them? Two hours ago? Three? Did that mean--did it _possibly_ mean--that there was a lag of an hour or two each way? Did it, for example, mean that at the speed of his suit's pararadio, millions of times faster than light, it took _hours_ to get a message to the ship and back? And if so ... where in the name of heaven was he? * * * * * Herrell McCray was a navigator, which is to say, a man who has learned to trust the evidence of mathematics and instrument readings beyond the guesses of his "common sense." When _Jodrell Bank_, hurtling faster than light in its voyage between stars, made its regular position check, common sense was a liar. Light bore false witness. The line of sight was trustworthy directly forward and directly after--sometimes not even then--and it took computers, sensing their data through instruments, to comprehend a star bearing and convert three fixes into a position. If the evidence of his radio contradicted common sense, common sense was wrong. Perhaps it was impossible to believe what the radio's message implied; but it was not necessary to "believe," only to act. McCray thumbed down the transmitter button and gave a concise report of his situation and his guesses. "I don't know how I got here. I don't know how long I've been gone, since I was unconscious for a time. However, if the transmission lag is a reliable indication--" he swallowed and went on--"I'd estimate I am something more than five hundred light-years away from you at this moment. That's all I have to say, except for one more word: Help." He grinned sourly and released the button. The message was on its way, and it would be hours before he could have a reply. Therefore he had to consider what to do next. He mopped his brow. With the droning, repetitious call from the ship finally quiet, the room was quiet again. And warm. Very warm, he thought tardily; and more than that. The halogen stench was strong in his nostrils again. Hurriedly McCray scrambled into the suit. By the time he was sealed down he was coughing from the bottom of his lungs, deep, tearing rasps that pained him, uncontrollable. Chlorine or fluorine, one of them was in the air he had been breathing. He could not guess where it had come from; but it was ripping his lungs out. He flushed the interior of the suit out with a reckless disregard for the wastage of his air reserve, holding his breath as much as he could, daring only shallow gasps that made him retch and gag. After a long time he could breathe, though his eyes were spilling tears. He could see the fumes in the room now. The heat was building up. Automatically--now that he had put it on and so started its servo-circuits operating--the suit was cooling him. This was a deep-space suit, regulation garb when going outside the pressure hull of an FTL ship. It was good up to at least five hundred degrees in thin air, perhaps three or four hundred in dense. In thin air or in space it was the elastic joints and couplings that depolymerized when the heat grew too great; in dense air, with conduction pouring energy in faster than the cooling coils could suck it out and hurl it away, it was the refrigerating equipment that broke down. McCray had no way of knowing just how hot it was going to get. Nor, for that matter, had the suit been designed to operate in a corrosive medium. All in all it was time for him to do something. * * * * * Among the debris on the floor, he remembered, was a five-foot space-ax, tungsten-steel blade and springy aluminum shaft. McCray caught it up and headed for the door. It felt good in his gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never mind why he had been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would, or could, do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out of this poisoned oven. _Crash-clang!_ The double jolt ran up the shaft of the ax, through his gauntlets and into his arm; but he was making progress, he could see the plastic--or whatever it was--of the door. It was chipping out. Not easily, very reluctantly; but flaking out in chips that left a white powdery residue. At this rate, he thought grimly, he would be an hour getting through it. Did he have an hour? But it did not take an hour. One blow was luckier than the rest; it must have snapped the lock mechanism. The door shook and slid ajar. McCray got the thin of the blade into the crack and pried it wide. He was in another room, maybe a hall, large and bare. McCray put the broad of his back against the broken door and pressed it as nearly closed as he could; it might not keep the gas and heat out, but it would retard them. The room was again unlighted--at least to McCray's eyes. There was not even that pink pseudo-light that had baffled him; here was nothing but the beam of his suit lamp. What it showed was cryptic. There were evidences of use: shelves, boxy contraptions that might have been cupboards, crude level surfaces attached to the walls that might have been workbenches. Yet they were queerly contrived, for it was not possible to guess from them much about the creatures who used them. Some were near the floor, some at waist height, some even suspended from the ceiling itself. A man would need a ladder to work at these benches and McCray, staring, thought briefly of many-armed blind giants or shapeless huge intelligent amoebae, and felt the skin prickle at the back of his neck. He tapped half-heartedly at one of the closed cupboards, and was not surprised when it proved as refractory as the door. Undoubtedly he could batter it open, but it was not likely that much would be left of its contents when he was through; and there was the question of time. But his attention was diverted by a gleam from one of the benches. Metallic parts lay heaped in a pile. He poked at them with a stiff-fingered gauntlet; they were oddly familiar. They were, he thought, very much like the parts of a bullet-gun. In fact, they were. He could recognize barrel, chamber, trigger, even a couple of cartridges, neatly opened and the grains of powder stacked beside them. It was an older, clumsier model than the kind he had seen in survival locker, on the _Jodrell Bank_--and abruptly wished he were carrying now--but it was a pistol. Another trophy, like the strange assortment in the other room? He could not guess. But the others had been more familiar; they all have come from his own ship. He was prepared to swear that nothing like this antique had been aboard. The drone began again in his ear, as it had at five-minute intervals all along: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ calling Herrell McCray...." And louder, blaring, then fading to normal volume as the AVC circuits toned the signal down, another voice. A woman's voice, crying out in panic and fear: "_Jodrell Bank!_ Where are you? Help!" IV Hatcher's second in command said: "He has got through the first survival test. In fact, he broke his way out! What next?" "Wait!" Hatcher ordered sharply. He was watching the new specimen and a troublesome thought had occurred to him. The new one was female and seemed to be in pain; but it was not the pain that disturbed Hatcher, it was something far more immediate to his interests. "I think," he said slowly, "that they are in contact." His assistant vibrated startlement. "I know," Hatcher said, "but watch. Do you see? He is going straight toward her." Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty, needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers. Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and death. He said, musing: "This new one, I cannot communicate with her, but I get--almost--a whisper, now and then. The first one, the male, nothing. But this female is perhaps not quite mute." "Then shall we abandon him and work with her, forgetting the first one?" Hatcher hesitated. "No," he said at last. "The male is responding well. Remember that when last this experiment was done every subject died; he is alive at least. But I am wondering. We can't quite communicate with the female--" "But?" "But I'm not sure that others can't." * * * * * The woman's voice was at such close range that McCray's suit radio made a useful RDF set. He located her direction easily enough, shielding the tiny built-in antenna with the tungsten-steel blade of the ax, while she begged him to hurry. Her voice was heavily accented, with some words in a language he did not recognize. She seemed to be in shock. McCray was hardly surprised at that; he had been close enough to shock himself. He tried to reassure her as he searched for a way out of the hall, but in the middle of a word her voice stopped. He hesitated, hefting the ax, glancing back at the way he had come. There had to be a way out, even if it meant chopping through a wall. When he turned around again there was a door. It was oddly shaped and unlike the door he had hewn through, but clearly a door all the same, and it was open. McCray regarded it grimly. He went back in his memory with meticulous care. Had he not looked at, this very spot a matter of moments before? He had. And had there been an open door then? There had not. There hadn't been even a shadowy outline of the three-sided, uneven opening that stood there now. Still, it led in the proper direction. McCray added one more inexplicable fact to his file and walked through. He was in another hall--or tunnel--rising quite steeply to the right. By his reckoning it was the proper direction. He labored up it, sweating under the weight of the suit, and found another open door, this one round, and behind it-- Yes, there was the woman whose voice he had heard. It was a woman, all right. The voice had been so strained that he hadn't been positive. Even now, short black hair might not have proved it, and she was lying face down but the waist and hips were a woman's, even though she wore a bulky, quilted suit of coveralls. He knelt beside her and gently turned her face. She was unconscious. Broad, dark face, with no make-up; she was apparently in her late thirties. She appeared to be Chinese. She breathed, a little raggedly but without visible discomfort; her face was relaxed as though she were sleeping. She did not rouse as he moved her. He realized she was breathing the air of the room they were in. His instant first thought was that she was in danger of asphyxiation; he started to leap up to get, and put her into, the small, flimsy space suit he saw slumped in a corner. At second thought he realized that she would not be breathing so comfortably if the air were full of the poisonous reek that had driven him out of the first room. There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn from that; perhaps he could economize on his own air reserve. Tentatively he cracked the seal of his faceplate and took a cautious breath. The faint reek of halogens was still there, but it was not enough even to make his eyes water, and the temperature of the air was merely pleasantly warm. He shook her, but she did not wake. He stood up and regarded her thoughtfully. It was a disappointment. Her voice had given him hope of a companion, someone to talk things over with, to compare notes--someone who, if not possessing any more answers than himself, could at least serve as a sounding-board in the give-and-take of discussion that might make some sort of sense out of the queerness that permeated this place. What he had instead was another burden to carry, for she was unable to care for herself and surely he could not leave her in this condition. * * * * * He slipped off the helmet absently and pressed the buttons that turned off the suit's cooling units, looking around the chamber. It was bare except for a litter of irrelevant human articles--much like the one in which he himself had first appeared, except that the articles were not _Jodrell Bank's_. A woven cane screen, some cooking utensils, a machine like a desk calculator, some books--he picked up one of the books and glanced at it. It was printed on coarse paper, and the text was in ideographs, Chinese, perhaps; he did not know Oriental languages. McCray knew that the _Jodrell Bank_ was not the only FTL vessel in this volume of space. The Betelgeuse run was a busy one, as FTL shipping lanes went. Almost daily departures from some point on Earth to one of the colonies, with equal traffic in the other direction. Of course, if the time-lag in communication did not lie, he was no longer anywhere within that part of the sky; Betelgeuse was only a few hundred light-years from Sol, and subspace radio covered that distance in something like fifty minutes. But suppose the woman came from another ship; perhaps a Singapore or Tokyo vessel, on the same run. She might easily have been trapped as he was trapped. And if she were awake, he could find out from her what had happened, and thus learn something that might be of use. Although it was hard to see what might be of use in these most unprecedented and unpleasant circumstances. The drone from _Jodrell Bank_ began again: "Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_ responding--" He turned the volume down but did not dare turn it off. He had lost track of time and couldn't guess when they would respond to his last message. He needed to hear that response when it came. Meanwhile, what about his fellow-captive? Her suit was only a flimsy work-about model, as airtight as his but without the bracing required for building jet propulsors into it. It contained air reserves enough, and limited water; but neither food nor emergency medical supplies. McCray had both of these, of course. It was merely one more reason why he could not abandon her and go on ... if, that is, he could find some reason for going in one direction preferably to another, and if a wall would conveniently open again to let him go there. He could give her an injection of a stimulant, he mused. Would that improve the situation? Not basically, he decided, with some regret. Sleep was a need, not a luxury; it would not help her to be awakened chemically, when body was demonstrating its need for rest by refusing to wake to a call. Anyway, if she were not seriously injured she would undoubtedly wake of her own accord before long. He checked pulse and eye-pupils; everything normal, no evidence of bleeding or somatic shock. So much for that. At least he had made one simple decision on his own, he thought with grim humor. To that extent he had reestablished his mastery of his own fate, and it made him feel a touch better. Perhaps he could make some more. What about trying to find a way out of this place, for instance? * * * * * It was highly probable that they would not be able to stay here indefinitely, that was the first fact to take into account. Either his imagination was jumpy, or the reek of halogens was a bit stronger. In any case there was no guarantee that this place would remain habitable any longer than the last, and he had to reckon with the knowledge that a spacesuit's air reserve was not infinite. These warrens might prove a death trap. McCray paused, leaning on the haft of his ax, wondering how much of that was reason and how much panic. He knew that he wanted, more than anything to get out of this place, to see sky and stars, to be where no skulking creatures behind false panels in the walls, or peering through televiewers concealed in the furnishings, could trick and trap him. But did he have any reason to believe that he would be better off somewhere else? Might it not be even that this place was a sort of vivarium maintained for his survival--that the leak of poison gases and heat in the first room was not a deliberate thrust at his safety, but a failure of the shielding that alone could keep him alive? He didn't know, and in the nature of things could not. But paradoxically the thought that escape might increase his danger made him all the more anxious to escape. He wanted to know. If death was waiting for him outside his chamber, McCray wanted to face it--now--while he was still in good physical shape. While he was still sane. For there was a limit to how many phenomena he could store away in the back of his mind; sooner or later the contradictions, the puzzles, the fears would have to be faced. Yet what could he do with the woman? Conceivably he could carry her; but could he also carry her suit? He did not dare take her without it. It would be no kindness to plunge her into another atmosphere of poison, and watch her die because he had taken her from her only hope of safety. Yet the suit weighed at least fifty pounds. His own was slightly more; the girl, say, a hundred and thirty. It added up to more mass than he could handle, at least for more than a few dozen yards. The speaker in his helmet said suddenly: "Herrell McCray, this is _Jodrell Bank_. Your transmission received. We are vectoring and ranging your signal. Stand by. We will call again in ten minutes." And, in a different tone: "God help you, Mac. What the devil happened to you?" It was a good question. McCray swore uselessly because he didn't know the answer. He took wry pleasure in imagining what was going on aboard _Jodrell Bank_ at that moment. At least not all the bewilderment was his own. They would be utterly baffled. As far as they were concerned, their navigator had been on the bridge at one moment and the next moment gone, tracelessly. That in itself was a major puzzle; the only way off an FTL ship in flight was in the direction called "suicide." That would have been their assumption, all right, as soon as they realized he was gone and checked the ship to make sure he was not for some reason wandering about in a cargo hold or unconscious in a closet after some hard-to-imagine attack from another crewman. They would have thought that somehow, crazily, he had got into a suit--there was the suit--and jumped out of a lock. But there would have been no question of going back to look for him. True, they could have tracked his subspace radio if he had used it. But what would have been the good of that? The first question, an all but unanswerable one, would be how long ago he had jumped. Even if they knew that, _Jodrell Bank_, making more than five hundred times light-speed, could not be stopped in fewer than a dozen light-years. They could hardly hope to return to even approximately the location in space where he might have jumped; and there was no hope of reaching a position, stopping, casting about, starting again--the accelerations were too enormous, a man too tiny a dust-mote. And, of course, he would have been dead in the first place, anyway. The transition from FTL drive to normal space was instantly fatal except within the protecting shield of a ship's engines. So they would have given him up and, hours later--or days, for he had lost track of time--they would have received his message. What would they make of that? He didn't know. After all, he hardly knew what he made of it himself. The woman still slept. The way back was still open. He could tell by sniffing the air that the poisons in the atmosphere were still gaining. Ahead there was nothing but blank walls, and the clutter of useless equipment littering the floor. Stolidly McCray closed his mind and waited. The signal came at last. "Mac, we have verified your position." The voice was that of Captain Tillinger, strained and shaking. "I don't know how you got there, but unless the readings lie you're the hell of a long way off. The bearing is identical with Messier object M-42 and the distance--" raggedly--"is compatible. About a thousand light-years from us, Mac. One way or another, you've been kidnaped. I--I--" The voice hesitated, unable to say what it could not accept as fact but could not deny. "I think," it managed at last, "that we've finally come across those super-beings in space that we've wondered about." * * * * * Hatcher's detached limbs were quivering with excitement--and with more than excitement, because he was afraid. He was trying to conceal from the others just how afraid he was. His second in command reported: "We have the second subject out of consciousness. How long do you want us to keep her that way?" "Until I tell you otherwise! How about the prime subject?" "We can't tell, Hatcher. But you were right. He is in communication with others, it seems, and by paranormal means." Hatcher noted the dismay in what his assistant said. He understood the dismay well enough. It was one thing to work on a project involving paranormal forces as an exercise in theory. It was something else entirely to see them in operation. But there was more cause for dismay than that, and Hatcher alone knew just how bad the situation was. He summoned one of his own members to him and impressed on it a progress report for the Council. He sent it floating through the long warrens of his people's world, ordered his assistants back to their work and closed in his thoughts to consider what had happened. These two creatures, with their command of forces in the paranormal--i.e., the electromagnetic--spectrum, seemed able to survive in the environments prepared for them. That was step one. No previous team had done as well. This was not the first time a probe team of his race had snatched a warmblooded biped from a spaceship for study--because their operation forces, psionic in nature, operated in non-Euclidean ways, it was easiest for them to make contact with the crew of a ship in the non-Euclidean space of FTL drive. But it was the first time that the specimens had survived. He reviewed the work they had already done with the male specimen. He had shown himself unable to live in the normal atmospheric conditions of Hatcher's world; but that was to be expected, after all, and the creature had been commendably quick about getting out of a bad environment. Probably they had blundered in illuminating the scene for him, Hatcher conceded. He didn't know how badly he had blundered, for the concept of "light" from a general source, illuminating not only what the mind wished to see but irrelevant matter as well, had never occurred to Hatcher or any of his race; all of their senses operated through the mind itself, and what to them was "light" was a sort of focusing of attention. But although something about that episode which Hatcher failed to understand had gone wrong, the specimen had not been seriously harmed by it. The specimen was doing well. Probably they could now go to the hardest test of all, the one which would mean success or failure. Probably they could so modify the creature as to make direct communication possible. And the other specimen? Hatcher would have frowned, if he had had brow muscles to shape such an expression--or a brow to be shaped. The female specimen was the danger. His own people knew how to shield their thoughts. This one evidently did not. It was astonishing that the Old Ones had not already encountered these bipeds, so loosely guarded was their radiation--when they radiated at all, of course, for only a few of them seemed to possess any psionic power worth mentioning. Hatcher hastily drove that thought from his mind, for what he proposed to do with the male specimen was to give him that power. And yet there was no choice for Hatcher's people, because they were faced with disaster. Hatcher, through his communications from the Council, knew how close the disaster was. When one of the probers from the Central Masses team disappeared, the only conclusion that could be drawn was the Old Ones had discovered them. They needed allies; more, they needed allies who had control of the electromagnetic forces that made the Old Ones so potent and so feared. In the male and female they had snatched out of space they might have found those allies. But another thought was in Hatcher's mind: Suppose the Old Ones found them too? Hatcher made up his mind. He could not delay any longer. "Open the way to the surface," he ordered. "As soon as possible, take both of them to where we can work." * * * * * The object Captain Tillinger had called "M-42" was no stranger to Herrell McCray. It was the Great Nebula in Orion, in Earth's telescopes a fuzzy patch of light, in cold fact a great and glowing cloud of gas. M-42 was not an external galaxy, like most of the "nebulae" in Messier's catalogue, but it was nothing so tiny as a single sun either. Its hydrogen mass spanned dozens of light-years. Imbedded in it--growing in it, as they fed on the gas that surrounded them--were scores of hot, bright new suns. _New_ suns. In all the incongruities that swarmed around him McCray took time to consider that one particular incongruity. The suns of the Orion gas cloud were of the spectral class called "B"--young suns, less than a thousandth as old as a Sol. They simply had not been in existence long enough to own stable planetary systems--much less planets which themselves were old enough to have cooled, brewed chemical complexes and thus in time produced life. But surely he was on a planet.... Wasn't he? McCray breathed a deep sigh and for one more time turned his mind away from unprofitable speculations. The woman stirred slightly. McCray knelt to look at her; then, on quick impulse, opened his medical kit, took out a single-shot capsule of a stimulant and slipped it neatly into the exposed vein of her arm. In about two minutes she would be awake. Good enough, thought McCray; at least he would have someone to talk to. Now if only they could find a way out of this place. If a door would open, as the other door had, and-- He paused, staring. There was another door. Open. He felt himself swaying, threw out an arm and realized that he was ... falling? Floating? Moving toward the door, somehow, not as though he were being dragged, not as though he were walking, but surely and rather briskly moving along. His feet were not touching the ground. It wasn't a volitional matter. His intentions had nothing to do with it. He flailed out, and touched nothing; nor did he slow his motion at all. He fought against it, instinctively; and then reason took over and he stopped. The woman's form lifted from the floor ahead of him. She was still unconscious. From the clutter on the floor, her lightweight space suit rose, too; suit and girl, they floated ahead of him, toward the door and out. McCray cried out and tried to run after them. His legs flailed and, of course, touched nothing; but it did seem that he was moving faster. The woman and her suit were disappearing around a bend, but he was right behind them. He became conscious of the returning reek of gases. He flipped up the plate of his helmet and lunged at the girl, miraculously caught her in one hand and, straining, caught the suit with the other. Stuffing her into the suit was hard, awkward work, like dressing a doll that is too large for its garments; but he managed it, closed her helmet, saw the flexible parts of her suit bulge out slightly as its automatic pressure regulators filled it with air. They drove along, faster and faster, until they came to a great portal, and out into the blinding radiance of a molten copper sky. * * * * * Gathered in a circle were a score or more of Hatcher's people. McCray didn't know they were Hatcher's people, of course. He did not know even that they were animate beings, for they lacked all the features of animals that he had been used to. No eyes. No faces. Their detached members, bobbing about seemingly at random, did not appear to have any relation to the irregular spheres that were their owners. The woman got unevenly to her feet, her faceplate staring toward the creatures. McCray heard a smothered exclamation in his suit-phones. "Are you all right?" he demanded sharply. The great crystal eye turned round to look at him. "Oh, the man who spoke to me." Her voice was taut but controlled. The accent was gone; her control was complete. "I am Ann Mei-Ling, of the _Woomara_. What are--those?" McCray said, "Our kidnappers, I guess. They don't look like much, do they?" She laughed shakily, without answering. The creatures seemed to be waiting for something, McCray thought; if indeed they were creatures and not machines or--or whatever one might expect to find, in the impossible event of being cast away on an improbable planet of an unexplored sun. He touched the woman's helmet reassuringly and walked toward the aliens, raising his arms. "Hello," he said. "I am Herrell McCray." He waited. He half turned; the woman watching him. "I don't know what to do next," he confessed. "Sit down," she said suddenly. He stared. "No, you must! They want you to sit down." "I didn't hear--" he began, then shrugged. He sat down. "Now lie stretched out and open your face mask." "_Here?_ Listen--Ann--Miss Mei-Ling, whatever you said your name was! Don't you feel the heat? If I crack my mask--" "But you must." She spoke very confidently. "It is _s'in fo_---what do you call it--telepathy, I think. But I can hear them. They want you to open your mask. No, it won't kill you. They understand what they are doing." She hesitated, then said, with less assurance, "They need us, McCray. There is something ... I am not sure, but something bad. They need help, and think you can give it to them. So open your helmet as they wish, please." McCray closed his eyes and grimaced; but there was no help for it, he had no better ideas. And anyway, he thought, he could close it again quickly enough if these things had guessed wrong. The creatures moved purposefully toward McCray, and he found himself the prisoner of a dozen unattached arms. Surprised, he struggled, but helplessly; no, he would not be able to close the plate again!... But the heat was no worse. Somehow they were shielding him. A tiny member, like one of the unattached arms but much smaller, writhed through the air toward him, hesitated over his eyes and released something tinier still, something so small and so close that McCray could not focus his eyes upon it. It moved deliberately toward his face. The woman was saying, as if to herself, "The thing they fear is--far away, but--oh, no! My God!" There was a terrible loud scream, but McCray was not quite sure he heard it. It might have been his own, he thought crazily; for that tiny floating thing had found his face and was burrowing deep inside; and the pain was beyond belief. * * * * * The pain was incredible. It was worse than anything he had ever felt, and it grew ... and then it was gone. What it was that the spheroidal aliens had done to his mind McCray had no way of learning. He could only know that a door had been open. An opaque screen was removed. He was free of his body. He was more than free, he was extended--increased--enlarged. He was inside the body of an alien, and the alien was in him. He was also outside both, looking at them. McCray had never felt anything like it in his life. It was a situation without even a close analogue. He had had a woman in his arms, he had been part of a family, he had shared the youthful sense of exploration that comes in small, eager groups: These were the comparisons that came to his mind. This was so much more than any of these things. He and the alien--he and, he began to perceive, a number of aliens--were almost inextricably mingled. Yet they were separate, as one strand of colored thread in a ball of yarn is looped and knotted and intertwined with every other strand, although it retains its own integrity. He was in and among many minds, and outside them all. McCray thought: This is how a god must feel. * * * * * Hatcher would have laughed--if he had lips, larynx or mouth to laugh with. He would have laughed in pure exultation, and, indeed, his second in command recognized the marionette quivering of his detached limbs as a shout of glee. "We've done it," cried the assistant, catching his delight. "We've made the project work!" "We've done a great deal more than that," exulted Hatcher. "Go to the supervisors, report to them. Pass on the word to the Central Masses probe. Maintain for the alien the pressure and temperature value he needs--" "And you, Hatcher?" "I'm going with him--out in the open! I'm going to show him what _we_ need!" * * * * * Hatcher. McCray recognized that this was a name--the name of the entity closest to himself, the one that had somehow manipulated his forebrain and released the mind from the prison of the skull. "Hatcher" was not a word but an image, and in the image he saw a creature whose physical shape was unpleasant, but whose instincts and hopes were enough like his own to provide common ground. He saw more than that. This Hatcher was trying to persuade him to move. To venture farther. To come with him.... McCray allowed himself to be lead and at once he was outside not only of his own body but of all bodies. He was free in space. The entity that had been born of Herrell McCray was now larger than a sun. He could see, all around him, the wonder and beauty of the great gas cloud in which his body rested, on one tiny planet of one trivial star. His sense of time was not changed from what it had been--he could count the pulses of his own body, still thudding in what, however remote, was his ear--but he could see things that were terribly slow and vast. He could see the friction of the streamers of gas in the cloud as light-pressure drove them outward. He could hear the subtle emanations of ion clashing with hurtling ion. He could see the great blue new suns tunneling through the cloud, building their strength out of the diffuse contaminated hydrogen that made the Orion nebula, leaving relatively clear "holes" behind them. He could see into the gas and through it. He could perceive each star and gassy comet; and he could behold the ordered magnificence of the galaxy of stars, and the universe of galaxies, beyond. The presence beside him was urging him to look beyond, into a denser, richer region of suns. McCray, unsure of his powers, stretched toward it--and recoiled. There was something there which was terrifying, something cold and restless that watched him come toward it with the eyes of a crouched panther awaiting a deer. The presence beside him felt the same terror, McCray knew. He was grateful when Hatcher allowed him to look away from the central clusters and return to the immediate neighborhood of his body. Like a child's toy in a diminishing glass, McCray could see the planet he had left. But it was no planet. It was not a planet, but a great irregular sphere of metal, honeycombed and warrened. He would have thought it a ship, though huge, if it had had engines or instruments.... No. It _was_ a ship. Hatcher beside him was proof that these creatures needed neither, not in any Earthly sense, at least. They themselves were engines, with their power to move matter apart from the intervention of other matter. They themselves were instruments, through the sensing of force, that was now within his own power. A moment's hesitant practice, and McCray had the "planet" in the palm of his hand--not a real palm, not a real hand; but it was there for his inspection. He looked at it and within it and saw the interior nests of Hatcher's folk, found the room where he had been brought, traced his course to the surface, saw his own body in its spacesuit, saw beside it the flaccid suit that had held the strange woman's body.... The suit was empty. The suit was empty, and in the moment of that discovery McCray heard a terrible wailing cry--not in his ears, in his mind--from the aliens around him. The suit was empty. They discovered it the same moment as he. It was wrong and it was dangerous; they were terrified. The companion presence beside him receded into emptiness. In a moment McCray was back in his own body, and the gathering members let him free. VI Some hundreds of light-years away, the _Jodrell Bank_ was making up lost time on its Betelgeuse run. Herrell McCray swept the long line from Sol to Betelgeuse, with his perceptions that were not his eyes and his touch that was not of matter, until he found it. The giant ship, fastest and hugest of mankind's star vessels, was to him a lumbering tiny beetle. It held friends and something else--something his body needed--air and water and food. McCray did not know what would happen to him if, while his mind was out in the stars, his body died. But he was not anxious to find out. McCray had not tried moving his physical body, but with what had been done to his brain he could now do anything within the powers of Hatcher's people. As they had swept him from ship to planet, so he could now hurl his body back from planet to ship. He flexed muscles of his mind that had never been used before, and in a moment his body was slumped on the floor of the _Jodrell Bank's_ observation bubble. In another moment he was in his body, opening his eyes and looking out into the astonished face of Chris Stoerer, his junior navigator. "God in heaven," whispered Stoerer. "It's you!" "It is," said McCray hoarsely, through lips that were parched and cracked, sitting up and trying the muscles of the body. It ached. He was bone-weary. "Give me a hand getting out of this suit, will you?" It was not easy to be a mind in a body again, McCray discovered. Time had stopped for him. He had been soaring the star-lanes in his released mind for hours; but while his mind had been liberated, his body, back on Hatcher's "planet," had continued its slow metabolism, its steady devouring of its tissues, its inevitable progress toward death. When he had returned to it he found its pulse erratic and its breathing ragged. A grinding knot of hunger seethed in its stomach. Its muscles ached. Whatever might become of his mind, it was clear that his body would die if it were left unfed and uncared-for much longer. So he had brought it back to the _Jodrell Bank_. He stood up and avoided Chris's questions. "Let me get something to eat, and then get cleaned up a little." (He had discovered that his body stank.) "Then I'll tell you everything you want to know--you and the captain, and anybody else who wants to listen. And we'll have to send a dispatch to Earth, too, because this is important.... But, please, I only want to tell it once." Because--he did not say--I may not have time to tell it again. For those cold and murderous presences in the clustered inner suns had reached out as casually as a bear flicking a salmon out of a run and snatched the unknown woman from Hatcher's planet. They could reach anywhere in the galaxy their thoughts roamed. They might easily follow him here. * * * * * It was good to be human again, and McCray howled with pain and joy as the icy needle-spray of the showers cleansed his body. He devoured the enormous plates of steak and potatoes the ship's galley shoved before him, and drank chilled milk and steaming black coffee in alternate pint mugs. McCray let the ship's surgeon look him over, and laughed at the expression in the man's eyes. "I know I'm a little wobbly," he said. "It doesn't matter, Doc. You can put me in the sickbay as long as you like, as soon as I've talked to the captain. I won't mind a bit. You see, I won't be there--" and he laughed louder, and would not explain. An hour later, with food in his belly and something from the surgeon's hypospray in his bloodstream to clear his brain, he was in the captain's cabin, trying to spell out in words that made sense the incredible story of (he discovered) eight days since he had been abducted from the ship. Looking at the ship's officers, good friends, companions on a dozen planetside leaves, McCray started to speak, stumbled and was for a moment without words. It was too incredible to tell. How could he make them understand? They would have to understand. Insane or not, the insane facts had to be explained to them. However queerly they might stare, they were intelligent men. They would resist but ultimately they would see. He settled his problem by telling them baldly and plainly, without looking at their faces and without waiting for their questions, everything that had happened. He told them about Hatcher and about the room in which he had come to. He told them about the pinkish light that showed only what he concentrated on--and explained it to them, as he had not understood it at first; about Hatcher's people, and how their entire sense-world was built up of what humans called E.S.P., the "light" being only the focusing of thought, which sees no material objects that it is not fixed on. He told them of the woman from the other ship and the cruel, surgical touch on his brain that had opened a universe to him. He promised that that universe would open for them as well. He told them of the deadly, unknowable danger to Hatcher's people--and to themselves--that lay at the galaxy's core. He told them how the woman had disappeared, and told them she was dead--at the hands of the Old Ones from the Central Masses--a blessing to her, McCray explained, and a blessing to all of them; for although her mind would yield some of its secrets even in death, if she were alive it would be their guide, and the Old Ones would be upon them. He did not wait for them to react. He turned to the ship's surgeon. "Doc, I'm all yours now, body and soul ... cancel that. Just body!" And he left them, to swim once more in space. * * * * * In so short a time McCray had come to think of this as life, and a sort of interregnum. He swept up and out, glancing back only to see the ship's surgeon leaping forward to catch his unconscious body as it fell and then he was in space between the stars once more. Here, 'twixt Sol and Betelgeuse, space was clear, hard and cold, no diffuse gas cloud, no new, growing suns. He "looked" toward Hatcher's world, but hesitated and considered. First or last, he would have to look once more upon the inimical presences that had peered out at him from the Central Masses. It might as well be now. His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy. Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic sphere to which our Earth's sector of the galaxy is only a remote and unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind's Sol lies in a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man's Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth's--tens of billions of stars in all, whirling close to each other, so that star greets star over distances that are hardly more than planetary. Sol's nearest neighbor star is four light-years away. No single sun in this dense, gyrating central mass was as much as one light-year from its fellows. Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen--whose planets had cooled and spawned life before Earth's hollows cupped the first scalding droplets that were the beginnings of seas. On these ancient worlds life existed. McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to communicate to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher's thoughts. Hatcher's people had fled from these ancients many millenia before--fled and hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred. Hatcher's people were creatures of thought. Man was the wielder of physical forces--"paranormal" to Hatcher, as teleportation and mind-seeing were "paranormal" to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both. McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years before he could stop. To battle the Old Ones would be no easy match--yet time might work for the human race. Already they controlled the electromagnetic spectrum, and hydrogen fusion could exert the force of suns. With Hatcher's help--and his own--Man would free his mind as well; and perhaps the Old Ones would find themselves against an opponent as mighty as themselves. He drew back from the Central Masses, no longer afraid, and swept out to see Hatcher's planet. It was gone. * * * * * In the great gas cloud the tunneling blue suns swept up their graze of hydrogen, untroubled by planets. Themselves too young to have solid satellites, Hatcher's adopted world removed again, they were alone. Gone! It was for a moment, a panicky thought. McCray realized what they had done. Hatcher's greatest hope had been to find another race to stand between his people and the Old Ones. And they had found it! Now Hatcher's world could hide again and wait until the battle had been fought for them. With a face light-years across, with a brain made up of patterns in the ether, McCray grinned wryly. "Maybe they made the right choice," he thought, considering. "Maybe they'd only be in the way when the showdown comes." And he sought out _Jodrell Bank_ and his body once more, preparing to return to being human ... and to teach his fellow-humans to be gods. [Transcriber's Note: No Secton V heading in original] 
20071	----	SUE A LITTLE HEROINE by L. T. MEADE Author of "A Girl from America," "The Princess of the Revels," "Polly, a New-Fashioned Girl," "A Sweet Girl Graduate," etc. New York The New York Book Company 1910 BIOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY L. T. Meade (Mrs. Elizabeth Thomasina Smith), English novelist, was born at Bandon, County Cork, Ireland, 1854, the daughter of Rev. R. T. Meade, Rector of Novohal, County Cork, and married Toulmin Smith in 1879. She wrote her first book, _Lettie's Last Home_, at the age of seventeen and since then has been an unusually prolific writer, her stories attaining wide popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. She worked in the British Museum, living in Bishopsgate Without, making special studies of East London life which she incorporated in her stories. She edited _Atlanta_ for six years. Her pictures of girls, especially in the influence they exert on their elders, are drawn with intuitive fidelity; pathos, love, and humor, as in _Daddy's Girl_, flowing easily from her pen. She has traveled extensively, being devoted to motoring and other outdoor sports. Among more than fifty novels she has written, dealing largely with questions of home life, are: _David's Little Lad_; _Great St. Benedict's_; _A Knight of To-day_ (1877); _Miss Toosey's Mission_; _Bel-Marjory_ (1878); _Laddie; Outcast Robbin, or, Your Brother and Mine_; _A Cry from the Great City_; _White Lillie and Other Tales_; _Scamp and I_; _The Floating Light of Ringfinnan_; _Dot and Her Treasures_; _The Children's Kingdom: the Story of Great Endeavor_; _The Water Gipsies_; _A Dweller in Tents_; _Andrew Harvey's Wife_; _Mou-setse: A Negro Hero_ (1880); _Mother Herring's Chickens_ (1881); _A London Baby: the Story of King Roy_ (1883); _Hermie's Rose-Buds and Other Stories_; _How it all Came Round_; _Two Sisters_ (1884); _Autocrat of the Nursery_; _Tip Cat_; _Scarlet Anemones_; _The Band of Three_; _A Little Silver Trumpet_; _Our Little Ann_; _The Angel of Love_ (1885); _A World of Girls_ (1886); _Beforehand_; _Daddy's Boy_; _The O'Donnells of Inchfawn_; _The Palace Beautiful_; _Sweet Nancy_ (1887); _Deb and the Duchess_ (1888); _Nobody's Neighbors_; _Pen_ (1888); _A Girl from America_ (1907). CONTENTS I. BIG BEN'S VOICE. 1 II. A SERVANT OF GOD. 3 III. GOOD SECURITY. 7 IV. SOLITARY HOURS. 9 V. EAGER WORDS. 10 VI. DIFFERENT SORT OF WORK. 12 VII. SHOPPING. 21 VIII. COMPARISONS. 26 IX. A TRIP INTO THE COUNTRY. 31 X. THE RETURN TO LONDON. 35 XI. A NEW DEPARTURE. 44 XII. LEFT ALONE. 48 XIII. PETER HARRIS. 60 XIV. THE SEARCH. 66 XV. CONCENTRATION OF PURPOSE. 69 XVI. PICKLES. 74 XVII. CINDERELLA. 78 XVIII. THE METROPOLITAN FIRE BRIGADE. 79 XIX. A SAINTLY LADY. 83 XX. CAUGHT AGAIN. 87 XXI. SAFE HOME AT LAST. 94 XXII. NEWS OF SUE. 105 XXIII. AMATEUR DETECTIVE. 109 XXIV. MOTHER AND SON. 112 XXV. ABOUT RONALD. 113 XXVI. TWO CUPS OF COFFEE. 124 XXVII. DELAYED TRIAL. 127 XXVIII. CINDERELLA WOULD SHIELD THE REAL THIEF. 130 XXIX. A LITTLE HEROINE. 132 XXX. WHAT WAS HARRIS TO HER? 134 XXXI. A STERN RESOLVE. 136 XXXII. AN UNEXPECTED ACCIDENT. 137 XXXIII. A POINTED QUESTION. 138 XXXIV. PICKLES TO THE FORE AGAIN. 141 XXXV. THE WINGS ARE GROWING. 142 XXXVI. A CRISIS. 143 XXXVII. THE HAPPY GATHERING. 151 SUE: A LITTLE HEROINE. CHAPTER I. BIG BEN'S VOICE. Sue made a great effort to push her way to the front of the crowd. The street preacher was talking, and she did not wish to lose a word. She was a small, badly made girl, with a freckled face and hair inclined to red, but her eyes were wonderfully blue and intelligent. She pushed and pressed forward into the thick of the crowd. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and looking up, saw a very rough man gazing at her. "Be that you, Peter Harris?" said Sue. "An' why didn't yer bring Connie along?" "Hush!" said some people in the crowd. The preacher raised his voice a little higher: "'Tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee.'" Peter Harris, the rough man, trembled slightly. Sue found herself leaning against him. She knew quite well that his breath was coming fast. "His disciples and Peter," she said to herself. The street preacher had a magnificent voice. It seemed to roll above the heads of the listening crowd, or to sink to a penetrating whisper which found its echo in their hearts. The deep, wonderful eyes of the man had a power of making people look at him. Sue gazed with all her might and main. "Father John be a good un," she said to herself. "He be the best man in all the world." After the discourse--which was very brief and full of stories, and just the sort which those rough people could not help listening to--a hymn was sung, and then the crowd dispersed. Sue was amongst them. She was in a great hurry. She forgot all about John Atkins, the little street preacher to whom she had been listening. She soon found herself in a street which was gaily lighted; there was a gin-palace at one end, another in the middle, and another at the farther end. This was Saturday night: Father John was fond of holding vigorous discourses on Saturday nights. Sue stopped to make her purchases. She was well-known in the neighborhood, and as she stepped in and out of one shop and then of another, she was the subject of a rough jest or a pleasant laugh, just as the mood of the person she addressed prompted one or other. She spent a few pence out of her meager purse, her purchases were put into a little basket, and she found her way home. The season was winter. She turned into a street back of Westminster; it went by the name of Adam Street. It was very long and rambling, with broken pavements, uneven roadways, and very tall, narrow, and dirty houses. In a certain room on the fourth floor of one of the poorest of these houses lay a boy of between ten and eleven years of age. He was quite alone in the room, but that fact did not at all insure his being quiet. All kinds of sounds came to him--sounds from the street, sounds from below stairs, sounds from overhead. There were shrieking voices and ugly laughter, and now and then there were shrill screams. The child was accustomed to these things, however, and it is doubtful whether he heard them. He was a sad-looking little fellow, with that deadly white complexion which children who never go into the fresh air possess. His face, however, was neither discontented nor unhappy. He lay very still, with patient eyes, quite touching in their absolute submission. Had any one looked hard at little Giles they would have noticed something else on his face--it was a listening look. The sounds all around did not discompose him, for his eyes showed that he was waiting for something. It came. Over and above the discord a Voice filled the air. Nine times it repeated itself, slowly, solemnly, with deep vibrations. It was "Big Ben" proclaiming the hour. The boy had heard the chimes which preceded the hour; they were beautiful, of course, but it was the voice of Big Ben himself that fascinated him. "Ain't he a real beauty to-night?" thought the child. "How I wishes as Sue 'ud hear him talk like that! Sometimes he's more weakly in his throat, poor fellow! but to-night he's in grand voice." The discord, which for one brief moment was interrupted for the child by the beautiful, harmonious notes, continued in more deafening fashion than ever. Children cried; women scolded; men cursed and swore. In the midst of the din the room door was opened and a girl entered. "Sue!" cried Giles. "Yes," answered Sue, putting down her basket as she spoke. "I'm a bit late; there wor a crowd in the street, and I went to hear him. He wor grand." "Oh, worn't he?" said Giles. "I never did know him to be in such beautiful voice." Sue came up and stared at the small boy. Her good-natured but somewhat common type of face was a great contrast to his. "Whatever are you talking about?" she said. "You didn't hear him; you can't move, poor Giles!" "But I did hear him," replied the boy. "I feared as I'd get off to sleep, but I didn't. I never did hear Big Ben in such voice--he gave out his text as clear as could be." "Lor', Giles!" exclaimed Sue, "I didn't mean that stupid clock; I means Father John. I squeezed up as close as possible to him, and I never missed a word as fell from his lips. Peter Harris were there too. I wonder how he felt. Bad, I 'spect, when he remembers the way he treated poor Connie. And oh, Giles! what do yer think? The preacher spoke to him jest as clear as clear could be, and he called him by his name--Peter. 'Tell His disciples and Peter,' Father John cried, and I could feel Peter Harris jump ahind me." "Wor that his text, Sue?" "Yes, all about Peter. It wor wonnerful." "Well, my text were, 'No more pain,'" said the boy. "I ache bad nearly always, but Big Ben said, 'No more pain,' as plain as he could speak, poor old fellow! It was nine times he said it. It were werry comforting." Sue made no reply. She was accustomed to that sort of remark from Giles. She busied herself putting the kettle on the fire to boil, and then cleaned a little frying-pan which by-and-by was to toast a herring for Giles's supper and her own. "Look what I brought yer," she said to the boy. "It were turning a bit, Tom Watkins said, and he gave it me for a ha'penny, but I guess frying and a good dash of salt 'ull make it taste fine. When the kettle boils I'll pour out your tea; you must want it werry bad." "Maybe I do and maybe I don't," answered Giles. "It's 'No more pain' I'm thinking of. Sue, did you never consider that maybe ef we're good and patient Lord Christ 'ull take us to 'eaven any day?" "No," answered Sue; "I'm too busy." She stood for a minute reflecting. "And I don't want to go to 'eaven yet," she continued; "I want to stay to look after you." Giles smiled. "It's beautiful in 'eaven," he said. "I'd like to go, but I wouldn't like to leave you, Sue." "Take your tea now, there's a good fellow," answered Sue, who was nothing if not matter-of-fact. "Aye, dear!" she continued as she poured it out and then waited for Giles to raise the cup to his lips, "Peter Harris do look bad. I guess he's sorry he was so rough on Connie. But now let's finish our supper, and I'll prepare yer for bed, Giles, for I'm desp'rate tired." CHAPTER II. A SERVANT OF GOD. John Atkins, the street preacher, was a little man who led a wonderful life. He was far better educated than most people of his station, and in addition his mind was tender in feeling and very sensitive and loving. He regarded everybody as his brothers and sisters, and in especial he took to his heart all sorrowful people. He never grumbled or repined, but he looked upon his life as a pilgrimage to a better country, and did not, therefore, greatly trouble if things were not quite smooth for him. This little man had a very wide circle of friends. The fact is, he had more power of keeping peace and order in the very poor part of London, back of Westminster, where he lived, than had any dignitary of the Church, any rector, any curate, or any minister, be he of what persuasion he might. Father John was very humble about himself. Indeed, one secret of his success lay in the fact that he never thought of himself at all. Having preached on this Saturday evening, as was his wont, to a larger crowd than usual, he went home. As he walked a passer-by could have seen that he was lame; he used a crutch. With the winter rain beating on him he looked insignificant. Presently he found the house where he had a room, went up the stairs, and entered, opening the door with a latch-key. A fire was burning here, and a small paraffin lamp with a red shade over it cast a warm glow over the little place. The moment the light fell upon Father John his insignificance vanished. That was a grand head and face which rose above the crippled body. The head was high and splendidly proportioned. It was crowned with a wealth of soft brown hair, which fell low on the shoulders. The forehead was lofty, straight, and full; the mouth rather compressed, with firm lines round it; the eyes were very deep set--they were rather light gray in color, but the pupils were unusually large. The pupils and the peculiar expression of the eyes gave them a wonderful power. They could speak when every other feature in the face was quiet. "I don't like them--I dread them," said Peter Harris on one occasion. "Aye, but don't I love 'em just!" remarked little Giles. Giles and Sue were special friends of John Atkins. They had, in fact, been left in his care by their mother three years before this story begins. This was the way they had first learned to know Father John. The man had a sort of instinct for finding out when people were in trouble and when they specially needed him. There was a poor woman lying on her dying bed, and a boy and a girl were kneeling close to her. "Keep a good heart up, Giles," she said to the boy. "I know I'm goin' to leave yer, and you're as lame as lame can be, but then there's Sue. Sue has a deal o' gumption for such a young un. Sue won't let yer want, Giles, lad; you need never go to the workhouse while Sue's alive." "No, that he needn't, mother," answered Sue. "Can't yer get back on to yer sofa, Giles?" she added, turning to the boy. "You'll break your back kneeling by mother all this time." "No, I won't; I'd rather stay," answered the boy. His eyes were full of light; he kept on stroking his mother's hand. "Go on, mother," he said. "Tell us more. You're goin' to 'eaven, and you'll see father." A sob strangled his voice for a minute. "Yes, I'll see my good 'usband--that is, I hope so; I can but trust--I allus have trusted, though often, ef I may say the truth, I couldn't tell what I were a-trusting to. Somehow, whatever folks say, there _is_ a Providence." "Oh, mother!" said Giles, "God is so beautiful--when you see father again you'll know that." "Mother," interrupted Sue, "does yer think as Providence 'ull get me constant work at the sewing, enough to keep Giles and me?" "I dunno, Sue," answered the woman. "I've trusted a good bit all my life, and more specially since your father was took, and somehow we haven't quite starved. Happen it'll be the same with Giles and you." The boy sighed. His back was aching terribly. His heart was breaking at the thought of losing his mother; he struggled to continue kneeling by the bedside, but each moment the effort became greater. The children were kneeling so when a quick, light step was heard on the stairs, and a little man entered. It was too dark in the room for the children to see his face; they heard, however, a very pleasant voice. It said in cheerful tones: "Why haven't you fire here, and a candle? Can I help you?" "There ain't much candle left," answered Giles. "And mother's dying," continued Sue. "She don't mind the dark--do yer, mother?" The little man made no reply in words, but taking some matches from his pocket, and also a candle, he struck a light. He placed the candle in a sconce on the wall, and then turned to the three. "Be yer a parson?" asked the woman. "I am a servant of God," answered Atkins. "I'm real glad as you're a parson," she answered; "you can make it all right between Almighty God and me." "You are mistaken; I can't do that. That is Jesus Christ's work. But I will pray with you--let me hold your hand, and we will pray together." Then and there in the dismal attic Father John spoke out his heart in the following simple words. Even Sue never forgot those words to the latest day she lived: "Lord God Almighty, look down upon this dying woman. Thy Son died for her and she knows it not. Lord, she is in great darkness, and she is so near death that she has no time to learn the truth in its fullness; but Thou who art in the light can show some of Thy light to her. Now, in her dying hour, reveal to her Thyself." The dying woman fixed her glittering eyes on the strange man. When he ceased speaking she smiled; then she said, slowly: "I allus felt that I could trust in Providence." She never spoke after that, and half an hour afterwards she died. This was the beginning of Father John's friendship with Giles and Sue. The next day Sue, by dint of many and anxious inquiries, found him out, and put her queer little unkempt head into his room. "Ef yer please, parson, may I speak to yer 'bout Giles and me?" "Certainly, my little girl. Sit down and tell me what I can do for you." "Parson," said Sue, with much entreaty in her voice and many a pucker on her brow, "what I wants to say is a good deal. I wants ter take care o' Giles, to keep up the bit o' home and the bit o' victual. It 'ud kill Giles ef he wor to be took to the work'us; and I promised mother as I'd keep 'im. Mother wor allers a-trustin', and she trusted Giles ter me." Here Sue's voice broke off into a sob, and she put up her dirty apron to her eyes. "Don't cry, my dear," answered Atkins kindly; "you must not break your word to your mother. Will it cost you so much money to keep yourself and Giles in that little attic?" "It ain't that," said she, proudly. "It ain't a bit as I can't work, fur I can, real smart at 'chinery needlework. I gets plenty to do, too, but that 'ere landlady, she ain't a bit like mother; she'd trusten nobody, and she up this morning, and mother scarce cold, and says as she'd not let her room to Giles and me 'cept we could get some un to go security fur the rent; and we has no un as 'ud go security, so we must go away the day as mother is buried, and Giles must go to the work'us; and it 'ull kill Giles, and mother won't trust me no more." "Don't think that, my child; nothing can shake your mother's trust where God has taken her now. But do you want me to help you?" Sue found the color mounting to her little, weather-beaten face. A fear suddenly occurred to her that she had been audacious--that this man was a stranger, that her request was too great for her to ask. But something in the kindness of the eyes looking straight into hers brought sudden sunshine to her heart and courage to her resolve. With a burst, one word toppling over the other, out came the whole truth: "Please, sir--please, sir, I thought as you might go security fur Giles and me. We'd pay real honest. Oh, sir, will you, jest because mother did trusten so werry much?" "I will, my child, and with all the heart in the world. Come home with me now, and I will arrange the whole matter with your landlady." CHAPTER III. GOOD SECURITY. John Atkins was always wont to speak of Sue and Giles as among the successes of his life. This was not the first time he had gone security for his poor, and many of his poor had decamped, leaving the burden of their unpaid rent on him. He never murmured when such failures came to him. He was just a trifle more particular in looking not so much into the merits as the necessities of the next case that came to his knowledge. But no more, than if all his flock had been honest as the day, did he refuse his aid. This may have been a weakness on the man's part; very likely, for he was the sort of man whom all sensible and long-headed people would have spoken about as a visionary, an enthusiast, a believer in doing to others as he would be done by--a person, in short, without a grain of everyday sense to guide him. Atkins would smile when such people lectured him on what they deemed his folly. Nevertheless, though he took failure with all resignation, success, when it came to him, was stimulating, and Giles and Sue he classed among his successes. The mother died and was buried, but the children did not leave their attic, and Sue, brave little bread-winner, managed not only to pay the rent but to keep the gaunt wolf of hunger from the door. Sue worked as a machinist for a large City house. Every day she rose with the dawn, made the room as tidy as she could for Giles, and then started for her long walk to the neighborhood of Cheapside. In a room with sixty other girls Sue worked at the sewing-machine from morning till night. It was hard labor, as she had to work with her feet as well as her hands, producing slop clothing at the rate of a yard a minute. Never for an instant might her eyes wander from the seam; and all this severe work was done in the midst of an ear-splitting clatter, which alone would have worn out a person not thoroughly accustomed to it. But Sue was not unhappy. For three years now she had borne without breaking down this tremendous strain on her health. The thought that she was keeping Giles in the old attic made her bright and happy, and her shrill young voice rose high and merry above those of her companions. No; Sue, busy and honest, was not unhappy. But her fate was a far less hard one than Giles's. Giles had not always been lame. When first his mother held him in her arms he was both straight and beautiful. Though born of poor parents and in London, he possessed a health and vigor seldom bestowed upon such children. In those days his father was alive, and earning good wages as a fireman in the London Fire Brigade. There was a comfortable home for both Sue and Giles, and Giles was the very light and sunshine of his father's and mother's life. To his father he had been a special source of pride and rejoicing. His beauty alone would have made him so. Sue was essentially an everyday child, but Giles had a clear complexion, dark-blue eyes, and curling hair. Giles as a baby and a little child was very beautiful. As his poor, feeble-looking mother carried him about--for she was poor and feeble-looking even in her palmy days--people used to turn and gaze after the lovely boy. The mother loved him passionately, but to the father he was as the apple of his eye. Giles's father had married a wife some degrees below him both intellectually and socially. She was a hard-working, honest, and well-meaning soul, but she was not her husband's equal. He was a man with great force of character, great bravery, great powers of endurance. Before he had joined the Fire Brigade he had been a sailor, and many tales did he tell to his little Giles of his adventures on the sea. Sue and her mother used to find these stories dull, but to Giles they seemed as necessary as the air he breathed. He used to watch patiently for hours for the rare moments when his father was off duty, and then beg for the food which his keen mental appetite craved for. Mason could both read and write, and he began to teach his little son. This state of things continued until Giles was seven years old. Then there came a dreadful black-letter day for the child; for the father, the end of life. Every event of that torturing day was ever after engraved on the little boy's memory. He and his father, both in high spirits, started off for their last walk together. Giles used to make it a practice to accompany his father part of the way to his station, trotting back afterwards safely and alone to his mother and sister. To-day their way lay through Smithfield Market, and the boy, seeing the Martyrs' Monument in the center of the market-place, asked his father eagerly about it. "Look, father, look!" he said, pointing with his finger. "What is that?" "That is the figure of an angel, lad. Do you see, it is pointing up to heaven. Do you know why?" "No, father; tell us." "Long ago, my lad, there were a lot of brave people brought just there where the angel stands; they were tied to stakes in the ground and set fire to and burned--burned until they died." "Burned, father?" asked little Giles in a voice of horror. "Yes, boy. They were burned because they were so brave they would rather be burned than deny the good God. They were called martyrs, and that angel stands there now to remind people about them and to show how God took them straight to heaven." "I think they were grand," answered the boy, his eyes kindling. "Can't people be like that now?" "Any one who would rather die than neglect a duty has, to my mind, the same spirit," answered the man. "But now, lad, run home, for I must be off." "Oh, father, you are going to that place where the wonderful new machinery is, and you said I might look at it. May I come?" The father hesitated, finally yielded, and the two went on together. But together they were never to come back. That very day, with the summer sun shining, and all the birds in the country far away singing for joy, there came a message for the brave father. He was suddenly, in the full prime of his manly vigor, to leave off doing God's work down here, doubtless to take it up with nobler powers above. A fireman literally works with his life in his hands. He may have to resign it at any moment at the call of duty. This trumpet-call, which he had never neglected, came now for Giles Mason. A fire broke out in the house where little Giles watched with keen intelligence the new machinery. The machinery was destroyed, the child lamed for life, and the brave father, in trying to rescue him and others, was so injured by falling stones and pieces of woodwork that he only lived a few hours. The two were laid side by side in the hospital to which they were carried. "Father," said the little one, nestling close to the injured and dying man, "I think people _can_ be martyrs now!" But the father was past words, though he heard the child, for he smiled and pointed upwards. The smile and the action were so significant, and reminded the child so exactly of the angel who guards the Martyrs' Monument, that ever afterwards he associated his brave father with those heroes and heroines of whom the sacred writer says that "the world is not worthy." CHAPTER IV. SOLITARY HOURS. Giles was kept in the hospital for many weeks, even months. All that could be done was done for him; but the little, active feet were never to walk again, and the spine was so injured that he could not even sit upright. When all that could be done had been done and failed, the boy was sent back to his broken-down and widowed mother. Mrs. Mason had removed from the comfortable home where she lived during her husband's lifetime to the attic in a back street of Westminster, where she finally died. She took in washing for a livelihood, and Sue, now twelve years old, was already an accomplished little machinist.[1] They were both too busy to have time to grieve, and at night were too utterly worn-out not to sleep soundly. They were kind to Giles lying on his sick-bed; they both loved him dearly, but they neither saw, nor even tried to understand, the hunger of grief and longing which filled his poor little mind. His terrible loss, his own most terrible injuries, had developed in the boy all that sensitive nerve organism which can render life so miserable to its possessor. To hear his beloved father's name mentioned was a torture to him; and yet his mother and Sue spoke of it with what seemed to the boy reckless indifference day after day. Two things, however, comforted him--one the memory of the angel figure over the Martyrs' Monument at Smithfield, the other the deep notes of Big Ben. His father, too, had been a martyr, and that angel stood there to signify his victory as well as the victory of those others who withstood the torture by fire; and Big Ben, with its solemn, vibrating notes, seemed to his vivid imagination like that same angel speaking. Though an active, restless boy before his illness, he became now very patient. He would lie on his back, not reading, for he had forgotten what little his father taught him, but apparently lost in thought, from morning to night. His mother was often obliged to leave him alone, but he never murmured at his long, solitary hours; indeed, had there been any one by to listen to all the words he said to himself at these times, they would have believed that the boy enjoyed them. Thus three years passed away. In those three years all the beauty had left little Giles's face; all the brightness had fled from his eyes; he was now a confirmed invalid, white and drawn and pinched. Then his poor, tired-out mother died. She had worked uncomplainingly, but far beyond her strength, until suddenly she sickened and in a few days was dead. Giles, however, while losing a mother, had gained a friend. John Atkins read the sensitive heart of the boy like a book. He came to see him daily, and soon completed the reading-lessons which his father had begun. As soon as the boy could read he was no longer unhappy. His sad and troubled mind need no longer feed on itself; he read what wise and great men thought, for Atkins supplied him with books. Atkins's books, it is true, were mostly of a theological nature, but once he brought him a battered Shakespeare; and Sue also, when cash was a little flush, found an old volume of the _Arabian Nights_ on a book-stall. These two latter treasures gave great food to the active imagination of little Giles. FOOTNOTE [1] In July 1877 arrangements were made to provide for the families of firemen who were killed in the performance of their duty, but nothing was done for them before that date. CHAPTER V. EAGER WORDS. When John Atkins was quite young he was well-to-do. His father and mother had kept a good shop, and not only earned money for their needs but were able to put by sufficient for a rainy day. John was always a small and delicate child, and as he grew older he developed disease of the spine, which not only gave him a deformed appearance but made him slightly lame. Nevertheless, he was an eager little scholar, and his father was able to send him to a good school. The boy worked hard, and eagerly read and learned all that came in his way. Thus life was rather pleasant than otherwise with John Atkins up to his fifteenth year, but about then there came misfortunes. The investment into which his father had put all his hard-won earnings was worthless; the money was lost. This was bad enough, but there was worse to follow. Not only had the money disappeared, but the poor man's heart was broken. He ceased to attend to his business; his customers left him to go elsewhere; his wife died suddenly, and he himself quickly followed her to the grave. After these misfortunes John Atkins had a bad illness himself. He grew better after a time, took to cobbling as a trade, and earned enough to support himself. How he came to take up street preaching, and in consequence to be much beloved by his neighbors, happened simply enough. On a certain Sunday evening he was walking home from the church where he attended, his heart all aglow with the passionate words of the preacher he had been listening to. The preacher had made Bunyan the subject of his discourse, and the author of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was at that time the hero of all heroes in the mind of Atkins. He was thinking of his wonderful pilgrimage as he hurried home. He walked on. Suddenly, turning a corner, he knocked up against a man, who, half-reeling, came full-tilt against him. "Aye, Peter," he said, knowing the man, and perceiving that he was far too tipsy to get to his home with safety, "I'll just walk home with you, mate. I've got an apple in my pocket for the little wench." The man made no objection, and they walked on. At the next corner they saw a crowd, all listening eagerly to the words of a large, red-faced man who, mounted on a chair, addressed them. On the burning, glowing heart of John Atkins fell the following terrible words: "For there be no God, and there be nothing before us but to die as the beasts die. Let us get our fill of pleasure and the like of that, neighbors, for there ain't nothing beyond the grave." "It's a lie!" roared Atkins. The words had stung him like so many fiery serpents. He rushed into the midst of the crowd; he forgot Peter Harris; he sprang on to the chair which the other man in his astonishment had vacated, and poured out a whole string of eager, passionate words. At that moment he discovered that he had a wonderful gift. There was the message in his heart which God had put there, and he was able to deliver it. His words were powerful. The crowd, who had listened without any great excitement to the unbeliever, came close now to the man of God, applauding him loudly. Atkins spoke of the Fatherhood of God and of His love. "Ain't that other a coward?" said two or three rough voices when Atkins ceased to speak. "And he comes here talking them lies every Sunday night," said one poor woman. "Come you again, master, and tell us the blessed truth." This decided Atkins. He went to his parish clergyman, an overworked and badly paid man, and told him the incident. He also spoke of his own resolve. He would go to these sheep who acknowledged no Shepherd, and tell them as best he could of a Father, a Home, a Hope. The clergyman could not but accept the services of this fervent city missionary. "Get them to church if you can," he said. "Aye, if I can," answered Atkins; "but I will compel them to enter the Church above--that is the main thing." Soon he began to know almost all the poor folks who crowded to hear him. In their troubles he was with them; when joy came he heard first about it, and rejoiced most of all; and many a poor face of a tired woman or worn-out man, or even a little child, looking into his, grew brighter in the presence of death. CHAPTER VI. DIFFERENT SORT OF WORK. Connie was a very pretty girl. She was between thirteen and fourteen years of age, and very small and delicate-looking. Her hair was of a pale, soft gold; her eyes were blue; she had a delicate complexion, pink and white--almost like a china figure, Sue said; Giles compared her to an angel. Connie was in the same trade that Sue earned her bread by; she also was a machinist in a large warehouse in the City. All day long she worked at the sewing-machine, going home with Sue night after night, glad of Sue's sturdy support, for Connie was much more timid than her companion. Connie was the apple of Harris's eye, his only child. He did everything he could for her; he lived for her. If any one could make him good, Connie could; but she was sadly timid; she dreaded the terrible moments when he returned home, having taken more than was good for him. At these times she would slink away to visit Giles and Sue, and on more than one occasion she had spent the night with the pair rather than return to her angry father. Some months, however, before this story begins, a terrible misfortune had come to Peter Harris. He had come home on a certain evening worse than usual from the effects of drink. Connie happened to be in. She had dressed herself with her usual exquisite neatness. She always kept the place ship-shape. The hearth was always tidily swept. She managed her father's earnings, which were quite considerable, and the wretched man could have had good food and a comfortable home, and been happy as the day was long, if only the craze for drink had not seized him. Connie was very fond of finery, and she was now trimming a pretty hat to wear on the following Sunday. Not long ago she had made a new friend, a girl at the warehouse of the name of Agnes Coppenger. Agnes was older than Connie. She was the kind of girl who had a great admiration for beauty, and when she saw that people turned to look at pretty Connie with her sweet, refined face and delicate ways, she hoped that by having such a pleasant companion she also might come in for her share of admiration. She therefore began to make much of Connie. She praised her beauty, and invited her to her own home. There Connie made companions who were not nearly such desirable ones as Sue and Giles. She began to neglect Sue and Giles, and to spend more and more of her time with Agnes. On a certain day when the two girls were working over their sewing-machines, the whir of the numerous machines filling the great warehouse, Agnes turned to Connie. "When we go out at morning break I 'ave a word to say to yer." Connie's eyes brightened. "You walk with me," whispered Agnes again. An overseer came round. Talking was forbidden in the great room, and the girls went on with their mechanical employment, turning out long seam after long seam of delicate stitches. The fluff from the work seemed to smother Connie that morning. She had inherited her mother's delicacy. She coughed once or twice. There was a longing within her to get away from this dismal, this unhealthy life. She felt somehow, down deep in her heart, that she was meant for better things. The child was by nature almost a poet. She could have worshiped a lovely flower. As to the country, what her feelings would have been could she have seen it almost baffles description. Now, Sue, working steadily away at her machine a little farther down the room, had none of these sensations. Provided that Sue could earn enough money to keep Giles going, that was all she asked of life. She was as matter-of-fact as a young girl could be; and as to pining for what she had not got, it never once entered her head. At twelve o'clock there was a break of half-an-hour. The machinists were then turned out of the building. It did not matter what sort of day it was, whether the sun shone with its summer intensity, or whether the snow fell in thick flakes--whatever the condition of the outside world, out all the working women had to go. None could skulk behind; all had to seek the open air. Connie coughed now as the bitter blast blew against her cheeks. "Isn't it cold?" she said. She expected to see Agnes by her side, but it was Sue she addressed. "I've got a penny for pease-pudding to-day," said Sue. "Will you come and have a slice, Connie? Or do yer want somethin' better? Your father, Peter Harris, can let yer have more than a penny for yer dinner." "Oh, yes," answered Connie; "'tain't the money--I 'aven't got not a bit of happetite, not for nothing; but I want to say a word to Agnes Coppenger, and I don't see her." "Here I be," said Agnes, coming up at that moment. "Come right along, Connie; I've got a treat for yer." The last words were uttered in a low whisper, and Sue, finding she was not wanted, went off in another direction. She gave little sighs as she did so. What was wrong with pretty Connie, and why did she not go with her? It had been her custom to slip her hand inside Sue's sturdy arm. During the half-hour interval, the girls used to repair together to the nearest cheap restaurant, there to secure what nourishing food their means permitted. They used to chatter to one another, exchanging full confidences, and loving each other very much. But for some time now Connie had only thought of Agnes Coppenger, and Sue felt out in the cold. "Can't be helped," she said to herself; "but if I am not mistook, Agnes is a bad un, and the less poor Connie sees of her the better." Sue entered the restaurant, which was now packed full of factory girls, and she asked eagerly for her penn'orth of pease-pudding. Meanwhile Connie and Agnes were very differently employed. When the two girls found themselves alone, Agnes looked full at Connie and said: "I'm going to treat yer." "Oh, no, you ain't," said Connie, who was proud enough in her way. "Yes, but I be," said Agnes; "I ha' lots o' money, bless yer! Here, we'll come in here." An A.B.C. shop stood invitingly open just across the road. Connie had always looked at these places of refreshment with open-eyed admiration, and with the sort of sensation which one would have if one stood at the gates of Paradise. To enter any place so gorgeous as an A.B.C., to be able to sit down and have one's tea or coffee or any other refreshment at one of those little white marble tables, seemed to her a degree of refinement scarcely to be thought about. The A.B.C. was a sort of forbidden fruit to Connie, but Agnes had been there before, and Agnes had described the delight of the place. "The quality come in 'ere," said Agnes, "an' they horders all sorts o' things, from mutton-chops to poached heggs. I am goin' in to-day, and so be you." "Oh, no," said Connie, "you can't afford it." "That's my lookout," answered Agnes. "I've half-a-crown in my pocket, and ef I choose to have a good filling meal, and ef I choose that you shall have one too, why, that is my lookout." As Agnes spoke she pulled her companion through the swinging door, and a minute later the two young girls had a little table between them, not far from the door. Agnes called in a lofty voice to one of the waitresses. "Coffee for two," she said, "and rolls and butter and poached heggs; and see as the heggs is well done, and the toast buttered fine and thick. Now then, look spruce, won't yer?" The waitress went off to attend to Agnes's requirements. Agnes sat back in her chair with a sort of lofty, fine-lady air which greatly impressed poor Connie. By-and-by the coffee, the rolls and butter, and the poached eggs appeared. A little slip of paper with the price of the meal was laid close to Agnes's plate, and she proceeded to help her companion to the good viands. "It's this sort of meal you want hevery day," she said. "Now then, eat as hard as ever you can, and while you're eating let me talk, for there's a deal to say, and we must be back in that factory afore we can half do justice to our wittles." Connie sipped her coffee, and looked hard at her companion. "What is it?" she asked suddenly. "What's all the fuss, Agnes? Why be you so chuff to poor Sue, and whatever 'ave you got to say?" "This," said Agnes. "You're sick o' machine-work, ain't you?" "Oh, that I be!" said Connie, stretching her arms a little, and suppressing a yawn. "It seems to get on my narves, like. I am that miserable when I'm turning that horrid handle and pressing that treadle up and down, up and down, as no words can say. I 'spect it's the hair so full of fluff an' things, too; some'ow I lose my happetite for my or'nary feed when I'm working at that 'orrid machine." "I don't feel it that way," said Agnes in a lofty tone. "But then, _I_ am wery strong. I can heat like anything, whatever I'm a-doing of. There, Connie; don't waste the good food. Drink up yer corffee, and don't lose a scrap o' that poached egg, for ef yer do it 'ud be sinful waste. Well, now, let me speak. I know quite a different sort o' work that you an' me can both do, and ef you'll come with me this evening I can tell yer all about it." "What sort of work?" asked Connie. "Beautiful, refined--the sort as you love. But I am not going to tell yer ef yer give me away." "What do you mean by that, Agnes?" "I means wot I say--I'll tell yer to-night ef yer'll come 'ome with me." "Yer mean that I'm to spend all the evening with yer?" asked Connie. "Yes--that's about it. _You_ are to come 'ome with me, and we'll talk. Why, bless yer! with that drinkin' father o' yourn, wot do you want all alone by yer lonesome? You give me a promise. And now I must pay hup, and we'll be off." "I'll come, o' course," said Connie after brief reflection. "Why shouldn't I?" she added. "There's naught to keep me to home." The girls left the A.B.C. shop and returned to their work. Whir! whir! went the big machines. The young heads were bent over their accustomed toil; the hands on the face of the great clock which Connie so often looked at went on their way. Slowly--very slowly--the time sped. Would that long day ever come to an end? The machinists' hours were from eight o'clock in the morning to six in the evening. Sometimes, when there were extra lots of ready-made clothes to be produced, they were kept till seven or even eight o'clock. But for this extra work there was a small extra pay, so that few of them really minded. But Connie dreaded extra hours extremely. She was not really dependent on the work, although Peter would have been very angry with his girl had she idled her time. She herself, too, preferred doing this to doing nothing. But to-night, of all nights, she was most impatient to get away with Agnes in order to discover what that fascinating young person's secret was. She looked impatiently at the clock; so much so that Agnes herself, as she watched her eyes, chuckled now and then. "She'll be an easy prey," thought Agnes Coppenger. "I'll soon get 'er into my power." At six o'clock there was no further delay; no extra work was required, and the machinists poured into the sloppy, dark, and dreary streets. "Come along now, quickly," said Agnes. "Don't wait for Sue; Sue has nothing to do with you from this time out." "Oh dear! oh dear!" said Connie. "But I don't want to give up Sue and Giles. You ha' never seen little Giles Mason?" "No," replied Agnes, "and don't want to. Wot be Giles to me?" "Oh," said Connie, "ef yer saw 'im yer couldn't but love 'im. He's the wery prettiest little fellow that yer ever clapped yer two eyes on--with 'is delicate face an' 'is big brown eyes--and the wonnerful thoughts he have, too. Poetry ain't in it. Be yer fond o' poetry yerself, Agnes?" "I fond o' poetry?" almost screamed Agnes. "Not I! That is, I never heerd it--don't know wot it's like. I ha' no time to think o' poetry. I'm near mad sometimes fidgeting and fretting how to get myself a smart 'at, an' a stylish jacket, an' a skirt that hangs with a sort o' swing about it. But you, now--you never think on yer clothes." "Oh yes, but I do," said Connie; "and I ha' got a wery pwitty new dress now as father guv me not a fortnight back; and w'en father don't drink he's wery fond o' me, an' he bought this dress at the pawnshop." "Lor', now, did he?" said Agnes. "Wot sort be it, Connie?" "Dark blue, with blue velvet on it. It looks wery stylish." "You'd look like a lydy in that sort o' dress," said Agnes. "You've the face of a lydy--that any one can see." "Have I?" said Connie. She put up her somewhat roughened hand to her smooth little cheeks. "Yes, you 'ave; and wot I say is this--yer face is yer fortoon. Now, look yer 'ere. We'll stand at this corner till the Westminster 'bus comes up, and then we'll take a penn'orth each, and that'll get us wery near 'ome. Yer don't think as yer father'll be 'ome to-night, Connie?" "'Tain't likely," replied Connie; "'e seldom comes in until it's time for 'im to go to bed." "Well then, that's all right. When we get to Westminster, you skid down Adam Street until yer get to yer diggin's; an' then hup you goes and changes yer dress. Into the very genteel dark-blue costoom you gets, and down you comes to yer 'umble servant wot is waitin' for yer below stairs." This programme was followed out in all its entirety by Connie. The omnibus set the girls down not far from her home. Connie soon reached her room. No father there, no fire in the grate. She turned on the gas and looked around her. The room was quite a good one, of fair size, and the furniture was not bad of its sort. Peter Harris himself slept on a trundle-bed in the sitting-room, but Connie had a little room all to herself just beyond. Here she kept her small bits of finery, and in especial the lovely new costume which her father had given her. She was not long in slipping off her working-clothes. Then she washed her face and hands, and brushed back her soft, glistening, pale-golden hair, and put on the dark-blue dress, and her little blue velvet cap to match, and--little guessing how lovely she appeared in this dress, which simply transformed the pretty child into one of quite another rank of life--she ran quickly downstairs. A young man of the name of Anderson, whom she knew very slightly, was passing by. He belonged to the Fire Brigade, and was one of the best and bravest firemen in London. He had a pair of great, broad shoulders, and a very kind face. It looked almost as refined as Connie's own. Anderson gave her a glance, puzzled and wondering. He felt half-inclined to speak, but she hurried by him, and the next minute Agnes gripped her arm. "My word, ain't you fine!" said that young lady. "You _be_ a gel to be proud of! Won't yer do fine, jest! Now then, come along, and let's be quick." Connie followed her companion. They went down several side-streets, and took several short cuts. They passed through the roughest and worst part of the purlieus at the back of Westminster. At last they entered a broader thoroughfare, and there Agnes stopped. "Why, yer never be livin' here?" asked Connie. "No, I bean't. You'll come to my 'ome afterwards. I want to take yer to see a lydy as maybe'll take a fancy to yer." "Oh!" said Connie, feeling both excited and full of wonder. The girls entered a side passage, and presently Connie, to her astonishment, found herself going upwards--up and up and up--in a lift. The lift went up as far as it would go. The girls got out. Agnes went first, and Connie followed. They walked down the passage, and Agnes gave a very neat double knock on the door, which looked like an ordinary front door to a house. The door was opened by a woman rather loudly dressed, but with a handsome face. "How do you do, Mrs. Warren?" said Agnes. "I ha' brought the young lydy I spoke to yer about. Shall us both come in?" "Oh, yes, certainly," said Mrs. Warren. She stood aside, and Connie, still following her companion, found herself at the other side of the neat door. The place inside was bright with electric light, and the stout, showily dressed lady, going first, conducted the girls into a room which Agnes afterwards spoke of as the dining-room. The lady sat down in a very comfortable arm-chair, crossed her legs, and desired Connie to come forward and show herself. "Take off yer 'at," she said. Connie did so. "You're rather pretty." Connie was silent. "I want," said the stout woman, "a pretty gel, something like you, to come and sit with me from ten to two o'clock hevery day. Yer dooties'll be quite light, and I'll give yer lots o' pretty clothes and good wages." "But what'll I have to do?" asked Connie. "Jest to sit with me an' keep me company; I'm lonesome here all by myself." Connie looked puzzled. "You ask wot wages yer'll get," said Agnes, poking Connie on the arm. Connie's blue eyes looked up. The showy lady was gazing at her very intently. "I'll give yer five shillin's a week," she said, "and yer keep, and some carst-off clothes--my own--now and again; and ef that bean't a bargain, I don't know wot be." Connie was silent. "You 'ad best close with it," said Agnes. "It's a charnce once in a 'undred. Yer'll be very 'appy with Mrs. Warren--her's a real lydy." "Yes, that I be," said Mrs. Warren. "I come of a very hold family. My ancestors come hover with William the Conqueror." Connie did not seem impressed by this fact. "Will yer come or will yer not?" said Mrs. Warren. "I'll take yer jaunts, too--I forgot to mention that. Often on a fine Saturday, you an' me--we'll go to the country together. You don't know 'ow fine that 'ull be. We'll go to the country and we'll 'ave a spree. Did yer never see the country?" "No," said Connie, in a slow voice, "but I ha' dreamt of it." "She's the sort, ma'am," interrupted Agnes, "wot dreams the queerest things. She's hall for poetry and flowers and sech like. She's not matter-o'-fack like me." "Jest the sort I want," said Mrs. Warren. "I--I loves poetry. You shall read it aloud to me, my gel--or, better still, I'll read it to you. An' as to flowers--why, yer shall pluck 'em yer own self, an' yer'll see 'em a-blowin' an' a-growin', yer own self. We'll go to the country next Saturday. There, now--ain't that fine?" Connie looked puzzled. There certainly was a great attraction at the thought of going into the country. She hated the machine-work. But, all the same, somehow or other she did not like Mrs. Warren. "I'll think o' it and let yer know," she said. But when she uttered these words the stately dressed and over-fine lady changed her manner. "There's no thinking now," she said. "You're 'ere, and yer'll stay. You go out arter you ha' been at my house? You refuse my goodness? Not a bit o' it! Yer'll stay." "Oh, yes, Connie," said Agnes in a soothing tone. "But I don't want to stay," said Connie, now thoroughly frightened. "I want to go--and to go at once. Let me go, ma'am; I--I don't like yer!" Poor Connie made a rush for the door, but Agnes flew after her and clasped her round the waist. "Yer _be_ a silly!" she said. "Yer jest stay with her for one week." "But I--I must go and tell father," said poor Connie. "You needn't--I'll go an' tell him. Don't yer get into such a fright. Don't, for goodness' sake! Why, think of five shillin's a week, and jaunts into the country, and beautiful food, and poetry read aloud to yer, and hall the rest!" "I has most select poetry here," said Mrs. Warren. "Did yer never yere of a man called Tennyson? An' did yer never read that most touching story of the consumptive gel called the 'May Queen'? 'Ef ye're wakin' call me hearly, call me hearly, mother dear.' I'll read yer that. It's the most beauteous thing." "It sounds lovely," said Connie. She was always arrested by the slightest thing which touched her keen fancy and rich imagination. "And you 'ates the machines," said Agnes. "Oh yes, I 'ates the machines," cried Connie. Then she added after a pause: "I'm 'ere, and I'll stay for one week. But I must go back first to get some o' my bits o' duds, and to tell father. You'd best let me go, ma'am; I won't be long away." "But I can't do that," said Mrs. Warren; "it's a sight too late for a young, purty gel like you to be out. Agnes, now, can go and tell yer father, and bring wot clothes yer want to-morrow.--Agnes, yer'll do that, won't yer?" "Yes--that I will." "They'll never let me stay," said Connie, reflecting on this fact with some satisfaction. "We won't ax him, my dear," said Mrs. Warren. "I must go, really, now," said Agnes. "You're all right, Connie; you're made. You'll be a fine lydy from this day out. And I'll come and see yer.--W'en may I come, Mrs. Warren?" "To-morrer evenin'," said Mrs. Warren. "You and Connie may have tea together to-morrer evenin', for I'm goin' out with some friends to the thayertre." Poor Connie never quite knew how it happened, but somehow she found herself as wax in the strong hands of Mrs. Warren. Connie, it is true, gave a frightened cry when she heard Agnes shut the hall door behind her, and she felt positive that she had done exceedingly wrong. But Mrs. Warren really seemed kind, although Connie could not but wish that she was not quite so stout, and that her face was not of such an ugly brick red. She gave the girl a nice supper, and talked to her all the time about the lovely life she would have there. "Ef I takes to yer I'll maybe hadopt yer as my own daughter, my dear," she said. "You're a wery purty gel. And may I ax how old you are, my love?" Connie answered that she was fourteen, and Mrs. Warren remarked that she was small for her age and looked younger. She showed the girl her own smart clothing, and tried the effect of her bit of fur round Connie's delicate throat. "There," she said; "you can keep it. It's only rabbit; I can't afford no dearer. But yer'll look real foine in it when we goes out for our constooshionul to-morrow morning." Connie was really touched and delighted with the present of the fur. She got very sleepy, too, after supper--more sleepy than she had ever felt in her life--and when Mrs. Warren suggested that her new little handmaid should retire early to bed, the girl was only too glad to obey. CHAPTER VII. SHOPPING. Connie slept without dreams that night, and in the morning awoke with a start. What was the matter? Was she late? It was dreadful to be late at the doors of that cruel factory. Those who were late were docked of their pay. Peter Harris was always very angry when his daughter did not bring in her full earnings on Saturday night. Connie cried out, "Father, father!" and then sat up in bed and pushed her golden hair back from her little face. What was the matter? Where was she? Why, what a pretty room! There was scarcely any light yet, and she could not see the different articles of furniture very distinctly, but it certainly seemed to her that she was in a most elegant apartment. Her room at home was--oh, so bare! just a very poor trundle-bed, and a little deal chest of drawers with a tiny looking-glass on top, and one broken chair to stand by her bedside. This was all. But her present room had a carpet on the floor, and there were pictures hanging on the walls, and there were curtains to the windows, and the little bed on which she lay was covered with a gay counterpane--soft--almost as soft as silk. Where could she be? It took her almost a minute to get back the memory of last night. Then she shuddered with the most curious feeling of mingled ecstasy and pain. She was not going to the factory to-day. She was not going to work at that horrid sewing-machine. She was not to meet Sue. She was not to be choked by the horrid air. She, Connie, had got a new situation, and Mrs. Warren was a very nice woman, although she was so fat and her dress was so loud that even Connie's untrained taste could not approve of it. Just then a voice called to her: "Get up, my dear; I'll have a cosy breakfast ready for yer by the time yer've put yourself tidily into yer clothes." "Yes," thought Connie to herself, "I've done well to come. Agnes is right. I wonder what she'll say when she comes to tea this evening. I wonder if she met father. I do 'ope as father won't find me. I'd real like to stay on here for a bit; it's much, much nicer than the cruel sort of life I 'ave to home." Connie dressed by the light which was now coming in more strongly through the window. Mrs. Warren pushed a can of hot water inside the door, and the girl washed with a strange, unwonted sense of luxury. She had no dress but the dark-blue, and she was therefore forced to put it on. When she had completed her toilet she entered the sitting-room. Mrs. Warren, in her morning _déshabille_, looked a more unpleasing object than ever. Her hair was in tight curl-papers, and she wore a very loose and very dirty dressing-gown, which was made of a sort of pattern chintz, and gave her the effect of being a huge pyramid of coarse, faded flowers. There was coffee, however, which smelled very good, on the hearth, and there was some toast and bacon, and some bread, butter, and jam. Connie and Mrs. Warren made a good meal, and then Mrs. Warren began to talk of the day's programme. "I have a lot of shopping to do this morning," she said, "and we'll go out not later than ten o'clock sharp. It's wonderful wot a lot o' things I has to buy. There's sales on now, too, and we'll go to some of 'em. Maybe I'll get yer a bit o' ribbon--you're fond o' blue ribbon, I take it. Well, maybe I'll get it for yer--there's no saying. Anyhow, we'll walk down the streets, and wot shops we don't go into we'll press our noses against the panes o' glass and stare in. Now then, my dear, yer don't s'pose that I'll allow you to come out walking with the likes o' me with yer 'air down like that." "Why, 'ow is it to be done?" said Connie. "I take it that it's beautiful; I ha' done it more tidy than ever." "But I don't want it tidy. Now then, you set down yere close to the fire, so that you can toast yer toes, and I'll see to yer 'air." Connie was forced to obey; more and more was she wax in the hands of her new employer. Mrs. Warren quickly took the hair-pins out of Connie's thick plait. She let it fall down to her waist, and then she unplaited it and brushed out the shining waves of lovely hair, and then said, with a smile of satisfaction: "Now, I guess there won't be anybody prettier than you to walk abroad to-day." "But I can't," said Connie--"I don't ever wear my 'air like that; it's only young lydies as does that." "Well, ain't you a lydy, and ain't I a lydy? You're going out with one, and yer'll wear yer 'air as I please." Connie shivered; but presently the little dark-blue cap was placed over the masses of golden hair, the gray fur was fastened round the slender throat, and Connie marched out with Mrs. Warren. Mrs. Warren's own dress was in all respects the reverse of her pretty young companion's. It consisted of a very voluminous silk cloak, which was lined with fur, and which gave the already stout woman a most portly appearance. On her head she wore a bonnet covered with artificial flowers, and she enveloped her hands in an enormous muff. "Now, off we go," said Mrs. Warren. "You'll enjoy yerself, my purty." It is quite true that Connie did--at least, at first. This was the time of day when, with the exception of Sundays, she was always buried from view in the ugly warehouse. She was unaccustomed to the morning sunshine, and she was certainly unaccustomed to the handsome streets where Mrs. Warren conducted her. They walked on, and soon found themselves in crowded thoroughfares. At last they stopped before the doors of a great shop, into which crowds of people were going. "Oh, what a pretty girl!" said Connie to her companion. A young girl, very like Connie herself--so like as to make the resemblance almost extraordinary--was entering the shop, accompanied by an old gentleman who was supporting himself by the aid of a gold-headed stick. The girl also had golden hair. She was dressed in dark blue, and had gray fur round her neck. But above the fur there peeped out a little pale-blue handkerchief made of very soft silk. "That's purty," whispered Mrs. Warren to Connie. "Yer'd like a 'andkercher like that--yer shall 'ave one. Get on in front o' me; you're slimmer nor me; I want to push into the shop." Connie obeyed. As she passed the fair young girl, the girl seemed to notice the extraordinary likeness between them, for she turned and looked at Connie and smiled. She also said something to her companion, who also stared at the girl. But stout Mrs. Warren poked Connie from behind, and she had to push forward, and presently found herself in the shop. There it seemed to her that Mrs. Warren did very little buying. It is true she stopped at several counters, always choosing those which were most surrounded by customers; it is true she pulled things about, poking at the goods offered for sale, and making complaints about them, but always keeping Connie well to the fore. A delicate color had sprung into the girl's cheeks, and almost every one turned to look at her. The shopmen turned; the shopgirls gazed; the customers forgot what they wanted in their amazement at Connie's beauty. Her hair, in especial, was the subject of universal admiration--its thickness, its length, its marvelous color. The girl herself was quite unconscious of the admiration which her appearance produced, but Mrs. Warren knew well what a valuable acquisition she had made in little Connie. When they left the shop she seemed to be in high good-humor. But, lo and behold! a change had taken place in the outside world. The sun, so bright and glorious, had hidden himself behind a murky yellow fog, which was coming up each moment thicker and thicker from the river. "Oh dear!" said Mrs. Warren. "Oh dear!" cried Connie too. "We won't get lost, will us, ma'am?" "Lost?" cried Mrs. Warren, with a sniff. "Now, I call this fog the most beautiful fortunation thing that could have 'appened. We'll have a real jolly morning now, Connie. You come along o' me. There, child--walk a bit in front. Why, ye're a real, real beauty. I feel sort of ashamed to be walkin' with yer. Let folks think that you're out with yer nurse, my pretty. Yes, let 'em think that, and that she's screening yer from misfortun' wid her own ample person." Thus Connie walked for several hours that day. In and out of crowded thoroughfares the two perambulated. Into shops they went, and out again they came. Everywhere Connie went first, and Mrs. Warren followed very close behind. At last the good lady said that she had done her morning's shopping. Connie could not well recall what she had bought, and the pair trudged soberly home. When they got there Mrs. Warren went straight to her own bedroom, and Connie sat down by the fire, feeling quite tired with so much exercise. Presently Mrs. Warren came out again. She had changed her dress, and had put on an ample satin gown of black with broad yellow stripes. She was in high good-humor, and going up to Connie, gave her a resounding smack on the cheek. "Now," she said, "yer won't think 'ard of poor Mammy Warren. See wot I've gone an' got an' bought for yer." Connie turned quickly. A soft little blue handkerchief, delicately folded in tissue-paper, was laid on the table by the girl. "Why--why--that ain't for me!" said Connie. "Yes, but it be! Why shouldn't it be for you? I saw yer lookin' at that purty young lydy who was as like yer as two peas. I watched 'ow yer stared at the blue 'andkercher, and 'ow yer sort o' longed for it." "But indeed--indeed I didn't." "Anyhow, here's another, and yer can have it, and wear it peeping out among yer fur. I take it that yer blue 'andkercher'll take the cake." "Then you've bought it for me?" said Connie. "Yus--didn't I zay so?" "But I never seen yer do it," said Connie. "Seen me do it?" said Mrs. Warren, her eyes flashing with anger. "You was too much taken up with yer own conceits, my gel--hevery one staring at yer, 'cos poor old Mammy Warren 'ad made yer so beautiful. But though you was full to the brim o' yourself, I warn't so selfish; I were thinkin' o' you--and yere's yer 'andkercher." Connie took up the handkerchief slowly. Strange as it may seem, it gave her no pleasure. She said, "Thank you, Mrs. Warren," in a subdued voice, and took it into her little bedroom. Connie felt that she did not particularly want to wear the handkerchief. She did not know why, but a trouble, the first of the many troubles she was to undergo in the terrible society of Mrs. Warren, came over her. She went back again and sat down by the fire. During the greater part of the afternoon the stout woman slept. Connie watched her furtively. A strong desire to get up and run away seized her. Could she not get out of that house and go back to Sue and Giles? How happy she would feel in Giles's bare little room! How she would enjoy talking with the child! With what wonder they would both listen to Big Ben as he spoke in that voice of his the number of the hours! Giles would make up fairy-tales for Connie to listen to. How Connie did love the "wonnerful" things he said about the big "Woice"! One day it was cheerful, another day sad, another day very encouraging, another day full of that noble influence which the child himself so largely exercised. At all times it was an angel voice, speaking to mankind from high above this sordid world. It helped Giles, and it helped Connie too. She sat by the fire in this well-furnished room and looked anxiously towards the door. Once she got up on tiptoe. She had almost reached the door, but had not quite done so, when Mrs. Warren turned, gave a loud snore, and opened her eyes. She did not speak when she saw Connie, but her eyes seemed to say briefly, "Well, don't you go any farther"; and Connie turned back into her small bedroom. Sharp at four o'clock Mrs. Warren started up. "Now then," she said, "I'm goin' to get the tea ready." "Can I help you, ma'am?" asked Connie. "Shall I make you some toast, ma'am?" "Toast?" cried Mrs. Warren. "Toast? Do you think I'd allow yer to spile yer purty face with the fire beatin' on it? Not a bit o' it! You set down there--it's a foine lydy you be, and I ha' to take care of yer." "But why should yer do that, ma'am? I ain't put into the world to do naught. I ha' always worked 'ard--father wanted me to." "Eh?" said Mrs. Warren. "But I'm yer father and mother both now, and I don't want yer to." "Don't yer?" said Connie. She sank down and folded her hands in her lap. "I must do summut to whiten them 'ands o' yours," said Mrs. Warren; "and I'm goin' to get yer real purty stockings an' boots to wear. You must look the real lydy--a real lydy wears neat boots and good gloves." "But I ain't a lydy," said Connie; "an' wots more," she added, "I don't want to be." "You be a lydy," said Mrs. Warren; "the Halmighty made yer into one." "I don't talk like one," said Connie. "No; but then, yer needn't speak. Oh lor'! I suppose that's Agnes a-poundin' at the door. Oh, stand back, child, and I'll go to her." Mrs. Warren opened the door, and Agnes stepped in. "I ha' took French leave," she said. "I dunno wot they'll say at the factory, but yere I be. You promised, you know, Mrs. Warren, ma'am, as I shouldn't 'ave naught to do with factory life, niver no more." "You needn't," said Mrs. Warren. "I ha' a deal o' work for yer to get through; but come along into my bedroom and we'll talk over things." Mrs. Warren and Agnes disappeared into the bedroom of the former, Mrs. Warren having first taken the precaution to lock the sitting-room door and put the key into her pocket. Poor Connie felt more than ever that she was a prisoner. More than ever did she long for the old life which she had lived. Notwithstanding her father's drinking bouts, notwithstanding his cruelty and neglect, the free life, the above-board life--even the dull, dull factory life--were all as heaven compared to this terrible, mysterious existence in Mrs. Warren's comfortable rooms. CHAPTER VIII. COMPARISONS. Mrs. Warren and Agnes talked together for quite three quarters of an hour. When they came out of the bedroom, Mrs. Warren was wearing a tight-fitting cloth jacket, which made her look more enormous even than the cloak had done. She had a small black bonnet on her head, over which she had drawn a spotted net veil. Her hands were encased in decent black gloves, her skirt was short, and her boots tidy. She carried in her hand a fair-sized brown leather bag; and telling Connie that she was "goin' out," and would be back when she saw her and not before, left the two girls alone in the little sitting-room. After she had shut the door behind her, Agnes went over to it, and possessing herself of the key, slipped it into her pocket. Then she stared hard at Connie. "Well," she said, "an' 'ow do yer like it?" "I don't like it at all," answered Connie, "I want to go--I will go. I'd rayther a sight be back in the factory. Mrs. Warren--she frightens me." "You be a silly," said Agnes. "You talk like that 'cos you knows no better. Why, 'ere you are as cosy and well tended as gel could be. Look at this room. Think on the soft chair you're sittin' upon; think on the meals; think on yer bedroom; think on the beautiful walk you 'ad this morning. My word! you be a silly! No work to do, and nothing whatever to trouble yer, except to act the lydy. My word! ef _you're_ discontent, the world'll come to an end. Wish I were in your shoes--that I do." "Well, Agnes, get into them," said Connie. "I'm sure you're more than welcome. I'm jest--jest pinin' for wot you thinks naught on. I want to see Giles and Sue and--and--father. You git into my shoes--you like it--I don't like it." Agnes burst into a loud laugh. "My word!" she said, "you're be a gel and a 'arf. Wouldn't I jest jump at gettin' into your shoes if I could? But there! yer shoes don't fit me, and that's the truth." "Don't fit yer, don't they?" exclaimed Connie. "Wot do yer mean by that?" "Too small," said Agnes, sticking out her ugly foot in its broken boot--"too genteel--too neat. No one could make a lydy o' me. Look at my 'ands." She spread out her coarse, stumpy fingers. "Look at my face. Why, yere's a glass; let's stand side by side, an' then let's compare. Big face; no nose to speak of; upper lip two inches long; mouth--slit from ear to ear; freckles; eyes what the boys call pig's eyes; 'air rough and coarse; figure stumpy. Now look at you. Face fair as a lily; nose straight and small; mouth like a rosebud; eyes blue as the sky. No, Connie, it can't be done; what with that face o' yourn, and that gold 'air o' yourn, you're a beauty hout and hout. Yer face is yer fortoon', my purty maid." "My face ain't my fortune." "Things don't fit, Connie. You ha' got to stay yere--and be a fine lydy. That's the way you works for yer livin'--I ha' to work in a different sort." "What sort? Oh, do tel me!" "No; that's my secret. But I've spoke out plain with the old woman, and I'm comin' yere Saturday night--not to stay, bless yer! no, but to do hodd jobs for her; for one thing, to look arter you when she's out. I 'spect she'll get Ronald back now you ha' come." "Ronald!" cried Connie. "Who's he?" "Never you mind; you'll know when yer see of 'im." "Then I'm a prisoner," said Connie--"that's what it means." "Well, well! take it like that ef yer like. Ain't it natural that Mrs. Warren should want yer to stay now she ha' got yer? When yer stays willin'-like, as yer will all too soon, then yer'll 'ave yer liberty. Hin an' out then yer may go as yer pleases; there'll be naught to interfere. Yer'll jest do yer dooty then, and yer dooty'll be to please old Mammy Warren." "Has my father missed me?" asked Connie, who saw by this time that she could not possibly cope with Agnes; if ever she was to effect her escape from this horrible place, it must be by guile. "'Ow is father?" she asked. "'Ave he missed me yet?" "Know nothing 'bout him. Don't think he have, for the boys, Dick and Hal, was 'ome when I come back. They 'ad no news for me at all." "You saw Sue to-day?" "Yus, I saw her, an' I kep' well away from her." "Agnes," said Connie in a very pleading voice, "ef I must stay 'ere--an' I don't know wot I ha' done to be treated like this--will yer take a message from me to little Giles?" "Wot sort?" asked Agnes. "Tell 'im straight from me that I can't come to see 'im for a few days, an' ax him to pray for me; an' tell him that I 'ears the Woice same as he 'ears the Woice, and tell 'im as it real comforts me. Wull yer do that, Agnes--wull yer, now?" "Maybe," said Agnes; then after a pause she added, "Or maybe I won't. I 'ates yer Methody sort o' weak-minded folks. That's the worst o' you, Connie; you're real weak-minded, for all ye're so purty, what wid yer 'prays' an' yer Woice, indeed!" "Hark! it's sounding now," said Connie. She raised her little delicate hand, and turned her head to listen. The splendid notes filled the air. Connie murmured something under her breath. "I know wot Giles 'ud say 'bout the Woice to-night," she murmured. But Agnes burst into a loud laugh. "My word!" she said. "You 're talkin' o' Big Ben. Well, you be a caution." "_He that shall endure_," whispered Connie; and then a curious hidden sunshine seemed to come out and radiate her small face. She folded her hands. The impatience faded from her eyes. She sat still and quiet. "Wot hever's the matter with yer?" asked Agnes. "Naught as yer can understand, Aggie." "Let's get tea," said Agnes. She started up and made vigorous preparations. Soon the tea was served and placed upon the little centre-table. It was an excellent tea, with shrimps and bread-and-butter, and cake and jam. Agnes ate enormously, but Connie was not as hungry as usual. "Prime, I call it!" said Agnes. "My word! to think of gettin' all this and not workin' a bit for it! You be in luck, Connie Harris--you be in luck." When the meal was over, and Agnes had washed up and made the place tidy, she announced her intention of going to sleep. "I'm dead-tired," she said, "and swallerin' sech a fillin' meal have made me drowsy. But I ha' the key in my pocket, so don't you be trying that little gime o'running away." Agnes slept, and snored in her sleep, and Connie restlessly walked to the window and looked out. When Big Ben sounded again her eyes filled with tears. She had never spent such a long and dismal evening in her life. Mammy Warren did not return home until between ten and eleven o'clock. Immediately on her arrival, Agnes took her departure. Mammy Warren then locked the door, and having provided herself with a stiff glass of whisky-and-water, desired Connie to hurry off to bed. "Yer'll be losing yer purty sleep," she said, "and then where'll yer be?" The next day Connie again walked abroad with Mrs. Warren. Once more she was dressed in the dark-blue costume, with her golden hair hanging in a great fleece down her back. But when she made her appearance without the little blue handkerchief, Mrs. Warren sent her back for it. "I know wot I'm about," she said. "The blue in the 'andkercher'll add to the blue in yer eyes. Pop it on, gel, and be quick." Connie obeyed. "I don't--want to," she said. "And _w'y_ don't yer?" The woman's voice was very fierce. "I'm somehow sort o' feared." "Take that for bein' sort o' feared," said Mrs. Warren; and she hit the child so fierce a blow on the arm that Connie cried out from the pain. Poor Connie was a very timorous creature, however, and the effect of the blow was to make her meek and subservient. The blue handkerchief was tied on and arranged to Mrs. Warren's satisfaction, and they both went out into the open air. They went by 'bus to quite a different part of the town on this occasion, and Mrs. Warren again assured her little companion that she had a great deal of shopping to get through. "That is why I wear this cloak," she said; "I ha' bags fastened inside to hold the things as I buy." Once again they got into a crowd, and once again Connie was desired to walk on a little way in front, and once again people turned to look at the slim, fair child with her beautiful face and lovely hair. Once more they entered several shops, and invariably chose the most crowded parts--so crowded that Mrs. Warren whispered to Connie: "We must wait till our turn, honey. We must ha' patience, dearie." They had patience. Mrs. Warren did absolutely purchase half-a-dozen very coarse pocket-handkerchiefs, keeping Connie close to her all the time. One of these she straightway presented to the girl, saying in a loud voice as she did so to the attendant: "I'm out with the purty dear to give her exercise. I am her nurse. She mustn't walk too far. No, thank you, mum, I'll carry the 'andkerchers 'ome myself; I won't trouble yer to send them to Portland Mansions.--Now, come along, my dear; we mustn't waste our time in this 'ot shop. We must be hout, taking of our exercise." They walked a very, very long way that morning, and Mrs. Warren, contrary to her yesterday's plan, did now and then expend a few pence. Whenever she did so she drew the shop people's attention to Connie, speaking of her as her charge, and a "dear, delicate young lydy," and begging of the people to be quick, as "'ot air" was so bad for the dear child; and invariably she refused to allow a parcel to be sent to Portland Mansions, saying that she preferred to carry it. At last, however, she seemed to think that Connie had had sufficient exercise, and they went home from the corner of Tottenham Court Road on the top of a 'bus. On their way Connie turned innocently to her companion and said: "Why ever did yer say as we lived in Portland Mansions?" But a sharp pinch on the girl's arm silenced her, and she felt more nervous and frightened than ever. The moment they got home, Mrs. Warren again returned to her bedroom, and came back neatly dressed in a black and yellow silk, with a keen appreciation of roast pork and apple sauce, which had been preparing in the oven all the morning. Connie too was hungry. When the meal came to an end Mrs. Warren said: "More like a lydy you grows each minute. But, my dear, I must thank yer nivver to open yer mouth when you're out, for yer ain't got the accent. Yer must niver do it until yer has acquired the rightful accent." "Was that why yer pinched me so 'ard when I axed why yer spoke o' Portland Mansions?" asked Connie. Mrs. Warren burst into a loud laugh. "Course it were," she said. "Don't yer nivver do nothing o' that sort agin." "But we don't live in Portland Mansions. Why did yer say so?" asked Connie. "Ax no questions and yer'll be told no lies," was Mrs. Warren's response. She accompanied this apparently innocent speech with a look out of her fierce black eyes which caused poor Connie's heart to sink into her shoes. After a minute Mrs. Warren said: "To-morrer's Saturday; we'll go out a bit in the morning, and then we'll take train into the country. I promised yer a jaunt, and yer shall 'ave it. I'm thinking a lot o' yer, my dear, and 'ow I can best help such a beautiful young gel. Yer accent must be 'tended to, and the best way to manage that is for you to have a refoined sort o' companion. Ronald is that sort. We'll go and fetch 'im 'ome to-morrer." "Whoever is Ronald?" asked Connie. "Do tell me, please," she added in an interested voice, "for Agnes spoke of him yesterday." "You wait till yer see," said Mrs. Warren. She nodded good-humoredly. The rest of the day passed very much like the day before. It was again intensely dull to poor Connie. She had nothing whatever to do but to feed and sit still. Again Mrs. Warren slept until tea-time. Then Agnes made her appearance, and Mrs. Warren went out in a tight-fitting coat, and with a leather bag in her hand. Agnes made tea and scolded Connie; and Connie grumbled and cried, and begged and begged to be given back her liberty. Mrs. Warren returned a little later than the night before. Agnes went away; Mrs. Warren drank whisky-and-water, and Connie was sent to bed. Oh, it was a miserable night! And would her own people ever find her? Would Sue be satisfied that Connie was not quite lost? And would Father John look for her? Dear, kind, splendid Father John! What would she not give to hear his magnificent voice as he preached to the people once again? Would not her own father search heaven and earth to find his only child? He was so good to Connie when he was not drunk--so proud of her, too, so glad when she kissed him so anxious to do the best he could for her! Would he give her up for ever? "Oh dear, dear!" thought the poor child, "if it was not for the Woice I believe I'd go mad; but the Woice--it holds me up. I'm 'appy enough w'en I 'ears it. Oh, little Giles, thank yer for telling me o' the wonnerful Woice!" CHAPTER IX. A TRIP INTO THE COUNTRY. Saturday dawned a very bright and beautiful day. Mrs. Warren got up early, and Connie also rose, feeling somehow or other that she was going to have a pleasanter time than she had yet enjoyed since her imprisonment. Oh yes, she was quite certain now that she was imprisoned; but for what object it was impossible for her even to guess. Mrs. Warren bustled out quite an hour earlier than usual. She did not go far on this occasion. She seemed a little anxious, and once or twice, to Connie's amazement, dodged down a back street as though she were afraid. Her red face turned quite pale when she did this, and she clutched Connie's arm and said in a faltering voice: "I'm tuk with a stitch in my side! Oh, my poor, dear young lydy, I'm afeered as I won't be able to take yer for a long walk this blessed morning." But when Connie, later on, inquired after the stitch, she was told to mind her own business, and she began to think that Mrs. Warren had pretended. They reached Waterloo at quite an early hour, and there they took third-class tickets to a part of the country about thirty miles from London. It took them over an hour to get down, and during that time Connie sat by the window wrapped in contemplation. For the first time she saw green grass and hills and running water, and although it was midwinter she saw trees which seemed to her too magnificent and glorious for words. Her eyes shone with happiness, and she almost forgot Mrs. Warren's existence. At last they reached the little wayside station to which Mrs. Warren had taken tickets. They got out, and walked down a winding country lane. "Is this real, real country?" asked Connie. "Yus--too real for me." "Oh ma'am, it's bootiful! But I dunna see the flowers." "Flowers don't grow in the winter, silly." "Don't they? I thought for sure I'd see 'em a-blowin' and a-growin'. Yer said so--yer mind." "Well, so yer wull, come springtime, ef ye're a good gel. Now, I want to talk wid yer wery serious-like." "Oh ma'am, don't!" said poor Connie. "None o' yer 'dont's' wid me! You ha' got to be very thankful to me for all I'm a-doin' for yer--feedin yer, and cockerin' yer up, and makin' a fuss o' yer, and brushing out yer 'air, and giving yer blue ties, and boots, and gloves." "Oh ma'am, yes," said Connie; "and I'm wery much obleeged--I am, truly--but I'd rayther a sight rayther, go 'ome to father; I would, ma'am." "Wot little gels 'ud like isn't wot little gels 'ull get," said Mrs. Warren. "You come to me of yer own free will, and 'avin' come, yer'll stay. Ef yer makes a fuss, or lets out to anybody that yer don't like it, I've a little room in my house--a room widdout no light and no winder, and so far away from any other room that yer might scream yerself sick and no one 'ud 'ear. Into that room yer goes ef yer makes trouble. And now, listen." Mrs. Warren gripped Connie's arm so tight that the poor child had to suppress a scream. "I know wot ye're been saying to Agnes--a-grumblin' and a-grumblin' to Agnes, instead o' down on yer knees and thankin' the Almighty that yer've found Mammy Warren. I know all about it: Yer'll stop that--d'yer 'ear--d'yer 'ear?" "Yus, ma'am," said Connie. "Do yer, promise?" "Yus, ma'am," said the poor child again. "I'll see as yer keeps it--yer little good-for-nothing beggar maid as I'm a-pamperin' of! Don't I work for yer, and toil for yer? And am I to have naught but grumbles for my pains? Yer won't like that room--an' it's there!" "I won't grumble," said Connie, terrified, and not daring to do anything but propitiate her tyrant. Mrs. Warren's manner altered. "Wull," she said, "I ha' brought yer down all this long way to 'ave a plain talk, and I guess we 'ave 'ad it. You please me, and I'll do my dooty by you; but don't please me, and there ain't a gel in the whole of Lunnon'll be more misrubble than you. Don't think as yer'll git aw'y, for yer won't--no, not a bit o' it. And now I've something else to say. There's a young boy as we're goin' to see to-day. 'Is name is Ronald; he's a special friend o' mine. I ha' had that boy a-wisiting o' me afore now, but he were took bad with a sort of fever. My word! din't I nurse him--the best o' good things didn't I give 'im! But his narves went wrong, and I sent him into the country for change of hair. He's all right now. He's a very purty boy, same as you're a purty gel, and I'm goin' to bring him back to be a companion for yer." "Oh ma'am!" "Yus," said Mrs. Warren. "Yer'll like that, won't yer?" "Oh yus, ma'am." "Wull, now--we'll be calling at the cottage in a few minutes, and wot I want yer to do is to have a talk with that yer boy. Ye're to tell him as I'm wonnerful good; ye're to tell him the sort o' things I does for yer. The poor boy--he got a notion in his head w'en he had the fever--that I--I--Mammy Warren--wor cruel to him. You tell him as there ain't a word o' truth in it, for a kinder or more motherly body never lived. Ef yer don't tell him that, I'll soon find out; an' there's the room without winders an' without light real 'andy. Now--do yer promise?" These words were accompanied by a violent shake. "Do yer promise?" "Yus, I promise," said Connie, turning white. Mrs. Warren had an extraordinary capacity for changing her voice and manner, even the expression of her face. While she had been extracting two promises from poor Connie, she looked like the most awful, wicked old woman that the worst parts of London could produce; but when on two points Connie had faithfully promised to yield to her wishes, she immediately altered her tactics, and became as genial and affectionate and pleasant as she had been the reverse a few minutes back. "I believes yer," she said, "and you're a real nice child, and there won't be any one in the 'ole of Lunnun 'appier than you as long as yer take the part of poor old Mammy Warren. Now then, yere's the cottage, and soon we'll see the little man. He'll be a nice companion for yer, Connie, and yer'll like that, won't you?" "Oh yes, ma'am," said Connie. She was not a London child for nothing. She had known a good deal of its ups and downs, although nothing quite so terrible as her present position had ever entered into her mind. But she saw clearly enough that the only chance of deliverance for her, and perhaps for the poor little boy, was to carry out Mammy Warren's injunctions and to keep her promise to the letter. Accordingly, when Mrs. Warren's knock at the cottage door was answered by a kind-looking, pale-faced woman, Connie raised her bright blue eyes to the woman's face and listened with deep interest when Mrs. Warren inquired how the poor little boy was. "Is it Ronald?" said the woman, whose name was Mrs. Cricket. "He's ever so much better; he's taken kindly to his food, and is out in the woods now at the back of the house playing all by himself." "In the woods is he, now?" said Mrs. Warren. "Well, I ha' come to fetch him 'ome." "Oh ma'am, I don't think he's as strong as all that." "I ha' come to fetch him 'ome by the wishes of his parients," said Mrs. Warren. "I suppose," she added, "there's no doubt in yer moind that I '_ave_ come from the parients of the boy?" "Oh no, ma'am--none, o' course. Will you come in, and I'll fetch him?" "Is he quite right in the 'ead now?" said Mrs. Warren as she and Connie followed Mrs. Cricket into the cottage. "He's better," said that good woman. "No talk o' dark rooms and nasty nightmares and cruel old women? All those things quite forgot?" asked Mrs. Warren. "He ain't spoke o' them lately." "Well then, he's cured; he's quite fit to come 'ome. This young lydy is a r'lation o' hisn. I ha' brought her down to see 'im, and we'll all travel back to town together.--You might go and find him, my dear," said Mrs. Warren, turning to Connie, and meanwhile putting her finger to her lips when Mrs. Cricket's back was turned in order to enjoin silence on the girl. "You run out into the woods, my purty, and find the dear little boy and bring him back here as fast as yer like." "Yes, missy," said Mrs. Cricket, opening the back door of the cottage, "you run out, straight up that path, and you'll find little Ronald." Connie obeyed. She was glad to be alone in order to collect her thoughts. A wild idea of running away even now presented itself to her. But looking back, she perceived that Mrs. Warren had seated herself by the kitchen window and had her bold eyes fixed on her retreating little figure. No chance of running away. She must trust to luck, and for the present she must carry out Mrs. Warren's instructions. Presently she came up to the object of her search--an exceedingly pretty, dark-haired boy of about ten years of age. His face was pale, his features regular, his eyes very large, brown, and soft, like rich brown velvet. He did not pay much attention to Connie, but went on laying out a pile of horse-chestnuts which he had gathered in rows on the ground. "Be your name Ronald?" said Connie, coming up to him. He looked at her, then sprang to his feet, and politely took off his little cap. "Yes, my name is Ronald Harvey." "I ha' come to fetch yer," said Connie. "What for?" asked the boy. "It's Mammy Warren," said Connie in a low tone. "What?" asked the child. His face, always pale, now turned ghastly white. "She's such a nice woman," said Connie. She sat down by Ronald. "Show me these purty balls," she said. "Wot be they?" "Chestnuts," said the boy. "Did you ever see them before? That was not true what you said about--about----" "Yus," said Connie, "it is true. I'm a little gel stayin' with her now, and you--I want you to come back with me. She's real, real kind is Mammy Warren." The boy put his hand up to his forehead. "You seem a nice girl," he said, "and you look like--like a lady, only you don't talk the way ladies talk. I'm a gentleman. My father was an officer in the army, and my darling mother died, and--and something happened--I don't know what--but I was very, very, very ill. There was an awful time first, and there seemed to be a woman called Mammy Warren mixed up in the time and----" "Oh, you had fever," said Connie, "and you--you pictured things to yourself in the fever. But 'tain't true," she added earnestly. "I'm wid her, an' she's real, real, wonnerful kind." "You wouldn't tell a lie, would you, girl?" said the boy. Connie bit her lip hard. "No," she said then in a choked voice. "I wonder if it's true," said the boy. "It seems to me it was much more than the fever, but I can't--I can't _quite_ remember." "She is very kind," echoed Connie. "Children, come along in," said a cheerful voice at that moment; and Connie, raising her eyes, saw the sturdy form of Mrs. Warren advancing up the path to meet her. "She was terrible cruel in my time," said Ronald, glancing at the same figure. "I don't want to go back." "Oh, do--do come back, for my sake!" whispered Connie. He turned and looked into the beautiful little face. "Boys have to be good," he said then, "and--and brave. My father was a very brave man." Then he struggled to his feet. "Well, Ronald," said Mrs. Warren, "and 'ow may yer be, my dear little boy? This is Connie, a cousin o' yourn. Wot playmates you two wull be! Ye're both comin' back with me to my nice 'ome this wery arfternoon. And now Mrs. Cricket 'as got a meal for us all and then yer little things'll be packed, Ronald, and I'll carry 'em--for in course yer nurse ought to carry yer clothes, my boy. We'll get off to the train as fast as ever we can arter we've had our meal. Now, children, foller me back to the cottage." Mrs. Warren sailed on in front. Connie and Ronald followed after, hand in hand. There was quite a splendid color in Connie's pale cheeks now, for all of a sudden she saw a reason for her present life. She had got to protect Ronald, who was so much younger than herself. She would protect him with her very life if necessary. CHAPTER X. THE RETURN TO LONDON. Mrs. Warren made a very hearty meal. She swallowed down cup after cup of strong coffee, and ate great hunches of thick bread-and-butter, and called out to the children not to shirk their food. But, try as they would, neither Connie nor Ronald had much appetite. Connie, in spite of herself, could not help casting anxious glances at the little boy, and whenever she did so she found that Mrs. Warren had fixed her with her bold black eyes. It seemed to Connie that Mrs. Warren's eyes said quite as plainly as though her lips had spoken: "I'll keep my word; there's the room with no winder and no light in it--yer'll find yerself in there ef yer don't look purty sharp." But notwithstanding the threatening expression of Mrs. Warren's eyes, Connie could not restrain all sign of feeling. Ronald, on the other hand, appeared quite bright. He devoted himself to Connie, helping her in the most gentlemanly way to the good things which Mrs. Cricket had provided. "The apple jam is very nice," he said. "I watched Mrs. Cricket make it.--Didn't I, Mrs. Cricket?" "That you did, my little love," said the good woman. "And I give you a little saucer of it all hot and tasty for your tea, didn't I, my little love?" "Oh yes," replied Ronald; "and didn't I like it, just!" "Jam's wery bad for little boys," said Mrs. Warren at this juncture. "Jam guvs little boys fever an' shockin' cruel dreams. It's bread-and-butter as little boys should heat, and sometimes bread without butter in case they should turn bilious." "Oh no, ma'am, begging your pardon," here interrupted Mrs. Cricket; "I haven't found it so with dear little Master Ronald. You tell his parients, please, ma'am, that it's milk as he wants--lots and lots of country milk--and--and a chop now and then, and chicken if it's young and tender. That was 'ow I pulled 'im round.--Wasn't it, Ronald, my dear?" "Yes," said Ronald in his gentlemanly way. "You were very good indeed, Mrs. Cricket." "Perhaps," interrupted Mrs. Warren, drawing herself up to her full height, which was by no means great, and pursing her lips, "yer'll 'ave the goodness, Mrs. Cricket, to put on a piece o' paper the exact diet yer like to horder for this yere boy. I'm a busy woman," said Mrs. Warren, "and I can't keep it in my 'ead. It's chuckens an' chops an' new-laid heggs--yer did say new-laid heggs at thruppence each didn't yer, Mrs. Cricket?--an' the richest an' best milk, mostly cream, I take it." "I said nothing about new-laid eggs," said Mrs. Cricket, who was exceedingly exact and orderly in her mind; "but now, as you 'ave mentioned them, they'd come in very 'andy. But I certain did speak of the other things, and I'll write 'em down ef yer like." "Do," said Mrs. Warren, "and I'll mention 'em to the child's parients w'en I see 'em." But at this juncture something startling happened, for Ronald, white as a sheet, rose. "Has my father come back?" he asked. "Have you heard from him? Are you taking me to him?" Mrs. Warren gazed full at Ronald, and, quick as thought, she adopted his idea. Here would be a way--a delightful way--of getting the boy back to her dreadful house. "Now, ain't I good?" she said. "Don't I know wot a dear little boy wants? Yus, my love, ye're soon to be in the harms of yer dear parient." "But you said both parients," interrupted Mrs. Cricket. Mrs. Warren put up her finger to her lips. She had got the boy in her arms, and he found himself most unwillingly folded to her ample breast. "Ain't one enough at a time?" was her most dubious remark. "And now then, Ronald, hurry up with yer things, for Connie and me, we must be hoff. We could leave yer behind, ef yer so wished it, but Lunnun 'ud be a much more convenient place for yer to meet yer father." "Oh I'll go, I'll go!" said Ronald. "My darling, darling father! Oh, I did think I'd never see him again! And he's quite well, Mrs. Warren?" "In splendid, splendid health," said Mrs. Warren. "Niver did I lay eyes on so 'andsome a man." "And I'll see him to-night?" said Ronald. "Yus--ef ye're quick." Then Ronald darted into the next room, and Mrs. Cricket followed him, and Connie and Mrs. Warren faced each other. Mrs. Warren began to laugh immoderately. "Young and tender chuckens," she said, "an' chops an' new-laid heggs an' milk. Wotever's the matter with yer, Connie?" Connie answered timidly that she though Ronald a dear little boy, and very pretty, and that she hoped that he would soon get strong with the nourishing food that Mrs. Warren was going to give him. But here that worthy woman winked in so mysterious and awful a manner that poor Connie felt as though she had received an electric shock. After a time she spoke again. "I'm so glad about his father!" she said. "His father was a hofficer in the harmy. Will he really see him to-night, Mrs. Warren?" "Will the sky fall?" was Mrs. Warren's ambiguous answer. "Once for all, Connie, you ax no questions an' you'll be told no lies." A very few moments afterwards Ronald came out of the little bedroom, prepared for his journey. Mrs. Cricket cried when she parted with him, but there were no tears in the boy's lovely eyes--he was all smiles and excitement. "I'll bring my own, own father down to see you, Mrs. Cricket," he said; "maybe not to-morrow, but some day next week. For you've been very good to me, darling Mrs. Cricket." Then Mrs. Cricket kissed him and cried over him again, and the scene might have been prolonged if Mrs. Warren had not caught the boy roughly by the shoulder and pulled him away. As they were marching down the tiny path which led from the cottage to the high-road, Mrs. Cricket did venture to say in an anxious voice: "I s'pose as Major Harvey'll pay me the little money as I spended on the dear child?" "That he will," said Mrs. Warren. "I'll see him to-night, most like, and I'll be sure to mention the chuckens and the chops." "Well then, good-bye again, darling," said Mrs. Cricket. Ronald blew a kiss to her, and then, taking Connie's hand, they marched down the high-road in the direction of the railway station, Mrs. Warren trotting by their side, carrying the small bundle which contained Ronald's clothes all tied up neatly in a blue check handkerchief. "Yer'll be sure to tell yer father wot a good nurse I were to you, Ronald," she remarked as they found themselves alone in a third-class carriage. "You're quite sure it _was_ only a dream?" said Ronald then very earnestly. "Wot do yer mean by that, chile?" inquired Mrs. Warren. "I mean the dark room without any light, and the dreadful person who--who--flogged me, and--the hunger." "Poor little kid!" said Mrs. Warren. "Didn't he 'ave the fever, and didn't Mammy Warren hold him in her arms, an', big boy that he be, walked up and down the room wid him, and tried to soothe him w'en he said them nasty lies? It wor a dream, my dear. W'y, Connie here can tell yer 'ow good I am to 'er." "Wery good," said Connie--"so good that there niver were no one better." She tumbled out the words in desperation, and Mammy Warren gave her a radiant smile, and poked her playfully in the ribs, and said that she was quite the funniest gel she had ever come acrost. After this Connie was quite silent until the little party found themselves at Waterloo. Here they mounted to the top of a 'bus, and Ronald, trembling with delight, clutched hold of Connie's hand. "Stoop down," he said; "I want to whisper." Connie bent towards him. "Do you think my father will be waiting for me when we get back to Mrs. Warren's?" "I don't know," was the only reply poor Connie could manage to give him. At last the omnibus drive came to an end, and the trio walked the short remaining distance to Mrs. Warren's rooms. Ronald almost tumbled upstairs in his eagerness to get there first. "Oh, how will he get in? I do hope he's not been waiting and gone away again." Mrs. Warren opened the door with her latch key. The room was dark, for there was neither fire-light nor gas-light; but soon these deficiencies were supplied, for Mrs. Warren was exceedingly fond of creature comforts. "I wonder when he'll come," said Ronald. He was standing by the table and looking anxiously with his big brown eyes all round him. "I do wonder when he'll come." Mrs. Warren made no reply. She began to prepare supper. As she did so there came a knock at the door. Mrs. Warren went to open it. She had an eager conversation with some one who stood without, and then she and Agnes entered the room together. Ronald evidently knew Agnes, for he shrank away from her and regarded her arrival with the reverse of pleasure. "Wull--and 'ow yer?" said Agnes in a cheerful tone. She chucked Ronald under the chin and remarked on his healthy appearance. "Wull," said Mrs. Warren, "yer can't blame the pore child for that, seein' as he 'ave been cockered up on the best food in the land--chuckens and chops, no less." "Oh, dear me! how shockin' greedy you must be!" said Agnes. "I'm sure, ma'am," she continued, turning to Mrs. Warren, "no one could desire better than wot _you_ 'as to eat." "I like my own food," said Mrs. Warren, "although it be simplicity itself. There are two red 'errin's for supper to-night, and bread-and-butter and tea, and a _little_ raspberry jam, and ef that ain't enough for anybody's palate, I don't know----" "My father, when he comes"--began Ronald, but here Mrs. Warren turned to him. "You're a manly boy, Ronald," she said, "and I know you'll tike wot I 'ave to say in a manly sperrit. Yer father have been called out o' Lunnon, and won't be back for a day or two. He sent a message by Agnes 'ere. He don't know the exact day as he'll be back, but he'll come wery soon." "Yes," said Agnes, "I seen him." "Where?" asked Ronald. "In the street," said Agnes. "He come along 'ere an hour back. Ef you'd been 'ome he might ha' took yer back with him; but w'en he found that you was still in the country he wor that pleased 'is whole face seemed to smile, and he said--said 'e, 'Dear Mammy Warren--I'd like to chuck her under her chin.' Them was his wery words." "I don't believe my father would say that sort of thing," answered Ronald. "Oh my!" said Agnes. "Highty-tighty! Don't yer go an' say as I tells lies, young man----" "An' it's the wery thing he would say," interrupted Mrs. Warren, "for a plainer-spoken, more hagreeable man than the Major niver drew breath." "He left yer a message," continued Agnes, "an' yer can tike it or leave it--I don't care. Wot he said wor this. You're to obey Mammy Warren, an' be wery grateful to her, an' do jest wot she tells yer until he comes 'ome. He'll be 'ome any day, an' he'll come an' fetch yer then, and the more good yer be to Mammy Warren the better pleased he'll be." Ronald sat down on a little stool. He had sat on that stool before. He looked with dim eyes across the over-furnished, hot, and terribly ugly room. That vision of delight which had buoyed him up all the way back to London was not to be realized for a few days. He must bear with Mrs. Warren for a few days. It did not enter into his head that the whole story about his father was false from beginning to end. The present disappointment was quite enough for so young a child to bear. After this Mrs. Warren and Agnes conversed in semi-whispers, and presently they retired into Mrs Warren's bedroom, and Connie and Ronald were alone. "I am glad yer've come 'ere, Ronald," said Connie. "Yes," said Ronald. He pressed his little white hand against his forehead. "You're missing your father, I know," continued Connie, "Somehow I'm a-missing o' mine." "Have you a father, Connie?" asked the little boy. "Yus--that I 'ave," said Connie. "Not a great, grand gentleman like yourn, but a father for all that." "Is your father in London?" asked the boy. "Oh yes," answered Connie, "and not far from 'ere, nayther." "Then why aren't you with him?" asked Ronald. "'Cos I can't be," replied Connie in a low whisper. "Hush!" said Ronald. Just then the door opened and Agnes came out. Mrs. Warren followed her. Mrs. Warren wore her usual tight-fitting jacket, but on this occasion Agnes carried a leather bag, which seemed to be stuffed so full that it was with difficulty it could be kept shut. Mrs. Warren addressed the two children. "I'm goin' to lock you two in," she said, "an' you'd best go to bed. There's a little bed made up in your room, Connie, for Ronald to sleep in; and as you're a deal older than that sweet little boy, you'll nurse him off to sleep, jest as though he wor your real brother. Arter he's asleep you can go to bed yerself, for there's nothing like early hours for beauty sleep. You yere me, Connie? You know wot to do?" "Yus," answered Connie. Her voice was almost cheerful. She was so truly glad that Mrs. Warren was going out. When she heard the key turning in the lock, and knew that she and Ronald were locked in all alone, she scarcely seemed to mind, so glad was she of Ronald's company. Neither child spoke to the other until the retreating footsteps of Mrs. Warren and Agnes ceased to sound on the stairs. Then Connie went up to Ronald, and kneeling down by him put her arms round him and kissed him. "You're very pretty," said the little boy, "although you don't talk like a lady. But that doesn't matter," he added, "for you've got a lady's heart." "I love you, Ronald," was Connie's answer. Ronald now put his own arms round Connie's neck and kissed her once or twice on her peach-like cheek, and then they both sat down on the floor and were happy for a few minutes in each other's company. After that Ronald began to speak. He told Connie about his father and about his mother. He did not cry at all, as most children would have done, when he spoke of those he loved so dearly. "Mother's dead nearly a year now," he said. "It was waiting for father that killed her. Father went out to a dreadful war in South Africa, and we heard that he was killed. Mother wouldn't believe it; she never did believe it--never--and she taught me not to, and I never did. But, all the same, it killed her." "And then wot became of you?" asked Connie. "I was taken here," replied Ronald. "That's three or four months ago now. I remember quite well being out walking with my nurse. She wasn't very nice, my nurse wasn't; but she was--oh, so good and kind compared to--what--what happened afterwards! Darling mother was dead. They had put her body in the grave, and the angels had got her soul. I didn't like to think of the grave, but I did love to remember the angels. The last thing mother said when she was dying was, 'Ronald, when your father comes back, be sure you tell him that I never believed that he was really dead.'" "I promised her, and then she said again, 'And you'll never believe it either, Ronald.' And I said that I never, never would, if it was a thousand years. And then she kissed me and smiled; and I s'pose the angels took her, for she never spoke any more." "Well," said Connie, who did not want Ronald to dwell too long on this very sad scene, "tell us 'bout the day you come 'ere." "Mother was in her grave," said Ronald, "and there was no one who thought very much about me; and my nurse--she was not half as kind as when mother lived. One day she took me for a walk. We went a long, long way, and presently she asked me to wait for her outside one of those awful gin-palaces. She used to go in there sometimes, even when mother was alive. Well, I waited and waited outside, but she never came out. I was not a bit frightened at first, of course, for my father's boy mustn't be a coward, must he, Connie?" "No," answered Connie. "But she didn't come out, and it got late, and people began to look at me, and by-and-by Mammy Warren came out of the gin-palace. She was--oh, so red in the face! and I thought I'd never seen so dreadfully stout a woman. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, 'Wotever are you doing here?' And I said, 'I'm waiting for my nurse, Hannah Waters.' And she said, 'Oh, then, _you're_ the little boy!' And I stared at her, and she said, 'Pooh Hannah's took bad, and she's asked me to take you home. Come along at once, my dear.' "I went with her. I wasn't a bit frightened--I had never been frightened in all my life up to then. But she didn't take me home at all. She brought me to this house. She was very kind to me at first, in a sort of a way, and she told me that my relations had given me to her to look after, and that I was to be her little boy for the present, and must do just what she wanted." "Well--and wot did she want?" asked Connie, trembling not a little. "It wasn't so dreadful bad at first," continued Ronald. "She used to take me out every day for long walks, and she made me look very nice; and we went into shops, for she said she wanted to buy things, but I don't think she ever did buy much. I used to be tired sometimes; we walked such a very long way." "And did she ever make you go a little, tiny bit in front of her?" said Connie. "Why, yes," replied Ronald. "But I rather liked that, for, you see, I'm a gentleman, and she's not a lady." "I wonder," said Connie, "ef she spoke of herself as your old nurse." Ronald began to laugh. "How clever of you to think of that, Connie! She always did; and whenever she did buy things she said they were for me; and she used to give--oh, tremendous grand addresses of where I lived." "Portland Mansions, p'r'aps?" said Connie. "Sometimes that, and sometimes other places; but of course the parcels were never sent there; she always carried them herself." "And she wore a big, big cloak, with pockets inside?" asked Connie. "Yes, she did--she did." "She does just the same with me now," said Connie. "I go out with her every day, and we go into the big shops--into the most crowded parts--and she doesn't buy much. I like that the best part of the day, for all the rest of the time I have to stay here and do nothing." "And so had I to stay in these rooms and do nothing," said Ronald. "But I won't have to stay long now," he continued, "as my dear, dear father has come home. Oh! I wish darling mother were alive, that she might feel as happy as I do to-night." "But tell me, Ronald," continued Connie, "how was it yer got the fever?" "I don't quite remember that part," said the little boy. "All that part was made up of dreams. There was a dreadful dream when I seemed to be quite well, and when I said something before some one, and Mammy Warren turned scarlet; and when I was alone she--she flogged me and put me into a dark, dark room for--oh! it seemed like--for ever. And I had nothing to eat, and I was so frightened--for she said there was a bogy there--that I nearly died. I didn't like to be frightened, for it seemed as though I couldn't be father's own son if I were afraid. But I was afraid, Connie--I was. I'll have to tell darling father about it when I see him; I'm sure he'll forgive me, more particular when he knows the whole thing was only a fever dream--for there's not any room in this house like that, is there, Connie." "Yes, but there be," thought Connie. But she did not say so aloud. That night Ronald slept as peacefully as though he were really back again with his father. But Connie lay awake. Anxious as she had been before Ronald's arrival, that state of things was nothing at all to her present anxiety. The next day was Sunday, and if it had not been for Big Ben the two poor children would have had a most miserable time, for they were shut up in Mrs. Warren's room from morning till night. In vain they begged to be allowed to go out. Mrs. Warren said "No," and in so emphatic a manner that they did not dare to ask her twice. Agnes did not come at all to the house on Sunday, and Connie and Ronald finally curled themselves up in the deep window-ledge, and Connie talked and told Ronald all about her past life. In particular she told him about Big Ben, and little Giles, and the wonderful, most wonderful "Woice." After that the children had a sort of play together, in which Ronald proved himself to be a most imaginative little person, for he invented many fresh stories with regard to Big Ben, assuring Connie that he was much more than a voice. He would not be at all surprised, he said if Big Ben was not a great angel who came straight down from heaven every hour to comfort the sorrowful people in Westminster. Ronald thought it extremely likely that this wonderful angel knew his own mother, and was on this special Sunday telling him to be a brave boy and keep up his heart, for most certainly he would be safe back with his father before another Sunday came. "That's what he says," continued Ronald, "and that's what'll happen, you'll see, Connie. And when darling father comes here you shall come away too, for I won't leave you alone with Mammy Warren. She's not a real kind person, is she, Connie?" "Don't ax me," said Connie. Ronald looked up into her face. "You can't tell a lie at all well," he said. "You're trying to make me think that Mammy Warren's nice, but you're not doing it well, for I don't believe you." Then the big clock once again tolled the hour, and Ronald laughed with glee. "There's no doubt about it now," he said. "Father _is_ coming, and very, very soon. Oh I am glad, and happy!" During that Sunday the children had very little food, for Mrs. Warren seemed all of a sudden to have changed her tactics. Whether it was the fact that she was really angry at Mrs. Cricket's having fed the boy on chicken and mutton-chops, no one could tell; but all he did have on that eventful Sunday was weak tea, stale bread and butter, and a very little jam. Towards evening the two poor little creatures were really hungry. By-and-by they clasped each other round the neck, and fell asleep in each other's arms. It was in this condition--curled up near the fire--that Mrs. Warren found them when she got home. CHAPTER XI. A NEW DEPARTURE. With Monday morning, however, all things seemed to have altered. Mrs. Warren was up spry and early. She called Connie to come and help her, but she desired Ronald to lie in bed. "It's a nasty day," she said; "there's sleet falling. We'll go out, of course, for fresh air is good for children, but we must none of us wear our best clothes." "What do yer mean by that?" said Connie. "Don't you go and ax me wot I mean; just do wot I tells yer. No dark-blue dress for yer to-day, missy. I ha' got a old gownd as 'ull fit yer fine." Poor Connie trembled. Mrs. Warren went into her bedroom. "'Ere, now," she said, "you put it on." The old gown was certainly not at all nice. Its color was quite indescribable. It was very ragged and torn, too, round the bottom of the skirt. It dragged down in front so as almost to trip poor Connie when she tried to walk, and was several inches too short in the back. Mrs. Warren desired Connie to take off her dainty shoes and stockings, and gave her some stockings with holes in them, and some very disreputable shoes down at the heel. She made her pin across her chest a little old shawl of an ugly pale pattern, and instead of allowing her to wear her hair in a golden fleece down her back, she plaited it, and tied it into a little bunch at the back of her head. She then put an old bonnet on the child's head--a bonnet which must have once belonged to quite an elderly woman--and tied it with strings in front. Connie felt terribly ashamed of herself. "I'm all in rags," she said, "jest as though I wor a beggar maid." "I've a fancy that yer shall wear these 'ere clothes to-day," said Mrs. Warren. "Yer've been a fine lydy too long; yer'll be a beggar maid to-day. W'en I tell yer wot to do in the street, yer'll do it. You can sing, I take it. Now then, you learn the words." Mrs. Warren planted down before Connie the well-known words of "Home, Sweet Home." "I know this without learning it," said the girl. "An' you 'as a good woice, I take it." "Middlin'," replied Connie. "Wull, sing it for me now." Connie struck up the familiar words, and so frightened was she that in real desperation she acquitted herself fairly well. "You'll take a treble, an' the little boy 'ull do likewise, and I'll take a fine, deep second. Ah! _I_ know 'ow to sing," said Mrs. Warren. "You won't take little Ronald out on a dreadful sort o' day like this," said Connie. "Wen I want yer adwice I'll ax fur it," said Mrs. Warren, with most withering sarcasm. Poor Connie felt her heart suddenly fit to burst. What new and dreadful departure was this? Mrs. Warren now brought Ronald into the front room, and there she arrayed him in garments of the poorest type, allowing his little thin legs to be quite bare, and his very thin arms to show through his ragged jacket. She posed, however, a little red cap on the midst of his curly dark hair; and this cap most wonderfully became the child, so that few people could pass him in the street without noticing the sweetness of his angelic face. Then Mrs. Warren prepared herself for the part she was to take. She went into her bedroom for the purpose, and returned looking so exactly like a stout old beggar woman that the children would scarcely have known her. She had covered her left eye with a patch, and now only looked out on the world with her right one. Her hair was knotted untidily under a frowsy old bonnet, and a very thin shawl was bound across her ample breast. "We'll do fine, I take it," she said to the children. "I am your mother, my dears; you'll both 'old me by the 'and. Purtier little lambs couldn't be seen than the two of yez. And ef poor, ugly Mammy Warren 'ave made herself still uglier for yer sweet sakes, 'oo can but love 'er for the ennoblin' deed? Wull, come along now, children; but first I'll build up the fire, for we'll be 'ungry arter this 'ere job." The fire was built up to Mrs. Warren's satisfaction, and the three went downstairs. Ronald was quite speechless with shame--to go out like this, to disgrace his brave father and his darling mother in this sort of fashion, was pure torture to the boy; but Connie, in the thought of him and the fear that he would take cold, almost forgot her own misery. The three did not go anywhere by 'bus that day, but hurried down side alleys and back streets until they got into the region of Piccadilly. The children had not the least idea where they were. Suddenly, however, they came to a pause outside a large hotel, and there Mrs. Warren struck up the first note of "Home, Sweet Home." She had timed everything well. The policeman was at the other end of his beat, and she would not be molested for quite ten minutes. The quavering, ugly notes of the old woman were well subdued, and Connie had a really fine voice, and it rose high on the bitter air in sweet, childish appeal and confidence. Ronald, too, was struck with a sudden thought. That hotel was a sort of place where father used to live when he was alive. Who could tell if his father himself might not have returned, and might not be there, and might not hear him if he sang loud enough and sweet enough? The voice of the boy and the voice of the girl blended together, and Mrs. Warren skilfully dropped hers so as not to spoil the harmony. The people in the hotel were attracted by the sweet notes, and crowded to the windows. Then Connie's face of purest beauty--Connie's face rendered all the more pathetic by the old bonnet and the dreadful, tattered dress--and Ronald with his head thrown back, his red cap held in his hand, the white snow falling in flakes on his rich dark hair, made between them a picture which would melt the hardest heart. Sixpences and even shillings were showered from the windows, and as the last note of "Home, Sweet Home" died away Mrs. Warren pocketed quite a considerable harvest. She and the children then moved on and did likewise before several other large buildings, but they were not so successful again as they had been with their first attempt. The police came back sooner than they were expected. Ronald began to cough, too, and Connie's face looked blue with cold. Mrs. Warren, however, was not disappointed. She spoke encouragingly and protectingly to the children. "Come 'ome, loveys," she said; "come 'ome, my little dears." They did get home--or, rather, they got back to the dreadful house where they were imprisoned--late in the afternoon, Ronald almost speechless with cold and fatigue, Connie trembling also, and aching in every limb. But now unwonted comforts awaited them. Mrs. Warren had no idea of killing off these sources of wealth. She put Ronald into a hot bath, and rubbed his limbs until they glowed, and then moved his little bed in front of the fire and got him into it. Connie was also rubbed and dried and desired to dispense with her beggar's toilet. Afterwards there was quite a good dinner of roast pork with crackling and apple sauce, and dreadful as their position was, both the poor children enjoyed this meal as they had never enjoyed food before. Thus a few days went by, the children going out every morning with Mrs. Warren sometimes as beggar children, but sometimes again as children of the well-to-do. These two programmes formed the most interesting part of their little lives. For the rest of the day they sat huddled up together, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, while each day a bigger and bigger ache came into Ronald's heart. Why, oh why did not his father come to fetch him? But as all things come to an end, so the children's life in Mrs. Warren's dreadful attics came to an abrupt conclusion. One day, just as they were dressed to go out, there came a hurried knock at the door. It seemed to Connie, who was very sharp and observant, that Mrs. Warren did not much like the sound. She went to the door and, before opening it, called out, "Who's there?" "Agnes," was the reply; whereupon Mrs. Warren opened the door a few inches, and Agnes squeezed in, immediately locking the door behind her. She whispered something into Mrs. Warren's ear, which caused that good woman to turn deadly white and stagger against the wall. "Yer've no time to faint, ma'am," said Agnes. "'Ere--let me slap yer on the back." She gave two resounding whacks on Mrs. Warren's stout back, which caused that woman to heave a couple of profound sighs and then to recover her presence of mind. She and Agnes then retired into her bedroom, where drawers were hastily opened, and much commotion was heard by the two prettily dressed and waiting children. In another minute or two Agnes came out alone. "Wull," she said, "and 'ow be you, Connie?" "I am all right," said Connie. "Where's Mammy Warren?" "She's tuk bad, and won't want yer to go out a-walkin' with her to-day. Oh my! oh my! how spry we be! It 'minds me o' the old song, 'As Willikins were a-walkin' wid his Dinah one day.'" "Agnes," said Connie, "I'm certain sure as there's some'ut wrong." "Be yer now?" said Agnes. "Wull then, ye're mistook. Wot could be wrong? Ye're a very queer and suspicious gel, Connie Harris--the most suspicious as I hever see'd. Ye're just for all the world the most selfish gel as could be found in the whole o' Lunnun. Pore Mammy Warren was told of the sudden death of her sister, and that's all the sympathy you guvs her. Wery different she behaves to you and Ronald. 'Hagnes,' says she, 'tike those pore children for a run,' says she, 'and bring them 'ome safe in time for dinner,' says she, 'an' give 'em some roast mutton for dinner, poor darlin's,' says Mammy Warren; and then she falls to cryin', and 'Oh, my sister!' she says, and 'Oh, poor Georgina!' she sobs. Now then, the pair of yer--out we goes, and I'll go wid yer." Quick as thought Agnes accomplished her purpose, and the two prettily dressed children--Connie with her hair down her back, Ronald looking like a little prince--found themselves in the street. But if the two children thought that they had the slightest chance of running away they were terribly mistaken, for Agnes proved even a sharper taskmistress than Mrs. Warren. She seemed to Connie to have suddenly got quite old and very cruel and determined. She walked the children here, and she walked them there. They peered into shop windows and got into crowds, but they did no shopping that morning. Connie was rather glad of that, and now she was so accustomed to being stared at that she hardly took any notice; while as to Ronald, his sweet brown eyes looked full up into the face of every gentleman who passed, in the faint hope of discovering his father again. It seemed to Connie that they were out longer than usual; but at last they did come back. Then, to their great surprise, they found the door of Mammy Warren's sitting-room wide opened. "My word! 'ow can this 'ave 'appened?" said Agnes. They all went in, and Agnes went straight to the bedroom. She came out presently, wearing a very grave face, and told the children that she greatly feared poor Mammy Warren had gone off her head with grief--that there wasn't a sign of her in the bedroom, nor anywhere in the house. "And she's took her things, too," said Agnes. "Wull, now--wull, I must go and search for her. Yer dinner's in the oven, children, and I'll come back to see 'ow yer be sometime to-night, p'rhaps." "Wull Mammy Warren come back to-night?" asked Connie. "I don't know--maybe the poor soul is in the river by now. She wor took wery bad, thinkin' of her sister, Georgina. I'll lock yer in, of course, children, and yer can eat yer dinner and think o' yer mercies." CHAPTER XII. LEFT ALONE. When Agnes went out the two children stared at each other. "Connie," said Ronald, "I wish you'd tell me the real, real truth." But Connie was trembling very much. "Don't yer ax me," she said. She suddenly burst into tears. "I am so dreadfully frightened," she cried. "I don't think I ever wor so frightened in all my life before. You're not half so frightened as I am, Ronald." "Of course not," said Ronald, "for I am a boy, you see, and I'll be a man by-and-by. Besides, I have to think of father--father would have gone through anything. Once he was in a shipwreck. The ship was really wrecked, and a great many of the passengers were drowned. Father told me all about it, but it was from a friend of father's that I learned afterwards how splendid he was, saving--oh, heaps of people! It was that night," continued Ronald, sitting down by the fire as he spoke, his eyes glowing with a great thought, and his little face all lit up by the fire-light--"it was that night that he first found out how much he loved mother; for mother was in a great big Atlantic liner, and it was father who saved her life. Afterwards they were married to each other, and afterwards I came to them--God sent me, you know." "Yus," said Connie. She dried her eyes. "Go on talking, Ronald," she said. "I never met a boy like you. I thought there were no one like Giles, but it seems to me some'ow that you're a bit better--you're so wonnerful, wonnerful brave, and 'ave such a cunnin' way of talkin'. I s'pose that's 'cos you--you're a little gen'leman, Ronald." Ronald made no answer to this. After a minute he said: "There's no thanks to me to be brave--that is, when I'm brave it's all on account of father, and 'Like father, like son.' Mother used to teach me that proverb when I was very small. Shall I tell you other things that father did?" "Oh yus, please," said Connie. "He saved some people once in a great big fire. No one else had courage to go in, but he wasn't afraid of anything. And another time he saved a man on the field of battle. He got his V. C. for that." "Wotever's a V. C.?" inquired Connie. "Oh," said Ronald, "don't you even know that? How very ignorant you are, dear Connie. A V. C.--why, it's better to be a Victoria Cross man than to be the greatest noble in the land. Even the King couldn't be more than a Victoria Cross man." "Still, I don't understand," said Connie. "It's an honor," said Ronald, "that's given for a very, very brave deed. Father had it; when he comes back he'll show you his Victoria Cross; then you'll know." "Do yer think as he'll come soon?" asked Connie. "He may come to-day," said Ronald--"or he may not," he added, with a profound sigh. The little boy had been talking with great excitement, but now the color faded from his cheeks and he coughed a little. He had coughed more or less since that dreadful day when Mrs. Warren had taken him out in the snowstorm. He was always rather a delicate child, and after his bad fever he was not fit to encounter such misery and hardship. "Connie," he said after a time, "it's the worst of all dreadful things, isn't it, to pretend that you are what you aren't?" "What do yer mean by that?" asked Connie. "Well, it's this way. You praise me for being brave. I am not brave always; I am very frightened sometimes. I am very terribly frightened now, dear Connie." "Oh Ronald!" said Connie, "if you're frightened hall's hup." "Let me tell you," said Ronald. He laid his little, thin hand on the girl's arm. "It's about father. Do you think, Connie, that Mammy Warren could have invented that story about him?" "I dunno," said Connie. "But what do you think, Connie? Tell me just what you think." "Tell me what you think, Ronald." "I am afraid to think," said the child. "At first I believed it, just as though father had spoken himself to me. I thought for sure and certain he'd be waiting for me here. I didn't think for a single moment that he'd be the sort of father that would come and stand outside in the landing and go away again just because I wasn't here. For, you see, I am his own little boy; I am all he has got. I know father so well, I don't believe he could do that kind of thing." "Oh, but you can't say," answered Connie. "Certain sure, it seemed as though Agnes spoke the truth." "I thought that too; only father's a very refined sort of man, and he'd never, never chuck Mrs. Warren under the chin." "Agnes might have invented that part," said poor Connie. But in her heart of hearts she had long ago given up all hope of Ronald's father coming to fetch him. "She might," said Ronald; "that is quite true; and he might have had to go to the country--perhaps to rescue some one in great danger. He is the sort who are always doing that. That's quite, quite likely, for it would be in keeping with father's way. And he'd like me, of course, to be unselfish, and never to make a fuss--he hated boys who made a fuss. Oh yes, I did believe it; and on Saturday night and on Sunday, when Big Ben talked to us, it seemed that it was mother telling me that father would soon be with me. But a whole week has gone and he hasn't come. Why, it's Saturday night again, Connie. I've been back again in this house for a whole week now, and father has never, never come." "Maybe he'll come to-night," said Connie. "I don't think so; somehow I'd sort of feel it in my bones if he was coming back." "What do yer mean by that?" said Connie. "Oh, I'd be springy-like and jumpy about. But I'm not. I feel--oh, so lazy and so--so tired! and a little bit--yes, a greatbit--frightened--terribly frightened." "You must cheer up, Ronald," said Connie. Then she added, "I wish we could get out o' this. I wish I could pick the lock and get aw'y." "Oh, I wish you could, Connie," said the child. "Couldn't you try?" "I'm a'most afeered to go into Mammy Warren's room," said Connie; "for ef she did come back and see me any time, she'd punish me awful; but p'r'aps I might find tools for picking the lock in her room." "Oh, do let's try!" said Ronald. Connie half-rose, then sat down again. "It's me that's the coward now," she said. "Oh, how so, Connie?" "'Cos," said Connie, "there's that dark room with no winder--'tain't a dream, Ronald." "I thought it wasn't," said Ronald, turning white. "No--it's there," said Connie, "and I'm afeered o' it." Ronald sat very still for a minute then. He was thinking hard. He was only a little boy of ten years old, but he was a very plucky one. He looked at Connie, who although a little older than he, was very slight and small for her age. "Connie," he said, "if you and I are ever to make our escape we must not be frightened. Even the dark closet won't frighten me now. _I_ am going into Mrs. Warren's room." "Oh Ronald! Are you? Dare you?" "Yes, I dare. Father did worse things than that--why should I be afraid?" "You'd win the V. C., Ronald, wouldn't you, now?" Ronald smiled. "Not for such a little, little thing. But perhaps some day," he said; and his eyes looked very bright. "Connie, if we can unpick the lock and get the door open, where shall we go?" "We'll go," said Connie in a brisk voice, "back to Father John as fast as ever we can." "Father John," said Ronald--"who is he?" "I told you, Ronnie--I told you about him." "I forgot for a minute," said Ronald. "You mean the street preacher." "Yus," said Connie. "'E'll save us. There's no fear o' Mammy Warren getting to us ever again ef he takes us in 'and." Ronald smiled. "The only thing I'm afraid of is this," he said--"that if it's true about father, he may come here and find me gone." "Let's leave a note for him," said Connie then. "Let's put it on the table. If Mammy Warren should come back she'll find the note, but that won't do any harm, for she knows Father John, and she's awful afeered of him, 'cos she said as much, so she'd never follow us there." "The very thing!" said Ronald. "Let's get some paper. Will you write the note, Connie?" The children poked round in the sitting-room, and found a sheet of very thin paper, and an old pen, and a penny bottle of ink. Ronald dictated, and Connie wrote: "DEAR FATHER,--I've waited here for a week. I am trying to be very brave. Connie's an awful nice girl. We've picked the lock here, father, and we've gone to Father John, in Adam Street. Please come quick, for your little boy is so very hungry for you. Come quick, darling father.--Your little waiting boy, RONALD." "That'll bring him," said Ronald. "We'll put it on the table." Connie had written her letter badly, and there were several blots; but still a feat was accomplished. Her cheeks were bright with excitement now. "What shall I put outside?" she asked--"on the envelope, I mean." Ronald thought for a minute; then he said in a slow and impressive voice: "To Major Harvey, V. C., from Ronald." "Nobody can mistake who it's meant for," said Ronald. "Here's a bit of sealing-wax," said Connie. "Let's seal it." They did so, Connie stamping the seal with a penny thimble which she took out of her pocket. "And now," said Ronald, pulling himself up, "all is ready, and I am going into Mammy Warren's room to try and find tools for picking the lock." "I'm a-goin' with yer," said Connie. "Oh Connie, that is brave of you." "No," said Connie, "it 'ud be real cowardly to let yer go alone." Hand in hand the two children crossed the ugly sitting-room, and opened the door which led into that mysterious apartment known as Mammy Warren's room. It certainly was a very strange-looking place. There was no bed to be seen anywhere, which in itself was surprising. But Connie explained to Ronald that the huge wooden wardrobe was doubtless a press-bed which let down at night. "She'd keep all kinds of things at the back of the bed," said the practical Connie, who had seen several similar arrangements in the houses of the poor. This room, however, although ugly and dark--very dark--seemed to be suspiciously bare. The children had turned on the gas--for evening had already arrived--and they could see with great distinctness. Mammy Warren owned the upper part of this tenement-house, and no one ever came up the creaking stairs except to visit her. The children therefore knew that if there was a footstep they would be in danger. Connie, however, assured Ronald that she could put out the light and be innocently seated by the fire if Mammy Warren did arrive unexpectedly. All was silence, however, on the creaking stairs, and they were able to resume their search. The chest of drawers stood with all its drawers open and each one of them empty. No sort of tool could the children find. The yellow and black silk dress had disappeared, but the disreputable old beggar's clothes hung on the peg behind the door. There was also a very ancient bonnet, which was hung by its strings over the dress. Otherwise there was not a scrap of anything whatever in the room except the press bedstead, which the children could not possibly open, and the empty chest of drawers. "But here," said Connie, "is a door. P'rhaps it's a cupboard door." "Let's try if it will open," said Ronald. He turned the handle. The door shot back with a spring, and the boy's face turned pale. "The dark closet!" said Connie. "The dark, dark room without a winder!" Ronald caught hold of Connie's hand and squeezed it tightly. After a minute he said in a husky voice: "Come away." Connie shut the mysterious closet door. The children turned out the gas in Mammy Warren's bedroom, and went back to the sitting-room. Here they crouched down, pale and trembling, before the fire. "Don't, Ronnie--don't," said Connie. "Hold me very tight, Connie," said the little boy. She did so, pressing him to her heart and kissing his little face. After a minute tears came to his eyes, and he said in a sturdy tone: "Now I am better. It was wrong of me to be so frightened." "Hark--there's the Woice!" said Connie. They sat very still while Big Ben proclaimed the hour of nine. "What does he say?" asked Ronald, turning round and looking at Connie. "I know," said Connie, a light on her pretty face. "Father John preached on it once. I know wot Big Ben's a-sayin' of to-night." "Tell me," said Ronald. "_He that shall endure_," said Connie. "Yes, Connie," repeated Ronald--"'He that shall endure'----" "_To the end_," said Connie, "_shall be saved_," she added. "Oh Connie!" cried the boy. "Do you really, really think so?" "Father John says it, and Father John couldn't tell a lie," continued the girl. "He says that is one of God's promises, and God never made a mistake. 'He that shall endure to the end--shall be saved.'" "Then," said Ronald, "if _we_ endure _we_ shall be saved." "Yes," replied Connie. "You're not frightened, then?" "Not after that," said Connie. "How can you tell that _was_ what Big Ben said?" "'Eard him," said Connie. She unclasped Ronald's arms from her neck and stood up. "I'm better," she said; "I'm not frightened no more. Sometimes it's 'ard to endure--Father John says it is. But ''E that _shall_ endure to the end'--to the _end_--he made a great p'int o' that--'shall be saved.'" "Then _we'll_ be saved," said Ronald. "Yus," answered Connie. She looked down at the little boy. The boy was gazing into the fire and smiling. Connie put on some fresh lumps of coal, and the fire broke into a cheerful blaze. It did not matter at all to the good coal whether it burned out its heart in an attic or a palace; wherever it was put to do its duty, it did it. Now gay little flames and cheerful bursts of bubbling gas rendered even the hideous room bright. "W'y, it's long past tea!" said Connie. "I'll put on the kettle and we'll have our tea, Ronald. Maybe Aggie'll be back in a minute, and maybe she'd like a cup o' tea." Connie put on the kettle, and then went to the cupboard to get out the provisions. These were exceedingly short. There was little more than a heel of very stale bread, and no butter, and only a scrape of jam; but there was a little tea in the bottom of the tea-canister, and a little coarse brown sugar in a cup. Connie laid the table quite cheerfully. "We'll toast the bread," she said. "Tea and toast is famous food." She got an old, bent toasting-fork, and she and Ronald laughed and even joked a little as they browned the stale bread until it was quite crisp and tempting-looking. "I'd ever so much rather have this tea than a great, big, grand one with Mammy Warren," said Connie. "Yes, Connie," said the boy; "so would I." They had no milk with their tea, but that was, after all but a small circumstance. They scraped out the jam-pot and spread its contents on the hot toast, and contrived to enjoy the slender meal to the utmost. Ronald said nothing about breakfast the next morning; he doubtless did not even give it a thought. But Connie remembered it well, although she took care not to allude to it. Ten o'clock struck, and still Agnes did not appear. Eleven, twelve--and no sign either of Mammy Warren or the girl. "Shall we go to bed?" said Ronald. "Let's bring our beds and lay 'em on the floor," said Connie, "in this room. Some'ow I don't think as Mammy Warren 'ull come back to-night. She wouldn't 'ave tuk all her things ef she meant to come; would she, Ronald?" "I don't know," said Ronald. He was very sleepy, for the hour was terribly late for so young a child to be awake. After a little reflection Connie decided only to drag his bed into the front room. She could lie on the floor by his side, wrapped up in a blanket. The fire was built up with the last scrap of coal in the hod, and then Ronald lay down without undressing. Connie begged of him to take off his clothes, but he said to her: "Maybe father'll come in the middle of the night. I somehow feel as if something must happen to-night, and I don't want not to be ready." Connie therefore only removed his shoes. She tucked the blankets round him, and said, "Good-night, Ronnie." "What is that verse?" asked Ronald again. "'He that shall endure to the end'----" "'Shall be saved,'" finished Connie. When she came to these words she noticed that little Ronald was sound asleep. Connie changed her mind about lying down. She sat on the floor by the boy's side, laid her head on the pillow close to his, and also dropped asleep. Big Ben called out the hour but the children slept. Perhaps the Voice spoke to them in their dreams, for they smiled now and then. Doubtless they were far away in those dreams from the dreadful attic, from the influence of a most cruel woman, from hunger and cold. The fire burned to a fine red glow, and then cooled down and grew gray and full of ashes, and eventually went out. For it had burned its heart out trying to help the children; and without a heart, even fire cannot keep alive. But the two children slept on, although Ronald now stirred uneasily and coughed in his sleep. It seemed to Connie that she also was oppressed by something, as though a great and terrible nightmare were sitting on her chest. Ronald coughed louder and opened his eyes. "Connie, Connie--where are we?" he cried. Connie sat up with a stare. "I be stiff," she began, "and--and cold. Wotever's the hour? Bide a bit, Ronald, and I'll find the matches and turn on the gas." "What's the matter with the room?" said Ronald. "I don't know nothing," said Connie. "My eyes smart," said Ronald, "and I can't breathe." "I feel queer too," said Connie. "I won't be a second finding out, though. You lie quiet." She groped about, found a match-box, which still contained a few matches, struck a light, and applied it to the gas, which was at full pressure now, and roared out, making a great flame. "W'y, the room's full o' smoke," said Connie. "Wottever can it be?" Ronald sat up in bed, opening his eyes. "Where does it come from?" he said. "The fire is out." Just then Big Ben proclaimed the hour of three. "He that shall endure," thought Connie. "To the end," darted through Ronald's mind; and just then both children heard an unmistakable and awful roar. Was it the roar of human voices or the roar of something else--a devouring and awful element? Connie turned white. Now, if ever, was the time to be brave. "I'll open the winder and look out," she said. She sprang towards it and, with a great effort, pushed it half up. The moment she did so, the noise from without came louder, and the noise from within was more deafening. "Fire! fire!" shouted a multitude of people from below in the street; and "Fire! fire!" cried the frenzied inhabitants of the old tenement-house. Connie and Ronald were on the top story. Connie went back to Ronald. "The house is on fire, Ronnie!" she said. "But we mustn't be frightened, either of us; we must think of the grand verse, and of what Big Ben said. Big Ben's an angel, you mind; Giles knows all about that." "Oh yes," said Ronald, his teeth chattering; for the draught from the open window, although it relieved his breathing, made him intensely cold. "It's a beautiful verse, isn't it, Connie?" he continued. "Yus," said Connie. "Let's get to the winder, Ronnie dear. We'll call out. There are people down in the street. The fire-engines 'ull be on in a minute; we'll be saved, in course." "Oh, of course," said Ronnie. He staggered to the floor, and put his feet into his shoes. "A good thing I wasn't undressed," he said. "Yus," said Connie. "Now, let's get to the winder." The children staggered there. The smoke was getting more dense; the room was filling faster and faster with the horrible, blinding, suffocating thing. But at the window there was relief. Connie put out her head for a minute, and then quickly drew it back. "There's flames burstin' out o' the winders," she said. "I wish as the firemen 'ud come." The children clung to one another. Just then, above the roar of the flames and the screams of the people, something else was distinctly audible. The fast approach of horses; the gallant figures of men in brass helmets: the brave firemen--members of the noblest brigade in the world--were on the spot. "It's hall right," said Connie. "They've come. Don't yer be a bit frightened, Ronnie; we'll soon be out o' this. You ax Giles w'en you see him wot _'e_ thinks o' firemen. '_Es_ father were one. Oh, there's no fear now that they've come!" She pressed close to the window and put out her head and shoulders. Ronald did likewise. The men out in the street were acting promptly. The hose were brought to bear on the increasing flames. But all to no purpose; the house was past saving. Was any one within? "No," said a woman down in the crowd; "hevery soul is out, even to my last biby--bless him!" She gave a hysterical cry, and sat down on a neighboring doorstep. But the firemen of the London Brigade are very careful to ascertain for themselves whether there is any likelihood of loss of life. "Has any one come down from the top floor?" asked a tall young man. He had a splendid figure--broad, square shoulders, and a light and athletic frame--which showed at once that he was the very best possible sort of fireman. Just then the flames burst out more brightly than ever, and Connie, with her fair hair surrounding her little face, and Ronald clinging to her hand, were both distinctly seen. "My God!" cried the firemen, "there are children up there. Put the escape up at once--don't lose an instant--I am going up to them." "You can't; it's certain death," said one or two. Several other voices were also raised in expostulation. But if any one in that crowd supposed that they were going to turn George Anderson, the bravest fireman in London, from his purpose, they were mistaken. "That little angel face, and the face of the boy by her side!" he said once or twice under his breath. And then up and up he went--up and up--the children in the burning room (for the flames had broken out behind them now) watching and watching. His fear was that they might fall from their perilous position. But they had both crept out on to the window-ledge. "Courage, courage!" he shouted to them. "Hold tight--I'll be there in a minute!" "The window is so hot!" gasped Connie. "Think--think of the Voice," whispered Ronald. He closed his eyes. In another minute he would have been beyond all earthly succor, and up in those beautiful realms where angels live, and his mother would meet him. But this was not to be. In less than an instant a firm hand rescued the two children from their perilous position, and they were brought down to the ground uninjured. Ronald fainted in that descent, but Connie kept her consciousness. They were out of Mammy Warren's awful house. She had a queer sense as though she had been delivered from a worse danger even than fire. People crowded round, and presently the tall fireman came up. "What is your name?" he said to Connie. "Connie," she replied. "Well, Connie," he answered, "it was the sight of your beautiful face in the window that gave me courage to save yer. Now, do you want to have a shelter for yourself and your little brother to-night?' "Thank you, sir," said Connie. The man pulled a card--it looked just like a gentleman's visiting card--out of his pocket. "Will you take that," he said, "to No. 12 Carlyle Terrace? It's just round the corner. Take your little brother with you. There are two bells to the house. Look for the one that has the word 'Night' written under it. It used to be a doctor's house, but there's no doctor there now. My mother will understand--give her that card, and tell her what has happened. Good night." He turned away. It was some time before Connie and Ronald could get rid of the many neighbors who volunteered help, and who regarded the two pretty children as the hero and heroine of the hour. Offers of a shake-down for the night, of a hasty meal, of a warm fire, came to Connie from all sorts of people. But she had made up her mind to follow out the directions of the tall fireman, and saying that she had friends at No. 12 Carlyle Terrace, she and Ronald soon started off to go to the address the fireman had given them. They were both too excited to feel the effects of all they had gone through at first, but when they reached the house, and Connie pressed the button of the bell which had the word "Night" written under it, she was trembling exceedingly. "Why are we coming here?" asked Ronald. "I dunno," said Connie. "Seems as though a hangel was with us all the time." "I expect so," answered Ronald in a very weak voice. "And," continued Connie, "he's a-leadin' of us 'ere." They had pressed the bell, and quickly--wonderfully quickly--they heard steps running down the stairs; and the door was opened by a tall woman--very tall and very thin--with a beautiful pale face and soft motherly eyes. "What is it?" she asked. "What is the matter? Oh, my poor little dears! And how you smell of fire! Have you been in a fire?" "Please, ma'am," said Connie, "be yer the mother o' Mr. George Anderson--the bravest fireman, ma'am? He told me to give yer this card, ma'am." "I am Mrs. Anderson. Oh, of course, if he's sent you----" "_'E_ saved us from the fire, ma'am," said Connie. "Come in, you poor little things," said Mrs Anderson. She drew the children in; she shut the door behind them. It seemed to Connie when that door shut that it shut out sorrow and pain and hunger and cold; for within the house there was warmth--not only warmth for frozen little bodies, but for tired souls. Mrs. Anderson was one of the most motherly women in London; and George, her son, knew what he was about when he sent the children to her. Soon they were revived with warm baths and with hot port-wine and water, and very soon afterwards they were both lying in beds covered with linen sheets that felt soft and fine as silk. But Mrs. Anderson sat by them both while they slept, for she did not like the look on the boy's face, and felt very much afraid of the shock for him. "The little girl can stand more," she said to herself. "She's a beautiful little creature, but she's a child of the people. She has been accustomed to hardships all her life; but with the boy it's different--he's a gentleman by birth. Something very cruel has happened to him, poor little lad! and this seems to be the final straw." Mrs. Anderson was a very wise woman, and her fears with regard to little Ronald were all too quickly realized. By the morning the boy was in a high state of fever. A doctor was summoned, and Mrs. Anderson herself nursed him day and night. Connie begged to be allowed to remain, and her request was granted. "For the present you shall stay with me," said Mrs. Anderson. "I don't know your story, nor the story of this little fellow, but I am determined to save his life if I can." "I can tell yer something," said Connie. "Little Ronald's a real gent--_'e's_ the son of a hofficer in 'Is Majesty's harmy, an' the hofficer's name is Major Harvey, V. C." "What?" cried Mrs. Anderson. She started back in amazement. "Why, I knew him and his wife," she said. "I know he was killed in South Africa, and I know his dear wife died about a year ago. Why, I've been looking for this child. Is your story quite true, little girl?" "Yus, it's quite true," said Connie. "But tell me--do tell me--is his father really dead?" "I fear so. It is true that his death was not absolutely confirmed; but he has been missing for over two years." "Ma'am," said Connie, "wot do yer mean by his death not bein' confirmed?" "I mean this, little girl," said Mrs. Anderson--"that his body was never found." "Then he ain't dead," said Connie. "What do you mean?" "I feel it in my bones," said Connie, "same as Ronald felt it in his bones. _'E_ ain't dead." Mrs. Anderson laid her hand on the girl's pretty hair. "I am getting in a real trained nurse to look after Ronald Harvey," she said. "If he's the son of my old friend, more than ever is he my care now; and you this evening, little Connie, shall tell me your story." This Connie did. When she had described all that had occurred to her during the last few weeks, Mrs. Anderson was so amazed that she could hardly speak. "My poor child!" she said. "You can't guess what terrible dangers you've escaped. That dreadful woman was, without doubt, a member of a large gang of burglars. Several have been arrested within the last day or two, and I have no doubt we shall hear of her soon at the police courts." "Burglars?" said Connie--"burglars? Them be thieves, bean't they?" "Yes--thieves." "But what could she do with us?" said Connie. "She used you for her own purposes. While people were looking at you, she was doubtless picking their pockets. Don't think any more about it, dear, only be thankful that you have escaped. And now, don't you feel very anxious about your father and your old friends?" "Yus," said Connie. "I'd like to go home. I'd like them to know once for all what happened." "Would you like to go back to-night? You can return to me, you know. I shall be up with Ronald until far into the night." Connie rose swiftly. "You're not afraid of the streets, my poor little child?" "Oh no, ma'am. I'm only quite an ordinary girl. I ha' learnt my lesson," continued Connie. "I were real discontent wid my life at the factory, but I'll be discontent no more." "You had a sharp lesson," said Mrs. Anderson. "I think God wants you to be a particularly good and a particularly brave woman, or He wouldn't have let you go through so much." "Yes, ma'am," answered Connie; "and I'll try 'ard to be good and brave." CHAPTER XIII. PETER HARRIS. While Connie was going through such strange adventures in Mammy Warren's attic room, her father, Giles, and Sue, and dear Father John were nearly distracted about her. Peter Harris was a rough, fierce, unkempt individual. He was fond of drink. He was not at all easily impressed by good things; but, as has been said before, if he had one tender spot in his heart it was for Connie. When he drank he was dreadfully unkind to his child; but in his sober moments there was nothing he would not do for the pretty, motherless girl. As day after day passed without his seeing her, he got nearly frantic with anxiety. At first he tried to make nothing of her disappearance, saying that the girl had doubtless gone to visit some friends; but when a few days went by and there were no tidings of her, and Sue assured him that she not only never appeared now at the great warehouse in Cheapside where they used to work together, but also that she had been seen last with Agnes Coppenger, and that Agnes Coppenger had also disappeared from her work at the sewing-machine, he began to fear that something bad had happened. Father John was consulted, and Father John advised the necessity of at once acquainting the police. But although the police did their best, they could get no trace whatever either of Agnes or of Connie. Thus the days passed, and Connie's friends were very unhappy about her. Her absence had a bad effect on Peter, who, from his state of grief and uneasiness, had taken more and more consolation out of the gin-palace which he was fond of frequenting. Every night now he came home tipsy, and the neighbors were afraid to go near. Soon he began to abuse Connie, to say unkind things about her, and to fly into a passion with any neighbor who mentioned her name. Giles shed silent tears for his old playmate, and even the voice of Big Ben hardly comforted him, so much did he miss the genial companionship of pretty Connie. But now at last the girl herself was going home. She had no fear. She was full of a wild and yet terrible delight. How often she had longed for her father! Connie had a great deal of imagination, and during the dreadful time spent at Mother Warren's, and in especial since Ronald had come, she began to compare her father with Ronald's, and gradually but surely to forget the cruel and terrible scenes when that father was drunk, and to think of him only in his best moments when he kissed her and petted her and called her his dear little motherless girl. Oh, he would be glad to see her now! He would rejoice in her company. Connie quickly found the old house in Adam Street, and ran up the stairs. One or two people recognized her, and said, "Hullo, Con! you back?" but being too busy with their struggle for life, did not show any undue curiosity. "Is my father in?" asked Connie of one. The man said, "He be." And then he added, "Yer'd best be careful. He ain't, to say, in his pleasantest mood to-night." Connie reached the well-known landing. She turned the handle of the door. It was locked. She heard some one moving within. Then a rough voice said: "Get out o' that!" "It's me, father!" called Connie back. "It's Connie!" "Don't want yer--get away!" said the voice. Connie knelt down and called through the keyhole: "It's me--I've 'ad a dreadful time--let me in." "Go 'way--don't want yer--get out o' this!" "Oh father--father!" called Connie. She began to sob. After all her dreams, after all her longings, after all her cruel trials--to be treated like this, and by her father! It seemed to shake her very belief in fathers, even in the great Father of all. "Please--please--I'm jest wanting yer awfu' bad!" she pleaded. Her gentle and moving voice--that voice for which Peter Harris, when sober and in his right mind, so starved to hear again--now acted upon him in quite the opposite direction. He had not taken enough to make him stupid, only enough to rouse his worst passions. He strode across the room, flung the door wide, and lifting Connie from her knees, said to her: "Listen. You left me without rhyme or reason--not even a word or a thought. I sorrowed for yer till I turned to 'ate yer! Now then, get out o' this. I don't want yer, niver no more. Go down them stairs, unless yer want me to push yer down. Go 'way--and be quick!" There was a scowl on his angry face, a ferocious look in his eyes. Connie turned quite gently, and without any apparent anger went downstairs. "Ah!" said a man in the street, "thought yer wouldn't stay long." "He's wery bad," said Connie. She walked slowly, as though her heart were bleeding, down Adam Street until she came to the house where Father John Atkins lived. It was a little house, much smaller than its neighbors. Father John's room was on the ground floor. She knocked at the door. There was no answer. She turned the handle: it yielded to her pressure. She went in, sank down on the nearest chair, and covered her face with both her hands. She was trembling exceedingly. The shock of her father's treatment was far greater than she could well bear in her present weak and over-excited condition. She had gone through--oh, so much--so very much! That awful time with Mammy Warren; her anxiety with regard to little Ronald; and then that final, awful, never-to-be-forgotten day, that night which was surely like no other night that had ever dawned on the world--the noise of the gathering flames, the terrific roar they made through the old building; the shouts of the people down below; the heat, the smoke, the pain, the cruel, cruel fear; and then last but not least--the deliverance! When that gallant fireman appeared, it seemed to both Connie and Ronald as though the gates of heaven had opened, and they had been taken straight away from the pains of hell into the glories of the blest. But all these things told on the nerves, and when Connie now had been turned away from her father's door, she was absolutely unfit for such treatment. When she reached Father John's she was as weak and miserable a poor little girl as could found anywhere in London. "My dear! my dear!" said the kind voice--the sort of voice that always thrilled the hearts of those who listened to him. A hand was laid on the weeping girl's shoulder. "Look up," said the voice again. Then there was a startled cry, an exclamation of the purest pleasure. "Why Connie--my dear Connie--the good Lord has heard our prayers and has sent you back again!" "Don't matter," said Connie, sobbing on, quite impervious to the kindness, quite unmoved by the sympathy. "There ain't no Father 'chart 'eaven," she continued. "I don't believe in 'Im no more. There ain't no Father, and no Jesus Christ. Ef there were, my own father wouldn't treat me so bitter cruel." "Come, Connie," said the preacher, "you know quite well that you don't mean those dreadful words. Sit down now by the cosy fire; sit in my own little chair, and I'll talk to you, my child. Why, Connie, can't you guess that we've been praying for you?" "Don't matter," whispered Connie again. The preacher looked at her attentively. He put his kind hand for a minute on her forehead, and then, with that marvellous knowledge which he possessed of the human heart and the human needs, he said nothing for the time being. Connie was not fit to argue, and he knew she was worn-out. He got her to sit in the old arm-chair, and to lay her golden head against a soft cushion, and then he prepared coffee--strong coffee--both for her and himself. It was late, and he was deadly tired. He had been up all the night before. It was his custom often to spend his nights in this fashion; for, as he was fond of expressing it, the Divine Master seemed to have more work for him to do at night than in the daytime. "There are plenty of others to help in the daytime," thought Father John, "but in the darkness the sin and the shame are past talking about. If I can lift a burden from one heart, and help one poor suffering soul, surely that is the best night's rest I can attain to." Last night he had put a drunken woman to bed. He had found her on a doorstep, and had managed, notwithstanding his small stature and slender frame, to drag her upstairs. There her terrified children met him. He managed to get them into a calm state of mind, and then induced them to help him for all they were worth. The great, bulky woman was undressed and put into bed. She slept, and snored loudly, and the children crowded round. He made them also go to bed, and went away, promising to call in the morning. He did so. The woman was awake, conscious, and bitterly ashamed. He spoke to her as he alone knew how, and, before he left, induced her to go with him to take the pledge. He then gave her a little money out of his slender earnings to get a meal for the children, and spent the rest of the day trying to get fresh employment for her. She had been thrown out of work by her misdemeanors; but Father John was a power, and more than one lady promised to try Mrs. Simpkins once again. The little preacher was, therefore, more tired than his wont. He bent over Connie. She drank her coffee, and, soothed by his presence, became calmer herself. "Now then," he said, "you will tell me everything. Why did you run away?" "'Cos I were tired o' machine-work. But, oh, Father John! I niver, niver meant to stay aw'y. I jest thought as I were to get a nice new situation; I niver guessed as it 'ud be a prison." Connie then told her story, with many gaps and pauses. "You see," said Father John when she had finished, "that when you took the management of your own life into your own hands you did a very dangerous thing. God was guiding you, and you thought you could do without Him. You have been punished." "Yus," said Connie. "I'll niver be the same again." "I hope, indeed, that you will not be the same. You have gone through marvellous adventures, and but for God Himself you would not now be in the world. It is not only your pain and misery that you have to consider, but you have also to think of the pain and misery you inflicted on others." "No," said Connie defiantly, "that I won't do. I thought father 'ud care, but he turned me from 'ome." "He did care, Connie. I never knew any one so distracted. He cared so terribly, and was so sore about you, that he took to drink to drown his pain. In the morning, when he is sober, you will see what a welcome he will give you." "No," said Connie, shaking her head. "But I say he will. He will help you, and he will be a father to you. I will take you to him myself in the morning." Connie did not say anything more. When she had finished her coffee, the preacher suggested that he should take her to Sue and Giles. The girl looked at him wildly. In telling her story, she had never mentioned the name of the lady who had taken her in, nor the name of the brave fireman who had befriended her. But now Father John boldly asked her for these particulars. Her little face flushed and she looked up defiantly. "I dunnut want to give 'em," she said. "But I ask you for them, Connie," said the preacher. Connie could no more withstand Father John's authoritative tone than she could fly. After a minute's pause she did tell what she knew, and Father John wrote Mrs. Anderson's address down in his note-book. "Now then, Connie," he said, rising, "you're better. Sue and Giles will be so glad to see you once more! Come, dear; let me take you to them." Connie stood up. There was a curious, wild light in her eyes; but she avoided looking at the street preacher, and he did not observe it. Had he done so he would have been more careful. The two went out into the street together. It was now getting really late. The distance between the preacher's room and the humble lodgings where Sue and Giles lived was no great way, but to reach the home of the little Giles they had to pass some very ill-favored courts. At one of these Connie suddenly saw a face she knew. She started, trembling, and would have fled on had not a hand been raised to warning lips. The preacher at that instant was stopped by a man who wanted to ask him a question with regard to a child of his whom Father John was trying to find employment for. Before he knew what had happened, Connie's hand was dragged from his. The girl uttered a slight cry, and the next minute was enveloped in the darkness of one of the worst courts in the whole of London. "Quiet--quiet!" said a voice. "Don't you let out one sound or you'll niver speak no more. It's me--Agnes. I won't do yer no 'arm ef ye're quiet. Come along with me now." Connie went, for she could not do anything else. Her feelings were absolutely confused. She did not know at that fearful moment whether she was glad or sorry to be back with Agnes Coppenger again. She only felt a sense of relief at having slipped away from Father John, and at having, as she thought, parted from her own cruel father. "Oh Agnes!" she whispered, "hide me; and don't--don't take me back to Mammy Warren!" "Bless yer!" said Agnes, "she's coped by the perlice. Mammy Warren's awaiting her trial in the 'Ouse of Detention; yer won't be worried by her no more." "W'ere are yer taking me, then, Agnes?" "'Ome--to my 'ouse, my dear." "Yer'll promise to let me go in the morning?" "Safe an' sure I will--that is, ef yer want to go." Agnes was now walking so fast that Connie had the utmost difficulty in keeping up with her. She seemed all the time to be dodging, getting into shadows, avoiding lights, turning rapidly round corners, making the most marvellous short cuts, until at last--at last--she reached a very tall house, much taller than the one where Mammy Warren had lived. She made a peculiar whistle when she got there. The door was opened by a boy of about Connie's age. "'Ere we be, Freckles," said Agnes; "and I ha' got the beautiful and saintly Connie back again." "Hurrah for saintly Connie!" cried Freckles. The two girls were dragged in by a pair of strong hands, and Connie found herself in utter darkness, descending some slippery stairs--into what depths she had not the slightest idea. "These are the cellars," said Agnes when at last a door was flung open, and she found herself in a very poorly lit apartment with scarcely any furniture. "You was in hattics before," continued Agnes; "now ye're in the cellars. Yer didn't greatly take to kind Mammy Warren, but perhaps yer'll like Simeon Stylites better. He's a rare good man is Simeon--wery pious too. He sets afore him a saint o' the olden days, an' tries to live accordin'. He ain't in yet, so yer can set down and take things heasy." Connie sat down. "I'm that frightened!" she said. Agnes began to laugh. "Sakes!" she exclaimed, "you ha' no cause. Simeon's a real feeling man, and he's allers kind to pore gels, more particular ef they 'appen to be purty." Agnes now proceeded to light a fire in a huge, old-fashioned grate. There seemed to be abundance of coal. She built the fire up high, and when it roared up the chimney she desired Connie to draw near. "You ain't got over yer fright yet," she began. "Don't talk of it," said Connie. "I guess as I won't--yer do look piquey. 'Ow's the other kid?" "I dunno." Agnes laughed and winked. After a minute she said, "Yer needn't tell me. 'E's with Mrs. Anderson, mother o' the fireman. The fireman--'e's a real 'andsome man--I can tike to that sort myself. The kid's wery bad, he is. Wull, ef he dies it'll be a pity, for he 'ave the makings in 'im of a first-rate perfessional." "Perfessional?" said Connie. "Yus--ef he lives 'e'll be one. Simeon Stylites 'ull see to that. You'll be a perfessional, too. There's no use in these 'ere days bein' anything of an amattur; yer must be a perfessional or yer can't earn yer bread." "I don't understand," said Connie. "Sakes! you be stupid. It's good to open yer heyes now. Wot do yer think Mammy Warren wanted yer for?" "I never could tell, only Mrs. Anderson said----" "Yus--tell us wot she said. She's a torf--let's get _'er_ idees on the subjeck." "I won't tell yer," said Connie. "Oh--_that's_ yer little gime! Wull--I don't keer--I'll tell yer from my p'int o' view. Mammy Warren wanted yer--not for love--don't think no sech thing--but jest 'cos she could make you a sort o' decoy-duck. W'ile she was pickin' up many a good harvest, folks was a-starin' at you; an' w'en the little boy were there too, w'y, they stared all the more. She 'ad the boy first, and he were a fine draw. But he tuk ill, an' then she had to get some sort, an' I told her 'bout you, and 'ow purty you were, an' wot golden 'air you 'ad. 'Her golden 'air was 'angin' down her back,' I sung to her, an' she were tuk with the picter. Then I got yer for her--you knows 'ow. Wull, pore Mammy Warren! she's in quad for the present. But she'll come out agin none the worse; bless yer! they feeds 'em fine in quad now. Many a one as I know goes in reg'lar for the cold weather. You see, we'n yer gets yer lodgin' an' yer food at Government expense, it don't cost yer nothing, an' yer come out none the worse. That's wot Mammy Warren 'ull do. But Simeon Stylites-'e's a man 'oo prides himself on niver 'avin' been tuk yet. He'll teach yer 'ow to be a perfessional. Now then--yer ain't frightened, be yer?" "No," said Connie. Once again she was the old Connie. She had got over her anguish of despair and grief about her father's conduct. She must get out of this, and the only chance was to let Agnes think that she didn't mind. "Yer'll make a _beautiful_ perfessional!" said Agnes, looking at her with admiration now. "I could--I could grovel at yer feet--pore me, so plain as I ham an' hall, an' you so wery genteel. There now, 'oo's that a-knockin' at the door?" Agnes went to the door. She opened it about an inch, and had a long colloquy with some one outside. "All right, Freckles," she said, "you can go to bed." She then came back to Connie. "Simeon ain't returning afore to-morrer," she said. "We'll tike to our beds. Come along with me, Connie." CHAPTER XIV. THE SEARCH. When Connie had been suddenly dragged with extreme force from the preacher's side, he had darted after her, and would have been knocked down himself, and perhaps killed, if the neighbor who had accosted him had not also gone a step or two into the dark alley and dragged him back by main force. "You don't go down there, Father John," he said--"not without two or three big men, as big as myself. That you don't--I'll keep you back, Father John by all the strength in my body; for if you go down you'll be killed, and then what use will yer be to the poor little gel?" Father John acknowledged the justice of this. A crowd of men and women had gathered round, as they always did in those parts at the slightest disturbance. Father John recognized many of them, and soon formed a little body of strong men and women. The policemen also came to their aid. They searched the blind alley, going into every house. In short, they did not leave a stone unturned to recover poor Connie; but, alas! all in vain. Father John was at least glad that he had not gone to visit Sue and Giles. He could not bear to bring them such terrible tidings as that poor Connie had come home and had been kidnapped again. "We'll get her," said the policeman. "There are lots of thieves about here; but as we've unearthed that dreadful character, Mother Warren, we'll quickly get the rest of the gang. Don't you be afraid, Father John; the child will be in your hands before the day is out." Nevertheless, Father John spent a sleepless night, and early--very early--in the morning he started off to visit Peter Harris. Peter had slept all night. In the morning he awoke with a headache, and with a queer feeling that something very bad had happened. When Father John entered his room he gazed at him with bloodshot eyes. "Wottever is it?" he said. "I had a dream--I must be mistook, of course, but I thought Connie had come back." "Well," said Father John very gravely, "and so she did come back." "Wot?" asked the father. He sat up on the bed where he had thrown himself, and pushed back his rough hair. "I have some very sad news for you, Harris. Will you wash first and have a bit of breakfast, or shall I tell you now?" "Get out with you!" said the man. "Will I wash and have a bit o' breakfast? Tell me about my child, an' be quick!" All the latent tenderness in that fierce heart had reawakened. "Connie back?" said the man. "Purty little Connie? You don't niver say so! But where be she? Wherever is my little gel?" "You ask God where she is," said the preacher in a very solemn voice. "She's nowhere to be found. She came here, and you--you turned her away, Peter Harris." "I did wot?" said Harris. "You turned her off--yes, she came to me, poor child. You had taken too much and didn't know what you were doing." The man's face was ghastly pale. "What do yer mean?" he said. "You took too much, and you were cruel to your child. She came to me in bitter grief. I did what I could to soothe her; I assured her that I know you well, and that you'd be all right and quite ready to welcome her home in the morning." "Well, and so I be. Welcome my lass home? There ain't naught I wouldn't do for her; the best that can be got is for my Connie. Oh, my dear, sweet little gel! It's the fatted calf she'll 'ave--the Prodigal didn't have a bigger welcome." "But she is no prodigal. She was sinned against; she didn't sin. Doubtless she did wrong to be discontented. She was never very strong, perhaps, either in mind or body, and she got under bad influence. She was often afraid to go home, Peter Harris, because of you; for you were so savage to her when you took, as you call it, a drop too much. I'll tell you another time her story, for there is not a moment now to spare; you must get up and help to find her." Peter Harris sprang to his feet just as though an electric force had pulled him to that position. "Find her?" he said. "But she were here--here! Where be she? Wot did yer do with her, Father John?" "I didn't dare to bring her back here last night, and she could not stay with me. I was taking her to Giles and Sue when----" "Man--speak!" Harris had caught the preacher by his shoulder. Father John staggered for a minute, and then spoke gently, "As we were passing a blind alley some one snatched her from me, right into the pitch darkness. I followed, but was pulled back myself. As soon as possible we formed a party and went to search for her, aided by the police; but she has vanished. It is your duty now to help to find her. The police have great hopes that they have got a clue, but nothing is certain. Beyond doubt the child is in danger. Wake up, Harris. Think no more of that horrible poison that is killing you, body and soul, and do your utmost to find your lost child." "God in heaven help me!" said the miserable man. "Lost--you say? And she come 'ere--and I turned her off? Oh, my little Connie!" "Keep up your courage, man; there's not a minute of time to spend in vain regrets. You must help the police. You know nearly all the byways and blind alleys of this part of London. You can give valuable information; come at once." A minute or two later the two men went out together. CHAPTER XV. CONCENTRATION OF PURPOSE. While these dreadful things were happening to Connie, Sue rose with the dawn, rubbed her sleepy eyes until they opened broad and wide, and went with all youthful vigor and goodwill about her daily tasks. First she had to light the fire and prepare Giles's breakfast; then to eat her own and tidy up the room; then, having kissed Giles, who still slept, and left all in readiness for him when he awoke, she started for her long walk from Westminster to St. Paul's Churchyard. She must be at her place of employment by eight o'clock, and Sue was never known to be late. With her bright face, smooth, well-kept hair, and neat clothes, she made a pleasing contrast to most of the girls who worked at Messrs. Cheadle's cheap sewing. Sue possessed in her character two elements of success in life. She had directness of aim and concentration of purpose. No one thought the little workgirl's aims very high; no one ever paused to consider her purpose either high or noble; but Sue swerved not from aim or purpose, either to the right hand or to the left. She was the bread-winner in the small family. That was her present manifest duty. And some day she would take Giles away to live in the country. That was her ambition. Every thought she had to spare from her machine-work and her many heavy duties went to this far-off, grand result. At night she pictured it; as she walked to and from her place of work she dwelt upon it. Some day she and Giles would have a cottage in the country together. Very vague were Sue's ideas of what country life was like. She had never once been in the country; she had never seen green fields, nor smelt, as they grow fresh in the hedges, wild flowers. She imagined that flowers grew either in bunches, as they were sold in Convent Garden, or singly in pots. It never entered into her wildest dreams that the ground could be carpeted with the soft sheen of bluebells or the summer snow of wood anemones, or that the hedge banks could hold great clusters of starry primroses. No, Sue had never seen the place where she and Giles would live together when they were old. She pictured it like the town, only clean--very clean--with the possibility of procuring eggs really fresh and milk really pure, and of perhaps now and then getting a bunch of flowers for Giles without spending many pence on them. People would have called it a poor dream, for Sue had no knowledge to guide her, and absolutely no imagination to fill in details; but, all the same, it was golden in its influence on the young girl, imparting resolution to her face and purpose to her eyes, and encircling her round, in her young and defenseless womanhood, as a guardian angel spreading his wings about her. She walked along to-day brightly as usual. The day was a cold one, but Sue was in good spirits. She was in good time at her place, and sat down instantly to her work. A girl sat by her side. Her name was Mary Jones. She was a weakly girl, who coughed long and often as she worked. "I must soon give up, Sue," she panted between slight pauses in her work. "This 'ere big machine seems to tear me hall to bits, like; and then I gets so hot, and when we is turned out in the middle o' the day the cold seems to strike so dreadful bitter yere;" and she pressed her hand to her sunken chest. "'Tis goin' to snow, too, sure as sure, to-day," answered Sue. "Don't you think as you could jest keep back to-day, Mary Jones? Maybe you mightn't be seen, and I'd try hard to fetch you in something hot when we comes back." "Ye're real good, and I'll just mak' shift to stay in," replied Mary Jones. But then the manager came round, and the girls could say no more for the present. At twelve o'clock, be the weather what it might, all had to turn out for half an hour. This, which seemed a hardship, was absolutely necessary for the proper ventilation of the room; but the delicate girls felt the hardship terribly, and as many of them could not afford to go to a restaurant, there was nothing for them but to wander about the streets. At the hour of release to-day it still snowed fast, but Sue with considerable cleverness, had managed to hide Mary Jones in the warm room, and now ran fast through the blinding and bitter cold to see where she could get something hot and nourishing to bring back to her. Her own dinner, consisting of a hunch of dry bread and dripping, could be eaten in the pauses of her work. Her object now was to provide for the sick girl. She ran fast, for she knew a shop where delicious penny pies were to be had, and it was quite possible to demolish penny pies unnoticed in the large workroom. The shop, however, in question was some way off, and Sue had no time to spare. She had nearly reached it, and had already in imagination clasped the warm pies in her cold hands, when, suddenly turning a corner, she came face to face with Harris. Harris was walking along moodily, apparently lost in thought. When he saw Sue, however, he started, and took hold of her arm roughly. "Sue," he said, "does you know as Connie came back last night?" "Connie?" cried Sue. Her face turned pale and then red again in eagerness. "Then God 'ave heard our prayers!" she exclaimed with great fervor. "Oh! won't my little Giles be glad?" "You listen to the end," said the man. He still kept his hand on her shoulder, not caring whether it hurt her or not. "She come back, my purty, purty little gel, but I 'ad tuk too much, and I were rough on her and I bid her be gone, and she went. She went to Father John; _'e_ were kind to her, and 'e were taking her to you, w'en some willain--I don't know 'oo--caught her by the arm and pulled her down a dark alley, and she ain't been seen since. Wottever is to be done? I'm near mad about her--my pore little gel. And to think that I--_I_ should ha' turned her aw'y!" Sue listened with great consternation to this terrible tale. She forgot all about poor Mary Jones and the penny pie which she hoped to smuggle into the workroom for her dinner. She forgot everything in all the world but the fact that Connie had come and gone again, and that Peter Harris was full of the most awful despair and agony about her. "I'm fit to die o' grief," said the man. "I dunno wot to do. The perlice is lookin' for her 'igh an' low, and---- Oh Sue, I am near off my 'ead!" Sue thought for a minute. "Is Father John looking for her too?" she said. "W'y, yus--of course he be. I'm to meet the perlice again this afternoon, an' we'll--we'll make a rare fuss." "Yer'll find her, in course," said Sue. "W'y, there ain't a doubt," she continued. "Wot do yer mean by that?" "There couldn't be a doubt," continued the girl; "for God, who brought her back to us all, 'ull help yer if yer ax 'Im." "Do yer believe that, Sue?" "Sartin sure I do--I couldn't live if I didn't." "You're a queer un," said Harris, he felt a strange sort of comfort in the rough little girl's presence. It seemed to him in a sort of fashion that there was truth in her words. She was very wise--wiser than most. He had always respected her. "You're a queer, sensible gel," he said then--"not like most. I am inclined to believe yer. I'm glad I met yer; you were always Connie's friend." "Oh yus," said Sue; "I love her jest as though she were my real sister." "An' yer do think as she'll come back again?" "I'm sartin sure of it." "Turn and walk with me a bit, Sue. I were near mad w'en I met yer, but somehow you ha' given me a scrap o' hope." "Mr. Harris," said Sue, all of a sudden, "you were cruel to Connie last night; but w'en she comes back again you'll be different, won't yer?" "I tuk the pledge this morning," said Harris in a gloomy voice. "Then in course you'll be different. It were w'en yer tuk too much that you were queer. W'en you're like you are now you're a wery kind man." "Be I, Sue?" said Harris. He looked down at the small girl. "No one else, unless it be pore Connie, iver called me a kind man." "And I tell yer wot," continued Sue--"ef ye're sure she'll come back--as sure as I am--she----" "Then I am sure," said Harris. "I'm as sure as there's a sky above us. There now!" "And a God above us," said Sue. The man was silent. "In that case," continued Sue, "let's do our wery best. Let's 'ave iverything nice w'en she comes 'ome. Let's 'ave a feast for her, an' let me 'elp yer." "Yer mean that yer'll come along to my room an' put things in order?" said Harris. "Yes; and oh, Mr. Harris! couldn't yer take her a little bit of a present?" "Right you are, wench," he said. Harris's whole face lit up. "That _be_ a good thought!" He clapped Sue with violence on the shoulder. "Right you be! An' I know wot she've set 'er silly little 'eart on--w'y, a ring--a purty ring with a stone in it; and 'ere's a shop--the wery kind for our purpose. Let's come in--you an' me--and get her one this wery instant minute." The two entered the shop. A drawer of rings was brought for Harris to select from. He presently chose a little ring, very fine, and with a tiny turquoise as decoration. He felt sure that this would fit Connie's finger, and laying down his only sovereign on the counter, waited for the change. Sue had gone a little away from him, to gaze in open-eyed wonder at the many trinkets exhibited for sale. Notwithstanding her excitement about Connie, she was too completely a woman not to be attracted by finery of all sorts; and here were scarves and laces and brooches and earrings--in short, that miscellaneous array of female decorations so fascinating to the taste of girls like Sue. In this absorbing moment she forgot even Connie. In the meantime, in this brief instant while Sue was so occupied, the man who served turned his back to get his change from another drawer. He did this leaving the box with the rings on the counter. In the corner of this same box, hidden partly away under some cotton-wool, lay two lockets, one of great value, being gold, set with brilliants. In this instant, quick as thought, Harris put in his hand, and taking the diamond locket, slipped it into his pocket. He then received his change, and he and Sue left the shop together. He noticed, however, as he walked out that the shopman was missing the locket. His theft could not remain undiscovered. Another instant and he would be arrested and the locket found on his person. He had scarcely time for the most rapid thought--certainly no time for any sense of justice to visit his not too fine conscience. The only instinct alive in him in that brief and trying moment was that of self-preservation. He must preserve himself, and the means lay close at hand. He gave Sue a little push as though he had stumbled against her, and then, while the girl's attention was otherwise occupied, he transferred the locket from his own pocket to hers, and with a hasty nod, dashed down a side-street which lay close by. Rather wondering at his sudden exit, Sue went on. Until now she had forgotten Mary Jones. She remembered her with compunction. She also knew that she had scarcely time to get the penny pies and go back to Cheapside within the half-hour. If she ran, however, she might accomplish this feat. Sue was very strong, and could run as fast as any girl; she put wings to her feet, and went panting down the street. In the midst of this headlong career, however, she was violently arrested. She heard the cry of "Stop thief!" behind her, and glancing back, saw two men, accompanied by some boys, in full pursuit. Too astonished and frightened to consider the improbability of their pursuing her, she ran harder than ever. She felt horrified, and dreaded their rudeness should they reach her. Down side-streets and across byways she dashed, the crowd in pursuit increasing each moment. At last she found that she had run full-tilt into the arms of a policeman, who spread them out to detain her. "What's the matter, girl? Who are you running away from?" "Oh, hide me--hide me!" said poor Sue. "They are calling out 'Stop thief!' and running after me so hard." Before the policeman could even reply, the owner of the pawnshop had come up. "You may arrest that girl, policeman," he said roughly. "She and a man were in my shop just now, and one or other of 'em stole a valuable diamond locket from me." "What a shame! I didn't touch it!" said Sue. "I never touched a thing as worn't my own in hall my life!" "No doubt, my dear," said the policeman; "but of course you won't object to be searched?" "No, of course," said Sue; "you may search me as much as you like--you won't get no stolen goods 'bout me;" and she raised her head fearlessly and proudly. The crowd who had now thickly collected, and who, as all crowds do, admired pluck, were beginning to applaud, and no doubt the tide was turning in Sue's favor, when the policeman, putting his hand into her pocket, drew out the diamond locket. An instant's breathless silence followed this discovery, followed quickly by some groans and hisses from the bystanders. "Oh, but ain't she a hardened one!" two or three remarked; and all pressed close to watch the result. Sue had turned very white--so white that the policeman put his hand on her shoulder, thinking she was going to faint. "She is innocent," said in his heart of hearts this experienced functionary; but he further added, "It will go hard for her to prove it--poor lass!" Aloud he said: "I've got to take you to the lock-up, my girl; for you must say how you 'appened to come by that 'ere little trinket. The quieter you come, and the less you talk, the easier it 'ull go wid you." "I have nothink to say," answered Sue. "I can't--can't see it at all. But I'll go wid yer," she added. She did not asseverate any more, nor even say she was innocent. She walked away by the policeman's side, the crowd still following, and the owner of the pawnshop--having recovered his property, and given his address to the policeman--returned to his place of business. Sue walked on, feeling stunned; her thought just now was how very much poor Mary Jones would miss her penny pies. CHAPTER XVI. PICKLES. The lock-up to which the policeman wanted to convey Sue was at some little distance. With his hand on her shoulder, they walked along, the crowd still following. They turned down more than one by-street, and chose all the short cuts that Constable Z could remember. One of these happened to be a very narrow passage, and a place of decidedly ill repute. The policeman, however, still holding his terrified charge, walked down it, and the crowd followed after. In the very middle of this passage--for it was little more--they were met by a mob even greater than themselves. These people were shouting, vociferating, waving frantic hands, and all pointing upwards. The policeman raised his eyes and saw that the cause of this uproar was a house on fire. It was a very tall, narrow house, and all the top of it was completely enveloped in flames. From one window, from which escape seemed impossible--for the flames almost surrounded it--a man leaned out, imploring some one to save him. The height from the ground was too great for him to jump down, and no fire-escape was yet in sight. Policeman Z was as kind-hearted a man as ever lived. In the excitement of such a moment he absolutely forgot Sue. He rushed into the crowd, scattering them right and left, and sent those who had not absolutely lost their heads flying for the fire-escape and the engines. They all arrived soon after, and the man, who was the only person in the burning part of the house, was brought in safety to the ground. In the midst of the shouting, eager crowd Sue stood, forgetting herself, as perhaps every one else there did also, in such intense excitement. Scarcely, however, had the rescued man reached the ground when she felt herself violently pulled from behind--indeed, not only pulled, but dragged so strongly that she almost lost her feet. She attempted to scream, but a hand was instantly placed over her mouth, and she found herself running helplessly, and against her will, down a narrow passage which flanked one side of the burning house; beyond this into a small backyard; then through another house into another yard; and so on until she entered a small, very dirty room. This room was full of unknown condiments in jars and pots, some queer stuffed figures in fancy-dresses, some wigs and curls of false hair, and several masks, false noses, etc., etc. Sue, entering this room, was pushed instantly into a large arm-chair, whereupon her captor came and stood before her. He was a lad of about her own size, and perhaps a year or two younger. He had a round, freckled face, the lightest blue eyes, and the reddest, most upright shock of hair she had ever seen. He put his arms akimbo and gazed hard at Sue, and so motionless became his perfectly round orbs that Sue thought he had been turned into stone. Suddenly, however, he winked, and said in a shrill, cheerful tone: "Well, then, plucky 'un, 'ow does yer find yerself now?" Not any number of shocks could quite deprive Sue of her common-sense. She had not an idea of what had become of her. Was this another and a rougher way of taking her to the lock-up? Was this queer boy friend or foe? "Be yer agen me, boy?" she said. "Agen yer! Well, the ingratitude! Ha'n't I jest rescued yer from the hands o' that 'ere nipper?" "Oh!" exclaimed Sue; and the relieved tension of her poor, terrified little heart found vent in two big tears which rose to her eyes. The red-haired boy balanced himself on one toe in order to survey those tears more carefully. "Well," he said at length, in a tone in which there was a ludicrous mingling of wonder and contempt--"well, ye're a queer un fur a plucky un--a wery queer un. Crying! My eyes! Ain't yer hin luck not to be in prison, and ain't that a subject for rejoicing? I don't cry when I'm in luck; but then, thank goodness! I'm not a gel. Lor'! they're queer cattle, gels are--wery queer, the best o' 'em. But they're as they're made, poor things! We can't expect much from such weakness. But now look you here, you gel--look up at me, full and solemn in the face, and say if ye're hinnercent in the matter o' that 'ere locket. If yer can say quite solemn and straightforward as yer his innercent, why, I'll help yer; but if yer is guilty--and, mark me, I can tell by yer heyes ef ye're talking the truth--I can do naught, fur I'm never the party to harbor guilty folks. Now speak the truth, full and solemn; be yer hinnercent?" Here the red-haired boy got down on his knees and brought his eyes within a few inches of Sue's eyes. "Be yer hinnercent?" he repeated. "Yes," answered Sue, "I'm quite, quite hinnercent; yer can believe me or not as yer pleases. I'm quite hinnercent, and I won't cry no more ef yer dislikes it. I wor never reckoned a cry-baby." "Good!" said the boy; "I b'lieves yer. And now jest tell me the whole story. I come hup jest when the perleeceman and the pawnbroker were a-gripping yer. Lor'! I could a' twisted out o' their hands heasy enough; but then, to be thankful agen, I ain't a gel." "There's no good twitting me wid being a gel," interrupted Sue; "gels have their use in creation same as boys, and I guess as they're often the pluckier o' the two." "Gels pluckier! Well, I like that. However, I will say as you stood game. I guessed as you wor hinnercent then. And now jest tell me the story." "It wor this way," began Sue, whose color and courage were beginning to return. Then she told her tale, suppressing carefully all tears, for she was anxious to propitiate the red-haired boy. She could not, however, keep back the indignation from her innocent young voice; and this indignation, being a sure sign in his mind of pluckiness, greatly delighted her companion. "'Tis the jolliest shame I ever heard tell on in all my life," he said in conclusion; but though he said this he chuckled, and seemed to enjoy himself immensely. "Now then," he added, "there's no doubt at all as ye're hinnercent. I know that as clear--I feels as sartin on that p'int--as tho' I wor reading the secrets of my own heart. But 'tis jest equal sartin as a magistrate 'ud bring you hin guilty. He'd say--and think hisself mighty wise, too--'You had the locket, so in course yer tuk the locket, and so yer must be punished.' Then you'd be tuk from the lock-up to the House o' Correction, where you'd 'ave solitary confinement, most like, to teach you never to do so no more." "'Ow long 'ud they keep me there?" asked Sue. "'Ow long 'ud they be wicked enough to keep me there fur what I never did?" "Well, as it wor a first offence, and you but young, they might make it a matter of no longer than a year, or maybe eighteen months. But then, agen, they'd 'ave to consider as it wor diamonds as you tuk. They gems is so waluable that in course you must be punished according. Yes, considerin' as it wor diamonds, Sue, I would say as you got off cheap wid two years." "You talk jest as tho' I had done it," said Sue angrily, "when you know perfect well as I'm quite hinnercent." "Well, don't be touchy. I'm only considerin' what the judge 'ud say. I ain't the judge. Yes, you'd 'ave two years. But, lor'! it don't much matter wot time you 'ad, for you'd never be no good arter." "Wot do you mean now?" asked Sue. "I mean as you'd never get no 'ployment, nor be able to hold up yer head. Who, I'd like to know, 'ud employ a prison lass--and what else 'ud you be?" Here Sue, disregarding her companion's dislike to tears, broke down utterly, and exclaimed through her sobs: "Oh! poor Giles--poor, poor Giles! It 'ull kill my little Giles. Oh! I didn't think as Lord Jesus could give me sech big stones to walk hover." "Now ye're gettin' complicated," exclaimed the red-haired boy. "I make 'lowance fur yer tears--ye're but a gel, and I allow as the picture's dark--but who hever is Giles? And where are the stones? Ye're setting still this 'ere minute, and I guess as the arm-chair in which I placed yer, though none o' the newest, be better than a stone." "Giles is my brother," said Sue; "and the stones--well, the stones is 'phorical, ef yer knows wot that means." "Bless us, no! I'm sure I don't. But tell about Giles." So Sue wiped her eyes again and went back a little further in her life-story. "It is complicated," said her companion when she paused--"a lame brother, poor chap, and you the support. Well, well! the more reason as you should keep out o' prison. Now, Sue, this is wot I calls _deep_; jest keep still fur a bit, and let me put on my considerin' cap." The red-haired boy seated himself on the floor, thrust his two hands into his shock of hair, and stared very hard and very straight before him. In this position he was perfectly motionless for about the space of half a minute; then, jumping up, he came again very close to Sue. "Be yer willin' to take the adwice of a person a deal wiser nor yourself? Look me full in the heyes and answer clear on that p'int." "Yes, I'm sure I am," said Sue, in as humble a spirit as the most exalted teacher could desire. "Good!" said the red-haired boy, giving his thigh a great clap. "Then you've got to hearken to _me_. Sue, there's nothink in life fur you but to hide." "To hide!" said Sue. "Yes. You must on no 'count whatever let the perleece find yer. We must get to discover the guilty party, and the guilty party must confess; but in the meanwhile yer must hide. There must be no smell o' the prison 'bout yer, Sue." "Oh! but--but--boy--I don't know yer name." "Pickles," said the red-haired boy, giving his head a bob. "Pickles, at yer sarvice." "Well, then, Pickles," continued Sue, "if I go and hide, what 'ull become o' Giles?" "And what 'ull come o' him ef yer go ter prison--yer goose? Now, jest yer listen to the words o' wisdom. You mustn't go back to Giles, fur as sure as you do the perleece 'ull have you. That would break that little tender brother's heart. No, no, leave Giles ter me; you must hide, Sue." "But where, and fur how long?" asked Sue. "Ah! now ye're comin' sensible, and axin' refreshin' questions. Where? Leave the where to me. How long? Leave the how long ter me." "Oh Pickles! ye're real good," sobbed Sue; "and ef yer'll only promise as Giles won't die, and that he won't break his heart wid frettin', why, I'll leave it ter you--I'll leave it all ter you." "And yer couldn't--search the world over--leave it to a safer person," said Pickles. "So now that's a bargain--I'll take care on Giles." CHAPTER XVII. CINDERELLA. "The first thing to be considered, Sue," said Pickles, as he seated himself on the floor by her side, "is the disguise. The disguise must be wot I consider deep." "Wot hever does yer mean now?" asked Sue. "Why, yer Silly, yer don't s'pose as yer can go hout and about as you are now? Why, the perleece 'ud have yer. Don't yer s'pose as yer'll be advertised?" "I dunno heven wot that his," said Sue. "Oh! my heyes, ain't yer green! Well, it 'ull be, say, like this. There'll be by hall the perleece-stations placards hup, all writ hout in big print: 'Gel missing--plain gel, rayther stout, rayther short, wid round moon-shaped face, heyes small, mouth big, hair----" "There! you needn't go on," said Sue, who, though by no means vain, scarcely relished this description. "I know wot yer mean, and I don't want ter be twitted with not being beautiful. I'd rayther be beautiful by a long way. I s'pose, as the disguise is ter change me, will it make me beautiful? I'd like that." Pickles roared. "Well, I never!" he said. "We'll try. Let me see; I must study yer fur a bit. Hair wot's called sandy now--changed ter black. Heyebrows; no heyebrows in 'ticlar--mark 'em hout strong. Mouth: couldn't sew hup the mouth in the corners. No, Sue, I'm feared as I never can't make no pictur' of yer. But now to be serious. We must set to work, and we has no time ter spare, fur hold Fryin-pan 'ull come home, and there'll be the mischief to pay ef he finds us yere." "Who's he?" asked Sue. "Who? Why, the owner of this yer shop. I'm in his employ. I'm wot's called his steady right-hand man. See, Sue, yere's a pair o' scissors; get yer hair down and clip away, and I'll get ready the dye." Pickles now set to work in earnest, and proved himself by no means an unskilled workman. In a wonderfully short space of time Sue's long, neutral-tinted hair was changed to a very short crop of the darkest hue. Her eyebrows were also touched up, and as her eyelashes happened to be dark, the effect was not quite so inharmonious as might have been feared. Pickles was in ecstasies, and declared that "Not a policeman in London 'ud know her." He then dived into an inner room in the funny little shop, and returned with an old blue petticoat and a faded red jersey. These Sue had to exchange for her own neat but sober frock. "Ye're perfect," said Pickles, dancing round her. "Yer looks hangelic. Now fur the name." "The name?" said Sue. "Must I 'ave a new name too?" "In course yer must; nothink must let the name o' Sue pass yer lips. Now, mind, that slip o' the tongue might prove fatal." "Wery well," said Sue in a resigned voice of great trouble. "Yer needn't be so down on yer luck. I don't myself think anythink o' the name o' Sue; 'tis what I considers low and common. Now, wot's yer favorite character? Say in acting, now." "There's no character hin all the world as I hadmires like Cinderella," said Sue. "Oh, my heyes, Cinderella, of hall people! Worn't Cinderella wot might 'ave bin called beautiful? Dressed shabby, no doubt, and wid hard-hearted sisters--but hadn't she small feet, now? Well, Sue, I don't say as ye're remarkable fur them special features b'in' small, nor is yer looks _wery_ uncommon; but still, ef yer have a fancy for the name, so be it. It _will_ be fun thinkin' of the beautiful, small-footed Cinderella and looking at you. But so much the better, so come along, Cinderella, fur Fryin'-pan 'ull catch us ef we don't make haste." "Where are we to go?" asked the poor little newly made Cinderella, with a piteous face. "Now, yer needn't look like that. None but cheerful folks goes down wid me. Where are yer to go to? Why, to mother, of course--where else?" "Oh, have you got a mother?" asked Sue. "Well, wot next? 'Ow did I happen ter be born? Yes, I has a mother, and the wery best little woman in the world--so come along." CHAPTER XVIII. THE METROPOLITAN FIRE BRIGADE. Pickles and Sue had to go a long way before they reached the destination of "the best little woman in the world." They walked along by-streets and all kinds of queer places, and presently reached a part of London where Sue had never been before. They passed whole streets of warehouses, and came then to poor-looking dwelling-houses, but all of an immense height, and very old and dirty. It was the back slums of Westminster over again, but it was a Westminster severed as far as one pole is from another to Sue. "We does a roaring trade yere," said Pickles, looking around him with the air of a proprietor well satisfied with his property. "Wot in?" asked Sue. "Wot hin? Well, that may surprise yer. Hin fire, of course." "Wot do yer mean?" asked Sue. "Wot does I mean? I mean as we deals in that 'ere rampagious helement. We belongs to the great London Fire Brigade. That his, my brother Will does; and I have a cousin wot thinks hisself no end of a swell, and he's beginning his drill. Do you suppose, you goose, as I'd have acted as I did, wid that 'ere remarkable coolness jest now, when the fire wor burning, and the man wor on the wery brink of destruction, ef fire had not bin, so to speak, my native hair? But now, here we are at last, so come along hup to mother!" Taking Sue's hand, Pickles dragged her up flight after flight of stairs, until they reached the top of one of the very tall, dirty houses. Here he suddenly flung open a door, and pushing Sue in, sang out: "Mother, yere I be! And let me introduce to you Cinderella. Her sisters have bin that unkind and mean as cannot be told, and she have taken refuge wid us until the Prince comes to tie on the glass slipper." No doubt Pickles' mother was thoroughly accustomed to him, for she did not smile at all, but coming gravely forward, took Sue's two hands in hers, and looking into her face, and seeing something of the great trouble there, said in a soft, kind tone: "Sit down, my dear--sit down. If I can help you I will." "Oh, you can help her real fine, mother!" said Pickles, beginning to dance a hornpipe round them both. "And I said as you were the wery best little 'oman in all the world, and that you would do hall you could." "So I will, my lad; only now do let the poor dear speak for herself." But Sue did not. There are limits beyond which fortitude will not go, and those limits were most suddenly reached by the poor child. Her morning's early rising, her long walk to her place of business, her hard work when she got there; then her hurried run for the sick girl's lunch, her cruel betrayal, her very startling capture by Pickles; the fact that her hair had been cut off, her clothes changed, her very name altered, until she herself felt that she must really be somebody else, and not the Sue whom Giles loved. All these things she had borne with tolerable calmness; but now (for Sue was really starving) the warm room, the bright fire--above all, the kind face that bent over her, the gentle voice that asked to hear her tale--proved too much. She put up her toil-worn hands to her face and burst into such sobs as strong people give way to in agony. Mrs. Price beckoned to Pickles to go away, and then, sitting down by Sue's side, she waited until the overloaded heart should have become a little quieted; then she said: "And now, my dear, you will tell me the story." Sue did tell it--told it all--Mrs. Price sitting by and holding her hands, and absolutely not speaking a single word. "You believes me, marm?" said Sue at last. Mrs. Price looked in the girl's eyes and answered simply: "Yes, poor lamb, I quite believe you. And now I am going to get you some supper." She made Sue lie back in the easy-chair by the fire, and drawing out a little round table, laid a white cloth upon it. Sue's mind, by this time partly relieved of its load, was able to take in its novel surroundings. The house might be very tall and very dirty, but this room at least was clean. Floor, walls, furniture--all reflected a due and most judicious use of soap and water; and the woman moving about with gentle, deft fingers, arranging now this and now that, was quite different from any woman Sue had ever seen before. She was a widow, and wore a widow's cap and a perfectly plain black dress, but she had a white handkerchief pinned neatly over her shoulders, so that she looked half-widow, half-nun. She was tall and slender, with very beautiful dark eyes. Sue did not know whether to think her the very gravest person she had ever seen or the very brightest. Her face was thoughtful and sweet; perhaps when in repose it was sad, but she never looked at a human being without a certain expression coming into her eyes which said louder and plainer than words, "I love you." This expression gave the hungry and poor who came in contact with her glance many a heart-thrill, and it is not too much to say they were seldom disappointed of the sympathy which the look in those dark and lovely eyes gave them reason to hope for. Mrs. Price now laid the tea-things, giving the poor little shorn and transformed Cinderella sitting by the hearth so many expressive glances that she began to feel quite a heavenly peace stealing over her. "Worn't Jesus real good to bring me yere?" was her mental comment. She had scarcely made it before two young men came in. These young men were dressed in the uniform of the London Fire Brigade. They looked dusty, and the taller of the two was covered with smoke and dirt. "Mother," he said as he tossed his helmet on the table. "I've been worked almost to death. You have supper ready, I hope." "Yes, yes, my lad--a nice little piece of boiled pork, smoking hot, and pease-pudding and potatoes. I am glad you've brought George with you. He is kindly welcome, as he knows." "As he knows very well," answered George, with a smile. He touched the woman's shoulder for an instant with his big hand. Then the two young men went into the next room to have a wash before supper. "William is coming on fine," said George, when they returned, looking at the other fireman--"though you did disobey orders, William, and are safe to get a reprimand.--Fancy, Mrs. Price! this brave son of yours, returning from his day's drill, must needs see a fire and rush into it, all against orders--ay, and save a poor chap's life--before any one could prevent him." It may be as well to explain here that each man who wishes to join the Metropolitan Fire Brigade must first have served some time at sea; also, before a man is allowed to attend a fire he must be thoroughly trained--in other words, he must attend drill. There's a drill class belonging to each station. It is under the charge of an instructor and two assistant instructors. Each man, on appointment, joins this class, and learns the use of all the different appliances required for the extinction of fire. William Price had not quite completed his eight weeks' drill. "Yes, it was a ticklish piece of work," continued Anderson. "The poor chap he rescued was surrounded by flames. Then, too, the street was so narrow and the crowd so great that the whole matter is simply wonderful; but that policeman who kept order was a fine fellow." "Why, it worn't never the fire as we come from jest now!" here burst from Sue. "Hush--hush, Cinderella!" said Pickles, who had come back, giving her a push under the table. "It 'ud be more suitable to yer present sitiwation ef yer didn't talk. In course it wor that same fire. Why, it wor that deed o' bravery done by my own nearest o' kin as incited me to hact as I did by you." "Whoever is the girl?" said Price, noticing poor Sue for the first time. "Cinderella's the name of this 'ere misfortunate maiden," replied Pickles; "an' yer ax no more questions, Bill, an' yer'll get no stories told." "I must go, Mrs. Price," said Anderson; "but I'll be back again as soon as possible." "Tell me first, George," said the widow, "how your mother is." "I haven't been to see her for a few days, but she wrote to say that both the children who were rescued from the fire a few days back are doing fairly well. The boy was bad at first, but is now recovering." "Ah! that was a brave deed," said Price in a voice of the greatest admiration. "And did she tell you the names of the poor little critters?" "She did. Connie was the name of one----" "Connie?" cried Sue, springing to her feet. "Sit down, Cinderella, and keep yourself quiet," cried Pickles. George Anderson gave the queer little girl who went by this name a puzzled glance. "Yes," he said briefly, "Connie was the name of one, and Ronald the name of the other. I never saw a more beautiful little creature in all the world than Connie." "That's _'er_!" broke from Sue's irrepressible lips. CHAPTER XIX. A SAINTLY LADY. When so many strange things were happening, we may be sure that Father John was not idle. He had hoped much from Peter Harris's knowledge of the byways and dens and alleys of Westminster. But although Peter was accompanied by the sharpest detectives that Scotland Yard could provide, not the slightest clue to Connie's whereabouts could be obtained. The man was to meet more detectives again that same afternoon, and meanwhile a sudden gleam of hope darted through Father John's brain. What a fool he had been not to think of it before! How glad he was now that he had insisted on getting the name and address of the brave fireman deliverer from Connie on the previous night! He went straight now to the house in Carlyle Terrace. He stopped at No. 12. There he rang the bell and inquired if Mrs. Anderson were within. Mrs. Anderson was the last woman in the world to refuse to see any one, whether rich or poor, who called upon her. Even impostors had a kindly greeting from this saintly lady; for, as she was fond of saying to herself, "If I can't give help, I can at least bestow pity." Mrs. Anderson was no fool, however, and she could generally read in their faces the true story of a man or woman who came to her. More often than not the story was a sad one, and the chance visitor was in need of help and sympathy. When this was not the case, she was able to explain very fully to the person who had called upon her what she thought of deceit and dishonest means of gaining a livelihood; and that person, as a rule, went away very much ashamed, and in some cases determined to turn over a new leaf. When this really happened Mrs. Anderson was the first to help to get the individual who had come to her into respectable employment. She was by no means rich, but nearly every penny of her money was spent on others; her own wants were of the simplest. The house she lived in belonged to her son, who, although a gentleman by birth, had long ago selected his profession--that of a fireman in the London Fire Brigade. He had a passion for his calling, and would not change it for the richest and most luxurious life in the world. Now Mrs. Anderson came downstairs to interview Father John. Father John stood up, holding his hat in his hand. He always wore a black frock-coat; his hair hung long over his shoulders; his forehead was lofty; his expressive and marvelously beautiful gray eyes lit up his rugged and otherwise plain face. It was but to look at this man to know that he was absolutely impervious to flattery, and did not mind in the least what others thought about him. His very slight but perceptible deformity gave to his eyes that pathetic look which deformed people so often possess. The moment Mrs. Anderson entered the room she recognized him. "Why," she said in a joyful tone, "is it true that I have the honor of speaking to the great street preacher?" "Not great, madam," said Father John--"quite a simple individual; but my blessed Father in heaven has given me strength to deliver now and then a message to poor and sorrowful people." "Sit down, won't you?" said Mrs. Anderson. Father John did immediately take a chair. Mrs. Anderson did likewise. "Now," said the widow, "what can I do for you?" "I will tell you, madam. Her father and I are in great trouble about the child----" "What child?" asked Mrs. Anderson. "You surely don't mean little Connie Harris? I have been nervous at her not reappearing to-day. At her own express wish, she went to visit her father last night. I would have sent some one with her, but she wouldn't hear of it, assuring me that she had been about by herself in the London streets as long as she could remember; but she has not returned." "No, madam?" Over Father John's face there passed a quick emotion. Then this last hope must be given up. "You have news of her?" said Mrs. Anderson. "I have, and very bad news." Father John then related his story. "Oh, why--why did I let her go?" said Mrs. Anderson. "Don't blame yourself dear lady; the person to blame is the miserable father who would not receive his lost child when she returned to him." "Oh, poor little girl!" said Mrs. Anderson. "Such a sweet child, too, and so very beautiful!" "Her beauty is her danger," said Father John. "What do you mean?" "She told me her story, as doubtless she has told it to you." "She has," said Mrs. Anderson. "There is not the least doubt," continued the street preacher, "that that notorious thief, Mrs. Warren, used the child to attract people from herself when she was stealing their goods. Mrs. Warren is one of the most noted pickpockets in London. She has been captured, but I greatly fear that some other members of the gang have kidnapped the child once more." "What can be done?" said Mrs. Anderson. "I wish my son were here. I know he would help." "Ah, madam," said Father John, "how proud you must be of such a son! I think I would rather belong to his profession than any other in all the world--yes, I believe I would rather belong to it than to my own; for when you can rescue the body of a man from the cruel and tormenting flames, you have a rare chance of getting at his soul." "My son is a Christian as well as a gentleman," said Mrs. Anderson. "He would feel with you in every word you have uttered, Father John. I will send him a message and ask him if he can meet you here later on to-night." "I shall be very pleased to come; and I will if I can," said Father John. "But," he added, "my time is scarcely ever my own--I am the servant of my people." "Your congregation?" said Mrs. Anderson. "Yes, madam; all sorts and conditions of men. I have no parish; still, I consider myself God's priest to deliver His message to sorrowful people who might not receive it from an ordained clergyman." Mrs. Anderson was silent. Father John's eyes seemed to glow. He was looking back on many experiences. After a minute he said: "The consolation is this: 'He that shall endure to the end--shall be saved.'" "How very strange that you should speak of that!" said Mrs. Anderson. "Why so, madam? Don't you believe it?" "Oh, indeed I do! But I'll tell you why I think it strange. There is a little boy--the child who was also rescued from the fire--in my house. He was very ill at first; he is now better, but not well enough to leave his bedroom. I was anxious about him for a time, but he is, I thank God, recovering. Now, this child went on murmuring that text during his delirium--a strange one to fall from the lips of so young a child." "Indeed, yes, madam. I am most deeply interested. I am glad you have mentioned the little boy. Connie told me about him last night. I am sorry that in my anxiety for her I forgot him." "You could never forget little Ronald if you were to see him," said Mrs. Anderson. "I don't think I ever saw quite so sweet a child. His patience, his courage, and I think I ought to add his faith, are marvelous." "He cannot be nicer or better than a little boy of the name of Giles who lives in a very poor attic near my own room," said the preacher. "I wonder," said Mrs. Anderson after a pause, "if you could spare time to come up and see little Ronald with me." "I should be only too glad," said Father John. So Mrs. Anderson took the preacher upstairs, and very softly opened the door, beyond which stood a screen. She entered, followed by the preacher, into a pretty room, which had lovely photographs hanging on the walls, that bore on childhood in different aspects. There was the summer child--the child of happiness--playing in the summer meadows, chasing butterflies and gathering flowers. And there also was the winter child--the child of extreme desolation--shivering on a doorstep in one of London's streets. There were other children, too--saintly children--St. Agnes and her lamb, St. Elizabeth, St. Ursula; and, above all, there were photographs of the famous pictures of the Child of all children, the Child of Bethlehem. The windows of the room were shaded by soft curtains of pale blue. A cheerful fire burned in the grate, and a child lay, half-sitting up, in a bed covered by a silken eider-down. The child looked quite content in his little bed, and a trained nurse who was in the room went softly out by another door as Mrs. Anderson and the preacher entered. "Hasn't Connie come back?" asked Ronald. "No, dear," said Mrs. Anderson; "she's not able to do so just yet." "I want her," said Ronald, suppressing a sigh. "I have brought this gentleman to see you, Ronald." "What?" The boy cast a quick glance at the somewhat ungainly figure of Father John. Another disappointment--not the father he was waiting for. But the luminous eyes of the preacher seemed to pierce into the boy's soul. When he looked once, he looked again. When he looked twice, it seemed to him that he wanted to look forever. "I am glad," he said; and a smile broke over his little face. Father John sat down at once by the bedside, and Mrs. Anderson went softly out of the room. "Waiting for something, little man?" said the street preacher. "How can you tell?" asked Ronald. "I see it in your eyes," said the preacher. "It's father," said Ronald. "Which father?" asked the preacher. "My own," said Ronald--"my soldier father--the V. C. man, you know." "Yes," said Father John. "I want him," said Ronald. "Of course you do." "Is he likely to come soon?" asked Ronald. "If I could tell you that, Ronald," said the street preacher, "I should be a wiser man than my Father in heaven means me to be. There is only one Person who can tell you when your earthly father will come." "You mean Lord Christ," said Ronald. "I mean Christ and our Father in heaven." Ronald shut his eyes for a minute. Then he opened them. "I want my father," he said. "I'm sort o' starving for him." "Well," said Father John, "you have a father, you know--you have two fathers. If you can't get your earthly father down here, you're certain safe to get him up there. A boy with two fathers needn't feel starved about the heart, need he, now?" "I suppose not," said Ronald. "He need not, of course," said Father John. "I'll say a bit of a prayer for you to the Heavenly Father, and I know that sore feeling will go out of your heart. I know it, Ronald; for He has promised to answer the prayers of those who trust in Him. But now I want to talk to you about something else. I guess, somehow, that the next best person to your father to come to see you now is your little friend Connie." "Yes, yes!" said Ronald. "I've missed her dreadful. Mrs. Anderson is sweet, and Nurse Charlotte very kind, and I'm beginning not to be quite so nervous about fire and smoke and danger. It's awful to be frightened. I'll have to tell my father when he comes back how bad I've been and how unlike him. But if I can't get him just now--and I'm not going to be unpatient--I want Connie, 'cos she understands." "Of course she understands," said the preacher. "I will try and get her for you." "But why can't she come back?" "She can't." "But why--why?" "That is another thing I can't tell you." "And I am not to be unpatient," said Ronald. "You're to be patient--it's a big lesson--it mostly takes a lifetime to get it well learned. But somehow, when it is learned, then there's nothing else left to learn." Ronald's eyes were so bright and so dark that the preacher felt he had said enough for the present. He bent down over the boy. "The God above bless thee, child," he said; "and if you have power and strength to say a little prayer for Connie, do. She will come back when the Heavenly Father wills it. Good-bye, Ronald." CHAPTER XX. CAUGHT AGAIN. When Connie awoke the next morning, it was to see the ugly face of Agnes bending over her. "Stylites is to 'ome," she said briefly. "Yer'd best look nippy and come into the kitchen and 'ave yer brekfus'." "Oh!" said Connie. "You'll admire Stylites," continued Agnes; "he's a wery fine man. Now come along--but don't yer keep him waiting." Connie had not undressed. Agnes poured a little water into a cracked basin for her to wash her face and hands, and showed her a comb, by no means specially inviting, with which she could comb out her pretty hair. Then, again enjoining her to "look slippy," she left the room. In the kitchen a big breakfast was going on. A quantity of bacon was frizzling in a pan over a great fire; and Freckles, the boy who had let Connie and Agnes in the night before, was attending to it. Two men with rough faces--one of them went by the name of Corkscrew, and the other was known as Nutmeg--were standing also within the region of the warm and generous fire. But the man on whom Connie fixed her pretty eyes, when she softly opened the door and in all fear made her appearance, was of a totally different order of being. He was a tall man, quite young, not more than thirty years of age, and remarkably handsome. He had that curious combination of rather fair hair and very dark eyes and brows. His face was clean-shaven, and the features were refined and delicate without being in the least effeminate; for the cruel strength of the lower jaw and firmly shut lips showed at a glance that this man had a will of iron. His voice was exceedingly smooth and gentle, however, in intonation. When he saw Connie he stepped up to her side and, giving her a gracious bow, said: "Welcome to the kitchen, young lady." "It's Stylites--bob yer curtsy," whispered Agnes in Connie's ear. So Connie bobbed her curtsy. Was this the man she was to be so dreadfully afraid of? Her whole charming little face broke into a smile. "I'm so glad as you're Stylites!" she said. The compliment, the absolutely unexpected words, the charm of the smile, had a visible effect upon the man. He looked again at Connie as though he would read her through and through; then, taking her hand, he led her to the breakfast-table. "Freckles," he said, "put a clean plate and knife on the table. That plate isn't fit for a young lady to eat off." Freckles grinned from ear to ear, showing rows of yellow teeth. He rushed off to wash the plate in question, and returned with it hot and shining to lay again before Connie's place. Simeon Stylites himself helped the little girl to the choicest pieces of bacon, to delicate slices of white bread, and to any other good things which were on the table. As he did this he did not speak once, but his eyes seemed to be everywhere. No one dared do a thing on the sly. The rough-looking men, Corkscrew and Nutmeg, were desired in a peremptory tone to take their mugs of tea to another table at the farther end of the great room. One of them ventured to grumble, and both cast angry glances at Connie. Stylites, however, said, "Shut that!" and they were instantly mute as mice. The boy Freckles also took his breakfast to the other table; but Agnes sat boldly down, and pushing her ill-favored face forward, addressed Simeon in familiar style: "I nabbed her--yer see." "Shut that!" said Stylites. Agnes flushed an angry red, gave Connie a vindictive look, but did not dare to utter another word. Connie ate her breakfast with wonderful calm, and almost contentment. During the night which had passed she had gone through terrible dreams, in which Simeon Stylites had figured largely. He had appeared to her in those dreams as an ogre--a monster too awful to live. But here was a gracious gentleman, very goodly to look upon, very kind to her, although rude and even fierce to the rest of the party. "He'll let me go 'ome," thought Connie; "he 'ave a kind 'eart." The meal came to an end. When it did so Corkscrew came up and inquired if the young "amattur" were "goin' to 'ave her first lesson in perfessional work." "Shut that!" said Stylites again. "You go into cellar No. 5 and attend to the silver, Corkscrew.--Nutmeg, you'll have the other jewelry to put in order this morning. Is the furnace in proper order?" "Yus, sir." "Get off both of you and do your business. We're going out this evening." "When, sir?" "Ten o'clock--sharp's the word." "On wot, sir?" "No. 17's the job," said Simeon Stylites. "And wot am I to do?" said Agnes. "Stay indoors and mend your clothes." "In this room, sir?" "No; your bedroom." "Please, Simeon Stylites, yer ain't thanked me yet for bringin' Connie along." For answer Stylites put his hand into his pocket, produced half-a-crown, and tossed it to Agnes. "Get into your room, and be quick about it," he said. "May I take Connie along, please, sir?" "Leave the girl alone. Go!" Agnes went. "Come and sit in this warm chair by the fire, dear," said Stylites. Connie did so. The smile round her lips kept coming and going, going and coming. She was touched; she was soothed; she had not a scrap of fear; this great, strong, kind man would certainly save her. He was so different from dreadful Mammy Warren. "Freckles," said the chief, "wash the breakfast things; put them in order; take them all into the pantry. When you have done, go out by the back door, being careful to put on the old man's disguise to-day. Fasten the wig firmly on, and put a patch over your eye. Here's five shillings; get food for the day, and be here by twelve o'clock sharp. Now go." "Yus, sir." Freckles had an exceedingly cheerful manner. He knew very little fear. The strange life he led gave him a sort of wild pleasure. He winked at Connie. "Somethin' wery strange be goin' to 'appen," he said to himself. "A hamattur like this a-brought in by private horders, an' no perfessional lesson to be tuk." He thought how he himself would enjoy teaching this pretty child some of the tricks of the trade. Oh, of course, she was absolutely invaluable. He didn't wonder that Mammy had brought in such spoil when Connie was there. But even Freckles had to depart, and Connie presently found herself alone with the chief. He stood by the hearth, looking taller and more exactly like a fine gentleman, and Connie was more and more reassured about him. "Please, sir----" she began. "Stop!" he interrupted. "Mayn't I speak, sir?" "No--not now. For God's sake don't plead with me; I can't stand that." "Why, sir?" But Connie, as she looked up, saw an expression about that mouth and that jaw which frightened her, and frightened her so badly that all the agony she had undergone in Mammy Warren's house seemed as nothing in comparison. The next minute, however, the cruel look had departed. Simeon Stylites drew a chair forward, dropped into it, bent low, and looked into Connie's eyes. "Allow me," he said; and he put his hand very gently under her chin, and raised her little face and looked at it. "Who's your father?" he asked. "Peter Harris." "Trade?" "Blacksmith, sir." "Where do you live?" "Adam Street, sir; and----" "Hush! Only answer my questions." Stylites removed his hand from under the girl's chin, and Connie felt a blush of pain sweeping over her face. "How long were you with that woman Warren?" "Dunno, sir." "What do you mean by answering me like that?" "Can't 'elp it, sir. Tuk a fright there--bad fire--can't remember, please, sir." "Never mind; it doesn't matter. Stand up; I want to look at your hair." Connie did so. Simeon took great masses of the golden, beautiful hair between his slender fingers. He allowed it to ripple through them. He felt its weight and examined its quality. "Sit down again," he said. "Yus, sir." "You're exactly the young girl I want for my profession." "Please, sir----" "Hush!" "Yus, sir." "I repeat--and I wish you to listen--that in my profession you would rise to eminence. You haven't an idea what it is like, have you?" "No--I mean I'm not sure----" "You had better keep in ignorance, for it won't be really necessary for you to understand." "Oh, sir." "Not really necessary." Connie looked up into the stern and very strange face. "But you miss a good deal," said Stylites--"yes, a very great deal. Tell me, for instance, how you employed your time before you entered Mrs. Warren's establishment." "I did machine-work, sir." "I guessed as much--or perhaps Coppenger told me. Machine-work--attic work?--Shop?" "Yus, sir--in Cheapside, sir--a workshop for cheap clothing, sir." "Did you like it?" "No, sir." "I should think not. Let me look at your hand." He took one of Connie's hands and examined it carefully. "Little, tapering fingers," he said, "spoiled by work. They could be made very white, very soft and beautiful. Have you ever considered what a truly fascinating thing a girl's hand is?" Connie shook her head. "You'd know it if you stayed with me. I should dress you in silk and satins, and give you big hats with feathers, and lovely silk stockings and charming shoes." "To wear in this 'ere kitchen, sir?" "Oh no, you wouldn't live in this kitchen; you would be in a beautiful house with other ladies and gentlemen. _You would_ like that, wouldn't you?" "Yus, sir--ef I might 'ave Ronald and Giles and father and Father John, and p'rhaps Mrs. Anderson and Mr. George Anderson, along o' me." "But in that beautiful house you wouldn't have Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, nor your father, nor that canting street preacher, nor the children you've just mentioned. It's just possible you might have the boy Ronald, but even that is problematical--you'd have to give up the rest." "Then, sir," said Connie, "I rayther not go, please." "Do you think that matters?" said Stylites. "Wot, sir?" "That you'd rather not go?" "I dunno, sir." "It doesn't matter one whit. Children who come here aren't asked what they'd rather or rather not do, girl--they've got to do what _I_ order." The voice came out, not loud, but sharp and incisive, as though a knife were cutting something. "Yus, sir--yus, sir." "Connie"--the man's whole tone altered--"what will you give me if I let you go?" "Oh, sir----" "I want you to give me something very big, I've taken great trouble to secure you. You're the sort of little girl I want; you would be very useful to me. You have come in here--it is true you haven't the least idea where this house is--but you've come in, and you've seen me, and you've discovered the name which these low people call me. Of course, you can understand that my real name is not Simeon Stylites--I have a very different name; and my home isn't here--I have a very different home. I would take you there, and treat you well, and afterwards perhaps send you to another home. You should never know want, and no one would be unkind to you. You would be as a daughter to me, and I am a lonely man." "Oh, sir--sir!" said poor Connie, "I--I like you, sir--I'm not afeered--no, not much afeered--but if you 'ud only let the others come----" "That I cannot do, girl. If you choose to belong to me you must give up the others." "_Ef_ I choose, sir--may I choose?" "Yes--on a condition." The man who called himself Simeon Stylites looked at the girl with a queer, hungry expression in his eyes. "I wanted you very badly indeed," he said; "and I was not in the least prepared to be sentimental. But I had a little sister like you. She died when she was rather younger than you. I loved her, and she loved me. I was quite a good man then, and a gentleman----" "Oh, sir--ye're that now." "No, girl--I am not. There are things that a gentleman would do which I would _not_ do, and there are things which no gentleman would do which I do. I have passed the line; nevertheless, the outward tokens remain; and I live--well, child, I want for nothing. My profession is very lucrative--very." Connie did not understand half the words of this strange, queer man, with a terribly stern and yet terribly pathetic voice. "When I saw you this morning," said Stylites, "I knew at once it was no go. You were like the little Eleanor whom alone in all the world I ever truly loved. You are too young to be told my story, or I would tell it to you." "Oh, sir," said Connie, "I'd real like to comfort yer." "You can't do that, and I won't spoil the life of any child with such a look of my little Eleanor. I am going to give you back your liberty--on a condition." "Wot's that?" said Connie. "That you never breathe to mortal what happened to you from the time you left your friend, the street preacher, last night, until the time when you found yourself at liberty and outside that same court. Wild horses mustn't drag it from you; detectives must do their utmost in vain. I am willing to do a good deal for you, girl, solely and entirely because of that chance likeness. But I won't have _my_ profession and _my_ chances in life imperilled. Do you promise?" "Sir, I'll niver,--niver tell." "You must promise more strongly than that--the others must be witnesses." "Oh, sir--oh, sir! you must trust me. Don't call the others in; let me promise to you, yer lone self, an' I will keep my word." The strange man with the strange eyes looked long for a full minute into Connie's face. "I could have been good to you," he said, "and what I had to offer was not altogether contemptible. But it somehow wouldn't have fitted in with my memory of Eleanor, who went back to God at eleven years of age, very pure in heart, and just like a little child. 'Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' Those are the words which mark her little grave in a distant part of the country. If you will follow in her steps, and be pure and good in heart and life, you may meet my Eleanor in another world. And perhaps you may be able to tell her that I--a man given over to extreme wickedness--did one kind deed for her sake when I gave you back to your friends." "Sir----" "Not another word. I am a man of moods, and I might recant what I have just said." Simeon Stylites sounded a little gong on the table. Agnes came hurriedly in. "Fetch this child's hat and jacket," said the great man imperatively. Agnes brought them. "Be I to take her out, sir?" she said. "No. And listen. This child isn't for us; let her alone in future.--Are you ready, Connie?" "Yus, sir." Simeon Stylites put on the most gentlemanly overcoat and a well-brushed silk hat, and he took a neat stick in his hand and went boldly out of the house. As soon as ever he got outside he saw a hansom, and beckoned the driver. He and Connie got in. They went for a long drive, and Stylites dismissed the hansom in a distant part of the town. "You wouldn't know your way back again?" he said to the girl. "No, sir; an' ef I knew I wouldn't tell." "Well, then--good-bye." "Good-bye, sir." "Yes, good-bye. Walk down this street till you come to the end. Here's a shilling--you'll get a hansom; ask a policeman to put you in. From there go home again, and forget that you ever saw or heard of Simeon Stylites." CHAPTER XXI. SAFE HOME AT LAST. When Harris parted from Sue he ran quickly in his cowardly flight. He did not stay his fleet steps until he had gained a very quiet street. Then, knowing that he was now quite safe, he exchanged his running for a rapid walk. He suddenly remembered that he was to meet the detectives, who were moving heaven and earth to get Connie back for him, not later than three o'clock. They were to meet by appointment in a certain street, and the hour of rendezvous was quickly approaching. He got there in good time; but what was his amazement to see, not only the two detectives--ordinary-looking men in plain clothes--but also the street preacher? The street preacher came up to him eagerly. The detectives also followed close. "Harris," said Atkins, "you can thank God on your knees--your child is safe at home." "Wot?" said Harris. In that instant something sharp as a sword went through his heart. Oh, what a mean, terrible, horrible wretch he was! What a cowardly deed he had just committed! And yet God was kind, and had given him back his child. "Connie is in your room, waiting for you," said Atkins. "I went in not an hour ago, hoping to find you, and there she was." "It's very queer," said Detective Z. "You should have been there also, and have questioned the girl. There isn't the least doubt that she could give the most valuable information, but she won't utter a word--not a word." "Won't she, now?" said Harris. "Perhaps not to you, but she wull, quick enough, to her own father." The entire party then turned in the direction of Harris's rooms. They went up the stairs, and Harris flung the door wide. A little, slight girl, in the identical same dark-blue dress which Harris had bought for her with such pride not many weeks ago, was standing near the fire. Already her womanly influences had been at work. The fire burned brightly. The room was tidy. The girl herself was waiting--expectation, fear, longing, all expressed in her sensitive face. "Father!" she cried as Harris--brutal, red of face, self-reproachful, at once the most miserable and the gladdest man on earth--almost staggered into the room. He took the slim little creature into his arms, gave her a few fierce, passionate kisses; then saying, "It is good to have yer back, wench," pushed her from him with unnecessary violence. He sank into a seat, trembling all over. The two detectives marked his agitation and were full of compassion for him. How deeply he loved his child, they felt. But Father John read deeper below the surface. The man was in a very queer state. Had anything happened? He knew Harris well. At such a moment as this, if all were right, he would not be so overcome. The detectives began to question Connie. "We want to ask you a few questions, my dear," said Constable Z. "Who dragged you into that court last night?" "I won't say," answered Connie. "You won't say? But you know." "I won't say nothing," said Connie. "That is blamed nonsense!" cried Harris, suddenly rousing himself. "Yer've got to say--yer've got to make a clean breast of it. Wot's up? Speak!" "I wouldn't be here, father," said Connie, "'ef I'd not promised most faithfully not _iver_ to tell, and I won't iver, iver, iver tell, not to anybody in all the world." There was a decidedly new quality in the girl's voice. "I wouldn't do it for nobody," continued Connie. She drew herself up, and looked taller; her eyes were shining. The detectives glanced at each other. "If you was put in the witness-box, missy," said one, "yer'd have to break that promise o' yourn, whoever you made it to, or you'ud know what contempt of the law meant." "But I am not in the witness-box," said Connie, her tone suddenly becoming gay. "It was awful kind of people to look for me, but they might ha' looked for ever and niver found me again. I'm 'ere now quite safe, and nothing 'as 'appened at all, and I'm niver goin' to tell. Please, Father John, _you_ won't ask me?" "No, my child," said Father John. "You have made a promise, perhaps a rash one, but I should be the last to counsel you to break it." Nothing more could be gained from Connie at present; and by-and-by Father John and the two detectives left her alone with Harris. When the door closed behind the three men a timid expression came into Connie's gentle eyes. Beyond doubt her father was sober, but he looked very queer--fearfully red in the face, nervous, trembling, bad in his temper. Connie had seen him in many moods, but this particular mood she had never witnessed in him before. He must really love her. He knew nothing about that terrible time last night when he had turned her away. Then he did not know what he was doing. Connie was the last to bear him malice for what--like many other little girls of her class--she considered he could not help. Most of the children in the courts and streets around had fathers who drank. It seemed to Connie and to the other children that this was a necessary part of fathers--that they all took what was not good for them, and were exceedingly unpleasant under its influence. She stood now by the window, and Harris sank into a chair. Then he got up restlessly. "I be goin' out for a bit, lass," he said. "You stay 'ere." "Oh, please, father," said Connie, "ef you be goin' out, may I go 'long and pay Giles a wisit? I want so much to have a real good talk with him." When Connie mentioned the word Giles, Harris gave quite a perceptible start. Something very like an oath came from his lips; then he crushed back his emotion. "Hall right," he said; "but don't stay too long there. And plait up that 'air o' yourn, and put it tight round yer 'ead; I don't want no more kidnappin' o' my wench." There was a slight break in the rough man's voice, and Connie's little sensitive heart throbbed to the tone of love. A minute later Harris had gone out, and Connie, perceiving that it was past four o'clock, and that it would not be so very long before Sue was back from Cheapside, prepared to set off in quite gay spirits to see little Giles. She went into her tiny bedroom. It was a very shabby room, nothing like as well furnished as the one she had occupied at Mammy Warren's. But oh, how glad she was to be back again! How sweet the homely furniture looked! How dear was that cracked and handleless jug! How nice to behold again the wooden box in which she kept her clothes! The little girl now quickly plaited her long, thick hair, arranged it tightly round her head, and putting on a shabby frock and jacket, and laying the dark blue, which had seen such evil days, in the little trunk, she hastily left the room. She was not long in making her appearance in Giles's very humble attic. Her heart beat as she mounted the well-worn stairs. How often--oh, how often she had though of Giles and Sue! How she had longed for them! The next minute she had burst into the room where the boy was lying, as usual, flat on his back. "Giles," she said, "I've come back." "Connie!" answered Giles. He turned quickly to look at her. His face turned first red, then very pale; but the next minute he held up his hand to restrain further words. "Don't say anything for half a minute, Connie, for 'e's goin' to speak." "Big Ben? Oh!" said Connie. She remembered what Big Ben had been to her and to Ronald in Mammy Warren's dreadful rooms. She too listened, half-arrested in her progress across the room. Then, above the din and roar of London, the sweet chimes pealed, and the hour of five o'clock was solemnly proclaimed. "There!" said Giles. "Did yer 'ear wot he said now?" "Tell us--do tell us!" said Connie. "'The peace of God which passeth all understanding.'" said Giles. "Ain't it fine?" "Oh yus," said Connie--"yus! Giles--little Giles--'ow I ha' missed yer! Oh Giles, Giles! this is the peace o' God come back to me again." Giles did not answer, and Connie had time to watch him. It was some weeks now since she had seen him--weeks so full of events that they were like a lifetime to the child; and in those weeks a change had come over little Giles. That pure, small, angel face of his looked smaller, thinner, and more angelic than ever. It seemed as if a breath might blow him away. His sweet voice itself was thin and weak. "I did miss yer, Connie," he said at last. "But then, I were never frightened; Sue were--over and over." "And w'y weren't yer frightened, Giles?" said Connie. "You 'ad a reason to be, if yer did but know." "I did know," said Giles, "and that were why I didn't fret. I knew as you were safe--I knew for sartin sure that Big Ben 'ud talk to yer--_'e'd_ bring yer a message, same as 'e brings to me." "Oh--he did--he did!" said Connie. "I might ha' guessed that you'd think that, for the message were so wery strong. It were indeed as though a Woice uttered the words. But oh, Giles--I 'ave a lot to tell yer!" "Well," said Giles, "and I am ready to listen. Poke up the fire a bit, and then set near me. Yer must stop talking _w'en 'e_ speaks, but otherwise you talk and I listen." "Afore I do anything," said Connie--"'ave you 'ad your tea?" "No. I didn't want it. I'll 'ave it w'en Sue comes 'ome." "Poor Sue!" said Connie. "I'm that longin' to see her! I 'ope she won't be hangry." "Oh, no," said Giles. "We're both on us too glad to be angry. We missed yer sore, both on us." While Giles was speaking Connie had put on the kettle to boil. She had soon made a cup of tea, which she brought to the boy, who, although he had said he did not want it, drank it off with dry and thirsty lips. "Dear Connie!" he said when he gave her the cup to put down. "Now you're better," said Connie, "and I'll speak." She began to tell her story, which quickly absorbed Giles, bringing color into his cheeks and brightness into his eyes, so that he looked by no means so frail and ill as he had done when Connie first saw him. She cheered up when she noticed this, and reflected that doubtless Giles was no worse. It was only because she had not seen him for so long that she was really frightened. When her story was finished Giles spoke: "You're back, and you're safe--and it were the good Lord as did it. Yer'll tell me 'bout the fire over agin another day; and yer'll tell me 'bout that little Ronald, wot 'ave so brave a father, another day. But I'm tired now a bit. It's wonnerful, all the same, wot brave fathers do for their children. W'en I think o' mine, an' wot 'e wor, an' 'ow 'e died, givin' up his life for others, I'm that proud o' him, an' comforted by him, an' rejoiced to think as I'll see 'im agin, as is almost past talkin' on. But there! you'd best go 'ome now; you're quite safe, for 'E wot gives Big Ben 'is message 'ull regard yer." "But why mayn't I wait for Sue?" said Connie. "No," said Giles in a faint tone; "I'm too tired--I'm sort o' done up, Connie--an' I can't listen, even to dear Sue axin' yer dozens and dozens o' questions. You go 'ome now, an' come back ef yer like later on, w'en Sue 'ull be 'ome and I'll ha' broke the news to her. She knows she must be very quiet in the room with me, Connie." So Connie agreed to this; first of all, however, placing a glass with a little milk in it by Giles's side. She then returned to her own room, hoping that she might find her father there before her. He was not there; his place was empty. Connie, however, was not alarmed, only it had struck her with a pang that if he really loved her half as much as she loved him he would have come on that first evening after her return. She spent a little time examining the room and putting it into ship-shape order, and then suddenly remembered that she herself was both faint and hungry. She set the kettle on, therefore, to boil, and made herself some tea. There was a hunch of bread and a piece of cold bacon in the great cupboard, which in Connie's time was generally stored with provisions. She said to herself: "I must ax father for money to buy wittles w'en he comes in." And then she made a meal off some of the bacon and bread, and drank the sugarless and milkless tea as though it were nectar. She felt very tired from all she had undergone; and as the time sped by, and Big Ben proclaimed the hours of seven, eight, and nine, she resolved to wait no longer for her father. She hoped indeed, he would not be tipsy to-night but she resolved if such were the case, and he again refused to receive her, to go to Mrs. Anderson and beg for a night's lodging. First of all, however, she would visit Giles and Sue. Giles would have told Sue the most exciting part of the story, and Sue would be calm and practical and matter-of-fact; but of course, at the same time, very, very glad to see her. Connie thought how lovely it would be to get one of Sue's hearty smacks on her cheek, and to hear Sue's confident voice saying: "You _were_ a silly. Well, now ye're safe 'ome, you'll see as yer stays there." Connie thought no words would be quite so cheerful and stimulating to hear as those matter-of-fact words of Sue's. She soon reached the attic. She opened the door softly, and yet with a flutter at her heart. "Sue," she said. But there was no Sue in the room; only Giles, whose face was very, very white, and whose gentle eyes were full of distress. "Come right over 'ere, Connie," he said. She went and knelt by him. "Ye're not well," she said. "Wot ails yer?" "Sue ain't come 'ome," he answered--"neither Sue nor any tidin's of her. No, I ain't frightened, but I'm--I'm lonesome, like." "In course ye're not frightened," said Connie, who, in the new _rôle_ of comforter for Giles, forgot herself. "I'll set with yer," she said, "till Sue comes 'ome. W'y, Giles, anythink might ha' kep' her." "No," said Giles, "not anythink, for she were comin' 'ome earlier than usual to-night, an' we was to plan out 'ow best to get me a new night-shirt, an' Sue herself were goin' to 'ave a evenin' patchin' her old brown frock. She were comin' 'ome--she 'ad made me a promise; nothin' in all the world would make her break it--that is, _ef_ she could 'elp herself." "Well, I s'pose she couldn't 'elp herself," said Connie. "It's jest this way. They keep her in over hours--they often do that at Cheadle's." "They 'aven't kep' 'er in to-night," said Giles. "Then wot 'ave come to her?" "I dunno; only Big Ben----" "Giles dear, wot _do_ yer mean?" "I know," said Giles, with a catch in his voice, "as that blessed Woice comforts me; but there! I must take the rough with the smooth. 'E said w'en last 'e spoke, 'In all their affliction 'E were afflicted.' There now! why did those words sound through the room unless there _is_ trouble about Sue?" Connie argued and talked, and tried to cheer the poor little fellow. She saw, however, that he was painfully weak, and when ten o'clock struck from the great clock, and the boy--his nerves now all on edge--caught Connie's hand, and buried his face against it, murmuring, "The Woice has said them words agin," she thought it quite time to fetch a doctor. "You mustn't go on like this, Giles," she said, "or yer'll be real ill. I'm goin' away, and I'll be back in a minute or two." She ran downstairs, found a certain Mrs. Nelson who knew both Sue and Giles very well, described the state of the child, and begged of Mrs. Nelson to get the doctor in. "Wull, now," said that good woman, "ef that ain't wonnerful! Why, Dr. Deane is in the 'ouse this very blessed minute attending on Hannah Blake, wot broke her leg. I'll send him straight up to Giles, Connie, ef yer'll wait there till he comes. Lor, now!" continued Mrs. Nelson, "w'y hever should Sue be so late--and this night, of all nights?" Connie, very glad to feel that the doctor was within reach, returned to the boy, who now lay with closed eyes, breathing fast. Dr. Deane was a remarkably kind young man. He knew the sorrows of the poor, and they all loved him, and when he saw Giles he bent down over the little fellow and made a careful examination. He then cheered up the boy as best he could, and told him that he would send him a strengthening medicine, also a bottle of port-wine, of which he was to drink some at intervals, and other articles of food. "Wen 'ull Sue come back?" asked Giles of the doctor. "Can't tell you that, my dear boy. Your sister may walk in at any minute, but I am sure this little friend will stay with you for the night." "Yus, if I may let father know," said Connie. "You mustn't fret, Giles; that would be very wrong," said the doctor. He then motioned Connie on to the landing outside. "The boy is ill," he said, "and terribly weak--he is half-starved. That poor, brave little sister of his does what she can for him, but it is impossible for her to earn sufficient money to give him the food he requires. I am exceedingly sorry for the boy, and will send him over a basket of good things." "But," said Connie, her voice trembling, "is he wery, wery ill?" "Yes," said the doctor--"so ill that he'll soon be better. In his case, that is the best sort of illness, is it not? Oh, my child, don't cry!" "Do yer mean that Giles is goin'--goin' right aw'y?" whispered Connie. "Right away--and before very long. It's the very best thing that could happen to him. If he lived he would suffer all his life. He won't suffer any more soon. Now go back to him, and cheer him all you can." Connie did go back. Where had she learnt such wonderful self-control--she who, until all her recent trials, had been rather a selfish little girl, thinking a good deal of her pretty face and beautiful hair, and rebelling when trouble came to her? She had chosen her own way, and very terrible trials had been hers in consequence. She had learned a lesson, partly from Ronald, partly from Big Ben, partly from the words of her little Giles, whom she had loved all her life. For Giles's sake she would not give way now. "Set you down, Connie--right here," said Giles. She sat down, and he looked at her. "Wot do doctor say?" said Giles. "Oh, that ye're a bit weakly, Giles. He's goin' to send yer a basket o' good wittles." Giles smiled. Then he held out his shadowy little hand and touched Connie. "Niver mind," he said softly; "I know wot doctor said." A heavenly smile flitted over his face, and he closed his eyes. "It won't be jest yet," he said. "There'll be plenty o' time. Connie, wull yer sing to me?" "Yus," said Connie, swallowing a lump in her throat. "Sing ''Ere we suffer.'" Connie began. How full and rich her voice had grown! She remembered that time when, out in the snow, she had sung--little Ronald keeping her company: "Here we suffer grief and pain, Here we meet to part again, In Heaven we part no more. Oh! that will be joyful, When we meet to part no more." The words of the hymn were sung to the very end, Giles listening in an ecstasy of happiness. "Now, 'Happy Land,'" he said. Connie sang: "There is a Happy Land, Far, far away, Where saints in glory stand, Bright, bright as day." The second hymn was interrupted by the arrival of a messenger, who brought a bottle of medicine and a large basket. The contents of the basket were laid on the table--a little crisp loaf of new bread, a pat of fresh butter, half a pound of tea, a small can of milk, a pound of sugar, half-a-dozen new-laid eggs, and a chicken roasted whole, also a bottle of port-wine. "Now then," said Connie, "look, Giles--look!" The messenger took away the basket. Even Giles was roused to the semblance of appetite by the sight of the tempting food. Connie quickly made tea, boiled an egg, and brought them with fresh bread-and-butter to the child. He ate a little; then he looked up at her. "You must eat, too, Connie. Why, you _be_ white and tired!" Connie did not refuse. She made a small meal, and then, opening the bottle of wine with a little corkscrew which had also been sent, kept the precious liquid in readiness to give to Giles should he feel faint. Eleven o'clock rang out in Big Ben's great and solemn voice. Connie was very much startled when she heard the great notes; but, to her surprise, Giles did not take any notice. He lay happy, with an expression on his face which showed that his thoughts were far away. "Connie," he said after a minute, "be yer really meanin' to spend the night with me?" "Oh yus," said Connie, "ef yer'll 'ave me." "You've to think of your father, Connie--he may come back. He may miss yer. Yer ought to go back and see him, and leave him a message." "I were thinking that," said Connie; "and I won't be long. I'll come straight over here the very minute I can, and ef Sue has returned----" "Sue won't come back--not yet," said Giles. "Why, Giles--how do you know?" "Jesus Christ told me jest now through the Woice o' Big Ben," said the boy. "Oh Giles--wot?" "'E said, 'Castin' all your care on God, for He careth for you.' I ha' done it, and I'm not frettin' no more. Sue's all right; God's a-takin' care of her. I don't fret for Sue now, no more than I fretted for you. But run along and tell your father, and come back." Connie went. At this hour of night the slums of Westminster are not the nicest place in the world for so pretty a girl to be out. Connie, too, was known by several people, and although in her old clothes, and with her hair fastened round her head, she did not look nearly so striking as when Mammy Warren had used her as a decoy-duck in order to pursue her pickpocket propensities, yet still her little face was altogether on a different plane from the ordinary slum children. "W'y, Connie," said a rough woman, "come along into my den an' tell us yer story." "Is it Connie Harris?" screamed another. "W'y, gel, w'ere hever were yer hall this time? A nice hue and cry yer made! Stop 'ere this minute and tell us w'ere yer ha' been." "I can't," said Connie. "Giles is bad, and Sue ain't come 'ome. I want jest to see father, and then to go back to Giles. Don't keep me, neighbors." Now, these rough people--the roughest and the worst, perhaps, in the land--had some gleams of good in them; and little Giles was a person whom every one had a soft word for. "A pore little cripple!" said the woman who had first spoken.--"Get you along at once, Connie; he's in." "I be sorry as the cripple's bad, and Sue not returned," cried another. "I 'ope Sue's not kidnapped too. It's awful w'en folks come to kidnappin' one's kids." While the women were talking Connie made her escape, and soon entered her father's room. She gave a start at once of pleasure and apprehension when she saw him there. Was he drunk? Would he again turn her out into the street? She didn't know--she feared. Peter Harris, however, was sober. That had happened in one short day which, it seemed to him, made it quite impossible for him ever to drink again. He looked at Connie with a strange nervousness. "Wull," he said, "you _be_ late! And 'ow's Giles?" He did not dare to ask for Sue. His hope--for he had a hope--was that Sue had come back without ever discovering the locket which he had transferred to her pocket. In that case he might somehow manage to get it away again without her knowing anything whatever with regard to his vile conduct. If God was good enough for that, why, then indeed He was a good God, and Harris would follow Him to his dying day. He would go to the preacher and tell him that henceforth he meant to be a religious, church-going man, and that never again would a drop of drink pass his lips. He had spent an afternoon and evening in the most frightful remorse, but up to the present he had not the most remote intention of saving Sue at his own expense. If only she had escaped unsuspected, then indeed he would be good; but if it were otherwise he felt that the very devils of hell might enter into his heart. "'Ow's Giles? 'Ow did he take yer comin' 'ome again, wench?" "Oh father," said Connie, panting slightly, and causing the man to gaze at her with wide-open, bloodshot eyes, "Giles is wery, wery bad--I 'ad to send for the doctor. 'E come, and 'e said--ah! 'e said as 'ow little Giles 'ud soon be leavin' us. I can't--can't speak on it!" Connie sat down and covered her face with her hands. Harris drew a breath at once of relief and suspicion. He was sorry, of course, for little Giles; but then, the kid couldn't live, and he had nothing to do with his death. It was Sue he was thinking about. Of course Sue was there, or Connie would have mentioned the fact of her not having returned home. Connie wept on, overcome by the strange emotions and experiences through which she had so lately passed. "Connie," said her father at last, when he could bear the suspense no longer, "Sue must be in great takin'--poor Sue!" "But, father," said Connie, suddenly suppressing her tears, "that's the most dreadful part of all--Sue ain't there!" "Not there? Not to 'ome?" thundered Harris. "No, father--she ha' niver come back. It's goin' on for twelve o'clock--an' Giles expected her soon arter six! She ain't come back, 'ave Sue. Wottever is to be done, father?" Harris walked to the fire and poked it into a fierce blaze. Then he turned his back on Connie, and began to fumble with his neck-tie, tightening it and putting it in order. "Father," said Connie. "Wull?" "Wot are we to do 'bout Sue?" "She'll be back come mornin'." "Father," said Connie again, "may I go and spend the night 'long o' Giles? He's too weakly to be left." "No," said Harris; "I won't leave yer out o' my sight. Ef there's kidnappin' about an' it looks uncommon like it--you stay safe within these four walls." "But Giles--Giles?" said Connie. "I'll fetch Giles 'ere." "Father! So late?" "Yus--why not? Ef there's kidnappin' about, there's niver any sayin' w'en Sue may be back. I'll go and fetch him now, and you can get that sofy ready for him; he can sleep on it. There--I'm off! Sue--God knows wot's come o' Sue; but Giles, e' sha'n't want." Harris opened the door, went out, and shut it again with a bang. Connie waited within the room. She was trembling with a strange mixture of fear and joy. How strange her father was--and yet he was good too! He was not drunk to-night. That was wonderful. It was sweet of him to think of bringing Giles to Connie's home, where Connie could look after him and give him the best food, and perhaps save his life. Children as inexperienced as Connie are apt to take a cheerful view even when things are at their lowest. Connie instantly imagined that Giles in his new and far more luxurious surroundings would quickly recover. She began eagerly to prepare a place for him. She dragged a mattress from her own bed, and managed to put it on the sofa; then she unlocked a trunk which always stood in the sitting-room; she knew where to find the key. This trunk had belonged to her mother, and contained some of that mother's clothing, and also other things. Connie selected from its depths a pair of thin and very fine linen sheets. These she aired by the fire, and laid them over the mattress when they were quite warm. There was a blanket, white and light and very warm, which was also placed over the linen sheets; and a down pillow was found which Connie covered with a frilled pillow-case; and finally she took out the most precious thing of all--a large crimson and gold shawl, made of fine, fine silk, which her mother used to wear, and which Connie dimly remembered as thinking too beautiful for this world. But nothing was too beautiful for little Giles; and the couch with its crimson covering was all ready for him when Harris reappeared, bearing the boy in his arms. "I kivered him up with his own blanket," he said, turning to Connie. "Ain't that sofy comfor'ble to look at? You lie on the sofa, sonny, an' then yer'll know wot it be to be well tended." Little Giles was placed there, and Connie prepared a hot bottle to put to his feet, while Harris returned to the empty room to fetch away the medicine and get the things which Dr. Deane had ordered. He left a message, too, with Mrs. Nelson, telling her what had become of the boy, and asking Dr. Deane to call at his house in the future. "You be a good man," said Mrs. Nelson in a tone of great admiration. "My word, now! and ain't it lucky for the kid? You be a man o' money, Mr. Harris--he'll want for nothing with you." "He'll want for nothing no more to the longest day he lives," answered Harris. "Ah, sir," said Mrs. Nelson, "he--he won't live long; he'll want for nothing any more, sir, in the Paradise of God." "Shut up!" said Harris roughly. "Ye're all with yer grumblin's and moans jest like other women." "And what message am I to give to Sue--poor girl--when she comes 'ome?" called Mrs. Nelson after him. But Harris made no reply to this; only his steps rang out hard and firm and cruel on the frosty ground. CHAPTER XXII. NEWS OF SUE. The next morning, when Connie awoke, she remembered all the dreadful things that had happened. She was home again. That strange, mysterious man, Simeon Stylites, had let her go. How awful would have been her fate but for him! "He were a wery kind man," thought Connie. "And now I must try to forget him. I must never mention his name, nor think of him no more for ever. That's the way I can serve him best--pore Mr. Simeon! He had a very genteel face, and w'en he spoke about his little sister it were real touching. But I mustn't think of him, for, ef I do, some day I might let his name slip, an' that 'ud do him a hurt." Connie's thoughts, therefore, quickly left Simeon Stylites, Agnes Coppenger, Freckles, Nutmeg, and Corkscrew, and returned to the exciting fact that Sue was now missing, and that Giles was under her own father's roof. She sprang out of bed, and quickly dressing herself, entered the general sitting-room. She was surprised to find that her father had taken his breakfast and had gone; that Giles was sitting up, looking very pretty, with his little head against the white pillow, and the crimson and gold shawl covering his couch. "Why, Connie," he said, the minute he saw her, "wot a silly chap I wor yesterday! It's all as plain now as plain can be--I know everything now." "Wottever do you mean?" said Connie. "But don't talk too much, Giles, till I ha' got yer yer breakfast." "Bless yer!" said Giles, with a weak laugh, "I ha' had my breakfast an hour and a half ago--yer father guv it to me. He be a wery kind man." "My father guv you your breakfast?" said Connie. She felt that wonders would never cease. Never before had Harris been known to think of any one but himself. "Set down by me, Connie; you can't do naught for your breakfast until the kettle boils. I'll tell yer now w'ere Sue is." "Where?" asked Connie. "Oh Giles! have yer heard of her?" "Course I 'ave--I mean, it's all as clear as clear can be. It's only that Sue 'ave more money than she told me 'bout, and that she's a-tryin' to give me my 'eart's desire." "Your 'eart's desire, Giles?" "Yus--her an' me 'ave always 'ad our dream; and dear Sue--she's a-makin' it come to pass, that's all. It's as plain as plain can be. She's a-gone to the country." "To the country? Oh no, Giles; I don't think so. Wottever 'ud take her to the country at this time o' year?" "It's there she be," said Giles. "She knew as I wanted dreadful to 'ear wot it were like, an' she 'ave gone. Oh Connie, you went to the country; but she didn't guess that. She ha' gone--dear Sue 'ave--to find out all for herself; an' she thought it 'ud be a rare bit of a s'prise for me. I must make the most of it w'en I see her, and ax her about the flowers and everything. She's sartin to be back to-day. Maybe, too, she could get work at plain sewin' in the country; an' she an' me could live in a little cottage, an' see the sun in the sky, and 'ear the birds a singin'. It's a'most like 'eaven to think of the country--ain't it, Connie?" "Yus," said Connie, "the country's beautiful; but wicked people come out o' Lunnon to it, an' then it's sad. An' there's no flowers a-growin' in the fields and 'edges in the winter, Giles--an' there's no birds a-singin'." "Oh! but that 'ull come back," said Giles. "You can eat yer breakfast now, Connie, an' then arter that we'll talk more about the country. You _ain't_ goin' to work to-day--be you, Connie?" "Oh no," said Connie; "I ha' lost that place, an' I dunno w'ere to find another. But there's no hurry," she added, "and I like best now to be along o' you." Connie then ate her breakfast, and Giles lay with his eyes closed and a smile of contentment on his face. In the course of the morning there came an unlooked-for visitor. A funny-looking, red-haired boy entered the room. Seeing Giles asleep, he held up his finger warningly to Connie, and stealing on tiptoe until he got opposite to her, he sat down on the floor. "Wull, an' wottever do yer want?" asked Connie. "Hush!" said the red-haired boy. He pointed to Giles. This action on the part of a total stranger seemed so absurd to Connie that she burst out laughing. The red-haired boy never smiled. He continued to fix his round, light-blue eyes on her face with imperturbable gravity. "Wull," he exclaimed under his breath, "ef she ain't more of a Cinderella than t' other! Oh, wouldn't the Prince give _her_ the glass slipper! Poor, poor Cinderella at 'ome! _you've_ no chance now. Ain't she jest lovely! I call her hangelic! My word! I could stare at that 'ere beauteous face for hiver." As these thoughts crept up to the fertile brain of Pickles his lips moved and he nodded his head, so that Connie really began to think he was bewitched. "Wottever do you want?" she whispered; and, fortunately for them both, at that juncture Giles stirred and opened his eyes. "That's right!" cried Pickles. "Now I can let off the safety-valve!" He gave a sigh of relief. "Whoever's he?" asked Giles, looking from the red-faced boy to Connie. But before she had time to reply, Pickles sprang to his feet, made a somersault up and down the room, then stood with his arms akimbo just in front of Giles. "I'm glad as you hintroduced the word 'he,' young un; hotherwise, from the looks of yer both, you seems to liken me to a monster. Yer want to know who's _he_? He's a boy--a full-grown human boy--something like yerself, only not so flabby by a long chalk." "But wot did you want? and wot's yer name, boy?" said Connie, who could not help laughing again. "Ah!" said Pickles, "now ye're comin' to the p'int o' bein' sensible, young 'oman. I thought at first you could only drop hangelic speeches, an' that you 'ailed from the hangel spheres; but now I see ye're a gel--oh, quite the very purtiest I hiver laid heyes on. Now, as I've spoke my true mind, I'll hanswer yer questions in a discreet an' pious manner. My name is Pickles--Pickles, at yer sarvice." "I never heered such a name in all my life," said Connie. "Wery like not. I were christened by the proper name o' James; but no James as ever walked 'ud hold me--it didn't fit no w'y; an' Pickles did. So Pickles I am, an' Pickles I'll be to the end o' the chapter. Now, as to wot I wants--w'y; I wants a talk with that mealy-faced chap wot looks as if I'd heat him up alive." "No, I don't," said Giles. "I were only thinking as you 'ad the wery reddest 'air I iver see'd in my life." "Personal remarks air considered ill-mannered, young man. And let me tell yer as my hair's my special glory. But now to business. You can't know, I guess, wot I wants yer for." "No, I can't," said Giles. "That's rum; and I to tike the trouble not only to wisit yer own most respectable mansion, but to foller yer 'ere in the true sperrit of kindness." "Ye're wery good; but I can't guess wot ye're up to," answered Giles. "Dear, dear! the silliness o' folks! Now, w'en a stranger seeks yer hout, isn't it safe to s'pose as he brings news?" "Wull, yes." "Next clue--shall I 'elp yer a bit? You 'asn't, so to speak, lost something lately--thimble, or a pair of scissors, or something o' that sort?" "Oh, it's Sue! It's my darling Sue;" exclaimed Giles, a light breaking all over his face. "'As yer brought news of Sue, boy?" "Be Sue a thimble, scissors, or a gel?" "Oh! a gel, in course--my own dear, dear, only sister." "A little, fat, podgy kind o' woman-gel, wid a fine crop o' freckles and sandy hair?" "Yes, yes; that's she. I have bin waiting fur her hall night. Where is she? Please, please, Pickles, where is she?" "Well, can't yer guess? Where 'ud she be likely ter be? She worn't a wandering sort o' gel, as neglected her home duties, wor she?" "Oh no! she never stayed out in hall her life afore." "She worn't, so to speak, a gel as wor given to pilfer, and might be tuk to cool herself in the lock-up." "Never--never! Sue 'ud sooner die than take wot worn't her own; and I wish I wor strong enough to punch yer head fur thinkin' sech a thing," said Giles, his face now crimson with indignation. "Well, softly, softly, young un; I didn't say as she _did_ pilfer. I think that 'ere podgy gel as honest as the day. But now, can't yer guess where she his?" "Oh yes! I can guess wery well," answered Giles, his face softening down. "I guessed long ago--didn't I, Connie?" "Well, now, wot hever did yer guess?" asked Pickles, in some amazement. "Oh! there wor but one thing to guess. There were one dream as Sue and I were halways dreaming, and she have gone off widout me at last, to see wot it wor like. She'll be back hany moment, arter she have seen and found hout hall she could. Sue have gone to the country, Pickles." "Oh, my heyes! to the country!" exclaimed Pickles. His face grew crimson, and he was obliged to leave his seat and walk to the window, where he remained with his back to the others for nearly a minute, and where he indulged in some smothered mirth. When he turned round, however, he was as grave as a judge. "You _are_ clever," he said to Giles. "I'm right, ain't I?" asked Giles. "In course; you're always as right as a trivet." "Oh, I'm so glad! And does she find it wery beautiful?" "Scrumptious! fairy-like! scrumptious!" "Oh, how happy I am! And when 'ull she be back?" "Well, that's the part as may moderate your raptures; she can't exactly tell when. She sent me to tell yer as she don't exactly know. It may be to-morrow; or, agen, it mayn't be fur a week, or even more. She's hever so sorry, and she sends yer a whole pocketful o' love, but she can't tell when she'll get back." "But what is she stayin fur?" "Oh! my heyes! wot is she staying fur? You wants ter live in a cottage in the country, don't yer?" "Why, yes, that's hour dream." "Well, ha'n't she to find hout wot the price o' them are? Ha'n't she, stoo-pid?" "I s'pose so. Is that what she's staying fur?" Pickles nodded. "You don't never tell no lies, do you, boy?" "I! Wot do yer take me fur? You can b'lieve me or not as yer pleases." "Oh! I do b'lieve yer. Will yer take a message back to Sue?" "Why, in course." "Tell her to have two rooms in the cottage, and plenty o' flowers hall round, and a big winder where I can look hout at the stars when I can't sleep o' nights." "Yes, I'll tell her faithful. Hanythink else?" "Tell her as I love to think as she's in the country, but to come back as fast as she can; and give--give her my wery best love. And you wouldn't like to give her a kiss fur me?" "Oh! my heye! yere's a rum go. Fancy me a-kissing Cind--I means Sue. No, young un, I hasn't the wery least hobjection in life. I'll give her two resounding smacks the wery minute as I sees her. Lor'! it will be fine fun. Now, good-bye. I'll come and see yer soon agen.--Good-bye, my beauty. I only wishes as it wor _you_ I wor axed ter kiss.--Good-bye, Giles. I'll remember wot yer said 'bout that 'ere cottage." "Be sure as the winders is big enough fur me to see the stars," called out Giles after him. CHAPTER XXIII. AMATEUR DETECTIVE. Mrs. Price had been blessed by nature with two sons, each as different in manners, disposition, appearance, and tastes as the poles. William, aged twenty, was dark, quiet-looking, with a grave and kind face. In disposition he was as fine a fellow as ever breathed, thoughtful for others, good to all, doing his duty because he loved and feared both God and his mother. He was very reserved, and seldom spoke, but when he did give utterance to his thoughts they were to the point and worth listening to. Mrs. Price was often heard to say that the mere presence of her elder son in the room gave her a sense of repose, that she felt that she had some one to lean on--which in truth she had. James, her second and younger son, had not one of his brother's characteristics; he had no gentle courtesies, no quiet ways. Except when asleep, he was never known to be still for a moment. One glance at his fiery head, at his comical face, would show plainly that he was a very imp of mischief. He was kind-hearted--he would not willingly injure the smallest living thing--but his wild, ungovernable spirit, his sense of the ludicrous in all and every circumstance, made him sometimes do unintentional harm, and his mother had some difficulty in getting him out of the scrapes into which he was always putting himself. No work he had ever done had so delighted the boyish heart of James Price, _alias_ Pickles, as the capture of Sue from the hands of the police. The whole story had a certain flavor about it which would be sure to captivate such a nature as his. Sue was innocent; he was quite certain of that. But then, as certainly some one else was guilty. Here, then, was a work after his own heart; he would find out who the guilty party was. He had a great deal of the detective about him; indeed, he had almost resolved to join that body when he was grown-up. He had brought Sue to his mother; and his mother, too, believing in the girl's innocence, was yet much puzzled how to advise her or what to do with her. Sue, being thoroughly drilled and frightened into such a course by Pickles, had declared that nothing would induce her to go home; for that if she did she would certainly be taken to prison, and found guilty of a crime of which she was quite innocent. Mrs. Price, too, felt that she could not counsel Sue to go back, though the agony of the poor girl, when she thought of Giles waiting and longing for her, was sad to witness. To comfort her a little, Pickles went to see Giles, being warned by Sue on no account to tell him the truth, which would, she said, absolutely and at once break his heart. Pickles, winking profoundly, told her to leave it to him. He went, and Giles himself supplied him with an idea on which he was not slow to work. Giles was fully persuaded that Sue was in the country, and might not return for some days. He seemed more pleased than otherwise that she should be so employed. Pickles was so delighted with his own success that he danced a kind of hornpipe all the way home. He found Sue by herself and very disconsolate, for Mrs. Price had gone out on some errands. The first thing he did was to go up to her and give her two very fierce salutes, one on her brow, the other on the point of her chin. "There, now," he said; "that 'ere little tender brother sent yer them." "Oh Pickles! how is he? Is he wery cut up?" asked poor Cinderella, raising a tearful face. "Cut up? Not a bit o' him! Why, he's quite perky; he think as you has gone to the country." "Oh Pickles! how hever could he?" "Well, listen, and I'll tell yer." Pickles here related his whole interview, not forgetting to reproduce in full all his own clever speeches, and his intense admiration for Connie. "I'd do a great deal fur _you_, Cinderella," he said in conclusion; "fur though ye're as ordinary a woman as I hiver met, yet still yer belongs to the species, and I has a weakness fur the species; but oh, lor'! ef it had been that 'ere Connie, why, I'd have a'most spilt my life-blood fur that hangelic creature." "Well, yer see, it wor only me," said Sue, not a little piqued. "Yes, it wor only you. But now, wot do you think of it all?" "Oh! I'm wery glad and thankful that Giles is wid Connie. He wor halways fond of Connie, and I'm real pleased as he thinks as I'm gone to the country--that 'ull satisfy him ef hanythink will, fur he have sech a longing fur it, poor feller! But oh, Pickles! I do hope as you didn't tell him no lies, to make him so keen upon it." "No--not I. I only nodded and made-believe as he wor clever. No, I wor careful o' the utterances o' the tongue, which is an unruly member." "Well, I'm glad," said Sue. "I only hope as it ain't wrong to deceive him." "No, it ain't a bit wrong; don't you go a fussing about nothink. But now you have got to listen to me, fur I have got something most serious to talk over." "I'll listen," replied Sue. "Good! And wot little bit o' brain you have you may stick inter the listening, too, fur you will presently have to think a deal." "Wery well," answered Sue, who had long ago come to consider Pickles the greatest oracle she had ever seen. Pickles planted himself on his knees in front of her, and having placed one hand firmly on each leg, bent forward until he brought himself into what he considered a telling position with regard to her face. "Ef yer want to unearth a secret, stare 'em well right inter the heyes," was one of his detective principles. "Now, Cinderella," he began, "you say as ye're hinnercent o' that 'ere theft?" "You know I am," answered Sue. "And yet that 'ere wauluable trinket wor found in yer pocket." "Well, I can't help that." "I'm afraid yer can't, Cinderella; and a wery ugly business it is fur yer; it 'ud bring yer in guilty in hany court wot hiver." "I know that, Pickles--I know that only too well; that's why I'm here." "An' you must stay yere until ye're proved hinnercent." "Yes." "Well, that may be awkward--not fur us, but fur poor, little tender Giles. He thinks as ye're gone to the country, and I give him to understand as yer would not be back fur maybe a day or two. But he's hall on a quiver fur yer to come back now; he's hall on a tremble to know wot the country is like. He says ye're to get a cottage as have a big winder in it, fur he wants to see the stars o' nights. Now, I think by the looks o' Giles as he'll fade away wery quick ef yer don't come back soon." "Oh, I know it--I know it!" said Sue. "What shall I do? Ef I do go back I shall be tuk ter prison. Oh! oh! oh!" and she began to weep. "Don't cry, you silly! Cryin' never mended no broken bones. You dry your eyes and listen when the oracle speaks." "I will," said Sue, endeavoring to check her sobs. "Well then, yer hinnercence must be proved. The way to prove yer hinnercence is to find hout _who_ put that 'ere trinket in yer pocket." "Oh Pickles! I don't--I don't think hany one could be so wicked." "Bless yer, gel! yer hasn't gone about and seen life like me. 'Tis a wicked world, Cinderella. Some one put that locket in yer pocket; ef it worn't yerself, it wor another." "I don't know why hany one should do it," said Sue. "You leave that to me. The reason is a mystery; the person wot did it is a mystery; it remains fur this yere child"--giving his breast a great slap--"to unravel them both. Now, Cinderella, wot kind o' man wor that 'ere Peter Harris wot went wid yer to the shop?" "He wor a wery rough kind o' man," said Sue, "and he often drank. He wor in trouble jest then 'bout Connie. Connie is his daughter. She wor away fur a bit, and had come back, and he wanted to give her a ring, and, as I telled yer, we went inter the shop to buy her one." "And had that 'ere Harris much money?" "He didn't say as he hadn't; he gave a sovereign to pay fur the ring." "Don't yer think, Cinderella, as it wor _he_ put the locket in your pocket?" "Indeed I don't," answered Sue, in great indignation. "He wor a bit rough, and used to drink a good deal, but I never heerd mortal say as he worn't as honest a man as ever stepped. Besides, Pickles, he wor a friend to me, and I wor a friend to Connie, and even ef he wished to do something so desperate wicked he couldn't, fur I wor at the other side o' the shop a'most." "All the same," replied Pickles, shaking his fiery head, "I believe as he did it. 'Tis a desperate big mystery, but I means to clear it hup, so you leave it ter me, Cinderella." CHAPTER XXIV. MOTHER AND SON. That night Mrs. Price and her younger son had a conversation. "I do not want to send her away, Jamie," she said when they had discoursed with much interest for some time. "She shall and must stay here for the present; but it cannot go on always, for what would the poor little brother do? If Cinderella is the bread-winner, and Cinderella can earn no bread, the poor little fellow will starve." James Price, _alias_ Pickles, was looking very sober, even thoughtful. "It tuk a deal o' time to save hup, and 'tis rare and comforting to reflect on having it--but there's my half-crown," he said. "Bless you, my laddie! it will help a trifle, but half-a-crown won't feed the smallest eater for long." "Then, mother, you know I allow no one ter dictate ter me but you. Wot's to be done? Ere we to betray the hinnercent?" "No, my lad--no. I confess I am sorely puzzled." "But I ain't," said Pickles, who had knowingly brought his mother round to make this confession. "I ain't puzzled the least bit in life, fur I _know_ who is the real thief." "Now, Jamie, what do you mean?" "Mother, it were the man as went with Cinderella inter the shop; it wor he wot stole the locket and then put it inter her pocket. I don't know how he did it, nor why he did it, but I do know that _did_ do it." "Oh! my dear boy, in your love of mystery you are allowing your imagination to run away with you. I do not think any one would be so wicked." "Never you mind, mother; take it on trust as there's that much wickedness in this yer world. Be thankful ye're hout o' the way o' hearing o' what's disgusting to dwell on, but this yere is a mystery as must be cleared hup. How do you s'pose, mother, as the locket did get inter Cinderella's pocket?" "It may have slipped in as she stood by the counter." "Oh, come, mother! that 'ud go down wid no jury as hiver walked. No, no; b'lieve me as 'tis as I say; and wot's more, 'tis my business to prove the truth o' my thoughts. There's a mystery, but James Price, _alias_ Pickles, 'ull unravel it. You keep Cinderella fur a week yere, mother, and I'll engage as the guilty party confesses by the end o' that time." "I will keep the little girl as long as is necessary, Pickles. But do be careful. Do not allow your vivid imagination to make you unjust to others." "You leave it ter me, mother. You jest promise faithful to keep Cinderella fur a bit, and I'll do the rest." "Yes, Jamie," said Mrs. Price, "I certainly will make that promise." "That's a brick o' a mother. And now I'm off to bed, fur there's nothing like sleep when the brain is much exercised, as mine is at present." CHAPTER XXV. ABOUT RONALD. While poor Harris was trying to soothe the agonies of his conscience by being specially and extra good to Giles, and while Giles, who under Connie's care was recovering a certain measure of strength, and poor little Sue was still acting the part of Cinderella with Pickles as her champion, another child who plays an important part in this story was gradually recovering health and strength. When Ronald was well enough, to come downstairs, and then to walk across Mrs. Anderson's pretty little parlor, and on a certain fine day to go out with her for a walk, the good lady thought it was full time to make inquiries with regard to his relations. She questioned her son George on the subject, and this gallant young fireman gave her what advice he could. "No, don't employ detectives, mother," said George. "Somehow I hate the whole lot of them. Keep Ronald as long as you want to; he's a dear little chap, and a gentleman by birth, and he loves you too." "I want to keep him, George; the child is the greatest delight and comfort to me. He is very unlike other children--very sensitive and delicate. But I do think that if he has relations they ought to know of his whereabouts." "You have questioned him, of course, on the matter," said George Anderson. "No--not much; he hasn't been strong enough. I think, too, the severe illness he has undergone, and the terrible frights he has been subject to, have to a certain extent affected his mind; and beyond the fact that he is always looking for his father, and hoping that his father may walk in, he never talks about the old days." "Well, mother," said George, "I must be off now; duty time is close at hand." As he spoke he rose from the seat by the fire which he had been enjoying in his mother's room. "Of course, there is little doubt that Major Harvey is dead; but you could call at the War Office and inquire, mother, couldn't you?" "Yes, I could and will; and I won't employ detectives, my boy. You may be certain of one thing--that I don't want to part with the child." The next day after breakfast, Mrs. Anderson felt that it was time to question Ronald with regard to his past life. "You are quite well now, Ronald," she said. "Yes," said Ronald, "ever so strong. I feel brave, too," he added; "it would take a very great deal to frighten me now. A soldier's boy should be brave," he continued, that pleading, pathetic look coming into his dark eyes, which gave such a special charm to his little face. "This soldier's boy is very brave," said Mrs. Anderson, patting his little hand, as the child stood close to her. "My father was a V. C., ma'am," remarked Ronald in a soft tone. "You're very proud of that, Ronald--you have good reason to be," said his friend. "But now, dear, I seriously want to ask you a few questions. You have told me about Connie, and about some of your dreadful life with Mammy Warren. I am anxious that you should try to forget all these terrible things as much as possible." "Oh! but, please, I never could forget dear Connie." "I don't want you to forget her. I have been planning a delightful surprise for you with regard to her. But other things you can forget." "There's another person I don't want to forget," said Ronald; "that is the good woman in the country who gave me delicious new-laid eggs and chops and chicken. Mrs. Cricket was her name. I used to think of _The Cricket on the Hearth_ often when I was looking at her. She was very like one, you know--such a cosy, purring sort of woman." "How long were you with her, Ronald?" "I don't remember going to her," said Ronald, shaking his head; "but perhaps I was too ill. But I do remember being with her, and the little path in the wood, and how I gradually got better, and how she petted me. And I remember Connie coming down the path looking like an angel; but Connie was the only bright thing for me to think about that dreadful day. But oh, please--please, Mrs. Anderson! poor Mrs. Cricket! Father hasn't come back, you know--he is coming, of course, but he hasn't come yet--and no one has paid Mrs. Cricket!" "No one has paid her, dear?" "Nobody at all. Mammy Warren said to her that father would pay her, but I know now it must have been all a lie." "I am very much afraid it was," said Mrs. Anderson. "That Mammy Warren was a dreadful woman. Well, Ronald, I must try and get Mrs. Cricket's address, and we'll send her some money; and some day perhaps--there's no saying when--you may be able to go back to her. Would you like to see her again?" "Very, very much," said the child, "if Mammy Warren doesn't come to fetch me." "Very well: I will endeavor to get her address. Perhaps Connie could tell me." "Oh! perhaps she could," said Ronald; "for _I_ couldn't. I haven't a notion where she lived, except that it was far in the country, and the cottage was _teeny_--just two rooms, you know--and there was a pretty wood outside, and the horse-chestnuts lying on the ground." "But now, Ronald, I want you to go farther back. Tell me of things that happened when--when your mother was alive." "I--I'll try," said the boy. "Go on, dear--tell me all you can." "It's very difficult," said Ronald. "I remember little bits, and then I forget little bits." "I don't want you to worry yourself, dear; but can you recall anybody ever calling to see your mother--anybody who might be a relation of yours?" "There was the old gentleman, of course," said Ronald. "Who, dear?" "He was very old, and he wore glasses, and his hair was white. He most times made mother cry, so I--I used to be sorry when he came." "Can you recall his name?" "Mother used to call him Uncle Stephen; but he was not her relation--he was father's. I think he always scolded mother; she used to look dreadfully bad after he was gone. I don't want to see _him_ again." "But he may have had a kind heart." "Oh, I don't know," said Ronald. "I don't want to see him again." "Do you think, by chance, that his name was Harvey?" "I don't know. I think he in a sort of way belonged to father." "Then," said Mrs. Anderson, "I guess that his name was Harvey. Now, I won't question you any more, Ronald. You may sit up and play with your bricks." Ronald played happily enough, and Mrs. Anderson, after thinking for a few minutes, wrote out an advertisement. The advertisement ran as follows: "If a gentleman who was called Uncle Stephen by a little boy, son of the late Major Harvey, who was supposed to have been killed in action at Ladysmith on ----, would wish to know anything of the same boy, he can get full particulars from Mrs. Anderson, 12 Carlyle Terrace, Westminster." This advertisement was put into the _Times_, the _Standard_, the _Telegraph_, and in fact, into all the daily newspapers. It appeared once, and Mrs. Anderson sat--as she expressed it--with her heart in her mouth for a whole day. But nothing happened: nobody came to inquire; there was no letter on the subject of the little son of brave Major Harvey. On the second day of the advertisement Mrs. Anderson felt a great relief in her heart. "After I have advertised for a whole week," she said to herself, "I shall, I think, have done my duty, and perhaps I shall be allowed to keep the dear child." She had looked, and felt, very sad on the first day of the advertisement, but on the second day she was more cheerful, and suggested to Ronald that Connie should come and have tea with him. Ronald was delighted, and clapped his hands in glee. Mrs. Anderson wrote a little note to Connie, slightly blaming her for not coming to see her, but begging her to call that afternoon and have tea with Ronald. Connie was greatly delighted when she got the letter. "May I go, Giles? Do yer mind?" she asked. "In course not," answered Giles. "Why should I mind? Yer'll dress yerself in yer wery best, Connie, and I'll like well to look at yer afore yer goes out, an' w'en yer comes back." So Connie put on her dark-blue costume once more, and brushed out her mane of golden hair and let it hang down her back; for she knew that Ronald would scarcely recognize her deprived of this ornament. Then, having left his tea all ready for Giles, she ran quickly in the direction of Mrs. Anderson's house. She arrived there at four o'clock in the afternoon, to see a little face pressed up close to the pane of glass, and eager eyes watching for her. When she appeared on the steps little hands began to clap, and there was an eager rush of footsteps and then Ronald himself opened the door. "Oh Connie, Connie!" he said, "come in--do, do come in!" "How be yer, Ronald?" asked Connie. "I'm as well as well can be, and I'm happy, too. Mrs. Anderson is just a beautiful old lady, and so very good to me! But come and tell me all about yourself. You and I are to have tea all alone in this room. We will have fun. Why, Connie dear, how lovely you look!" Connie told Ronald that he also looked lovely, and the two children sat down side by side, while Ronald related the little bit of his story which had transpired since Connie saw him last. "I was very ill," he said, "for a bit, and silly, and--and cowardly. But a wonderful man came to see me, and he talked--oh, so beautifully!--and then I got better; and Mrs. Anderson has been more than good to me--no one was ever so good to me before except father. She tells me, Connie, that I must not keep looking out for father; for if he can come he will, and if he can't I've just got to wait with patience. The street preacher, too, talked about patience. It's a little bit hard to be very patient, isn't it, Connie?" "Yus," said Connie. "Oh! and, Connie, some day perhaps you and I may go and stay with Mrs. Cricket in the country, and Mrs. Anderson is going to send her money for the chickens and fresh eggs and things. But I can't remember where the country is--can you, Connie?" "We got out at a plice called Eastborough, an' the cottage wor a ivy cottage down a lane." "Ivy Cottage--of course!" said Ronald. "How stupid of me to have forgotten! Now it's all right, and dear Mrs. Cricket will get her money." When Ronald had told all his story Connie told all hers. In especial she told about Giles, and about poor Sue, who had vanished just as suddenly and completely as she (Connie) and Ronald himself on a certain day had disappeared from their friends. "It's very, very queer," said Ronald. "Connie," he added, "I want to see that little boy. Can't you take me back to him now--can't you?" "Yus," said Connie, "I could; but would it be right?" "We'll ask Mrs. Anderson," said Ronald, "I'm certain sure she won't mind. You know the way there; you won't let yourself be kidnapped any more, will you, Connie?" "No," said Connie. Then tea was brought in, and the children enjoyed it. But Ronald could think of nothing but Giles and his earnest desire to see him. Once again he begged and implored of Connie to take him, just to sit for a few minutes by the little cripple's side, and Connie again said that Mrs. Anderson ought to know. It was just at that moment that a cab drew up at the door, and out of the cab there stepped a white-headed old man, who came ponderously up the steps, leaning on a gold-headed stick. He rang the bell with a loud peal. Ronald began to listen. "Who can it be?" he said. He ran to the window, and looking out, saw the cab waiting; but he missed the sight of the old gentleman, whom doubtless he would have recognized; and the neat little parlor-maid went to open the door, and then the labored steps were heard in the hall, and the drawing-room door was opened and shut, and there was silence. "A visitor for my dear new aunty," said Ronald. "I always call her my aunty, and she likes it very much. Oh Connie, do take me just to see Giles! I know it isn't wrong, and I should be quite safe with you." "First of all," said Connie, "we'll ring the bell and ask if we may speak to Mrs. Anderson for a minute." "Very well," said Ronald; "only I 'spect she's busy with the person who has called." Anne came to answer the children's summons, and told them that her mistress was particularly engaged and could not be disturbed. "That's all right," answered Ronald; "you can go away now, please. You needn't take the tea-things just for a bit. You can go away, please, Anne." Anne, who was devoted to Ronald, thought that the children wanted to play together, and left them alone in the little parlor. The light was growing dim, and Connie poked the fire into a blaze. "I ought to be goin' back," she said. "Giles 'ull want me. I'll come another day, Ronald, and Mrs. Anderson'll let me bring yer back to Giles then." "No, no--to-day," said Ronald--"to-day--to-night--this minute. It isn't wrong. I must see him. You'll take me to see him, and then you'll bring me back, won't you, Connie?" "W'y, yus," said Connie. "I s'pose it ain't wrong; but you can't do more nor set down in the room for about five minutes, Ronald, for yer'll 'ave to get back 'ere quite early, you know." Ronald, delighted at any sort of consent on the part of his little friend, rushed upstairs to fetch his velvet cap and his little overcoat. But he forgot, and so did Connie, all about the thin house-shoes he was wearing. Soon he had slipped into the coat, and cramming the cap on his head and looking up at Connie with a gay laugh, said: "Now we'll come." They were in the hall, and had just opened the hall door, when suddenly that of the drawing-room was opened, and the old man, who helped himself along with a stick, came out. Ronald looked back and caught sight of him; but Ronald himself being in shadow, the old man did not notice him. The old man then spoke in a loud voice: "It is all settled, then, and I will call to-morrow morning at ten o'clock to fetch back the boy. Have him ready. And now, good-day to you, madam." But the old gentleman suddenly stopped as he uttered these words, for the hall door was slammed by some one else with violence, and Ronald turned a white face up to Connie. "It's himself--it's Uncle Stephen. He made mother cry and cry. I won't go back to him. I won't be his boy. Hide me--hide me, Connie!" Connie herself felt very much frightened. "Come along 'ome with me," she said. "He can't get yer at my 'ome. Don't shrink like that, Ronald. Be a man, dear Ronald." The children got back to Connie's rooms without any special adventure. There Giles was waiting with that peaceful look on his face which seemed more or less to quiet every one who came in his way. He smiled all over his little face when he saw Connie, and then his eyes grew big and surprised as he noticed the small boy who kept her company. "Why are yer back so soon, Connie?" he said. "I warn't not one little bit lonesome. And 'oo's he?" said Giles. "This is my dear little friend Ronald," said Connie. "And I wanted to see you awful bad," said Ronald, running up to Giles, flinging his cap on the floor, and kneeling down by him. "I have thought of you--oh, so much! It was you, you know, who taught me to endure to the end. Did Connie tell you about that?" "Yes," said Giles, "she told me." Ronald looked up at Connie. Giles watched the two, and then he held out his little hand and touched Ronald's. "You're wery brave," he said. "You had a brave father." "He is a V. C. man. He's coming to see me one day," said Ronald. "I know," said Giles. "It's real supporting to 'ave a brave father. I have one too." "Have you?" said Ronald. "And is he coming to see you one day?" "No--I'm goin' to 'im. Don't let's talk about it now." Ronald sat down on the side of Giles's crimson and gold bed, and glanced round the room. Connie lit a paraffin lamp and put it on the table. In his first excitement at seeing Giles, Ronald forgot the mad terror which had awakened in him at the sound of Uncle Stephen's voice. But now he remembered. "I have come to stay," he remarked emphatically. "Oh no, Ronald, you can't," exclaimed Connie. "I am not going back," exclaimed Ronald. "Giles, I needn't, need I? There's a dreadful man coming to-morrow, and he's going to take me away from my darling aunty. I won't go. I'll hide here with you, Giles." "Will yer?" said Giles. "That 'ull be real pain to yer aunty, won't it?" "Real pain?" said Ronald. "But Connie can tell her. Connie needn't say where I am. She can just tell that I heard Uncle Stephen's voice, and that I am hiding. I can't go back, can I, Giles--can I?" "Dunno," said Giles; but a wistful expression came into his face. "Why do you look like that?" asked Ronald. "Sometimes one 'as to do things one can't do," was Giles's next rather difficult remark. "But this is really silly," said Ronald, "for we can do the things we can do." "Course not--not by ourselves," said Giles. "But if we're to endure to the end, why, 'E'll help." "You remind me of that awful fire," said Ronald. He jumped up and walked across the room. His eyes were dim; his heart was beating with great rapidity, for he was still weak and had gone through much. Oh, that cruel, cruel old man who had made his mother cry so often! He thought upon him with a growing terror. Connie looked at Ronald, and then she glanced at Giles and her eyes said to Giles: "Help me all you can about Ronald." Then Giles called her to him. "Leave Ronald with me for a bit," he said. "Go back and tell Mrs. Anderson; but leave little Ronald with me." Connie immediately went out; but Ronald was so absorbed in trying to quiet his beating heart, and in trying to recover his courage, that he did not even know when she closed the door after her. Connie ran as quickly as she could all the way to Carlyle Terrace. There she rang a loud peal at the front door. It was Mrs. Anderson herself who opened it to her. "Oh Connie!" said the widow, "thank God! Have you brought news of Ronald? What _has_ happened, Connie--what _has_ happened?" Connie immediately entered the house. "May I speak to yer, ma'am?" she said. "Certainly; but where is the boy?" "He's quite safe, ma'am--he's with Giles." "Why did he go out? He did very wrong." "I did wrong too," said Connie. "I tuk him. He's frightened, ma'am. Ronnie's rare and frightened. He heered wot the old gentleman said." "How could he hear?" said Mrs. Anderson. Connie told. "'Tain't true, ma'am, is it?" said Connie. "Yer wouldn't niver, niver, let little Ronald go away?" "Yes, but I must. I am very sad. I wish I needn't send him; but the gentleman who called to-day is his father's uncle, and his nearest relation in the world. Connie, you must bring Ronald home. I will go with you myself to fetch him." "Oh, ma'am," said Connie, beginning to sob, "it 'ull break his 'eart." "No, Connie," answered Mrs. Anderson. "Hearts like Ronald's--brave and true and faithful--don't break; they endure. Besides that, the old gentleman--Mr. Harvey--will not be unkind to him; I am certain of that." So Connie and Mrs. Anderson returned side by side to the house where Giles and Ronald were waiting for them. When they entered they saw a picture which Mrs. Anderson could never forget: the dying boy, with his radiant face, lying on the bed half-supported by pillows, the crimson and gold coverlet making a wonderful patch of color; and Ronald, the tears still wet on his cheeks, but his eyes very bright, his lips firm, his whole attitude that of a soldier's child. The moment he saw Mrs. Anderson he went up to her. "I am ashamed," he said. "Giles has told me the son of a V. C. man should not be a coward. It is all right--I am going back." Mrs. Anderson pressed the boy's hand. "I knew you wouldn't disappoint me, Ronald," she said. Then she turned and talked a little longer to Giles. She saw how weak the child was, and knew, with a woman's perception, what a very little time longer he had to live in this old world. "My sister's in the country, ma'am," said Giles in his brightest manner. "She's looking for a little house for her an' me--two winders in our room--that's wot Sue an' me thought we 'ud like--and iverythink wery purty. Sue may be back any day. She's takin' a good bit of a time a-lookin' for the 'ouse; but she'll find it, an' then I'll go there." "But are you strong enough to be moved, Giles?" inquired Mrs. Anderson. "Yus," said Giles in his confident tone, "quite strong enough. I want to see the country, and to live in it for a spell, afore I go right 'ome to the best Country of all. Sue's lookin' out; she'll be back--oh, any day, for she knows the time's short." "Giles," said Connie, "you're too tired to talk any more." She gave the boy some of his restorative medicine, and Ronald went up and kissed him. "Don't forget," said Giles, "brave fathers----" "Not me!" answered Ronald. "Brave fathers for ever!" Then Ronald went away. Mrs. Anderson took his hand and led him back to the house. She did not scold him for going out with Connie. She did not mean to reproach him at all; he had made a great victory; she felt proud of him. When supper had come to an end she called the boy to her: "Ronald dear, I wish to say something. If you were a coward to-day, so was I." "You--my aunt?" said Ronald. "Oh no--no!" "Yes. I didn't want to part with you." Ronald shivered. "Won't you ever see me any more?" "I hope so. Mr. Harvey was very kind." "Is his name Harvey--same as mine?" "Yes, darling; he is your father's uncle, and your father lived with him in his old place in Somersetshire when he was a boy. He loved your father. He'll tell you lots of stories about him." "About when does he expect father home?" asked Ronald. "He doesn't know. Perhaps, Ronald--perhaps--never." But here Ronald gave himself a little shake. "I know father's coming back," he said--"feel it in my bones." There was silence then between the woman and the boy. After a long time Ronald spoke: "He made mother cry, all the same." "He told me about that. He wasn't really unkind to her. I, on the whole, like him, Ronald, and I think you can do a lot for him--I think your father would wish it." "Would he?" said Ronald, his eyes sparkling. "I think so. I expect God wants you to help him. He's a hard old man because he has no one to love him, but he did care for your father." Ronald flung his arms round Mrs. Anderson's neck and kissed her. That night it must be owned that he slept badly; and early--very early--in the morning he awoke. "Times is pretty bad," thought the boy to himself; "and there's lots o' battles round. But oh, Giles! brave fathers for ever! You and me won't disgrace our fathers, will we, Giles?" Then he got up and dressed himself, and went downstairs and waited until Mrs. Anderson arrived. As soon as she entered the room he said one word to her--"When?" "Ten o'clock," said Mrs. Anderson. It was eight o'clock then. "Two hours more," said Ronald. During those two hours he was very busy. He packed his bricks, and helped Mrs. Anderson to put his very scanty wardrobe into a very tiny trunk. The time went by. Ten o'clock struck, and, sharp to the minute, a cab drew up at the door. Out of the cab the old gentleman stepped. He entered the hall. He was a very fussy old man, and did not want a young child to live in the house with him. He expected, too, that Mrs. Harvey's boy--he had undoubtedly a great contempt for poor young Harvey--would be a miserable, dwindled, wretched sort of creature. But, lo and behold! a little chap with head well thrown back, his eyes bright and lips brave, stepped up to him. "Here I am, Uncle Stephen. I am Ronald. How do you do?" "Bless my soul!" said the old man. "Let me look at you." He drew the boy round so as to get the light on his face. "'Pon my word!" he said, "you are not the sort of little chap I expected. You're uncommon like your father." Ronald flushed with pride. Mr. Harvey came into the parlor and had a little talk with Mrs. Anderson. "I am indeed indebted to you, madam," he said. "This boy is so surprisingly like my nephew that I could almost fancy the years had gone back and I was teaching the little chap to take his first gallop.--Your father was game on a horse, my lad." "Yes, sir," said Ronald, nodding his head. "'Spect so, sir," he added. The old gentleman chucked him under the chin and uttered a laugh. "Well, boy, we must be going," he said. "We mustn't keep your kind friend. You will let me know, madam, for what I am indebted to you." "For nothing, sir," said Mrs. Anderson. A crimson color rushed into her face. "It has been a labor of love to help this dear little fellow. I could take no money; you mustn't even mention it, sir." "Well, madam--well--I respect your proper pride, and anything I can do---- By the way--eh, Ronald?--there's no saying, but I might invite your friend down to the country.--Do you know Somersetshire, madam?" "I used to know it very well when I was a girl. My people lived in Somersetshire." "Then perhaps you will come and pay us a visit, and see Ronald after he has learned the full use of the saddle and bridle--eh, Ronald?" "Oh--aunty! Will you come?" said Ronald. "I will, darling.--I should like it very much indeed, Mr. Harvey; it is most kind of you to ask me." "But please--please," said Ronald, who had suddenly lost all his fear, "may Connie come, too?" "Who's Connie?" "My special friend and sister." "Ho, ho!" said the old man. "I must hear more about her. Can make no rash promises. But all right, little chap; I'll do what I can for you. Now, if you had taken after---- Well, never mind--I won't say anything to hurt you." "And, please," said Ronald suddenly, "of course you wouldn't pay my aunty, for the things she did can't be paid for. But poor Mrs. Cricket--aunty, I know her address. The place in the country is called Eastborough; and it's Ivy Cottage, aunty; and--she was good to me----" "Yes," said Mrs. Anderson, "you'll let me explain, please, Mr. Harvey. This dear little boy spent a month at Mrs. Cricket's, and she was never paid a penny." "She ought to be paid," said Ronald. "Course, when father returns he'll pay you back again. But she ought to get it, for there was real new-laid eggs, and the chickens were so tender." "'Pon my word," said the old gentleman, "you're a queer boy! I guess you've got the true Harvey blood in you. Never neglect a friend--eh? And never owe a penny. Well now, madam, will you see to this? And what amount of money ought I to give you for the woman?" Mrs. Anderson named what she thought would be a correct sum, and immediately afterwards the old gentleman produced the money from his waistcoat pocket. It was a hard moment for Ronald when he said good-bye, but after he got into the cab he could not help feeling both surprised and elated. He could not help staring and staring at the old gentleman. "Was it your photograph," he said at last, "that my father kept in his dressing-room?" "I expect so," said the old gentleman. "It's surprising," said Ronald, "how I forget. But now I remember. He loved you--he used to talk to me about you. He said it was you taught him first to be brave." "Bless him--bless him!" said the old gentleman. His voice got a little raspy; it is certain that his eyes were a little dim. "Perhaps," said Ronald--he had a marvelous way of comprehending the situation--"but for you he would not have been a V. C. man." "God bless you! It was in himself--he had the noblest heart, the grandest nature! There, boy! don't upset me. 'Pon my word! I hated the thought of having you---- And I hated going to you," said Ronald; "but----" The old face looked into the young face, and the young face looked into the old face, and then they both laughed. Before they reached the old gentleman's hotel Ronald had so far advanced to a friendly footing that he had peered into the contents of the old man's pocket, had pulled out his watch, had applied it to his ear, and had even gone the amazing length of demanding one for himself. CHAPTER XXVI. TWO CUPS OF COFFEE. When Harris parted from Giles and Connie--on the very same day that Connie had gone to tea with Ronald, on the very same day that Ronald had visited Giles--he was as troubled and miserable as man could be. There was but one brave thing for him to do--he ought to confess his sin. Where Sue could be he had not the faintest idea. Why was she absent? It was days now since she had left her home--Sue, of all people--Sue, with a little delicate brother like Giles. It was unlike her to go. There could be but one reason. Harris had taken means to ascertain whether poor Sue had been up before the magistrates. He knew enough about the law, and about crime generally, to know that she would be taken up for theft to Bow Street; but beyond doubt she had never gone there. Where in all the world could she be? Harris was by no means sufficiently sorry to give himself up for conscience's sake; but he was in a state of nervousness and great distress of mind. As he walked down a side-street, his hands in his pockets, his rough fur cap--which he generally wore slouched--well off his eyes, he was suddenly accosted by a red-haired boy, who looked at him with a very innocent face and inquired meekly "ef he were lookin' for a job." "None o' yer sauce, youngster," said Harris, passing on. "I don't mean the least sauce in life, master," said the red-haired boy, still in the most humble and gentle tone. "I only thought ef we were goin' in the same direction we might p'rhaps cheer each other up." "You're a likely youngster, you ere," he said, looking down at him with the grimmest of smiles. "Yus, my mother says as I'm well grown for my hage," replied Pickles; and then, keeping pace with the tall man, he began to whistle softly. Harris returned to his interrupted thoughts, and soon forgot the small boy, who had to run to keep up with his long strides. Suddenly the little boy exclaimed in a shrill, eager treble: "I say, mister!" "Wot now, young 'un?" "You ain't of a wery obleeging turn, be yer? You couldn't help me, now, ter find a guilty party?" "You seems a wery rum chap," said Harris rather crossly. "I don't know nothink 'bout yer guilty parties. There, be off, can't yer!" "I'll be off in a twinkle, master. I ain't rum a bit; my mother allers said as I wor a real quiet boy; but when my heart is full to bustin' it seems a relief to talk to a body, and you, tho' yer puts on bein' fierce, have a kind nature." "Now, what hever do yer mean by that?" "Master, you must furgive a wery timid and heasily repulsed boy; but it ain't possible, even fur one so known to be frightened as me, to be feared of yer. I reads yer kindness in yer heyes, master, and so I makes bold to tell my tale o' woe." "Well, tell away," said Harris, who could not help laughing and looking a little less gruff than before. "You wouldn't be inclined, now, that we should have hour talk hover a pint of hot coffee? There's a heatin-house where the young man have took down the shutters and is dusting away in a manner as his real appetizing. I has fourpence in my pocket. You wouldn't mind my treating yer, jest fer once, would yer?" "Not in the least, youngster. I think it'll be a wery sensible use to put yer money to, and a deal more prudent than spending it in marbles or street plays." "Master, my mother don't allow me to play at marbles, or to hindulge in street wanities, so I has the money and can afford ter be generous. Now let's enter. I smells the coffee a-grinding hup fur hour breakfasts halready." So Harris and Pickles went in to the eating-house, where in a moment or two, over two steaming cups of excellent coffee, Pickles proceeded to unburden himself of his story. "It is only a few days agone, master, as the occurrence as distresses me happened. I wor walking along a certain street wot shall be nameless. I wor walking along bravely, as is my wont, and thinking of my mother, when I see'd a young gel a-flying past me. She wor a wery short, stout gel, and her legs they quite waggled as she ran. I never see'd a gel run so wery hard afore, and I pricked hup my senses to guess wot it hall meant. Soon wor the mystery explained. I heerd ahind of her the cry of 'Stop thief!' and a number of men and boys were a-giving of her chase. I thought as I'd run wid 'em and see what it hall meant. "Presently we shall come up wid the gel. There she wor in the arms of a policeman. He wor a-clutching of her, and trying to find hout wot wor the matter; but she wor so blown she couldn't speak fur a good bit. Then hup comes a man wot said as he had a pawnshop, and that inter the pawnshop had come a man and a gel ter buy a ring, and when they come hout there wor a diamond locket missing. He said as either the gel or the man 'ad tuk the locket; and as the man could not be found, he must get the policeman to search the gel. The poor fat gel, she looked quite scared, and said as she hadn't done it; but the nipper said as she must be searched, and he put in his hand inter her pocket and drew hout the diamond locket. She said as she had never put it there. But, in course, it worn't ter be expected as they'd believe her, so she were tuk orf ter prison. She wor tuk orf ter prison--I see'd her myself." Here Pickles paused. Nothing could have been more refined and delicate than the use he had made of his eyes during this narrative; only very quick and fleeting glances did he bestow upon his companion. When Harris at the commencement of his tale started and changed color, Pickles dropped a piece of bread, and stayed under the table looking for it until the man had quite recovered his composure. When his short story had come to an end he paused; then he said, still without bestowing more than the swiftest side-glance on Harris, "The poor fat gel were tuk orf to the lock-hup. But 'tis borne bin on me, master--'tis borne him on me, and I can't get no rest day nor night--as that yer gel were hinnercent. I believe as she never tuk the locket, and I think that ef ye're as kind-hearted as yer looks yer'll help me ter find that other guilty party." Harris rose to his feet. "Don't be a fool, lad," he said angrily. "I have no time ter give ter sech nonsense. I'm soory fur the gel, but ef she had the locket, of course she tuk the locket. There! I can waste no time. I'll pay fur my hown coffee. Good-morning." "Good-morning, master, and thank yer. I'm glad as ye're sorry fur the gel; she have a lame brother as must miss her, and her case 'ull go heavy, I fear. It seems as it might be a good work ter find the guilty party. I think as it wor the man as went with her inter the shop. I mean ter attend the trial, and I'll mention, ef permitted, my suspicions. But I won't keep yer longer. Sorry again as yer won't oblige me, I'll go home now and consult my mother." All the way back to Great Anvill Street, where Mrs. Price lived, Pickles danced a hornpipe. "I've nailed him at last," he said, chuckling and laughing and dancing all in one breath. "Now to put on the torture screw until he confesses! Oh Pickles, my boy, _wot_ a treasure you'll prove yerself in Scotland Yard!" CHAPTER XXVII. DELAYED TRIAL. It is quite true that Pickles had put on the torture screw. Harris felt exceedingly uncomfortable as he walked home. It was a fact, then, that Sue had been caught and put in prison. That disagreeable boy had seen it all; he had witnessed her rapid flight; he had heard her protestations of innocence; he had seen her carried off to prison. Sue, so good and brave and honest, would be convicted of theft and would have to bear the penalty of theft--of another's theft, not her own. What a foolish girl she had been to run away! Of course, it made her guilt seem all the plainer. There was not a loophole of escape for her. She was certain to be found guilty; probably to-day she would be brought before the magistrate and sentence pronounced upon her. He wondered what magistrate would try her; how long her punishment would last. Had he dared he would have attended her trial. But he did not dare. That red-haired boy--that most unpleasant, impudent boy--would probably be there. There was no saying what things he might say. He would probably appear as a witness, and nothing would keep that giddy tongue of his quiet. What a very queer boy he was, and how strange were his suspicions! When any one else in all the world would have accepted Sue's guilt as beyond doubt or question, he persisted in declaring her innocent. Nay, more than that, he had even declared that the man who had gone with her into the shop was the guilty person. Harris knew there was no proof against the man. No one had seen him take the locket; no one had witnessed its transfer into Sue's pocket. The man was safe enough. No one living could bring his guilt home to him. But stay a moment! A horrible fear came over him. Why did that boy speak like that? He saw Sue running away. Perhaps he had seen more than that. Perhaps he had come on the platform of events earlier in the narrative. Harris felt the cold sweat starting to his forehead as it occurred to him that that awful boy had reason for his talk--that he _knew_ to whom he was speaking. When Harris took the locket he might have been flattening his nose against the window-pane at the pawnbroker's; he might have seen all that was taking place. What was to be done? He could not confess, and yet if he didn't he was in horrible danger; his present state was worse than any state he had been in before. Suppose Connie ever found out his meanness, his wickedness. Harris was very fond of Connie just then. He had suffered during her absence. His home was pleasant to him--as pleasant as his guilty conscience would permit during those days, for little Giles was like no one else. Oh, could the awful moment ever come when Giles would look at him with reproachful eyes--when Giles would turn away from him? The miserable man felt that were such a time to arrive it would be almost as bad as the knowledge that God Himself could not forgive him. He was distracted, miserable; he must find a refuge from his guilty thoughts. A public-house stood handy. He had not really taken too much for a long time now--not since that terrible night when, owing to drink, he had turned his child from his door. But he would forget his misery now in drink. "That dreadful boy!" he muttered--"that dreadful, dreadful boy, with hair like a flame, and eyes that peered into you like gimlets!" Harris passed through the great swing-doors. His good angel must almost have disappeared at that moment. Meanwhile Connie and Giles watched and waited in vain for Sue. She was coming to-day--she was coming to-morrow. But the weary hours went by and no Sue arrived; there was no message from her. Harris went oftener and oftener to the public-house, and brought less and less of his wages home, and Giles faded and faded, and Connie also looked very sad and weary. Once Connie said to Giles, when nearly a month had gone by: "Yer'll 'ave to give up that notion 'bout the country, Giles, for 'tain't true." "Yus, I believe I must give it up," said Giles. "Ain't yer anxious now 'bout dear Sue?" asked Connie. "Not wery," said Giles. "Ef she ain't in the country, the good Lord 'ave her safe somewhere else--that's wot I'm a-thinkin' of. Father John said to me we'en he come last as trials of this sort are good for me." "You 'ave nothing but trials, poor Giles!" said Connie. "Oh no," answered Giles; "I ha' lots o' blessings--you and Big Ben, the beautiful Woice, you know. Connie, some'ow I think as my wings is growin' wery fast. I think w'en they're full-grown----" "Wot then?" asked Connie. "Why, I'll fly away. I can't 'ardly believe as a poor little lame boy like me could fly up higher than the stars, but that's wot 'ull 'appen. I picter it wery often--me no longer tied down to my bed, but with wings, flyin' about as strong as the angels. Only Father John says I'll be higher than the angels, for I'll be one o' the ransomed o' the Lord. I'll see Father John, too, an' you'll come after a bit, an' Sue 'ull come. I can't fret no, I can't." After this Connie went for the doctor, and the doctor said that the boy was very ill--that he might linger a few weeks more, but his sufferings were growing less, and that Connie's kind care was effecting wonders for him. The weeks went by. Harris grew accustomed to his sense of guilt, and Sue to her captivity. Pickles was anxiously looking forward to a crisis. Harris, after giving way to drink for several days, refrained again and worked steadily. He brought in, in consequence, good wages, and Connie and Giles wanted for nothing. It was the one salve to his conscience, this making of Giles comfortable; otherwise, notwithstanding the manifest amendment of his ways, he was scarcely happy. Indeed, Pickles took care that he should not be so. In the most unlikely and unexpected places this dreadful boy would dart upon him, and more and more certain was Harris that he not only knew his secret, but had witnessed his guilt. Harris would have fled miles from the boy, but the boy would not be fled from. He acted as a perpetual blister on the man's already sore conscience, and Harris almost hated him. His first resolve to confide in Pickles and bribe him into silence had long ago died away. He dared not even offer to bribe him; the perfectly fearless and uncorrupt spirit which looked out of the eyes of the boy would be, he knew, proof against all that he could do in the matter of either rewards or punishments. No; all that Harris could do was to maintain as imperturbable a spirit as possible while Pickles expatiated upon the cruel fate of Sue. As far as he could dare question him, he learned from Pickles that Sue had not been yet tried even before the magistrate. He wondered greatly at this delay, and Pickles, who read his wonder in his eyes, remarked lightly that the reason of this long postponement was because the police were busy looking for the guilty party. "Whether they finds him or not," concluded Pickles, "it must come off soon now, fur I'm told that the expense of keeping Sue is breaking that 'ere lock-hup. I 'spect as it 'ull be the finest bit o' a trial as have been fur many a day. I means to be there. And you'll come, won't yer, Mr. Harris?" "I'm sick o' the subject," said Harris. "Oh no, you ain't, Mr. Harris; you 'ave a wery quiet manner, as his only wot his right and becoming, but I can see yer hinterest in yer heyes. You can't keep that good-natured, human look out o' yer heyes, Mr. Harris; nor can yer help a-starting when yer sees me a-coming. Oh no, yer may say wot yer likes, but ye're real interested in that pore, misfort'nit Sue, I _knows_; so you will come to her shameful trial, won't yer?" In despair, and fearing any other reply, Harris promised. CHAPTER XXVIII. CINDERELLA WOULD SHIELD THE REAL THIEF. After one of these interviews Pickles went home and consulted Sue. "Cinderella," he said, "am I to act as yer prince or not?" "I dunno wot hever yer means, Pickles." "Well, my beauty, 'tis jest this--the Prince rescued Cinderella from her cruel sisters, and I want ter rescue you from the arms of justice. You has a wery shameful accusation hanging over you, Cinderella; you is, in short, hiding from the law. I can set yer free. Shall I?" Sue's plump face had grown quite thin during the anxieties of the past month, and now it scarcely lighted up as she answered Pickles: "I want ter be set free, but I don't want ter be set free in your way." "'Tis the only way, Cinderella. The man, Peter Harris, is the guilty party. He tuk that 'ere locket; he put it in yer pocket. I don't know how he did it, nor why he did it, but I do know that no one else did it. I have jest come from him, and lor' bless yer! I have had him on the torture hooks. I made-b'lieve as you were to be tried next week, and I axed him to come to the trial. I could a'most see him shivering at the bare thought, but fur hall that he did not dare but say he'd come. Now, Cinderella, ef you were to allow me to manage it, and I wer to get you and he face to face, why, he'd jest have to confess. I'd have a couple o' witnesses handy, and we'd write it down wot he said, and you'd be set free. I'd manage so to terrify him aforehand that he'd have ter confess----" "And then he'd be put in prison?" said Sue. "Why, in course; and well he'd deserve it. He's the right party to go, fur he's guilty. Yes, shameful guilty, too." "He couldn't manage to run away and escape afterwards?" Pickles laughed. "You think as I'd help him, maybe. Not a bit o' me! I don't harbor no guilty parties, Cinderella, as I ha' told yer heaps and heaps o' times. No, he's guilty, and he goes ter prison; there ain't nothink hard in sending him ter prison." "It ha' seemed ter me often lately, Pickles, as it must be harder to lie in prison guilty than not guilty--you ha'nt, nothink ter trouble yer mind ef yer ain't guilty." "Well then, I s'pose, in that case, as yer'll give yerself hup." "I'd a deal rayther be in hiding with yer, Pickles; but I don't feel as ef I _could_ put Mr. Harris in prison." "Then you must go yerself, fur this thing can't go on fur ever." Sue looked frightened, and her commonplace gray eyes fell to the ground. She took up the poker and began to trace a pattern on the floor: it was as intricate as her own fate just now. She was a little heroine, however, and her noble thoughts redeemed all plainness from her face when at last she spoke: "Once, Pickles, arter mother died we was brought down wery low. I had a dreadful influenzy, and I couldn't nohow go to the machining, and we were near starving. Mr. Harris lent me a shilling that time, and we pulled through. Another time I couldn't meet the rent, and Connie, she begged of her father, and he give me the money; and when I offerd it him back again he wouldn't take it. He wor a rough man, but he had a kind heart. When I were last at home he wor in a real dreadful trouble about Connie--and I loved Connie better nor any one in hall the world, arter Giles. Pickles, it 'ud break Connie's heart fur her father to be tuk to prison. I don't know why he did that--ef he really did do it--but I can't furget those two times as he wor good ter me, and hever since I have come yere he have done heverything fur Giles. No, I couldn't send Mr. Harris to prison. I couldn't rest heasy ef I thought o' him sent there by me. I'd rayther lie there myself." "Wery well, Cinderella; in course you've got ter choose, fur one or other of yer must go to prison, as it is against hall common-sense as you could stay hiding here fur ever. I hadmires yer rare consideration fur that hardened man, Peter Harris. I can't understand it--no, not the least bit in the world--but I hadmires it as I hadmires the top o' the big mountain wot I could never climb, but jest contemplate solemnly from below. I can understand better yer repugnance not to break the heart o' that purty Connie. Most plain women is hard on their more lucky sisters, and I hadmires you, Cinderella, fur rising superior to the wices of yer sex; but wot I can't hunderstand--wot puzzles me--is yer sad failure in sisterly love. There's that little brother; why, heven now he's pining hal to nothing to see yer. Don't yer think as it 'ull break _his_ heart ef yer is tuk ter prison? Why, ef yer could have seen him when he heerd me even hint at sech a thing! He said as he wished as he could knock me down." The tears rapidly filled Sue's eyes. "Pickles," she said after a moment of thought, "'tis a wonderful, wonderful puzzlement ter me. I can't least of all break the heart of Giles. Giles wor left ter me by mother, and I promised as I'd allers tend him real faithful; but wot I 'as bin thinking is that ef yer must give me hup, and not hide me any longer, and I must be locked hup fur a time, that perhaps we might manage as Giles might still think as I wor in the country. Connie would be wery good ter him, and Mr. Harris would support him jest as well as I could have done. Giles, he's that innercent that he'd easily be made ter believe as I could not help going away. He knows nothink o' life, little Giles don't; he'd never, never guess as there were ought o' the prison 'bout me, and arter a time he'd get accustomed to doing widout me. I think, Pickles, we might manage so as not to break Giles's heart, and yet fur me to go ter prison." "Then you really, really chooses to go ter prison, Cinderella?" "I choose, Pickles, never to tell on Peter Harris--never, wot hever happens. I don't want ter go to prison--not one bit--but ef I can't stay hiding, why, I s'pose as I must." "You can't stay hiding more than a day or two longer, Cinderella, and I thinks as ye're a great fool;" and Pickles walked out of the room in apparently high dudgeon. CHAPTER XXIX. A LITTLE HEROINE. Two days afterwards it was Sunday. Pickles and his mother went to church, but Sue did not accompany them. She had hitherto, notwithstanding her disguise, been afraid to stir abroad. To-day, however, when mother and son had departed, she ran eagerly up to the tiny attic where she slept. In this attic was an old box without a lock. Sue opened it in some perturbation. There were several articles of wearing apparel in this box, all of a mothy and mouldy character. One by one Cinderella pulled them out. First there was a purple silk dress. She gazed at it with admiration. Yes; no one would ever recognize Sue in silk. It would be delightful to put it on. She did so. The skirt was much too long, but with the aid of a whole boxful of pins, she managed to bundle it up round her waist. Then came a soft, many-colored Paisley shawl. Would any one in all the world think of the little machinist if she sallied forth in purple silk and Paisley shawl? Sue did not believe it possible. She put on the shawl, and tied on her head an old-fashioned bonnet, trimmed with many-colored ribbons. There was further, in the wonderful box, an old remnant of gauze. This would act as a veil. Now, indeed, she was completely disguised. She thought herself very grand, and wondered had the Prince ever bought finer clothes for the real Cinderella. She shut the box again, tripped downstairs, and out into the street. She had not been out for a whole month now, and the fresh, frosty air, even coming to her through the musty gauze, was very refreshing. She walked quickly. She had an object in view. Very purposeful was her careworn little face as she stepped briskly along. She had a problem to solve. It was too weighty for her young shoulders; she must get the advice of another. She meant to consult Father John--not by words; no, not even with him would she dare confide her secret. But he preached now both Sunday morning and Sunday evening. She would stand with the crowd and listen to his sermon. Perhaps once again there would be a message for her in it. She had not forgotten that last sermon of his; and that last message sent to her from God by his lips had been with her all through her month of captivity. It had been a sad and anxious month for Sue, and now its crisis had come, for the kind people who had protected her could do so no longer; she could no longer eat their bread, nor accept the shelter of their home. No; Sue quite agreed with Pickles that it would be impossible for her to stay in hiding always. Better go forth at once and meet the worst and have it over. She would be put in prison. Yes--that is, either she or Peter Harris would be put in prison. Pickles had quite brought her round to the belief that Harris was really the guilty party. He had done a very, very dreadful thing. Sue could not understand why he had acted so badly, so cruelly by her. Surely he was the right person to go to prison; she could not bear his crime for him. But then, again, it would be very like Jesus Christ if she did. It was wonderful how the thought of the Great Example was before the mind of this simple, ignorant child as she walked hastily on to meet the one who she believed would decide her fate. To-morow, most likely, Pickles would come to her and ask for her final decision. She must make up her mind to-day. She had a long way to walk, and when she reached the street where Father John held his weekly services the place was already crowded. The preacher had mounted on his chair and had commenced his discourse. Sue heard one or two people say, "Look at little Mother Hubbard." But others, again, admired her costume, and out of respect for the rich silk dress, made way for her to approach nearer to the preacher. "Now, Lord Jesus, please do give me the right word," whispered Sue. Then through her musty veil her eyes were fixed anxiously on Atkins. Was it more than a coincidence? This was the sentence which fell upon the expectant ear: "My dear, dear brothers and sisters, 'tis a wonderfully happy thing to be good. It gives a man rare courage. You, most of you, knew poor Bob Daily. Well, he died this morning. He was not a scrap afraid. I was with him, and he went away rejoicing. He knew he was going straight away to Jesus--straight away to the arms of Jesus. He told me a queer thing which had happened to him when he was a young man. He was falsely accused of a crime which he had not done. He was put in prison. He had to stay locked up for what he was innocent of for two years. He said he guessed who had really done the crime, but he did not like to tell on this man, who was much worse off than himself. He bore the punishment for the guilty man, and he had his reward. All the time he was in prison Jesus remained so close to him that He made his heart sing. He says that he could look back on that part of his life as the very happiest time that he had ever spent." "I'm a bit faint-like," said Sue to her nearest neighbor. "Let me out, please." The people made way for her, and for a moment or so she leant against the nearest lamp-post. She did not hear another word of the sermon. She did not need to. When she felt better she walked back to Great Anvill Street. * * * * * That night, just before Pickles went to bed, Sue sought him. "Pickles, I ha' made up my mind--I ha' made it up quite," she said. "Well?" asked Pickles. "You gave me three days, Pickles, and the time 'ull be up to-morrow. Well, I'll go to prison 'stead o' Peter Harris. I ha' that in my mind which 'ull make it come uncommon light ter me. I'll go to prison 'stead o' he." CHAPTER XXX. WHAT WAS HARRIS TO HER? Pickles went up to the very small room where he slept, threw himself on his bed, and fell a-wondering. For the first time in his life he was completely at sea. What _did_ Cinderella mean? For a whole month now she had been his special charge. He had rescued her; he had kept her in the safe shelter of his mother's house; he had been, he considered, very kind indeed to Cinderella. What a fate she would have had but for him! Sent to prison for a crime of which she was absolutely innocent, her whole future disgraced, blighted, ruined! All the time while he had been hunting up Harris, and bringing his ingenious little mind to bear down the full weight of his crime upon the guilty man, he had thought that no amount of gratitude on Cinderella's part--nay, even a whole lifetime of devotion--could scarcely repay all she owed him. But now he kicked his legs impatiently and said to himself that it was enough to provoke the best-natured boy in the universe. After all his trouble, all his hard thoughts and anxious reflections, here was this tiresome Cinderella refusing to be set free. He had, as he expressed it, nailed his man; he had put the noose round him, and all he had to do was to tighten it, and Sue would be free and Harris sent to prison. But without Sue's aid he could not do this, and Sue most emphatically to-night had refused his aid. She would go to prison herself, but she would not betray Harris. What did the girl mean? What was this cowardly Harris to her that she should risk so much and suffer so sorely for his sake? How she had dreaded prison! How very, very grateful she had been to him for saving her! But now she was willing to go there, willing to bear the unmerited punishment, the lifelong disgrace. Why? Pickles, think hard as he would, could get no answer to solve this difficulty. True, she had said she had something in her mind which would lighten the prison fare and the prison life. What was it? Pickles could stand it no longer; he must go and consult his mother. He ran downstairs. Mrs. Price had not yet gone to bed. Pickles sat down beside her by the fire, and laid his curly red head in her lap. "Mother," he said, "this 'ere detective's foiled at last." "What's up now, Jamie, boy?" asked the mother. Pickles told her. He described how he had all but brought the crime home to Harris; how he had proved to Sue that Harris was the guilty party; but that now Sue, after all his tremendous trouble, had refused to identify him. She would go to prison, she said; she would not tell on Harris. "I don't understand it one bit, mother," he said in conclusion. "But I do, Jamie, my boy," answered Mrs. Price, tears filling her kind eyes. "I understand it very well. It means just this--that Sue, dear child, is very noble." Pickles opened his eyes very wide. "Then, mother," he began, "Cinderella is----" and then he stopped. "Your Cinderella, whom you rescued, is a real little heroine, Jamie; but she must not go to prison. We must do something for her. She has been with me for a whole month now, and I never came across a more upright little soul. You surely have not been frightening her with the base idea that we would give her up, my boy?" Pickles colored and hung his head. "I own, mother," he said, "that I did put a little bit of the torture screw to bear on Sue. I didn't mean really as she should go to prison; but I thought as a small dose of fright might make her tell on that Harris. I do think that Peter Harris is about the meanest character I ever come across, and I'd like _him_ to go to prison wery well indeed, mother dear." "If he's guilty, believe me he's not a very happy man, my lad. My own feeling is that 'tis best to leave all punishment to the God against whom we sin. But about Sue? She must not sleep with the notion that she's to go to prison. I have a great mind to go to her now." "Oh! but, mother, mayn't I tell her my own self? 'Twas I as rescued her. She's my own Cinderella, after all, mother dear; and I'd real enjoy telling her. She's asleep hours ago now, mother." "Well, lad, see and have it out with the child before you go to work in the morning, and then I'll have a talk with her afterwards." CHAPTER XXXI. A STERN RESOLVE. But Sue was not asleep. She had quite made up her mind now as to her line of action. There was no longer even a particle of lingering doubt in her brave little soul; she was innocent, but as the sin which was committed must be punished, she would bear the punishment; she would go to prison instead of Harris. Prison would not be so bad if she went there innocent. Yes, Sue would certainly go to Prison. The next day she would consult Mrs. Price, and take the proper steps to deliver herself up to the police. She would go to the pawnbroker's shop and say to him, "I am the little girl in whose pocket you found that lovely diamond locket. I am very sorry I hid from you so long, but now I have come back, and you can send for the police. I will promise not to run away again when they are taking me to prison." This was Sue's resolve, but first she intended to do something else. It was because of this something else that she lay awake now; it was because of this almost passionate longing and desire that she lay with her eyes wide open. She was going to put on her disguise once more; just once again, before she was put in prison, she would wander free and unrestrained into the streets. But she must do this very, very early in the morning, and she feared that if she closed her eyes she would sleep over the right time. It was now March, and the days were lengthening. She rose before the dawn, put on again some portion of the remarkable costume she had worn the day before, and went out. Yes, she was going to prison. She was most likely going to prison that very day. But before she was locked up she would visit Harris's house. She would steal into his rooms to take one look--one long last look for how many weary months--at Giles. She knew the ways of this tenement house well. She had nothing to do but walk up the stairs and lift the latch of Harris's room and go in. Some of the neighbors locked their room doors at night. But Susan remembered with satisfaction that Harris never did so. It was quite dark when she set off, for she knew she had a very long walk from Great Anvill Street to Westminster. CHAPTER XXXII. AN UNEXPECTED ACCIDENT. By dint asking her way more than once, of some of the very policemen whom she dreaded, Sue found herself at last in the old, well-remembered neighborhood. She passed the door of the house where her mother had died and where she had been so happy with Giles, and went on quickly to the other house where Connie and Harris lived. The house door stood open, as was its wont. Sue mounted the stairs; with trembling hands she lifted the latch of Harris's room. Yes, as she had trusted, it was only on the latch. She stooped down, unfastened her shoes, and took them off; then she stole into the room. There were two bedrooms, besides a sitting-room, in Harris's portion of the house. In one of the bedrooms slept Harris, in the other his daughter, and in the little sitting-room lay the lame boy. Thus Sue found herself at once in the presence of her little brother. Her heart beat high. How easily she had accomplished her purpose! How good God was to her! Stealing over on tiptoes, she knelt down by Giles. There was scarcely any light as yet; but a little streamed in from the badly curtained window. This little had sought out Giles, and lingered lovingly round his delicate face and graceful head; he looked ethereal with this first soft light kissing him. Sue bent down very close indeed. She dared not breathe on his face. She scarcely dared draw her own breath in her fear of waking him; but she took his gentle image more firmly than ever into her heart of hearts: it was to cheer her and comfort her during long, long months of prison life. As she bent over him in an ecstasy of love and longing, Giles stirred. Instantly Sue hid herself behind a curtain: here she could see without being seen. The lame boy stirred again and opened his eyes. He looked peaceful; perhaps he had had a happy dream. "I think Sue 'ull soon now have found that cottage in the country," he said aloud. Then he turned over and, still smiling, went to sleep again. Sue's eyes filled with tears. But the light was getting stronger; any moment Harris might rise. Though she would go to prison for Harris, yet she felt that she could not bring herself to meet him. Yes, she must go away with an added weight in her poor, faithful little heart. She stole downstairs, and out into the street. Yes, it was very hard to bear the sight of Giles, to hear those longing words from the lips of Giles, and yet go away to meet unjust punishment for perhaps two long years. Still, it never entered into Sue's head to go back from her resolve, or to save herself by betraying another. Her head was very full of Bible lore, and she compared herself now to one of those three young men who had gone into a fiery furnace for the cause of right and duty. "Jesus Christ wor with them, jest as He'll be with me," she said to herself as she crossed Westminster Bridge. Yes, brave little girl, you were to go through a fiery furnace, but not the one you thought was being prepared for you. Sue's trouble, swift and terrible, but in an unlooked-for form, was on her even now. Just as she had got over the bridge, and was about to cross a very wide thoroughfare, some lumbering wagons came thundering up. They turned sharp round a corner, and the poor child, weak and giddy from her morning's most unwonted exertion, suddenly found herself turning faint. She was in the middle of the crossing, the wagons were upon her, but she could not run. She had scarcely time to throw up her arms, to utter one piercing cry of terror, before she was thrown to the ground. She had a horrible sensation of her life being crushed out of her, of every bone being broken; then followed peace and unconsciousness. One of the wagons had gone partly over her; one leg was broken. She was carried to the accident ward at St. Thomas's Hospital close by. CHAPTER XXXIII. A POINTED QUESTION. Neither had Mrs. Price slept well. All night long she either had fitful and broken dreams, in which her small guest, Sue, constantly figured; or she lay with her eyes open, thinking of her. She was surprised at the child's resolve. She recognized an heroic soul under that plain and girlish exterior. In the morning she got up rather earlier than usual, and instead of going directly downstairs, as was her custom, she went up to Sue's attic. She had promised her eccentric young son to allow him to tell his own tale in his own way; but she meant to comfort Sue with some specially loving and kind greeting. Having a true lady's heart, she knew how to give Sue a very cheering word, and she went upstairs with that heart full. Of course there was no Sue in the little chamber. The bed had been lain in, but was now cold and unoccupied. Mrs. Price went downstairs, considerably puzzled and disturbed. She sent for Pickles and told him. She was full of fear at Sue's disappearance, and told the heedless boy that she blamed him. "You did wrong, my lad--you did very wrong," she said. "You gave the poor thing to understand that she was to be put in prison, and now doubtless she has gone to deliver herself up." "No, mother. She only went out to have a little exercise. Cinderella 'ull be back in an hour or so," answered the boy. But he did not speak with his usual assurance and raillery. The fact was, the calculations in his shrewd little brain were upset by Sue's disappearance. He felt disturbed, perplexed, and annoyed. His mother being really displeased with him was a novel experience to Pickles. She blamed herself much for having allowed him his own way in this matter, and the moment breakfast was over, went out to the nearest police-station to relate Sue's story. Pickles stayed in until noon; then he also went out. He had cheered himself until this hour with the hope that Sue had only gone out for a walk. Notwithstanding all the improbabilities of his poor, frightened Cinderella venturing to show herself in the street, he had clung firmly to this idea; but when the neighboring clock struck twelve he was obliged to abandon it. He was obliged to admit to his own little puzzled heart that it was on no ordinary walk that Sue had gone. Remorse now seized him in full measure. He could not bear the house; he must vent his feelings in exercise. For the first time in his sunny and healthy young life he walked along the streets a defeated and unhappy boy. Suddenly, however, a thought occurred to him. He stood still when it flashed across his fertile brain. Then, with a cheerful shout, which caused the passers-by to turn their heads and smile, he set off running as fast as his feet would carry him. Hope would never be long absent from his horizon, and once again he was following it joyfully. He was on his way now to Harris's house. He meant to pay pretty Connie a visit, and when with her he would put to her a pointed question. It was nearly three o'clock when he reached Westminster. A few minutes later he found himself on the landing outside Connie's rooms. Here, however, he was again a little puzzled, for he wanted to see Connie and not to see Giles. Taking a long time about it, he managed to set the closed door ajar. He looked in. Connie and Giles were both within. Connie was mending her father's socks; Giles was reading aloud to her. Neither of them had noticed the slight creaking noise he had made in opening the door. He ventured on a very slight cough. This sound was heard; the reading ceased. "Come in," said Connie. This he must not do. He waited an instant, then creaked the door again. "Dear, dear! I made certain I had shut that door," said Connie. At this she rose unsuspiciously. "Jest wait a minute, Giles dear. I didn't catch that last bit." She ran to the door to put it to. Pickles placed his foot in her way. The obstacle caused her to look into the passage. There a boy, very red by nature, and with his natural color now much intensified by hard running, stood awaiting her. He pointed to the door, put his finger to his lips, then rushed down the first flight of stairs, where he turned round, and beckoned to her to follow him. "I'll be back in a minute, Giles," said Connie. She had ready wit enough to perceive at a glance that Pickles had something to say to her which he did not wish Giles to hear. Closing the door behind her, she ran downstairs. Pickles could have hugged her in his gratitude. "Ain't you a perfect duck of a darlin'?" he said, gazing hard and full into her face. "What do you want me for, Pickles?" asked Connie. "Fur one or two things of much private importance. First, tell me, how is the little lame chap as is fretting fur his sister wot is kept in the country?" "He is not so well, Pickles; he is not so well as he was. Pickles, I don't believe that story about Sue being in the country." "You don't believe me when I opens my lips to give utterance to the words of gospel truth!" replied Pickles. But his red face grew a shade redder, and his full, bold gaze was not quite so steady as usual. "Why, surely, Pickles, _you_ ain't going to be troubled wid nerves!" he said to himself. Connie, watching anxiously, entreated in her softest tones: "Dear Pickles, you might trust me. I should like to know, and I won't tell Giles." "Ay, ay, that's a woman's curiosity; but the misfortune is as it can't be gratified. No, Connie. You are as rare and pretty a bit of woman as hiver I clapped heyes on. But fur hall that you ain't going to come hover this yere boy. When I tells you, Connie, that Sue is hin the country, please believe as she _his_ in that year health-giving place. When 'tis conwenient fur me to confide in you farther, why, I'll do it. That time ain't at present. In the meantime, ef you want to real help them who ere in difficulty, you will let me know widout any more wasting o' precious time where yer father, Peter Harris, is working to-day." "Oh Pickles! wot do you want wid him?" "Nothink to hurt you, pretty one. Now, will you speak? "He's at Messrs ---- in ---- Street," replied Connie. "Thank yer; and now I'm off. Ef you'll listen to the words o' solemn wisdom, and be guided in that same, you'll not mention this stolen interview to little Giles--bless the little chap! You keep up his heart, Connie. As soon as hiver this yer young man can manage it, Sue shall come home. Lor', now! ain't the world strange and difficult to live in? Wot 'ull bring joy to one 'ull give pain to t'other, but the cause o' right must win the day. Well, good-bye, Connie. I'll wery like look in soon again." CHAPTER XXXIV. PICKLES TO THE FORE AGAIN. Connie went back to Giles, and Pickles, having obtained the information which he desired, sped as fast as his feet could carry him down the street. Once more his spirits were high, and hope was before him. "I may save you, you most obstinate and tiresome Cinderella," he said to himself. "But oh, _wot_ a mistake gels are! Why hever those weak and misguided beings was allowed to be is a puzzlement too great fur me." But though Pickles talked even to himself in this light and careless vein, there was (and he knew it) a pain in his heart--a pain joined to an admiration for Sue, which would have made him willing to fight to the very death in her behalf. The day, however, had been spent while he was rushing about, and by the time he reached the place where Connie had directed him to seek her father, the workmen were putting by their tools and preparing to go home. Pickles followed Harris down the street. Harris was talking to and walking with one of his fellow-workmen, and Pickles did not care to accost him except when he was alone. At the corner, however, of the next street the two parted; and then the boy, putting his face into grave and serious order, ran lightly after Harris. When he addressed him his very voice trembled. "Mr. Harris, I see'd you coming out of that yer shop. I'm in much perplexity and trouble in my mind, and I thought the sight of you and a talk wid you might maybe set me up." "You thought wrong, then," said Harris, replying in his gruffest voice, "for I'm in a mortal bit of a hurry, and I'm in no humor to listen to no chaff, so get away." "Oh, Mr. Harris! I'll endeavor to run by yer side for a minute or two. Mr. Harris, wot does yer think? That little Sue wot I tolled yer on--why, she has discovered who the guilty party is. She have found out who really stole the locket and put it into her pocket." "She have!" said Harris. He was so astonished and taken by surprise that he now stood still. He stood quite still, gazing helplessly at Pickles, while his weather-beaten face grew pale. "'Tis gospel truth as I'm telling yer," continued Pickles, fixing his own light-blue eyes full on his victim. "Sue knows hall about it--the whole thing; the great and awful meanness have been made plain to her. Yes, she knows all, Sue does; but, Mr. Harris----" "Yes; wot have I to say to this tale? I'm in a hurry--tearing hurry--I tell yer." "Yes, Mr. Harris; I won't keep yer. Sue knows, but Sue, she won't betray. I know who did it," she said, "but I won't tell on him. He lent me a shilling once. He is kind to my little brother wot is lame. I know wot he did, but I won't never tell, I'll go to prison 'stead of he." Harris's color had returned. He now walked so fast that Pickles had to run to keep up with him. Suddenly, seeing a passing omnibus, he hailed it, and in a second was on the roof. He did not glance at Pickles. In reply to his tale he had not answered by a single word. CHAPTER XXXV. THE WINGS ARE GROWING. Connie went back to Giles, sat down by him, and he resumed his reading. He was going through the _Pilgrim's Progress_ to her, reading short sentences at a time, for his voice was too low and weak to enable him to exert himself for long at a time. "Connie, wot were that as I read last?" Connie colored. "You weren't listening," said Giles reproachfully. "It wor a most beautiful bit. But you didn't hear me, Connie." "I wor thinking o' something else jest then," owned Connie. "I'll listen now wid hall my might, dear Giles." "Ah! but I'm tired now," said Giles; "and besides, I want to talk 'bout something else, Connie." "Well." "Sue have been a whole month in the country to-day--rayther more than a month. I don't understand it at all. I never thought as she could stay so long away from me. I suppose 'tis hall right, and cottages such as we want do take a powerful long time to find. It has been a long time--wery, wery long--but have I been patient 'bout Sue all this long time, Connie?" "Yes, indeed, dear Giles." "Oh! I'm glad, fur I've tried to be. Then, Connie, wot I'm thinking is that ef Sue don't soon come back--ef she don't soon find that 'ere cottage--why, I won't want it, Connie. Sue 'ull come back and find me--gone." "Gone!" echoed Connie. "Do you mean dead? Oh Giles! you're not ill enough to die." "Yes, Connie, I think I am. I'm so real desperate weak sometimes that I don't like even to move a finger. I used to be hungry, too, but now I never cares to eat. Besides, Connie dear----" "Yes, Giles," answered Connie. "Those wings that I told you of--why, I often seem to feel them flutter inside of me. I told you before, Connie, that when they was full grown, why, I'd fly away. I think they are growing wery fast. I'll want no cottage in the country now. I'm going away to a much better place, ain't I, Connie?" "Oh! but, Giles, I don't want to think that--I don't want to," answered Connie, the tears raining down her cheeks. "'Tis real good fur me, though, Connie. I used to pine sore fur the country; but it have come hover me lately that in winter it 'ud be dull--scarcely any flowers, and no birds singing, nor nothink. Now, in heaven there's no winter. 'A land o' pure delight,' the hymn calls it, 'and never-withering flowers.' So you see, Connie, heaven must be a sight better than the country, and of course I'd rayther go there; only I'm thinking as 'tis sech a pity 'bout Sue." "Yes, I wish as Sue was home," said Connie. "Connie dear, couldn't we send her a message to come straight home to me now? I'm so feared as she'll fret real hard ef she comes wid news of that cottage and finds me gone." "I'll look fur her; I will find her," said Connie with sudden energy. Then she rose and drew down the blinds. "I'll find Sue ef I can, Giles; and now you will go to sleep." "Will you sing to me? When you sing, and I drop off to sleep listening, I allers dream arterwards of heaven." "What shall I sing?" "'There is a land of pure delight.'" CHAPTER XXXVI. A CRISIS. Connie went downstairs and stood in the doorway. She had gone through a good deal during these last adventurous weeks, and although still it seemed to those who knew her that Connie had quite the prettiest face in all the world, it was slightly haggard now for a girl of fourteen years, and a little of its soft plumpness had left it. Connie had never looked more absolutely pathetic than she did at this moment, for her heart was full of sorrow for Giles and of anxiety with regard to Sue. She would keep her promise to the little boy--she would find Sue. As she stood and thought, some of the roughest neighbors passed by, looked at the child, were about to speak, and then went on. She was quite in her shabby, workaday dress; there was nothing to rouse jealousy about her clothes; and the "gel" seemed in trouble. The neighbors guessed the reason. It was all little Giles. Little Giles was soon "goin' aw'y." "It do seem crool," they said one to the other, "an' that sister o' his nowhere to be found." Just then, who should enter the house but kind Dr. Deane. He stopped when he saw Connie. "I am going up to Giles," he said. "How is the little chap?" "Worse--much worse," said Connie, the tears gathering in her eyes. "No news of his sister, I suppose?" "No, sir--none." "I am sorry for that--they were such a very attached pair. I'll run up and see the boy, and bring you word what I think about him." The doctor was absent about a quarter of an hour. While he was away Connie never moved, but stood up leaning against the door-post, puzzling her brains to think out an almost impossible problem. When the doctor reappeared she did not even ask how Giles was. Kind Dr. Deane looked at her; his face was wonderfully grave. After a minute he said: "I think, Connie, I'd find that little sister as quickly as I could. The boy is very, very weak. If there is one desire now in his heart, however, it is just to see Sue once more." "I ha' give him my word," said Connie. "I'm goin' to find Sue ef--ef I never see Giles agin." "But you mustn't leave him for long," said the doctor. "Have you no plan in your head? You cannot find a girl who is lost as Sue is lost in this great London without some clue." "I ain't got any clue," said Connie, "but I'll try and find Pickles." "Whoever is Pickles?" asked the doctor. "'E knows--I'm sartin sure," said Connie. "I'll try and find him, and then----" "Well, don't leave Giles alone. Is there a neighbor who would sit with him?" "I won't leave him alone," said Connie. The doctor then went away. Connie was about to return to Giles, if only for a few minutes, when, as though in answer to an unspoken prayer, the red-headed Pickles appeared in sight. His hair was on end; his face was pale; he was consumed with anxiety; in short, he did not seem to be the same gay-hearted Pickles whom Connie had last met with. When he saw Connie, however, the sight of that sweet and sad face seemed to pull him together. "Now must I give her a blow, or must I not?" thought Pickles to himself. "It do seem 'ard. There's naught, a'most, I wouldn't do for pore Cinderella; but w'en I have to plant a dart in the breast of that 'ere most beauteous crittur, I feels as it's bitter 'ard. W'y, she 'ud make me a most captiwatin' wife some day. Now, Pickles, my boy, wot have you got in the back o' your 'ead? Is it in love you be--an' you not fourteen years of age? Oh, fie, Pickles! What would yer mother s'y ef she knew?" Pickles slapped his hand with a mighty thump against his boyish breast. "That's the w'y to treat nonsense," he said aloud. "Be'ave o' yerself, Pickles--fie for shame, Pickles! That 'ere beauteous maid is to be worshipped from afar--jest like a star. I do declare I'm turnin' po-ettical!" "Pickles!" called Connie at this moment. "Stop!" "Pickles be 'ere," replied the youth, drawing up before Connie and making a low bow. "Giles is worse, Pickles," said Connie, "an' wot's to be done?" Pickles's round face grew grave. "Is 'e wery bad?" he asked. "So bad that he'll soon go up to God," said Connie. Her eyes filled with tears; they rolled down her cheeks. "Bright as dimants they be," thought the boy as he watched her. "Precious tears! I could poetise 'bout them." "Pickles," said Connie again, "I have made Giles a promise. He sha'n't die without seeing Sue. I'm sartin sure, Pickles, that you could take me to Sue now--I'm convinced 'bout it--and I want you to do it." "Why do you think that?" asked Pickles. "'Cos I do," said Connie. "'Cos of the way you've looked and the way you've spoken. Oh, dear Pickles, take me to her now; let me bring her back to little Giles to-night!" Once again that terribly mournful expression, so foreign to Pickles's freckled face, flitted across it. "There!" he said, giving himself a thump. "W'en I could I wouldn't, and now w'en I would I can't. I don't know where she be. She's lost--same as you were lost--w'ile back. She's disappeared, and none of us know nothink about her." "Oh! is she really lost? How terrible that is!" said Connie. "Yus, she's lost. P'r'aps there's one as could find her. Connie, I 'ate beyond all things on 'arth to fright yer or say an unkind thing to yer; but to me, Connie, you're a star that shines afar. Yer'll fergive the imperence of my poetry, but it's drawn from me by your beauty." "Don't talk nonsense now, Pickles," said Connie. "Things are too serious. We must find Sue--I must keep my promise." "Can you bear a bit o' pine?" said Pickles suddenly. "Pain?" said Connie. "I've had a good deal lately. Yes, I think--I think I can bear it." "Mind yer," said Pickles, "it's this w'y. I know w'y Sue left yer, and I know w'y she ain't come back. It's true she 'aven't give herself hup yet, although she guv me to understand as she were 'bout to go to prison." "To prison?" said Connie, springing forward and putting her hand on Pickles's shoulder. "Sue--the most honest gel in all the world--go to prison?" "Oh yes," said Pickles, "yer might call her honest; but w'en she goes into a pawnshop an' comes hout agin wid a golden dimant locket a-hid in her pocket, there are people as won't agree wid yer, an' that's the solemn truth, Connie." Connie's face was very white. "I don't believe it," she said. "Yer don't?" cried Pickles. "But I were there at the time. But for me she would ha' been locked up long ago. But I tuk pity on her--'avin' my own suspicions. I hid her and disguised her. Wot do yer think I come 'ere for so often but jest to comfort the poor thing an' bring her news o' Giles? Then all of a suddn't my suspicions seemed confirmed. I guessed wot I see is workin' in your mind--that some one else done it an' putt the blame on 'er. Oh, I'm a born detective. I putt my wits in soak, an' soon I spotted the guilty party. Bless yer, Connie! ye're right--Sue be honest--honest as the day--noble, too--more nobler nor most folk. Pore Sue! Pore, plain Cinderella! Oh, my word! it's beauteous inside she be--an' you're beauteous outside. Outside beauty is captiwatin', but the hinner wears best." "Go on," said Connie; "tell me wot else you 'ave in yer mind." "It's this: yer may own up to it, an' there's no use beatin' about the bush. The guilty party wot stole the locket an' transferred it by sleight-of-'and to poor Sue is no less a person than yer own father, Connie Harris." Connie fell back, deadly pale. "No--no!" she said. "No--no! I am sartin sure 'tain't that way." "Yus, but it be that way--I tell yer it be. You ax 'im yerself; there's no time for muddlin' and a-hidin' o' the truth. You ax the man hisself." "Father!" said Connie. "Father!" Harris, wrangling with another workman, was now seen approaching. When he perceived his daughter and Pickles, his first impulse was to dart away down a side-street; but Pickles, that most astute young detective, was too sharp for him. "No," he said, rushing at the man and laying his hand on his shoulder. "Giles is bad, an' we can't find Sue no'ow, and yer must tell the truth." Harris did not know why his heart thumped so heavily, and why a sort of wild terror came over him; but when Connie also joined Pickles, and raising her eyes to the rough man's face, said, "Be it true or be it lies, you are my own father and I'll niver turn agin yer," her words had a most startling effect. Harris trembled from head to foot. "S'y that agin, wench," he muttered. "You're mine--I'll not turn agin yer," said Connie. "Then why--wot 'ave I done to deserve a child like this? There, Pickles! you know--and you ha' told Connie--it's all the truth. There come a day w'en I wanted money, an' I were met by sore temptation. I tuk the dimant locket w'en the pawnbroker 'ad 'is back turned on me; but as I were leavin' the shop--Sue bein' by my side--I suddenly saw him pokin' his finger into the place where it had been. I knew it were all up. I managed to slip the locket into Sue's pocket, and made off. I ha' been near mad since--near mad since!" "Small wonder!" said Pickles. "An' do yer know that she 'ad made up her mind to go to prison 'stead o' you?" "You told me so," said Harris--"at least you told me that she was goin' to prison instead o' the guilty party." "Wull," said Pickles, "yer own 'eart told yer 'oo was the guilty party." "That's true, youngster." "Father," said Connie, "we can't find Sue anywhere, and Giles is dying, and we must get her, and you must help." "Help?" said Harris. "Yes, I'll help. I won't leave a stone unturned. She wanted to save me, knowing the truth. Wull, I'll save and find her, knowin' the truth." "I will come with you," said Connie. "I want to go wid yer; only wot am I to do with Giles?" "Don't worrit 'bout him," said Pickles. "I'm 'ere to be o' sarvice to you, Miss Connie--and to you, sir, now as you 'ave come ter yer right mind." "Then I will come with you, father," said Connie. "We'll both go together and find Sue." As Pickles was entering the house he popped his head out again. "I forgot to mention," he said, "as hinquiries o' the most strict and dertective character 'ave been institooted by yer 'umble sarvant for poor Cinderella--I mean Sue. They've led to no results. There's nothing now but one o' the hospitals." It is very doubtful whether Pickles believed himself the clue he had unexpectedly given to Harris and Connie, but certain it is that they immediately began their investigations in those quarters. From one hospital to another they went, until at last they found Sue in bed in St. Thomas's Hospital--flushed, feverish, struggling still to hide her secret in order that when she was better she might save Peter Harris. The poor child was rather worse than usual that evening, and the surgeon who had set her leg was slightly anxious at her feverish symptoms. He said to the nurse who was taking charge of the little girl: "That child has a secret on her mind, and it is retarding her recovery. Do you know anything about her?" "No, sir. It is very awkward," said the nurse, "but from the first she has refused to give her name, calling herself nothing but Cinderella." "Well," said the doctor, "but Cinderella--she doesn't seem touched in the head?" "Oh no," said the nurse; "it isn't that. She's the most sensible, patient child we have in the ward. But it's pitiful to see her when she thinks no one is listening. Nothing comforts her but to hear Big Ben strike. She always cheers up at that, and murmurs something below her breath which no one can catch." "Well, nurse," said the doctor, "the very best thing would be to relieve her mind--to get her to tell you who her people are, and to confide any secret which troubles her to you." "I will try," said the nurse. She went upstairs after her interview with the doctor, and bending over Sue, took her hot hand and said gently: "I wish, little Cinderella, you would tell me something about yourself." "There's naught to tell," said Sue. "But--you'll forgive me--I am sure there is." "Ef you was to ask me for ever, I wouldn't tell then," said Sue. "Ah! I guessed--there is something." "Yes--some'ut--but I can't bear it--the Woice in the air is so beautiful." "What voice?" asked the nurse, who feared that her little patient would suddenly become delirious. "It's Big Ben hisself is talkin' to me and to my darling, darling little brother." "Oh! you have a little brother, Cinderella?" "Yus, a cripple. But don't ask me no more. The Woice gives me strength, and I won't niver, niver tell." "What does Big Ben say? I don't understand." "No," said Sue; "and p'r'aps ye're not wanted to understand. It's for me and for him, poor darling, that Woice is a real comfort." The nurse left her little charge a few minutes afterwards. But before she went off duty she spoke to the night nurse, and confessed that she was anxious about the child, who ought to be recovering, and certainly would but for this great weight of trouble on her mind. All these things, which seemed in themselves unimportant, bore directly on immediate events; for when Connie and Harris arrived at St. Thomas's Hospital and made inquiries with regard to a little, freckled girl, with an honest face and sturdy figure, the hall porter went to communicate with one of the nurses, and the nurse he communicated with turned out to be the night nurse in the very ward where Sue was lying--so suffering, so ill and sorely tried. Now, the nurse, instead of sending word that this was not the hour for visiting patients, took the trouble to go downstairs herself and to interview Connie and her father. Connie gave a faithful description of Sue, and then the nurse admitted that there was a little girl in the hospital who was now in the children's surgical ward. She had been brought in a day or two ago, having a broken leg, owing to a street accident. She was a very patient, good child, but there was something strange about her--nothing would induce her to tell her name. "Then what do you call her?" asked Harris. He was still full of inward tremors, for at that moment he was thinking that of all the sweet sights on earth, that sight would be little Sue's plain face. "Have yer no name for the pore child?" he repeated. "Yes," said the nurse. "She calls herself Cinderella." "It's Sue! It's Sue herself father! God has led us to her--and it's Sue her very own self!" Poor Connie, who had borne up during so many adventures, who had faced the worst steadfastly and without fear, broke down utterly now. She flung herself into her father's arms and sobbed. "Hush, wench hush!" said the rough man. "I am willin' to do hall that is necessary.--Now then, nurse," he continued, "you see my gel--she's rather upset 'bout that pore Cinderella upstairs. But 'ave yer nothing else to say 'bout her?" "She acts in a strange way," said the nurse. "The only thing that comforts her is the sound of Big Ben when he strikes the hour. And she did speak about a little cripple brother." "Can us see her?" asked Connie just then. "It is certainly against the rules, but--will you stay here for a few minutes and I'll speak to the ward superintendent?" The nurse went upstairs. She soon returned. "Sister Elizabeth has given you permission to come up and see the child for a few minutes. This, remember, is absolutely against the ordinary rules; but her case is exceptional, and if you can give her relief of mind, so much the better." Then Connie and her father followed the nurse up the wide, clean stairs, and down the wide, spotless-looking corridors, until they softly entered a room where many children were lying, some asleep, some tossing from side to side with pain. Sue's little bed was the fifth from the door, and Sue was lying on her back, listening intently, for Big Ben would soon proclaim the hour. She did not turn her head when the nurse and the two who were seeking her entered the ward; but by-and-by a voice, not Big Ben's, sounded on her ear, and Connie flung herself by her side and covered her hand with kisses. "You don't think, Sue, do yer," said Connie, "that _us_ could stop seekin' yer until we found yer?" Sue gave a startled cry. "Connie--Connie! Oh Connie! 'ow is Giles?" "'E wants yer more than anything in all the world." "Then he--he's--still alive?" "Yus, he's still alive; but he wants yer. He thought you was in the country, gettin' pretty rooms for you and him. But oh, Sue! he's goin' to a more beautiful country now." Sue didn't cry. She was about to say something, when Harris bent forward. "God in 'eaven bless yer!" he said in a husky voice. "God in 'eaven give back yer strength for that noble deed yer ha' done for me an' mine! But it's all at an end now, Susan--all at an end--for I myself 'ave tuk the matter in 'and, an' hall you 'as to do is to get well as fast as ever yer can for the sake o' Giles." "You mustn't excite her any more to-night," said the nurse then, coming forward; "seeing," she added, "that you have given the poor little thing relief. You can come again to-morrow; but now she must stay quiet." Late as the hour was when Harris and Connie left St. Thomas's Hospital, Harris turned to Connie. "I've some'ut to do--and to-night. Shall I take yer 'ome first, or wull yer come with me?" "Oh, I will come with you, father," said Connie. "Wull then, come along." They walked far--almost as far as Cheapside. Connie could not imagine why her father was taking her into a certain dingy street, and why he suddenly stopped at a door which had not yet been shut for the night. "I thought as there were a chance of findin' him up," he said. "Come right in, gel." Connie entered, and the next minute Harris was addressing the pawnbroker from whom he had stolen the locket. "I 'ave a word to say with you," he remarked; and then he related the circumstances of that day, several weeks ago now. "But we found it," said the pawnbroker, "in the pocket of the young gel." "It was I as put it there," said Harris. "It was I--the meanest wretch on 'arth. But I've come to my senses at last. You can lock me up ef yer like. I'll stay 'ere; I won't even leave the shop ef yer want to deliver the real thief over to justice." The pawnbroker stared at the man; then he looked at Connie. There is no saying what he might have done; but Connie's face, with its pleading expression, was enough to disarm any one. "The fact is," he began "this sort o' thing ought to be punished, or however could poor folks live? But it's a queer thing. When the young gel vanished, as it seemed, into the depths of the 'arth, and I 'ad got my property back, I tuk no further trouble. In course, now that you 'ave delivered yerself up, it seems a'most fair that the law should take its course." "That's wot I think," said Harris. "Make a short job of it, man. Call in a constable; 'e can take me to Bow Street to-night." "No 'urry, man," said the pawnbroker. "I want yer to tell me some'ut more. Is that other little party alive or dead? It seems to me as though the 'arth must 'ave swallered her up." "I will tell you," said Connie; and she did relate Sue's story--as much as she knew of it--and with such pathos that even that pawnbroker, one of the hardest of men, felt a queer softness about his heart. "Wull," he said--"wull, it's a queer world! To think o' that child plannin' things out like that! And ef she ad come to me, I might ha' believed her, too. Wull now, she be a fine little crittur. An' s'pose"--he glanced at Harris--"I don't prosecute you, there's no call, to my way o' thinkin'. And the fact is, I'm too busy to be long out of the shop. Don't you steal no more, neighbor. You ha' got off dirt-cheap this time, but don't you steal no more." CHAPTER XXXVII. THE HAPPY GATHERING. There came a day in the early spring of that year when a great many pleasant things happened to the people who have been mentioned in this story. Connie's room was very bright with flowers--spring flowers--which had been sent to her all the way from Eastborough by Mrs. Cricket. Quantities of primroses were placed in a huge bowl, and the sun came feebly in at the window and seemed to kiss and bless the flowers. There were also some early buttercups and quantities of violets. Giles was neither better nor worse, but perhaps on this day he was a little bit on the side of better. It was so beautiful to think that Sue was coming back! Oh, this was a wonderful day! Sue was well again; Connie was happy; Harris was never tired of doing all he could both for Connie and Giles; and other people were happy too, for Sue's return was to be marked by a sort of holiday--a sort of general feast. To this feast was invited--first, Mrs. Anderson; then Ronald, who happened to be staying in London and was deeply excited at the thought of seeing Connie once more; and also dear Father John, who would not have missed such an occasion for the wide world. Of course, Pickles could not be left out of such a gathering; but he could scarcely be considered a guest, for did he not belong, so to speak, to the family, and was not dear Sue, in particular, his special property? Mrs. Anderson supplied the good things for the feast. This she insisted upon. So Connie spread quite a lordly board--cold meats not a few, some special delicacies for Giles, and a splendid frosted cake with the word "Cinderella" written in pink fairy writing across the top. This special cake had been made by Mrs. Price, and Pickles had brought it and laid it with immense pride on a dish in the centre of the table. "Yus," said Connie, "it do look purty, don't it? Wot with good things to eat, and wot with flowers, it's quite wonderful." When everything was arranged, Connie went into a little room to put on once again her dark-blue dress, and to unplait her thick hair and allow it to fall over her shoulders. "It's for Ronald," she said. "Ronald wouldn't know me without my hair down." Then, one by one, the visitors made their appearance--Father John, who sat down by Giles's side and held his hand, and by his mere presence gave the boy the greatest possible comfort; and Pickles, whose face was shining with hard rubbing and soap and water, and whose red hair stuck upright all over his head. Then Mrs. Anderson came in and sat down, and gave a gentle look first at Giles and then at Connie; and Connie felt that she loved her better than ever, and Giles wondered if he would meet many with faces like hers in heaven. In short, every one had arrived at last except the little heroine. But hark! there was a sound outside as though some vehicle had stopped at the door. Giles's breath came fast. There were steps on the stairs, and two porters from the hospital carried Sue in between them. "Oh, I can really walk," she said. "And oh, Giles--Giles!--Please put me down, porter; I really, really can walk." "Jest as himpatient as ever, Cinderella!" said Pickles, who always tried, as was his custom, to be specially funny in pathetic times. Sue glanced at him, but could not speak just then. There are moments in our lives when no words will come. She went up to Giles and hid her face on his pillow. Poor little Sue had a bitterly hard fight with herself, for that face, which belonged not to earth, unnerved her, notwithstanding the rapture of seeing it once again. But Giles himself was the first to recover composure. "We are 'avin' such a feast!" he said. "An' it's all _so_ beautiful! Now then, Sue I do 'ope as ye're 'ungry." After that Ronald spoke and made the others laugh; and Sue bustled about, just as though she were at home, and Connie helped her; and very soon they all crowded round the table, except Giles, who had his dainty morsels brought to him by Sue's own hands. Thus they ate and laughed and were merry, although perhaps the laughter was a little subdued and the merriment a trifle forced. It was when the feast was quite over that Father John spoke a few words--just a very few--about the love and goodness of God, and how He had brought His wandering sheep home again to the fold, and how He had helped Connie in dark times, and Ronald in dark times, and Sue in dark times. "And He is helping Giles, and will be with him to the end," said the street preacher. "And now," he added, "I think Giles is very tired and would like to be all alone with Sue. Suppose, neighbors, we go into the next room." The opening of the door of the next room was one of the surprises which had been planned by Connie and her father. As he was now earning such really excellent wages, and as he had taken the pledge and meant to keep it, he felt he was entitled to another room. It was neatly furnished. There was a fire burning in the grate, and there were white muslin curtains to the windows. Connie spoke of it with great pride as the "drawing-room," and Pickles assured her that even to set foot in that room was enough to make Connie a "lydy" on the spot. When they were alone Sue and Giles talked softly one to the other. "The blessed Woice," said Sue, "'ave been with me all the w'y." "And with me," said Giles. "You won't go jest yet, Giles," said Sue. "Wery soon--but not quite yet," he answered. Sue smiled and kissed his hand, and they talked as those who have been long parted, and know they must be parted soon again, will talk, when heart meets heart. In the other room people were not more cheerful, but at least more glad. "There is nothing left to wish for," said Pickles. "It's just the best thing in all the world for little Giles to get quite well up in heaven. Ain't it now?" he added, looking at Father John. "Yes," said Father John very briefly. Then he turned to Connie. "You must never forget all that you have lived through, Connie," he said. "You'll be a better and a braver girl just because of these dark days." "She's the best wench on 'arth," said Harris. Suddenly Ronald sprang forward and spoke. "Uncle Stephen said I was to tell you he has bought the cottage in the country where Mrs. Cricket lives and he's adding to it and making it most beautiful, and dear Mrs. Cricket is to be housekeeper, and you're all to come down in the summer--all of you--even Giles; and Giles is to stay there as long as he lives. Uncle Stephen is a splendid man," continued Ronald. "It was after him my darling V. C. father took when he became so great and brave and manly, and I love Uncle Stephen better than any one except father. Father hasn't come home yet, and perhaps I won't see him until Giles sees his father. But I'm a very, very happy boy, and it's all because of Uncle Stephen. Now, the rest of you can be happy too in my cottage--Uncle Stephen says it _is_ my cottage--in the beautiful country." * * * * * These things came to pass, and even Giles went for a short time to the beautiful country, where the flowers grew in such abundance, and where the birds sang all day long. "Now you can guess," he said to Sue after they had been there a fortnight or more, "some little bit about the joys of the Land of Pure Delight." * * * * * Transcriber's Notes 1. This book makes extensive use of dialect. Original spellings of words in dialect have been retained. 2. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. 3. Table of Contents added in this text was not present in original edition. 4. One word has been changed from the original to correctly identify the speaker, Agnes, replying to Connie's question: p. 27 original: "Wot sort?" asked Connie. replacement: "Wot sort?" asked Agnes. 
63709	----	Prisoner of the Brain-Mistress By BRYCE WALTON The silver sphere bobbed beside the Brain. It began to glow, and suddenly to expand, and I felt myself drawn toward it. Then I became part of it, part of the heat and brightness and whirling, and I could feel myself melting away--until I became nothing.... [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There are all kinds of men labeled with all sorts and degrees of psycho tags. For what it's worth, I have always been primarily motivated by an insatiable urge for action. I have always awakened with faculties sharp and eyes clear, ready for any emergency of which there are plenty in these chaotic years of social adjustment from the Twentieth to the Twenty-fifth Century. This awakening I knew would exceed in magnitude any I had known. I knew I was in a place to which the little alien man had brought me. I was stretched out on a smooth cold table of metal. I was also aware of a contraption of unknown purpose clamped about my skull, and my entire store of bodily faculties seemed vitally prepared for any eventuality, as though steeling itself for a subconsciously preconceived super-human effort. I still hesitated about opening my eyes. It wasn't from physical fear which I have learned to convert into mental and physical energy. There was a fear of that alienness. Alien was the word for the little man with the bulbous head and crinkled little face of a premature child. I knew that his outer dress and hairless, swollen and blue-veined skull, and the invisible electronic force that had brought us here, were all of some other time, world, dimension, or something of all three. It wasn't exceptional on my part to be thinking of such fantastic possibilities in such a calm and detached a manner. Nothing seems fantastic anymore to a Twenty-fifth Centurian. Nothing. What we have not actually seen practiced through the marvels of chemistry and electronics, we have been trained to believe possible. We have two great goals facing us around the corner of probability--an Elixir of Life from some bio-chemical laboratory, and a ship constructed for an ultimate landing on a distant star. But first, we must readjust the various political factions which prevent integration of human potential. The last effort is the gigantic one. All other sciences have advanced beyond the science of society which is still infantile, but learning to walk more or less alone. The goal of global social integration is in sight, but the battle will still be long and difficult. This all leads to the body of this story--to the World-City of Mohln, to which the Scientist, Draken, brought me for the fulfillment of a grandiose and necessary, but horribly destructive destiny. When the Fascisti wormed their way underground after their crushing defeat by the forces of World Democracy, after the close of that episode of evolutionary birth pangs called World War II, they created a small, evil and powerful recalcitrant force of reaction, seeking to regain minority control over the Earth Mass. Their threat is their secrecy. They never work openly; they are too small in number; but their acts of sabotage and political intrigue is disheartening at times, and a constant threat to our Administrative balance. As elected Commander of the International Secret Police, my sole duty is to combat the specially trained cult of sabateurs of our democratic World-State, the Black Spartans. Somehow that night--I've never been able to find the leak--two of them gained the top of my apartment building and were hiding on the roof landing as I stepped out to enter my jet-car. * * * * * There was no warning, no challenge. Their aim was simply to burn me out. Some well-trained intuitive sense threw me in a long dive forward and sidewise as the shaft of deadly heat crackled past and smoked beside my outstretched hand. My E-special blaster was out and ready even as I hit the fine plastic mesh of the roof. I twisted over and burned a swath in their direction. I came up to one knee, keeping their area lanced with rays, then to my feet, going to one side and trying to distinguish their black plastic suits from the shadows. A form stumbled out of the thick dark. It was half bent forward, grasping its middle. I smelled scorched flesh and knew he must be mortally injured, but I couldn't afford to underestimate the fanatical power of a Spartan. He was still coming at me, so I burned him again, watched him crumble and sag. That was an error. The other Spartan, who was still somewhere back in the shadows of the collonade, blasted my arm, burning it half through. I watched my fingers curl and my E-special fall out and away slowly as in a dream. There wasn't pain, physical pain. There was sheer mental anguish as I visualized myself closing my career of duty for the World-State, a failure. I knew what they wanted with my corpse. Dead, my cerebrum would be removed, activated, and its mental storage released through electronic recorders the Spartan scientists had developed. They preferred a brain taken from death as there was no slightest difficulty from conscious or even subconscious resistance. But the Spartan couldn't burn me without a parting voice. His egomania demanded that I see and hear the power that had defeated me. He came out of the shadows, a black muscled melodramatic outline. "Goodby," he slurred in a thick accent. "For a reputed great man, you employ pathetic guards. Your force is growing weak and negligent, Allinger. Soon our long wait and our long fight will reach its victorious end, even as you reach your shameful end now." The Spartan tensed his blaster and I leaped straight into it, desperately, because I had nothing to lose. I never got to him, and his blaster never got to me. I hit something painfully and bounced off. My arm was a lump of burning agony as I thudded to the roof, stunned by an impact with an invisible barrier. The Spartan was discharging his blaster at me, but the power rebounding flung him to his knees. The blaster was knocked over the side of the roof-landing, and the Spartan staggered to his feet again, and weaved back. Then, abruptly, his eyes bulged with awe that changed to terror. He backed away, staring, not at me, but at something beside me. Then the Spartan disappeared suddenly. I heard a faint _whirring_ that rose up and faded rapidly. For an instant I followed the sound of the jet-car as it receded toward the red moon outlining the archaic structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, then I turned to see what had saved my life. It had been prolonged at least. I hadn't been at all surprised to see the little man appear on the private jet-car landing of my San Francisco apartment. There had been no sound, only coruscating shifting hues of light that materialized him, not like the magic of old, but with all the magnificent and unlimited magic of science. He stood there juggling the huge silver globe like a bubble toy, but one that certainly could never burst. His long, delicate arms and legs and torso couldn't have lifted twenty pounds without straining. The silver sphere must be elevated by unknown forces of its own. The little man's body, only a bit more than bone tightly stretched over with transparent, form fitting material, swayed toward me. The pinched up, chalk face in the midst of that bulging head studied me with enigmatic lack of expression that was extremely disconcerting. I could read plenty of purpose behind the blankness. So much elaborate ritual demanded proportionate purpose. The ancient bulky structure of the Bridge twinkled its lights against the night sky behind the little man. Or was it the twitching of my eyes? I was preparing for a run over to the Federal Building for a meeting of the Pacific Defense Zone of the International Peace Maintenance Fleet, but, important as that meeting was to be, I had forgotten it completely. * * * * * His voice was nasal, squeaky, and somehow contemptuous. It was halting, too, difficult to follow. I doubted if he had ever employed the International symbols before. In fact, I intuitively knew that he was either not of my time at all, or not of my world. "I have studied the psychology of all potential men for the task that is to follow. I have chosen you, Ivan Allinger." "Should I be flattered?" I studied him, but could reach no conclusion. The face puckered more. "Flattered?" The meaning of the word seemed to escape him for a moment. "Perhaps. It is a great task. I have not chosen you because of your physical attributes alone, although they seem exceptional enough. Your ideological background will synchronize perfectly with the job that you must do in Mohln." "Mohln?" "It is another world. A future and far distant one." "You are from some future time? Really?" "Yes. Mohln is another planet of this system, to which your descendants will migrate in a length of time you would label one million years. Our greatest scientist, the atavistic female, Jokan, demanded that I go back into the past of the race and seek out an object for her laboratory experiments." I accepted him as he presented himself, which is always advisable under such circumstances. "I'm afraid that doesn't sound inviting at all," I explained. "A guinea pig of some sort for future scientific probing. Sorry." I started away, though I knew he could stop me when he pleased. It was a test. But he stopped me with a word. "Wait, Ivan." I turned. "Yes?" "My reasons for choosing you are different from Jokan's reasons. Let me explain." He tottered toward me weakly on his spindly legs. I towered over him as he squinted up into my face. "There are many reasons why I cannot allow your refusal," he said. "One great reason that ties you with destiny." I tried to escape then, feeling that he was right. I knew that a series of unimaginable events were twisting me into cosmic circumstances. Circumstances too gigantic to even excite amazement or disbelief, only stunned passivity. I wasn't able to execute an about face or the lifting of one leg that might possibly have sent me beyond the range of the little man's potentiality. I had forgotten the silver sphere which bobbed beside him as a monstrous toy might. It began to glow and expand into a great bulb of incandescence, and it caught me immediately and paralyzed me, and sucked me into realms of cosmology beyond the wildest imaginings of all the Einsteins. I actually felt the sensation of melting. Of melting and flowing as an integral part of space-time, for want of a better phrase. I was an atomic drop of liquid poured into a river without beginning, end or embankments. Perfection was an empty, archaic word to me. I had never thought it could be intellectually employed, and I was especially careful not to apply it to that shifting abstract--woman. I was looking at it now. A perfect woman. A creation molded from centuries of perfection; a creation of symmetric loveliness that was literally and figuratively out of this world. My last day on Earth was ended. I had opened my eyes. I saw first that some miracle of science had reconstructed the burned away half of my right arm. Then I noticed the woman. I was sitting bolt upright in an instant on the smooth metal table. The little man with his strange "Buck Rogers" dress was looking quietly at me. And she was looking at me, too, out of slitted lids that veiled all the women of the ages in subtly yet violently burning eyes. She lifted a jeweled hand. Her sensual lips trembled a little before they parted, and strong white teeth gleamed provocatively between the red lines. I started, and gripped hard at the edges of the table. Was this the way a woman scientist studied coldly and objectively a prospective laboratory subject? I looked questioningly at the little wizened man who had kidnaped me from my own world. His blank face showed me nothing. Then, when she spoke.... I don't want to take unnecessary time at this point or any other to explain or describe this woman, Jokan. I doubt if you could visualize her anyway, even if I occupied this entire narrative describing her, because she was too strangely lovely. She was perfection, as I've said, and that's all. Her voice was music, and I involuntarily started toward her as she spoke. * * * * * "Withdraw the brain recorder, Draken," she said softly, not taking those icy eyes from mine. The little man, Draken, complied. She pointed to a great three-dimensional chart extending across the laboratory. It was made up of shifting convolutions and numerical graphs and complicated combinations of shadings corresponding to brain patterns. "That is your brain, Ivan," she said. Her voice was cold, completely frozen, and yet--"We know all about you." I felt a little disappointment along with the relief. She turned toward Draken. "You made a great mistake, Draken. Bringing in an Intellectual was a foolish thing to do." Draken objected. "But you said you wanted a good physical specimen. This man is. You defined your requested specimen in no greater detail." "But you should know that an intellectual can cause difficulties. This man would be considered a god among the women. Perhaps even among the men. Mohln is at a point where such an element as this could precipitate disaster, create perhaps a germ of dissatisfaction with our great order. Or is that, by chance, what you intend?" Draken backed away. "No, it isn't." "Don't let the presence of this man be known beyond these four walls, or out of your own laboratory. For your sake and mine, heed my suggestion, Draken." "Yes," quivered Draken. "I am heeding it. But you know my attitude toward this _great_ order. You know how I regard the maintenance of the Status Quo." I knew it too, from the way his pallid lips curled. This little man hated the Mohln system, whatever it was. Jokan got languidly to her feet, a fluid musical allegro. "I know, Draken. If you weren't the greatest thinker in Mohln besides myself, I would report you to the Council for the Maintenance of the Status Quo. But as long as you only think idly, you can cause Mohln no harm." "The only harm Mohln can suffer," said Draken wearily, "is to continue on as it does now. Toward final decay and rot." Jokan laughed frostily. I shivered. "Stop worrying, Draken, and go away. I must begin my experiments." She turned her eyes on me. She could have stared down a bronze statue. I turned my eyes from hers on the pretense of looking for Draken, but he was gone. I jumped to my feet, and the movement revealed that I, too, had on the costume that Draken wore. Without egoism, I can say that it must have looked more becoming on me than on the little scientist. I was at least a foot taller than Jokan. She came toward me, fluid motion. I couldn't back away--I insist I wanted to get away for various reasons, the least being that I wanted to get solid on my mental feet--from the metal table. I looked almost frantically for a door or some kind of exit, even a window. There was nothing. Then those perfect arms slipped around my neck and that body pressed itself against mine and-- I am only human. That's a trite enough excuse, if an excuse is necessary, but under those conditions I could certainly do no less. I let my arms come around her perfect waist, and I bent her back in the most acceptable televex manner and planted a long solid one right on those perfect lips--lips I'm very certain had never been kissed before. And that was precisely the trouble, perhaps, with that thoughtless, but irresistible, impulse of mine. Her nails were long and sharp and they clawed at my face. Cold light blazed in her eyes, flashing with outraged dignity and burning hate. I swung down and away, sliding across the metal table, and stood with blood running down my face, with the table my only protection between myself and this paradoxical Circe. "Savage," she shrieked, and shrieking was very unbecoming to the cold austerity of her. In fact it was like a cloak I had torn away from her body. "Primal, barbaric beast!" "I'm not quite primal enough to cope with you," I said, looking more frantically still for an exit. There still weren't any exits, but people came into this room, and people went out of it. How? I expected her to vault the table after me, but she lithely backed away, and though I didn't realize it then, her cold brain was summoning her eunuchs from afar. A section of the wall to one side began to glow like a light through semi-opaque glass. The light deepened and began to whirl. And then I saw that there was a kind of opening there. Yes. A kind of opening with something promising no good lumbering through, its head and massive shoulders projecting up out of the shifting mist like a televexed fictional monster. It was a monstrous metal man. A real, animated robot out of an old scientification fabrication. It was coming directly for me. I flashed one look--I think it was a beseeching one--at Jokan. In such instances as that people swallow great lumps of their pride. * * * * * Jokan was stretched up to her complete height against the far wall. Her face was expressionless, and her eyes oozed liquid oxygen. Her hands were strained into fists at her sides. "Atavistic," Draken had said of this female scientist of Mohln. An understatement promising no hope for consideration. I dodged beneath the robot's reaching appendages. There were three arms with a number of variously utilized digits at the end of each. And all of them were wicked. Many of them designed for purposes I couldn't grasp. Anyway I looked at it, the robot represented a perfect mauling and crushing instrument. I can describe it now with a light touch. _Then_ I was trembling with cold fear, and sweat poured off my face as I eluded the robot by dodging about the only fixture in the middle of the room, the table. I noticed a minor motion of Jokan; then I watched, with a hideously empty stomach, the table fold itself into the floor. I leaped to one side and grabbed Jokan, twisted her around in front of me, and said with as little chattering as possible into her perfect pink little ear, "Call them off or--" I tightened my arm about her throat and began bending her head back. She writhed around and kicked me, and her finger nails started their old habit pattern again. But she wasn't used to this sort of thing, and didn't employ any real effeminate technique at all. I continued bending her head back. I could feel her choking and gasping. She knew then that I would kill her. I hadn't asked to come to Mohln, wherever and whenever it was. It was all something I had nothing to do with, that now threatened my life. All directly the responsibility of Jokan. To me, she was a real Circe, deserving no sympathy, only hate, and deserving death. But I could never have actually tried, or threatened to kill her, under less pressing conditions than those. It was simply a case of breaking her neck to save mine, which I consider justified. The metallic digits squeezed shut on each elbow, from behind. I twisted my head upward at the second robot, sweating pain in my eyes. Unfeeling paralysis then, as the digits tore through muscle tendon, nerve fibers and even cracked bone. I was mouthing sounds, probably screaming, hearing my own cries from a great distance, blinded by pain, a mist blurring my eyes. I was lifted straight up, then swung down beneath one implacable arm. I dangled there, my crushed elbows swinging and dripping beneath my face. I saw those perfect little feet come up and stand in front of my tortured eyes. And they _were_ perfect little feet, encased in red sandals to match the blood from my wounds. Even facing torture, and possible death, I thought of them as perfect little feet. I didn't attempt to twist my face upward. I kept on staring crazily at those perfect little feet. There was character and expression in them, different and more sympathetic than the body they supported. They came closer, shifted a bit, uncertain and nervous. I had been brought here as the subject for anatomical research, a laboratory specimen to be dissected. Yet, for an instant, another purpose had shown in Jokan's eyes. I knew that, or did I merely want to know it. I tried to imagine how terribly lonely and maladjusted she must be in a loveless world. Beautiful and to be desired, yet in a loveless, sexless world. With specimens like Draken, I could easily guess that this was the kind of world in which Jokan lived out frustration. Perfect women, and pathetic, skin-and-bone puppets for men. She had said I would be a god among women. Without egoism, again, I could see why. There was too much gross ambiguity. The women and men just didn't seem to be of identical species. And in addition, Jokan was an atavistic. Which wouldn't matter anymore to me, because I was being dragged out of there. Where? Into what? How could I know? I watched those feet fade into blurred distance. They were whirling around as they faded. I knew I was losing all grasp of consciousness. Which was all right, too, because hard after the initial shock, the real excruciating agony was beginning to shoot into my brain. Only a few hours later, that's all, and I was all in one piece again. A more effective and healthy feeling organism than before, thanks to incredible biological treatments I couldn't even guess at. I kept flexing my arms, watching them bend and unbend with questioning fascination. I turned toward Draken. "Why am I still here and alive?" Draken's embryonic face puckered at me like an impish child's. He explained: "Jokan is an atavist as I said. Women have always been noted for their bodies rather than their brains, although potentially their brain capacity has always been equal to the male's. And that cultural error has never been changed. Instead, women have grown more beautiful and symmetrical with the centuries, from the standpoint of decadent and ancient aesthetic values. The men, on the other hand, have always been considered as thinkers rather than as creations of beauty. They have developed brain potential alone, while their physical characteristics have atrophied. "Except for atavists like Jokan, the overly curious longing for the male body, as you represent it, has been conditioned out of the reaction patterns by the psycho-medics by centuries of selection. Jokan, as you have seen, is different. She demanded that I go back to your time, or even further back and return with a man capable of matching her body in physical attraction. You enraged her for a moment, but she has recovered from that momentary emotional unbalance." * * * * * I objected at this point. "But you said I was to be just a laboratory specimen for dissection." "This whole transaction was elaborate and demanded official sanction from the Council. So, on the record, your space-time teleportation is only for biological purposes. You understand." I nodded. It was not an exceptional situation, basically. It seemed that a few million years of evolution can't destroy the fundamental behavior patterns entirely. "A good man's still hard to find?" The little scientist stared in blank affirmation. Then he said: "I could have chosen any number of men who could have satisfied Jokan's demands, perhaps even more thoroughly than you. Don't you wonder why I singled you out? With your background in your world, and your ideological concepts, you were the only one for me to chose--for my own purposes." "Which are--" I prompted. "Neither of the preceding purposes are the basic ones for my asking you to return here with me. The real reason is that you must destroy Mohln." I stared. I turned everything over in my mind, then tried to say calmly: "Why? This is civilization and the apex of human progress for which I face death daily in my own time. Destroy it!" I had begun to regard this little withered man as a first class fanatic, born of highly complicated and advanced psychological conflicts. He said: "When the Earth was enveloped in its final ice sheet, living as we demanded it ceased to be feasible. The pick of human mentality and physiognomy migrated here to Mohln. Here we began our great--what we thought great--new and scientific social order. Yes, it's reached a zenith all right. A zenith of decay and stagnation. Except for a few scientists, Mohln is populated by mindless automatons. Beautiful, mindless women, and great brained, spineless men. They all exist in a futile vacuum." I was watching him narrowly for signs of madness. He looked mad enough, but his squeezed up face was unreadable. I said feebly: "From what little experience I've had here, you seem to have reached a pretty ultimate state of civilization." "That is the great tragedy. There is no ultimate state. That is the great delusion which you must shatter. Everyone, societies, worlds, all seek an ultimate state. Change is the law, and there is no ultimate law. This world of Mohln thinks it has achieved an ultimate perfection. It has, because of the delusion, only succeeded in stagnation. This social structure is neither alive nor dead, Ivan Allinger. It is standing still. The ultimate futility is to be static." "Then you refute yourself," I said, feeling for a sophistic insert. "You have reached an ultimate something." "Only movement is the ultimate goal. And change is success. Advancement--progress is limitless. This culture of Mohln has reached an ultimate lostness. Only one action can shake it back onto the pattern of change. The entire World-City of Mohln must be destroyed, reduced to chaos. Out of this chaos, by trial and error, the people of Mohln must be given the germ of incentive again, and forced by necessity to fight their way back onto new roads of endeavor." I thought hard. I felt familiar struggles in my heart. I understood this. My own life was dedicated, back in my own space and time, to this same effort and goal--to stimulate progress, and change; to destroy all reactionary elements that might lead to permanence. He followed my introspection with words. "You fought in the great wars of your time against the reactionary forces that would have led your society into staticism and decay. You are devoting the present to the furthering of the ideals of progress. Do you want to see all your work, and all the work of all your kind, of your own present, past and future end in--this?" He spread his withered arms about him, encompassing the whole of the World-City of Mohln. "No," I heard myself muttering. "No. I wouldn't want that. I would prevent it, if I could. But I demand more than your words to convince me that this magnificence of organization I see about me is the hopeless futility you are telling me it is." "I will take you out into the city and show you," he said. "But it is strictly against the rules of the Council. And the few intellectuals, the scientists and research technicians don't care anymore about the disintegration of the order about them. In their own little worlds they find something to work on, a stimulus, and they ignore everything else. Like Jokan." * * * * * Draken led me out onto a balcony, and I saw--well, a word that might inspire somewhat explanatory suggestive visions of what I saw, in your own mind, could be the symbol, Utopia. It was an endlessly stretching composite of all social dreams. The mauve lighting that softened the city like a beautiful mist. The mighty, gleaming plastic shells of buildings. Power hung at levels reaching high toward a translucent dome that covered the city. Tiers on tiers of splendidly designed walkways, tubeways and highways networked the spaces between structures. And the air sang with music, more magnificent than all the symphonies of my own time. I forgot the dizzying height, and almost stepped out into the exalting splendor of it. There seemed no danger, as though it were all an endless soft cloud of enchantment into which I could sink, then float buoyed up by dreams and music and shifting light.... But the little tugging fingers of Draken dragged me back. "It is all false," he whispered. "It is all delusion. Beneath all this grandeur the lost puppets dance and sleep, but never live. These words, which are the only words that make a social system worthy of continuation--curiosity, incentive, ambition, drive, longing, dissatisfaction--all meaningless here, all unknown to these pathetic tropisms. If you will come with me, you can see for yourself, and understand." I went with little Draken. I did see for myself. I understood.... And Draken was entirely correct in all that he had said. This World-City of Mohln had achieved an ultimate--an ultimate lostness. It was a magnificent hollow shell of a City. There were no people in it. All the mighty wonder was lost to the semi-living marionettes that wandered through it. But it meant life to them, nevertheless. They never had to exert a finger, nor expend the energy of one thousandth of a gram of thinking energy to live. But the technocratic creations of long preceding times, of even a few still working scientists, kept them alive. But they neither knew this, nor cared. They were fed, clothed, bathed and even reborn by robots. They were put to sleep, awakened, vitalized, and exhausted by machines. They were parasitic non-entities, dependent on the machines that other, _vital_ minds, had built. Back on the balcony, Draken continued in that squeaky, uncertain quaver of his: "Everything here is done by robots. There are different castes of robots. Their functional system is graduated up through ever lessening numbers until it reaches what is only a master switch. One single switch in this World-City, pushed too far--" Draken looked at me suggestively and added hoarsely: "If the master switch was ever pushed too far, this entire civilization, as you call it, would stop functioning with any set mechanical pattern. All the robots and machines and the system they operate would cease activity. There would be your chaos. There would be the needed situation under which the unthinking slaves will have to think for themselves, solve their own problems once again. Or die. I think they will solve them. I have that much faith in them. They always have. So far." It was a statement on Draken's part. But it was really a question. Would I push that master switch--too far? "Why haven't _you_ done this before?" I asked. "Why drag a man from another world, a million years in the past, to do this simple thing?" Draken lowered his head in the first display of real, understandable emotion I had seen in him. Shame. "I can't," he said simply. "I do not have the will, the free will to do it. My intellect tells me it is the correct thing to do. But my psycho-conditioning has created an insurmountable antipathy toward such an act." His dried up monkey-like hands clenched into tiny impotent fists. "Many times I have gone into that room and tried to pull that switch. But each time I have failed. I know now that I shall never be able to. No one in this world could do it until you came. You can. Your age was a dynamic one, of destruction and construction, each inseparable from the other. You could do it, not only with ease, but with the satisfaction of knowing you were taking a necessary step forward in human progress. The question is--will you?" * * * * * A lot of time clambered through my fogged mind then before I formulated a logical sequence of thoughts that led to what seemed to me a logical reply. "I believe I will," I finally answered slowly. "I can't see that there is any other way out." "Execution," a familiarly brittle voice said behind me, and I turned. Draken began whimpering pathetically and cowered back against the colonnade. Jokan stood a few feet from me, wearing a thin, semi-transparent gown that seemed anachronistic and out of place, as though she had gotten the idea for it out of an old history book. Her body was a lithe shadow behind it. But her eyes burned irrascible hatred. "Execution for you, and for Draken; that is a better way." "I wish I could agree," I said. "But you see our concern is for society as a whole, rather than with a small minority that benefit from the apathy and ignorance of the majority. For your satisfaction, and that of a few others, you may be right. Frankly, dear Jokan, though you're very very lovely to look at, your mind is ugly and warped. And I would rather see you dead." I sprang and reached for her. She screamed once, before the robots came in and lumbered for me. I remember mumbling about the monotony of the robot act; as she eluded me, and I eluded them. And I kept on trying to grab Jokan. It was an obsession with me. A quick glance revealed Draken cowered down in his corner, his old child's face twisted in stunned horror. My only intention at that moment was to get my hands around Jokan's perfect neck just one more time. It was a mad, fanatical urge now. I hated her. I hated her with a blind madness. The robots weren't nearly as dexterous as they should have been. Physical encounter was undoubtedly alien to their primary purpose. This place of Draken's was bigger, with a few articles in it, than the laboratory had been. There were pneumatic chairs and couches and ray lamps and vitamin globes. I ducked, sprawled, ran and careened in and out of these rooms and around the strange looking fixtures. I, close on Jokan's sandaled heels, and the robots close on mine. It might even seem more or less a comical scene in retrospect, but-- Then I saw that silver sphere of Draken's, hanging in the air about four feet from the floor, smooth, mysterious, but very suggestive. As I ran back past Draken, I yelled at him. I doubt if Draken understood my words, he was so stricken with horror, but he grasped my meaning, and somehow managed to stagger onto his quavering legs and tottered wild-eyed toward the sphere. But Jokan understood my meaning, too. And through some telepathic direction I still don't understand, she guided the robots onto poor Draken. Draken never had a chance. I don't think he even comprehended conflict. He could neither fight back, nor try to escape. It seemed that violence, either offensive or defensive, was beyond his understanding. That was why he could not bring himself to pull the master switch that would have accomplished his desired destruction of Mohln. That was also the reason why the robot was able to take him into its inexorable metal arms and crush him into something not far removed from pulp. His delicate, deep pocketed eyes looked beseechingly into mine, once. Then the tremendous pressure bulged them horribly and unconsciously at me. His bony arms flapped and waved spasmodically and blood spurted from his small almost invisible ears and equally minute nose. Then his whole frail body seemed to crack through the middle and deflate. At another telepathic command from Jokan, the robot's arms raised and unbent, and the body of Draken thudded on the inlaid floor. I heard myself yelling. I wasn't retreating from the other two robots then, or trying to get away at all. Something gave way inside me. What I had seen just now shocked every sense that might have been ethical or moral in me. One word churned inside my brain. The word was revenge. And then another word was added to it that seemed better. Compensation. Then another word etched in capital letters overshadowed and encompassed the other two. _Kill._ * * * * * The first robot reached out with its very utilitarian and gadget-studded arms to rake me in. I had no idea how much the monster weighed. But the Frankensteinian creation was off balance as it reached for me. I twisted and grasped the metalic tentacle, heaved forward, throwing my hip into the gleaming stomach and heaved down. The robot seemed light-weighted enough as it flew ceilingward, and clanged hollowly against the wall. There was a flash of current, a slight odor of ozone as the teleo-electronic man twitched about at my feet. The violence evidently stunned my fair and wicked Circe. Her telepathic control over the remaining robots faltered and in that instant I seized her. A dead, hot rage swelled through my head and heart so I could hardly draw a breath. I wrenched at her neck, felt it crack dangerously and felt her long sleek muscles tremble against mine. I felt almost bestial in the power of my rage. I twisted sidewise and felt her body give, and heard her breath coming in short jagged whines like a dog's. Her finger nails weren't clawing now. The cold, emotionless cruelty of her eyes was dying behind fear and indecision. She hadn't been reluctant to dream of blood and guts and shattered bones, but too much of the real thing hurt even her atavistic senses. "Keep them off me," I said in her ear. She tried to pull away. I held her at arm's length and began slapping her. Her face was white as powder until red finger marks appeared on it. I hit harder and her perfect upper lip split and a narrow line of blood ran down and stained the dark hollow between her perfect marble breasts. The gold-flecked pupils of her eyes widened, and the horror deepened in back of them. The the horror went out like a flame and the lids with the perfect long lashes blinked over them and tears flowed down as from a weeping statue. I threw a quick circuit about the room. The robots were immobile; tensed, though, for action. At any moment Jokan might regain her Circe faculties and summon them, even if it meant her own life. I didn't know then what emotions surged around inside her strange heart. I lifted her onto my shoulder and started through the rooms. I had no idea how to escape. Whatever inconceivable manner the walls dissolved through the manipulation of incredible advanced force fields, I of course didn't know. But I put three rooms filled with the futuristic mores between myself and the robot minions of Jokan before I dropped her on a pneumatic couch and wrapped my hands about her throat for the third time and began to squeeze. I began slowly and methodically, looking all the time into her eyes. Then I saw it. I saw the real depths of her eyes, and a shock trembled through me. Jokan had changed. How she had changed! She read the implacable purpose in my eyes that I felt in my heart, and as her arms came up, mine slid down softly from about her throat. I kissed her. I lifted her passive softness up and felt it respond. The hands with the feral nails caressed the back of my neck, and her lips were hungry. I had seen in her eyes a change, and had answered it. Then I said: "Lead me to the room that holds the master switch. Then we'll go." She slid out of my arms languidly and onto her feet. She leaned toward me, and her fingers grasped mine. They were warm, not cold; how could they ever have been cold? "Go where?" "Can you run that space-time apparatus that brought me here?" She nodded, then looked fearfully over my face. "Take me to the main switch," I repeated. We went back, and she somehow attracted the translucent, yet not translucent, sphere to her side. It followed after her like a monstrous being, a cosmic slave. She led me toward the wall and it dissolved. I still am not able to understand the phenomenon. We continued through and into an elevator. We dropped down through a blur of distance. She led me through a glowing tunnel and into a tubecar and there was a dim sensation of movement in which we might have sped a thousand miles, or ten thousand. She led me out of the tubecar and we crossed a walkway, where lines of listless people stood moving in various directions. The little swollen-headed men and the tall austere but listless women. They were all going places, but it didn't matter. They had eyes, ears, senses, but they might have been machines reacting through photo-electric devices. I thirsted for the main switch that would send them all into blind chaos. It was a hellish thing for the world I had risked my life many times to build upward and progressively toward greatness. But it had all ended here, a blind alley of despair, and the hell I planned would be its only salvation. Suddenly, from all sides, robots converged on us, directed by a number of the little white-skulled men with velvet togas flapping about slug-white spindly legs. "The Council," said Jokan. "They are afraid now. They attack, and they are half mad because they have been conditioned that such an act of violence is atavism, the inexcusable social crime." * * * * * Their puckered faces, in the center of the bloated domes of heads, were strained and flinching. The robots shambled onto Jokan and me, and Jokan did something to them with her mind which evidently was more powerful in this capacity at least than all the Council combined. And the robots turned and began flailing each other into lumps of smoking twisted metal. My stomach crawled. The Council, supreme intellects of a million years of progress, had fallen down onto the moving walkway, slobbering and twitching in the final stages of dementia. Even a thousand gram brain breaks when faced with an insolvable problem. The gleaming expanse of moving plastic carried the Council out of our sight. The little men and the Amazonian women who slouched past didn't even notice. And if they did, it was foreign to their conditioning. They couldn't think about it. They would soon have to think. When I pushed the master switch too far.... We encountered no more resistance, if that feeble expression of the apex of human development so far met could be called resistance. Finally we emerged into a room that surprised me with its lack of grandeur and its barrenness. All the World-City that was meaningless was a dream of ostentation and color and beauty of intricate design. This room, in contrast, the heart of the World-City, the key to its life, was completely denuded. A small plastic shell and in the middle was a conical dais and on the dais was a lever. Jokan nodded toward the lever and her eyes that followed me as I walked to it and moved it, were bright with some inner fire I couldn't diagnose. I jerked my hand away. The meaning of my act enveloped me in a mist of fear. I trembled violently. Sweat beaded on my face and smarted in my eyes. Had I been right in my choice? Had Draken been correct in his analysis, and had I been justified in jumping to such an empirical conclusion without more conclusive proof? Had all these nameless slaves of decay been victims of the delusion from which I had freed them? Or had I been deluded by the lies of a fanatic? I looked down and saw my hand reaching for the lever to move it back. It was an unconscious gesture motivated by vague fears. I seemed such a little man to destroy a world. What was happening to all animated puppets of this future society now that its mechanical contrivances had been destroyed? What had happened, even back in my own time, in large cities, when only the electric systems had been blown up, or the water mains, or gas mains? What mind-numbing chaos and madness must be developing around me as I stood inside the heart of a world which I had torn loose from its arteries. Jokan led me from the room and onto a balcony. Somehow I had thought myself down far in the bowels of this World-City. But as I stepped out, clouds were on a level with my eyes, synthetic clouds, and wind slapped my face. We looked down. Blind in that room with only my imaginative thoughts, the vastness of my act had been a conceivable thing. Here, looking over the true vastness, an endlessness, I found my brain whirling, refusing to consider what was really happening. In a monody of sadness and fatalism, Jokan recited the meaning to me, as she watched her world crumble. A sound surged up and about me. A low murmuring that grew and expanded into a vibrating roar. To my right, far away, I saw a massive steely structure explode into a billion fragments and a blinding flash of power carried to my ears a splitting roar. It began happening all over, through the tiers and levels and towering heights of the World-City, as far on any side I looked, as far as I could see. I cringed. Below, a sea of blind ants scurried madly about in infantile terror. Flying boats crashed as their automatic pilots stopped functioning. All the power of the city had ceased. The smoothly working machinery had become an onrushing nemesis of destruction, each stride feeding on the preceding flaw in function or the complete lack of any function. Huge structures, power-hung, dropped their millions of tons of weight onto hordes of milling humans who had no idea what was happening--if they had ever known. Gravity neutralizing units died and whole tiers collapsed. Unlimited power from the harnessing of liquid oxygen reversed into a destructive titan; a wave of overpowering heat rose up in a choking mist. Then the building on which we stood began to tremble. I turned. The bobbing sphere of escape was between Jokan and I, a small supremely compact unit of atomic power, perhaps, conducting its own motivation. "Why doesn't it stop, too?" I asked, as people ask ambiguous questions in a crisis. "It responds to the human mind alone," she said. "We have progressed far in physiogenics, too, as well as in the mechanical sciences. Perhaps it is the real world after all. We can go far beyond the machines." "We'd better go someplace--fast," I said shakily, for the building lurched sickeningly, and I toppled back against the wall. The colonnade buckled in front of me, but Jokan wasn't afraid. She kept looking over the World-City. I stumbled toward her. The heat was intensifying, becoming intolerable. I clutched at her frantically. "You are going with me," I shouted. I doubt if she heard me. "I love you," I yelled into her ear. "Don't you understand?" She heard that. Her lips smiled thinly. Pain altered her face like a plastic mask. I felt the gigantic power of the sphere then as before. It began to glow and oscillate and expand. And it sucked me into its limitless depths and cosmological labyrinths as before. I felt the melting and flowing and the indescribable twisted warping of sanity.... * * * * * Jokan, working at my side, has done much to conquer the evil virus of the Spartan menace. Her scientific knowledge, and her telepathic acumen, place her above many of our greatest minds. This is enhanced by an almost fanatical desire to destroy those who would destroy social progress. Her faithfulness to duty is legendary. We love each other with ties no one can understand who hesitate to conceive of bonds extending through dimensions of space and time. She never leaves my side in the unceasing night and day, crusading against the Fascistic disease that is being stamped out, though painfully and with aching slowness, that has extended over six centuries. But between us there is an uneasiness. Sometimes this uneasiness finds expression in little episodes--like the conversation at the last meeting of the International Agencies in Casablanca. We were having drinks before going into the Presidium. Jokan was lovely--that's a dismal understatement--in a low cut evening gown of plasti-silk. Her eyes were half closed. "Will we ever win?" she said over the brim of a Tom Collins, which is still the world's favorite cocktail. "Yes," I said. Then I turned casually, though I didn't feel casual at all. I knew what she was thinking. "You must be the greatest optimist of all time," she said. "And I'll help you and myself and all of us stay that way. I'll never mention it again. Perhaps we can both forget." "Try to forget what?" I said, though I knew well enough. Her eyes fixed mine as only her eyes can. "Forget that the great world we're fighting so hard to build we will be destroying a million years from tonight." I coughed and ordered another drink for myself. But I can't forget. 
50372	----	THE TRAGEDY OF IDA NOBLE _A NOVEL_ BY W. CLARK RUSSELL [Illustration] NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1892 COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. _All rights reserved._ CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. A YANKEE RUSE 5 II. THE PEOPLE OF LA CASANDRA 33 III. DON CHRISTOVAL'S STORY 59 IV. A MIDNIGHT THEFT 90 V. MADAME 123 VI. A TRAGEDY 154 VII. DON LAZARILLO LEAVES US 185 VIII. IDA NOBLE 219 IX. CAPTAIN NOBLE 249 THE TRAGEDY OF IDA NOBLE. CHAPTER I. A YANKEE RUSE. On Monday, August 8th, 1838, the large bark Ocean Ranger, of which I was second mate, was in latitude 38° 40' N., and longitude 11° W. The hour was four o'clock in the afternoon. I had come on deck to relieve the chief officer, who had had charge of the ship since twelve. It was a very heavy day--a sullen sky of gray vapor seeming to overhang our mastheads within pistol-shot of the trucks. From time to time there had stolen from the far reaches of the ocean a note as of the groaning of a tempest, but there had been no lightning; the wind hung a steady breeze out of the east, and the ship, with slanting masts and rounded breasts of canvas, showing with a glare of snow against the dark ground of the sky, pushed quietly through the water that floated in a light swell to the yellow line of her sheathing. Some time before I arrived on deck a vessel had been descried on the port bow, and now at this hour of four she had risen to the tacks of her courses, and her sails shone so radiantly in the dusky distance that at the first glance I knew her to be an American. The captain of my ship, a man named Hoste, was pacing the deck near the wheel; I trudged the planks a little way forward of him, stepping athwart-ships, or from side to side. The men, who were getting their supper, passed in and out of the galley, carrying hook-pots of steaming tea. It was an hour of liberty with them, the first of what is called the "dog watches." The gloom of the sky seemed to heighten the quietude that was upon the ship. The sailors talked low, and their laughter was sudden and short. All was silent aloft, the sails stirless to the gushing of the long salt breath of the east wind into the wide spaces of cloths, and nothing sounded over the side save the dim crackling and soft seething noises of waters broken under the bow, and sobbing and simmering past, with now and again a glad note like the fall of a fountain. The captain picked up a telescope that lay upon the skylight, and crossing the deck took a view of the approaching ship; then approached me. "She is an American," he said. "Yes, sir." "How do you know she is an American?" "By the light of the cotton in her canvas." "Ay, and there are more signs than that. She has put her helm over as though she would speak us." By five o'clock she was about a mile to a mile and a quarter distant on our weather bow, at which hour she had backed her maintop-sail and lay stationary upon the sea, rolling lightly and very stately on the swell, the beautiful flag of her nation--the stars and stripes--floating inverted from her peak as a signal of distress. Both Captain Hoste and I had searched her with a telescope, but we could see no other signs of life aboard her than three figures--one of which stood at the wheel--on her short length of poop, and a single head as of a sailor viewing us over the bulwark-rail forward. We shortened sail as we slowly drew down, and when within speaking distance Captain Hoste hailed her. The answer was--"For God's sake send a boat!" Yet she had good boats of her own, and it puzzled me, then, that she should request us to send, seeing that there must be hands enough to enable her to back the yards on the main. Captain Hoste cried out, "But what is wrong with you?" One of the figures on the poop or raised deck tossed his hands in a gesture of agitation and distress, and in piteous, nasal Yankee accents repeated, "For God's sake send a boat!" Captain Hoste gazed for a while, as though hesitating. He then said to me, "Mr. Portlack, there may be trouble aboard that ship, not to be guessed at by merely looking at her and singing out. Take a couple of hands in the jolly boat and ascertain what is wanted," and so saying he bawled a command to the sailors forward to lay the maintop-sail of the Ocean Ranger to the mast, while I called to others to lay aft and lower away the jolly boat that was suspended at irons called davits, a little distance past the mizzen-rigging. By this time a darker shade had entered the gloom of the sky, due partly to the sinking of the hidden sun, and partly to the thickening of the atmosphere as for rain. The sea, that ran in folds of leaden hue, was merely wrinkled and crisped by the wind, and I had no difficulty in making head against the streaming foam-lined ripples and in laying the little boat alongside the American. She was a tall, black ship with an almost straight stem and of a clipper keenness of bow. Her stemhead and quarters were rich with gilt devices; her towering skysail poles, the white trucks of which gleamed like silver, seemed to pierce the dusky surface of vapor above them. I sprang into the mizzen channel and stepped from the rail on to the poop. Saving the man at the wheel there was but one person on deck; I sent a look forward but the ship was deserted. _This_, I instantly thought to myself, will be a case of mutiny. There has been brutality, or, which is nearly as bad as brutality, bad food, and the men have refused duty and gone below. The person who received me was an American skipper of a type that travel had rendered familiar. His dress was remarkable for nothing but an immense felt, sugar-loaf-shaped hat--a Fifth of November hat. He had a hard, yellow face with a slight cast in one eye, and his long beard was trimmed to the aspect of a goat's. I did not observe in him any marks of the agitation and distress which had echoed in his melancholy return yell to us of "For God's sake send a boat!" He eyed me coolly and critically, running his eyes over me from top to toe as though I were a man soliciting work, and as though he were considering whether to engage me or not. He then said, "Good afternoon!" "Pray," said I, "what is wrong with you that you asked us to send a boat?" "Step below," said he, moving to the little companion hatch that conducted to the cabin. "I am in a hurry," said I, with a glance round the sea; "it darkens quickly and I wish to return to my ship. Pray let me hear your wants." "This way, if you please," he answered, putting his foot upon the ladder. There was no help for it: I must follow him or return to my ship without being able to satisfy the questions which Captain Hoste would put to me. As I stepped to the hatch it began to rain, but without increase of wind; away to windward in the east the sea was already shrouded with drizzle, and already to leeward the Ocean Ranger loomed with something of indistinctness in the thickening atmosphere, her white sails showing in the gathering dusk as she rolled like spaces of pale light flung and eclipsed, flung and eclipsed again. The helmsman at the wheel of the Yankee stared hard at me as I approached the hatch. On entering the cabin, I found the captain with an air of bustle in the act of placing a bottle and glasses upon the table. "Sit you down, sit you down," he called to me. "Here is such a drop of rum as I know some folks in your country would think cheap at a dollar a glass." "This is no time to drink," said I, "thanking you all the same, nor is rum a liquor I am accustomed to swallow at this hour. Pray tell me what is wrong with you." "Wal," said he, "if you won't drink my health, then I just reckon there's nothen for me to do but to drink yourn." He poured out about a gill of neat rum which, first smelling it, with a noisy smack of his lips he tossed down. I looked at my watch, meaning to give him three minutes and then be off, let his distress be what it might. The cabin was so gloomy that our faces to each other could scarcely be more than a glimmer. The evening shadow, darker yet with rain and with the wet of the rain upon the glass, lay upon the little skylight over the table; the windows overlooking the main deck were narrow apertures, and there was nothing of the ship to be seen through them; yet, even as the Yankee put down his glass, fetching a deep breath as he did so, I seemed to hear a sound as of men softly treading, accompanied by a voice apparently giving orders in subdued tones, and by the noise of rigging carelessly dropped or hastily flung down. "What ship is yourn?" said the captain. "The Ocean Ranger," I replied. "But you are trifling with me, I think. I am not here to answer that sort of questions. What do you want?" "Wal," he answered, "I'll tell you what I want, mister. I'm short of men, and men," he added, with a touch of brutal energy in his tone, "I must have, or, durn me, if the Ephriam Z. Jackson is going to fetch New York this side of Christmas Day. I reckon," he continued, with an indiscribable nasal drawl, "that your captain will be willing to loan me two or three smart hands." "I reckon," I replied, with some heat, "that he will be willing to do nothing of the sort, if for no other reason than because it's already a tight fit with us in the matter of labor. If _that_ is your want--very sorry, I'm sure, that we should be unable to serve you," and I made a step toward the companion ladder. "Stop, mister," he cried, "how might _you_ be rated aboard your ship?" "Second mate," I replied, pausing and looking round at the man. "Wal," said he, coolly, "I don't mind telling you that my second mate's little better than a sojer"--by which he meant "soldier"--"and if so be as you are willing to stop just here, I'll break him and send him forrards, where he'll be of some use, and you shall take his place." My astonishment held me silent for some moments. "Thank you," said I, "my captain is waiting for me to return," and with a stride I gained the companion steps. "Stop, mister!" he shouted. "Men I must have, and at sea when the pi-rate necessity boards a craft politeness has to skip. You can stop if you like; but if you go you goes alone. I tell you I must have men. Two men ye've brought, and they're going to stop, I calculate. _In_ fact, we've filled on the Ephriam Z. Jackson, and she's _ong rout_ again, mister. If _you_ go--" I stayed to hear no more, and in a bound gained the deck. Sure enough they had swung the topsail yard, and the ship, slowly gathering way, was breaking the wrinkles of the sea which underran her into a little froth under her bows! Five or six sailors were moving about the decks. I rushed to the side to look for my boat; she lay where I had left her, straining at the line, and wobbling and splashing angrily as she was towed; but there was nobody in her. My two men were not to be seen. I shouted their names, my heart beating with alarm and temper, but either they were detained by force below, or, influenced by the seaman's proverbial reckless love of change, they had been swiftly and easily coaxed by a handsome offer of dollars and of rum into skulking out of sight until I should have left the ship. My own vessel lay a mere smudge in the rain away down upon the lee quarter, yet she was not so indistinct but that I was able to make out she had not yet filled on her topsail. I could imagine Captain Hoste bewildered by the action of the Yankee, not yet visited by a suspicion of the fellow's atrocious duplicity, and waiting a while to see what he intended to do. I had followed the sea for many years, and my profession had taught me speed in forming resolutions. Had the weather been clear, even though the time were an hour or two later than it was, I should have continued to demand my men from this perfidious Yankee. I should have tried him with threats--have made some sort of a stand, at all events, and taken my chance of what was to follow. But if I was to regain my ship every instant was precious. It was darkening into night even as I paused for a few moments, half wild with anger and the hurry of my thoughts. My men were hidden; and my suspicions, indeed my conviction, assured me that I might shout for them till I was hoarse to no purpose. Then, again, the American vessel was now at every beat of the pulse widening the distance between her and the Ocean Ranger. It was certain that my first business must be to regain my own vessel while yet a little daylight lived, and leave the rest to Captain Hoste; and without further reflection, and without pausing to look if the American captain had followed me out of the cabin, I dropped into the mizzen channels and thence into the jolly-boat that was towing close under, and cast adrift the line that held the boat to the ship's side. The little fabric dropped astern tumbling and sputtering into the wide race of wake of the ship that drove away from me into the dimness of the rain-laden atmosphere in a large pale cloud, which darkened on a sudden in a heavier fall of wet that in a minute or two was hissing all about me. I threw an oar over the boat's stern, and, getting her head round for my ship, fell to sculling her with might and main. There was now a little more wind, and the rain drove with a sharper slant, but the small ridges of the sea ran softly with the boat, melting with scarce more than a light summer play of froth on either hand of me, as I stood erect sculling at my hardest. The heavier rush of rain had, however, by this time touched the Ocean Ranger, and she now showed as vaguely as a phantom down in the wet dusk. I could barely discern the dim spaces of her canvas, mere dashes of faint pallor upon the gloom, with the black streak of her hull coming and going as my boat rose and sank upon the swell. I had not been sculling more than three or four minutes when I perceived that Captain Hoste had gathered way upon his ship. She was, in fact, forging ahead fast and rounding away into the west in pursuit of the American, leaving my boat in consequence astern of her out upon her starboard quarter. It was very evident that the boat was not to be seen from the Ocean Ranger--that Captain Hoste imagined me still on board the American, and that, observing the Yankee to be sailing away, he concluded it was about time to follow him--though this was a pursuit I had little doubt Hoste would speedily abandon, for it was not hard to guess that the Ephraim Z. Jackson would outsail the Ocean Ranger by two feet to one. The consternation that seized me was so excessive that my hands grasped the oar motionlessly, as though my arms had been withered. I could do no more than stand gaping over my shoulder at the receding ships. As to shouting--why, already my vessel had put a long mile and a half between her and my boat; and though I could not tell amid the haze of the rain and the shadow of the evening what canvas she was carrying, I might gather that Captain Hoste was pressing her, by the heel of her tall dim outline, and by the occasional glance of the froth of her wake in the thickness under her counter. I threw my oar inboards and sat down to collect my mind and think. My consternation, as I have said, was almost paralyzing. The suddenness of the desperate and dreadful situation in which I found myself benumbed my faculties for a while. I was without food; I was without drink; I was also without mast, sail, or compass, in a little open boat in the heart of a wide surface of sea, the night at hand--a night of storm, as I might fear when I cast my eyes up at the wet, near, scowling face of the sky and then looked round at the fast-darkening sea, narrowed to a small horizon by the gloomy walls of rain, in the western quarter of which the American had already vanished, while my own ship, as I stood straining my gaze at the pale blotch she made, slowly melted out like one's breath upon a looking-glass. Yet, heavy as my heart was with the horror of my position, I do not remember that I was then sensible of despair in any degree. When my wits in some measure returned, I thought to myself, rascal as the Yankee captain has proved himself, he surely will not be such a villain as to leave me to perish out here. He will know, by the Ocean Ranger pursuing him, that Captain Hoste has not seen my boat. Then he will shorten sail to enable the Ocean Ranger to approach, and hail Captain Hoste to tell him that I am adrift somewhere astern; so that at any hour I may expect to see the loom of my ship close at hand in search of me, within earshot, with a dozen pairs of eyes on the look-out and a dozen pairs of ears straining for my first cry. That my drift might be as inconsiderable as possible, I lashed the two oars of the boat together, made them fast to the painter, threw them overboard and rode to them. But when this was done it was dark, I may say pitch dark; the rain fell heavily and continuously, and the wind sang through it in a sort of shrill wailing such as I had never before taken notice of in the wind at sea, and this noise put a new and distinct horror into my situation because of my loneliness. The froth of the streaming ripples broke bare and ghastly, and the run of the waters against the boat's sides filled the atmosphere with notes as of drowning sobbing. The cold of the night was made piercing by the wet of it and the quarter whence the wind blew. I was soaked to the skin, and sat hugging my shuddering body, forever staring around into the blind obscurity, and forever seeing nothing more than the mocking and fleeting flash of the near run of froth. The breeze held steady, but something of weight came into the heave of the little ridges, and from time to time the chop of the boat's bows as she chucked into a hollow, meeting the next bit of a sea before she had time to fairly rise to it; from time to time, I say, some handfuls of spray would come slinging out of the darkness forward into my face, but nothing more than that happened during those hours of midnight gloom. Though never knowing what the next ten minutes might bring forth, I had made up my mind that I was to be drowned, or if not drowned then that I was doomed to some dreadful ending of insanity which should be brought about by hunger, by thirst, by that awful form of mental anguish which is called despair, and that if I were spared to see the sun rise I should never see him set again. But the night passed--the night passed, and I remember thanking God that it was an August night, which signified, comparatively speaking, short hours of darkness. It passed, and the breaking dawn found me crouching and hugging myself as I had been crouching and hugging myself during the black time that was now ending, staring in my loneliness, and with a heart that felt broken, over the low gunwale of the boat at the rim of the sea which slowly stole out all round me in a line of ink against the ashen slant of the sky. It had ceased to rain, but the morning broke sullen and gloomy; the heavens of the complexion they had worn when the night had darkened upon them; the wind no stronger than before, yet singing past my ears with a harsh salt shrillness that had something squall-like in the keen-edged tone of it each time the head of a swell threw me up to the full sweep. I stood up, weak and trembling, and searched the ocean, but there was nothing to be seen. Again and again I explored the horizon with eyes rendered dim by my long vigil and by the smarting of the salt which lay in a white crust about the eyelids and in the hollows, but there was nothing more to behold than the gray ocean, freckled with foam, throbbing desolately in the cold gray light to its confines narrowed by the low seat from which I gazed. I had now no hope whatever of being searched for and picked up by my own ship. I did not doubt that she had pursued the Yankee, who had outsailed her and been lost sight of by her in the darkness, and that Captain Hoste, understanding the villainous trick that had been played upon him, but assuming that I, as well as the two men, had been detained by the American, had long ago shifted his course and proceeded on his voyage. I looked at my watch, but I had forgotten to wind it overnight, and it had stopped. By and by I reckoned the hour to be between eight and nine. There was no sun to tell the time by. Not until then was I sensible of hunger and thirst. Now on a sudden I felt the need of eating and drinking, and the mere circumstance of there being nothing to eat and drink--and more particularly to _drink_--fired my imagination, which at once converted thirst into a consuming pain, and I put my lips to my wet sleeve and sucked; but the moisture was bitter, bitter with salt, and I flung myself down into the bottom of the boat with a cry to God that, if I was to perish, my agony might come quickly and end quickly. I believe I lay in a sort of stupor for some hour or more; then noticing a slight brightening in the heavens directly overhead, as though due to the thinning of the body of vapor just there, I staggered on to my feet, and no sooner was my head above the boat's gunwale than I spied a vessel steering directly for me, as I was immediately able to perceive. How far distant she was I could not have said, but my sailor's eye instantly witnessed the course she was pursuing by the aspect of her canvas, that was of a brilliant whiteness, so that at first I imagined her to be the American in search of me, until, after viewing her for some time steadfastly, I perceived that she was a large topsail schooner, apparently a yacht, heeling from the wind, and sliding nimbly through the water, as one might tell by the rapidity with which the whole fabric of her enlarged. The sight gave me back all my strength. I sprang into the bows, dragged the oars inboard, and to one of them attached my coat, which I went to work to flourish, making the wet serge garment rattle like the fly of a flag as I swept it round and round high above my head. Within half an hour she was close to me, with her square canvas aback to deaden her way, the heads of a number of people dotting the line of her rail--a shapely and graceful vessel indeed, with a band of yellow metal along her waterline, dully glowing over the white edge of froth, as though some light of western sunshine slept upon her, her canvas gleaming like satin, a spark or two in her glossy length where her cabin port-holes were, and the brassy gleam of some gilt effigy under her bowsprit, from which curved to the masthead the lustrous pinions of her jibs and staysail. A red-headed man wearing a cap with a naval peak stood abaft the main rigging in company with others, and as the beautiful little vessel came softly swaying and floating down over the heave of the swell to my boat, he cried out, "Can you catch hold of the end of a line?" "Ay, ay," I answered, in a weak voice, lifting my hand. "Then look out!" he bawled. A seaman grasping a coil of rope sprang on top of the bulwarks and sent the fakes of the line spinning to me. I caught the end with a trembling grasp and took a turn round a thwart, but not till then could I have imagined how weak I was, for even as I held the rope my knees yielded and I sank into the bottom of the boat in a posture of supplication, half swooning. The next moment the little fabric had swung in alongside the schooner; I was grasped by some sailors and lifted on board. "Let the boat go adrift, she's of no use to us," the red-headed man cried out. Another standing near him exclaimed with a strong foreign accent, but in good English, "Stop! what name is written in her?" Some one answered, "The Ocean Ranger, London." "Let that be noted, and then let her go," said the voice with the foreign accent. In this brief while I stood, scarcely seeing though I could hear, supported by the muscular grip of a couple of the seamen who had dragged me over the side. "Bring a chair," exclaimed the red-headed man. "No," cried the other with a foreign accent, "let him be taken into the cabin and fed. Do not you see that he perishes of hunger and of thirst and of cold?" On this I was gently compelled into motion by the two seamen, who conveyed me to an after hatch and thence down into a little interior that glittered with mirrors, and that was luminous and fragrant besides with flowers. I was still so much dazed as hardly to be fully conscious of what I was doing. Sudden joy is as confounding as sudden grief, and the delight of this deliverance from my horrible situation was as disastrous to my wits (weakened by the fearful night I had passed through) as had been the shock to them when I found myself adrift in the boat on the previous evening. The two seamen quitted the cabin, leaving me seated at the table, but their place was immediately taken by the red-headed man, by the gentleman with the foreign accent, and a minute later by a third person, a short, square, hook-nosed, black-browed, inky-bearded fellow. They viewed me for a while in silence; one of them then called "Tom," and a negro boy stepped through a door at the foremost end of the cabin. "Bring brandy and water; also some cold meat and white biscuit. Bring the brandy first." Who spoke I did not know. A tumbler of grog was placed in my hand, but my arm trembled so violently that I was unable to raise the glass to my lips. Some one thereupon grasped my wrist and enabled me to drink, which I did greedily, muttering, as I recollect, a broken "Thank God! thank you, gentlemen," as I put the glass quivering upon the table. "How long have you been in this plight?" inquired the red-headed man in a voice whose harshness and coarseness, half demented as I was, I remember noticing. "Ask him no questions yet," exclaimed one of the others. "Let him have meat, dry clothes, and sleep, and he will rally. Ay! he will rally, for he has a lively look." The effect of the brandy was magical. It clarified my sight as though some friendly hand had swept a cobweb from each eyeball. It filled my body with strong pulses, and enabled me to hold my head erect. But by this time the negro boy had reappeared with a plate of cold boiled beef and a dish of biscuit, and I fell to--eating with the animal-like rage of starvation. I devoured every scrap that was set before me, and then with a steady hand raised and drained a second glass of grog that had been mixed by the man with the foreign accent. And now I felt able to converse. "Gentlemen," said I, making a staggering effort to bow to them, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for rescuing me from a horrible death. I thank you gentlemen for this bitterly-needed refreshment." "You are soaked to the skin," said the man with the foreign accent. "You will tell us your story when you are dry and comfortable. Captain Dopping, you can lend this poor man some dry linen and clothes?" "Ay!" responded the other, in his coarse determined voice. "Are ye able to stand?" "I think so," I replied. I rose, but observing that I faltered, he came round to where I was swaying, grasped me by the arm and led me to a little cabin alongside the door through which the negro boy had emerged. In this cabin were two shallow bunks or sleeping-shelves, one on top of the other. The room was lighted by a circular port-hole, and by what is called a bull's-eye--a piece of thick glass let into the deck overhead. My companion rummaged a locker, and tossing a number of garments into the lower bunk, bade me take my pick and shift myself and then turn in, and, saying this in a harsh, fierce way, he withdrew. I removed my wet clothes, and grateful beyond all expression was the comfort of warm dry apparel to my skin, that for more than twelve hours had been soaked with rain and steeped in brine. I then stretched my length in the lower sleeping-shelf, and, after putting up a prayer of gratitude for my deliverance, closed my eyes and in a few minutes fell asleep. I slept until about three o'clock in the afternoon. On waking I found the interior bright with sunshine. I lay for a little, thinking and taking a view of the cabin. My faculties, refreshed by sleep, were sharp in me. I could remember clearly and realize keenly. The disaster which had befallen me was a great professional blow. It had deprived me of my ship, and robbed me of an appointment I had been forced to wait some tedious months to obtain. With the ship had gone all my clothes, all my effects, everything, in short, I possessed in the wide world, saving a few pounds which I had left in a bank at home. The Ocean Hanger was bound on a voyage that would keep her away from England for two years and a half, perhaps three years; so that for, let me say, three years all that I owned in the world, saving my few pounds, would be as utterly lost to me as though it had gone to the bottom. While I thus lay musing, the door of the berth opened, and the red-headed man--Captain Dopping--entered. Having my eyes clear in my head now, I immediately observed that he was a freckled, red-haired, staring man, with big protruding moist blue eyes and scarlet whiskers; all of his front teeth but two or three were gone, and the gaps in his gums gave his face, when he parted his lips, the grin of a skull. I got out of the bunk when he entered. "How do you feel now?" said he, eying me in a hard, deliberate, unwinking way. "Refreshed and recovered," said I. He ran his gaze over my figure to observe what garments belonging to him I had arrayed myself in, then said, "What is your name?" "James Portlack." "What are you?" "What _was_ I, you must ask," said I, with a melancholy shake of the head. "Second mate of the bark Ocean Ranger," and I told him briefly of the abominable trick which the Yankee captain had played off on Captain Hoste, and which had resulted in leaving me adrift in the desperate and dying condition I had been rescued from. "A cute dodge, truly," said he, without any exhibition of astonishment or dislike, nay, with a hint in his air of having found something to relish in the American's device. "It is what a Welshman would call 'clebber.' This is a yarn to tickle Don Christoval." "Who is Don Christoval?" said I. "He is Don Christoval del Padron." "The owner of this schooner?" He gave a hard smile, but returned no answer. "What is the name of this vessel?" I asked. "La Casandra." "Where are you from?" "Cadiz." "To what port?" said I, with anxiety. He gave another hard smile, and then, eying me all over afresh, exclaimed, "Come along on deck. Don Christoval and Don Lazarillo will be wanting to see you, now you're awake." I asked him to lend me a cap, not knowing what had become of mine, and followed him through the small brilliant cabin into which I had been conducted by the two seamen. I had a quick eye, and took note of many things in a moment or two. The cabin was peculiarly furnished, that is, for a sea-going interior. It gleamed with hanging mirrors; the sides were embellished with pictures, such as might hang upon the walls of a room ashore; there were little sofas and arm-chairs, of a kind you might see in a drawing-room, but not in the cabin of a vessel, whether a pleasure-craft or not. In short, it was evident that a portion of the furniture of a house had been employed for fitting out this interior. But where the vessel herself showed, I mean the ceiling or upper deck, the sides, the planks left visible by the carpet--_there_ all was plain and even rough, by which signs I might know that La Casandra was not a yacht, despite the shining of the mirrors and the gilt of the picture-frames, the rich carpet under foot, the crimson velvet sofas and chairs. I followed Captain Dopping up the narrow companion-steps, and gained the deck. The rain was gone, the gloomy sky had rolled away down the western sea-line, and the afternoon sun shone gloriously in a sky of blue piebald with stately sailing masses of swollen cream-colored vapor, which studded the blue surface of the sea with island-like spaces of violet shadow. A pleasant breeze was blowing, and it was warm with the sunshine. The schooner was under all the canvas it was possible to spread upon her, and how fast she was sailing I might know by the white line of her wake. I had no eyes at the instant for anything but the horizon, the whole girdle of which I rapidly scanned with some wild silly notion in me of catching a sight of the cloths of the Ocean Ranger, that in searching for me might have been navigated some leagues to the north. CHAPTER II. THE PEOPLE OF LA CASANDRA. The two foreigners, as I might suppose them to be--the two gentlemen who had talked to me and viewed me in the cabin before I went to the captain's berth--these men were pacing the sand-colored planks of the quarter-deck arm in arm, cigars in their mouths, as I emerged; but, on seeing me, they came to a halt. One was a truly noble-looking fellow, rising a full inch taller than six feet, and of a magnificently proportioned shape. This was the man who had addressed me in good English, but with a foreign accent. He was, besides, an exceedingly handsome person, his complexion very dark, his eyes of the dead blackness of the Indian's, but soft and glowing; he wore a large heavy mustache, black as ink, and curling to his ears; his teeth were strong, large, and of an ivory whiteness. Plain sailor-man as I was, used to the commonplace character and countenance of the mariner, I was without any art in the deciphering of the mind by gazing at the lineaments of the human face. To me this person offered himself as a noble, handsome man, of imposing presence, of a beauty even stately; but when I think of him now in the light of that larger knowledge of human nature which years have taught me, when I recall his face, I say, I am conscious of having missed something in the expression of it which must have helped me to a tolerably accurate perception of the _real_ character of this schooner's errand, when the "motive" of her voyage was explained to me. His companion was a short man, a true Spaniard in his looks; his large hooked nose, his searching, restless, brilliant black eyes, his mustaches and short black beard might well have qualified him to sit for a picture of Cervantes, according to such prints of that great author as I have seen. They were both well dressed--too well dressed, indeed. They wore overcoats richly furred, velvet coats beneath, splendid waistcoats, and so forth. The fingers of the shorter man sparkled with precious stones. There was a stout gold chain round his neck, and a costly brooch in his cravat. They both fastened a penetrating gaze upon me for some moments, and exchanged a few sentences in Spanish before addressing me. "The gentleman's name is Portlack--Mr. Portlack, Don Christoval," said Captain Dopping: "he was second mate of a bark named the Ocean Ranger. He was hocussed, as the Pikeys (gypsies) say, by an American captain. He'll tell you the story, sir." "How do you feel?" said Don Christoval. "Perfectly recovered, I thank you," said I. "I am glad. We were not too soon. I believe that another twenty-four hours of your desperate situation must have killed you," said this tall Don, delivering his words slowly, and looking very stately, and speaking in English so correctly that I wondered at his foreign accent. "Vot ees secon' mate?" inquired the shorter man, pronouncing the words with difficulty. "Why, you might call it second lieutenant, Don Lazarillo," replied Captain Dopping. "It is a position of trust; it is a position of distinction on board ship?" exclaimed Don Christoval. "Oh yes," said Captain Dopping. "Do you know navigation?" asked the tall Don. "I hold a master's certificate," I replied, smiling. "Explain," said Don Lazarillo sharply, as though his mind were under some constant strain of unhealthy anxiety. "I do not speak a word of Spanish," said I, turning to Captain Dopping. "No need for it," said he, in his harsh accents. "A master's certificate, Don Christoval, enables the holder of it to take charge of a ship, and in order to take charge of a ship a man is supposed to know everything that concerns the profession of the sea." "Explain," cried Don Lazarillo with impatience. His tall companion translated; on which the other, nodding vehemently, stroked his mustaches while he again surveyed me from head to foot, letting his eyes, full of fire, settle with the most searching look that can be imagined upon my face. I caught Don Christoval exchanging a glance with Captain Dopping. There was a brief pause while the tall Don lighted his cigar. He then said, with a smile: "You have lost your ship, sir?" "I have, I am sorry to say." "What will you do, sir?" "It is for you to dispose of me. I should be glad to make myself useful to you until you transfer me or land me." "But then--but then?" "Then I must endeavor to obtain another berth," said I. "Explain," cried Don Lazarillo. Don Christoval spoke to him in Spanish. "You are a gentleman by birth?" said the tall Don. "My father was a clergyman," I answered. "Yes, sir, that is very good. Your speech tells me you are genteel. To speak English well you must be genteel. Education will enable you to speak English grammatically, but it will not help you to pronounce it properly. For example, a man vulgarly born, who is educated too, will omit his h's, and he will neglect his g's. He will say nothin', and he will say 'ouse instead of house. Yes, I know it--I know it," said he, smiling. "Well, you shall tell me now all about your adventure." This I did. He occasionally stopped me while he interpreted to his companion, who listened to him with eager attention, while he would also strain his ears with his eyes sternly fixed upon my face when I spoke. When I had made an end, Don Christoval drew Captain Dopping to him by a backward motion of his head, and, after addressing him in low tones, he took Don Lazarillo's arm, and the pair of them fell to patrolling the deck. "We shall sling a hammock for you under the main hatch," said Captain Dopping, walking up to me. "Sorry we can't accommodate you aft. There's scarce room for a rat in my corner, let alone two men." "Any part of the schooner will serve to sling a hammock in for me," said I. "You will take your meals with me in the cabin," said he. "I eat when the two gentlemen have done." "Where does your mate live?" said I. "I have no mate," he answered. "We were in a hurry, and could not find a man." He eyed me somewhat oddly as he spoke, as though to mark the effect of his words. "But is there no one to help you to keep a look-out?" "Ay! a seaman," he answered, carelessly. "But now that you're aboard we will be able to relieve him from that duty." "Whatever you put me to," said I, "you will find me as willing at it as gratitude can make a man." He roughly nodded, and asked me what part of England I came from. I answered that I was born near Guildford. "I hail from Deal," said he. "Do you know Deal?" "Well," I answered; and spoke of some people whom I had visited there; gave him the names of the streets, and of a number of boatmen I had conversed with during my stay at the salt and shingly place. This softened him. It was marvelous to observe how the magic of memory, the tenderness of recollected association humanized the coarse, harsh, bold, and staring looks of this scarlet-haired man. "But," said I, "you have not yet told me where this schooner is bound to." "You will hear all about it," he answered, with his usual air returning to him. I was not a little astonished by this answer. Had the schooner sailed on some piratic expedition? Was there some colossal undertaking of smuggling in contemplation? But though piracy, to be sure, still flourished, it was hardly to be thought of in relation with those northern seas toward which the schooner was heading; while as for smuggling, if the four seamen whom I counted at work about the vessel's deck comprised--with the fifth man, who was at her helm--the whole of the crew, there was nothing in any theory of a contraband adventure to solve the problem submitted by Captain Dopping's reticence. He left me abruptly, and walked forward and addressed one of the men, apparently speaking of the job the fellow was upon. I listened for that note of bullying, for that tone of habitual brutal temper, which I should have expected to hear in him when he accosted the seamen, and was surprised to find that he spoke as a comrade rather than as a captain; with something even of careless familiarity in his manner as he addressed the man. I had now an opportunity for the first time since I came on deck to inspect the schooner. It was easy to see that she had never been built as a yacht; her appearance, indeed, suggested that in her day she had been employed as a slaver. She was old, but very powerfully constructed, and seemingly still as fine a sea-boat as was at that time to be encountered on the ocean. Her bulwarks were high and immensely thick; the fore-part of her had a rise, or "spring" as it is called, which gave a look of domination and defiance to her round bows which at the forefoot narrowed into a stem of knife-like sharpness. She was very loftily rigged and expanded an enormous breadth of mainsail. I had never before seen so long a gaff, and the boom when amidships forked far out over the stern. Her decks were very clean but grayish with brine and years of hard usage. I noticed that she carried a small boat hanging in davits on the starboard side, and a large boat abaft the little caboose or kitchen that stood like a sentry-box forward. This boat, indeed, resembled a man-of-war's cutter--such a long and heavy fabric as one would certainly not think of looking for on board a craft of the size of La Casandra. It was my sailor's eye that carried my mind to this detail. No man but a sailor, and perhaps a suspicious sailor as I then was, standing as I did upon the deck of a vessel whose destination was still a secret to me, would have noticed that boat. The five of a crew were all of them Englishmen, strong, hearty fellows. I inspected them curiously, but could find nothing in them that did not suggest the plain, average, honest merchant sailor. They were well clothed for men of their class, habited in the jackets, round hats and wide trousers of the Jacks of my period, and I took notice that though their captain stood near them they worked as though without sense of his presence, occasionally calling a remark one to another, and laughing, but not noisily, as if what discipline there was on board the schooner existed largely in the crew's choice of behavior. These and other points I remarked, but nothing that I saw helped me to any sort of conclusion as to the destination of the little ship or the motive of the cruise. All that I could collect was that here was a schooner bearing a Spanish name and owned or hired by one or both of those Spaniards, who continued to pace the quarter-deck arm-in-arm, but manned, so far as I could see, by a company of five Englishmen and a negro lad, and commanded by an English skipper. I walked a little way forward, the better to observe the vessel's rig at the fore, and on my approaching the galley, a fellow put his head out of it--making a sixth man now visible. He kept his head out to stare at me. Many ugly men have I met in my time, but never so hideous a creature as that. His nationality I could not imagine, though it was not long before I learned that he was a Spaniard. His coal-black hair fell in a shower of greasy snake-like ringlets upon his back and shoulders. One eye was whitened by a cataract or some large pearly blotch, and the other seemed to me to possess as malevolent an expression as could possibly deform a pupil unnaturally large, and still further disfigured by a very net-work of blood-red lines. His nose appeared to have been leveled flat with his face at the bridge by a blow, leaving the lower portion of it standing straight out in the shape of the thick end of a small broken carrot. His lips of leather, his complexion of chocolate, his three or four yellow fangs, his mat of close cropped whiskers, coarse as horse-hair, his apparel of blue shirt open at the neck and revealing a little gilt or gold crucifix, a pair of tarry leather trousers, carpet slippers, and the remains of an old Scotch cap that lay rather than sat upon his hair; all these points combined in producing one of the most extraordinary figures that had ever crossed my path--a path, I may say, that in my time had carried me into many wild scenes, and to the contemplation of many strange surprising sights. While this prodigy of ugliness and I were staring at each other, the captain came across the deck to me. "What do you think of this schooner?" he said. "She is a very good schooner. She is old--perhaps thirty years old. I believe she has carried slaves in her time." "I _know_ it," he replied, with a strong nod, to which his furiously red hair seemed to impart a character of hot temper. "I have seen," said I, "handsomer men than yonder beauty who is staring at me from the galley door." "Ay. He is good enough to shut up in a box and to carry about as a show. He is cook and steward. His name is Juan de Mariana. He cooks well, and is or has been a domestic in Don Lazarillo's establishment." "How many go to your crew?" said I, questioning him with an air of indifference now that I found he was disposed to be communicative. "Eight." "The number includes you and the cook and the nigger lad?" He nodded, and looked at me suddenly, as though about to deliver something on the top of his mind, then checked himself, and pulling out his watch, exclaimed: "I understand you are willing to serve as mate of this vessel." "I am willing to do anything. Do not I owe my life to you all?" "Well," said he, "that may be settled now. It is Don Christoval's wish. As to pay, him and me will go into that matter with you by and by." I opened my eyes at the sound of the word _pay_, but made no remark. It was a grateful sound, as you will suppose, to a man who had as good as lost everything save what he stood up in, and who, when he got ashore, might find it very hard to obtain another berth. The two Spanish gentlemen had left the deck. Captain Dopping said: "Step aft with me," and we walked as far as the cabin skylight, where facing about the captain called out, "Trapp, South, Butler, Scott, lay aft, my lads. I have a word to say to you." He then turned to the fellow who stood at the helm and exclaimed, "Tubb, you'll be listening." The seamen quitted their several employments and came to the quarter-deck. The Spanish cook stepped out of the galley to hearken, and a moment later the ebony face of the negro showed in the square of the forecastle hatch. The sailors looked as though they pretty well guessed what was coming. "Lads," said Captain Dopping, placing his hand upon my arm, "this here is Mr. James Portlack. He was second mate of the bark, Ocean Ranger, a ship I know." "And I know her, too," said one of the men. "Mr. Portlack," continued Captain Dopping, "holds a master's certificate, which is more than I do, and he tops me by that. But I'm your captain, and your captain I remain. Mr. Portlack consents to act as the mate of the Casandra. Is this agreeable to you, lads?" "Ay, ay; agreeable enough," was the general answer. "Well, then, Butler, you're displaced, d'ye see? No call for you to relieve me any longer." "And a good job too," said the man, a heavy, sturdy, powerfully built fellow with small, honest, glittering blue eyes, and immense bushy whiskers; "there was nothin' said about my taking charge of the deck in the agreement." "Well, you're out of it," exclaimed Captain Dopping, "and the ship's company's stronger by a hand, which is as it should be. D'ye hear me, cook?" "Yash, yash, I hear all right, capitan," answered the swarthy creature from the door of his galley, contorting his countenance into the aspect of a horrid face beheld by one in a high fever, in his struggle to articulate in English. "That'll do, my lads," said the captain. The men leisurely rounded and went forward again. There was nothing unusual in this proceeding. It was customary, it may still be customary at sea, to invite the decision of the crew before electing a man to fill a vacant post as first or second mate. All that I found singular lay in the behavior of the men. There was something in their bearing I find it impossible to convey--a suggestion of resolution struggling with reluctance, or it might be that they gave me the impression of fellows who had entered upon an undertaking without wholly understanding its nature or without fully believing in the sincerity of its promoters. But be their manner what it might, its effect upon me was to greatly sharpen my curiosity as to the object of this schooner's voyage from Cadiz to the north as she was now heading. I said to Captain Dopping, "I will take charge at once if you wish to go below." "Very well," said he, "I will relieve you at four bells, and that will give you the first watch to stand," by which he meant the watch from eight o'clock till midnight. "But I do not know your destination," said I. "How is the schooner to be steered?" "As she goes," said he with a significant nod, angry with the scarlet flash of hair and whisker which accompanied it. "Right," said I, and fell to pacing the deck, while he disappeared down the companion-way. Athirst as I was for information, I was determined that my curiosity should not be suspected. Be the errand of this little ship what it might, I was always my own master, able to say "No" to any proposals I should object to, though taking care to give due effect by willingness in all honest directions to the gratitude excited in me by my deliverance. I would find the fellow at the helm watching me with an expression on his weather-darkened face that was the same as saying he was willing to tell all he knew, but I took no notice of him, contenting myself with merely observing the vessel's course and seeing that she was kept to it. The voices of the two Spaniards and Captain Dopping rose through the little skylight, one of which lay open. They spoke in English, and occasionally I heard my name pronounced with now and then a sharp hissing "Explain" from Don Lazarillo, but I did not catch, nor did I endeavor to catch, any syllables of a kind to furnish me with a sense of their discourse. All this afternoon the weather continued rich, glowing, summer-like. One seemed to taste the aromas of the land in the eastern gushing of the blue and sparkling breeze. The three white spires of a tall ship glided like stars along the western rim, but though we were in the great ocean high-way nothing else showed during the remainder of the hours of light. Beyond a little feeling of stiffness and of aching in my joints I was sensible of no bad results of my night-long bitter and perilous exposure in the jolly-boat of the Ocean Ranger. I had, indeed, been too long seasoned by the sea to suffer grievously from an experience of this sort. Night after night off the black and howling Horn, off the stormy headland of Agulhas, amid mountainous seas, in frosty hurricanes whose biting breath was sharpened yet by hills and islands of ice glancing dimly through the snow-thickened darkness, I had kept the deck, I had helped to stow the canvas aloft, I had toiled at the pumps, waist-high in water, my hair crackling with ice, my hands without feeling. No! I was too seasoned to suffer severely from the after-effects of exposure in an open boat throughout an August night in the Portuguese parallels. At five o'clock, when I glanced through the skylight, I spied the negro lad named Tom laying the cloth in the little cabin. Occasionally a whiff of cooking, strong with onions or garlic, would come blowing aft in some back-draught out of the canvas. I judged that the crew were well fed by observing one of them step out of the galley and enter the forecastle, bearing a smoking round of boiled beef and a quantity of potatoes in their skins; then by seeing another follow him with pots of coffee or tea, two or three loaves of bread, and other articles of food which I could not distinguish. Fare so substantial and bountiful seemed to my fancy a very unusual entertainment for a forecastle tea or "supper," as the last meal at sea is commonly called. I found myself watching everything that passed before me with growing curiosity. The hideous cook Mariana, followed by the negro boy bearing dishes, came aft with the cabin dinner, and presently, when I peeped again through the skylight as I trudged the deck in the pendulum walk of the look-out at sea, I perceived the two Spaniards at table. The several dyes of wines in decanters blended with the brilliance of silver--or of what resembled silver--and other decorative details of flowers and fruit, and the square of the skylight framed a picturesquely festal scene. It was possible to peep without being observed. The Spaniards talked incessantly; their speech rose in a melodious hum; for to pronounce Spanish is, to my ear, to utter music. But the majestic dialect was as Greek to me. Don Lazarillo gesticulated with vehemence, and I never glanced at the skylight without observing him in the act of draining his glass. Don Christoval was less demonstrative. He was slow and stately in his movements, and when he flourished his arm or clasped his hands, or leaned back in his chair to revolve the point of his mustache with long, large, but most shapely fingers, he made one think of some fine actor in an opera scene. It was six o'clock by the time they had dined, and at this hour the seamen taking the privilege of the "dog watch"--but, indeed, it was all privilege from morning to night in that schooner--were pacing the deck forward, four of them, every man smoking his pipe--the fifth man being at the tiller. I might now make sure that there went but five seamen to this ship's company. The ugly cook leaned in the door of his galley puffing at a cigarette. The sun was low, his light crimson; his fan-shaped wake streamed in scarlet glory under him to the very shadow of the schooner, and the little fabric, slightly leaning from the soft and pleasant breeze, floated through the rose-colored atmosphere, her sails of the tincture of delicate cloth of gold, her bright masts veined with fire, her shrouds as she gently rolled catching the western light until they burned out upon the eye as though of polished brass. The two Spaniards arrived on deck, each with an immensely long cigar in his mouth. Don Christoval addressed me pleasantly in his excellent English. He asked me with an air of grand courtesy if I now felt perfectly well, inquired the speed of the schooner, my opinion of her, my experiences of the Bay of Biscay in this month of August, and inquired if I was acquainted with the coast of England, and especially with that part comprised between St. Bees Head and Morecambe Bay. His friend eagerly listened, keeping his fiery eyes fastened upon my face, and whenever I had occasion to say more than "yes" or "no," he would call upon Don Christoval to interpret. Shortly after the tall Don had ceased his questions--and I found no expression in his handsome face and in the steady gaze of his glowing impassioned eyes to hint to me whether my replies satisfied him or not--Captain Dopping came up out of the cabin. "Now, Mr. Portlack," said he, in his harsh, intemperate voice, yet intending nothing but civility, as I could judge, "get you to your supper, sir; eat hearty, and you can make as free with the liquor as your common sense thinks prudent." I was hungry, having tasted no food since the meal of beef and biscuit which had been set before me when I was first brought on board; nevertheless I entered the cabin and took my place with some diffidence. I felt a sort of embarrassment in eating alone and helping myself--perhaps because of the shore-going appearance of the interior; it was like making free in a gentleman's dining-room, the host being absent. Tom, the nigger boy, waited upon me. He gave me a dish of excellent soup, and I fared sumptuously on spiced beef, some sort of dried fish that was excellent eating, potatoes, beans, fruit, and the like. The fruit was fresh enough to make me understand that the vessel was but recently from port. There were several kinds of wines in decanters upon the table; but two glasses of sherry sufficed me, though two such glasses of sherry I had never before drank. It might be that I was no judge, but to my palate the flavor of that amber-colored wine was exquisite. The negro boy stood near waiting and watching me intently in the intervals of his business. Had the skylight been closed I should have put some questions to him, but the regular passage of the shadows of the two Spaniards upon the glass of the skylight as they walked the deck, warned me to be very wary. The change, not indeed from an open boat, but from the decks and the cabin of the Ocean Ranger to this interior, with its pictures, mirrors, its handsomely equipped and most hospitable table, was great indeed, and as I looked about me I found it difficult to realize the experience I was passing through. I could now tell by the weight of the fork and spoon which I handled that the plate which glittered upon the white damask cloth was solid silver. There could be no doubt whatever that the furniture of a drawing-room or of a boudoir had gone to the equipment of this cabin. Nothing seemed to fit, nothing had that air of oceanic _fixity_ which you look for in sea-going decorations. But a quality of tawdriness stole into the general appearance through contrast of the gilt, the looking glasses, the pictures, the velvet, with the plain, worn sides of the vessel, the rude cabin beams, and the gray and even grimy ceiling or upper deck. I asked the negro boy if he spoke English. "Yes, massa," said he, "I speak English, nuffin else, tank de Lord." "Were you shipped at Cadiz?" "Yes sah." "I suppose they found you cruising about on the look-out for a job." He showed his teeth and smiled broadly and blandly, in silence upturning his dusky eyes to the skylight. It was no business of mine to question him, but I thought it as likely as not that he had run from some American vessel, for it was hard to imagine that a lad who was undoubtedly a Yankee negro, and who I might fully believe was without a word of Spanish, would be idling in Cadiz. I was about to go on deck when the boy said to me, "Do yah know where yaw've to sleep?" "In the 'tween decks I understood," said I. "I'll show yah, massa, I'll show yah. Dis is de road to your bedroom, sah," and, somewhat to my surprise, he went to a little door at the foremost end of the cabin, opened it, and conducted me into a part of the schooner that was almost immediately under the main-hatch. The main-hatch was a very wide square, and the cover of it was formed of three pieces, one portion of which was lifted so that light and air penetrated; the sun was still above the horizon, and I could see plainly. A hammock had been swung in a corner on the starboard side; it was to be my bed, and there was no other article of furniture; but then I was a sailor, very well able to dispense with all conveniences, requiring nothing but a bucket of fresh brine to supply the absence of a wash-stand. There was a quantity of rope, some bolts of canvas, and other matters of that kind stowed away down here. The space, however, was no more than a good sized cabin, owing to the after bulk-head coming well forward and the forecastle bulk-head standing well aft. Having taken a brief survey of my quarters, heaving as I did so a melancholy sigh of regret over the new sea-chest, the quantity of wearing apparel, the nautical instruments, books and old home memorials which the Ocean Ranger had sailed away with, and which it was as likely as not I should never hear of again, I re-entered the cabin and mounted the short flight of companion steps. Captain Dopping was walking with the two Spaniards. I went a little way forward to leeward, and leaned upon the rail, looking at the sea. The breeze was soft and pleasant, warm with the long day of sunshine, and the schooner was sliding in buoyant launchings over the round brows of the wide heave of the swell which in the far dim east swayed in folds of soft deep violet to the tender magical coloring of the shadow of the coming night that had paused in the heavens there. Four of the seamen were sitting in the schooner's head, watching with amused hairy countenances the face of the cook Mariana, who grotesquely gesticulated and contorted his form in his efforts to address them in English. On a sudden Captain Dopping crossed the deck, holding a handsome cigar case filled. "Don Christoval wants to know if you smoke?" said he. I took a cigar and lighted it at the stump which Captain Dopping was smoking, and perceiving that Don Christoval observed me, I raised my hat, and made him a low bow, which he returned with the majesty of a grandee. The captain resumed his place at the side of the two Spaniards, and I smoked my cigar alone, with wonder fast increasing upon me as I looked at the cigar, and then reflected upon the entertainment I was fresh from, and recollected how Captain Dopping had pronounced the word _pay_. What did it all mean? What mystery was signified, what proposals presently to come were indicated by this handsome, this hospitable reception of a distressed seaman--a mere second mate as I was or had been, rendered destitute by disaster--one of a crowd of obscure persons without pretensions of any kind or sort? Surely, had I been a nobleman, a man in the highest degree important and influential, this treatment could scarcely have been more liberal and considerate. I had nearly smoked out the exceedingly fine cigar when Captain Dopping, in his rasping voice, cried out to one of the men--I believe it was to the man George South--to step aft and take charge of the deck for a bit. I turned my head, and found that the two Spaniards had gone below. Captain Dopping beckoned to me, but the gesture was not wanting in respect. He was but a Deal longshore man, though superior to the ordinary run of those fellows, and was impressed or, at all events, influenced by my holding a master's certificate and, let me say it without vanity, for it is a thing to concern me but little after all these years, by my speech, manners, and appearance. "You are wanted in the cabin," said he, and he led the way below. CHAPTER III. DON CHRISTOVAL'S STORY. Don Christoval and Don Lazarillo were seated at the table drinking coffee; the atmosphere was charged with the delicate aroma of the berry, blended with the perfume of choice Cuba tobacco. The hour was somewhere about seven. The sunset made the little space of heaven that showed through the skylight resemble a square of gilt. Spite, however, of there being some half-hour of twilight left, the two polished and gleaming silver cabin-lamps were burning. "Pray sit," said Don Christoval. "I want to talk to you on an affair of business." I took a chair. Captain Dopping seated himself opposite me. Don Lazarillo watched me with a fiery gaze of excitement and expectation. "I will tell you plainly and at once, Mr. Portlack," said Don Christoval, fastening his fine, burning, liquid eyes upon my face, "what the object of our expedition is. In a word, it is this: I am going to England to recover my wife, who has been feloniously stolen from me." He paused to observe the effect of his words. I could only look blankly, for there was really nothing to be _thought_ so far, and therefore nothing to be said. "You will have suspected that our excursion was a singular one," said he smiling, with a note of sweetness threading his voice. "I confess, sir," said I, "that I supposed this schooner to be on an errand which might be something a little out of the way." "What does he say?" said Don Lazarillo in Spanish. Don Christoval patiently translated and then resumed, addressing me now with an air of melancholy and in tones curiously plaintive. "It is fit that my story should be told to you, because I shall desire your willing assistance. That story is well known to my friend, Captain Dopping, who did not engage the crew until he had made them acquainted with the object of this expedition. Captain Noble was in your Royal Navy, but he no longer serves. My mother, who I may tell you was an English woman, was distantly related to Captain Noble on his mother's side. I met the captain and his daughter Ida in Paris, and," said he, with a graceful flourish of his hand, "I fell in love with the young lady. Captain Noble's wife is a woman of distinction. She is Lady Ida Noble, and her father is an earl. She did not favor my addresses, nay," said he, with his face darkening--and I observed that the countenance of Don Lazarillo, who was eying him steadfastly, darkened too in manifest sympathy with his friend's mood--"she was rude; she was repellent; she was insulting. She had high desires for her child, higher," he cried, smiting his breast, and rearing his form, and looking at his friend, "than Don Christoval del Padron." He gesticulated again. "Enough!--the lady, passionately adoring me, consented to elope. I had followed them to Madrid, and from Madrid my charming girl and I fled to London, where we were secretly married. The father tracked us. We were man and wife ere he discovered us. But, two days before we had arranged to leave England for Cuba, where I have an estate, I returned to the hotel where I had left my wife, and found her gone. I made inquiries, and gathered from the description given to me by the people of the hotel that Captain Noble and his son had called, had had an interview with my wife, and that she had driven away with them in the carriage in which they had arrived. I easily guessed," he continued, speaking plaintively, without the least temper, with an expression of melancholy that wonderfully heightened the beauty of his face, "that she had been made the victim of some cruel stratagem. I knew she would write to me when the chance was permitted her, and week after week I lingered at the hotel, believing she would address me there or return to me there. "A month passed, and then I received a letter. She informed me that her father and brother had called and implored her to accompany them to her mother, who lay in a dying state at a hotel in Bond Street. She loved her mother, and her tender heart was half broken by this afflicting intelligence. Naturally, she made haste to accompany her father and brother; but it was a base lie, Mr. Portlack, an inhuman stratagem! They conveyed her, not to her mother, but, valgamedios! to Captain Noble's estate in Cumberland. There she has remained; there she still is; but her deliverance is at hand, and she awaits me." "A regular mean and cruel business, don't you think, Mr. Portlack?" cried Captain Dopping, dragging at his scarlet whiskers. "Does 'ee understand?" exclaimed Don Lazarillo. "Perfectly," I answered. "It would be strange if I could not understand your pure English, sir," addressing Don Christoval. "What we want to know is----" began Captain Dopping. "Patience," interrupted Don Christoval, elevating his hand. "It is probable," he continued, turning to me, "that we may have to employ force. I hope not, but we are prepared," he added, with a flash in his eyes. "The lady is my wife: you will allow that I have a right to her?" "Undoubtedly," said I. "The marriage was in all senses lawful. I can produce the necessary documentary evidence. I can produce my dear one's letter in which she communicates to me the perfidious conduct of her father. You will own that I have a greater right to my wife than her father has to his daughter." "You will own that?" rasped out Captain Dopping. "The law sets the husband first. He's afore all hands." "That is so; that need not be reasoned," said I. "Will you," said Don Christoval, "agree to assist me in obtaining possession of my wife?" Don Lazarillo appeared to understand this question. He eyed me sternly and with inexpressible eagerness. "Sir," said I, "you have saved my life and you have been very good to me. I should wish to be of service to you, though for no other reason than to prove my gratitude. But, sir, it would enable me to answer you, to learn the steps that are to be taken to recover the lady." "That is easily done," exclaimed Don Christoval, with a sweep of his hand that made a single diamond upon his finger stream in an arc of white fire under the lamps. "Captain Noble's house is called Trafalgar Lodge. It is a house that stands amid grounds. It is situated on the coast of Cumberland, to the south of St. Bees Head. A walk to it from the shore occupies less than half an hour, so close is it to the sea. The cliffs are high, but there is a little bay that has a margin of sand which even at high water gives plenty of foothold for landing from a boat. Into this bay between the cliffs comes sloping a--I forget the name in English." "A gap, Don Christoval?" said Captain Dopping. "That is it--that is it. You walk up this gap into the country and then the house is not far off. There is a little town about four miles distant inland--it is what you would call the nearest post-town to Trafalgar Lodge. It is a silent range of cliff--there are no guards of the coast. I have inquired, and there are no guards of the coast along that cliff. Well, when we arrive we keep what Captain Dopping calls a wide offing until the darkness of the night comes. We shall be guided by the weather: if it is fine we act, if it is stormy we keep at sea and wait. But suppose it fine. Good! We launch the boat. Myself, my friend here, Don Lazarillo de Tonnes, Captain Dopping, and five seamen enter her and we land. The rest is our affair. There must not be miscarriage; this voyage is costly." He glanced as he spoke at Don Lazarillo. "And we must go ashore in such force as to assure myself of getting possession of my wife, let Captain Noble and his son and his men servants and any gentlemen guests who may be sleeping in his house--let them, I say, oppose us as they will. But"--he held up his forefinger with a smile that made his teeth glance like light under his heavy black mustache--"what meantime is to become of this schooner? Do you see? The men we have we must take ashore, saving Mariana and Tom." "The long and short of it is, Mr. Portlack," here broke in Captain Dopping, with a note of impatience hardening yet his harsh utterance, "there wasn't time to ship more hands in Cadiz. Don Christoval had received news that if he wanted to get possession of his lady he must bear a hand, for she stands to be carried abroad by her father, and that 'ud signify a constant shifting of places. We wanted more men, and Don Christoval would have no sailors but Englishmen. I scraped together the best I could collect in a hurry, but our company was too few by one or two for this here job. There's a house to be surrounded, d'ye see; there's a chance of one or more of us being hurt in the melhee that's likely as not to happen, and then again a man must be left in charge of the boat." Don Christoval listened with patience, watching me; Don Lazarillo, in a fiery whisper, asked his friend to translate. This was done, and a short pause ensued. "What you wish me to do," said I, "is to take charge of the schooner while you and the crew are ashore?" "That is it," cried Don Christoval. "With me you leave Mariana and the negro boy?" "So." "A slender ship's company if it should come on to blow on a sudden," said I, smiling. "We shall leave the vessel snug," said Captain Dopping, "and we don't reckon upon being more than three hours gone. Besides, we shall be guided by the looks of the weather. It's still summer time, ain't it?" "You see, Mr. Portlack," said Don Christoval, leaning back in his chair and infusing a peculiar note of sweetness into his voice, "you are a navigator and my friend Captain Dopping is a navigator. It would be rash for both navigators to go ashore. Suppose an accident should befall Captain Dopping--how should we reach Cuba: nay, how should we reach a near safe port? There is no navigation among us saving what you and he have." "I understand, sir. I also gather that when you have regained the lady you proceed forthwith to the island of Cuba?" "To my estate there," he answered. "You'll be able to see your way through this job?" exclaimed Captain Dopping. "The law's at the back of us. A man has a right to his own. There's no lawyer a-going to gainsay that, you know. If you steal my watch and refuse to hand it over, there's no law to hinder me from coaxing you into my view of the business with a loaded pistol." "Explain, in the name of the Virgin," hissed Don Lazarillo, in Spanish, for these words I could understand, and such was his excitement and impatience that the rings upon his trembling hands danced in flashes like rippling water under a light. Don Christoval interpreted, on which the other bestowed several approving nods upon Captain Dopping. "But I have not yet spoken," said Don Christoval, "of any reward for your services. I here offer you fifty guineas, which shall be paid to you on our arrival in Cuba." "Do you assent, Señor, do you assent?" whipped out Don Lazarillo, who now and again would catch the meaning of what was said. The offer was a tempting one. It was made to a man rendered bankrupt by disaster. The money would go far to supply my loss; then again, my immediate business when I reached a port, no matter where it might be situated, must be to find a berth, and here was one prepared for me, easily and comfortably to be filled by me. Moreover, I was but a young man, and there were such elements of wild and startling romance in this Spaniard's proposal as could not fail to eloquently appeal to my love of adventure and to my delight in everything new and stirring. It was not for me to too curiously inquire into the sincerity of Don Christoval's story. Captain Dopping believed it; the five seamen believed it; and what was there for me to ground suspicion upon? I paused but a minute and then said, "I accept, sir." "Good!" cried Don Christoval, with enthusiasm. He went to a locker, and took from it a small, richly-inlaid box or desk, which he placed upon the table; then on a sheet of gilt-edged paper, in the corner of which was stamped or embossed in colors a nosegay of flowers, with a legend in Latin upon a scroll beneath it, he wrote as follows: "_La Casandra, at Sea,_ "_August 9, 1838._ "_I, Don Christoval del Padron, hereby undertake to pay to Mr. James Portlack, acting as first mate of this schooner, the sum of fifty-two pounds ten shillings sterling on the vessel's arrival at Cuba._" He affixed his signature, and the document was further signed by Don Lazarillo and Captain Dopping as witnesses. "This is the form of my agreement with Captain Dopping and with the sailors," said Don Christoval, handing me the paper. "I trust it satisfies you;" and he gave me one of his noble grandee bows. "Oh, yes, sir, and I am obliged to you for it. I suppose the crew will be discharged on the vessel's arrival at Cuba?" "Ay!" exclaimed Captain Dopping. "I have but one more question to ask. Is your Cuban port fixed upon?" "Matanzas will not be far off," replied Don Christoval. Matanzas I knew to be near Havana; and at Havana, whose harbor in those days was populous with ships, I felt I should have no difficulty in obtaining a berth and so making my way home. I rose, bowed, and went on deck. The sun was gone; the night had fallen; it was hard upon eight o'clock. The wind had slightly freshened, and the schooner was slipping nimbly but quietly over the dark surface of the waters. There was a slip of young moon in the south-west, by which sign I might know that, if we made good progress, there would be moonlight for the wild midnight adventure we were embarked on. There was a growling murmur of sailors' voices forward in the gloom; aft, sliding up and down against the brilliant dust of stars over the stern, was the lonely shadow of the helmsman gripping the tiller; the seaman who had been commissioned to keep a look-out trudged in the gangway. My watch on deck would come round at eight o'clock, that is to say, in a few minutes. I leaned against the rail to think, but my reverie was almost immediately broken in upon by Captain Dopping. He approached me close, and peered to make sure of me, and said: "Well, now you are one of us, what think ye of the job?" "I have not yet had time to think," said I. "It is good pay," said he, "and no risk to you either. You're on the right side of the door anyway. There's bound to be a scrimmage. The house is an old, strong building, there are gates to pass, and we must look to be fired upon." "That you must expect," said I. "But you are numerous enough--seven powerful men, not counting the eighth, whom you leave to tend the boat. You will go ashore armed, of course?" "Of course." "You do not doubt that it is a genuine business?" said I. "No, no," he answered in his file-like tones; "it's genuine enough. What d'ye suspect?" "Why, do you see, an errand of this sort, Captain Dopping," said I, hushing my voice, "might signify anything else than the recovery of a Spanish gentleman's wife." "So it might," he answered; "but in our case it don't happen to. You'll be satisfied when you see the lady brought aboard." "Who is Don Lazarillo?" said I. "A bosom-friend of Don Christoval's. I look to him more than to the other for my money. Plenty he has; ye may guess that by his hands." "But my agreement is with Don Christoval." "He'll pay ye--he'll pay ye." "How did you meet him?" "I heard that he was making inquiries for a master to take charge of this schooner. I was piloting a Spaniard to the Thames when she was run into, and they sent for me to Cadiz; and I had finished my business, and was thinking of getting home again, when this job fell in my way." Pulling out his watch, he stepped so as to bring the dial plate into the sheen round about the skylight, then calling out that it was eight bells, and that the course of the vessel was the course to be steered, he vanished. The Spaniards arrived on deck to smoke, and they walked up and down, constantly talking very earnestly in Spanish. But they never offered to accost me until they went below, at about half-past nine, when they both wished me good night, after Don Christoval had addressed a few words to me about the weather and the time we were likely to occupy in our run to the Cumberland coast. But though they went below, they did not go to bed. The negro boy placed fruit, wine, and biscuit upon the table, and the two Dons went to cards, each of them smoking a long cigar. There was something dream-like to me in the sight of them, along with the fancies begotten by the strange situation I now found myself in. It was like taking a peep into a camera obscura to glance through the skylight at the picture which it framed. Don Christoval looked a noble, handsome creature indeed, in the irradiation of the soft oil flames of the sparkling silver lamps. His smiles played like a light upon his face, so white were his teeth, so luminous the glow of his dark eyes at every festal sally of his own or his friend. Was his tale to be doubted? Surely he was a sort of man to inspire a most romantic passion in a woman; and, given that passion, all that he had related was perfectly credible and consistent. Likely as not, Don Lazarillo was finding the money for this adventure. Captain Dopping had said so, and, indeed, one had only to think of the schooner's equipment, and to peer down into that gleaming interior, to guess that the cost of this amazing quest must heavily tax even a very long purse. Don Christoval had talked of his estate in Cuba; he might be a poor man, nevertheless; his poverty, indeed, might have proved one of the objections which Captain Noble and his wife had found unconquerable, though their daughter had thought otherwise. It was quite conceivable then that Don Lazarillo, being an intimate friend of Don Christoval, should be helping him by his purse, his sympathy, and his association. But speculations of this sort were not very profitable. I had myself to consider, and it reconciled me, I must own, to the adventure to reflect that the part I was expected to play in it was a passive one. The law of England in those times was not what it now is. Men were hanged for offenses which are now visited by short periods of imprisonment. If I was being betrayed into a felonious confederacy, I might hope to be safe in the plea of ignorance, and in the excuse of having taken no active share in what might happen. Another consideration: suppose I had declined Don Christoval's proposal, how should I have been served? I could not imagine they would speak a passing ship to transfer me to her. They were in a hurry, and not likely, therefore, to delay the run to the Cumberland coast by entering a port to set me ashore. So I must have remained on board in any case, and being on board, assuming the act they were intent on an illegal one, I should have been as much or as little incriminated as I now might be by agreeing to serve as mate in the vessel. For eight days, dating from the morning of my rescue, nothing of sufficient interest happened to demand that this story should stand still while I tell it. We had extraordinarily fine weather; never once did the breeze head us so as to divert the schooner by as much as half a point from her course. Twice it blew fresh enough to single reef our canvas for us, but the breeze was a fair wind; it filled the sky with flying shapes of white vapor, but it left the sun shining brilliantly in the clear blue hollows between, and on these occasions it was that La Casandra showed her sailing qualities; for during thirteen hours the log regularly returned her speed as at something over twelve and a half knots in the hour. She heaped the foam to her stemhead, and flashed it in dazzling clouds from her bows, and the race of it spread away astern like the boiling yeast from the beat of the wheels of a paddle-steamer, with a sparkling hill of sea steadfast on either quarter, and over those fixed curves of brine the froth swept like lace endlessly unrolling. I punctually took sights every day with Captain Dopping, and every day, therefore, knew the exact position of the schooner at noon. The point of coast we were making for lay a few miles to the south of St. Bees Head. I reckoned that we should be off it by about the 18th. As the days passed, indeed I may say as the hours passed, the Spaniards grew visibly more anxious. Their laughter was infrequent, their conversation earnest and often agitated, as I might reasonably suppose by the tones of their voices and by their demeanor; they came and went restlessly, one or the other of them often appearing on deck in the night watches, and they never sat long at table. But their behavior was perfectly consistent, entirely natural, such as was to have been expected in men who had embarked on a wild romantic adventure, heavily laden with possibilities of tragedy. They had very little to say to me, nor were their conversations with Captain Dopping as frequent as before. They kept much together, walking arm in arm, Don Christoval grave to austerity, Don Lazarillo energetic in gesticulation, often pausing to withdraw his arm to smite his hands with vicious emphasis of what he might be saying, and all their talk, as I might imagine, was wholly about the probable issue of this attempt to obtain possession of Señora del Padron. I had many opportunities of speaking to the seamen. I warily questioned them, and one or two appeared convinced that the object of this expedition was as had been represented to them, while the others owned that though they did not doubt Don Christoval's story, it might not be exactly as he had put it, either. "But what does it signify?" a man named Scott said to me in one middle-watch while I conversed with him as he stood at the helm. "If when we gets ashore and we find out that the job's different from what we've been made to believe it, why, sir, here stands one," said he, thumping his breast, "who'll find it easy enough to say 'No' if he means 'No.' There's no blazing furriner in all Europe, let alone a Spaniard, as is good enough for an Englishman to get into a mess for. This here Don says he wants his wife, and I suppose his money's as good as any other man's. Well, we're willing for to help him to get his wife, and as his tarms are handsome we're quite agreeable to a bit of a shindy when it comes to our marching up to the house and asking that the gent's lawful wife should be restored to him. But if it ain't that," said he, squirting a mouthful of tobacco juice over the stern, "if it's to be something that we haven't agreed for, some job as might end in a prison hulk and a free passage to Australia, here stands one," he repeated, striking himself afresh, "as'll find it easy to say 'No,' if so be as 'No' is the meaning that's in his mind." This, as I collected from the short chats I held with others of the men, fairly represented the sentiments of the schooner's forecastle on the subject of our expedition. We had hauled on a course a trifle more westerly than was necessary to secure ourselves a wide offing, and then, somewhere about one o'clock on the afternoon of the 18th, we shifted our helm and headed the yacht east-north-east. All hands were on deck on the look-out for the land, the pale blue loom of which might now at any moment be visible on the sea-line. The wind was about south, the day clear, hot and tranquil; there was a terrace of swollen white vapor down in the west, with a look of thunder in the knitted texture of the brows of the stuff, but the mercury in the barometer stood high, and I could find nothing to disquiet me in the appearance of the English heavens, tessellated here and there with spaces of high-poised, delicate cloud that gleamed with divers hues like the pearly inside of a mussel-shell. Lunch had been served on deck to the two Spaniards. I noticed a change in Don Christoval; his face had hardened, there was an air of sneering temper in his rare smile that reduced it to little more than a mirthless grin, and often a vindictive look in his eyes as he would stand staring ahead at the sea, swaying his noble figure to the heave of the deck. His manner, indeed, suggested itself as that of one who seeks for courage in temper, for resolution in the evocation of hot thoughts. Don Lazarillo was pale as though oppressed with nausea. He constantly raised his hat to press a large silk pocket-handkerchief to his brow. When I glanced at him I'd wonder whether, when the hour came, he would be among those who entered the boat. A small brig, a collier, with dingy ill-fitting canvas, her yards braced sharp up, passed under our stern near enough to hail us, but we took no notice of the old fellow who stood flourishing his hand upon the rail; whereupon to mark his disgust he flung his tall, weather-worn hat down on to the deck, and shook his fist at us with a shout whose meaning did not catch my ear, though a laugh arose among the men forward. The cook Mariana showed himself very agitated. He was constantly in and out of his galley, running into the schooner's head to stare, then darting back afresh to his pots and pans, one moment popping his hideous face out from the door to starboard, then thrusting it through the door to port, making one think of those little toy monsters which spring out of a box when you free the lid. At four o'clock the land was in sight. The giant St. Bees Head dimly shaded the sea-line in the north-east, and thence the shore stretched in a blue film to the south, dying out in the azure atmosphere. Don Christoval leaned over the rail viewing the land with a face darkened by an immovable frown, the scowling air of which gave a malevolent expression to his eyes. He stood rooted--motionless--his hand with a paper cigar between his fingers, half raised to his mouth, as though the whole form of him had been withered by a blast of lightning. "How close do you mean to sail, Capitan?" cried Don Lazarillo, sputtering out his words brokenly, with such an accent as could not possibly be imitated in print. "We shall be seen!" he exclaimed, with his face working with agitation. "No fear of our being seen at this distance, Don Lazarillo," answered Captain Dopping. "A four mile offing is all we want till nightfall, and that there land is three times that distance off." Don Lazarillo asked Don Christoval to explain, but the tall Spaniard continued to stand as though in a trance. An hour passed, all remained quiet aboard the schooner. The light wind fanned the clipper keel of the craft forward, and by the expiration of the hour the land was hard, firm, and defined, but with no feature of spur, chasm, or ravine visible as yet to the naked eye. Sail was shortened to the extent of the topsail being furled, a jib hauled down, and the gaff-topsail taken in. "Best see, while there's plenty of time and daylight," said Captain Dopping to me, "that the boat's all ready for launching," and then addressing Don Christoval, he exclaimed, "Shall we get the arms-chest up, sir, and the weapons served out? It may come on a dark night," he added, sending a look at the terrace of cloud in the west, "and it won't do to mess about with lanterns." "Do whatever you think proper," whipped out Don Christoval in accents fierce with excitement, though by his stern, hard, and frowning face it would have been impossible to guess his agitation. I superintended the clearing away of the boat, and saw that everything was in readiness for launching her. This was to be done smack fashion--that is to say, by running her through the gangway over the side. Meanwhile a couple of seamen brought up a large square black box. Captain Dopping opened it, and disclosed a number of cutlasses and heavy pistols of the old-fashioned type. He called to the seamen and handed them each a pistol and a cutlass. I watched their faces as they received them. They all of them handled the weapons as objects strange to their grasp, with awkward grins running over their countenances as they poised the firearms in their brawny fists or drew the cutlasses to examine their blades. "I hope," said the man Andrew Trapp, "that it ain't going to come to our using these here tools?" "The lady's to be got possession of," said Captain Dopping, "without spilling blood if it can be managed; but to be got, anyhow." "That's right enough," said the sailor named South, "but all the same," said he, leveling the pistol he held, "if so be as I am to fire this here consarn, I choose that it shouldn't be at a fellow countryman." "Mind dat pistole," cried Don Lazarillo, recoiling a step. "I take it," said the seaman named William Scott, gazing earnestly at the cutlass in his hand, "that these weapons are meant more to what they calls overawe the people in the house we're to surround than to be used agin 'em." "We may have to exert force," said Don Christoval, who stood near listening; "if our lives are threatened we must be in a position to protect ourselves. Is not this as you would wish, men?" There was a general murmur of assent. "I claim my right--no more!" the tall Spaniard cried, with an impassioned gesture of his arm; "you will help me to assert my right? I trust no blood may be shed--if blood is shed it will not be our fault." "That puts it correctly, I _think_, lads?" exclaimed Captain Dopping, in his harshest voice and with his most thrusting manner. The sailors holding their weapons went forward. Were they to be trusted at a pinch, I wondered? Assuredly they were not to be trusted in any sense if the business they were about to enter upon should prove in the smallest degree different from the object of the expedition as represented by Don Christoval. We continued to stand in for the land under small canvas, which, however, there was no further occasion to reduce, for as the sun sank the wind fined down, and at seven o'clock the breeze had scarce weight enough to hold our sails steady. The sun was astern of us, and his light streamed full upon the coast, which glowed red as copper in that atmosphere upon the dark blue of the water brimming to its base and against the violet of the eastern sky. When the little collier brig which had spoken us sank her topmost cloths past the rim of the ocean, the sea line ran flawless from St. Bees Head right away round to the point where the land melted out. It was hard to credit that we were in home waters, so deserted was that wide surface. The schooner might, indeed, have been softly rippling through the heart of some Pacific solitude. With the aid of a powerful telescope, handed to me by Don Christoval, I could distinctly make out the bay where the boat was to go ashore, and the dark scar of gap or ravine vanishing in the land beyond. I had never before been off this coast, and ran the glass along the line of it, but I could see no houses, no habitation of any sort; it was sheer rugged cliff, whose character of forbidding desolation was not to be softened by the rich and beautiful light that at this hour clothed it. I asked Captain Dopping if he was acquainted with this coast, and he answered that many years before he had made a trip to Whitehaven, which lay round the corner to the north of St. Bees Head. That was all he knew of the Cumberland shore. Occasionally Don Lazarillo would descend into the cabin, and twice on glancing through the skylight I detected him in the act of pouring out with a trembling hand a full bumper of sherry, which he seemed to swallow furtively, but looking round instead of _up_, possibly forgetting the deck window through which I peeped. These draughts began to tell upon him; his face grew flushed, his fiery eyes moist, and his gait changed into a defiant strut when he moved restlessly about his friend, talking with extraordinary vehemence and a frequent snap of his fingers. Don Christoval, on the other hand, exhibited a new phase of mood. There was less of gloom in his face, more of animation. He smoked his cigar collectedly, with now and again a smile, and sometimes a laugh at what his flushed-faced, restless, gesticulating companion said. I took it that the English blood in his veins kept his nerves steady without obliging him to imitate Don Lazarillo's quest after courage in the contents of a decanter of wine. I remember the sunset that night as one of sullen and thunderous magnificence. The luminary, like a huge red rayless target, sank into the coast of cloud over the stern, setting fire to the round and tufted shoulders of the long, compacted mass, but darkening the base of it into an ugly livid hue. Long beams of light, like the spokes of some titanic wheel of flame, projected in burning lines till their red and storm-colored extremities were over our mastheads; and as they slowly fainted, the coast ahead of us darkened, the blue of the sky beyond it deepened into liquid dusk with a single rose-colored star faintly trembling in the heavens almost directly above the bay that was our destination, as though it were some freshly kindled beacon to advise us how to head through the approaching gloom. We continued slowly to stand in. The stem of the schooner scarcely broke the quiet water, and I reckoned that unless more wind came we should not have arrived at a point where we were to come to a stand much before midnight. The moon rose somewhere about half-past eight. She soared in a swollen mass of crimson out of the inky dye of the land, but swiftly changed into clear silver. Astern of us there was a constant play of red lightning, with an occasional moan of thunder slipping over the dark soft folds of the small swell. The two Spaniards, Captain Dopping, and myself stood near the helm. "The moon," said Don Christoval, "shines full upon our white canvas, and reveals us." "But first of all," said Captain Dopping, "who's keeping a look-out yonder? And next, supposing there to be eyes on the watch, who's to guess our business? Wouldn't any man who may already have twigged us through a glass reckon us a gentleman's pleasure-yacht from the Isle of Man, say, sauntering inward in view of this quiet night with a chance of a calm atop of it? But if you like, Don Christoval--though it's not what I should recommend--we'll stand in a mile or two farther, then douse every stitch, and ride to a short scope. The soundings'll be about twenty fathom." "That will look suspicious," said Don Christoval. "I do not like the idea. I do not advocate anchoring. See the time that will be lost in heaving up the anchor." "What ees it dat Capitan Dopping say?" inquired Don Lazarillo. His friend explained; on which Don Lazarillo cried out shrilly, "No, no, no," and addressed Don Christoval in Spanish with incredible vehemence of delivery and gesticulation, his friend meanwhile uttering the single word "Si!" in a soothing note over and over again. "But if this breeze takes off, Captain Dopping," said I, when I could get an opportunity to speak, "you'll either have to bring up or take your chance of the schooner drifting far enough to make the pull from the shore to her a long one." Captain Dopping stared round the sea, whistling. "How far off is the land?" said Don Christoval. "Call it six mile," answered the captain. "It would be too far to row," said Don Christoval. "We must creep farther in." "At what hour, sir," I asked, "do you wish to land?" "It must be past midnight," answered the Spaniard, "when the house is hushed, and when, should firearms be used, there will be no one awake in the country around to hear the reports." "And how long is the job going to take us, I wonder?" said Captain Dopping, cutting off a piece of black tobacco with a big clasp knife, whose blade glittered in the moonlight, and burying the morsel in his cheek. "An hour--easily in an hour," answered Don Christoval, speaking rapidly and breathing swiftly. "Mark now how I piece out the time: three quarters of an hour to row ashore, half an hour to march to the house, that makes an hour and a quarter; an hour in executing our errand, that makes two hours and a quarter; and then another hour and a quarter to regain the schooner, that makes three hours and a half in all. Call the time four o'clock when we sail away, by five we shall be out of sight of land." CHAPTER IV. A MIDNIGHT THEFT. It fell a stark calm at ten o'clock, and then I believed that there could be nothing for it but to bring up--that is, to let go the anchor; but half an hour later the moonlight upon the water--for by this time the moon had floated southward--was tarnished by a little air of wind from the south and west; it breathed, wet with dew, like a sigh into the schooner's canvas, then softly freshened into a small summer night-wind. The mass of clouds in the west had vanished; all was clear heaven from the sea line there to the looming shadow of the land over our bow; the moon rode high, small and piercingly clear; the canvas shone like ice in the light; stars of diamond-like brilliance sparkled in the moisture along the rail; and every man's shadow lay at his feet upon the pearl-colored planks, as though drawn in Indian ink there. The hush of expectation lay upon the little vessel as she crept along with a noise of rippling water refreshingly rising from alongside. Captain Dopping held his watch to the moon. "Wants but twenty minutes to midnight," said he; "we're close enough in. Down helm," and he began to sing out orders in a voice whose harshness sounded startlingly upon the ear amid the exquisite serenity of that moonlit night. The men ran about, still further reducing sail. So clear was the night, it was possible even at a distance to read the expressions upon their faces. There was no Preventive Force or Coastguard Service then as now. The English coast was indeed watched at certain parts of it where smuggling was notoriously carried on, and the people who kept a look-out were styled blockaders; but the northern reaches, more particularly where the coast was rugged and high, and where the facility for "running" goods, as it was called, was small, were unsentineled. The smuggler needed the accommodating creek, the comfortably shoaling foreshore, secret hiding places, and, above all, a handy local machinery for the prompt distribution of his commodities. All this was to be found in the English Channel, more particularly in that stretch of it which lies between the North and South Forelands; but it was not to be met with up here, on this lonely iron-bound Cumberland coast. In our time, even in these times, when smuggling is a decaying, an almost extinct business, the pallid apparition of such a schooner as La Casandra hovering doubtfully at midnight off any point of the English shore would infallibly in a very short time win the regard and invite the visit of a boat full of brawny coastguards, armed, as our men were about to arm themselves, with pistols and with cutlasses. "Get the boat launched, my lads," called out Captain Dopping. The gangway was unshipped, the muscular fists of the seamen gripped her gunwales, and she was run with a note of thunder overboard, stern foremost, smiting the water a blow that lashed it white, then lying quietly in the shadow of the schooner. The two Spaniards descended into the cabin, Don Lazarillo talking noisily as he trod upon his companion's heels. I stood looking on while Captain Dopping and the seamen girded the cutlasses to their hips and thrust pistols into their pockets or breasts. "You will keep a bright look-out for us, Mr. Portlack," said the captain. "Hold the schooner as stationary as possible. There's nothing going to hurt her to-night," said he, with a look round, "and there'll be no tide to speak of for another two hours. You will then wear and keep her with her head to the nor'ard." "Ay, ay, sir. But suppose, while you're ashore, a boat should come off and speak us?" "Not likely, not likely," he rasped out. "But suppose it, Captain Dopping. I accept no responsibility. What am I to say, and what am I to do?" "Don't Don Christoval and his friend mean to come?" he answered, walking to the skylight and looking down. Either he could not invent any instructions, or he considered a visit from a shore boat as a thing too improbable to merit consideration. The two Spaniards came on deck. I had never supposed that Don Lazarillo would have had courage to enter the boat until I observed that he had armed himself with a long saber, the extremity of whose steel scabbard was visible at the skirts of the Spanish cloak he had drawn over his shoulders. Don Christoval was similarly swathed, but how armed I am unable to say, as no weapon was to be seen upon him. "All's ready for the start, gentlemen," exclaimed Captain Dopping. "Right!" exclaimed Don Christoval in a firm, deep voice, "let the men enter the boat." The sailors dropped into her one by one, and sat silent and grim and dark in the gloom of the schooner's side, waiting. "Where is Mariana?" cried Don Christoval. The ugly cook's voice answered from somewhere forward, and he approached. Don Christoval addressed him in Spanish impressively, and as it seemed to my ear menacingly, emphasizing his words with frequent gestures. Mariana responded humbly with many shakes of the head, as though in deprecation of what had been said to him. Don Christoval then turned to me and extended his hand. "Mr. Portlack, I rely upon your vigilance and seamanship. We hope not to be long absent." He relinquished my hand, I raised my cap, and without another word, he, Don Lazarillo and Captain Dopping stepped over the side. "Shove off," the captain exclaimed, and in a few moments the boat was gliding shoreward to the noise of the rhythmic grind of her five long oars betwixt the thole-pins, with eddies of dim phosphorescence under each lifted blade. I watched her until her small shape, blending with the shadow thrown by the high land upon the water, was lost to sight, and then stepped aft to the helm, at which stood the negro boy Tom, who had been ordered to the tiller by me when the steersman had relinquished it to enter the boat. I mechanically eyed the illuminated disk of compass card, while my thoughts accompanied the armed expedition that was making for the shore. I figured the arrival of the boat at the margin of white sand that curved with the bay; in fancy I saw the people get out of her, leaving one behind to watch, and marching in a little dark company up the gap, a faint noise of the clank of side-arms attending them. In imagination I marked them cautiously approach the house--but what sort of house was it? Walls I had heard it had, and gates, and these must be forced or scaled. But what of Madame del Padron, the Ida of Don Christoval's heart, if not of his hearth? Was she lying awake yonder, expecting her husband? Impossible! for no date could certainly have been fixed for the arrival of the schooner off the coast. But of course she would be awaiting him with impassioned anxiety at all hours of the night--nights that were gone, and to-night that was going: and he would have told her that he meant to regain her with the aid of an armed crew of seamen. Yet, though forewarned, should a struggle happen, she would listen with terror to the sound of firearms, to explosions, which might signify the death of her husband, or the fall of one or more of her own people, only a little less dear to her than her husband. What was her age? Was she dark or fair? Beautiful I could not but imagine the heroine, or, rather, the object, of such an adventure as this must be. Then from musings of this sort my mind rambled into reflections of the odd and perilous fortune that had brought me into this business. How had fared the two sailors whom the murderous rogue of a Yankee skipper had pilfered from me? Into what-parallels had the Ocean Ranger penetrated by this time, and what man of her crew had been selected to fill my place? I looked at the negro boy, whose eyes in the moonlight resembled a brace of new silver coins set in a block of indigo. "What's your other name?" said I. "Tom, sah." "Ay, but what besides Tom?" "Tom ober and ober again, massa, as often as yah like." "How old are you?" He grinned widely as he answered, "Nebber was told, sah." "Are you a Roman Catholic?" said I, talking sheerly for the want of something to do, and imagining he might have been chosen by Don Christoval because of his religion. He shook his head, still broadly grinning, but meaning that he did not understand. "Have you any religion?" "Yes, sah." "What is it?" "I believe dat when I die I shall be seen no mo'." "Where do you go when you die?" "I know, sah," he answered, with a low throaty laugh. "Where?" said I. "Dis child," said he, touching his body, "goes dar," and he pointed down; "dat child," he continued, indicating his shadow that stretched sharply defined upon the planks, "goes up dar," and he pointed upward. "Who taught you that?" said I. "Is it true, massa?" "Mind your helm," said I, "and I'll talk to you another time." I went to the side and peered. The atmosphere in the south-west was brimful of moonshine, and the sea line mingled with the sky in the delicate haze of sheen till you could not tell heaven from water. Nothing broke the stillness but the voice of the wind-brushed ripples, unless it were the chafe of a rope on high or the gull-like cry of the sheave of a block stirred by a sudden strain. The shadowy figure of Mariana, the cook, restlessly paced the deck forward. He seemed to be keeping a sharp look-out, as I was. A flock of wild fowl passed high overhead; their cries as they swept, invisible, over our trucks made a strange, solemn, plaintive noise in the midnight silence that was upon the sea. Sometimes I believed I could hear the small remote thunder of surf echoing out of the line of land which, now that the moon was shining upon it, stood in a long pale spectral range. I was thirsty and stepped below for a tumbler of seltzer and claret. I took a cigar from a box which stood upon the table, dimmed the cabin lamps, and returned on deck. Expectation, the constant obligation of keeping a penetrating look-out, made the time heavy. The moon floated into the western quarter, and slowly the orb lost its brilliance and took its rusty hue of setting, though it was still high above the horizon. Nothing in the shape of a sail was visible the wide sea round; I was able to sink my sight to the confines of the water, but never could see the dimmest apparition of a ship. Some time before three o'clock I wore the schooner, and waiting until she regained the point at which the boat had left her, I brought her head to the wind and held her so with her canvas trembling to the breeze. It was shortly after I had done this that my eye was taken by a faint redness ashore. The rim of the cliff turned black against the dim crimson light. It might have passed as the first of the lunar dawn--as though another moon were rising beyond the land to replace the orb that was sinking in the west. Mariana came out of the bows and called out to me with his incommunicable accent: "Señor, do you see?" and he pointed to the light. "Yes," said I, "that looks like a fire ashore. Whether the house has been fired by design or mischance, our people will have to bear a hand; for should there be any sort of country-side thereabouts it'll be swiftly up and wide awake and running and shouting to _that_ signal." He grunted, evidently without understanding a word of what I had said, and went forward again. I had just glanced at the cabin clock and observed that it exactly wanted five minutes to four when my ears were caught by the sound of oars working in their pins. A moment later we were hailed in a voice thin with distance. I answered with a "Halloa!" at the top of my lungs. Presently the boat shaped itself out of the gloom that lay heavy upon the waters to the eastward. The gathering strength of the grinding noise was warrant that the men strained hard at their oars. The boat came shearing and hissing alongside as though her stem were of red-hot steel; the oars were flung in and a boat-hook arrested the fabric's progress. I stood at the side in the open space of the schooner's gangway. My eye was instantly caught by the figure of a woman supported in the arms of Don Christoval. One sees a thing quickly, and in the breathless pause between the arrival of the boat and what next happened I had time to note that the woman rested perfectly motionless as though dead, that her head was uncovered, and that her left arm lay like a stroke or dash of white paint in the gloom with a scintillation of gems in the dim gleam of some gold ornaments upon her wrist. Indeed, imperfect as my view was of her, I might yet know that she was in ball attire! Three or four seamen came bounding out of the boat; the voice of Don Christoval exclaimed: "Is that you, Mr. Portlack?" "It is, sir." "Captain Dopping," he cried, "has been shot dead. We were forced to leave him behind. The command of the schooner devolves upon you. This lady is in a heavy swoon, and must be lifted over the side. Let it be done instantly, pray; there is no time to lose." I was greatly startled and shocked to hear of Captain Dopping having been shot dead and left behind, but the general agitation of the moment, the obligation of hurry, the wild impatience of the Spaniard, that hissed feverishly through his words, gave me no time to think of anything but what we had in hand. Don Christoval, muscular and big as he was, was unable, no doubt through exhaustion, to rise with the burden he supported. Don Lazarillo, addressing him in Spanish, sprang on board the schooner. I ordered a couple of seamen to assist Don Christoval, and the lady was lifted over the side and received by Don Lazarillo and Mariana, who straightway bore her below. I believed her to be dead. She never stirred, or uttered the least sound. "Are all returned, saving the captain?" I called out. "All returned, sir," answered the gruff voice of one of the seamen. "Anybody wounded?" "Nobody hurt, saving the captain, who was shot dead," responded the same voice. Don Christoval, with a stagger in his gait, stepped out of the boat on to the deck, calling to me to give him my hand, lest he should fall backward. "Be quick, and sail away, Mr. Portlack," said he, hoarsely. "A wing of the house caught fire, but through no fault of ours--no! It was owing to the carelessness of some terrified servant within. Only one shot was fired; it was meant for me, and slew Captain Dopping, who was at my side. That fire was a terrible signal--it may still be burning: I do not know; all seemed in darkness when we gained the gap, but they rang a danger bell, a fearful summons that seemed to echo for miles and miles. Did you hear it here?" he cried, almost gasping with the rapidity of his utterance. "No, sir." "Mounted messengers will have been flying from place to place long ago," he continued; "they will send to Whitehaven, where, I heard our sailors say, there may be lying a Revenue cutter, or some more formidable ship of the State yet, to pursue us; therefore, for our lives' sake, Mr. Portlack, get the boat in and start at once." He paused an instant to clasp his hands with an air of impassioned, theatrical appeal to me, then went below walking like a drunken man. The bows of the boat were hastily hoisted into the gangway by means of a tackle called a burton. All hands of us then grasped the fabric, and dragged her bodily to her place on the deck. I could collect, by the motions of the men, that they were frightfully fatigued, but they worked with a will, as for their lives, indeed; well knowing--better knowing than I probably--what must be the fate of all hands of us if we were to be captured red-handed thus, with the house still on fire ashore for all we could tell--though I could now see no signs of the glow I had before observed--and with the dead body of the captain to fearfully testify to the audacious nature of this expedition. Every stitch of sail the schooner carried was, cloth by cloth, expanded. Within ten minutes of the boat's return she was in her place on deck, the little topgallant-sail was being sheeted home, and La Casandra, under full breasts of canvas, was sliding out into the gloom south and west. Clouds had collected in the west; and if the moon still hung over the sea, she could not show her face. Our course brought the weak damp wind a little forward of the beam. This was the schooner's best point of sailing, and she slided through it with a nimbleness that I hoped would put her out of sight of land before daybreak. While the men, with weary motions, were coiling away the running gear which littered the deck, Mariana came up out of the cabin with a bottle of brandy. He told me that Don Christoval wished the sailors to drink. I said-- "Take it forward and serve it out; but see that no man gets more than a dram. If you muddle their brains, you will be putting us in the way of being hanged." That he partly understood me I knew, by the energetic assent he howled out in his own tongue. I carefully swept the sea line, and then took a look through the cabin skylight. I had intended no more than a glance, but my gaze was arrested, as though fascinated by the spectacle it surveyed. Some one had turned up the lamps, and their flames burned brightly. Don Christoval sat at the table, supporting his head by resting his jaw upon his clinched fists. Don Lazarillo occupied a chair close to him; a tumbler, half full, was before him; he held an unlighted cigar, and his eyes were fixed upon the object at which his friend was staring. _This_ was no more nor less than the figure of a girl of about two-and-twenty, resting at full length upon a velvet couch. The remains of what might have been a wreath of flowers were in her hair. A portion of her hair, that was of a dark red, and that glowed like gold, as though it had been plentifully dusted with gilt powder, was detached, and lay in a long thick tress upon her shoulder. They had unclasped a rich opera cloak, and her attire was revealed. Her ball-dress of white satin, looped here and there with pink roses, was cut low, and exposed her throat and shoulders; but there were some ugly scratches on the flesh near her left shoulder. She wore very handsome jewelry: diamond earrings, a rope of pearls with a cross of diamonds that sparkled against the dark yellow of the tresses which had fallen. Her arms of faultless mold were bare to the short sleeves; her hands were gloved; I believed I could witness traces of blood upon the white kid; and her wrists were circled with bracelets. But to describe all this is really to describe nothing: for how am I to convey to you the disorder of apparel that suggested a struggle which you must have thought deadly in its consequences, when you looked at her motionless shape, her closed eyes, her bloodless face, and the lifeless pose of her arms? I stood gazing. Presently Don Christoval, extending a trembling hand, poured himself out half a tumbler of brandy--brandy I might suppose it was, by observing that he filled up the glass with water. He drained the tumbler, and suddenly looked up and saw me. He instantly rose and came on deck. He was without his hat. He seated himself on the corner of the skylight, where he commanded a view of the interior of the cabin, and called down some words in Spanish to Don Lazarillo, who nodded violently, but without removing his eyes from the girl. "Does the schooner make good way?" said Don Christoval. "Yes," I answered; "her speed is about five miles an hour." "At dawn shall we be out of sight of the coast?" "It will not be long before daybreak," said I, "and at dawn the coast may be in sight of us, but I do not suppose we shall be in sight of it." He stood up to look around the sea. "It is sad," he exclaimed, "that Captain Dopping should have been shot." "It is shocking," said I. "You have sole control of the schooner now, Captain Portlack, for my captain I make you," said he. "And the money that I had agreed to pay to Captain Dopping shall be yours, in addition to the fifty guineas as arranged." I gave him a bow and said, "Thank you." My eyes were fixed upon the motionless girl below; he was able to observe the direction of my gaze by the sheen of the lamp-light, that rose like a haze through the glass and the lifted lid of the skylight. "How cruel! how cruel!" said he, in a deep yet musical voice, that was not the less thrilling because of a certain indefinable flavor of theatricalism; "how cruel, that I should be obliged to claim what is mine by force, which I find barbarous when I look there," said he, pointing to the figure of his wife, "and when I recall Captain Dopping's cry as he fell lifeless at my side." "Is your lady dead?" said I. "No, no, I think not; indeed, I am sure not. She is sunk in a trance or stupor. If she were bled, she would revive; but there is no man on board who has the skill to bleed her." "She looks to have been very roughly handled." "What you see," he cried, "is the work of her inhuman father and brother. Captain Noble, his son, and my wife had returned from a ball. We found the gate open, the carriage at the door: they had only just alighted, indeed, and the carriage was in the act of driving away; but the hall-door was closed. We knocked, and Captain Noble put his head out of a window and asked who was there. I told him that it was I, Don Christoval del Padron; that I had arrived to take possession of my wife, whom he had forcibly divorced from me and was keeping a prisoner--that is, never leaving her out of his own sight or the sight of others of his family. He disappeared, and then returned to the window. I did not know he was armed. He shouted insultingly to us to be off. "Give me my wife!" I cried. "I desire no struggle, no uproar. Give her to me, to whom she belongs, and we will withdraw peacefully." He fired, and Captain Dopping fell and died with a groan. On this we stormed the door; we put a pistol to the keyhole and blew away the lock. Strangely enough, the door was not bolted. No doubt, in the alarm our sudden appearance had caused, this had been overlooked, or possibly Captain Noble supposed that some one had shot the bolts. We entered; but what follows others may be better able to tell than I. All was confusion and cries. They had hidden my wife. We entered five rooms before we found her. This search was mine and Don Lazarillo's. The seamen guarded the door, and stood cutlass in hand over Captain Noble and his son. I found my wife locked in a room. When I turned the key and she beheld me she rushed to my arms with a cry of delight. I enveloped her in her opera cloak and conducted her downstairs, but on Captain Noble and his son beholding us they dashed themselves against the seamen, rushed upon us, and then it was that my wife suffered in her apparel and upon her neck, as you see. She fainted, she instantly became insensible. In the stupor that she now lies in we carried her to the boat. As we left the house I saw the red light of fire in a wing on the left, but it was not our doing; they can not charge that to me." This extraordinary story he told in such broken-winded English as I have attempted to convey it in. While I listened, I had found it difficult to reconcile his statement that his wife had been imprisoned by her father with the circumstance of her having accompanied him and her brother to a ball. Then, again, while I listened, from time to time, looking at the figure of the girl as he spoke, I wondered, as I had before wondered again and again, in thinking over the object of this expedition, why, if the lady, as he had represented, had been all anxiety to rejoin her husband, should Don Christoval have considered it necessary to carry an armed force ashore with him? That she had not been a prisoner, in the sense of being confined to a room, or to a suite of rooms, was made manifest by the ball attire in which she lay as one dead upon the cabin sofa. Her liberty in a certain degree she must have enjoyed. Could she not, at some preconcerted signal, have stolen from the house secretly, and darkly joined her husband, and secretly and darkly sailed away with him, saving all this tremendous obligation of midnight landing and of armed seamen, with its tragic result of fire and a slain man, not to mention the condition of the wife, who, if not now actually dead, might be a corpse before the sun rose? There might have been a pause of five or six seconds while I thus mused, during which I seemed to feel rather than see that his dark and burning eyes were scrutinizing me by aid of the cabin light that touched my face. "The lady lies startlingly motionless, shockingly lifeless, Don Christoval," said I. "But her pulse beats--her pulse beats." "Shall you persist in sailing to Cuba, sir?" "Certainly; we are now proceeding to Cuba," he exclaimed, and he half rose from the corner of the skylight as though with a mind to step to the compass. "Cuba is a long way off," said I. "What of that?" he cried, instantly, and with heat. "Seeing the condition of that lady," said I, "I could not be sure but that you would wish to visit some near port to obtain medical help, and----" "What?" he demanded, bending his head forward to observe me. "Why!" said I, with embarrassment, because I was about to say something that might sound like impertinence in the ear of the Spaniard, "madame, your wife, Don Christoval, will not be expected by you to make a voyage to the island of Cuba in a ball-dress." "I have provided for that," he exclaimed, haughtily. "I have minded my business, Captain Portlack, and if you will mind yours all will be well." He immediately added in a softened voice, as though regretting any display of temper, "Yes, we must proceed to Cuba. If Cuba is erased from my programme, my arrangements will be rendered worthless. Besides, we have to-night done that which must oblige us, for every man's sake, to put as many leagues of water between ourselves and yonder country as this schooner can measure in a month. The Atlantic Ocean is not too wide for us after what has happened in the darkness this morning." Just then the cook or steward Mariana came under the skylight and upturned his mask of a face. He addressed Don Christoval in Spanish. The other answered and was about quitting me, but stopped and said: "Let me see, Captain Portlack, I believe you sleep under the main hatch?" I said yes, that was so. "Well, we shall not wish to disturb you. Don Lazarillo surrenders his cabin to my wife, and he takes that which Captain Dopping occupied. But any conveniences you may require, pray ask for, and you shall have them. I will take care that all the nautical instruments, the chronometer, the charts, and such furniture are conveyed to you." He then went below. It was not proper that I should linger at the skylight as though I were a spy. I paced the deck, looking eastward for the first faint green of the dawn; yet my walk carried me so close to the skylight, and the length of deck I traversed was so short besides, that it was easy to see what was going on below without pausing or appearing to look. Still, what I saw was no more than this: that Don Christoval, his friend, and Mariana assembled at the side of the unconscious girl, where they appeared to hold a consultation; that when I passed the skylight in another turn, I observed them posturing themselves as though to lift her; and that when I once more passed the skylight in the third turn, the interior was empty--the lady had been conveyed to her berth. Day broke a little later. The land showed dim against the dawn; and the distance we had made good during the hour of darkness had carried us, as I had foreseen, far out of eye-shot of any point of the range of cliffs. There was a small vessel standing to the north, abeam of us, and the sails of another, hull down, were shining upon the blue edge of the sea right ahead, as prismatically to the early piercing radiance of the now risen sun as a leaning shaft of crystal. I leveled a glass at her and found that she was pursuing the course we were steering. There was nothing in sight where the shadow of the land was; but even if I had supposed we should be pursued, I was very sure we should not be caught. There was nothing, I might swear, flying the crimson cross, capable of holding her own with La Casandra. As to our being intercepted--life moved sluggishly in those days. Steamers there were indeed, but they were few, and none to be promptly prepared for sea to a swift summons. The electric telegraph did not exist. I can not say there were no railways; but I am certain that pursuit would have been long rendered hopeless before intelligence of what had taken place could be communicated to a port where the machinery necessary for an ocean chase was to be found and put in motion. But, then, were we likely to be pursued? Who would be able to guess at our destination? I paced the deck, depressed, anxious, full of misgiving. I heartily wished myself out of this business; yet I now stood so committed to it that I was at a loss to know how to act. The violent death of Captain Dopping was a shock to me. It sharply edged my realization of the significance of this midnight adventure. And now that the tragic business was ended there was something I found unintelligible in it, something which pleaded to my instincts, stirring and troubling them. Four seamen sat to leeward of the little galley; they seemed to be dozing; their whiskered faces were bowed over their folded arms; a fifth man was at the tiller. I peered through the skylight and saw Don Lazarillo asleep in a chair. The man at the helm was William Scott; he had been there while Don Christoval talked to me, and I guessed that he had overheard every syllable of the Spaniard's narrative of the adventures of the party ashore. I stepped up to him and said: "This has been a strange business." "It has, sir." "I am now in command here, as I suppose you know?" "I didn't know, sir; but you're the one to take command, surely, now the captain's dead and gone." "Yes, but it is a command I do not desire. I shall want a mate, some man to stand watch and watch with me. Did you hear Don Christoval tell me just now what happened ashore?" "Yes, sir. His yarn was pretty near the truth; not quite, though." "Where," said I, "was he mistaken?" "The lady was insensible when him and the other Spanish gent brought her downstairs. It's true that her father and the young gentleman, her brother, bust from us when they see her being carried through the hall, but it is not true that she got them scratches upon her shoulder _then_. She was bleeding when the two Spaniards came along down the stairs with her. I took notice of them marks, and so did Tubb and Butler." "Did her father, Captain Noble, say anything during the time you were guarding him--while you, or whoever else it was, stood watch over him?" "Ay, a deal more than my memory carries, sir. Yet it was nothing but calling names--nothing in the way of explaining matters. It was '_The infernal villain!--The brutal wretch!--Who are these scoundrels?--Are you pirates, you ruffians?--You speak English; you are English; will you help these two Spaniards, English as I reckon you to be, to kidnap an Englishwoman from her father's home in England?_' But if that had been all! Butler, he flourished his cutlass and threatened to give the old gent a tap over the head if he didn't belay his jaw. Pirates we _wasn't_! We was ashore helping a gentleman to his rights. Captain Dopping told us that the law was on our side, and there's ne'er a pirate as can say _that_ of his calling." I continued to pace the deck a while musing on this man's version of the adventure. The morning opened wide and brilliant as the sun soared. Soon after daybreak the breeze freshened, and the waters were now streaming and arching into little heads of foam as they ran with it. Mariana came out of the cabin and was trudging forward when I called to him: "How is the lady?" Instead of responding he shrugged his shoulders till the lobes of his long yellow ears rested upon them, proceeded to the galley and lighted the fire. I went a little way forward and called to the seamen, who at daybreak had risen from their squatting postures and now hung together talking in low voices. They approached me. There were four of them, Trapp, South, Butler, and Tubb; Scott still grasped the tiller till he should be relieved at four bells--that is to say, at six o'clock. "Men," said I, "Don Christoval has asked me to take charge of this schooner. You may have heard him say so when he came aboard this morning." "I heard him, sir," said Andrew Trapp. "I shall want a mate," said I. "Butler, you filled that post under Captain Dopping. Will you take it afresh?" "If I must, I must, sir," he answered gloomily. "No extra pay goes to the job, I suppose?" "I can not tell you. Scott says that the lady's father behaved like a madman, and that you threatened him with your cutlass." "That's true," answered Butler. "He called us pirates, and swore he'd have us hanged as pirates. I never was tarmed a pirate afore, and I lost my temper, but I did him no hurt." "It's a job," exclaimed Tubb, "which I, for one, am sorry I ever meddled with. Yonder," cried he, pointing to the dim haze of land, "lies Captain Dopping, shot through the head. Had any man said it was a-going to come to _that_, I should have told the Don that _I_ wasn't one of the sailors he was looking out for." "That's a bad part of it," said I, "perhaps the worst part. But another very bad part is the condition of the lady. She looked to me, as she lay in the cabin, as if she had been very roughly handled." The ugly cook put his head out of the galley and stared at us. I called to him, in an angry voice, to bear a hand and get the men's breakfast, adding that they had been up all night and wanted the meal. "There's to be no loafing, no skulking, now, d'ye understand. We're too few as it is, and you're just one of those rusty pieces of old iron which want working up, Yankee fashion; so turn to, d'ye hear?" and I confirmed my meaning by a menacing inclination of the head. The ugly rogue vanished, but I could hear him muttering a number of Spanish oaths to himself. "You were speaking of the lady, sir," said Butler. "She looks," said I, "to have been rascally used. Her dress is vilely torn, as though in a struggle. Her shoulder is badly scratched, and why should she have fainted dead away, and why should she remain insensible for hours--insensible still, for all I know? For joy at seeing her husband?" "She was carried down the stairs unconscious by the two Spaniards," said Tubb, "her clothes was tore then, and her flesh was scratched." "Did the Spaniards mount the stairs alone?" "Alone, sir," answered Butler. "Scott and me stood over the lady's father and his son; and South and Tubb guarded the door." "Who remained in charge of the boat?" "Me," said the man named Trapp. "The name of the lady's father," said I, "is Captain Noble. Did he say nothing more to the point than to abuse you as pirates?" "Nothing noticeable," answered Butler; "his wits seemed to be drove out of him by his rage." "I heard him ask," said South, "how we, as English sailors, could help a scoundrel Spaniard to steal an English lady away from her father's house in England." "Did he say _steal_?" said I. "Force was the word he used--force an Englishwoman away. I didn't hear the word steal, George," said Butler. "Is it a fine house?" said I. "A regular gentleman's castle, sir," answered Butler. "We found the gates open; there was a carriage with a coachman and footman at the door; it was just a-driving off as we marched in." "What became of that carriage?" "I see the coachman pull up," answered South, "when he was near the gates. I kept my eye on the vehicle, for there were two men on the box of it. When the lock was blowed away, the coachman flogged his horses, and the whole concern disappeared. I expect they drove off to give the alarm, but where to, blowed if I know, for there looked to be no houses for miles around." "What happened next?" said I. But what the men now told me substantially corresponded with Don Christoval's story: saving that they were all agreed that the lady was insensible and in the disordered and torn condition in which she had been brought aboard when carried downstairs by the two Spaniards. "Well," said I, "the schooner's decks must go without a scrubbing this morning. Hurry up that cook and get your breakfast. Butler, you'll relieve me at eight bells. I must find out how the lady is doing. If she's to die--and as she lay in the cabin she looked as if she were dying--Don Christoval will surely not want us to sail him to Cuba." "But where else?" said Butler, nervously and suspiciously. "To a French port, if you like--to any place that is near. I wish to get out of this ship." "So do I," said Butler, looking at his mates, "but we want our money, Mr. Portlack, and we want to be landed in some part of the world where we aren't going to be nabbed for this 'ere job. Let it be Cuba, if _you_ please, sir. 'Tain't too far off--no, by a blooming long chalk, 'tain't too far off." "Get your breakfast and relieve me at eight," said I, and I walked aft. CHAPTER V. MADAME. Don Christoval remained out of sight below. I assumed that he was attending to his wife. His friend continued asleep in an arm-chair near the table under the skylight; his head was fallen back, his mouth was wide open, and his deep and powerful snore was audible at the distance of the helm. By and by the negro boy Tom rose through the companion hatch. "Where is Don Christoval?" said I. "In dah missus' cabin, sah," he answered. "Has consciousness returned to her?" He scratched his head and answered that he did not understand me. "Have you heard the lady speaking--have you heard her voice?" "Not speak, but sing, massa." "Sing?" cried I, looking at him. "Ay, massa, like dis:" he sang a few notes. "Her song is all de same as a nuss-gal making him noisy pickaninny go for to sleep." He went to the galley and presently returned with a tray full of breakfast things. Don Lazarillo was awakened by the negro lad laying the cloth for breakfast. I was at the skylight at the moment and my eye was upon the Spaniard. He started to his feet, delivered himself of a loud yawn, looked blankly around him with the stupid air of the newly awakened; the motions of his body were then arrested as though he had been paralyzed; he listened, intently gazing aft, continued to listen while you might count twenty, the expression of his face slowly changing from astonishment to terror. He then made a stride and disappeared out of the small range of view I commanded. I strained my ear but caught nothing unusual. He has heard the Señora del Padron singing, thought I. The negro boy went again to the galley and once more returned with a second tray of dishes for the table. I was hungry and sleepy. Rest I might easily obtain by summoning Butler aft to keep a look-out, but I had no notion of turning in until I had breakfasted. I supposed that I should be expected to eat as heretofore, when Captain Dopping was alive in the vessel--that is to say, after the Spaniards had left the table; and I was wondering when Don Christoval meant to put in an appearance; at that moment he came on deck. His face was colorless; I may say it was ghastly with what I must term its pallor of swarthiness. The peculiar hue seemed to enlarge his eyes. He stood curling his mustaches a moment looking around him, and then approached me with a shallow and unquiet smile. "All goes well with the schooner, I hope, Captain Portlack?" said he. "Yes, sir." "How does the weather promise?" "The day may keep fine, but I look for wind presently." "I am going to ask you," said he, with a harsher Spanish or foreign intonation in his accent than I had ever before noticed in his speech, "to be so good, Señor Portlack," he raised his hat and held it a little above his head, "to waive your custom of taking your meals in the cabin," he put his hat on. "I deplore the necessity. You will not regard it, if you please, as a violation of the laws of hospitality--laws by which we are eminently governed in our country. Neither will you suppose that your estimable society is not prized and your professional help and attainments greatly valued by Don Lazarillo de Tormes and myself. But--" He abruptly ceased, giving me nothing more to interpret than a truly royal sweep of his arm. "You wish me to eat in my own quarters, Don Christoval? I shall be happy to do so; but I presume I am to be waited upon?" "Most undoubtedly," he burst out. "I entreat that you will speak every wish that may occur to you. Your apartment shall be furnished from the cabin: there shall be a table and all conveniences. Tom will see to you as he sees to us. I thank you for your ready assent;" and he gave me a stately bow, raising his hat again. I returned his salute in the handsomest way I could manage, and inquired after his wife. "Oh, she will do, she will do," he answered. "Patience! the shock was great and sudden; she expected me indeed, but there was nothing in expectation to soften the agitation excited by my sudden appearance. Add to this the inhuman behavior of her father and brother, their outrageous violent language, their grasping her," he continued, advancing his arms and opening and clinching his fingers as he acted the part, "in the hope of tearing her from me. But patience, Captain Portlack." Then without another word he returned to the cabin. At eight o'clock Butler came to the quarter-deck. I gave him the course, told him I should turn in for a couple of hours after breakfast, and bade him call me should the wind shift ahead, for we were in St. George's Channel, with the Irish coast on one side and the English coast on the other, and in case of our having to _ratch_, as it is called, La Casandra would need better piloting than Butler was equal to. I was about to quit him when he said: "Beg pardon, Mr. Portlack, what might the Don have been a-saying just now?" Then observing my change of expression, he quickly added, "The question's asked quite humbly, sir. The long and short of it is, we men don't feel comfortable. We want to make sartin that there's to be no putting in to any new port, and least of all to an English port." I feigned not to understand him. "So long as you receive the money that is agreed upon between you and Don Christoval it can not signify what port we put into." "Oh, but it do, then!" cried he, turning red in the face. "What! Why, only consider!" he continued, raising his voice for the edification of his mates who stood listening forward. "Put into an English port and see what 'ud happen! Put into any civilized port and see what 'ud happen! I know them Customs covies. What 'ud they find? A lady in evening attire: us without any sort of yarn capable of satisfying the suspicions we're bound to raise. Why, all hands of us 'ud be detained for investigation, and then!" "You may ease your mind," said I, coldly. "Don Christoval was merely talking to me about my breakfast," and going to the main hatch I dropped through it into my quarters. Here I found the furniture that had belonged to Captain Dopping's cabin; there were also a little table, a velvet arm-chair from the cabin, and a rug such as would be stretched before a fire-place lying upon the deck. My quarters, thus equipped, looked hospitable enough. Indeed, it was to my taste to live thus apart. It rendered me independent; I could do as I pleased, light my pipe, turn in or turn out, eat and drink, and come and go with a bachelor-liberty that I should not have been able to enjoy had I dwelt as Captain Dopping had in the cabin. The one objection to my quarters lay in the gloom of them. In fine weather there was plenty of light to be obtained through the open hatch; but in stormy times the hatch must be closed, and then I should have to live by lamp-light. A few minutes after I had descended, the door that communicated with the cabin opened, and the negro lad entered with my breakfast. He put the tray on the table, and stood as though expecting me to question him. "Is the lady still singing?" said I. "No, sah, ebery ting quiet now." "That will do," said I, and he went on deck through the main hatch. I made a hearty meal and smoked a pipe of tobacco--Captain Dopping had laid in a liberal stock of pipes and tobacco. I then pulled off my boots and coat, sprang into my hammock, and in five minutes was as sound asleep as the dead. Butler wakened me by putting his head into the hatch and shouting. I went on deck, and found my prediction to Don Christoval of a fine day disproved. The weather had thickened, the sky was a wide spread of shadow, under which a quantity of yellow, wing-like shapes of scud were flying with a velocity that might have made you suppose it was blowing a gale of wind. The wind was damp, but there was no rain. Blowing it was, but not yet hard, and Butler had given no other orders than to roll up the topgallant-sail. The breeze was on the quarter, about north-north-west. Had we been working up against it we should have found it a strong wind; as it was, the schooner was swirling before it with every cloth set, saving the little sail I have mentioned. A strong swell chased her, and to each hurl of the regular, giant undulation the vessel flashed along, burying her bows in foam with the next launching swoop in a manner to remind you of the flight of a flying-fish from one glittering blue slope of brine to another. The vessel that had been ahead of us at daybreak was now on the bow close to--a box-shaped concern with painted ports; she plunged heavily, and seemed to stagger again under her heights of canvas, like an old woman whose balance is threatened by the umbrella she holds up. Such a sputtering as she made I had never before beheld. All about her was white water as she washed through it; it was as though a water-spout were foaming under her. Yet she held her own stoutly; and, two hours after I had been on deck, she was still in sight in the haze astern. I could make no use of Captain Dopping's sextant in such weather as this. Don Lazarillo was walking the deck alone, swathed to the heels in a cloak, and a large, flapping felt hat, drawn down to his eyebrows. He looked at me askew as I stepped his way to glance at the binnacle. Often had I met his fiery glance scanning me, but never so searchingly as now. He kept his eyes upon me as I stood at the compass watching the behavior of the little ship as she swept to the heads of the swell. When I moved forward, he advanced with a forced, deep grin which so contracted his visage that it looked no more than a mat of hair with a hooked nose thrust through it. He saluted me, and I bowed low, as was my custom with these gentlemen, and the following exchange of sentences took place, partly by signs, partly by shouts; but the substance of our meaning is all that I will venture to give. It would be impossible for the pen to convey his broken English, and as I have not a word of Spanish, I dare not attempt to write the sentences with which he intermingled his English. "It is a very dark day." "It is," I answered. "It blows heavily." "No, Don Lazarillo," said I. "I thank the Virgin I am not seasick. Yet, the sight of those mountains," said he, pointing over the side with a yellow, jeweled hand, "makes me sensible that my stomach is of the most delicate." "By this time you should have grown accustomed to the motion of a ship." "Yes, it is so. Might not this dark day prove fatal to us?" Here he struck his fists together to denote a collision between vessels. I shook my head and touched my eyes and pointed to the men forward, touching my eyes again that he might gather it was the custom of English sailors in thick weather to keep a look-out. "How long to Cuba?" he asked. I shrugged my shoulders. "Is Don Christoval still resolved to go to Cuba?" said I. "Yes," he cried in Spanish, in the most passionate way that can be imagined, while an expression of dark suspicion entered his eyes. "You know the way to Cuba?" "Oh yes," I answered smiling. He nodded wildly as though he would say, "See that you carry us there, that's all!" "How is madame?" said I, pointing to the skylight. "Better--better," he replied, with a little scowl, and then giving me a bow he took a turn or two and went below. The wind freshened gradually during the afternoon, and when I left the deck at four o'clock the schooner was under greatly reduced canvas, driving along at eleven or twelve miles an hour, her decks dark with damp, fountains of spray blowing ahead of her off the high archings of foam upturned by the irresistible thrust of her stem, a shrill, dreary noise of wind in her rigging, and the fellow at the helm and the figure on the look-out forward gleaming in oil-skins and sea-helmets. All through the night it continued to blow, and it blew all through the three following days and nights. At long intervals one or the other of the Spaniards appeared on deck, but for no other purpose than to take a hurried look round. Some small theory of navigation, though utterly insufficient for practical purposes, they must have had; for, happening on one occasion during this boisterous time to look through the skylight glass, I perceived them bending over a chart. Don Christoval, with his forefinger upon it, seemed to trace a course, while he glanced up in the direction where there hung, screwed to the upper deck, what is known at sea as a "tell-tale compass," that is, a compass whose face is inverted, usually fixed over the captain's chair, so that, as he sits at table, he may perceive at a glance whether the helmsman is holding the vessel to her course. I stood watching, careless as to whether the Spaniards perceived me or not. The skylight was closed, and their voices were inaudible. Don Christoval seemed to explain; Don Lazarillo measured: there was much nodding and gesticulation, and they frequently looked from the chart to the "tell-tale compass." Presently Don Christoval rolled up the chart, and the pair of them withdrew out of reach of my sight. I took notice that when Mariana was not employed at cooking in the galley, he was aft below in the cabin. I could not imagine what sort of work the two Dons could find to put the ugly, greasy rogue to in that part of the schooner. I now never entered the cabin, and could do no more than conjecture what passed in it. Regularly at meal-times, if I happened to be on deck, I would peep through the skylight window, expecting to find madame at table; and if it happened that I was off duty when meals were served in the cabin, I would tell Butler to cast a look through the glass and report to me if he saw anything of the lady. But my curiosity was punctually disappointed: the lady remained invisible. It happened that, on the evening of the third day of this spell of dirty weather, I went below to get some supper. It was seven o'clock, and the evening dark as midnight with the driving thickness in the wind and the black surface of cloud that was stretched across the sky. As I dropped through the hatch, pulling the piece of cover over it to keep the wet out of my quarters, I observed a glare in the interior, which I very well knew could not proceed from the lamp that swung under a beam near my hammock. In fact that lamp was unlighted. Looking past the bulk-head to which the steps by which I descended were nailed, I found that the door which communicated with the cabin stood open. The wind, though abaft the beam, gave a decided "list" or inclination to the rushing fabric, and her rolls to windward, owing to the swell being almost astern, were too inconsiderable to cause the door to swing to. The cabin was steeped in light; the lamps were large for the interior, and burned brilliantly, and their luster was duplicated and reduplicated by the mirrors which hung against the side. Don Christoval lay at full length upon a sofa; his hand, drooping to the floor, holding between its fingers an extinguished cigar, showed that he was asleep. Don Lazarillo was either on deck or in his berth. The dinner-cloth was upon the table, but cleared of its furniture, though on a large swing-tray between the lamps were one or two decanters of wine, a plate of fruit, biscuits, and the like. But that which instantly arrested my eye was the figure of Mariana seated on a chair at the after extremity of the cabin, where stood two berths. He bestrode his chair as a man strides a horse, bowing his hideous face to the back of it. His posture assured me that he was acting the part of sentinel. I stood viewing him. I could see no signs of the lady's presence, in the shape, I mean, of apparel, of any detail of female attire. I searched with my eyes swiftly, but narrowly, and encountered nothing to indicate the existence of a woman on board. What did I expect to see? I know not, unless it were something a lady might use, and leave on a chair or a table--a smelling-bottle, a glove; but this does not matter. I wished to discover if madame had left her berth, and I found no hint to inform me that she had done so. But what signified the presence of that ugly, I may say that loathsome, sentry stationed at what I might make sure was the door of the berth she occupied? By the aid of the light flowing in from the cabin, I sought and found the materials for lighting my own lamp. I then quietly closed the bulk-head door. A little later the hatch was lifted, and the negro boy descended with my supper--a repast consisting of cold meat, biscuit and fruit, and half a bottle of wine. "Where is the cook?" said I. "In de cabin, massa." "He appears to live in the cabin. What is he doing there now, d'ye know?" "Watching, sah." "Watching what?" "Dah lady." "Oh!" said I, "watching the lady, hey? Is she in her room?" "No, sah; outside de door ob it. Dey has to watch her," said he, showing his teeth. "Why, do you know?" "I heered the tall Don say at breakfiss-time dat she was gone for mad." After a pause I said, "When did you hear him say this?" "Yesterday morning, sah." "To whom did he say it?" "To Mariana, massa. T'odder gentleman was sleeping." I recollected that I had watched Don Lazarillo awaken from his sleep on the previous morning, and that I had observed the expression of terror his face had taken when, as I might _now_ know, he learned for the first time, by hearing madame singing, that she had lost her mind. "Why did you not, before this evening, tell me that the lady was gone for mad, as you call it?" "Massa nebber asked dah question." "Have you seen her?" "No, sah, and I dun wan' to. Her laugh make my blood creep. It's wuss dan her singing, sah. Now and agin she laugh, but now she sings no mo'." "How is she watched at night, do you know?" He twisted his hand to indicate the turning of a key in its lock, by which I gathered that madame by night was locked up in her cabin. "Is she watched?" "Mariana him sometime sleep and sometime sit at her door. When him sleep, den Don Christoval keep watch. When Don Christoval sleep den t'odder gent keep watch. Dey makes tree watches ob it, sah." I asked him how he knew this. He answered in his negro speech that he had found it out by looking and listening. "But what are you to find out by listening?" said I. "You don't understand Spanish, and those three men among themselves talk in no other language." "Mariana, him say to me in de galley, 'Tom,' him say, 'you look to de sailors' pudden. De massa wan' me to keep watch in de cabin.' I say, 'Why you no sleep now in the fok'sle?' and he say he hab business in de cabin." Here the boy ceased; the poor fellow conveyed his meaning with difficulty, yet I could see his face working with the intelligence of an explanation which lay in his brain, but which his tongue wanted English to impart. That he knew the lady was watched by the three Spaniards in the manner described by him--that is to say, in three watches, by night at all events, if not by day--was certain. He left me. I ate my supper, lighted a pipe, and sat musing. What had driven the lady mad? One could not put it down to any ill-usage she had met with aboard the schooner, because I might certainly know from the information of the negro boy that she had awakened mad from the death-like swoon or stupor she was plunged in when conveyed from the boat into the cabin. Had her joy on finding herself with her husband again--the husband of her adoration--proved too much for her mind? Had the sudden shock of his apparition--of the apparition of Don Christoval and his six armed associates--been rendered too enormous for her poor brains, through the fearful significance it gathered from the slaying of Captain Dopping by her father, and by her father's and brother's last rush and struggle to wrest her from the hands of the two Spaniards? But then the sailors were all agreed that she was already insensible when this final rush and struggle took place, that she was borne downstairs and carried out of the house bleeding and unconscious as she was when I beheld her lying in the cabin. A haunting suspicion grew darker, stronger, harder within me. * * * * * I was again on deck at midnight; the weather had somewhat moderated, but a strong sea was running, through which the schooner, under small canvas, crushed her way in thunder, whitening the water around her till the black atmosphere of the night about her decks was charged with the ghastly twilight of the beaten and boiling foam. But before my watch expired the deep shadow on high was broken up. A few stars sparkled, the seas ran with less weight, and the diminished breeze enabled me to make sail upon the schooner. The cabin skylight was closed, and owing to the moisture upon the glass it was impossible to see into the interior. Throughout the night the lamps were kept dimly burning, and ardently as I might peer, thirsty with curiosity, I never could distinguish the movement of a shadow to indicate that those who occupied the cabin were stirring in it. At four o'clock I went to my hammock, and at half-past seven was on deck again. It was a fine clear morning; large white clouds were rolling over the dark blue sky, and the sea, swept by the fresh wind that hummed sweet and warm over the quarter, ran in delicate lines of foam, which writhed and twisted in confused splendor in the glorious wake of the sun; while westward, the surface of the deep resembled a spacious field lustrous with fantastic shapes of frost. Butler had heaped canvas on the schooner, and she was sliding nobly through the water. The men had washed the decks down, and hung about waiting for their breakfast. From time to time Mariana's head showed in the galley-door. So far, aboard of us, there had been no discipline to speak of. The men, indeed, acknowledged me as captain, and sprang to my commands; but outside such absolutely essential duties as that of making and shortening sail and washing down the decks of a morning, nothing was done. The fellows would hang about smoking and yarning, always ready indeed for a call, but nothing more. Nor, indeed, was it for me to keep them employed. I could not accept this adventure seriously--could not regard the command I had been asked to take as imposing any further obligation upon me than that of navigating the schooner to a part of the coast of Cuba adjacent to Matanzas, and again and again I would ask myself, Will it ever come to Cuba? Will it ever come to half-way to Cuba? There was an element of unreality in the voyage we were now supposed to be pursuing that submitted it as a mere holiday jaunt to my fancy--a purposeless cruise, rendering needless and aimless the customary shipboard routine of the sea. While I stood looking along the deck, Don Christoval arrived. He was haggard and blanched, as though risen from a bed of sickness. The fire of his fine eyes was quenched, and his gaze was extraordinarily melancholy and spiritless. He saluted me gravely, but stood for some time as though lost in thought, meanwhile taking a slow view of the whole compass of the sea, as though in search of some object he expected to behold upon the horizon. I believed he would return to the cabin without addressing me; but I was mistaken. "Good morning, Captain Portlack." "Good morning, sir." "The bad weather is passed, I hope. The schooner is sailing very fast. It rejoices me to reflect that every hour diminishes, by something, the tedious miles we have to traverse." He paused, eying me steadfastly, with the air of a man soliciting sympathy. He then beckoned to me with one of his grand gestures and went a little way forward, out of the hearing of the fellow who stood at the tiller. "Captain Portlack," said he, "I am in great grief." "I am sorry to hear it," said I, looking at him. "My poor wife is mad." "Mad!" I echoed, in an accent of concern and astonishment, not choosing, by appearing aware of the fact, that he should suspect I had been spying upon him or making inquiries. "Mad," he repeated, in a low, hoarse voice. "When she recovered from her swoon she did not know me. She began to sing, she laughed--Mother of God, a diabolic laugh! She is now speechless, never lifting her eyes, never changing her countenance, and she sits thus:" he clasped his hands before him, bent his head, fixed his eyes upon the deck, and thus dramatically represented her condition for at least a minute. I sought in vain in his voice, in his face, in his air, for some hint, some color, some expression of such grief of affection, of such emotion of sorrow, as the love he had spoken of as existing between them would naturally cause one to look for; instead, I seemed to find nothing but alarm, uncertainty, irritability, subdued by fear. "We must hope," said I, "that she will speedily recover her mind." "Will you descend into the cabin and see her?" said he, shortly, as though he had talked this invitation over and settled it. I was slightly startled, and answered, "What good can I do, Don Christoval?" "You are her countryman," said he; "your accent, that is far purer than mine when I discourse in your tongue, may excite her attention. Nor, perhaps, may it be wholly with her as I fear." "You do not wish to imply that she is shamming?" He gesticulated with a fury that I could not but think pretended. "No, no, poor girl! Shamming indeed! God defend me from conveying such an idea. But will you descend, Captain Portlack, and see her?" "I owe the preservation of my life to you," said I, "and it is my sincere desire to be of use to you in any honest direction. But how shall I serve you by visiting madame, your wife?" Spiritless as his eyes were, the glance he shot at me as I pronounced these words was as piercing as I had found his gaze when he inspected me on my first being taken aboard his schooner. He slightly frowned, wrenched at, rather than twirled his immense mustaches, beat softly with his foot in manifest effort to control himself, then said abruptly: "Will you descend, Captain Portlack?" "With pleasure," said I, and I followed him below, leaving Butler, whose watch would not expire till eight o'clock, in charge of the vessel. Don Lazarillo was seated at the cabin table. I see him now supporting his head on his elbow, his bearded chin buried in the palm of his hand, and his finger-ends at his teeth as though he were gnawing upon his nails. He was the most perfect figure of nervous perplexity that could be imagined. He looked at me swiftly, but sternly and devouringly, too, and addressed his friend in Spanish. "Pardon me," I exclaimed, before Don Christoval could reply, "You know, gentlemen, I do not understand your tongue. This is a strange and sad affair. It will reassure me if you converse in the only speech I am acquainted with." Don Lazarillo shrugged his shoulders. "My friend was merely expressing satisfaction at your visit," said Don Christoval, loftily, yet without hauteur. He turned to the door of the berth on the port or left-hand side of the schooner, hesitated as though conquering an instant's irresolution of mind, then turned the handle, motioning with his head that I should enter. The berth was a small one. It was comfortably, almost handsomely, furnished after the style of the cabin in which the Spaniards lived; but I had no eyes just then for the equipment of the box of a place. The morning sun shone full upon the port-hole, and the little room was hardly less brilliant with luster than the cabin from which I had stepped. In a low, crimson velvet arm-chair was seated the lady I had been invited to visit. She sat in the posture that had been theatrically represented to me by Don Christoval. Her hands were locked upon her knees, as though she had been suddenly arrested in the act of rocking herself in a fit of wild grief; her head was bowed, and her eyes were rooted to the deck. I stood surveying her for some moments, but she never stirred; she did not appear to breathe. I did not witness the least movement of her eyes, whose lids were fixed as though, indeed, she were a figure of wax. She was dressed, or wrapped rather, in a ruby-colored dressing-gown belonging, as I might suppose by the gay style of it, to one of the Spaniards. The collar of this gown came to her throat. I was unable to see whether she was still appareled in ball attire. Handsome diamond drops hung motionless in her ears, and her hands, from which the gloves had been removed, sparkled with rings. There were three or four rings upon the third finger of her left hand, but I did not observe that one of them was a wedding ring. Her hair, that was of a dark red and very abundant, was in great disorder, but the remains of the wreath, which I had noticed on her when she lay upon the sofa, had been removed. The posture of her head left something of her face undisclosed; what I saw of it did not impress me as beautiful. Her eyebrows were lighter than her hair, almost sandy; her cheeks and brow were colorless as marble; yet her profile as I now witnessed it was not without delicacy, and I might suppose that when all was well with her she would show as a pretty woman. She looked the age Don Christoval had mentioned--twenty-two. Her stature I could not imagine, and the dressing-gown concealed her figure. Don Lazarillo approached in a tiptoe walk and stood in the doorway staring at her. "My dear one," said Don Christoval, faintly smiling and infusing into his accents a note of sweetness I had heard on more than one occasion in his voice, "I have brought Captain Portlack to see you. He is the captain of this schooner. He is your countryman--a true Englishman. Raise your eyes, my dear one, that you may see him," and thus speaking, with grace inexpressible, he bent his fine form over her and pressed his lips to her forehead. Less of life could not have appeared in a statue. "Speak to her," said Don Christoval, turning to me. Behind us Don Lazarillo ejaculated in Spanish. "How shall I address her?" said I, looking at the tall Spaniard. He started, sent a glance of lightning rapidity at his friend, reflected a moment, and then said, "Accost her as Miss Noble. By that name she may remember herself. Ay, señor, call her Ida Noble." I bit my lip, and, planting myself by a step in front of the lady, bent my knee till my face was on a level with hers. "Look at me, madame," said I. "I know you as Ida Noble. Look at me. I am your countryman and your _friend_." I pronounced the word "friend" with the utmost emphasis I could communicate to it. She raised her eyes without altering the posture of her head. They were of a soft brown, and the richer for the contrast of her hair. I never could have imagined such eyes under eyebrows of so pale a yellow as hers. She looked at me during a few beats of the pulse steadfastly, and then smiled, but there was no meaning in her smile or in her regard. A moment after she bent her eyes down again, and began to sing; but the air was without music; the words which left her lips half articulated were without sense. "Valgame Dios!" cried Don Lazarillo. She ceased to sing and set her lips again, and continued to gaze at the deck without any signs of life, as before. I rose to my stature, and, after watching her a while, said to Don Christoval, "I can do no good." "You made her smile, Captain Portlack," said he, in a soft whisper. I shook my head, stepped to the door, and passed into the cabin. The others followed, Don Christoval closing the door behind him. "I believe, with patience," said he, "that you could bring her mind back to her." "I am no doctor, gentlemen," said I. "I know nothing about the treatment of the insane." "What do 'ee say?" exclaimed Don Lazarillo. "What a calamity to befall me!" cried Don Christoval, clasping his hands and upturning his face with a look of wretchedness that certainly was not counterfeited. "Does she eat and drink?" said I. "A little, just a little," he answered. "I put food in a plate on her knee and leave her, and when I return a little is gone." "Should she show no signs of mending, shall you persevere in this voyage to Cuba, sir?" "Certainly," he replied passionately, with a gesture like a blow. I paused to hear if he had more to say. Finding him silent, I bowed and went on deck. Butler stood at the rail abreast of the skylight. Though his face habitually carried a sulky look, owing to the sour expression into which the extremities of his mouth were curved, his was a face to assure one on the whole that its owner was a good average honest English sailor. I am not of those who believe that the character is to be read in the face: but my own experience is, that I was never yet deceived by a man to whom I had taken a liking because of his face. Yet I admit that many honest souls, many excellent hearts, go through the world with repellent countenances. Hence the unwisdom of judging by the face. I stepped up to Butler, and looking him in the eyes I exclaimed, "Butler, I believe we have been cheated into the commission of a gallows act by the lies of those two Spaniards down below in the cabin." His intelligence was sluggish, and he looked at me with a gaze slow of perception. "I have just seen the lady," said I. "Ha! and how is she a-doing, sir?" "She is mad--undoubtedly driven mad by the outrage that has been perpetrated upon her and hers." "Tom was saying she was off her head, and why, 'cause he heard her sing and laugh. Singing and laughing ain't no sign of madness. I asked Mariana the question plain, and he says 'No' to it--'No,' in the hearing of us all; but now you've seen her, sir, and she _is_ mad?" "She is utterly mad. Mad as from a broken heart. She sits like a figure-head, without a stir." I paused. "She is no more Don Christoval's wife than I am," said I. "Are you sure of that?" he cried, sharply. "I have been almost sure of it for some time--I am quite sure of it now." He looked as alarmed as a man with strong bushy whiskers and a skin veneered with mahogany by the weather could well appear. "How have ye made sure, Mr. Portlack?" "She has no wedding ring." He chewed upon this and then said: "But a wedding ring ben't no infallible sign of marriage, is it, sir? I've heered my mother say that she once lost her wedding ring and was always going to buy another, but didn't, and for years she went without a wedding ring, though father was alive most of the time, and a perticlar man, too." "If the lady below were a married woman she would wear a wedding ring," said I. "Ay," said he, with a knowing look entering his eyes, "but suppose the father had obliged the lady to take her wedding ring off? What more natural, seeing how he was all agin the marriage?" To this I could return no other answer than a shake of the head. He eyed me with a small air of triumph. "If there's nothing more to make ye doubt, Mr. Portlack," said he, "than the want of a wedding ring on the lady's finger, I'm for allowing that the Don's yarn's true." As I had nothing more than suspicion to oppose to his desire to believe in the story, I contented myself with saying: "You will find that I am right, nevertheless. I shall go and get some breakfast, and will relieve you in ten or twelve minutes." I walked to the main-hatch, but he followed me. "Supposing it as you say, sir," he inquired, "what 'ud be the consequences of the job to us men?" "Transportation for life." He muttered something under his breath and then said, "And supposing the lady to be his lawful wife, sir?" "I am no lawyer," I answered, and dropped through the hatch. CHAPTER VI. A TRAGEDY. I was prepared to find that Butler had carried my words forward. I returned to the deck after breakfast, and the man trudged to the forecastle, and not long afterward I observed the four seamen, the fifth being at the helm, engaged in earnest conversation. They talked, pipe in mouth, their hands deep buried in their capacious breeches pockets, and sometimes they talked with their backs upon one another, and sometimes they would pace the deck, passing one another, but always talking, and frequently they directed their eyes aft, insomuch that I expected every minute that the whole group would approach me and oblige me to share in the discussion. My manner and my words when I had visited madame below had been altogether too pronounced for so shrewd an intelligence as that of Don Christoval to miss the true meaning of. In short, I had as good as said that I did not consider the lady to be his wife; that she had been abducted--ferociously and inhumanly stolen from her father's home, and that we Englishmen who formed his crew had been betrayed into an act of criminal villiany by his rascally lies. All this I was conscious I had as good as said, because, meaning it, I had looked it, and, in a sentence, I had suggested it. I therefore concluded that the two Spaniards would talk this matter of my suspicions over, decide upon some prompt course of action, and come to me on deck--but what to do and what to say? Would Don Christoval _admit_ the adventure to be one of abduction, pleading the necessity of representing himself as married that he might obtain the assistance of English seamen, since it was clear that he would not ship Spanish sailors for the expedition; or would he approach me with threats, defying me to disprove his statement that the lady below was his wife, and giving me to understand that if I did not mind my own business----. My mind was rambling in speculations of this kind when I heard the sound of a guitar and a voice singing. The skylight lay open; I heard it as distinctly as though I were in the cabin. Don Lazarillo sat smoking at the table, keeping time with his fingers, the rings upon them sparkling as he tapped. It was not he who was playing the guitar and singing; therefore it was Don Christoval. The sounds came from the after-part of the interior, and I had no doubt whatever that madame's door was open, and that Don Christoval was touching the strings and lifting up his voice with some quite superstitious or quite rational hope of exorcising the demon of madness out of the girl by the bewitching music he was making. Bewitching it was. I listened, wholly fascinated by it. His voice was a clear, sweet, most thrilling and lovely tenor, soft and yet penetrating, and controlled, so far as I could possibly judge, by the most exquisite art. Whether he had ever before produced his guitar I can not say; certainly this was the first time I had heard the sound of it. He sang several airs; one of them so haunted me that I remember long afterward humming it over to a friend of mine who was a very good musician in his way, and he instantly pronounced it a composition of Mozart, giving it an Italian name which I have forgotten. I should never have supposed that music possessed the magic claimed for it until I heard that sweet, thrilling tenor voice, threaded by the tones of the delicately-touched guitar. The songs in succession wrought a fairy atmosphere for the senses. The schooner melted out--the ocean vanished. I was transported to a land sweet with the aroma of the orange grove, romantic with Moorish palaces, melodious with the laughter of dancers and the merry rattle of the castanets. Bless me, thought I, as I paced the deck afresh when the singing was ended, a man need not go to sea to visit distant countries when he may travel farther than sail or steam can convey him by sitting at home and listening to a tenor voice accompanied by a guitar. Half an hour later the two Spaniards made their appearance. I had marked the hideous cook steal to the companion-way, and judged that he was keeping watch. The two Dons, with lighted cigars in their mouths, walked the deck arm-in-arm. Don Christoval seemed to notice that the men forward were observing him with unusual attention. I assumed this because I perceived that he suddenly put on an air of carelessness, of ease, even of gayety, such as certainly was not visible in him when he first showed himself. This air I further remarked was swiftly copied by his companion, but on _him_ it sat with a horrible awkwardness. He had neither the figure, the beauty, nor the skill to act as his friend did. Would Don Christoval challenge me for my suspicions? If so, I should be honest with him; tell him in unmistakable English what my conviction was; inform him that I would no longer share in the dastardly crime into which he had betrayed his sailors; and insist that I should be transshipped to the first vessel that passed, or that I should be suffered to carry the schooner close enough to a coast, the nearest at hand, to enable me to get ashore. It was likely enough that my full mind showed in my face. A few times I caught him eyeing me askance, but, beyond calling out some commonplace to me about the weather, the progress of the schooner, and so forth, he said nothing. It was, however, clear to me that, let his thoughts be what they would, he could say nothing. I was the only navigator aboard the vessel; he was entirely at my mercy, therefore; he would rightly fear that any menaces, any bullying, any tall-talk, must only result in causing me to sullenly throw up my command; in which case the schooner would be but a little less helpless than were she reduced to the condition of a sheer hulk by a gale of wind. At noon I took an observation. Butler came aft to relieve me, and I went to my quarters to work out my sights. When I had worked out my sights and found out the position of the schooner on the chart, I lighted a pipe and sat down to reflect. I was now so perfectly sure that the unhappy young lady in the cabin had been kidnapped that my thoughts were never for an instant influenced by the consideration that there _might_ be a probability of the Spaniard's story proving true. Everything pointed to this expedition as an adventure of abduction. The sailors affirmed that the girl was bleeding and insensible when carried through the hall past the room in which two of them with drawn cutlasses were guarding her father and brother. This, then, signified that she had been forcibly seized, and the state of her apparel and the scratches upon her shoulder proved that there had been a struggle. Would she have struggled had Don Christoval been her husband, to whom she was yearning to be reunited? My blood felt hot in my veins when I thought upon this outrage; when I reflected how I had been made a party to this deed of villainy; how I, as an Englishman, had been courted by a cunning, clever lie to abet the stealing of a countrywoman of my own from her father's home in England by a brace, as I might take them, of unprincipled Spanish adventurers. Now, while I thus sat musing over my position, and considering what course to shape to carry me clear of the dangerous association into which misadventure had brought me, I was startled by a cry in the adjacent cabin--a cry sharp, abrupt, terrible: affecting the ear as a lightning flash affects the eye. The pipe I was about to raise to my lips was arrested midway. I believe I am no coward, yet I must own that that cry, that penetrating cry, seemed to thicken my blood, seemed to stop the pulsation of my heart. But the pause with me was brief. I dashed down my pipe, sprang to the bulk-head door and flung it open. And now what a picture did I see! The tall, commanding figure of Don Christoval was in the act of sinking to the deck; his hand was upon the table, but the fingers were slowly slipping from the edge of it, and, even as I looked, the man without a sound fell at his length and lay motionless. In the doorway of the port or left-hand berth stood the lady whom I have heretofore styled Madame, but whom I will henceforth call Ida Noble. She grasped a knife in her hand--a long carving knife it seemed to me, and I remember noticing a red gleam in it as the vessel rolled, slipping the sunshine out of a mirror toward where the girl was. She stood erect, with her eyes fixed upon the body of the Spaniard; she was as stirless as he; the figures of them both at that instant might have passed as a brace of posture-makers representing a tragedy in one of those drawing-room performances called _tableaux vivants_. Behind a chair on the starboard side of the table crouched the figure of Mariana. He squatted, and his attitude was exactly that of a monkey. His face was green; his wide-open eyes disclosed twice the usual surface of eyeball; his features were convulsed with terror, and never yet was there an artist whose imagination could have reached to the height of that fellow's hideousness, as he crouched, stabbed also, as I then believed, though this was not so. A mad woman grasping a long knife is a formidable object; much more formidable is she when that knife is stained with blood, and when the person she has slain is still in view, lying a corpse a little distance away from her. On my showing myself, Mariana cried out, but whether in Spanish or English I knew not. What was I to do? What would you do were you suddenly confronted by a mad woman armed with a long knife? I looked up at the skylight and saw the horror-stricken countenance of Don Lazarillo peering down; but even as my eye went in a glance to the Spaniard's livid face, one of the sailors, and then another of the sailors, came to his side. Count twenty, and the time you will occupy in doing so will comprise the period from the moment of my opening the door to look out down to this instant. Next moment the girl threw the knife on the deck with a gesture of abhorrence, courtesied with irony to the body of Don Christoval, and closed the door of the berth upon herself. Then there was a rush. We could all find our courage now. Mariana sprang from behind his chair, overturning it; Don Lazarillo, followed by the two sailors, came in a few bounds through the companion-hatch. I stepped to the side of Don Christoval's body, and stood looking upon him. Stone dead I knew him to be. In Calcutta during a cholera outbreak, and on board an emigrant ship visited with fever, I had many a time stood beside the dying and the dead, and the spectacle of death was very familiar to me. "Lock her door!" shrieked Don Lazarillo. One of the seamen picked up the knife and viewed it at arm's length. I carefully turned the body over. "Ay, there it is," said I, pointing to a cut slightly stained with blood in the Spaniard's waistcoat. The wound was in the left ribs, and one had but to glance at the knife to cease to wonder that the man should have dropped dead. "Lock the door!" again shrieked Don Lazarillo in his broken English, looking from the body of his friend to the door, and from the door to the body of his friend, and recoiling, and shrinking and hugging himself, and so munching his lips that one watched to see froth upon them--doing all this as he looked. Mariana repeatedly crossed himself, uttering all sorts of Spanish ejaculations in a voice like the subdued low of a calf. "Is he dead, sir?" asked one of the sailors. "He can never be more dead," said I, stooping to look into the face of the body. "They drove her mad, and this is how she requites them. A cruel, bloody business, my lads. Fling that knife overboard." The fellow launched it javelin-fashion through an open port-hole. Don Lazarillo began to scream out in Spanish. His meaning might have some reference to securing the lady; I do not know. "Silence!" I roared. "Do you want to be the next victim?" and in my wrath I made an infuriate gesture as of stabbing; on which, with one wild look at me, he fled up the companion steps and remained above, viewing us through the skylight. Butler and another seaman, both very pale, and fetching their breath quickly, entered the cabin and looked at the body. "Here's a murdering job to happen!" said Scott. "Who's done this?" cried Butler, who had been somewhere forward when Don Christoval's wild death-shriek had sounded. Mariana, with a paralytic gesture, pointed to Miss Noble's berth. "Who's done it?" repeated Butler, in a voice strong and hoarse with horror. "The girl whom these Spaniards have driven mad," said I. I turned to Mariana. "Did you see Don Christoval stabbed?" "Ah, Dios! yes," he answered; and in language which is to be as little conveyed as his voice, or the expressions which chased his face, which at every instant gave a new character to his ugliness, he contrived to make us understand this: that Don Christoval had entered the lady's room, where he, Mariana, heard him address her soothingly; that the door was suddenly flung open, and that, at the same moment, even as the Spaniard stood on the threshold, the girl buried the knife in his side. "How did she come by the knife?" cried Butler. Mariana, trembling violently, with his eyes fixed upon the door of Miss Noble's berth, as though at every moment he expected to behold it thrown open, made us understand that the negro boy, some time during the morning, had left a basket of the cabin cutlery upon the table, and that the girl must have looked out and possessed herself of a knife at some moment when the two Spaniards were on deck, and when he--Mariana--had quitted his post of sentry to enter Don Christoval's berth. This was conjecture on the fellow's part, but beyond doubt it was accurate. Don Lazarillo continued to gaze at us through the skylight with an expression as of a horrible sneer upon his face. I again stooped over the form of Don Christoval, felt his pulse, and examined his half-closed, fast-glazing eyes, then bade a couple of the seamen pick the body up and convey it to the cabin the Spaniard had occupied. While this was doing, I grasped the handle of the door of Miss Noble's room. "Mind!" shrieked Don Lazarillo from above. Mariana ran on deck. I felt the idleness of announcing myself by knocking. More knives than one it was possible she might have concealed; I therefore at first held the door but a little way open and looked in. The girl was standing beside the bunk or sleeping-shelf; her elbows were upon the edge of it, her cheeks in her hands, and she stood motionlessly gazing, as I might suppose, through the port-hole. She was robed as in the morning; that is to say, in a crimson dressing-gown, which, in that era of short skirts, clothed her to her heels. She was but a little above the average stature of woman, though she had looked far taller than she really was when she stood in the doorway grasping the knife, with her eyes upon the dead Spaniard. Finding her unarmed, I entered, carefully sweeping the room as I did so with my eyes for any signs of a knife or other weapon. The four seamen stood in the doorway, and she did not turn her head. I approached her, keeping a distance of some two or three feet between us, and prepared, poor lady! for any act of violence. Still she continued to stare through the port-hole. "Miss Noble," said I, "you smiled at me this morning. Look at me now. You will remember me as your friend." She turned her head slowly; not more mechanical could have been that extraordinary movement had clock-work produced it. When her soft brown eyes--in which assuredly I witnessed nothing of that sparkle or fire of madness which is said to burn in the vision of the insane--were upon me, she frowned and bit her under lip, exposing her small white front teeth. I believed from her expression that she was struggling with her memory. She then suddenly turned fully round, as though sensible of being watched from the door, and the sailors, to the wild look she gave them, stirred and fell back with uneasy shuffling motions of their feet. She stared at them for a while, and afterward at me, preserving her frown, and holding her lip under her teeth; she was deadly white, but spite of her frown, which you would have thought must give an expression of disdain or anger or contempt to her brow, her face was meaningless. She eyed me fixedly for some moments, then, with the former slow motion of her head, resumed her first posture. I stepped to the door. "What is to be done?" said I. "It's a cruel business. The Spaniard's been rightly sarved out," exclaimed one of the sailors. "What is to be done?" I repeated; for here, to be sure, was a condition of ocean life that had never before been encountered by my experience. The men gazed at the girl in silence. I mused, and presently said, "One of you keep this door; the rest of us must turn to and search the cabin, to make sure there is nothing in it with which she can hurt herself." There were four of us, and there being little to examine, we had soon satisfied ourselves that there was no weapon anywhere hidden. She took not the least notice of us; but when I explored her sleeping-berth, upon whose edge, as I have told you, her elbows reposed, she fell back a step or two, and then, going to the arm-chair, seated herself, clasping her knees and rooting her eyes to the deck. "Will she have a knife about her?" said Butler, in a hoarse whisper. I thoroughly considered this, and, after a narrow scrutiny of her, decided that she had not concealed a knife upon her, and I was the more willing to believe so because I had not the heart--I will not say the courage--to search her. It shocked me to think of offering any violence to the poor girl, and violence I knew it must come to--she would resist, a struggle would increase her madness--if I laid my hands upon her. But I was certain she had not concealed a knife. The dressing-gown she wore was without a pocket. The sleeves were loose, and while she stood at the bunk I had noticed that her arms, whose wrists were still clasped by bracelets, were bare, whence I concluded that the dressing-gown concealed the ball attire she had been brought aboard in. So I decided that she had not secreted a weapon, because, recollecting her attire as she lay upon the sofa in the cabin after she had been brought to the schooner, I could not conceive that it offered any points for the concealment of a knife. I closed the door upon her, and we stood outside consulting. Our debate determined us to this: that while she continued in this passive condition she was to be left as she was; that for the present the five seamen would take it turn and turn about to watch that she did not quit her room; that she was to be fed as heretofore, that is to say, food and wine were to be placed before her, of which she would partake if she chose, for no man could compel her to eat. Then, no longer choosing that the helmsman should remain alone on deck--for Don Lazarillo, Mariana, and the negro boy counted for nothing--I went to the companion steps and was followed by Butler and two others. Don Lazarillo and Mariana stood a little way forward of the skylight. They conversed, and their gestures expressed unbounded horror and dismay. On our appearing, they fell silent and watched us. Some distance beyond them was the figure of the negro boy. There was nothing in sight. The white canvas soared round and brilliant, and the rigging was vocal with the gushing of the blue breeze. Astern of us ran an arrowy wake of foam, and off the weather bow rose a steady sound of seething, like to the noise made by the boiling foot of a cataract heard afar. I took up a position near the tiller, that was in the grasp of the seaman Tubb, and the sailors stood near me. "What's happened below?" said Tubb. "The tall Spaniard's been stabbed dead by the mad lady," answered South. Tubb delivered himself of a long whistle, following it on by an agitated swing of the tiller that hove the schooner to the wind two points before he could recover her. "And now what is to be done?" said I. "You see the pass we've been brought into. Two men dead of the adventure, and the rest of us guilty of a deed that must earn us transportation for life should the law get hold of us. What's to be done, I say? Is this voyage to Cuba to be prosecuted? Our duty is--and let me tell you our policy is--to make all the restitution that is possible, and that we can alone do by conveying the poor lady home." "I ain't going home," cried Butler in a voice of obstinacy, smiting his thigh. Don Lazarillo and Mariana crept, or sneaked rather, by a pace nearer to us and stood listening. "And _I_ ain't going home," said Tubb, fetching the head of the tiller a whack. "You talk of transportation for life, Mr. Portlack; d'ye want it to happen, sir?" "No," I answered; "but I wish to do what is right, and to make it as right as right can be by doing it quickly. The lady must be restored to her friends." "No offense, Mr. Portlack," said Scott, "but we aren't to forget that you're on the right side of the hedge. You wasn't in the melhee; we was. Your going home can't sinnify; ourn means lagging for all hands." The two Spaniards sneaked a little closer. "I wish to suggest nothing likely to imperil you," said I. "Though I was never willingly of you--you don't want me to tell you how it happens that I'm here; yet being of you, you'll find me with you, content to share in all that may befall you. As to my being on the right side of the hedge," cried I, rounding upon Scott, "that's but a notion of yours. The lawyers may think very much otherwise. But I say this, that since these two Spaniards have decoyed our heads into a noose, the only way to avoid being strangled is to whip our heads out again; and d'ye ask how that's to be done? My answer is, Do what is right. Act so that you'll be able to say, should you come to be charged as helpers in this crime of abduction: We believed the lady to be the Spaniard's wife; we were told that a man had a right to his own, and we were willing to help him to his own, but the moment we found we had been deceived we turned to like honest men, to make all the amends in our power by restoring the poor lady to her friends. _That_ is what's in my head, and it is the advice I give you, and wish you to act upon for my sake and for yours." South looked thoughtfully at Butler; but Butler, with an angry countenance, vengefully smiting his thigh again with his clinched fist, cried out, "There's to be no going home with me. There's to be no taking the chance of the law with me. There's to be no risking even a week o' jail with me. Ye may call it Cuba, or ye may call it Madagascar, but let no man speak of the United Kingdom. I've got my liberty, and I'm for keeping of it. 'Sides," he whipped out, "who's going to pay me my money, now the Spaniard as hired us is dead and gone?" The eyes of the men at this were at once bent upon Don Lazarillo. "Sooner than go home I'd start away in that there boat," said Scott, pointing to the cutter on the main deck, "and take my chance of making the land or being picked up. I once had a fortnight of quod for refusing to sail after joining. That was enough for me. No more, thank ye." He stepped to the rail and violently expectorated. "Who's going to pay us?" said Trapp. "If t'others are of my mind, there'll be no leaving this schooner till we've received every farden of our money. We've earnt it, by----!" he added, hitting the tiller head another thump. "Mr. Portlack," said Butler, gazing at me gloomily and mutinously, "you still talk as if you was cocksure that the lady wasn't the tall gent's wife." I paused while I gazed at him, then, with vehement strides, walked up to Don Lazarillo. "You and your dead friend," I cried, staring into the shrinking and working face of the man, "have cheated me and the men here by your lies into the commission of a crime. You know," I thundered, determined to terrorize him into a confession of the truth, "that the poor lady below, whom you have driven mad, was not Don Christoval's wife. Dare to tell me she was, you villain, and I'll fling you overboard!" "What ees it you say?" he cried, with his swarthy face of the color of pepper with fear. "_You_ understand me!" I shouted, addressing Mariana. "You have been in the secret, too, from the beginning. Own it, you dog, own it, or I'll throttle you." I raised my hand; the ugly creature delivered a singular cry and dropped on his knees. "Señor Portlack," he whined, "spare my life, for the blessed Virgin's sake, and if I do not tell you the truth may Satan catch my soul now and carry it away to eternal torment. The señorita was not the cavalier's wife. The caballero's story was true in all but that part. She was the lady of his love, but not his wife. If I'm not speaking the truth, may my soul be tormented for ever and ever." Saying which he crossed himself and stood up. The obligation of feigning wrath alone preserved me from bursting into a laugh at the sight of his hideous face convulsed with fear. "Explain to Don Lazarillo," cried I, sternly, "what you have told me." He did so. Don Lazarillo watched him with sparkling eyes and ashen cheek, and on his ceasing made as if he would strike him. "Will you deny that Mariana speaks the truth?" I exclaimed. The Spaniard shot at me a look of mingled malice, hate, and fright, then, with a shrug of the shoulders that convulsed his figure, he turned his back, and, with clasped hands, stood viewing the ocean over the rail. "Now, men," said I, addressing Butler and the others, "you have heard the truth for yourselves, and you may read it also in that Spanish gentleman's behavior. Isn't it abominable that we Englishmen, or let me say that _you_ Englishmen, should have been tricked by the lies of a brace of foreigners into helping them to steal a poor young lady of your own country from her father's home? For what purpose was this done? There was little enough love in it, I'll swear. She is no doubt an heiress, and the Don that lies dead below hoped, by stealing her, to steal her fortune also; and you may take it that yonder gentleman," I continued, pointing at Don Lazarillo, "entered upon this inhuman undertaking as a speculation. That's my notion, and if he understands what I'm saying, he knows that I've hit the truth. He was to share in the plunder, on condition of his finding money enough to equip this expedition." My eyes rested upon Mariana as I spoke; the ugly rascal, to whom my words seemed perfectly intelligible, let his head sink, in an affirmative gesture. The wretch, in fact, was horribly frightened, feared for his life, in short, and by the looks of him I might not only know that he was willing to tell all, but to tell more than all, to appease my wrath, which I must own was largely simulated. Butler stepped up to Don Lazarillo, whose back was still upon us, and touched the man's elbow with his forefinger. "Here," said he, "what about my money?" Don Lazarillo appeared deaf, and continued to stare over the rail. Butler thrust at his elbow again with his long forefinger. "I am asking," he said, "about my money. Who's a-going to pay me?" The other seamen now drew close to the Spaniard, who stood as though deaf. Mariana rapidly and hoarsely uttered a sentence or two in Spanish, probably a translation of Butler's words. Don Lazarillo then whipped round; his eyes glowed like live coals, but his ashy pallor was more defined than before. On finding himself confronted by the three sailors, he placed himself in the posture of a man at bay with a sword in his hand, only, happily, he was without a sword. "What do you want?" he cried. "Who's a-going to pay us?" shouted Butler, unnecessarily exerting his lungs, as the custom is with us English when we address foreigners, whose incapacity to understand seems to suggest deafness to our insular minds. Don Lazarillo, looking toward me, exclaimed, "I speak about dat wiz ze Capitan Portlack." "Ay," cried Scott, "but if you can talk to him, you can talk to us. It's we that's consarned. It's us as wants to know who's a-going to pay us. You've brought us into a blooming mess with your lies, and the five of us men, as Captain Dopping shipped at Cadiz, stands for to be transported if so be as our law catches hold of us, and all along of you and him as lays below. If you can talk to Mr. Portlack, you can talk to us." "What you weesh me say?" cried the miserable Spaniard, extending his arms, and casting a look of entreaty at me. "Who's a-going to pay us men?" vociferated Butler, striking the palm of his left hand with a leg-of-mutton fist. The men stood so close to Don Lazarillo that he was forced to dodge his head here and there to catch a sight of Mariana, to whom he cried out something in his native tongue. "Señor Portlack," said the cook, in a cringing attitude, "Don Lazarillo beg me say he will speak wid you. I will translate." "Let it be so, men," I exclaimed; "you'll do no good by shouting questions to a man who doesn't understand you." They drew away sulkily. Don Lazarillo pulled off his hat to pass a large colored silk handkerchief over his forehead. He then stepped up to me. The cook posted himself close to him, and the sailors, with whom now was the negro boy, took up a station within easy earshot. Mariana translating, the dialogue took this form:-- "The men wish to know who is to pay them their wages?" "Don Christoval is now dead," answered the Spaniard. "This adventure therefore terminates!" "How?--terminates?" I cried. "We are still upon the high seas. We have still the young lady with us to restore to those from whom you and your friend stole her. No, no, this adventure has not yet terminated!" "What do you mean to do?" he asked. "That is no answer to my question. Who will pay those men for the work they have done, the risks they have run, and have yet to run?" He put his hand to his brow, and, after a pause, said, "I must think." The sailors fell a-shouting exclamations. The chorus was swelled by the voices of the man at the helm, and by the fellow below, who had got upon the cabin table, and stood with his head in the open skylight, listening. "Silence!" I cried; "how am I to transact your business if you interrupt me? The men," I continued, addressing the Spaniard, "look to you for payment. They will not lose sight of you until you pay them. Have you money with you, or the equivalent of money?" I added, fixing my eyes upon his rings and brooch; "for _I_ must be paid, Don Lazarillo, and _they_ must be paid." "I will answer. I will be honorable. I will give my word; and the word of a Spanish gentlemen is gold." A growl proceeded from the seamen. "But first, as a matter of courtesy, to help my mind in its blindness--for the death of my friend has caused my brains to spin round in my head--I entreat you, señor, to tell me what are your intentions?" "To restore the young lady to her friends." "What!" he cried, shouting the words with a face of horror to Mariana; "you will proceed to England?" I responded with a vehement nod. "Then vot sall become of me?" he exclaimed in English. I shrugged my shoulders. He folded his arms tightly upon his breast, and, with bowed head, fell to measuring a few feet of the deck. We all watched him in silence while he thus walked. Suddenly he stopped, and, turning upon Mariana, addressed him volubly and with amazing energy, making a very windmill of his arms. I knew that he was saying a great deal more than Mariana could translate, more, indeed, to judge from the expression that entered the cook's face, than the repulsive-looking creature would choose to translate. Nevertheless, I waited in patience, making a single gesture of command to the sailors to be still. Mariana then spoke; the substance of his speech was this: Don Lazarillo asked for a few hours. He desired to look over the effects of his dead friend; he desired time to mature a proposal which he hoped to make to me. This was substantially all that Mariana translated. Yet, owing to his slow delivery and to his broken-winded English, the matter he delivered appeared to contain much more than was in it. I had no doubt, however, that Don Lazarillo in his speech had acquainted the fellow with some half-formed scheme in his mind, as good for Mariana perhaps as for himself. I told the cook to inform the Don that we would give him until six o'clock that evening, and that if he was not ready with his proposals by that hour, I should shift the schooner's helm for England, where, on my arrival, it would be my duty to deliver him and Mariana into the hands of justice. The cook, in translating this, was almost as ashen in color as the other. Don Lazarillo descended into the cabin. Butler came up to me. "You're merely frightening the man, I hope, sir," said he, "with this here talk of sailing to England?" "Let's settle with him first," I answered, "and then I'll call a council of the crew. Meanwhile it is senseless to keep the schooner under all this canvas. Let us shorten sail and lay her with her head to the east until we hear what Don Lazarillo has to say for himself." He looked doubtfully round the sea, then consented. So we reduced the schooner down to what is termed a scandalized mainsail and a jib, and all that afternoon she lay under that canvas, blowing along very quietly eastward. Some time about four o'clock I went below and asked Trapp, who was still on watch in the cabin, if all had been quiet in the lady's cabin. "Ne'er so much noise as a mouse would have made, sir," said he. I lightly tapped on the young lady's door, and without waiting for a response, which I knew I should not obtain, I turned the handle and looked in. The girl was seated in her chair, but her head lay back upon the cushioned round of it. Her eyes were sealed, and her lips apart. I looked at her, scarcely knowing whether she was alive or dead; but presently observing that her bosom rose and fell, I went to her side, put my ear to her mouth, and heard her breathing regularly and peacefully. I stood a while looking at her, my heart full of pity. I peered closely at her fingers: her rings were rich and beautiful--diamonds and rubies of great value; but I might make sure now there was no wedding-ring buried among the three or four which armored the finger the ring would have been on. One little foot showed, and I perceived that she was shod with white satin. There was something to shock me in the ironic contrast created by the sight of that satin shoe--the contrast between the grim and tragic reality that was now hers and the festal vision of the ball-room, with its swimming figures, the bright music of the dance, the gleam of fans, the scent of flowers. I was happy to discover that she was able to sleep. It seemed to my plain mind a good sign, for I had often been told that sleeplessness was one of the horrible conditions of insanity; that not to be able to sleep drove men mad; and that when they were mad still they were sleepless. Strange as it will seem, I could not, I did not, associate any horror of assassination with that restful figure. I had seen her standing at the door, and had marked the red gleam upon the knife she held; I had seen the tall and handsome Spaniard in the act of falling, then tumbling his whole length and expiring. Yet I could gaze at this poor girl without the least emotion of aversion, without the least sense of that sort of horrid unaccountable fascination with which red-handed crime constrains the gaze of the spectator. This was not, I think, because I knew she was mad, and, being mad, irresponsible, and, being irresponsible, virtually guiltless. No; it was because of a singular atmosphere of purity and sweetness about her as she now lay sleeping. Beautiful she was not. Indeed, she was not even what might be called pretty; but now that she slept the demon within her slept also. What was native in her showed in her countenance. You witnessed it in this slumber of madness as you would have beheld it in her waking hours of sanity. I stood viewing her and I thought to myself she is a refined lady, pure, gentle, and good. CHAPTER VII. DON LAZARILLO LEAVES US. I went out, closing the door behind me, and called to Butler through the skylight to send the negro boy to me. The lad arrived, and I bade him prepare a tray of refreshments for Miss Noble. "How does the poor lady do, sir?" said Trapp, who sat in a chair looking on while I got upon the table and called. "She is sound asleep," said I. "So much the better. You can go forward and get your supper. I'll keep a look-out here for the present." He went away, and presently the boy Tom arrived with the tray, on which he had heaped some cold ham, fruit, jelly from a bottle, and so forth. I poured some wine into a tumbler, and softly entering the lady's berth placed the tray beside her on the deck, where, should the schooner begin to frisk, it would slide without capsizing. I supposed that all this while Don Lazarillo was in his own cabin gnawing, as his trick was, upon his finger-ends while he reflected upon the proposals he was presently to submit. My thoughts went from him to his dead friend, and I stepped to the berth where the body lay to look at it. On opening the door I beheld Don Lazarillo on his knees at the side of the bunk in which reposed the body of Don Christoval. His hands were clasped, his eyes were upturned, and, though his accents were inaudible outside the door, he prayed with so much fervor as to be for some moments insensible of my presence. Then bringing his flashing eyes from the upper deck he directed them at me, made the sign of the cross upon his breast, rose to his feet, made the sign of the cross upon the face of the dead body, on whose breast he had laid a crucifix, and then looked at me. I went to the side of the bunk and stood for a few moments gazing at the pale, still, serene, most handsome face of the dead. "When ees he to bury?" said Don Lazarillo. "To-night," said I. "He is Catolique," he exclaimed. "We shall have to cast him into the sea without ceremony, I fear," said I, "unless you will say some prayers over him." He seemed to understand me, for he nodded eagerly, and then, as if to an afterthought, made me a very low, humble bow of thanks. Pointing to my fingers, then to the chain of my watch, and then to the body of the Spaniard, I said, "Will you see to his property?" He pulled open a drawer and motioned me to observe some objects wrapped in a silk pocket-handkerchief. On this I looked again at the body, and now saw that the one or two rings and other jewelry which Don Christoval had worn were removed. I walked out of the berth, leaving Don Lazarillo to proceed with his prayers, earnestly hoping, however, that he would be ready with his proposals by six o'clock, and that they would be practicable and consistent with my own wishes; because if he made no sign I should be at a loss, since it was certain that the crew would not suffer me to execute my threat to carry him to England while they remained on board; and how to deal with _them_ was a problem I should not very well be able to solve until I had dealt with _him_. I told Tom to procure me a cup of chocolate from Mariana. I then took a cigar from a locker in which were many boxes of cigars, and, seating myself in an arm-chair, smoked and ruminated on the tragic incidents of the day. Shortly before six I peeped into Miss Noble's room. She still slept soundly, exactly in the posture in which I had left her. This I did not think wonderful, since, for all I knew, she might not have slept a wink while she had been aboard the schooner, and nature, utterly exhausted, had claimed at last the heavy arrears owing to her. I listened: her breathing was perfectly placid; her bosom rose and fell gently and regularly. I touched her hand and found it warm. The refreshments were upon the deck untouched, as I had placed them. As I closed the door upon the sleeping girl, Don Lazarillo emerged from the cabin in which his friend's remains lay. There was a scowl upon his face that darkened his cheeks like a deeper dye of complexion. I watched him out of the corners of my eyes, saying to myself, "This man is a Spaniard; I have used strong words to him; he would think nothing of serving me as Miss Noble served his friend." He drew a paper cigar from a pocket case, lighted it, and sat down, pointing to the little clock in the skylight as he did so, as though he would say, "You see I am punctual." And, in truth, it was exactly six o'clock. He broke the silence by making me understand that he wished for Mariana. The sailors were assembled at the skylight gazing down impatiently, and I bade one of them tell the cook to lay aft, and for Butler and two others to join us below. "But come quietly," said I, "and make no noise when you're here, for Miss Noble is asleep. One of you must remain on deck to keep a look-out." This fell to George South, and Andrew Trapp was at the helm. Butler, Scott, and Tubb came below, and they were hastily followed by Mariana. The conversation (as translated by the cook, though it is needless, perhaps, to say that my version is somewhat more intelligible than the original as it appeared in Mariana's speech) proceeded thus: "Well, Don Lazarillo," said I, "you have had plenty of time to consider. What now do you wish to say?" "La Casandra is my property," he replied; "she is owned by me, and I placed her at the disposal of Don Christoval del Padron. You talk of carrying her to England. I do not wish that she should go to England." "It is my business to restore the young lady to her friends," said I; "and since this schooner carried her off from them, most assuredly she will have to carry her back to them." "But what is to become of my schooner when you have her in England?" "I do not know, and I do not care," said I. "Stop! I will tell you this: I shall hand her over to the shipping authorities at the port at which we arrive. I will name you as her owner. You can claim her, if you will, but I shall be compelled to tell the story of this adventure, and to explain the part you took in it." "What's all this got to do with paying of us?" growled Butler. Don Lazarillo sat scowling at me. "You are quite at liberty," I continued, "to remain on board your own schooner; but in that case you return with us to England, where certainly my immediate duty will be to inform against you." He snarled a malediction. "What about our money? Ask him that," cried Scott to Mariana. "I will send you and the lady," said Don Lazarillo, "to the first passing ship that is proceeding to England, and these sailors will continue the voyage with me to Cuba." "Who's going to navigate the vessel?" said Tubb. "A passing ship will help us to a lieutenant," answered Don Lazarillo. "Where's the passing ship to come from?" sneered Butler. "Who's a-going to wait for her? And d'ye think us men 'ud be content to mess about in this blooming schooner, may be for weeks, not knowing where we are and not knowing how to head? Ask the gent who's a-going to pay us, cook? That's what we're assembled for to hear." "Besides," said I, "I should not dream of transferring Miss Noble to another vessel in her present condition." I spied Don Lazarillo and Mariana exchanging a look. Indeed, I already more than suspected that these proposals of the Spaniards so far were no more than a "try on," to use a cant term; that he held another card in his hand ready to play should he be forced to do so, but that, meanwhile, his business was to make the best terms he could for himself. This conjecture was confirmed by the next speech of his that Mariana translated: "Then what remains but for me to be transshipped to a passing vessel--Mariana and me?" "That is reasonable. That shall be done," said I. "It is what I myself should have proposed." "_Contento!_" said Don Lazarillo, and was silent. "What about our money?" said Butler. The Spaniard looked round him on Mariana rendering this, then said, "I will give drafts upon my bank at Madrid." Butler, who was clearly the sea lawyer of this little community, fastening his eyes upon the rings on Don Lazarillo's fingers, shook his head with a contemptuous snort of laughter. "No, no," cried he, "I know what drafts be. A draft's a check, and a check's a bit of paper as may be made not worth the ink it's wrote upon with by the party withdrawing of his money from the bank. No, no," he continued, shaking his head somewhat savagely at Don Lazarillo, "we want money, not paper, and if ye can't pay us in money, then ye've got to settle with us in what is next best to it." And here he looked significantly at the Don's rings again. "You may tell Don Lazarillo," said I to Mariana, "that we shall not be satisfied with his drafts, nor with anything short of the cash he may have about him; and what he may lack in cash he must make good in jewelry, of which he and his dead friend have plenty between them." When this was interpreted, an expression like a spasm passed over Don Lazarillo's face. He reflected, then, with a passionate gesture, whipped out a pocket-book, from which he abstracted a handsome gold pencil-case, and all very passionately, with knitted brows and muttering lips, he entered certain figures, then shrieked rather than pronounced the amount to the cook, naming it in Spanish currency. Mariana nodded. Don Lazarillo now addressed him with excitement, then, springing to his feet, he entered Don Christoval's room, from which, in a few minutes, he returned bearing with him a bag of yellow leather, and the silk pocket-handkerchief which, as he had given me to understand, contained his deceased friend's jewelry. He opened the bag with trembling fingers, and then, with glowing eyes, he capsized the contents on to the table. This consisted of English sovereigns--two or three hundred, I should have imagined. "Count," shrieked the Spaniard, "and divide." I counted, and made the sum exactly a hundred and fifty pounds. "Divide," yelled Don Lazarillo, and he added some terms in Spanish which Mariana did not think proper to interpret. The cook's eyes gleamed like the blade of a new poniard as he looked at the money. I told thirty pounds for each man; for this, it seems, was the wages agreed upon for the run. Don Lazarillo then thrust the little parcel of jewelry which had belonged to his friend across to me. "Dat veel pay you, I hope, Capitan Portlack," he exclaimed, hooking his thumbs in the arms of his waistcoat, and leaning back with an assumption of haughtiness and contempt, which fitted him as ill as the clothes of Don Christoval would. I opened the handkerchief, and found a handsome gold watch and chain and a very fine diamond ring. I gave Don Lazarillo a nod, and without speech put these articles into my pockets. The value of this jewelry to purchase it would probably have amounted to three or four times the sum I was to receive; but then I estimated the things at their selling price, which probably might not reach to fifty guineas, so that in pocketing them I was taking no more than was my due. "You are now all satisfied, I hope," exclaimed Don Lazarillo, through Mariana. Yes, we were all satisfied. "And you put Mariana and me and my effects on board the first passing ship that will receive us?" "Yes," said I. "But suppose that she is sailing to Australia or to India?" "I shall not be able to help that," said I. "You may stay in this schooner if you please, but Miss Noble must be conveyed home." He rose from his seat frowning, viciously bit off the end of a cigar, lighted it, and went on deck, followed by the cook. "Well, your minds are easy now, I hope, my lads?" said I, rising. "We're obliged to ye, Mr. Portlack," answered Butler. "You've managed first-rate for us. And now, d'ye know, sir, while I've been sitting at this table an idea's come into my head." "What is that idea?" "It consarns our leaving the schooner, sir." "Let me hear it." "There's that big boat amidships," said he. "We shipped at Cadiz, and it was known at Cadiz that this here Casandra sailed from that port on such and such a day. Now my idea is: suppose you run in for the Spanish land until you've got Cadiz within, say, half-a-day's sail. Us men will then launch the cutter and start away for the port, you giving us its bearings. We must turn to and invent a yarn and represent this schooner as having foundered, the rest of the people who got away in the small boat being lost sight of by us. There are plenty of vessels at Cadiz, and they're always in want of hands. We can ship as smartly as we choose, get away, and then there'll be an end." I reflected, and said, "I think your scheme excellent, and Cadiz, though still somewhat south, is, in my opinion, as good as any other port. Only, when you are gone and the two Spaniards transshipped, I shall be alone in this schooner." "There'll be Tom, sir," said Tubb. I smiled. "If you're to return to England, Mr. Portlack," said Butler, pronouncing his words with great emphasis, "in this here schooner, and we're to leave you, which must be, for ne'er a man of us must dream of going home for a long spell to come arter such a job as this, then what I say is, there's no help for it. Alone ye'll have to be until such times as a passing vessel 'ull loan ye a man or two to help you home." "Your scheme requires reflection," said I. "Give me time to think over it. And now, since you're below, you may as well turn to and get that body yonder ready for the last toss. We'll drop it over the side at eight bells." I walked to Miss Noble's cabin and looked in. She was still asleep, preserving absolutely her former posture. I beckoned to Butler, who was at that instant stepping from Don Christoval's berth. He approached, and I said, "See there," pointing to the lady. "She has been sleeping like that pretty nearly ever since we left the berth after searching it." "Is she sleeping?" said he. "Yes," said I, "but there is something unnatural in such slumber as this. She has not stirred a finger for some hours." "She seems breathing all right, and appears comfortable enough, sir," said he, after silently surveying her. "She does not look comfortable. I wish to see her in her bunk. Let us gently lift her into it. If she wakens she may prove to have her mind. Observe her face; there is no madness in that placid expression." We were both strong men, and, bending over her we grasped, swiftly raised, and laid her at her length in the bunk. She never moved. It was indeed like lifting a statue; just as we placed her so did she continue to lie, breathing quietly with an expression upon her lips that was almost a smile. "Well," hoarsely whispered Butler, "blowed if I could ha' believed in such a thing had I been told it. She may be a-dying." "I hope not," said I; "one would wish to right the enormous wrong that has been done her before she dies." We stood in the doorway a few minutes looking at her, talking in whispers of the assassination of the Spaniard, and of other matters growing out of that tragic subject, such as the part that Don Lazarillo was playing in this extraordinary enterprise, the probability of the girl having lost her reason for life, and so forth, during which the young lady lay as motionless as though she rested in her coffin. Butler then left the cabin to obtain materials for stitching up the body in, and I went on deck. We buried the remains of Don Christoval at eight bells that evening, that is, at eight o'clock. It was a fine moonless evening, with so much star-light in the heavens that the twilight seemed to still dwell in the atmosphere when the afterglow had long ago died out. There was a pleasant breeze, and a sullen, steady sweep of swell, over which the schooner, almost denuded of her canvas--for our plans were not yet formed--rode with the regularity of the tick of a clock. Ever since sunset Don Lazarillo had hung about in the waist, conversing with Mariana in Spanish in subdued accents, yet with an energy that again and again ran a hiss through his utterance. The body, with a couple of cannon shot attached to its feet, was handed on deck by three of the men; it was then placed upon a piece of the main-hatch cover, and hoisted to the lee-rail, the foot of the cover resting on the rail, while the head was supported by Butler and South. The two Spaniards, who had fallen dumb when the body was brought on deck, repeatedly crossed themselves, holding their hats in their hands, while the men were manoeuvring at the sides with Don Christoval's remains. "Are you ready?" said I. "All ready, sir," answered Butler. "Pull off your caps, lads," said I, and, bareheaded, I stepped up to Don Lazarillo and begged him to recite the prayers he desired to pronounce over his friend's ashes. He responded with a bow, which, for the moment, affected me by its mixture of courtesy and grief, and then, with Mariana stalking at his heels, approached the body. They went down upon their knees, and Don Lazarillo prayed loudly, the cook occasionally striking in with an ejaculation. I gazed with respect, and even reverence, at this strange picture. No matter what a man's faith may be, no matter what his color may be, no matter how wild and grotesque the accents in which he vents himself, never can I behold him praying to the Being in whom he believes, yea, even though he be a John Chinaman prostrate to the flat of his forehead upon the floor of his joss-house, without being strangely moved and melted into feelings and sensations in which one should seem to find but little affinity with the rough life of the ocean. The Spaniard's prayers were not mine, his religion was not mine; but what signifies _that_, thought I, as I stood listening and gazing; every man sets his watch in the dark, and it is but reasonable that every man should think his own time right. The night wind, damp with dew, hummed in the rigging; the dark water broke from the gentle thrust of the stem in sobs, while Don Lazarillo prayed, and while Mariana ejaculated. As my eye went to the pale glimmering shape of the canvas I heard again the sounds of the sweet tenor voice as it had quietly rung through the open skylight that morning. I heard again the harp-like notes of the delicately-fingered guitar. I beheld again those visions which that clear, melodious voice had evoked, those summer aromatic scenes which Don Christoval's songs had painted upon the vision of my mind. The Spaniards rose from their knees. Don Lazarillo made the sign of the cross upon the body, then pronounced some word in Spanish, with a sob in his tone. "Let it go, men," said I. They tilted the hatch, and the pale shape flashed over the side. "Is Butler forward there?" I called out as I was pacing the quarter-deck half an hour later. "Here he is, sir," responded Butler's voice. "Step aft," said I. He arrived. "Butler, I've been thinking over your scheme. For the last half-hour I've been thinking of nothing else. If you men go away in the boat, will the negro boy Tom be willing to remain with me?" "Yes, sir." "How do you know." "I put the question to him and he said he would be willing." "Then," I exclaimed, "I consent. I agree with you that, if you are to leave me, I must be alone until I can get help. I might indeed transship you, feign to the master of the vessel we should speak that you were mutineers--a character you would all have to support--and ask him to give me two or three men in exchange for my five. That I might do; but the business would consist of a lie, and I hate lies. We should have to act a part: the five of you would have to invent a yarn, and carefully stick to it, while you were aboard the vessel that received you.... No! your plan is the most straightforward, and the least troublesome. The risk is mine, and a heavy risk it is--to be left in a big vessel with one hand only, and that hand a boy, and a mad lady below, who will require watching, and who may attempt our lives when she awakes. But I see no other way out of the difficulty." "Nor I, sir," he answered. "We don't like the notion of leaving ye alone; but then, you insist upon carrying this here schooner to England, and to England we don't mean to go," said he, slapping his leg. "Say no more. We'll hold that matter settled. Only, before you leave, the two Spaniards must have left; otherwise they'll be cutting Tom's and my throat, taking their chance, as I shall have to take my chance, of being fallen in with and succored. The Don doesn't like the notion of losing his schooner; but lose her he must, for he'll never dare to lay claim to her." "I should think not!" said he. "Well, sir, then I'll tell my mates it's settled. What about leaving the vessel under this small canvas?" "Oh," I answered, "sail can now be made, and I'll shape a course for Cadiz. As we approach the land, we stand to fall in with some trader, who'll put the two Spaniards ashore on their native soil." I was in charge of the deck, and it was for me, therefore, to give the necessary orders for sail to be made. The sailors sprang about with marvelous agility. The influence of the money they had received operated far more strongly in them than the influence of the funeral they had witnessed, and I believe that nothing had restrained them from singing, dancing, making a night of it, in short--for the fellows were never without plenty of a cheap sort of claret that had been economically laid in for their consumption--nothing, I say, had hindered them from celebrating their payment of thirty pounds a man by a forecastle carousal, but the feeling that some trifling respect was due to the memory of the dead and to the affliction of Don Lazarillo. Sail was heaped upon the schooner. Her twin spires floated through the liquid dusk that was radiant with large trembling stars, and a sheen melted off the edges of the canvas into the gloom, as though the whole fabric were some tall island of ice. Don Lazarillo sat under the skylight; he lay back in his chair with his legs crossed, his hands clasped upon his waistcoat, and a long cigar forking out of his mouth. His eyes of fire were fixed upon one of the cabin lamps, and I saw them gleaming, through the clouds of smoke he expelled, like the lanterns of a light-ship on a thick night. His countenance wore an expression of desperate dejection. Some distance away from him sat the man South, whose turn it was to watch beside Miss Noble's cabin door. This duty I conceived might, for the next two hours, at all events, be intrusted to the negro boy. He was somewhere forward. I called to him, and he came along to me out of the gloom; his black face so blending with the obscurity that the white jacket and canvas breeches he wore made him resemble a body without a head. "You are satisfied to remain with me, Tom," said I, "when the sailors leave me?" "Yes, massa." "You are a good boy, and a plucky boy. We shall not be long without help, I expect. I will take care that you are rewarded." The expanse of his teeth by a sudden grin was like a streak of dim light upon the darkness. "Go below into the cabin," said I, "and relieve South. Let him go forward. You know what you have to watch?" "Dah lady's door, sah." He descended, and up came South, who was immediately followed by Don Lazarillo. The Spaniard, temporarily blinded by the brilliance he had emerged from, stood in the companion-way staring around; then perceiving me, he crossed the deck and with great haste and agitation addressed me in Spanish. "No compreny, no compreny, Don Lazarillo!" I exclaimed, and sang out for Mariana to be sent aft. The fellow promptly arrived, and upon him the Don instantly discharged a whole torrent of words. "What is wrong?" said I. The cook answered that Don Lazarillo wished Miss Noble's cabin to be watched by a seaman. Tom was a boy. Should Miss Noble dash out of her cabin armed with a knife, what would Tom be able to do? "Tell Don Lazarillo," said I, "that Miss Noble is slumbering in what seems to be a trance." The Don violently shook his head. His friend had been assassinated: he himself might be the next victim. By the bones of St. Thomas, was he to be stuck in the back like a pig, or to have his head half severed from his body in his sleep? He would ask Captain Portlack to do him a great favor--to exchange quarters with him. He, Don Lazarillo, with Señor Portlack's courteous permission, would sleep under the main hatch during the remainder of his stay on board La Casandra. I promptly assented, and that the unhappy Spaniard should meanwhile enjoy some little ease of mind, I called to South and bade him resume his look-out in the cabin. I now hoped to be able to get the truth about this wild and tragic expedition out of Don Lazarillo, and, with as much tact as I was master of, sought through Mariana to direct the conversation that way. But I was disappointed. Don Lazarillo returned evasive answers, and then, suddenly complaining of the cold, made me a bow and withdrew to the cabin with Mariana, who, I presently ascertained, immediately went to work to prepare my quarters for the reception of the Don. After ten o'clock I saw no more of the Spaniard. I had heard some sound of hammering, but knew not what it signified until South, coming up out of the cabin after having been relieved by one of the seamen, informed me that it had been caused by Mariana nailing up the bulk-head door that led to the sleeping quarters I had occupied. "The Don don't mean that the lady shall get at him, sir," said the man, with a short laugh. I stepped into the cabin to mix myself a glass of grog, dim the lamps, and take a look round. "Has all been still within?" said I to William Scott, who was to be sentry down here till midnight. He replied that he had not heard a sound. On this I opened the door of the lady's room, and bade Scott hold it open that I might see by the sheen of the cabin lamps. There lay the girl as she had been lying for hours, always breathing with the same regularity, her posture exactly the same. I viewed her attentively, but could not detect that she had moved her head or a limb by as much as the breadth of a finger-nail. I marveled much as I returned on deck. Was this sleep the forerunner of death? Was life ebbing away as she thus rested? If not, then how long would this slumber last? Yet, thought I, it is best as it is; better that her senses should be thus locked up, than that with eyes brilliant with madness she should be ceaselessly pacing the floor of her room, or with insane cunning watching for an opportunity to steal forth. I slept during my watch below--that is, from twelve to four--in the cabin that had been Don Lazarillo's, and Captain Dopping's before him, to which new quarters I found that Mariana had brought the charts, chronometer, nautical instruments, and so forth. I slept soundly. Butler aroused me: all had been well. The breeze had freshened, he said; at three o'clock a large line-of-battle ship had passed within musket-shot; saving this, there was nothing to report. I looked in upon the girl on my way to the deck and found her, as I was now expecting to find her, in a deep and death-like sleep. When the dawn broke I anxiously scanned the sea line in search of a ship. Every hour of sailing of this sort was sweeping us closer into the Spanish coast; and as I had no intention whatever of relinquishing my five seamen until I had got rid of the two Spaniards, my present keen anxiety was to heave something into view that would receive them and carry them off. The rising sun flashed a bright and joyous morning into the wide scene of heaven and ocean. The horizon lay clear as the rim of a lens; a sweep of delicate blue to either hand of the glorious wake of the soaring luminary, with the sky sloping down to it in a dim azure, richly mottled in the west with clouds; but there was nothing to be seen. On this I resolved to shorten sail and to head somewhat more to the southward, where we stood a chance of falling in with the sort of craft we desired to signal. All hands were on deck. I briefly explained my motive, and canvas was forthwith reduced, diminishing the speed of the schooner to within about four miles an hour. While the men were busy with the ropes, Don Lazarillo's dark and bearded face rose through the main hatch. His eyes swept the horizon, as mine had, and then they settled upon me with a frown of disappointment. His complexion was unwholesome, as from a long night of sleeplessness and anxiety, not to mention the several passions which would contend within him when he reflected on the death of his friend, the complete and tragic failure of the expedition, the prospective loss of his schooner, and the certain loss of the money--doubtless a large sum--with which I was quite sure he had aided Don Christoval in the execution of his scheme to run away with an English heiress. He gave me a sullen bow, pointed with a shrug to the bare ocean, addressed Mariana, whose eyes watched him from the galley-door, and descended into the cabin; but as I happened to be standing close to the companion-way, I was able to observe that he paused, before entering the interior, to make sure that somebody was watching Miss Noble's berth. He had finished his breakfast by the time I was ready for mine, and as I took my seat he got up and went on deck in silence, casting a single savage glance at the door of the lady's cabin as he walked to the companion-steps. I looked in upon her when I had breakfasted; there was no change in her attitude: her trance, if trance it were, was as profound as ever it had been. However, as it turned out, Don Lazarillo was not to pass another night aboard La Casandra. And, indeed, seeing what waters we were now navigating, it would have been extraordinary, a thing beyond all average sea-faring experience, had hour after hour rolled by without bringing us a sight of a sail. I was eating some dinner, at half-past one o'clock, in the cabin, when Butler put his head into the skylight and called down: "Mr. Portlack, there's a small vessel standing almost direct for us out of the south'ard and west'ard--bound in, apparently, for the Portugal coast. Shall we signal her?" "Ay, certainly," cried I. "Heave the schooner to, and run the ensign aloft. I'll be with you presently." In about ten minutes' time I finished my dinner, swallowed a bumper of the noble Burgundy which had been stowed aft for the consumption of the Spaniards, lighted one of the fine Havana cigars, of which there was a locker half full, and, exchanging a sentence with Trapp, whose turn it was to keep watch on Miss Noble, went on deck. Not above three miles distant, and heading, as it seemed, directly for us, was a square-rigged vessel, a little brig, as she subsequently proved. Her canvas glanced like satin in the sun as she rolled. She was coming leisurely along under all plain sail. There was a color blowing at her main royalmast head, where alone it would have been visible to us, and on seeing it through a glass I made it out to be the Portuguese ensign. Don Lazarillo was on deck, swathed in his long Spanish cloak, and wearing on his head a large Andalusian hat. He looked like a bandit in an opera. Mariana, whose head was adorned by a long blue cap, shaped like the night-caps men used to sleep in when I was a boy, watched the approaching craft from his favorite skulking-hole, the caboose door. "She veel do, I hope!" cried Don Lazarillo, on catching sight of me, motioning toward the brig with a theatrical gesture. "I hope so, indeed," said I, earnestly. "But," cried I, happening to direct my eyes at our gaff end, where flew not the English but the Spanish colors, "what have you got hoisted there, Butler?" "The only ensign aboard, sir," he answered. "Upon my word! Yet I might have supposed so. La Casandra is a Spaniard, to all intents and purposes. So much the better," I added, as I sent another glance at the flag we were flying. "The Portuguese may be more willing to oblige the people of that flag's nationality than those whose rag is the red, white, and blue." The schooner had been hove to, thrown head to wind, her square canvas being furled, and nothing was to be heard but the slopping sound of waters alongside and the straining noises of the fabric as she leaned to the swell, while silently and eagerly we kept our eyes fastened upon the coming Portuguese brig. She drew close to windward, put her helm down, backed her maintop-sail yard, and lay within hailing distance--a prettier model than ever I should have thought to see flying _her_ colors, clean in rig, and her canvas fitting her well. The white water raced fountain-like from her bows as she courtesied, ripples of light ran like thrills through her black, wet sides, and there was a frequent leap of white fire from the brass and glass along her quarter-deck. A tall, gaunt man, whose features were just distinguishable, got upon the rail, and, holding on by a back-stay, pulled off his red cap and hailed us in Portuguese. Don Lazarillo looked round to observe if anybody meant to answer him; then exclaiming, "I understand; I speak his language," he shouted an answer--but an answer that seemed a fathom long; in fact, there was room in Don Lazarillo's response to the Portuguese skipper's hail for the whole story of our adventure. Mariana came and stood alongside the Don. Many cries were exchanged; the gestures were frequent and often frantic. Presently the Portuguese skipper dropped on to his deck, and Don Lazarillo bade Mariana inform me that the man meant to come aboard. In a few minutes the Portuguese brig lowered a boat; her gaunt skipper entered it, accompanied by a couple of men, and pulled the little craft alongside of us. I had never beheld so strange a figure as that Portuguese skipper. His face was little more than that of a skull, the flesh of which resembled the skin of an old drum where it is darkened by the beating of the sticks; it lay in ridges, as though badly pasted on, and these ridges looked to have become iron-hard through exposure to the weather. His eyes were large, intensely black, and horribly deep sunk, and glowed with what might well have been the fire of fever. Don Lazarillo pronounced some words, haughtily motioning to me; on which the Portuguese skipper gave me such a bow as a skeleton would make, and I pulled off my hat. Then the Spaniard addressed Mariana, who, accosting me in his extraordinary English, said that Don Lazarillo desired to know if it should be left to him to conduct this business of their quitting the schooner. I answered, "Certainly." I had no wish to interfere at all; nor could I be of the slightest use to them, not knowing a syllable of their tongues. On this Don Lazarillo took the Portuguese skipper into the cabin, and with them went the cook. After a few moments I heard the sound of a cork drawn; this was followed by much animated conversation; but I did not choose to show myself at the skylight under which they were seated, and their accents reached my ear faintly. I said to Butler, with a smile: "I hope the Don isn't conspiring with the Portugal man to seize the schooner." "Lord bless ye, Mr. Portlack," he answered with a grin. "How many of the likes of them chaps in the boat over the side down there would be needed for such a job as that?" And a grimy, wretched brace of men they were; yellow as mustard, and dark for want of soap, clad in costumes of rags, the lower extremities of which were kept together by being thrust into half-Wellington boots, bronzed with brine. "Where are you from?" I shouted. They were squatting in the bottom of the boat like monkeys, and their manner of looking upward was exactly that of monkeys--swift, their gleaming eyes restless, and a queer puckering of their leather lips that seemed a grin. They understood me, and one answered, "Bahia." "Where are you bound to?" "Lisbon." I tried them with one or two more questions, but to no purpose. After the lapse of some twenty minutes Mariana came out of the cabin, and said that Don Lazarillo begged I would be so good as to send two seamen below to convey his effects into the boat. "Certainly," I answered, and ordered a couple of men to attend upon the Spaniard. Guessing that the Don's effects would be comparatively trifling, I could not imagine why he required the services of two men in addition to the cook's help; until, after a little, first one sailor made his appearance with his arms full of boxes of cigars, then the second sailor arrived with a case of wine, then Mariana came on deck with bags and valises belonging to the two Dons. These articles were handed into the boat, and the seamen and the cook returned for more. It was clearly Don Lazarillo's intention to carry off as much as the Portuguese boat would hold, and by and by she was lying alongside deep with wine, cigars, a chest, as I supposed, of the silver plate, and a variety of other portable articles. Don Lazarillo then came up with the Portuguese captain. They went to the side and looked over at the boat, and the Portuguese captain hailed the men in her, and some unintelligible talk followed. The boat was then drawn under the gangway by the two fellows, and without a syllable, but with one deadly glance of malice at me, Don Lazarillo entered her. Mariana, throwing a bundle into her, followed. The Portuguese skipper then sprang, and the boat shoved off. Fortunately for her inmates, the surface of the sea flashed and feathered in ripples only, for the spite or avarice of the Spaniard had so loaded the boat that it needed but a very little weight in the movement of the water to swamp and founder her out of hand. When her two oars had impelled her a pistol-shot distant from us, Don Lazarillo stood up and proceeded to harangue me in Spanish, with both arms raised and both fists clinched. He rapidly worked himself into a white heat of passion; his voice rose into a penetrating shriek. That he was heaping upon my head every malediction which the language of his country, rich in grotesquely injurious terms, could supply him with, I did not doubt. I picked up a telescope and looked at his face through it, which cool, provoking act so heightened the madness of his wrath that he fell to swaying and toppling about after the manner of a man delirious with drink; whereupon the Portuguese captain, who had sat stolidly looking up at him, to save his own and the lives of the others--for the boat dangerously swayed to the Don's ecstatic gestures--struck him behind in the bend of his legs with the sharp of his hand, and Don Lazarillo vanished in a twinkling in the bottom of the boat. A roar of laughter went up from our men. "Trim sail, lads, and then heap it on her," I called out; and, even as the boat lay alongside the brig, with the people in her handing up Don Lazarillo's little cargo, the Casandra, yielding to the impulse of her broad and lofty cloths, was ripping through it to the southward and eastward, the brine spitting at her stem, and the shapely little Portuguese brig veering astern into a Lilliputian toy, her white canvas resembling a hovering butterfly in the confused, misty, and broken fires of the sun's reflection upon the ocean in the south-west. CHAPTER VIII. IDA NOBLE. "Our turn next, sir," exclaimed Butler, coming away from the rail, where he had been standing for a minute looking at the brig under his hand. "Yes. I shall be sorry to lose you," said I; "but what must be, must be, and you've made up your minds." "Ay, sir. It is right and proper, indeed, that you should carry the poor lady home; and gladly would we help ye if we durst. But after what's happened----" He violently shook his head. "How far d'ye reckon the coast of Cadiz to be distant, sir?" "Call it four days at this rate of sailing," said I. Then, looking at him, I continued: "I wish you men would change your minds, and let me set you ashore north of Ushant." I was proceeding to explain my reason, but he arrested me by an emphatic, "No, sir. Let it be Cadiz, if you please. The further away the better. All us men have friends at Cadiz, and there are other reasons for our deciding upon that port." I went below to see what Don Lazarillo had left behind him. The negro lad sat in a chair keeping that watch in the cabin which we continued to maintain spite of the girl's wonderful death-like sleep. It would have been easy, indeed, to have padlocked or in other ways secured the door; but then, if the door had been thus secured, our vigilance would certainly have been relaxed: in which case there was the chance of the cabin being empty at the moment when her consciousness returned, and, consequently, nobody at hand to arrest any dangerous behavior in her. I found that Don Lazarillo had emptied the locker of its cigars. The negro boy told me that the Spaniard had also carried away the wine which had lain stowed in the lazarette. But there was nothing to grieve me in this news; there were pipes and tobacco on board, and a plentiful stock of cheap wine for the use of the sailors. I entered Don Christoval's cabin and found nothing but the bedding left. The clothes of the dead man had been packed and conveyed to the brig. There was a chest of drawers, and in a corner stood a small table with drawers; these I ransacked, with a faint fancy or hope of meeting with some forgotten letter, some diary or document which Don Lazarillo had neglected to take, and which might throw some fresh light upon this extraordinary expedition. But every drawer was empty. I was standing lost in thought, with my eyes fixed upon the vacant bunk or sleeping-shelf, musing upon the incidents of the past few days, and wondering into what sort of issue my hand was to shape this adventure, when I was startled by an extraordinary cry, scarcely less alarming in its way than the death-scream that had been uttered by Don Christoval. It was such a cry as a wounded savage might deliver. Before I could reach the door of the berth the negro boy rushed in. "Oh, massa," he panted, "dah lady's looking out." My impression was that he had been stabbed. "Are you hurt?" I exclaimed, grasping him by the arm. "No, sah!" "Who shrieked just now?" "I did, sah." I cuffed him over his woolly head to clear him out of my road, and stepped into the cabin. Miss Noble, with the handle of the cabin door in her grasp, stood looking out with an expression upon her face of such utter bewilderment that but for her costume and my knowing she was the sole occupant of her room, I should not have recognized her. A person watching the motions of a gliding apparition, _knowing_ it to be a ghost, beckoning, stalking, compelling, might very well be supposed to stare as that girl did. Her eyes slowly rolled over the interior, as though the organ of vision, stupefied by bewilderment, was scarcely capable of effort. She was deadly pale, yet, spite of the withering influence of her astonishment upon her features, I seemed to find an expression of intelligence in them that most certainly was not to be witnessed before. She breathed swiftly. One side of her hair was now entirely unfastened, and the heavy mass of the dark red tresses lay upon her shoulder and upon her bosom. I instantly looked at her idle hand; it held nothing. I surveyed her a little, wondering whether she would speak; whether reason had been restored to her; whether there might not happen at any beat of the pulse a sudden horrible transformation in her, a new and blacker exhibition of insanity. Her dark eyes came to mine; there was an expression of terror in them. She pressed her hand to her forehead, and looked down as though she would sharpen her sight by averting it for a moment from the object at which she gazed, then looked at me again, pleadingly, eagerly, and fearfully. "Do not you know where you are, Miss Noble?" said I, in the most careless, matter-of-fact manner I could put on. "I am trying to think," she answered. "Pray give me your hand," said I. She extended it as a child might. I led her to an arm-chair and gently obliged her to sit. A decanter half-full of sherry stood in the swing-tray. I poured a little of the wine into a glass, and presented it to her; she took it and drank. Her behavior and looks were absolutely rational, clouded as they were by a bewilderment which her eyes appeared to express as hopeless. She had been fasting for many hours, and I was sure I could not do better than make her take food. I beckoned to Tom, who stood staring at the lady from the other end of the cabin. He approached, though he kept the table between him and Miss Noble. Her bewilderment visibly deepened as her eyes rested on his black face. I directed him to obtain the most delicate refreshments which the cabin larder of the schooner yielded, and to bear a hand. "You have been long asleep," said I, gently. "You were unconscious when you were brought aboard this vessel--for you know _now_ that you are at sea--and you must not wonder that you are bewildered on waking to find yourself in this strange scene." "Where am I?" she asked, in a voice that was but a little above a whisper, so breathless was she with continued surprise. "You are on board a schooner called La Casandra. I am acting as her captain. We are now making haste to return to England, to restore you to your home." "England--home?" she muttered, looking at me, then around her, then down at the dressing-gown she was robed in, then pulling a sleeve of the gown a little way up the arm and gazing at the bracelets upon her wrists. "Why am I here?" she exclaimed, drawing a breath that sounded like a sob. "Will you not wait till you have eaten a trifle? Nothing has passed your lips for very many hours. As strength returns, your memory will brighten, and I know I shall make you happy by the assurance I am able to give you." "Why am I here?" she repeated. I considered it wise to humor her: but to humor her I must tell the truth. "You are here," said I, "because two Spaniards--one of them named Don Christoval del Padron, and the other styled Don Lazarillo de Tormes--went ashore near your father's estate, on the coast of Cumberland, accompanied by a crew of armed sailors, and forcibly stole you away from your home, carrying you in a state of insensibility to a boat." She interrupted me at this point by crying out, "Yes, yes, now I remember, now I remember." She clasped her hands and half rose, repeating, "Yes, yes, now I remember," staring past me wildly as she spoke, as though she addressed some one at the other end of the cabin; then burying her face in her hands she sat in silence, rocking herself in the throes of a conflict with memory. I stood looking on, waiting for nature to have her way with her. The seamen, having got wind of her awakening, had collected at the skylight and were looking down; but fearing that the sight of them might terrify her, I dispersed the group of dark and hairy faces with an angry gesture. Tom arrived with a tray of refreshments. I dispatched him on deck to inform Butler and the others that the lady had returned to consciousness; that her reason had awakened with her, and that she was now as sane as any of us, but that they were to keep quiet and to hold their heads out of view. Presently the girl looked up; she was weeping, but so silently that I did not know she was crying until I saw her face. "It has all come back to me," she exclaimed in a broken voice, and shuddering violently. "Did you tell me you were taking me home?" "Yes, Miss Noble, you are going home." "Will it be long before we arrive home?" "Not very long." "And what has happened to me since I have been here?" said she, looking again down at the rich crimson dressing-gown she was habited in. "You have been in a sort of stupor," I answered, "but you have awakened strong and well; or let me say, in a very little while you will be strong and well. But you must eat, if you please, and while you eat you shall ask any questions you like, and I will answer you." I put the plate beside her, and noticed with gladness that she eyed it somewhat wistfully. Indeed, if anybody were ever nearly starved, she was; though medical men to whom I have stated her case have since told me that persons visited with these extraordinary fits of slumber can live for days, and even for weeks, without food. Tom had been careful not to put a knife on the tray; but there was a fork, and with it I placed a thin slice of ham between two white biscuits and presented this sea-sandwich to her, and she began to eat. She ate the whole of it, and then I made her another and gave her a little more sherry, and now I could observe how excellently this refreshment served her as medicine; for every moment seemed to diminish something of her bewilderment, while intelligence brightened in her eyes, and a very faint bloom from the improved action of her heart sifted into her complexion. Suddenly, with a start, and with a wild and terrified look around the cabin, she asked me where the two Spaniards were. The idea of them, borne on the current of the thoughts and fancies flowing through her brain, had, as I might judge, but that instant entered her consciousness. Now it was not to be supposed that I could tell her she had with her own hand slain one of those Spaniards; and no purpose, therefore, could be served by informing her that one of them was dead. "They have left the vessel," I answered. "Will they return?" she cried. "No, indeed; I will take care of that. You need not fear that they will trouble you any more." Her countenance relaxed its expression of terror, and her eyes met mine with a soft and touching look of gratitude in them. She then sighed deeply, and pressed her hand to her forehead. "Pray, Miss Noble, tell me how you feel?" said I. "My head swims," she answered. "The motion of this vessel affects me." Now that might well have been so, strange as it may seem. She would suffer from sea-sickness neither in her trance nor in her madness; but now that both were passed, now that her real nature was re-established in her, she must needs begin to suffer as she would have suffered from this same sea-sickness at the beginning of the voyage had she been brought on board in her senses. It seemed to me a most wholesome, reassuring sign, though I would not say so, for I desired to preserve her from all suspicion of the hideous state she had passed through. "Suppose," said I, "that you lie down and endeavor to obtain some sleep. What you have awakened from was stupor, and there can be no refreshment in stupor. A few hours of wholesome, natural rest are sure to work wonders." She rose in silence, but with consent in her eyes. Observing that her movements were unsteady, I gently held her arm and directed her steps to her berth. She got into her bunk, and I paused to inquire if there was anything I could do for her. "Nothing," she answered in a low voice. "I am grateful for your kindness. Everything has come back to me. Oh, yes, I now remember that dreadful night--that dreadful night! But you are not deceiving me?" "In what?" "You tell me that Don Christoval and his friend are not in this vessel." "Rest your poor heart, Madame. I swear to you as an English seaman that they are out of this vessel, and that you will never be troubled by them again." "Where are they?" she asked. "We will talk about them by and by." She closed her eyes, and I stood beside her a few minutes, then went out, calling to Tom to come and keep watch, with a threat to rope's-end him if he shrieked again should the lady suddenly show herself, for that she was now as sane as he or I was. I went on deck heartily rejoiced by this restoration of the poor lady's mind. It cleared me of a heavy load of anxiety. Now I could contemplate taking charge of the schooner with only Tom to help me until I could procure further assistance: this I could think of without half the misgiving which before worked in me when my mind went to it. On my showing myself, Butler, who was in charge, immediately approached me. "I see the poor lady's woke up at last, sir." "Yes," said I. "And Tom says she has her intellect sound again." "It is true, and thank God for it," said I. "Strange, Mr. Portlack," said he, after biting for a moment or two meditatively on the piece of tobacco in his cheek, "that the poor lady should come to just at the time that there Spaniard goes off, as one might say. There's a tarm to fit the likes of such a traverse, but I forgets it." "A coincidence," said I. "Well, that'll do, I dessay, though there's another word a-running in my head. And how do the lady relish the notion of having stuck the big Spaniard?" "Now listen to me, Butler," said I, "and repeat what I am about to tell to your mates in the most powerful voice you can command, and in the strongest words you can employ. Under no circumstances whatever, on no consideration whatever, must the lady be given to know that she committed that act. Tell her of it, and in all probability you will drive her mad for good and all." "There's no fear of any of us ever a-telling her of it," he replied, with a sort of sulky astonishment working in his face at the energy with which I had addressed him; "but she'll have to hear of it some of these days, won't she, sir?" "Not from us," said I, "and therefore what is going to happen some of these days will be no business of ours." "That's true enough," said he. "There is another point that may be worth our consideration. Briefly, the lady has now her senses; she has a clear eye, and may very likely prove to have a keen memory. I will take care that your names are not known to her; and should she ever come on deck while you remain on board, I would advise you and your mates to show as little of yourselves as the navigation of the ship will suffer." He looked thoughtful, and fell to stroking his chin. "Yes, by thunder! Mr. Portlack, you're right," he exclaimed. "If she gets to hear our names, and is able to describe us, why! Tell ye what it is, sir: the sooner we five men are off, the better; and until we've cleared out, I hope you won't encourage her to come on deck too often." Having tasted no food for some hours, I went below, and dispatched Tom to procure me some supper. While he waited upon me the following conversation took place between us: "You must never at any time, or on any occasion, say, either aboard this schooner or ashore, that the lady in the cabin yonder killed the Spaniard." "No, sah." "If you do, you and I, who are to convey this lady home, will be charged as accomplices in the awful crime of bloody murder." "I'll be berry car'fu', sir." "A single hint from you might lead to you and me being hanged by the neck until we are dead. On the other hand, if you keep silent, I will take care that you are rewarded; and if you have had enough of the sea, I dare say the friends of the lady will find you some comfortable berth ashore." The lad's black face was somewhat complicated by expression. There was mingled fright and delight in his wide grin and the stare of his large, bland, dusky African eyes. "Mind!" said I. And here let me own that my desire that the murder of the Spaniard should be kept a profound secret was largely--indeed almost wholly--a selfish one. For, first, I never doubted that, if the girl came to hear of what she had done, the thought of it working in a brain still weak with recent craziness would render her incurably mad, and so immeasurably increase my present anxieties and the trouble I should be put to to carry her home. Next, I wished the dreadful deed kept secret, since this singular expedition having caused me trouble and grief enough already upon the high seas, I was by no means anxious that darker worries should grow out of it on my arrival on shore. I saw nothing of the lady that evening, nor, indeed, throughout the night. Two or three times I knocked upon her door to inquire if she needed anything, and once only she answered. Her reply satisfied me that her mind was hers again; that, in short, there had been no relapse since I had left her. However, to provide against all risk, I arranged that the seamen should keep a look-out in the cabin as heretofore. I had charge of the deck from four till eight. It blew continually a fine breeze of wind, and hour after hour the schooner swept through it as though driven by powerful engines. I guessed, if the vessel maintained her present rate of sailing, that the men would be enabled to leave me before forty-eight hours had passed. Daybreak showed us several ships on the sea line. They were all of them small vessels, and standing, with the exception of one, to the north. The man Scott, who was at the helm, said that it was a pity his mates could not see their way to transshipping themselves aboard a craft, instead of making for Cadiz in the cutter. "Why don't you stop with me?" said I. "No, no!" he exclaimed. "But listen. Could not we three--you, me, and the negro boy--carry the schooner into Penzance, say, where you might go ashore at once, take the coach for London, and vanish much more entirely than ever you will by going to Cadiz?" "No, sir, no; there's to be no going home with me. I should be a fool to trust myself in England. I'm too respectable a man to live in any country where I'm 'wanted.'" "Well, then," said I, "Butler's scheme of the cutter and of Cadiz is the practicable one, and you must adopt it. You talk of my transshipping you. What story am I to tell the captain whom I ask to receive you? You don't look like mutineers, and not one of you is clever enough to act such a part as would enable me to spin my yarn without exciting suspicion. Now, suspicion is the last thing we wish to excite." "True, sir," said Scott. It was about a quarter before eight when the negro boy, who had been preparing the table for my breakfast, came on deck to tell me that the lady was in the cabin. I looked through the skylight and beheld her sitting in an arm-chair. She saw me, and bowed with a slight smile. I lifted the lid of the skylight that I might converse with her, and called down, "Good morning, Miss Noble. I hope you are feeling very much better?" "I am very much better, thank you," she answered, in a voice soft indeed, but whose tone and firmness were ample warrant of returning strength. "I hope to join you shortly. My watch on deck expires in a few minutes. It is a fine bright morning and there is a noble sailing breeze, and the schooner is going through the water like a witch." "I should like to go on deck," she said, "but I have no covering for my head." I recommended her to wait till after breakfast, when we would go to work to see what the schooner could yield her in the shape of head-gear; and shortly afterward, on Butler arriving to relieve me, I joined her. She had dressed her hair, and this and the effect of the comfortable night she had passed had made another being of her. With her recovery, or, at all events, with her improvement, had reappeared what I might suppose her habitual nature. Her countenance expressed decision of character; her gaze was gentle but steadfast; and in the set of her lips there was such a suggestion of self-control as even my untutored sea-faring eye could not miss. I now took notice, too, of her well-bred air. In the hurry and agitation of the preceding day I had missed this quality, or she may have failed to express it. But now, on my entering the cabin, and on her rising and extending her hand, I was instantly sensible of the presence of the high-born lady. Almost in the first words she pronounced she asked me for my name. I gave it to her, and with mingled dignity and sweetness she thanked me for my sympathy and attention. Our discourse was chiefly about her health, the sort of night she had passed, and the like, while Tom was putting the breakfast upon the table. We then seated ourselves. She ate with appetite, but was so reserved at first that I thought to myself, "Now, Madame, I suppose you intend I shall thoroughly understand you are a lady of high degree, between whom and a second mate in the merchant service there stretches a social interval wide as the Atlantic Ocean; and though I had hoped you would tell me your story and help me to a clear understanding of Don Christoval and his expedition, you mean to disappoint me through your new resolution to assert your dignity." But never was I more mistaken in a lady's character. I could see her glancing from time to time at the negro boy, who lost no opportunity of staring at her in return, as though he expected to see her at any moment snatch up a knife. I believed I could read her thoughts, and told the boy to go on deck and stop there till I called him. She trifled for a bit with her rings; then, with a little show of nervousness, though her accents did not falter, she said to me: "Mr. Portlack, from the moment of my fainting on that dreadful night, down to my awaking yesterday, I seem to remember nothing. I say I _seem_, and yet I am haunted by a sort of horrid memory--how shall I express it? It is the shadow of a recollection, and that recollection again is, as it were," pressing her brow as though struggling to deeply realize her thought, "no more than the memory of the shadow of something horrible. Am I meaningless to you?" "No." She viewed me anxiously and searchingly, and said, "Have I been mad?" "You were insensible when you were brought aboard, and you awoke from your extraordinary stupor for the first time yesterday." "Mr. Portlack, tell me, have I been out of my mind?" Hating a lie as I do, I was yet resolved that she should not know the truth, and I said "No" with so much emphasis that her face instantly cleared. She smiled, and clasped her hands. "Ah!" she exclaimed, breathing deep as though she sighed, "in so long and dreadful a slumber I must have dreamed many fearful dreams." I wished to disengage her mind from this subject, and I was also desirous that she should understand, without further loss of time, how it happened that I made one of the kidnaping gang. "With your permission," said I, "I will tell you my story, which, I believe, you will think a strange one even in the experiences of a sea-faring person." She watched me with attention, and I proceeded to relate my adventures, beginning with the Ocean Ranger, and then going on to the American ship, to my distressful and perilous situation in the open boat, and then to this schooner La Casandra falling in with me; thus I steadily worked my way right through my own yarn, omitting nothing save the incident of the death of Don Christoval. That she was a young lady of much strength of character I might now be sure of by her manner of listening to me. I was graphic enough, particularly in my description of our arrival off the coast of Cumberland; nevertheless, she attended to me with composure, with firm lips and steady regard. No exclamation escaped her. Once or twice she sighed, and once she colored, as though from some sudden passion of resentment swiftly controlled. "And now, Miss Noble," said I, "I hope I have made you understand how it happens that I am here?" "Perfectly," she answered, "and I am glad that you _are_ here, Mr. Portlack. But you have not told me what has become of Don Christoval and his friend." There was nothing for it--I must tell another falsehood; but Heaven would forgive me, for I meant well. So I answered that I had informed them, on learning that she was not Madame del Padron, that it was my intention to carry her home, and that on my arrival my first business would be to inform against them for having abducted her; whereupon they had prayed to be transshipped to a passing vessel; to which, after reflection, I consented, and the two scoundrels were transferred to a little Portuguese brig on the preceding day. She sank into thought. After a while she lifted up her head and gazed slowly and with curiosity round her at the pictures, the mirrors, and the other furniture in the cabin. Her eyes next went to her bracelets, and they then met mine. I waited for her to speak. "How long is it now, Mr. Portlack, since I was stolen from my father's house?" "This is the sixth day of your absence." "What will my father and mother think? They can not have been able to _do_ anything. That will be the hardest part to my father. They will have no idea into what part of the world I was to be carried. Will they even know that this vessel was lying off the coast to receive me?" "Oh, yes," said I, "they will know that. Some one is certain to have followed the sailors and the Spaniards as they marched with you to the boat." "Would there be any papers, any letters, do you think," said she, "on the body of the man who you said was killed, from which my father might learn that this vessel's destination was Cuba?" "I do not know. Most probably not." "What a wanton act of wickedness! What unnecessary, barbarous cruelty!" she exclaimed. "Had I been driven mad, it would not have been strange. We had just arrived from a ball, when my father cried out that there was a crowd of men outside. He told me to run upstairs. I can not imagine that he suspected the errand on which they had come. I believed that the men had arrived to plunder the house: it is situated on a lonely part of the coast. I went into a room, and almost at that moment I heard the report of a gun. The house is an old-fashioned building, the walls very thick. I was so far away from the hall that no sound reached me, but in a short time I heard foot-steps, and the noise of doors violently opened, and the voices of men exclaiming in Spanish. The door of my room was tried; I had turned the key, but the lock was an old one. The two Spaniards put their shoulders against the door, and it flew open; then I recollect a few moments of struggling and shrieking, and nothing more." "Did you never fear that Don Christoval would one day or night attempt to carry you off?" "Never," she responded, with a note of vehemence disturbing her calm tones, and I saw a flash in her brown eyes. "He evidently kept himself acquainted with your movements." "Yes," she answered; "in another week we were going abroad. We should have been starting about now, or to-morrow." "He told me that. Who was the spy he employed, I wonder?" She reflected, and answered: "No member of our household, I am sure. What sort of person is Don Lazarillo de Tormes?" I described him, and perceived by her way of listening that she had never seen him, and indeed had never heard of him. "You may take it, Miss Noble," said I, "that whoever Don Lazarillo may have been, he found the money for this adventure." "That must have been so," she answered; "Don Christoval is poor." "Had he any property in Cuba?" "I believe not," she answered. "Forgive me for being inquisitive. Was--I mean, is the man in any way related to you?" "He is. He is a distant connection on my father's side. His father was a Spaniard, and, I have always understood, of noble blood. Don Christoval was in England, and called upon us when we were in London. We afterward met him in Paris. My father disliked him, and it came to his forbidding him from holding any communication with us. He then challenged my brother to a duel, and, unknown to my father and mother, my brother attended with a friend, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy; but Don Christoval did not appear. That is entirely all that I can tell you about the man, Mr. Portlack." "I felt," said I, "that he was lying when he spoke of you as his wife. But how was it possible to make sure of the truth, one way or the other? He put his story so persuasively, his voice was so sweet, he was so very handsome, that any one believing in his tale could not but have pitied him, even to the degree of feeling willing to help him to recover what he called his own." She slightly colored, and said, "He only wanted my money." Here I might have complimented her, but I was an off-hand sailor, without any talent for drawing-room civilities. I need not dwell at length upon what passed between Miss Noble and me on this our first opportunity for enjoying a long chat. It was natural that we should again and again travel over the same ground. Though she did not repeat her question whether she had been out of her mind, I noticed, in her references to her state of catalepsy or stupor, a haunting uneasiness, as though the shadow of some black dream lay upon her in tormenting shapelessness and illusiveness. I can fancy that it resembled one of those ideas which visit most of us in our life-time--the idea that we have felt, suffered, or done something in another sphere of being. She was clearly a lady of strong constitution. She showed no traces of the condition she had been in for nearly a week. One would have thought to see her haggard, bloodless, famine-pinched, with pale lips and unlighted eyes; but, making due allowance for the costume of crimson dressing-gown and for the absence of divers finishing details of toilet, I could not conceive that she, at any time in her life, could have looked much better than she now did. May be her profound sleep had cleansed her countenance of the dreadful marks which the talons of the fiend Madness commonly grave upon the human face. Be this as it may, her health seemed excellent as I sat conversing with her at that breakfast-table; her calm voice had the true music of good breeding; her remarks exhibited no common order of perception and good sense, and to my mind--though it is said that sailors are easy to please--she needed no other face than her own, with its soft brown eyes, and purely feminine lineaments, and dark red hair, massive, abundant, and glowing, to be as fascinating a lady as a man could hope to meet with in English or any other society. I had, in the course of our conversation, told her very honestly what the sailors intended to do. I added that they were right in endeavoring to escape from the consequences of a wrong into the perpetration of which they had been basely betrayed by the lies of Don Christoval and his friend. I had then explained that I should be left alone in the schooner with the negro boy, but that I had not the least doubt of promptly obtaining all the help I needed to carry the vessel safely and comfortably home. This made her ask how long it might take us to reach home. "Eight or ten days," I answered. "What, meanwhile, am I to do for clothes?" said she; and, with something of unconsciousness in her manner, as though her fingers were governed by a thought in her head, she opened her dressing-gown and revealed herself in ball attire. Though she had been thus appareled for a week there seemed to be nothing soiled, nothing faded, in this aspect of her. It was the suddenness of the revelation, I dare say, that gave to her form the brilliance I found in it. Then, there was also the contrast of the rich crimson dressing-gown to heighten this instant splendor of attire and the incomparable whiteness of her neck and shoulders, though these were still defaced by several long, ugly black scratches. She buttoned the dressing-gown to her throat again, and said, with a smile full of self-possession, but sweetened by a little expression of sadness: "This is not the kind of dress that one would wear at sea, Mr. Portlack." "It is very beautiful," said I in my simple way. "The skirt is badly torn," she exclaimed. "Those wretches must have treated me very roughly, even after I had fainted." "You certainly will require warmer clothing than that ball-dress," said I. "Stay! an idea occurs to me. Was it Don Christoval--yes, I believe it was Don Christoval, who informed me--who implied rather--that he had made some provisions for you in the matter of dress." I shouted through the skylight for Tom. The boy arrived. "Go and ask Mr. Butler," said I, "if he can tell me in what part of the vessel Captain Dopping stowed the wearing apparel which was taken on board by Don Christoval for the use of this lady." The boy went on deck. Presently Butler's head showed in the skylight. There was a shawl round his throat, that covered his mouth to the height of his nostrils, and he wore a sou'-wester, the forward thatch of which he had turned down, while the ear-lappets hid his cheeks. It was clear he did not intend that Miss Noble should see more of his face than might serve him to breathe with. "Beg pardon, sir," he said in a muffled hurricane note, talking through his shawl. "Here's this here Tom come with some message from you, and I don't know what he means." I explained. "Ho! yes," said he; "I understand now. There's a chest of garments, I believe, stowed away down in the lazareet." In less than twenty minutes the negro lad and I had explored the lazarette, discovered the chest, lugged it into Miss Noble's cabin, and there left it open. All that it contained I could not tell you, but when I next saw Miss Noble she was wearing a green dress of some light, good material, the waist of which was secured by a band, and on her head was a plain straw hat of a sort to prove very serviceable to a lady at sea. CHAPTER IX. CAPTAIN NOBLE. Now, until we had closed the Spanish coast, that is to say, during the following four days, nothing happened of such moment as deserves your attention. The men kept themselves as much as possible out of sight of Miss Noble, and every fellow whose turn it was to stand at the helm invariably arrived so concealed about the face that I would often find it difficult to give him his right name. The sailors' dread of being observed by Miss Noble grew speedily into a real inconvenience; it came, indeed, very near to hindering me, in the daytime when the lady was on deck, from navigating the schooner; and to end it I took occasion, when we sat below at some meal or other, to tell her of what the men were afraid; with the result, that until the fellows left us her visits to the deck were very few, and chiefly in the dusk. It was four days from the date of the transshipment of Don Lazarillo and the cook that by my computation we arrived within ten leagues of the coast of Spain, the port of Cadiz bearing about east-by-south. It was a sunny morning, with a pleasant breeze. We hove the schooner to, for I did not think proper to approach the land nearer than thirty miles. Here and there was a gleam of white canvas upon the horizon; and I thought to myself, reflecting in the interests of the men, their departure must not be witnessed, nor must anything be near enough to fall in with them and to have the schooner in sight also; therefore I hove La Casandra to at a distance of about ten leagues from the port of Cadiz, nothing being visible but one or two sail, hull down. Everything was in readiness. You will believe that the boat, owing to the men's anxiety to get away, had been long before this morning provisioned and equipped. She was launched through the gangway just as she had been launched off the Cumberland coast on that silent, tragic night; then, while she lay alongside, the seamen, in obedience to my command, went to work to reduce sail upon the schooner, so that there would be little left for me and Tom to do should it come on to blow before we could procure help. While this was doing Miss Noble remained in the cabin. Everything being ready, Butler stepped up to me with his hand extended. I grasped and shook it. "Good-by, sir, and we all hope, I'm sure, that you'll have a safe and happy run home." "Good-by, Butler--good-by, my lads. You have behaved very well. I thank you for the willingness with which you have done your work under me. See that the yarn you have in your heads you all stick to, so that you'll be able to speak as with one tongue when you get ashore." "Trust us, sir," said Scott. "I hope the lady thoroughly understands," said Trapp, "how it happened that we five Englishmen was led into a job which ne'er a man of us would have touched, no, not for five times the money received, had the true meaning of it been explained?" "She does. And now you had better be off." They entered the boat, stepped the mast, and I gave Butler the course to steer by the little box compass that had been placed in the stern-sheets. They then hoisted the sail, and as the boat slid away from the shadow of the schooner's side, they all stood up and loudly cheered me. I halloed a cheer back to them with a flourish of my cap, then stepped aft, and, putting the helm over, brought the schooner with her head to west-north-west. "Come and lay hold of the tiller, Tom." The negro boy arrived. "Miss Noble," said I, putting my head into the companion-way, "the men have left the schooner." She at once came on deck, and stood looking in silence at the cutter as she swept swiftly eastward under the white square of her lug. "We are lonely indeed, now," she presently exclaimed, bringing her eyes from the boat to cast them round the horizon. "Yes," said I, "but we are going home," and I pointed to the compass. But she was right, for all that. Lonely the schooner looked with her deserted decks and small canvas, and lonely I felt, not so much at the beginning as later on, when the rolling hours brought the night along, without heaving anything into view that we could turn to account. Miss Noble earnestly wished to help; she assured me she could steer; she was sprung, she said, from a naval stock, and she told me that salt water had run in the veins of several generations on her father's side, and that she was to be trusted at the helm. And, indeed, I found that she steered perfectly well; she held the yacht's head steady to her course; and as half the art of steering lies in that, the most experienced man could not have done more. Her taking the helm enabled the boy to cook for us, and it gave me an opportunity to obtain sights, to attend to the sails, and the like. Yet, when day broke next morning, I well remember heartily praying that I should not have to pass, single-handed, such another night as we had managed to scrape through. I was on deck all night long. I obliged Miss Noble to go below and take some rest, and Tom slept at my feet while I grasped the tiller, ready to relieve me when I was exhausted with standing. Happily it was a fine night; a warm wind blew out of the west, and the stars shone purely with a few shadows of clouds sailing down the eastern slope. It was shortly after eight o'clock, while I stood near the tiller drinking a cup of chocolate which Tom had brought me out of the galley, where he had lighted a fire, that, happening to look astern, I spied a sail. Nothing else was in sight, and I had but to look once to know that she was overtaking us. This, indeed, must have been practicable to the clumsiest wagon afloat; for the canvas the schooner was under, merry as was the breeze that whipped the sea into snow and fire under the risen sun, was scarcely sufficient to drive her along at four miles in the hour. When I had drunk my chocolate I bade Tom prepare some breakfast for Miss Noble, who was, or had been, resting on a sofa in the cabin. When the girl had finished her meal she came on deck. And now the overtaking vessel had risen to her hull, and in the telescope which I pointed at her was proving herself a large ship, with a black and white band and a red gleam of copper under the checkered side as she leaned from the breeze. "I wish she may not be an English frigate," said I to Miss Noble. "Why?" she asked. "Because," said I, "she is sure to prove too inquisitive to be convenient. She'll be sending a lieutenant on board; he will see you; he will ask questions; he will demand the schooner's papers; he will not be satisfied, and will return to his ship for instructions; and we want to get home comfortably, Miss Noble." "I understand you," she answered. "But an English frigate! What security, what safety is there in the very sound of the words!" I waited a little while, and then, again leveling the glass at the vessel, I clearly perceived that she was not an English frigate, but a large merchantman, resembling a man-of-war in many details, saving the row of grinning artillery, the white line of hammocks, the heavy tops, and a peculiar cut of canvas that could never be mistaken by a nautical eye in those days of tacks and sheets. Apparently she was a troop ship out of the Mediterranean; there were many red spots of uniform upon her forecastle past the yawn and curves of the white and swelling jibs. And, indeed, she had need to be a hired transport, for nothing of her rig would have any business in the Mediterranean and nothing homeward bound from the Indies or the Australias was likely to be met with so far to the eastward as was the longitude of the waters we were in. I hoisted the Spanish ensign, and left it flying at half-mast. "Now, Miss Noble," said I, "what story shall I tell those people, should they heave to and send a boat, as I hope and believe they will?" She gazed at me inquiringly. "If I give them the whole truth," said I, "it will run like wildfire throughout the ship. The vessel will probably arrive before we do; there are crowds of people on board to talk; the news of the outrage done you and yours will be circulated, printed; it will become everybody's gossip. Now, would Captain Noble wish this? Would my lady, your mother, desire this?" "No, they would not," she answered, after a pause. "You are kind and wise to ask the question. The thought did not occur to me when I wished that yonder vessel might prove an English frigate." "Then I must invent a story," said I. "But did not you say," she asked, "that when we arrived at an English port you would be obliged to hand the schooner over to the authorities of the port, to whom you would relate the truth, as it would be impossible and most unwise to attempt to deceive them? Those were your words, Mr. Portlack." "Yes, I remember; those were my words. Well, Miss Noble?" "Well," said she, "don't you see that, since you must tell the truth when you arrive in England, this wretched story will have to be made public in any case?" "No," said I, "there is a difference. Yonder is a ship full of soldiers and sailors, and others--gossips all, no doubt. To give them the truth--and to give it to the captain or the mate is to give it to them all--is tantamount to publishing your story throughout England, whether you will or not; but to communicate with the receiver of wrecks is another matter. There is official reserve to depend upon. Your father, too, will not be wanting in influence. To me, Miss Noble, it is all one. I desire to be influenced by your wishes." "My wish certainly is," said she in her calm, emphatic way of speaking, "that as little as possible of what has befallen me should be known." "Then," said I, "I will ask you to step into the cabin and keep in your own berth out of sight until the visit I hope to receive is ended." She went below forthwith. Half an hour later the large full-rigged hired transport Talavera had ranged alongside La Casandra, easily within earshot. She was crowded with troops; numbers of military officers in undress uniform surveyed us from the poop. A tall man in a frock coat and a cap with a naval peak stood upon a hen-coop, and hailed to know what was the matter. "My men have deserted," I cried back; "there are but this negro boy and myself to carry the schooner to an English port. Can you lend me a couple of hands?" "I will send a boat," he exclaimed, very easily perceiving that it was impossible for me to board him. A boat in charge of a mottled-faced, jolly-looking, round-shouldered man, about thirty years of age, swept alongside, and the jolly-looking man came on board. "Are you the master?" said he. "Yes," said I. "Short of men, hey?" said he. "So I should suppose, if _he's_ your crew," bursting into a laugh as he indicated the negro boy with a motion of his chin. "How come you to be at sea with no more crew than one little nigger?" "My crew," said I, "were composed of five English sailors. They were shipped at Cadiz. Yesterday they took the boat, and sailed away to the coast of Spain in her, saying _they_ weren't going to England. Can you lend me a couple of hands?" "What's the name of this craft?" said he, looking up at the Spanish ensign. "La Casandra." "From Cadiz, d'ye say?--to where?" "To Penzance," said I, naming the first port that entered my head. "Who's the owner?" "Don Lazarillo de Tormes." He asked several further questions of a like sort, and seemed perfectly satisfied with my answers. I invited him to step below and drink a glass of wine, but he declined, saying that his ship was in too great a hurry to get home to allow him to stop and take a friendly glass on the road. He had not long returned to the Talavera when the boat, in charge of a midshipman, came alongside the schooner again, and a couple of young sailors, each with a sailor's bag upon his shoulder, climbed over the side. The midshipman, looking up, called out to me: "They're a couple of Dutchmen, but the captain guesses they'll serve your turn." I told him to give my hearty thanks to the captain for his kindness. He then went back to his ship, which immediately swung her yards, and in a little while a wide space of water separated the two vessels. "Dutchman" is a generic word employed by sailors to designate Germans, Swedes, Danes, and others of the northern nationalities. These two Dutchmen proved to be, the one a young Swede, who spoke English very imperfectly, and the other a young Dane, whose knowledge of English was almost wholly restricted to the names of ropes and sails; both of them smart, respectful young fellows, without curiosity, accepting their sudden change of life with the proverbial indifference of the sailor. I had intended, for the convenience of Miss Noble, to carry the schooner to Whitehaven; but before we gained the parallel of Land's End it came on to blow heavily from the north and west--so heavily, and with such an ugly, menacing look of continuance in the wide, dark, greenish scowl of the sky, that I thought proper to shift my helm for the English Channel. _There_ we encountered terrible weather. I hoped to make some near port, but, owing to the thickness and to the gale that had veered due west, I could do nothing but keep the schooner running until we were off the South Foreland. The weather then moderating, I steered for Ramsgate harbor, and the schooner was safely moored alongside the wall of the East Pier in six days to the hour from the date of our receiving the two seamen from the Talavera. You will suppose that Miss Noble long before this had written a letter--nay, had written four letters--to her father ready for instantly posting on her arrival anywhere. It seems that he had four addresses--his house in Cumberland, his house in town, and two clubs, one in London and one in the north--and she was determined that her letters should not be delayed through his absence from one address or another. These letters were immediately posted, but communication in those days was not as it is now, and if it happened that her father was in Cumberland, then, let him post it and coach it as he would, it must occupy him hard upon four days--and perhaps five days--to reach Ramsgate. Certain Custom House officers came on board and rummaged the schooner for contraband cargo. They stared hard at the cabin furniture, and moved and groped here and there with eyes full of suspicion. I told Miss Noble that my immediate business now lay at the Custom House, and I begged to know what her plans were, that I might help her to further them. "I will go to a hotel," she answered, "and there wait for my father. As you are going into the town, will you engage a sitting-room and bedroom for me at the best hotel in the place? And I will also ask you to order a trunk-maker to send a portmanteau down to this schooner, otherwise I shall not know how to pack my ball-dress and jewelry. This dress," said she, looking down at the robe in which she was attired, and which had formed a portion of the apparel that Don Christoval had laid in for her, "I shall continue to wear until my father brings me the dresses I have written for." "I will do what you ask," said I, and, leaving her on board, I climbed the ladder affixed to the pier wall, and bent my steps in the direction of the Custom House. The receiver was a little, eager-looking man, afflicted with several nervous disorders. He could neither sit nor stand for any length of time; he blinked hideously, and he also stuttered. My tale took the form of a deposition, and I omitted no single point of it, save the assassination of Don Christoval. "This," said the little receiver, stammering and blinking--"this," he exclaimed, when I had come to an end, "is a very extraordinary story, sir." "It is," said I. "Captain Noble is a well-known gentleman," said he. "I was for a short time on duty at Whitehaven, and heard much of him." "His daughter has written to him," said I, "and he will doubtless be here as fast as he can travel. And what about the schooner?" "I must wait for instructions," he answered; "your deposition will be sent to head-quarters." "Have I not a lien upon her?" "For what?" said he. "For services rendered." "Seems the other way about, don't it?" said he, with his stammer. "The services appear to have been rendered by her to you." "There are two men and a boy who want their wages," said I. "Who is the owner, d'ye say?" exclaimed the little man. "Don Lazarillo de Tormes." "Well, he will be communicated with." "No, he won't, though," said I. "We shall never hear anything more of Don Lazarillo de Tormes. What! do you think that the man would dare come forward and claim his schooner on top of an outrage which would earn him transportation for life, could they get hold of him in this country?" "If he doesn't come forward," said the little receiver, blinking at me, "and if the schooner remains unclaimed for any length of time, why, then she will be sold; and there'll be your opportunity for asserting your rights." I walked into the town, leaving the little receiver putting on his hat to view the wonderful schooner, with a hope, too, of catching a sight of Miss Noble. I obtained the required accommodation for the lady at the Albion Hotel; then, observing a shop in which some trunks were displayed, I told the shopkeeper to send one of them, or a portmanteau if he had such a thing, down to the schooner La Casandra. Entering the street again, I walked a little way, and, finding myself in the market-place, stopped to consider. I did not possess a farthing of money in my pocket, and it would take me some time to draw my little savings out of that London bank in which they were deposited; but money for immediate needs I must have, and, addressing a porter in a white apron, who stood in the market-place smoking a pipe, I asked him to direct me to a pawnbroker. He pointed with his pipe up the street, and proceeding in that direction I presently observed the familiar sign of the three balls. I entered, and put down the gold chain and watch that had belonged to Don Christoval, and for it I received twenty sovereigns and a ticket. I then returned to the schooner, where I found Miss Noble in the cabin reasoning with the trunk-maker, who had arrived, bearing with him two or three samples of the desired goods. "He will not trust me, Mr. Portlack! and yet it is true--and too absurd--that I can make him nothing but promises of payment." "Pray, how much do you want?" said I. "Fourteen shillings," she answered, and she added tranquilly, with a slight smile, "To think that I should want fourteen shillings!" I put down a sovereign; the man gave me change, shouldered the remaining boxes, and went away. Having escorted Miss Noble to her hotel, I again returned to the schooner, which I intended should be my home until after the arrival of Captain Noble. The two sailors asked me what they should do. I advised them to ship aboard a collier and make their way to London, where they would easily find some one to advise them as to what proceedings they should take in respect of reward for the assistance they had rendered me in carrying the schooner home. Next day they found a collier wanting men, and, giving them a sovereign, I bade them farewell. I never heard of them again. Meanwhile, I kept the negro boy on board the schooner. We had arrived at Ramsgate on a Wednesday morning. On the afternoon of the following Tuesday I was pacing the deck of the schooner as she lay moored against the pier wall. The harbor master had not long left me. An hour we had spent together, I in talking and he in listening; for the receiver, with whom he was intimate, had dropped many hints of my story to him over a glass of whisky and water one night, and he told me he could not rest until he had heard my version of the extraordinary romance. It was a brilliant afternoon; a fresh breeze from the west swept into the harbor between the pier-heads, and the water danced in light. A few smacks, bowed down by their weight of red canvas, were endeavoring to beat out to sea. A number of wherries straining at their painters frolicked in the flashful tumble, past which was the slope of beach with galleys and small boats high and dry, and many forms of lounging boatmen. On the milk-white heights of chalk the windows of the houses glanced in silver fires, which came and went in a sort of breathing way as they blazed out and were then extinguished by the violet shadows of masses of swollen cloud majestically rolling under the sun. I was gazing with pleasure at this animated 'longshore picture, full of color and splendor and movement, when I observed a gentleman rapidly coming along the pier, which happened to be almost deserted. There was something of a deep-sea roll in his gait, and though he clutched a stick in one hand, the other hung down at his side in a manner that is peculiar to people who have long used the sea. I seemed to guess who he was, and watched him approaching while I knocked the ashes out of my pipe. He came to the edge of the wall, and, looking down, shouted out in a hoarse voice: "Is this schooner the Casandra?" "Yes, sir," I answered. He put his hand on the ladder and descended. He had a clean-shaven face, the color of which at this moment was a fiery red, but then he had been walking fast. His eyes were large, and remarkable for an expression of eager expectation, as though he had been all his life waiting to receive some important communication. His hat was a broad-brimmed beaver; he was buttoned up in a stout bottle-green coat, and he was booted after the fashion of country gentlemen of that age. "My name is Noble--Captain Noble," said he. "Are you Mr. Portlack?" "I am," said I. "Give me your hand," he exclaimed. He grasped and squeezed my fingers almost bloodless, letting go my hand with a vehement jerk as though he threw it from him. "I thank you for bringing my daughter home, sir. Her mother thanks you for your attention to her child. You have acted the part of a gentleman, of a sailor, of a man of honor. I thank you again, and yet again." Then, glancing along the decks of the vessel, he added, "So _this_ is the blasted schooner, hey?" "I trust Miss Noble has told you," said I, "how it happens that I was on board this vessel on the night of her abduction?" "Yes," he answered, still continuing to examine the vessel curiously, now looking aloft, now forward, now aft, as though he could not take too complete a view of the craft. "Yes, she told me. The scoundrels! Thank God! I shot one of 'em. I would have shot 'em all, but the ruffians stood over me and my son with naked cutlasses and loaded pistols." "I hope they did not burn the house down?" "No, we extinguished the fire. Fifteen hundred pounds' worth of damage--that's all!" He made a cut through the air with his stick, exclaiming: "The rogues! the villains! They took me unaware. So many of them, too! How many were there?" "Two Spaniards," said I, "the master of this schooner, and four seamen. You were attacked by seven." "Seven!" he cried. "Seven against two! for as to my coachman and footman--what do you think? They drove away--by heavens! they lashed the horses and bolted! I should like to go below; I should like to examine this blackguard craft. A fine, stout vessel all the same. A pirate in her day, no doubt." We descended into the cabin, which he at once made the round of, peering at the pictures, staring at the looking-glasses, examining the chairs, as though he were in a museum and every object was extraordinarily curious. "And pray, how is Miss Noble, sir?" said I. "I have not seen her since Tuesday." "Very well; wonderfully well," he answered. "How do you find her in looks after her terrible experience?" "Why, neither her mother nor I see any change. She is a shade paler than she commonly is. But the girl has the heart of a lioness." "So she has, sir." "Now," said he, "Mr. Portlack, tell me about those two cursed Spaniards. I want to get at them." He flung his stick upon the table and threw himself into an arm-chair. "What did your daughter tell you about those two men?" said I. "Why, she was insensible, she says, for the greater part of the time, and you informed her that, on the day of her recovery, you transshipped the two miscreants at their request. What vessel received them?" and here he pulled out a pocket-book and a pencil-case, with the intention of taking notes. "Your daughter told you that she was insensible, sir, and that she continued insensible for many days?" "Yes," said he, flourishing his pencil with an irritable gesture, clearly annoyed at my not answering _his_ question. "That," said I, "is all that she would be able to tell you." My manner caused him to view me steadfastly, and the odd expression of expectation in his eyes grew more defined. "When your daughter awoke from her first swoon, Captain Noble, she awoke--mad." "What do you mean by mad?" he said. "She was a maniac," said I. "And I wish that were all." "Out with it--out with it _all_, then, man, for God's sake!" he exclaimed. "Only one Spaniard, along with the Spanish steward, left the schooner. The body of the other Spaniard we dropped overboard." He put his note-book on the table and tightly folded his arms on his breast. I believe, though I could not be sure, that he then guessed what I was about to tell him. "I knew that your daughter was mad," said I. "Don Christoval introduced me into her cabin, hoping, I know not what, from my visit. It was not long after, that, being in the quarters which I then occupied yonder," said I, pointing, "I heard a terrible cry, and opening that door there I witnessed Don Christoval in the act of falling and expiring, stabbed to the heart by your daughter, who stood just within her cabin--that one there--grasping a large knife she had managed to get possession of." He fell back in his chair, and remained for some moments looking at me as though he could not understand my meaning; then a sort of groan escaped him, and he got up and began to march about the cabin. "These are dreadful tidings for a father's ears," he exclaimed, stopping abreast of me. Then his mood changed with almost electric swiftness, and, hitting the table a heavy blow with his fist, he roared out: "By --, but it served the ruffian right! It was _my_ spirit working in her, mad as she might be. That's how I would have served him, and the rest of them, one and all--the atrocious villains!" "Of course you know," said I, "that your daughter is utterly ignorant of having slain that Spaniard--ignorant of that, and ignorant that she was out of her mind: though some dark fancy seemed to haunt her for a while, until, by a falsehood, which I detest, I dispelled it." "What did you tell her?" "She asked me if she had been mad, and I said 'No'!" "Mr. Portlack," he cried, grasping me by the hand, "you have the delicacy of a gentleman. The more I know of you the more I honor you.... And she stabbed him to the heart? Oh, now, to think of it! Her mother must not be told--there must not be a whisper; she is all nerves and imagination. Who knows of this beside yourself?" "The five seamen," said I; "the five of a crew of Englishmen, who, when they found that they had been tricked by the Spaniards, resolved to leave the schooner. They sailed away in a boat for Cadiz when we were off that port. They know all about the assassination; but, take my word for it, they'll never let you hear of them on this side of the grave." He began to pace the cabin afresh. "There is another," said I, "who possesses the secret, to call it so." "You mean yourself?" "No; a lad--a negro boy. He is now in the schooner. I am troubled to know what to do with him. I have made him believe that he and I will both be hanged if he opens his lips. Yet, he may talk by and by, Captain Noble. He is a mere lad." "What is to be done?" said he, frowning. "Tough as I am, it would break my heart if this were to be known. Conceive the effect of the intelligence upon my daughter. Great Heaven! if you could but tell me it was a dream of yours! Upon _your_ secrecy, Mr. Portlack, I know we can all depend. Your behavior throughout is warrant enough for me. How to thank you--But about this boy? Let me see him, will you?" I at once went on deck and called down into the forecastle, where the lad lay asleep in a bunk. I told him to clean himself and come to me in the cabin, and I then returned to Captain Noble. "There is only this lad to deal with," said I. "Believe me when I assure you that you will never hear more of those five seamen, nor of Don Lazarillo and the steward. Captain Dopping, the master of this schooner, you yourself shot dead. As for me--But for myself I will say no more than this: I hold that your daughter was barbarously used. The men who stole her, and who drove her mad by stealing her, were scoundrels whom I would have shot down as I would shoot down a brace of mad mongrels, sooner than have suffered them, as foreigners, to lay violent hands upon a countrywoman of mine, and upon so good and sweet a young lady as your daughter. My one desire throughout has been to make all the amends in my power. I was innocently betrayed into this villainous business, and I trust, Captain Noble, that the theory of reparation I have endeavored to work out establishes me in your mind as a man in whose keeping the tragic secret of this adventure is absolutely safe." He endeavored to speak, but his voice failed him. He took my hand in both his, and in silence looked at me with his eyes dim with tears. "And now about the boy," said I. "It occurs to me that you might have influence to procure him some situation on board a man-of-war, going abroad or at present abroad." He was about to answer, when the lad's legs showed in the companion-way and down he came. Captain Noble stared at him, and he stared at the Captain. "A likely lad, Mr. Portlack. Does he speak English?" "Do you speak English, Tom?" said I. "Nuffin but English, de Lord be praised!" he answered, grinning. Captain Noble mused as he eyed him. "You have behaved very honestly," said he, "and I shall want to do you a kindness. Come to the hotel where I am stopping to-morrow morning at ten o'clock, and you and I will have a chat." "I'll be dere, sah." "It will give me time to think," said Captain Noble in an aside to me. "And come you and dine with us this evening, Mr. Portlack, will you?" I glanced down at my clothes. "Never mind about your dress," he continued. "We shall expect you at half-past six o'clock." He stayed for another quarter of an hour, and then left the schooner. Never had anything before, and I may say never has anything since, proved so memorable to me as that dinner with Captain and Lady Ida Noble and Miss Noble at the Albion Hotel, Ramsgate. The reason why it was memorable you shall hear in a minute. I found Lady Ida Noble very different from the individual I had supposed her to be, on the representations of Don Christoval. I expected to meet a tall, haughty, and forbidding lady, of an ice-like coldness of demeanor; instead, I found her an impulsive little woman, in a high degree nervous and emotional, possessed of a ready capacity of tears, resembling her daughter in face and figure in a sort of miniature way--for Miss Noble stood half a head taller than her mother--and a refined lady in all she said and did. She overwhelmed me with thanks, and seemed unable to make enough of me. Miss Noble looked very well indeed; there was color in her cheek and fire in her soft dark eyes, and a quiet vivacity of good health in her bearing and movements. Indeed, her swift recovery, or rather, let me say, her emergence into health from the horrible disease of insanity and from her long death-like condition of catalepsy, impressed me then, as it impresses me still, as the most startling and extraordinary of all the incidents of our startling and extraordinary voyage. When the ladies had left us, Captain Noble put a cigar-case upon the table, and said: "I have been thinking about that negro boy. I have a relative in the West Indies, and I will send the lad out to him, if he is willing to go. I will tell my relative the story of my daughter's abduction, explain that I want the matter kept secret, and bid him have an eye to the lad." "He is a good boy," said I, "and deserves a comfortable berth." "He shall have it," said Captain Noble, "and I will put money in his pocket, too. I'll talk with him in the morning." He then questioned me about Don Lazarillo, but I could tell him nothing. The very name, indeed, I said, might be assumed, though I thought this improbable, seeing that the other had sailed under true colors. In talking of these Spaniards he, by design or accident, informed me that his daughter was heiress to a considerable property. I can not be sure of the amount he named, but I have a recollection of his saying that on her mother's death she would inherit a fortune of between sixty thousand and eighty thousand pounds. One subject leading to another, he inquired as to the payment of the sailors of La Casandra. I answered that Don Lazarillo, being terrified by the seamen's threats, had entered his dead friend's berth and produced a bag of gold which exactly sufficed to discharge the claims of the men. "And what did the rogues offer you, Mr. Portlack?" said he. "Fifty guineas, sir." "Did you get it?" I smiled, and answered that, instead of money, Don Lazarillo had given me Don Christoval's watch and chain and diamond ring. "Have you the things upon you?" said he. "I have the ring," said I, pulling it out of my waistcoat pocket. "The watch and chain I pawned for twenty pounds, being without money, save a trifle in a savings bank in London. What this ring is worth I'm sure I can't imagine," said I, looking at it. "I hope it will yield me an outfit. I as good as lost everything I possessed when the Ocean Ranger sailed away in chase of the Yankee, leaving me adrift." He extended his hand for the ring, and appeared to examine it. "Have you the pawn-ticket for the watch and chain?" he asked. I gave it to him. "I should like to possess that watch and chain," said he, "and I should like also to possess this ring. I'll buy them from you." I bowed, scarcely as yet seeing my way. He pulled out his pocket-book and extracted a check already filled in. "You will do me the favor," said he, "to accept this as a gift, and I will do you the favor to accept this pawn-ticket and ring as a gift." The check was for five hundred guineas. This noble check is the reason for my calling that dinner at the Albion Hotel, Ramsgate, a memorable one. It laid the foundations of the little fortune which I now possess, but which without that check I should never have possessed, so hopelessly unprofitable is the vocation of the mariner. But I did even better than that out of the ill-fated Don Christoval and his friend, for, nobody appearing to claim the schooner, she was sold after a considerable lapse of time; and when I returned from a voyage in which I had gone as chief officer, I was agreeably surprised at being informed, by the solicitor whom I had requested to watch my interests during my absence, that the claim he had made on my behalf as virtually the salvor of the schooner had been admitted, and that I was the richer by a proportion of the proceeds amounting to a hundred and ninety pounds. Whether because of the influence possessed by Captain Noble, or because the authorities (whoever _they_ might be) decided not to take proceedings against me as the only discoverable member of the gang who had forced Miss Noble from her home, certain it is that I never heard anything more of the matter. I took care that my address should be known, and carefully informed the receiver at Ramsgate, and Captain Noble also, that I was willing while ashore at any moment to come forward and state what I knew; but, as I have before said, I was never communicated with. The whole story lay as dead in the minds of those few who knew of it as though the events I have related had never occurred. Five years had expired since the date of my having safely restored Miss Noble to her parents. I was now commanding a large Australian passenger ship, and among those who sailed to Melbourne with me was a gentleman named Fairfield. He was a solicitor in practice at Carlisle. One day, in conversing with him, by the merest accident I happened to pronounce the name of Captain Noble. He asked me if I knew him. I answered warily that I had heard of him. He grew garrulous--an unusual weakness in a lawyer--and, in the course of a long quarter-deck yarn, told me that Miss Noble had been for two years out of her mind, tended as a lunatic by nurses in her father's house, but for nearly two years now she had been perfectly well, and some six months ago had married Sir Ralph A----, Bart., a widower, whose estate lay within five miles of her father's. He said that there was some mystery about the lady's past. She had been abducted and ill-used. He never could get at the truth himself, and would like to learn it. He understood that she went out of her mind because of some horrible haunting fancy of having committed a murder. That was all he could tell me, and from that day to this I have never been able to hear of either her or her people. THE END. ==================================================== Transcriber's Notes: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Punctuation inaccuracies were silently corrected. The following changes have been made: Page 76: her stem-head, and flashed it _was changed to_ her stemhead, and flashed it Page 160: she stood motiontionless gazing _was changed to_ she stood motionlessly gazing Page 198: wrong that has deen done her _was changed to_ wrong that has been done her ==================================================== 
62416	----	Juggernaut of Space Ray Cummings Never had the mind of man conceived so horrible a doom as was reaching for Earth. Never had a greater need for Earth's valiant champions been needed. And yet the only ones who could fight the menace--were five futile humans, prisoners on another world. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] My name is Robert Rance. You've heard of me, of course--through the recent weird affair of the Crimson Comet, if for nothing else. It seems to me rather ironic: for five years I have been reporting popular science items on the split-wave band of non-visual broadcasting. Station WANA-NYC--the main outlet of _Amalgamated Newscasters' Association_, for whom I work. I struggled for personal publicity. Then I was plunged--certainly entirely against my will--into the blood-chilling, gruesome adventure which is now popularly known as "The Death of the Crimson Comet." Out of it has come publicity beyond my wildest dreams. And now that I've got it, I don't want it. I'm not a hero, of dauntless, fearless courage. I'm not a scientific genius, who has made possible to Earth the New Era of Interplanetary Travel. But I've been called all that by broadcasting asses who are my friends. I'm just a plain American, who, when his life is in danger gets frightened as the devil, fighting to get himself out of a jam, and with not much thought of anything else. I didn't relish that Crimson Comet business, and I don't want ever to experience anything like it again. I'm not alone in this. There were four others in it with me. They don't like all this public fuss being made over them any more than I do. They weren't heroic. They just tried their best not to get killed. So on their behalf, and my own, I'm writing this narrative of exactly what happened to us. Not the professionally glamorized version which you've heard so many times. Just the facts. The thing must have been brewing, under cover, for many months. Like a smouldering, unnoticed fire. No one knows; we can only guess at what happened. But looking back on it now, there were incidents, seemingly unrelated at the time, which now I can see were significant. The first of them was in August, 1985--about a year ago. I had just finished a broadcast on some trivial, popular science subject, which I had tried to make sound important to my listeners. And Dr. Johns of the White Mountains Observatory telephoned me. I knew him quite well; he had often steered me into little subjects for my broadcasts, but this, I could see at once, was something different The tel-grid showed his thin face without its usual smile. His grey hair was rumpled; his eyes bloodshot. He looked as though he hadn't slept for much too long. "I thought you might want to come up and see me, Bob," he suggested. "Sure I will. I always appreciate your tips, Dr. Johns." His smile was queer. "I haven't got anything--not that you can use," he said. "Certainly not yet. I guess I just figure I'll feel better, talking about it. When can you arrive?" "I'll come right away," I told him. "Not busy tonight. I'll be there by midnight." We disconnected. I was just about to leave when Shorty Dirk walked in on me. Shorty was--and still is--connected with the _American Newsprint Publishers_--a reporter in the Crime Division, specializing in reporting the work of the Bureau of Missing Persons. He and I were good friends, perhaps because we are so different. I'm big and rangy, slow-going and easy-tempered. In college I was a good athlete, but now this radio work was putting quite a bit of soft poundage on me which didn't belong--poundage which, I do assure you, the Crimson Comet business got rid of in a hurry. Like all of us five, I was something like an undernourished greyhound when we got back. Shorty isn't much over five and a half feet, thin and wiry and alert--a sort of little human dynamo; a freckle-faced fellow with a shock of bristly red hair and a good-natured grin. "Where you going?" he asked. I told him. "I'll go with you," he said. He grinned. "I'm only here, Bob, because I haven't got anything better to do." * * * * * We took my small flyer from the roof stage and headed north. It was a handsome night, warm and almost cloudless with the upper air so clear that the stars were packed solid on the purple-blue vault of the heavens. Shorty and I didn't theorize, during the brief trip up to the White Mountains, on what Dr. Johns might have to say. Shorty wasn't much interested in astronomy, anyway--to him, as he often said, it was an uninteresting enigma. He mentioned that tonight. "Good," I said. "Then, how is crime coming? Many people missing lately?" Things were dull, he assured me. Nothing but the usual run of stuff that you couldn't write up or broadcast because nobody but a few relatives were interested. As it happened, the Crimson Comet affair caused five mysterious disappearances, Shorty, myself and three others. I think I can understand now why it happened that I knew them all. I must have been marked, through my widely broadcast popular science. That involved Shorty, because he was so much with me. And as for the other three--looking back on it now I realize that each of them vanished soon after having been with me. I was being trailed and was seized last. We landed on the private stage of the big Observatory about midnight and presently were with Dr. Johns in his study. What he had to tell us didn't seem very startling at the time. But in the light of what was to happen, looking back on it now I can see its deadly significance. Like a great pattern of evil, to involve disaster and death to all the world! Grim, stealthy events creeping upon us--little things here on Earth just involving me and those few others; and with them, giant events mysteriously taking place out in the great vault of the stars. "Here at the Observatory," Dr. Johns was saying, "we thought that somehow we must be making miscalculations. A fraction of a second in the axial and orbital movements of the Earth, which involved the visual movement of all the starfield. But we checked and rechecked. And then other observatories reported it." The Earth's axial rotation, and its movement around the Sun apparently were changing infinitesimally. "Too bad," Shorty commented. "I'm sure sorry." But Dr. Johns didn't smile. "There seem to be many unrelated things," he said. "You can shrug any of them off. But then, if it once occurs to you that they might be connected--" "What other things?" I asked. Meteorologists were admitting that the weather was peculiar. Nothing which had not occurred before, of course--unusual, freakish storms in many parts of the Earth. "And for a month now," Dr. Johns went on, "there has been noticeable a peculiar purple radiance in the air at night." "Purple radiance?" Shorty echoed. "Hadn't noticed it." "Because it isn't visible to the naked eye," Dr. Johns retorted. "But it has disturbed the exposure time of our photographic work. Slowed it down. And our spectrograms show it, or at least they show its effects so that we know if we could see it--it would be a purplish glow." And there was a new comet which several of the observatories recently had located. I had heard that much--had mentioned it in one of my broadcasts. "We call it a comet," Dr. Johns explained, "because there's a crimson radiance streaming back from it as it comes in toward the Sun. But its nucleus seems sizable--five hundred miles in diameter possibly. A planetoid, with a radiance. You might just possibly call it that." "And it's just about now crossing the orbit of Mars," I said. "That was the last report made public, wasn't it?" Dr. Johns nodded. "Our calculations of its orbit--made a month ago--showed it would pass within about twenty million miles of Earth. But that's all changed now. It's erratic." I was beginning to see why he was startled. This new Crimson Comet wasn't obeying the normal laws of Celestial Mechanics. It was swimming erratically in Space. Could it be a solid body as big as five hundred miles in diameter? Solid enough to be the cause, by its proximity, of the Earth's axial and orbital disturbances? "And this purple radiance," Dr. Johns said soberly, "we've just been wondering if that could be coming from the comet." * * * * * I need not specify all the weird theories that Dr. Johns and I talked of that evening. With me, a broadcaster of popular science as lurid always as I could make it, weird, gruesome theories came natural. But with him, a man of cold logic and careful science--well, it must have been a premonition. Was this Crimson Comet hurling a lethal radiance at us, attacking the Earth? A tiny, inhabited world of diabolic science enabling it to direct its own course through Space, peopled with weird enemies coming at us now, bent on destroying us? You couldn't make such speculations public. People would laugh. But some wouldn't. Some would believe you, and go into a wild panic. And Dr. Johns had sent for me--a sort of kindred spirit in the concocting of wild tales. "You two, say nothing of this," he warned us. "And if it goes on, you can announce it, Bob." He shrugged again, and tried to laugh lugubriously. "I feel like an idiot, talking about the end of the world with a couple of news-hounds. And yet, somehow, I also feel that maybe everyone of us on Earth is in more deadly danger than he ever was before!" And we certainly were! That was the general gist of our talk that night with Dr. Johns. I never found out more from him--I had no time. The thing struck at me four days later. During those four days, it happened that quite by chance I met the three other people who were destined to be plunged with Shorty and myself into adventure. The first was Peter Mack. I was walking at night in Washington Square, in New York City--small remaining tradition of little old New York. To me it's like a Monks' Garden, flowered, tree-lined rectangle enclosed by the massive building walls with the canyon of Fifth Avenue running into it. The night was hot and clear. The little tent of blue over the Square was star-filled. I chanced to sit down for a moment on a bench. "Got a light?" There was a young fellow on the bench with me. He shifted toward me. He was a thin, lanky fellow about my own age, hatless, with the starlight on his sparse, rumpled sandy hair. A slack-jawed fellow, with shabby clothes. He had a grimy cigarette butt between his fingers. "I can do better than that," I smiled. I gave him a cigarette and lighted it for him. "Thanks." He would have turned away, but I stopped him. I don't know why, but there seemed something about him that was likable. He needed a shave badly; his clothes were torn. I had a look at his eyes, red-rimmed, bloodshot. Just a down-and-outer on a park bench. But you don't see many of them these days. "Maybe you haven't got a job," I said. "I can tell you a dozen places--easy work too--in case you're a stranger in town." "I'm not," he said. "Thanks for the cigarette. I'm just minding my own business." I shrugged; and as he gave me a resentful look and shifted back to his own end of the bench, I let him alone. I know now a lot of things that were the matter with Peter Mack, but he has asked me not to go into details. It isn't important anyway; resentfulness at a girl; the escape mechanism of too much drink; trouble with the authorities in a lot of minor ways. And then a sort of sullen resentment at everything and everybody. A derelict who could salvage himself but he didn't want to. * * * * * Anyway, that was Peter Mack. And then there was Vivian La Marr. I met her back stage at the _Gayety_ with Shorty who was there to see the stage manager who was to be a witness in some trivial crime-affair that Shorty was reporting. This Vivian La Marr was the main reason why the _Gayety_ was having trouble with the Anti-Vice League and was about to lose its license. She came up to me back stage--a lush, artificial blonde, heavy with makeup; with an amazing expanse of flesh smooth as satin, and a negligible tinseled costume that the Anti-Vice League did not like at all but which pleased the _Gayety's_ customers very much. "You're Robert Rance," she said. "I saw your picture an' wasn't you televized a few times." I agreed that was so. "I also heard one of your astronomy lectures," she added with a wry grimace. "I was wonderin' how a guy like that could live with himself." She looked me up and down. "Now I see you ain't so bad," she said. She was grinning. "Much obliged," I said. "Maybe I can teach you astronomy some time!" "From you I would be glad to learn anything," she retorted, mockingly. We were standing by the stage door where it was cooler, and a moment later she was called back on the stage. That was Vivian La Marr. The other person who was destined to be involved with us was J. Walter Blaine, the International Financier. I interviewed him at his Fifth Avenue Club. He tells me now that I may say what I like concerning my impression of him that first time I met him. So I will be absolutely frank. A man of multi-millions and international importance makes many friends, and inevitably many enemies. Seldom can he know what people really think of him. His enemies exaggerate the worst, and his friends mostly fawn. Blaine's personal reputation, by hearsay, had reached me, of course. I had no expectation of liking him, and, very frankly, I didn't. I found him a big man, as tall as myself, heavy, portly from easy living. But I must say his appearance was impressive--a big mane of shaggy hair, a rather handsome, large-featured face, keen dark eyes under heavy brows, a jutting chin. He was playing chess with a fellow club member and I sat down to watch. I know something about chess and I think his playing very well displayed his character. He won, with skill of aggressive attack. But there was about it something you didn't like. His incisive moving of his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. It was a quite informal game. Once Blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake, exposing a piece. His opponent offered to have him take it back. He didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss rather than admit his error. Then he was finished and turned to me. I was there to interview him for the Editor of a booklet being issued by the Royal Astronomical Society of London. It seems that the Society was issuing a booklet with little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained donations--sort of a tribute of thanks. I was commissioned to write the one on Blaine. "Did they tell you how much I gave them?" he demanded of me now. I shook my head. "No," I said. His smile was ironic. "I gave them a hundred pounds. What they wanted, and expected, was ten thousand. So now you'll write something very nice about me which they hope will flatter me so I'll give them more. Don't bother, young man." Blaine was a bachelor. My first impression of him was that he was doing some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category. So much for J. Walter Blaine. It was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. I was walking along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of Amalgamated Newscasters. The street was fairly brightly lighted. I recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on one side. And quite suddenly it was as though I had stepped through a black door into nothingness! I could have been stricken blind, yet it was not that, for in another split-second I could see a dim, red radiance and hear voices. Then I could see the shapes of people--three men and a woman--stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here in the red darkness. "Look! Here comes another one of us!" It was a terrified man's voice, vaguely familiar. "My Gawd, it's the handsome astronomer! _I_ know him!" The voice of Vivian La Marr. And then there was Shorty's voice! "Bob! Bob Rance!" I could feel him gripping me and there was the vague outline of his frightened white face at my shoulder. "Bob! Tell us--what's happened to all of us?" And Vivian cried: "Hang onto him! There he goes!" I was trying to speak but my tongue was thick, my throat dry and congested. Things were dim and hazy in my mind; and I could feel the cool blankness stealing through my muscles. The touch of hands on my arms faded, until at last there was no more sensation. I made one last great effort to bring myself out of the fog. Then I felt myself falling into a soundless blackness. II I think I did not quite lose consciousness. I was aware that I had fallen to the earthy ground, with Shorty and Vivian bending over me. My head was roaring; I was bathed in cold sweat. Then I began to feel better, trying to sit up, with Shorty's arm holding me. "You're all right now, Bob? Can't you speak?" "Yes. I--guess so." Whatever had happened which had brought me here when an instant ago, it seemed, I was walking alone by the park, none of us could imagine. The identical experience had happened to Shorty, to Vivian La Marr; and to Peter Mack, and J. Walter Blaine. "But--where are we?" I demanded, when in another moment I was strong enough to struggle upright in the crimson glowing darkness. "Damned if we know," Shorty said. It seemed a sort of underground grotto. I could begin to make out its rocky walls and ceiling now, with that glow like a crimson phosphorescence streaming from them. One by one my companions had found themselves here. Blaine was the first. Then at intervals it seemed as though the wall across the grotto had opened and Shorty, Vivian and Mack came stumbling in, standing an instant, dazed, and then falling, as I had fallen, almost in a normal faint. "No way of getting out of this damned place," Shorty was saying. "The rock-wall over there moves like a door, but we haven't been able to open it." How much time had passed since we were stricken with this weird thing, none of us could guess. Suddenly I was startled. My clothes were too big for me. My body felt thin; I had lost twenty or thirty pounds. And in the dim crimson glow now I could see Mack, Vivian and Blaine fairly well. All of them thinner than I remembered them, with faces drawn and haggard and big glowing smouldering eyes. And we men had a growth of beard. Weeks could have passed! Vivian laughed lugubriously as she met my startled stare. "De-glamorized," she said. "I feel like a lost alley cat." She was clad in a thin, summer street dress. Her lush lissome curves were gone so that it hung drably on her. The vivid artificial blonde hair was darkish at the roots; it fell in a tangled mass to her shoulders. Her makeup was gone; her lips pallid. "We're all about starved to death, if you ask me," she added. "He brought us food a while ago," Blaine put in. "Try to eat it," Mack said. "There's some of it over by the wall. If that's what we've been living on, no wonder we're starved." "He? Food?" I stammered. Since Blaine had found himself here, what seemed like perhaps twelve hours had passed. Our captor had come twice. They had only seen him dimly. "But he's human--semi-human, anyway," Shorty said. "And he seems to talk English a little." "Look!" Vivian suddenly murmured. "Here he comes again." The red glow across the cave for an instant brightened. It seemed as though a rock had slid aside and closed again. A dim upright shape moved toward us; stopped and stood regarding us with eyes that gleamed green, smouldering in the dimness. "The Great Mind--ready--see you soon," the figure's weird, guttural voice said. I moved forward, unsteadily on my feet. "I want to talk to you," I said. I could see him now, quite plainly. A man? I suppose you could call him that. He was about five feet tall, squat and square, with high square shoulders, a rectangular torso and two legs which seemed encased in a flexible metal grey fabric. His head was round, set upon a triangular neck with its apex under his chin--a bullet head, hairless, with a weird, box-like face, square-chinned and broad square nose. His two arms, long and powerful-looking, dangled at his sides. * * * * * This, we were soon to learn, was a Radak. I recall my first clear impression that there was about him a queer sense of power. And something else, mysterious, yet even more apparent. An automaton-like quality. It was as though here were an individual who was only acting his role as a tiny part of some great, organized thing. A cog in a machine. The German Nazis of my father's boyhood, must have been like that. And here with these Radaks of the Crimson Comet it seemed intensified to be almost gruesome. You could not tell why, but you could sense it. Human individuals who lived only to do what they were told. A great mental force dominating them from birth to death, so that they thought what they were told to think; only did what they were told to do. This Radak answered our questions now; he seemed willing enough to talk, though in many ways his knowledge of our language, newly absorbed by his weird brain, was inadequate. I think it best to summarize briefly here, the total of what we learned and saw of the strange little world and its people. In actuality we were destined to see very little. Doomed little world! And since its death now, as you all know, most of its secrets will forever remain a mystery. It was some five hundred Earth-miles in diameter, doubtless of immense density because we were not aware of much change of gravitational force. Of its past history, no one knows much. Somewhere out in Interplanetary Space it must once have had a normal orbit. I shall explain more of that later. Two human races were here now. The Radaks--there were perhaps something like a thousand or two of them--were the rulers. The others were the Lei--a primitive, gentle people, no more than slaves to the dominating Radaks. Nature always had been cruel, uncompromising, here on Zelos. (Which was the word their native language seemed to call their world.) Both Radaks and Lei lived always in great underground caverns with which this section of the surface was honeycombed. Above them, on the outer surface, weird storms and erratic extremes of heat and cold were prevalent. And out there strange monsters roamed--the Deathless Things, as they were called, since it was impossible to kill them. Creatures of indescribable horrible quality who seemed unwilling to come into the confines of the underground corridors and grottos, so that all the humans were of necessity driven here, eking out a drab and grim existence. How the strange science of the Radaks developed will forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it was brought here from some other planet. Despite the science, life here was primitive--a struggle for the bare necessities. Queerly enough, the Radak science seemed not concerned with better living. They had a few small space-fliers--the secret of interplanetary travel was known to them. Perhaps only recently--that seems rather certain. Beyond that, there was nothing save the weird, mysterious mechanisms by which at last they had been able to control the space-movements of their tiny world. It was all here, in what they called the "Great Cavern of Machines." Shorty and I were there for a brief time--an unforgettable time of horror. "The Great Mind will see us soon?" I was saying now to this Radak who stood stiff and stolid beside me. "Who--what is that?" We were soon to see. Another Radak appeared, motioning us imperiously to follow him. Neither of these fellows seemed to have any weapons on them, though of course there was no way of telling. Shorty nudged me, muttering something about starting a fight. "You're crazy," I whispered. "We'd be killed." "The Great Mind--want see you now," one of the Radaks said. He led us, and we followed him, with the other Radak behind us, out into a dim rock-corridor gleaming with that same crimson phosphorescence. The banker, Blaine, pushed past me. "I'll attend to this," he said. "This Ruler, whoever he is, he can be bought. I'll get him to take us back to Earth--promise him riches--" The ragged, cadaverous Mack gave Blaine a glance of contempt. "I guess it's strange to you, not being able to buy everything with your money, isn't it?" he commented. A distant murmur of voices sounded ahead of us now, and we could see where the light-glow widened as the corridor emerged into another grotto. More Radaks were around us now, herding us with their stiff, jerky movements, jabbering with their strange guttural voices. The murmur ahead of us grew louder; then we emerged from the tunnel. * * * * * It was at first almost like being above ground--a huge grotto with red-glowing ceiling high up, dim in the crimson haze. To the sides the precipitous rock-walls widened rapidly out. Ahead of us, down a ragged, undulating slope, there was only a red haze of distance. There seemed to be distant fields, with things growing in them. There was a spindly blue and red stalk-like vegetation growing like trees perhaps to a height of a hundred feet. And off to the left, under the trees, there were mound-shaped little buildings. We were on a broad level space at the top of the slope. A hundred or more Radaks were here, some crowding at us, but most standing stiff, gazing at us with gleaming, animal-like eyes. And now I saw Radak women and children among them--the women broader-hipped, narrower shouldered. But they were all cast in the same mold--even the children stood at attention, like rows of little statues waiting for something to move them, with only their eyes in motion. Most of the murmuring voices were further down the slope. A crowd of figures milled about, down there, trying to see us better. A thousand perhaps. The Lei, the slaves of this little world. Certainly they seemed far more human than the Radaks--slim and slight, and some of them as tall as Shorty. They were dressed in simple flowing fabric garments. A bronzed-skinned people, the women with long-flowing hair. "You come--this way," the Radak said. "Now--you stand still--the Great Mind speak to you." Ruler of the Crimson Comet. He sat on a sort of stone throne with a leafy canopy over him. Our captors shoved us forward until we stood in a wavering line, all of us staring blankly at this Being whose mentality encompassed and dominated every living human on his tiny world. He looked as though once he had had the aspect of a Radak. But that perhaps was a hundred or two hundred Earth-years ago. He sat now with his shriveled, wrinkled grey body small as a child, encased in a single garment of woven fabric. His round head, devoid of hair, wobbled on a spindly neck. Skin like shriveled grey parchment covered his shrunken bony face giving him a mummy-like appearance of immense age. His shiny, smooth-grey skull seemed bloated by the pulsating brain-tissue within it. It bulged in places, with worm-like knots under the scalp, dilating, quivering, as his huge green-glowing eyes regarded us. Then he spoke, slowly with a measured, sonorous voice of weird sepulchral tone. And what he said--it was as though here we faced a mental power too great to resist; as though there could be no question but that his thoughts must be our thoughts. I felt it with a sudden strange shudder--a radiance of thought from him, beating down, destroying whatever was within me of independent individualism. And the realization swept me; if I yielded to this radiance--these thought-waves, whatever they might be, then all that was Robert Rance would be gone. I would be nothing but an automaton. He was saying, "You will listen. There are things I shall explain to you Earthmen. I have sent to Earth and brought you here--because each of you has a knowledge of many things on Earth that I wish to know." * * * * * I listened, numbed, somewhat perhaps as though hypnotized. In this Radak ruler's judgment, Blaine the banker, Mack the derelict, Shorty, myself and Vivian--the sum total of the myriad things that were stacked in our brains--were what now must go into his. Certainly a varied, representative strata of Earth-knowledge. "You want to learn everything we know?" Blaine suddenly said. "How can you do that? Suppose we don't want to teach you? And why do you want to learn it? What are your plans? What I want to know is--do you realize who and what I am, on Earth?" Of us all, undoubtedly the dominating nature of J. Walter Blaine made him best able to resist that weird mental force that was engulfing us. Yet his manner, his querulous, arrogant questions under these strange, unearthly conditions here on the Crimson Comet certainly were fatuous, childish. Mack gave a short, disagreeable laugh. "On Earth, okay," Mack muttered. "But you don't amount to much here." "Money of course, won't mean anything to you," Blaine was saying. "But I have other things on Earth--things you would want. Look here, if you'll send all these people away, I'll have a talk with you. I'll--" He got no further. It seemed that a look of wonderment was upon the shriveled, ancient grey face. The eyes were darting little green fires. The measured voice said, "I shall attend to you later--" And then droned into the Radak tongue. Four of the squat little men marched upon Blaine, seizing him. "What in the devil--stop that!" Blaine remonstrated. There was a scuffle beginning. I recall that I shouted, "Blaine! Take it easy! You'll be killed!" Amazing power of these squat little men! A claw-like hand was clapped over Blaine's mouth; his flailing arms and kicking legs were pinned by the Radak's clutches; and then they picked him up and carted him away. "I shall begin with you, Peter Mack," the Radak ruler said quietly. "Come forward, bend before me." For a second Mack hesitated, flinging Shorty and me a questioning glance. But we had nothing to offer. Then the shabby, lanky figure of the bearded Mack shambled forward, guided by two Radaks until he was standing with head bent before the Ruler. Down the slope the murmurs of the crowd of Lei rose into a babble. The milling throng of slave-people a hundred yards or so from us crowded curiously forward to see Mack better. There was a sudden, low-voiced command from the Radak Ruler. A dozen or more of the squat, grey Radaks ran at the Lei, cuffing them, knocking them back ... I saw a young Lei girl, slim, with flowing white and tawny hair framing her face. The little automaton Radak ran at her, struck her in the mouth so that the blood spurted out. And through it all, near me a row of Radak children stood stiffly at attention, motionless, with only their round green eyes turning sidewise to watch the scene. Then the ancient Radak Ruler's smouldering gaze was upon Mack's head. An awed silence fell over the scene as Mack stood motionless. Who shall say by what weird and gruesome process Mack was now being sapped! No one on Earth knows what a thought is. No one can say what is within our brain cells to constitute knowledge. But something is there, something in our conscious and subconscious minds upon which our memory can draw. And we do know that thought is a wave of vibration--an infinitely tiny, infinitely rapid vibration. A thing that at least has a tangible entity. And this Radak's mind now was drawing, sapping from Mack. A minute. Five minutes. In the tense silence, I felt Shorty clutch at me, heard him mutter: "God, it's weird!" Mack now was drooping. A mental agony, rasping his nerves now, drawing vitality from him so that he drooped, swayed, and suddenly let out a groan. Mental anguish, with screaming nerves translating it into physical pain. "It's torture!" Vivian murmured. "Look at him--stop it! Stop it!" Mack had fallen to the ground, writhing now, mumbling with futile hands clawing at his face and head as though to pluck away that damnable, torturing gaze. But still, calmly, inexorably the green-eyed, monstrous little Radak held him--this shriveled Radak Ruler, avidly, greedily drawing in the knowledge of Mack's past life--those myriad little things of Earth-life stored within Mack's brain. Surely it must have been a torture most horrible. * * * * * Shorty and I were starting to leap forward in protest. But Vivian was ahead of us, raging, rushing heedlessly at the old Radak. She almost reached him. She was screaming, "You--you rotten damn Thing--you--" Her hand went up to strike him. It was all a sudden chaos, just a few seconds. Radaks caught Shorty and me; with almost machine-like strength their arms pinned us. I think I yelled at Shorty not to struggle. In that same second, I saw Vivian's arm with clenched fist trying to hit the Radak Ruler, but a little squat grey figure standing guard there, jumped and seized her. It was an amazing tableau. At the threatened blow, the Ruler shrank back. His whole little body quivered, pulsated; and on the weird, almost unhuman face, there was a look, not of fear, but of strange revulsion--as though the threat of that physical blow were something too horrible to contemplate. "Vivian! Vivian--you--they'll kill you! Run--Vivian, run--" Mack was staggering to his feet, stumbling, half falling. But he reached Vivian, clutched her. Both of them were confused, dazed so that all they could do was stand there, holding onto each other. I saw Mack gazing defiantly at the oncoming Radaks--Mack who on Earth probably wouldn't have lifted a hand to help anyone, ready now to fight to protect this girl. "You will all--stand--away from them." It was the Ruler's quiet, measured voice. And abruptly I saw that his shriveled hand had gone to his belt. A weapon was hanging there--a little pot-bellied black cylinder. His fingers shifted it, seemed aiming it at Vivian and Mack. Shorty and I were struggling, but the Radaks held us. And we were both shouting. Then there was a soundless, almost invisible flash, just a vague spitting glow of light from the little cylinder. It leaped and for a second clung upon Mack and the girl. They seemed to stiffen. Just that; nothing else. Still clutching each other they stood transfixed, and on their faces there was a blankness, a strange emptiness. "You will walk together, hand in hand," the Ruler's soft voice was droning. "One of my Radaks will lead you to the upper exit. And then you will walk together alone--out into the Realm of the Deathless Things." He added something in his own language. A little Radak moved in front of Mack and Vivian now. Hand in hand they were standing docile, and then they were following the Radak--following him with slow measured steps, their faces blank, their eyes staring straight ahead of them. Like somnambulists, walking in their sleep. "Good Lord," Shorty murmured. "That could be the way we were abducted on Earth! Do you suppose--" * * * * * His words were cut off. The Ruler had given another command. The Radaks gripping us were pulling us away--shoving us back into the dim crimson tunnel from which they had brought us. I turned to look behind me. The stiff figures of Mack and Vivian still were visible, walking in a trance, following the square, box-like little Radak who marched silently ahead of them. For a moment they wound along the edge of the slope; then the crimson murk of radiance enveloped them and they were gone. Roughly Shorty and I were shoved along the tunnel by our captors. Then a rock panel slid aside. We were shoved in, and the panel slid closed. "Well," Shorty murmured. "That's that. We're in a jam, Bob--a damn weird jam." It was soundless in here, and darker than out in the main open grotto. But still there was that dim crimson glow. We were in a small cave-cell now. The air was hot, fetid, earthy. Presently we could see a little better. There was nothing but black, spongy ground, glowing red rock walls and a rock ceiling close over us. In the dimness I fumbled, feeling the wall, trying to find the crevice of the sliding door panel; but could not. Time passed. Shorty and I both realized now that we were weak and faint from hunger--not altogether the hunger from missing a meal or so, but the depletion of long under-nourishment. Together we lay down on the fibrous ground. I think at that moment I was more despairing than ever before in my life. I seemed unable to cope with even the thought of what we might possibly plan. I closed my eyes. I seemed just to want to drift into the blessed relief of sleep. "This is one jam we might not get out of, Bob," Shorty murmured presently. "Yes, looks so." Then suddenly both of us were galvanized into alertness. The door-panel was sliding open with a little rasp and an influx of brighter red glow. Outside in the corridor we saw a group of Radaks on guard. But none of them came in. They moved aside and a figure came past them--a Lei girl. Her slim body was draped in a bluish garment of thatch. Her long tawny hair flowed down over her shoulders. She was carrying a slab on which there was food and drink for us. Then she set the slab on the ground near us. She was between us and the door, almost a silhouette but I could see that her hand was at her lips and her glowing eyes seemed warning us to be silent. For an instant she leaned close toward me. "I am Tahn--the wife of Taro, the Lei." Her voice barely whispered it. "You say nothing. I come again--with Taro's plan to help you! We would save you and your Earth--if we can!" Silent, Shorty and I just stared. Then she had turned and was gone. The rock panel slid closed upon us. III I must explain now what was happening to Mack and Vivian as they afterward told it to me. Mack recalls quite clearly that moment of dazed, numbed anguish when he writhed on the ground with the horrible sapping gaze of the Radak Ruler upon him. Then he heard Vivian scream, saw her rushing at the shriveled old Radak. He called, "Vivian! Run--they'll kill you--" He found himself staggering to his feet, stumbling until he was by her side. He felt her clutch him, both of them standing there, numbed and dazed, terrified, with the feeling that the rushing Radaks would instantly kill them. He remembers that the girl and himself took a stumbling step forward. To Mack it was like stumbling through a suddenly appearing black curtain of emptiness. Just an abyss of soundless nothingness, except that there seemed still to be Vivian's clutch on his arm. No, it was her hand holding his as they stood peering at a distant blur of red radiance. "Viv--where are we? What happened?" "Pete--I'm frightened--can't--see anything--" But the red radiance was growing, spreading to dispel the blank empty darkness so that in a moment he could see the drab, disheveled form of the girl beside him, her moist, cold hand convulsively clutching his, and the red light on her pallid, terrified face. And in the distance now there were outlines--a sort of red line that looked like a shimmering cliff with jagged spires upstanding in a row. "Vivian--everything's gone--the Radaks--we're not where we were--Bob and Shorty--gone--" The red glow in a moment had brightened to be far more luminous than they remembered it in the caverns. Obviously there was a sky overhead now--a lurid, murky, blood-red haze of infinite distance. This was the outer surface of the little planetoid. The Realm of the Deathless Monsters! Mack realized it with a shudder of terror. He and Vivian now could see that they were standing upon a little rise of ground, in what could have been called a forest. Everywhere great stalks of spindly blue and grey vegetation towered into the air. Growing things of fantastic shape, woven in places to be a solid jungle. Or again there were open glades of rocky ground--buttes and little spires, small ravines and crevices. All of it bathed in crimson, as though here were a bloody landscape of unutterable horror. The horror of things not yet seen ... things lurking-- "Oh Pete, what can we do?" Hungry and faint she swayed against him. But in the blood-red light she was trying to smile. "You tell us what we ought to do--I will help us do it, Pete. I'm not--not afraid." But the terror of despair was clutching at both of them. Mack tried to gather his wits. Alone here on an alien world. Could they find food and drink? Wander here, until some ghastly monster engulfed them? Or should they try to get back underground? Why? To have the murderous Radaks fall upon them and kill them? But the will to live in every human is very strong. No one will lie down and just hopelessly wait for death. "Viv--those cliffs over there--cliffs with the spires--there ought to be tunnels maybe at the bottom of them. If we could get back--maybe get to Bob and Shorty--" His voice trailed away. It all seemed so hopeless. Then he felt the girl clutch at his arm. "Look! Maybe that's water? I'm so thirsty--" "I see it. Maybe it is. Come on." In a nearby open glade, surrounded by stalks of the towering fibrous vegetation, what could have been a shallow pool of water was spread on the open rocks. A little pool, twenty feet or so in diameter. Rivulets extended off to the sides of it in crevices of the rock-surfaces. It was quite shallow, seemingly only a few inches deep. The red radiant glow that suffused everything stained it like blood, but it was translucent so that the rocks showed through it. Was it water? As they approached, Vivian stepped over one of the branching rivulet arms. The translucent red stuff suddenly lifted from the rocks, the little tentacle arm of it wrapping itself around her ankle! * * * * * The girl screamed. In a panic Mack reached down, plucking at the red mass. Ghastly horror! It was like quivering, sticky glue. Frantically he tore at it. Warm, pulsating, protoplasm. It stuck to his fingers, greedily fastening upon his flesh until he wiped it away. Vivian, too, was frantically flailing at the stuff. And in that second Mack was aware that the whole twenty-foot spread of it on the rocks was in motion now--rolling itself up from the rocks, congealing, gathering itself into a great circular mass. Huge, eight-foot ball of blood-red, pulsating protoplasm. Yet now it seemed there was a nucleus, a little central part, more solid than the rest, suddenly growing to look almost like a head and face in the center of the mass. Red-gleaming eyes; a sucking mouth, yawning. All this Mack saw in a horrified second or two while still he was flailing to cast away the broken, pulpy arm of the monster. And he saw now that the great ball of it was rocking. Then it started to roll and bump toward them! "Vivian! Run--good Lord, here it comes!" They fled. But behind them it was coming, gathering speed, bumping and squishing over the rocks. Mack tried to keep his wits. The monstrous thing was only twenty feet behind them now. And as it rolled, it was expanding. A lashing ball twice as high as their heads. Then ahead of them Mack saw a narrow pass between two huge rocks--a space some three feet wide. He shoved Vivian into it--a space too small for the monster to follow. It was a crevice only some ten feet long. They dashed through it. Mack turned to see what the crimson Deathless Thing would do. It had hit the rocks, and now it was oozing through the narrow space--thin red streamer of protoplasm feeding itself through the crevice. Mack and Vivian had fled to one side, and as the jet of red pulp came through, out on the other side it rolled itself again into a ball--ghastly thing that kept on going down the slope! In a moment it was a hundred feet away. Panting, Mack clutched his companion and they stared. The bumping, rolling circular mass had reached a patch of forest. It slowed; stopped. "Pete, look!" The girl's terrified, awed voice murmured it. "Look at it now!" There in the forest glade the monstrous crimson ball was sagging, flattening, spreading itself out into a thin, translucent layer on the rocky ground. Then it was motionless, quiescent, waiting. "Well!" Mack breathed. "At least we know now what to avoid! We--" But again Vivian gripped him. "What's that over there?" Her shaking hand gestured to one side. It was an upright blob moving in a patch of trees. A tree hid it; then it showed again. It stopped, seemed to turn upon itself. Still upright. Then again it moved. Suddenly Mack gasped, "A man! Look--see it now--a man--why--why it's Blaine!" Startled relief was in his voice. The figure came to another open space, where the crimson glow in the air showed it plainly. It was Blaine. He was moving along, gazing around as though searching. "Blaine! Blaine!" Mack called. The banker turned at the voice; saw Mack and Vivian who now were running toward him. "You Mack--Vivian--you're safe--" "Yes, sure!" It was a blessed relief to Mack. "I've been looking for you," Blaine called. He was running to meet them. "And I've got something--something important! A weapon--" The three reached each other. Blaine and Mack gripped hands. Then suddenly Vivian gasped: "Another! Another of those Things--" Out among the trees beyond where Blaine had been a moment before, a slithering red shape was visible. Another of the Deathless Things which soundlessly had been stalking Blaine. Like a huge thirty-foot crimson python it was sliding through the vegetation. Its neck and head came up, reared up as for a second it stopped, peering with red-green eyes seeking its prey. Then it lowered its head and came slithering rapidly forward! * * * * * I must go back now for just a moment to recount what had happened to Blaine, from that moment when the Radak guards hustled him away from their shriveled ancient ruler. Ignoring his protests, he was shoved along a corridor, thrown into a cave-cell and its door-slide closed upon him. But he wasn't alone there for long. Presently the slide opened again and a figure came in. It was obviously a Radak, but of somewhat a different type. The same square, powerful look. But this one was taller, almost as tall as Blaine. Grey-skinned, lean and muscular. He seemed fairly young, thirty Earth-years perhaps. "I have come for to talk to you," the visitor announced. He sat stiffly on a rock by a wall of the cave. His grey-black woven garment swished as he motioned Blaine to sit on the ground before him. "You are very interesting to me. Sit down." "Thanks. I'll stand," Blaine said. "You speak my language very well." "That I should." The Radak's smile made his strange face wrinkle into a grimace. "I am Ratan. Our Great Mind sent me to your Earth. I picked you Earthmen, and ordered you seized. I will tell you about that. You can be very helpful to us, I am thinking. Perhaps especially so. I am commanded to tell you our plans." Carefully Blaine listened to the strange things this Ratan quite calmly was telling him. With their weird mechanisms, the Radaks now were directing their tiny world through Space, toward our Earth. Already they were bathing Earth with a radiance which was disturbing the Earth's axial and orbital rotations--that vague, dim purple haze which Dr. Johns had described to Shorty and me. Then when Zelos was closer to Earth, the vibratory beam would be intensified. The Earth would be drawn from its orbit. Engulfed in this weird gravitational force, it would follow Zelos back from the Sun--out into Interplanetary Space.... The abduction of the Earth! Blaine knew little of science, but enough to realize what soon would happen on Earth.... "Storms--the disturbance of all your atmospheric pressures--" Ratan was saying with his ironic smile, "that will very soon kill many of your people. And then will come the congealing cold. Certain it is that human life on your Earth will not withstand it." Our atmosphere, not adapted to insulate the cold of Space-- There was no need for this Ratan to picture for Blaine the wild devastation of Earth. "Perhaps even before we have drawn you out to the orbit of Saturn," Ratan was saying, "then there will be no Earthman still living." The end of human Earth-life. It might take another Earth-year, or many. But it was coming. Inevitable. A thing that the Radak Great-Mind had long planned, and that already was being successfully accomplished.... There are on Earth now as I write this brief narrative, many scientists working to understand the theories of the strange, diabolic mechanisms of the bandit Crimson Comet. The projection of some new application of gravitational force. The purple ray was something of that nature, of course. A link between Zelos and Earth, like a chain binding them together--a powerful little tug pulling a great ocean liner. And the same force unquestionably was what made Zelos itself mobile in Space. That much we know definitely because in miniature, but doubtless of the same approximate nature, the purple gravitational ray is the motive power for the Radak Space-ship which we now have intact. "So you are planning to kill everyone on Earth," Blaine said. His heart was pounding, but he tried to hold his voice calm. He stood with folded arms, gazing at Ratan. "And what will that gain you?" "Our little planet here we do not like," Ratan retorted. "Many space-ships we will build, and when your Earth-people are gone, then we will migrate to your much better world. The Lei, and the Radaks to rule them. The Great Mind has planned it all. We have been secretly to your Earth, we have studied life there. It will be much better for us than this. The Great Mind will rule your whole world for a while--until he dies. And then--do you not see something unusual in me?" "What?" Blaine demanded. "I am the appointed one to be the next Great Mind. When I was born it was decided. I have been trained for that. Just for that, nothing else." * * * * * Blaine could see it in him now. That air of quiet, confident dominance. "I see what you mean," Blaine agreed. "I am like that, on Earth. You realize it?" "It is why I chose to bring you here," Ratan said. "I can be very helpful to you," Blaine added. "My companions--they are just captives. But I would like to be more than that." The banker shrugged. "I bow to the inevitable. If you are to seize my world, then I would like to do the best for myself. That's good sense, isn't it?" Was he gaining this fellow's confidence? The big Radak smiled also. "What do you mean?" "On Earth I am very powerful. I have money, property." "Of what good could that be to me?" Ratan smiled. "And when I get there--I have it all anyway." "What I mean," Blaine persisted, "I am an organizer. I know the resources of Earth--" "And to that I agree," Ratan interrupted. "You mean, you would join us, as a friend." "For a position of power among you Radaks, yes. You will find I can handle the Lei." He smiled cannily. "On Earth they called me ruthless. I could bend men to my will--and always to my own profit." Blaine's keen, appraising gaze was watching the Radak. Ratan was smiling; he could understand talk like this, and it was obvious that he liked it.... Blaine's heart was pounding. At Ratan's broad grey belt a little pot-bellied metal cylinder was hanging. He gestured to it casually. "What is that, Ratan?" "That? It is a weapon of ours. Very important. There are only very few of us who may carry it. A Rak-gun, perhaps your language would term it." "Let me see it. How does it work?" But Ratan was only fingering it lovingly. He made no move to detach it from his belt. He was smiling. "It is what brought you from Earth." He seemed willing enough to describe it. The projection of a vibration akin to thought-waves, but infinitely more intense. In effect it paralyzed the conscious mind, yet left the motor area intact. The victim, to all intents and purposes was a somnambulist. The subconscious mind, with will power numbed, then was open to any suggestive stimulus which it received. The victim's muscles instinctively obeyed commands. And the memory areas recorded nothing. Shorty and I had seen it happen to Vivian and Mack. Blaine did not know of that. But it had happened to him, on Earth, as it had to all of us. "And, then, after a time it wears off?" "Exactly. An hour--what you would call an hour on Earth, perhaps. But another shock of it can be given. You were under its influence for about three weeks--the time it took for our Space-ship to bring us here." "And you fed me very badly," Blaine commented. He was taut inside now. He took a casual step forward so that he was almost within reach of the seated Radak. "Is that thing easy to operate?" Blaine's heart leaped as Ratan unclipped the little cylinder from his belt. "Very simple," the Radak said. "Just a pressure on this little lever. But it will be years before the Great Mind or myself would let you handle one of these." "I was thinking," Blaine said, "when we get to Earth you yourself will not be the Great Ruler. But if, perhaps, the Great Mind should suddenly die? Then it would be only the great Ratan, with me to help him--" Blaine had leaned forward confidentially and lowered his voice. "Did you ever think of that?" Surely at least the idea of murdering his commander was startling to Ratan, and for that instant he was off his guard. Just a second, but it was enough for Blaine. The banker abruptly reached, snatched the cylinder and leaped backward. "Now you damned villain--" * * * * * Blaine raised the cylinder level. With a roar, Ratan was on his feet. There was a soundless, vague little flash. Ratan, tensing his muscles for a leap abruptly relaxed, wavered. "Quiet now! Stand still!" Blaine ordered sharply. He stood listening, with the quiescent, blankly staring Ratan before him. Had Ratan's roar of startled anger aroused any guards out in the corridor? It seemed not. There was only silence. "Now we will go out of here," Blaine said softly. "We will go out. You know where Robert Rance is now. You will lead me to him." With hands outstretched, the big Radak moved to the door, slid it open. At this moment Shorty and I were confined in another cave-cell not far away. Ratan knew it; he was leading Blaine there. But suddenly, at a corridor intersection, voices sounded! Radaks were coming. "Crouch down!" Blaine commanded. "Be quiet! Not a sound from you!" There was a wall recess. Blaine shoved his numbed captive into it. Together they crouched. And now Blaine saw that in a sheath at Ratan's belt, there was a knife. He drew it out; held it in his other hand and kept the cylinder ready. Two Radaks were coming. They were talking together in their own language. They stopped nearby, evidently with the intention of parting here at the intersection. Blaine listened. Then he whispered to Ratan: "Answer me softly. What are they saying? Tell me in English." "Those Earth-people banished--into the Realm of--Deathless--Monsters--and they will die--of course." Ratan's words were mumbled, queerly mouthed, like one who talks in his sleep. Blaine assumed that all of us were out there on the upper surface, not just Vivian and Mack. Swiftly he changed his plans. "In a moment when I command you," he whispered, "you will lead me there. You know where the Earth-people would probably be now? Out which exit they went? Answer me--softly." "By the--big cliff with the--rock spires.... The exit is--down this left corridor." Tensely Blaine waited. The nearby Radaks parted and moved away. "Now, lead me," he whispered. Again they moved forward, down the left-hand corridor-branch now. And suddenly behind Blaine there was a shout. He whirled. One of the Radaks had changed his mind and was coming back, calling something to his fellow. Blaine had no time to get himself and Ratan out of sight. The Radak saw them--saw the stiffly walking Ratan, and Blaine with the cylinder in his hand. With a startled shout, the little Radak leaped at Blaine. The flash met him; he stopped in his tracks, stood stiff. But from the other direction, his companion was coming. And now the commotion was bringing others. Blaine could hear several of the guttural voices and the thuds of their oncoming footsteps. With a leap Blaine went past Ratan. The squat little shape of the other Radak came charging down the center of the narrow corridor. His greenish eye-beams were weird in the crimson gloom. Again Blaine fired his cylinder. But this time evidently he missed and in another second the Radak was on him. The shock of the impact flung them both to the ground. The cylinder was knocked from Blaine's hand. He felt his adversary's arms clutching him, squeezing him with machine-like strength. In another moment Blaine's ribs would have smashed. But his left hand still gripped the knife. With despairing effort he drove it into the Radak's side. Ghastly knife-thrust! It went in with a crunch, a rasp as it severed the strange flesh. There was a hiss as hot fluid spurted. The Radak's scream was horrible. His arms fell away. Blaine disentangled himself. On the ground near him he saw the cylinder, snatched it, dropped it into his pocket. A commotion was all around him now. Oncoming Radaks in several of the branching corridors. But ahead of Blaine there seemed no one. He ran. Behind him he could dimly see the squat little figures gazing at their dead fellow, and surrounding the stricken Ratan. No one seemed to notice the fleeing Blaine as he ran the length of the winding corridor until at last he was out upon the crimson upper surface. For a time he wandered. He did not see any of the crimson monsters, or at least did not recognize them for what they were. Then he heard Mack shouting at him; saw Mack and Vivian running toward him. "I've got something important--a weapon," he called to Mack. Then abruptly the three of them saw that huge, python-like crimson Thing which had been silently stalking Blaine. "Look!" Vivian gasped. "Another of them!" It was slithering rapidly at them now, no more than fifty feet away. Its green-swaying eye-beams clung to them. For that instant they were standing stricken with terror. To one side of them there was the brink of an abyss a few yards away, and to the other, and behind them, a ragged little cliff. "Got to try and climb those rocks!" Mack gasped. "Can't get past that snake thing--we're trapped--" But Blaine swept him aside. The cylinder was in Blaine's hand now. "This will stop it!" he muttered. "You two--get behind me!" The monstrous thirty-foot thing was only half its own length away from them now. Then, as its head reared over a projection of the uneven, rocky ground, Blaine carefully aimed the cylinder and fired. But the monster didn't stop! There was no conscious, thinking brain in that ghastly, pulsating crimson head! Just motor-ganglia reacting to the impulses of instinct! Blaine fired again. But the monster kept on coming and in another second was upon them! IV Back in our cave-cell, Shorty and I stared blankly after the figure of the Lei woman, Tahn, as she motioned to the Radak guards who slid our door-panel closed. Again we were alone. "Well," Shorty murmured. "What do you make of that? The wife of some Lei named Taro, she said." And that she would come back and try to get us out of here. That her husband had some plan-- Eagerly, Shorty and I waited. Would it be an hour, or a day? Both of us were thinking of Blaine, locked somewhere around here, perhaps in a cell like ours. Or had the Radaks killed him by now? And Vivian and Mack, wandering out there in the Realm of the Things you couldn't kill. "Guess they're done for," Shorty said, when I mentioned them. "Unless we can get out there to them--" Shorty's smile was ironic. "That would fix everything, of course. Don't be an ass, Bob. If we were out there, we'd all be trying to get back. For what? So the Radaks would jump on us and kill us." It was all so utterly hopeless. But it was queer, that instinct all five of us had, to try and keep together. The young Lei woman had brought us food and drink. Shorty and I slumped on the earthern floor now and sampled the food. Nauseous stuff, indescribable. "If it's been weeks since we left the Earth," Shorty said, "no wonder we're nearly starved to death." But we managed to eat and drink some of it, and then exhausted by the nerve tension of what we had been through, we drifted off into an uneasy slumber. The rasp of the sliding door-panel jerked us into alertness. I had the feeling that only a little time had passed. The panel slid open just a foot or two, and a figure came in. It was Tahn. Both Shorty and I were on our feet. "You came as you hoped," I said softly. "We're ready. Just tell us what you want us to do." She barely whispered, "The Radak guards just now are changing. There is no one outside. We go, quickly." "Go where?" Shorty demanded. "To my husband, Taro. He is in a corridor near here. Come now, quickly." The faintly red corridor outside was empty. Swiftly Tahn led us along it, around several sharp bends, past a cross-corridor intersection. I was tense, expecting every moment that Radaks would leap upon us from the shadows. But so far we had escaped notice, though obviously there were many Radaks near here. Several times we passed the dim oval openings of little grottos, and often there were guttural, chattering voices from within them. "Won't the guards discover we're gone?" Shorty murmured. "Perhaps not for maybe much time. I am in charge of you, I bring you food and drink. The guards stay outside, should you try to break out." Our tunnel was descending now. And suddenly from the dimness to one side, there came a murmur: "Tahn! Tahn--" A young Lei man was crouching in a shadowed recess. It was Tahn's husband, Taro. "She has brought you, Earthmen. That is good." We crouched down with him. He was a youngish fellow, tall, slim and powerfully built. His single draped garment exposed one bronze shoulder. His grey-black hair was chopped at the base of his neck, with a narrow band of bright-colored fabric tied around his forehead. With his high-cheek bones, hawk-like nose and gleaming dark eyes he could have been a stalwart young savage of Earth. "I want to help you," he was saying. "Your coming here fits my plans, and believe me I have worked on them a long time. Tahn and I, making the Radaks trust us." "Say," Shorty murmured, "you certainly are fluent with English." The young Lei's face wrinkled into a smile. "Why should I not, my wife and I? We Lei learn things quickly. Perhaps a different mind-quality from yours, almost at once to absorb what we hear. Ratan--he is next to the Great Mind as leader of the Radaks--he chose Tahn and me to go on the expedition to Earth. We were carefully watched, or we would have escaped to warn you. It was Tahn who took care of you on the way here." * * * * * He told us then of the weird Radak-gun, with its flash of mind-current--the weapon which probably just at this exact moment no more than half a mile away in this maze of subterranean corridors, Blaine was snatching from Ratan.... And Tahn told us, too, of the Radak plot to devastate Earth. "You have some plan?" Shorty murmured. He told us then that he knew how to get into the Cavern of Machines--a huge, guarded grotto where all the diabolic, giant mechanisms of the Radaks were housed. The power plant of little Zelos, and the source of the purple radiance which was bathing Earth. "If we can kill the guards and get into the Cavern--only the Great Mind himself--or Ratan--will be there. No one else but those two are allowed there. No one else knows the secrets of the mechanisms to operate them." "So we just get in and overcome the Great Mind himself," Shorty commented. He gave a mock shudder with an attempt to be humorous. "All right. Figure that's done. Then what?" Taro's plan was certainly desperate, but at least it promised the possibility of success. "Do you know where the Earthman Blaine is?" I demanded. Tahn said, "He is in a cave-cell. I am ordered to take him food and drink very soon." "What weapons have you got?" Shorty asked. "Say, if you could get one of those brain-paralyzing guns--" Taro shook his head. "Never could I even get near one. The Great Mind always carries one--and so does Ratan. But there is no chance--" "We must get to Blaine," I said. "And then try and find Vivian and Mack. We've all got to be together--" We planned it for a few moments more. Then cautiously Taro and Tahn led us to a corridor intersection. "We will hide here," he said, gesturing to another shadowed recess where the ragged rocks of the wall jutted out in an overhang. "Tahn can go best." The young Lei turned to his wife. "Tahn, listen. You get food and drink. You take it to Blaine's cell. There are not always guards perhaps. You watch your chance--" "Listen!" Shorty suddenly interjected. "Maybe I'm crazy, but there's some kind of commotion around here." We could all hear it now--a distant murmur of turmoil down one of the side corridors. Taro nodded. "Something is wrong. And Blaine's cell is down that way. You Earthmen wait here! I will go with Tahn. Then we come back to you." * * * * * They were gone only a few moments. From a little distance they had stood unnoticed, watching and listening. Blaine had escaped! He had seized Ratan's thought-gun; turned it upon Ratan and one of the guards; had stricken them. And had knifed another guard, and vanished. "Well! Good for Blaine," Shorty murmured. "He's smarter than all the rest of us put together! And he's got one of those guns! Where'd he go--" "They think perhaps out to the outer surface," Taro said. "He ran that way." "To find Mack and Vivian!" I exclaimed. "Well, that's what we want to do. Show us that exit, Taro." "I will go with you," the young Lei said quietly. But there was no mistaking his shudder and the grim look on his face. "Tahn, you stay here." "I will go with my husband," she retorted. "Taro, please--" We took her. It seemed that the commotion at Blaine's cell must have drawn all the Radaks from these other passages. We were not discovered as we threaded our way back, until presently we were ascending a winding tunnel which ended at the crimson upper surface. How long it took us to sight Mack, Vivian and Blaine I do not know. It seemed an eternity of apprehension, as Taro and Tahn cautiously led us along winding rocky defiles and past patches of that weird, fantastic forest. Shorty and I saw none of the monsters. But there were many times when suddenly, without explanation, Taro turned us from where we would have wandered. Then we were far enough from the tunnel entrances so that we dared talk without possibility that the Radaks would hear us. "Blaine! Blaine--where are you?" "Mack! Vivian--are you here?" It was Tahn who first saw them. We were in a cluster of rocks with a brink ahead of us. I could see lower ground perhaps fifty feet down--a precipitous descent close ahead of us. It chanced that Tahn was leading, and suddenly she turned, gave a cry, and then pointed over the brink. "There they are! Down there! Look--look at them--" We crowded to the brink. Fifty feet down this ragged wall, Blaine, Vivian and Mack stood backed against it. An abyss was near them. And in front of them a great crimson, python-like thing was slithering, almost upon them now, with Blaine futilely firing his gun at it! There was nothing we could do; and for those seconds all four of us stood staring, mute, numbed with horror. The scene on the ledge below us was clear as though on a little stage. The monster in another second would be upon its victims. I saw Blaine throw down his gun in despair. His voice floated up to us. "Damn thing won't work! Got to--try to run--" Then, suddenly we saw Mack leap forward, not toward where he might have a wild chance of climbing up our ragged little cliff-wall, but the other way--toward the brink that dropped down to another terrace, between the brink and the monster's slithering length. His intention was obvious--to lead the monster over that other brink after him.... To sacrifice himself so that his companions might escape. In the chaos of that second we saw Mack get past the monster's head and neck. Its head turned. And then, before Mack could hurl himself down the hundred-foot drop, a loop of the great crimson body lashed out. It seemed that a tentacle whipped separate from the undulating snake-like body--a tentacle that seized Mack, looped around him and flung him into the air. Just a ghastly second or two as Mack's whirling body came up diagonally toward us in the air, and then fell back, into a ragged cluster of rocks beyond the monster's tail. Horribly we could hear the thud as it struck. For another second the great crimson head of the monster seemed to rear, with swaying eye-beams searching. But Mack's body was hidden by the rock-cluster. * * * * * Then, suddenly the gruesome python shape, head down, began oozing over the brink beside it. Flowing mass of protoplasm. It thinned out as it sagged down the hundred-foot drop--thinned until it was a narrow ribbon--a blood-red rivulet of waterfall. Then it was all on the lower level, gathering itself together until in a moment it was a great congealed, quivering crimson ball with the head in the center. For another instant it pulsated; then it bumped and rolled down a ragged slope, reached a little patch of distant vegetation where we could dimly see it spreading itself thinly out.... Spread like a blood-red pool, quiescent, waiting. With Taro and Tahn, Shorty and I climbed down the ragged little descent, joined Vivian and Blaine. "He tried to save us," the white-faced Vivian murmured. "Yes," I agreed. "We saw it." We found his broken body in the cluster of rocks fifty feet away. He was still conscious but we thought he was dying. One of his arms hung limp. Blood was coming from a head wound. But his pallid face was trying to smile. "My leg and arm," he mumbled. "Can't move them." One of his legs undoubtedly was broken. As we told him that the monster had gone his gaze seemed only on Vivian. "Thought it would kill you, Viv," he muttered. "Didn't want that." Then he fainted. He had been trying to get up on one elbow as Vivian knelt with an arm under his head. Then his eyes closed, and he sagged, went limp. "We must stop that blood from his head," Tahn murmured. "And then try and get him into one of the tunnels." Vivian jumped up. "Here's what we need--bandages." She flashed us a little twisted smile as she tore off her waist and skirt and ripped them into strips. "Here--bandages." She handed the strips of fabric to Tahn. Then she grinned at me. "This underdress--not too becoming, is it?" She gestured at the brief undergarment that now partly covered her, and her whimsical smile broadened. "Well this time, anyway, I had a good motive, didn't I?" Shorty and I carried the still unconscious Mack back to one of the tunnel entrances. And Taro led us to a shadowed, cave-like little place where we laid him down. Good luck seemed with us. We had encountered, so far, no Radaks. "You and Tahn will stay with him," I told Vivian. And Shorty and I had decided that Blaine had best stay also. For once Blaine had to do something against his will. "Think I'm too old to help you young fellows now?" he said. "All right, maybe I am." Certainly he was in no physical condition to be much help in the desperate venture we were planning. He handed me the Radak-gun, showed me how to use it. I dropped it in my pocket. "Good luck to you," Blaine said. "Thanks. We'll need it," I acknowledged. Then Shorty, Taro and I left them. Taro had hidden the only weapons he could get, near here. We found them--sheathed knives that the Lei used in the underground fields. They were odd-shaped knives; they seemed made of a highly polished, metallic stone. I thumbed one. It was sharp. "Very handy," Shorty commented. "Come on, Taro, let's go. Where is this Cavern of Machines?" It was perhaps half an Earth-mile, low down in the maze of underground passages. Shorty clutched his knife; I held the Radak-gun as we followed Taro down the dim, descending crimson tunnel. V "There's one of the guards!" Shorty whispered. "See him?" I pushed Shorty back. "No, two of them! The other one's sitting down. You and Taro keep behind me. I'll tackle them with the Radak-gun." We could see the square grey figures of two Radaks down the little length of tunnel ahead of us. They were by an opening that seemed to lead sharply downward, with a glow of radiance streaming up. And now in the heavy underground silence we could hear the faint muffled thrum and whine of mechanisms. My hand silently gripped Taro. All three of us crouched. "That's the entrance to the Cavern of Machines?" I whispered. "Yes." "Two guards. Are there liable to be more of them around?" Taro shook his head. "I think not. Though I cannot surely say." "The machines are operating," Shorty said. "Hear them? That means only the Great Mind, or Ratan will be down there in the Cavern?" "Yes," the young Lei agreed. "It's most likely not Ratan," I said. "Blaine got him--struck him insensible. Or would he be recovered by now?" Taro had no way of guessing. With an ordinary Radak the shock would have lasted longer than this. "But Ratan's mind is trained--developed--more powerful as you would say. He could recover more quickly." "Are there other entrances?" Shorty asked. "They'd have guards at them. If we make any commotion down there, and a bunch of Radaks come rushing us--" "This is the only entrance." "Right," Shorty chuckled. "Come on then, let's finish off these fellows." He fingered his knife. "You tackle 'em with that gun, Bob. But if you miss, trust me--I'll slip this knife into them--" With Taro and Shorty behind me I crept soundlessly forward. In my hand the pot bellied little Radak gun, so unfamiliar, gave me an uneasy feeling. Suppose I should miss. An uproar from these guards might bring dozens of others. "How close do I have to get?" I whispered to Taro. "This now--close enough." One of the Radaks was standing up, lounging with his back to the wall. The other was lying down. To send my flash clinging to the heads of both of them, I would have to shift my aim, and fire twice. My hand trembled a little. Then I pressed the lever. There was that vaguely visible flash. The gun-hilt in my grip vibrated, and at the muzzle of it there was a faint little hiss. A hit! The Radak on the ground seemed to stiffen. He raised his head, staring blankly. The Radak who was standing noticed it. He started, whirled around toward us. It took all my will power to withhold my second flash for that instant. But I did; and then as the standing figure steadied, I fired again. "Got him!" Shorty murmured. "Good work, Bob! Come on!" We ran forward. The standing Radak was motionless, gazing with vacant stare. Shorty dashed up to him. "Lie down, you're asleep! If you're not, you ought to be." But the Radak did not move, just turned his empty gaze toward the sound of Shorty's voice. I got it. "They don't speak English! Tell them, Taro." The Lei murmured commandingly in his own language, and in a moment the two guards were lying inert with closed eyes. "Mighty neat," Shorty whispered. "Come on--here we go." Beyond the guards an earthen ramp led sleepily downward, winding to a circular spiral. Then presently we emerged upon a little ledge with the great Cavern of Machines spread out before us. "Crouch down! We will see who is here," Taro whispered. There was awe in his voice. "We must not be seen until we attack." It was a huge, vault-like cavern, with glowing roof high over our heads, and we were about twenty feet above its lower level, with a narrow, steep ramp leading down from near us. I saw that it was a weird, dim grotto, lurid with swaying, prismatic glows of colored radiance, and throbbing, humming with a myriad mechanical voices. Distant railed terraces held frameworks of metal, where opalescent tubes were glowing. Beams of light-radiance seemed to carry the power from one strange mechanism to the next, like wires connecting them in series. No Lei, no ordinary Radak, and certainly least of all us Earthmen, could by any chance have understood the scientific details of what we were seeing. I recall there was a convergence of beams, high up in mid-air at the center of the cavern, where a shower of tiny electrolyte sparks glittered like a fountain of pyrotechnics. And out of it a narrow concentrated beam of violet-purple glow shot upward to a grid in the ceiling--the gravitational force, doubtless, which from there was conducted to some point above where it was hurled into Space. How long I stared, awed, I have no idea. Then I was aware of Taro beside me, whispering, "It is the Great Mind who is down there. He has just come into sight--down by that yellow glow." The floor of the cavern held a dozen or more of the huge mechanisms, and in the center of them there was a throbbing space that seemed to hold the controls of all these intricate machines. Down there in the weird glow we could now see the lone figure of the ancient Radak leader--shriveled and bent, he moved around, occasionally reaching to shift some lever or make some adjustment. "He must not see us coming!" Taro whispered. His voice was tense. And on his face now as the multi-colored glow bathed it, there was unmistakable terror. This young Lei, like all his people, born and bred to fear the dominance of the Great Mind--to attack that little figure, to Taro was almost unthinkable. Taro had planned this; dreamed of it. But faced with it now, there was only terror sweeping him, so that had he been here alone, easily he could have turned and fled. Shorty and I had no such inhibitions. "What in the devil," Shorty murmured. "He's got a Radak-gun--sure, I've no doubt of it. We've got to duck that. But once I get close to him--" Shorty's gesture with his knife was significant. For minutes more we tensely waited. Then we got down the ramp without being seen, and on the lower floor we crouched between two of the giant whining machines. "Easy now!" I whispered. "You two--keep behind me--" I held the Radak-gun in my hand. We waited another moment; then ducked forward and crouched again, behind a great glowing mechanism through which two beams of colored light were passing. We were only some twenty feet from the leader now. Close enough for my shot, or for us to rush him. He was bending down over a glowing dial. Green light from it streamed upward, bathed his weird mummy-like countenance so that suddenly he seemed like some horrible ghoul intent upon a task diabolic, gruesome. "Let him have it!" Shorty whispered. "Now's your chance!" I must confess my heart was racing, with a sudden nameless premonition of terror. Thoughts are instant things. I tried to tell myself that this was just a weazened old man. Helpless, with three of us about to leap on him. Of course he was helpless! With sudden relief I saw that he had discarded his belt. It hung on the peg of a rack, several feet away from him--his belt, with his Radak-gun! Shorty saw it at the same instant. "There's his gun, Bob! He can't reach it! We've got him!" Of course ... I leveled my weapon. I was sighting it ... I shall always wonder if my racing thoughts were projected then to warn the Radak leader. Or did he sense us in some other way? I was standing a little out into an aisle between two big mechanisms when suddenly he lifted his head, turned and saw me. The movement, and my own startled reaction, spoiled my aim ... Mustn't fire until I was sure.... I recall that in that split-second I was aware that the old Radak had not moved. He was just staring at me with glittering eyes and his shrunken grey face horrible with the intensity of his menace. He knew of course that he couldn't reach his weapon. He didn't try.... * * * * * Just a helpless, weazened old man. But as I sighted my gun I was aware of the power radiating from him. The power of his mind, pitted now against mine; his will commanding me to drop my weapon and my own brain demanding my muscles to sight it, to fire it. Conflict most horrible. It was as though every fibre of me was being outraged, seared and torn. My nerves screaming.... And my mind was screaming--kill him! Got to kill him now!... Don't drop the gun! Hold your fingers tight! But I could feel my fingers loosening their grip. The muzzle was swaying. Everything seemed blurring before me, swimming into a phantasmagoria of horror.... It was all in a second or two. I heard Shorty mutter a startled oath beside me. But it was Taro, despite that he must have been unutterably frightened, who kept his wits. He uttered a grim shout, jumped to his feet, sidewise away from me. It did what Taro had hoped. For just an instant that baleful gaze left me, fastened on Taro. Then it swung back--but in that instant I had recovered myself, leveled the gun and fired. New horror! The Radak leader's gaze, again on me, seemed to meet the flash of my gun in mid-air between us. I could imagine there must have been a conflict there--a little almost soundless, almost invisible puff of deranged vibrations. And the derangement must have been forced backward to me. All in the flash of a thought. To my conscious mind there was only my pressing the gun-lever, and then a bursting explosion at my hand as the Radak-gun flew into fragments! One of them struck my forehead; I staggered back, went down. But I was aware that Shorty, with Taro close after him, had leaped--Shorty, with knife upraised, his catapulting body hitting the crouching, ghoul-like figure. Shorty thinks now his knife never reached its mark. There was just the impact of his body, knocking the weazened figure backward. The Radak screamed a shrill, weirdly horrible cry. But it ended in a gurgle--just for an instant, a gruesome, liquid gurgle. Then there was only Shorty's gasp of horror. I was scrambling to my feet. I crouched, stricken, staring. Shorty had drawn back, standing staring. And Taro too had checked his rush. All three of us, frozen with revulsion. On the floor, weird in a green-red glow from a nearby machine, the weazened, mummy body of the Radak lay huddled. A thing which had been nearly all of mental quality. And now it had encountered a physical blow, to which every atom of its weird makeup was foreign. And what a second before had been living, solid substance now was dissolving! The clothes sagged, deflated. A bubbling ooze was where the face had been. Just a brief moment, and then before us the Radak's garments lay crumpled and flat in a little pool of stenching putrescence! I turned away, sickened. Then Shorty recovered himself. "It--that damned thing screamed! Others will come--" "Hurry now! Smash the machines! It is what we came for--" Taro gasped. I made a leap for the control panels; then stopped, whirled around. There was a cry from behind and above me. On a narrow, railed little balcony which connected with the ramp down which we had come, the figure of a Radak was standing! A tall grey shape! It was Ratan, though I did not know who it was then. He had a knife in his hand, and he was in the act of leaping over the rail to land upon me! I had no time to avoid him. His body came sprawling, landed on my shoulders, bore me down. * * * * * Simultaneously I was aware that Shorty and Taro were smashing at the control apparatus. It crackled, tinkled like breaking glass, with a huge flash of colored light and sparks that sent Shorty and Taro reeling backward, dazed so that they did not see what was happening to me. Then they were up, at it again, hurling broken fragments of the controls at the nearby grids, tubes and prisms. And in that same second, the multi-colored flash spread--deranged--weird current. Like burning powder-trains it leaped everywhere around the grotto. Puffs, sparks of fountain-glare, the hissing, whining, screeching of breaking machines.... On the floor I struggled with Ratan on top of me. He had no gun--just a long, thin knife with polished blade that glittered as he tried to thrust it into my throat. My own knife was gone. I reached, clutched at the grey wrist, turning the knife so that it went past my throat. Then I heaved upward. In the struggle Ratan dropped his knife and neither of us could reach it. Locked together we rolled, pummeling, scrambling. Then I knew that I had him. My fist landed on his hawk-nosed grey face--a solid blow that made him scream with revulsion and pain. Then I had heaved him off, staggered to my feet. I seemed to be in a cloud of yellow-green, choking, acrid vapour through which only dimly I could see Ratan struggling erect. And there was Shorty's voice: "Bob! Bob, where are you? Got to get out of here! Taro--Taro--" It seemed that somewhere near me, Taro was coughing, choking. Then I realized that the shape of Ratan was plunging at me through the heavy chemical smoke. I was swaying, but I squared off, hit him solidly in the face again. He went down, and I leaped on him, lifting his head and shoulders, then banging his head back against the corner of a mechanism-frame--pounding it again and again until suddenly I was aware that it had smashed and was dripping upon me. With a shudder I cast the inert body away and leaped to my feet. "Bob! Got to get out of here! Taro--" Shorty was still shouting. Green-yellow vapour was swirling around me. Electrolyte flashes seemed everywhere--the whole grotto, an inferno of pyrotechnics. Then I saw the figure of Shorty staggering to help Taro from where he had fallen. I swayed and joined them. "That ramp," I gasped. "Behind us! Come on--" We tried to hold our breath as we staggered up the ramp. Then there seemed a little puff of breathable air. As we plunged into the exit tunnel, for an instant I turned. The big grotto was alive with swirling turgid smoke and flames and leaping, bursting light-fire. And a bedlam of weird bursting sounds. The death of the monstrous Radak science, screaming with its agony of dissolution. Coughing and choking, we ran up the tunnel, with the sounds and the glare fading behind us; and the pure air reviving us. "All the Radaks will be after us," Shorty panted. "Faster, Taro!" Distant cries were all around us in the maze of tunnels. The alarm was spreading everywhere. We saw a few plunging Radak shapes, but were able to avoid them. Taro was leading us; I gripped him as we ran. "You say you know where they keep their space-flyer?" "Yes. Not far from Blaine and the others." Then we reached the girls and Blaine, who were crouching in that tunnel recess with the still unconscious Mack. Vivian and Tahn just stared at us white-faced, with little cries of relief. Blaine gasped, "You did it!" "We sure did," Shorty agreed. "Come on--the space-ship--" "You and I--we'll carry Mack--" I said. Shorty nodded, and we lifted him. Carrying Mack slowed us. But his emaciated body was light. In a moment I slung him over my shoulders, and with Shorty steadying him, we made better speed. It wasn't far, but there were Radak figures everywhere now. Weirdly, only one of them came near us. Shorty and Taro were ready to attack him. The squat little shape came plunging along a side tunnel, apparently heading for us. He seemed to be gibbering, mouthing, then screaming. But he ignored us, running, knife in hand, until he bashed himself into a rock.... * * * * * We ran on, and then suddenly I realized that we had emerged into that huge underground space where first we had met the Great Mind. Taro ran toward a wall, found some hidden mechanism. I saw, in the crimson radiance, that by the wall a hundred yards or so away, a big slide had opened. A small, gleaming, pot-bellied cylinder was standing there. It came automatically out on rollers, and stopped in the open--a little thirty foot Space-flyer. And over it, high up, the ceiling of the vast cavern seemed to have opened; the murky purple-red of the sky was up there. All this I saw in those few seconds. But there was far more here. A turmoil of sounds and moving, milling figures. A scene of weird, ghastly horror so that for a moment I stood swaying with the limp body of Mack slung over my shoulders and my companions clustered around me. Down the slope where the little Lei village stood under the trees in the red gloom, a crowd of Lei were struggling. And everywhere among them, squat grey shapes of Radaks were plunging.... Radaks with knives and scimitar-like swords, and some with rock-chunks and bludgeons ... Radaks screaming, running amok. I saw one lunge with a knife at a Lei woman. The knife went into her and she fell; and the Radak kept on going until he crashed into a tree. The Great Mind was dead. Ratan, who might have taken his place, was dead. The Mental Force of all this little Radak world was gone. The Lei themselves had not been under its control. For generations they had been cowed, terrified into sullen obedience, but that was all. With the Radaks it was different. They were born, bred and trained to be automatons. To think what they were told to think. Mentally dominated, controlled so that the very essence of their mind was shaped and held together by their leader. And now they had no leader! For them, there was nothing left but mental chaos, so that gibbering with the insanity of minds unhinged, they were plunging here in wild, unreasoning chaos, obeying their instinct to kill. "My people--I must help them!" Taro's unutterable horror at last found voice. He would have plunged down the slope with his young wife after him. But Vivian seized Tahn, clung to her. I shouted at Shorty, "Hold him! Don't let him go!" Shorty hung on to him. "No, you don't!" "You can't help them!" I protested. "And we can't operate the space-ship! You want Earth-people to help your world--got to get back there, we--" The words died in my throat. We all saw that none of us could get to the Lei now, even if we had tried. A group of a hundred or more of the screaming, gibbering Radaks had swept between us and the Lei village. But the way to the space-ship still seemed open. We ran for it. One of the Radaks, by chance perhaps, turned toward us; and all the ones near him, like sheep followed him. A horde of grey, maniac Things charging us.... We got to the gleaming little cylinder with only an instant to spare--reached it, tumbled through its doorway. I laid Mack on the white grid of its floor. Shorty banged the door-slide, hanged it as the bodies of the Radaks thudded against it. Taro ran for the controls and in another instant the little ship quivered and lifted. There was a transparent bulls-eye window panel near me. For a second I had a glimpse of horrible, snarling, maniac faces pressed against it. Then they fell away; and in a moment we were out through the upper opening, slanting upward with the crimson surface of little Zelos dropping down. Then we were in space, with the brilliant, beautiful miracle of the Universe glittering around us.... * * * * * I think there is little more I need add. You have all heard and read, of course, of the events of this past year. The secret of space-flying! We have it now. Earth-scientists, studying the Radak ship, had no difficulty in constructing others far larger. Fortunately our Earth-materials proved adaptable; there was nothing vital that we lacked. Many large ships were swiftly built, and an armed force went to Zelos. Haste was necessary, as you will recall, for when the mechanisms of the Radaks were smashed, it was soon found that the Crimson Comet was plunging directly toward our Sun. J. Walter Blaine wanted no publicity when he freely gave the millions necessary for the scientific research and the myriad activities which went into the building of the space-ships. You all offered your own donations, and they were refused only because Blaine felt he had earned the privilege of financing the enterprise. He wants me now to extend his thanks to you. Our first expedition to Zelos was when, in its Sunward plunge, it had crossed our Earth-orbit and was at its closest point to us. And the expedition found that no more than a thousand of the Lei had been killed by the maniac Radaks, who in those terrible hours after our departure, plunged around, screaming until they bashed themselves to destruction, or were killed by the Lei. Taro and Tahn were with our first expedition to the doomed little world, and they stayed there throughout all the several trips of the many big ships which evacuated the Lei. I am glad that it was finally decided not to bring the Lei here to Earth. They would have been just curiosities here; and then lost, whirled away into the maelstrom of our huge world. Surely it was the best of good fortune for them when our exploring ships found that Venus was uninhabited, and with conditions for life so propitious. And now the Lei, with Taro and Tahn to lead them, are masters of a great world of their own. With the friendly world of Earth nearest to them. Surely we will prove a helpful, friendly, neighboring world, with no greedy thought of anything more than that. Zelos is gone now. I was one of those who saw it go--that night about a month ago. It was a little dot in the sky, with a great flaming streamer of the Sun licking upward as though eager to meet it. And then it was gone. I recall the earnest solicitations of so many of you who prayed that Mack would get well. He wants me to thank you all again. I saw him only last week, in the little mountain home where he and Vivian went after their wedding trip. That astoundingly pretentious wedding they had--well, that was because Blaine insisted on doing it. He may insist again, if and when a layette is needed. I don't know about that. But Mack, who now has an executive position in one of Blaine's many industries, got their little house himself. He and Vivian remained firm on that. And as I said at the beginning, you must see now that none of us are glamorous heroes. We're all at our regular jobs, with the Crimson Comet just a gruesome memory. So now, kind friends--please forget us. Except me. I'm certainly no hero, but, well, I won't mind if you'll remember that I broadcast twice a week on subjects of Popular Astronomy--Station WANA-NYC. 
12315	----	Team. SHANTY THE BLACKSMITH; A TALE OF OTHER TIMES BY MRS. SHERWOOD. 1852. SHANTY THE BLACKSMITH. * * * * * It was during the last century, and before the spirit of revolution had effected any change in the manners of our forefathers, that the events took place, which are about to be recorded in this little volume. At that period there existed in the wild border country, which lies between England and Scotland, an ancient castle, of which only one tower, a few chambers in the main building, certain offices enclosed in high buttressed walls, and sundry out-houses hanging as it were on those walls, yet remained. This castle had once been encircled by a moat which had been suffered to dry itself up, though still the little stream which used to fill it when the dams were in repair, murmured and meandered at the bottom of the hollow, and fed the roots of many a water plant and many a tree whose nature delights in dank and swampy soils. The verdure, however, which encircled this ancient edifice, added greatly to the beauty, when seen over the extent of waste and wild in which it stood. There can be no doubt but that the ancient possessors of this castle, which, from the single remaining barrier, and the name of the family, was called Dymock's tower, had been no other than strong and dangerous free-booters, living on the plunder of the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland. Every one knows that a vast extent of land, waste or at best but rudely cultivated, had once belonged to the Lords of Dymock; but within a few years this family had fallen from affluence, and were at length so much reduced, that the present possessor could hardly support himself in any thing like the state in which he deemed it necessary for his father's son to live. Mr. Dymock was nearly thirty years of age, at the time our history commences; he had been brought up by an indolent father, and an aunt in whom no great trusts had been vested, until he entered his teens, at which time he was sent to Edinburgh to attend the classes in the college; and there, being a quick and clever young man, though without any foundation of early discipline, or good teaching, and without much plain judgment or common sense, he distinguished himself as a sort of genius. One of the most common defects in the minds of those who are not early subjected to regular discipline is, that they have no perseverance; they begin one thing, and another thing, but never carry anything on to any purpose, and this was exactly the case with Mr. Dymock. Whilst he was in Edinburgh he had thought that he would become an author; some injudicious persons told him that he might succeed in that way, and he began several poems, and two plays, and he wrote parts of several treatises on Mathematics, and Physics, and Natural History; the very titles of these works sound clever, but they were never finished. Dymock was nearly thirty when his father died; and when he came to reside in the tower, his mind turned altogether to a new object, and that was cultivating the ground, and the wild commons and wastes all around him: and if he had set to work in a rational way he might have done something, but before he began the work he must needs invent a plough, which was to do wonderful things, and, accordingly, he set to work, not only to invent this plough, but to make it himself, or rather to put it together himself, with the help of a carpenter and blacksmith in the neighbourhood. But before we introduce the old blacksmith, who is a very principal person in our story, we must describe the way in which Mr. Dymock lived in his tower. His aunt, Mrs. Margaret Dymock, was his housekeeper, and so careful had she always been, for she had kept house for her brother, the late laird, that the neighbours said she had half-starved herself, in order to keep up some little show of old hospitality. In truth, the poor lady was marvellously thin, and as sallow and gaunt as she was thin. Some old lady who had stood for her at the font, in the reign of Charles the Second, had, at her death, left her all her clothes, and these had been sent to Dymock's tower in several large chests. Mrs. Margaret was accordingly provided for, for life, with the addition of a little homespun linen, and stockings of her own knitting; but, as she held it a mighty piece of extravagance to alter a handsome dress, she wore her godmother's clothes in the fashion in which she found them, and prided herself not a little in having silks for every season of the year. Large hoops were worn in those days, and long ruffles, and sacks short and long, and stomachers, and hoods, and sundry other conceits, now never thought of; but Mrs. Margaret thought that all these things had a genteel appearance, and showed that those who bought them and those who inherited them had not come of nothing. Mrs. Margaret, however, never put any of these fine things on, till she had performed her household duties, looked into every hole and corner in the offices, overlooked the stores, visited the larder, scullery and hen-yard, weighed what her three maids had spun the day before, skimmed the milk with her own hands, gathered up the candle ends, and cut the cabbage for the brose; all which being done, and the servants' dinner seen to, and it must be confessed, it was seldom that they had a very sumptuous regale, she dressed herself as a lady should be dressed, and sate down to her darning, which was her principal work, in the oval window in the chief room in the castle. Darning, we say, was her principal work, because there was scarcely an article in the house which she did not darn occasionally, from the floor-cloth to her own best laces, and, as money was seldom forthcoming for renewing any of the finer articles in the house capable of being darned, no one can say what would have been the consequence, if Mrs. Margaret had been divested of this darning propensity. How the old lady subsisted herself is hardly known, for it often happened that the dinner she contrived for her nephew, was barely sufficient for him, and although on these occasions she always managed to seem to be eating, yet had Mr. Dymock had his eyes about him, he could not but have seen that she must often have risen from the table, after having known little more than the odour of the viands. Nothing, however, which has been said of Mrs. Margaret Dymock goes against that which might be said with truth, that there was a fund of kindness in the heart of the venerable spinster, though it was sometimes choked up and counteracted by her desire to make a greater appearance than the family means would allow. Besides the three maids in the kitchen, there were a man and a boy without doors, two or three lean cows, a flock of sheep which were half starved on the moor, a great dog, and sundry pigs and fowls living at large about the tower; and, to crown our description, it must be added, that all the domestic arrangements which were beyond the sphere of Mrs. Margaret were as ill managed as those within her sphere were capitally well conducted; however, as Mr. Dymock said to her one day when she ventured to expostulate with him on this subject, "Only have a little patience, my good aunt, when I have completed what I am now about, for instance my plough, you will see how I will arrange every thing. I cannot suffer these petty attentions and petty reforms to occupy me just now; what I intend to do will be done in a large way; I mean not only to repair but to restore the castle, to throw the whole of my lands to the north into a sheep-walk, to plant the higher points, and to convert the south lands into arable. But my first object is the plough, and that must be attended to, before everything else; the wood-work is all complete, but a little alteration must be made in the coulter, and after all, I apprehend I must do it myself, as old Shanty is as stupid as his own hammer." Mrs. Margaret hinted that every man had not the ingenuity of her nephew; adding, however, that old Shanty was as worthy and God-fearing a man as any on the moor. "I do not deny it," replied Mr. Dymock, "but what has worth and God-fearing to do with my plough. I have been trying in vain to make him understand what I want done, and am come to the resolution of going myself, taking off my coat, and working with him; I should make a better blacksmith in a week, than he has in forty years." Mrs. Margaret lifted up her hands and eyes, and then fetching a deep sigh, "That I should have lived to hear that," she exclaimed; "the last representative of the house of Dymock proposing to work at a blacksmith's forge!" "And why not? Mrs. Margaret," replied the nephew, "does a gentleman lower himself when he works merely for recreation, and not for sordid pelf; you have heard of Peter the Great?" "Bless me, nephew," replied the spinster, bridling, "where do you think my ears have been all my life, if I never heard of Peter the Great!" "You know then, that he worked with his own hands at a blacksmith's forge," returned the nephew. "I know no such thing," said Mrs. Margaret, "and if the Romans say so, I account it only another of their many lies; and I wonder they are not ashamed to invent tales so derogotary to the honour of him they call their head!" "Pshaw!" said the laird; "I am not speaking of the Pope, but of the Czar of all the Russias!" "Well! well! Dymock;" returned Mrs. Margaret, "I only wish that I could persuade you from committing this derogation. However, if you must needs work with Shanty, let me beg you to put on one of your old shirts; for the sparks will be sure to fly, and there will be no end of darning the small burns." "Be assured aunt," said Mr. Dymock, "that I shall do nothing by halves; if I work with Shanty, I shall put on a leathern apron, and tuck up my sleeves." "All this does not suit my notions," replied Mrs. Margaret: but her nephew had risen to leave her, and there was an end to the argument. As Mr. Dymock had told his aunt; so he did: he went to Shanty's forge, he dressed himself like the old master himself, and set fairly to work, to learn the mysteries of the trade; mysteries which, however, as far as Shanty knew them, were not very deep. [Illustration: He went to Shantys Forge _See Page 14_] There has not often been a more ill-arranged and unsettled mind than that of Mr. Dymock; his delight was in anything new, and for a few days he would pursue this novelty with such eagerness, that during the time he seemed to forget every thing else. It was a delicate job, and yet one requiring strength which was needed for the plough. Shanty had told the laird at once, that it was beyond his own skill or strength, seeing that he was old and feeble, "and as to your doing it, sir," he said, "who cannot yet shape a horse-shoe! you must serve longer than a week, before you get that much knowledge of the craft; there is no royal way to learning, and even for the making of a horse-shoe a 'prenticeship must be served, and I mistake me very much if you don't tire before seven days service are over, let alone as many years." But, Mr. Dymock had as yet served only two days, when one evening a young man, a dark, athletic, bold-looking youth, entered the blacksmith's shed. It was an evening in autumn, and the shed was far from any house; Dymock's tower was the nearest, and the sun was already so low that the old keep with its many mouldering walls, and out-buildings, was seen from the shed, standing in high relief against the golden sky. As the young man entered, looking boldly about him, Shanty asked him what he wanted. "I want a horse-shoe," he replied. "A horse-shoe!" returned the blacksmith, "and where's your horse?" "I has no other horse than Adam's mare," he replied; "I rides no other, but I want a horse-shoe." "You are a pretty fellow," returned Shanty "to want a horse-shoe, and to have never a horse to wear him." "Did you never hear of no other use for a horse-shoe, besides protecting a horse's hoof?" replied the youth. "I have," returned the blacksmith, "I have heard fools say, that neither witch nor warlock can cross a threshold that has a horse-shoe nailed over it. But mind I tell you, it must be a cast shoe." "Well" said the young man, "suppose that I am plagued with one of them witches; and suppose that I should have bethought me of the horse-shoe, what would you think of me then? What may that be which you are now shaping; why may it not serve my turn as well as another? so let me have it, and you shall have its worth down on the nail." "Did not I tell you," said Shanty, sullenly, "that it must be a cast shoe that must keep off a witch; every fool allows that." "Well," said the young man, looking about him, "have you never a cast shoe?" "No," replied Shanty, "I have none here fit for your turn." "I am not particular," returned the young man, "about the shoe being an old one; there is as much virtue, to my thinking, in a new one; so let me have that you are about." "You shall have none of my handiworks, I tell you," said Shanty, decidedly, "for none of your heathenish fancies and follies. The time was when I lent myself to these sort of follies, but, thank my God, I have learned to cast away, aye, and to condemn such degrading thoughts as these. Believe me, young man, that if God is on your side, neither witch nor warlock, or worse than either, could ever hurt you." "Well," said the young man, "if you will not make me one, will you let me make one for myself?" "Are you a smith?" said Mr. Dymock, before Shanty could reply. "Am I a smith?" answered the young man; "I promise you, I should think little of myself if I was not as much above him, (pointing to Shanty, who was hammering at his horse-shoe, with his back towards him,) as the sun is brighter than the stars." Shanty took no notice of this piece of insolence; but Mr. Dymock having asked the stranger a few more questions, proceeded to show him the job he wanted done to his plough, and from one thing to another, the young man undertook to accomplish it in a few hours, if the master of the shed would permit. Shanty did by no means seem pleased, and yet could not refuse to oblige Mr. Dymock; he, however, remarked, that if the coulter was destroyed, it was no odds to him. The young stranger, however, soon made it appear that he was no mean hand at the work of a blacksmith; he had not only strength, but skill and ingenuity, and in a short time had so deeply engaged the attention of Dymock by his suggestions of improvements to this same plough, that the young laird saw none but him, and allowed the evening to close in, and the darkness of night to cover the heath, whilst still engaged in talking to the stranger, and hearkening to his ingenious comments on the machinery of the plough. In the meantime, although the sun had set in golden glory, dark and dense clouds had covered the heavens, the wind had risen and whistled dismally over the moor, and a shower of mingled rain and sleet blew into the shed, one side of which was open to the air. It was in the midst of this shower, that a tall gaunt female, covered with a ragged cloak, and having one child slung on her back, and another much older in her hand, presented herself at the door of the shed, and speaking in a broad northern dialect, asked permission to shelter herself and her bairns, for a little space in the corner of the hut. Neither Dymock nor the young man paid her any regard, or seemed to see her, but Shanty made her welcome, and pointing to a bench which was within the glow of the fire of the forge, though out of harm's way of sparks or strokes, the woman came in, and having with the expertness of long use, slung the child from her back into her arms, she sate down, laying the little one across her knee, whilst the eldest of the two children dropped on the bare earth with which the shed was floored, and began nibbling a huge crust which the mother put into his hand. In the meantime, work went on as before the woman had come in, nor was a word spoken, till Shanty, looking up from the horse-shoe which he was hammering, remarked in his own mind, that he wondered that the little one stretched on the woman's knee, was not awakened and frightened by the noise of the forge; but there the creature lies, he thought, as if it had neither sense or hearing. When this strange thought suggested itself, the old man dropped his hammer, and fixing his eye on the infant, he seemed to ask himself these questions,--What, if the child should be dead? would a living child, drop as that did from the back of the woman on her lap, like a lump of clay, nor move, nor utter a moan, when thrown across its mother's lap? Urged then by anxiety, he left his anvil, approached the woman, and stood awhile gazing at the child, though unable for some minutes to satisfy himself, or to put away the horrible fear that he might perchance be looking at a body without life. Mr. Dymock was acting the part of bellows-blower, in order to assist some work which the young stranger was carrying on in the fire. The lad who generally performed this service for Shanty, had got permission for a few hours, to visit his mother over the Border, Mr. Dymock having told him in all kindness that he would blow for him if needs must. But the fitful light--the alternate glow and comparative darkness which accompanied and kept time with the motion of the bellows, made it almost impossible for the old man to satisfy himself concerning his horrible imagination. He saw that the infant who lay so still on the woman's lap, was as much as two years of age; that, like the woman, it had dark hair, and that its complexion was olive; and thus he was put out in his first notion, that the child might perchance be a stolen one. But the bellows had filled and exhausted themselves many times before his mind was set at rest with regard to his first fearful thought; at length, however, the child moved its arm, and uttered a low moan, though without rousing itself from its sleep; on which Shanty, being satisfied, turned back to his block and his horse-shoe, and another half-hour or more passed, during which the tempest subsided, the clouds broke and began to disappear, and the stars to come forth one by one, pointing out the direction of the heavens to the experienced eye of the night-walking traveller. The woman observing this, arose, and taking the sleeping babe in her arms whilst the other child clung to her cloak, she thanked the blacksmith for the convenience of the shelter which he had given her; when he, with the courtesy of one who, though poor and lowly, had been admitted to high conference with his Redeemer, invited her to stay longer--all night if she pleased,--regretting only that he had nothing to offer her but a bed of straw, and a sup of sowens for the little ones. "For which," she replied, "I thank you; what can any one give more than what he has. But time is precious to me, this night I must be over the Border; mind me, however, I shall remember you, and mayhap may call again." So saying, she passed out of the shed, almost as much disregarded by Dymock in her going out, as she had been in coming in. And now, for another hour, the strokes of the hammers of old Shanty and the young stranger might have been heard far over the moor in the stillness of the night, for the wind had entirely died away, and the fitful glare of the forge, still shone as a beacon over the heath. At length, however, the job which the stranger had undertaken was finished, and Dymock, having given him a silver piece, the only one in his pocket, the young man took his leave, saying as he went out, and whilst he tossed the silver in his hand,--"Well, if I have not got what I came for, I have got that which is as good, and in return for your civility, old gentleman," he added, addressing Shanty, "I give you a piece of advice; nail the horse-shoe, which you would not spare to me, over your own door, for I tell you, that you are in no small danger of being over-reached by the very warlock, who has haunted my steps for many a day." So saying, he went gaily, and with quick step, out of the shed, and his figure soon disappeared in a ravine or hollow of the moor. In the mean time, Dymock and Shanty stood at the door. The former being full of excitement, respecting the wonderful sagacity of the singular stranger, and the other being impatient to see the master off, as he wanted to shut up his shed, and to retire to the little chamber within, which served him for sleeping apartment, kitchen, and store-room, not to say study, for our worthy Shanty never slept without studying the Holy Word of God. But whilst these two were standing, as we said, at the door, suddenly, a low moan reached their ears, as coming from their left, where the roof of the shed being lengthened out, afforded shelter for any carts, or even, on occasion, waggons, which might be brought there, for such repairs as Shanty could give them. At that time, there was only one single cart in the shed, and the cry seemed to come from the direction of this cart. Dymock and Shanty were both startled at the cry, and stood in silence for a minute or more, to ascertain if it were repeated. Another low moan presently ensued, and then a full outcry, as of a terrified child. Dymock and Shanty looked at each other, and Shanty said, "It is the beggar woman. She is still skulking about, I will be bound; hark!" he added, "listen! she will be stilling the child, she's got under the cart." But the child continued to screech, and there was neither threat nor blandishment used to still the cries. Dymock seemed to be so thoroughly astounded, that he could not stir, but Shanty going in, presently returned with a lighted lanthorn, and an iron crow-bar in his hand; "and now," he said, "Mr. Dymock, we shall see to this noise," and they both turned into the out-building, expecting to have to encounter the tall beggar, and with her perhaps, a gang of vagrants. They, however, saw only the infant of two years' old, who had lain like a thing dead on the woman's lap, though not dead, as Shanty had feared, but stupified with hollands, the very breath of the baby smelling of the spirit when Dymock lifted it out of the cart and brought it into the interior shed. Shanty did not return, till he had investigated every hole and corner of his domain, with the crow-bar in one hand, and the lanthorn in the other. The baby had ceased to cry, when brought into the shed, and feeling itself in the arms of a fellow-creature, had yielded to the influence of the liquor, and had fallen again into a dead sleep, dropping back on the bosom of Mr. Dymock. "They are all off," said Shanty, as he entered the house, "and have left us this present. We have had need, as that young rogue said, of the horse-shoe over our door. We have been over-reached for once; that little one is stolen goods, be sure, Mr. Dymock,--some great man's child for aught we know,--the wicked woman will not call again very soon, as she promised, and what are we to do with the child? Had my poor wife been living, it might have done, but she is better off! What can I do with it?" "I must take it up to the Tower," said Mr. Dymock, "and see if my aunt Margaret will take to it, and if she will not, why, then there are charity schools, and poor-houses to be had recourse to; yet I don't fear her kind heart." "Nor I neither, Mr. Dymock," said Shanty, and the old man drew near to the child, and holding up his lanthorn to the sleeping baby, he said, "What like is it? Gipsy, or Jew? one or the other; those features, if they were washed, might not disgrace Sarah or Rachel." "The mouth and the form of the face are Grecian," said Dymock, "but the bust is oriental." Shanty looked hard at his patron, as trying to understand what he meant by _oriental_ and _Grecian;_ and then repeated his question, "Gipsy or Jew, Mr. Dymock? for I am sure the little creature is not of our northern breed." "We shall see by and bye," said Dymock, "the question is, what is to be done now? I am afraid that aunt Margaret will look prim and stately if I carry the little one up to the Tower; however, I see not what else to do. Who is afraid? But put your fire out, Shanty, and come with us. You shall carry the bantling, and I will take the lanthorn. Mayhap, aunt Margaret may think this arrangement the more genteel of the two. So let it be." And it was so; old Shanty turned into child-keeper, and the Laird into lanthorn-carrier, and the party directed their steps towards the Tower, and much talk had they by the way. Now, as we have said before, there was a fund of kindness in the heart of Mrs. Margaret Dymock, which kindness is often more consistent than some people suppose, with attention to economy, especially when that economy is needful; and moreover, she had lately lost a favourite cat, which had been, as she said, quite a daughter to her. Therefore the place of pet happened to be vacant just at that time, which was much in favour of the forlorn child's interests. Dymock had taken Shanty with him into the parlour, in which Mrs. Margaret sat at her darning; and he had suggested to the old man, that he might just as well tell the story himself for his aunt's information, and account for the presence of the infant; and, in his own words, Mrs. Margaret took all very well, and even did not hint that if her nephew had been in his own parlour, instead of being in a place where vagrants were sheltered, he would at all events have been out of this scrape. But the little one had awoke, and had begun to weep, and the old lady's heart was touched, so she called one of the maids, and told her to feed the babe and put it to sleep; after which, having ordered that Shanty should be regaled with the bladebone of a shoulder of mutton, she withdrew to her room to think what was next to be done. The result of Mrs. Margaret's thoughts were, that come what might, the child must be taken care of for a few days, and must be washed and clothed; and, as the worthy lady had ever had the habit of laying by, in certain chests and boxes piled on each other in her large bed-room, all the old garments of the family not judged fitting for the wear of cottagers, she had nothing more to do than, by the removal of half-a-dozen trunks, to get at a deal box, which contained the frocks, and robes, and other garments which her nephew had discarded when he put on jacket and trousers. From these she selected one of the smallest suits, and they might have been seen airing at the kitchen fire by six o'clock that morning. Hot water and soap were next put in requisition, and as soon as the baby awoke, she was submitted to such an operation by the kitchen fire, as it would appear she had not experienced for a long time. The little creature was terribly frightened when soused in the water, and screeched in a pitiful manner; the tears running from her eyes, and the whole of her small person being in a violent tremor. The maids, however, made a thorough job of it, and scoured the foundling from head to foot. At length Mrs. Margaret, who sat by, directing the storm, with a sheet across her lap and towels in her hand, pronounced the ablution as being complete, and the babe was lifted from the tub, held a moment to drip, and then set on the lap of the lady, and now the babe seemed to find instant relief. The little creature was no sooner placed on Mrs. Margaret's knee, than, by some strange and unknown association, she seemed to think that she had found an old friend,--some faintly remembered nurse or mother,--whom she had met again in Mrs. Dymock, and quivering with delight, she sprang on her feet on the lady's lap, and grasped her neck in her arms, pressing her little ruby lips upon her cheek; and on one of the maids approaching again with some of her clothes, she strained her arms more closely round Mrs. Margaret, and perfectly danced on her lap with terror lest she should be taken away from her. "Lord help the innocent babe!" said the old lady, "what is come to her?" and Mrs. Margaret's eyes were full of tears; but the good lady then soothed and carressed the babe, and instructed her to sit down on her knees, whilst she directed the servant to assist in dressing her. But no, no, it would not do; no one was to touch her but Mrs. Margaret; and the old lady, drawing herself up, at length said,--"Well, Janet, we must give way, I suppose; it seems that I am to be the favourite; there is something in my physiognomy which has taken the child's fancy; come, hand me the clothes, I must try my skill in dressing this capricious little dame." Mrs. Margaret was evidently pleased by the poor orphan's preference, and whilst she was dressing the infant, there was time to discover that the little child was a perfect beauty in her way; the form of her face being oval, the features exquisite, the eyes soft, yet sparkling, and the lips delicately formed. The hair, of raven black, was clustered and curling, and the head set on the shoulders in a way worthy of the daughters of kings; but the servants pointed out on the arm of the infant, a peculiar mark which was not natural, but which had evidently been burnt therein. One said it was a fan, and another a feather; but Mrs. Margaret augured vast things from it, pronouncing that the child surely belonged to some great person, and that no one could say what might be the consequence of kindness shown to such a child. As soon as Mr. Dymock came down into the breakfast-room, Mrs. Margaret came swimming in with the child in her arms, exclaiming, "A pretty piece of work you have done for me, nephew! I am under a fine servitude now;" and she primmed up her mouth, but her eye laughed,--"little Miss here, chooses to be waited on by me, and me only; and here I am, with nothing to do but to attend on my lady." "Little Miss," said Mr. Dymock, "what little Miss? who have you got there?" "Neither more nor less," replied Mrs. Margaret, "than your foundling." "Impossible!" said Mr. Dymock: "Why, what have you done to her?" "Merely washed, combed, and dressed her," said Mrs. Margaret; "give me credit, nephew, and tell me what I have brought out by my diligence." "You have brought out a brilliant from an unfinished stone," exclaimed Mr. Dymock; "that is a beautiful child; I shall have extreme delight in making as much of that fine mind, as you have done with that beautiful exterior." "Then you do not think of putting her in a foundling hospital or a workhouse, nephew, as you proposed last night?" said Mrs. Margaret, with a smile. "It would be a folly," replied the nephew, "to degrade such a creature as that;" and he attempted to kiss the baby; but, swift as thought, she had turned her face away, and was clinging to Mrs. Margaret. The old lady primmed up again with much complacency, "Did I not tell you, nephew, how it was," she said, "nothing will do but Aunt Margaret. Well, I suppose I must give her my poor pussy's corner in my bed. But now her back is turned to you, Dymock, observe the singular mark on her shoulder, and tell me what it is?" Mr. Dymock saw this mark with amazement:--He saw that it was no natural mark; and at length, though not till after he had examined it many times, he made it out, or fancied he had done so, to be a branch of a palm tree. From the first he had made up his mind that this was a Jewish child; and, following the idea of the palm-tree, and tracing the word in a Hebrew lexicon,--for he was a Hebrew scholar, though not a deep one,--he found that Tamar was the Hebrew for a palm tree. "And Tamar it shall be," he said; "this maid of Judah, this daughter of Zion shall be called Tamar;" and he carried his point, although Mrs. Margaret made many objections, saying it was not a Christian name, and therefore not proper for a child who was to be brought up as a Christian. However, as Mr. Dymock had given up his whim of learning the business of a smith since the adventure which has been so fully related, and had forgotten the proposed experiment of turning up the whole moor round the Tower with his new-fangled plough,--that plough having ceased to be an object of desire to him as soon as it was completed,--she thought it best to give way to this whim of giving the child so strange a name, and actually stood herself at the font, as principal sponsor for little Tamar. Thus, the orphan was provided with a happy home; nor, as Mrs. Margaret said, did she ever miss the child's little bite and sup. After a few days, the babe would condescend to leave Mrs. Margaret, when required to go to the servants. She would even, when directed so to do, steal across the floor, and accept a seat on Mr. Dymock's knee, and gradually she got very fond of him. Nor was her affection unrequited; he had formed a theory about her,--and it was not a selfish theory, for he never expected to gain anything by her,--but he believed that she was of noble but unfortunate Jewish parentage, and he built this theory on the singular grace and beauty of her person. At all events, he never doubted but that she was a Jewess; and he talked of it, and thought of it, till he was entirely convinced that it was so, and had convinced his aunt also, and established the persuasion in the minds of most persons about him. If Mr. Dymock was not a genius, he had all the weaknesses commonly attributed to genius, and, in consequence, was as useless a being as ever cumbered the ground; yet, he was generally loved, and no one loved him more than Tamar did, after she had got over her first baby fear of him. But Mrs. Margaret, who had no pretensions to genius, was the real benefactor of this child, and as far as the lady was concerned in bringing her up, performed the part of a truly affectionate mother. Her first effort was made to bring the will of the child, which was a lofty one, under subjection to her own; and the next, to give her habits of industry and self-denial. She told her that whatever she might hear respecting her supposed parentage, she was merely a child without pretentions, and protected from motives of love, and of love only; that her protectors were poor, and ever likely to remain so, and that what God required of her, was that when able, she should assist them as they had assisted her in helpless infancy. As to religion, Mrs. Margaret taught her what she herself knew and believed; but her views were dark and incomplete, she saw not half as much of the great mystery of salvation, as had been revealed to Shanty in his hut; yet, the desire of doing right in the sight of God, had been imparted to her, and this desire was a fixed principle, and did not appear to be affected by her want of knowledge. As to forms, Mrs. Margaret had her own, and she was very attentive to them, but she had very small opportunity of public worship, as there was no church within some miles of the Tower. In the meantime, whilst the old lady went plodding on in her own quiet way, teaching the little girl all she knew herself, Mr. Dymock was planning great things by way of instruction for Tamar. He was to teach her to read her native language, as he called the Hebrew, and to give her various accomplishments, for he had dipped into innumerable branches, not only of the sciences, but of the arts; and as he happened to have met with a mind in Tamar which was as rapid as his own, though far more plodding and persevering, the style of teaching which he gave her, produced far richer fruit than could possibly have been expected. But as Rome was not built in a day, neither must it be supposed that good Mrs. Margaret had not many a laborious, if not weary hour before her part of the care necessary to the well-rearing of the child, was so complete that the worthy woman might sit down and expect a small return; for, as she was wont to say, the child could not be made, for years after she could hold a needle, to understand that the threads should not be pulled as tight in darning as in hem stitch, and this, she would say, was unaccountable, considering how docile the child was in other matters; and, what was worst of all, was this,--that the little girl, who was as wild and fleet, when set at liberty, as a gazelle of the mountains, added not unseldom to the necessity of darning, until Mrs. Margaret bethought herself of a homespun dress in which Tamar was permitted to run and career during all hours of recreation in the morning, provided she would sit quietly with the old lady in an afternoon, dressed like a pretty miss, in the venerable silks and muslins which were cut down for her use when no longer capable of being worn by Mrs. Margaret. By this arrangement Tamar gained health during one part of the day, and a due and proper behaviour at another; and, as her attachment to Mrs. Margaret continued to grow with her growth, many and sweet to memory in after-life were the hours she spent in childhood, seated on a stool at the lady's feet, whilst she received lessons of needlework, and heard the many tales which the old lady had to relate. Mrs. Margaret having led a life without adventures, had made up their deficiency by being a most graphic recorder of the histories of others; Scheherazade herself was not a more amusing story-teller; and if the Arabian Princess had recourse to genii, talismans, and monsters, to adorn her narratives, neither was Mrs. Dymock without her marvellous apparatus; for she had her ghosts, her good people, her dwarfs, and dreadful visions of second sight, wherewith to embellish her histories. There was a piety too, a reference in all she said to the pleasure and will of a reconciled God, which added great charms to her narratives, and rendered them peculiarly interesting to the little girl. Whilst Tamar was under her seventh year, she never rambled beyond the moat alone; but being seven years old, and without fear, she extended her excursions, and not unseldom ran as far as Shanty's shed. The old man had always taken credit to him self for the part he had had in the prosperity of the little girl, and Mrs. Margaret did not fail to tell her how she had first come to the Tower in Shanty's arms; on these occasions the child used to say,--"then I must love him, must not I ma'am?" And being told she must, she did so, that is, she encouraged the feeling; and on a Sunday when he was washed and had his best coat on, she used to climb upon his knees, for she always asked leave to visit him on that day if he did not come up to the Tower, as he often did, to ask for her, and being on his knees she used to repeat to him what she had been learning during the week. He was very much pleased, when she first read a chapter in the Bible, and then it was that he first opened out to her some of his ideas on religion; which were much clearer and brighter than either Mrs. Margaret's or her nephew's. How this poor and solitary old man had obtained these notions does not appear; he could not have told the process himself, though, as he afterwards told Tamar, all the rest he knew, had seemed to come to him, through the clearing and manifestation of one passage of Scripture, and this passage was COL. iii. 11. "But Christ is all." "This passage," said the old man, "stuck by me for many days. I was made to turn it about and about, in my own mind, and to hammer it every way, till at length, I was made to receive it, in its fulness. Christ I became persuaded, is not all to one sort of men, and not all to another sort, nor all at one time of a man's life, and not all at another; nor all in one circumstance of need, and not all in another; nor all to the saints and not all to the sinner; nor all in the hour of joy, and not all in the hour of retribution; being ready and able to supply one want, and unwilling to supply another. For," as he would add, "does a man want righteousness? there it is laid for him in Christ; does he want merit? there is the treasure full and brimming over; does he want rest and peace? they are also provided for him; does he want faith? there also is faith prepared for him; but the times and the seasons, these are not given to him to know; and, if confusion and every evil work now prevail, Christ being all, he will bring order out of confusion, when the fulness of the time shall come. "And so," continued the old man, "when it was given me to see and accept this one passage first, in its completeness, all other parts of Scripture seemed to fall at once into their places; and the prophecies; the beautiful prophecies of future peace and joy to the earth, of the destruction of death and of hell, all opened out to me, as being hidden and shut up in Christ,--for Christ is all; and as I desired the treasure, so I was drawn more and more towards Him who keeps the treasure, and all this," he would add, "was done for me, through no deserts or deservings of my own; for till this light was vouchsafed me, I was as other unregenerate men, living only to myself, and for myself; and more than this," he would say, "were it the Divine will to withdraw the light, I should turn again to be dead and hard, as iron on the cold anvil." In this way, Shanty often used to talk to Mrs. Margaret, and after a while to Tamar; but the old lady for many years remained incapable of entering so entirely as he could wish, into his views of the sufficiency of the Redeemer. She could not give up entirely her notions of the need of some works, not as evidences of the salvation of an individual, but as means of ensuring that salvation, and accordingly she never met with Shanty for many years, without hinting at this discrepancy in their opinions, which hints seldom failed of bringing forward an argument. When Tamar was about nine years old, Mr. Dymock gave her a dog. Of this creature she was very fond, and always accustomed it to accompany her in her excursions around the Tower. There was on the moor, not many hundred paces from the Tower, a heap of blocks of granite, some of which bore evidence of having been cut with a chisel; but these were almost entirely grown over with saxifrages and other wild plants. The country people seldom resorted to this place, because they accounted it uncanny, and Mrs. Margaret had several wild tales to tell about it, which greatly interested Tamar. She said, that in the times of papal power, there had been a monastery there, and in that place a covenanter had been murdered; hence, it had been pulled down to the ground, and all the unholy timbers and symbols of idolatry burnt; "and still," she added, "to this day, uncanny objects are seen in that place, and wailings as of souls in woe have also been heard coming from thence; and I myself have heard them. Nay, so short a time ago as the night or two before you, Tamar, were brought a baby to this house, a light was seen there, and unearthly voices heard as coming from thence." Of course after this, it could not be thought that Tamar should approach this place quite alone, though she often desired to do so; had not Mrs. Margaret told her these stories, she probably might never have had this desire, but there is a principle in human nature, which hankers after the thing forbidden; hence, as St. Paul says, "By the law is the knowledge of sin." We are not defending human nature, which is indefensible, but merely stating facts. Tamar had much desire to visit this mysterious place; and so it happened one day, when she had her dog with her, and the sun was shining, and all about her bright and gay, that she climbed up the little green knoll, and pushing her way through many brambles, furze bushes, and dwarf shrubs, she found herself in the centre of the huge heaps of stones and rubbish, of which she had hitherto seen only the summits, from the windows of the Tower. But being arrived there, she came to a stand, to look about her, when her dog, to whom Dymock had given the poetical name of Sappho, began to prick up her ears, and snuff as if she scented something more than ordinary, and the next minute, she dashed forward, made her way through certain bushes, and disappeared. Tamar called aloud; a hollow echo re-sounded her voice, but no dog appeared;--again she called,--again she heard the echo, and again she was silent; but she was by no means a timid child; she had been too much accustomed to be alone,--too much used to explore old corners, of which there were multitudes about the Tower, occupied only by owls and bats. She therefore went forward to the place where Sappho had disappeared, and forcing aside the shrubs, she saw before her a low, arched door-way, which, had she understood architecture, she would have known, from the carvings about the posts and lintel, to have been Norman. She was surprised, indeed, but thinking only of her dog, she called again, and was perfectly amazed at the long, hollow, and deep sound, of the reverberation. She stood still again, holding the bushes aside, and was aware of a rush of damp vapour, blowing in her face. Sappho, she called again, and the next minute heard an impatient bark, or yelp, from the animal, and another sound, low, deep and muttering, which she could not comprehend. She was now getting much alarmed and dropping the boughs, took to flight, and she had scarcely cleared the rubbish, when Sappho came scouring after her, jumping upon her as if glad to see her again. She patted her head, saying "My poor Sappho, what have you seen in that dark place? I wish you had a tongue to tell me." Tamar immediately returned to the Tower, and hastened to tell her adventure to Mrs. Margaret. "Oh!" said the old lady, "is it so? that reminds me of what I heard my father say, many and many is the year gone by, that there was an old tradition of a secret passage underground from the Monastery to the Tower; but he never knew where the passage came into the Tower. But be it which way it might, it must needs have passed under the moat." "How strange!" said Tamar; "but when that passage was made, it could not have been secret; many people must have known it, and I wonder, then, how it could have been so entirely forgotten." "Who shall say how things were done in those days," said Mrs. Margaret; "those times long past, when things uncanny had more power than they have now? But it is not good to talk of such things," added the lady; "and now, Tamar, let that which you have seen to-day never again be mentioned by you; for, as sure as the master should hear of it, he would be for looking into the cavern, and, Heaven knows what he might stir up, if he were to disturb such things as might be found there. I only wish that that the mischief may not be already done!" But no mischief did occur, at least for a long time, from this mysterious quarter. Tamar did not again visit the place; and in a short time thought no more of the matter. The happy days of childhood were passing away with Tamar, and sorrow was coming on her patrons, from a quarter which poor Mrs. Margaret had long darkly anticipated; but whilst these heavy clouds were hanging over the house of Dymock, a few, though not very important events intervened. Mr. Dymock, by fits and snatches, had given such lessons to Tamar as had enabled her to proceed, by her own exertions, in several branches of knowledge quite out of the sphere of Mrs. Margaret. Amongst these was the history of the Jews, carried on in connection between the New and Old Testament, and afterwards in Christian times, and to these he added certain crude views of prophecy; for he was resolved that Tamar was a Jewess, and he had talked himself into the belief that she was of some distinguished family. It is no difficult matter to impress young persons with ideas of their own importance; and none are more liable to receive such impressions, than those who, like Tamar, are in the dark respecting their origin. The point on which Mr. Dymock failed in his interpretations of prophecy, is not unfrequently mistaken, even in this more enlightened age. He never considered or understood, that all prophecy is delivered in figurative language; every prophecy in the Old Testament having first a literal and incomplete fulfilment, the complete and spiritual fulfilment being future. He did not see that the Jews, according to the flesh, were types of the Spiritual Israel; that David was the emblem of the Saviour; and that the universal kingdom promised to the seed of David, was no other than the kingdom of Christ, into which all the children of God will be gathered together as into one fold under one Shepherd. Not seeing this, he anticipated a period of earthly triumph for the Jews, such as an ambitious, worldly man might anticipate with delight; and he so filled the mind of his young pupil with these notions of the superiority of her race, that it is a miracle that he did not utterly ruin her. As it was, she counted herself greatly superior to all about her, and was much hurt and offended when old Shanty represented the simple truth to her, telling her, that even were she the lineal descendant of Solomon himself, she could have no other privilege than that of the lowest Gentile who has obtained a new birth-right in the Saviour of mankind; "for," said he, "under the Gospel dispensation there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek,--the same Lord over all, is rich unto all that call upon him," Rom. x. 12. It did not, however, suit Tamar to adopt these truths at the present time; and as Shanty could not succeed with her, he took the liberty of speaking to Mr. Dymock on the subject. "Why do you fill the young girl's mind, Dymock," said he, "with such fancies as you do? But, leaving her alone, let us speak of the Jews in general. They that wish them well should not fill them up with notions of a birth-right which they have forfeited, and thus confirm them in the very same pride which led them to crucify the Lord of Glory. What is a Jew more than another man? for he is not a Jew which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew which is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter, whose praise is not of men but of God." Rom. ii. 28, 29. Mr. Dymock would not listen to honest Shanty on this subject, much as he respected him; and, indeed, the poor Laird was at this time deeply oppressed with other matters. He had, in his various speculations, so entirely neglected his own affairs for some years past, that poverty, nay actual penury, was staring in his face. He had formerly mortgaged, by little and little, most of his lands, and nothing now remained to make money of, but the Castle itself and a few acres around it, with the exception only of a cottage and a small field, hitherto occupied by a labourer, which lay in a kind of hollow on the side of the knoll, where the entrance of the secret cavern was. This cottage was as remote from Dymock's Tower in one way, as Shanty's shed was in another; although the three dwellings formed together a sort of equilateral triangle. Mr. Dymock long suspected that this labourer had done his share to waste his substance; and once or twice it had occurred to him, that if he left the Castle he might retire to the cottage. But yet, to part with the Castle, could he find a purchaser, would, he feared, be death to Mrs. Margaret, and how would Tamar bear it?--this glorious Maid of Judah, as he was wont to call her,--this palm tree of Zion, this daughter of David,--the very fine person, and very superior air of Tamar having confirmed him in the impression of her noble birth. It was whilst these heavy thoughts respecting what must be done in the management of his affairs dwelt on his mind, that the same man who had finished the unfortunate plough appeared again in Shanty's shed. The old man recognized him immediately, although fourteen years had much changed his appearance, and he at once charged him with having had some concern with the woman who left the child. The well-acted astonishment of the vagrant, for such he was, silenced Shanty, though it did not convince him that he was mistaken in his conjecture. However, the old man, changing his mode of attack, and regretting that he had put the stranger on his guard by giving him so home a thrust, pretended to be convinced, and entered into easy conversation with him; amongst other things asking him if perchance he knew of any one who wanted to purchase an estate? "Aye!" said the vagrant, to whom as we small have the pleasure of introducing him again, we think it may be well to give the name of Harefoot,--"Aye! old gentleman, and might one ask where this estate of yours may be?" "It is of no consequence," replied Shanty, "I answer no questions, as not being empowered so to do. At all events, however, the estate is not far from hence, and it is a magnificent place, I promise you, More's the pity, that those who have owned it for some hundreds of years, should be compelled to part with it." Other matters were then introduced, and Shanty endeavoured to wind about Harefoot, but with little success; for, deep as he thought himself, he had one deeper to deal with. In truth, poor Shanty was but a babe in cunning, and the vagrant departed, without having dropped a single hint which could be taken hold of respecting Tamar. In the meantime troubles were pressing upon poor Dymock, the interest of moneys lent on the motgage was not forthcoming, and the Laird having no better friend (and as to a sincerer he needed none,) than poor Shanty, used from day to day to go down to the shed, to open his heart to the old man. Shanty had long advised his patron to tell his situation to Mrs. Margaret, and to advertise the sale of the castle, but Dymock's pride had not yet so far submitted itself, as to enable him to make so public a confession of the downfall of the family, as an advertisement would do. "I cannot open my heart to my aunt, Shanty," he said, "she, poor creature, has devoted her whole life to keeping up the dignity of the house; how, then, will she bear to see the whole labour of her life annihilated?" "The sooner she knows of what is coming the better," returned Shanty, "if she is not prepared, the blow when it comes, will go nigh utterly to overpower her," and the old man proposed to go himself, to open the matter to her. "You shall, Shanty, you shall," said the Laird, "but wait a little, wait a little, we may hear of a purchaser for the castle, and when such a one is found, then you shall speak to my aunt." "But first," said Shanty, "let me prepare your adopted one, let me open the matter to her; she is of an age, in which she ought to think and act no longer as a child; it is now fourteen years since I carried her up in my arms to Dymock's Tower, and though the young girl is too much filled up with pride, yet I fear not but that she is a jewel, which will shine brighter, when rubbed under the wheel of adversity; allowing what I hope, that there is a jewel under that crust of pride." "Pride!" repeated Dymock, flying off into the region of romance, "and if a daughter of Zion, a shoot from the Cedar of Lebanon, is not to carry her head high, who is to do so? the fate of her race may indeed follow her, and she may be brought down, to sit in the dust, but still even in the dust, she may yet boast her glorious origin." Shanty raised his hands and eyes, "Lord help you! Dymock," he said, "but you are clean demented. I verily believe, that the child is nothing mere than the offspring of a begging gipsy, and that if her mother had been hanged, she would only have met with her deserts." Discussions of this kind were constantly taking place between Shanty and Dymock, and it was in the very midst of one these arguments, that the rare appearance of a hired chaise,--a job and pair, as Shanty called it, appeared coming over the moor, directly to the shed, and so quick was the approach, that the Laird and the blacksmith had by no means finished their conjectures respecting this phenomenon, before the equipage came to a stand, in the front of the hut. As the carriage stopped, a spare, sallow, severe looking old gentlemen, put his head out of the window, and calling to the post boy, in a sharp, querulous tone, asked if he were quite sure that he was right? "Not sure that this is old Shanty's hut; Shanty of Dymock's Moor," replied the post-boy, in a broad Northern accent; "ask me if I don't know my own mother's son, though she never had but one bairn." Dymock and Shanty no sooner heard the voice of the boy, than they both recognized him, and stepping forward, they went up to the carriage and offered to assist the old gentleman to alight; he received their civilities with very little courtesy. However, he got out of the carriage, and giving himself a shake, and a sort of twist, which caused the lappets of his coat to expand, like the fan-tail of a pigeon, he asked, if the place was Dymock's Moor, and if the old man he saw before him, was one called Shanty of the Moor? The blacksmith declared himself to be that same person, "and this gentlemen," he added, pointing to Dymock, whose every day dress, by the bye, did not savor much of the Laird, "This gentleman is Dymock himself." "Ah, is it so," said the stranger, "my business then is with him, show me where I can converse with him." "I have no parlour to offer you," said Shanty; "to my shed, however, such as it is, I make you welcome." No gracious notice was taken by the stranger of the offer, but without preamble or ceremony, he told his errand to Mr. Dymock. "I hear," he said, "that you wish to sell your Tower, and the lands which surround it; if after looking at it, and finding that it suits me, you will agree to let me have it, I will pay you down in moneys, to the just and due amount of the value thereof, but first I must see it." "It stands there, Sir," said Shanty, seeing that Mr. Dymock's heart was too full to permit him to speak; "it stands there, Sir, and is as noble an object as my eye ever fell upon. The Tower," continued the old man, "at this minute, lies directly under the only dark cloud now in the heavens; nevertheless, a slanting ray from the westering sun now falls on its highest turret; look on, Sir, and say wherever have you seen a grander object?" The old gentleman uttered an impatient pish, and said, "Old man, your travels must needs have lain in small compass, if you think much of yon heap of stones and rubbish." The Laird's choler was rising, and he would infallibly have told the stranger to have walked himself off, if Shanty had not pulled him by the sleeve, and, stepping before the stranger, said something in a soothing way, which should enhance the dignity of the Tower and encourage the pretended purchaser. "I must see it, I must see it," returned the old gentleman, "not as now mixed up with the clouds, but I must examine it, see its capabilities, and know precisely what it is worth, and how it can be secured to me and my heirs for ever." It was warm work which poor Shanty now had to do; between the irritated seller and the testy buyer, he had never been in a hotter place before his own forge, and there was wind enough stirring in all reason, without help of bellows, for the Laird puffed and groaned and uttered half sentences, and wished himself dead, on one side of the old blacksmith, whilst the stranger went on as calmly, coolly, and deliberately, with his bargain, on the other side, as if he were dealing with creatures utterly without feeling. Shanty turned first to one, and then to another; nodding and winking to Dymock to keep quiet on one side, whilst he continued to vaunt the merits of the purchase on the other. At length, on a somewhat more than usually testy remark of the stranger reaching the ears of the Laird, he burst by Shanty and had already uttered these words, "Let me hear no more of this, I am a gentleman, and abominate the paltry consideration of pounds, shillings, and pence;" when Shanty forcibly seizing his arm, turned him fairly round, whispering, "Go, and for the sake of common sense, hold your tongue, leave the matter to me, let me bargain for you; go and tell Mrs. Margaret that we are coming, and make what tale you will to her, to explain our unceremonious visit; you had better have told her all before." The Laird informed Shanty that there was no need of going up to the Tower to inform his aunt, as she and Tamar were gone that day over the border to visit a friend; but added he, "I take your offer, Shanty, make the bargain for me if you can, and I shall not appear till I am wanted to sign and seal," and away marched the Laird nor was he forthcoming again for some hours. After he was gone, Shanty begged leave to have a few minutes given him for washing his hands and face and making himself decent, and then walked up with the testy old gentlemen to the castle. Little as Shanty knew of the great and grand world, yet his heart misgave him, lest the ruinous state of the castle, (although the Tower itself stood in its ancient and undilapidated strength,) should so entirely disgust the stranger that he should at once renounce all ideas of the purchase; he was therefore much pleased when the old gentleman, having gone grumbling and muttering into every room and every outhouse, crying, it is naught! it is naught! as buyers generally do, bade Shanty tell the Laird that he was going to the nearest town, that he should be there till the business was settled, that he would give the fair valuation for the estate, and that the payment should be prompt. Shanty was, indeed astonished; he was all amazement, nor did he recover himself, till he saw the old gentleman walk away, and get into his carriage which was waiting on the other side of the moat, it not being particularly convenient, on account of the total deficiency of anything like a bridge or passable road? to bring a carriage larger than a wheel-barrow up to the castle. Dymock returned to the shed, when he, from some place of observation on the moor, saw that the carriage had reached the high road, and there, having been told all that had passed, the poor gentleman (who, by the bye, was not half pleased with the idea of the honours of Dymock falling into the hands of such a purchaser,) informed Shanty that he must prepare to go with him the next day to Hexham, where the stranger had appointed to meet him. "I go with you!" exclaimed Shanty, "was ever so strange a conceit." "I shall be fleeced, shorn, ruined," implied Mr. Dymock, "if I go to make a bargain, without a grain of common sense in my company." "True," returned Shanty, "your worship is right; but how are we to go? I have plenty of horse-shoes by me, but neither you, nor I Laird, I fear could find any four legs to wear them." "We must e'en walk then," said Dymock, "nay, I would gladly carry you on my back, rather than descend to the meanness of driving a bargain with a testy old fellow like that; by the bye, Shanty, what does he call himself?" "Salmon," replied Shanty, "and I mistake if he has not a touch of the foreigner on his tongue." "You will accompany me, then Shanty," said the Laird. "I will," he replied, "if this evening you will open the business out to Mrs. Margaret." "It cannot be Shanty," replied Dymock chuckling, "for she does not expect to be back over the border till to-morrow, and when to-morrow is over and we know what we are about, then you shall tell her all." "Dymock," said Shanty, "you are hard upon me, when you have a morsel to swallow that is too tough for you, you put it into my mouth; but," added the old man kindly, "there is not much that I would refuse to do for your father's son." The sun had not yet risen over the moor, when Dymock and Shanty, both arrayed in their best, set off for Hexham, where they found the crabbed old gentlemen, still in the humour of making the purchase, though he abused the place in language at once rude and petulant; his offer, however, was, as Shanty compelled Dymock to see, a very fair one, though the more sensible and wary blacksmith could not persuade his friend to beware of trusting anything to the honour of Mr. Salmon. Dymock's estate had been deeply mortgaged, the sale was made subject to the mortgages, and the purchaser was bound to pay the mortgagee the mortgage moneys, after which there was small surplus coming to poor Dymock. This small surplus was, however, paid down on the signing of the papers; still, however, there was an additional payment to take place soon after possession. This payment was, it was supposed, to be for fixtures and other articles, which were to be left on the premises, and it was not to be asked till Mr. Salmon had been resident a few weeks. The amount was between five and six hundred pounds, and was in fact all that Dymock would have to depend upon besides his cottage, his field, a right of shooting on the moor, and fishing in a lake which belonged to the estate, and about twenty pounds a year which appertained to Mrs. Margaret, from which it was supposed she had made some savings. Shanty had succeeded in forcing the Laird to listen to the dictates of prudence, and to act with sufficient caution, till it came to what he called the dirty part of the work, to wit, the valuation of small articles, and then was the blood of the Dymocks all up; nor would he hear of requiring a bond for the payment of this last sum, such a document, in fact, as should bind the purchaser down to payment without dispute. He contented himself only with such a note from the old man as ought he asserted to be quite sufficient, and it was utterly useless for Shanty to expostulate. The Laird had got on his high horse and was prancing and capering beyond all the controul of his honest friend, whilst Mr. Salmon, no doubt, laughed in his sleeve, and only lamented that he had not known Dymock better from the first, for in that case he would have used his cunning to have obtained a better bargain of the castle and lands. It was not one nor two visits to Hexham which completed these arrangements; however Mr. Dymock, after the first visit, no longer refused to permit Shanty to open out every thing to his aunt, and to prepare her to descend into a cottage, on an income of forty or fifty pounds a year. Mrs. Margaret bore the information better than Shanty had expected; she had long anticipated some such blow, and her piety enabled her to bear it with cheerfulness. "I now," she said, "know the worst, and I see not wherefore, though I am a Dymock, I should not be happy in a cottage, I am only sorry for Tamar; poor Tamar! what will become of her?" "Oh mother! dear mother!" said Tamar weeping, "why are you sorry for me, cannot I go with you? surely you would not part from me;" and she fell weeping on Mrs. Margaret's bosom. "Never before! oh, never before," cried Mrs. Margaret, "did I feel my poverty as I do now." "Mother dear! oh mother dear! had I thousands of pounds, I would devote them all to you, and to my dear protector." "God helping you, or God working in you Tamar," said Shanty, rubbing his rough hand across his eyes, "but never boast of what you will do, dear child; boasting does not suit the condition of humanity." "Oh! that I could now find my father," she replied, "and if I could find him a rich man, what a comfort it would be; what would I give now," she added, "to find a rich father!" Mrs. Margaret kissed her child, and wept with her, calling her a dear, affectionate, grateful creature; but Shanty made no remark respecting Tamar's gratitude; he had it in his mind to speak to her when alone, and he very soon found the opportunity he wished. It was on the next Sunday that he met Tamar walking on the moor, and it was then that he thus addressed her, "I was sorry damsel," he said, "to hear you speak as you did to Mrs. Margaret the other day, making a profession of what you would do for her if you were rich, and yet never offering her that which you have to give her." "What have I to give her?" asked Tamar. "Much," replied the old man; "much, very much. You have strength, and activity, and affection to give her. With forty pounds a-year, a house, and a little field, which is all your adopted parents will have, can they, think you, keep a servant? Will not the very closest care be necessary, and should not one who is young, and faithful, and attached, rejoice to serve her benefactors at such time as this, and to render their fall as easy as possible; and where, I ask you, Tamar, should they find such service as you can render them?" They were walking side by side, the old man and the beautiful girl, among the heather of the moor; and he was looking up kindly and animatedly to her,--for he was a remarkably short, thick-set man,--but she was looking down on the ground, whilst a bitter struggle was passing in her mind. She had been filled up by her guardian with wild fancies of her own greatness, which was hereafter to be made manifest; and it would have been too strong for unaided nature, to bring herself to submit to such drudgeries as duty seemed now to require of her; her bright-brown cheek was flushed with the inward contest, and her bosom seemed to be almost swelled to suffocation. But the assistance required was not withheld in the hour of need, and Shanty was soon made aware of the change of feelings which was suddenly imparted to the orphan by the change of the expression of her countenance; the tears had already filled her eyes, when she turned to her old friend, and thanked him for his reproof, expressing her conviction, that his advice was that of a true Christian, and begging him always to tell her, in like manner, when he saw that she was going wrong. A more general discussion on the subject of true religion then followed, and Shanty assured Tamar, that all high notions of self, whether of birth, talents, or riches, were unpleasing in the sight of God, and utterly inconsistent with that view of salvation by Christ, which is independent of all human merit. Such was the nature of the lessons given by the old man to Tamar. His language was, however, broad, and full of north-country phrases, so much so, as to have rendered them inexplicable to one who had not been accustomed to the Border dialect. From that day, however, through the divine mercy, the heart of Tamar was given to the duties which she saw before her, and all her activity was presently put into requisition; for Mr. Salmon had given notice, that he should take possession of Dymock's Tower as soon as it could be got ready for him, and he also sent persons to make the preparations which he required. These preparations were of a most singular nature; his object appeared neither to be the beautifying of the old place, or even the rendering it more comfortable, for he neither sent new furniture, nor ordered the restoration of any of the dilapidated chambers or courts. But he ordered the moat to be repaired, so that it could be filled and kept full, and he directed that a light draw-bridge should also be erected. The walls of the inner courts were also to be put to rights, and new gates added. There was a great laugh in the country respecting this unknown humourist; and some said he was preparing for a siege, and others going to set up for a modern Rob Roy, and Castle-Dymock was to be his head-quarters. The greater part of the furniture, and all the fixtures, were to be paid for by the money for which the Laird had Mr. Salmon's memorandum; and they who knew their condition, said that the things had been brought to a good market, as little of the furniture would have been worth the carriage across the moor. Nothing at present, therefore, remained for the aunt and the nephew to do, but to remove to the cottage as soon as it should be ready to receive them. This humble habitation was situated in a small nook or vale of the moor called Heatherdale. A little fresh-water spring ran through it, coming in at the higher end of the valley, and going out through a natural cleft in a block of granite at the other end. There were many tall trees scattered on the banks within the dell; and the place was so sheltered, that many a plant would flourish in the garden on the south side of the house, which could hardly be kept alive in any other situation in the country. The cottage was an old, black, timbered and thatched edifice, and had four rooms of considerable dimensions, two above and two below, with a porch in the front, overgrown with briony and another hardy creeper. As soon as this tenement was vacated, and the Laird's intention of inhabiting it known, the ancient tenants of the family all manifested their affection by using their several crafts in repairing the cottage, and setting the house to rights,--one mended the thatch, another repaired the wood-work, a third white-washed the walls, another mended the paling, and old Shanty did any little job in his way which might be required. The labours of love never hang long on hand, and though the old tenant had gone out only at Lady-day, the hawthorn had scarcely blossomed when the affectionate people pronounced the work complete. Poor Dymock had become very restless when he saw the changes which were going on at the Tower; but when there was no longer an excuse to be found for delaying the removal, he gave way altogether, or rather, we should say, made a cut and run, and went off to botanize the lakes in Westmoreland, with a knapsack on his back, and a guinea in his pocket. Before he went, however, he had opened his heart to his daughter Tamar, saying, "I now take leave, dear child, of the life of a gentleman; henceforward I must content myself with the corner of a kitchen ingle; and this, truly, is a berth," he added, "too good for a cumberer of the ground, such as I am." He said this as he passed through the gate of the court, giving his adopted one time only to snatch his hand and kiss it, and he was gone beyond her hearing before she could relieve her heart with a burst of tears. After a while, however, she dried them up, and began to busy her mind in thinking what she could do to render the cottage comfortable for her beloved guardian; and having at length formed her plan, she ran to Mrs. Margaret, and asked her permission to take the arrangement of their new house. "Let me," said she, "see all the things put in their places; you and I, dear aunt Margaret, will have to ourselves a kitchen as neat as a palace, and we will make a study of the inner room for Mr. Dymock." "What!" said the old lady, "and give up our parlour?" "Dear mother," replied the young girl carelessly, "if there is to be no maid but poor Tamar, why should not the kitchen be the happiest place, for her own dear mother? You shall have your chair in the corner, between the window and the fire-place, and your little work-table by it, and then you can direct me without moving from your needle. Oh! dear, aunt Margaret," she added, "I am beginning to think that we shall be happier in the cottage, than we have been in the Castle; we shall have fewer cares, and shall have a pleasure in putting our small means to the best. Do not the scatterings of the flock, aunt Margaret, make us as warm hose as the prime of the fleece?" "That may be doubted child," replied the old lady with a smile, "but go young creature, take your way; I believe ere yet you have done, that you, with your sunny smile, will cheat me into contentment before I know what I am about; but mind, my lovely one," she added, "I will tell you how it is. I have been led to see how God in his displeasure,--displeasure, I say, on account of the pride of ancestry and station, which I have hitherto persisted in cherishing,--how God, I repeat, in his displeasure has remembered mercy, and, in taking away that which is worthless, has left me that which is most precious, even you my bright one." The old lady then kissed Tamar, and gave her the permission she required, to arrange the cottage according to her own fancy. When the day of removal actually arrived, being the day after the Laird had walked himself off, the neighbours, with Shanty at their head, came to assist. Tamar had determined upon having the room within the kitchen, for her beloved father by adoption; a village artist having understood her pious wish, had stained the walls of light grey, and painted the frame of the casement window of the same colour. Tamar had prepared a curtain of some light drapery for the window; a well-darned carpet covered the floor, the Laird's bookcases occupied one entire end of the room opposite the window, the wonted table of the old study at the Tower was placed in the centre of the floor, and was covered with its usual cloth, a somewhat tarnished baize, with a border worked in crewels by Mrs. Margaret in days gone by. In the centre of this table the inkstand was placed, and on the opposite wall, a venerable time-piece, asserted, with what truth we presume not to say, to be nearly as old as the clock sent by Haroun Al Raschid to the emperor Charlemagne. A few high-backed chairs, certain strange chimney ornaments, and other little matters dear to the Laird, finished the furniture of this room, and Tamar perfectly laughed with joy, when, having seen all done, she became aware that this small apartment was in fact more comfortable than the cold, wide, many-drafted study in the Tower. Those who were with her caught the merry infection and laughed too, and Shanty said, "But dear one, whilst you thus rejoice in your own contrivances, have you not a word of praise to give to Him, who has spread such glories as no human skill could create, beyond yon little window?" The old man then opened the casement, and showed the sweet and peaceful scene which there presented itself; for the cottage was enclosed in a small dell, the green sides of which seemed to shut out all the world, enclosing within their narrow limits, a running brook, and hives of bees, and many fragrant flowers. Tamar was equally successful, and equally well pleased with her arrangements in other parts of the cottage; the kitchen opened on one side to a little flower garden, on the other to the small yard, where Mrs. Margaret intended to keep her poultry, and the whole domain was encompassed by the small green field, which made up the extent of the dell, and was the only bit of land left to the representative of the house of Dymock. But Mrs. Margaret had reckoned that the land would keep a little favourite cow, and with this object Tamar had taken great pains to learn to milk. When all was ready, Mrs. Margaret with many tears took leave of Dymock's Tower; she had not seen the process of preparation in the cottage, and was therefore perfectly astonished when she entered the house. Tamar received her with tears of tenderness, and the worthy lady having examined all the arrangements, blessed her adopted one, and confessed that they had all in that place that man really required. Neither did she or Tamar find that they had more to do than was agreeable; if they had no servants to wait upon them, they had no servants to disarrange their house. They had engaged an old cottager on the moor to give them an hour's work every evening, and for this they paid him with a stoup of milk, or some other small product of their dairy; money they had not to spare, and this he knew,--nor did he require any; he would have given his aid to the fallen family for nothing, had it been asked of him. In wild and thinly peopled countries, there is more of neighbourly affection,--more of private kindness and sympathy than in crowded cities. Man is a finite creature; he cannot take into his heart many objects at once, and such, indeed, is the narrowness of his comprehension, that he cannot even conceive how the love of an infinite being can be generally exercised through creation. It is from this incapacity that religious people, at least too many of them, labour so sedulously as they do to instil the notion of the particularity of the work of salvation, making it almost to appear, that the Almighty Father brings beings into existence, merely to make them miserable,--but we are wandering from our story. Aunt Margaret and Tamar had been at the cottage a fortnight before Dymock returned; Tamar saw him first coming down the glen, looking wearied, dispirited and shabby. She ran out to meet her adopted father, and sprang into his arms; his eyes were filled with tears, and her bright smiles caused those eyes to overflow. She took his hand, she brought him in, she set him a chair, and Mrs. Margaret kissing him, said "Come Dymock brighten up, and thank your God for a happy home." Dymock sighed, Tamar took his heavy knapsack from him, and placed before him bread and butter, and cheese, and a stoup of excellent beer. "Eat, dear father," she said, "and then you shall go to bed, (for it was late in the evening,) and to-morrow you will see what a sweet place this is;" but poor Dymock could not rally that night. Tamar had always slept with Mrs. Margaret, and the best room of the two above stairs had been prepared for Dymock, Mrs. Margaret having found a place under the rafters for her innumerable boxes. The poor Laird slept well, and when he awoke the sun was shining into his room, and aunt Margaret had arranged his clean clothes at the foot of his bed; he arose in better spirits, and dressing himself, he went down; he found Tamar in the kitchen, and she, without speaking, took his hand and led him to his study. The poor gentleman could not bear this: he saw the sacrifice his aunt had made for him, and the exertions also which Tamar must have made to produce this result, and he fairly wept; but this burst of agitation being over, he embraced his adopted child, and expressed his earnest hope that henceforward he might be enabled to live more closely with his God. But the mind of Dymock was not a well balanced one; he could not live without a scheme, and he had scarcely been two days in the cottage, when he re-aimed at the ideas which he had formerly indulged of becoming an author, and of obtaining both fame and money by his writings. Mrs. Margaret was fretted when she was made aware of this plan, and sent Tamar to Shanty, to ask him to talk him out of the fancy, and to persuade him to adopt some employment, if it were only digging in his garden, which might bring in something; but Shanty sent Tamar back to Mrs. Margaret to tell her that she ought to be thankful that there was anything found which would keep the Laird easy and quiet, and out of the way of spending the little which he had left. Poor Dymock, therefore, was not disturbed in his attempts at authorship, and there he used to sit in his study with slip-shod feet, an embroidered dressing gown, which Mrs. Margaret had quilted from an old curtain, and a sort of turban twisted about his head, paying no manner of attention to hours or seasons. As Mrs. Margaret only allowed him certain inches of candle, he could not sit up all night as geniuses ought to be permitted to do; but then he would arise with the lark and set to work, before any of the labourers on the moor were in motion. In vain did Mrs. Margaret complain and expostulate; she even in her trouble sent Tamar again to Shanty to request him to plead with the Laird, and beg him to allow himself to enjoy his regular rest; but in this case when she required Shanty's aid, she had reckoned without her host. "Go back to Mrs. Margaret, damsel," he said, "go and tell the lady that as long as she can keep the Laird from work by candle light, so long no harm is done, and if instead of murmuring at this early rising, fair child, you will take example by him, and leave your bed at the same time that your hear him go down, you will do well. He that lies in bed gives a daily opportunity to his servants, if he has any to serve him, to do mischief before he is up, and she that rises with the sun and goes straight forward, like an arrow in its course, in the path of her duties, shall find fewer thorns and more roses in that path, than those who indulge in ease. Through divine mercy," continued the old man, "our own exertions are not needed for the assurance of our salvation, but sloth and carelessness tend to penury and misery, in this present life; and there is no sloth more ruinous to health and property than that of wasting the precious morning hours in bed." Tamar was not deaf to the pleadings of Shanty; she began immediately to rise with the first crowing of the cock, and thus obtained so much time for her business, that she could then afford herself some for reading. Mrs. Margaret took also to rise early, so that instead of breakfasting as formerly at eight o'clock, the family took that meal at seven; but the Laird often managed to have such bright and valuable thoughts just at breakfast time, that for the sake of posterity, as he was wont to say, he could by no means endanger the loss of them by suffering such a common place interruption as that of breakfast, such an every day and vulgar concern. On these occasions Tamar always took in his coffee and toast, and set it before him, and she generally had the pleasure of finding that he took what she brought him, though he seldom appeared to be aware either of her entrance or her exit, Mrs. Margaret invariably exclaiming when Tamar reported her reception in the study, "Lord help him! see what it is to be a genius!" In the meantime, the moat around Dymock's Tower was repaired and filled up, or was fast filling up; the draw-bridge was in its place, and the gates and walls restored; and as the neighbours said, the Tower wanted nothing but men and provisions to enable it to stand a siege. At length, all being pronounced ready, though no interior repairing had taken place, the new possessor arrived, bringing with him two servants, an old man and an old woman, and many heavy packages, which were stowed in a cart, and lifted out by himself and his man-servant, whom he called Jacob. This being done, he and his people were heard of no more, or rather seen no more, being such close housekeepers, that they admitted no one over the moat, though the man Jacob, rode to the nearest market every week on the horse which had dragged the baggage, to bring what was required, which, it was said, was not much more than was necessary to keep the bodies and souls of three people together. Numerous and strange were the speculations made by all people on the moor upon these new tenants of Dymock's Tower, and Shanty's shed was a principal scene of these speculations. Various were the reproaches which were cast on the strangers, and no name was too bad for them. "Our old Laird," one remarked, "was worth ten thousand such. As long as he had a crust, he would divide it with any one that wanted it. Mark but his behaviour to the poor orphan, who is now become the finest girl, notwithstanding her dark skin, in all the country round." Then followed speculations on the parentage of Tamar, and old Shanty asserted that he believed her to be nothing more or less than the daughter of the gipsy hag who had laid her at his door. Some said she was much to good to be the child of a gipsy; and then Shanty asserted, that the grace of God could counteract not only the nature of a child of a vagrant of the worst description, but even that of such vagrant himself; the Spirit of God being quick and powerful, and sharper than a two-edged sword. Shanty was a sort of oracle amongst his simple neighbours, and what he said was not often disputed to his face; nevertheless, there was not an individual on the moor who knew Tamar, who did not believe her to be a princess in disguise or something very wonderful; and, at the bottom of her heart, poor Tamar still indulged this same belief, though she did not now, as formerly express it. It was in the month of June, very soon after, Mr. Salmon had arrived at the Tower, and before Dymock, who was a woful procrastinator, had gone to demand the last payment, that Tamar, who was extraordinarily light and active, had undertaken to walk to the next village to procure some necessaries; she had three miles to go over the moor, nor could she go till after dinner. Her way lay by Shanty's shed; and Mrs. Margaret admonished her, if anything detained her, to call on Shanty, and ask him to walk over the remainder of the moor with her on her return. When she came down from preparing herself for this walk, all gay and blooming with youth and health, and having a basket on her arm, she met Dymock in the little garden. "Whither away? beautiful Maid of Judah," said the genius. "My bright-eyed Tamar," he added, "I have been thinking of a poem, and if I can but express my ideas, it will be the means of lifting up my family again from the destitution into which it has fallen. My subject is the restoration of Jerusalem in the latter days, and the lifting up of the daughters of Zion from the dust. The captives of Israel now are hewers of wood and carriers of water; but the time will come when the hands that now wear the manacles of servitude shall be comely with rows of jewels." "If no daughter of Judah," replied Tamar, "wears heavier manacles than I do, dear father, they may bear them with light hearts;" and, as she passed quickly by her adopted father, she snatched his hand and kissed it, and soon she disappeared beyond the boundary of the glen. Tamar reached the village in so short a time, and did her errands so quickly, that having some hours of light before her, she thought she would try another way of return, over a small bridge, which in fact spanned the very water-course which ran through her glen; but being arrived at this bridge, to her surprise she found it broken down. It was only a single plank, and the wood had rotted and given way. The brook was too wide and deep in that place to permit her to cross it, and the consequence was, that she must needs go round more than a mile; and, what added to her embarrassment, the evening, which had been fine, was beginning to cloud over, the darkness of the sky hastening the approach of the dusk. She had now farther to walk than she had when in the village; and, added to the threatenings of the clouds, there were frequent flashings of pale lightning, and remote murmurings of thunder. But Tamar was not easily alarmed; she had been brought up independently, and already had she recovered the direct path from the village to Shanty's shed, when suddenly a tall figure of a female arose, as it were, out of the broom and gorse, and stepped in the direction in which she was going, walking by her side for a few paces without speaking a word. The figure was that of a gipsy, and the garments, as Tamar glanced fearfully at them as they floated in a line with her steps, bespoke a variety of wretchedness scarcely consistent with the proud and elastic march of her who wore them. Whilst Tamar felt a vague sense of terror stealing over her, the woman spoke, addressing her without ceremony, saying, "So you have been driven to come this way at last; have you been so daintily reared that you cannot wade a burn which has scarcely depth enough to cover the pebbles in its channel. Look you," she added, raising her arm, and pointing her finger,--"see you yon rising ground to the left of those fir trees on the edge of the moor,--from the summit of that height the sea is visible, and I must, ere many hours, be upon those waters, in such a bark as you delicately-bred dames would not confide in on a summer's day on Ulswater Mere." Whilst the woman spoke, Tamar looked to her and then from her, but not a word did she utter. "Do you mind me?" said the gipsy; "I have known you long, aye very long. You were very small when I brought you to this place. I did well for you then. Are you grateful?" Tamar now did turn and look at her, and looked eagerly, and carefully, and intently on her dark and weather-beaten countenance. "Ah!" said the gipsy, whilst a smile of scorn distorted her lip,--"so you will demean yourself now to look upon me; and you would like to know what I could tell you?" "Indeed, indeed, I would!" exclaimed Tamar, all flushed and trembling. "Oh, in pity, in mercy tell me who I am and who are my parents?--if they still live; if I have any chance or--hope of seeing them?" "One is no more," replied the gipsy. "She from whom I took you lies in the earth on Norwood Common. I stretched the corpse myself,--it was a bonny corpse." Tamar fetched a deep, a very deep sigh. "Does my father live?" she asked. "Your father!" repeated the gipsy, with a malignant laugh,--"your father!" Tamar became more and more agitated; but excessive feeling made her appear almost insensible. With great effort she repeated,--"Does my father live?" "He does," replied the woman, with a malignant smile, "and shall I tell you where and how?--shut up, confined in a strong-hold, caught like a vile animal in a trap. Do you understand me, Tamar? I think they call you Tamar." "What!" said the poor girl, gasping for breath, "is my father a convicted felon?" "I used no such words," replied the gipsy; "but I told you that he lies shut up; and he is watched and guarded, too, I tell you." "Then he has forfeited his liberty," said Tamar; "he has committed some dreadful crime. Tell me, Oh! tell me, what is it?" The gipsy laughed, and her laugh was a frightful one. "What!" she said, "are you disappointed?--is the blight come over you? has the black fog shut out all the bright visions which the foolish Laird created in your fancy? Go, child!" she said, "go and tell him what I have told you, and see whether he will continue to cherish and flatter the offspring of our vagrant race." "He will," replied Tamar; "but tell me, only tell me, what is that mark burnt upon my shoulder?" "Your father branded you," she answered, "as we do all our children, lest in our many wanderings we should lose sight of our own, and not know them again; but come," she added, "the night draws on, darkness is stealing over the welkin; you are for the shed; there is your pole-star; see you the fitful glare of the forge?--I am for another direction; fare-you-well." "Stay, stay," said Tamar, seizing her arm, "Oh, tell me more! tell me more! My father, if I have a living father, I owe him a duty,--where is he? Tell me where he is, for the love of heaven tell me?" The woman shook her off,--"Go, fool," she said, "you know enough; or stay," she added, in her turn seizing Tamar's arm,--"if you like it better, leave those Dymocks and come with me, and you shall be one with us, and live with us, and eat with us and drink with us." "No! no!" said Tamar, with a piercing shriek, disengaging herself from the gipsy, and running with the swiftness of a hare, towards the friendly hovel. Old Shanty was alone, when, all pale and trembling, Tamar entered the shed, and sunk, half fainting, on the very bench on which the gipsy had sate on the eventful night in which she had brought her to the hovel fourteen years before. Shanty was terrified, for he had a paternal feeling for Tamar; he ceased immediately from his hammering, and sitting himself by her on the bench, he rested not until she had told him every thing which had happened; and when she had done so,--"Tamar," he said, "I am not surprised; I never thought you any thing else than the child of a vagrant, nor had you ever any ground for thinking otherwise. There are many imaginations," added the pious old man, "which attend our nature, which must be destroyed before we can enter into that perfect union with the Son, which will render us one with the Father, and will insure our happiness when God shall be all in all, and when all that is foretold in prophecy respecting this present earth shall be completed. Sin," continued the old man, "is neither more nor less than the non-conformity of the will of the creature with that of the Creator; and when the will of every child of Adam is brought into unison with the divine pleasure, then, as far our race is concerned, there will be an end of sin; and, in particular cases, Tamar, as regarding individuals in the present and past days, each one is happy, not as far as he indulges the imaginations suggested by his own depraved nature, but as far as he is content to be what his God would have him to be, as indicated by the circumstances and arrangements of things about him." It was marvellous (or rather would have been so to a stranger,) to hear this poor old dusky blacksmith, speaking and reasoning as he did; but who shall limit or set bounds to the power of the Lord the Spirit in enlightening the mind, independently as it were, of human ministry, or at least of any other ministry than that which teaches and promulgates the mere letter of Scripture? Tamar's mind was at that time fully prepared to receive all that Shanty said to her, and, insensibly to themselves, they were presently led almost to forget the information given by the gipsy, (which in fact left Tamar just as it had found her,) whilst new thoughts were opening to them; and the young girl was brought to see, that in her late anxiety to render the kind friends who had adopted her, comfortable as to outward circumstances, she had failed in using her filial influence to draw their attention to thoughts of religion. Shanty put on his coat, and walked with her over the rest of the moor, nor did he leave Heatherdale (where Mrs. Margaret insisted that he should sup,) until he had opened out to the Laird and his aunt the whole history of Tamar's rencounter with the gipsy. It was curious to observe the effect of this story on the minds of the two auditors. Mrs. Margaret embraced Tamar with tears, saying, "Methinks I am rejoiced that there is no one likely to claim my precious one from me;" whilst the Laird exclaimed, "I am not in the least convinced. The gipsy has no doubt some scheme of her own in view. She is afraid of being found out, and transported for child-stealing; but I wish I could see her, to tell her that I no more believe my palm-tree to have sprung from the briers of the Egyptian wilderness, than that I am not at this moment the Laird of Dymock." "Lord help you, nephew!" said Mrs. Margaret, "if poor dear Tamar's noble birth has not more substantial foundation than your lairdship, I believe that she must be content as she is,--the adopted daughter of a poor spinster, who has nothing to leave behind her but a few bales of old clothes." "Contented, my mother," said Tamar, bursting into tears, "could I be contented if taken from you?" Thus the affair of the gipsy passed off. The Laird, indeed, talked of raising the country to catch the randy quean; but all these resolutions were speedily forgotten, and no result ensued from this alarm, but that which Almighty power produced from it in the mind of Tamar, by making her more anxious to draw the minds of her patrons to religion. After this, for several weeks things went on much as usual on Dymock's moor. The inhabitants of the Tower were so still and quiet, that unless a thin curl of smoke had now and then been seen rising from the kitchen chimney, all the occupants might have been supposed to have been in a state of enchantment. Jacob, however, the dwarfish, deformed serving-man, did cross the moat at intervals, and came back laden with food; but he was so surly and short, that it was impossible to get a word of information from him, respecting that which was going on within the moat. Whilst Dymock scribbled, his aunt darned, Shanty hammered, and Tamar formed the delight and comfort of all the three last mentioned elders. But some settlement was necessarily to be made respecting Mr. Salmon's last payment, which had run up, with certain fixtures and old pictures, for which there was no room in the cottage, to nearly six hundred pounds, and after much pressing and persuading on the part of Mrs. Margaret, the Laird was at length worked up to the point of putting on his very best clothes, and going one morning to the Tower. He had boasted that he would not appear but as the Laird of Dymock in Dymock castle; therefore, though the weather was warm, he assumed his only remains of handsome apparel, viz, a cloak or mantle of blue cloth and with a hat, which was none of the best shape, on his head, he walked to the edge of the moat, and there stood awhile calling aloud. At length Jacob appeared on the other side, and knowing the Laird, he turned the bridge, over which Dymock walked with sullen pride. "I would see your master, where is he?" said the Laird, as soon as he got into the court. The eye of the dwarf directed that of Dymock to the window of a small room in a higher part of the keep, and the Laird, without waiting further permission, walked forward into the Tower. It gave him pain to see all the old and well remembered objects again; but it also gave him pleasure to find everything in its place as he had left it--even the very dust on the mouldings and cornices, which had remained undisturbed through the reign of Mrs. Margaret, from the absolute impossibility of reaching the lofty site of these depositions, was still there. Not an article of new furniture was added, while the old furniture looked more miserable and scanty, on account of some of the best pieces having been taken out to fill the cottage. Dymock walked through the old circular hall, the ground-floor of the Tower, and went up the stairs to the room where Mrs. Margaret used to sit and darn in solitary state; there was the oriel window, which hanging over the moat, commanded a glorious view on three sides. Dymock walked up to this window, and stood in the oriel, endeavouring, if possible, to understand what the feelings of his ancestors might have been, when they could look from thence, and call all the lands their own as far as the border, without counting many broader and fairer fields, in the southern direction. Whilst waiting there in deep and melancholy mood, suddenly his eye fell on the airy figure of Tamar standing on the opposite side of the moat, and looking up to him; as soon as she caught his eye, she kissed her hand and waved it to him, and well he could comprehend the sparkling smile which accompanied this motion, though he was too far off to see it. "And art thou not fair Maid of Judah," said the affectionate genius, "worth to me all the broad lands of my fathers? Could they purchase for me such love as thine? Art thou not the little ewe lamb of the poor man?--but none shall ever have thee from me my daughter, but one entirely worthy of thee?" Scarcely had Dymock returned the courtesy of Tamar, before Jacob, who had run to the top of the Tower before him, came to tell him that his master was ready to see him, and Dymock, who needed no guide, soon found himself at the head of several more rounds of stairs, which got narrower as they ascended,--and in front of a narrow door well studded with knobs of iron. Within this door was a room, which in time past had been used for security, either for prisoners, treasures, or other purposes,--tradition said not what,--but it still had every requisite of strength, the narrow windows being provided with stauncheons of iron, and the walls covered with strong wainscotting, in one side of which were sliding pannels opening into a closet. The secret of these pannels was known only to Dymock, and he, when he sold the castle, had revealed it to Mr. Salmon, vaunting the great service of which this secret closet, had been, in keeping plate and other valuables, though he acknowledged, poor man, that he had never made any great use of this mysterious conservatory. It seems that Mr. Salmon had appropriated this same room to his especial use; his bed, which in the French taste was covered with a tent-like tester, occupied one nook, and the curtains, as well as the floor-cloth, were of very rich, but tarnished and threadbare materials. Several ponderous tomes in vellum emblazoned with gold, were placed on a ledge of the wall near the bed; a square table, a trunk strongly clamped with brass, and an old fashioned easy chair, completed the furniture. And now for the first time Dymock saw Mr. Salmon in his deshabille. The old gentleman had laid aside his coat, probably that it might be spared unnecessary wear and tear; he wore a claret coloured waistcoat with large flaps, on which were apparent certain tarnished remains of embroidery; his lower extremities, as far as the knees, were encased in a texture the colour of which had once been pepper and salt, and from the knee downwards he wore a pair of home-manufactured, grey worsted stockings, which proved that his housekeeper was by no means inferior to Mrs. Margaret in her darning talents, though we must do the Laird's aunt the justice to assert, that she never darned stockings with more than three different colours. His slippers, both sole and upper part, had evidently at one time formed a covering of a floor, though what the original pattern and colours had been, could not now be made out. With all this quaintness of attire, the old man had the general appearance of neatness and cleanliness, and had it not been for the expression of his countenance, would have been far from ill-looking. He received Dymock with a sort of quiet civility, not unlike that which a cat assumes when she is aware of a mouse, and yet does not perceive that the moment is come to pounce upon it. Dymock drew near to the table, and accosted Mr. Salmon with his usual courteous, yet careless manner, and having apologized for coming at all on such an errand, wishing that there was no such thing as money in the world, he presented the inconclusive and inefficient memorandum, which the old gentleman had given him, "trusting, as he said, that it would be no inconvenience for him to pay what he conceived would be a mere trifle to him." Mr. Salmon had, it seems, forgotten to ask Dymock to sit down; indeed, there was no chair in the room but that occupied by his own person; however, he took his own note from the Laird's hands, and having examined it, he said, "But Mr. Dymock, there are conditions,--the memorandum is conditional, and I understand thereby, that I undertake to pay such and such moneys for such and such articles." "Well Sir, and have you not these articles in possession?" asked Dymock; have I removed a single item, which I told you on the honour of a gentleman should be yours on such and such conditions, and did you not tell me that you would pay me a certain sum, on entering into possession of these articles?" "What I did say, Sir," replied the old man, "is one thing; or rather what you choose to assert that I did say, and what is written here is another thing." "Sir!" replied Dymock, "Sir! do you give me the lie?--direct or indirect, I will not bear it; I, a son of the house of Dymock, to be thus bearded in my own Tower, to be told that what I choose to assert may not be true; that I am, in fact, a deceiver,--a sharper,--one that would prevaricate for sordid pelf!" What more the worthy man added, our history does not say, but that he added much cannot be disputed, and that he poured forth in high and honourable indignation, many sentiments which would have done credit both to the gentleman and the Christian. [Illustration: See Page 123] In the meantime the old man had drawn a huge bunch of keys from his pocket, and had deliberately opened the trunk before mentioned, at the top of which were sundry yellow canvass bags of specie; he next fitted a pair of spectacles on his nose, and then raising the cover of the table, he drew out a drawer containing a pair of scales, and began to weigh his guineas, as if to make a show of that of which he had none,--honesty; and the Laird having spent his indignation, was become quiet, and stood looking on, in a somewhat indolent and slouching attitude, making no question but that his honourable reasonings had prevailed, and that Mr. Salmon was about, without further hesitation, to pay him the five hundred and ninety-four pounds, ten shillings, and sixpence, which were his just due. Whilst Salmon went on with this process of weighing, which he did with perfect _sang-froid_, he began to mutter, "Five hundred and ninety-four pounds, ten shillings, and six-pence; too much, too much by half, for worm-eaten bed-steads and chairs, darned curtains and faded portraits; but Mr. Dymock, to show you that I am a man of honour, I will pay you at this moment four hundred pounds in the King's gold, and the remainder, that is, the one hundred and ninety-four pounds, ten shillings, and six-pence, shall be put to arbitration; we will go over each item, you and I, and a friend of each, and we will examine every article together, and if it is decided that the things are worth the moneys, well and good, it shall be so, and I will forthwith pay down the residue, though not compelled so to do by bond or signature." Again the hot blood of the Dymocks rose to the brow of the Laird; by an amazing effort of prudence and presence of mind, however, he caught up Salmon's note from the table, a motion which made the old man start, look up, and turn yellow, and then whisking round on his heel, with an expression of sovereign contempt, the Laird turned out of the room, exclaiming, "I scorn to address another word to thee, old deceiver; I shake the dust of thy floor from my foot; I shall send those to talk with thee, whose business it is to deal with deceivers;" and thus he quitted the chamber, drawing the door after him with a force which made every chamber in the Tower reverberate. In descending the spiral stairs, he came to a narrow window, which overlooked the moat, and from thence he saw Tamar lingering on the other side thereof. He stood a moment and she called to him; her words were these,--"Have you sped?" in reply to which, protruding his head through the narrow aperture, he said: "No! the man's a low and despicable deceiver," adding other terms which were by no means measured by the rules of prudence or even courtesy; these words were not, however, lost on Tamar, and by what she then heard, she was induced to take a measure which had she deliberated longer thereon, she might not have ventured upon. Dymock having spent his breath and his indignation through the window, to the disturbance of sundry bats and daws, which resided in the roof of the Tower, was become so calm that he made the rest of his descent in his usually tranquil and sluggish style, and even before he had crossed the court towards the draw-bridge, he had made up his mind to get Shanty to settle this knotty business, feeling that the old blacksmith would have been the proper person to have done it from the first. Jacob, the ugly, ill-conditioned serving-man, was waiting to turn the light bridge, and had Dymock looked upon him, he would have seen that there was triumph on the features of this deformed animal, for Jacob was in all his master's secrets; he knew that he meant to cheat the Laird, and he being Salmon's foster brother, already counted upon his master's riches as his own. Salmon's constitution was failing rapidly, and Jacob, therefore, soon hoped to gather in his golden harvest. Jacob too, hated every creature about him, and his hatred being inherited from his parents, was likely to be coeval with his life. The cause of this hatred will be seen in the sequel; but Jacob had no sooner turned the bridge and fixed it against the opposite bank, than Tamar springing from behind a cluster of bushes, jumped lightly on the boards, and the next moment she was with Dymock and Jacob on the inner side of the moat, under the tower. Jacob had started back, as if he had seen a spectre, at the appearance of the blooming, sparkling Tamar, who came forward without hat or other head dress, her raven tresses floating in the breeze. "Why are you here, my daughter?" said Dymock. "Do not restrain me, dear father," she answered, "you have not sped you say, only permit me to try my skill;" and then turning suddenly to Jacob, she drew herself up, as Dymock would have said, like a daughter of kings, and added, "show me to your master, I have business with him; go and tell him that I am here, and that I would see him." "And who are you?" asked Jacob, not insolently as was his wont, but as if under the impression of some kind of awe; "who shall I say you are?" Dymock was about to answer; but Tamar placed her hand playfully on his lips, and took no other notice of the question of the serving man, but by repeating her command. "What are you doing,--what do you propose to do, Tamar?" said the Laird. Tamar was fully aware that she had power to cause her patron at any time, to yield to her caprices; and she now used this power, as women know so well how to effect these things--not by reason--or persuasion, but by those playful manoeuvrings, which used in an evil cause have wrought the ruin of many a more steadfast character than Dymock. "I have a thought dear father," she said, "a wish, a fancy, a mere whim, and you shall not oppose me: only remain where you are; keep guard upon the bridge, I shall not be absent long, only tell me how it has happened that your errand here has failed, and you," she added, addressing Jacob, "go to your master and tell him I am here." "Why do you stand?" she added, stamping her little foot with impatience; "why do you not obey me?" and her dark eyes flashed and sparkled, "go and tell your master that I wish to see him." "And who must I tell him that you are?" he asked. "My name has been mentioned in your presence," she replied, "and if you did not hear it the fault is your own; it will not be told again." "Are you the daughter of this gentleman?" asked Jacob. "You have heard what he called me," she answered, "go and deliver my message." Whilst Jacob was gone, for go he did, at the young girl's bidding, Dymock told Tamar all that had taken place in Mr. Salmon's room, and Tamar confessed her wish to be permitted to speak to the old gentleman herself. Dymock was glad that any one should undertake this business, provided he could be relieved from it, and he promised Tamar that he would stand by the bridge and watch for her till her return. "Then I will myself go up to the Tower and demand admission:" so saying, she ran from Dymock, coursed rapidly through the various courts, and swift as the wind ascended the stairs, meeting no one in her way. She found the door of Salmon's chamber ajar, and pushing it open, she entered, and stood before Salmon, Jacob, and Rebecca (the old woman before mentioned as having come with Mr. Salmon to the Tower;) these three were all deep in consultation, Mr. Salmon being still seated where the Laird had left him. As Tamar burst upon them in all the light of youth; of beauty, and of conscious rectitude in the cause for which she came, the three remained fixed as statues, Jacob and Rebecca in shrinking attitudes, their eyes set fearfully upon her, their faces gathering paleness as they gazed; whilst Salmon flushed to the brow, his eyes distended and his mouth half open. The young girl advanced near to the centre of the room and casting a glance around her, in which might be read an expression of contempt quite free from fear, she said, "I am come by authority to receive the just dues of the late possessor of this place, and I require the sum to be told into my hand, and this I require in the name of Him who rules on high, and who will assuredly take cognizance of any act of fraud used towards a good and honourable man." "And who? and who?" said Salmon, his teeth actually chattering "who are you? and whence come you?" "I come from the Laird of Dymock," she answered, "and in his name I demand his rights!" "You, you," said Salmon, "you are his daughter?" "That remains to be told," replied Tamar, "what or who I am, is nothing to you, nor to you, nor you," she added, looking at Jacob and Rebecca, her eye being arrested for a minute on each, by the singular expression which passed over their countenances. "Give me the Laird's dues and you shall hear no more from me," she said, "never again will I come to trouble your dulness; but, if you deny it to me, you shall never rest from me;--no, no, I will haunt you day and night," and getting hotter as she continued to speak, "you shall have no rest from me, neither moat nor stone walls shall keep me out." She was thinking at that moment of the secret passage by which she fancied she might get into the Tower, if at this time she did not succeed; it was a wild and girlish scheme, and whether practicable or not, she had no time to think. As she uttered these last words, Salmon rose slowly from his seat, pushed his chair from behind him and stepped back, a livid paleness covering his features whilst he exclaimed: "Are you in life? or are you a terrible vision of my fancy? Jacob,--Rebecca,--do you see it too--Ah! you look pale, as those who see the dead--is it not so?" The terror now expressed in the three countenances, was rapidly extending to the heart of Tamar. What can all this mean, she thought, what is there about me that thus appals them: it is their own guilt that renders them fearful; but why should I fear? now is the moment for strength of heart, and may heaven grant it to me. Having strength given her; she again demanded the just due of her guardian. "It would be better to give it," muttered Jacob; and Rebecca at the same time screached out, "In the name of our father Abraham, give her what she asks, master,--and let her go,--let her go to her father,--to him that has reared her, and yet disowns her,--let her go to him; or like the daughters of Moab she will bring a curse on our house." "Hold your tongue, you old fool," said Jacob, "what do you know of her, and of him who was once Laird of Dymock? But, master," he added "pay the girl what she asks, and I will go down and get back your note, and once for all we will shut our doors upon these people." "But I would know," said Salmon, "I would know whence that girl has those eyes, which are bright as the bride of Solomon,--as Rachel's," he added, "they are such as hers." "Go to," said Jacob, "what folly is this, tell the money to the girl, and let her go." "Jacob! Jacob!" exclaimed Salmon, "I am ruined, undone, I shall come to beggary,--five hundred and ninty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence," and the teeth of the old man began to chatter, terror and dotage and cunning, seeming to be striving within him for the mastery and altogether depriving him of the power of acting. Jacob muttered one or two indistinct imprecations, then approaching the table himself, he told the gold from the bags with the facility of a money-changer, whilst Tamar stood calmly watching him; but the serving man finding the weight too great for her, he exchanged much of the gold, for Bank of England notes, which he took out of the same trunk, and then delivering the sum into Tamar's hands; "There young woman, go," he said, "and never again disturb my master with your presence." Whilst this was going on, Salmon had kept his eyes fixed on Tamar, and once or twice had gasped as if for breath; at length he said, "And you are Dymock's daughter, damsel, but you are not like your father's people,--are they not Nazarenes; tell me what was she who bore you?" "Beshrew you," exclaimed Jacob, "what is all this to you," and roughly seizing Tamar by the arm, he drew her out of the room, saying, "you have all you want, go down to your father, and let us see you no more." The young girl almost doubted as she descended the stairs, but that still she was over-reached, and if so, that Dymock would not perhaps find it out till it might be too late; she therefore, hearing Jacob behind her, ran with all her might, and coming to the place where Dymock stood, she called to him to follow her, and ran directly to Shanty's shed; Dymock proceeded after her a few yards behind, and Jacob still farther in the rear, crying "Laird, stop! stop! Mr. Dymock! give us your release, here is a paper for you to sign." Fortunately, Tamar found Shanty alone in his shed, and taking him into his inner room, she caused him to count and examine the money and thus was he occupied when Dymock and Jacob came in. Tamar went back to the outer room of the shed; but Shanty remained within, and when he found that all was right, Mr. Dymock gave his release. Jacob returned to the Tower, and old Shanty trotted off to Hexham, to put the money in a place of security; nor did he fail in his object, so that before he slept, the Laird had the satisfaction to think that this dirty work was all completed, and that without his having in the least soiled his own hands in the process. As to the mystery of Tamar's having been enabled to effect what he could not do, he soon settled that matter in his own mind, for, thought he, "if I the Laird of Dymock could never refuse a favour asked me by this maid of Judah, how could inferior minds be expected to withstand her influence?"--the poor Laird not considering that the very inferiority and coarseness of such minds as he attributed to Salmon and Jacob, would have prevented them from feeling that influence, which he had found so powerful. But they had felt something, which certainly belonged to Tamar, and had yielded to that something; nor could Tamar herself, when she reflected upon that scene in the Tower, at all comprehend how she had excited such emotions as she witnessed there; neither could Shanty, nor Mrs. Margaret help her out. Again for another month, all went on in its usual routine; all was quiet at Dymock's Tower, and darning, writing, and hammering, continued to be the order of the day with Mrs. Margaret, the Laird, and Shanty, whilst Tamar was all gay and happy in the fulfilment of many active duties, rising with the lark, and brushing the dew from the frequent herbs which encompassed her dwelling. It was all summer with her then, nor did she spoil the present by anticipation of the severities of a wintery day, for the work of grace was going on with her, and though her natural temper was lofty and violent, as appeared by her manner to Jacob on the occasion lately described, yet there was a higher principle imparted, which rendered these out-breakings every day more rare. We have said before, that Mrs. Margaret had a favourite cow, named by her mistress, Brindle, from the colours of her coat. Tamar had learned to milk Brindle, and this was always her first work. One morning in the beginning of August, it happened, or rather, was so ordered by Providence, that the Laird was constrained through the extreme activity of his imagination, which had prevented him from sleeping after midnight, to arise and go down to his study in order to put these valuable suggestions on paper. It was, however, still so dark when he descended into his study, that he was compelled to sit down awhile in his great chair, to await the break of day; and there that happened to him, which might as well have happened in bed,--that is he fell asleep, and slept soundly for some hours. All this, however, had not been done so quietly, but that he had awakened his sister and Tamar, who slept in the adjoining room; the consequence of which was, that Tamar got up and dressed herself, and having ascertained the situation of the Laird, and informed Mrs. Margaret that all was well in that quarter, she descended again into the kitchen, and proceeded to open the house-door. The shades of night were as yet not dispersed, although the morning faintly dawned on the horizon; but the air was soft, fragrant, and elastic, and as it filled the chest of Tamar, it seemed to inspire her with that sort of feeling, which makes young things whirl, and prance, and run, and leap, and perform all those antics which seem to speak of naught but folly to all the sober and discreet elders, who have forgotten that they were ever young. Almost intoxicated with this feeling inspired by the morning air, Tamar bounded from the step of the door, and ran a considerable way, first along the bottom of the glen, and then in a parallel line on the green side thereof; suddenly coming to a stand, she looked for Brindle, and could not at first discern her; a minute afterwards, however, she saw her at the higher end of the glen, just where it opened on the moor, and where it had hitherto been protected from the inroads of the sheep, or other creatures feeding on the common, by a rail and gate. This rail and gate had wanted a little repair for several weeks, the Laird having promised to give it that repair; and he was well able so to have done, having at one time of his life worked several months with the village carpenter. But the good man had not fulfilled his promise, and it had only been the evening before that Tamar had tied up the gate with what came nearest to her hand, namely, certain tendrils of a creeper which hung thereabouts from the rock that formed the chasm by which the valley was approached in that direction. These tendrils she had twisted together so as to form a band, never supposing that Brindle, though a young and female creature, could possibly be sufficiently capricious to leave her usual fragrant pasturage, in order to pull and nibble this withering band. But, however, so it was, as Tamar asserted, for there when she came up to the place, the band was broken, the gate forced open, and Brindle walking quietly forward through the narrow gully towards the moor. Tamar being come to the gate, stopped there, and called Brindle, who knew Tamar as well as she knew her own calf. But the animal had snuffed the air of liberty which came pouring down the little pass, from the open moor, and she walked deliberately on with that air which seemed to say,--"I hear your voice, but I am not coming." Tamar was provoked; had it been a human creature who was thus acting she might perhaps have recollected that it is not good to give way to anger; as it was, she made no such reflection, but exclaiming in strong terms against the creature, she began to run, knowing that if Brindle once got on the moor it would probably cost her many a weary step before she could get her back again. In measure however, as she quickened her pace, so did Brindle, and in a few minutes the truant animal had reached the open moor and began to career away in high style, as if rejoicing in the trouble she was giving. But even on the open moor it was yet very dusk; the dawn was hardly visible on the summits of the distant hills, and where there were woods or valleys the blackness was unbroken. Tamar stood almost in despair, when she found that the animal had reached the open ground; but whilst watching how she could get round her, so as to turn her back, the creature rather slackened her pace, and began to browze the short grass among the heather. Tamar now slowly advancing was taking a compass to come towards her head, when she, perceiving her, turned directly round, and trotted on straightforward to the knoll, which was at most not half a quarter of a mile from the dingle; Tamar followed her, but could not reach her till she had pushed her way in among the trees and bushes, and when Tamar reached the place, she found her quietly feeding in the green area, surrounded by the ruins. The light was still very imperfect, and Tamar was standing half hid by the bushes and huge blocks of granite, doubting whether she should not leave the cow there whilst she ran back to call the Laird to assist her, when suddenly she was startled by the sound of voices. She drew closer behind the block, and remained perfectly still, and ceased to think of the cow, so great was her amazement to find persons in a place, generally deserted by the country people, under the impression that things were there which should not be spoken of. She then also remembered her adventure with Sappho, and what Mrs. Margaret had told her of the concealed passage; and now recollecting that secret passage, she was aware that she stood not very far from the mysterious door-way. All these thoughts crowded to her mind, but perfect quiet was needful at the moment. As the disk of the sun approached the horizon, the light was rapidly increasing; the dawn in those higher latitudes is however long, but those who knew the signs of the morning were aware that it would soon terminate, and that they whose deeds feared the light had no time to lose. Tamar accordingly heard low voices, speaking, as it were in the mouth of the cavern, and then a voice of one without the cavern--of one as in the act of departing, saying distinctly, "twelve then at midnight!" The answer from within did not reach Tamar's ears, at least, she heard only an indistinct murmur, but the voice without again came clear to her, and the words were to this effect, "I will not fail; I will take care that he shall be in no condition to return;" the answer was again lost to Tamar, and probably some question, but the reply to this question was clear. "It is his day to go,--the garrison can't live without provision,--if he don't go to-day, we must skulk another twenty-four hours,--we must not venture with him, there will be murder!" then followed several sentences in such broad slang, as Tamar could not comprehend, though she thought she understood the tendency of these words, which were mixed with oaths and terms so brutal, that her blood ran cold in thinking of them; "Caught in his own snare,--he will sink in his own dyke,--we have him now, pelf and all." After this, Tamar heard parting steps, and various low rumbling noises as if proceeding from under ground; then all was still, and no farther sound was heard by her, but the rustling of leaves, the chirping of birds, and the cropping of the herb by the incisors of Brindle. In the mean time the morning broke, the light of day was restored, and Tamar creeping gently from her hiding-place, left Brindle, whilst she ran back to the cottage. She had not gone far, before she met the labourer who was accustomed to assist her in the care of the garden. She told him that the cow had strayed to the knoll, and that she had seen her enter among the trees; and he undertook, with his dog, to drive her back to the glen, though, he said, he would on no account go up on the knoll, but his dog would drive her down, and he would see her home. "And why not go on to the knoll?" said Tamar. The man replied, that the place was known to be uncanny, and that not only strange noises, but strange sights had been seen there. "Lately?" asked Tamar, "have they been seen and heard lately?" The poor man could not assert that they had, and Tamar was not going to tell him what she had seen and heard. No! this mystery was to be left for the consideration of Dymock and Shanty, and she was anxious to know if their thoughts agreed with hers. When she arrived at the cottage, and the labourer had brought back Brindle, and fastened the gate, and Tamar had milked her cow, and done her usual services, she went to Dymock who was just awake, and brought him out to breakfast with Mrs. Margaret, "You shall not say any thing about posterity, and the benefits which you are doing to them by recording your thoughts, this morning, sir," she said, "but you shall hear what I have to tell you, and I will not tell you, but in the presence of Mrs. Margaret." When Dymock heard what Tamar had to say, he was at first quite amazed, for it seems, that if he had ever heard of the secret passage he had forgotten it, and Mrs. Margaret had had her reasons, for not stirring up his recollections; but when he was made acquainted with this fact, and had put together all that Tamar had related, he made the same reflections which she had done, and said that he had no doubt, but that these ruins had been the rendezvous of vagrants for years, and that there was now a plan to rob Mr. Salmon, through the means of the secret passage. He went further, for he had no lack of imagination, and proceeded to conjecture, that it was through the manoeuvreing of these very vagrants, that the old curmudgeon had been brought to Dymock's Tower, and following the connexion, he began to put together the appearance of the young blacksmith, the gipsy who had left Tamar at Shanty's, her second appearance and rapid disappearance, the coming of Mr. Salmon, his supposed riches, his strange whim of shutting himself up, and every other extraordinary circumstance, in a jumble even more inexplicable and confusing, than any of his previous speculations upon these events,--and when he had so done he put on his hat, and declared that he must go forthwith to Shanty. "To see," said Tamar, "what he can hammer out of it all, but something must and ought to be done to put Mr. Salmon on his guard, for otherwise, assuredly he will be robbed this night." "And perhaps murdered," exclaimed Mrs. Margaret; "but go, brother, be quick, and let us have Shanty's advice." "And I," said Tamar, after the Laird was departed, "will go to the Tower, and if possible get admittance. I will stop the going off of Jacob." Mrs. Margaret expostulated with her, but all her pleadings came to this,--that she should send a neighbour to watch for Tamar on the side of the moat, the young girl having assured her kind protectress, that she had nothing to fear for her, and that as the Laird was proverbially a procrastinator, he might let half the day pass, before he had settled what was to be done. Poor Mrs. Margaret was all tremor and agitation; at the bottom of her heart, she did not like to be left in the cottage, so near a gang of thieves as she felt herself to be; she was not, however, a selfish character, and after some tears, she kissed Tamar and bade her go, watching her the whole way through the glen, as if she were parting with her for years. The light step of the young girl, soon brought her to the edge of the moat, and she arrived, as it was ordered by Providence, at a very convenient time, for she met Rebecca on the moor, the old woman having just parted from Jacob, whose figure was still to be seen jogging along the heath. The first words of Tamar were to entreat Rebecca to call Jacob back, and when she found that she was speaking to one who chose to lend a deaf ear, she raised her own voice, but with equal ill success; turning then again to Rebecca, she saw that she was hastening to the bridge, on which she followed her, and was standing with her under the Tower, before the old woman could recollect herself. The creature looked yellow with spite, as she addressed the young maiden with many bitter expressions, asking her what she did there, and bidding her to be gone. "I am come," replied Tamar, "to see your master, and I will see him." "It is what you never shall again," replied the dame; "he has never been himself since he last saw you." "How is that?" said Tamar; "What did I do, but press him to act as an honourable man, but of this I am resolved," she added, "that I will now see him again," and as she spoke, she proceeded through the postern into the courts, still passing on towards the principal door of the Tower, Rebecca following her, and pouring upon her no measured abuse. Tamar, however, remarked, that the old woman lowered her voice as they advanced nearer the house, on which she raised her own tones, and said, "I must, and will see Mr. Salmon, it is a matter of life and death I come upon;--life and death I repeat, and if you or your master, have any thing on your minds or consciences, you will do well to hear what I have to tell you; a few hours hence and it will be too late." "In that case," said Rebecca, looking at one angry and terrified, "come with me, and I will hear you." "No," exclaimed Tamar, speaking loud, "I will see your master, my errand is to him," and at the same instant, the quick eye of the young girl, observed the face of Salmon peering through a loop-hole, fitted with a casement, which gave light to a closet near the entrance. Encouraged by this she spoke again, and still louder than before, saying, "See him I will, and from me alone, shall he hear the news I am come to tell." The next minute she heard the casement open, and saw the head of the old man obtruded from thence, and she heard a querulous, broken voice, asking what was the matter? Tamar stepped back a few paces, in order that she might have a clearer view of the speaker, and then looking up, she said, "I am come Mr. Salmon as a friend, and only as a friend, to warn you of a danger which threatens you,--hear me, and you may be saved,--but if you refuse to hear me, I tell you, that you may be a ghastly livid corpse before the morning." "Rebecca, Rebecca!" cried the old man, "Rebecca, I say, speak to her," and his voice faltered, the accents becoming puling. "Hear her not," said the dame, "she is a deceiver, she is come to get money out of you." "And heaven knows," cried Mr. Salmon, "that she is then coming to gather fruit from a barren tree. Money, indeed! and where am I to find money, even for her,--though she come in such a guise, as would wring the last drop of the heart's blood?" "Tush!" said Rebecca, "you are rambling and dreaming again;" but the old man heard her not, he had left the lattice, and in a few seconds he appeared within the passage. During this interval, Rebecca had not been quiet, for she had seized the arm of Tamar, and the young girl had shaken her off with some difficulty, and not without saying, "Your unwillingness to permit me to speak to your master, old woman, goes against you, but it shall not avail you, speak to him I will," and the contest between Tamar and the old woman was still proceeding, when Salmon appeared in the passage. Tamar instantly sprang to meet him, and seeing that his step was feeble and tottering, she supported him to a chair, in a small parlour which opened into the passage, and there, standing in the midst of the floor between him and Rebecca, she told her errand; nor was she interrupted until she had told all, the old man looking as if her recital had turned him into stone, and the old woman expressing a degree of terror, which at least cleared her in Tamar's mind, of the guilt of being connected with the thieves of the secret passage. As soon as the young girl had finished, the old miser broke out in the most bitter and helpless lamentations. "My jewels!--my silver!--my moneys!" he exclaimed, "Oh my moneys!--my moneys! Tell me, tell me damsel, what I can do? Call Jacob. Where is Jacob? Oh, my moneys!--my jewels!" "Peace, good sir! peace!" said Tamar, "we will befriend you, we will assist you, we will protect you; the Laird is an honourable man, he will protect you. I have known him long, long,--since I was a baby; and he would perish before he would wrong any one, or see another wronged." "The Laird did you say," asked Salmon, "your father; he is your father damsel is he not?" "I have no other," replied Tamar, "I never knew another. Why do you ask me?" "Because," said Rebecca, "he is doting, and thinks more of other people's concerns than his own." "Has he ever lost a daughter?" asked Tamar. "He lost a wife in her youth," answered the old woman, "and he was almost in his dotage when he married her, and he fancies because you have black hair, that you resemble her; but there is no more likeness between you two, than there is between a hooded crow and a raven." "There is more though, there is much more though," muttered the old man, "and Jacob saw it too, and owned that he did." "The fool!" repeated Rebecca, "the fool! did I not tell him that he was feeding your poor mind with follies; tell me, how should this poor girl be like your wife?" The old man shook his head, and answered, "Because, he that made them both, fashioned them to be so; and Rebecca, I have been thinking that had my daughter lived, had Jessica lived till now, she would have been just such a one." "Preserve you in your senses, master," exclaimed Rebecca, "such as they are, they are better than none; but had your daughter lived, she would have been as unlike this damsel as you ever were to your bright browed wife. Why you are short and shrivelled, so was your daughter; your features are sharp, and so were hers; she was ever a poor pining thing, and when I laid her in her grave beside her mother, it was a corpse to frighten one; it was well for you, as I ever told you, that she died as soon." "Yet had she lived, I might have had a thing to love," replied the old man; and then, looking at Tamar, he added, "They tell me you are the Laird's daughter,--is it so, fair maid?" Rebecca again interrupted him. "What folly is this," she said, raising her voice almost to a shriek, "how know you but that, whilst you are questioning the damsel, your chests and coffers are in the hands of robbers; your money, I tell you, is in danger: your gold, your oft-told gold. You were not wont to be so careless of your gold; up and look after it. You will be reduced to beg your bread from those you hate; arise, be strong. Where are your keys? Give them to the damsel; she is young and active; she will swiftly remove the treasure out of the way. Can you not trust her? See you not the fair guise in which she comes? Can you suspect a creature who looks like your wife, like Rachel? Is not her tale well framed; and are you, or are you not deceived by her fair seemings? She is the daughter of a beggar, and she knows herself to be such; and there is no doubt but that she has her ends to answer by giving this alarm." The old man had arisen; he looked hither and thither; he felt for his keys, which were hanging at his girdle; and then, falling back into his chair, he uttered one deep groan and became insensible, his whole complexion turning to a livid paleness. "He is dying!" exclaimed Tamar, holding him up in his chair, from which he would have otherwise fallen. "He is dying, the poor old man is dying; bring water, anything." "He has often been in this way since he came here," replied Rebecca. "We have thought that he has had a stroke; he is not the man he was a few months since; and had I known how it would be, it is strange but I would have found means to hinder his coming." "If he were ever so before," said Tamar "why did you work him up, and talk to him, as you did, about his daughter; but, fetch some water," she added. "I shall not leave him with you," answered Rebecca. "Nor shall I abandon him to your tender mercies," replied Tamar, "whilst he is in this condition. I am not his daughter, it is true,--but he is a feeble old man, and I will befriend him if I can." The old gentleman at this moment fell forward with such weight, that Tamar ran from behind him, and dropping down on her knees, received his head on her shoulder, then, putting one arm round him, she was glad to hear a long, deep sigh, the prelude of his returning to partial consciousness; and as he opened his eyes, he said,--"Ah, Rachel, is it you? You have been gone a long time." Tamar was at that moment alone with the old man. Rebecca had heard voices at a distance, and she had run to pull up the bridge. "I am not your Rachel, venerable Sir," she said; "but the adopted daughter of the Laird of Dymock," and she gently laid his head back. "Then why do you come to me like her?" said the old man. "That is wrong, it is very cruel; it is tormenting me before my time. I have not hurt you, and I will give you more gold if you will not do this again." "You rave, Sir," said Tamar. "Who do you take me for?" "A dream," he answered. "I have been dreaming again;" and he raised himself, shook his head, rubbed his hands across his eyes, and looked as usual; but before he could add another word, Dymock and Shanty entered the parlour. Rebecca had been too late in preventing their crossing the bridge, and they with some difficulty made the old gentleman understand that if he had any valuables, they must ascertain whether the place in which they were kept was any way approachable by the cavern. They also told him that they had taken means to have the exterior mouth of the cavern upon the knoll, stopped up, after the gang were in it; that they had provided a considerable force for this purpose; and that they should bring in men within the Tower to seize the depredators. Dymock then requested Tamar to return to Mrs. Margaret, and remain quietly with her; and when she was gone, the bridge was drawn up, and she went back to the cottage. She had much to tell Mrs. Margaret, and long, very long,--after they had discussed many times the singular scene between Salmon, Rebecca, and Tamar, and spoken of what might be the plans of Dymock and Shanty for securing the Tower,--did the remainder of the day appear to them. Several times they climbed to the edge of the glen, to observe if aught was stirring; but all was still as usual. There stood the old Tower in solemn, silent unconsciousness of what might soon pass within it; and there was the knoll, looking as green and fresh as it was ever wont to do. At sun-set Tamar and Mrs. Margaret again visited this post of observation, and again after they had supped at eight o'clock. They then returned and shut their doors; they made up their fires; and whilst Tamar plied her needle, Mrs. Margaret told many ancient tales and dismal predictions of secret murders, corpse-candles, and visions of second-sight, after which, as midnight approached, they became more restless and anxious respecting their friends, wondering what they would do, and expressing their hopes, or their fears, in dark sentences, such as these:--"We trust no blood may be shed!--if there should be blood!--if Dymock or poor Shanty should be hurt!" Again, they turned to form many conjectures, and put many things together:--"Was Mr. Salmon connected with the gipsies who had brought Tamar to the moor?--Was it this gang that proposed robbing him?--Was the young blacksmith called Harefoot connected with the gipsy?--Had he persuaded Salmon to bring his treasures there, in order that he might pilfer them?--And lastly, wherefore was Mr. Salmon so affected both times he had seen Tamar?" Here, indeed, was a subject for conjecture, which lasted some hours, and beguiled the sense of anxiety. At length the morning began to dawn on that long night, and Tamar went out to milk Brindle, whose caprices had, in fact, the day before, been the first mover in all this confusion. Cows must be milked, even were the master of the family dying; and Tamar wished to have this task over before any message should come from the Tower; and scarcely had she returned to the cottage, when the lad who administered the wind to Shanty's forge, came running with such haste, that, to use his own words,--"he had no more breath left for speaking than a broken bellows." "For the love of prince Charles," he said, "can you give us any provender, Mrs. Margaret? It is cold work watching all night, with neither food nor drink, save one bottle of whiskey among ten of us, and scarce a dry crust." "But what have you done?" asked Tamar. "We have nabbed them," replied the boy. "There were four of them, besides an old woman who was taken in the cave, and they are in the Tower till we can get the magistrates here, and proper hands to see them off. They came like rats from under ground. My master had made out where to expect them, in one of the cellars, behind the great hogshead which used to be filled at the birth of the heir, and emptied at his coming of age. So we were ready in the cellar, and nabbed three of them there, and the other, who was hindmost, and the woman, were taken as they ran out the other way; and there they are in the strong-hold, that is, the four men, but the woman is up above; and it is pitiful to hear how she howls and cries, and calls for the Laird; but he fell asleep as soon as he knew all was safe, and we have not the heart to disturb him." "Well," said Mrs. Margaret, "I am most thankful that all is over without bloodshed, and my nephew asleep. No wonder, as he has not slept since twelve in the morning of yesterday." "Excepting in his chair," said Tamar. "But the provender, mistress," said the young man. "Here," replied Tamar; "lift this pail on your head, and take this loaf, and I will follow with what else I can find." "Nay, Tamar," said Mrs. Margaret, "You would not go where there is such a number of men and no woman, but that old witch Rebecca." "I am not afraid of going where my father is," replied Tamar; "but I must see that woman. I should know her immediately. I am convinced that she is the very person who brought me to Shanty's shed. She hinted at some connexion with me. Oh, horrible! may it not be possible that I may have near relations among these miserable men who are shut up in the strong-hold of the Tower?" As Tamar said these words, she burst into tears, and sunk upon the bosom of Mrs. Margaret, who, kissing her tenderly, said, "Child of my affections, of this be assured, that nothing shall separate you from me. My heart, methinks, clings more and more to you; and oh, my Tamar! that which I seem most to fear is that you should be claimed by any one who may have a right to take you from me." This was a sort of assurance at that moment requisite to the poor girl; and such, indeed, was the interest which Mrs. Margaret felt in ascertaining if this really were the woman who had brought Tamar to Shanty's, that she put on her hood and cloak, and having filled a basket from the larder, she locked the cottage door, and went with Tamar to the Tower. It was barely light when they crossed the moat, for the bridge was not drawn; and when they entered the inner-court, they found many of the peasants seated in a circle, dipping portions of the loaf in Brindle's pail. "Welcome! welcome! to your own place, Mrs. Margaret Dymock!" said one of them, "and here," he added, dipping a cup into the pail, "I drink to the restoration of the rightful heir and the good old family, and to your house-keeping, Mrs. Margaret; for things are done now in another style to what they were in your time." A general shout seconded this sentiment, and Mrs. Margaret, curtseying, and then pluming herself, answered, "I thank you, my friends, and flatter myself, that had my power been equal to my will, no hungry person should ever have departed from Dymock's Tower." The ladies were then obliged to stand and hear the whole history of the night's exploit,--told almost in as many ways as there were tongues to tell it; and whilst these relations were going forward, the sun had fairly risen above the horizon, and was gilding the jagged battlements of the Tower. Shanty was not with the party in the court, but he suddenly appeared in the door-way of the Tower. He seemed in haste and high excitement, and was about to call to any one who would hear him first, when his eye fell on Tamar and Mrs. Margaret. "Oh, there you are," he said; "I was looking for one of swift foot to bring you here. Come up this moment; you are required to be present at the confession of the gipsy wife, who is now willing to tell all, on condition that we give her her liberty. Whether this can be allowed or not, we doubt; though she did not make herself busy with the rest, but was caught as she tried to escape by the knoll." "Oh! spare her, if possible," said Tamar, "or let her escape, if you can do nothing else to save her; I beseech you spare her!" Shanty made no reply, but led the way to an upper room of the Tower, which had in old time, when there were any stores to keep, (a case which had not occurred for some years,) been occupied as a strong-hold for groceries, and other articles of the same description; and there, besides the prisoner, who stood sullenly leaning against the wall, with her arms folded, sat Dymock and Salmon,--the Laird looking all importance, his lips being compressed and his arms folded,--and old Salmon, being little better in appearance than a _caput mortuum_, so entirely was the poor creature overpowered by the rapid changes in the scenes which were enacting before him. Shanty had met Rebecca running down the stairs as he was bringing up Mrs. Margaret, and he had seized her and brought her in, saying, "Now old lady, as we are coming to a clearance, it might be just as well to burn out your dross among the rest; or may be," he added, "you may perhaps answer to the lumps of lime-stone in the furnace, not of much good in yourself, but of some service to help the smelting of that which is better,--so come along, old lady; my mind misgives me, that you have had more to do in making up this queer affair than you would have it supposed." The more Rebecca resisted, the more determined was Shanty; neither did he quit his hold of the old woman, until the whole party had entered the room, the door being shut, and his back set against it, where he kept his place, like a bar of iron in a stanchion. Chairs had been set for Mrs. Margaret and Tamar, and when they were seated Dymock informed the prisoner that she might speak. Tamar had instantly recognized her; so had Shanty; and both were violently agitated, especially the former, when she began to speak. We will not give her story exactly in her own words; for she used many terms, which, from the mixture of gipsy slang and broad Border dialect, would not be generally understood; but, being translated, her narrative stood as follows:-- She was, it seems, of gipsy blood, and had no fixed habitation, but many hiding places, one of which was the cavern or passage connected with Dymock's Tower. Another of her haunts was Norwood Common, which, every one knows, is near London, and there was a sort of head-quarters of the gang, though, as was their custom, they seldom committed depredations near their quarters. She said, that, one day being on the common, she came in front of an old, black and white house, (which was taken down not many years afterwards;) in the front thereof was a garden, and a green lawn carefully trimmed, and in that garden on a seat sat an old lady, a tall and comely dame, she said, and she was playing with a little child, who might have been a year and-a-half old. The gipsy, it seems, had asked charity through the open iron railing of the garden; and the lady had risen and approached the railing, bringing the child with her, and putting the money into the infant's hand to pass it through the railing. The vagrant had then observed the dress and ornaments of the child, that she had a necklace of coral, clasped with some sparkling stone, golden clasps in her shoes, much rich lace about her cap, and above all, golden bracelets of curious workmanship on her wrists. "She had not," said Rebecca; "she never wore those ornaments excepting on festival days." The vagrant took no notice of this remark of Rebecca's; but Shanty gave the old servant a piercing look, whilst all others present, with the exception of Salmon, felt almost fainting with impatience; but Salmon's mind seemed for the moment in such a state of obtuseness, as disabled him from catching hold of the link which was leading to that which was to interest him as much as, or even more than, any one present. The gipsy went on to say, that her cupidity was so much excited by these ornaments, that she fixed her eye immediately on the family, and resolved, if possible, to get possession of the child. She first inquired respecting the family, and learned, that the house was occupied by a widow lady, who had with her an only daughter, a married woman; that the child she had seen belonged to that daughter; and that the husband was abroad, and was a Jew, supposed to be immensely rich. "I knew it," said Dymock, turning round and snapping his fingers; "I hammered it out, Master Shanty, sooner than you did; I knew the physiognomy of a daughter of Zion at the very first glance; you, too, must never talk again of your penetration, Aunt Margaret," and the good man actually danced about the room; but Shanty on one side, and Aunt Margaret on the other, seized him by an arm, and forced him again upon his chair, entreating him to be still; whilst Salmon roused himself in his seat, shook off, or tried to shake off his confusion, and fixed his eyes stedfastly on the vagrant. The woman then went on to describe the means by which she had got a sort of footing in this house; how she first discovered the back-door, and under what pretences she invited the servants to enter into a sort of concert with her for their mutual emolument, they bartering hare-skins, kitchen grease, cold meat, &c., for lace, tapes, thread, ballads, and other small matters. "The thieves?" cried Salmon; but no one noticed him. "There were only two servants in the house," said the gipsy; "there might be others, but I saw them not, and one of those now stands here;" and she fixed her eagle eye on Rebecca; "the other is Jacob." "Jacob and Rebecca!" exclaimed Salmon; "it was my house, then, that you were robbing, and my servants whom you were tampering with." "Go on," said Dymock to the vagrant, whose story then proceeded to this effect:-- She had visited the offices of this house several times; when, coming one evening by appointment of the servants, with some view to bartering the master's goods with her own wares, she found the family in terrible alarm, she had come as she said, just at the crisis in which a soul had parted, and it was the soul of that same old lady who had been playing with the infant on the grass-plot. Rebecca was wailing and groaning in the kitchen, for she needed help to streak the corpse, and the family had lived so close and solitary, that she knew of no one at hand to whom to apply, and she feared that the dead would become stark and cold, before she could find help; Jacob was not within, he had gone to London, to fetch a Doctor of their own creed, and was not likely to be back for some time. "And why? said I," continued the vagrant, "why, said I, should I not do for this service as well as another? for many and many had been the corpse which I had streaked; so she accepted my offer, and took me up to the chamber of death, and I streaked the body, and a noble corpse it was. The dame had been a comely one, as tall as that lady," pointing to Dymock's aunt, "and not unlike her." "Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. Margaret, smiling, "I understand it now;" but Dymock bade her be silent, and the vagrant went on. "So," said she, "when I had streaked the body, I said to Rebecca we must have a silver plate, for pewter will not answer the purpose." "What for?" said she. "'To fill with salt,' I answered, 'and set upon the breast.' "So she fetched me a silver plate half filled with salt, and I laid it on the corpse; 'and now,' I said, 'we must have rue and marjoram, run down and get me some;' and then I frightened her, poor fool as she was, by telling her that by the limpness of the hand of the corpse, I augured another death very soon in the house." "When I told this to Rebecca, the creature was so frightened, that away she ran, leaving me in the room with the body. Swift as thought," continued the woman, "I caught the silver dish, and was running down stairs,--it was gloaming--when I saw a door open opposite the chamber of death, and there, in the glimmering, I saw the child of the family asleep in a little crib. She had on her usual dress, with the ornaments I spoke of, and seemed to have fallen asleep before her time, as she was not undressed. I caught her up, asleep as she was, and the next moment I was out in the yard, and across the court, and through the back-door, and away over the common, and to where I knew that none would follow me, but they of my people, who would help my flight." "And the child with you," said Salmon, "did you take the child?" "More I will not tell," added the woman; "no, nor more shall any tortures force from me, unless you bind yourselves not to prosecute me,--unless you promise me my liberty." "I have told you," said the Laird, "that if you tell every thing you shall be free,--do you question my truth?" "No, Dymock," said the vagrant; "I know you to be a man of truth, and in that dependence you shall hear all." "I stripped the child of her gaudery, I wrapped her in rags, and I slung her on my back; but I did her no harm, and many a weary mile I bore her, till I came to the moor; and then, because she was a burden, and because the brand on her shoulder would assuredly identify her, if suspicion fell on me for having stolen her, I left her in the old blacksmith's shed, and there she found a better father than you would have made her; for what are you but a wicked Jew, with a heart as hard as the gold you love." The fixed, and almost stone-like attitude in which the old man stood for some moments after his understanding had admitted the information given by the vagrant, so drew the attention of all present, that there was not a sound heard in the room, every one apprehending that the next moment they should see him drop down dead, nor did any one know what was best to do next; but this moment of terror was terminated by the old man's sinking on his knees, clasping his hands, and lifting his eyes, and breaking out in a short but solemn act of thanksgiving, and then turning his head without rising, as it were looking for his daughter, she sprang toward him, and threw her arms about him, whilst he still knelt. It would be difficult to describe the scene which followed: Dymock began to caper and exult, Mrs. Margaret to weep, Rebecca to utter imprecations, and Shanty to sing and whistle, as he was wont to do when hammering in his shed, and the vagrant to dare the old Jewess to deny any thing which she had said. When Dymock had assisted Tamar to lift her father into the chair, and when the old man had wept plentifully, he was again anxious to examine the case more closely; and a discussion followed, in which many things were explained and cleared up on both sides, though it was found necessary for this end, to promise Rebecca that she should be forgiven, and no vengeance taken upon her, if she should confess her part of the history. This discussion lasted long, and the substance of what was then opened to Tamar and her paternal friends was this:--Mr. Salmon was, it seems, a Polish Jew, extremely rich, and evidently very parsimonious; he had had mercantile concerns in London, and had there married, when nearly fifty years of age, a beautiful young Jewess, whose mother he had greatly benefitted, when in the most deplorable circumstances. With this lady he had gone abroad, and it was very evident that he had been a severe and jealous husband. She had brought him a daughter soon after her marriage. This child was born in Poland, Rebecca was her nurse; but Mrs. Salmon, falling into bad health immediately after the birth of the child, she implored her husband to permit her to return to England, and to her mother. Salmon saw that she was not happy with him; and the strange suspicion seized him, as there was little tie between him and his wife, that in case his own child died, she might palm another upon him,--to prevent which, he branded the babe with the figure of a palm branch, and sent her home, with Rebecca and Jacob, who were both Jews, to watch her; though there was no need, as Rachel was a simple, harmless creature. She was also in very bad health when she reached England, and scarcely survived her mother three days, and during that time hardly asked for her child; and the artful servants had contrived to make their master believe that the baby had proved a sickly deformed creature, and had died, and been buried in the coffin with its mother. Salmon was in Poland when all these horrors occurred, and there Jacob and Rebecca found him; and having now no other object, he devoted himself entirely to amassing riches, passing from one state of covetousness to another, till at length he began to fall into the dotage of avarice, which consists in laying up money for the sake of laying up, and delighting in the view of hoards of gold and precious things. With this madness in his mind, he turned much of his property into jewels, and returning to England, he began to look about for a safe place wherein he might deposit his treasures. But, as a Jew, he could not possess land; he therefore passed the form of naturalization, and whilst looking about for a situation in which he might dwell in safety, his character and circumstances became in part known to the gipsies, (who, amongst other thieves, always have their eyes on those who are supposed to carry valuables about them,) and the man called Harefoot, formed the plan of getting him and his treasures into Dymock's Tower. This Harefoot was the nephew of the woman who had brought Tamar to Shanty's; and the old miser, being tempted by the moat, and other circumstances of the place, fell into the snare which had been thus skillfully laid for him. It was not till after Salmon had come to the Tower, that the connection between Salmon and Tamar was discovered by the old woman; and it was at this time that she contrived to meet Tamar, and to convey the notion to her, that she was of a gipsy family; fearing lest she should, by any means, be led to an explanation with Salmon, before her nephew and his gang had made sure of the treasure. Harefoot had supposed that he and his gang were the only persons who knew of the secret passage; and the reason why they had not made the attempt of robbing Salmon by that passage sooner, was simply this, that Harefoot, having been detected in some small offence in some distant county, had been confined several weeks in a house of correction, from which he had not been set free many days before he came to the moor, and took upon himself the conduct of the plot for robbing Salmon. What Jacob and Rebecca's plans were did not appear, or wherefore they had not only fallen in with, but promoted the settlement of their master in the Tower; but that their object was a selfish one cannot be doubted. Had other confirmation been wanting, after the mark on Tamar's shoulder had been acknowledged, the vagrant added it, by producing a clasp of one armlet, which she had retained, and carried about with her in a leathern bag, amongst sundry other heterogeneous relics; and she accounted for having preserved it, from the fear she had of exposing a cypher wrought on a precious stone, which might, she thought, lead to detection. A dreadful hue and cry in the court below, soon after this disturbed the conference. All seemed confusion and uproar; Dymock and Shanty rushed down stairs, and aunt Margaret and Tamar ran out to the window in the nearest passage; there they learnt that the prisoners had broken the bars of their dungeon, swam the moat, and fled; and the ladies could see the peasants in pursuit, scouring over the moor, whilst those they were pursuing were scarcely visible. "I am glad of it," said Tamar, "I should rejoice in their escape, they will trouble us no more; and oh, my dear mother, I would not, that one sad heart, should now mix itself with our joyful ones!" Mrs. Margaret and Tamar stood at the window till they saw the pursuers turning back to the castle, some of them not being sorry in their hearts, at the escape of the rogues, but the most remarkable part of the story was, that whilst they had all been thus engaged, the woman had also made off, and, though probably not in company with her, that most excellent and faithful creature Rebecca, neither of whom were ever heard of again. And now none were left, but those who hoped to live and die in each other's company, but these were soon joined by the magistrates and legal powers, who had been summoned from the nearest town, together with people from all quarters, who flocked to hear and learn what was going forward; and here was an opportunity not to be lost by Dymock and Shanty, of telling the wonderful tale, and old Salmon having been recruited with some small nourishment, administered by Mrs. Margaret, presented his daughter to the whole assembly, and being admonished by Shanty, placed in her hands before them, the deed of transfer of the lands and castle of Dymock, which in fact to him, was but a drop in the ocean of his wealth. As she received this deed, she fell on one knee, and kissed her venerable father's hand, after which he raised and embraced her, paternal affection and paternal pride acting like the genial warmth of the sun, in thawing the frost of his heart and frame. She had whispered something whilst he kissed her, and as his answer had been favourable, she turned to Dymock, and now bending on both knees, she placed the deed in his hands, her sweet face at the same time being all moist with gushing tears, falling upon her adopted father's hand. Shanty in his apron and unshorn chin, explained to those about, what had been done; for they, that is the Laird, Aunt Margaret, Salmon, and Tamar, were standing on the elevated platform, at the door of the Tower: and then arose such shouts and acclamations from one and all, as made the whole castle ring again, and one voice in particular arose above the rest, crying, "Our Laird has got his own again, and blessing be on her who gave it him." "Rather bless Him," cried Shanty, "who has thus brought order out of confussion, to Him be the glory given in every present happiness, as in all that we are assured of in the future." As there were no means of regaling those present at that time, and as Mr. Salmon was then too confused to do that which he ought to have done, in rewarding those who had defended him, most of them being poor people, they were dismissed with an invitation to a future meeting at the Tower; two or three gentlemen, friends of Dymock, only being left. Much consultation then ensued, whilst Mrs. Margaret bestirred herself, to procure female assistance, and to provide the best meal, which could be had at a short notice. During this conference with the Laird and his friends, all of whom were honourable men, Mr. Salmon was induced to consent to have his treasures, his bonds, his notes and bills, consigned to such keeping as was judged most safe; neither, could these matters be settled, without a journey to town, in which Dymock accompanied him, together with a legal friend of the latter of known respectability. We do not enter into the particulars of this journey, but merely say, that Mr. Salmon in the joy, and we may add, thankfulness of recovering his child, not only permitted himself to be advised, but whilst in town made his will, by which, he left all he possessed to his daughter, and this being concluded to the satisfaction of all concerned, he returned to Dymock's Tower, laden with presents for Mrs. Margaret. Neither were Shanty's services overlooked; the cottage and land appertaining thereunto, were to be his for life, free from rent and dues, together with twenty pounds a year, in consideration of his never-varying kindness to Tamar. The old man wept, when told of what was done for him, and himself went the next day to Morpeth, to bring from thence a sister, nearly as old as himself, who was living there in hard service. And here the memorandum from which this story is derived, becomes less particular in the details. It speaks of Mr. Salmon after the various exertions he had made, (these exertions having been as it was supposed succeeded by a stroke,) sinking almost immediately into a state nearly childish, during which, however, it was a very great delight to Tamar, to perceive in the very midst of this intellectual ruin an awakening to things spiritual; so that it would seem, as if the things hidden from him in the days of human prudence and wisdom, were now made manifest to him, in the period of almost second childishness. Tamar had been enabled to imbibe the purest Christian principles, in her early youth, for which, humanly speaking, she owed much to Shanty, and she now with the assistance of the kind old man, laboured incessantly, to bring her father to the Messiah of the Christians, as the only hope and rest of his soul; and she had reason before her father died, to hope that her labours had not been without fruit. As to worldly pelf, she had it in rich abundance, but she could have little personal enjoyment of it whilst shut up with her aged father in Dymock's Tower, yet she had exquisite delight in humouring therewith, the fancies of Dymock, and administering to the more sober and benevolent plans of Mrs. Margaret; for this lady's principal delight was, to assist the needy, and her only earthly or worldly caprice, that of restoring the Tower and its environs, and furnishing, to what she conceived had been its state, in the, perhaps, imaginary days of the exaltation of the Dymocks. A splendid feast in the halls of Dymock's Tower, is also spoken of, as having taken place, soon after the return of the Laird from London, from which, not a creature dwelling on the moor was absent, when Salmon directed Tamar to reward those persons who had assisted him in his greatest need, and when Mrs. Margaret added numbers of coats and garments to those that were destitute. Dymock in his joy of heart, caused the plough to be brought forward, and fixed upon a table in the hall, for every one to see that day, Mrs. Margaret having been obliged to acknowledge, that it was this same plough, which had turned up the vein of gold, in which all present were rejoicing. With the notice of this feast the history terminates, and here the writer concludes with a single sentiment,--that although a work of kindness wrought in the fear of God, as imparted by the Lord, the Spirit--seldom produces such a manifest reward, as it did in the case of Mrs. Margaret and her nephew, for the race is not always to the swift, nor the burthen to the strong, yet, even under this present imperfect dispensation, there is a peace above all price, accompanying every act, which draws a creature out of self, to administer to the necessities of others, whenever these acts are performed in faith, and with a continual reference to the pleasure of God, and without view to heaping up merits, which is a principle entirely adverse to anything like a correct knowledge of salvation by the Lord the Saviour. 
38347	----	available by Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 38347-h.htm or 38347-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38347/38347-h/38347-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38347/38347-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://www.archive.org/details/millionairebaby00gree THE MILLIONAIRE BABY [Illustration: "I HAVE SAID SO MUCH THAT I MUST SAY MORE. LISTEN AND BE MY FRIEND." _p. 288_] THE MILLIONAIRE BABY by ANNA KATHARINE GREEN Author of The Filigree Ball, The Leavenworth Case, Etc. With Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers Copyright 1905 The Bobbs-Merrill Company CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Two Little Shoes 1 II "A Fearsome Man" 30 III A Charming Woman 39 IV Chalk-Marks 52 V The Old House in Yonkers 69 VI Doctor Pool 80 VII "Find the Child!" 98 VIII "Philo! Philo! Philo!" 109 IX The Bungalow 122 X Temptation 132 XI The Secret of the Old Pavilion 140 XII Behind the Wall 176 XIII "We Shall Have to Begin Again" 196 XIV Espionage 201 XV A Phantasm 207 XVI "An All-Conquering Beauty" 211 XVII In the Green Boudoir 232 XVIII "You Look As If--As If--" 249 XIX Frenzy 263 XX "What Do You Know?" 274 XXI Providence 289 XXII On the Second Terrace 315 XXIII A Coral Bead 321 XXIV "Shall I Give Him My Word, Harry?" 331 XXV The Work of an Instant 338 XXVI "He Will Never Forgive" 340 XXVII The Final Struggle 350 THE MILLIONAIRE BABY I TWO LITTLE SHOES The morning of August eighteenth, 190-, was a memorable one to me. For two months I had had a run of bad luck. During that time I had failed to score in at least three affairs of unusual importance, and the result was a decided loss in repute as well as great financial embarrassment. As I had a mother and two sisters to support and knew but one way to do it, I was in a state of profound discouragement. This was before I took up the morning papers. After I had opened and read them, not a man in New York could boast of higher hopes or greater confidence in his power to rise by one bold stroke from threatened bankruptcy to immediate independence. The paragraph which had occasioned this amazing change must have passed under the eyes of many of you. It created a wide-spread excitement at the time and raised in more than one breast the hope of speedy fortune. It was attached to, or rather introduced, the most startling feature of the week, and it ran thus: A FORTUNE FOR A CHILD. _By cable from Southampton._ A reward of five thousand dollars is offered, by Philo Ocumpaugh, to whoever will give such information as will lead to the recovery, alive or dead, of his six-year-old daughter, Gwendolen, missing since the afternoon of August the 16th, from her home in ----on-the-Hudson, New York, U. S. A. Fifty thousand dollars additional and no questions asked if she is restored unharmed within the week to her mother at Homewood. All communications to be addressed to Samuel Atwater, ----on-the-Hudson. A minute description of the child followed, but this did not interest me, and I did not linger over it. The child was no stranger to me. I knew her well and consequently was quite aware of her personal characteristics. It was the great amount offered for her discovery and restoration which moved me so deeply. Fifty thousand dollars! A fortune for any man. More than a fortune to me, who stood in such need of ready money. I was determined to win this extraordinary sum. I had my reason for hope and, in the light of this unexpectedly munificent reward, decided to waive all the considerations which had hitherto prevented me from stirring in the matter. There were other reasons less selfish which gave impetus to my resolve. I had done business for the Ocumpaughs before and been well treated in the transaction. I recognized and understood both Mr. Ocumpaugh's peculiarities and those of his admired and devoted wife. As man and woman they were kindly, honorable and devoted to many more interests than those connected with their own wealth. I also knew their hearts to be wrapped up in this child,--the sole offspring of a long and happy union, and the actual as well as prospective inheritor of more millions than I shall ever see thousands, unless I am fortunate enough to solve the mystery now exercising the sympathies of the whole New York public. You have all heard of this child under another name. From her birth she has been known as the Millionaire Baby, being the direct heir to three fortunes, two of which she had already received. I saw her first when she was three years old--a cherubic little being, lovely to look upon and possessing unusual qualities for so young a child. Indeed, her picturesque beauty and appealing ways would have attracted all eyes and won all hearts, even if she had not represented in her small person the wealth both of the Ocumpaugh and Rathbone families. There was an individuality about her, combined with sensibilities of no ordinary nature, which, fully accounted for the devoted affection with which she was universally regarded; and when she suddenly disappeared, it was easy to comprehend, if one did not share, the thrill of horror which swept from one end of our broad continent to the other. Those who knew the parents, and those who did not, suffered an equal pang at the awful thought of this petted innocent lost in the depths of the great unknown, with only the false caresses of her abductors to comfort her for the deprivation of all those delights which love and unlimited means could provide to make a child of her years supremely happy. Her father--and this was what gave the keen edge of horror to the whole occurrence--was in Europe when she disappeared. He had been cabled at once and his answer was the proffered reward with which I have opened this history. An accompanying despatch to his distracted wife announced his relinquishment of the project which had taken him abroad and his immediate return on the next steamer sailing from Southampton. As this chanced to be the fastest on the line, we had reason to expect him in six days; meanwhile-- But to complete my personal recapitulations. When the first news of this startling abduction flashed upon my eyes from the bulletin boards, I looked on the matter as one of too great magnitude to be dealt with by any but the metropolitan police; but as time passed and further details of the strange and seemingly inexplicable affair came to light, I began to feel the stirring of the detective instinct within me (did I say that I was connected with a private detective agency of some note in the metropolis?) and a desire, quite apart from any mere humane interest in the event itself, to locate the intelligence back of such a desperate crime: an intelligence so keen that, up to the present moment, if we may trust the published accounts of the affair, not a clue had been unearthed by which its author could be traced, or the means employed for carrying off this petted object of a thousand cares. To be sure, there was a theory which eliminated all crime from the occurrence as well as the intervention of any one in the child's fate: she might have strayed down to the river and been drowned. But the probabilities were so opposed to this supposition, that the police had refused to embrace it, although the mother had accepted it from the first, and up to the present moment, or so it was stated, had refused to consider any other. As she had some basis for this conclusion--I am still quoting the papers, you understand--I was not disposed to ignore it in the study I proceeded to make of the situation. The details, as I ran them over in the hurried trip I now made up the river to ----, were as follows: On the afternoon of Wednesday, August sixteenth, 190-, the guests assembled in Mrs. Ocumpaugh's white and gold music-room were suddenly thrown into confusion by the appearance among them of a young girl in a state of great perturbation, who, running up to the startled hostess, announced that Gwendolen, the petted darling of the house, was missing from the bungalow where she had been lying asleep, and could not be found, though a dozen men had been out on search. The wretched mother, who, as it afterward transpired, had not only given the orders by which the child had been thus removed from the excitement up at the house, but had actually been herself but a few moments before to see that the little one was well cared for and happy, seemed struck as by a mortal blow at these words and, uttering a heart-rending scream, ran out on the lawn. A crowd of guests rushed after her, and as they followed her flying figure across the lawn to the small copse in which lay hidden this favored retreat, they could hear, borne back on the wind, the wild protests of the young nurse, that she had left the child for a minute only and then to go no farther than the bench running along the end of the bungalow facing the house; that she had been told she could sit there and listen to the music, but that she never would have left the child's side for a minute if she had not supposed she would hear her least stir--protests which the mother scarcely seemed to heed, and which were presently lost in the deep silence which fell on all, as, brought to a stand in the thick shrubbery surrounding the bungalow, they saw the mother stagger up to the door, look in and turn toward them with death in her face. "The river!" she gasped, "the river!" and heedless of all attempt to stop her, heedless even of the efforts made by the little one's nurse to draw her attention to the nearness of a certain opening in the high hedge marking off the Ocumpaugh grounds on this side, she ran down the bank in the direction of the railway, but fainted before she had more than cleared the thicket. When they lifted her up, they all saw the reason for this. She had come upon a little shoe which she held with frantic clutch against her breast--her child's shoe, which, as she afterward acknowledged, she had loosened with her own hand on the little one's foot. Of course, after this the whole hillside was searched down to the fence which separated it from the railroad track. But no further trace of the missing child was found, nor did it appear possible to any one that she could have strayed away in this direction. For not only was the bank exceedingly steep and the fence at its base impassable, but a gang of men, working as good fortune would have it, at such a point on the road below as to render it next to impossible for her to have crossed the track within a half-mile either way without being observed, had one and all declared that not one of them had seen her or any other person descend the slope. This, however, made but little impression on the mother. She would listen to no hints of abduction, but persisted in her declaration that the river had swallowed her darling, and would neither rest nor turn her head from its waters till some half a dozen men about the place had been set systematically to work to drag the stream. Meanwhile, the police had been notified and the whole town aroused. The search, which had been carried on up to this time in a frantic but desultory way, now became methodical. Nor was it confined to the Ocumpaugh estate. All the roads and byways within half a mile either way were covered by a most careful investigation. All the near-by houses were entered, especially those which the child was most in the habit of frequenting, but no one had seen her, nor could any trace of her presence be found. At five o'clock all hope of her return was abandoned and, much against Mrs. Ocumpaugh's wish, who declared that the news of the child's death would affect her father far less than the dreadful possibilities of an abduction, the exact facts of the case had been cabled to Mr. Ocumpaugh. The night and another day passed, bringing but little relief to the situation. Not an eye had as yet been closed in Homewood, nor had the search ceased for an instant. Not an inch of the great estate had been overlooked, yet men could still be seen beating the bushes and peering into all the secluded spots which once had formed the charm of this delightful place. As on the land, so on the river. All the waters in the dock had been dragged, yet the work went on, some said under the very eye of Mrs. Ocumpaugh. But there was no result as yet. In the city the interest was intense. The telegraph at police headquarters had been clicking incessantly for thirty-six hours under the direction, some said, of the superintendent himself. Everything which could be done had been done, but as yet the papers were able to report nothing beyond some vague stories of a child, with its face very much bound up, having been seen at the heels of a woman in the Grand Central Station in New York, and hints of a covered wagon, with a crying child inside, which had been driven through Westchester County at a great pace shortly before sunset on the previous day, closely followed by a buggy with the storm-apron up, though the sun shone and there was not a cloud in the sky; but nothing definite, nothing which could give hope to the distracted mother or do more than divide the attention of the police between two different but equally tenable theories. Then came the cablegram from Mr. Ocumpaugh, which threw amateur as well as professional detectives into the field. Among the latter was myself; which naturally brings me back once more to my own conclusions. Of one thing I felt sure. Very early in my cogitations, before we had quitted the Park Avenue tunnel in fact, I had decided in my own mind that if I were to succeed in locating the lost heiress, it must be by subtler methods than lay open to the police. I was master of such methods (in this case at least), and though one of many owning to similar hopes on this very train which was rushing me through to Homewood, I had no feeling but that of confidence in a final success. How well founded this confidence was, will presently appear. The number of seedy-looking men with a mysterious air who alighted in my company at ---- station and immediately proceeded to make their way up the steep street toward Homewood, warned me that it would soon be extremely difficult for any one to obtain access to the parties most interested in the child's loss. Had I not possessed the advantage of being already known to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, I should have immediately given up all hope of ever obtaining access to her presence; and even with this fact to back me, I approached the house with very little confidence in my ability to win my way through the high iron gates I had so frequently passed before without difficulty. And indeed I found them well guarded. As I came nearer, I could see man after man being turned away, and not till my card had been handed in, and a hurried note to boot, did I obtain permission to pass the first boundary. Another note secured me admission to the house, but there my progress stopped. Mrs. Ocumpaugh had already been interviewed by five reporters and a special agent from the New York police. She could see no one else at present. If, however, my business was of importance, an opportunity would be given me to see Miss Porter. Miss Porter was her companion and female factotum. As I had calculated upon having a half-dozen words with the mother herself, I was greatly thrown out by this; but going upon the principle that "half a loaf was better than no bread," I was about to express a desire to see Miss Porter, when an incident occurred which effectually changed my mind in this regard. The hall in which I was standing and which communicated with the side door by which I had entered, ended in a staircase, leading, as I had reason to believe, to the smaller and less pretentious rooms in the rear of the house. While I hesitated what reply to give the girl awaiting my decision, I caught the sound of soft weeping from the top of this staircase, and presently beheld the figure of a young woman coming slowly down, clad in coat and hat and giving every evidence both in dress and manner of leaving for good. It was Miss Graham, a young woman who held the position of nursery-governess to the child. I had seen her before, and had no small admiration for her, and the sensations I experienced at the sight of her leaving the house where her services were apparently no longer needed, proved to me, possibly for the first time, that I had more heart in my breast than I had ever before realized. But it was not this which led me to say to the maid standing before me that I preferred to see Mrs. Ocumpaugh herself, and would call early the next day. It was the thought that this sorrowing girl would have to pass the gauntlet of many prying eyes on her way to the station and that she might be glad of an escort whom she knew and had shown some trust in. Also,--but the reasons behind that _also_ will soon become sufficiently apparent. I was right in supposing that my presence on the porch outside would be a pleasing surprise to her. Though her tears continued to flow she accepted my proffered companionship with gratitude, and soon we were passing side by side across the lawn toward a short cut leading down the bank to the small flag-station used by the family and by certain favored neighbors. As we threaded the shrubbery, which is very thick about the place, she explained to me the cause of her abrupt departure. The sight of her, it seems, had become insupportable to Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Though no blame could be rightfully attached to her, it was certainly true that the child had been carried off while in her charge, and however hard it might be for _her_, few could blame the mother for wishing her removed from the house desolated by her lack of vigilance. But she was a good girl and felt the humiliation of her departure almost in the light of a disgrace. As we came again into an open portion of the lawn, she stopped short and looked back. "Oh!" she cried, gripping me by the arm, "there is Mrs. Ocumpaugh still at the window. All night she has stood there, except when she flew down to the river at the sound of some imaginary call from the boats. She believes, she really believes, that they will yet come upon Gwendolen's body in the dock there." Following the direction of her glance, I looked up. Was that Mrs. Ocumpaugh--that haggard, intent figure with eyes fixed in awful expectancy on the sinister group I could picture to myself down at the water's edge? Never could I have imagined such a look on features I had always considered as cold as they were undeniably beautiful. As I took in the misery it expressed, that awful waiting for an event momently anticipated, and momently postponed, I found myself, without reason and simply in response to the force of her expression, unconsciously sharing her expectation, and with a momentary forgetfulness of all the probabilities, was about to turn toward the spot upon which her glances were fixed, when a touch on my arm recalled me to myself. "Come!" whispered my trembling companion. "She may look down and see us here." I yielded to her persuasion and turned away into the cluster of trees that lay between us and that opening in the hedge through which our course lay. Had I been alone I should not have budged till I had seen some change--any change--in the face whose appearance had so deeply affected me. "Mrs. Ocumpaugh certainly believes that the body of her child lies in the water," I remarked, as we took our way onward as rapidly as possible. "Do you know her reasons for this?" "She says, and I think she is right so far, that the child has been bent for a long time on fishing; that she has heard her father talk repeatedly of his great luck in Canada last year and wished to try the sport for herself; that she has been forbidden to go to the river, but must have taken the first opportunity when no eye was on her to do so; and--and--Mrs. Ocumpaugh shows a bit of string which she found last night in the bushes alongside the tracks when she ran down, as I have said, at some imaginary shout from the boats--a string which she declares she saw rolled up in Gwendolen's hand when she went into the bungalow to look at her. Of course, it may not be the same, but Mrs. Ocumpaugh thinks it is, and--" "Do you think it possible, after all, that the child did stray down to the water?" "No," was the vehement disclaimer. "Gwendolen's feet were excessively tender. She could not have taken three steps in only one shoe. I should have heard her cry out." "What if she went in some one's arms?" "A stranger's? She had a decided instinct against strangers. Never could any one she did not know and like have carried her so far as that without her waking. Then those men on the track,--they would have seen her. No, Mr. Trevitt, it was not in _that_ direction she went." The force of her emphasis convinced me that she had an opinion of her own in regard to this matter. Was it one she was ready to impart? "In what direction, then?" I asked, with a gentleness I hoped would prove effective. Her impulse was toward a frank reply. I saw her lips part and her eyes take on the look which precedes a direct avowal, but, as chance would have it, we came at that moment upon the thicket inclosing the bungalow, and the sight of its picturesque walls, showing brown through the verdure of the surrounding shrubbery, seemed to act as a check upon her, for, with a quick look and a certain dry accent quite new in her speech, she suddenly inquired if I did not want to see the place from which Gwendolen had disappeared. Naturally I answered in the affirmative and followed her as she turned aside into the circular path which embraces this hidden retreat; but I had rather have heard her answer to my question, than to have gone anywhere or seen anything at that moment. Yet, when in full view of the bungalow's open door, she stopped to point out to me the nearness of the place to that opening in the hedge we had just been making for, and when she even went so far as to indicate the tangled little path by which that opening could be reached directly from the farther end of the bungalow, I considered that my question had been answered, though in another way than I anticipated, even before I noted the slight flush which rose to her cheek under my earnest scrutiny. As it is important for the exact location of the bungalow to be understood, I subjoin a diagram of this part of the grounds: [Illustration: LAWN EXTENDING TO THE HIGHWAY. A The Ocumpaugh mansion. B The Bungalow. C Mrs. Carew's house. D Private path. E Gap in hedge leading to the Ocumpaugh grounds. F Gap leading into Mrs. Carew's grounds. G Bench at end of bungalow.] As I took this all in, I ventured to ask some particulars of the family living so near the Ocumpaughs. "Who occupies that house?" I asked, pointing to the sloping roofs and ornamental chimneys arising just beyond us over the hedge-rows. "Oh, that is Mrs. Carew's home. She is a widow and Mrs. Ocumpaugh's dearest friend. How she loved Gwendolen! How we all loved her! And now, that _wretch_--" She burst into tears. They were genuine ones; so was her grief. I waited till she was calm again, then I inquired very softly: "What wretch?" "You have not been inside," she suggested, pointing sharply to the bungalow. I took the implied rebuke and entered the door she indicated. A man was sitting within, but he rose and went out when he saw us. He wore a policeman's badge and evidently recognized her or possibly myself. I noted, however, that he did not go far from the doorway. "It is only a den," remarked Miss Graham. I looked about me. She had described it perfectly: a place to lounge in on an August day like the present. Walls of Georgia pine across one of which hung a series of long dark rugs; a long, low window looking toward the house, and a few articles of bamboo furniture describe the place. Among the latter was a couch. It was drawn up underneath the window, on the other side of which ran the bench where my companion declared she had been sitting while listening to the music. "Wouldn't you think my attention would have been caught by the sound of any one moving about here?" she cried, pointing to the couch and then to the window. "But the window was closed and the door, as you see, is round the corner from the bench." "A person with a very stealthy step, apparently." "Very," she admitted. "Oh, how can I ever forgive myself! how can I ever, ever forgive myself!" As she stood wringing her hands in sight of that empty couch, I cast a scrutinizing glance about me, which led me to remark: "This interior looks new; much newer than the outside. It has quite a modern air." "Yes, the bungalow is old, very old; but this room, or den, or whatever you might call it, was all remodeled and fitted up as you see it now when the new house went up. It had long been abandoned as a place of retreat, and had fallen into such decay that it was a perfect eyesore to all who saw it. Now it is likely to be abandoned again, and for what a reason! Oh, the dreadful place! How I hate it, now Gwendolen is gone!" "One moment. I notice another thing. This room does not occupy the whole of the bungalow." Either she did not hear me or thought it unnecessary to reply; and perceiving that her grief had now given way to an impatience to be gone, I did not press the matter, but led the way myself to the door. As we entered the little path which runs directly to that outlet in the hedge marked E, I ventured to speak again: "You have reasons, or so it appears, for believing that the child was carried off through this very path?" The reply was impetuous: "How else could she have been spirited away so quickly? Besides,--" here her eye stole back at me over her shoulder,--"I have since remembered that as I ran out of the bungalow in my fright at finding the child gone, I heard the sound of wheels on Mrs. Carew's driveway. It did not mean much to me then, for I expected to find the child somewhere about the grounds; but _now_, when I come to think, it means everything, for a child's cry mingled with it (or I imagined that it did) and that child--" "But," I forcibly interposed, "the police should know this." "They do; and so does Mrs. Ocumpaugh; but she has only the one idea, and nothing can move her." I remembered the wagon with the crying child inside which had been seen on the roads the previous evening, and my heart fell a little in spite of myself. "Couldn't Mrs. Carew tell us something about this?" I asked, with a gesture toward the house we were now passing. "No. Mrs. Carew went to New York that morning and had only just returned when we missed Gwendolen. She had been for her little nephew, who has lately been made an orphan, and she was too busy making him feel at home to notice if a carriage had passed through her grounds." "Her servants then?" "She had none. All had been sent away. The house was quite empty." I thought this rather odd, but having at this moment reached the long flight of steps leading down the embankment, I made no reply till we reached the foot. Then I observed: "I thought Mrs. Carew was very intimate with Mrs. Ocumpaugh." "She is; they are more like sisters than mere friends." "Yet she goes to New York the very day her friend gives a musicale." "Oh, she had good reasons for that. Mrs. Carew is planning to sail this week for Europe, and this was her only opportunity for getting her little nephew, who is to go with her. But I don't know as she will sail, now. She is wild with grief over Gwendolen's loss, and will not feel like leaving Mrs. Ocumpaugh till she knows whether we shall ever see the dear child again. But, I shall miss my train." Here her step visibly hastened. As it was really very nearly due, I had not the heart to detain her. But as I followed in her wake I noticed that for all her hurry a curious hesitancy crept into her step at times, and I should not have been surprised at any moment to see her stop and confront me on one of the two remaining long flights of steps leading down the steep hillside. But we both reached the base without her having yielded to this impulse, and presently we found ourselves in full view of the river and the small flag-station located but a few rods away toward the left. As we turned toward the latter, we both cast an involuntary look back at the Ocumpaugh dock, where a dozen men could be seen at work dragging the river-bed with grappling irons. It made a sadly suggestive picture, and the young girl at my side shuddered violently as we noted the expression of morbid curiosity on the faces of such onlookers, men and women, as were drawn up at the end of the small point on which the boat-house stood. But I had another reason than this for urging her on. I had noticed how, at the sight of her slight figure descending the slope, some half-dozen men or so had separated themselves from this group, with every appearance of intending to waylay and question her. She noticed this too, and drawing up more closely to my side, exclaimed with marked feeling: "Save me from these men and I will tell you something that no one--" But here she stopped, here our very thoughts stopped. A shout had risen from the group at the water-edge; a shout which made us both turn, and even caused the men who had started to follow us to wheel about and rush back to the dock with every appearance of intense excitement. "What is it? What can it be?" faltered my greatly-alarmed companion. "They have found something. See! what is that the man in the boat is holding up? It looks like--" But she was already half-way to the point, outstripping the very men whose importunities she had shrunk from a moment before. I was not far behind her, and almost immediately we found ourselves wedged among the agitated group leaning over the little object which had been tossed ashore into the first hand outstretched to receive it. It was a second little shoe--filled with sand and dripping with water, but recognizable as similar to the one already found on the preceding day high up on the bank. As this fact was borne in on us all, a groan of pity broke from more than one pair of lips, and eye after eye stole up the hillside to that far window in the great pile above us where the mother's form could be dimly discerned swaying in an agitation caught from our own excitement. But there was one amongst us whose glance never left that little shoe. The train she had been so anxious to take whistled and went thundering by, but she never moved or noticed. Suddenly she reached out her hand. "Let me see it, please," she entreated. "I was her nurse; let me take it in my hand." The man who held it passed it over. She examined it long and closely. "Yes, it is hers," said she. But in another moment she had laid it down with what I thought was a very peculiar look. Instantly it was caught up and carried with a rush up the slope to where Mrs. Ocumpaugh could be seen awaiting it with outstretched arms. But I did not linger to mark her reception of it. Miss Graham had drawn me to one side and was whispering in my ear: "I must talk to you. I can not keep back another moment what I think or what I feel. Some one is playing with Mrs. Ocumpaugh's fears. That shoe is Gwendolen's, but it is not the mate of the one found on the bank above. That was for the left foot _and so is this one_. Did you not notice?" II "A FEARSOME MAN" The effect of this statement upon me was greater than even she had contemplated. "You thought the child had been stolen for the reward she would bring?" she continued. "She was not; she was taken out of pure hate, and that is why I suffer so. What may they not do to her! In what hole hide her! My darling, O my darling!" She was going off into hysterics, but the look and touch I gave her recalled her to herself. "We need to be calm," I urged. "You, because you have something of importance to impart, and I, because of the action I must take as soon as the facts you have concealed become known to me. What gives you such confidence in this belief, which I am sure is not shared by the police, and who is the _some one_ who, as you say, is playing upon Mrs. Ocumpaugh's fears? A short time ago it was as _the wretch_ you spoke of him. Are not _some one_ and _the wretch_ one and the same person, and can you not give him now a name?" We had been moving all this time in the direction of the station and had now reached the foot of the platform. Pausing, she cast a last look up the bank. The trees were thick and hid from our view the Ocumpaugh mansion, but in imagination she beheld the mother moaning over that little shoe. "I shall never return there," she muttered; "why do I hesitate so to speak!" Then in a burst, as I watched her in growing excitement: "She--Mrs. Ocumpaugh--begged me not to tell what she believed had nothing to do with our Gwendolen's loss. But I can not keep silence. This proof of a conspiracy against herself certainly relieves me from any promise I may have made her. Mr. Trevitt, I am positive that I know who carried off Gwendolen." This was becoming interesting, intensely interesting to me. Glancing about and noting that the group down at the water-edge had become absorbed again in renewed efforts toward farther discoveries, I beckoned her to follow me into the station. It was but a step, but it gave me time to think. What was I encouraging this young girl to do? To reveal to _me_, who had no claim upon her but that of friendship, a secret which had not been given to the police? True, it might not be worth much, but it was also true that it might be worth a great deal. Did she know how much? I wanted money--few wanted it more--but I felt that I could not listen to her story till I had fairly settled this point. I therefore hastened to interpose a remark: "Miss Graham, you are good enough to offer to reveal some fact hitherto concealed. Do you do this because you have no closer friend than myself, or because you do not know what such knowledge may be worth to the person you give it to--in money, I mean?" "In money? I am not thinking of money," was her amazed reply; "I am thinking of Gwendolen." "I understand, but you should think of the practical results as well. Have you not heard of the enormous reward offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh?" "No; I--" "Five thousand dollars for information; and fifty thousand to the one who will bring her back within the week unharmed. Mr. Ocumpaugh cabled to that effect yesterday." "It is a large sum," she faltered, and for a moment she hesitated. Then, with a sweet and candid look which sank deep into my heart, she added gravely: "I had rather not think of money in connection with Gwendolen. If what I have to tell leads to her recovery, you can be trusted, I know, to do what is right toward me. Mr. Trevitt, the man who stole her from her couch and carried her away through Mrs. Carew's grounds in a wagon or otherwise, is a long-haired, heavily whiskered man of sixty or more years of age. His face is deeply wrinkled, but chiefly marked by a long scar running down between his eyebrows, which are so shaggy that they would quite hide his eyes if they were not lit up with an extraordinary expression of resolution, carried almost to the point of frenzy; a fearsome man, making your heart stand still when he pauses to speak to you." Startled as I had seldom been, for reasons which will hereafter appear, I surveyed her in mingled wonder and satisfaction. "His name?" I demanded. "I do not know his name." Again I stopped to look at her. "Does Mrs. Ocumpaugh?" "I do not think so. She only knows what I told her." "And what did you tell her?" "Ah! who are these?" Two or three persons had entered the station, probably to wait for the next train. "No one who will molest you." But she was not content till we had withdrawn to where the time-table hung up on the opposite wall. Turning about as if to consult it, she told the following story. I never see a time-table now but I think of her expression as she stood there looking up as if her mind were fixed on what she probably did not see at all. "Last Wednesday--no, it was on the Wednesday preceding--I was taking a ride with Gwendolen on one of the side roads branching off toward Fordham. We were in her own little pony cart, and as we seldom rode together like this, she had been chattering about a hundred things till her eyes danced in her head and she looked as lovely as I had ever seen her. But suddenly, just as we were about to cross a small wooden bridge, I saw her turn pale and her whole sensitive form quiver. 'Some one I don't like,' she cried. 'There is some one about whom I don't like. Drive on, Ellie, drive on.' But before I could gather up the reins a figure which I had not noticed before stepped from behind a tree at the farther end of the bridge, and advancing into the middle of the road with arms thrown out, stopped our advance. I have told you how he looked, but I can give you no idea of the passionate fury lighting up his eyes, or the fiery dignity with which he held his place and kept us subdued to his will till he had looked the shrinking child all over, and laughed, not as a madman laughs, oh, much too slow and ironically for that! but like one who takes an unholy pleasure in mocking the happy present with evil prophecy. Nothing that I can say will make you see him as I saw him in that one instant, and though there was much in the circumstance to cause fear, I think it was more awe than fright we felt, so commanding was his whole appearance and so forcible the assurance with which he held us there till he was ready to move. Gwendolen cried out, but the imploring sound had no effect upon him; it only reawakened his mirth and led him to say, in a clear, cold, mocking tone which I hear yet, 'Cry out, little one, for your short day is nearly over. Silks and feathers and carriages and servants will soon be a half-forgotten memory to you; and right it is that it should be so. Ten days, little one, only ten days more.' And with that he moved, and, slipping aside behind the tree, allowed us to drive on. Mr. Trevitt, yesterday saw the end of those ten days, and where is she now? Only that man knows. He is one man in a thousand. Can not you find him?" She turned; a train was coming, a train which it was very evident she felt it her duty to take. I had no right to detain her, but I found time for a question or two. "And you told Mrs. Ocumpaugh this?" "The moment we arrived home." "And she? What did she think of it?" "Mrs. Ocumpaugh is not a talkative woman. She grew very white and clasped the child passionately in her arms. But the next minute she had to all appearance dismissed the whole occurrence from her thoughts. 'Some socialistic fanatic,' she called him and merely advised me to stop driving with Gwendolen for the present." "Didn't you recall the matter to her when you found the child missing?" "Yes; but then she appeared to regard it in a superstitious way only. It was a warning of death, she said, and the man an irresponsible clairvoyant. When I tried to urge my own idea upon her and describe how I thought he might have obtained access to the bungalow and carried her off, while still asleep, to some vehicle awaiting them in Mrs. Carew's grounds, she only rebuked me for my folly and bade me keep still about the whole occurrence, saying that I should only be getting some poor half-demented old wretch into trouble for something for which he was not in the least responsible." "A very considerate woman," I remarked; to which Miss Graham made reply as the train came storming up: "Nobody knows how considerate, even if she has dismissed me rather suddenly from her service. Don't let that wretch"--again she used the word--"deceive her or you into thinking that the little one perished in the water. Gwendolen is alive, I say. Find him and you will find her. I saw his resolution in his eye." Here she made a rush for the cars, and I had time only to get her future address before the train started and all further opportunity of conversation between us was over for that day. I remained behind because I was by no means through with my investigations. What she had told me only convinced me of the necessity I had already recognized of making myself master of all that could be learned at Homewood before undertaking the very serious business of locating the child or even the aged man just described to me, and who I was now sure had been the chief, if not the sole, instrument in her abduction. III A CHARMING WOMAN Stopping only long enough to send a telegram to my partner in New York, (for which purpose I had to walk along the tracks to the main station) I returned by the short cut to Homewood. My purpose in doing this was twofold. I should have a chance of seeing if the men were still at work in the river, and I should also have the added opportunity of quietly revisiting the bungalow, on the floor of which I had noted some chalk-marks, which I felt called for a closer examination than I had given them. As I came in view of the dock, I saw that the men were still busy, but at a point farther out in the river, as if all hope had been abandoned of their discovering anything more inshore. But the chalk-marks in the bungalow were almost forgotten by me in the interest I experienced in a certain adventure which befell me on my way there. I had just reached the opening in the hedge communicating with Mrs. Carew's grounds, when I heard steps on the walk inside and a woman's rich voice saying: "There, that will do. You must play on the other side of the house, Harry. And Dinah, see that he does so, and that he does not cross the hall again till I come back. The sight of so merry a child might kill Mrs. Ocumpaugh if she happened to look this way." Moved by the tone, which was one in a thousand, I involuntarily peered through the outlet I was passing, in the hope of catching a glimpse of its owner, and thus was favored with the sight of a face which instantly fixed itself in my memory as one of the most enchanting I had ever encountered. Not from its beauty, yet it may have been beautiful; nor from its youth, for the woman before me was not youthful, but from the extraordinary eloquence of its expression caught at a rare moment when the heart, which gave it life, was full. She was standing half-way down the path, throwing kisses to a little boy who was leaning toward her from an upper window. The child was laughing with glee, and it was this laugh she was trying to check; but her countenance, as she made the effort, was almost as merry as his, and yet was filled with such solemn joy--such ecstasy of motherhood I should be inclined to call it, if I had not been conscious that this must be Mrs. Carew and the child her little nephew--that in my admiration for this exhibition of pure feeling, I forgot to move on as she advanced into the hedge-row, and so we came face to face. The result was as extraordinary to me as all the rest. Instantly all the gay abandonment left her features, and she showed me a grave, almost troubled, countenance, more in keeping with her severe dress, which was as nearly like mourning as it could be and not be made of crape. It was such a sudden change and of so complete a character, that I was thrown off my guard for a moment and probably betrayed the curiosity I undoubtedly felt; for she paused as she reached me, and, surveying me very quietly but very scrutinizingly too, raised again that marvelous voice of hers and pointedly observed: "This is a private path, sir. Only the friends of Mrs. Ocumpaugh or of myself pass here." This was a speech calculated to restore my self-possession. With a bow which evidently surprised her, I answered with just enough respect to temper my apparent presumption: "I am here in the interests of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, to assist her in finding her child. Moments are precious; so I ventured to approach by the shorter way." "Pardon me!" The words did not come instantly, but after some hesitation, during which she kept her eyes on my face in a way to rob me of all thought save that she possessed a very strong magnetic quality, to which it were well for a man like myself to yield. "You will be my friend, too, if you succeed in restoring Gwendolen." Then quickly, as she crossed to the Ocumpaugh grounds: "You do not look like a member of the police. Are you here at Mrs. Ocumpaugh's bidding, and has she at last given up all expectation of finding her child in the river?" I, too, thought a minute before answering, then I put on my most candid expression, for was not this woman on her way to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and would she not be likely to repeat what she heard me say? "I do not know how Mrs. Ocumpaugh feels at present. But I know what her dearest wish is--to see her child again alive and well. That wish I shall do my best to gratify. It is true that I am not a police detective, but I have an agency of my own, well-known to both Mrs. and Mr. Ocumpaugh. All its resources will be devoted to this business and I hope to succeed, madam. If, as I suspect, you are on your way to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, please tell her that Robert Trevitt, of Trevitt and Jupp, hopes to succeed." "I _will_," she emphasized. Then stepping back to me in all the grace of her thrilling personality, she eagerly added: "If there is any information I can give, do not be afraid to ask me. I love children, and would give anything in the world to see Mrs. Ocumpaugh as happy with Gwendolen again as I am with my little nephew. Are you quite sure that there is any possibility of this? I was told that the child's shoe has been found in the river; but almost immediately following this information came the report that there was something odd about this shoe, and that Mrs. Ocumpaugh had gone into hysterics. Do _you_ know what they meant by that? I was just going over to see." I did know what they meant, but I preferred to seem ignorant. "I have not seen Mrs. Ocumpaugh," I evasively rejoined. "But _I_ don't look for the child to be drawn from the water." "Nor I," she repeated, with a hoarse catch in her breath. "It is thirty-six hours since we lost her. Time enough for the current to have carried her sweet little body far away from here." I surveyed the lady before me in amazement. "Then _you_ think she strayed down to the water?" "Yes; it would madden me to believe otherwise; loving her so well, and her parents so well, I dare not think of a worse fate." Taking advantage of her amiability and the unexpected opportunity it offered for a leading question, I hereupon ventured to say: "You were not at home, I hear, when she vanished from the bungalow." "No; that is, if it happened before three o'clock. I arrived from the station just as the clock was striking the hour, and having my little nephew with me, I was too much occupied in reconciling him to his new home, to hear or see anything outside. Most unfortunate!" she mourned, "most unfortunate! I shall never cease reproaching myself. A tragedy at my door"--here she glanced across the shrubbery at the bungalow--"and I occupied with my own affairs!" With a flush, the undoubted result of her own earnestness, she turned as if to go. But I could not let her depart without another question: "Excuse me, Mrs. Carew, but you gave me permission to seem importunate. With the exception of her nurse, you were the one person nearest the bungalow at the time. Didn't you hear a carriage drive through your grounds at about the hour the alarm was first started? I know you have been asked this before, but not by me; and it is a very important fact to have settled; very important for those who wish to discover this child at once." For reply she gave me a look of very honest amazement. "Of course I did," she replied. "I came in a carriage myself from the station and naturally heard it drive away." At her look, at her word, the thread which I had seized with such avidity seemed to slip from my fingers. Had little Miss Graham's theory no better foundation than this? and were the wheels she heard only those of Mrs. Carew's departing carriage? I resolved to press the matter even if I ran the risk of displeasing her. "Mrs. Carew--for it must be Mrs. Carew I am addressing--did your little nephew cry when you first brought him to the house?" "I think he did," she admitted slowly; "I think he did." I must have given evidence of the sudden discouragement this brought me, for her lips parted and her whole frame trembled with sudden earnestness. "Did you think--did any one think--that those cries came from Gwendolen? That she was carried out through my grounds? Could any one have thought that?" "I have been told that the nursery-governess did." "Little Miss Graham? Poor girl! she is but defending herself from despair. She is ready to believe everything but that the child is dead." Was it so? Was I following the false light of a will-o'-the-wisp? No, no; the strange coincidence of the threat made on the bridge with the disappearance of the child on the day named, was at least real. The thread had not altogether escaped from my hands. It was less tangible, but it was still there. "You may be right," I acquiesced, for I saw that her theories were entirely opposed to those of Miss Graham. "But we must try everything, _everything_." I was about to ask whether she had ever seen in the adjoining grounds, or on the roads about, an old man with long hair and a remarkable scar running down between his eyebrows, when a young girl in the cap and apron of a maid-servant came running through the shrubbery from the Ocumpaugh house, and, seeing Mrs. Carew, panted out: "Oh, do come over to the house, Mrs. Carew. Mrs. Ocumpaugh has been told that the two shoes which have been found, one on the bank and the other in the river, are not mates, and it has quite distracted her. She has gone to her room and will let no one else in. We can hear her moaning and crying, but we can do nothing. Perhaps she will see you. She called for you, I know, before she shut her door." "I will go." Mrs. Carew had turned quite pale, and from standing upright in the road, had moved so as to gain support from one of the hedges. I expected to see her turn and go as soon as her trembling fit was over, but she did not, though she waved the girl away as if she intended to follow her. Had I not learned to distrust my own impression of people's motives from their manners and conduct, I should have said that she was waiting for me to precede her. "Two shoes and not mates!" she finally exclaimed. "What does she mean?" "Simply that another shoe has been drawn up from the river-bottom which does not mate the one picked up near the bungalow. Both are for the left foot." "Ah!" gasped this sympathetic woman. "And what inference can we draw from that?" I should not have answered her; but the command in her eyes or the thrilling effect of her manner compelled me, and I spoke the truth at once, just as I might have done to Mrs. Ocumpaugh, or, better still, to Mr. Ocumpaugh, if either had insisted. "But one," said I. "There is a conspiracy on the part of one or more persons to delude Mrs. Ocumpaugh into believing the child dead. They blundered over it, but they came very near succeeding." "Who blundered, and what is the meaning of the conspiracy you hint at? Tell me. Tell me what such men as you think." Her plastic features had again shown a change. She was all anxiety now; cheeks burning, eyes blazing--a very beautiful woman. "We think that the case looks serious. We think from the very mystery it displays, that there is a keen intelligence back of this crime. I can not go any further than that. The affair is as yet too obscure." "You amaze me!" she faltered, making an effort to collect her thoughts. "I have always thought, just as Mrs. Ocumpaugh has, that the child had somehow found her way to the water and was drowned. But if all this is true we shall have to face a worse evil. A conspiracy against such a tender little being as that! A conspiracy, and for what? Not to extort money, or why these blundering efforts to make the child appear dead?" She was the same sympathetic woman, agitated by real feeling as before, yet at this moment--I do not understand now just why--I became aware of an inner movement of caution against too great a display of candor on my own part. "Madam, it is all a mystery at present. I am sure that the police will tell you the same. But another day may bring developments." "Let us hope so!" was her ardent reply, accompanied by a gesture, the freedom of which suited her style and person as it would not have done those of a less impressionable woman. And, seeing that I had no intention of leaving the spot where I stood, she moved at last from where she held herself upright against the hedge, and entered the Ocumpaugh grounds. "Will you call in to see me to-morrow?" she asked, pausing to look back at a turn in the path. "I shall not sleep to-night for thinking of those possible developments." "Since you permit me," I returned; "that is, if I am still here. Affairs may call me away at any moment." "Yes, and so with me. Affairs may call me away also. I was to sail on Saturday for Liverpool. Only Mrs. Ocumpaugh's distress detains me. If the situation lightens, if we hear any good news to-night, or even early to-morrow, I shall continue my preparations, which will take me again to New York." "I will call if you are at home." She gave me a slight nod and vanished. Why did I stand a good three minutes where she had left me, thinking, but not getting anything from my thoughts, save that I was glad that I had not been betrayed into speaking of the old man Miss Graham had met on the bridge? Yet it might have been well, after all, if I had done so, if only to discover whether Mrs. Ocumpaugh had confided this occurrence to her most intimate friend. IV CHALK-MARKS My next move was toward the bungalow. Those chalk-marks still struck me as being worthy of investigation, and not only they, but the bungalow itself. That certainly merited a much closer inspection than I had been able to give it under Miss Graham's eye. It was not quite a new place to me, nor was I so ignorant of its history (and it had a history) as I had appeared to be in my conversation with Miss Graham. Originally it had been a stabling place for horses; and tradition said that it had once harbored for a week the horse of General Washington. This was when the house on the knoll above had been the seat and home of one of our most famous Revolutionary generals. Later, as the trees grew up around this building, it attracted the attention of a new owner, William Ocumpaugh, the first of that name to inhabit Homewood, and he, being a man of reserved manners and very studious habits, turned it into what we would now call, as Miss Graham did, a den, but which he styled a pavilion, and used as a sort of study or reading-room. His son, who inherited it, Judge Philo Ocumpaugh, grandfather of the present Philo, was as studious as his father, but preferred to read and write in the quaint old library up at the house, famous for its wide glass doors opening on to the lawn, and its magnificent view of the Hudson. His desk, which many remember (it has a place in the present house, I believe), was so located that for forty years or more he had this prospect ever before him, a prospect which included the sight of his own pavilion, around which, for no cause apparent to his contemporaries, he had caused a high wall to be built, effectually shutting in both trees and building. This wall has since been removed; but I have often heard it spoken of, and always with a certain air of mystery; possibly because, as I have said, there seemed no good reason for its erection, the place holding no treasure and the gate standing always open; possibly because of its having been painted, in defiance of all harmony with everything about the place, a dazzling white; and possibly because it had not been raised till after the death of the judge's first wife, who, some have said, breathed her last within the precincts it inclosed. However that may be, there seems to be no doubt that this place exerted, very likely against his will, for he never visited it, a singular fascination over the secretive mind of this same upright but strangely taciturn ancestor of the Ocumpaughs. For during the forty years in which he wrote and read at this desk, the shutters guarding the door overlooking those decaying walls were never drawn to, or so the tradition runs; and when he died, it was found that, by a clause in his will, this pavilion, hut or bungalow, all of which names it bore at different stages of its existence, was recommended to the notice of his heirs as an object which they were at liberty to leave in its present forsaken condition, though he did not exact this, but which was never, under any circumstances or to serve any purpose, to be removed from its present site, or even to suffer any demolition save such as came with time and the natural round of the seasons, to whose tender mercies he advised it to be left. In other words, it was to stand, and to stand unmolested, till it fell of its own accord, or was struck to the earth by lightning--a tragic alternative in the judgment of those who knew it for a structure of comparative insignificance, and one which, in the minds of many, and perhaps I may say in my own, appeared to point to some serious and unrevealed cause not unlinked with the almost forgotten death of that young wife to which I have just alluded. This was years ago, far back in the fifties, and his son, who was a minor at his death, grew up and assumed his natural proprietorship. The hut--it was nothing but a hut now--had remained untouched--a ruin no longer habitable. The spirit, as well as the letter, of that particular clause in his father's will had so far been literally obeyed. The walls being of stone, had withstood decay, and still rose straight and firm; but the roof had begun to sag, and whatever of woodwork yet remained about it had rotted and fallen away, till the building was little more than a skeleton, with holes for its windows and an open gap for its door. As for the surrounding wall, it no longer stood out, an incongruous landmark, from its background of trees and shrubbery. Young shoots had started up and old branches developed till brick and paint alike were almost concealed from view by a fresh girdle of greenery. And now comes the second mystery. Sometime after this latter Ocumpaugh had attained his majority--his name was Edwin, and he was, as you already imagine, the father of the present Philo--he made an attempt--a daring one it was afterward called--to brighten this neglected spot and restore it to some sort of use, by giving a supper to his friends within its broken-down walls. This supper was no orgy, nor were the proprieties in any way transgressed by so harmless a festivity; yet from this night a singular change was observed in this man. Pleasure no longer charmed him, and instead of repeating the experiment I have just described, he speedily evinced such an antipathy to the scene of his late revel that only from the greatest necessity would he ever again visit that part of the grounds. What did it mean? What had occurred on that night of innocent enjoyment to disturb or alarm him? Had some note in his own conscience been struck by an act which, in his cooler moments, he may have looked upon as a species of sacrilege? Or had some whisper from the past reached him amid the feasting, the laughing and the jesting, to render these old walls henceforth intolerable to him? He never said, but whatever the cause of this sudden aversion, the effect was deep and promised to be lasting. For, one morning, not long after this event, a party of workmen was seen leaving these grounds at daybreak, and soon it was noised about that a massive brick partition had been put up across the interior of this same pavilion, completely shutting off, for no reason that any one could see, some ten feet of what had been one long and undivided room. It was a strange act enough; but when, a few days later, it was followed by one equally mysterious, and they saw the encircling wall which had been so carefully raised by Judge Ocumpaugh ruthlessly pulled down, and every sign of its former presence there destroyed, wonder filled the highway and the curiosity of neighbors and friends passed all bounds. But no explanations were volunteered then or ever. People might query and peer, but they learned nothing. What was left open to view told no tales beyond the old one, and as for the single window which was the sole opening into the shut-off space, it was then, as now, so completely blocked up by a network of closely impacted vines, that it offered little more encouragement than the wall itself to the eyes of such curiosity-mongers as crept in by way of the hedge-rows to steal a look at the hut, and if possible gain a glimpse of an interior which had suddenly acquired, by the very means taken to shut it off from every human eye, a new importance pointing very decidedly toward the tragic. But soon even this semblance of interest died out or was confined to strange tales whispered under breath on weird nights at neighboring firesides, and the old neglect prevailed once more. The whole place--new brick and old stone--seemed doomed to a common fate under the hand of time, when the present Philo Ocumpaugh, succeeding to the property, brought new wealth and business enterprise into the family, and the old house on the hill was replaced by the marble turrets of Homewood, and this hut--or rather the portion open to improvement--was restored to some sort of comfort, and rechristened the bungalow. Was fate to be appeased by this effort at forgetfulness? No. In emulation of the long abandoned portion so hopelessly cut off by that dividing wall, this brightly-furnished adjunct to the great house had linked itself in the minds of men to a new mystery--the mystery which I had come there to solve, if wit and patience could do it, aided by my supposedly unshared knowledge of a fact connecting me with this family's history in a way it little dreamed of. Naturally, my first look was at the building itself. I have described its location and the room from which the child was lost. What I wanted to see now, after studying those chalk-marks, was whether that partition which had been put in, was as impassable as was supposed. The policeman on guard having strolled a few feet away, I approached the open doorway without hindrance, and at once took that close look I had promised myself, of the marks which I had observed scrawled broadly across the floor just inside the threshold. They were as interesting and fully as important as I had anticipated. Though nearly obliterated by the passing of the policeman's feet across them, I was still enabled to read the one word which appeared to me significant. If you will glance at the following reproduction of a snap-shot which I took of this scrawl, you will see what I mean. [Illustration] The significant character was the 16. Taken with the "ust," there could be no doubt that the whole writing had been a record of the date on which the child had disappeared: August 16, 190-. This in itself was of small consequence if the handwriting had not possessed those marked peculiarities which I believed belonged to but one man--a man I had once known--a man of reverend aspect, upright carriage and a strong distinguishing mark, like an old-time scar, running straight down between his eyebrows. This had been my thought when I first saw it. It was doubly so on seeing it again after the doubts expressed by Miss Graham of a threatening old man who possessed similar characteristics. Satisfied on this point, I turned my attention to what still more seriously occupied it. The three or four long rugs, which hung from the ceiling across the whole wall at my left, evidently concealed the mysterious partition put up in Mr. Ocumpaugh's father's time directly across this portion of the room. Was it a totally unbroken partition? I had been told so; but I never accept such assertions without a personal investigation. Casting a glance through the doorway and seeing that it would take my dreaming friend, the policeman, some two or three minutes yet to find his way back to his post, I hastily lifted these rugs aside, one after the other, and took a look behind them. A stretch of Georgia pine, laid, as I readily discovered by more than one rap of my knuckles, directly over the bricks it was intended to conceal, was visible under each; from end to end a plain partition with no indications of its having been tampered with since the alterations were first made. Dismissing from my mind one of those vague possibilities, which add such interest to the calling of a detective, I left the place, with my full thought concentrated on the definite clue I had received from the chalk-marks. But I had not walked far before I met with a surprise which possibly possessed a significance equal to anything I had already observed, if only I could have fully understood it. On the path into which I now entered, I encountered again the figure of Mrs. Carew. Her face was turned full on mine, and she had evidently retraced her steps to have another instant's conversation with me. The next moment I was sure of this. Her eyes, always magnetic, shone with increasing brightness as I advanced to meet her, and her manner, while grave, was that of a woman quite conscious of the effect she produced by her least word or action. "I have returned to tell you," said she, "that I have more confidence in your efforts than in those of the police officers around here. If Gwendolen's fate is determined by any one it will be by you. So I want to be of aid to you if I can. Remember that. I may have said this to you before, but I wish to impress it upon you." There was a flutter in her movements which astonished me. She was surveying me in a straightforward way, and I could not but feel the fire and force of her look. Happily she was no longer a young woman or I might have misunderstood the disturbance which took place in my own breast as I waited for the musical tones to cease. "You are very good," I rejoined. "I need help, and shall be only too glad to receive your assistance." Yet I did question her, though I presently found myself walking toward the house at her side. She may not have expected me to presume so far. Certainly she showed no dissatisfaction when, at a parting in the path, I took my leave of her and turned my face in the direction of the gates. A strange sweet woman, with a power quite apart from the physical charms which usually affect men of my age, but one not easily read nor parted from unless one had an imperative errand, as I had. This errand was to meet and forestall the messenger boy whom I momently expected with the answer to my telegram. That an opportunity for gossip was likewise afforded by the motley group of men and boys drawn up near one of the gate-posts, gave an added interest to the event which I was quite ready to appreciate. Approaching this group, I assimilated myself with it as speedily as possible, and, having some tact for this sort of thing, soon found myself the recipient of various gratuitous opinions as to the significance of the find which had offered such a problem both to the professional and unprofessional detective. Two mismated shoes! Had Gwendolen Ocumpaugh by any chance worn such? No--or the ones mating them would have been found in her closet, and this, some one shouted out, had not been done. Only the one corresponding to that fished up from the waters of the dock had come to light; the other, the one which the child must really have worn, was no nearer being found than the child herself. What did it all mean? No one knew; but all attempted some sort of hazardous guess which I was happy to see fell entirely short of the mark. There was not a word of the vindictive old man described by Miss Graham, till I myself introduced the topic. My reason or rather my excuse for introducing it was this: On the gate-post near me I had observed the remnants of a strip of paper which had been pasted there and afterward imperfectly torn off. It had an unsightly look, but I did not pay much attention to it till some movement in the group forced me a little nearer to the post, when I was surprised enough to see that this scrap of paper showed signs of words, and that these words gave evidence of being a date written in the very hand I now had no difficulty in recognizing as that of the old man uppermost in my own mind, even if he were not the one whom Miss Graham had seen on the bridge. This date--strange to say--was the same significant one already noted on the floor of the bungalow--a fact which I felt merited an explanation if any one about me could give it. Waiting, therefore, for a lull in the remarks passing between the stable-men and other employees about the place, I drew the attention of the first man who would listen, to the half torn-off strip of paper on the post, and asked if that was the way the Ocumpaughs gave notice of their entertainments. He started, then turned his back on me. "That wasn't put there for the entertainment," he growled; "that was pasted up there by some one who wanted to show off his writin'. There don't seem to be no other reason." As the man who spoke these words had thereby proved himself a blockhead, I edged away from him as soon as possible toward a very decent looking fellow who appeared to have more brains than speech. "Do you know who pasted that date upon the post?" I inquired. He answered very directly. "No, or I should have been laying for him long before this. Why, it is not only there you can see it. I found it pinned to the carriage cushions one day just as I was going to drive Mrs. Ocumpaugh out." (Evidently I had struck upon the coachman.) "And not only that. One of the girls up at the house--one as I knows pretty well--tells me--I don't care who hears it now--that it was written across a card which was left at the door for Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and all in the same handwriting, which is not a common one, as you can see. This means something, seeing it was the date when our bad luck fell on us." He had noted that. "You don't mean to say that these things were written and put about before the date you see on them." "But I do. Would we have noticed since? But who are you, sir, if I may ask? One of them detective fellows? If so, I have a word to say: Find that child or Mrs. Ocumpaugh's blood will be on your head! She'll not live till Mr. Ocumpaugh comes home unless she can show him his child." "Wait!" I called out, for he was turning away toward the stable. "You know who wrote those slips?" "Not a bit of it. No one does. Not that anybody thinks much about them but me." "The police must," I ventured. "May be, but they don't say anything about it. Somehow it looks to me as if they were all at sea." "Possibly they are," I remarked, letting him go as I caught sight of a small boy coming up the road with several telegrams in his hand. "Is one of those directed to Robert Trevitt?" I asked, crowding up with the rest, as his small form was allowed to slip through the gate. "Spec's there is," he replied, looking them over and handing me one. I carried it to one side and hastily tore it open. It was, as I expected, from my partner, and read as follows: Man you want has just returned after two days' absence. Am on watch. Saw him just alight from buggy with what looked like sleeping child in his arms. Closed and fastened front door after him. Safe for to-night. Did I allow my triumph to betray itself? I do not think so. The question which kept down my elation was this: Would I be the first man to get there? V THE OLD HOUSE IN YONKERS The old man whose handwriting I had now positively identified was a former employer of mine. I had worked in his office when a lad. He was a doctor of very fair reputation in Westchester County, and I recognized every characteristic of his as mentioned by Miss Graham, save the frenzy which she described as accompanying his address. In those days he was calm and cold and, while outwardly scrupulous, capable of forgetting his honor as a physician under a sufficiently strong temptation. I had left him when new prospects opened, and in the years which had elapsed had contented myself with the knowledge that his shingle still hung out in Yonkers, though his practice was nothing to what it used to be when I was in his employ. Now I was going to see him again. That his was the hand which had stolen Gwendolen seemed no longer open to doubt. That she was under his care in the curious old house I remembered in the heart of Yonkers, seemed equally probable; but why so sordid a man--one who loved money above everything else in the world--should retain the child one minute after the publication of the bountiful reward offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh, was what I could not at first understand. Miss Graham's theory of hate had made no impression on me. He was heartless and not likely to be turned aside from any project he had formed, but he was not what I considered vindictive where nothing was to be gained. Yet my comprehension of him had been but a boy's comprehension, and I was now prepared to put a very different estimate on one whose character had never struck me as being an open one, even when my own had been most credulous. That my enterprise, even with the knowledge I possessed of this man, promised well or held out any prospects of easy fulfilment, I no longer allowed myself to think. If money was his object--and what other could influence a man of his temperament?--the sum offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh, large though it was, had apparently not sufficed to satisfy his greed. He was holding back the child, or so I now believed, in order to wring a larger, possibly a double, amount from the wretched mother. Fifty thousand was a goodly sum, but one hundred thousand was better; and this man had gigantic ideas where his cupidity was concerned. I remember how firmly he had once stood out for ten thousand dollars when he had been offered five; and I began to see, though in an obscure way as yet, how it might very easily be a part of his plan to work Mrs. Ocumpaugh up to a positive belief in the child's death before he came down upon her for the immense reward he had fixed his heart upon. The date he had written all over the place might thus find some explanation in a plan to weaken her nerve before pressing his exorbitant claims upon her. Nothing was clear, yet everything was possible in such a nature; and anxious to enter upon the struggle both for my own sake and that of the child of whose condition under that terrible eye I scarcely dared to think, I left Homewood in haste and took the first train for Yonkers. Though the distance was not great, I had fully arranged my plans before entering the town where so many of my boyish years had been spent. I knew the old fox well enough, or thought I did, to be certain that I should have anything but an easy entrance into his house, in case it still harbored the child whom my partner had seen carried in there. I anticipated difficulties, but was concerned about none but the possibility of not being able to bring myself face to face with him. Once in his presence, the knowledge which I secretly possessed of an old but doubtful transaction of his, would serve to make him mine even to the point of yielding up the child he had forcibly abducted. But would he accord me an interview? Could I, without appeal to the police--and you can readily believe I was not anxious to allow them to put their fingers in my pie--force him to open his door and let me into his house, which, as I well recalled, he locked up at nine--after which he would receive no one, not even a patient? It was not nine yet, but it was very near that hour. I had but twenty minutes in which to mount the hill to the old house marked by the doctor's sign and by another peculiarity of so distinct a nature that it would serve to characterize a dwelling in a city as large as New York--though I doubt if New York can show its like from the Battery to the Bronx. The particulars of this I will mention later. I have first to relate the relief I felt when, on entering the old neighborhood, I heard in response to a few notes of a certain popular melody which I had allowed to leave my lips, an added note or two which warned me that my partner was somewhere hidden among the alleys of this very unaristocratic quarter. Indeed, from the sound, I judged him to be in the rear of the doctor's house and, being anxious to hear what he had to say before advancing upon the door which might open my way to easy fortune or complete defeat, I paused a few steps off and waited for his appearance. He was at my elbow before I had either seen or heard him. He was always light of foot, but this time he seemed to have no tread at all. "Still here," was his comforting assurance. "Both?" I whispered back. "Both." "Any one else?" "No. A boy drove away the buggy and has not come back. Sawbones keeps no girl." "Is the child quiet? Has there been no alarm?" "Not a breath." "No cops in the neighborhood? No spies around?" "Not one. We've got it all this time. But--" "Hush!" "There's nobody." "Yes, the doctor; he's fastening up his house. I must hasten; nothing would induce me to let that innocent remain under his roof all night." "It's not the windows he is at." "What then?" "The door, the big front door." "The--" "Yes." I gave my partner a surprised look, undoubtedly lost in the darkness, and drew a step nearer the house. "It's just the same old gloom-box," I exclaimed, and paused for an instant to mark the changes which had taken place in the surroundings. They were very few and I turned back to fix my eye on the front door where a rattling sound could be heard, as of some one fingering the latch. It was this door which formed the peculiarity of the house. In itself it was like any other that was well-fashioned and solid, but it opened upon space--that is, if it was ever opened, which I doubted. The stoop and even the railing which had once guarded it, had all been removed, leaving a bare front, with this inhospitable entrance shut against every one who had not the convenience for mounting to it by a ladder. There was another way in, but this was round on one side, and did not present itself to the eye unless one approached from the west end of the street; so that to half the passers-by the house looked like a deserted one till they came abreast of the flagged path which led to the office door. As the windows had never been unclosed in my day and were not now, I took it for granted that they had remained thus inhospitably shut during all the years of my absence, which certainly offered but little encouragement to a man bent on an errand which would soon take him into those dismal precincts. "What goes on behind those shuttered windows?" thought I. "I know of one thing, but what else?" The one thing was the counting of money and the arranging of innumerable gold pieces on the great top of a baize-covered table in what I should now describe as the back parlor. I remembered how he used to do it. I caught him at it once, having crept up one windy night from my little room off the office to see what kept the doctor up so late. As I now stood listening in the dark street to those strange touches on a door disused for years, I recalled the tremor with which I rounded the top of the stair that night of long ago and the mingled fear and awe with which I recognized, not only such a mint of money as I had never seen out of the bank before, but the greedy and devouring passion with which he pushed the glittering coins about and handled the bank-notes and gloated over the pile it all made when drawn together by his hooked fingers, till the sound, perhaps, of my breathing in the dark hall startled him with a thought of discovery, and his two hands came together over that pile with a gesture more eloquent even than the look with which he seemed to penetrate the very shadows in the silent space wherein I stood. It was a vision short, but inexpressibly vivid, of the miser incarnate, and having seen it and escaped detection, as was my undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of discovery which spoke of treasure ill acquired. And now he was seeking to add to his gains, and I stood on the outside of his house listening to sounds I did not understand, instead of attempting to draw him to the office-door by ringing the bell he never used to disconnect till nine. "Do you know that I don't quite like the noises which are being made up there?" came in a sudden whisper to my ear. "Supposing it was the child trying to get out! She does not know there is no stoop; she seemed sleeping or half-dead when he carried her in, and if by any chance she has got hold of the key and the door should open--" "Hush!" I cried, starting forward in horror of the thought he had suggested. "It is opening. I see a thread of light. What does it mean, Jupp? The child? No; there is more than a child's strength in that push. Hist!" Here I drew him flat against the wall. The door above had swung back and some one was stamping on the threshold over our heads in what appeared to be an outburst of ungovernable fury. That it was the doctor I could not doubt. But why this anger; why this mad gasping after breath and the half-growl, half-cry, with which he faced the night and the quiet of a street which to his glance, passing as it did over our heads, must have appeared altogether deserted? We were consulting each other's faces for some explanation of this unlooked-for outbreak, when the door above us suddenly slammed to and we heard a renewal of that fumbling with lock and key which had first drawn our attention. But the hand was not sure or the hall was dark, for the key did not turn in the lock. Suddenly awake to my opportunity, I wheeled Jupp about and, making use of his knee and back, climbed up till I was enabled to reach the knob and turn it just as the man within had stepped back, probably to procure more light. The result was that the door swung open and I stumbled in, falling almost face downward on the marble floor faintly checkered off to my sight in the dim light of a lamp set far back in a bare and dismal hall. I was on my feet again in an instant and it was in this manner, and with all the disadvantages of a hatless head and a disordered countenance, that I encountered again my old employer after five years of absence. He did not recognize me. I saw it by the look of alarm which crossed his features and the involuntary opening of his lips in what would certainly have been a loud cry if I had not smiled and cried out with false gaiety: "Excuse me, doctor, I never came in by that door before. Pardon my awkwardness. The step is somewhat high from the street." My smile is my own, they say; at all events it served to enlighten him. "Bob Trevitt," he exclaimed, but with a growl of displeasure I could hardly condemn under the circumstances. I hastened to push my advantage, for he was looking very threateningly toward the door which was swaying gently and in an inviting way to a man who if old, had more power in his arms than I had in my whole body. "_Mr._ Trevitt," I corrected; "and on a very important errand. I am here on behalf of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose child you have at this moment under your roof." VI DOCTOR POOL It was a direct attack and for a minute I doubted if I had not made a mistake in making it so suddenly and without gloves. His face purpled, the veins on his forehead started out, his great form shook with an ire that in such domineering natures as his can only find relief in a blow. But the right hand did not rise nor the heavy fist fall. With admirable self-restraint he faced me for a moment, without attempting either protest or denial. Then his blazing eyes cooled down, and with a sudden gesture which at once relaxed his extreme tension of nerve and muscle, he pointed toward the end of the hall and remarked with studied politeness: "My office is below, as you know. Will you oblige me by following me there?" I feared him, for I saw that studiously as he sought to hide his impressions, he too regarded the moment as one of critical significance. But I assumed an air of perfect confidence, merely observing as I left the neighborhood of the front door and the proximity of Jupp: "I have friends on the outside who are waiting for me; so you must not keep me too long." He was bending to take up the lamp from a small table near the basement stair as I threw out these words in apparent carelessness, and the flash which shot from under his shaggy brows was thus necessarily heightened by the glare in which he stood. Yet with all allowances made I marked him down in my own mind as dangerous, and was correspondingly surprised when he turned on the top step of the narrow staircase I remembered so vividly from the experience I have before named, and in the mildest of accents remarked: "These stairs are a trifle treacherous. Be careful to grasp the hand-rail as you come down." Was the game deeper than I thought? In all my remembrance of him I had never before seen him look benevolent, and it alarmed me, coming as it did after the accusation I had made. I felt tempted to make a stand and demand that the interview be held then and there. For I knew his subterranean office very well, and how difficult it would be to raise a cry there which could be heard by any one outside. Still, with a muttered, "Thank you," I proceeded to follow him down, only stopping once in the descent to listen for some sound by which I could determine in which room of the many I knew to be on this floor the little one lay, on whose behalf I was incurring a possible bullet from the pistol I once saw lurking amongst bottles and corks in one of the innumerable drawers of the doctor's table. But all was still around and overhead; too still for my peace of mind, in which dreadful visions began to rise of a drugged or dying child, panting out its innocent breath in darkness and solitude. Yet no. With those thousands to be had for the asking, any man would be a fool to injure or even seriously to frighten a child upon whose good condition they depended; much less a miser whose whole heart was fixed on money. The clock struck as I put foot on the landing; so much can happen in twenty minutes when events crowd and the passions of men reach their boiling-point! I expected to see the old man try that door, even to double bolt it as in the years gone by. But he merely threw a look that way and proceeded on down the three or four steps which led into the species of basement where he had chosen to fix his office. In another moment that dim and dismal room broke upon my view under the vague light of the small and poorly-trimmed lamp he carried. I saw again its musty walls covered with books, where there were shelves laden with bottles and a loose array of miscellaneous objects I had often handled but out of which I never could make any meaning. I recognized it all and detected but few changes. But these were startling ones. The old lounge standing under the two barred windows which I had often likened in my own mind to those of a jail, had been recovered; and lying on the table, which I had always regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension, I perceived something which I had never seen there before: a Bible, with its edges worn and its leaves rumpled as if often and eagerly handled. I was so struck by this last discovery that I stopped, staring, in the doorway, looking from the sacred volume to his worn but vigorous figure drawn up in the middle of the room, with the lamp still in his hand and his small but brilliant eyes fixed upon mine with a certain ironical glitter in them, which gave me my first distrust of the part I had come there to play. "We will waste no words," said he, setting down the lamp, and seizing with his disengaged hand the long locks of his flowing beard. "In what respect are you a messenger from Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and what makes you think I have her child in this house?" I found it easier to answer the last question first. "I know the child is here," I replied, "because my partner saw you bring her in. I have gone into the detective business since leaving you." "Ah!" There was an astonishing edge to his smile and I felt that I should have to make the most of that old discovery of mine, if I were to hold my own with this man. "And may I ask," he coldly continued, "how you have succeeded in connecting me with this young child's disappearance?" "It's straight as a string," I retorted. "You threatened the child to its face in the hearing of its nurse some two weeks ago, on a certain bridge where you stopped them. You even set the day when the little Gwendolen should pass from luxury to poverty." Here I cast an involuntary glance about the room where the only sign of comfort was the newly upholstered lounge. "That day was the sixteenth, and we all know what happened on that date. If this is not plain enough--" I had seen his lip curl--"allow me to add, by way of explanation, that you have seen fit to threaten Mrs. Ocumpaugh herself with this date, for I know well the hand which wrote _August 16_ on the bungalow floor and in various other places about Homewood where her eye was likely to fall." And I let my own fall on a sort of manuscript lying open not far from the Bible, which still looked so out of place to me on this pagan-hearted old miser's table. "Such chirography as yours is not to be mistaken," I completed, with a short gesture toward the disordered sheets he had left spread out to every eye. "I see. A detective without doubt. Did you play the detective here?" The last question leaped like a shot from his lips. "You have not denied the threats to which I have just called your attention," was my cautious reply. "What need of that?" he retorted. "Are you not a--_detective_?" There was sarcasm, as well as taunt in the way he uttered that last word. I was conscious of being at a loss, but put a bold front on the matter and proceeded as if conscious of no secret misgiving. "Can you deny as well that you have been gone two days from this place? That during this time a doctor's buggy, drawn by a horse I should know by description, having harnessed him three times a day for two years, was seen by more than one observer in the wake of a mysterious wagon from the interior of which a child's crying could be heard? The wagon did not drive up to this house to-night, but the buggy did, and from it you carried a child which you brought with you into this house." With a sudden down-bringing of his old but powerful hand on the top of the table before him, he seemed about to utter an oath or some angry invective. But again he controlled himself, and eying me without any show of shame or even of desire to contradict any of my assertions, he quietly declared: "You are after that reward, I observe. Well, you won't get it. Like many others of your class you can follow a trail, but the insight to start right and to end in triumphant success is given only to a genius, and you are not a genius." With a blush I could not control, I advanced upon him, crying: "You have forestalled me. You have telegraphed or telephoned to Mr. Atwater--" "I have not left my house since I came in here three hours ago." "Then--" I began. But he hushed me with a look. "It is not a matter of money," he declared almost with dignity. "Those who think to reap dollars from the distress which has come upon the Ocumpaugh family will eat ashes for their pains. Money will be spent, but none of it earned, unless you, or such as you, are hired at so much an hour to--follow trails." Greatly astounded not only by the attitude he took, but by the calm and almost indifferent way in which he mentioned what I had every reason to believe to be the one burning object of his existence, I surveyed him with undisguised astonishment till another thought, growing out of the silence of the many-roomed house above us, gripped me with secret dread; and I exclaimed aloud and without any attempt at subterfuge: "She is dead, then! the child is dead!" "I do not know," was his reply. The four words were uttered with undeniable gloom. "You do not know?" I echoed, conscious that my jaw had fallen, and that I was staring at him with fright in my eyes. "No. I wish I did. I would give half of my small savings to know where that innocent baby is to-night. Sit down!" he vehemently commanded. "You do not understand me, I see. You confound the old Doctor Pool with the new." "I confound nothing," I violently retorted in strong revulsion against what I had now come to look upon as the attempt of a subtile actor to turn aside my suspicions and brave out a dangerous situation by a ridiculous subterfuge. "I understand the miser whom I have beheld gloating over his hoard in the room above, and I understand the doctor who for money could lend himself to a fraud, the secret results of which are agitating the whole country at this moment." "So!" The word came with difficulty. "So you _did_ play the detective, even as a boy. Pity I had not recognized your talents at the time. But no--" he contradicted himself with great rapidity; "I was not a redeemed soul then; I might have done you harm. I might have had more if not worse sins to atone for than I have now." And with scant appearance of having noted the doubtful manner in which I had received this astonishing outburst, he proceeded to cry aloud and with a commanding gesture: "Quit this. You have undertaken more than you can handle. You, a messenger from Mrs. Ocumpaugh? Never. You are but the messenger of your own cupidity; and cupidity leads by the straightest of roads directly down to hell." "This you proved six long years ago. Lead me to the child I believe to be in this house or I will proclaim aloud the pact you entered into then--a pact to which I was an involuntary witness whose word, however, will not go for less on that account. Behind the curtain still hanging over that old closet I stood while--" His hand had seized my arm with a grip few could have proceeded under. "Do you mean--" The rest was whispered in my ear. [Illustration: "DO YOU MEAN"--THE REST WAS WHISPERED IN MY EAR.] I nodded and felt that he was mine now. But the laugh which the next minute broke from his lips dashed my assurance. "Oh, the ways of the world!" he cried. Then in a different tone and not without reverence: "Oh, the ways of God!" I made no reply. For every reason I felt that the next word must come from him. It was an unexpected one. "That was Doctor Pool unregenerate and more heedful of the things of this world than of those of the world to come. You have to deal with quite a different man now. It is of that very sin I am now repenting in sackcloth and ashes. I live but to expiate it. Something has been done toward accomplishing this, but not enough. I have been played upon, used. This I will avenge. New sin is a poor apology for an old one." I scarcely heeded him. I was again straining my ears to catch a smothered sob or a frightened moan. "What are you listening for?" he asked. "For the sound of little Gwendolen's voice. It is worth fifty thousand dollars, you remember. Why shouldn't I listen for it? Besides, I have a real and uncontrollable sympathy for the child. I am determined to restore her to her home. Your blasphemous babble of a changed heart does not affect me. You are after a larger haul than the sum offered by Mr. Ocumpaugh. You want some of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's fortune. I have suspected it from the first." "I want? Little you know what I want"--then quickly, convincingly: "You are strangely deceived. Little Miss Ocumpaugh is not here." "What is that I hear, then?" was the quick retort with which I hailed the sigh, unmistakably from infantile lips, which now rose from some place very much nearer us than the hollow regions overhead toward which my ears had been so long turned. "That!" He flashed with uncontrollable passion, and if I am not mistaken clenched his hands so violently as to bury his nails in his flesh. "Would you like to see what that is? Come!"--and taking up the lamp, he moved, much to my surprise as well as to my intense interest, toward the door of the small cupboard where I had myself slept when in his service. That he still meditated some deviltry which would call for my full presence of mind to combat successfully, I did not in the least doubt. Yet the agitation under which I crossed the floor was more the result of an immediate anticipation of seeing--and in this place of all others in the world--the child about whom my thoughts had clung so persistently for forty-two hours, than of any results to myself in the way of injury or misfortune. Though the room was small and my passage across it necessarily short, I had time to remember Mrs. Ocumpaugh's pitiful countenance as I saw it gazing in agony of expectation from her window overlooking the river, and to catch again the sounds, less true and yet strangely thrilling, of Mrs. Carew's voice as she said: "A tragedy at my doors and I occupied with my own affairs!" Nor was this all. A recollection of Miss Graham's sorrow came up before my eyes also, and, truest of all, most penetrating to me of all the loves which seemed to encompass this rare and winsome infant, the infinite tenderness with which I once saw Mr. Ocumpaugh lift her to his breast, during one of my interviews with him at Homewood. All this before the door had swung open. Afterward, I saw nothing and thought of nothing but the small figure lying in the spot where I had once pillowed my own head, and with no more luxuries or even comforts about her than had been my lot under this broad but by no means hospitable roof. A bare wall, a narrow cot, a table with a bottle and glass on it and the child in the bed--that was all. But God knows, it was enough to me at that breathless moment; and advancing eagerly, I was about to stoop over the little head sunk deep in its pillow, when the old man stepped between and with a short laugh remarked: "There's no such hurry. I have something to say first, in explanation of the anger you have seen me display; an anger which is unseemly in a man professing to have conquered the sins and passions of lost humanity. I did follow this child. You were right in saying that it was my horse and buggy which were seen in the wake of the wagon which came from the region of Homewood and lost itself in the crossroads running between the North River and the Sound. For two days and a night I followed it, through more difficulties than I could relate in an hour, stopping in lonely woods, or at wretched taverns, watching, waiting for the transfer of the child, whose destination I was bound to know even if it cost me a week of miserable travel without comfortable food or decent lodging. I could hear the child cry out from time to time--an assurance that I was not following a will-o'-the-wisp--but not till to-day, not till very late to-day, did any words pass between me and the man and woman who drove the wagon. At Fordham, just as I suspected them of making final efforts to escape me, they came to a halt and I saw the man get out. "I immediately got out too. As we faced each other, I demanded what the matter was. He appeared reckless. 'Are you a doctor?' he asked. I assured him that I was. At which he blurted out: 'I don't know why you've been following us so long, and I don't care. I've got a job for you. A child in our wagon is ill.'" With a start I attempted to look over the old man's shoulder toward the bed. But the deep, if irregular, breathing of the child reassured me, and I turned to hear the doctor out. "This gave me my chance. 'Let me see her,' I cried. The man's eye lowered. I did not like his face at all. 'If it's anything serious,' he growled, 'I shall cut. It isn't my flesh and blood nor yet my old woman's there. You'll have to find some place for the brat besides my wagon if it's anything that won't get cured without nu'ssin'. So come along and have a look.' I followed him, perfectly determined to take the child under my own care, sick or well. 'Where were you going to take her?' I asked. I didn't ask who she was; why should I? 'I don't know as I am obliged to tell,' was his surly reply. 'Where we are going oursel's,' he reluctantly added. 'But not to nu'ss. I've no time for nu'ssin' brats, nor my wife neither. We have a journey to make. Sarah!'--this to his wife, for by this time we were beside the wagon, 'lift up the flap and hold the youngster's hand out. Here's a doctor who will tell us if it's fever or not.' A puny hand and wrist were thrust out. I felt the pulse and then held out my arms. 'Give me the child,' I commanded. 'She's sick enough for a hospital.' A grunt from the woman within, an oath from the man, and a bundle was presently put in my arms, from which a little moan escaped as I strode with it toward my buggy. 'I do not ask your name,' I called back to the man who reluctantly followed me. 'Mine is Doctor Pool and I live in Yonkers.' He muttered something about not peachin' on a poor man who was really doin' an unfortunate a kindness, and then slunk hurriedly back and was gone, wagon, wife and all, by the time I had whipped up my tired old nag and turned about toward Yonkers. But I had the child safe and sound in my arms, and my fears of its fate were relieved. It was not well, but I anticipated nothing serious. When it moaned I pressed it a little closer to my breast and that was all. In three-quarters of an hour we were in Yonkers. In fifteen minutes I had it on this bed, and had begun to unroll the shawl in which it was closely wrapped. Did you ever see the child about whom there has been all this coil?" "Yes, about three years ago." "Three years! I have seen her within a fortnight; yet I could carry that young one in my arms for a whole hour without the least suspicion that I was making a fool of myself." Quickly slipping aside, he allowed me to approach the bed and take my first look at the sleeping child's face. It was a sweet one but I did not need the hint he had given me to find the features strange, and lacking every characteristic of those of Gwendolen Ocumpaugh. Yet as the cutting off of the hair will often change the whole aspect of the face--and this child's hair was short--I was stooping in great excitement to notice more particularly the contour of cheek and chin which had given individuality to the little heiress, when the doctor touched me on the arm and drew my attention to a pair of little trousers and a shirt which were hanging on the door behind me. "Those are the clothes I came upon under that great shawl. The child I have been following and whom I have brought into my house under the impression it was Gwendolen Ocumpaugh is not even a girl." VII "FIND THE CHILD!" I could well understand the wrath to which this man had given way, by the feeling which now took hold of my own breast. "A boy!" I exclaimed. "A boy." Still incredulous, I leaned over the child and lifted into the full light of the lamp one of the little hands I saw lying outside of the coverlet. There was no mistaking it for a girl's hand, let alone a little lady's. "So we are both fools!" I vociferated in my unbounded indignation, careful however to lay the small hand gently back on the panting breast. And turning away both from the doctor and his small patient, I strolled back into the office. The bubble whose gay colors I had followed with such avidity had burst in my face with a vengeance. But once from under the influence of the doctor's sarcastic eye, my better nature reasserted itself. Wheeling about, I threw this question back: "If that is a boy and a stranger, where is Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?" A moan from the bed and a hurried movement on the part of the doctor, who took this opportunity to give the child another dose of medicine, were my sole response. Waiting till the doctor had finished his task and drawn back from the bedside, I repeated the question and with increased emphasis: "Where, then, is Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?" Still the doctor did not answer, though he turned my way and even stepped forward; his long visage, cadaverous from fatigue and the shock of his disappointment, growing more and more somber as he advanced. When he came to a stand by the table, I asked again: "Where is the child idolized by Mr. Ocumpaugh and mourned to such a degree by his almost maddened wife that they say she will die if the little girl is not found?" The threat in my tones brought a response at last--a response which astonished me. "Have I not said that I do not know? Do you not believe me? Do you think me as blind to-day to truth and honor as I was six years ago? Have you no idea of repentance and regeneration from sin? You are a detective. Find me that child. You shall have money--hundreds--thousands--if you can bring me proofs of her being yet alive. If the Hudson has swallowed her--" here his figure rose, dilated and took on a majesty which impressed itself upon me through all my doubts--"I will have vengeance on whoever has thus dared the laws of God and man as I would on the foulest murderer in the foulest slums of that city which breeds wickedness in high places as in low. I lock hands no longer with Belial. Find me the child, or make me at least to know the truth!" There was no doubting the passion which drove these words hot from his lips. I recognized at last the fanatic whom Miss Graham had so graphically described in relating her extraordinary adventure on the bridge; and met him with this one question, which was certainly a vital one: "Who dropped a shoe from the little one's closet, into the water under the dock? Did you?" "No." His reply came quick and sharp. "But," I insisted, "you have had something to do with this child's disappearance." He did not answer. A sullen look was displacing the fire of resolve in the eyes I saw sinking slowly before mine. "I will not acknowledge it," he muttered; adding, however, in what was little short of a growl: "Not yet, not till it becomes my duty to avenge innocent blood." "You foretold the date." "Drop it." "You were in league with the abductor," I persisted. "I declare to your face, in spite of all the vaunted scruples with which you seek to blind me to your guilt, that you were in league with the abductor, knowing what money Mrs. Ocumpaugh would pay. Only he was too smart for you, and perhaps too unscrupulous. You would stop short of murder, now that you have got religion. But his conscience is not so nice and so you fear--" "You do not know what I fear and I am not going to tell you. It is enough that I am conscious of my own uprightness and that I say, Find the child! You have incentive enough." It was true and it was growing stronger every minute. "Confine yourself to such clues as are apparent to every eye," he now admonished me with an eagerness that seemed real. "If they are pointed by some special knowledge you believe yourself to have gained, that is all the better--perhaps. I do not propose to say." I saw that he had uttered his ultimatum. "Very good," said I. "I have, nevertheless, one more question to ask which relates to those very clues. You can not refuse to answer it if you are really desirous of aiding me in my efforts. Where did you first come upon the wagon which you followed so many hours in the belief that it held Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?" He mused a moment with downcast head, his nervous frame trembling with the force with which he threw his whole weight on the hand he held outspread on the table before him. Then he calmly replied: "I will tell you that. At the gate of Mrs. Carew's grounds. You know them? They adjoin the Ocumpaughs' on the left." My surprise made me lower my head but not so quickly that I did not catch the oblique glint of his eye as he mentioned the name which I was so little prepared to hear in this connection. "I was in my buggy on the highroad," he continued. "There was a constant passing by of all kinds of vehicles on their way to and from the Ocumpaugh entertainment, but none that attracted my attention till I caught sight of the covered wagon I have endeavored to describe, being driven out of the adjoining grounds. Then I pricked up my ears, for a child was crying inside in the smothered way that tells of a hand laid heavily over the mouth. I thought I knew what child this was, but you have been a witness to my disappointment after forty-eight hours of travel behind that wretched wagon." "It came out of Mrs. Carew's grounds?" I repeated, ignoring everything but the one important fact. "And during the time, you say, when Mrs. Ocumpaugh's guests were assembling? Did you see any other vehicle leave by the same gate at or before that time?" "Yes, a carriage. It appeared to have no one in it. Indeed, I know that it was empty, for I peered into it as it rolled by me down the street. Of course I do not know what might have been under the seats." "Nothing," was my sharp retort. "That was the carriage in which Mrs. Carew had come up from the train. Did it pass out before the wagon?" "Yes, by some minutes." "There is nothing, then, to be gained by that." "There does not seem to be." Was his accent in uttering this simple phrase peculiar? I looked up to make sure. But his face, which had been eloquent with one feeling or another during every minute of this long interview till the present instant, looked strangely impassive, and I did not know how to press the question hovering on my lips. "You have given me a heavy task," I finally remarked, "and you offer very little assistance in the way of conjecture. Yet you must have formed some." He toyed with his beard, combing it with his nervous, muscular fingers, and as I watched how he lingered over the tips, caressing them before he dropped them, I felt that he was toying with my perplexities in much the same fashion and with an equal satisfaction. Angry and out of all patience with him, I blurted out: "I will do without your aid. I will solve this mystery and earn your money if not that of Mr. Ocumpaugh, with no assistance save that afforded by my own wits." "I expect you will," he retorted; and for the first time since I burst in upon him like one dropping from the clouds through the unapproachable doorway on the upper floor, he lost that look of extreme tension which had nerved his aged figure into something of the aspect of youth. With it vanished his impressiveness. It was simply a tired old man I now followed upstairs to the side door. As I paused to give him a final nod and an assurance of intended good faith toward him, he made a kindly enough gesture in the direction of my old room below and said: "Don't worry about the little fellow down there. He'll come out all right. I shan't visit on him the extravagance of my own folly. I am a Christian now." And with this encouraging remark he closed the door and I found myself alone in the dark alley. My first sense of relief came from the coolness of the night air on my flushed forehead and cheeks. After the stifling atmosphere of this underground room, reeking with the fumes of the lamp and the heat of a struggle which his dogged confidence in himself had made so unequal, it was pleasurable just to sense the quiet and the cool of the night and feel myself released from the bondage of a presence from which I had frequently recoiled but had never thoroughly felt the force of till to-night; my next, from the touch and voice of my partner who at that moment rose from before the basement windows where he had evidently been lying for a long time outstretched. "What have you two been doing down there?" was his very natural complaint. "I tried to listen, I tried to see; but beyond a few scattered words when your voices rose to an excited pitch, I have learned nothing but that you were in no danger save from the overthrow of your scheme. That has failed, has it not? You would have interrupted me long ago if you had found the child." "Yes," I acknowledged; drawing him down the alley, "I have failed for to-night, but I start afresh to-morrow. Though how I can rest idle for nine hours, not knowing under what roof, if under any, that doomed innocent may be lying, I do not know." "You must rest; you are staggering with fatigue now." "Not a bit of it, only with uncertainty. I don't see my way. Let us go down street and see if any news has come over the wires since I left Homewood." "But first, what a spooky old house that is! And what did the old gentleman have to say of your tumbling in on him from space without a 'By your leave' or even an 'Excuse me'? Tell me about it." I told him enough to allay his curiosity. That was all I thought necessary,--and he seemed satisfied. Jupp is a good fellow, quite willing to confine himself to his particular end of the business which does not include the thinking end. Why should it? There was no news--this we soon learned--only some hints of a contemplated move on the part of the police in a district where some low characters had been seen dragging along a resisting child of an unexpectedly refined appearance. As no one could describe this child and as I had refused from the first to look upon this case as one of ordinary abduction, I laid little stress on the report, destined though it was to appear under startling head-lines on the morrow, and startled my more credulous partner quite out of his usual equanimity, by ordering him on our arrival at the station to buy me a ticket for ----, as I was going back to Homewood. "To Homewood, so late!" "Exactly. It will not be late there--or if it is, anxious hearts make light sleepers." His shoulders rose a trifle, but he bought the ticket. VIII "PHILO! PHILO! PHILO!" Never have I felt a weirder sensation than when I stepped from the cars on to the solitary platform from which a few hours before I had seen the little nursery-governess depart for New York. The train, soon to disappear in the darkness of the long perspective, was all that gave life and light to the scene, and when it was gone, nothing remained to relieve the gloom or to break the universal stillness save the quiet lap of the water and the moaning of the wind through the trees which climbed the heights to Homewood. I had determined to enter if possible by way of the private path, though I expected to find it guarded against just such intrusion. In approaching it I was given a full view of the river and thus was in a position to note that the dock and adjoining banks were no longer bright with lanterns in the hands of eager men bending with fixed eyes over the flowing waters. The search which had kept so many busy at this spot for well on to two days had been abandoned; and the darkness seemed doubly dark and the silence doubly oppressive in contrast. Yet hope spoke in the abandonment; and with renewed spirit and a more than lively courage, I turned toward the little gate through which I had passed twice before that day. As I expected, a silent figure rose up from the shadows to prevent me; but it fell back at the mention of my name and business, thus proving the man to be in the confidence of Mrs. Ocumpaugh or, at the least, in that of Miss Porter. "I am come for a social chat with the coachman," I explained. "Lights burn late in such extensive stables. Don't worry about me. The people at the house are in sympathy with my investigation." Thus we stretch the truth at great crises. "I know you," was the answer. "But keep away from the house. Our orders are imperative to allow no one to approach it again to-night, except with the child in hand or with such news as would gain instant admission." "Trust me," said I, as I went up the steps. It was so dark between the hedge-rows that my ascent became mere groping. I had a lantern in my pocket which I had taken from Jupp, but I did not choose to make use of it. I preferred to go on and up, trusting to my instinct to tell me when I had reached a fresh flight of steps. A gleam of light from Mrs. Carew's upper windows was the first intimation I received that I was at the top of the bank, and in another moment I was opposite the gap in the hedge opening upon her grounds. For no particular reason that I know of, I here paused and took a long survey of what was, after all, nothing but a cluster of shadows broken here and there by squares of subdued light. I felt a vague desire to enter--to see and talk again with the charming woman whose personality had made such an impression upon me, if only to understand the peculiar feelings which those indistinguishable walls awakened, and why such a sense of anticipation should disturb my admiration of this woman and the delight which I had experienced in every accent of her trained and exquisite voice. I was standing very still and in almost total darkness. The shock, therefore, was great when, in finally making up my mind to move, I became conscious of a presence near me, totally indiscernible and as silent as myself. Whose? No watchman, or he would have spoken at the rustle I made stumbling back against the hedge-row. Some marauder, then, or a detective, like myself? I would not waste time in speculating; better to decide the question at once, for the situation was eery, the person, whoever he was, stood so near and so still, and so directly in the way of my advance. Drawing the lantern from my pocket, I pushed open the slide and flashed the light on the immovable figure before me. The face I beheld staring into mine was one quite unknown to me, but as I took in its expression, my arm gradually fell, and with it the light from the man's features, till face and form were lost again in the darkness, leaving in my disturbed mind naught but an impression; but such an impression! The countenance thus flashed upon my vision must have been a haunting one at any time, but seen as I saw it, at a moment of extreme self-abandonment, the effect was startling. Yet I had sufficient control over myself to utter a word or two of apology, which was not answered, if it was even heard. A more exact description may be advisable. The person whom I thus encountered hesitating before Mrs. Carew's house was a man of meager build, sloping shoulders and handsome but painfully pinched features. That he was a gentleman of culture and the nicest refinement was evident at first glance; that this culture and refinement were at this moment under the dominion of some fierce thought or resolve was equally apparent, giving to his look an absorption which the shock attending the glare I had thus suddenly thrown on his face could not immediately dispel. Dazed by an encounter for which he seemed even less prepared than myself, he stood with his heart in his face, if I may so speak, and only gradually came to himself as the sense of my proximity forced itself in upon his suffering and engrossed mind. When I saw that he had quite emerged from his dream, I dropped the light. But I did not forget his look; I did not forget the man, though I hastened to leave him, in my desire to fulfill the purpose for which I had entered these grounds at so late an hour. My plan was, as I have said, to visit the Ocumpaugh stables and have a chat with the coachman. I had no doubt of my welcome and not much doubt of myself. Yet as I left the vicinity of Mrs. Carew's cottage and came upon the great house of the Ocumpaughs looming in the moonlight above its marble terraces, I felt impressed as never before both by the beauty and magnificence of the noble pile, and shrank with something like shame from the presumption which had led me to pit my wits against a mystery having its birth in so much grandeur and material power. The prestige of great wealth as embodied in this superb structure well-nigh awed me from my task and I was passing the twin pergolas and flower-bordered walks with hesitating foot, when I heard through one of the open windows a cry which made me forget everything but our common heritage of sorrow and the equal hold it has on high and low. "Philo!" the voice rang out in a misery to wring the heart of the most callous. "Philo! Philo!" Mr. Ocumpaugh's name called aloud by his suffering wife. Was she in delirium? It would seem so; but why Philo! always Philo! and not once Gwendolen? With hushed steps, ears ringing and heart palpitating with new and indefinable sensations, I turned into the road to the stables. There were men about and I caught one glimpse of a maid's pretty head looking from one of the rear windows, but no one stopped me, and I reached the stable just as a man came sauntering out to take his final look at the weather. It was the fellow I sought, Thomas the coachman. I had not miscalculated the nature of my man. In ten minutes we were seated together on an open balcony, smoking and beguiling the time with a little harmless gossip. After a free and easy discussion of the great event, mingled with the naturally-to-be-expected criticism of the police, we proceeded under my guidance to those particulars for which I had risked losing this very valuable hour. He mentioned Mrs. Ocumpaugh; I mentioned Mrs. Carew. "A beautiful woman," I remarked. I thought he looked astonished. "_She_ beautiful?" was his doubtful rejoinder. "What do you think of Mrs. Ocumpaugh?" "She is handsome, too, but in a different way." "I should think so. I've driven rich and I've driven poor. I've even sat on the box in front of an English duchess, but never have I seen such features as Mrs. Ocumpaugh's. That's why I consent to drive an American millionaire's wife when I might be driving the English nobility." "A statue!" said I; "cold!" "True enough, but one you never tire of looking at. Besides, she can light up wonderfully. I've seen her when she was all a-quiver, and lovely as the loveliest. And when do you think that was?" "When she had her child in her arms." I spoke in lowered tones as befitted the suggestion and the circumstances. "No," he drawled, between thoughtful puffs of smoke; "when Mr. Ocumpaugh sat on the seat beside her. This, when I was driving the victoria. I often used to make excuse for turning my head about so as to catch a glimpse of her smile at some fine view and the way she looked up at him to see if he was enjoying it as much as she. I like women who love their husbands." "And he?" "Oh, she has nothing to complain of in him. He worships the ground she walks on; and he more than worshiped the child." Here _his_ voice fell. I brought the conversation back as quickly as I could to Mrs. Carew. "You like pale women," said I. "Now I like a woman who looks plain one minute, and perfectly charming the next." "That's what people say of Mrs. Carew. I know of lots who admire that kind. The little girl for one." "Gwendolen? Was she attracted to Mrs. Carew?" "Attracted? I've seen her go to her from her mother's lap like a bird to its nest. Many a time have I driven the carriage with Mrs. Ocumpaugh sitting up straight inside, and her child curled up in this other woman's arms with not a look or word for her mother." "How did Mrs. Ocumpaugh seem to like that?" I asked between puffs of my cigar. "Oh, she's one of the cold ones, you know! At least you say so; but I feel sure that for the last three years--that is, ever since this woman came into the neighborhood--her heart has been slowly breaking. This last blow will kill her." I thought of the moaning cry of "Philo! Philo!" which at intervals I still seemed to hear issue from that upper window in the great house, and felt that there might be truth in his fears. But it was of Mrs. Carew I had come to talk and not of Mrs. Ocumpaugh. "Children's fancies are unaccountable," I sententiously remarked; "but perhaps there is some excuse for this one. Mrs. Carew has what you call magnetism--a personality which I should imagine would be very appealing to a child. I never saw such expression in a human face. Whatever her mood, she impresses each passing feeling upon you as the one reality of her life. I can not understand such changes, but they are very fascinating." "Oh, they are easy enough to understand in her case. She was an actress once. I myself have seen her on the stage--in London. I used to admire her there." "An actress!" I repeated, somewhat taken aback. "Yes, I forget what name she played under. But she's a very great lady now; in with all the swells and rich enough to own a yacht if she wanted to." "But a widow." "Oh, yes, a widow." I let a moment of silence pass, then nonchalantly remarked: "Why is she going to Europe?" But this was too much for my simple-hearted friend. He neither knew nor had any conjecture ready. But I saw that he did not deplore her resolve. His reason for this presently appeared. "If the little one is found, the mother will want all her caresses. Let Mrs. Carew hug the boy that God in his mercy has thrown into her arms and leave other children to their mothers." I rose to leave, when I bethought me and stopped to ask another question. "Who is the gentleman I have seen about here--a man with a handsome face, but very pale and thin in his appearance, so much so that it is quite noticeable?" "Do you mean Mr. Rathbone?" "I do not know his name. A light complexioned man, who looks as if greatly afflicted by some disease or secret depression." "Oh, that is Mr. Rathbone, sure. He is sickly-looking enough and not without his trouble, too. They say--but it's all gossip, of course--that he has set his heart on the widow." "Mrs. Carew?" "Of course, who else?" "And she?" "Why, she would be a fool to care for him, unless--" "Unless what?" Thomas laughed--a little uneasily, I could not help thinking. "I'm afraid we're talking scandal," said he. "You know the relationship?" "What relationship?" "Why, his relationship to the family. He is Gwendolen's cousin and I have heard it said that he's named after her in Madam Ocumpaugh's will." "O, I see! The next heir, eh?" "Yes, to the Rathbone property." "So that if she is not found--" "Your sickly man, in that case, would be well worth the marrying." "Is Mrs. Carew so fond of money as all that? I thought she was a woman of property." "She is; but it takes money to make some men interesting. He isn't handsome enough, or independent enough to go entirely on his own merits. Besides, he has a troop of relatives hanging on to him--blood-suckers who more than eat up his salary." "A business man, then?" "Yes, in some New York house. He was always very fond of Gwendolen, and I am not surprised to hear that he is very much cut up by our trouble. I always thought well of Mr. Rathbone myself,"--which same ended the conversation so far as my interest in it was concerned. IX THE BUNGALOW As soon as I could break away and leave him I did, and betook myself to Mrs. Carew's house. My resolve was taken. Late as it was, I would attempt an interview with her. The lights still burning above and below gave me the necessary courage. Yet I was conscious of some embarrassment in presenting my name to the astonished maid, who was in the act of extinguishing the hall-light when my vigorous ring prevented her. Seeing her doubtful look and the hesitation with which she held the door, I told her that I would wait outside on the porch till she had carried up my name to Mrs. Carew. This seemed to relieve her and in a moment I was standing again under the vines waiting for permission to enter the house. It came very soon, and I had to conquer a fresh embarrassment at the sight of Mrs. Carew's nimble and gracious figure descending the stairs in all eagerness to greet me. "What is it?" she asked, running hastily forward so that we met in the center of the hall. "Good news? Nothing else could have brought you back again so soon--and at an hour so late." There was a dangerous naïveté in the way she uttered the last three words which made me suspect the actress. Indeed I was quite conscious as I met her thrilling and expressive glance, that I should never feel again the same confidence in her sincerity. My judgment had been confounded and my insight rendered helpless by what I had heard of her art, and the fact that she had once been a capable player of "parts." But I was man enough and detective enough not to betray my suspicion, now that I was brought face to face with her. It had always been latent in my breast, even in the very midst of my greatest admiration for her. Yet I had never acknowledged to myself of what I suspected her, nor did I now--not quite--not enough to give that point to my attack which would have insured me immediate victory or defeat. I was obliged to feel my way and so answered, with every appearance of friendly confidence: "I fear then that I shall be obliged to ask your pardon. I have no good news; rather what might be called, if not bad, of a very perplexing character. The child has been traced"--here I purposely let my voice halt for an instant--"here." "Here?" her eyes opened, her lips parted in a look of surprise so ingenuous that involuntarily I felt forced to add, by way of explanation: "The child, I mean, who was carried screaming along the highway in a wagon and for whom the police--and others--have for two days been looking." "Oh!" she ejaculated with a slight turn of her head aside as she motioned me toward a chair. "And is that child Gwendolen? Or don't you know?" She was all eagerness as she again faced me. "That will be known to-morrow," I rejoined, resisting the beautiful brightness of her face with an effort that must have left its mark on my own features; for she smiled with unconscious triumph as she held my eyes for a minute in hers saying softly, "O how you excite me! Tell me more. Where was the wagon found? Who is with it? And how much of all this have you told Mrs. Ocumpaugh?" With the last question she had risen, involuntarily, it seemed, and as though she would rush to her friend if I did not at once reassure her of that friend's knowledge of a fact which seemed to throw a gleam of hope upon a situation hitherto entirely unrelieved. "Mrs. Ocumpaugh has been told nothing," I hastily returned, answering the last and most important question first. "Nor must she be; at least not till certainty replaces doubt. She is in a critical state, I am told. To rouse her hopes to-night only to dash them again to-morrow would be cruel policy." With her eyes still on my face, Mrs. Carew slowly reseated herself. "Then there are doubts," she faltered; "doubts of its being Gwendolen?" "There is always doubt," I replied, and openly paused in manifest non-committal. "Oh!" she somewhat wildly exclaimed, covering her face with her hands--beautiful hands covered with jewels--"what suspense! what bitter and cruel suspense! I feel it almost as much as if it were my Harry!" was the final cry with which she dropped them again. And she did feel it. Her features had blanched and her form was shaking. "But you have not answered my questions as to where this wagon is at present and under whose care? Can't you see how anxious I must be about that--if it should prove to be Gwendolen?" "Mrs. Carew, if I could tell you that, I could tell you more; we shall both have to wait till to-morrow. Meanwhile, I have a favor to ask. Have you by any chance the means of entrance to the bungalow? I have a great and inappeasable desire to see for myself if all the nooks and corners of that place have given up their secrets. It's an egotistical desire, no doubt--and may strike you as folly of the rankest--but we detectives have learned to trust nobody in our investigations, and I shall never be satisfied till I have looked this whole spot over inch by inch for the clue which may yet remain there. If there is a clue I must find it." "Clue?" She was looking at me a little breathlessly. "Clue to what? Then she wasn't in the wagon; you are still seeking her--" "Always seeking her," I put in. "But surely not in the bungalow!" Mrs. Carew's expression was one of extreme surprise. "What can you find there?" "I do not know. But I want to look. I can go to the house for a key, but it is late; and it seems unpardonable to disturb Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Yet I shall have to do this if you have not a key; for I shall not sleep till I have satisfied myself that nothing can be discovered on the immediate scene of Gwendolen's disappearance, to help forward the rescue we both are so intent upon." "You are right," was the hesitating reply I received. "I have a key; I will fetch it and if you do not mind, I will accompany you to the bungalow." "Nothing would give me greater pleasure," I replied with my best bow; white lies come easy in our trade. "I will not keep you a minute," she said, rising and going into the hall. But in an instant she was back. "A word to my maid and a covering for my head," she explained, "and I will be with you." Her manner pointed unmistakably to the door. I had no alternative but to step out on the porch to await her. But she was true to her word and in a moment she had joined me, with the key in her hand. "Oh, what adventures!" was her breathless cry. "Shall I ever forget this dreadful, this interminable week! But it is dark. Even the moon is clouded over. How shall we see? There are no lights in the bungalow." "I have a lantern in my pocket. My only hope is that no stray gleam from it may pierce the shrubbery and bring the police upon us." "Do you fear the police?" she chatted away, almost as a child might. "No; but I want to do my work alone. There will be little glory or little money in it if they share any of my discoveries." "Ah!" It was an irrepressible exclamation, or so it seemed: but I should not have noted it if I had not caught, or persuaded myself that I had caught, the oblique glint from her eye which accompanied it. But it was very dark just at this time and I could be sure of nothing but that she kept close to my side and seemed more than once on the point of addressing me in the short distance we traversed before reaching the bungalow. But nothing save inarticulate murmurs left her lips and soon we were too busy, in our endeavors to unlock the door, to think of conversation. The key she had brought was rusty. Evidently she had not often made use of it. But after a few futile efforts I succeeded in making it work, and we stepped into the small building in a silence that was only less profound than the darkness in which we instantly found ourselves enveloped. Light was under my hand, however, and in another moment there opened before us the small square room whose every feature had taken on a ghostly and unfamiliar air from the strange hour and the unwonted circumstances. I saw how her impressionable nature was affected by the scene, and made haste to assume the offhand air I thought most likely to overcome her apprehension. But the effect of the blank walls before her, relieved, but in no reassuring way, by the long dark folds of the rugs hanging straight down over the mysterious partition, held its own against my well-meant efforts, and I was not surprised to hear her voice falter as she asked what I expected to find there. I pointed to a chair and said: "If you will sit down, I will show you, not what I expect to find, but how a detective goes about his work. Whatever our expectations, however small or however great, we pay full attention to details. Now the detail which has worried me in regard to this place is the existence of a certain space in this building unaccounted for by these four walls; in other words, the portion which lies behind these rugs,"--and throwing aside the same, I let the flame from my lantern play over the walled-up space which I had before examined with little satisfaction. "This partition," I continued, "seems as firm as any of the walls, but I want to make sure that it hides nothing. If the child should be in some hole back of this partition, what a horror and what an outrage!" "But it is impossible!" came almost in a shriek from the woman behind me. "The opening is completely walled up. I have never known of its being otherwise. It looked like that when I came here three years ago. There is no possible passage through that wall." "Why was it ever closed up? Do you know?" "Not exactly. The family are very reticent about it. Some fancy of Mr. Ocumpaugh's father, I believe. He was an odd man; they tell all manner of stories about him. If anything offended him, he rid himself of it immediately. He took a distaste to that end of the hut, as they used to call it in the old days before it was remodeled to suit the house, so he had it walled up. That is all we know about it." "I wish I could see behind that wall," I muttered, dropping back the rug I had all this time held in my hand. "I feel some mystery here which I can not grasp." Then as I flashed my lantern about in every direction with no visible result, added with the effort which accompanies such disappointments: "There is nothing here, Mrs. Carew. Though it is the scene of the child's disappearance it gives me nothing." X TEMPTATION The sharp rustle of her dress as she suddenly rose struck upon my ear. "Then let us go," she cried, with just a slight quiver of eagerness in her wonderful voice. I comprehended its culture now. "The place is ghostly at this hour of the night. I believe that I am really afraid." With a muttered reassurance, I allowed the full light of the lantern to fall directly on her face. She _was_ afraid. There was no other explanation possible for her wild staring eyes and blue quivering lips. For the instant I hardly knew her; then her glance rose to mine and she smiled and it was with difficulty I refrained from acknowledging in words my appreciation of her wonderful flexibility of expression. "You are astonished to see me so affected," she said. "It is not so strange as you think--it is superstition--the horror of what once happened here--the reason for that partition--I know the whole story, for all my attempts to deny it just now. The hour, too, is unfortunate--the darkness--your shifting, mysterious light. It was late like this--and dark--with just the moon to illumine the scene, when she--Mr. Trevitt, do you want to know the story of this place?--the old, much guessed-at, never-really-understood story which led first to its complete abandonment, then to the building of that dividing wall and finally to the restoration of this portion and of this alone? Do you?" Her eagerness, in such startling contrast to the reticence she had shown on this very subject a few minutes before, affected me peculiarly. I wanted to hear the story--any one would who had listened to the gossip of this neighborhood for years, but-- She evidently did not mean to give me time to understand my own hesitation. "I have the whole history--the touching, hardly-to-be-believed history--up at my house at this very moment. It was written by--no, I will let you guess." The naïveté of her smile made me forget the force of its late expression. "Mr. Ocumpaugh?" I ventured. "Which Mr. Ocumpaugh? There have been so many." She began slowly, naturally, to move toward the door. "I can not guess." "Then I shall have to tell you. It was written by the one who--Come! I will tell you outside. I haven't any courage here." "But I have." "You haven't read the story." "Never mind; tell me who the writer was." "Mr. Ocumpaugh's father; he, by whose orders this partition was put up." "Oh, you have _his_ story--written--and by himself! You are fortunate, Mrs. Carew." I had turned the lantern from her face, but not so far that I did not detect the deep flush which dyed her whole countenance at these words. "I am," she emphatically returned, meeting my eyes with a steady look I was not sufficiently expert with women's ways, or at all events with this woman's ways, to understand. "Seldom has such a tale been written--seldom, let us thank God, has there been an equal occasion for it." "You interest me," I said. And she did. Little as this history might have to do with the finding of Gwendolen, I felt an almost imperative necessity of satisfying my curiosity in regard to it, though I knew she had deliberately roused this curiosity for a purpose which, if not comprehensible to me, was of marked importance to her and not altogether for the reason she had been pleased to give me. Possibly it was on account of this last mentioned conviction that I allowed myself to be so interested. "It is late," she murmured with a final glance towards those dismal hangings which in my present mood I should not have been so greatly surprised to see stir under her look. "However, if you will pardon the hour and accept a seat in my small library, I will show you what only one other person has seen besides myself." It was a temptation; for several reasons it was a temptation; yet-- "I want you to see why I am frightened of this place," she said, flashing her eyes upon me with an almost girlish appeal. "I will go," said I; and following her quickly out, I locked the bungalow door, and ignoring the hand she extended toward me, dropped the key into my pocket. I thought I heard a little gasp--the least, the smallest of sounds possible. But if so, the feeling which prompted it was not apparent in her manner or her voice as she led the way back to her house, and ushered me into a hall full of packing-boxes and the general litter accompanying an approaching departure. "You will excuse the disorder," she cried as she piloted me through these various encumbrances to a small but exquisitely furnished room still glorying in its full complement of ornaments and pictures. "This trouble which has come to one I love has made it very hard for me to do anything. I feel helpless, at times, completely helpless." The dejection she expressed was but momentary, however. In another instant she was pointing out a chair and begging me to make myself comfortable while she went for the letter (I think she called it a letter) which I had come there to read. What was I to think of her? What was I to think of myself? And what would the story tell me to warrant the loss of what might have proved a most valuable hour? I had not answered these questions when she reëntered with a bundle in her hand of discolored--I should almost call them mouldered--sheets of much crumpled paper. "These--" she began; then, seeing me look at them with something like suspicion, she paused until she caught my eye, when she added gravely, "these came to me from Mrs. Ocumpaugh. How she got them you will have to ask her. I should say, judging from appearances--" Here she took a seat opposite me at a small table near which I had been placed--"that they must have been found in some old chest or possibly in some hidden drawer of one of those curious antique desks of which more than one was discovered in the garrets of the old house when it was pulled down to give place to the new one." "Is this letter, as you call it, so old?" I asked. "It is dated thirty-five years ago." "The garret must have been a damp one," I remarked. She flashed me a look--I thought of it more than once afterward--and asked if she should do the reading or I. "You," I rejoined, all afire with the prospect of listening to her remarkable voice in what I had every reason to believe would call forth its full expression. "Only let me look at those sheets first, and understand as perfectly as I may, just what it is you are going to read to me." "It's an explanation written for his heirs by Mr. Ocumpaugh. The story itself," she went on, handing me over the papers she held, "begins abruptly. From the way the sheet is torn across at the top, I judge that the narrative itself was preceded by some introductory words now lacking. When I have read it to you, I will tell you what I think those introductory words were." I handed back the sheets. There seemed to be a spell in the air--possibly it arose from her manner, which was one to rouse expectation even in one whose imagination had not already been stirred by a visit at night and in more than commonly bewildering company to the place whose dark and hitherto unknown secret I was about to hear. "I am ready," I said, feeling my strange position, but not anxious to change it just then for any other conceivable one. She drew a deep breath; again fixed me with her strange, compelling eyes, and with the final remark: "The present no longer exists, we are back in the seventies--" began this enthralling tale. I did not move till the last line dropped from her lips. XI THE SECRET OF THE OLD PAVILION I was as sane that night as I had ever been in my life. I am quite sure of this, though I had had a merry time enough earlier in the evening with my friends in the old pavilion (that time-honored retreat of my ancestors), whose desolation I had thought to dissipate with a little harmless revelry. Wine does not disturb my reason--the little wine I drank under that unwholesome roof--nor am I a man given to sudden excitements or untoward impulses. Yet this thing happened to me. It was after leaving the pavilion. My companions had all ridden away and I was standing on the lawn beyond my library windows, recalling my pleasure with them and gazing somewhat idly, I own, at that bare portion of the old wall where the tree fell a year ago (the place where the moon strikes with such a glitter when it rides high, as it did that night), when--believe it or not, it is all one to me--I became conscious of a sudden mental dread, inexplicable and alarming, which, seizing me after an hour of unmixed pleasure and gaiety, took such a firm grip upon my imagination that I fain would have turned my back upon the night and its influences, only my eyes would not leave that open space of wall where I now saw pass--not the shadow, but the veritable body of a large, black, hungry-looking dog, which, while I looked, turned into the open gateway connecting with the pavilion and disappeared. With it went the oppression which held me spell-bound. The ice melted from my blood; I could move my limbs, and again control my thoughts and exercise my will. Forcing a laugh, I whistled to that dog. The lights with which the banquet had been illuminated were out, and every servant had left the place; but the tables had not been entirely cleared, and I could well understand what had drawn this strange animal thither. I whistled then, and whistled peremptorily; but no dog answered my call. Angry, for the rules are strict at my stables in regard to wandering brutes, I strode toward the pavilion. Entering the great gap in the wall where a gate had once hung, I surveyed the dismal interior before me, with feelings I could not but consider odd in a strong man like myself. Though the wine was scarcely dry in the glass which an hour before I had raised in this very spot amid cheers and laughter, I found it a difficult matter to reënter there now, in the dead of night, alone and without light. For this building, harmless as it had always seemed, had been, in a way, cursed. For no reason that he ever gave, my father had doomed this ancient adjunct to our home to perpetual solitude and decay. By his will he had forbidden it to be destroyed--a wish respected by my guardians and afterward by myself--and though there was nothing to hinder its being cared for and in a manner used, the dismal influence which had pervaded the place ever since his death had, under the sensations I have mentioned, deepened into horror and an unspeakable repugnance. Yet never having had any reason to believe myself a coward, I took boldly enough the few steps necessary to carry me inside its dismal precincts; and meeting with nothing but darkness and silence, began to whistle again for the dog I had certainly seen enter here. But no dog appeared. Hastening out, I took my way toward the stables. As I did so I glanced back, and again my eyes fell on that place in the wall gleaming white in the moonlight. Again I felt the chill, the horror! Again my eyes remained glued to this one spot; and again I beheld the passing of that dog, running with jaws extended and head held low--fearsome, uncanny, supernaturally horrible; a thing to flee from, if one could only flee instead of standing stock-still on the sward, gazing with eyes that seemed starting from their sockets till it had plunged through that gap in the wall and again disappeared. The occult and the imaginary have never appealed to me, and the moment I felt myself a man again, I hurried on to the stables to call up my man Jared. But half-way there I paused, struck by an odd remembrance. This father of mine, Philo Ocumpaugh, had died, or so his old servants had said, under peculiar circumstances. I had forgotten them till now--such stories make poor headway with me--but if I was not mistaken, the facts were these: He had been ailing long, and his nurses had got used to the sight of his gaunt, white figure sitting propped up, but speechless, in the great bed opposite the stretch of blank wall in the corner bedroom, where a picture of his first wife, the wife of his youth, had once hung, but which, for some years now, had been removed to where there were fewer shadows and more sunlight. He had never been a talkative man, and in all the five years of my own memory of him, I had never heard him raise his voice except in command, or when the duties of hospitality required it. Now, with the shadow of death upon him, he was absolutely speechless, and his nurses were obliged to guess at his wishes by the movement of his hands or the direction of his eyes. Yet he was not morose, and sometimes was seen to struggle with the guards holding his tongue, as though he would fain have loosed himself from their inexorable control. Yet he never succeeded in doing so, and the nurses sat by and saw no difference in him, till suddenly the candle, posed on a table near by, flickered and went out, leaving only moonlight in the room. It was moonlight so brilliant that the place seemed brighter than before, though the beams were all concentrated on one spot, a blank space in the middle of the wall upon which those two dim orbs in the bed were fixed in an expectancy none there understood, for none knew that the summons had come, and that for him the angel of death was at that moment standing in the room. Yet as moonlight is not the natural light for a sick man's bedside, one amongst them had risen for another candle, when something--I had never stopped to hear them say what--made him pause and look back, when he saw distinctly outlined upon the white wall-space I have mentioned, the figure--the unimaginable figure of a dog, large, fierce and hungry-looking, which dashed by and--was gone. Simultaneously a cry came from the bed, the first words for months--"Aline!"--the name of his girl-wife, dead and gone for years. All sprang; some to chase the dog, one to aid and comfort the sick man. But no dog was there, nor did he need comfort more. He had died with that cry on his lips, and as they gazed at his face, sunk low now in his pillow as if he had started up and fallen back, a dead weight, they felt the terror of the moment grow upon them till they, too, were speechless. For the aged features were drawn into lines of unspeakable anguish and horror. But as the night passed and morning came, all these lines smoothed out, and when they buried him, those who had known him well talked of the beautiful serenity which illumined the face which, since their first remembrance of him, had carried the secret of a profound and unbroken melancholy. Of the dog, nothing was said, even in whispers, till time had hallowed that grave, and the little children about, grown to be men and women. Then the garrulity of age had its way. This story, and the images it called up, came like a shock as I halted there, and instead of going on to the stables, I turned my steps toward the house, where I summoned from his bed a certain old servant who had lived longer in the family than myself. Bidding him bring a lantern, I waited for him on the porch, and when he came, I told him what I had seen. Instantly I knew that it was no new story to him. He turned very pale and set down the lantern, which was shaking very visibly in his hand. "Did you look up?" he asked; "when you were in the pavilion, I mean?" "No; why should I? The dog was on the ground. Besides--" "Let us go down to the pavilion," he whispered. "I want to see for myself if--if--" "If what, Jared?" He turned his eyes on me, but did not answer. Stooping, I lifted the lantern and put it in his hand. He was quaking like a leaf, but there was a determination in his face far beyond the ordinary. What made him quake--he who knew of this dog only by hearsay--and what, in spite of this fear, gave him such resolution? I followed in his wake to see what it was. The moon still shone clear upon the lawn, and it was with a certain renewal of my former apprehensions that I approached the spot on the wall where I had seen what I was satisfied not to see again. But though I glanced that way--what man could have avoided it?--I perceived nothing but the bare paint, and we went on and passed in without a word, Jared leading the way. But once on the threshold of the pavilion itself, it was for him to show the coward. Turning, he made me a gesture; one I did not understand; and seeing that I did not understand it, he said, after a fearful look around: "Do not mind the dog; that was but an appearance. Lift your eyes to the ceiling--over there--at the extreme end toward the south--do you see--_what_ do you see?" "Nothing," I replied, amazed at what struck me as utter folly. "Nothing?" he repeated in a relieved voice, as he lifted up his lantern. "Ah!" came in a sort of muttered shriek from his lips, as he pointed up, here and there, along the farther ceiling, over which the light now played freely and fully. "What is that spot, and that spot, and that? They were not there to-day. I was in here before the banquet, and _I_ would have seen. What is it? Master, what is it? They call it--" "Well, well, what do they call it?" I asked impatiently. "Blood! Do you not see that it is blood? What else is red and shiny and shows in such great drops--" "Nonsense!" I vociferated, taking the lantern in my own hand. "Blood on the ceiling of my old pavilion? Where could it come from? There was no quarrel, no fight; only hilarity--" "Where did the dog come from?" he whispered. I dropped my arm, staring at him in mingled anger and a certain half-understood sympathy. "You think these stains--" I began. "Are as unreal as the dog? Yes, master." Feeling as if I were in a dream, I tossed up the lantern again. The drops were still there, but no longer single or scattered. From side to side, the ceiling at this one end of the building oozed with the thick red moisture to which he had given so dreadful a name. Stepping back for fear the stains would resolve themselves into rain and drop upon my forehead, I stared at Jared, who had now retreated toward the door. "What makes you think it blood?" I demanded. "Because some have smelt and tasted it. We have never talked about it, but this is not an uncommon occurrence. To-morrow all these stains will be gone. They come when the dog circles the wall. Whence, no one knows. It is our mystery. All the old servants have heard of it more than once. The new ones have never been told. Nor would I have told you if you had not seen the dog. It was a matter of honor with us." I looked at him, saw that he believed every word he said, threw another glance at the ceiling, and led the way out. When we had reached the house again, I said: "You are acquainted with the tradition underlying these appearances, as you call them. What is it?" He could not tell me. He knew no more than he had already stated--gossip and old wives' tales. But later, a certain manuscript came into my possession through my lawyer, which I will append to this. It was written by my unhappy father, some little time before his last illness, and given into the charge of the legal representative of our family, with the express injunction that its seal was to remain intact if for twenty years the apparition which had haunted him did not present itself to the eyes of any of his children. But if within that time his experience should repeat itself in theirs, this document was to be handed over to the occupant of Homewood. Nineteen out of the twenty years had elapsed, without the dog being seen or the ceiling of the pavilion dropping blood. But not the twentieth; hence, the document was mine. You can easily conceive with what feelings I opened it. It was headed with this simple line: MY STORY WHICH I CAN WRITE BUT COULD NEVER TELL. I am cursed with an inability to speak when I am most deeply moved, either by anger or tenderness. This misfortune has wrecked my life. On the verge of old age, the sorrows and the mistakes of my early life fill my thoughts so completely that I see but one face, hear but one voice; yet when she was living--when _she_ could see and hear, my tongue was silent and she never knew. Aline! my Aline! I married her when I was thirty-five and she eighteen. All the world knows this; but what it does not know is that I loved her--toy, plaything that she was--a body without a mind--(or, so I considered her)--while she had but followed the wishes of her relatives in giving her sweet youth to a cold and reticent man who might love, indeed, but who had no power to tell that love, or even to show it in the ways which women like, and which she liked, as I found out when it was too late. I could not help but love her. It was ingrained within me; a part of the curse of my life to love this gentle, thoughtless, alluring thing to which I had given my name. She had a smile--it did not come often--which tore at my heart-strings as it welled up, just stirring the dimples in her cheeks, and died away again in a strange and moving sweetness. Though I reckoned her at her worth; knew that her charm was all physical; that she neither did nor could understand a passion like mine, much less return it, it was none the less irresistible, and I have known myself to stand before a certain book-shelf in the turn of the stairway for many minutes together, because I knew that she would soon be coming down, and that, when she did, some ribbon from her gown would flutter by me, and I should feel the soft contact and go away happy to my books. Yet, if she stopped to look back at me, I could only return her look with one she doubtless called harsh, for she had not eyes to see below the surface. I tell you all this, lest you may not understand. She was not your mother and you may begrudge me the affection I felt for her; if so, thrust these leaves into the fire and seek not the explanation of what has surprised you; for there is no word written here which does not find its meaning in the intense love I bore for her, my young girl-wife, and the tragedy which this love has brought into my life. She was slight in body, slight in mind and of slight feeling. I first discovered this last on the day I put my mother's ring on her finger. She laughed as I fitted it close and kissed the little hand. Not from embarrassment or childish impulse; I could have understood that; but indifferently, like one who did not know and never could. Yet I married her, and for six months lived in a fool's paradise. Then came that hall. It was held near here, very near, at one of our neighbor's, in fact. I remember that we walked, and that, coming to the driveway, I lifted her and carried her across. Not with a smile--do not think it. More likely with a frown, though my heart was warm and happy; for when I set her down, she shook herself, and I thought she did it to hide a shudder, and then I could not have spoken a word had my life depended on it. I little knew what lay back of that shudder. Even after I had seen her dance with him, not only once, but twice, I never dreamed that her thoughts, light though they were, were not all with me. It took that morsel of paper and the plain words it contained to satisfy me of this, and then-- But passion is making me incoherent. What do you know of that scrap of paper, hidden from the whole world from the moment I first read it till this hour of full confession? It fluttered from some one's hand during the dance. I did not see whose. I only saw it after it had fallen at my feet, and as it lay there open I naturally read the words. They were written by a man to a woman, urging flight and setting the hour and place for meeting. I was conscious of shame in reading it, and let these last details escape me. As I put it in my pocket I remember thinking, "Some poor devil made miserable!" for there had been hint in it of the husband. But I had no thought--I swear it before God--of who that husband was till I beheld her flit back through the open doorway, with terror in her mien and searching eyes fixed on the floor. Then hell opened before me, and I saw my happiness go down into gulfs I had never before sounded, even in imagination. But even at that evil hour my countenance scarcely changed--I was opposite a mirror, and I caught a glimpse of myself as I moved. But there must have been some change in my voice--for when I addressed her, she started and turned her face upon me with a wild and pathetic look which knocked so at my heart that I wished I had never read those words, and so could return her the paper with no misgiving as to its contents. But having read it, I could not do this; so, beyond a petty greeting, I said nothing and let the moment pass, and she with it; for couples were dancing and she was soon again in the whirl. I am not a dancing man myself, and I had leisure to think and madden myself with contemplation of my wrecked life and questions as to what I should do to her and to him, and to the world where such things could happen. I had forgotten the details of time and place, or rather had put them out of my mind, and I would not look at the words again--could not. But as the minutes went by, the remembrance returned, startling and convincing, that the hour was two and the place--our old pavilion. I walked about after that like a man in whose breast the sources of life are frozen. I chatted--I who never chatted--with women, and with men. I even smiled--once. That was when my little white-faced wife asked me if it were not time to go home. Even a man under torture might find strength to smile if the inquisitor should ask if he were not ready to be released. And we went home. I did not carry her this time across the driveway; but when we parted in the library, where I always spent an hour before retiring, I picked out a lily from a vase of flowers standing on my desk and held it out to her. She stared at it for a moment, quite as white as the lily, then she slowly put out her hand and took it. I felt no mercy after that, and bade her good-night with the remark that I should have to write far into the morning, and that she need not worry over my light, which I should not probably put out till she was half through with her night's rest. For answer, she dropped the lily. I found it next morning lying withered and brown, in the hall-way. That light did burn far into the morning; but I was not there to trim it. Before the fatal hour had struck, I had left the house and made my way to the pavilion. As I crossed the sward I saw the gleam of a lantern at the masthead of a small boat riding near our own landing-place, and I understood where he was at this hour, and by what route he hoped to take my darling. "A route she will never travel," thought I, striving to keep out of my mind and conscience the vision of another route, another travel, which that sweet young body might take if my mood held and my purpose strengthened. There was no moon that night, and the copse in which our pavilion stands was like a blot against the starless heavens. As I drew near it, my dog, the invariable companion of my walks, lifted a short, sharp bark from the stables. But I knew whose hand had fastened him, and I went on without giving him a thought. At the door of the pavilion I stopped. All was dark within as without, and the silence was something to overwhelm the heart. She was not there then, nor was he. But he would be coming soon, and up or down between the double hedge-rows. I went to meet him. It was a small detail, but possibly a necessary one. In her eyes he was probably handsome and gifted with all that I openly lacked. But he was shallow and small for a man like me to be concerned about. I laughed inwardly and with very conceivable scorn as I heard the faint fall of his footsteps in the darkness. It was nearly two and he meant to be prompt. Our coming together in that narrow path was very much what I expected it to be. I had put out my arms and touched the hedge on either side, so that he could not escape me. When I heard him drawing close, I found the voice I had not had for her, and observed very quietly and with the cold politeness of a messenger: "My wife finds herself indisposed since the ball, and begs to be excused from joining you in the pleasant sail you proposed to her." That, and no more; except that when he started and almost fell into my arms, I found strength to add: "The wind blows fresh to-night; you will have no difficulty in leaving this shore. The difficulty will be to return." I had no heart to kill him; he was young and he was frightened. I heard the sob in his throat as I dropped my arm and he went flying down to the river. This was child's play; the rest-- My portion is to tell it; forty years ago it all befell, and till now no word of it has ever left my lips. There was no sound of her advancing tread across the lawn as I stepped back into my own grounds to enter the pavilion. But as I left the path and put foot inside the wall, I heard a far, faint sound like the harsh closing of a door in timid hands, followed by another bark from the dog, louder and sharper than the first--for he did not recognize my Aline as mistress, though I had striven for six months to teach him the place she held in my heart. By this I knew she was coming, and that what preparations I had to make must be made soon. They were not many. Entering the well-known place, I lit the lantern I had brought with me and set it down near the door. It cast a feeble light about the entrance, but left great shadows in the rear. This I had calculated on, and into these shadows I now stepped. The pavilion, as you remember it, is not what it was then. I had used it little, fancying more my own library up at the house, but it was not utterly without furnishings, and to young eyes might even look attractive, with love, or fancied love, to mellow its harsh lines and lend romance to its solitude. At this hour and under these circumstances it was a dismal hole to me; and as I stood there waiting, I thought how the place fitted the deed--if deed it was to be. I had always thought her timid, afraid of the night and all threatening things. But as I listened to the sound of her soft footfall at the door, I realized that even her breast could grow strong under the influence of a real or fancied passion. It was a shock--but I did not cry out--only set my teeth together and turned a little so that what light there was would fall on my form rather than on my face. She entered; I felt rather than heard the tremulous push she gave to the door, and the quick drawing in of her breath as she put her foot across the threshold. These sapped my courage. This fear, this almost hesitation, drew me from thoughts of myself to thoughts of her, and it was in a daze of mingled purposes and regrets that I felt her at last at my side. "Walter!" fell softly, doubtfully from her lips. It was the name of him the dip of whose oars as he made for his boat I could now faintly hear in the river below us. Turning, I looked her in the face. "You are late," said I. God gave me words in my extremity. "Walter has gone." Then, as the madness of terror replaced love in her eyes, I lifted her forcibly and carried her to the window, where I drew aside the vines. "That is his boat's lantern you see drawing away from the dock. I bade him God-speed. He will not come again." Without a word she looked, then fell back on my arm. It was not life which forsook her face, and left her whole sweet body inert--that I could have borne, for did she not merit death who had killed my love, killed me?--but happiness, the glow of youthful blood, the dreams of a youthful brain. And seeing this, seeing that the heart I thought a child's heart had gone down in this shipwreck, I felt my anger swell and master me body and soul, and before I knew it, I was towering over her and she was cowering at my feet, crushed and with hands held up in defense, hands that had been like rose-leaves in my grasp, futile hands, but raised now in entreaty for her life to me, to me who had loved her. Why did they not move me? Why did my muscles tighten instead of relax? I do not know; I had never thought myself a cruel man, but at that instant I felt that this toy of my strong manhood had done harm far beyond its value, and that it would comfort me to break it and toss it far aside; only I could not bear the cry which now left her lips: "I am so young! not yet, not yet, Philo! I am so young! Let me live a little while." Was it a woman's plea, conscious of the tenderness she appealed to, or only a child's instinctive grasping after life, just life? If it were the first, it would be easy to finish; but a child's terror, a child's longing--that pulled hard at my manhood, and under the possibility, my own arm fell. Instantly her head drooped. No defense did she utter; no further plea did she make; she simply waited. "You have deserved death." This I managed to utter. "But if you will swear to obey me, you shall not pay your forfeit till you have had a further taste of life. Not in my house; there is not sufficient freedom within its walls for you; but in the broad world, where people dance and sing and grow old at their leisure, without duty and without care. For three months you shall have this, and have it to your heart's content. Then you shall come back to me my true wife, if your heart so prompts; if not, to tell me of your failure and quit me for ever. But--" Here I fear my voice grew terrible, for her hands instinctively rose again. "Those three months must be lived unstained. As you are in God's sight this hour, I demand of you to swear that, if you forget this or disregard it, or for any cause subject my name to dishonor, that you will return unbidden at the first moment your reason returns to you, to take what punishment I will. On this condition I send you away to-night. Aline, will you promise?" She did not answer; but her face rose. I did not understand its look. There was pathos in it, and something else. That something else troubled me. "Are you dissatisfied?" I asked. "Is the time too short? Do you want more months for dancing?" She shook her head and the little hands rose again: "Do not send me away," she faintly entreated; "I don't know why--but I--had rather stay." "With me? Impossible. Are you ready to promise, Aline?" Then she rose and looked me in the eye with courage, almost with resolution. "As I live!" said she. And I knew she would keep her word. The next thing I remember of that night was the sight of her little white, shivering figure looking out at me from the carriage that was to carry her away. The night was cold, and I had tucked her in with as much care as I might have done the evening before, when I still worshiped her, still thought her mine, or at least as much mine as she was any one's. When I had done this and pressed a generous gift into her hand, I stood a minute at the carriage door, in pity of her aspect. She looked so pinched and pale, so dazed and hopeless. Had she been alone--but the companion with whom I had provided her was at her side and my tongue was tied. I turned, and the driver started up the horses. "Philo!" I heard blown by me on the wind. Was it she who called? No, for there was anguish in the cry, the anguish of a woman, and she was only a frightened, disheartened child whom I had sent away to--dance. One month, two months went by, and I began to take up my life. Another, and she would be home for good or ill. I thought that I could live through that other. I had heard of her; not from her--that I did not require; and the stories were all of the same character. She was enjoying life in the great city to which I had sent her; radiant at night, if a little spiritless by day. She was at balls, at concerts and at theaters. She wore jewels and shone with the best; I might be proud of her conquests and the sweetness and dignity with which she bore herself. Thus her friends wrote. But she wrote nothing; I had not required it. Once, some one--a visitor at the house--spoke of having seen her. "She was surrounded with admirers," he had said. "How early our American women ripen!" was his comment. "She held her head like one who has held sway for years; but I thought her a trifle worn; as if pleasure absorbed too much of her sleep. You must look out for her, Judge." And I smiled grimly enough, I own, to think just how I was looking out for her. Then came the thunderbolt. "I am told that no one ever sees her in the day-time; that she is always busy, days. But she does not look as if she took that time for rest. What can your little wife be doing? You ought to hurry up that important opinion of yours and go see." He was right; what was she doing? And why shouldn't I go see? There was no obstacle but my own will; but that is the greatest obstacle a man can have. I remained at Homewood, but the four weeks of our further probation looked like a year. Meanwhile, I had my way with the pavilion. I have shown you my heart, sometimes at its best, oftenest at its worst. I will show it to you again in this. I had a wall built round it, close against the thicket in which it lay embedded. This wall was painted white, and near it I had lamps placed which were lit at nightfall. Should a figure pass that wall I could see it from my window. No one could enter that doorway now, without running the risk of my seeing him from where I sat at my desk. Did I feel easier? I do not know that I did. I merely followed an impulse I dared not name to myself. Two weeks of this final month went by. Then (it was in the evening) some one came running up from the grounds, with the message that Mrs. Ocumpaugh had ridden into the gate, but that she was not ready to enter the house. Would I meet her at the pavilion? I was in the library, at my desk, with my eyes on the wall, when this was told me. I had just seen the fierce figure of that unmanageable dog of mine run by that white surface, and my lips were open to order him tied up, when he, and everything else in this whole world, was forgotten in this crushing news of her return. For the three months were not up and her presence here could mean but one thing--she had found temptation too much for her, and she had come back to tell me so in obedience to her promise. "I will go meet Mrs. Ocumpaugh," I said. The man stared. "I will go meet Mrs. Ocumpaugh now," I repeated, and tried to rise. But my limbs refused; death had entered my heart, and it was some few minutes before I found myself upon the lawn outside. When I got there I was trembling and so uncertain of movement that I tottered at the gate. But seeing signs of her presence within, I straightened myself and went in. [Illustration: "I SHOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN THE WOMAN WHO STOOD THERE WITH MY NAME FORMED ON HER LIPS."] She was standing at the extreme end of the room when I entered, in the full light of the solitary moonbeam which shot in at the western casement. She had thrown aside her hat and coat, and never in all my life had I seen anything so ethereal as the worn face and wasted form she thus disclosed. Had it not been for the haunting and pathetic smile which by some freak of fate gave poignancy to her otherwise infantile beauty, I should not have known the woman who stood there with my name formed on her lips. "Destroyed!" was my thought; and the rage which I felt that moment against fate flushed my whole being, and my arms went up, not in threat against her, but to an avenging Heaven, when I heard an impetuous rush, an angry growl, and the delicate, trembling figure went down under the leap of the monstrous animal which I had taught to love me, but could never teach to love her. In horror and unspeakable anguish of soul I called off the dog; and, stooping with bitter cries, I took her in my arms. "Hurt?" I gasped. "Hurt, Aline?" I looked at her anxiously. "No," she whispered, "happy." And before I realized my own feelings or the passion with which I drew her to my breast, she had nestled her head against my heart, smiled and died. The shock of the dog's onslaught had killed her. I would not believe it at first, but when I was quite sure, I took out the pistol I carried in my breast and shot the cowering brute midway between the eyes. When this was done, I turned back to her. There was no light but the moon, and I needed no other. The clear beams falling on her face made her look pure and stainless and sweet. I could almost have loved her again as I marked the tender smile which lingered from that passing moment on her lips. "Happy," she had said. What did she mean by that "Happy"? As I asked myself I heard a cry. The companion who had been with her had rushed in at the doorway, and was gazing in sorrow and amazement at the white form lying outstretched and senseless against that farther wall. "Oh," she cried, in a tone that assured me she had not seen the dog lying in his blood at my back; "dead already? dead at the first glance? at the first word? Ah, she knew better than I, poor lamb. I thought she would get well if she once got home. She wearied so for you, sir, and for Homewood!" I thought myself quite mad; past understanding aright the words addressed to me. "She wearied--" I began. "With all her soul for you and Homewood," the young woman repeated. "That is, since her illness developed." "Her illness?" "Yes, she has been ill ever since she went away. The cold of that first journey was too much for her. But she kept up for several weeks--doing what no other woman ever did before with so little strength and so little hope. Danced at night and--" "And--and--what by day, what?" I could hardly get the words out of my mouth. "Studied. Learned what she thought you would like--French--music--politics. It was to have been a surprise. Poor soul! it took her very life. She did not sleep-- Oh, sir, what is it?" I was standing over her, probably a terrifying figure. Lights were playing before my eyes, strange sounds were in my ears, everything about me seemed resolving itself into chaos. "What do you mean?" I finally gasped. "She studied--to please _me_? Why did she come back, then, so soon--" I paused, choked. I had been about to give away my secret. "I mean, why did she come thus suddenly, without warning me of what I might expect? I would have gone--" "I told her so; but she was very determined to come to you herself--to this very pavilion. She had set the time later, but this morning the doctor told her that her symptoms were alarming, and without consulting him or heeding the advice of any of us, she started for home. She was buoyant on the way, and more than once I heard her softly repeating your name. Her heart was very loving-- Oh, sir, you are ill!" "No, no," I cried, crushing my hand against my mouth to keep down the cry of anguish and despair which tore its way up from my heart. "Before other hands touch her, other eyes see her, tell me when she began--I will not say to love me, but to weary for me and--Homewood." "Perhaps she has told you herself. Here is the letter, sir, she bade me give you if she did not reach here alive. She wrote it this morning, after the doctor told her what I have said." "Give--give--" She put it in my hand. I glanced at it in the moonlight, read the first few words, and felt the world reel round me. Thrusting the letter in my breast, I bade the woman, who watched me with fascinated eyes, to go now and rouse the house. When she was gone I stepped back into the shadows, and catching hold of the murderous beast, I dragged him out and about the wall to a thick clump of bushes. Here I left him and went back to my darling. When they came in, they found her in my arms. Her head had fallen back and I was staring, staring, at her white throat. That night, when all was done for her which could be done, I shut myself into my library and again opened that precious letter. I give it, to show how men may be mistaken when they seek to weigh women's souls: _My Husband:_ I love you. As I shall be dead when you read this, I may say so without fear of rebuff. I did not love you then; I did not love anybody; I was thoughtless and fond of pleasure, and craved affectionate words. He saw this and worked on my folly; but when his project failed and I saw his boat creep away, I found that what feeling I had was for the man who had thwarted him, and I felt myself saved. If I had not taken cold that night I might have lived to prove this. I know that you do not love me very much, but perhaps you would have done so had you seen me grow a little wiser and more like what your wife should be. I was trying when--O Philo, I can not write--I can not think. I am coming to you--I love--forgive--and take me back again, alive or dead. I love you--I love-- As I finished, the light, which had been burning low, suddenly went out. The window which opened before me was still unshuttered. Before me, across the wide spaces of the lawn, shone the pavilion wall, white in the moonlight. As I stared in horror at it, a trembling seized my whole body, and the hair on my head rose. The dark figure of a running dog had passed across it--_the dog which lay dead under the bushes_. "God's punishment," I murmured, and laid my head down on that pathetic letter and sobbed. The morning found me there. It was not till later that the man sent to bury the dog came to me with the cry, "Something is wrong with the pavilion! When I went in to close the window I found the ceiling at that end of the room strangely dabbled. It looks like blood. And the spots grew as I looked." Aghast, bruised in spirit and broken of heart, I went down, after that sweet body was laid in its grave, to look. The stains he had spoken of were gone. But I lived to see them reappear,--as you have. God have mercy on our souls! XII BEHIND THE WALL "A most pathetic and awesome history!" I exclaimed, after the pause which instinctively followed the completion of this tale, read as few of its kind have ever been read, by this woman of infinite resources in feeling and expression. "Is it not? Do you wonder that a visit in the dead of night to a spot associated with such superstitious horrors should frighten me?" she added as she bundled up the scattered sheets with a reckless hand. "I do not. I am not sure but that I am a little bit frightened myself," I smiled, following with my eye a single sheet which had escaped to the floor. "Allow me," I cried, stooping to lift it. As I did so I observed that it was the first sheet, the torn one--and that a line or so of writing was visible at the top which I was sure had not been amongst those she had read. "What words are those?" I asked. "I don't know, they are half gone as you can see. They have nothing to do with the story. I read you the whole of that." Mistress as she was of her moods and expression I detected traces of some slight confusion. "The putting up of the partition is not explained," I remarked. "Oh, that was put up in horror of the stains which from time to time broke out on the ceiling at that end of the room." I wished to ask her if this was her conclusion or if that line or two I have mentioned was more intelligible than she had acknowledged it to be. But I refrained from a sense of propriety. If she appreciated my forbearance she did not show it. Rising, she thrust the papers into a cupboard, casting a scarcely perceptible glance at the clock as she did so. I took the hint and rose. Instantly she was all smiles. "You have forgotten something, Mr. Trevitt. Surely you do not intend to carry away with you my key to the bungalow." "I was thinking of it," I returned lightly. "I am not quite through with that key." Then before she could recover from her surprise, I added with such suavity as I had been able to acquire in my intercourse with my more cultivated clients: "I have to thank you, Mrs. Carew, for an hour of thrilling interest. Absorbed though I am in the present mystery, my mind has room for the old one. Possibly because there is sometimes a marked connection between old family events and new. There may be some such connection in this case. I should like the opportunity of assuring myself there is not." She said nothing; I thought I understood why. More suavely yet, I continued, with a slight, a very slight movement toward the door: "Rarely have I had the pleasure of listening to such a tale read by such an interpreter. It will always remain in my memory, Mrs. Carew. But the episode is over and I return to my present duty and the bungalow." "The bungalow! You are going back to the bungalow?" "Immediately." "What for? Didn't you see all there was to see?" "Not quite." "I don't know what there can be left." "Nothing of consequence, most likely, but you can not wish me to have any doubts on the subject." "No, no, of course not." The carelessness of her tone did not communicate itself to her manner. Seeing that my unexpected proposition had roused her alarm, I grew wary and remarked: "I was always overscrupulous." With a lift of her shoulders--a dainty gesture which I congratulated myself I could see unmoved--she held out her hand in a mute appeal for the key, but seeing that I was not to be shaken in my purpose, reached for the wrap she had tossed on a chair and tied it again over her head. "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Accompany you," she declared. "Again? I thought the place frightened you." "It does," she replied. "I had rather visit any other spot in the whole world; but if it is your intention to go back there, it is mine to go with you." "You are very good," I replied. But I was seriously disconcerted notwithstanding. I had reckoned upon a quiet hour in the bungalow by myself; moreover, I did not understand her motive for never trusting me there alone. Yet as this very distrust was suggestive, I put a good face on the matter and welcomed her company with becoming alacrity. After all, I might gain more than I could possibly lose by having her under my eye for a little longer. Strong as was her self-control there were moments when the real woman showed herself, and these moments were productive. As we were passing out she paused to extinguish a lamp which was slightly smoking,--I also thought she paused an instant to listen. At all events her ears were turned toward the stairs down which there came the murmur of two voices, one of them the little boy's. "It is time Harry was asleep," she cried. "I promised to sing to him. You won't be long, will you?" "You need not be very long," was my significant retort. "I can not speak for myself." Was I playing with her curiosity or anxieties or whatever it was that affected her? I hardly knew; I spoke as impulse directed and waited in cold blood--or was it hot blood?--to see how she took it. Carelessly enough, for she was a famous actress except when taken by surprise. Checking an evident desire of calling out some direction up stairs, she followed me to the door, remarking cheerfully, "You can not be very long either; the place is not large enough." My excuse--or rather the one I made to myself for thus returning to a place I had seemingly exhausted, was this. In the quick turn I had made in leaving on the former occasion, my foot had struck the edge of the large rug nailed over the center of the floor, and unaccountably loosened it. To rectify this mishap, and also to see how so slight a shock could have lifted the large brass nails by which it had been held down to the floor, seemed reason enough for my action. But how to draw her attention to so insignificant a fact without incurring her ridicule I could not decide in our brief passage back to the bungalow, and consequently was greatly relieved when, upon opening the door and turning my lantern on the scene, I discovered that in our absence the rug had torn itself still farther free from the floor and now lay with one of its corners well curled over--the corner farthest from the door and nearest the divan where little Gwendolen had been lying when she was lifted and carried away--where? Mrs. Carew saw it too and cast me a startled look which I met with a smile possibly as ambiguous as the feeling which prompted it. "Who has been here?" she asked. "Ourselves." "Did we do that?" "I did; or rather my foot struck the edge of the rug as I turned to go out with you. Shall I replace it and press back the nails?" "If you will be so good." Do what she would there was eagerness in her tone. Remarking this, I decided to give another and closer look at the floor and the nails. I found the latter had not been properly inserted; or rather that there were two indentations for every nail, a deep one and one quite shallow. This caused me to make some examination of the others, those which had not been drawn from the floor, and I found that one or two of them were equally insecure, but not all; only those about this one corner. Mrs. Carew, who had paused, confused and faltering in the doorway, in her dismay at seeing me engaged in this inspection instead of in replacing the rug as I had proposed, now advanced a step, so that our glances met as I looked up with the remark: "This rug seems to have been lately raised at this corner. Do you know if the police had it up?" "I don't. I believe so--oh, Mr. Trevitt," she cried, as I rose to my feet with the corner of the rug in my hand, "what are you going to do?" She had run forward impetuously and was now standing close beside me--inconveniently close. "I am going to raise this rug," I informed her. "That is, just at this corner. Pardon me, I shall have to ask you to move." "Certainly, of course," she stammered. "Oh, what is going to happen now?" Then as she watched me: "There is--there _is_ something under it. A door in the floor--a--a--Mrs. Ocumpaugh never told me of this." "Do you suppose she knew it?" I inquired, looking up into her face, which was very near but not near enough to be in the full light of the lantern, which was pointed another way. "This rug appears to have been almost soldered to the floor, everywhere but here. There! it is thrown back. Now, if you will be so very good as to hold the lantern, I will try and lift up the door." "I can not. See, how my hands shake! What are we about to discover? Nothing, I pray, nothing. Suspense would be better than that." "I think you will be able to hold it," I urged, pressing the lantern upon her. "Yes; I have never been devoid of courage. But--but--don't ask me to descend with you," she prayed, as she lifted the lantern and turned it dexterously enough on that portion of the door where a ring lay outlined in the depths of its outermost plank. "I will not; but you will come just the same; you can not help it," I hazarded, as with the point of my knife-blade I lifted the small round of wood which filled into the ring and thus made the floor level. "Now, if this door is not locked, we will have it up," I cried, pulling at the ring with a will. The door was not locked and it came up readily enough, discovering some half-dozen steps, down which I immediately proceeded to climb. "Oh, I can not stay here alone," she protested, and prepared to follow me in haste just as I expected her to do the moment she saw the light withdrawn. "Step carefully," I enjoined. "If you will honor me with your hand--" But she was at my side before the words were well out. "What is it? What kind of place do you make it out to be; and is there anything here you--do--not--want--to see?" I flashed the light around and incidentally on her. She was not trembling now. Her cheeks were red, her eyes blazing. She was looking at me, and not at the darksome place about her. But as this was natural, it being a woman's way to look for what she desires to learn in the face of the man who for the moment is her protector, I shifted the light into the nooks and corners of the low, damp cellar in which we now found ourselves. "Bins for wine and beer," I observed, "but nothing in them." Then as I measured the space before me with my eye, "It runs under the whole house. See, it is much larger than the room above." "Yes," she mechanically repeated. I lowered the lantern to the floor but quickly raised it again. "What is that on the other side?" I queried. "I am sure there is a break in the wall over in that corner." "I can not see," she gasped; certainly she was very much frightened. "Are you going to cross the floor?" "Yes; and if you do not wish to follow me, sit down on these steps--" "No, I will go where you go; but this is very fearful. Why, what is the matter?" I had stepped aside in order to avoid a trail of footprints I saw extending across the cellar floor. "Come around this way," I urged. "If you will follow me I will keep you from being too much frightened." She did as I told her. Softly her steps fell in behind mine, and thus with wary tread and peering eyes we made our way to the remote end, where we found--or rather where I found--that the break which I had noticed in the uniformity of the wall was occasioned by a pile of old boxes, arranged so as to make steps up to a hole cut through the floor above. With a sharp movement I wheeled upon her. "Do you see that?" I asked, pointing back over my shoulder. "Steps," she cried, "going up into that part of the building where--where--" "Will you attempt them with me? Or will you stay here, in the darkness?" "I--will--stay--here." It was said with shortened breath; but she seemed less frightened than when we started to cross the cellar. At all events a fine look of daring had displaced the tremulous aspect which had so changed the character of her countenance a few minutes before. "I will make short work of it," I assured her as I hastily ran up the steps. "Drop your face into your hands and you will not be conscious of the darkness. Besides, I will talk to you all the time. There! I have worked my way up through the hole. I have placed my lantern on the floor above and I see-- What! are you coming?" "Yes, I am coming." Indeed, she was close beside me, maintaining her footing on the toppling boxes by a grip on my disengaged arm. "Can you see?" I asked. "Wait! let me pull you up; we might as well stand on the floor as on these boxes." Climbing into the room above, I offered her my hand, and in another moment we stood together in the noisome precincts of that abominable spot, with whose doleful story she had just made me acquainted. A square of impenetrable gloom confronted me at the first glance--what might not be the result of a second? I turned to consult the appearance of the lady beside me before I took this second look. Had she the strength to stand the ordeal? Was she as much moved--or possibly more moved than myself? As a woman, and the intimate friend of the Ocumpaughs, she should be. But I could not perceive that she was. For some reason, once in view of this mysterious place, she was strangely, inexplicably, impassibly calm. "You can bear it?" I queried. "I must--only end it quickly." "I will," I replied, and I held out my lantern. I am not a superstitious man, but instinctively I looked up before I looked about me. I have no doubt that Mrs. Carew did the same. But no stains were to be seen on those blackened boards now; or rather, they were dark with one continuous stain; and next moment I was examining with eager scrutiny the place itself. Accustomed to the appearance of the cheerful and well-furnished room on the other side of the partition, it was a shock to me (I will not say what it was to her) to meet the bare decaying walls and mouldering appurtenances of this dismal hole. True, we had just come from a description of the place in all the neglect of its many years of desolation, yet the smart finish of the open portion we had just left poorly prepared us for what we here encountered. But the first impression over--an impression which was to recur to me many a night afterward in dreams--I remembered the nearer and more imperative cause which had drawn us thither, and turning the light into each and every corner, looked eagerly for what I so much dreaded to find. A couch to which some old cushions still clung stood against the farther wall. Thank God! it was empty; so were all the corners of the room. Nothing living and--nothing dead! Turning quickly upon Mrs. Carew, I made haste to assure her that our fears were quite unfounded. But she was not even looking my way. Her eyes were on the ground, and she seemed merely waiting--in some impatience, evidently, but yet merely waiting--for me to finish and be gone. This was certainly odd, for the place was calculated in itself to rouse curiosity, especially in one who knew its story. A table, thick with dust and blurred with dampness, still gave tokens of a bygone festivity--among which a bottle and some glasses stood conspicuous. Cards were there too, dingy and green with mould--some on the table--some on the floor; while the open lid of a small desk pushed up close to a book-case full of books, still held a rusty pen and the remnants of what looked like the mouldering sheets of unused paper. As for the rest--desolation, neglect, horror--but no _child_. The relief was enormous. "It is a dreadful place," I exclaimed; "but it might have been worse. Do you want to see things nearer? Shall we cross the floor?" "No, no. We have not found Gwendolen; let us go. Oh, let us go!" A thrill of feeling had crept into her voice. Who could wonder? Yet I was not ready to humor her very natural sensibilities by leaving quite so abruptly. The floor interested me; the cushions of that old couch interested me; the sawn boards surrounding the hole--indeed, many things. "We will go in a moment," I assured her; "but, first, cast your eyes along the floor. Don't you see that some one has preceded us here; and that not so very long ago? Some one with dainty feet and a skirt that fell on the ground; in short, a woman and--a lady!" "I don't see," she faltered, very much frightened; then quickly: "Show me, show me." I pointed out the marks in the heavy dust of the long neglected floor; they were unmistakable. "Oh!" she cried, "what it is to be a detective! But who could have been here? Who would want to be here? I think it is horrible myself, and if I were alone I should faint from terror and the close air." "We will not remain much longer," I assured her, going straight to the couch. "I do not like it either, but--" "What have you found now?" Her voice seemed to come from a great distance behind me. Was this on account of the state of her nerves or mine? I am willing to think the latter, for at that moment my eye took in two unexpected details. A dent as of a child's head in one of the mangy sofa-pillows and a crushed bit of colored sugar which must once have been a bit of choice confectionery. "Some one besides a lady has been here," I decided, pointing to the one and bringing back the other. "See! this bit of candy is quite fresh. You must acknowledge that. _This_ was not walled up years ago with the rest of the things we see about us." Her eyes stared at the sugary morsel I held out toward her in my open palm. Then she made a sudden rush which took her to the side of the couch. [Illustration: "GWENDOLEN HERE?" SHE MOANED. "GWENDOLEN HERE?"] "Gwendolen here?" she moaned. "Gwendolen here?" "Yes," I began; "do not--" But she had already left the spot and was backing toward the opening up which we had come. As she met my eye she made a quick turn and plunged below. "I must have air," she gasped. With a glance at the floor over which she had so rapidly passed, I hastily followed her, smiling grimly to myself. Intentionally or unintentionally, she had by this quick passage to and fro effectually confused, if not entirely obliterated, those evidences of a former intrusion which, with misguided judgment, I had just pointed out to her. But recalling the still more perfect line of footprints left below to which I had not called her attention, I felt that I could afford to ignore the present mishap. As I reached the cellar bottom I called to her, for she was already half-way across. "Did you notice where the boards had been sawed?" I asked. "The sawdust is still on the floor, and it smells as fresh as if the saw had been at work there yesterday." "No doubt, no doubt," she answered back over her shoulder, still hurrying on so that I had to run lest she should attempt the steps in utter darkness. When I reached the floor of the bungalow she was in the open door panting. Watching her with one eye, I drew back the trap into place and replaced the rug and the three nails I had loosened. Then I shut the slide of the lantern and joined her where she stood. "Do you feel better?" I asked. "It was a dismal quarter of an hour. But it was not a lost one." She drew the door to and locked it before she answered; then it was with a question. "What do you make of all this, Mr. Trevitt?" I replied as directly as the circumstances demanded. "Madam, it is a startling answer to the question you put me before we first left your house. You asked then if the child in the wagon was Gwendolen. How could it have been she with this evidence before us of her having been concealed here at the very time that wagon was being driven away from--" "I do not think you have reason enough--" she began and stopped, and did not speak again till we halted at the foot of her own porch. Then with the frank accent most in keeping with her general manner, however much I might distrust both accent and manner, she added as if no interval had intervened: "If those signs you noted are proofs to you that Gwendolen was shut up in that walled-off portion of the bungalow while some were seeking her in the water and others in the wagon, _then where is she now_?" XIII "WE SHALL HAVE TO BEGIN AGAIN" It was a leading question which I was not surprised to see accompanied by a very sharp look from beneath the cloudy wrap she had wound about her head. "You suspect some one or something," continued Mrs. Carew, with a return of the indefinable manner which had characterized her in the beginning of our interview. "Whom? What?" I should have liked to answer her candidly, and in the spirit, if not the words, of the prophet of old, but her womanliness disarmed me. With her eyes on me I could get no further than a polite acknowledgment of defeat. "Mrs. Carew, I am all at sea. We shall have to begin again." "Yes," she answered like an echo--was it sadly or gladly?--"you will have to begin again." Then with a regretful accent: "And I can not help you, for I am going to sail to-morrow. I positively must go. Cablegrams from the other side hurry me. I shall have to leave Mrs. Ocumpaugh in the midst of her distress." "What time does your steamer sail, Mrs. Carew?" "At five o'clock in the afternoon, from the Cunard docks." "Nearly sixteen hours from now. Perhaps fate--or my efforts--will favor us before then with some solution of this disheartening problem. Let us hope so." A quick shudder to hide which she was reaching out her hand, when the door behind us opened and a colored girl looked out. Instantly and with the slightest possible loss of self-possession Mrs. Carew turned to motion the intruder back, when the girl suddenly blurted out: "Oh, Mrs. Carew, Harry is so restless. He is sleepy, he says." "I will be up instantly. Tell him that I will be up instantly." Then as the girl disappeared, she added, with a quick smile: "You see I haven't any toys for him. Not being a mother I forgot to put them in his trunk." As though in response to these words the maid again showed herself in the doorway. "Oh, Mrs. Carew," she eagerly exclaimed, "there's a little toy in the hall here, brought over by one of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's maids. The girl said that hearing that the little boy fretted, Mrs. Ocumpaugh had picked out one of her little girl's playthings and sent it over with her love. It's a little horse, ma'am, with curly mane and a long tail. I am sure 'twill just please Master Harry." Mrs. Carew turned upon me a look brimming with feeling. "What thoughtfulness! What self-control!" she cried. "Take up the horse, Dinah. It was one of Gwendolen's favorite playthings," she explained to me as the girl vanished. I did not answer. I was hearing again in my mind that desolate cry of "Philo! Philo! Philo!" which an hour or so before had rung down to me from Mrs. Ocumpaugh's open window. There had been a wildness in the tone, which spoke of a tossing head on a feverish pillow. Certainly an irreconcilable picture with the one just suggested by Mrs. Carew of the considerate friend sending out the toys of her lost one to a neighbor's peevish child. Mrs. Carew appeared to notice the pre-occupation with which I lingered on the lower step. "You like children," she hazarded. "Or have you interested yourself in this matter purely from business reasons?" "Business reasons were sufficient," was my guarded reply. "But I like children very much. I should be most happy if I could see this little Harry of yours nearer. I have only seen him from a distance, you know." She drew back a step; then she met my look squarely in the moonlight. Her face was flushed, but I attempted no apology for a presumption which could have but one excuse. I meant that she should understand me if I did not her. "You _must_ love children," she remarked, but not with her usual correctness of tone. Then before I could attempt an answer to the implied sarcasm a proud light came into her eyes, and with a gracious bend of her fine figure she met my look with one equally as frank, and cheerfully declared: "You shall. Come early in the morning." In another moment she had vanished inside and closed the door. I was defeated for the nonce, or else she was all she appeared to be and I a dreaming fool. XIV ESPIONAGE As I moved slowly away into the night the question thus raised in my own mind assumed greater and more vital consequence. Was she a true woman or what my fears pictured her--the scheming, unprincipled abductor of Gwendolen Ocumpaugh? She looked true, sometimes acted so; but I had heard and seen what would rouse any man's suspicions, and though I was not in a position to say: "Mrs. Carew, this was not your first visit to that scene of old tragedy. You have been there before, and with Gwendolen in your arms," I was morally certain that this was so; that Mrs. Ocumpaugh's most trusted friend was responsible for the disappearance of her child, and I was not quite sure that the child was not now under her very roof. It was very late by this time, but I meant, if possible, to settle some of these doubts before I left the neighborhood of the cottage. How? By getting a glimpse of Mrs. Carew with her mask off; in the company of the child, if I could compass it; if not, then entirely alone with her own thoughts, plans and subtleties. It was an act more in line with my partner's talents than my own, but I could not afford to let this deter me. I had had my chance with her, face to face. For hours I had been in her company. I had seen her in various stages of emotion, sometimes real and sometimes assumed, but at no moment had I been sure of her, possibly because at no moment had she been sure of me. In our first visit to the bungalow; in her own little library, during the reading of that engrossing tale by which she had so evidently attempted to lull my suspicions awakened by her one irrepressible show of alarm on the scene of Gwendolen's disappearance, and afterward when she saw that they might be so lulled but not dispelled; in the cellar; and, above all, in that walled-off room where we had come across the signs of Gwendolen's presence, which even she could not disavow, she had felt my eyes upon her and made me conscious that she had so felt them. Now she must believe them removed, and if I could but gain the glimpse I speak of I should see this woman as she was. I thought I could manage this. I had listened to the maid's steps as she returned up stairs, and I believed I knew in what direction they had tended after she reached the floor above. I would just see if one of the windows on the south side was lighted, and, if so, if it was in any way accessible. To make my way through the shrubbery without rousing the attention of any one inside or out required a circumspection that tried me greatly. But by dint of strong self-control I succeeded in getting to the vantage-place I sought, without attracting attention or causing a single window to fly up. This reassured me, and perceiving a square of light in the dark mass of wall before me I peered about among the trees overlooking this part of the building for one I could climb without too much difficulty. The one which looked most feasible was a maple with low-growing-branches, and throwing off my coat I was soon half-way to its top and on a level, or nearly so, with the window on which I had fixed my eye. There were no curtains to this window--the house being half dismantled in anticipation of Mrs. Carew's departure--but it was still protected by a shade, and this was drawn down, nearly to the ledge. But not quite. A narrow space intervened which, to an eye placed where mine was, offered a peep-hole of more or less satisfactory proportions, and this space, I soon saw, widened perceptibly from time to time as the wind caught at the shade and blew it in. With utmost caution I shifted my position till I could bring my eye fairly in line with the interior of this room, and finding that the glimpse given revealed little but a blue wall and some snowy linen, I waited for the breeze to blow that I might see more. It came speedily, and in a gust which lifted the shade and thus disclosed the whole inside of the room. It was an instantaneous glimpse, but in that moment the picture projected upon my eye satisfied me that, despite my doubts, despite my causes for suspicion, I had been doing this woman the greatest injustice in supposing that her relations to the child she had brought into her home were other than she had made out. She had come up as she had promised, and had seated herself on the bed with her face turned toward the window. I could thus catch its whole expression--an expression this time involuntary and natural as the feelings which prompted it. The child, with his newly-obtained toy clutched in one hand, knelt on the coverlet with his head pressed against her breast, saying his prayers. I could hear his soft murmur, though I could not catch the words. But sweet as was the sight of his little white-clad form burying its head, with its mass of dusky curls, against the breast in which he most confided, it was not this alone which gave to the moment its almost sacred character. It was the rapturous look with which Mrs. Carew gazed down on this little head--the mother-look, which admits of nothing false, and which when once seen on a woman's face, whether she be mother in fact or mother only in heart--idealizes her in the mind for ever. Eloquent with love and holy devotion the scene flashed upon my eyes for a moment and was gone. But that moment made its impression, and settled for good and all the question with which I had started upon this adventure. She _was_ the true woman and I was the dreaming fool. As I realized this I also realized that three days out of the seven were gone. XV A PHANTASM I certainly had every right to conclude that this would end my adventures for the day. But I soon found that I was destined to have yet another experience before returning to my home in New York. The weather had changed during the last hour and at the moment I emerged from the shadows of the hedge-row into the open space fronting the Ocumpaugh dock, a gleam of lightning shot across the west and by it I saw what looked like the dusky figure of a man leaning against a pile at the extreme end of the boat-house. Something in the immobility maintained by this figure in face of the quick flashes which from time to time lit up the scene, reminded me of the presence I had come upon hours before in front of Mrs. Carew's house; and moved by the instinct of my calling, I took advantage of the few minutes yet remaining before train time, to make my way in its direction, cautiously, of course, and with due allowance for the possible illumination following those fitful bursts of light which brought everything to view in one moment, only to plunge it all back into the profoundest obscurity the next. I had two motives for my proceeding. One, as I say, sprang from the natural instinct of investigation; the other was kindlier and less personal. I did not understand the meaning of the posture which this person had now assumed; nor did I like it. Why should this man--why should any man stand like this at the dead of night staring into waters, which, if they had their tale to tell, had not yet told it--unless his interest in the story he read there was linked with emotions such as it was my business to know? For those most openly concerned in Gwendolen's loss, the search had ceased; why, then, this lone and lingering watch on the part of one who might, for all I knew, be some over-zealous detective, but who I was rather inclined to believe was a person much more closely concerned in the child's fate, viz: the next heir-in-law, Mr. Rathbone. If it were he, his presence there savored of mystery or it savored of the tragic. The latter seemed the more likely hypothesis, judging from the expression of his face, as seen by me under the lantern. It behooved me then to approach him, but to approach him in the shadow of the boat-house. What passed in the next few minutes seemed to me unreal and dreamlike. I was tired, I suppose, and so more than usually susceptible. Night had no unfamiliar effects for me, even night on the borders of this great river; nor was my occupation a new one, or the expectation I felt, as fearful and absorbing as that with which an hour or two before I had raised my lantern in that room in which the doleful mystery of half a century back, trenched upon the still more moving mystery of to-day. Yet, that experience had the sharpness of fact; while this had only the vagueness of a phantasm. I was very near him but the lightning had ceased to flash, and I found it impossible to discern whether or not the form I had come there to identify, yet lingered in its old position against the pile. I therefore awaited the next gleam with great anxiety, an anxiety only partly alleviated by the certainty I felt of hearing the faint, scarcely recognizable sound of his breathing. Had the storm passed over? Would no more flashes come? Ah, he is moving--that is a sigh I hear--no detective's exclamation of impatience, but a sufferer's sigh of depression or remorse. What was in the man's mind? A steamboat or some equally brilliantly illuminated craft was passing, far out in the channel; the shimmer of its lights gave sudden cheer to the distant prospect; the churning of its paddles suggested life and action and irresistibly drew my eyes that way. Would his follow? Would I find his attitude changed? Ah! the long delayed flash has come and gone. He is standing there yet, but no longer in an attitude of contemplation. On the contrary, he is bending over the waters searching with eager aspect, where so many had searched before him, and, in the instant, as his face and form leaped into sight, I beheld his clenched right hand fall on his breast and heard on his lips the one word-- "Guilty!" XVI "AN ALL-CONQUERING BEAUTY" I was one of the first to procure and read a New York paper next morning. Would I discover in the columns any hint of the preceding day's events in Yonkers, which, if known, must for ever upset the wagon theory? No, that secret was still my secret, only shared by the doctor, who, so far as I understood him, had no intention of breaking his self-imposed silence till his fears of some disaster to the little one had received confirmation. I had therefore several hours before me yet for free work. The first thing I did was to hunt up Miss Graham. She met me with eagerness; an eagerness I found it difficult to dispel with my disappointing news in regard to Doctor Pool. "He is not the man," said I. "Can you think of any other?" She shook her head, her large gray eyes showing astonishment and what I felt bound to regard as an honest bewilderment. "I wish to mention a name," said I. "One I know?" she asked. "Yes." "I know of no other person capable of wronging that child." "You are probably right. But there is a gentleman--one interested in the family--a man with something to gain--" "Mr. Rathbone? You must not mention him in any such connection. He is one of the best men I know--kind, good, and oh, so sensitive! A dozen fortunes wouldn't tempt a man of his stamp to do any one living a wrong, let alone a little innocent child." "I know; but there are other temptations greater than money to some men; infinitely greater to one as sensitive as you say he is. What if he loved a woman! What if his only hope of winning her--" "You must not think that of him," she again interposed. "Nothing could make a villain of _him_. I have seen him too many times in circumstances which show a man's character. He is good through and through, and in all that concerns Gwendolen, honorable to the core. I once saw him save her life at the risk of his own." "You did? When? Years ago?" "No, lately; within the last year." "Tell me the circumstances." She did. They were convincing. As I listened, the phantasm of the night before assumed fainter and fainter proportions. When she had finished I warmly remarked that I was glad to hear the story of so heroic an act. And I was. Not that I ascribed too deep a significance to the word which had escaped Mr. Rathbone on the dock, but because I was glad to have my instinctive confidence in the man verified by facts. It seemed to clear the way before me. "Ellie," said I (it seemed both natural and proper to call her by that name now), "what explanation would you give if, under any circumstances (all circumstances are possible, you know), you heard this gentleman speak of feeling guilty in connection with Gwendolen Ocumpaugh?" "I should have to know the circumstances," was her quiet answer. "Let me imagine some. Say that it was night, late night, at an hour when the most hardened amongst us are in a peculiarly responsive condition; say that he had been spending hours near the house of the woman he had long loved but had quite despaired of winning in his greatly hampered condition, and with the fever of this longing upon him, but restrained by emotions the nature of which we can not surmise, had now found his way down to the river--to the spot where boats have clustered and men crouched in the gruesome and unavailing search we know of; say that he hung there long over the water, gazing down in silence, in solitude, alone, as he thought, with his own conscience and the suggestions offered by that running stream where some still think, despite facts, despite all the probabilities, that Gwendolen has found rest, and when his heart was full, should be seen to strike his breast and utter, with a quick turn of his face up the hill, this one word, 'Guilty'?" "What would I think? This: That being overwrought by the struggle you mention (a struggle we can possibly understand when we consider the unavoidable consciousness which must be his of the great change which would be effected in all his prospects if Gwendolen should not be found), he gave the name of guilt to feelings which some would call simply human." "Ellie, you are an oracle." This thought of hers had been my thought ever since I had had time really to reflect upon the matter. "I wonder if you will have an equally wise reply to give to my next question?" "I can not say. I speak from intuition; I am not really wise." "Intuition is above wisdom. Does your intuition tell you that Mrs. Carew is the true friend she professes to be to Mrs. Ocumpaugh?" "Ah, that is a different thing!" The clear brow I loved--there! how words escape a man!--lost its smoothness and her eyes took on a troubled aspect, while her words came slowly. "I do not know how to answer that offhand. Sometimes I have felt that her very soul was knit to that of Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and again I have had my doubts. But never deep ones; never any such as would make it easy for me to answer the question you have just put me." "Was her love for Gwendolen sincere?" I asked. "Oh, yes; oh, yes. That is, I always thought so, and with no qualification, till something in her conduct when she first heard of Gwendolen's disappearance--I can not describe it--gave me a sense of disappointment. She was shocked, of course, and she was grieved, but not hopelessly so. There was something lacking in her manner--we all felt it; Mrs. Ocumpaugh felt it, and let her dear friend go the moment she showed the slightest inclination to do so." "There were excuses for Mrs. Carew, just at that time," said I. "You forget the new interest which had come into her life. It was natural that she should be preoccupied." "With thoughts of her little nephew?" replied Miss Graham. "True, true; but she had been so fond of Gwendolen! You would have thought-- But why all this talk about Mrs. Carew? You don't believe--you surely can not believe--" "That Mrs. Carew is a charming woman? Oh, yes, but I do. Mr. Rathbone shows good taste." "Ah, is she the one?" "Did you not know it?" "No; yet I have seen them together many times. Now I understand much that has always been a mystery to me. He never pressed his suit; he loved, but never harassed her. Oh, he is a good man!" This with emphasis. "Is she a good woman?" Miss Graham's eyes suddenly fell, then rose again until they met mine fully and frankly. "I have no reason," said she, "to believe her otherwise. I have never seen anything in her to hinder my esteem; only--" "Finish that 'only.'" "She does not appeal to me as many less gifted women do. Perhaps I am secretly jealous of the extreme fondness Gwendolen has always shown for her. If so, the fault is in me, not in her." What I said in reply is not germane to this story. After being assured by a few more discreet inquiries in some other perfectly safe quarters that Miss Graham's opinion of Mr. Rathbone was shared by those who best knew him, I returned to the one spot most likely to afford me a clue to, if no explanation of, this elusive mystery. What did I propose to myself? First, to revisit Mrs. Carew and make the acquaintance of the boy Harry. I no longer doubted his being just what she called him, but she had asked me to call for this purpose and I had no excuse for declining the invitation, even if I had desired to do so. Afterward--but first let us finish with Mrs. Carew. As she entered her reception-room that morning she looked so bright--that is, with the instinctive brightness of a naturally vivacious temperament--that I wondered if I had been mistaken in my thought that she had had no sleep all that night, simply because many of the lights in her house had not been put out till morning. But an inspection of her face revealed lines of care, which only her smile could efface, and she was not quite ready for smiles, affable and gracious as she showed herself. Her first words, just as I expected, were: "There is nothing in the papers about the child in the wagon." "No; everything does not get into the papers." "Will what we saw and what we found in the bungalow last night?" "I hardly think so. That is our own special clue, Mrs. Carew--if it is a clue." "You seem to regard it as such." With a shrug I declared that we had come upon a mystery of some kind. "But the child is not dead? That you feel demonstrated--or don't you?" "As I said last night, I do not know what to think. Ah; is that the little boy?" "Yes," she gaily responded, as the glad step of a child was heard descending the stairs. "Harry! come here, Harry!" she cried, with that joyous accent which a child's presence seems to call out in some women. "Here is a gentleman who would like to shake hands with you." A sprite of a child entered; a perfect sunbeam irradiating the whole room. If, under the confidence induced by the vision I had had of him on his knees the night before, any suspicion remained in my mind of his being Gwendolen Ocumpaugh in disguise, it vanished at sight of the fearless head, lifted high in boyish freedom, and the gay swish, swish of the whip in his nervous little hand. "Harry is playing horse," he cried, galloping toward me in what he evidently considered true jockey style. I made a gesture and stopped him. "How do you do, little man? What did you say your name is?" "Harry," this very stoutly. "Harry what? Harry Carew?" "No, Harry; just Harry." "And how do you like it here?" "I like it; I like it better than my old home." "Where was your old home?" "I don't know. I didn't like it." "He was with uncongenial people, and he is very sensitive," put in Mrs. Carew, softly. "I like it here," he repeated, "and I like the big ocean. I am going on the ocean. And I like horses. Get up, Dandy!" and he cracked his whip and was off again on his imaginary trot. I felt very foolish over the doubts I had so openly evinced. This was not only a boy to the marrow of his bones, but he was, as any eye could see, the near relative she called him. In my embarrassment I rose; at all events I soon found myself standing near the door with Mrs. Carew. "A fine fellow!" I enthusiastically exclaimed; "and startlingly like you in expression. He is your nephew, I believe?" "Yes," she replied, somewhat wistfully I thought. I felt that I should apologize for--well, perhaps for the change she must have discerned in my manner. "The likeness caused me a shock. I was not prepared for it, I suppose." She looked at me quite wonderingly. "I have never heard any one speak of it before. I am glad that you see it." And she seemed glad, very glad. But I know that for some reason she was gladder yet when I turned to depart. However, she did not hasten me. "What are you going to do next?" she inquired, as she courteously led the way through the piles of heaped-up boxes and baskets, the number of which had rather grown than diminished since my visit the evening before. "Pardon my asking." "Resort to my last means," said I. "See and talk with Mrs. Ocumpaugh." An instant of hesitation on her part, so short, however, that I could hardly detect it, then she declared: "But you can not do that." "Why not?" "She is ill; I am sure that they will let no one approach her. One of her maids was in this morning. She did not even ask me to come over." "I am sorry," said I, "but I shall make the effort. The illness which affects Mrs. Ocumpaugh can be best cured by the restoration of her child." "But you have not found Gwendolen?" she replied. "No; but I have discovered footprints on the dust of the bungalow floor, and, as you know, a bit of candy which looks as if it had been crushed in a sleeping child's hand, and I am in need of every aid possible in order to make the most of these discoveries. They may point the way to Gwendolen's present whereabouts and they may not. But they shall be given every chance." "Whoop! get up! get up!" broke in a childish voice from the upper landing. "Am I not right?" I asked. "Always; only I am sorry for Mrs. Ocumpaugh. May I tell you--" as I laid my hand upon the outer door-knob--"just how to approach her?" "Certainly, if you will be so good." "I would not ask for Miss Porter. Ask for Celia; she is Mrs. Ocumpaugh's special maid. Let her carry your message--if you feel that it will do any good to disturb her." "Thank you; the recommendation is valuable. Good morning, Mrs. Carew. I may not see you again; may I wish you a safe journey?" "Certainly; are we not almost friends?" Why did I not make my bow and go? There was nothing more to be said--at least by me. Was I held by something in her manner? Doubtless, for while I was thus reasoning with myself she followed me out on to the porch, and with some remark as to the beauty of the morning, led me to an opening in the vines, whence a fine view could be caught of the river. But it was not for the view she had brought me there. This was evident enough from her manner, and soon she paused in her observations on the beauties of nature, and with a strange ringing emphasis for which I was not altogether prepared, remarked with feeling: "I may be making a mistake--I was always an unconventional woman--but I think you ought to know something of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's private history before you see her. It is not a common one--at least it has its romantic elements--and an acquaintance with some of its features is almost necessary to you if you expect to approach her on so delicate a matter with any hope of success. But perhaps you are better informed on this subject than I supposed? Detectives are a mine of secret intelligence, I am told; possibly you have already learned from some other source the story of her marriage and homecoming to Homewood and the peculiar circumstances of her early married life?" "No," I disclaimed in great relief, and I have no doubt with unnecessary vivacity. "On the contrary, I have never heard anything said in regard to it." "Would you like to? Men have not the curiosity of women, and I do not wish to bore you, but--I see that I shall not do that," she exclaimed. "Sit down, Mr. Trevitt; I shall not detain you long; I have not much time myself." As she sank into a chair in saying this, I had no alternative but to follow her example. I took pains, however, to choose one which brought me into the shadow of the vines, for I felt some embarrassment at this new turn in the conversation, and was conscious that I should have more or less difficulty in hiding my only too intense interest in all that concerned the lady of whom we were speaking. "Mrs. Ocumpaugh was a western woman," Mrs. Carew began softly; "the oldest of five daughters. There was not much money in the family, but she had beauty, a commanding, all-conquering beauty; not the beauty you see in her to-day, but that exquisite, persuasive loveliness which seizes upon the imagination as well as moves the heart. I have a picture of her at eighteen--but never mind that." Was it affection for her friend which made Mrs. Carew's always rich voice so very mellow? I wished I knew; but I was successful, I think, in keeping that wish out of my face, and preserving my manner of the simply polite listener. "Mr. Ocumpaugh was on a hunting trip," she proceeded, after a slight glance my way. "He had traveled the world over and seen beautiful women everywhere; but there was something in Marion Allison which he had found in no other, and at the end of their first interview he determined to make her his wife. A man of impulses, but also a man of steady resolution, Mr. Trevitt. Perhaps you know this?" I bowed. "A strong man," I remarked. "And a romantic one. He had this intention from the first, as I have said, but he wished to make himself sure of her heart. He knew how his advantages counted; how hard it is for a woman to disassociate the man from his belongings, and having a spirit of some daring, he resolved that this 'pearl of the west'--so I have heard him call her--should marry the man and not his money." "Was he as wealthy then as now?" "Almost. Possibly he was not quite such a power in the financial world, but he had Homewood in almost as beautiful a condition as now, though the new house was not put up till after his marriage. He courted her--not as the landscape painter of Tennyson's poem--but as a rising young business man who had made his way sufficiently to give her a good home. This home he did not have to describe, since her own imagination immediately pictured it as much below the one she lived in, as he was years younger than her hard-worked father. Delighted with this naïveté, he took pains not to disabuse her mind of the simple prospects with which she was evidently so well satisfied, and succeeded in marrying her and bringing her as far as our station below there, without her having the least suspicion of the splendor she was destined for. And now, Mr. Trevitt, picture, if you can, the scene of that first arrival. I have heard it described by him and I have heard it described by her. He was dressed plainly; so was she; and lest the surprise should come before the proper moment, he had brought her on a train little patronized by his friends. The sumptuousness of the solitary equipage standing at the depot platform must, in consequence, have struck her all the more forcibly, and when he turned and asked her if she did not admire this fine turn-out, you can imagine the lovely smile with which she acknowledged its splendor and then turned away to look up and down for the street-car she expected to take with him to their bridal home. "He says that he caught her back with the remark that he was glad she liked it because it was hers and many more like it. But she insists that he did not say a word, only smiled in a way to make her see for whom the carriage door was being held open. Such was her entrance into wealth and love and alas! into trouble. For the latter followed hard upon the two first. Mr. Ocumpaugh's mother, who had held sway at Homewood for thirty years or more, was hard as the nether millstone. She was a Rathbone and had brought both wealth and aristocratic connections into the family. She had no sympathy for penniless beauties (she was a very plain woman herself) and made those first few years of her daughter-in-law's life as nearly miserable as any woman's can be who adores her husband. I have heard that it was a common experience for this sharp-tongued old lady to taunt her with the fact that she brought nothing into the family but herself--not even a _towel_; and when two years passed and no child came, the biting criticisms became so frequent that a cloud fell over the young wife's sensitive beauty, which no after happiness has ever succeeded in fully dispelling. Matters went better after Gwendolen came, but in reckoning up the possible defects in Mrs. Ocumpaugh's character you should never forget the twist that may have been given to it by that mother-in-law." "I have heard of Madam Ocumpaugh," I remarked, rising, anxious to end an interview whose purport was more or less enigmatic to me. "She is dead now--happily. A woman like that is accountable for much more than she herself ever realizes. But one thing she never succeeded in doing: she never shook Mr. Ocumpaugh's love for his wife or hers for him. Whether it was the result of that early romantic episode of which I have spoken, or whether their natures are peculiarly congenial, the bond between them has been one of exceptional strength and purity." "It will be their comfort now," I remarked. Mrs. Carew smiled, but in a dubious way that added to my perplexity and made me question more seriously than ever just what her motive had been in subjecting me to these very intimate reminiscences of one I was about to approach on an errand of whose purport she could have only a general idea. Had she read my inmost soul? Did she wish to save her friend, or save herself, or even to save me from the result of a blind use of such tools as were the only ones afforded me? Impossible to determine. She was at this present moment, as she had always been, in fact, an unsolvable problem to me, and it was not at this hurried time and with such serious work before me that I could venture to make any attempt to understand her. "You will let me know the outcome of your talk with Mrs. Ocumpaugh?" she cried, as I moved to the front of the porch. It was for me to look dubious now. I could make no such promise as that. "I will let you know the instant there is any good news," I assured her. And with that I moved off, but not before hearing the peremptory command with which she entered the house: "Now, Dinah, quick!" Evidently, her preparations for departure were to be pushed. XVII IN THE GREEN BOUDOIR So far in this narrative I have kept from the reader nothing but an old experience of which I was now to make use. This experience involved Mrs. Ocumpaugh, and was the cause of the confidence which I had felt from the first in my ability to carry this search through to a successful termination. I believed that in some secret but as yet undiscovered way, it offered a key to this tragedy. And I still believed this, little as I had hitherto accomplished and blind as the way continued to look before me. Nevertheless, it was with anything but a cheerful heart that I advanced that morning through the shrubbery toward the Ocumpaugh mansion. I dreaded the interview I had determined to seek. I was young, far too young, to grapple with the difficulties it involved; yet I saw no way of avoiding it, or of saving either Mrs. Ocumpaugh or myself from the suffering it involved. Mrs. Carew had advised that I should first see the girl called Celia. But Mrs. Carew knew nothing of the real situation. I did not wish to see any girl. I felt that no such intermediary would answer in a case like this. Nor did I choose to trust Miss Porter. Yet to Miss Porter alone could I appeal. The sight of a doctor's gig standing at the side door gave me my first shock. Mrs. Ocumpaugh was ill, then, really ill. Yet if I came to make her better? I stood irresolute till I saw the doctor come out; then I walked boldly up and asked for Miss Porter. Just what Mrs. Carew had advised me not to do. Miss Porter came. She recognized me, but only to express her sorrow that Mrs. Ocumpaugh was totally unfit to see any one to-day. "Not if he brings news?" "News?" "I have news, but of a delicate nature. I should like the privilege of imparting the same to Mrs. Ocumpaugh herself." "Impossible." "Excuse me, if I urge it." "She can not see you. The doctor who has just gone says that at all hazards she must be kept quiet to-day. Won't Mr. Atwater do? Is it--is it good news?" "That, Mrs. Ocumpaugh alone can say." "See Mr. Atwater; I will call him." "I have nothing to say to _him_." "But--" "Let me advise you. Leave it to Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Take this paper up to her--it is only a sketch--and inform her that the person who drew it has something of importance to say either to her or to Mr. Atwater, and let her decide which it shall be. You may, if you wish, mention my name." "I do not understand." "You hold my credentials," I said and smiled. She glanced at the paper I had placed in her hand. It was a folded one, fastened something like an envelope. "I can not conceive,--" she began. I did not scruple to interrupt her. "Mrs. Ocumpaugh has a right to the privilege of seeing what I have sketched there," I said with what impressiveness I could, though my heart was heavy with doubt. "Will you believe that what I ask is for the best and take this envelope to her? It may mean the ultimate restoration of her child." "This paper?" "Yes, Miss Porter." She did not try to hide her incredulity. "I do not see how a picture--yet you seem very much in earnest--and I know she has confidence in you, she and Mr. Ocumpaugh, too. I will take it to her if you can assure me that good will come of it and no more false hopes to destroy the little courage she has left." "I can not promise that. I believe that she will wish to receive me and hear all I have to say after seeing what that envelope contains. That is as far as I can honestly go." "It does not satisfy me. If it were not for the nearness of Mr. Ocumpaugh's return, I would have nothing to do with it. He must hear at Sandy Hook that some definite news has been received of his child." "You are right, Miss Porter, he must." "He idolized Gwendolen. He is a man of strong feelings; very passionate and much given to follow the impulse of the moment. If his suspense is not ended at the earliest possible instant, the results may be such as I dare not contemplate." "I know it; that is why I have pushed matters to this point. You will carry that up to her?" "Yes; and if--" "No ifs. Lay it before her where she sits and come away. But not beyond call. You are a good woman--I see it in your face--do not watch her as she unfolds this paper. Persons of her temperament do not like to have their emotions observed, and this will cause her emotion. That can not be helped, Miss Porter. Sincerely and honestly I tell you that it is impossible for her best friends to keep her from suffering now; they can only strive to keep that suffering from becoming permanent." "It is a hard task you have set me," complained the poor woman; "but I will do what I can. Anything must be better for Mrs. Ocumpaugh than the suspense she is now laboring under." "Remember," I enjoined, with the full force of my secret anxiety, "that no eye but hers must fall upon this drawing. Not that it would convey meaning to anybody but herself, but because it is her affair and her affair only, and you are the woman to respect another person's affairs." She gave me a final scrutinizing look and left the room. "God grant that I have made no mistake!" was the inward prayer with which I saw her depart. My fervency was sincere. I was myself frightened at what I had done. And what had I done? Sent her a sketch drawn by myself of Doctor Pool and of his office. If it recalled to her, as I felt it must, the remembrance of a certain memorable visit she had once paid there, she would receive me. When Miss Porter reëntered some fifteen minutes later, I saw that my hazardous attempt had been successful. "Come," said she; but with no cheerful alacrity, rather with an air of gloom. "Was--was Mrs. Ocumpaugh very much disturbed by what she saw?" "I fear so. She was half-asleep when I went in, dreaming as it seemed, and pleasantly. It was cruel to disturb her; indeed I had not the heart, so I just laid the folded paper near her hand and waited, but not too near, not within sight of her face. A few minutes later--interminable minutes to me--I heard the paper rattle, but I did not move. I was where she could see me, so she knew that she was not alone and presently I caught the sound of a strange noise from her lips, then a low cry, then the quick inquiry in sharper and more peremptory tones than I had ever before heard from her, 'Where did this come from? Who has dared to send me this?' I advanced quickly. I told her about you and your desire to see her; how you had asked me to bring her up this little sketch so that she would know that you had real business with her; that I regretted troubling her when she felt so weak, but that you promised revelations or some such thing--at which I thought she grew very pale. Are you quite convinced that you have news of sufficient importance to warrant the expectations you have raised in her?" "Let me see her," I prayed. She made a sign and we both left the room. Mrs. Ocumpaugh awaited me in her own boudoir on the second floor. As we went up the main staircase I was afforded short glimpses of room after room of varying richness and beauty, among them, one so dainty and delicate in its coloring that I presumed to ask if it were that of the missing child. Miss Porter's look as she shook her head roused my curiosity. "I should be glad to see her room," I said. She stopped, seemed to consider the matter for a moment, then advanced quickly and, beckoning me to follow, led me to a certain door which she quietly opened. One look, and my astonishment became apparent. The room before me, while large and sunny, was as simple, I had almost said as bare, as my sister's at home. No luxurious furnishings here, no draperies of silk and damask, no half-lights drawing richness from stained glass, no gleam of silver or sparkle of glass on bedecked dresser or carved mantel. Not even the tinted muslins I had seen in some nurseries; but a plain set of furniture on a plain carpet with but one object of real adornment within the four walls. That was a picture of the Madonna opposite the bed, and that was beautiful. But the frame was of the cheapest--a simple band of oak. Catching Miss Porter's eye as we quietly withdrew, I ventured to ask whose taste this was. The answer was short and had a decided ring of disapproval in it. "Her mother's. Mrs. Ocumpaugh believes in simple surroundings for children." "Yet she dressed Gwendolen like a princess." "Yes, for the world's eye. But in her own room she wore gingham aprons which effectually covered up her ribbons and laces." The motive for all this was in a way evident to me, but somehow what I had just seen did not add to my courage for the coming interview. We stopped at the remotest door of this long hall. As Miss Porter opened it I summoned up all my nerve, and the next moment found myself standing in the presence of the imposing figure of Mrs. Ocumpaugh drawn up in the embrasure of a large window overlooking the Hudson. It was the same window, doubtless, in which she had stood for two nights and a day watching for some sign from the boats engaged in dragging the river-bed. Her back was to me and she seemed to find it difficult to break away from her fixed attitude; for several minutes elapsed before she turned slowly about and showed me her face. When she did, I stood appalled. Not a vestige of color was to be seen on cheek, lip or brow. She was the beautiful Mrs. Ocumpaugh still, but the heart which had sent the hues of life to her features, was beating slow--slow--and the effect was heartbreaking to one who had seen her in her prime and the full glory of her beauty as wife and mother. "Pardon," I faltered out, bowing my head as if before some powerful rebuke, though her lips were silent and her eyes pleading rather than accusing. Truly, I had ventured far in daring to recall to this woman an hour which at this miserable time she probably would give her very life to forget. "Pardon," I repeated, with even a more humble intonation than before, for she did not speak and I hardly knew how to begin the conversation. Still she said nothing, and at last I found myself forced to break the unbearable silence by some definite remark. "I have presumed," I therefore continued, advancing but a step toward her who made no advance at all, "to send you a hurried sketch of one who says he knows you, that you might be sure I was not one of the many eager but irresponsible men who offer help in your great trouble without understanding your history or that of the little one to whose seemingly unaccountable disappearance all are seeking a clue." "My history!" The words seemed forced from her, but no change in eye or look accompanied them; nor could I catch a motion of her lips when she presently added in a far-away tone inexpressibly affecting, "_Her_ history! Did he bid you say that?" "Doctor Pool? He has given me no commands other than to find the child. I am not here as an agent of his. I am here in Mr. Ocumpaugh's interest and your own; with some knowledge--a little more knowledge than others have perhaps--to aid me in the business of recovering this child. Madam, the police are seeking her in the holes and slums of the great city and at the hands of desperate characters who make a living out of the terrors and griefs of the rich. But this is not where I should look for Gwendolen Ocumpaugh. I should look nearer, just as you have looked nearer; and I should use means which I am sure have not commended themselves to the police. These means you can doubtless put in my hands. A mother knows many things in connection with her child which she neither thinks to impart nor would, under any ordinary circumstances, give up, especially to a stranger. I am not a stranger; you have seen me in Mr. Ocumpaugh's confidence; will you then pardon me if I ask what may strike you as impertinent questions, but which may lead to the discovery of the motive if not to the method of the little one's abduction?" "I do not understand--" She was trying to shake off her apathy. "I feel confused, sick, almost like one dying. How can I help? Haven't I done everything? I believe that she strayed to the river and was drowned. I still believe her dead. Otherwise we should have news--real news--and we don't, we don't." The intensity with which she uttered the last two words brought a line of red into her gasping lips. She was becoming human, and for a minute I could not help drawing a comparison between her and her friend Mrs. Carew as the latter had just appeared to me in her little half-denuded house on the other side of the hedge-row. Both beautiful, but owing their charms to quite different sources, I surveyed this woman, white against the pale green of the curtain before which she stood, and imperceptibly but surely the glowing attractions of the gay-hearted widow who had found a child to love, faded before the cold loveliness of this bereaved mother, wan with suffering and alive with terrors of whose depth I could judge from the clutch with which she still held my little sketch. Meanwhile I had attempted some kind of answer to Mrs. Ocumpaugh's heart-rending appeal. "We do not hear because she was not taken from you simply for the money her return would bring. Indeed, after hours of action and considerable thinking, I am beginning to doubt if she was taken for money at all. Can you not think of some other motive? Do you not know of some one who wanted the child from--_love_, let us say?" "Love?" Did her lips frame it, or did I see it in her eyes? Certainly I heard no sound, yet I was conscious that she repeated the word in her mind, if not aloud. "I know I have startled you," I pursued. "But, pardon me--I can not help my presumption--I must be personal--I must even go so far as to probe the wound I have made. You have a claim to Gwendolen not to be doubted, not to be gainsaid. But isn't there some one else who is conscious of possessing certain claims also? I do not allude to Mr. Ocumpaugh." "You mean--some relative--aunt--cousin--" She was fully human now, and very keenly alert. "Mr. Rathbone, perhaps?" "No, Mrs. Ocumpaugh, none of these." Then as the paper rattled in her hand and I saw her eyes fall in terror on it, I said as calmly and respectfully as I could: "You have a secret, Mrs. Ocumpaugh; that secret I share." The paper trembled from her clasp and fell fluttering downward. I pointed at it and waited till our eyes met, possibly that I might give her some encouragement from my look if not from my words. "I was a boy in Doctor Pool's employ some five years ago, and one day--" I paused; she had made me a supplicating gesture. "Shall I not go on?" I finally asked. "Give me a minute," was her low entreaty. "O God! O God! that I should have thought myself secure all these years, with two in the world knowing my fatal secret!" "I learned it by accident," I went on, when I saw her eye turn again on mine. "On a certain night six years ago, I was in the office behind an old curtain--you remember the curtain hanging at the left of the doctor's table over that break in the book-shelves. I had no business there. I had been meddling with things which did not belong to me and, when I heard the doctor's step at the door, was glad to shrink into this refuge and wait for an opportunity to escape. It did not come very soon. First he had one patient, then another. The last one was you; I heard your name and caught a glimpse of your face as you went out. It was a very interesting story you told him--I was touched by it though I hardly understood." "Oh! oh!" She was swaying from side to side, swaying so heavily that I instinctively pushed forward a chair. "Sit," I prayed. "You are not strong enough for this excitement." She glanced at me vaguely, shook her head, but made no move toward accepting the proffered chair. She submitted, however, when I continued to press it upon her; and I felt less a brute and hard-hearted monster when I saw her sitting with folded hands before me. "I bring this up," said I, "that you may understand what I mean when I say that some one else--another woman, in fact, may feel her claim upon this child greater than yours." "You mean the real mother. Is she known? The doctor swore--" "I do not know the real mother. I only know that you are not; that to win some toleration from your mother-in-law, to make sure of your husband's lasting love, you won the doctor over to a deception which secured a seeming heir to the Ocumpaughs. Whose child was given you, is doubtless known to you--" "No, no." I stared, aghast. "What! You do not know?" "No, I did not wish to. Nor was she ever to know me or my name." "Then this hope has also failed. I thought that in this mother, we might find the child's abductor." XVIII "YOU LOOK AS IF--AS IF--" I had studiously avoided looking at her while these last few words passed between us, but as the silence which followed this final outburst continued, I felt forced to glance her way if only to see what my next move should be. I found her gazing straight at me with a bright spot on either cheek, looking as if seared there by a red-hot iron. "You are a detective," she said, as our regards met. "You have known this shameful secret always, yet have met my husband constantly and have never told." "No, I saw no reason." "Did you never, when you saw how completely my husband was deceived, how fortunes were bequeathed to Gwendolen, gifts lavished on her, her small self made almost an idol of, because all our friends, all our relatives saw in her a true Ocumpaugh, think it wicked to hold your peace and let this all go on as if she were the actual offspring of my husband and myself?" "No; I may have wondered at your happiness; I may have thought of the consequences if ever he found out, but--" I dared not go on; the quick, the agonizing nerve of her grief and suffering had been touched and I myself quailed at the result. Stammering some excuse, I waited for her soundless anguish to subside; then, when I thought she could listen, completed my sentence by saying: "I did not allow my thoughts to stray quite so far, Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Not till my knowledge of your secret promised to be of use did I let it rise to any proportion in my mind. I had too much sympathy for your difficulties; I have to-day." This hint of comfort, perhaps from the only source which could afford her any, seemed to move her. "Do you mean that you are my friend?" she cried. "That you would help me, if any help were possible, to keep my secret and--my husband's love?" I did not know how to dash the first spark of hope I had seen in her from the beginning of this more than painful interview. To avoid it, I temporized a trifle and answered with ready earnestness: "I would do much, Mrs. Ocumpaugh, to make the consequences of your act as ineffective as possible and still be true to the interests of Mr. Ocumpaugh. If the child can be found--you wish that? You loved her?" "O yes, I loved her." There was no mistaking the wistfulness of her tone. "Too well, far too well; only my husband more." "If you can find her--that is the first thing, isn't it?" "Yes." It was a faint rejoinder. I looked at her again. "_You do not wish her found_," I suddenly declared. She started, rose to her feet, then suddenly sat again as if she felt that she could not stand. "What makes you say that? How dare you? how can you say that? My husband loves her, I love her--she is our own child, if not by birth, by every tie which endears a child to a parent. Has that wicked man--" "Doctor Pool!" I put in, for she stopped, gasping. "Yes; Doctor Pool, whom I wish to God I had never seen--has he told you any such lies as that? the man who swore--" I put out my hand to calm her. I feared for her reason if not for her life. "Be careful," I enjoined. "Your walls are thick but tones like yours are penetrating." Then as I saw she would be answered, I replied to the question still alive in her face: "No; Doctor Pool has not talked of you. I saw it in your own manner, madam; it or something else. Perhaps it was something else--another secret which I have not shared." She moistened her lips and, placing her two hands on the knobs of the chair in which she sat, leaned passionately forward. Who could say she was cold now? Who could see anything but a feeling heart in this woman, beautiful beyond all precedent in her passion and her woe? "It is--it was--a secret. I have to confess to the abnormal. The child did not love me; has never loved me. Lavish as I have been in my affection and caresses, she has never done aught but endure them. Though she believes me her own mother, she has shrunk from me with all the might of her nature from the very first. It was God's punishment for the lie by which I strove to make my husband believe himself the father which in God's providence he was not. I have borne it; but my life has been a living hell. It was that you saw in my face--nothing else." I was bound to believe her. The child had made her suffer, but she was bent upon recovering her--of course. I dared not contemplate any other alternative. Her love for her husband precluded any other desire on her part. And so I admitted, when after a momentary survey of the task yet before me, I ventured to remark: "Then we find ourselves once more at the point from which we started. Where shall we look for his child? Mrs. Ocumpaugh, perhaps it would aid us in deciding this question if you told me, sincerely told me, why you had such strong belief in Gwendolen's having been drowned in the river. You did believe this--I saw you at the window. You are not an actress like your friend--you expected to see her body drawn from those waters. For twenty-four hours you expected it, though every one told you it was impossible. Why?" She crept a step nearer to me, her tones growing low and husky. "Don't you see? I--I--thought that to escape me, she might have leaped into the water. She was capable of it. Gwendolen had a strong nature. The struggle between duty and repulsion made havoc even in her infantile breast. Besides, we had had a scene that morning--a secret scene in which she showed absolute terror of me. It broke my heart, and when she disappeared in that mysterious way--and--and--one of her shoes was found on the slope, what was I to think but that she had chosen to end her misery--this child! this babe I had loved as my own flesh and blood!--in the river where she had been forbidden to go?" "Suicide by a child of six! You gave another reason for your persistent belief, at the time, Mrs. Ocumpaugh." "Was I to give this one?" "No; no one could expect you to do that, even if there had been no secret to preserve and the child had been your own. But the child did not go to the river. You are convinced of that now, are you not?" "Yes." "Where then did she go? Or rather, to what place was she taken? Somewhere near; somewhere within easy reach, for the alarm soon rose and then she could not be found. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, I am going to ask you an apparently trivial and inconsequent question. Was Gwendolen very fond of sweets?" "Yes." She was sitting upright now, staring me in the face in unconcealed astonishment and a little fear. "What sort of candy--pardon me if I seem impertinent--had you in your house on the Wednesday the child disappeared? Any which she could have got at or the nurse given her?" "There were the confections brought by the caterer; none other that I know of; I did not indulge her much in sweets." "Was there anything peculiar about these confections either in taste or appearance?" "I didn't taste them. In appearance they were mostly round and red, with a brandied cherry inside. Why, sir, why do you ask? What have these miserable lumps of sugar to do with Gwendolen?" "Madam, do you recognize this?" I took from my pocket the crushed mass of colored sugar and fruit I had picked up from the musty cushions of the old sofa in the walled-up room of the bungalow. She took it and looked up, staring. "It is one of them," she cried. "Where did you get it? You look as if--as if--" "I had come upon a clue to Gwendolen? Madam, I believe I have. This candy has been held in a hot little hand. Miss Graham or one of the girls must have given it to her as she ran through the dining-room or across the side veranda on her way to the bungalow. She did not eat it offhand; she evidently fell asleep before eating it, but she clutched it very tight, only dropping it, I judge, when her muscles were quite relaxed by sleep; and then not far; the folds of her dress caught it, for--" "What are you telling me?" The interruption was sudden, imperative. "I saw Gwendolen asleep; she held a string in her hand but no candy, and if she did--" "Did you examine both hands, madam? Think! Great issues hang on a right settlement of this fact. Can you declare that she did not have this candy in one of her little hands?" "No, I can not declare that." "Then I shall always believe she did, and this same sweetmeat, this morsel from the table set for your guests on the afternoon of the sixteenth of this month, I found last night in the disused portion of the bungalow walled up by Mr. Ocumpaugh's father, but made accessible since by an opening let into the floor from the cellar. This latter I was enabled to reach by means of a trap-door concealed under the rug in the open part of this same building." "I--I am all confused. Say that again," she pleaded, starting once more to her feet, but this time without meeting my eyes. "In the disused part of the bungalow? How came you there? No one ever goes there--it is a forbidden place." "The child has been there--and lately." "Oh!" her fingers began to tremble and twist themselves together. "You have something more than this to tell me. Gwendolen has been found and--" her looks became uncertain and wandered, as I thought, toward the river. "She has not been found, but the woman who carried her into that place will soon be discovered." "How? Why?" I had risen by this time and could answer her on a level and face to face. "Because the trail of her steps leads straight along the cellar floor. We have but to measure these footprints." "And what?--what?" "We find the abductor." A silence, during which one long breath issued from her lips. "Was it a man's or woman's steps?" she finally asked. "A woman's, daintily shod; a woman of about the size of--" "Who? Why do you play with my anguish?" "Because I hate to mention the name of a friend." "Ah! What do you know of my friends?" "Not much. I happened to meet one of them, and as she is a very fine woman with exquisitely shod feet, I naturally think of her." "What do you mean?" Her hand was on my arm, her face close to mine. "Speak! speak! the name!" "Mrs. Carew." I had purposely refrained up to this moment from bringing this lady, even by a hint, into the conversation. I did it now under an inner protest. But I had not dared to leave it out. The footprints I alluded to were startlingly like those left by her in other parts of the cellar floor; besides, I felt it my duty to see how Mrs. Ocumpaugh bore this name, notwithstanding my almost completely restored confidence in its owner. She did not bear it well. She flushed and turned quickly from my side, walking away to the window, where she again took up her stand. "You would have shown better taste by not following your first impulse," she remarked. "Mrs. Carew's footsteps in that old cellar! You presume, sir, and make me lose confidence in your judgment." "Not at all. Mrs. Carew's feet have been all over that cellar floor. She accompanied me through it last night, at the time I found this crushed bonbon." I could see that Mrs. Ocumpaugh was amazed, well-nigh confounded, but her manner altered from that moment. "Tell me about it." And I did. I related the doubts I had felt concerning the completeness of the police investigation as regarded the bungalow; my visit there at night with Mrs. Carew, and the discoveries we had made. Then I alluded again to the footprints and the important clue they offered. "But the child?" she interrupted "Where is the child? If taken there, why wasn't she found there? Don't you see that your conclusions are all wild--incredible? A dream? An impossibility?" "I go by the signs," I replied. "There seems to be nothing else to go by." "And you want--you intend, to measure those steps?" "That is why I am here, Mrs. Ocumpaugh. To request permission to continue this investigation and to ask for the key to the bungalow. Mrs. Carew's is no longer available; or rather, I should prefer to proceed without it." With sudden impulse she advanced rapidly toward me. "What is Mrs. Carew doing this morning?" she asked. "Preparing for departure. She is quite resolved to sail to-day. Do you wish to see her? Do you wish her confirmation of my story? I think she will come, if you send for her." "There is no need." This after an instant's hesitation. "I have perfect confidence in Mrs. Carew; and in you too," she added, with what she meant for a kind look. She was by nature without coquetry, and this attempt to please, in the midst of an overwhelming distress absorbing all her faculties, struck me as the most pitiful effort I had ever seen. My feeling for her made it very hard for me to proceed. "Then I may go on?" I said. "Of course, of course. I don't know where the key is; I shall have to give orders. You will wait a few minutes, somewhere in one of the adjoining rooms, while I look up Mr. Atwater?" "Certainly." She was trembling, feverish, impatient. "Shall _I_ not look up Mr. Atwater for you?" I asked. "No. I am feeling better. I can go myself." In another moment she had left the room, having forgotten her own suggestion that I should await her return in some adjoining apartment. XIX FRENZY Five minutes--ten minutes--elapsed and I became greatly impatient. I walked the floor; I stared from the window; I did everything I could think of to pass away these unendurable moments of suspense with creditable self-possession. But I failed utterly. As the clock ticked off the quarter hour, and then the half, I grew not only impatient but seriously alarmed, and flinging down the book I had taken up as a last resort, stepped from the room, in the hope of coming across some one in the hall whom I could interrogate. But the house seemed strangely quiet, and when I had walked the full length of the hall without encountering either maid or mistress, I summoned up courage to return to the room I had left and ring the bell. No answer, though I waited long for it. Thinking that I had not pressed the button hard enough, I made a second attempt, but again there was no answer. Was anything amiss? Had she-- My thought did not complete itself. In sudden apprehension of I knew not what, I dashed from the room and made my way down stairs without further ceremony. The unnatural stillness which had attracted my attention above was repeated on the floor below. No one in the rooms, no one in the passages. Disturbed as I had not been yet by anything which had occurred in connection with this harrowing affair, I leaped to the nearest door and stepped out on the lawn. My first glance was toward the river. All was as usual there. With my worst fears dispelled, but still a prey to doubts for which as yet I had no name, I moved toward the kitchen windows, expecting of course to find some one there who would explain the situation to me. But not a head appeared at my call. The kitchen, too, was deserted. "This is not chance," I involuntarily exclaimed, and was turning toward the stables when I perceived a child, the son of one of the gardeners, crossing the lawn at a run, and hailing him, asked where everybody had gone that the house seemed deserted. He looked back but kept on running, shouting as he did so: "I guess they're all down at the bungalow! I'm going there. Men are digging up the cellar. Mrs. Ocumpaugh says she's afraid Miss Gwendolen's body is buried there." Aghast and perhaps a trifle conscience-stricken, I stood stock-still in the sunshine. So this was what I had done! Driven her to frenzy; roused her imagination to such a point that she saw her darling--always her darling even if another woman's child--lying under the clay across which I had attempted simply to prove that she had been carried. Or--no! I would not think that! A detective of my experience outwitted by this stricken, half-dead woman whom I had trembled to see try to stand upon her feet? Impossible! Yet the thought brought the blood to my cheek. Digging up the bungalow cellar! That meant destroying those footprints before I had secured a single impression of the same. I should have roused her curiosity only, not her terror. Now all might be lost unless I could arrive in time to--do what? Order the work stopped? With what face could I do that with her standing by in all the authority of motherhood--frenzied motherhood--seeking the possible body of her child! My affair certainly looked dubious. Yet I started for the bungalow like the rest, and on a run, too. Perhaps Providence would favor me and some expedient suggest itself by which I might still save the clue upon which so many hopes hung. The excitement which had now drawn every person on the place in the one direction, was at its height as I burst through the thicket into the path running immediately about the bungalow. Those who could get in at the door had done so, filling the room whence Gwendolen had disappeared, with awe-struck men and chattering women. Some had been allowed to descend through the yawning trap-door, down which all were endeavoring to peer, and, fortified by this fact, I armed myself with an appearance of authority despite my sense of presumption, and pushed and worked my own way to these steps, saying that I had come to aid Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose attention I declared I had been the first to direct to this place. Struck with my manner if not with my argument, they yielded to my importunity and allowed me to pass down. The stroke of the spade and the harsh voice of the man directing the work greeted my disquieted ears. With a bound I cleared the last half-dozen steps and, alighting on the cellar bottom, was soon able, in spite of the semi-darkness, to look about me and get some notion of the scene. A dozen men were working--the full corps of gardeners without doubt--and a single glance sufficed to show me that such of the surface as had not been upturned by their spades had been harried by their footsteps. Useless now to promulgate my carefully formed theory, with any hope of proof to substantiate it. The crushed bonbon, the piled-up boxes and the freshly sawed hole were enough without doubt to establish the fact that the child had been carried into the walled-up room above, but the link which would have fixed the identity of the person so carrying her was gone from my chain of evidence for ever. She who should have had the greatest interest in establishing this evidence was leaning on the arm of Miss Porter and directing, with wavering finger and a wild air, the movements of the men, who, in a frenzy caught from her own, dug here and dug there as that inexorable finger pointed. Sobs choked Miss Porter; but Mrs. Ocumpaugh was beyond all such signs of grief. Her eyes moved; her breast heaved; now and then a confused command left her lips, but that was all. Yet to me she was absolutely terrifying, and it took all the courage left from my disappointment for me to move so as to attract her attention. When I saw that I had succeeded in doing this, I regretted the impulse which had led me to break into her mood. The change which my sudden appearance caused in her was too abrupt; too startling. I feared the effects, and put up my hand in silent deprecation as her lips essayed to move in what might be some very disturbing command. If she heeded it I can not say. What she said was this: [Illustration: "IT'S THE CHILD--I'M LOOKING FOR THE CHILD!"] "It's the child--I'm looking for the child! She was brought here. You proved that she was brought here. Then why don't we find her, or--or her little innocent body?" I did not attempt an answer; I dared not--I merely turned away into a corner, where I should be out of the way of the men. A thought was rising in my mind; a thought which might have led to some definite action if her voice had not risen shrilly and with a despairing utterance in these words: "Useless! It is not here she will be found. I was mad to think it. Pull up your spades and go." A murmur of relief from one end of the cellar to the other, and every spade was drawn out of the ground. "I could have told you," ventured one more hardy than the rest, "that there was no use disturbing this old clay for any such purpose. Any one could see that no spade has been at work here before in years." "I said that I was mad," she repeated, and waved the men away. Slowly they retreated with clattering spades and a heavy tread. The murmur which greeted them above slowly died out, and the bungalow was deserted by all but our three selves. When quite sure of this, I turned, and Miss Porter's eyes met mine with a reproachful glance easy enough for me to understand. "I will go, too," whispered Mrs. Ocumpaugh. "Oh! this has been like losing my darling for the second time!" Real grief is unmistakable. Recognizing the heartfelt tone in which these words were uttered, I recurred to the idea of frenzy with all the sympathy her situation called for. Yet I felt that I could not let her leave before we had come to some understanding. But how express myself? How say here and now in the presence of a sympathetic but unenlightened third party what it would certainly be difficult enough for me to utter to herself in the privacy of that secluded apartment in which we had met and talked before our confidence was broken into by this impetuous act of hers. Not seeing at the moment any natural way out of my difficulties, I stood in painful confusion, conscious of Miss Porter's eyes and also conscious that unless some miracle came to my assistance I must henceforth play but a sorry figure in this affair, when my eyes, which had fallen to the ground, chanced upon a morsel of paper so insignificant in size and of such doubtful appearance that the two ladies must have wondered to see me stoop and with ill-concealed avidity pick it up and place it in my pocket. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose false strength was fast leaving her, now muttered some words which were quite unintelligible to me, though they caused Miss Porter to make me a motion very expressive of a dismissal. I did not accept it as such, however, without making one effort to regain my advantage. At the foot of the steps I paused and glanced back at Mrs. Ocumpaugh. She was still looking my way, but her chin had fallen on her breast, and she seemed to sustain herself erect only by a powerful effort. Again her pitiable and humiliating position appealed to me, and it was with some indication of feeling that I finally said: "Am I not to have an opportunity of finishing the conversation so unhappily interrupted, Mrs. Ocumpaugh? I am not satisfied, and I do not believe you can be, with the partial disclosures I then made. Afford me, I pray, a continuation of that interview, if only to make plain to me your wishes. Otherwise I may fall into some mistake--say or do something which I might regret--for matters can not stand where they are. You know that, do you not, madam?" "Adèle! go! go!" This to Miss Porter. "I must have a few words more with Mr. Trevitt. I had forgotten what I owe him in the frenzy which possessed me." "Do you wish to talk to him _here_?" asked that lady, with very marked anxiety. "No, no; it is too cold, too dark. I think I can walk to Mrs. Carew's. Will you join me there, Mr. Trevitt?" I bowed; but as she passed near me in going out, I whispered in her ear: "I should suggest that we hold our talk anywhere but at Mrs. Carew's house, since she is liable to be the chief subject of our conversation." "Now?" "Now, more than ever. Her share in the child's disappearance was not eliminated or affected in any way by the destruction of her footprints." "I will go back to the house; I will see him in my own room," Mrs. Ocumpaugh suddenly announced to her greatly disturbed companion. "Mr. Trevitt will follow in a few minutes. I must have time to think--to compose myself--to decide--" She was evidently thinking aloud. Anxious to save her from any self-betrayal, I hastily interrupted her, saying quietly: "I will be at your boudoir door in a half-hour from now. I myself have something to think of in the interim." "Be careful!" It was Miss Porter who stopped to utter this word in my ear. "Be very careful, I entreat. Her heart-strings are strained almost to breaking." I answered with a look. She could not be more conscious of this than I was. XX "WHAT DO YOU KNOW?" I was glad of that half-hour. I, too, wanted a free moment in which to think and examine the small scrap of paper I had picked up from this cellar floor. In the casual glance I had given it, it had seemed to offer me a fresh clue, quite capable of replacing the old one; and I did not change my mind on a second examination; the shape, the hue, the few words written on it, even the musty smell pervading it, all going to prove it to be the one possible link which could reunite the chain whose continuity I had believed to be gone for ever. Rejoicing in my good luck, yet conscious of still moving in very troubled waters, I cast a glance in the direction of Mrs. Carew's house, from the door of the bungalow whence I had seen Mrs. Ocumpaugh depart, and asked myself why Mrs. Carew, of all persons in the vicinity, had been the only one to hang back from this scene of excitement. It was not like her to hide herself at such a crisis (how invariably she had followed me in each, and every visit I had paid here!), and though I remembered all her reasons for pre-occupation, her absence under the present conditions bore an aspect of guilt which sent my mind working in a direction which was not entirely new to me, but which I had not as yet resolutely faced. Guilt! The word recalled that other and similar one uttered by Mr. Rathbone in that adventure which had impressed me as so unreal, and still held its place in my mind as something I had dreamed. He was looking up when he said it, up the hill, up toward Mrs. Carew's house. He had struck his own breast, but he had looked up, not down; and though I had naturally associated the word he had used with himself--and Miss Graham, with a womanly intuition, had supplied me with an explanation of the same which was neither far-fetched nor unnatural, yet all through this day of startling vicissitudes and unimaginable interviews, faint doubts, bidden and unbidden, had visited my mind, which at this moment culminated in what I might call the irresistible question as to whether he might not have had in mind some one nearer and dearer than himself when he uttered that accusing word. Her position, as I saw it now, did not make this supposition too monstrous for belief; that is, if she secretly loved this man who did not dare, or was too burdened with responsibility, to woo her. And who can penetrate a woman's mind? To give him--possibly without his knowledge--what every one who knew him declared him to stand in special need of--money and relief from too exacting work--might have seemed motive enough to one of her warm and impulsive temperament, for eliminating the child she cared for, but not as she cared for him. It was hard to think it; it would be harder yet to act upon it; but the longer I stood there brooding, the more I felt my conviction grow that from her and from her alone, we should yet obtain definite traces of the missing child, if only Mrs. Ocumpaugh would uphold me in the attempt. But would Mrs. Ocumpaugh do this? I own that I had my doubts. Some hidden cause or instinct which I had not been able to reach, though I had plunged deep into the most galling secrets of her life, seemed to stand in the way of her full acceptance of the injury I believed her to have received from Mrs. Carew; or rather, in the way of her public acknowledgment of it. Though she would fain have this upturning of the bungalow cellar pass for an act of frenzy, I could not quite bring myself to look upon it as such since taking a final observation of its condition. Though her professed purpose had been to seek the body of her child, the spades had not gone deeper than their length. It had been harrowing, not digging, she had ordered, and harrowing meant nothing more than an obliteration of the footprints which I had menaced her with comparing with those of Mrs. Carew. Why this show of consideration to one she might call friend, but who could hold no comparison in her mind with the safety or recovery of the child which, if not hers, was the beloved object of her husband's heart and only too deeply cherished by herself? Did she fear her charming neighbor? Was the bond between them founded on something besides love, and did she apprehend that a discovery of Mrs. Carew's connection with Gwendolen's disappearance would only precipitate her own disgrace and open up to public recognition the false relationship she held toward the little heiress? Hard questions these, but ones which must soon be faced and answered; for wretched as was Mrs. Ocumpaugh's position and truly as I sympathized with her misery, I was none the less resolved to force such acknowledgments from her as would allow me to approach Mrs. Carew with a definite accusation such as even that daring spirit could not withstand. Thus resolved, and resisting all temptation to hazard an interview with the latter lady before I had seen Mrs. Ocumpaugh again, I made my way up slowly through the grounds and entered by the side door just as my watch told me that the half-hour of my waiting was over. Miss Porter was in the upper hall, but turned aside at my approach with a meaning gesture in the direction of the boudoir. I thought that her eyes looked red; certainly she was trembling very much; and with this poor preparation for an interview before which the strongest and most experienced man might quail, I advanced for the second time that morning to the door behind which the distracted mother awaited me. If I knocked I do not remember it. I rather think she opened the door for me herself upon hearing my step in the hall. At all events we were soon standing again face to face, and the battle of our two wills--for it would be nothing less now--had begun. She was the first to speak. Braving my inquiring look with eyes in whose depths determination struggled with growing despair, she asked me peremptorily, almost wildly: "Have you told any one? Do you mean to publish my shame to the world? I see decision in your face. Does it mean that? Tell me! Does it mean that?" "No, madam; far be it from me to harbor such an intention unless driven to it by the greatest necessity. Your secret is your own; my only reason for betraying my knowledge of it was the hope I cherished of its affording us some clue to the identity of Gwendolen's abductor. It has not done so yet, may never do so; then let us leave that topic and return to the clue offered by the carrying of that child into the long-closed room back of the bungalow. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, intentionally or unintentionally, the proof upon which I relied for settling the identity of the person so carrying her has been destroyed." With a flush which her seemingly bloodless condition made perfectly startling, she drew back, breaking into wild disclaimers: "I know--I fear--I was too wild--too eager. I thought only of what might lie under that floor." "In a half-foot of earth, madam? The spades did not enter any deeper." With a sudden access of courage, born possibly of her despair, she sought neither to attempt denial nor palliate the fact. "And if this was my intention--though I don't acknowledge it--you must recognize my reason. I do not believe--you can not make me believe--that Gwendolen was carried into that room by Mrs. Carew. But I could see that you believed it, and to save her the shame of such an accusation and all that might follow from it, I--oh, Mr. Trevitt, you do not think this possible! Do you know so little of the impulses of a mind, bewildered as mine has been by intolerable suffering?" "I can understand madness, and I am willing to think that you were mad just then--especially as no harm has been done and I can still accuse Mrs. Carew of a visit to that room, with the proof in my hand." "What do you mean?" The steady voice was faltering, but I could not say with what emotion--hope for herself--doubt of me--fear for her friend; it might have been any of these; it might have been all. "Was there a footprint left, then? You say proof. Do you mean proof? A detective does not use that word lightly." "You may be sure that I would not," I returned. Then in answer to the appeal of her whole attitude and expression: "No, there were no footprints left; but I came upon something else which I have sufficient temerity to believe will answer the same purpose. Remember that my object is first to convince you and afterward Mrs. Carew, that it will be useless for her to deny that she has been in that room. Once that is understood, the rest will come easy; for we know the child was there, and it is not a place she could have found alone." "The proof!" She had no strength for more than that "The proof! Mr. Trevitt, the proof!" I put my hand in my pocket, then drew it out again empty, making haste, however, to say: "Mrs. Ocumpaugh, I do not want to distress you, but I must ask you a few questions first. Do you know the secret of that strangely divided room?" "Only in a general way. Mr. Ocumpaugh has never told me." "You have not seen the written account of it?" "No." "Nor given into Mrs. Carew's hand such an account?" "No." Mrs. Carew's duplicity was assuming definite proportions. "Yet there is such an account and I have listened to a reading of it." "You?" "Yes, madam. Mrs. Carew read it to me last night in her own house. She told me it came to her from your hands. You see she is not always particular in her statements." A lift of the hand, whether in deprecation or appeal I could not say, was all the answer this received. I saw that I must speak with the utmost directness. "This account was in the shape of a letter on several sheets of paper. These sheets were very old, and were torn as well as discolored. I had them in my hand and noticed that a piece was lacking from one of them. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, are you ready to repeat that Mrs. Carew did not receive this old letter from you or obtain it in any way you know of from the house we are now in?" "I had rather not be forced to contradict Mrs. Carew," was the low reply; "but in justice to you I must acknowledge that I hear of this letter for the first time. God grant--but what can any old letter have to do with the agonizing question before us? I am not strong, Mr. Trevitt--I am suffering--do not confuse and burden me, I pray--" "Pardon, I am not saying one unnecessary word. These old sheets--a secret from the family--did not come from this house. Whence, then, did they come into Mrs. Carew's possession? I see you have forestalled my answer; and if you will now glance at this end of paper, picked up by me in your presence from the cellar floor across which we both know that her footsteps have passed, you will see that it is a proof capable of convicting her of the fact." I held out the scrap I now took from my pocket. Mrs. Ocumpaugh's hand refused to take it or her eyes to consult it. Nevertheless I still held it out. "Pray read the few words you will find there," I urged. "They are in explanation of the document itself, but they will serve to convince you that the letter to which they were attached, and which is now in Mrs. Carew's hands, came from that decaying room." "No, no!" The gesture which accompanied this exclamation was more than one of refusal, it was that of repulse. "I can not see--I do not need to--I am convinced." "Pardon me, but that is not enough, Mrs. Ocumpaugh. I want you to be certain. Let me read these words. The story they prefaced is unknown to you; let it remain so; all I need to tell you about it is this: that it was written by Mr. Ocumpaugh's father--he who raised this partition and who is the undoubted author of these lines. Remember that they headed the letter: "'_Perish with the room whose ceiling oozes blood! If in time to come any man reads these lines, he will know why I pulled down the encircling wall built by my father, and why I raised a new one across this end of the pavilion._'" Mrs. Ocumpaugh's eyes opened wide in horror. "Blood!" she repeated. "A ceiling oozing blood!" "An old superstition, Mrs. Ocumpaugh, quite unworthy your attention at this moment. Do not let your mind dwell upon that portion of what I have read, but on the word 'room.' 'Perish with the room!' We know what room was meant; there can be but one. I have myself seen the desk from which these sheets were undoubtedly taken--and for them to be in the hand of a certain person argues--" Mrs. Ocumpaugh's hand went up in dissuasion, but I relentlessly finished--"that she has been in that room! Are you more than convinced of this now? Are you sure?" She did not need to make reply; eyes and attitude spoke for her. But it was the look and attitude of despair, not hope. Evidently she had the very greatest reason to fear Mrs. Carew, who possibly had her hard side as well as her charming one. To ease the situation, I spoke what was in both our minds. "I see that you are sure. That makes my duty very plain, Mrs. Ocumpaugh. My next visit must be upon Mrs. Carew." The spirit which, from the beginning of this later interview, had infused fresh strength into her feeble frame, seemed to forsake her at this simple declaration; her whole form drooped, and the eyes, which had rested on mine, turned in their old way to the river. I took advantage of this circumstance. "Some one who knows you well, who knows the child well, dropped the wrong shoe into the river." A murmur, nothing more, from Mrs. Ocumpaugh's set lips. "Could it--I do not say that it was--I don't see any reason why it should be--but could it have been Mrs. Carew?" Not a sound this time, not a sound. "She was down at the dock that night. Did you know it?" A gesture, but whether of assent or dissent I could not tell. "We know of no other person who was there but the men employed." "_What do you know?_" With all her restraint gone--a suffering and despairing woman, Mrs. Ocumpaugh was on her knees, grasping my arm with both hands. "Quit this torture! tell me that you know it all and leave me to--to--die!" "Madam!" I was confounded; and as I looked at her face, strained back in wild appeal, I was more than confounded, I was terrified. "Madam, what does this mean? Are you--you--" "Lock the door!" she cried; "no one must come in here now. I have said so much that I must say more. Listen and be my friend; oh, be my friend! _Those were my footsteps you saw in the bungalow. It was I who carried Gwendolen into that secret hole._" XXI PROVIDENCE Had I suspected this? Had all my efforts for the last half-hour been for the purpose of entrapping her into some such avowal? I do not know. My own feelings at the time are a mystery to me; I blundered on, with a blow here and a blow there, till I hit this woman in a vital spot, and achieved the above mentioned result. I was not happy when I reached it. I felt no elation; scarcely any relief. It all seemed so impossible. She marked the signs of incredulity in my face and spoke up quickly, almost sharply: "You do not believe me. I will prove the truth of what I say. Wait--wait!"--and running to a closet, she pulled out a drawer--where was her weakness now?--and brought from it a pair of soiled white slippers. "If the house had been ransacked," she proceeded pantingly, "these would have told their own tale. I was shocked when I saw their condition, and kept my guests waiting till I changed them. Oh, they will fit the footprints." Her smile was ghastly. Softly she set the shoes down. "Mrs. Carew helped me; she went for the child at night. Oh, we are in a terrible strait, we two, unless you will stand by us like a friend--and you will do that, won't you, Mr. Trevitt? No one else knows what I have just confessed--not even Doctor Pool, though he suspects me in ways I never dreamed of. Money shall not stand in the way--I have a fortune of my own now--nothing shall stand in the way, if you will have pity on Mrs. Carew and myself and help us to preserve our secret." "Madam, what secret? I pray you to make me acquainted with the whole matter in all its details before you ask my assistance." "Then you do not know it?" "Not altogether, and I must know it altogether. First, what has become of the child?" "She is safe and happy. You have seen her; you mentioned doing so just now." "Harry?" "Harry." I rose before her in intense excitement. What a plot! I stood aghast at its daring and the success it had so nearly met with. "I've had moments of suspicion," I admitted, after a short examination of this beautiful woman's face for the marks of strength which her part in this plot seemed to call for. "But they all vanished before Mrs. Carew's seemingly open manner and the perfect boyishness of the child. Is she an actress too--Gwendolen?" "Not when she plays horse and Indian and other boyish games. She is only acting out her nature. She has no girl tastes; she is all boy, and it was by means of these instincts that Mrs. Carew won her. She promised her that if she would leave home and go with her to Europe she would cut her hair and call her Harry, and dress her so that every one would think her a boy. And she promised her something else--that she should go to her father--Gwendolen idolizes Mr. Ocumpaugh." "But--" "I know. You wonder why, if I loved my husband, I should send away the one cherished object of his life. It is because our love was threatened by this very object. I saw nothing but death and chaos before me if I kept her. My husband adores the child, but he hates and despises a falsehood and my secret was threatened by the one man who knows it--your Doctor Pool. My accomplice once, he declared himself ready to become my accuser if the child remained under the Ocumpaugh roof one day after the date he fixed for her removal." "Ah!" I ejaculated, with sudden comprehension of the full meaning of the scrawls I had seen in so many parts of the grounds. "And by what right did he demand this? What excuse did he give you? His wish for money, immense money--old miser that he is!" "No; for money I could have given him. His motive is a less tangible one. He has scruples, he says--religious scruples following a change of heart. Oh, he was a cruel man to meet, determined, inexorable. I could not move or influence him. The proffer of money only hurt my cause. A fraud had been perpetrated, he said, and Mr. Ocumpaugh must know it. Would I confess the truth to him myself? No. Then he would do so for me and bring proofs to substantiate his statements. I thought all was lost--my husband's confidence, his love, his pleasure even in the child, for it was his own blood that he loved in her, and her connection with his family of whose prestige he has an exaggerated idea. Made desperate by the thought, I faced this cruel doctor--(it was in his own office; he had presumed upon that old secret linking us together to summon me there)--and told him solemnly that rather than do this I would kill myself. And he almost bade me, 'Kill!' but refrained when the word had half left his lips and changed it to a demand for the child's immediate removal from the benefits it enjoyed under false pretenses." And from this Mrs. Ocumpaugh went on to relate how he had told her that Gwendolen had inherited fortunes because she was believed to be an Ocumpaugh; that not being an Ocumpaugh she must never handle those fortunes, winding up with some such language as this: "Manage it how you will, only relieve me from the oppression of feeling myself a party to the grossest of deceptions. Can not the child run away and be lost? I am willing to aid you in that, even to paying for her bringing up in some decent, respectable way, such as would probably have been her lot if you had not interfered to place her in the way of millions." It was a mad thought, half meant and apparently wholly impossible to carry out without raising suspicions as damaging as confession itself. But it took an immediate hold upon the miserable woman he addressed, though she gave little evidence of it, for he proceeded to add in a hard tone: "That or immediate confession to your husband, with me by to substantiate your story. No slippery woman's tricks will go down with me. Fix the date here and now and I promise to stand back and await the result in total silence. Dally with it by so much as an hour, and I am at your gates with a story that all must hear." Is it a matter of wonder that the stricken woman, without counsel and prohibited, from the very nature of her secret, from seeking counsel, uttered the first one that came to mind and went home to brood over her position and plan how she could satisfy his demands with the least cost to herself, her husband and the child? Mr. Ocumpaugh was in Europe. This was her one point of comfort. What was done could be done in his absence, and this fact greatly minimized any risk she was likely to incur. When he returned he would find the house in mourning, for she had already decided within herself that only by apparent death could this child be safely robbed of her endowments as an Ocumpaugh and an heiress. He would grieve, but his grief would lack the sting of shame, and so in course of time would soften into a lovely memory of one who had been as the living sunshine to him and, like the sunshine, brief in its shining. Thus and thus only could she show her consideration for him. For herself no consideration was possible. It must always be her fate to know the child alive yet absolutely removed from her. This was a sorrow capable of no alleviation, for Gwendolen was passionately dear to her, all the dearer, perhaps, because the mother-thirst had never been satisfied; because she had held the cup in hand but had never been allowed to drink. The child's future--how to rob her of all she possessed, yet secure her happiness and the prospect of an honorable estate--ah, there was the difficulty! and one she quite failed to solve till, in a paroxysm of terror and despair, after five sleepless nights, she took Mrs. Carew into her confidence and implored her aid. The free, resourceful, cheery nature of the broader-minded woman saw through the difficulty at once. "Give her to me," she cried. "I love little children passionately and have always grieved over my childless condition. I will take Gwendolen, raise her and fill her little heart so full of love she will never miss the magnificence she has been brought to look upon as her birthright. Only I shall have to leave this vicinity--perhaps the country." "And you would be willing?" asked the poor mother--mother by right of many years of service, if not of blood. The answer broke her heart though it was only a smile. But such a smile--confident, joyous, triumphant; the smile of a woman who has got her heart's wish, while she, she, must henceforth live childless. So that was settled, but not the necessary ways and means of accomplishment; those came only with time. The two women had always been friends, so their frequent meetings in the green boudoir did not waken a suspicion. A sudden trip to Europe was decided on by Mrs. Carew and by degrees the whole plot perfected. In her eyes it looked feasible enough and they both anticipated complete success. Having decided that the scheme as planned by them could be best carried out in the confusion of a great entertainment, cards were sent out for the sixteenth, the date agreed upon in the doctor's office as the one which should see a complete change in Gwendolen's prospects. It was also settled that on the same day Mrs. Carew should bring home, from a certain small village in Connecticut, her little nephew who had lately been left an orphan. There was no deception about this nephew. Mrs. Carew had for some time supplied his needs and paid for his board in the farm-house where he had been left, and in the emergency which had just come up, she took care to publish to all her friends that she was going to bring him home and take him with her to Europe. Further, a market-man and woman with whom Mrs. Carew had had dealings for years were persuaded to call at her house shortly after three that afternoon, to take this nephew of hers by a circuitous and prolonged ride through the country to an institution in which she had had him entered under an assumed name. All this in one day. Meanwhile Mrs. Carew undertook to open with her own hands a passage from the cellar of the bungalow into the long closed room behind the partition. This was to insure such a safe retreat for the child during the first search, that by no possibility could anything be found to contradict the testimony of the little shoe which Mrs. Ocumpaugh purposed presenting to all eyes as found on the slope leading to that great burial-place, the river. Otherwise the child might have been passed over to Mrs. Carew at once. All this being decided upon, each waited to perform the part assigned her--Mrs. Carew in a fever of delight--for she was passionately devoted to Gwendolen and experienced nothing but rapture at the prospect of having this charming child all to herself--Mrs. Ocumpaugh, whose only recompense would be freedom from a threatening exposure which would cost her the only thing she prized, her husband's love, in a condition of cold dread, relieved only by the burning sense of the necessity of impressing upon the whole world, and especially upon Mr. Ocumpaugh, an absolute belief in the child's death. This was her first care. To this her mind clung with an agony of purpose which was the fittest preparation possible for real display of feeling when the time came. But she forgot one thing--they both forgot one thing--that chance or Providence might ordain that witnesses should be on the road below Homewood to prove that the child did not cross the track at the time of her disappearance. To them it seemed enough to plead the child's love for the water, her desire to be allowed to fish, the opportunity given her to escape, and--the little shoes. Such short-sightedness in face of a great peril could be pardoned Mrs. Ocumpaugh on the verge of delirium under her cold exterior, but Mrs. Carew should have taken this possibility into account; and would have done so, probably, had she not been completely absorbed in the part she would be called upon to play when the exchange of children should be made and Gwendolen be intrusted to her charge within a dozen rods of her own home. This she could dwell on with the whole force of her mind; this she could view in all its relations and make such a study of as to provide herself against all contingencies. But the obvious danger of a gang of men being placed just where they could serve as witnesses, in contradiction of the one fact upon which the whole plot was based, never even struck her imagination. The nursery-governess whose heart was divided between her duty to the child and her strong love of music, was chosen as their unconscious accomplice in this fraud. As the time for the great musicale approached, she was bidden to amuse Gwendolen in the bungalow, with the understanding that if the child fell asleep she might lay her on the divan, and so far leave her as to take her place on the bench outside where the notes of the solo singers could reach her. That Gwendolen would fall asleep and fall asleep soon, the wretched mother well knew, for she had given her a safe but potent sleeping draft which could not fail to insure a twelve hours' undisturbed slumber to so healthy a child. The fact that the little one had shrunk more than ever from her attentions that morning both hurt and encouraged her. Certainly it would make it easier for Mrs. Carew to influence Gwendolen. In her own mind filled with terrible images of her husband's grief and her long prospective dissimulation, one picture rose in brilliant contrast to the dark one embodying her own miserable future and that of the soon-to-be bereaved father. It was that of the perfect joy of the hungry-hearted child in the arms of the woman she loved best. It brought her cheer--it brought her anguish. It was a salve to her conscience and a mortal thrust in an already festering wound. She shut it from her eyes as much as possible,--and so, the hour came. We know its results--how far the scheme succeeded and whence its great failure arose. Gwendolen fell asleep almost immediately on reaching the bungalow and Miss Graham, dreaming no harm and having the most perfect confidence in Mrs. Ocumpaugh, took advantage of the permission she had received, and slipped outside to sit on the bench and listen to the music. Presently Mrs. Ocumpaugh appeared, saying that she had left her guests for a moment just to take a look at Gwendolen and see if all were well with her. As she needed no attendance, Miss Graham might stay where she was. And Miss Graham did, taking great pleasure in the music, which was the finest she had ever heard. Meanwhile Mrs. Ocumpaugh entered the bungalow, and, untying the child's shoes as she had frequently done before when she found her asleep, she lifted her and carried her just as she was down the trap, the door of which she had previously raised. The darkness lurking in such places, a darkness which had rendered it so impenetrable at midnight, was relieved to some extent in daylight by means of little grated openings in the wall under the beams, so that her chief difficulty lay in holding up her long dress and sustaining the heavy child at the same time. But the exigency of the moment and her apprehension lest Miss Graham should reënter the bungalow before she could finish her task and escape, gave great precision to her movements, and in an incredibly short space of time she had reached those musty precincts which, if they should not prove the death of the child, would safely shelter her from every one's eye, till the first excitement of her loss was over, and the conviction of her death by drowning became a settled fact in every mind. Mrs. Ocumpaugh's return was a flight. She had brought one of the little shoes with her, concealed in a pocket she had made especially for it in the trimmings of her elaborate gown. She found the bungalow empty, the trap still raised, and Miss Graham, toward whom she cast a hurried look through the window, yet in her place, listening with enthralled attention to the great tenor upon whose magnificent singing Mrs. Ocumpaugh had relied for the successful carrying out of what she and Mrs. Carew considered the most critical part of the plot. So far then, all was well. She had but to drop the trap-door carefully to its place, replace the corner of the carpet she had pulled up, push down with her foot the two or three nails she had previously loosened, and she would be quite at liberty to quit the place and return to her guests. But she found that this was not as easy as she had imagined. The clogs of a terrible, almost a criminal, consciousness held back her steps. She stumbled as she left the bungalow and stopped to catch her breath as if the oppression of the room in which she had immured her darling had infected the sunny air of this glorious day and made free breathing an impossibility. The weights on her feet were so palpable to her that she unconsciously looked down at them. This was how she came to notice the dust on her shoes. Alive to the story it told, she burst the spell which held her and made a bound toward the house. Rushing to her room she shook her skirts and changed her shoes, and thus freed from all connecting links with that secret spot, reëntered among her guests, as beautiful and probably as wretched a woman as the world contained that day. Yet not as wretched as she could be. There were depths beneath these depths. If he should ever know! If he should ever come to look at her with horrified, even alienated eyes! Ah, that were the end--that would mean the river for her--the river which all were so soon to think had swallowed the little Gwendolen. Was that Miss Graham coming? Was the stir she now heard outside, the first indication of the hue and cry which would soon ring through the whole place and her shrinking heart as well? No, no, not yet. She could still smile, must smile and smite her two glove-covered hands together in simulated applause of notes and tones she did not even hear. And no one noted anything strange in that smile or in that gracious bringing together of hands, which if any one had had the impulse to touch-- But no one thought of doing that. A heart may bleed drop by drop to its death in our full sight without our suspecting it, if the eyes above it still beam with natural brightness. And hers did that. She had always been called impassive. God be thanked that no warmth was expected from her and that no one would suspect the death she was dying, if she did not cry out. But the moment came when she did cry out. Miss Graham entered, told her story, and all Mrs. Ocumpaugh's pent-up agony burst its bounds in a scream which to others seemed but the natural outburst of an alarmed mother. She fled to the bungalow, because that seemed the natural thing to do, and never forgetting what was expected of her, cried aloud in presence of its emptiness: "The river! the river!" and went stumbling down the bank. The shoe was near her hand and she drew it out as she went on. When they found her she had fainted; the excess of excitement has this natural outcome. She did not have to play a part, the humiliation of her own deed and the terrors yet to come were eating up her very soul. Then came the blow, the unexpected, overwhelming blow of finding that the deception planned with such care--a deception upon the success of which the whole safety of the scheme depended--was likely to fail just for the simple reason that a dozen men could swear that the child had never crossed the track. She was dazed--confounded. Mrs. Carew was not by to counsel her; she had her own part in this business to play; and Mrs. Ocumpaugh, conscious of being mentally unfit for any new planning, conscious indeed of not being able to think at all, simply followed her instinct and held to the old cry in face of proof, of persuasion, of reason even; and so, did the very wisest thing possible, no one expecting reason in a mother reeling under such a vital shock. But the cooler, more subtile and less guilty Mrs. Carew had some judgment left, if her friend had lost hers. Her own part had been well played. She had brought her nephew home without giving any one, not even the maid she had provided herself with in New York, an opportunity to see his face; and she had passed him over, dressed in quite different clothes, to the couple in the farm-wagon, who had carried him, as she supposed, safely out of reach and any possibility of discovery. You see her calculations failed here also. She did not credit the doctor with even the little conscience he possessed, and, unconscious of his near waiting on the highway in anxious watch for the event concerning which he had his own secret doubts, she deluded herself into thinking that all they had to fear was a continuation of the impression that Gwendolen had not gone down to the river and been drowned. When, therefore, she had acted out her little part--received the searching party and gone with them all over the house even to the door of the room where she said her little nephew was resting after his journey--(Did they look in? Perhaps, and perhaps not, it mattered little, for the bed had been arranged against this contingency and no one but a detective bent upon ferreting out crime would have found it empty)--she asked herself how she could strengthen the situation and cause the theory advanced by Mrs. Ocumpaugh to be received, notwithstanding the evidence of seeming eye-witnesses. The result was the throwing of a second shoe into the water as soon as it was dark enough for her to do this unseen. As she had to approach the river by her own grounds, and as she was obliged to choose a place sufficiently remote from the lights about the dock not to incur the risk of being detected in her hazardous attempt, the shoe fell at a spot farther down stream than the searchers had yet reached, and the intense excitement I had myself seen in Mrs. Ocumpaugh's face the day I made my first visit to Homewood, sprang from the agony of suspense with which she watched, after twenty-four hours of alternating expectation and disappointment, the finding of this second shoe which, with fanatic confidence, she hoped would bring all the confirmation to be desired of her oft-repeated declaration that the child would yet be found in the river. Meanwhile, to the infinite dismay of both, the matter had been placed in the hands of the police and word sent to Mr. Ocumpaugh, not that the child was dead, but missing. This meant world-wide publicity and the constant coming and going about Homewood of the very men whose insight and surveillance were most to be dreaded. Mrs. Ocumpaugh sank under the terrors thus accumulating upon her; but Mrs. Carew, of different temperament and history, rose to meet them with a courage which bade fair to carry everything before it. As midnight approached (the hour agreed upon in their compact) she prepared to go for Gwendolen. Mrs. Ocumpaugh, who had not forgotten what was expected of her at that hour, roused as the clock struck twelve, and uttering a loud cry, rushed from her place in the window down to the lawn, calling out that she had heard the men shout aloud from the boats. Her plan was to draw every one who chanced to be about, down to the river bank, in order to give Mrs. Carew full opportunity to go and come unseen on her dangerous errand. And she apparently succeeded in this, for by the time she had crept back in seeming disappointment to the house, a light could be seen burning behind a pink shade in one of Mrs. Carew's upper windows--the signal agreed upon between them of the presence of Gwendolen in her new home. But small was the relief as yet. The shoe had not been found, and at any moment some intruder might force his way into Mrs. Carew's house and, in spite of all her precautions, succeed in obtaining a view of the little Harry and recognize in him the missing child. Of these same precautions some mention must be made. The artful widow had begun by dismissing all her help, giving as an excuse her speedy departure for Europe, and the colored girl she had brought up from New York saw no difference in the child running about the house in its little velvet suit from the one who, with bound-up face and a heavy shade over his eyes, came up in the cars with her in Mrs. Carew's lap. Her duties being limited to a far-off watch on the child to see that it came to no harm, she was the best witness possible in case of police intrusion or neighborhood gossip. As for Gwendolen herself, the novelty of the experience and the prospect held out by a speedy departure to "papa's country" kept her amused and even hilarious. She laughed when her hair was cut short, darkened and parted. She missed but one thing, and that was her pet plaything which she used to carry to bed with her at night. The lack of this caused some tears--a grief which was divined by Mrs. Ocumpaugh, who took pains to assuage it in the manner we all know. But this was after the finding of the second shoe; the event so long anticipated and so little productive. Somehow, neither Mrs. Carew nor Mrs. Ocumpaugh had taken into consideration the fact of the child's shoes being rights and lefts, and when this attempt to second the first deception was decided on, it was thought a matter of congratulation that Gwendolen had been supplied with two pairs of the same make and that one pair yet remained in her closet. The mate of that shown by Mrs. Ocumpaugh was still on the child's foot in the bungalow, but there being no difference in any of them, what was simpler than to take one of these and fling it where it would be found. Alas! the one seized upon by Mrs. Carew was for the same foot as that already shown and commented on, and thus this second attempt failed even more completely than the first, and people began to cry, "A conspiracy!" And a conspiracy it was, but one which might yet have succeeded if Doctor Pool's suspicion of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's intentions, and my own secret knowledge of Mrs. Ocumpaugh's real position toward this child, could have been eliminated from the situation. But with those two factors against them, detection had crept upon them in unknown ways, and neither Mrs. Ocumpaugh's frantic clinging to the theory she had so recklessly advanced, nor Mrs. Carew's determined effort to meet suspicion with the brave front calculated to disarm it, was of any avail. The truth would have its way and their secret stood revealed. This was the story told me by Mrs. Ocumpaugh; not in the continuous and detailed manner I have here set down, but in disjointed sentences and wild bursts of disordered speech. When it was finished she turned upon me eyes full of haggard inquiry. "Our fate is in your hands," she falteringly declared. "What will you do with it?" It was the hardest question which had ever been put me. For minutes I contemplated her in a silence which must have been one prolonged agony to her. I did not see my way; I did not see my duty. Then the fifty thousand dollars! At last, I replied as follows: "Mrs. Ocumpaugh, if you will let me advise you, as a man intensely interested in the happiness of yourself and husband, I would suggest your meeting him at quarantine and telling him the whole truth." "I would rather die," said she. "Yet only by doing what I suggest can you find any peace in life. The consciousness that others know your secret will come between you and any satisfaction you can ever get out of your husband's continued confidence. A wrong has been done; you are the only one to right it." "I can not. I can die, but I can not do that." And for a minute I thought she would die then and there. "Doctor Pool is a fanatic; he will pursue you until he is assured that the child is in good hands." "You can assure him of that now." "Next month his exactions may take another direction. You can never trust a man who thinks he has a mission. Pardon my presumption. No mercenary motive prompts what I am saying now." "So you intend to publish my story, if I do not?" I hesitated again. Such questions can not be decided in a moment. Then, with a certain consciousness of doing right, I answered earnestly: "To no one but to Mr. Ocumpaugh do I feel called upon to disclose what really concerns no one but yourself and him." Her hands rose toward me in a gesture which may have been an expression of gratitude or only one of simple appeal. "He is not due until Saturday," I added gently. No answer from the cold lips. I do not think she could have spoken if she had tried. XXII ON THE SECOND TERRACE My first step on leaving Homewood was to seek a public telephone. Calling up Doctor Pool in Yonkers, I assured him that he might rest easy as to the young patient to whose doubtful condition he had called my attention. That she was in good hands and was doing well. That I had seen her and would give him all necessary particulars when I came to interview him later in the day. To his uneasy questions I vouchsafed little reply. I was by no means sure of the advisability of taking him into my full confidence. It was enough for him to know that his demands had been complied with without injury to the child. Before hanging up the receiver, I put him a question on my own behalf. How was the boy in his charge? The growl he returned me was very non-committal, and afforded me some food for thought as I turned back to Mrs. Carew's cottage, where I now proposed to make a final visit. I entered from the road. The heavily wooded grounds looked desolate. The copper beeches which are the glory of the place seemed to have lost color since I last saw them above the intervening hedges. Even the house, as it gradually emerged to view through the close shrubbery, wore a different aspect from usual. In another moment I saw why. Every shutter was closed and not a vestige of life was visible above or below. Startled, for I had not expected quite so hasty a departure on her part, I ran about to the side door where I had previously entered and rang fit to wake the dead. Only solitary echoes came from within and I was about to curse the time I had lost in telephoning to Doctor Pool, when I heard a slight sound in the direction of the private path, and, leaping hastily to the opening, caught the glimpse of something or somebody disappearing down the first flight of steps. Did I run? You may believe I did, at least till I had descended the first terrace; then my steps grew gradually wary and finally ceased; for I could hear voices ahead of me on the second terrace to which I had now come, and these voices came from persons standing still. If I rushed on I should encounter these persons, and this was undesirable. I accordingly paused just short of the top, and so heard what raised the moment into one of tragic importance. One of the speakers was Mrs. Carew--there was no doubting this--the other was Mr. Rathbone. From no other lips than his could I hope to hear words uttered with such intensity, though he was guarded in his speech, or thought he was, which is not always the same thing. He was pleading with her, and my heart stood still with the sense of threatening catastrophe as I realized the attitude of the pair. He, as every word showed, was still ignorant of Gwendolen's fate, consequently of the identity of the child who I had every reason to believe was at that very moment fluttering a few steps below in the care of the colored maid, whose voice I could faintly hear; she, with his passion to meet and quell, had this secret to maintain; hearing his wild entreaties with one ear and listening for the possible outbursts of the not-to-be-restrained child with the other; mad to go--to catch her train before discovery overwhelmed her, yet not daring to hasten him, for his mood was a man's mood and not to be denied. I felt sorry for her, and cast about in my mind what aid to give the situation, when the passion of his words seized me, and I forgot her position in the interest I began to feel in his. "Valerie, Valerie," he was saying, "this is cruelty. You go with no good cause that I can see--put the sea between us, and yet say no word to make the parting endurable. You understand what I suffer--my hateful thoughts, my dread, which is not so much dread as--Oh, that I should say it! Oh, that I should feel it!--hope; guilty, unpardonable hope. Yet you refuse me the little word, the kindly look, which would alleviate the oppression of my feelings and give me the thought of you to counteract this eternal brooding upon Gwendolen and her possible fate. I want a promise--conditional, O God! but yet a promise; and you simply bid me to have patience; to wait--as if a man could wait who sees his love, his life, his future trembling in the balance against the fate of a little child. If you loved me--" "Hush!" The feeling in that word was not for him. I felt it at once; it was for her secret, threatened every instant she lingered there by some move, by some word which might escape a thoughtless child. "You do not understand me, Justin. You talk with no comprehension of myself or of the event. Six months from now, if all goes well, you will see that I have been kind, not cruel. I can not say any more; I should not have said so much. Go back, dear friend, and let me take the train with Harry. The sea is not impassable. We shall meet again, and then--" Did she pause to look behind her down those steps--to make some gesture of caution to the uneasy child? "you will forgive me for what seems cruelty to you now. I can not do differently. With all the world weeping over the doubtful fate of this little child, you can not expect me to--to make any promise conditional upon her _death_." The man's cry drove the irony of the situation out of my mind. "Puerilities! all puerilities. A man's life--soul--are worth some sacrifices. If you loved me--" A quick ingathering of his breath, then a low moan, then the irrepressible cry she vainly sought to hush, "O Valerie, you are silent! You do not love me! Two years of suffering! two years of repression, then this delirium of hope, of possibility, and you _silent_! I will trouble you no more. Gwendolen alive or Gwendolen dead, what is it to me! I--" [Illustration: "HUSH! THERE IS NO DOUBT ON THAT TOPIC; THE CHILD IS DEAD. LET THAT BE UNDERSTOOD BETWEEN US."] "Hush! there is no doubt on that topic; the child is _dead_. Let that be understood between us." This was whispered, and whispered very low, but the air seemed breathless at that moment and I heard her. "This is my last word to you. You will have your fortune, whether you have my love or not. Remember that, and--" "Auntie, make Dinah move away; I want to see the man you are talking to." Gwendolen had spoken. XXIII A CORAL BEAD "What's that?" It was Mr. Rathbone who first found voice. "To what a state have I come when in every woman's face, even in hers who is dearest, I see expressions I no longer understand, and in every child's voice catch the sound of Gwendolen's?" "Harry's voice is not like Gwendolen's," came in desperate protest from the ready widow. A daring assertion for her to make to him who had often held this child in his arms for hours together. "You are not yourself, Justin. I am sorry. I--I--" Almost she gave her promise, almost she risked her future, possibly his, by saying, under the stress of her fears, what her heart did not prompt her to, when-- A quick move on her part, a low cry on his, and he came rushing up the steps. I had advanced at her hesitating words and shown myself. When Mr. Rathbone was well up the terrace (he hardly honored me with a look as he went by), I slowly began my descent to where she stood with her back toward me and her arms thrown round the child she had evidently called to her in her anxiety to conceal the little beaming face from this new intruder. That she had not looked as high as my face I felt assured; that she would not show me hers unless I forced her to seemed equally certain. Every step I took downward was consequently of moment to me. I wondered how I should come out of this; what she would do; what I myself should say. The bold course commended itself to me. No more circumlocution; no more doubtful playing of the game with this woman. I would take the bull by the horns and-- I had reached the step on which she crouched. I could catch sight of the child's eyes over her shoulder, a shoulder that quivered--was it with the storm of the last interview, or with her fear of this? I would see. Pausing, I said to her with every appearance of respect, but in my most matter-of-fact tones: "Mrs. Carew, may I request you to send Gwendolen down to the girl I see below there? I have something to say to you before you leave." _Gwendolen!_ With a start which showed how completely she was taken by surprise, Mrs. Carew rose. She may have recognized my voice and she may not; it is hard to decide in such an actress. Whether she did or not, she turned with a frown, which gave way to a ravishing smile as her eyes met my face. "You?" she said, and without any betrayal in voice or gesture that she recognized that her hopes, and those of the friend to whose safety she had already sacrificed so much, had just received their death-blow, she gave a quick order to the girl who, taking the child by the hand, sat down on the steps Mrs. Carew now quitted and laid herself out to be amusing. Gravely Mrs. Carew confronted me on the terrace below. "Explain," said she. "I have just come from Mrs. Ocumpaugh," I replied. The veiled head dropped a trifle. "She could not sustain herself! So all is lost?" "That depends. But I must request you not to leave the country till Mr. Ocumpaugh returns." The flash of her eye startled me. "Who can detain me," she cried, "if I wish to go?" I did not answer in kind. I had no wish to rouse this woman's opposition. "I do not think you will want to go when you remember Mrs. Ocumpaugh's condition. Would you leave her to bear the full burden of this deception alone? She is a broken woman. Her full story is known to me. I have the profoundest sympathy for her. She has only three days in which to decide upon her course. I have advised her to tell the whole truth to her husband." "You!" The word was but a breath, but I heard it. Yet I felt no resentment against this woman. No one could, under the spell of so much spirit and grace. "Did I not advise her right?" "Perhaps, but you must not detain _me_. You must do nothing to separate me from this child. I will not bear it. I have experienced for days now what motherhood might be, and nothing on earth shall rob me of my present rights in this child." Then as she met my unmoved countenance: "If you know Mrs. Ocumpaugh's whole history, you know that neither she nor her husband has any real claim on the child." "In that you are mistaken," I quickly protested. "Six years of care and affection such as they have bestowed on Gwendolen, to say nothing of the substantial form which these have taken from the first, constitute a claim which all the world must recognize, if you do not. Think of Mr. Ocumpaugh's belief in her relation to him! Think of the shock which awaits him, when he learns that she is not of his blood and lineage!" "I know, I know." Her fingers worked nervously; the woman was showing through the actress. "But I will not give up the child. Ask anything but that." "Madam, I have had the honor so far to make but one requirement--that you do not carry the child out of the country--yet." As I uttered this ultimatum, some influence, acting equally upon both, caused us to turn in the direction of the river; possibly an apprehension lest some word of this conversation might be overheard by the child or the nurse. A surprise awaited us which effectually prevented Mrs. Carew's reply. In the corner of the Ocumpaugh grounds stood a man staring with all his eyes at the so-called little Harry. An expression of doubt was on his face. I knew the minute to be critical and was determined to make the most of it. "Do you know that man?" I whispered to Mrs. Carew. The answer was brief but suggestive of alarm. "Yes, one of the gardeners over there--one of whom Gwendolen is especially fond." "She's the one to fear, then. Engage his attention while I divert hers." All this in a whisper while the man was summoning up courage to speak. "A pretty child," he stammered, as Mrs. Carew advanced toward him smiling. "Is that your little nephew I've heard them tell about? Seems to me he looks like our own little lost one; only darker and sturdier." "Much sturdier," I heard her say as I made haste to accost the child. "Harry," I cried, recalling my old address when I was in training for a gentleman; "your aunt is in a hurry. The cars are coming; don't you hear the whistle? Will you trust yourself to me? Let me carry you--I mean pick-a-back, while we run for the train." The sweet eyes looked up--it was fortunate for Mrs. Carew that no one but myself had ever got near enough to see those eyes or she could hardly have kept her secret--and at first slowly, then with instinctive trust, the little arms rose and I caught her to my breast, taking care as I did so to turn her quite away from the man whom Mrs. Carew was about leaving. "Come!" I shouted back, "we shall be late!"--and made a dash for the gate. Mrs. Carew joined me, and none of us said anything till we reached the station platform. Then as I set the child down, I gave her one look. She was beaming with gratitude. "That saved us, together with the few words I could edge in between his loud regrets at my going and his exclamations of grief over Gwendolen's loss. On the train I shall fear nothing. If you will lift him up I will wrap him in this shawl as if he were ill. Once in New York--are you not going to permit me?" "To go to New York, yes; but not to the steamer." She showed anger, but also an admirable self-control. Far off we could catch the sounding thrill of the approaching train. "I yield," she announced suddenly. And opening the bag at her side, she fumbled in it for a card which she presently put in my hand. "I was going there for lunch," she explained. "Now I will take a room and remain until I hear from you." Here she gave me a quick look. "You do not appear satisfied." "Yes, yes," I stammered, as I looked at the card and saw her name over that of an inconspicuous hotel in the down-town portion of New York City. "I merely--" The nearing of the train gave me the opportunity of cutting short the sentence I should have found it difficult to finish. "Here is the child," I exclaimed, lifting the little one, whom she immediately enveloped in the light but ample wrap she had chosen as a disguise. "Good-by--Harry." "Good-by! I like you. Your arms are strong and you don't shake me when you run." Mrs. Carew smiled. There was deep emotion in her face. "_Au revoir!_" she murmured in a tone implying promise. Happily I understood the French phrase. I bowed and drew back. Was I wrong in letting her slip from my surveillance? The agitation I probably showed must have caused her some thought. But she would have been more than a diviner of mysteries to have understood its cause. Her bag, when she had opened it before my eyes, had revealed among its contents a string of remarkable corals. A bead similar in shape, color and marking rested at that very moment over my own heart. Was that necklace one bead short? With a start of conviction I began to believe so and that I was the man who could complete it. If that was so--why, then--then-- It isn't often that a detective's brain reels--but mine did then. The train began to move-- This discovery, the greatest of all, if I were right, would-- I had no more time to think. Instinctively, with a quick jump, I made my place good on the rear car. XXIV "SHALL I GIVE HIM MY WORD, HARRY?" I did not go all the way to New York on the train which Mrs. Carew and the child had taken. I went only as far as Yonkers. When I reached Doctor Pool's house, I thought it entirely empty. Even the office seemed closed. But appearances here could not always be trusted, and I rang the bell with a vigor which must have awakened echoes in the uninhabited upper stories. I know that it brought the doctor to the door, and in a state of doubtful amiability. But when he saw who awaited him, his appearance changed and he welcomed me in with a smile or what was as nearly like one as his austere nature would permit. "How now! Want your money? Seems to me you have earned it with unexpected ease." "Not such great ease," I replied, as he carefully closed the door and locked it. "I know that I feel as tired as I ever did in my life. The child is in New York under the guardianship of a woman who is really fond of her. You can dismiss all care concerning her." "I see--and who is the woman? Name her." "You do not trust me, I see." "I trust no one in business matters." "This is not a business matter--yet." "What do you mean?" "I have not asked for money. I am not going to till I can perfectly satisfy you that all deception is at an end so far as Mr. Ocumpaugh at least is concerned." "Oh, you would play fair, I see." I was too interested in noting how each of his hands involuntarily closed on itself, in his relief at not being called upon to part with some of his hoardings, to answer with aught but a nod. "You have your reasons for keeping close, of course," he growled as he led the way toward the basement stairs. "You're not out of the woods, is that it? Or has the great lady bargained with you?--Um? Um?" He threw the latter ejaculations back over his shoulder as he descended to the office. They displeased me, and I made no attempt to reply. In fact, I had no reply ready. Had I bargained with Mrs. Ocumpaugh? Hardly. Yet-- "She is handsome enough," the old man broke in sharply, cutting in two my self-communings. "You're a fellow of some stamina, if you have got at her secret without making her a promise. So the child is well! That's good! There's one long black mark eliminated from my account. But I have not closed the book, and I am not going to, till my conscience has nothing more to regret. It is not enough that the child is handed over to a different life; the fortunes that have been bequeathed her must be given to him who would have inherited them had this child not been taken for a veritable Ocumpaugh." "That raises a nice point," I said. "But one that will drag all false things to light." "Your action in the matter along with the rest," I suggested. "True! but do you think I shall stop because of that?" He did not look as if he would stop because of anything. "Do you not think Mrs. Ocumpaugh worthy some pity? Her future is a ghastly one, whichever way you look at it." "She sinned," was his uncompromising reply. "The wages of sin is death." "But such death!" I protested; "death of the heart, which is the worst death of all." He shrugged his shoulders, leading the way into the office. "Let her beware!" he went on surlily. "Last month I saw my duty no further than the exaction of this child's dismissal from the home whose benefits she enjoyed under a false name. To-day I am led further by the inexorable guide which prompts the anxious soul. All that was wrong must be made good. Mr. Ocumpaugh must know on whom his affections have been lavished. I will not yield. The woman has done wrong; and she shall suffer for it till she rises, a redeemed soul, into a state of mind that prefers humiliation to a continuance in a life of deception. You may tell her what I say--that is, if you enjoy the right of conversation with her." The look he shot me at this was keen as hate and spite could make it. I was glad that we were by this time in the office, and that I could avoid his eye by a quick look about the well-remembered place. This proof of the vindictive pursuit he had marked out for himself was no surprise to me. I expected no less, yet it opened up difficulties which made my way, as well as hers, look dreary in the prospect. He perceived my despondency and smiled; then suddenly changed his tone. "You do not ask after the little patient I have here. Come, Harry, come; here is some one I will let you see." The door of my old room swung open and I do not know which surprised me most, the kindness in the rugged old voice I had never before heard lifted in tenderness, or the look of confidence and joy on the face of the little boy who now came running in. So inexorable to a remorseful and suffering woman, and so full of consideration for a stranger's child! "Almost well," pronounced the doctor, and lifted him on his knee. "Do you know this child's parentage and condition?" he sharply inquired, with a quick look toward me. I saw no reason for not telling the truth. "He is an orphan, and was destined for an institution." "You know this?" "Positively." "Then I shall keep the child. Harry, will you stay with me?" To my amazement, the little arms crept round his neck. A smile grim enough, in my estimation, but not at all frightful to the child, responded to this appeal. "I did not like the old man and woman," he said. Doctor Pool's whole manner showed triumph. "I shall treat him better than I did you," he remarked. "I am a regenerate man now." I bowed; I was very uneasy; there was a question I wanted to ask and could not in the presence of this child. "He is hardly of an age to take my place," I observed, still under the spell of my surprise, for the child was handling the old man's long beard, and seeming almost as happy as Gwendolen did in Mrs. Carew's arms. "He will have one of his own," was the doctor's unexpected reply. I rose. I saw that he did not intend to dismiss the child. "I should like your word, in return for the relief I have undoubtedly brought you, that you will not molest certain parties till the three days are up which I have mentioned as the limit of my own silence." "Shall I give him my word, Harry?" The child, startled by the abrupt address, drew his fingers from the long beard he was playfully stroking and, eyeing me with elfish gravity, seemed to ponder the question as if some comprehension of its importance had found entrance into his small brain. Annoyed at the doctor's whim, yet trusting to the child's intuition, I waited with inner anxiety for what those small lips would say, and felt an infinite relief, even if I did not show it, when he finally uttered a faint "Yes," and hid his face again on the doctor's breast. My last remembrance of them both was the picture they made as the doctor closed the door upon me, with the sweet, confiding child still clasped in his arms. XXV THE WORK OF AN INSTANT I did not take the car at the corner. I was sure that Jupp was somewhere around, and I had a new mission for him of more importance than any he could find here now. I was just looking about for him when I heard cries and screams at my back, and, turning, saw several persons all running one way. As that way was the one by which I had just come, I commenced running too, and in another moment was one of a crowd collected before the doctor's door. I mean the great front door which, to my astonishment, I had already seen was wide open. The sight which there met my eyes almost paralyzed me. Stretched on the pavement, spotted with blood, lay the two figures I had seen within the last five minutes beaming with life and energy. The old man was dead, the child dying, one little hand outstretched as if in search of the sympathetic touch which had made the last few hours perhaps the sweetest of his life. How had it happened? Was it suicide on the doctor's part or just pure accident? Either way it was horrible, but--I looked about me; there was a man ready to give explanations. He had seen it all. The doctor had been racing with the child in the long hall. He had opened the door, probably for air. A sudden dash of the child had brought him to the verge, the doctor had plunged to save him, and losing his balance toppled headlong to the street, carrying the child with him. It was all the work of an instant. One moment two vigorous figures--the next, a mass of crushed humanity! A sight to stagger a man's soul! But the thought which came with it staggered me still more. The force which had been driving Mrs. Ocumpaugh to her fate was removed. Henceforth her secret was safe if--if I chose to have it so. XXVI "HE WILL NEVER FORGIVE" I was walking away when a man touched me. Some one had seen me come from the doctor's office a few minutes before. Of course this meant detention till the coroner should arrive. I quarreled with the circumstances but felt forced to submit. Happily Jupp now came to the front and I was able to send him to New York to keep that watch over Mrs. Carew, without which I could not have rested quiet an hour. One great element of danger was removed most remarkably, if not providentially, from the path I had marked out for myself; but there still remained that of this woman's possible impulses under her great determination to keep Gwendolen in her own care. But with Jupp to watch the dock, and a man in plain clothes at the door of the small hotel she was at present bound for, I thought I might remain in Yonkers contentedly the whole day. It was not, however, till late the next afternoon that I found myself again in Homewood. I had heard from Jupp. The steamer had sailed, but without two passengers who had been booked for the voyage. Mrs. Carew and the child were still at the address she had given me. All looked well in that direction; but what was the aspect of affairs in Homewood? I trembled in some anticipation of what these many hours of bitter thought might have effected in Mrs. Ocumpaugh. Evidently nothing to lessen the gloom into which the whole household had now fallen. Miss Porter, who came in haste to greet me, wore the careworn look of a long and unrelieved vigil. I was not astonished when she told me that she had not slept a wink. "How could I," she asked, "when Mrs. Ocumpaugh did not close her eyes? She did not even lie down, but sat all night in an arm-chair which she had wheeled into Gwendolen's room, staring like one who sees nothing out into the night through the window which overlooks the river. This morning we can not make her speak. Her eyes are dry with fever; only now and then she utters a little moan. The doctor says she will not live to see her husband, unless something comes to rouse her. But the papers give no news, and all the attempts of the police end in nothing. You saw what a dismal failure their last attempt was. The child on which they counted proved to be both red-haired and pock-marked. Gwendolen appears to be lost, lost." In spite of the despair thus expressed my way seemed to open a little. "I think I can break Mrs. Ocumpaugh's dangerous apathy if you will let me see her again. Will you let me try?" "The nurse--we have a nurse now--will not consent, I fear." "Then telephone to the doctor. Tell him I am the only man who can do anything for Mrs. Ocumpaugh. This will not be an exaggeration." "Wait! I will get his order. I do not know why I have so much confidence in you." In another fifteen minutes she came to lead me to Mrs. Ocumpaugh. I entered without knocking; they told me to. She was seated, as they said, in a large chair, but with no ease to herself; for she was not even leaning against its back, but sat with body strained forward and eyes fixed on the ripple of the great river where, from what she had intimated to me in our last interview, she probably saw her grave. There was a miniature in her hand, but I saw at first glance that it was not the face of Gwendolen over which her fingers closed so spasmodically. It was her husband's portrait which she held, and it was his face, aroused and full of denunciation, which she evidently saw in her fancy as I drew nearer her in my efforts to attract her attention; for a shiver suddenly contracted her lovely features and she threw her arms out as if to ward from herself something which she had no power to meet. In doing this her head turned slightly and she saw me. Instantly the spell under which she sat frozen yielded to a recognition of something besides her own terrible brooding. She let her arms drop, and the lips which had not spoken that morning moved slightly. I waited respectfully. I saw that in another moment she would speak. "You have come," she panted out at last, "to hear my decision. It is too soon. The steamer has twenty-four hours yet before it can make port. I have not finished weighing my life against the good opinion of him I live for." Then faintly--"Mrs. Carew has gone." "To New York," I finished. "No farther than that?" she asked anxiously. "She has not sailed?" "I did not see how it was compatible with my duty to let her." Mrs. Ocumpaugh's whole form collapsed; the dangerous apathy was creeping over her again. "You are deciding for me,"--she spoke very faintly--"you and Doctor Pool." Should I tell her that Doctor Pool was dead? No, not yet. I wanted her to choose the noble course for Mr. Ocumpaugh's sake--yes, and for her own. "No," I ventured to rejoin. "You are the only one who can settle your own fate. The word must come from you. I am only trying to make it possible for you to meet your husband without any additional wrong to blunt his possible forgiveness." "Oh, he will never forgive--and I have lost all." And the set look returned in its full force. I made my final attempt. "Mrs. Ocumpaugh, we may never have another moment together in confidence. There is one thing I have never told you, something which I think you ought to know, as it may affect your whole future course. It concerns Gwendolen's real mother. You say you do not know her." "No, no; do not bring up that. I do not want to know her. My darling is happy with Mrs. Carew--too happy. O God! Give me no opportunity for disturbing that contentment. Don't you see that I am consumed with jealousy? That I might--" She was roused enough now, cheek and lip and brow were red; even her eyes looked blood-shot. Alarmed, I put out my hand in a soothing gesture, and when her voice stopped and her words trailed off into an inarticulate murmur I made haste to say: "Listen to my little story. It will not add to your pain, rather alleviate it. When I hid behind the curtain on that day we all regret, I did not slip from my post at your departure. I knew that another patient awaited the doctor's convenience in my own small room, where he had hastily seated her when your carriage drove up. I also knew that this patient had overheard what you said as well as I, for impervious as the door looked I had often heard the doctor's mutterings when he thought I was safe beyond ear-shot, if not asleep. And I wanted to see how she would act when she rejoined the doctor; for I had heard a little of what she had said before, and was quite aware that she could help you out of your difficulty if she wished. She was a married woman, or rather had been, but she had no use for a child, being very poor and anxious to earn her own living. Would she embrace this opportunity to part with it when it came? You may imagine my interest, boy though I was." "And did she? Was she--" "Yes. She was ready to make her compact with the doctor just as you had done. Before she left everything was arranged for. It was her child you took--reared--loved--and have now lost." At another time she might have resented these words, especially the last; but I had roused her curiosity, her panting eager curiosity, and she let them pass altogether unchallenged. "Did you see this woman? Was she of common blood, common manners? It does not seem possible--Gwendolen is by nature so dainty in all her ways." "The woman was a lady. I did not see her face, it was heavily veiled, but I heard her voice; it was a lady's voice and--" "What?" "She wore beautiful jewels." "Jewels? You said she was poor." "So she declared herself, but she had on her neck under her coat a string of beads which were both valuable and of exquisite workmanship. I know, because it broke just as she was leaving, and the beads fell all over the floor, and one rolled my way and I picked it up, scamp that I was, when both their backs were turned in their search for the others." "A bead--a costly bead--and you were not found out?" "No, Mrs. Ocumpaugh, she never seemed to miss it. She was too excited over what she had just done to count correctly. She thought she had them all. But this has been in my pocket for six years. Perhaps you have seen its like; I never have, in jeweler's shop or elsewhere, till yesterday." "Yesterday?" Her great eyes, haggard with suffering, rose to mine, then they fell on the bead which I had taken from my pocket. The cry she gave was not loud, but it effectually settled all my doubts. "What did you know of Mrs. Carew before she came to ----?" I asked impressively. For minutes she did not answer; she was trembling like a leaf. "Her mother!" she exclaimed at last. "Her mother! her own mother! And she never hinted it to me by word or look. Oh, Valerie, Valerie, what tortures we have both suffered! and now you are happy while I--" Grief seemed to engulf her. Feeling my position keenly, I walked to the window, but soon turned and came back in response to her cry: "I must see Mrs. Carew instantly. Give my orders. I will start at once to New York. They will think I have gone to be on hand to meet Mr. Ocumpaugh, and will say that I have not the strength. Override their objections. I put my whole cause in your hands. You will go with me?" "With pleasure, madam." And thus was that terrifying apathy broken up, to be succeeded by a spell of equally terrifying energy. XXVII THE FINAL STRUGGLE She, however, did not get off that night. I dared not push the matter to the point of awakening suspicion, and when the doctor said that the ship was not due for twenty hours and that it would be madness for her to start without a night's rest and two or three good meals, I succumbed and she also to the few hours' delay. More than that, she consented to retire, and when I joined her in her carriage the following morning, it was to find her physically stronger, even if the mind was still a prey to deepest anguish and a torturing indecision. Her nurse accompanied us and the maid called Celia, so conversation was impossible--a fact I did not know whether to be thankful for or not. On the cars she was shielded as much as possible from every one's gaze, and when we reached New York we were driven at once to the Plaza. As I noticed the respect and intense sympathy with which her presence was met by those who saw nothing in her broken aspect but a mother's immeasurable grief, I wondered at the secrets which lie deep down in the hearts of humanity, and what the effect would be if I should suddenly shout aloud: "She is more wretched than you think. Her suspense is one that the child's return would not appease. Dig deeper into mortal fear and woe if you would know what has changed this beautiful woman into a shadow in five days." And I myself did not know her mind. I could neither foresee what she contemplated nor what the effect of seeing the child again would have upon her. I only knew that she must never for a moment be out of sight of some one who loved her. I myself never left the hall upon which her room opened, a precaution for which I felt grateful when, late in the evening, she opened the door and, seeing me, stepped out fully dressed for the street. "Come and tell Sister Angelina that I may be trusted with you," she said. Sister Angelina was the nurse. Of course I did as she bade me, and after some few more difficulties I succeeded in getting her into a carriage without attracting any special attention. Once there she breathed more easily, and so did I. "Now take me to _her_," she said. Whether she meant Mrs. Carew or Gwendolen, I never knew. I now saw that the hour had come for telling her that she no longer need have any fear of Doctor Pool. Whatever she contemplated must be done with a true knowledge of where she stood and to just what extent her secret remained endangered. I do not know if she felt grateful. I almost think that for the first few minutes she felt rather frightened than relieved to find herself free to act as her wishes and the preservation of her place in her husband's heart and the world's regard impelled her. For she never for a moment seemed to doubt that now the doctor was gone. I would yield to her misery and prove myself the friend she had begged me to be from the first. She turned herself toward me and sought to read my face, but it was rather to find out what I expected of her than what she had yet to fear from me. I noted this and muttered some words of confidence; but her mood had already changed, and they fell on deaf ears. I was not present at the meeting of the two women. That is, I remained in what they would call a private parlor, while Mrs. Ocumpaugh passed into the inner room, where she knew she would find Mrs. Carew and the child. Nor did I hear much. Some words came through the partition. I caught most of Mrs. Carew's explanation of how she came to give up her new-born child. She was an actress at the time with a London success to her credit, but with no hold as yet in this country. She was booked for a tour the coming season; the husband who might have seen to the child was dead; she had no friends, no relatives here save a brother poorer than herself, and the mother instinct had not awakened. She bartered her child away as she would have parted with any other encumbrance likely to interfere with her career. But--here her voice rose and I heard distinctly: "A fortune was suddenly left me. An old admirer dying abroad bequeathed me two million dollars, and I found myself rich, admired and independent, with no one on earth to care for or to share the happiness of what seemed to me, after the brilliant life I had hitherto led, a dreary inaction. Love had no interest for me. I had had a husband, and that part of my nature had been satisfied. What I wanted now--and the wish presently grew into a passion--was my child. From passion it grew to mania. Knowing the name of her to whom I had yielded it (I had overheard it in the doctor's office), I hunted up your residence and came one day to Homewood. "Perhaps some old servant can be found there to-day who could tell you of the strange, deeply veiled lady who was found one evening at sunset, clinging to the gate with both hands and sobbing as she looked in at the triumphant little heiress racing up and down the walks with the great mastiff, Don. They will say that it was some poor crazy woman, or some mother who had buried her own little darling; but it was I, Marion, it was I, looking upon the child I had sold for a half-year's independence; I who was broken-hearted now for her smiles and touches and saw them all given to strangers, who had made her a princess, but who could never give her such love as I felt for her then in my madness. I went away that time, but I came again soon with the titles of the adjoining property in my pocket. I could not keep away from the sight of her, and felt that the torture would be less to see her in your arms than not to see her at all." The answer was not audible, but I could well imagine what it was. As every one knew, the false mother had not long held out against the attractions of the true one. Instinct had drawn the little one to the heart that beat responsive to its own. What followed I could best judge from the frightened cry which the child suddenly gave. She had evidently waked to find both women at her bedside. Mrs. Carew's "Hush! hush!" did not answer this time; the child was in a frenzy, and evidently turned from one to the other, sobbing out alternately, "I will not be a girl again. I like my horse and going to papa and sailing on the big ocean, in trousers and a little cap," and the softer phrases she evidently felt better suited to Mrs. Ocumpaugh's deep distress: "Don't feel bad, mamma, you shall come see me some time. Papa will send for you. I am going to him." Then silence, then such a struggle of woman-heart with woman-heart as I hope never to be witness to again. Mrs. Ocumpaugh was pleading with Mrs. Carew, not for the child, but for her life. Mr. Ocumpaugh would be in port the next morning; if she could show him the child all would be well. Mr. Trevitt would manage the details; take the credit of having found Gwendolen somewhere in this great city, and that would insure him the reward and them his silence. (I heard this.) There was no one else to fear. Doctor Pool, the cause of all this misery, was dead; and in the future, her heart being set to rest about her secret, she would be happier and make the child happier, and they could enjoy her between them, and she would be unselfish and let Gwendolen spend an hour or more every day with Mrs. Carew, on some such plea as lessons in vocal-training and music. Thus pleaded Mrs. Ocumpaugh. But the mother hardly listened. She had eaten with the child, slept with the child and almost breathed with the child for three days now, and the ecstasy of the experience had blinded her to any other claim than her own. She pitied Mrs. Ocumpaugh, pitied most of all her deceived husband, but no grief of theirs could equal that of Rachel crying for her child. Let Mrs. Ocumpaugh remember that when the evil days come. She had separated child from mother! child from mother! Oh, how the wail swept through those two rooms! I dared not prophesy to myself at this point how this would end. I simply waited. Their voices had sunk after each passionate outbreak, and I was only able to catch now and then a word which told me that the struggle was yet going on. But finally there came a lull, and while I wondered, the door flew suddenly open and I saw Mrs. Ocumpaugh standing on the threshold, pallid and stricken, looking back at the picture made by the other two as Mrs. Carew, fallen on her knees by the bedside, held to her breast the panting child. "I can not go against nature," said she. "Keep Gwendolen, and may God have pity upon me and Philo." I stepped forward. Meeting my eye, she faltered this last word: "Your advice was good. To-morrow when I meet my husband I will tell him who found the child and why that child is not at my side to greet him." * * * * * That night I had a vision. I saw a door--shut, ominous. Before that door stood a woman, tall, pale, beautiful. She was there to enter, but to what no mortal living could say. She saw nothing but loss and the hollowness of a living death behind that closed door. But who knows? Angels spring up unknown on the darkest road, and perhaps-- Here the vision broke; the day and its possibilities lay before me. THE END A LIST _of_ IMPORTANT FICTION THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY A ROMANCE OF AMERICAN CHIVALRY * * * * * THE LAW OF THE LAND Of Miss Lady, whom it involved in mystery, and of John Eddring, gentleman of the South, who read its deeper meaning By EMERSON HOUGH, Author of The Mississippi Bubble * * * * * Romantic, unhackneyed, imaginative, touched with humor, full of spirit and dash. _Chicago Record Herald_ So virile, so strong, so full of the rare qualities of beauty and truth. _New York Press_ A powerful novel, vividly presented. The action is rapid and dramatic, and the romance holds the reader with irresistible force. _Detroit Tribune_ Pre-eminently superior to any literary creation of the day. Its naturalness places it on the plane of immortality. _New York American_ Illustrated by Arthur I. Keller 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 A THOROUGHBRED GIRL * * * * * ZELDA DAMERON By MEREDITH NICHOLSON Author of The Main Chance * * * * * Zelda Dameron is in all ways a splendid and successful story. There is about it a sweetness, a wholesomeness and a sturdiness that will commend it to earnest, kindly and wholesome people. _Boston Transcript_ The whole story is thoroughly American. 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In The Happy Average he has voiced a deep-seated human sympathy for the unheroic. _Life_ A most delightful romance that is as fresh as the flowers of May. _Pittsburg Leader_ As an example of a good, healthy, entertaining and human story, The Happy Average must be given a place in the front rank. _Nashville American_ Not only the best book that has come from Mr. Whitlock's pen, but a really noteworthy achievement in fiction. _Chicago Tribune_ 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 THE LIFE AND LOVES OF LORD BYRON * * * * * THE CASTAWAY "Three great men ruined in one year--a king, a cad and a castaway."--_Byron_. BY HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES Author of Hearts Courageous * * * * * Lord Byron's personal beauty, his brilliancy, his genius, his possession of a title, his love affairs, his death in a noble cause, all make him the most magnetic figure in English literature. In Miss Rives's novel the incidents of his career stand out in absorbing power and enthralling force. The most profoundly sympathetic, vivid and true portrait of Byron ever drawn. Calvin Dill Wilson, author of _Byron--Man and Poet_ Dramatic scenes, thrilling incidents, strenuous events follow one another; pathos, revenge and passion; a strong love; and through all these, under all these, is the poet, the man, George Gordon. _Grand Rapids Herald_ With eight illustrations in color by Howard Chandler Christy 12mo, cloth, price, $1.00 everywhere A BOOK TO MAKE THE SPHINX LAUGH * * * * * IN THE BISHOP'S CARRIAGE BY MIRIAM MICHELSON * * * * * From the moment when, in another girl's chinchilla coat, Nance Olden jumps into the unknown carriage, and, snuggling up to the solemn owner, calls him "Daddy," till she makes her final bow, a happy wife and a triumphant actress, she holds your fancy captive and your heart in thrall. If jaded novel readers want a new sensation, they will get it here. _Chicago Tribune_ For genuine, unaffected enjoyment, read the adventures of this dashing desperado in petticoats. _Philadelphia Item_ It is beguiling, bewitching, bristling with originality; light enough for the laziest invalid to rest his brain over, profound enough to serve as a sermon to the humanitarian. _San Francisco Bulletin_ Illustrated by Harrison Fisher 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 A ROMANCE OF THE DOLLAR MARK * * * * * THE COST BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS Author of Golden Fleece * * * * * A masterly novel, interesting to the point of fascination, analytic to the point of keenness, thoroughly well written with complete understanding, and entirely committed to advocacy of the best things in life. Wallace Rice in _Chicago Examiner_ Rapid and vivid, sure and keen, light and graceful. _New York Times_ It is a story full of virile impulse. It treats of men of hardy endeavor, battling for leadership in the world of commerce and politics. If you want a novel that is intensely modern and intensely full of speed and spirit, you have it in The Cost. Bailey Millard in _San Francisco Examiner_ With sixteen illustrations by Harrison Fisher 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 LOVE, POLITICS AND PELF * * * * * THE GRAFTERS BY FRANCIS LYNDE Author of The Master of Appleby * * * * * One of the best examples of a new and distinctly American class of fiction--the kind which finds romance and even sensational excitement in business, politics, finance and law. _The Outlook_ Its sweeping sentences fire the blood like new wine. _Boston Post_ Telephone, telegraph, locomotive, skirl, click, thunder through the pages in a way unprecedented in fiction. It is an amazingly modern book. _New York Times_ Virile, with the rugged strength of the West, The Grafters is like the current of a deep river, vigorous and forceful. _Louisville Courier-Journal_ Illustrated by Arthur I. Keller 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 A GOOD DETECTIVE STORY * * * * * THE FILIGREE BALL By ANNA KATHERINE GREEN Author of "The Leavenworth Case" * * * * * This is something more than a mere detective story; it is a thrilling romance--a romance of mystery and crime where a shrewd detective helps to solve the mystery. The plot is a novel and intricate one, carefully worked out. There are constant accessions to the main mystery, so that the reader can not possibly imagine the conclusion. The story is clean-cut and wholesome, with a quality that might be called manly. The characters are depicted so as to make a living impression. Cora Tuttle is a fine creation, and the flash of love which she gives the hero is wonderfully well done. Unlike many mystery stories The Filigree Ball is not disappointing at the end. The characters most liked but longest suspected are proved not only guiltless, but above suspicion. It is a story to be read with a rush and at a sitting, for no one can put it down until the mystery is solved. Illustrated by C. M. Relyea 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 AN ANGEL OF THE TEXAS PLAINS * * * * * HULDAH Proprietor of the Wagon-Tire House and Genial Philosopher of the Cattle Country By ALICE MACGOWAN and GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE * * * * * A book that will brighten your hope, broaden your charity, and keep you mellow with its humor. _Minneapolis Journal_ It is cram full of human nature. There is nobody like Aunt Huldah in any other book, and it is a good thing that she got into this one. _Washington Times_ The book with its western breezes, homely philosophy, queer characters and big hearts, is almost as exhilarating as the heroine must have been herself. _Baltimore Herald_ Aunt Huldah is the kind of a woman loved by the whole world, and the novel is the most attractive since the days of David Harum. _Indianapolis Star_ 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 For the man who can rejoice at a book that is not trivial; For the man who feels the power of Egypt's marvelous past; For the man who is stirred at heart by the great scenes of the Bible; For the man who likes a story and knows when it is good. * * * * * THE YOKE A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt * * * * * A theme that captures the imagination: Israel's deliverance from Egypt. Characters famous for all time: Moses, the Pharaoh, Prince Rameses. Scenes of natural and supernatural power; the finding of the signet, the turning of the Nile into blood, the passage of the Red Sea. A background of brilliant color: the rich and varied life of Thebes and Memphis. A plot of intricate interest: a love story of enduring beauty. Such is "The Yoke." Ornamental cloth binding. 626 pages Price $1.50 ART AND ARIZONA * * * * * A GINGHAM ROSE By ALICE WOODS ULLMAN Author of Edges * * * * * The author has a strange power of looking into the workings of her own mind and heart, and of setting down what she finds there with freedom, humor and justice. The result is "something new under the sun"--a book with the tang of originality. Nothing could be more refreshing than this story of a girl who turned a cad into a man and a man into a hero. Bizarre, fantastic, intensely individual, bright and interesting, with characters that have a trick of saying and doing unexpected things. _Washington Times_ A remarkable book, sustained in power and interest, strong in its characterization and picturesque in its treatment of life. It is human, palpitating with reality, tensely alive. _Harper's Weekly_ Frontispiece by the author 12mo, cloth, price, $1.50 HER INFINITE VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE * * * * * HER INFINITE VARIETY By BRAND WHITLOCK * * * * * Not a little of the attractiveness of Her Infinite Variety by Brand Whitlock lies in its markedly handsome appearance. Howard Chandler Christy's illustrations are among the best he has drawn, and are, happily, quite numerous.--_Philadelphia Record._ Her Infinite Variety represents Mr. Brand Whitlock, the author, in holiday mood. It is from first to last a clever little comedy, full of delicious and unexpected satire, the whole thing handled with a blythe spirit of irony.--_New York Globe._ The qualities which make up a good story are mingled in the most alluring proportions in Her Infinite Variety, by Brand Whitlock. Its humor is keen, sparkling and spontaneous.--_Boston Transcript._ Her Infinite Variety, by Brand Whitlock, is a delight to the eye, a well-spring of mental recreation.--_Philadelphia North American._ With 12 full-page illustrations in photogravure by Howard Chandler Christy 12mo. Price $1.50 * * * * * The Bobbs-Merrill Company, _Indianapolis_ 
36220	----	MY LITTLE SISTER _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND THE NEW MOON THE OPEN QUESTION BELOW THE SALT THE MAGNETIC NORTH THE DARK LANTERN COME AND FIND ME (PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM HEINEMANN) THE CONVERT (METHUEN) VOTES FOR WOMEN: A Play in Three Acts (MILLS & BOON) THE FLORENTINE FRAME (JOHN MURRAY) WOMEN'S SECRET (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY) WHY? (WOMAN'S PRESS, LINCOLN'S INN HOUSE, KINGSWAY) UNDER HIS ROOF (WOMAN WRITER'S LEAGUE, 12 HENRIETTA ST.) MY LITTLE SISTER BY ELIZABETH ROBINS [Decoration] NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1913 COPYRIGHT, 1912, 1913 BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1913 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I FIRST IMPRESSIONS 1 II LESSONS 6 III A THUNDER-STORM 13 IV NIMBUS 16 V THE MOTHER'S VOW 24 VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING 33 VII A SHOCK 45 VIII ANNAN 51 IX ERIC 59 X THE BUNGALOW 68 XI AWAKENING 83 XII OUR FIRST BALL 94 XIII THE CLOUD AGAIN 108 XIV "WHERE IS BETTINA?" 120 XV MY SECRET 137 XVI THE YACHTING PARTY 150 XVII THE EMERALD PENDANT 161 XVIII RANNY 169 XIX ANOTHER GIRL 178 XX TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS 186 XXI AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER 198 XXII PLANTING THYME 209 XXIII ERIC'S SECRET 215 XXIV MADAME AURORE 224 XXV GOING TO LONDON 244 XXVI AUNT JOSEPHINE 253 XXVII THE DINNER PARTY 266 XXVIII THE GREY HAWK 287 XXIX WHERE? 303 XXX THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL 310 XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD 322 XXXII DARKNESS 329 XXXIII A STRANGE STEP 336 XXXIV THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING 341 MY LITTLE SISTER CHAPTER I FIRST IMPRESSIONS She is very fair, my little sister. I mean, not only she is good to look upon. I mean that she is white and golden, and always seemed to bring a shining where she went. * * * * * I have not been able, I see, to set down these few sentences without touching the quick. I have used the present and then fallen to the past. I say "is" and then, she "seemed." And I do not know whether I should have written "was" or "seems." And that, in sum, is my story. * * * * * We were both so young when we went to Duncombe that even I cannot clearly remember what life was like before. Whether there was really some image left upon my mind of India, or my father in a cocked hat, looking very grand on a horse, or whether these were a child's idea of what a cavalry officer's daughter must have seen, I cannot tell. I do not think I imagined the confused picture of dark faces and a ship. My first clear impression of the world is the same as Bettina's. A house, which we did not yet know as small, set in a place which still is wide and green. As far back as we remember it at all, we remember roaming this expanse; always, in the beginning, with our mother. A region where we played with the infinite possibilities of existence--from the discovery of a wheat-ear's hidden nest, to the apparition of a pack of hounds on the horizon, followed by men in red coats and ladies in sober habit, on horses that came galloping out of the vague, up over the green rim of the world, jumping the five-barred gate into Little Klaus's meadow, and vanishing in a pleasant fanfare of horn, of baying and hallooing, leaving us standing there in a stirred and wonderful stillness. We seldom met anyone afoot in those days except, now and then, the cottager who lived in a thatched hut down in one of the multitude of hollows. We called him "Kleiner Klaus," because he had one horse of his own, and because sometimes in the paddock four others grazed and kicked their heels. And he was little and shrewd-looking, and used to smile at Bettina. To be sure, everyone smiled at Bettina. And Bettina would show her dimple, and nod her shining curls, and pass by like a small Princess, scattering gold of gladness and goodwill. Though we children looked on Kleiner Klaus as a friend, years went by before we dared so much as say good-morning to him. Anyone else found at large in our green dominions was an enemy. So much we learned before we learned to speak our mother tongue, and all in that first lesson, so far as I was concerned. A lesson typified in the figure hurrying to the rescue down the flagged path toward the gate. My mother!... who had moved through all our days with changeless calm. And now she was running so fast that her thick hair was loosened. A lock blew across her face. Mélanie, our nurse, stood inside the gate with Bettina in her arms. A lady leaned over, asking the way to the Dew Pond. Mélanie could not even understand the question. But I knew all about the Dew Pond. I had been there with my mother to look for caddis flies. So I pointed to the knoll against the sky, and stammered a direction. Bettina was of no use to anyone looking for the Dew Pond. But she quickly took her place as the centre of interest. All that she did to make good her Divine Right was to show her dimple, and point a meaning finger at the jewelled watch pinned to the stranger's gown. The lady held out her hands to our baby. Bettina consented to be taken nearer to the sparkling toy. Then our mother, as I say, hurrying out of the house as though it were on fire, taking the baby and the nurse and me away in such haste, I had no time to finish telling the lady how to find the Dew Pond. I heard my mother, who was commonly so gentle, telling the nurse in stern staccato French if ever it happened again she would be sent away. Never, never was she to allow anyone to touch our baby. Had the strange woman kissed Bettina? The new nurse lied. And I said no word. But the impression was stamped deep. No one outside the family at Duncombe was ever to kiss Bettina. Or even to kiss me--which I remember thinking a pity. Moreover, I perceived that if, through the ignorance or the wickedness of stranger-folk, this thing were to happen again, one would never dare confess it. For such a catastrophe the far-sighted Bon Dieu had provided the refuge of the lie. CHAPTER II LESSONS There was one lasting cloud upon a childhood spent as close to our mother as fledglings in a nest. Our mother was the most beautiful person we had ever seen. Even as quite young children we were dimly conscious of the touch of pathos in the beauty that is frail, as though we guessed it was never to grow old. But this was not the cloud. For the presentiment was too undefined, it came in a guise too gentle to give us present uneasiness. In the unquestioning way of children, we accepted the fact that one's mother should be too easily tried to join in active games. But she taught us how to play. She was as much a factor in our recreation as in our lessons--so much so that we were a long time in finding out the dividing line between work and play. I think that must have been because our mother had a genius for teaching. The hard things she made stimulating, and the easy things she made delight. No; there was an exception to this. Not even my mother could make me good at music. She was infinitely patient. She made allowances for me that she never made for my sister. Once, when I was dreadfully discouraged, I was allowed to leave my "Étude" and learn something that might be supposed to catch my fancy--a gay and foolish little waltz-tune called "The Emerald Isle." "Oh, but quicker, child!" I hear her now. "It is not a dirge." I began again--_allegro_, as I thought. But "Faster, faster!" my mother kept saying, till I dropped my hands. "How _can_ I? You expect me to be as quick as God!" I think this must have been after that act of His which gave us a sense of surpassing swiftness. For long I blamed my lack of skill upon my fingers; they were as stiff as Bettina's were elastic. She kept always the hand of a very young child--so soft and pliant that you wondered if there were any bones in it at all until you heard the firm tone in her playing, and saw the way in which, when she was stirred, she brought down the flying hands on some rich, resolving chord. Years after I was still able only to practise, Bettina "played." And better even than her playing was Bettina's singing. That began when she was quite a baby. I see her now, a small figure, all white except her green shoes and her hair of sunset gold, singing; singing a nursery rhyme to an ancient tune my mother had found in one of her collections of old English song: "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_" We thought this specially accomplished of Bettina, because it was the first thing she sang in English. I do not remember how we learned French. It must have been the first language that we spoke. Our mother, without apparent intention, kept us to the habit of talking French when we did the pleasantest things. All the phrases and verbal framework of our games were French; all the mythology stories were in French. And we seemed to fall into that tongue only by chance when we went collecting treasures for our herbarium, or the fresh-water aquarium. We found out by-and-by that the walks we thought so adventurously long were little walks. We also found that our world was less uninhabited than we thought. Duncombe, we discovered, stood midway between two large country houses. Besides the cottage of Kleiner Klaus, there were other small peasant holdings, dotted like islands in our sea of green--brave little enclosures made, as we heard later, by the few who refused to be wholly dispossessed when, in the eighteenth century, the open heath had been taken from the people. Our own Duncombe, which we thought very grand and spacious, had been only a superior sort of farmhouse. Everyone has marked the shrinkage in those nobler spaces we knew as children. In our case, not all imaginary, the difference between what we thought was "ours" and what, for the time being, was. We never doubted but the boundless heath belonged to us as much as our garden did. We were confirmed in our belief by the attitude of our mother towards those persons detected in daring to walk "our" paths, or touch our wildflowers, or, worst crime of all, disturb our birds. The proper thing to do, on catching sight of any stranger, was to start with an aversion suggested by our mother's, but improved upon--more pictorial. We would all three stare at the intruder, and then allow our eyes to travel to the nearer of the signs, "Trespassers," etc. If this pantomime did not convince the creature of the impropriety of his presence, we would look at one another with wide eyes, as though inquiring: "Can such things be? Are these, then, deliberate criminals? If so"--our looks agreed--"the company of outlaws is not for us." We turned our backs and went home. I was twelve before I realised that we ourselves were trespassers. The heath belonged to Lord Helmstone. That was a blow. Still worse, the later knowledge that Duncombe House and garden were not our own. The laying out of a golf course, and the cheapening of the motor-car, forced the facts upon our knowledge. But I am glad that as little children we did not know these things. We saw ourselves as heiresses to the prettiest house and garden in the world. And no whit less to those broad acres rolling away--with foam of gorse and broom on the crests of their green waves--rolling northward towards London and the future. Two miles to the south was our village--source of such supplies as did not come direct from Big Klaus, or from Little Klaus. We knew the village, because when we were little we went to church there. Big Klaus, the red-faced farmer, who had a great many collie dogs and nearly as many sons, drove us to church in a dog-cart. The moment the squat tower came in view Bettina and I would lean out to see who would be the first to catch sight of Colonel Dover. He was nearly always waiting near the lych-gate to help my mother out of the cart. One or two other people would stop to speak as we came or went. Often they asked, Would she come to a garden-party? Would she play bridge? Would she help with a children's school-treat? And she never did any of these things. Bettina and I liked Colonel Dover till we overheard something Martha Loring said to the cook. Both women seemed to think my mother was going to marry him! Bettina was too young to mind much. Besides, he had beguiled Bettina with chocolate. I was furious and miserable. I said to myself that, of course, my mother would never dream.... But the servants' gossip poisoned all the time of primroses that year. I thought about little else in our walks. Once we met him. Something began that day to whisper in the back of my head: "If he asks her enough she might give in. She does to me when I persist." Out of my first great anxiety was born the beginning of my knowledge of my mother's character. I could see that she, too, was afraid of giving in. But afraid of contest quite as much. Afraid of--I knew not what. But I knew she stayed away from church, because she was afraid. I knew our walks were different, because we were always thinking we might meet him. I prayed God to give my mother strength--for Christ's sake not to let it happen. Morning and night I prayed that prayer for half a summer. Dreadful as the issue was, I was thankful afterwards that I had taken the matter in hand. CHAPTER III A THUNDER-STORM Two Sundays in succession we had not been to church. As we were going out, after lessons, on Monday morning, a thunder-storm came on. So Bettina and I played in the upstairs passage. I remember how dark it grew, although there was a skylight overhead, and a window opening on the staircase. We groped for our playthings in the twilight, till quite suddenly the _croisée_ of the casement showed as ink-black lines crossing a square of blue-white fire. The shadowy stair was fiercely lit; our toys, too, and our faces. The moment after, we sat in blackness, waiting for the thunder. Far off it seemed to fall clattering down some vast incline. Then the rain. Thudding torrents that threatened to batter in the skylight. Our mother came out of her room in time to receive the next flash full upon her face. I see the light now, making her eyes glitter and her paleness ghostlike. She drew back from the window. Before the lightning died I had seen that she was frightened. I had been frightened, too, till I saw that she was. In the impulse to reassure her, my own fear left me. I went to her in that second blackness and put my hand in hers. When I could see again I looked through the streaming window-pane, as we stood there, and I saw a man sheltering under the chestnut-tree at our gate. He lifted his umbrella, and seemed to make a sign: "May I come in?" "Why, there is Colonel Dover!" I said, and could have bitten my tongue. My mother had moved away. She seemed not to hear, not to have seen. I stood, half behind the curtain, praying God to keep him out. I prayed so hard I felt my temples prick with heat, and a moisture in my hair. A blinding flash made us start back. Almost simultaneously came a shock of sound like a cannon shot off in the house. We three were clinging together. "That struck near by," my mother said, to our relief, for we had thought the house must tumble to pieces. The storm slackened after that, and daylight struggled back. We went on with our playing. I noticed, as my mother went downstairs, that she kept her head turned away from the window. Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother, with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the drawing-room door for the bearers to pass. Their feet left muddy marks in the hall.... We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had been taken away. People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric current. I knew God had heard my prayer. But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was riven from foot to crotch. That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You expect me to be as quick as God." CHAPTER IV NIMBUS I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No. He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon. Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of fear. I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones. We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships. My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade. More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home." I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal. I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew themselves pursued. Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music in her ears. Her changed "home" face was like summer come again. She would help us to strip off our wraps, and, all in a glow, we would go flying to the haven of our pretty fire-bright room with its gay chintzes, its lamps and flowers. One of us would ring for tea; another would draw chairs about the blaze. My mother's part was to close the heavy inside shutters, to let down across the panels the iron bar, and draw the curtains. "_Now_ we are safe and sound!" she would say. I do not pretend to explain, for I do not know how it was that, though we loved our walks, Bettina and I came to share her sense of danger. In the beginning we may have felt the flight home to be merely a kind of game. A playing at Prisoner's Base with the threshold of Duncombe House for goal. When we reached there (and only in the nick of time!) we had escaped our enemy, whether Colonel Dover or another. We had won. We had barred him out. That feeling lasted warm, triumphant, until bed-time. Then, heavy wooden shutters, even with iron all across, were no avail. Another enemy, craftier, deadlier than any that might haunt the heath at dusk, had got into the house. He was in hiding all the cheerful part of evening, when lights and voices were about. At bed-time, in dim passages, you felt his breath on the back of your neck. He never faced you. Always he was behind you. But he was never at his deadliest while you had your shoes and stockings on. He waited behind curtains or under the bed, to clutch at your bare feet as you jumped in. I try not to read into the influences about our childhood more than was there. Perhaps our fears had no obscurer origin than the humble domestic fact that my mother never trusted the servants with the locking-up of the house. We saw her go the rounds each night, holding a candle high to bolts, or low to locks and catches. I believe now she may have had only some natural fear, in that lonely place, of robbery. But for us children the Dread was harder to fight against, being bodyless. As everyone knows, except those most in need of knowing--I mean children--every old house is an orchestra of ghostly sound. One room at Duncombe, in particular, was an eerie place to sit in when the winds were out. You heard a kind of unearthly music played there on winter evenings. Sounds so remote from any whistling, moaning, or other wind instrumentality, that Bettina and I spoke of it in whispers: "Now the organ's playing." Our mother heard it, too. At the first note she would lift her eyes and listen. We had an obscure feeling that she heard more than we--a something behind the music. Something which we strained to catch, and often seemed upon the verge of understanding. There is no more characteristic picture of my mother in my mind than that which shows her to me with needle arrested over work slipping off her knee, or holding a page half-turned, her lifted face wearing that look, listening, foreboding. There is something more expressive in the white of certain eyes than in the iris. The white of my mother's eyes was a crystalline blue-white. It caught the light and glistened. It seemed to respond more sensitively, to have more "seeing" in it than was in the pale blue iris. The contrast of heavy dark lashes may have lent the eye that almost startling look when the fringe of shadow lifted suddenly, and the eyeball answered to the light. There was nothing the least tragic about my mother's usual looks or moods. She was merely gentle and aloof. She helped us to be very happy children; and if she made us sometimes most unhappy, she did so unconsciously. And she did so only at times when she must have been unhappy, too. She played for us to dance. And she played for us to sing. But after Bettina and I had gone through our gay little action songs, and after we had sung all together our glees and catches, we would be sent upstairs to do lessons in the morning-room--which was our schoolroom under the cheerfuller name. Then, sitting alone, between daylight and dark, our mother would sing for herself songs of such sadness as youth could hardly bear. I think we were not expected to hear them. We would open the windows on that side in mild weather to hear the better. But the songs were sadder when we heard them faintly. Have you ever noticed that? I would sit trying to fix my mind on lessons, listening to that music she never made for us. And I would look across at Bettina's face, all changed and overcast. Then I would shut the window. Bettina ought never to hear such music. For myself I wondered uneasily what there could be in the beautiful world to inspire a song like that, and to make a lady sit singing it "between the lights." As I say, when the sound was fainter the sadness of it pierced us deeper still. As we two sat there, formless fears crept in and crouched in the shadowy places. Oh, we were glad when Martha Loring's face appeared, with the lamp and consolatory suggestions of supper. Better still, the blessed times when the music was too sad even for our mother--when she would break off and come to find us--help us to hurry through our task, and then for reward (hers, or ours?... I never quite knew) open the satinwood cabinet, and take out the treasures and let us see and handle them. All but two. We had been allowed to hold our father's order and his watch. We had turned over the pretty things he had given her; we knew that I was to have the diamond star, when I grew up, and Betty was to have the pearl and emerald pendant. Only the two brass buttons we might never touch. We never knew why the brass buttons were so precious. She held them wonderfully--as though they were alive. And we, too--we were always happier after we had seen them. We knew that she felt, somehow, safer. So did we. CHAPTER V THE MOTHER'S VOW We had no knowledge at first hand, of any family life except our own. But we imagined that we made up for any loss in that direction by following the outward fortunes of one other family, from a reverent distance, but with a closeness of devotion. In that mysterious world beyond the heath, we divined two exhaustless springs of enthusiasm: the Army and the Royal Family. The reason for the first is clear. As for the second, we never guessed that our varied knowledge and intimate concern about the persons of the reigning house was a commonplace in English family life of the not very strenuous sort. Royal personages presented themselves to our imagination, partly as the Fairy Tale element in life, partly as an ideal of mortal splendour, partly as symbols of our national greatness. From fairy queens and princes no great step to the sea-king's daughter, or to her sailor-son, the Prince of Wales. His wife, that Princess of Wales, who even before her marriage had been the idol of England was our idol too--apart from her high destiny as mother of the future King, (the little Prince born in the same year as Bettina)--and mother of that fascinating figure in the story, the solitary Princess of her house, three years younger than the youngest of our family. Our interest in them all received a fresh accession at the birth of Prince Henry; we hailed the advent of Prince George; we felt the succession trebly sure in the fortunate arrival of Prince John. We saw them safely christened; we consulted the bulletins in the _Standard_ and the _Queen_ about their health; we followed their august comings and goings with an enthusiasm undampened by hearing how well they were all being brought up on the incomparable "White Lodge" system, which had been so successfully applied to the little royalties' mamma. Apart from these Shining Ones, a sense of the variety, the unexpectedness of life to lesser folk, reached us through the changing fortunes of one of the country-houses that abutted on the heath. It was let to different people, from time to time, for the hunting. If the people had children, they were of palpitating interest to us, even though we never saw much of the children. Sometimes the fathers and mothers scraped acquaintance with our mother. If they had seen the Brighton doctor driving up to our door, they would stop to ask how my mother was. The doctor was a grim man with a stiff grey beard. He said my mother ought to have a nurse. She said she had me. That was the proudest moment of my childhood. I had to try very hard not to be glad when she was ill. It was such delight to nurse her. And after all, the only thing she herself seemed to mind about being ill was not having Bettina always with her. Bettina was too little to understand that one must be quiet in a sick room. In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape, and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny home-made hymn-books in their laps. When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously: "Someone must go down and bring Bettina back." I could not bear to see Loring, or Mélanie, doing anything for my mother. I think they humoured me, and that Mélanie performed her service chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid was able to come downstairs. She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different. Not only thin. Different. * * * * * Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people who "called to inquire." We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon "indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her malady. We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought. When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children. In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look. I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?" One day Dora shook her head. "Why not?" She was going back to school. "Aren't _you_ going back to school?" she asked. "Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school." Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us. "You _like_ having to go to school!" I said. She loved it. "So would you." "I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction. She couldn't think why. Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at home." Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified to hear we had never had one. Even then we did not associate that lack with poverty. Rather with the riches of our mother's personal accomplishments, and her devotion for her children. And indeed we may have been partly right. I think if she had been a millionaire she would not willingly have shared with a strange woman those hours she spent with us. We read a great deal aloud. My mother and I took turns. Bettina used to sit over the embroidery she was so good at, and I so hopeless. Or she would sit under the wild broom in Cæsar's Camp watching the birds; or lie curled up on the sofa stroking Abdul, the blue Persian. Indoors or out, I don't think Bettina often listened to the reading. Perhaps that was because we read a good deal of history. Poetry was "for pleasure," our mother said. But it had to be translated into singing to be any pleasure to Bettina. I loved it all. Betty was two years younger than I, but nobody would believe I was not the elder by five years, or even six. I was proud of this, seeing in the circumstance my sole but sufficient advantage over a sister excelling in all things else. I am not to be understood as having been envious of Bettina. For I recognised her accomplishments as among our best family assets--reflecting glory on us all; ranking in honour after the respect shown to our mother, and the V. C. our father won in the Soudan. But my thoughtfulness and gravity as a child, my being cast in a larger, soberer mould, lent validity to my assumption of the right to take care of Bettina. Even to harry her now and then, when her feet outstrayed the paths appointed. Bettina was not only younger, she was delicate; she had to be protected against colds, against fatigue. There is, in almost every house, one main concern. When I look back, I see that in ours the main concern was Bettina. If she had been less sweet-natured, she would have been made intolerable. But the great need of being loved kept Bettina lovable. I cannot remember that we ever spent half a day away from each other, or away from our mother, until--but that is to come later. I feel still the panic that fell on us after the excitement of seeing the good-natured Mrs. Reuter drive up in her motor-car--the first we had encountered at close quarters--a jarring, uncanny, evil-smelling apparition in our peaceful court. Mrs. Reuter leaned out and unfolded her dreadful errand--to invite us children to come and stay at her house in Brighton from Friday to Monday! We stood there, blank, speechless. Our mother, with a presence of mind for which we blessed her, said she could not spare us; she was not well; I was a famous little nurse. Relief and pride rushed together. I could have kissed my mother's feet. My own could hardly keep from dancing. "Let me take the little one, then," said this brutal visitor. The little one burst into large, heart-rending sobs. Twenty times that afternoon the little one made my mother say: "I will not let anyone take you away--no, never. Very well, you shall not pay visits." And Betty, suspicious, insistent: "Not _never_?" "Not never." Oh, mother! mother! would you had kept your word! CHAPTER VI MARTHA'S GOING--YET REMAINING When I was thirteen years old we lost our ally, Martha Loring. She had been with us since she was fifteen--at first a little scullery-maid. Later, she was promoted, and became a person much trusted, in spite of her youth and her love of fun. We had all sorts of games and private understandings with Martha. She was a genius at furnishing a dolls' house. She got another friend of ours to make us a dresser for Alexandra's kitchen. This other gifted person was Peter, one of Big Klaus's sons. He was almost twenty, and he used to bring the vegetables. We did not know why he could never bring us our presents at the same time--perhaps out of fear of the cook, who held strict views upon the wickedness of eating between meals. She was elderly, and very easily annoyed. She never knew that that clever Peter circumvented her by climbing over the orchard wall with our red apples and with pockets full of the hazelnuts we loved. Martha Loring told us that, if ever we spoke of these gifts, they would be forbidden, and Peter would never come any more. So we were most careful. So was Peter. So careful that he brought his gifts after dark. Martha used to have to go down the garden and wait for them--wait so long, sometimes, that we fell asleep, and only got Peter's presents in the morning. Martha had laughing brown eyes and full scarlet lips. No wonder we were impressed by the transformation of this cheerful and familiar presence into something heavy-eyed and secret. One morning she came out of our mother's room sobbing, and went away without saying good-bye--though she wasn't ever coming back, the cook said. Our mother was so unwell that day she did not want even me in the room. In the evening Bettina and I went into the kitchen to ask Mrs. Ransom what had become of Martha. Mrs. Ransom was in a bad temper. She said roughly that Martha had gone under. "Under? Under what?" Mrs. Ransom said, "Sh!" I went back to the kitchen alone, and begged the cook to tell me what had happened. She was angrier than ever, and said the young ladies where she lived before never asked questions, and would never have fashed themselves about a housemaid who was a horrid person. I was angry, too, at that, and told her she was jealous of Martha. She chased me out with a hot frying-pan. We felt justified in disbelieving all Mrs. Ransom had said when we found out that Martha had not "gone under" at all. She had gone to stay with the family of Little Klaus. But our mother said Little Klaus's wife ought not to have taken Martha in. And she wrote Mrs. Klaus a letter. As for us, we were never to speak to Martha again. And we were not to go near Little Klaus's cottage as long as Martha stayed there. Very soon she went away. We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton. Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid us back. I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices. Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called "Household Medicine." I read it a great deal--especially when one of the little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their sufferings. One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr. Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had been like this for two days. "Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do was to send him some proper food--all of which was done in collusion with Martha. I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account. I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring. The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under." Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again--so well that she insisted on going for a walk. My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings and overshoes. But, after all, we only stayed out about ten minutes. My mother said the air was raw, and "not safe." At luncheon Bettina was urged to eat more. Though, as I say, she seemed quite well again, she had not recovered her appetite. Her normal appetite was small and fastidious. Often special dainties had to be prepared to tempt Bettina. And I remember, for a reason that will be obvious later--I remember we had delicious things to eat that day. Unluckily, Bettina wasn't hungry, and she grew rather fretful at being urged to eat more than she wanted. My mother remembered a tonic that she sometimes made Bettina take. When she had helped us to pudding, she went upstairs to find the tonic, because she was the only one who knew where it was. The moment she had gone, Bettina sprang up and scraped her favourite pudding into the fire. We laughed together, and recalled her evil ways as a baby. Always there had been this trouble to make Bettina eat--specially breakfast. My mother and I used to be tired out waiting while my sister, sitting in her high-chair, nibbled toast a crumb at a time, and let her bacon grow cold. So a punishment had to be invented. Bettina, who dearly loved society, must be left alone to finish breakfast--a plan that seemed to work, for when one of us went back in a few minutes, Bettina's plate would be bare. Then the awful discovery one day, in cleaning out a seldom-opened part of the side-board--a great collection of toast and bits of mouldy bacon, pushed quite to the back of the capacious drawer. While we sat laughing over the old misdeed, feeling very grown up now and superior, a face looked in at the window--a pinched, unhappy face, with hungry eyes. A woman stood out there, holding a baby wrapped in a shawl. The window was shut, for the rain had begun as we sat down--heavy leaden drops out of a leaden sky. I ran and opened the window. "What is it?" I said, quite unnecessarily. The woman told us she had started for the hop-fields that morning. She had no money to pay a railway fare, but a man had given her a lift as far as the village. She did not know how she was going to reach the hop-fields. At that moment I heard my mother's voice. "What _are_ you doing? Shut the window instantly!" And as I was not quick about it, she came behind me and shut the window sharply. What was I thinking of? Had I no regard for my little sister, sitting there in the current of raw air? Really, she had thought me old enough by now to be trusted! Seldom had I been so scolded. I forgot for a moment about the woman. I remembered her only when I saw my mother make a gesture over my head. "Go away!" "Oh, but she is tired and wet," I said, and I tried to tell her story. My mother interrupted me. Hop-pickers were a very low class. They were dirty and verminous, and spread infectious diseases. "Go away!" she said. And again that gesture. I felt myself choking. "She is hungry," I whispered. My mother measured out the tonic. My first misgiving about her shook the foundations of existence. Other, lesser instances, came back to me--strange lapses into hardness on the part of so tender a being. What did they mean? If I scratched my arm, she would fly for a soothing lotion, and help healing with soft words. If Bettina pinched her finger, the whole house would be stirred up to sympathise. No smallest ache or ailing of ours but our mother's sensitiveness shared. And yet.... The woman with her burden had moved away--a draggled figure in the rain. A horrible feeling sprang up in my heart--an impulse of actual hatred towards my mother--as the hop-picker disappeared. Hatred of Bettina, too. I kept thinking of the pudding in the fire. And of Martha Loring. If Martha Loring had been in the kitchen, she would somehow have got food to the woman, and a few pence. The image of Martha Loring shone bright above the greyness of that wretched time. Looking back, I say to myself: "Not all in vain, perhaps, the life of the little servant who had been turned out of doors." At Duncombe, where she had had her time of happiness, where she had served and suffered, something of her spirit still survived. Martha Loring sat that day in judgment on my mother. And I was torn with the misery of having to admit the sentence just. I became critical of matters never questioned before. I fell foul of Bettina. She was selfish. She was vain. And her hair was turning pink. It was true that the paler gold of early childhood was warming to a sort of apricot shade, infinitely lovely. But "pink hair" was accounted libellous. And, anyhow, it was a crime to tease Bettina. Wasn't it worse, I demanded, groping among the new perceptions dawning--wasn't it worse for Bettina to tease a dumb animal? The "worse," I was shrewd to note, was not admitted. But "Of course, Bettina must not tease the cat." With unloving eyes I watched my mother lift an ugly black spider very gently in a handkerchief, and put the creature out to safety. But that haggard hop-picker--no, I couldn't understand it. The hop-picker haunted me. Then I made a compact with her. For her sake I would contrive, somehow, to give bread to any hungry man or woman who should go by. "And so," I addressed the hop-picker in my thoughts, "though you had no bread for yourself, you will be the means of giving bread to others." The hop-picker accepted the arrangement. Peace came back. In the vague pagan fashion of the young I thought, too, that by kind deeds I might pay off my mother's score. Her fears for us somehow prevented her from feeling for other people's children. Something I didn't know about had made her like that. In my struggle to resolve the discord between a nagging conscience, and my adoration for my mother, I seemed to leave childhood behind. Still, very dimly, if at all, could I have realised there was any connection between her continued shrinking from our fellow-creatures, and that old nameless fear we used to bar the door against. Yet in one guise or another, Fear still was at the gate. Yesterday the menace of Bettina's illness. To-day a hop-picker, bringing a whiff of the sick world's infection through our windows. To-morrow? CHAPTER VII A SHOCK When to-morrow came we knew. We had been using up our capital. Another year, at this rate, and it would be gone. What was to become of us? Should we have to sell Duncombe House? I asked. Only then we heard that Duncombe belonged to Lord Helmstone. But the rent was low. My mother said "at the worst," we would go on living at Duncombe. Yes, even if we kept only one servant instead of three. For we would still have the tiny pension granted an officer's widow. And should we always have the pension? Yes, as long as she lived. Not "always" then. * * * * * A horrible feeling of helplessness, a sense of the bigness of the world and of our littleness, came down upon me. We seemed to have almost no relations. We knew our father had a step-sister, a good deal older than he. We heard that she lived in London and was childless. That was all. My mother had been an orphan. She never seemed to want to talk about the past. When we were little we took no interest in these things. As we grew older we grew afraid of paining her with questions. In some crisis of house-cleaning a photograph came to the surface. Who was this with the hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings? Oh, that was Mrs. Harborough. "Aunt Josephine?" "Well, your father's step-sister." All hope of better acquaintance with her was dashed by learning that she had opposed our father's marriage, opposed it bitterly. "She couldn't have known you," Bettina said. "That I was not known to her was crime enough," my mother answered with unwonted bitterness. Just as we were made to feel that questions about Aunt Josephine were troubling, I felt now that to inquire into our precise financial condition was to harass and depress my mother. The condition was bad. Therefore it was best covered up. "We shall manage," she said. I was sixteen when this thunder-bolt descended, and, by that time, I knew that "to manage" was just what my mother, at all events, was quite incapable of doing. We still kept three servants and no accounts. Lawyers' letters were put away. Out of sight, they seemed to be out of mind. Out of my mother's mind. I thought constantly about these things. One day, months later, I blurted out a hope that we should all die together. My mother was horrified. "But if we don't," I said, "how are we going to live--Bettina and I, without the pension?" "You will have husbands, I hope, to take care of you." I went over the grounds for this "hope" with no great confidence. My mother went alone into the garden. She came in looking tired and white. Compunction seized me. I persuaded her to go and lie down. I would bring up her tea-tray. I expected to have to beg and urge. But she went upstairs "quite goodly," as we used to say. She looked back and smiled. She was still the most beautiful person we knew. But it was a very waxen beauty now. I must learn not to weary her with insoluble riddles. I went into the dining-room to make her tray ready--I liked doing it myself. Bettina's voice came floating in. She had grown tired of playing proper music. She was singing the nursery rhyme which my mother had set to variations of the tinkling old-world tune: "_Where are you going to, my pretty maid?_" I thought how strange and wonderful was the simplest, most ordinary little life. There must always be that question: what is going to become of me? I had long known what was the proper thing to happen. I ought to marry Lord Helmstone's heir. And Bettina should marry a prince. But Lord Helmstone's heir turned out to be a middle-aged cousin with a family. Lord Helmstone himself had only lately taken to coming to Forest Hall--since the laying out of the golf-course. Still less frequently came my lady. Very smart, with amazing clothes; and some married daughters with babies. There were two daughters unmarried, who seemed to be always abroad or in London. We liked Lord Helmstone; even my mother liked him. But she criticised his "noisy friends." These were the golfers who motored down from London. Broad-shouldered men, in tweeds that made them seem broader still. They would pass by our garden-wall and look at Bettina. Often when they had passed they looked back. Secretly, I wondered if any of them were those "husbands" who were going to take care of us. Some lodged in the village. The noisiest stayed at the Hall. Bettina's singing had broken off abruptly. I heard her running upstairs. And then a cry. "Come--oh, quickly, _quickly_!" Bettina had heard the fall overhead. Our mother lay on the floor, Bettina standing over her, agonised, helpless. We lifted her on to the bed. We loosened her clothing, and brought water, and bathed her temples. She opened her eyes and smiled--then the lids went down. Still that look, the look that made her a stranger. Was this death?... Bettina shrank from it. But I told her not to leave the room a second. I would bring the doctor quickly. Bettina's face.... "I cannot stay alone," she whispered. "I will send up one of the servants." She held my arm. "Suppose ... while you are gone---- Oh, I am afraid." "I will run all the way," I said. CHAPTER VIII ANNAN I could not speak when I reached the village. They gave me water. I had in any case to wait a moment till the postmaster was free, for I could not use the telephone myself. My mother had a horror of our touching the public one. She had spoken with disgust of the mouthpiece that everybody breathed into. "Full of germs!" Then it must be bad for other people, we said. "Other people must take their chance." I remembered that as I leaned against the counter, panting, while the postmaster wrote out a telegram. _We_ were "taking the chance" now. Such a little thing--my not knowing how to telephone. Yet it might cost my mother her life. The postmaster rang up Brighton. The doctor was out. What could be done but leave a message! I would go to the Helmstones and ask for a motor-car. Why had I not thought of that before? Then the postmaster said that the Helmstones had all left for London that morning. He had seen them go by. Two motors full. He recommended the doctor at Littlecombe. If I waited a while, the baker's cart would come back from its rounds, and I could send, or go myself with the driver to Littlecombe. "Wait"? There was that at Duncombe that would not wait. For me, too, waiting was the one impossible thing. I cast about in my distracted mind. That new acquaintance of the Helmstones'! Was he not a sort of a doctor? "The scientific chap," as his lordship called the man who had taken rooms at Big Klaus's farm. Lord Helmstone had complained of his Scotch arrogance--"frankly astonished if a Southron makes a decent drive." We had not seen him--at least, not to distinguish an arrogant Scot from other golfers. I ran most of the way to the farm. As I stood waiting for the door to open, a man came up the path with golf clubs. Tallish. In careless clothes, otherwise of a very un-careless aspect. In those seconds of watching the figure come up the pathway with a sort of rigidity of gait, I received an impression of something so restrained and chilling that I hoped he was not the man I had come for. In any case this was not a person before whom one would care to show emotion. I asked if he were Mr. Annan. Yes, his name was Annan. His tone asked: and what business was it of mine? But he halted there, below me, as I stood on the step explaining very briefly my errand. He did not want to come; I could see that. He made some excuse about not being a general practitioner. I was sorry I had spoken in that self-possessed way. I saw I had given him no idea of the urgency of our need. I had to explain that all we asked of him was to give some help at once. And only for once. Our regular doctor would be with us very soon. He seemed slow-witted, for he stood there several seconds, with one free hand pulling at his rough moustache of reddish-brown. "We mustn't lose time," I said. As I led the way, I heard the door open behind me, and the sound of golf clubs thrown down in a stone passage. He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for a warning. The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed, at the tall nettles growing in the ditch. What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered young golfers in Norfolk jackets--far too like them, to help in so dire a need as ours. I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps, why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan would go far." He had gone too far in the direction of overwork. He had been urged to come down here and play golf. Still, he worked long hours.... And while I recalled these things, in the back of my head, I kept repeating: "Mother, mother! I am bringing help." We did not talk, except for my turning suddenly to warn him that my younger sister was not to know if my mother---- "Yes, yes!" he said. I felt he understood. I walked faster--almost at a run. He did not seem to notice. His long strides kept him near me without an effort. Mother, mother!---- Oh, how wildly the birds were singing! She had said that only we ever noticed the special quality in the vesper song. Something the morning never heard. The air was filled with a passion of that belated singing. "Good-night," I heard her say, "is better than good-morning." Oh, mother! if that is so for you, think of your children. Did the stranger object to jumping ditches and climbing stiles? "I am taking you the short cut," I said. "Of course." We were coming to the copse on the edge of the heath. The hawthorn foamed along the outer fringe. This was where we met Colonel Dover all those years ago. Every inch of the way I saw pictures of my mother. All that gentleness and beauty---- What a richness had been lavished on our lives! I had never begun to understand it before this evening--never once had thanked her. Mother, mother!---- The copse was full of her. Her figure went before me between the bare larch boles, taking care not to tread on flowers. The ground was a sheet of blue when we had last come here. The time of wild hyacinths was nearly over now. And her time---- Was that nearly over too? Where would she be when the foxgloves stood tall here among the bracken? The larch stems wavered and the hazels shivered. The man was on in front now, the first to cross the outermost stile. As I hurried after him, he looked back. I did not know until I met his eyes that mine were wet ... and that I was walking not quite steadily. I had run a long way that evening. "Rest a moment," he said; and he looked away from me and up at the flowering may. "The scent is very heavy," he said. "I knew a woman once who was always made faint by it." He did not look at me again. But I had seen that those hard eyes could look kind. * * * * * Now we could see the red tile roof. Underneath it what was happening? I had been long gone, for all my running. As we came across the links, the sun went down behind the wall of Duncombe garden. Oh, sun! I prayed, do not go down for ever. * * * * * Before I entered the house a strange thing happened. A great peace fell on me. I knew, without asking, that all was well. Was that a blackcap singing? And had I seen the sun go down? What magic light was this, then, that was shining on the world? * * * * * He saw my mother, and told us what to do. Bettina stayed with her, while I came down with Mr. Annan to hear his verdict. As we stood in the lower hall, I looked up to find his eyes on me--eyes suddenly so gentle that terror fell on me afresh. "You don't think she is going to die?" "Good nursing," he said, "will make a difference. One must always hope----" "Oh, you must save us!" I said incoherently; and then corrected: "My mother!..." He seemed to accept the charge. He would come back early in the morning. * * * * * I never found the bridge between that passion of dread about my mother's life--and the strange new passion that took possession of me, body and soul. Like the dart of a kingfisher out of the shade of a thicket into intensest sunshine, the new thing flashed across my life, all emerald and red-gold and azure--a blinding iridescence, and a quickness that was like the quickness of God. CHAPTER IX ERIC For a long time I said nothing in his presence, except in answer to some direction. There seemed no need to talk. Enough for me to see him come striding across the links; to watch him walk into my mother's room; to see a certain look come into his eyes. It came so seldom that sometimes I told myself I must have dreamed it. Then it would come again. He made my mother almost well. But when he went back to London he left a great misery behind him. No one knew, and I hoped that in time I should get over it. At least I pretended that was what I hoped. I would rather have had that pain of longing than all the pleasure any other soul could give. * * * * * The following year my mother was wonderfully well, and so cheerful I hadn't the heart to worry her with questions. We saw more of the Helmstones than ever before. My mother even went to them once or twice. A few days before that first visit of Eric Annan's had ended, Lady Helmstone and the two unmarried daughters came home from touring round the world in their cousin's yacht. Lady Barbara was the plain daughter. She was twenty-two and wrote poetry, we heard. But we thought the youngest of the family much the cleverest. Hermione was striking to look at, and the fact that she laughed at Barbara, and at pretty well everyone else, made her seem very superior. Also, she had an air. She made a deep impression on Bettina. I, too, found her wonderful. But my mother said she was crude. We thought that was only because, in spite of "being who she was," Hermione Helmstone put pink stuff on her lips and darkened the under lid of her green eyes. Just a little, you understand. Enough to give her a look of extraordinary brilliancy. She took a great fancy to Bettina. In spite of Bettina's being so young Hermione used to tell her about her love affairs. There seemed to be a great many. But one was serious. She was as good as engaged, she said, to Guy Whitby-Dawson. He was in the Guards. We were all agog. When was she going to be married? She didn't know. It was dreadfully expensive being in the Guards. Being a peer seemed to be very expensive, too. Hermione's father had so many places to keep up, and so many daughters, he couldn't afford to give Hermione more than "the merest pittance." When we heard what it was, we thought it very grand to call such a provision a mere pittance. I wished we three had a pittance. For those two to try to live on it would be madness, Hermione said. So she and Guy would have to wait. Perhaps some of Guy's relations would die. Then he would have plenty. Meanwhile, in spite of being as good as engaged, Hermione flirted a good deal with her cousin, Eddie Monmouth, and with the various other young men who came to the week-end parties and for the hunting. Bettina and I were often rather sorry for Guy, until the day when Hermione brought over some of his photographs for us to look at. We did not admire him at all. But we never told Hermione. As for me, though I tried to take an interest, I was never really thinking about any of the things that were going on about me. And I was always thinking of the same thing. Day and night, the same thing. If my mother sent me into the garden to see whether the autumn crocuses were up--all I could see was his face. It came up everywhere I looked. I grew impatient of the companionship I had most loved. I was thankful when Hermione had carried off my sister for the afternoon. I felt Lord Helmstone had done me a personal kindness when he dropped in, on the way to or from the golf links, to talk to my mother. I would slip away just for ten minutes to think about "him" in peace. When I went in I would find I had been gone for hours. The old laws of Time and Space seemed all at sixes and sevens. The old devotions paled. Mercifully, nobody knew. * * * * * I looked for him all the next spring. In the summer I said to myself, I shall never see him again. Then a day in September when he came. Came not only to Big Klaus's and the Links. He came to Duncombe the very first evening, to ask about my mother. I heard his voice at the door. It seemed to come up from the roots of the world to knock against my heart. I stood by the banisters out of sight and listened, while I held the banisters hard. No, he wouldn't come in now. He would come to-morrow. I flew to the window in the morning-room, and looked out. I had not dreamed him. He was true. * * * * * The next day brought him. I had all those hours to get myself in hand. I was quite quiet. The others seemed gladder to see him than I. He was pleased at finding my mother so well. The crowning proof of her being stronger was her doing a quite unprecedented thing. She invited Mr. Annan to come and have tea at Duncombe, instead of tramping all that distance back to the Farm. Big Klaus's tea she was sure was worse even than the Club House brew. The result was that he fell into the habit of playing another round after tea, which my mother said was good for him. She agreed with Lord Helmstone that Mr. Annan should not work when he had come away for a holiday. The Helmstones were for ever asking him to lunch and dine. But he always said "that sort of thing" took up too much time. So we felt flattered when, instead of playing the other round, he would sit there in the garden, after tea, smoking a pipe and talking to us. Bettina said our home-made cakes and delicious Duncombe tea were quite wasted on him. I was secretly indignant at the charge. But Bettina made him confess he could not tell Indian from China. "Very well then," I said, "it proves he doesn't come only for tea," and upon that a fire seemed to play all round my body, scorching me. But no one noticed. It was wonderful to see him again--to verify all those things I had been thinking about him for the year and four months since he went away. But if I were told, even now, to describe Eric Annan, I would say at once that he was a person whose special quality escaped from any net of words that sought to catch it. If, at the time I speak of, I had been compelled to make the attempt, I should have taken refuge in such commonplaces as: strongly-built; colouring, between dark and fair; a wholesome kind of mouth, with good teeth; brown eyes, not large, with reddish flecks in the iris. And I might have added one thing more uncommon. That gift of his for saying nothing at all without embarrassment. I thought of him as a person standing alone. I could not imagine him in the usual relationships. The others must have felt like that about him, too, for I remember they were surprised when Lord Helmstone told us that Eric Annan was one of the large family of an impoverished Scots laird. Bettina said to him the next day: "I don't suppose you have any sisters." He looked surprised, and I expected him to repudiate such trifles. But he said: "Yes. Three," in a tone that dismissed them. But the confession seemed to have brought him nearer, to make him more human. He had been a little boy, then, playing with little girls. He had grown up, not only with students and professors, but with sisters. Oh, happy sisters! how they must adore him! I asked him to tell us about them: were the sisters like him? No. What were they like? "Oh----" he looked vague. Then he presented a testimonial. They were "all right." The proof: two of them were married. And the third? Oh, the third was only twenty. I felt a special interest in that one. But all we could learn was that she was engaged. So she was probably "all right," too. My mother was the best at making him talk. She discovered that he was "like so many of the silent-seeming people," fluent enough when he liked. Though he never was fluent about his sisters, when he came to know us better, he told my mother about his elder brother, struggling still to keep up the property--a losing battle. And a second brother, not very clever, intended for the navy. He hadn't got on. He left the navy and had some small post in the Customs. The third brother was "trying to grow tea in Ceylon." Bettina hoped the third brother was more intelligent about tea than our friend. Eric was the fourth son. To get a scientific education, on any terms, had been a struggle. He had to arrive at it obliquely, by way of studying medicine. Pure science didn't pay. But science was the one thing on earth worth a man's giving his life to. I see him sitting in the level light on Duncombe lawn, looking up in that sudden way of his, and narrowing his eyes at the sunset, bringing out the word _research_ with a tenacity of insistence on the "r" which must make even a Natural Law feel the hopelessness of hiding any longer. That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden. CHAPTER X THE BUNGALOW My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the _dévot_, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint. I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium. Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing _Schwärmerei_, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics. The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor. Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance. But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking. She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"--a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put. "Three weeks." "A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors." He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays--thank God!--in a laboratory. Which was scarcely polite. "Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells." He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit. "No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance--oh, naturally, not _her_ kind. What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded. Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton--Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand." They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind." "Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper. Hermione was not a bit dashed. "_You_ may look for romance in bottles if you like. For my part ..." she stuck out her chin. "Well, oblige the company by telling us what you look for in a story?" "Orange blossoms," says she promptly; "not little bits of brain." He laughed with the rest of us at that, and he knocked the ash out of his pipe against the arm of the garden chair. Lord Helmstone, he said, would be waiting for his foursome. * * * * * A day or two after, Hermione accused him to his face of "story-telling." "You said you were only going to stay three weeks." To our astonishment he answered: "I don't think I said 'only' three weeks. I said three weeks. Three weeks certainly." "----and all the while arranging to settle down and live here." I looked from Eric, slightly annoyed, to Hermione, mocking, and to Lady Barbara, rolling large pale eyes and smiling self-consciously. "What makes you think I'm going to settle down?" he demanded. "Well, isn't that the intention of most people who put up a cottage in the country?" "Oh! you mean my penny bungalow." He picked up his golf clubs. "Nobody in this country 'settles down' in a bungalow," he said. As though she had some private understanding of the matter, Lady Barbara seemed to speak for him. "----just to live in for a while," she said quite gently. "Not to live in at all." Eric threw the strap of the canvas golf-bag over his shoulder, and made for the front-door. "What do you want a bungalow _for_, then?" Hermione's teasing voice followed after him. "----mere harmless eccentricity." He was "like that," he said. He turned round at Hermione's laugh, and I saw him looking at the expression on Lady Barbara's face. Very gentle and happy; almost pretty. And I had never thought Lady Barbara the least pretty before. Eric, too, seemed to be struck. "I find I've got to have a place to put things," he said more seriously, and then he went on out. "Must have some place to keep one's traps," he called back. Lady Barbara stood leaning against the door and looking out at the retreating figure, still with that expression that made the plain face almost beautiful. I felt that Eric had come lamely out of the encounter. What did it all mean? For he had said nothing whatever to us (who thought ourselves his special friends) about this curious project of putting up a bungalow. * * * * * A hideous little ready-made house, with a roof of corrugated iron, painted arsenic green, it came down from London in sections, and was set up in a field adjoining Big Klaus's orchard. The field belonged to Lord Helmstone. Eric continued to eat and to sleep at Big Klaus's, but he used to go over to the Bungalow and shut himself up to work. As the days went on, and he showed no sign of increased intimacy with the Helmstones I clutched at the idea that perhaps he had found he couldn't work very well in the midst of farmyard noises. He had spoken of the melancholy moo-ing of cows waiting for meadow-bars to be let down; of the baa-ing and grunting and the eternal barking that went on. And those noises--which he was, strangely, still more sensitive to--produced by Big Klaus's cocks and hens underneath Eric's window; and by the ducks and geese hissing and clacking on the pond between the house and the stables. I was not likely to forget how he had mocked at "country quiet" or the samples he gave us of the academic calm that reigned at Big Klaus's. I think I never heard my mother laugh so much as on that first day he "did" the peaceful country life for us--Eric rather out of temper, presenting his grievance with great spirit: "----wretched man sits up addling his brains till two in the morning. At four, this kind of thing----" In a quiet, meditative way he would begin clucking. Then quacking, almost sleepily at first; then with more and more fervour till he would leave the ducks and soar away on the ecstasy of a loud, exuberant crow. All this not the least in the sketchy, impressionist way that most people who try will imitate those humble noises, but with a precision and vigour that first startled you, and then made you feel that you were being given, not only an absolutely faithful reproduction of the sound those creatures make, but in the oddest way given their point of view as well. We laughed the more, I think, because the comedy seemed to come out of the revelation of the immense seriousness of the animals. Eric's commentary seemed so fair. It seemed to admit that the importance to ducks and cocks and hens of _their_ goings on was at least as great as the importance of peace and quiet to him. With an air of doing it against the grain, he gave you (with a rueful kind of honesty) the duck's sentiments in a series of depressed little quacks that hardly needed the translation: "'Been all over this repulsive pond; turned myself and all my family upside down for hours. Nothing!'" Then indignant quacks, and: "'Silly new servant can't tell time. Past five o'clock, and no sharps!'" Then a single jubilant "'Quack! There she is----'" and a rising chorus, till anyone not in the room would be ready to swear we kept as many ducks as Big Klaus. A moment's silence, and in his own person Eric would say with a sigh: "_Now_, perhaps, I can tackle that German review." "'Buck! Buck! Buck!'"--or rather a series of sounds that defies the alphabet. Then the interruption: "'My-wife's-laid-an-egg!'" and the shrill rapture of a loud crow of great authority. The Bungalow was out of earshot of all that. We heard orders were given that no letters or telegrams were ever to be taken to the Bungalow. When Eric was there, "no matter what happened," nobody was to disturb him. And when he wasn't there the Bungalow was shut and locked. I think I have said that Hermione was the most daring girl imaginable. She went one day ("Well, doesn't the field belong to us?") and looked in at first one window and then another. She said there was nothing but a stove and packing-cases in the room she could see into. And she brought back a bewildering account of what had been done to the windows of the other room. There were no curtains and no blinds, but thick brown paper had been pasted over the glass of each lower sash. You could no more see in than you could see through the wall. The top sashes were down, and Hermione naturally thought he must be there. So she called "Mr. Annan!" quite loud. But he wasn't there after all, she said. Of course, the next time she met him on the links she began to tease him about papering up his windows. "And how can you see?" "Oh, quite well, thank you." "Well, anyhow, I don't believe you read all the time. Nobody could read the whole day and half the night." No, he didn't read all the time. "What do you do then?" Ah, there was no telling. And that was true. There was no getting Eric to tell you anything he didn't want to. Hermione announced that she had been to call. "Yes," he said, "I heard you call." She stared. "You don't mean to say you were in there all the time?" "Yes, I was there," he said, going on with his putting practice quite at his ease. Hermione was speechless for a moment, and that was the only time in my life I ever saw Hermione blush. "What a monster you were not to come out when you heard me!" "Sorry, but I was too busy," he said. "I always _am_ busy when I'm at the Bungalow." She was still rather red, but laughing, too. "I suppose, then, you heard me try the door?" (She hadn't told us she had gone as far as that.) "Yes, I heard you try the door." "Well, you _are_ an extraordinary being--shutting yourself up with brown paper pasted over the windows----" "----only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight." "Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!" He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are." "I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of." "Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet." She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he makes bombs." "Sh! not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off. "No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make counterfeit money." "If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be counterfeit." * * * * * One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs. She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared. "No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?" He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank. But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets." "Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs." "'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them." "Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever." Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span. "But I never did anything horrible to them." Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succumbed. Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child." But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know nobody gives the dogs such whippings as you do." Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand. "Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For _your_ pleasure. And profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to keep them? In hutches, or in enclosures in the field. Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said. "I shall just notice how long you keep them." "Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them." Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?" "Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune." Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop grass. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a day----" "But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did." While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers." CHAPTER XI AWAKENING There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief Assistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow. This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief Assistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs. Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death. "I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject. "Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it." * * * * * I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person. We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came. That pleased me more than anything. He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I, too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world. Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit." A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes---- Then he died. Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It was a fine way to die." He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the governing class, out of touch with the real work of the world--no wonder they still groped after the military idea. They saw the idle on the one hand and the overworked on the other, wallowing in a sickly wash of sentiment; they saw the dry rot in Government. He himself had small patience with politicians, or with those other "preachers"--in the pulpits. In old days, when the churches were in touch with the people, a man might feed his flock instead of merely living off the sheep of his pasture. But the people who fared worst at Eric's hands were the professional politicians. They were "bedevilled" by the most intellect-deadening of all the opiates, the Soothing Syrup of Popularity. They must be excused from doing anything else because, forsooth, they did such a lot of talking. We discovered an unexpected vein of humour in him the day he travestied a certain distinguished friend of Lord Helmstone's. We were shown the Great Man on the hustings at a Scottish election, and we laughed afresh over Eric's fury at his own evocation. As though the distinguished personage were actually there, perorating on Duncombe lawn, Eric brushed up his moustache and began to heckle him. What had he _done_--except to use his great position as a rostrum? What had been done by all the members of the Lords and Commons put together comparable to the achievements of--for instance, Sanitary Science? Ha, _Science_! No phrase-making. No flourish of fine feelings. Just Sanitation--the force that had done more in fifty years to improve the condition of the poor than all the philanthropy since the birth of Christ. And what had the Government done even for Science? Then the Personage, magnificently superior, setting forth the folly, the sinful waste of getting him there, and not listening to his words of wisdom. "When I ope my mouth let no dog bark." No such ineptitudes from your man of science. The conditions of his work--humbleness of spirit, a patient tracking down of fact--these kept him sane; kept him oriented. Woe to him if he fell into fustian, or pretended to a wisdom he could not substantiate. Your man of science had to mind his eye and test his findings. He worked without applause, away from the limelight. He was unwritten about--unknown. Even when, after years of toil, your man of science came out of obscurity with some great gift for the world in his hand, no one except other men of science was the least excited. The _Daily Mail_ was quite unmoved. The service done mankind by science left the general public in the state of Pet Majorie's turkey: "----she was more than usual calm, She did not give a single damn." He was not complaining. All this was wholesome. "Science!" _"No high-piled monuments are theirs who chose Her great inglorious toil--no flaming death. To them was sweet the poetry of prose, And wisdom gave a fragrance to their breath."_ "Who wrote that?" my mother asked. With a thrill in his voice: "A friend of mine!" Eric said, "A friend of the human race." And he told us about him. I asked to have the verse written down. Life seemed a splendid thing as he talked; but still, a splendour only to dazzle me--not to light and lead. When he was there, all I asked was to sit and listen, and now and then to steal a look. When he had gone, all I wanted was to be left alone, that I might go over all he had said, all he had looked, and endlessly embroider upon that background. My best times, in his absence, were those safest from interruption--the long, blessed hours while other people slept. To lie in bed conjuring up pictures of Eric, conversations with Eric, had come to be my idea not only of happiness but of luxury. And, as seems the way of all indulgence taken in secret and without restraint, this of mine enervated me, made me less fit for the society of my fellow-beings. I found myself irked by the things that before had pleased me, impatient even of people I loved. I was like the secret drinker, ready to sacrifice anything to gratify my hidden craving. * * * * * All this time Bettina was less in my thoughts than she had been since she was born--till that afternoon when I began to think furiously about her again. Lord Helmstone had come with Eddie Monmouth and carried Eric off. I thought they had all three gone to the links. I went indoors and wrote a note for my mother. Then I escaped to the garden. I will go down in the orchard, I said to myself, and wait by the gap for a glimpse of Eric playing the short round. Along the south wall I went towards the landmark of the big apple-tree, a yard or so this side of the gap. As I passed the ripening wall-fruit, netted to protect it from the birds, I remembered my mother had said the formal espaliers wore the air of a jealously-guarded beauty smiling behind her veil. The old tree by the gap was like some peasant "Mother of Many," she said, rude and generous, bearing on her gnarled arms a bushel to one of the more delicate fruits on the wall. All the way down to the end of the orchard I had glimpses through the lesser trees of old "Mother of Many," brave and smiling, holding out clusters of red-cheeked apples to the last rays of the sun. I started, and stood as still as the apple-tree. Under the low branches two figures. My sister's raised face. The other bending down. He kissed her--Eddie Monmouth. I turned and fled back to the house. The kiss might have been on my lips, so effectually it wakened me out of my dreaming. Bettina!--old enough to be kissed by a man! So she was the first to be engaged ... my little sister, who had only just had her sixteenth birthday. * * * * * I tried that night to lead up to a confidence. But I had neglected Bettina too long, apparently, for her to want to tell me her great secret just at first. So I waited. Then a dreadful day when Hermione came over to say that she was going up to London for Eddie Monmouth's wedding. Yes, most unexpected. All in hot haste, just before his sailing for India. The bride a girl they had never heard of. I dared not look at Betty for some minutes. When at last I mustered up courage to steal a glance--not a cloud on Betty's face. Here was courage! But what the poor child must be going through.--I could not leave her to bear this awful thing alone.... When Hermione had gone I told Bettina that I knew. She looked at me out of her innocent eyes, and reddened just a little. Then she laughed: "Oh, I don't mind _like that_!" she said. "He was very nice. But I think I prefer Ranny Dallas." At first I was sure this was just a brave attempt to bear her suffering alone. But I was wrong. Bettina _did_ like Ranny Dallas best! He liked Bettina, and flirted with her. I began to see that I had not been looking after Bettina properly. * * * * * But I saw more than that. I saw that I, too, had been drifting. I had no idea where any of us were. Where was my mother in her lonely struggle? Where was Bettina, in her ignorance, straying? I, myself? I had been content with dreaming. Or with waking now and then to thrill at stories about other people's courage, insight, indomitable patience. Why should _I_ not rouse myself and nerve myself? Why should not I, too, scorn delight and live laborious days? It was then the Great Idea came to me. CHAPTER XII OUR FIRST BALL Eric stayed nearly eight weeks instead of three. Yet I let him go away without a word about the radical change that had come over a life outwardly the same. * * * * * That was the year I was eighteen. But I still did lessons with my mother--French and German, and English history. I asked her to let me leave off history, and allow me to work by myself a little. I wanted to surprise her, by-and-by, so she was not to question me. I studied a great deal harder than she knew. When we sat down to breakfast at half-past eight I would usually have three hours of work behind me. Often when Bettina and I were both supposed to be at the Helmstones, I had stayed behind in the copse "to read." This would be when I knew Ranny Dallas was not at the Hall. I still thought that, like all the other young men who came there, he was attracted by Hermione. But I could not forget that Bettina "liked him best"--liked him more than the man she had allowed to kiss her, and who had not cared for her at all. I did my best to make Betty see that even if a man as young as Ranny Dallas were to think of marrying at present, it would be the Hermione sort of person he would think of. For we knew that since his elder brother's death a great deal was expected of Ranny. All that I could get out of Betty just then was that he was not so young as he looked. But I heard, presently, that he had told her he was "chucking the army." His father was growing feeble, and wanted his son to settle down and nurse the family constituency. I remember how annoyed Betty was at my saying that, whether Ranny was old enough to think of marrying or not, I certainly couldn't imagine such a boy being a Member of Parliament. Betty quoted Hermione. Hermione, who knew much more about such things than I did, had said she was sure that Ranny would get into the House at the very next by-election. And Hermione had clinched this by adding: "Ranny Dallas always gets everything he wants." I made up my mind that for Betty's sake I must keep my eyes open. All that I had seen in him so far was a fair, rather chubby young man, who was not really very good-looking, but who somehow made the impression of being so--chiefly, I think, because he looked so extraordinarily clean. And he had that smile which makes people feel that the world must be a nicer place than they had thought. Then, too, there was something rather nice in the way his hair simply would curl in wet weather, for all the plastering down. His round, blunt-featured face was clean-shaven; and if I had wanted to tease Ranny, I should have told him I was sure he hadn't long "got over" dimples. But Betty was right; he was older than he looked. I tried to be with her whenever he was about. But this became more and more difficult. For often he came down without any warning. If they couldn't have him at the Hall, he would put up at the inn. And he seemed quite as content walking those two miles to the links, or clanking up and down the hilly road on a ramshackle bicycle he had found at the inn. Our jobbing gardener was overheard to say that _he_ wouldn't be seen riding such a bicycle--"no, not on a dark night!" Ranny, as we knew, had two motor-cars of his own, and was very particular about their every detail. But he said all that the much-abused "bike" needed was a brake. Even without a brake it was "a lot better," he said, "than having to think about the shover-chap." After all, whether Ranny was nominally at the inn, or staying with the Helmstones, he spent most of his time with them--and, for all I could do, he spent a good deal of the time with Bettina. I still couldn't make up my mind whether he amused himself more with her or with Hermione. But there was no doubt in Lord Helmstone's mind. He used to chaff Hermione when Ranny wasn't there, and when he was there Ranny got the chaffing. "What! you here again?" his lordship would say. "Why, I thought you'd only just gone." Then he'd ask, with a business-like briskness, what he'd come for. "Why, to play a game o' golf with your lordship." "Can't think what a boy of your age is doing with golf." Then he would say to us: "Here's a fella usen't to care a doit for golf--and now this passion!" When Lord Helmstone said that--which, in the way of facetious persons secure from criticism, he did a great many times--a colour like a girl's would sometimes overspread Ranny's face, in spite of the implication being so little of a novelty. Then Lord Helmstone would call attention to Ranny's being "very sunburnt," and he would chuckle and rattle his keys. "You ought to run away and play cricket. Eh----?" "In this weather?" "Well, go deer-stalking, then. Or play polo. Something more suitable to your years than pottering about golf-links. Something vigorous. Keep down superfluous tissue. Eh--what?" People liked teasing Ranny. He took it so charmingly. When I admitted that much to Betty, she said he did take chaffing well, but she sometimes thought he got more than his share. Lord Helmstone, she said, never ventured to treat Mr. Annan in that way. I said that was quite different, and we very nearly had a serious quarrel. When I saw that Betty really couldn't see the vast difference between making fun of that boy and making fun of a man like Eric Annan, I began to feel more anxious than ever about Betty. This was the first year the Helmstones kept Christmas in the South. They filled the great house full to overflowing for a dance on New Year's Eve. We had only our white muslin summer frocks to wear. But not even Bettina minded, and we had a most heavenly time. Hermione had taught us the new dances. She said she "never in all her born days knew anybody so quick as Bettina at learning a new step." Even I danced every dance, and Bettina had to cut some of hers in two. There were several new young men in the house-party. Two were brothers, and both sailors. The oldest one danced better than any man we had ever seen, and he would have liked to dance with Bettina the whole night long. It was our first ball, and Betty was only sixteen. So perhaps it was not very strange that the music and the motion and all the admiration went to Betty's head. For she did behave rather badly to Ranny. When she had danced three times with the oldest sailor--Captain Gerald Boyne--Ranny took her into a corner and remonstrated. I saw he looked pretty serious, but I didn't know till she and I were undressing in our own room that night, or rather morning--I didn't know how strongly he had spoken. We had found our mother waiting for us, and we were both a little remorseful for being so late when we saw how tired she looked. "But you know we asked you if we might stay to the end." Then, I told her they had all begged us to wait for one or two more dances after the musicians went away, and how a friend of Lady Helmstone's played waltzes for us. My mother thought it a pity to keep London hours in the country. We were to get to bed now as quickly as possible, and tell her "all about it in the morning." So we took the candle and went away to our own room. It suddenly looked different to me--this room Bettina and I had shared all our lives. The ceiling seemed to have dropped a foot. But all the same it looked very white and kind in the dim light. Bettina ran and pulled back one of the dimity curtains. Yes, the moon was brighter than ever! Betty threw open the window and leaned out. Oh, what a pity to go to bed when the world was looking like this! We had had a green Christmas, and the wind that blew in was not cold; but I thought how horrified my mother would be to see Betty leaning out of a window in January, with the night-wind blowing on her neck. We quarrelled a little, very softly, about shutting the window. Bettina was still flushed and a good deal excited. Rather anxious, too, about what had happened at the ball. But she defended herself. She overdid her air of justification--"such perfect nonsense Ranny's making all that fuss, just because a person naturally likes to waltz with a man who dances so divinely!" I asked what, precisely, Ranny had said. "Oh, he said he had hoped I would care to dance with him. And, of course, I said I did. I had already given him the first polka, and I had promised him----" She broke off. Nobody had ever been quite so reasonable as she, or so unreasonable as Ranny. He had tried to prevent her dancing _at all_ with Captain Boyne. "But you had already danced three times with Captain Boyne," I reminded her. "Well, what of that?" she demanded, in a quite un-Betty-like way. And instead of undressing she followed me about the room, her cheeks very bright as she told me how that unreasonable Ranny had "kept saying that he 'made a point of it.' Then my partner for the mazurka came, and I saw Ranny go over to you. What did he say?" she asked, so eagerly that she forgot to keep her voice down. My mother knocked on the wall. "Go to sleep, children," she called. We both answered "Yes," and I began hurriedly to undo Betty's gown. But she never stopped twisting her head round: "Go on, tell me. What did he say?" I told her, a little impatiently, that he hadn't said anything in particular--he hadn't tried to make himself the least agreeable, and he danced badly. "Danced badly?" said Bettina, as though it were quite a new idea. "I think that must have been your fault. He dances quite well with me." "Yes," I admitted, "he does dance best with you." Then she told of the part Hermione had played. Nothing escaped Hermione, and as soon as she got wind of what was happening, she egged Betty on. Hermione had laughed out, in the most meaning way, when she saw Ranny coming towards Betty in the interval with "blood in his eye," as she expressed it. She whispered to Betty that Ranny was far too used to having his own way. "'But you'll see, you'll have to give in,'" Hermione said, and went off laughing just as Ranny came up. And he began badly: "'You've told Boyne he can't have this waltz?'" Betty said "No." "'Why not? _Why_ haven't you told him?'" "He would ask for a reason." "'Very well, give it'" "'I don't know any reason,'" Betty said. "'The reason is....' Then he stopped, and seemed to change his mind. He began again: 'The reason is, you are going to sit out with me.' And then," Betty ended nervously, "Gerald Boyne came, and--we waltzed that time too." "Yes," I said severely, "everybody was saying, 'Those two again!' And I didn't see you dance with Ranny at all after that." No; but it wasn't her fault. "It was quite understood he was to have the cotillion." "Then it was very wrong of you to dance the cotillion with Captain Boyne. It was making yourself conspicuous." She protested again that it wasn't her fault. "I kept them all waiting as it was. You saw how I kept them waiting for Ranny, till everyone was furious. And as he didn't come, I had to dance with whoever was there." "I suppose what made him angry was my going off for that horrid waltz after he had said he 'made a point of it'--I wasn't to dance again with 'that fellow.' And then, what do you think I said?" Bettina took hold of my arm, so I couldn't go on braiding my hair. "I said he was jealous of Captain Boyne, or why should he call him 'that fellow'? Even at the moment I felt how horrid that was of me; for it's not a bit like Ranny to be jealous in a horrid way, calling people 'fellows.' So I said: 'If the Boynes aren't nice, why are they here?' And Ranny said: 'Oh, Gerald Boyne's people are all right. His brother is all right. But I shouldn't want you to dance with Gerald if you were my sister. And if you were my wife, I should forbid it.'" "'But,' I said, 'I'm _not_ your sister!'--Betty tossed her head, laughing softly--'and I'm not your wife----'" I asked her if she had said it like that? Yes, she had. "And I said, too--I said it was 'fortunate.'" Then without the least warning, poor Betty sat down on the foot of her bed and began to cry. I put my arm round her. And she pulled her bare shoulders away. "You needn't think I'm crying about Ranny," she said. "I suppose it's being so angry makes me cry." "You are crying because you are over-tired," I said, and I began to take off her shoes and stockings. "I'm _not_ crying because I'm tired, but because"--she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown--"it's a disappointment to see anyone so silly ... making 'points' of such things as waltzes." When she was ready for bed, she stood meditating a moment. And then: "Ranny has never struck me as one of the horrid, unforgiving sort of people. Has he you?" "Oh, no," I said, and I made her get into bed. I covered her up. But it was no use; she threw back the eiderdown, and sat bolt upright. "----asking me like that, _at a ball_, if I liked Captain Boyne best--a man I'd never seen before--don't you call it very rude?" "No; only a little foolish----" Another knock on the communicating door. "If you children keep on talking I shall have to come in." We promised we wouldn't say another word. But more than once Betty began: "Ranny----" "Sh!" I said. The quarrel about the window had ended in our leaving it a couple of inches open, and the curtains looped back. As we lay there, the room grew brighter; so bright that every little treasure on the long, narrow shelf above each bed could be plainly seen. All the small vases and pictures and china animals--all the odds and ends we had cherished most since we were babies. When Bettina had come in that night, the first thing she did was to clear a space for her cotillion favours. The moonlight showed the brilliant huddle of fan and bonbon-basket tied with rose-colour, and, most conspicuous of all, the silver horn hung with parti-coloured ribbons. When we had lain quiet in our beds for ten minutes or so, Bettina pulled out a pillow from under her head, and propped it so that the moon couldn't shine any longer on the be-ribboned horn. And neither could Betty's eyes rest on it any more. She lay still for some time, and I was falling asleep, when I heard her bed creak. She had pulled herself half out of the covers, and was leaning over the pillow-barrier. She took the horn and the other favours, one by one, and with much gravity thrust them under the bed. A sigh of satisfaction and a settling down again. I turned and smiled into my pillow. It was so exactly the sort of thing Bettina used to do when she was in the nursery--punishing her toys when things went wrong. What a blessing, I said to myself, that I was coming to like Ranny Dallas. For, quite certainly, he was going to be my brother-in-law. CHAPTER XIII THE CLOUD AGAIN The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the North. Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was. "Perhaps he will write," I said. "He isn't the sort that writes--not even when he's friends with a person." Then, with a rather miserable laugh, Betty added: "He _says_ he can't spell." So I gathered that she had asked him to try. And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two, and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne. We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely what would happen--all, that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter. It was a somewhat subdued Bettina who began that year; but I don't think it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long. (Oh, Bettina! how is it now?) I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being actively unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father was very ill. Ranny's place was at home. Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in common. And she spoke as though any week-end that found his father better, Ranny might motor down. So we waited. Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends. As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced prematurely. I, too. I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love me for finding--all alone like this. I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret. * * * * * My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm. My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty? "The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?" "Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and dogs." "Oh, as for dogs!----" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?" "Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say." She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance." When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things." Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late." "Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself." At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, _I_ have been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want." She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know." As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part--of how our very devotion and craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny." "Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!" I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so? Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself. "What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me." "Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell." And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved with me too. I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics" to tell. The very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of girls!--girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate. I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens, have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet.... "Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her own. I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself incredibly bold, I reminded her of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said (unconscious at the moment of the lie)--"you know all that happens to us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big." I could not have approached her in any way more telling than to make confidence on her part seem a corollary to confidence on ours. She cast about with an indulgent air for something new. And then I heard for the first time of the "sort of cousin" who had come to keep house for my grandfather, and to bring up the little girl of four. I wondered the more at so important a figure having been left out of all previous pictures, when I heard that my grandfather had cared more for this "sort of cousin" than he had cared for his only child. The cousin must have been a horrible woman, though my mother told me so little about her, I cannot think how I knew. The most definite thing that was said was: "She brought out all that was least good in your grandfather." And when he ceased to care for the cousin in one way, she made him care for her in another. "She ministered to all his whims and perversities." My mother dismissed the first sixteen years of her life with: "I had seen a great deal of evil before I was grown; mercifully, I met your father when I was still very young." He was the one man, I gathered, whom she had ever found worthy of all trust, all love; and she had been so glad to leave home--to leave England! But out there in India she must have seen plenty of nice army people. Oh, plenty of army people. She seemed not to want to dwell much even on the happy time. She had her two children in three years. The babies kept her at home, and she had loved being at home with the babies--and above all with my father in his spare hours. Then, as we knew, he had been killed out tiger-hunting. And she broke off, "Now go on about the Boynes." I asked her, mischievously, why she took such an interest in the Boynes, as though I had not tried to bring that very thing about. Her ideal of "the confidence that should exist" broke down even here; the navy, she said evasively, was "the finest of the services." "Not finer than the army," I protested. "Yes, finer than the army. Peace was the real 'enemy' to soldiers; but peace did not demoralise sailors, for there was always the sea for them to conquer. Was Hermione expecting to see the Boynes soon again?" I smiled inwardly. She might as well have confessed that she thought the older Boyne might "do" for me, and the younger Boyne for Betty. But what had become of the ideal of confidence? Confidence, to be complete, must needs be mutual. If Betty and I had not been able to tear out of our hearts and hold up for inspection those shy hopes of ours, neither had our mother been able to show us the true face of memory. I did not know then how hard this was to do, or that the faithfullest intention must fall short; that genius itself cannot pass on to others all the poignancy of past Hope, or--mercifully--more than a pale reflection of past Despair. There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately behind. They may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed. The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue, stand appalled. The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I felt about---- No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look like this. I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how, when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me--days which our mother must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the key to--there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the beauty of life to those two lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended. The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour. Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the sadness of life to older people. Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of older women--that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed. She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness--and a fear. Not even my secret could console me at such moments. Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother--where was Betty? She was late. She was very late. Unaccountably, alarmingly late. CHAPTER XIV WHERE IS BETTINA? She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina waited--nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case." She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked nor stirred. We went out in the hall and held a whispered conference. "She won't mind a bit," Bettina was sure. "It isn't as if it would do another time"--for the Helmstones were off again to-morrow. To clinch the argument, Betty told me that Hermione was expecting a letter, by the last post, from a friend of Ranny's; the one chance of hearing anything for Heaven knew how long. So I let Bettina go. * * * * * My mother never woke till nearly nine, and of course the first thing she asked was, "Where is Betty?" I said the maid had taken her, and Lady Helmstone had promised to send her home. My mother was extremely ill-pleased that Bettina had gone. I had hoped that after that profound sleep she would wake up feeling better, as I have noticed the books nearly always say is what will happen. But I have noticed, since, that people who have been sleeping heavily at some unseasonable hour will often waken not refreshed and calmed, but out of sorts, and easily fretted by quite small things. They seem to require time before they can collect themselves and see the waking world in true proportion. "We thought you wouldn't mind," I said. And why _should_ we? Why, above all, should I, who was so much older...? "To go anywhere else ... I should have been against it," I said, "but to the Helmstones--where you let her go so constantly." Saying that was a mistake. Did not Betty know, above all, did not I know, the feeling of all the proper sort of mothers about young girls being away from home at night? Day-visiting--a totally different matter. It was "the last evening for weeks," I reminded her. The Helmstones were going back to town.... "I am not sorry," said my mother. To my surprise the circumstance that seemed to annoy her most was that I had not gone with Bettina. She spoke to me in such a way I felt the tears come into my eyes. "I stayed on your account," I said. "I have told you before"--and she told me again. The supper tray came up, and went down scarcely touched. I asked if I should read to her. No. There had been reading enough for that day. So I mended the fire and brought some sewing. She lay with the candle alight on the night table, waiting, listening. "Who is to be there?" "Oh, just the family, I suppose." "Did you ask?" "No--but Betty would have said, if...." "----_never even asked!_" We sat in silence. "What time is it?" "A quarter to ten." "It is not like Bettina," she said presently. Bettina had never in her life done such a thing before. I agreed she never had. If Bettina transgressed (and I admit that this was seldom), she never did so outright. And she was not sly. She did not so much evade as avoid an inconvenient rule. My mother remembered, no doubt, that any sin of deliberate disobedience was far more likely to be mine. "I suppose the child, not able to ask my permission, came to you." Yes, she had consulted me. "And you took it upon yourself----" I sat there, in disgrace. Presently: "Perhaps the Boynes have motored down. Or one of them." I said I had no reason to think so. All the same, I couldn't help welcoming the suggestion. For the idea that the Boynes, "or one of them," might be there, seemed, oddly enough, to excuse Bettina in my mother's eyes. And she was moved to make me understand why I had been reproached. We had to be far more careful than most girls. I heard about the heavy responsibility of bringing up "girls without a father." I wondered in what way our father's being here would have altered the events of this particular evening. And since he had been quoted to justify anxiety, I made bold to go to him for cheer. At times of stress before, I had invoked my father. Not often, and all-cautiously. And never yet in vain. That night I wondered aloud what were the kind of things our father would have done. "His mere being here would make all the difference." His mere name certainly did much. Once again I had cause to bless him for taking the chill out of the domestic atmosphere. She talked more about him and, by implication, more about herself that night than ever before or after. She told me of the mistakes he had saved her from. The things he had warned her against. Though he was brave as a lion, she would have me believe that he was afraid of trusting people. He had said to her after a certain occurrence---- "What occurrence?" I interrupted. "No need to go into that," she said hurriedly. The point lay in his comment: "The safe course is not to trust anyone." "That is very uncomfortable," I said. It was better, she answered, to be less comfortable and safe, than to be more comfortable and---- "And what?" She had stopped suddenly, and felt for her watch on the night table. "Ten minutes past. They will surely see that she starts for home by ten o'clock." We sat for five minutes without speaking. I thinking of my father. Then we heard the maids making the nightly round, shutting and locking up the house. "Look out of the window," my mother said. I could see nothing. The night was dark and still. "She can't be long now," my mother said. "But go and tell them they may bolt the front door. We are sure to hear her coming up the walk." She called me back. "Tell them not to forget to put the chain on the door." Oh, the times we had been told that! Downstairs I found the house shut up and barred as for a siege. The maids had done their work and vanished. I was the only creature stirring. Upstairs the same. My mother seemed not to hear me come back into the room. She was lying with the candle-light on her face, and on her face the old listening fear. What made her look like that? If there had been anything, if there had been even that old mournful sound of the wind, I could have minded less. But the night was very quiet. The house was hushed as death. And still she listened. Now and then she would lift her eyelids suddenly, and the intense white of the eyeballs shone, while she strained to catch some sound beyond my narrower range. I sat there by the fire a long, long time. And she never spoke--until I, unable to bear the stillness any longer, fell back for that last time on the familiar Magic--my father, and the old, beautiful days. She stirred. She folded and unfolded her hands, and then took up the theme. But in a different key. "The more I came to understand other women's lives," she said, "the more I saw that my happiness was like the safety of a person walking a narrow plank across a chasm." Then after a moment, she added, "A question of nice equilibrium." "I don't know how you ever bore the fall," I said. "The fall?" "Yes--when father was killed--and all the happiness fell down." Then she said something wholly incomprehensible at the time, but which I understand better now. "Perhaps," she said, "I would have borne what you call 'the fall' less well if I hadn't known ... there are worse than tigers in the world's jungle." I felt I was on the track of some truer understanding, and a secret excitement took hold of me. "How was it you came to know that?" I asked. "It is a thing," she said, "that even happy women learn." Then, hurriedly, she went on: "And it ended--my happiness--before any stain or tarnish dimmed it. All bright and shining one moment, the next all vanished." I watched the face I knew so well. Covertly, I watched it. Saw the delicate lineaments a little pinched with anxiety. The eyes veiled one moment, the next lifting wide as at a sudden call. "What was that?" she said. I heard nothing. Oftenest that quick lift of heavy eyelids, and the flash of bright fixity, would come without any following of speech. And the eloquence of that silence, tense, glittering, wrought more upon my nerves than any words. All my body strung to attention, I listened with my soul. No sound. No sound at all. Then, inwardly, I rebelled against the tyranny and waste of this emotion. Why was she like this? "Have they put on the chain?" she asked. "Yes." "And bolted the door?" "Yes." "How do you know they have bolted it?" "I heard them." "Heard _them_?" "Heard the bolt." "One may easily think a stiff bolt has gone home, and all the while----" "But I am sure." My easy certainty seemed to anger her. "I thought so, too, once." She said it with a vehemence that startled me. After a moment: "Was that here?" I asked. "No, no, no"--she shook it off. I went and knelt down by the bed. "Tell me about it, mother." "No, no. It is not the kind of thing you need ever know." "How can you be sure? _You_ weren't expecting anything to happen." I felt my way by the shrinking in her face. "Yet someone came to the unbolted door----?" "What makes you think that!" she exclaimed, and I was hot and cold under her look. "It--it only came into my head"; and then, with fresh courage, or renewed curiosity, "But I am right!" I said, with sudden firmness. "Isn't it so? You were horribly frightened, _weren't_ you?" I touched her hand, expecting she would draw it away from me, but the fingers had locked on the silk frill of the quilt. They were cold; they made me think of death. "Yes," she said, very low, "I was horribly frightened." I felt the shuddering that ran along her wrist, and the chill of that old fear of hers crept into my blood, too. She looked through me, as though I were vapour, as though the bodyless Dread her eyes were fixed on once again for that instant--as though _that_ were the most real presence in the room. "Tell me," I whispered, "tell me what it was." "----impossible to talk about such things." She drew away her hand. "All you need to know is ... the need of taking care. Of never running risks. What time is it?" "Five minutes past eleven." "Did Lady Helmstone say she and Hermione would walk back with Bettina?" "No, she didn't say that." "What did she say?" "Just that she would send Betty home." After some time she said quite suddenly: "That might mean alone in the motor." I was going to say "Why not?" But as I looked up from my work at the face under the candle light, a most foolish and indefinable fear flashed across my mind--a feeling too ridiculous to own--sudden, indefinable dread of that inoffensive man, the Helmstones' head chauffeur. I had no sooner cast out the childish thought than I remembered the two under men. One only a sort of motor-house "odd man." To that hangdog creature might fall the task of driving Betty home! I had thought of this man vaguely enough before, yet with some dash of human sympathy, for it was common talk that he was "put upon" by the other men. He was a weakling, and unhappy; now I suddenly felt him to be evil--desperate. Oh, why had I let Bettina go! Even if the chauffeurs, all three, were decent enough ordinarily, what if just to-night they had been drinking? Betty coming across the deserted heath with a drunken driver---- Oh, God, I prayed, don't let anything happen to Bettina.... * * * * * A quarter past eleven. I put on a bold face. "They wouldn't, I think, have a motor-car out for Betty at this hour, and the reason she is late is because she has told them she would like the walk." "They will hardly send a woman with her at this time of night." We both started violently, and all because a coal had fallen out of the grate on the metal fender. My mother was the first to speak: "They are haphazard people, I sometimes think.... You don't suppose they would send her back with a groom...?" I said I was sure they would not, though an hour before I would have asked, Why not? "Lord Helmstone couldn't be expected to put himself out. I _wish_ I had not let the servants go to bed!" she exclaimed. "Why didn't you think of it? Of course, _they_ should have gone and brought Bettina home." I saw now how right and proper this would have been. Half past eleven. "It is very strange," I said. "Go and look out again, you may see a lantern, or the motor-lamps." I leaned out into the fresh-smelling darkness, and I saw nothing, I heard nothing. I hung there, unwilling to draw in my head and admit the world without was empty of Bettina. She had been thrown out of the car. She was lying by the roadside somewhere, dead, that was why she didn't come home. Suddenly I thought of Gerald Boyne. What if, after all, he had been dining there. He would be sure to want to bring Bettina home. Yes, and those casual Helmstones would turn Bettina over to him without a thought. A man Ranny wouldn't let his sister dance with in a room full of her friends.... Bettina, setting out with Gerald Boyne to cross the lonely heath--and never reaching home. I knew all this was wild and foolish ... then why did these imaginings make me feel I could not bear the suspense another moment? I shut the window and turned round. "You must let me go for her," I said. The same suggestion must have been that moment on her lips. "Go, wake the servants," she said, "tell them to dress quickly. Get your cloak and light the lantern." She gave her short sharp directions. The young servant was to go with me. The old one was to lock the door behind us, and wait up with my mother. I went with a candle through silent passages, and knocked on doors. I left the lantern burning down in the hall, and in my cloak went back to my mother's room. She was leaning out, over the side of the bed listening. "Aren't they ready?" "They are only just roused." "Servants take ten times as long to dress as----Hark. Look out!" I went back to the window and peered between the close-drawn curtains, with hands at my temples on either side of my eyes. Nothing. Except.... Yes, I could hear the heavy step of the older woman down in the hall unlocking, unbolting, unchaining the door ... that the housemaid and I might lose no time when she was ready. The old woman must be waiting for us there below, with the lantern in her hand. A faint light was lying on the path. Not a sound now in all the world except my mother's voice behind me: "You will take the short cut." "Oh yes." "And as you go don't talk--_listen_." "Listen!" I echoed, with mounting horror. "What should I hear?" "How do we know?" A chill went down my back. The bedroom-door opened, and Bettina walked in. "Such a nice evening! They've been teaching me bridge. Why have you put on your cloak? Why are you looking--oh! what has happened to you?" Not very much was said to Bettina that night. She and two of the Helmstones' maids had come round by the orchard-gate, walking softly on the grass, "so as not to waken mother." Only a little crestfallen, she was sent away to bed. My mother had motioned me to wait. As I watched Bettina making her apologies and her good-night, I thought how worse than useless had been all that anxiety and strain. "I shall remember to-night," I said to myself, "whenever I am frightened again." But this, I could see before she spoke, was not the moral my mother was drawing. "Shut the door," she signed. And when I had come back to her, she drew herself up in bed and laid her hand on mine. "I want you to make me a promise," she said. "It is not fair to girls not to let them know that terrible things _can_ happen. Promise me that you will take better care of Bettina. Never let anyone make you forget----" I promised--oh, I promised that! CHAPTER XV MY SECRET Eric, like the violets and primroses, came earlier that third spring. He seemed an old friend now, with an established footing in the house. Yet I had never been alone with him for more than five minutes before the day I told him my secret. I had imagined it all so different from the way it fell out. I said to myself that I would meet him on his way home some evening, after he had played the last round. He would never know that I had been waiting for him in the copse; but that would be where I should tell him, standing by the nearer stile, where I had first seen kindness in his eyes. My mother's health was worse again that spring, and when I wasn't studying I was much with her. After Eric came I stayed with her even more, for he said she had lost ground. He discouraged her from coming downstairs. I believe he prevailed on her to keep her room chiefly by coming constantly to see her, bringing books and papers. My mother's sick-room was not like any other I have seen. It was full of light and air, and hope and pleasantness. She would lie on the sofa in one of the loose gowns she looked so lovely in, and we would have tea up there. Nearly always I managed to go down to the door with Eric. One day, that very first week, he came a good hour before we expected him. Bettina had shut herself up to write to Hermione, "----and I am afraid my mother is asleep," I said. "Well, you are not," he answered. I saw his eyes fall on the books and papers that littered the morning-room sofa, and I felt myself grow red. The books would betray me! The strange thing was that he pushed them away without ever looking at them! And he sat down beside me. He had never been so close to me before. I think I was outwardly quite unmoved. But I could not see him, even at a distance, without inward commotion. When he sat down so near me, a great many pulses I had not known before were in my body began to beat and hammer. I felt my heart grow many sizes too big, and my breast-bone ache under the pressure. I said to myself the one essential was that he should not suspect--for him to guess the state he had thrown me into would be the supreme disaster. He might despise me. Almost certainly he would think I was hysterical. I knew the contempt he felt for hysterical women. Never, never should he think me one! I would rather die, sitting rigidly in my corner without a sign, than let him think I had any taint of the hysterical in me! Above all, for my Great Secret's sake, I must show self-command. Upon that I saw, in a flash, this was the ideal moment for telling him about The Plan. He asked how had my mother slept. I don't know what I said. But I remember that he spoke very gently of her. And he said I must husband my strength. I stayed too much indoors, he said. Hereafter I was to take an hour's brisk walk every day of my life. I told him I couldn't always do that in these days. "You must," he said. I thought of my books, and shook my head. "Won't you do it if I ask you to?" he said. He leaned a little towards me. I dared not look up. "I understand your not wanting to leave your mother," he said. "But couldn't your sister----" Then, before I could answer, "No," he said, smiling a little, "I suppose she couldn't." There was something in his tone that did not please me. "You mean Betty is too young?" No; he didn't mean that, he said. What _did_ he mean? "Well, she has other preoccupations, hasn't she?" he said lightly. "You mean Hermione? Hermione and all the family are in London." No; he didn't mean Hermione. I was in too much inner turmoil to disentangle his meaning then. For he went on quickly to say: "Suppose I sit with your mother for that hour, while you go out and get some exercise?" I was to lose an hour of him--tramping about alone! The very thought gave me an immense self-pity. My eyes grew moist.... "Come, come!" I said to myself, "keep a tight rein!" Just as I was getting myself under control again, he undid it all by laying his hand over mine. "Let me help you," he said. "Oh, w-will you?" I stammered; while to myself I said: "He is being kind; don't think it is more--don't _dare_ think it is more!" Though I couldn't help thinking it _was_ more, I turned to the thought of my Great Scheme as a kind of refuge from a feeling too overwhelming to be faced. And yet, I don't know, it may have been partly some survival in me of the coquetry I thought I hated; that, too, may have helped to make me catch nervously at a change of subject. So I interrupted with something about: "If you really do want to help me----" But I found I could not talk coherently while his touch was on my hand. The words I had rehearsed and meant to say--they flew away. I felt my thoughts dissolving, my brain a jelly, my bones turning to water. With the little remnant of will-power left I drew my hand away. My soul and my body seemed to bleed at the wound of that sundering. For in those few seconds' contact we two seemed to have grown into one. I found I had risen to my feet and gone to sit by the table, with a sense of having left most of myself behind clinging to his hand. I made an immense effort to remember things he had told us about those early struggles of his. And I asked questions about that time--questions that made him stare: "How did you guess? What put that in your head?" I said I imagined it would be like that. "Well, it _was_ like that." "And you overcame everything!" I triumphed. "You are the fortunate one of your family." He laughed a little grim kind of laugh. "The standard of fortune is not very high with us." He looked thoroughly discontented. "I am afraid," I said, "you are one of the ungrateful people." What had he to be grateful for? He threw the question at me. "Why, that you have the most interesting profession in the world," I said. "You don't mean the practice of medicine!--mere bread-and-butter." "You don't love your profession!" He smiled, and that time the smile was less ungenial. But I had not liked the tone of patronage about his work. "They were all wasted on you, then--those splendid opportunities--the clinic in Hamburg, the years in Paris----" "Oh, well"--he looked taken aback at my arraignment--"I mayn't be a thundering success, but I won't say I'm a waster." "If you don't love and adore the finest profession in the world----! Yes, somebody else ought to have had your chances. Me, for instance." "You! Oh, I dare say," his smile was humorous and humouring. "You think I'm not in earnest. But I am." I went to the cupboard where Bettina and I each had a shelf, and brought out an old wooden workbox. I opened it with the little key on my chain. I took out papers and letters. "These are from the Women's Medical School in Hunter Street"--I laid the letters open before him--"answers to my inquiries about terms and conditions." He glanced through one or two. "What put this into your head?" he said, astonished, and not the least pleased so far as one could see. "How did you know of the existence of these people?" "You left a copy of the _Lancet_ here once." Something in his face made me add: "But I should have found a way without that." "What way--way to what?" He spoke irritably in a raised voice. I looked anxiously at the door. "We won't say anything just yet to my mother," I begged. "My mother wouldn't--understand." "What wouldn't she understand?" All his kindness had gone. He was once more the cold inaccessible creature I had seen that first day stalking up to Big Klaus's door. "What I mean is," I explained, quite miserably crestfallen, "my mother wouldn't understand what I feel about studying medicine. But _you_"--and I had a struggle to keep the tears back--"I've looked forward so to telling you----" He turned the papers over with an odd misliking expression. "For one thing, you could never pass the entrance examination," he said. I asked why he thought that. "Do you see yourself going to classes in London, cramming yourself with all this?"--his hand swept the qualifications list. "Not classes in London," I said. "But people do the London Matriculation without that. I am taking the University Tutorial Correspondence Course," I said. I was swallowing tears as I boasted myself already rather good at Botany and French. My mother thought even my German tolerable. I picked up the little pamphlet issued by the University of London on the subject of Matriculation Regulations, and I pointed out Section III., "Provincial Examinations." The January and June Matriculation Examinations were held at the Brighton Municipal Technical College. He could see that made it all quite convenient and easy. "I can see it is all quite mad," he answered. "Suppose by some miracle you were to pass the entrance exams.--have you any idea how long they keep you grinding away afterwards?" "Five to seven years," I said. "Well! Can't you see what a wild idea it is?" I said to myself: he knows about our straitened means. "You mean it costs such a great deal." "It costs a great deal more than you think," he said, shifting about discontentedly in his chair. Then I told him that my mother had some jewels. "I am sure that when she sees I am in earnest, when I have got my B. A., she will be willing I should use the jewels----" "It's a dog's life," he said, "for a woman." I gathered my precious papers together. "You think I shall mind the hard work. But I shan't." "It isn't the hard work," he said, "though it's not easy for a man. For a woman----" he left the woman medical-student hanging over the abyss. For all my questions I could not bring him to the point of saying what these bugbears were. He was plainly tired of the subject. My first disappointment had yielded to a spiritless catechism of how this and how that. My persistent canvass of the matter brought him nearer a manifestation of ill-temper than I had ever seen in him. There was a great deal, he said, that he couldn't talk about to a girl of eighteen. But had I or anybody else ever heard of a man who was a doctor himself wanting his sister, or his daughter to study medicine? He had never known one. _Not one._ I confessed I couldn't think why that was, except that nobody belonging to a girl ever wanted her to do anything, except--I stopped short and then hurried on.... "But after all, you know that women do go through the medical schools and come out all right." He shook his head. "They've lost something. Though I admit most of the women you mean, never had the thing I mean." I said I didn't understand. "Well, you ought to. You've got it." He looked at me with an odd expression and asked how long I'd had this notion in my head. I said a year. "All this time! You've been full of this ever since I was here last!" I lied. I said I had thought of absolutely nothing else all that time. He stood up ... but I still sat there wondering what had made me tell him that lie. "You won't go," I said, "without seeing my mother." To-day--he hadn't time. I went down with him as usual to the front door, weeping inwardly, yet hoping, praying, that before the door closed he would say something that would help--something kind. He often said the best things of all just as he was going--as though he had not dared to be half so interesting, or a tenth so kind, but in the very act of making his escape. To-day he put on his covert coat in a moody silence. Still silent, he took his hat. I stood with the door-knob in my hand. "You think, then, even if Aunt Josephine helped----" "Who is Aunt Josephine?" "My father's step-sister. She is well off." Aunt Josephine's riches made no impression upon him. He was going away a different man from the one who had come in and pushed away my papers, to sit beside me and to take my hand. He pulled his stick out of the umbrella-stand. "You feel sure I couldn't?" I pleaded at the door. "I feel sure you could do something better." He was out on the step. "Good-bye," he said, with the look that hurt me, so tired--disappointed. He had come for peace--for my mother's tranquil spirit to bring rest to his tired mind. And all he had found here was my mother's daughter fretting to be out in the fray! I had not even listened. I had interrupted and pulled away my hand. After I shut the door, I opened it again, and called out: "Oh, what was it you were going to tell me?" "It wouldn't interest you," he said, without even turning round. CHAPTER XVI THE YACHTING PARTY I had to make use of Eric's old plea, "pressure of work," to account for his going away without seeing my mother. I watched the clock that next afternoon in a state of fever. Would he come again at three, so that we might talk alone? No. The torturing minute-hand felt its way slowly round the clock-face, its finger, like a surgeon's on my heart, pressing steadily, for all my flinching, to verify the seat and the extent of pain. Four o'clock. Five. Half-past. No hope now of his coming, I told myself, as those do who cannot give up hope. My mother questioned me. What had Mr. Annan said the day before? Had he, then, come so early for "nothing in particular"? I said that I supposed he had come early because he found he could not come late. About six o'clock, as I was counting out some drops for my mother, a ring at the front door made me start and spill the liquid on the table. He had relented! He was coming to say the things I had been so mad as to prevent his saying yesterday. We listened. My heart fell down as a woman's voice came up. Lady Helmstone! Wanting to see my mother "very particularly." We wondered, while the maid went down to bring her, what the errand might be which could not be entrusted to Bettina. For, wonderful to say, Bettina was to be allowed to go to a real dinner-party that night at the Hall. Hermione had written from London, begging that Betty might come and hear all about the yachting party. This was not the first we had heard of the project. It had been introduced in a way never to be forgotten. We had counted on hearing from the Helmstones all the thrilling details about the Coronation which was fixed for the coming June. We felt ourselves sensibly closer to the august event through our acquaintance with the Helmstones. Lesser folk than they might hope to see the great Procession going to the Abbey--King and Queen in the golden Coach of State, our particular friends the little Princes and the young Princess in yet another shining chariot, followed by the foreign Potentates, the State officials, and by _our_ Peer of the Realm with all his brother Lords and Barons in scarlet and ermine; and the flower of the British Army, a glancing, flaming glory in the rear. The highly fortunate might see this Greatest Pageant of the Age on its return from the Abbey, when the Sovereigns would be wearing their crowns and their Coronation robes. But the Helmstones! They would actually see the anointing and the crowning from their High Seats in the Abbey. Even a girl like Hermione would be asked to the State Ball. Never before had we realised so clearly the advantages of being a Peer. We thought the Helmstones very modest not to be talking continually about the Coronation. While we waited, impatient to hear more on the great theme, they had introduced the subject of the yachting trip. I remembered this while Lady Helmstone was coming up the stair--I remembered our bewilderment at learning that they hoped to sail "about Easter," and to be cruising in the Ægean at the end of June. They had forgotten the Coronation! Then the shock of hearing Lord Helmstone thank God that he would "be well out of it." London, he said, would be intolerable this season. He had let the house in Grosvenor Square "at a good round Coronation figure" to a new-made law-lord--"sort of chap who'll revel in it all." Many of the greatest houses in London were to be let to strangers. The yachting trip was one of many arranged that people might escape "the Coronation fuss." According to my mother, Lord Helmstone and his like showed a kind of treason to the country in not doing their share to make the symbolic act of Coronation a public testimony to English devotion to the Monarchy. What would become of the significance of the occasion if the aristocracy (upholders of that order typified by the King) deserted the King on a day when the eyes of the world would be upon the English throne. Oh, it was pitiable! this leaving the great inherited task to the upstart rich. Lord Helmstone's act showed blacker in the light of remembered honour done him both by the present King and by his father. We knew Lord Helmstone had liked the late King best. Yet even of him we had heard this unworthy subject speak with something less than reverence. With bated breath Bettina and I had reported these lapses, as well as the late ironic reference to "the bourgeois standards of the present Court." Our mother said that only meant that the life of the King and Queen was a model for their people. "But Lord Helmstone laughed," we persisted--"they all laughed." We saw we were wrong to dwell upon so grave a lapse. Lord Helmstone's taste was questionable, we heard. "He does not scorn the distinctions His Majesty confers." There were people--my mother was sorry if Lord Helmstone was one--who thought it superior to smile at the Fount of Honour. Smiling at Founts was one thing. But to go a-yachting when you might help to crown the King of England, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith...! Bettina and I had agreed privately that the reason she was allowed the unheard-of licence of dining out alone was that she might embrace this final opportunity of probing the mystery before the Helmstones vanished. They had come down from London for their last week-end before going to Marseilles to join the _Nautch Girl_. And now Lady Helmstone was passing our bedroom, where Bettina on the other side of the closed door sat working feverishly to finish putting some fresh lace on the gown she was to wear at dinner. Lady Helmstone came into my mother's room, very smart and smiling, and without preamble proposed to take Bettina along as one of her party. Equally without hesitation my mother said the idea was quite impracticable. Lady Helmstone was a person accustomed to having her own way. "You cannot expect," she said, "you cannot _want_ to keep your girls at home for ever." "N-no," my mother agreed, with that old look of shrinking. But Bettina was far too young---- A niece of Lord Helmstone's, just Bettina's age, was to be of the party. Ah, well, Bettina was different. Bettina was the sort of child who had never been able to face the idea of a single night away from home. And this was a question of a cruise of--how many weeks? "Six months," said Lady Helmstone cheerfully. My mother stared. Lady Helmstone could not have meant the proposal seriously--"Bettina would die of home-sickness." Lady Helmstone ventured to think not. As I have said, she was ill-accustomed to seeing her invitations set aside. She spoke of Hermione's disappointment ... they were all so fond of Bettina. She should have every care. My mother made her acknowledgments--the suggestion was most kind; most hospitably meant. But Lady Helmstone had only to put it to Bettina. She would soon see. Lady Helmstone smiled. "I think you will find Bettina would like to come with us." I was annoyed at her way of saying that, as if she knew Bettina better than we. I went into the next room, and got out my school-books. I left the door open in case my mother should need me, and I heard them talking about "daughters." There was much to be said, Lady Helmstone thought, for the way they did things in France. My mother preferred the English way. "And yet you will not take it," said the other, with that suavity that allowed her to be impertinent without seeming so. "I don't think--living as you do--you quite realise the trouble mothers take to give their girls the sort of opportunity you are refusing." There were changes--"great and radical changes," she said--changes which my mother, leading this life of the religieuse, was possibly not aware of. My mother deprecated as much as she had heard of these changes. "Ah, but, _necessary_--a question of supply and demand. You can afford to disregard them only if you do not expect your daughters to marry." My mother said stiffly that she saw no reason to suppose her daughters would not marry--"all in good time." They were very young, Bettina a child---- "She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best "opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty--I may say of patriotism--have to think seriously about these things." She herself, having married off three daughters and two nieces, might be considered something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls about London.... _Three!_ Conceive the indiscretion!--only the young one really caring about balls--the other two going stolidly through with it, season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard--I changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and _never_ more than two at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's position to do--I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in London." There was a pause. "Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a tone of perfunctory politeness. "_All the other women leave_," said Lady Helmstone, with a rusé significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. _August is the time._ I made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden, cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef--cordon bleu. 'You must give better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did." There was another significant pause. "The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those girls would be manoeuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother would be in her grave, but for...." The interview ended stiffly. The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know there had been any question of her going. "The child is already disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione." When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and said: "If Betty never went _anywhere_, I should not want her to go away in the care of a woman like that." CHAPTER XVII THE EMERALD PENDANT I put the finishing touches to Bettina's dress in our mother's room that night, so that the invalid might have the pleasure of lying there and looking at Betty, all white and golden in the candle-light. While I tied her sash I noticed her frowning at herself in the glass. "I look dreadfully missish," she said. When I protested, she said: "Worse, then! Like a charity child at a school-treat!" We were amazed. My mother asked where she had got such ideas. I heard Hermione behind Betty's voice. She turned round and faced our mother with her most beguiling air. "It's going to be mine some day ... lend me the pearl and emerald pendant." That my mother should be surprised at the suggestion, seemed only natural. But I could not see why she should be so annoyed. I, too, begged her to let Bettina wear the pendant. After all, Bettina was in her seventeenth year ... and this was a real party. "A girl of sixteen wanting to wear a thing like that!" Bettina frowned. How old must she be before she could wear the pendant? My mother wouldn't say.... After Bettina had gone, I asked about the market value of jewels. My mother seemed to think the inquiry very odd and somehow offensive. I asked if she thought the big diamond star was worth as much as £600. She said I appeared to have a very sordid way of looking at things whose real value was that they were symbolic of something beyond price. I said I knew that. But did she not think that for some great and important end, my father would have been the first to say, let the jewels be sold? My mother put her hand up to her eyes. I blew out one candle and set a shield before the other. She spoke my name and I started--the voice sounded odd. I went back to the bedside. "Are you ill?" I said. She shook her head and motioned me to sit down. Then she told me. We were living on the proceeds of the diamond star. The pendant had been sold last summer. There was nothing more worth selling except the furniture, and possibly a few prints. We owed Lord Helmstone six months' rent. I met the shock with the help of my secret. I steadied myself against the thought that, at the worst, I would find the means (through Aunt Josephine or somebody) for qualifying myself to support my mother and sister. I saw myself, at the worst, a humble soldier enlisting in that army where Eric held command. I, too, marching with that high companionship ... marching to the world's relief. In the midst of telling how I was forging ahead with my London University Tutorial Correspondence, and to what the year's successful work was leading, I kept thinking that, after all, this ill wind might help to blow away the cloud that Eric's disapproval had brought lowering over the present and obscuring all the future. My mother will be proud of me, I thought. She will even be a little touched; and then, for all the light was so dim, I saw her face of horror! It was a mad idea. Her daughter a "female doctor"! Never! "Not--not female doctor," I protested. "That _does_ sound----" "Well, you see for yourself how the very sound of it----" I assured her that I didn't dislike the sound of "medical woman." But there was no necessity to emphasise "woman" at all; the only thing important was whether the person was qualified to treat the sick. People did not feel they had to say male doctor. "Doctor is enough." I was told that the reason no one said male doctor was because "doctor" _was_ male, and everyone understood that. I left the point, and I pleaded my main cause with all my might. I hadn't any accomplishments--no music, nothing. "I'm not the decorative one, and I like 'doing things'; plain, everyday things." There had to be people like that. It was all no use. * * * * * That confession of mine, more than hers about the jewels, goaded my mother into taking a step which even we, blind as we were, felt to be epoch-making in our history. That same evening she began to talk about Aunt Josephine--to excuse her. Mrs. Harborough had been so wrapped up in her brilliant young step-brother (and Aunt Josephine would never allow the "step") that _any_ other person's coming in must inevitably have been resented. "She idolised your father." A woman of high character. Given to good works. Busied about the redemption of long-shoremen and about country treats for jam-factory girls. Knee-deep in philanthropy. And childless. She _could_ not, especially now after that old first anger had long cooled, she could not be indifferent to the fate of her brother's children. "Are you thinking of writing to her?" I said. She explained that for her to address Mrs. Harborough was, under the circumstances, hardly possible. But there was no reason in the world why I should not. I felt there were reasons, but I could not think what they were. My mother, meanwhile, grew almost cheerful, outlining the sort of thing I might say. No requests in this first communication. A letter, merely--if it found her so inclined--merely to open a long-closed door. I did not like my task. I decided I would put it off till morning, though I knew that at any time I should find it easier to write: "Please lend me £1,000 for a course of study," than write such a letter as my mother had dictated. * * * * * Betty came back from her dinner-party in great excitement. Ranny Dallas had motored over from Dartmoor that very day--with a man friend. They had been at the Helmstones' to tea. I wondered, dully, that Lady Helmstone had said nothing whatever about Ranny during her visit. She must have just parted from him. Another curious thing was that Ranny had not stayed for the dinner-party. He and his friend were at the inn. "What in the world do you think that means?" I asked Bettina, glad enough to escape from my own thoughts. She was smiling. "I think it is very natural." And why was it natural for a luxurious young man to put up with tough mutton and watery potatoes at a village inn, when he and any friend of his were certain of a welcome, and the best possible dinner, in a house like the Helmstones'? Betty merely continued to smile in that beatific, but somewhat foolish fashion. I said, rather more to make her speak than for any soberer reason, "Perhaps he isn't so sure of his welcome"; and then in a flash I saw quite clearly something I had been blind to till that instant. For all the liking the Helmstones felt for Betty they may not have liked being undeceived about Ranny's supposed devotion to Hermione. That this idea had never occurred to me before showed me stupid, I saw, as well as self-absorbed. But the idea would not have occurred to me at all, I think, but for some of the things Lady Helmstone had said to my mother that afternoon. Betty was asking me with a superior air, if I couldn't understand that Ranny would "prefer to talk things over" before meeting her at a dinner-party "with everybody looking on." She reminded me a little tremulously that it would be their very first meeting "since...." There was a moment when I thought she was going to cry. And then, without any sense of transition, I wondered how anybody in the world could be as happy as Betty looked. . . . . . The next morning, still in a mood of the deepest dejection, I dated a sheet of paper, and began: "My dear Aunt Josephine." I looked at the words for full five minutes, with a feeling of intense unwillingness to set down another syllable. And then I yielded to the impulse which made certain other words so easy, so delicious to say or trace. I took a fresh sheet. Before I knew, I had written: "Dear Mr. Annan." Well, why not? Was it not better to write to him, rather than face another afternoon like yesterday? My mother wondering, suspicious; my own eyes flying back and forth like distracted shuttles from window to clock--from clock to window, hour after hour. DEAR MR. ANNAN,--I have told my mother. She feels as you do. She does not like my idea. So I have agreed for the present not to think about it any more. I was his "sincerely," and I sent the note by one of the little Klauses. * * * * * CHAPTER XVIII RANNY I imagined that day I should never again have to live through a time of such suspense. Waiting, till I could get away without being noticed, to carry my note to Kleiner Klaus's. Waiting, for the Klaus's boy to come home. Waiting, while his mother brushed his clothes and cuffed him. Waiting, while he recovered his spirits. Waiting, while slowly, slowly, his mind took in the particulars of his errand, and the most particular part of it, in his eyes--the penny he should have when he brought me back an answer. And the long hours of that afternoon waiting for the answer, or even for the errand-boy to come back. When I was not looking out of the window my mind was still so bent on listening for one particular footstep on the brick walk, and at the door his voice--the only voice in the world with meaning in it--that scarcely any impression was made on me by other steps and other voices. I heard them, subconsciously, to dismiss them; for everything was irrelevance that wasn't Eric. But my mother interrupted my mechanical reading aloud. "Who," (with her air of listening to sounds beyond my ken) "who can all those people be?" There was Bettina in the passage making frantic signs that I was to hurry out and speak to her. And voices of men and women came up from the open door. I recognised Lord Helmstone's. I heard him asking the maid if Mr. Annan were here. "No? That's very odd," said Hermione in her sceptical way--"Perhaps he's come in without your knowing. Will you just find out?" My mother, too, had heard Lord Helmstone's cheerful bass, suggesting that his party might take shelter here. I had not noticed before the slight rain falling. "Go and ask him to come upstairs," my mother said. And lower: "I don't want _him_ to take it amiss." I saw she was thinking of her refusal to let Betty go on the yacht. Betty was waiting for me in ambush near the head of the stair: "You must come down and help me. Ranny is there, too." I was bewildered at finding so many at the door. For besides Lord Helmstone and Hermione, there was Lady Barbara, and Ranny Dallas and his friend--a cheerful, talkative, red-haired man they called Courtney. The Helmstones were still discussing whether they should come in. Hermione said it was only a slight sprinkle, and her mother was expecting them back to tea. Lady Barbara, with engaging simplicity, insisted there was no object in going back without Mr. Annan. I saw at once that Ranny looked different. Just in what way, or to what extent, I could not at first have said. A very little thinner, too little to account for the change I was dimly conscious of. And when he first came in, he came with some nonsense, and that pleasant laugh, that always "started things" in an easy harmonious key. "We've descended on you," Lord Helmstone said, "like a posse of detectives. Sleuth-hounds on that fella Annan's track. We've our instructions to bag him and carry him home to tea." Bettina (oh, I could have beaten her for that!) said Mr. Annan would very probably come in presently. And she led the way into the drawing-room, while I took Lord Helmstone upstairs. By the time I came down again Bettina had ordered tea. Hermione turned round as I came in. "What have you done with my father! Now father's disappeared!"--as if she had only just grasped the fact. "Didn't I tell you," she said to Ranny, "Duncombe is a place where if a man goes in, he doesn't come out?" Betty and I gave them tea. I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note in answer to mine. As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged, too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet, looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning his way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him, the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring--his laugh most of all gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer. When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way probably more imbecile than pleasing. I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to Bettina and to the other, newer, swain--one of the apparently endless supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them. Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the matter with Ranny. "I don't know," she whispered. I saw it was true. Bettina did not know. She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup and the low voice was earnest enough: "_Find out._" The rain had been only a passing shower. "Oh, yes, the sun has come out--but my father hasn't! Didn't I say," Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?" Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?" Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric. Ranny asked me how the sunk garden was coming on. I didn't like going so far from the gate, but Betty's earnest "find out" was ringing in my ears. I sent a searching look across the heath, and then Ranny and I left the others and went down to the rock-quadrangle that used to be so tidily affluent in stone-loving mosses, sedums and suchlike. The weeds were fast driving the more delicate things out of the neglected tangle. For the old gardener had been gone a year, now, and there was overmuch for a jobbing person to do in a day or two a week. I apologised for the poor unkempt place, thinking how different I might have made it, but for the hours I spent over books. And would Eric have liked me better if---- I craned my neck, uneasy at not being able to see the gate nor any part of the bypath. Only the higher reach of heath road. Ranny had not pretended to be listening. I don't think he so much as saw how changed the garden was. We talked about the new young man--"awful good sort," according to Ranny. But that testimony, too, he gave in an absent-minded, perfunctory way. "Can't we sit down?" he said, looking blindly at a garden seat still shining-wet. I said we'd better walk. I lead him back near enough the house to see if the others had waylaid Eric. No, just the same group under my mother's window--Hermione and Babs arguing hotly about something. The red-haired young man aiming at an imaginary golf-ball with the crook-handle of his heavy walking-stick, and swinging it violently over his shoulder, that Bettina might see the approved position of feet and body before, and after, a furious drive. Whether Bettina made a practice of asking for this information I cannot say. But every man who came our way, young or old, was seized with an uncontrollable desire to teach Bettina the difference between good form and bad form at the game of golf. Ranny had been walking with his head bent and no pretence at making conversation. When I stopped, he looked up suddenly and caught sight of the group. He wheeled about, and stood with his back to the house and his face averted from me as well. "Look here," he said, "why shouldn't we go and meet Annan?--warn him--eh?" My heart leapt at the suggestion. And yet.... "Why should you want to do that?" I said suspiciously. "Oh, well, I don't care where we go--only ..." His voice sounded so queer I felt frightened. "I don't think I'll go back to _them_ just yet," he managed to bring out. "Do you mind?" CHAPTER XIX ANOTHER GIRL We turned off through the shrubbery, and went out by the side gate along the bypath to the links. Ranny walked behind, absolutely silent, till he burst out: "May I smoke?" When he had lit a cigarette, I glanced back. I thought he looked a shade less miserable. I could see the four figures standing out against the house, and still no sign anywhere of Eric. I asked Ranny if he was to be one of the yachting party. "Lord, no!" Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something about how we should miss Hermione. "Er--yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was steadier. "Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you." "Me?" Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's a woman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came." I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?" "Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out--I had never backed in--I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him. "How will it end?" I asked. "End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday." We walked on. "They've asked Betty," I said. "_No!_" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?" "Yesterday evening." "Is Betty going?" "No," I said. And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?" "She doesn't know anything about it. My mother doesn't want her to go." And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No sign. Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness--thinking Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day. I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since Christmas. "Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating, almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell you about it, and see if--if you thought I've advised him right...." The friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was. Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting--as a rule. But the weather was rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing earthly to do, except rag, and--you know the kind of thing." I didn't know a bit, but I said I did. "Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed thing to do, so---- Oh, well, they got engaged." He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and went home to think it out. _Couldn't_ think it out. Felt he'd better go and talk it over with somebody----" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole to be in, isn't it?" I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell the girl he'd made a mistake. "Oh, but he couldn't do _that_!" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend of course he'd have to go through with it. "You don't mean," I said, "that when he was feeling like that you think he ought to let the poor girl marry him!" He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life if his friend drew back. I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back. Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of a mainstay, "my friend--he isn't a cad you know. A man _can't_ back out of a thing like that." Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had "backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him. "Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry, nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about," he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to have--oh, it's rotten luck!" I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He said that what _he_ thought wasn't the question. The question was what the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked. Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake. Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling. I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick. But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that "feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The girl _couldn't_ be told the truth. "She'll guess it!" But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she couldn't be expected to release--m--my friend." "Why?" "Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably never have as good an offer again." I was conscious of an inner fury when he said that. I turned on him. And all of a sudden, quite curiously, my feeling changed. His face showed not only utter innocence of any arrogance, the expression on it was of great misery. And this was so at odds with the roundness and the hint of dimples, the roughened hair that the damp air had begun to curl, that as I looked at him, I felt the queer, stirring-at-the-heart sort of softness perhaps only women know, when they catch a glimpse in some man's face of the child that died when he grew up. I could see just what Ranny had been like when he was in short dresses. Full of laughter; as he was still when we first knew him. And in face of those earlier bumps and bruises, just this bewilderment overmastering the pain of the baby who is outraged at the disproportion between desert and reward--the baby who thinks, if he doesn't say: "I never did a single thing, and here all this has tumbled down on my head." In that instant I saw how lovable Ranny Dallas was, and instead of reproaching him, I found myself saying: "If that's true--what you say--it is very horrible for the girl, but I see it is probably nearly as horrible for the man." And Ranny sat down on the wet heather under a gorse bush and buried his face in his hands. "Get up," I said; "here's my handkerchief. Get up quickly. Lady Helmstone is coming." But who was the man with her? It was Eric Annan. CHAPTER XX TWO INVITATIONS AND A CRISIS Before those two were visible to the group round Duncombe front door, or within hailing distance of us, they turned into the bypath leading to Big Klaus's. I could not tell whether Eric had seen us. But I was quite sure Lady Helmstone had. Sure, too, that she had deliberately avoided us. Ranny didn't want to come back with me, and I didn't press him. I promised him I would say he was going to walk across the heath to the inn--"_had_ to get back--expecting a telegram." I stayed behind in the gorse bushes alone, till I saw Lord Helmstone and all his party going home. . . . . . I couldn't bear the thought of meeting Betty. I went round by the kitchen and crept up the back stairs. I listened at my mother's door. Not a sound. Then I heard Betty downstairs playing the accompaniment to a song she and Ranny used to sing. So I opened my mother's door and went in. The first thing she said was, without any preface, "I know, now, why Lady Helmstone invited a child like Bettina to go yachting for six months rather than you." "So do I," I answered; "they all adore Bettina. And then she is Hermione's special friend." "There is another reason," my mother said, looking out of the window. "A reason that concerns--Lady Barbara." Then she glanced at me, a little shyly, and away her eyes went again to the window. "Lord Helmstone thinks a sea-voyage would be the best thing in the world for Mr. Annan. They are asking him to be one of the party." I felt as if some hard substance had struck me violently in the face. But I managed to bring out the words: "Is he going, do you think?" "No doubt he will go," she said. * * * * * Already I seemed to have lost him as utterly as though he had died. Yet with none of that sad comfort my mother had spoken of--the comfort of knowing one's possession safe beyond all risk of loss or tarnishing. I had never been on a yacht. I had never seen a yacht. Yet I could see Eric on the _Nautch Girl_. And Lady Barbara! Her mother's words came back: "Very little is done at balls." Very much, the story-books had told me, was done by throwing people together on a long voyage. My own heart told me the same. Yes, I had lost him. And I had lost myself. * * * * * The next day was Sunday. In the morning Hermione came to carry Bettina off for their last day together. I had to promise that, if Ranny should come to Duncombe, I would send for Betty. . . . . . As I sat with my mother, that same afternoon, the door opened, and there was the maid bringing in Mr. Annan. I think I scarcely spoke or moved. It was my mother who said: "I thought you would come to say good-bye." "'Good-bye'?" Then, with unusual _brusquerie_ where my mother was concerned, he added: "When _I_ come to see people, what I say is, 'How do you do?'" "But aren't you going away to-morrow?" "Why should I?" "Why, to catch the _Nautch Girl_." "I can't think of a girl I should so little care to catch." And he wasn't going at all! Had never contemplated it for a moment! The weight of the world fell off my shoulders. And for nearly five minutes of a joy almost too great to be borne, I believed that it was because of me he wasn't going. Then he told my mother it was because of his work. And so it was that, unconsciously, he made good the excuse I had offered for his bolting off the afternoon I told him my secret. He seemed to have forgotten that episode. At least, he behaved as though it had never happened. He laughed a little over his interview with her ladyship. "Very determined individual, Lady Helmstone." He had told her, finally, that he hadn't time even to go to his sister's wedding. He had not thought it necessary, he said to add that he wouldn't have gone to his sister's wedding however much time he had. Of course, my mother asked why such unbrotherly behaviour? He told us that he didn't approve of the marriage. There was nothing against the man's character. He was a "Writer to the Signet," which seemed in Scotland to mean a sort of barrister. I said "Writer to the Signet" sounded much finer than "barrister." I was told that Maggie Annan could not be expected to live on a fine sound. And that was about all they would have. This particular "Writer to the Signet" was poor. "Oh, poorer than poor!" I didn't like his way of saying that. As we went downstairs I was rather glad of being able to disagree with him about something. It would keep me from being foolish. I had that feeling of the creature who has been straining long at bonds, and finds the sudden loosing a test of equilibrium. For fear I should seem too gloriously content with him, I taxed Eric with thinking over much about money. He said a man may put up with any sort of hardship he likes for himself. But no man had a right to marry till he could support a wife in some sort of comfort. I suggested that perhaps Maggie Annan cared less about comfort than she cared about other things. He retorted that Maggie probably hadn't thought it out at all. She was acting on impulse. "To think it out--that was the man's business." And so on. I felt myself growing impatient when he said "comfort" for the second time. "When people are old, yes! 'Comfort' then. But when they're young, what _does_ it matter?" He leaned against the newel of the staircase and looked at me, quite surprised. "I thought you were more practical," he said. "I _am_ practical. That's why I say comfort is wasted on the young. They don't even want it--unless they're rather horrid sort of young people." "Thank you," he said, laughing, and I felt hot. I tried to explain. Such a lot of things were fun when you were young, especially when they were shared. I had noticed that. Things that made you cross, and made you ill when you were older---- Suddenly I stopped, saying in my heart: "Heavens! isn't this the kind of foolishness I was hoping to be saved from? Or is it worse?..." For Eric was smiling in such a disconcerting way. I said primly that Miss Maggie did not need me to defend her, and that I must not keep him from his work. That word was like the touch of a whip. In two seconds he was gone. The next day, Monday, just the same. He ran in only for a moment to see my mother. He could not sit down; he could not do this, nor that. Work, work! It had seized him in a fresh grip. I was thankful to the work for having carried him away that Monday afternoon, when Betty came back from seeing the Helmstones off. It was a Betty we had never seen before. I don't know what else Hermione had said to her, but Betty had been told that she, too, might have gone yachting. It was like a stab to see my mother's face now, and to remember the confidence with which she had quoted the old story about Bettina's insisting on the promise that she should not be made to pay visits: "Not _never_?" "Not never!" I had hated Lady Helmstone for saying that Bettina would, in her ladyship's opinion, be found to have outgrown her reluctance. It was true. Bettina wanted to go! My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge. "I was a baby then. What did I know?" And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she was _not_ going to leave her mother. * * * * * I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a tangle. I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind--absolute quiet and tranquillity." "You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason." * * * * * I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely gathering to burst--and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more than once. But my mother, never. "You will see all the beautiful places some day, my darling." Bettina was sure she never should. This had been her one chance--who else was likely to take her? "The fit and proper person. Your husband will take you, as your father took me." That answer surprised us both. I could not blame Bettina for feeling that it seemed to postpone the delights of travel overlong. The strange new Bettina went about the house, settling to nothing, at once restive and idle. All on edge. The worst sign of all was that she neglected her music. My mother remonstrated. "What's the use?" "You will find your music a very important part of your equipment." "Equipment!" said the new Bettina scornfully. "Equipment for what?" "For taking your place in the world." "The world!" Bettina exchanged looks with me. Yes, the world seemed far away. Inaccessible. "If we never go anywhere--never see anyone, what is the use in being equipped?" I think Bettina was sorry she said that. The effect of it was as though some rude hand had thrown down a screen. My mother looking up with hollow, startled eyes must have caught a glimpse of something that she dreaded. * * * * * "Don't put it off," she whispered. "Write to your Aunt Josephine to-night." I composed my letter very carefully. My sister and I had often wished, I wrote, that we had some acquaintance with our only relation. Especially as she and our father had been so much to each other. Our mother was in poor health. We lived very quietly. But we all hoped if ever Aunt Josephine came to this part of the world--a very pretty part--she would come to see us. I was nearly nineteen now, and I was hers "affectionately." Feeling myself very diplomatic and "deep," I enclosed the last photograph Hermione had taken of Bettina. I wrote on it "Betty at sixteen--but it does not do her justice." If anything could win her over, it would be that snapshot of Betty dancing on Duncombe lawn. I posted the letter in an access of remorse and wretchedness--afraid I had left it too late. For my mother had said, "After all, instead of your leaving me, I shall have to leave you." That same night Eric told me that he had sent to London for a heart-specialist. And the heart-specialist had answered he would be down on Thursday, which was the day after to-morrow. I saw in Eric's face that he was anxious at the delay. He admitted that he was "afraid" to wait. Yes, he would wire for another man. Eric--"afraid"! "You don't," I whispered, "you don't mean ... quite soon?" He repeated that he was "afraid." Then I felt I knew all that any specialist could tell me. * * * * * That was the day I came to know the steadying influence of a call to face great issues. They bring their own greatness with them. They wrap it round our littleness. Only afterwards, thinking how gentle and watchful Eric looked in telling me, I remembered that people were supposed to faint when they heard news like that. For myself I had never felt so clear-headed. Never felt the responsibility of life so great. Never felt that for us to fail in bearing our share was so unthinkable. If this Majesty of Death were soon to clothe my mother, her children must not hide and weep. They must help her, help each other to meet the Great King at the gate. All the little troubles fell away. I was kind again to Betty. I called my lover "Eric." He called me by my name. Just that. No more passed between him and me. But I felt I had taken this man and that he had taken this woman "for better or worse." CHAPTER XXI AUNT JOSEPHINE'S LETTER Bettina came into the room and handed me a letter. "Mrs. Harborough!"--my mother drew herself up on the pillow with an animation I had not thought to see again. I opened and read: "My dear niece----" "Ah!" my mother brought out the ejaculation with an effect of having doubted if the relationship would be owned. That introductory phrase turned out to be the most comprehensible part of the first half of Aunt Josephine's letter. As for me, I was completely floored by "the Dynamism of Mind," after I had stumbled over a cryptic reference to my mother's state--"which you must not expect me to call sickness. There is no such thing. There is only harmony or unharmony, whether of the so-called body or the soul." On the third page, the writer descended from these Alpine heights, to say that it had been "inspirationally borne in upon" her that the time was come for her brother's daughters to widen their horizon, and incidentally, to see something of their father's world. The implied slur upon our mother's world was, to my surprise, not resented. "Go on. Go on." The letter ended by saying that, in spite of very grave and urgent preoccupations, Aunt Josephine would endeavour to draw a little of the old life round her, if her nieces would come and stay with her in Lowndes Square for a few weeks. "A London season!" Bettina cried. I looked up from the letter and saw my mother watching with hungry delight Bettina's face of rapture. Bettina had not looked like that since the Helmstones went away. But the most marked change, after all, was in my mother herself. When Eric came he was staggered. "I'll believe in miracles after this!"--and we joked about the Dynamism of Mind. My mother had taken for granted that both Bettina and I would accept Aunt Josephine's invitation, though I said at once _I_ could not leave home. My mother put this aside with: "Bettina go alone! A wild idea." When the question came up again in Eric's presence I did not press it far. But, going downstairs, I asked him how _was_ I to put it to my mother? "Put what?" he asked. "Why, the fact that we can't leave her. Or, at least, that I can't." I agreed Betty must go. "So must you," he said. My heart beat faster. His villeggiatura was near the end. London, for me, meant Eric. "You need the change," he said, "more than Betty does." "You forget," I said, a little sadly, "what we've been facing here. The specialist coming----" "Well, he will find she has rallied." Nevertheless, she was in no condition, Eric said, to be crossed. Had she not told me herself that my first duty was to take care of Betty? That was not how he would put it--all the same, the change would do me good. Then a word about our "trustworthy servants." In any event I was not to say any more about not going, till we had seen the "London chap." * * * * * She went on quite wonderfully. We were positively gay again--she and I and Bettina--the three of us laying plans. We talked about clothes, and planned how we should look very nice on very little money. When the great specialist came, he found my mother sitting up in a bed covered with old evening-gowns, old laces, and embroidered muslins; things she had worn long ago in India, and which should help to make us brave for our first London season. Smart little blouses, morning-gowns and afternoon-gowns, could be made in the house or in the village. But who was worthy to make an evening-frock fit for London? My mother was much more concerned about this than about the great specialist, whom she received rather as a friend of Eric's. He echoed all that Eric had said. * * * * * My mother had made me write to Aunt Josephine on the evening of the same day that brought her letter. I did not tell anyone, but I put off posting my answer till the London doctor had gone. My letter was not only thanks and acceptance. I felt I ought, in common civility, to try to make some more or less intelligent rejoinder to the odd part of my aunt's letter. And this modest effort seemed not to displease her. For she replied in eight pages of cloudy metaphysic and a highly lucid cheque. The cheque alone supported us in our attempt to grapple with those eight bewildering pages. The first introduced us, by way of the Psychology of the Solar Plexus, to the Self-Superlative: "If this view-point interests you, I will later explain to you--in terms of inclusiveness and totalism--the mystical activities of the Ever-Creative Self." "Isn't she awfully learned!" said Bettina in a scared voice. "On your return home, having 'contacted,' as we say, the talents and the tranquillity of others--instead of contacting things of lack and fear--you will be able to think happily and sweetly about matters that formerly disturbed you. All the ills of life are curable from within. Complete health is wisdom. I do not go so far as to predict that you will find yourself instantly able to adopt the bio-vibratory sympathism which habitualises thought to the Majesty of Choice. But I _do_ say that after giving the deeper and sweeter Self a chance to unite the self of common consciousness, constructively, with the Powers Within, that you, too, may find yourself a Healer--that is, Harmoniser--clothed in the Regal Now." After that plunge, Aunt Josephine came to the surface for breath, so to speak, and to say that she thought it only fair to tell us that she herself had seen almost nothing of general society for the past ten years. She had her work. She had her classes in which we might take some interest. I was to tell "the musical one" that Self-Expression, through voice-culture and pianoforte playing, was one of the Keys to the Biosophian System. Aunt Josephine had already taken opera-tickets for the season. And we should go to as many concerts as we liked. We should see pictures and we should see people. We should "learn to use the plus sign in thought." We should "recognise the cosmic truth that ALL IS GOOD." This concluding phrase was underscored three times. And still, despite its provokingly obvious aspect, I felt that I had not a notion what Aunt Josephine meant by it. My mother said the reason was that I knew nothing of mysticism. Eric said neither did he. But he knew stark, staring lunacy when he saw it. And he was more than doubtful if we ought to be entrusted to this demented step-aunt. My mother reproved Eric's flippancy. Either she really did see daylight, and most excellent meaning, in the Biosophical Theory, or she concerned herself to make out a case for the defence of Aunt Josephine. She told Eric she was surprised that a man of science should at this time of the day cast ridicule on the doctrine of an essential harmony between "soul states" and the health of the body. For her part, she felt the attraction of this idea of ceasing the little lonely personal fight against overwhelming odds--this putting oneself into direct relation with the Infinite. Eric stared. Yes, my mother maintained, there was much to be said for Mrs. Harborough's idea that each individual should learn to think of his life in connection with this underlying force. If, instead of denying God we affirmed Him ... refusing to accept or to believe in evil---- "All very jolly for us," Eric said, "but what about the poor cancerous devils in our hospital? I see us looking in on them and saying: 'Oh, you're all right! Three cheers for harmony. Come out and play golf with the staff.'" * * * * * After Eric had gone my mother lay back on the pillow, her shining eyes on Bettina pirouetting noiselessly about the room. I begged Bettina to stop her gyrating. She explained she was doing the cheque dance. Mercifully there was this antidote--I mean postscript to Aunt Josephine's letter. "Nearer the time" she would send us the money for our tickets. The enclosed £40 was for clothes. Now the way was clear! No. The question still was, Who, this side of London, could be trusted to make our frocks? The seriousness of the consideration brought the cheque dance to an end. We sat and thought. The precise date of this visit was not yet fixed. Aunt Josephine had asked what time would suit us best. With one voice, Betty and I cried, "_June!_" But we were promptly told (and we agreed) that to suggest June would be too grasping. Aunt Josephine would have other, more important, guests eager to come to her for the Coronation month. So we answered: Any time convenient to her. Then that admirable Aunt wrote back: "Would next month do?" And would we stay for the Coronation? In spite of the breathless shortness of the time of preparation, Bettina composed Coronation dances and practised curtseying to the Queen, though she knew quite well that she would only see Her Majesty at a distance driving by in her golden coach. The one consideration that sobered Bettina was who, _who_--on this short notice, with all the feminine world crying passionately for frocks--who could be found to make ours? The more plain and simple, the more important was style and cut. Nobody in the country-side was competent for such an undertaking. Brighton? Very dear, and not first-rate. Suddenly Bettina clapped her hands. "The little French dressmaker Hermione told us about." The very person! Only, wouldn't she be up to the eyes in work? We remembered, too, she was said to be "not strong." She didn't care, as a rule, to work out of London. But she had come to sew for those horrid people Lord Helmstone let the Pond House to the year before. The people turned out to be badly off, and, after doing some damage, they had gone away without paying their rent. A law-suit was pending between them and Lord Helmstone. We had never known them, but we could not help noticing their clothes. They were beautiful. Even my mother said so. Hermione had played golf once or twice with the boy and girl. One day she had admired openly something the girl was wearing. "Yes, looks quite Bond Street, doesn't it?" the girl said. "And all done at home by a little dressmaker at four-and-six a day." Hermione had got the woman's address, specially for us, she said--meaning for Bettina. Hermione was always advising Bettina about her clothes and making the child discontented with what she had. We had not wanted any "little tame dressmaker" at the time, but we were enchanted now, when Bettina turned up the card inscribed: "MADAME AURORE, "87, CRUTCHLEY STREET, "LEICESTER SQUARE." "Madame Aurore!" my mother echoed. "No doubt a cockney of the cockneys!" * * * * * She was not a cockney. And she was a great surprise. CHAPTER XXII PLANTING THYME The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to bring. And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning. The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats--a business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds' singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many days like this--with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the sheltered south-west corner, were the bees in any number tuning up their fiddles. I looked up from my work and saw--at that most unusual hour--Eric Annan at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd--excited. I dropped the garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said. "Matter? What should be the matter?" I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had betrayed himself. "I thought you looked as if--as if something had happened," I said. What I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour. But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their roots. "What are you planting there?" he asked. "Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last year. "Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked. I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He looked astonished. I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I confessed the walks. "You ought not to have told me," he said. "Why?" "Because, for these next days, I can't come too." I went on planting thyme. "Promise me, for these next days _you_ won't go either." "Why?" I asked again. "Because my thoughts might go wandering." I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly. "I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me." He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way. "Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next--how many days am I to be cooped up when the morning is at its best?" "Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you going to put in?" "All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry. "Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled. "So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They 'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue butterflies would be a poor sort of place." We talked irrelevancies for a moment more--the passion of the convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts of moths and butterflies preferred. He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone. I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and sybarites--all for colour and sweet scents. He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies were much misunderstood. "In their way--and a very good way, too--they answer to the call." "What call?" "The call to serve the ends of life." I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?" "More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers. It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life' indeed! They simply _love_ bright colour and things that smell sweet...." "Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all life comes from lovers." At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange thing was it seemed to frighten him. We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath. Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors, Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room. "What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I asked, I thought I knew. CHAPTER XXIII ERIC'S SECRET My sister and I breakfasted in the morning-room in those days, and we always had a fire for Bettina's sake on chilly mornings. In the back of my mind I was hoping Eric's complaint of cold was an excuse. If my first impression had been right, if he had something to tell me, he would tell it better indoors. I should hear it better, sitting beside him. The pang when he passed the sofa by! I was wrong.... I was an idiot.... He drew up before the ungenerous little fire and began at once to speak with suppressed excitement of a "secret." "----the sort of thing that--well, I wouldn't trust my own brother with it." And upon that he stopped short. I did not say: "You can trust me." But I hardly breathed in the pause. I felt it all hung on whether he told me. What hung? Why, everything--whether life was going to be kind to me some day ... whether it was well or ill that I had been born. He seemed to be content with having told me there was a secret. For he changed the subject abruptly to the Bungalow, and what an adept Bootle was at inoculation and the preparation of cultures. Bootle possessed the great and glorious faculty of accuracy! One of the few men on earth whose account of a thing did not need to be checked. Sitting over the fire that morning, Eric told me that the Bungalow was a laboratory. Very important work had been done there last autumn. (So _that_ was why he had stayed on!) "Tentative but highly significant results" had been arrived at--results which all these months of contest and putting to proof, in London and on the Continent, had not been able to upset. "Gods!" Eric exclaimed, with a startling vehemence. But this was a glorious place to work in! The best air in England! And the Bungalow had been an inspiration from on high! Far away from noise and interruption; and not merely for a few paltry hours. Great stretches of time to himself! Then you were so fit here. You slept. You had all your wits about you. As we knew, it was Hawkins's idea in the first place--that Eric should come down and rest. Well, now I was to hear something more about Hawkins. Hawkins was a kind of mascot. He not only was the best man they'd ever had in that chair at the University. He wasn't only a first-rate bacteriologist, and first-rate all-round man. There was something about Hawkins that struck fire out of other people. His rooms were a meeting-place for chaps keen about--well, about the things that matter. Hawkins gave a dinner at his club one night to some London University men and a couple of distinguished foreigners. "Of course, we talked shop. We argued and stirred one another up, and the sparks flew. When the rest had gone Hawkins and I stayed talking in the smoking-room. About an idea"--Eric looked round to see that the door was shut--"a new idea I was working at for dealing with cancer." "Dealing!" I echoed, leaning forward. "You mean curing?" "----I told Hawkins about an experiment I'd been making. As I've said, Hawkins is very intelligent. But he contested my conclusions. I grew hot. We argued. I told him more and more. Hawkins thought my experiments too rough-and-ready. Even if they weren't rough-and-ready, to be conclusive they must be tried on an extended scale. I stood up for the validity of tests, on a small scale, done with an infinity of care--a ruthless spending of the investigator rather than multiplication of the subject. All the same, I couldn't deny that precious time was being wasted and many lives. Hawkins was right. I did need a trained staff, and I needed--oh, masses of things I had not got, and had no prospect of getting. We had tried the forlorn hope of a Government grant--and failed. We agreed that, in working out an idea like mine, the crucial danger lay in premature publicity. We are in a cleft stick in these matters. Without the right people knowing, believing, helping, it is hard--pretty nearly impossible--to go forward. I sat, rather dejected, and stared at the fire. The smoking-room had been empty except for a little, dried-up old man, who was half asleep over the evening papers. A few minutes after Hawkins had gone out to pay his bill, the little old man waked up and went to a writing-table. In a half-minute or so I looked round, and he was standing quite near me, warming his back at the fire. "'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He _seemed_ right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing." His eyes were shining as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence--a renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its triumphant claim. "You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday troubles." "Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary, everyday troubles." "You helped us----" "Oh, that's different--an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs." It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's happened." "When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here." We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment--the----" He looked at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to deliberate. A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And--the--the experiments. How do they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all. "That," he said, sinking his voice--"that's just what I'm coming to; though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe I stumbled on the secret." I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew _you'd_ understand." Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face! And we sat there, with the morning sun shining over us, and just looked gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest man in England. He half put out his hand, and drew it back. "I am to find that out, too, very soon," he said. The clock downstairs chimed ten. Eric jumped up like a person with a train to catch. He had taken me into his counsels prematurely like this, he said, because he wanted to feel sure that I wasn't putting any wrong construction on the fact of his burying himself for these next days. "I like to think you are understanding. If I have any good news, I'll come and tell you. If you don't hear, you'll know I don't dare let go my clue even for an hour, except to sleep." And now he must go. I went with him as far as the gate. He walked with head bent, and eyes that saw things hidden from me. Already he was back in the Bungalow. I felt the misery of being deserted. But I felt, too, the strong intelligence, the iron purpose, in the man. And though I was torn and aching, I was proud. For all my jealousy, as I saw the mouth so firm-set under the red-brown thatch, saw the colour in his face, something reached me, too, of the heat of this passion to find out--something of the absorption of the man of science in his task. Here was the new kind of soldier going to his post. I held out my hand. "Good luck!" He took it, then dropped it quickly. And quickly, without once looking back, he walked away. I watched him hurrying across the links till one of the heath hollows swallowed him up. As I turned to go back to my thyme-planting, I heard the dog-cart rattling along the stony road. Madame Aurore! I never finished planting the thyme. CHAPTER XXIV MADAME AURORE Madame Aurore was little and wasted and shrill. She had deep scars in her neck, and dead-looking yellow hair. She was drenched in cheap scent. Her untidy, helter-skelter dress gave no hint of the admirable taste she lavished upon others. She saw at once what we ought to have, and she talked about our clothes with an enthusiasm as great as Betty's own. "Ah, but _Madame_!" she remonstrated dramatically, when my mother showed her the new white satin, which was for me, and a creamy lace gown which was to be modernised for Bettina--"not _böt_ vhite!" My mother explained that my gown was to have rose-coloured garnishing. "Mais non! mais _non_!" Madame must pardon her for the liberty, but she, Madame Aurore, could not bring herself to see our chief advantage thrown away. What, then, was our chief advantage? Betty demanded. What indeed, but the contrast between us. The moment she laid eyes on the hair of Mademoiselle Bettina she had said to herself: the frock of Mademoiselle Bettina should be that tender green of tilleul--with just a note of bleu de ciel. Oh, a dress of spring-time--an April dress, a gay little dress, for all its tenderness! A dress to make happy the heart of all who look thereon. But "green!" We had sent all the way to London for the white satin, and we had no green. Then 'twas in truth une bonne chance that Madame Aurore _had_! She often bought up bargains and gave her clients an opportunity to acquire them. She rushed out of the room, and returned with a piece of silk chiffon of the most adorable hue. She showed us the effect over white satin. My satin. But then, as Madame Aurore said, we could so easily send to Stagg and Mantle's for more. She looked at me out of snapping black eyes--eyes like animated boot-buttons. "Yes, yes; for you, Mademoiselle, ze note sall be sérénité ... hein? Zis priceless old lace over ivory satin. Ah...." She struck an attitude. "I _see_ it. So ... and so. A ceinture panne, couleur de feuille d'automne touched with gold broderie. Hein? Oh, very distingué, hein?" "It must not be expensive"; we had to say that to Madame Aurore all that first day, at regular intervals. But she had her way. She sewed hard, and she chattered as hard as she sewed. Bettina ran across her in the passage that first evening as Madame Aurore came up from supper. And they began instantly on the fruitful theme of "green gown." My mother called out to Bettina that she had talked enough about clothes for one day, and in any case she had left us to go early to bed. Bettina regretted her rash promise--wasn't the least tired, and could have talked clothes till cock-crow! There was some argument on this head at the door, in which Madame Aurore joined, with too great a freedom, and an elaborate air of ranging herself on my mother's side. This pleased, least of all, the person Madame Aurore designed to propitiate. Madame Aurore, I am sure, had not been in the house an hour before she had taken the measure of our main preoccupation. Mademoiselle Bettina ought to be grateful, she said, to have a mother so devoted, so solicitous. Standing near the open door, she piled up an exaggerated case of maternal love. There was nothing in life like the love between mother and child. Ah, didn't she know! Her own little girl---- My mother said she must have the door shut now, and I was sent to undo Betty's gown. Bettina thought it angelic of Madame Aurore not to resent our mother's lack of interest in the small Aurore. According to Bettina, Madame showed a wonderfully nice disposition in not withdrawing her interest from us after that. She seemed rather to imply: very well, you don't care about my child ... but I am still ready to care about yours. "Parfaitement!" ... the little dressmaker remembered Bettina's passing Dew Pond House the summer before. It was true what Hermione had reported. Madame Aurore had leaned out of the window to watch Bettina. She had even expressed the wish that she might have the dressing of cette jolie enfant. Oh, but life was a droll affair! Bettina thought it entirely delightful. She went about the house singing. The first time Madame Aurore heard Bettina she arrested the rapid stab of her basting needle: "Who ees dat?" "That is my youngest daughter." "She tink to go on ze stage?" "Oh, no." "Not? It ess a vast, zat." * * * * * She was always cold. Whenever we were out of the morning-room she piled on the coal. On the second day I remonstrated. Fuel, I explained, was very expensive so far from the coal-fields. She smiled. "You are ze careful one, hein?" and she looked at me in a way which made me uncomfortable. But I did not feel about the poor little creature as my mother did. My mother went so far as to wish we had not sent for her. She would never have allowed her to come if she had seen her first. I thought my mother severe. Everybody else, including the servants, liked Madame Aurore. No wonder. She spent her life doing things for people. Sewing for us all day like mad, so that our two best frocks might be finished in spite of the shortness of the time; and still ready at nightfall to show the cook how to make p'tite marmite, or sauce à la financière--equally ready to advise the housemaid how to give the Bond Street, not to say the Rue de la Paix, touch to her Sunday alpaca, and chic to old Ransom's beehive hat. If she asked them one and all more questions in a minute than they could answer in a month, what did that show but the generous interest she took in her fellow-beings? Bettina, with her little air of large experience, said that Madame Aurore was the most "sympathetic" person she had ever met. Madame Aurore's benevolent concern about our clothes, our soups, sauces, and servants, and everything that was ours, extended to our friends and relations and everything that was theirs. She had never, she said, known people--let alone such charming people as we--with so few acquaintances. Bettina thought Madame Aurore was sorry for us. She asked a great deal about the Helmstones. "Ze only friends and zey are avay for seex mont!" Ah, it was well we were going to London. We should die, else, of aloneness. Aunt Josephine plainly was the one ray of light in our grey existence. Where did she live? Lowndes Square! Ah, but a very expensive and splendid part of London! No news to us, who had our own private measure for social altitudes. Bettina had looked out Lowndes Square on our faded map of London. Aunt Josephine was only a private person, but she lived nearer the King and Queen than the Helmstones did. And for all her being a Biosophist she had asked us to stay for the Coronation. Bettina frequently led the conversation to the great event of June. But this queer little Frenchwoman was more interested in Aunt Josephine than she was in the King and Queen. Here was distinction for an Aunt! And what was she like--this lady? We must have a picture of our only and so valuable relation. Bettina went and rooted about in the deep print and photograph drawer, till she brought Aunt Josephine to light. Very faded and old-fashioned looking, but Madame Aurore regarded the face with a respectful enthusiasm. "Oh, une grande dame! une vraie grande dame!" Madame Aurore understood better now what was required. We repudiated, on our aunt's behalf, the idea that she was so much grande dame as philanthropist, thinker, recluse. We did not deny her grandeur. We but clarified it; or, at least, Bettina did. "Bettina talks too much to that woman," my mother said to me privately. She sent for Bettina and told her she was not to speak to Madame Aurore about anything except her work. Bettina thought to interpret this order literally would be inhuman. Besides, she considered it very nice of Madame Aurore to take such an interest in us. "_I_ am grateful when people take an interest," said Bettina with her air of superiority. When my mother heard that Bettina had been discussing Aunt Josephine, and had unearthed the photograph to show to Madame Aurore, she was annoyed. "Go and bring me the picture," she said. Bettina went into the morning-room, and looked about for some minutes. The little dressmaker sat there, in a litter of white and green, sewing furiously. Bettina said at last that she hated most dreadfully to bother Madame Aurore, but where was that old photograph? Madame Aurore looked up absently. "Had Mademoiselle Bettina not taken it out?" "Perhaps I did----" Bettina scoured the house. Aunt Josephine's photograph was never found. * * * * * I was glad our mother did not know that Bettina had told Madame Aurore about the pendant and the diamond star. Bettina excused herself by saying Madame Aurore had been so certain a lady like our mother must have jewels, and that she would lend them to her daughters, in order to put the finishing touch of elegance to our toilette. Betty had felt it due to our mother to acknowledge that a part, at least, of this exalted expectation was not so wide of the mark. And Bettina endorsed Madame Aurore's opinion that a diamond star certainly _would_ "light up" my ivory satin and old lace. Also--but no, we must do without. * * * * * The green frock was all but finished. We had brought the cheval glass out of my mother's room. She was "not strong enough to stand the patchouli," so she missed the great moment of the final trying on. Bettina stood before the glass, looking somehow more childish than ever, or rather seeming less of common earth and more of fairyland, in the tunic-frock of green, her short curls on her neck. My fancy that she was like somebody out of "The Midsummer Night's Dream," was set to flight by Madame Aurore's shower of couturière's compliment, mixed with highly practical considerations, such as: "See how it falls when you sit down. Parfaitement! And can you valk in it? But _wis grace_!" Bettina proved she could. "A merveille! Sapristi! Mademoiselle Bettine would see the sensation she was going to create in London. Could she lift ze arm--hein?" Mais belle comme un ange!--many makers of quite beautiful gowns studied the effect seulement en repos. Mademoiselle Bettine would, without doubt, dance in that frock. Let us see, did it lend itself? Bettina moved about the morning-room to waltz time--laughing at and with Madame Aurore; stopping to make court curtsies; watching in the glass if green frock had pretty manners. One thing more, its maker said, and behold Perfection! It needed ... it cried aloud for a single jewel. "Ah, yes." Bettina's look fell. No doubt the finishing touch would have been a pearl and emerald pendant. But---- Madame Aurore struck in with a torrential rapture, drowning explanation and regret. Life, Madame Aurore shrilled, was for ever using her, humble instrument though she was--for the working out of these benevolences. There had she--but three days ago--all innocent, unknowing--tossed that piece of chiffon tilleul into her trunk. Or rather, not her hand performed the act--not hers at all. The hand of Fate! And now, _The Finger!_ ... pointing straight at the pearl and emerald pendant. But, instantly, must Mademoiselle Bettine go and get the ravishing jewel--the diamond star, as well, while she was about it. Then poor Betty had to say these glories were no more. Madame Aurore snapped her boot-button eyes, and rolled them up. Our poor, _poor_ mother! Deeply, ah! but profoundly, Madame Aurore commiserated une dame si distinguée, si élégante, being in straitened circumstances. Ah, Madame Aurore understood! She would be most economical with the coals. All the same she wasn't. But what did it matter! since she turned us out dresses that we were sure Hermione, herself, would have characterised as "Dreams." Bettina went about the house, singing: "'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?' 'Going to London, Sir,' she said...." * * * * * Madame Aurore even managed to put the finishing touches to the two frocks made in the village, which Bettina called our Coronation robes--just white muslin, but not "just muslin" at all, after they had passed through Madame Aurore's hands. She listened indulgently while Bettina wondered how the young Princes would like driving through London in a gold coach, and above all how the little Princess would feel; and how she would look; and how did Madame Aurore think she would do her hair? "I don't like that woman," my mother observed pointedly to Bettina. "Oh, dearest, she feels it. I know from something----" "I do not object to her knowing. But I am not interested in Madame Aurore." My mother dismissed her. The fact was that none of the torrent of talk (carried on now in a whisper, with elaborate deference to the chère malade)--none of it had to do with Madame Aurore herself. We had had to ask her all of the little we came to know about her. She had no regular business in London. Ah, no, she was too often ill. She merely went out to work when she was "strong enuss." "Zen too, ze leedle gal. I haf to sink about her." The thought seemed one to harass. All would be different if Mme. Aurore had a shop. We agreed that to have a shop full of lovely French models, would be delightful. And by-and-by the little Aurore would help in the shop. "_Nevair!_" said Mme. Aurore with sudden passion. She knew all about being in shops. It was to prevent her daughter from knowing, too, that Mme. Aurore must make money. The little Aurore should go to the Convent school--which seemed somehow an odd destination for the daughter of Madame Aurore. She spoke of it as a far dream, beckoning. "Nossing--but _nossing_ can be done in zis world vidout monny." And what people will do for money--oh, little did we know! But the world was like that. Eh bien, Madame Aurore had not made it. _Had_ she done so, it would be a better place. Betty and I smiled at the pains taken to make this clear. Madame Aurore professed herself revolted by an arrangement which made "ze goodness or ze badness of a pairson" dependent upon where you happened to find yourself. "Par example you can be extrêmement good _here_." More. She would go so far as to say you must be a genius to discover how to be bad here. Through Betty's laughing protest, the little woman went on with seriousness to assure us it was "une chose bien différente dans ..." she checked herself, bit off the end of her thread, and spat it out. "It is different, you mean, in Crutchley Street?" Betty asked. And, though she got no answer, I think we both understood the anxious mother to be thinking of the small Aurore left all alone in one of the world's Mean Streets. Perhaps the reason Betty got no answer to her question was that she had slightly raised her voice in putting it, and I had said, "Sh!" "What ees it?" Madame Aurore demanded, looking round. "I was only reminding Betty," I said. "We mustn't disturb my mother." Hah! naturally not. _Whatever_ happened, she was not to be disturbed! I was afraid, from the tone in which Madame Aurore said this, that she thought I had been reproving her. And, to divert her thoughts, I asked: "Who takes care of her--the little daughter--while you are away?" Again she bit viciously at the thread. "Not motch 'care'!" The small eyes snapped as she drew the thread through the needle's eye. I had never seen even her hands fly so fast, or her whole feverish little body attack the basting with such fury of energy as after that reference to the child left behind in Crutchley Street. Bettina said soothingly: "I suppose you left her with some good friend?" "Ze best I haf." The admission was made in an accent so coldly hopeless that Bettina, round-eyed, said: "Oh, dear, isn't she a nice friend?" "She is like ozzers. She is as nice as she can afford." Madame Aurore had recovered her shrill vivacity. She had not, after all, taken to heart my hint about keeping our voices down. "In some parts of ze vorld," she went on, in that raised, defiant note, "you might be quite good for a week; wis luck for a few months; but you could not be good from year's end to year's end." "Why was that?" Bettina asked softly. Madame Aurore laughed out. "Ze climat!" she said, in a voice that must certainly have penetrated the next room. "Somesing in ze air." Then lower, with a tigerish swiftness: "I shall not ron ze risk for _my_ liddle gal! _Non!_" She tossed the satin on the machine, thrust it under the needle, and seemed to work the treadle by dint of compressing lips and knitting brows. Bettina and I agreed we would not talk to her any more about her daughter, since, unlike most mothers, the thought of her child did not soften Madame Aurore, but made her hard and angry. We put this down to wounded feelings at my mother's curt dismissal of the theme. Surreptitiously--for she knew leave would be refused--Bettina gave Madame Aurore some of our old toys, and other little gifts, to take home to her daughter. I did not prevent this, for I, too, felt uneasily that we ought somehow to make up for our mother's nervous detestation of Madame Aurore. Had this, as the little dressmaker hinted, something of sheer sickness in it--an invalid's caprice? Bettina said lightheartedly: "Oh, it's only because Aurore is a foreigner. Mother admits she never did like foreigners." After the first day there was almost no personal interchange between Madame Aurore and her employer. Yet I had a queer feeling that a silent drama was being played out between those two who, without meeting, were acting and reacting upon each other. Madame Aurore asked each day, How was madame? in a voice of extremest solicitude--nay, of gloomiest apprehension. I found myself wrestling with an uncomfortable feeling that this hopeless view of my mother's health was somehow prompted by a desire "to get even" with the one unresponsive member of our little circle--to get even in the only way open to Madame Aurore. I knew she advised the housemaid to look out for another place, and offered to find her one in London, where she would be paid double, and have almost nothing to do. The housemaid was greatly tempted, but I was told she said she wouldn't go till her mistress was better. "Bettair! She vill not last a mont!" said Madame Aurore. At first such echoes as reached me of these prognostications made me merely angry. But I could not quite cast them aside. I began to wonder miserably if there were anything in this view. After all we, too--even Eric--had held it ourselves, only such a little while before! I wrote to Aunt Josephine to say that if my mother were not better by Monday morning, I should bring Bettina as arranged; but I would stay only one night and go home the next day. The question rose on Friday as to whether Madame Aurore should return to London on Saturday night, or some time on Sunday. "Saturday night," said my mother with decision. Bettina ventured to urge the Sunday alternative. "The poor little thing is so tired after sewing all day----" To which my mother responded by ordering the cart for Saturday evening. "I cannot sleep with that woman in the house." . . . . . Bettina ran in to say Madame Aurore was ready to say good-bye. To our embarrassment, our mother would not permit Madame Aurore to enter the room, even for the purpose of taking leave. We went out and did what we could to soften the refusal. "She has not been sleeping...." "She is trying to rest...." "She is so much obliged to you...." Ah, Madame Aurore understood. Our poor, poor mother was undoubtedly failing. We were adjured to take every care. Certainly we should not both leave the poor lady. We told Madame Aurore that we should never forget her. "I shall take good care of the address," Bettina said. No, Madame Aurore would send us a new address. She was looking for larger rooms. She believed she was going to be stronger now. She meant to take on two or three hands. In that case, she would not be able to go out any more to people's houses. She would let us know.... She filled the hall with her patchouli and shrill vivacity, and presently was gone. When we went back into my mother's room, we found her telling the housemaid to hang our gowns in a draught "to purify them." Betty was moved to some final remonstrance. My mother cut her short: "That was a horrible woman!" "Well, well," I said, "she's gone." "Yes. That is the best that can be said of Madame Aurore. We are done with her for ever." CHAPTER XXV GOING TO LONDON Mercifully, no soul can stand at the pitch of tension long. Those too frail snap. The strong relax. As I have learned since, few who have to do with lingering illness but come to know the gradual, inevitable dulling of apprehension in the watchers. Eric says the power of human adaptability sees to it that the abnormal state of the sufferer shall come by mere continuance to wear an air of the normal. And so the watcher, with no violence to loyalty, or conscience, is relieved of the sharper sympathy. Certainly, my mother seemed to us in no worse case than many a time before. Bettina and I agreed that she began to improve the moment Duncombe air was no longer poisoned for her by the presence of poor Madame Aurore. What Eric had said of our trustworthy servants was true. Yet I had brought my mother to agree that my absence, now, was to be a matter only of hours, even if I went back for the Coronation. And still I was not spared a profound sinking of the heart at the moment of leave-taking. I put my misgiving down to the fear that parting from Bettina for four long weeks, would be more than my mother's scant reserve of strength could bear. As for Bettina (oh, when I remember that!)--Bettina showed the bravest front; calling back from the door: "I shall write you every blessed day." "Yes," my mother steadied her voice to answer. "I shall want to hear everything. The good and--the less good." "There won't be any 'less good.' It's all going to be glorious." * * * * * As Big Klaus's dog-cart took us across the heath I strained my eyes for some glimpse of Eric. A week that day since he had come and shared his secret! He could never mean to let me go without a word. Not till the train was in motion could I give up hope. I stood a moment longer at the window looking back. No sign. I took my seat between Betty and an old gentleman; she and I both too stirred and excited to talk. Betty, half-turned away, looked out of her window, and I, across her shoulder and over the flying hedges, looked still for a man who might be walking the field-paths, looked for the bright green roof of his Bungalow, looked for the chimneys of the farm. No sign. I sat fighting down my tears. Not an hour of these bustling days had been so full, but I had felt the blank of Eric's silence. And now again I met the ache of loss with: This will teach you! You were dreading a little time away. He adds a week to our parting. _He_ doesn't mind. It's only you, poor fool--only you who mind. I looked round, in a sudden terror, lest anyone should be noticing that my eyes were wet. Mercifully, the people were all looking at Betty. I looked at Betty, too. I could not see her eyes, but the nearer cheek was that lovely colour whose name she gave once to an evening sky. We had come up on the top of a knoll and stood for a moment, breathless. My mother had said no painter could get such a colour. And neither were there any words in the language to describe it. For it was not red, not flame, not pink, nor orange. But Betty, looking steadily, had found the right words for it: "A fiery rose." And that was the colour in Betty's cheeks on the way to London. No wonder people looked at her. There was a man who got out of the first-class carriage next us at every station, and walked by our window. He looked in at Bettina. I was glad our carriage was full. I felt sure, if it had not been, he would have come in. I could see Bettina did not resent the staring. And then I saw her look out of the corner of her eyes. "Bettina!" I whispered. "Don't encourage that strange man to stare in here." "_Me?_" she said. "What am I doing?" I told her again that she encouraged him. But I was handicapped by not being able to say just how. I admitted that what she did was very slight. But it was enough. "It was what you did to Eddie Monmouth." Then, because she pretended not to understand, I told her that she was falling into bad deceitful ways. I knew she had written to Ranny Dallas.... Yes, and kept writing, though the moment I realised what was going on I wrote to Ranny myself. I said if any more letters came from him, I should have to tell Betty about the girl in Norfolk. Ranny wrote back that he had told Betty himself! And still they went on corresponding, secretly. I said to her now, that I should hardly be surprised if she was hoping to meet Ranny in London. "Oh, one may 'hope' almost anything," said Betty airily. "Not of a man who is engaged to another girl!" "Yes," said Betty; "as long as he isn't married...." Then, rather frightened, I asked outright if she was really expecting to meet Ranny somewhere. "How can I say? He is fond of the opera," she said in a very superior, grown-up way. "I _might_ happen to see him some night in the throng----" "In the throng! Betty," I said. "You have given Ranny Dallas your address." "No," she said; "but I've given it to Tom Courtney." Tom Courtney was Ranny's red-haired friend. "If you had watched," Betty said, "you would know that I was corresponding with Tom Courtney, too. Chiefly about Ranny. Tom Courtney is a splendid friend. He explains things much better than Ranny can. And then" (Betty's momentary annoyance vanished in laughter)--"then, too, Tom can spell--beautifully!" I refused to laugh. "I knew you'd be horrified," Betty said again, "and that is why I have to keep things from you. You are a sort of nun. _You_ never feel as if all your blood had been whipped to a syllabub. And besides----" "Besides?" "I do like nice men. I don't mind their knowing. And I don't mean to be an old maid. _You_ wouldn't care." "You think I wouldn't?" I had no time to say more, for the train stopped. We thought at first we had reached Victoria Station, but it was only Clapham Junction. The "staring" man passed once more, with a porter behind carrying golf-clubs and portmanteau. Our carriage, too, was emptying. The people stood and reached things down from the racks, and then filed out. When the train went on we were alone. Betty was still excited, but more grave, even harassed--a look that sat rather pitiful on her babyish face. I moved up close to her again, and I told her there was something I had to say before we got to London. "You and I, you see, we don't know very much, and we get carried away." "You mean me," said Betty. "You are thinking about Eddie Monmouth and----" Then I told her I did not mean her alone. "I don't know how it is," I said, remembering Mr. Whitby-Dawson and Captain Monmouth and Ranny--yes, and others--"I don't know how it is, but girls seem to 'care' more than men do." "I've thought that, too," Bettina said. I said I was sure it was true. Men had so much to do. Life was so full for them ... perhaps that took their minds off. I put my arm round Bettina and held her close. "I am going to confess something," I said, "that most older sisters would deny. But you have got nobody but me. And I have nobody but you. We must help each other." "I shall have Aunt Josephine," Betty reminded me. "A stranger--and too old besides." I dismissed Aunt Josephine for the particular purpose in view. "I am going to tell you something very--particular." Then, while she looked at the cushions opposite, and I looked out of the window, I told her I had learned from Eric Annan what she had learned through the others. "We'll say it just this once, and never, never again so long as we live! And we may have to deny it," I warned her. "But I think, if I'm honest about it with you, maybe you won't feel that I don't understand ... or that I am, as you say, 'different.' You will feel closer to me," I pleaded. "And maybe we shall both be stronger for that." I waited a moment. I was glad Betty still stared straight in front of her. "We don't only care more than men do," I said. "We _need_ men more than they need us." Bettina turned at that. I felt her eyes on me. Then she looked down and stroked my hand. "I think Mr. Annan does care about you," she said. "A little," I said. "Not enough. Not as I care." Bettina pointed out that Eric Annan was not so young as we. "Why, he must be thirty. Perhaps when he was our age"--our eyes met in the new comradeship, and then fell--"he may have taken more interest in--more interest in the things we think about." Then she took it back. "No, no. You may depend it's only girls who are like that--caring so terribly much. I thought it was only me. But if you are like that too, maybe there are others." After a moment: "You were good to tell me," she said. "I don't feel so--unnatural." The train was slowing. The light grew grey. We were in a dim place, between a smoky wall and a rattling train going out as we came in. Then the platform, and the porters running along by our windows. "Luggage, miss?" Bettina started up. "Aunt Josephine!" CHAPTER XXVI AUNT JOSEPHINE She was an imposing figure, beautifully dressed in black. She was handsomer than her picture, and younger-looking than we expected. It occurred to me that bio-vibratory sympathism had a thinning effect. Her manner was more decisive than I had expected from a dreamer. Very commanding and important, she stood there with her liveried servant behind her. Bettina had known her instantly by the grey hair rolled high and the pear-shaped earrings. She kissed us, and said I was more like my mother. And were our boxes labelled? She hardly waited for us to answer. She did not wait at all for our little trunk. "A footman will attend to the luggage," she said. As she led us down the platform, her eyes kept darting about in a way that made me think she must be expecting someone else by that train. I looked round, too. But nobody else seemed to be expecting Aunt Josephine, though a woman towards the end of the platform looked very searchingly at our party as we passed. Aunt Josephine did not seem to notice. She was busy putting on a thick motor-veil over the lace one that was tied round her hat--her lovely hat, that, as Betty said afterwards, was "boiling over with black ostrich-feathers." A wonderful scent had come towards us with Aunt Josephine--nothing the least like that faint garden-smell that clung to our linen, from the sprays of lavender and dried verbena our mother put newly each year under the white paper of our wardrobe-shelves. Such a ghost of fragrance could never have survived here. This perfume of Aunt Josephine's--not so much strong as dominant--routed the sooty, acrid smell of the station. When she lifted her arms to put the chiffon over her face, fresh waves of the rich, mysterious scent came towards us. She seemed in haste to leave so mean a place as Victoria. She spoke a little sharply to the footman. He explained--and, indeed, we could see--that a great, shining motor-car was threading its way as well as it could through a tangle of taxi-cabs and inferior cars. Aunt Josephine stood frowning under her double veil, and once I saw her eyes go towards the woman who had noticed us. The woman was speaking to one of the porters. The porter, too, looked at Aunt Josephine and nodded. The dowdy woman gave the porter a tip, and sent him on an errand. I was far too excited to notice such uninteresting people, but for the curious personal kind of detestation in the look the dowdy woman fixed upon Aunt Josephine. "We won't wait," said our aunt. "We'll take this taxi." But just then the beautiful shining car swerved free, and we were hurried in. The footman spread a rug over our knees. As we glided out of the station I noticed the dowdy woman asking her way of a policeman. And the policeman didn't know the way. He shook his head. And both of them looked after us. As we whirled through the crowded streets I felt how everyone must be envying Bettina and me. Presently we came to a quiet corner. The houses stood back from the street, in gardens. Our aunt's was one of these. I was too excited to notice much about the outside. But the inside! Betty and I exchanged looks. We had no idea Aunt Josephine was so rich. There were more big footmen--foreigners; very quick and quiet. The entrance-hall and stairs were wide and dim. When the front-door was shut, the house seemed as silent as a church on a week-day, and the soft-footed servants rather like the sidesmen who show strangers to their places. The very window was like a window in a church. It had stained glass in it, and black lines divided it from top to bottom, into sections, like church windows. If I had ventured to speak I should have whispered. Not even at Lord Helmstone's had we trodden on such carpets. No wonder our footsteps made no sound. Going upstairs we seemed like a procession in a picture. That was because the walls were immense mirrors separated by gilded columns. Aunt Josephine had taken off her motor-veil. She had certainly grown much thinner since she had the photograph taken. That accounted for her being a more "aquiline" aunt than we expected. Her nose curved down, especially when she smiled. And her eyes were not sleepy at all--a full yellow eye, the iris almost black. We followed her along a corridor till she threw open a door. "This is yours," she said in the voice that was both sharp and quick. I looked into the wonderful pink and white room. Instead of two little beds, as we had at home, was one very large one. It looked like an Oriental throne with rose-silk hangings. "I will send you up some tea," she said. "And you must rest. I am having a friend or two to dine. So wear your smartest gown. Come," she said to Betty. "Betty is the one who ought to rest," I said. "And so she shall," our aunt said. "I will show Betty her room." Betty looked blank. "We are not to be together?" she asked. "Together!" Aunt Josephine repeated the word with the smile that drew her nose down. "Oh, you shall have a room of your own." Betty moved a little nearer me. I explained that she and I always had the same room. "Yes, in a small house. Here there is no need." I wanted to tell her that it was not need that made us share things. But though poor Betty looked cast down, all I said was that I should come to her in plenty of time to do her hair. "A maid will do that," my aunt said. But I managed to tell her quite firmly that I must show the maid how. Aunt Josephine looked at me a moment. She doesn't like me, I thought. And I felt uncomfortable. As she followed her out, Betty made a sign over her shoulder that I was to come now. But after that look Aunt Josephine had given me, I felt I must walk warily. So I only signalled back, as much as to say "by-and-by." * * * * * A woman in a cap and apron brought me tea. I asked if she would mind taking the tray to my sister's room so we could have tea together. The woman said madam's orders were that the young ladies should rest. I reflected that Bettina would probably rest better if she did not talk, so I said no more. The woman had a face like wood. Two of the big footmen brought in our little trunk. I got out Bettina's dressing-gown and slippers, and asked the wooden woman to take them to my sister. I was so tired with all the excitement that I went to sleep on the pink satin sofa. The wooden woman waked me. "Time to dress," she said, and she had the bath ready. I looked round for our little trunk. "Oh, you couldn't have a thing like that standing about in here," the wooden woman said. And, indeed, I had felt, as I saw it coming in, how out of keeping its shabbiness was with all the satin damask, the gilding, and the lace. She had done the unpacking, the wooden woman said. And there were my white satin frock and silk stockings on the bed. "But half the things in the trunk are my sister's," I said. She had taken the other young lady what was needed, the woman answered. And whatever I wanted I was to ring for. I felt that this was no doubt the way of London ladies. But I longed for our shabby little trunk. It seemed the last link with home. I looked round the beautiful room with a sense of distaste. This feeling must be the homesickness I had read about. I went to the window. The lines that divided the long panes into panels, the lines that I had thought of as purely decorative were rods of iron. "You'll be late," the wooden woman said, and she drew the silk curtains over the lace ones, and switched on the electric light. She came back while I was brushing my hair. She offered to do it for me. I was so glad to be able to do it myself. I would not have liked her to touch me. I hurried with my dressing so that I could go to Bettina. The woman tried to prevent me. But I was firm. "Show me the way, will you? Or shall I ask someone else?" She hesitated, and then seemed to think she had best do as she was told. Half-way down a long, soft-carpeted passage she asked me to wait an instant. She knocked at one of the many doors. I heard my aunt's voice inside. And whispering. Only one of the electric lights was turned on here, in the corridor. The air was heavy. The "Aunt Josephine" scent, foreign, dizzily sweet, was everywhere. A light-headed feeling came over me. I longed for an open window. They must all be shut as well as curtained. Between the many doors, paintings were hung. I had been vaguely conscious of these as we came up. I saw now they were pictures of women. Most of them seemed to be in different stages of the bath. One was asleep in a strange position, with nothing on. I was going past that one when I noticed the opposite door ajar. I stopped and listened. "Bettina," I said softly. A voice very different from Bettina's answered in some language I did not know. I started back and, as I was going on, the door was opened wide. A lady stood on the threshold in a flood of light. A lady with a dazzling complexion. Her lips were so brightly red, they looked bloody. She had diamonds in her ears, and a diamond necklace on a neck as white and smooth as china. Her yellow hair was disarranged as though she had been asleep. She was wearing a kimono of scarlet silk embroidered in silver. She asked me something, not in French, not German, and not, I think, Italian. I said I was afraid I did not understand. My aunt came noiseless down the long corridor, and the foreign lady hastily shut her door. This other guest must be some very great person! My aunt was dressed for dinner in a gown all covered with little shining scales, like a snake's skin. "What are you doing?" she said, in an odd tone as if she had caught me in something underhand. I explained that I was looking for Bettina. And I found courage to say that I was sorry our rooms were so far apart. She took no notice of that. "You will see Bettina at dinner," she said, and it struck me she could be very stern. I felt my heart begin to beat, but I managed to say that I was sure Betty would wait for me to help her to dress. "I have told you she will have a maid to do all that is necessary." "I hope you won't mind," I said, "just for to-night. It is always my mother, or me, who dresses Bettina...." She seemed to consider. I said to myself again: "Oh, dear, she doesn't like me at all." "Take her, Curran," she said. The hard-faced woman came and piloted me round the angle of the corridor to Betty's door. . . . . . We fell into each other's arms, and laughed and kissed, as though we had been parted for weeks. * * * * * I was determined not to let her know that Aunt Josephine and I were not liking one another. I only said I didn't like her taste in pictures. Betty tried to stand up for her. She reminded me of the statues and casts from the antique at Lord Helmstone's. She asked me suddenly if I wasn't well. I complained a little of the air. I thought we might have the window open while I did her hair. But Betty said, no. She had tried, and found she didn't understand London fastenings. So she had rung for the maid, and the maid had said: "This isn't the country"--and that people didn't like their windows open in London. Betty thought it quite reasonable. London dust and "blacks" would soon ruin this pretty white room. Betty defended everything. When I complained that the scent everywhere was making me headachy, Betty said she liked it. She wished our mother would let us use scent. The only thing Betty found the least fault with was the way I was doing her hair. She wanted it put up "in honour of London." But she looked such a darling with her short curls lying on her neck that I was doing it in the everyday way. And there wasn't time now for anything more than to fasten on the little wreath, for the woman came to say madam had sent up for us. So I hurried Betty into her frock, the woman watching out of those hard eyes of hers. Nobody in the whole of Betty's life had looked at her like that. The woman didn't want us to stop even to find a handkerchief. And after all, just as Betty was coming, the woman said: "Wait a minute," and wanted to shut the door. I stood on the threshold waiting. A gentleman was coming upstairs. With his hat on! He stared at me as he went by, and so did the footman who followed him. I drew back into the room and the woman shut the door. "Who was that gentleman?" I asked. She seemed not to hear. So I asked again. "_That_--oh, that is the doctor," she said. Naturally we asked if somebody was ill. "Not very," she answered in such a peculiar way we said no more. She stood and watched us as we went downstairs. * * * * * "Our first London dinner-party," Bettina whispered. We took hands. We were shaking with excitement. We saw ourselves going by in the mirrors between the golden columns. The whole place was full of tall girls in white, and little girls in apple-green, wearing forget-me-not wreaths in their hair. CHAPTER XXVII AT DINNER Down in the lower hall were the men-servants with their watchful eyes. They showed us the drawing-room door. As we came in, I was conscious again of Aunt Josephine's appraising look. Then of the elaborate grey head turning towards an old man, as if to ask: Well, what do you think of my nieces? He had a red blotchy face. The kind of red that is crossed by little purple lines like the tracery of very tortuous rivers on a map. The lines ran zigzagging into his nose, which was thick at the end, round and shining. He had no hair except a sandy fringe, and his eyes, which had no lashes, looked as if he had a cold. He was introduced as "an old friend of mine"--but she forgot to tell us his name. We heard him called Colonel. Through all the scent we could not help noticing that he smelled of brandy. I looked round for the beautiful foreign lady. But I was prepared to find her late, after seeing her idling at her door, in a dressing-gown, so near the dinner-hour. There was only one other person. A man of about thirty-six. Good-looking I thought--and not happy. He had a clear face, quite without colour. The skin very smooth and tight. His dry brown hair was thinning on the crown. He had nice hands. I noticed that when he stroked his close-fitting moustache. I did not like him because of his manner. I did not know what was wrong with it. Perhaps he was only absent-minded. But when I tried to imagine him talking to my mother I could not. He was introduced first to Bettina. The others treated him as if he were very important. They talked about his new Rolls Royce, which turned out to be a motor-car. The Colonel tried to get him to say how many times he had been fined for "exceeding speed limit." Then they talked about "The Tartar." How he was always late. It would be a chance if he came at all. Aunt Josephine was positive he would appear. "I wired to say it was all right." "Just as well, perhaps, if he doesn't come to-night," the good-looking man said. He would be in a devil of a temper. Betty asked why would he? They said because his favourite horse had been "scratched." Betty thought it was nice of him to be so fond of his horse. But if it was only a scratch---- We did not know why they laughed. But we laughed too. We tried not to show how unintelligible the talk was. I listened very hard. I felt like a learner in a foreign tongue. I understood the words but not the sentences. The Colonel looked at his watch in a discontented way. Then we went in to dinner. I don't think we sat in the order Aunt Josephine had meant. But the absent-minded man, who had taken me in, refused to change, or to let me. I had the old Colonel on my left. Aunt Josephine of course at the head. The empty place was between her and Betty. The table was glittering and magnificent. We had little helpings of strange, strong-tasting food before the soup. And caviar. "You like caviar?" the Colonel said. I said I didn't know, for in my heart I felt it looked repulsive. "Don't know caviar?" I said of course I had heard of it. He asked where. And I said, "In Shakespeare." The old Colonel choked, and they all laughed to see how apoplectic he looked--all except Betty and me. I caught Betty's eye. She had that fiery-rose in her cheeks. I felt excited, too, and "strange." But I hoped they didn't notice. Betty and I had agreed that we must try not to show how unused we were to the ways of a great London house. So I made conversation. I asked about the absent guest. My good-looking man pretended to be annoyed. He called, in his slightly husky voice, across the table to Aunt Josephine: "Already she wants to talk about The Tartar!" I explained that I meant the foreign lady--the very beautiful lady I had seen upstairs looking out of her door. Again my man exchanged glances with Aunt Josephine. He was smiling disagreeably. Aunt Josephine did not smile at all. But the old Colonel laughed his croaking laugh, and said the lady upstairs expected people to go to her. "Does she expect dinner to go to her, too?" Betty asked. And something in their faces made Betty blush, though she didn't know why, as I saw. I believed they were teasing Betty, just for fun, and to see that beautiful colour in her cheeks flicker and deepen. So I leaned towards her, and across the flowers and the dazzling lights I told her the foreign lady was not very well. That was why she was not coming down. The Colonel asked me why I thought the lady wasn't well. So I said: "Because I saw the doctor going up to her." They were all quite still for a second or two. I looked at Aunt Josephine. Why was it wrong to mention the doctor's visit? Was she afraid of making these friends of the beautiful lady anxious about her? My man still was smiling, but not pleasantly. I couldn't tell whether the strange noises the Colonel made were choking or laughing. But I felt more and more miserably shy; And I had no clear idea of why I should feel so--unless it was that nothing these people said meant what it seemed to mean. I could see that Betty was bewildered, too. We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like this. I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar" had come, after all. He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He strolled in as if the place belonged to him--a great broad-shouldered young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head, and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but there was something oddly familiar about him. He nodded to the others. When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment, and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she was. She turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson." The young man stared. Everybody stared. He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange. A creepy feeling came over me. I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older? I looked round at the company and met the eyes of the neighbour on my right. They were unhappy eyes; but they reassured me. "What put such an idea into your head?" Aunt Josephine was asking Betty. "Because," Betty said, and she looked at the young man again, "only because I saw so many of your--of Mr. Whitby-Dawson's photographs----" "Really?" the young man said, in a bored voice. "That was, no doubt, a great privilege. My name's Williams." In her embarrassment Betty turned to the man who sat between us. "He has even the little scar," she said, like a person defending herself. "Mr. Whitby-Dawson got his scar in a duel with a student at Heidelberg. He studied at the University there part of one year----" "Studied duelling?" the Colonel chuckled. Our absent-minded man was not absent-minded any more. He was listening, with a look I could not understand, as if he took a malicious pleasure in poor Betty's mistake. Such a trifling slip to have taken the young man for Guy Whitby-Dawson, and yet it seemed to have put the company out of tune. Or perhaps it was the loss of the race. All except my man seemed to care very much about the lost race. The Tartar, in his annoyed voice, told his hostess and the Colonel how it happened. He leaned his elbow on the table, and almost turned his back on poor Bettina. I thought I could see that my man seemed not to like The Tartar; and that gave me a kindlier feeling towards him; I wondered what had made him unhappy. I felt I wanted to justify Bettina to him. I felt, too, that she would recover herself sooner if we broke the silence at our end. So I said--in a voice too low, I thought, for the others to hear--that I also had noticed the resemblance to Mr. Whitby-Dawson. Lower still, he asked me how we came "to hear of Mr.--of--the gentleman in question." Then Betty and I between us told about Hermione Helmstone's engagement--only we did not, of course, give her name. "The faithless Whitby!" our man said, with the tail of his eye on the young gentleman opposite. As for him, he tried to go on talking about "Black Friar," as though he heard nothing of the history being retailed on the other side. But I had a feeling that he was listening all the time. Bettina's loyalty to Hermione made her object to hearing Guy called faithless. "They would have had only £400 a year between them. And he said--Mr. Whitby-Dawson said--they couldn't possibly live on that. He was miserable, poor man!" "I should say so! Poor and miserable." "Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in single harness.'" "'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single harness,' eh?" Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe. And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish. The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at Bettina and me. Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that bubbling laugh of hers. The Tartar turned his head. He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and lay on her neck. The Tartar stopped talking about the race. He still ate his food condescendingly--with one hand. But he drank with great good-will. He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the ladies' glasses. I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water. The Tartar said "Nonsense!"--quite as though the matter were for him to decide. The servant filled Bettina's tall, vaselike glass. Bettina looked alarmed. Already she had displeased this dreadful Tartar once. "Ought I?" she telegraphed across to me. I shook my head. "There is one woman in London"--The Tartar made a motion towards the head of the table--"one woman who's got a decent cellar." The Tartar was almost genial. He raised his glass to my aunt. "I approve of the new coiffure, too. Rippin'!" The Colonel was not to be diverted from the subject of the wine. "Take an old man's advice," he said to me. "It's a chancy sort of world. Make sure of a little certain bliss." He lifted his own glass and drained it. The Tartar said something to Bettina which I could not hear. She looked up at him with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and with that "fiery rose" quite suddenly overspreading her face again. She put out her hand to the tall glass, hesitated, and then looked at the head of the table. Perhaps Bettina saw what all of a sudden was clear to me. Aunt Josephine was like a huge grey hawk. The head craning out; the narrow forehead, all grey crest; the face falling away from the beak. How she had changed from the days when she had a double chin! The tilt of the outstretched head was exactly like a bird's. Watching sideways--watching ... for what? The eye made me shrink. It made Bettina set her lips, obedient, to the glass. She looked apologetic over the rim at me. Mine stood untouched. "I see you have a will of your own," the voice on my right said in my ear. The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The scent of flowers, and that other all-pervading perfume, mixed with the tobacco, was making Bettina faint. My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina, and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out the burning. But the others took no notice. I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great trouble not to cry. "Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window opened?" He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black coffee," he recommended. He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows barred with iron, too?" He looked sharply at me. "I believe so," he said. I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still wondering and might ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it used to be a private madhouse." "_This house?_" He nodded. "You needn't say I told you." That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to be shut up here--they had left this uncanny influence behind. A strangeness and a strain. The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard. "Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!" No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders in my aunt's house. As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in the days when.... The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented." All the windows were still barred. What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady upstairs. The doctor--he was for those too dangerous to trust downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry--such callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties--to write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ... nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red look out of her eyes. "There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my side. But he was nervous too, and jumped down my throat: "Don't ask me questions! I never passed an examination in my life," he pulled out his watch. "And I've got an engagement to keep in exactly three minutes' time." No wonder I stared. One man comes when dinner is half done, and one wants to go before the hostess had risen. For my part I wanted him _not_ to go ... I told him so. "Why?" he turned suddenly and faced me. I said it was perhaps because I felt I knew him best. "Anyway," I persisted, "don't go!" He hesitated. "_Please_ don't go," I said. I was relieved when he said, very well, he would "see it out." For I knew, had he gone, my aunt would think I had driven him away. There was a rustle, and I saw Aunt Josephine rising. My man left me instantly. He went and opened the door. As we filed out he turned towards my aunt. I heard him whisper, "_Je vous fais mes compliments, madame_." He looked at Betty. Aunt Josephine nodded. "But...." her face changed. What was wrong? For whom was that "but"? I turned quickly and caught the yellow eyes leaving my back. I was "but." But why? What had I done? The Colonel talked to Betty and The Tartar, as he led the way back to the drawing-room. The other man still was behind with my aunt. He seemed to be reassuring her. His curious low voice kept going off the register. At a break I heard the words: "Doucement" enunciated with an emphasis that carried. I kept thinking how all the softly-draped windows had iron bars behind the silk. In the drawing-room, my aunt was saying to The Tartar, "Oh, yes, Bettina sings and dances." "She sings," I said. "Don't you skirt-dance?" The Tartar asked. Bettina looked sorry. "I can dance ordinary dances," she said. "But what sort is a skirt-dance?" The men made a semicircle round her to explain. Betty said she hadn't done any skirt-dances since she was a little girl. "Oh, and what are you now?" the Colonel said, grinning horribly. They made Bettina tell about the action-songs our mother had taught us in the nursery. They asked her to do one. Of course Bettina refused. "They're only for children," she said with that little air borrowed from our mother. The Tartar threw back his bullet head and roared. The Colonel said they were sick, in London, of sophisticated dancing. What they wanted was Bettina's sort. Bettina shook her head. The Grey Hawk said it was too soon after dinner. But they went across the room towards the piano. I was following, when the man who had taken me in to dinner said: "This is a comfortable chair." So I sat down. He said something about the strangeness of London "just at first." It would pass away. I told him I hoped Bettina would find it so. As for me, I was only staying till to-morrow. He looked so surprised that I explained I had to go back and take care of my mother. "You have never been to London since you were a child--and you come all this way just for a few hours?" "I came to take care of Betty," I said. "She has never travelled alone." He looked at me: "And you?" "Oh, I haven't either. To-morrow will be the first time. But then, I am older." He said nothing for several moments. I looked across the room to where I could see the back of Bettina's head, between the bare crown of the Colonel and The Tartar's black bullet. The Tartar was bending over towards Bettina. Aunt Josephine sat near them, facing the door, and us. My man looked up suddenly and saw the eyes of the Grey Hawk on us. "We must talk!" he said, with a laugh, "or they will think we aren't getting on. That isn't a comfortable chair after all." He stood up. I said it was quite comfortable. While he was insisting, a servant came in to speak to my aunt. I caught a glimpse through the door of a footman going upstairs with a short, fattish young man. Too young, I thought, to be another doctor. We went to the end of the room, and we sat on a sofa near the fireplace--one of those sofas you sink down in till you feel half buried. I didn't like to say I hated it, for he was taking so much trouble. He put a great down cushion at my back, as if I were an invalid. "There! Now, can you sit quite still for a few minutes? As still as if I were taking your picture?" I said I supposed I could. "And must I look pleasant?" I laughed. He hesitated and then: "How good are your nerves?" he asked. "Very good," I boasted. But he was grave. "Have you ever fainted?" "Never!" I said, a little indignantly. "Could you hear something very unexpected, even horrible, and not cry out?" "You know something!" I thought of an accident to my mother. "You have news for me...." "Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes still turned away, while he said: "Everything--more than life, depends on your self-control during the next few minutes." I sat staring at him. "Have you any idea where you are?"--and still he looked not at me but towards the others. My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner about barred windows and private lunatic asylums. The man sitting not three feet way from me--was mad. I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I answered him: "I am at my aunt's--Mrs. Harborough's." "Where does your aunt live?" "At 160 Lowndes Square." "You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most infamous houses in Europe." CHAPTER XXVIII THE GREY HAWK Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in the papers--and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair. He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I suppose you know there _are_ such places----" He interrupted himself to say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean--well, it would mean ruin. _Now_ do you understand?" Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why he should wish to kill me I could form no idea. "You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven voice. "I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other end of the room. I shrank further back into the cushions. But: "I have myself in hand, now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you are afraid. Betty's laughter sounded far away. "Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored." "But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed? "That was all right," he said. "That was to steady _us_." He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad? "Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't." I sat in that stillness of stark terror--staring at him. And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been horror's height a little while before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept saying inwardly. If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing suspicion. "Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk swooping to snatch me. "Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do, you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed I could feel." I moved at that--but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking. I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite quietly--_can_ you?" I made a sign for yes. "No haste ... you must do it languidly--go out of the room." "But my----" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning anguish) "----shall I not be asked where I am going and why?" He said no. Because he would make the others a sign. He thought my sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does, I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do. "If, after all, they were to prevent me--what, what then?" "They won't--they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that stopped the heart. I implored him to let me go out alone. He fixed his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of this room alone." "I could say I must post a letter." "They would ring for a servant." I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could run." "----as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No servant would open it for you." "Will they for you?" "I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up. I thought he meant I was to make trial then of that terrible passage to the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever came--Betty and I together--than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed men, and I with a maniac out in the hall! "I cannot leave my sister!" I said. He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you understand? If you don't leave the room with me, _she_ will leave it with Whitby-Dawson." "No! No!" He hushed me. "She won't know why--but she'll do it. And she won't come back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated paper off the table. He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion, during which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She was laughing excitedly. The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely, with his arm across the picture. The reading part was in French. I had to crane to see over the top--Betty twisting round on the piano-stool, and touching the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to sing. I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My trouble is to be able to forget. I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously, and wanted to know if I had not heard there were such places---- "I won't say like this. This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful." He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes. "You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he insisted. Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able to think. I had been imagining other people insane. But perhaps it was I.... I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a shock--that's all." I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him. "I am sorry I told you," he said. What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand. "You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made when you begged me not to go. You make _me_, after all, an instrument of initiation." Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious, I think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice. And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?" "Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly." He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"--he nodded towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one--"all this, far more crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world--in every capital of every nation on the earth. And it has always been so." He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more--"help me quickly to get help!" He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about our ears." He was doing all he could to calm and steady me, he said. And certainly he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare, an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought--it was all a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human nature!"--like the tolling of a muffled bell. Bishops and old ladies imagined you could alter these things. Take India--"I've been there. I knew an official who'd had charge of the chaklas. You don't know what chaklas are? Your father knew. If you'd gone riding round any one of the cantonments you'd have seen. Little groups of tents. A hospital not far off. Women in the tents. Out there it's no secret. They're called "Government women." The women are needed by the army. So there they are." Women are "needed." Through the chaos came back clear the memory of my talk with Betty in the train: "Men don't need us as much as we need them." Even Governments, he said, had to recognise human nature, and shape their policies accordingly. I was too young to remember all that talk in the press some years ago, about the mysterious movements of British battleships in the Mediterranean. Instead of hanging about Malta, the ships had gone cruising round the Irish coast. Why? The officials said, for good and sufficient reasons. The chorus of criticism died down. The "reasons" were known to those who had to know. Not enough women at Malta. The British fleet spent some time about the Irish coasts. "Human nature----" "I can do it now!" I cried under my breath, and I stood up. He shot out a hand and pulled me back. "Christ! not while the grey hawk is hovering outside! And your lips are livid." A good thing, he said, that I had still a few minutes. "You have your sister to thank. She is a success. She piles up anticipation. The value of that, to the jaded, is the stock-in-trade of people like our hostess. At a time when her profession is a hundred per cent. more dangerous than it's ever been since the world began, she perfects it--makes it pay in proportion to its danger." Couldn't I trust him to know? He gave me his word: "No indecent haste here. They are adepts. They have learned that the climax is less to the sated than the leading up. The leading up is all." After a second: "How did she get hold of you?" I knew no more than the dead. "Through someone very well informed...." He probed and questioned. I could only shake my head. But my tortured mind flung itself spasmodically from one figure to another in our little world, and felt each one's recoil from my mere unspoken thought. Until--_the little dressmaker_! Her questions ... her pains to establish the fact of our isolation, of our poverty ... her special interest in our aunt. "You haf a photografie--hein?" And then the picture's vanishing. Had it come to this house to serve as model? The Tartar liked "the new coiffure----" Two servants came in. One carried a great silver tray. "Oh, leave that a bit!" The Tartar, over the back of the sofa, waved the footman off. They came towards us, and were told: "Put it there on the table." The man beside me made a show of welcoming it. He dropped the illustrated paper on my lap. "Bend down--bend down low," he whispered. I bent over the swimming page. "What will you have?" he called out to me, as the footmen were leaving the room. I tried to answer. No sound. "Oh, you prefer crême de menthe, do you?" he said quite loud. "Yes, there's crême de menthe." He filled a glass and brought it to me. "Cognac," he whispered. "It will steady you." I put my shaking lips to the glass. I did not drink. "Ah, you are afraid," he said. And he looked at me with his unhappy eyes. My hand was shaking. Some of the stuff spilt out on my new dress. "Give it to me," he said, and he drank it off--"just to show" me. I was conscious that Betty was singing--And that the door had opened. The Grey Hawk stood there with, as I thought at first, a thick-set boy dressed in a man's evening clothes. As she dismissed him I saw he was a hunchback. She shut the door behind the hunchback and the Colonel left the piano and came towards her. He was laughing. They stood and talked. "Bend down. Bend low----" the voice said in my ear. The Colonel's croaking laugh came nearer. The man at my side called out: "Look here, Colonel. No poaching on my preserves. We are deep in a discussion about Art. You're not to interrupt." "Oh, Art is it?" The old man had come behind our sofa, and was leaning down between us. I smelt a foul breath. With a sense of choking I lifted my head. The Colonel's watery eyes went from me to the strange ugly picture in the illustrated paper. I did not understand it. I do not think I would have been conscious of having looked at it, but for the expression on the Colonel's face. Bettina finished her song. They all clapped. In the buzz, Bettina raised her voice. No, no. She couldn't dance, and sing, as well as accompany herself, she said. "What time is it in?" the grey woman asked. She took Bettina's place at the piano. Still Bettina hesitated, while The Tartar urged. "Oh, _I_ don't mind," Bettina said, "if you like such babyish songs." "Of course we do,"--the Colonel went back to them. Bettina said pertly: "I should think you'd be ashamed." She stood beside the grey woman and hummed the old tune. She helped by striking a few notes. "Now!" the grey woman said to Betty. The word was echoed in my ear. "Now?" I repeated. "But first"--he caught my hand. "Bite your lip a little.... Ah! not blood." He smuggled his handkerchief to me behind the cushion. "You'll be all right," he whispered. "But I wish I could go with you! You see that I must stay behind----" "Yes, oh yes," I looked at Betty. "I must stay," he said, "to give you time. Then when I've seen you out of this ... a door open, a door shut--and I shall never see you again...." "Now! _Now!_" I hardly noticed that he took his blood-stained handkerchief out of my hand. For Bettina had come forward and stood poised, holding her green skirt with both hands, like a child about to curtsey. I stood up. All the room was dancing with my little sister. I got to the door. "_Where are you going to...?_" Betty sang. But she was too amused and excited to notice me. My companion had crossed the room, and was bending over the Grey Hawk. She looked round at him surprised, mocking.... Some power came to help me across the threshold. A footman started up out of the floor and stood before me. "Where are you going?" He echoed Betty. "I am waiting for--one of the gentlemen," I said, and I steadied myself against a chair. If Betty's song stopped, I should know we had failed. I held my breath, as I leaned over and took my last look into the room. Our friend was leaving the grey woman. She played on. Bettina was dancing, a hand on her hip, the other twirling moustachios--playing the gallant. Such a baby she looked! And I had done her hair like that---- "_What is your fortune, my pretty maid?_" The man had come out and softly shut the door. He gave the footman a strange look and passed him something. "It's all right," he said. The footman looked in his hand and stared. "Mais, merci--merci, monsieur." He vanished. I went towards the stairs. "_That's_ not the way," the voice said harshly. "Shan't I get a cloak----" "For God's sake, no! It's a question of moments now." He was undoing the door. "Run for your life. First to the left--second to the right--a cab-rank." I fled out of the house. CHAPTER XXIX WHERE? I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker. I beat the door with my fist. An old man opened at last. "Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But he was gentle and frail. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness. At last! A room where a woman sat alone--reading by a shaded light. "Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "Are _you_ Mrs. Harborough? Then come--come quickly ... I'll tell you on the way----" The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me through spectacles. "You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted sobbing on the name. "Bettina----! Bettina----!" I seized the lady's hand and tried to draw her out of her chair. But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power of inert resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her chair. Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has happened?" "_Not yet!_" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be quick. Oh, God, let us be quick----" The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the quiet voice, "pay the cabman." "No!" I shrieked. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me. "You must see that you are quite unintelligible. Sit down and collect yourself." "Sit down! Isn't it enough that _one_ woman sits still, while--while----" She was putting questions. I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to meet us!" And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish, the injustice of it. How could one have expected this woman to come! But she should be moved and stirred at last! "I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "--only a minute or two late." "The other woman was not late!" "Who?" I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and tell her---- "Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled it at her. "She took us to a house--a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now----" I told her all I could pack into a few sentences. "It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England." "_Come and see!_ Betty----" But they only thought me mad; they tortured me with questions. I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant more." Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began. But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her two feet side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face, like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like a Theban statue than a living woman. I turned away. The figure in the chair rose up at last. Oh, but slowly--slow, and stiff, and ponderous. I felt in her all the heaviness of the acquiescent since Time began. "That is right," she said to the old man who had brought the maid. And the maid was old, too. Three helpless ghosts. Like death the sense came over me that I was as badly off with these three, as I had been alone. Again I turned from them, frantic. "I will go out," I cried, "and find help." I ran towards the door. It was then the old man made the first sane suggestion. We could telephone to the police. That would save time! The police would meet us outside Betty's prison. I followed the butler into the hall. We all stood there, by the telephone. Ages seemed to go by while he was getting the number. And when he had got the number, he could not hear the questions that were put. I tore the receiver out of his hand--I pushed him aside. But I had never used the telephone before, and I spoke too loudly. When they told me so, I sobbed. The voice at the other end was faint and cool. Oh, the easy way the world was taking Betty's fate! And then the faint cool voice at the other end said something which showed me I was not believed. He, too, was thinking I was out of my mind. The receiver dropped from my hand. "They cannot understand," I said. I told Mrs. Harborough that she must go to Bettina, and I would bring the police. Some objection was made. I did not stop to hear it: "I cannot wait for any words! And I will not wait another second for any human soul!" Then, running beside me as I made for the front door, the old butler spoke again: "----a policeman in our square." He would call the policeman in. The old man was right. A policeman stood at the corner, watching that no harm should come to the ladies of Lowndes Square. I had run out, with the butler protesting at my heels: "_Not in the street_, miss!" he said, with the first hint of emotion I had found in him. I did not wait; but he must have brought the policeman in during my outpouring, for the look of the hall during those swift seconds is stamped on my brain. The elderly maid kneeling at her mistress's feet, changing her shoes; the policeman facing my aunt, helmet in hand, his reverent eye falling before the dignity of Mrs. Harborough, while I, at his elbow, poured out broken sentences, interlarded with: "I'll tell you the rest as we go----" My strained voice was grown weak. I wondered, suddenly, if it had ever really reached their ears. I was like a person down under the sea, trying to make my voice heard through a mile of murky water. I was like a woman buried alive, who, in the black middle of the night, beats at her coffin-lid in some deserted graveyard. "It is no use!" I cried. "I shall go back alone." At last we were all going out of the door. The policeman put on his helmet. "And where is this house?" he asked. "It is--it is----" A pit of blackness opened. I felt myself falling headlong. I heard a cry that made my flesh writhe--as though the cry had been Bettina's, and not mine. A voice said: "It is not possible you have forgotten the address!" I had never known it! CHAPTER XXX THE BLUNT LEAD-PENCIL It must have been half an hour before reason came back. A strange man was there, lean and grey. A friend, I heard--a Healer. All those old, old faces! What had they done? What could they do?--except telephone again to the police the vague and non-committal fact of a girl decoyed and lost to sight in the labyrinth of London. They dared to think they could get me to bed. They found me, not a girl--more a wild animal! Out, out I must go. The outward struggle was matched by the one in my mind. Where should I go? To whom? There must be somebody who would care. Somebody who had Power to give effect to caring. Wildly my ignorance cast about. Who had Power? The King--yes; and surely the Queen would "care." But who was I to reach the Queen? Her sentinels and servants would thrust me out. All my crying would never reach the Queen. Then, the only thing that was left was for me to go out and cry the horror in the street. They held the door while they told me there had been telephoning back and forth. And someone had already gone to Alton Street. "Is that where Betty is?" No. Alton Street was the nearest police-station. The person who had been sent there had not yet come back. Then I, too, must go to Alton Street to learn what they were doing. The power of the police still loomed immense. At Alton Street I would hear they had already found Betty. She might even be there at this moment.... * * * * * My aunt, the Healer and I driving through deserted streets. How long was it since I had been away from Bettina? "Oh, not long," they said. And the police beyond a doubt had turned the time to good account. I had a vision of the Betty I should find at Alton Street. Fainting, ministered to by men, reverent of her youth and terror.... * * * * * A grimy room with a counter running down its length. No sign of Betty; only men in uniform grouped in twos and threes behind the counter. They listened. Yes, my aunt's messenger "had been in." They shook their heads. The Healer did most of the talking. A man with a sallow face put a question now and then. He was the inspector. Although there were only policemen there besides ourselves, the inspector talked quite low, as though he was afraid someone might come to know a girl was lost. "I can't hear what you are saying!" I said. "She is _my_ sister. You must tell me what you are doing to find her." They had so little to go upon. "The only clue, and that a very slight one," was the cabman. Could I remember what he was like? The strangeness of the question! Taxi-drivers were as much alike to country eyes as the cabs they drove---- But why ask me? "Bring the man in, and let the inspector see him." Then they told me. The man who was waiting there outside was not the one who had taken me to Lowndes Square. But where _was_ our "slight and only clue"? They said that while they all were busied over me, unconscious, the butler had paid the cabman and let him go. He had never thought to take the number. The slight, the only clue, was lost. But no. The inspector said they would circulate an inquiry for a cabman who had brought a young lady of my description to Lowndes Square that night. I tried to learn how long this would take--what we could do meanwhile. What had been already done. They seemed to be saying things which had no meaning. Except one thing. The great difficulty was that I could not describe the outside of the house, nor even the general locality. Which way had we driven from Victoria? I had no idea. But surely I had looked about. What had I noticed as we drove away from the station? I do not know whether at another time I might have answered better, but I could remember only a confused crowd of passengers, porters, taxi-cabs, and motors. Yes, and the woman who had looked after us while she asked her way of a policeman. Why had she looked after us? I could no more tell them that than I could tell why both she and the policeman had followed us with such unfriendly eyes. "Ah!"--the inspector exchanged glances with the Healer--"a possible clue there." I could not imagine what he meant. I could not believe that he meant anything when I saw the expressionless yellow face turned to Mrs. Harborough to say that "in any case" the Victoria policeman would not be on duty now. The inspector talked about what they would do to-morrow. "To-night--to-night; what can we do to-night?" He brought a piece of yellow paper. He put the questions over again, and this time he wrote the answers down with a stump of worn lead-pencil. The glazed paper was like the man, it took impressions grudgingly; it held them very faint. While the blunt lead-pencil laboured across the sheet, something that other man had said to me in the house of horror flashed back across my mind. I had not believed him at the time, still less now, in the presence of the guardians of the City--all these grave and decent people. Shamefaced I asked Mrs. Harborough if the inspector knew of "any house where a woman takes young girls." She and all the rest were one as silent as the other, till I steadied my voice to say again, this time to the man himself: "You have no knowledge, then, of 'such a place'?" "I don't say that," he answered. I looked at him bewildered. "You mean you do know of a house--a house where----" He hesitated too. "We know some," he said. "You don't mean there are many?" Again the hesitation. "Not many of the sort you describe." He took up the stump of pencil hurriedly and held it poised. "Try to recollect some landmark," he said--"some building, some statue that you passed." I did my best to obey--to wrench my mind away from the inside of that place where Betty was ... to think of what we had seen on the way. "Did you drive through the Park?" said my aunt. "No," the inspector answered for me, "she wouldn't take them through the Park; she would go as fast as possible--by side streets----" But I told them we had passed the Park. We had seen flower-beds through a tall iron railing. She said it was Hyde Park, and the flowers were on our left. "Hamilton Place. Park Lane." The inspector punctuated my phrases. "Driving north. You crossed Oxford Street?" I could not say. Other questions, too, I had no answer for. I held my head between my hands trying to force the later impressions out--trying to recover something of that drive I seemed to have taken a hundred years ago in some other state of being. And as I stood so, sobbing inwardly and praying God to let me remember, I heard the inspector say the most horrible thing of all. And it was the horrible thing that gave me a moment of hope. He told my aunt that the police kept a list of "these houses." A list. He said the police were "expected to have an eye on such places." And no one contradicted him. "Even if there are many," I burst out--"you have all these policemen here. You have hundreds more. Those houses in the list must all be searched----" They would do what they could, he said. I did not know why they should at the same time speak of doing all they could, and yet should look so hopeless. But I saw that nobody moved. My two companions talked in undertones. The men in uniform still stood in twos and threes. One near a high desk drummed with his fingers on an open book. The Healer folded his thin long hands upon the counter. In that horrible stillness I said suddenly, "Look at the clock!" The clock's hands too were folded, praying people to notice it was midnight. They stirred a little at my voice. They looked at me and at the clock. The inspector said they were waiting for Mrs. Harborough's messenger. The messenger had gone out with a constable to make inquiry at the nearest cab shelter. Why had they not told us that before! My two companions followed me, talking low. * * * * * We were driven to a little wooden house, set close against the curb. Two or three men inside, and one behind an urn was pouring coffee. Yes, yes, a gentleman had "called." Each one there had been questioned. Others, besides, who had been in and out. No one had taken a lady to Lowndes Square that night. The door shut behind us. We were out again, in the street. Two taxi-cabs in the rank, and ours at the curb? Besides our driver and ourselves not a soul afoot, outside the little wooden shelter. Betty--Betty, what am I to do? I looked up at the houses. In almost any one of them must be some good man, who, if he knew, would help me. But the houses were curtained, and dark. The silence of the streets seemed a deeper silence than any the country knows. The only sound, my two companions whispering. "He" would no doubt be waiting for them at Lowndes Square, they said. Could they mean, then, to go home...? Betty--Betty---- I looked up again at the houses--houses of great folk, I felt sure. Officials, perhaps; equerries; people about the Court--people whose names we had often seen in the paper as going here and there with the King and Queen. People who would not be turned back at any time of night if they went to the Palace on an errand of life and death. Should I run along the street ringing at all the bells? I may have made some movement, for Mrs. Harborough took my arm and drew me towards the cab. No, the people in the great houses would be sleeping too far away from those blank doors. Deafness had fallen on the world, and on the houses of good men a great darkness. A light--at last, a light! shining out of a house on a far corner which had been masked by the cab shelter. And people awake there, for a taxi waited at the door--the door of hope. Above it an electric burner made a square of brightness. In that second of tense listening, my foot on the step of the cab, a raised voice reached me faintly. I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound. I shall find someone to go to the Queen...! The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a public-house." They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted, except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen." While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down. The wind blew cold on my wet face. "The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't help Betty?" The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in chauffeur's dress. A man--with crooked shoulders! I remembered now. I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices calling after me. The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the machinery whirring. "Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you the man who brought me to Lowndes Square an hour or so ago?" The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him. Oh, God, the relief! CHAPTER XXXI THE MAN WITH THE SWORD "Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the stooping figure. The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him. He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station. In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a horror of losing him. "I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough. And all the while---- But we are coming, Betty! Coming.... The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of police-stations. They settled which would be the one. "Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "I will give you all I have if you'll drive fast." The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my eyes away from the only clue. Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door. The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street. And Betty wasn't there. Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector." The young man said he was the inspector. Among us we told him. The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible, alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of the inspector. This man was human. "You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?" I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An inspector's post was the station. But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound some great alarum, summoning a legion of police. He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already, there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a stump of blunt lead-pencil. "_Don't_ wait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...." But he, too, made little of the need for haste. He, too, made much of what I had noticed as we left Victoria--the homely woman and the policeman watching as we drove away. "You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?" "No doubt--and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the trains. They're at the docks when ships come in." It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the policeman knew," she said--"if he so much as suspected, why did he not stop the motor?" The inspector shook his head. "Why didn't he arrest the woman?" "He is not allowed," said the inspector. I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover the house---- "When? When?" And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it. "'_Watch it!_'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean stand outside and wait!--while all the time inside----" They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house.... And was the warrant ready? Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases." Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?" "Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords, the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume--the sort of dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levée. "When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked. "Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard." "Scotland!" I cried. They told me Scotland Yard was in London. Then we'll go to Scotland Yard! He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "He _might_ be there in the morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases! The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty hands over my face and wept aloud. Betty--Betty--who will help us? * * * * * I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should have as much help (_now_, when help was any good)--as much help from the sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand. Who was there in all the world who really cared? A vision of my mother rose to stab at me. No other friend? Eric!--as far away as heaven. The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames that shrivelled up my flesh. Torment! Torment! Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister--calling out for me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell! Torment! Torment! I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a crash. The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She has lost her mind," one said. But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More pictures, and still more. Well, well--Betty would die soon! Like cool water--holy water--came the thought of death. Perhaps she was already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead! Here was healing at last. Betty was dead! CHAPTER XXXII DARKNESS But when the morning came I could not be sure that Betty was dead. They brought me a telegram. In wrenching the envelope off I tore the message twice. My fingers could hardly piece the signature together. I realised, at last, the Duncombe housemaid's name. My mother was sinking, she said; and we were expected back by the night train. The message had been sent an hour after we left home. It reached Lowndes Square seven hours before I had come beating at the door. That it had lain in the hall forgotten seemed to me hardly to matter now. Not even to-day could I go home. I seemed to see the future. If my mother had not died in the night, the end would very quickly come. There was mercy there. As for me--I knew I should not die till I was sure that Betty was out of the world. As though to our best, our only friend, I turned to the thought of her physical weakness. But I must be sure. I rose up out of my bed ... and Darkness took me in her arms. * * * * * I was ill a long, long while. Whenever a time came that found me free of fever, able to think again, what could I think except that, even if Betty were dead--there were the others. The unhappy man had said that always, always there were others. So I had seen "the need" wrong. The lamp of a young girl's hope, held up in her little world, to help her to find a mate--that light was pale beside the red glare of this fierce demand from men. And the people who knew least went on saying it wasn't true. And the people who knew most said: there are many thousand "lost sisters" in London. Who would help me to find mine?--or to sleep once more, knowing Bettina safely dead! Nothing to hope from the foggy, self-bemused mystic, whose face alternated with that of the nurse in and out of my dreaming and my waking. Long ago she had turned away from service, even from knowledge. There was "no evil, except as a figment of mortal mind." Peace! peace!--and this battle nightly at her gate! Just once her doors burst open, and she was made aware. The sound would soon be faint in her ears, and then would cease. Who else? Not her friend, the Healer--whose way of healing was to look away from the wound. Could I trust even Eric to help? The man who had set his work before his love--who had said: "If all the people in the house were dying, if the house were falling about my ears and I thought I was 'getting it'--I'd let the house fall and the folks die and go on tracking the Secret home." Even if that were not quite seriously meant, no more than all the other good men and true, would that one leave the lesser task and set himself to cure this cancer at the heart of the world. Eric, and all the rest (this it was that crushed hope out of my heart)--_they all knew_. And they accepted this thing. That was the thought that again and again tore me out of my bed, and brought the great Darkness down. * * * * * In the grey intervals I was conscious of Mrs. Harborough's being more and more in the room. I came to look for her. She spoke sometimes of my father. She imagined I was like him. To think that made her very gentle and, I believe, brought her a kind of light. I wondered about the doctor. How had she been brought to have someone tending me who did not call himself a Healer, yet who I felt might well have cured any malady but mine? She had forbidden the nurse to talk to me about my sister, so that I was the more surprised the day Mrs. Harborough spoke of Betty of her own accord. "If you will try to get strong," she said, "I will tell you what has been done to find her. And when you are really well I will do all that any one woman can to help." So we talked a little--just a little now and then, about the things I thought of endlessly. And not vaguely either. She saw how vagueness maddened me. We faced things. How she had misunderstood my mother. That could never be made up now. My mother never knew why we were not with her, nor even that we were not there. Consciousness had never come back to her. I heard of all that Eric had done, and that his was the last face she knew. He had stayed with her all that night, to the end. There were letters for me from him. Soon, now, I should have my letters. He had been many times to ask about me. About _me_! What was he doing about.... But no, that was for me alone. Up and down the streets I should go, looking into the eyes of outcasts under city lamps--looking for the eyes I knew. Nor could I wait till I was well. Night by night I went upon the quest. Catching distant glimpses of Bettina in my dreams, struggling to reach her, for ever losing her in the turmoil of streets and the roar of stations, till the thought of Bettina was merged in overmastering terror of the noise and evil which was London. The moment I was a little better they tried to get me to sleep without an opiate. The doctor made so great a point of this, I did all in my power not to disappoint him, and for no reason in the world but that something in his voice reminded me of Eric--just a little. Nobody knew how much of the time, behind closed eyes, my mind was broad awake.... Oh, the London nights!--airless, endless. And the anguish of those haunted hours before dawn. My country ears, so used to silence or the note of birds, strained to interpret London sounds before break of day. Hardly any honest, individual voices, and yet no moment quiet. Incessantly the distant rumbling of ... _something_. I could never tell what. It was the roar of London streets by day, attenuated, held at bay, but never conquered--the bustle and clang muffled in the huge blanket of the night. The strongest impression about it was just of the vague, unverifiable thing being _there_--an enemy breathing in the dark. Sometimes it started up with a rattle of chains. "Mail-carts," said the nurse. And that other sound--like one's idea of battering-rams thundering at fortress walls--the nurse would have me believe that to such an accompaniment did milk make entry into London! Sometimes the thick air was so sharply torn by horn, or pierced by whistle, that I would start up in my bed trembling, listening, till the dying clamour sunk once more to the level of the giant's breathing. When I was not delirious, the reason I lay still was sometimes half a nightmare reason; a feeling that the muffled night-sounds were like the bees at home in the rhododendron, drumming softly so long as we sat still. The moment we rose up the bees rose too, with angry commotion, ready to fly in our faces and sting. Just so with that muted hum of London. If I were not very still, if I were to rise and venture out, all the stinging, angry noises would rise, too, and overwhelm me. And out there in the heart of the swarm, Bettina. Being stung and stung, till feeling died. CHAPTER XXXIII A STRANGE STEP One day, when my head was clearer, I seemed to have lain a great while waiting for someone to come. I asked where Mrs. Harborough was. She was "engaged for the moment." Presently I asked what kept her. The nurse rang and sent a message. Mrs. Harborough came up at once. She had been talking to Mr. Annan, she said. And would I like to see him? No. I shrank under the bedclothes, and turned my face to the wall. An afternoon, soon after that, brought me the sudden clear sense of Eric's being again in the house. I was sure that he timed his visits so that he might see the doctor. When the doctor left the room that afternoon I asked if Mr. Annan had been again. Yes; and did I want to see him now? No. "He has come to-day with another friend of yours," said Mrs. Harborough, lingering. "One of the Helmstones?" I asked dully. "No; Mr. Dallas." Ranny! Ranny was downstairs. The happy, care-free people were going still about the world. "Is he married?" I asked. "Married?" Mrs. Harborough seemed surprised. Certainly, he seemed free to devote a great deal of time to us. Mr. Annan and he between them had left no means untried, she said. "I have been told a thousand times," I interrupted, "that everything has been done, but no one ever tells me what." I fell to crying. Looking more stirred than I had ever thought to see her, she told me that young Dallas had offered rewards, and had gone from place to place in search.... I seized her hands. I made her sit by the bedside. Yes, and always he had come back here, making his report and asking questions. Eric brought the doctors and the nurses ... but Ranny had done better. Ranny had stirred up Scotland Yard. When Eric told him the nurse had said I was for ever raving about barred windows, Ranny had flung out of my aunt's drawing-room and was gone a day and a night. Yes, he came back. He had found the house. He got a warrant, and he went with the police when they made their search. He had seen the woman. She brazened it out. She had never heard of either Bettina or me. _My_ story? Oh, very possible, she said, that I and my sister had been "seeing life." No uncommon thing for young women to lie about their escapades. "Drugged?" the usual excuse. The next day I asked them to let me see Ranny. They refused. I did not sleep that night. The doctor came earlier the next morning and was troubled. "What is it?" he said. I told him. "I will promise to be very quiet," I said. I would promise anything if they would only let me see Ranny. Mrs. Harborough went out and sent a message. Mr. Dallas was staying quite near, she said. But I waited for him for a thousand years. And then ... a footstep on the stair. My heart drew quivering back from the two-edged knife of Wanting-to-know and Dreading-to-know. Then all that poignancy of feeling fell to dulness, for the step was not Ranny's and not Eric's. I had never heard this slow, uncertain footfall. The door opened, and it was Ranny. He did not look at me. His eyes went circling low, like swallows before rain. They settled on the coverlid till, slowly, he had come and stood beside me. Then Ranny lifted his eyes.... Oh, poor eyes! Poor soul looking out of them! "Ranny," I whispered, "speak to me." "I have failed," he said. He leaned heavily against the chair. "I have heard," I managed to say, "how hard you have been trying...." "But I have failed!" he said once more; and I hope I may never again hear such an accent. I pointed to the chair ... we could neither of us speak for a while. And then he cleared his throat. "They took her out of that house and hid her," he said. "And then they took her abroad. I traced her to their house in Paris. But she had gone. Always I have been too late." When I could speak I said: "You are a good friend, Ranny...." He made an impatient gesture. "Nothing is any good!" He stood up. "But I wanted you to know that I am trying.... Trying still. Nothing that you could do but I am doing it. Will you believe that?" "But, Ranny," I said, "how can you do all this? Haven't you ... other claims?" "Other claims?" he said, as though he had never heard of them. "You surely did have other claims?" "I thought I had. But when this came I saw they were nothing." He stopped an instant near the door. "You don't believe I would lie to you?" "No," I said. "Then get well. _You_ have something to live for. You and Annan. Not like me." He went out with that strange-sounding step. CHAPTER XXXIV THE END WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING They were sorry they had let him come. A new night nurse was sent. Two doctors, now. And, either I dreamed it or, at the worse times, Eric was there as well. But always when I was myself, and the haunted night had given way to day, his face was gone. Yet his care was all about me. The doctors were friends of his; the nurses of his choosing. I cannot explain why, but ferreting out these facts gave me something less than the comfort they might be thought to bring. Why was he troubling about me? Why was he not spending every thought and every hour in trying to find Bettina? Ranny had meant it well, telling me I had something to live for besides Betty, and giving that something a name. But it was an ill turn; a sword in my side for many a day and night. It gave me a ceaseless smart of anger against Eric. I was jealous, too, that it had been Ranny, and not Eric, who had been taking all these journeys. Ranny had been working day and night. Ranny was the person we owed most to--Betty and I. And was I to lie there, suffocated by all this care, and leave a boy like Ranny (a boy I had expected so little of) to spend himself, soul and substance, for my sister? How dared Eric think that he and I were going to be happy, while Ranny searched the capitals of Europe, and while Bettina.... . . . . . One night, or early morning rather, stands out clear. Vaguely I remembered a renewed struggle, and a fresh defeat. Now, strangely, unaccountably, I had waked out of deep sleep with a feeling quite safe and sure, at last, that Betty was free. . . . . . The night-light had burned out. A pearly greyness filled the room. . . . . . The nurse was sitting by the window, wrapped in a shawl. Her head, leaning against the window-frame, was thrown back as though to look at something. I don't know whether it was the shawl drawn about drooped shoulders, or the association of a lifted face by the window, but I thought of the hop-picker. And of the promise I had made. Yes, and kept. As long as I had been at Duncombe after that haggard woman passed, no other with my knowing had gone hungry away. Not all suffering, then, was utterly vain. What was the white-capped figure looking at--so steadily, so long? I raised myself on my elbow, and leaned forward till I, too, could see. A tracery of branches, bare, against a clear-coloured sky; and through the crossing lines, a little white moon looked through its sky-lattice into the open window of my room. I got up, so weak I had to cling hold of table and chair, till I stood by the nurse. She was asleep, poor soul! But I hardly noticed her then. I was looking up in a kind of ecstasy, for it seemed to me that a pale young face--not like the Bettina I had known, and still Bettina's face, was leaning down out of Heaven to bring me comfort. But as I looked I saw there was high purpose as well as a world of pity in the face--as though she would have me know that not in vain her innocence had borne the burden of sin. And I was full of wondering. Till, suddenly, I realised that not to comfort me alone, nor mainly, was Betty leaning out of heaven ... _she was come to do for others what no one had done for her_. Then the agony of the sacrifice swept over me afresh. I remembered I had gone back into that last Darkness saying, as I had said ten thousand times before: "Why had this come to Betty?" And now again I asked: "Why had it to be you?" Through the gentle grey of morning Betty seemed to be leading me into the Light. For the answer to my question was that the suffering of evil-doers had never been fruitful as the suffering of the innocent had been. Was there, then, some life-principle in such pain? A voice said: "You shall find in mortal ill, the seed of Immortal Good." I knelt down by the window and thanked my sister. Others shall thank her, too. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Italics are indicated by _underscores_. Small caps are indicated by ALL CAPS. In the original, mid-chapter breaks are indicated by either asterisks (retained here) or by double-spaced lines (a row of dots here). Variations in spelling, hyphenation, and use of accents appear as in the original. End-of-line hyphenations in the original are rejoined here. Obvious typographical errors have been changed. Contents: "NUMBUS" to "NIMBUS" Page 2: "wheat-ears'" to "wheat-ear's" (a wheat-ear's hidden) Page 12: "servants" to "servants'" (the servants' gossip) Page 24: "Fairly" to "Fairy" (the Fairy Tale element) Page 49: period added (my mother liked him.) Page 52: "Helmstone's" to "Helmstones'" (acquaintance of the Helmstones') Page 88: quote added (fragrance to their breath.") Page 93: removed hyphen from "live-laborious days" Page 175: "seedums" to "sedums" (mosses, sedums and suchlike) Page 226: "d'automme" to "d'automne" (feuille d'automne touched) Page 227: "Drew" to "Dew" (Dew Pond House) Page 259: "then" to "them" (take them to my sister) 
11556	----	Facing the Flag by Jules Verne [Redactor's Note: _Facing the Flag_ {number V044 in the T&M listing of Verne's works} is an anonymous translation of _Face au drapeau_ (1896) first published in the U.S. by F. Tennyson Neely in 1897, and later (circa 1903) republished from the same plates by Hurst and F.M. Lupton (Federal Book Co.). This is a different translation from the one published by Sampson & Low in England entitled _For the Flag_ (1897) translated by Mrs. Cashel Hoey.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FACING THE FLAG BY J U L E S V E R N E AUTHOR OF "AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS"; "TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA"; "FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON," ETC. New York THE F. M. LUPTON PUBLISHING COMPANY PUBLISHERS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1897 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS CHAP I. Healthful House II. Count d'Artigas III. Kidnapped IV. The Schooner "Ebba" V. Where am I.--(Notes by Simon Hart, the Engineer.) VI. On Deck VII. Two Days at Sea VIII. Back Cup IX. Inside Back Cup X. Ker Karraje XI. Five Weeks in Back Cup XII. Engineer Serko's Advice XIII. God Be with It XIV. Battle Between the "Sword" and the Tug XV. Expectation XVI. Only a few more Hours XVII. One against Five XVIII. On Board the "Tonnant" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FACING THE FLAG. CHAPTER I. HEALTHFUL HOUSE. The _carte de visite_ received that day, June 15, 189-, by the director of the establishment of Healthful House was a very neat one, and simply bore, without escutcheon or coronet, the name: COUNT D'ARTIGAS. Below this name, in a corner of the card, the following address was written in lead pencil: "On board the schooner _Ebba_, anchored off New-Berne, Pamlico Sound." The capital of North Carolina--one of the forty-four states of the Union at this epoch--is the rather important town of Raleigh, which is about one hundred and fifty miles in the interior of the province. It is owing to its central position that this city has become the seat of the State legislature, for there are others that equal and even surpass it in industrial and commercial importance, such as Wilmington, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Edenton, Washington, Salisbury, Tarborough, Halifax, and New-Berne. The latter town is situated on estuary of the Neuse River, which empties itself into Pamlico Sound, a sort of vast maritime lake protected by a natural dyke formed by the isles and islets of the Carolina coast. The director of Healthful House could never have imagined why the card should have been sent to him, had it not been accompanied by a note from the Count d'Artigas soliciting permission to visit the establishment. The personage in question hoped that the director would grant his request, and announced that he would present himself in the afternoon, accompanied by Captain Spade, commander of the schooner _Ebba_. This desire to penetrate to the interior of the celebrated sanitarium, then in great request by the wealthy invalids of the United States, was natural enough on the part of a foreigner. Others who did not bear such a high-sounding name as the Count d'Artigas had visited it, and had been unstinting in their compliments to the director. The latter therefore hastened to accord the authorization demanded, and added that he would be honored to open the doors of the establishment to the Count d'Artigas. Healthful House, which contained a select _personnel_, and was assured of the co-operation of the most celebrated doctors in the country, was a private enterprise. Independent of hospitals and almshouses, but subjected to the surveillance of the State, it comprised all the conditions of comfort and salubrity essential to establishments of this description designed to receive an opulent _clientele_. It would have been difficult to find a more agreeable situation than that of Healthful House. On the landward slope of a hill extended a park of two hundred acres planted with the magnificent vegetation that grows so luxuriantly in that part of North America, which is equal in latitude to the Canary and Madeira Islands. At the furthermost limit of the park lay the wide estuary of the Neuse, swept by the cool breezes of Pamlico Sound and by the winds that blew from the ocean beyond the narrow _lido_ of the coast. Healthful House, where rich invalids were cared for under such excellent hygienic conditions, was more generally reserved for the treatment of chronic complaints; but the management did not decline to admit patients affected by mental troubles, when the latter were not of an incurable nature. It thus happened--a circumstance that was bound to attract a good deal of attention to Healthful House, and which perhaps was the motive for the visit of the Count d'Artigas--that a person of world-wide notoriety had for eighteen months been under special observation there. This person was a Frenchman named Thomas Roch, forty-five years of age. He was, beyond question, suffering from some mental malady, but expert alienists admitted that he had not entirely lost the use of his reasoning faculties. It was only too evident that he had lost all notion of things as far as the ordinary acts of life were concerned; but in regard to subjects demanding the exercise of his genius, his sanity was unimpaired and unassailable--a fact which demonstrates how true is the _dictum_ that genius and madness are often closely allied! Otherwise his condition manifested itself by complete loss of memory;--the impossibility of concentrating his attention upon anything, lack of judgment, delirium and incoherence. He no longer even possessed the natural animal instinct of self-preservation, and had to be watched like an infant whom one never permits out of one's sight. Therefore a warder was detailed to keep close watch over him by day and by night in Pavilion No. 17, at the end of Healthful House Park, which had been specially set apart for him. Ordinary insanity, when it is not incurable, can only be cured by moral means. Medicine and therapeutics are powerless, and their inefficacy has long been recognized by specialists. Were these moral means applicable to the case of Thomas Roch? One may be permitted to doubt it, even amid the tranquil and salubrious surroundings of Healthful House. As a matter of fact the very symptoms of uneasiness, changes of temper, irritability, queer traits of character, melancholy, apathy, and a repugnance for serious occupations were distinctly apparent; no treatment seemed capable of curing or even alleviating these symptoms. This was patent to all his medical attendants. It has been justly remarked that madness is an excess of subjectivity; that is to say, a state in which the mind accords too much to mental labor and not enough to outward impressions. In the case of Thomas Roch this indifference was practically absolute. He lived but within himself, so to speak, a prey to a fixed idea which had brought him to the condition in which we find him. Could any circumstance occur to counteract it--to "exteriorize" him, as it were? The thing was improbable, but it was not impossible. It is now necessary to explain how this Frenchman came to quit France, what motive attracted him to the United States, why the Federal government had judged it prudent and necessary to intern him in this sanitarium, where every utterance that unconsciously escaped him during his crises were noted and recorded with the minutest care. Eighteen months previously the Secretary of the Navy at Washington, had received a demand for an audience in regard to a communication that Thomas Roch desired to make to him. As soon as he glanced at the name, the secretary perfectly understood the nature of the communication and the terms which would accompany it, and an immediate audience was unhesitatingly accorded. Thomas Roch's notoriety was indeed such that, out of solicitude for the interests confided to his keeping, and which he was bound to safeguard, he could not hesitate to receive the petitioner and listen to the proposals which the latter desired personally to submit to him. Thomas Roch was an inventor--an inventor of genius. Several important discoveries had brought him prominently to the notice of the world. Thanks to him, problems that had previously remained purely theoretical had received practical application. He occupied a conspicuous place in the front rank of the army of science. It will be seen how worry, deceptions, mortification, and the outrages with which he was overwhelmed by the cynical wits of the press combined to drive him to that degree of madness which necessitated his internment in Healthful House. His latest invention in war-engines bore the name of Roch's Fulgurator. This apparatus possessed, if he was to be believed, such superiority over all others, that the State which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean. The deplorable difficulties inventors encounter in connection with their inventions are only too well known, especially when they endeavor to get them adopted by governmental commissions. Several of the most celebrated examples are still fresh in everybody's memory. It is useless to insist upon this point, because there are sometimes circumstances underlying affairs of this kind upon which it is difficult to obtain any light. In regard to Thomas Roch, however, it is only fair to say that, as in the case of the majority of his predecessors, his pretensions were excessive. He placed such an exorbitant price upon his new engine that it was practicably impossible to treat with him. This was due to the fact--and it should not be lost sight of--that in respect of previous inventions which had been most fruitful in result, he had been imposed upon with the greatest audacity. Being unable to obtain therefrom the profits which he had a right to expect, his temper had become soured. He became suspicious, would give up nothing without knowing just what he was doing, impose conditions that were perhaps unacceptable, wanted his mere assertions accepted as sufficient guarantee, and in any case asked for such a large sum of money on account before condescending to furnish the test of practical experiment that his overtures could not be entertained. In the first place he had offered the fulgurator to France, and made known the nature of it to the commission appointed to pass upon his proposition. The fulgurator was a sort of auto-propulsive engine, of peculiar construction, charged with an explosive composed of new substances and which only produced its effect under the action of a deflagrator that was also new. When this engine, no matter in what way it was launched, exploded, not on striking the object aimed at, but several hundred yards from it, its action upon the atmospheric strata was so terrific that any construction, warship or floating battery, within a zone of twelve thousand square yards, would be blown to atoms. This was the principle of the shell launched by the Zalinski pneumatic gun with which experiments had already been made at that epoch, but its results were multiplied at least a hundred-fold. If, therefore, Thomas Roch's invention possessed this power, it assured the offensive and defensive superiority of his native country. But might not the inventor be exaggerating, notwithstanding that the tests of other engines he had conceived had proved incontestably that they were all he had claimed them to be? This, experiment could alone show, and it was precisely here where the rub came in. Roch would not agree to experiment until the millions at which he valued his fulgurator had first been paid to him. It is certain that a sort of disequilibrium had then occurred in his mental faculties. It was felt that he was developing a condition of mind that would gradually lead to definite madness. No government could possibly condescend to treat with him under the conditions he imposed. The French commission was compelled to break off all negotiations with him, and the newspapers, even those of the Radical Opposition, had to admit that it was difficult to follow up the affair. In view of the excess of subjectivity which was unceasingly augmenting in the profoundly disturbed mind of Thomas Roch, no one will be surprised at the fact that the cord of patriotism gradually relaxed until it ceased to vibrate. For the honor of human nature be it said that Thomas Roch was by this time irresponsible for his actions. He preserved his whole consciousness only in so far as subjects bearing directly upon his invention were concerned. In this particular he had lost nothing of his mental power. But in all that related to the most ordinary details of existence his moral decrepitude increased daily and deprived him of complete responsibility for his acts. Thomas Roch's invention having been refused by the commission, steps ought to have been taken to prevent him from offering it elsewhere. Nothing of the kind was done, and there a great mistake was made. The inevitable was bound to happen, and it did. Under a growing irritability the sentiment of patriotism, which is the very essence of the citizen--who before belonging to himself belongs to his country-- became extinct in the soul of the disappointed inventor. His thoughts turned towards other nations. He crossed the frontier, and forgetting the ineffaceable past, offered the fulgurator to Germany. There, as soon as his exorbitant demands were made known, the government refused to receive his communication. Besides, it so happened that the military authorities were just then absorbed by the construction of a new ballistic engine, and imagined they could afford to ignore that of the French inventor. As the result of this second rebuff Roch's anger became coupled with hatred--an instinctive hatred of humanity--especially after his _pourparlers_ with the British Admiralty came to naught. The English being practical people, did not at first repulse Thomas Roch. They sounded him and tried to get round him; but Roch would listen to nothing. His secret was worth millions, and these millions he would have, or they would not have his secret. The Admiralty at last declined to have anything more to do with him. It was in these conditions, when his intellectual trouble was growing daily worse, that he made a last effort by approaching the American Government. That was about eighteen months before this story opens. The Americans, being even more practical than the English, did not attempt to bargain for Roch's fulgurator, to which, in view of the French chemist's reputation, they attached exceptional importance. They rightly esteemed him a man of genius, and took the measures justified by his condition, prepared to indemnify him equitably later. As Thomas Roch gave only too visible proofs of mental alienation, the Administration, in the very interest of his invention, judged it prudent to sequestrate him. As is already known, he was not confined in a lunatic asylum, but was conveyed to Healthful House, which offered every guarantee for the proper treatment of his malady. Yet, though the most careful attention had been devoted to him, no improvement had manifested itself. Thomas Roch, let it be again remarked--this point cannot be too often insisted upon--incapable though he was of comprehending and performing the ordinary acts and duties of life, recovered all his powers when the field of his discoveries was touched upon. He became animated, and spoke with the assurance of a man who knows whereof he is descanting, and an authority that carried conviction with it. In the heat of his eloquence he would describe the marvellous qualities of his fulgurator and the truly extraordinary effects it caused. As to the nature of the explosive and of the deflagrator, the elements of which the latter was composed, their manufacture, and the way in which they were employed, he preserved complete silence, and all attempts to worm the secret out of him remained ineffectual. Once or twice, during the height of the paroxysms to which he was occasionally subject, there had been reason to believe that his secret would escape him, and every precaution had been taken to note his slightest utterance. But Thomas Roch had each time disappointed his watchers. If he no longer preserved the sentiment of self-preservation, he at least knew how to preserve the secret of his discovery. Pavilion No. 17 was situated in the middle of a garden that was surrounded by hedges, and here Roch was accustomed to take exercise under the surveillance of his guardian. This guardian lived in the same pavilion, slept in the same room with him, and kept constant watch upon him, never leaving him for an hour. He hung upon the lightest words uttered by the patient in the course of his hallucinations, which generally occurred in the intermediary state between sleeping and waking--watched and listened while he dreamed. This guardian was known as Gaydon. Shortly after the sequestration of Thomas Roch, having learned that an attendant speaking French fluently was wanted, he had applied at Healthful House for the place, and had been engaged to look after the new inmate. In reality the alleged Gaydon was a French engineer named Simon Hart, who for several years past had been connected with a manufactory of chemical products in New Jersey. Simon Hart was forty years of age. His high forehead was furrowed with the wrinkle that denoted the thinker, and his resolute bearing denoted energy combined with tenacity. Extremely well versed in the various questions relating to the perfecting of modern armaments, Hart knew everything that had been invented in the shape of explosives, of which there were over eleven hundred at that time, and was fully able to appreciate such a man as Thomas Roch. He firmly believed in the power of the latter's fulgurator, and had no doubt whatever that the inventor had conceived an engine that was capable of revolutionizing the condition of both offensive and defensive warfare on land and sea. He was aware that the demon of insanity had respected the man of science, and that in Roch's partially diseased brain the flame of genius still burned brightly. Then it occurred to him that if, during Roch's crises, his secret was revealed, this invention of a Frenchman would be seized upon by some other country to the detriment of France. Impelled by a spirit of patriotism, he made up his mind to offer himself as Thomas Roch's guardian, by passing himself off as an American thoroughly conversant with the French language, in order that if the inventor did at any time disclose his secret, France alone should benefit thereby. On pretext of returning to Europe, he resigned his position at the New Jersey manufactory, and changed his name so that none should know what had become of him. Thus it came to pass that Simon Hart, alias Gaydon, had been an attendant at Healthful House for fifteen months. It required no little courage on the part of a man of his position and education to perform the menial and exacting duties of an insane man's attendant; but, as has been before remarked, he was actuated by a spirit of the purest and noblest patriotism. The idea of depriving Roch of the legitimate benefits due to the inventor, if he succeeded in learning his secret, never for an instant entered his mind. He had kept the patient under the closest possible observation for fifteen months yet had not been able to learn anything from him, or worm out of him a single reply to his questions that was of the slightest value. But he had become more convinced than ever of the importance of Thomas Roch's discovery, and was extremely apprehensive lest the partial madness of the inventor should become general, or lest he should die during one of his paroxysms and carry his secret with him to the grave. This was Simon Hart's position, and this the mission to which he had wholly devoted himself in the interest of his native country. However, notwithstanding his deceptions and troubles, Thomas Roch's physical health, thanks to his vigorous constitution, was not particularly affected. A man of medium height, with a large head, high, wide forehead, strongly-cut features, iron-gray hair and moustache, eyes generally haggard, but which became piercing and imperious when illuminated by his dominant idea, thin lips closely compressed, as though to prevent the escape of a word that could betray his secret--such was the inventor confined in one of the pavilions of Healthful House, probably unconscious of his sequestration, and confided to the surveillance of Simon Hart the engineer, become Gaydon the warder. CHAPTER II. COUNT D'ARTIGAS. Just who was this Count d'Artigas? A Spaniard? So his name would appear to indicate. Yet on the stern of his schooner, in letters of gold, was the name _Ebba_, which is of pure Norwegian origin. And had you asked him the name of the captain of the _Ebba_, he would have replied, Spade, and would doubtless have added that that of the boatswain was Effrondat, and that of the ship's cook, Helim--all singularly dissimilar and indicating very different nationalities. Could any plausible hypothesis be deducted from the type presented by Count d'Artigas? Not easily. If the color of his skin, his black hair, and the easy grace of his attitude denoted a Spanish origin, the _ensemble_ of his person showed none of the racial characteristics peculiar to the natives of the Iberian peninsula. He was a man of about forty-five years of age, about the average height, and robustly constituted. With his calm and haughty demeanor he resembled an Hindoo lord in whose blood might mingle that of some superb type of Malay. If he was not naturally of a cold temperament, he at least, with his imperious gestures and brevity of speech, endeavored to make it appear that he was. As to the language usually spoken by him and his crew, it was one of those idioms current in the islands of the Indian Ocean and the adjacent seas. Yet when his maritime excursions brought him to the coasts of the old or new world he spoke English with remarkable facility, and with so slight an accent as to scarcely betray his foreign origin. None could have told anything about his past, nor even about his present life, nor from what source he derived his fortune,--obviously a large one, inasmuch as he was able to gratify his every whim and lived in the greatest luxury whenever he visited America,--nor where he resided when at home, nor where was the port from which his schooner hailed, and none would have ventured to question him upon any of these points so little disposed was he to be communicative. He was not the kind of man to give anything away or compromise himself in the slightest degree, even when interviewed by American reporters. All that was known about him was what was published in the papers when the arrival of the _Ebba_ was reported in some port, and particularly in the ports of the east coast of the United States, where the schooner was accustomed to put in at regular periods to lay in provisions and stores for a lengthy voyage. She would take on board not only flour, biscuits, preserves, fresh and dried meat, live stock, wines, beers, and spirits, but also clothing, household utensils, and objects of luxury--all of the finest quality and highest price, and which were paid for either in dollars, guineas, or other coins of various countries and denominations. Consequently, if no one knew anything about the private life of Count d'Artigas, he was nevertheless very well known in the various ports of the United States from the Florida peninsula to New England. It is therefore in no way surprising that the director of Healthful House should have felt greatly flattered by the Count's visit, and have received him with every mark of honor and respect. It was the first time that the schooner _Ebba_ had dropped anchor in the port of New-Berne, and no doubt a mere whim of her owner had brought him to the mouth of the Neuse. Otherwise why should he have come to such a place? Certainly not to lay in stores, for Pamlico Sound offered neither the resources nor facilities to be found in such ports as Boston, New York, Dover, Savannah, Wilmington in North Carolina, and Charleston in South Carolina. What could he have procured with his piastres and bank-notes in the small markets of New-Berne? This chief town of Craven County contained barely six thousand inhabitants. Its commerce consisted principally in the exportation of grain, pigs, furniture, and naval munitions. Besides, a few weeks previously, the schooner had loaded up for some destination which, as usual, was unknown. Had this enigmatical personage then come solely for the purpose of visiting Healthful House? Very likely. There would have been nothing surprising in the fact, seeing that the establishment enjoyed a high and well-merited reputation. Or perhaps the Count had been inspired by curiosity to meet Thomas Roch? This curiosity would have been legitimate and natural enough in view of the universal renown of the French inventor. Fancy--a mad genius who claimed that his discoveries were destined to revolutionize the methods of modern military art! As he had notified the director he would do, the Count d'Artigas presented himself in the afternoon at the door of Healthful House, accompanied by Captain Spade, the commander of the _Ebba_. In conformity with orders given, both were admitted and conducted to the office of the director. The latter received his distinguished visitor with _empressement_, placed himself at his disposal, and intimated his intention of personally conducting him over the establishment, not being willing to concede to anybody else the honor of being his _cicerone_. The Count on his part was profuse in the expression of his thanks for the considerations extended to him. They went over the common rooms and private habitations of the establishment, the director prattling unceasingly about the care with which the patients were tended--much better care, if he was to be believed, than they could possibly have had in the bosoms of their families--and priding himself upon the results achieved, and which had earned for the place its well-merited success. The Count d'Artigas listened to his ceaseless chatter with apparent interest, probably in order the better to dissemble the real motive of his visit. However, after going the rounds for an hour he ventured to remark: "Have you not among your patients, sir, one anent whom there was a great deal of talk some time ago, and whose presence here contributed in no small measure to attract public attention to Healthful House?" "You refer to Thomas Roch, I presume, Count?" queried the director. "Precisely--that Frenchman--that inventor--whose mental condition is said to be very precarious." "Very precarious, Count, and happily so, perhaps! In my opinion humanity has nothing to gain by his discoveries, the application of which would increase the already too numerous means of destruction." "You speak wisely, sir, and I entirely agree with you. Real progress does not lie in that direction, and I regard as inimical to society all those who seek to follow it. But has this inventor entirely lost the use of his intellectual faculties?" "Entirely, no; save as regards the ordinary things of life. In this respect he no longer possesses either comprehension or responsibility. His genius as an inventor, however, remains intact; it has survived his moral degeneracy, and, had his insensate demands been complied with, I have no doubt he would have produced a new war engine--which the world can get along very well without." "Very well without, as you say, sir," re-echoed the Count d'Artigas, and Captain Spade nodded approval. "But you will be able to judge for yourself, Count, for here is the pavilion occupied by Thomas Roch. If his confinement is well justified from the point of view of public security he is none the less treated with all the consideration due to him and the attention which his condition necessitates. Besides, Healthful House is beyond the reach of indiscreet persons who might...." The director completed the phrase with a significant motion of his head--which brought an imperceptible smile to the lips of the stranger. "But," asked the Count, "is Thomas Roch never left alone?" "Never, Count, never. He has a permanent attendant in whom we have implicit confidence, who speaks his language and keeps the closest possible watch upon him. If in some way or other some indication relative to his discovery were to escape him, it would be immediately noted down and its value would be passed upon by those competent to judge." Here the Count d'Artigas stole a rapid and meaning glance at Captain Spade, who responded with a gesture which said plainly enough: "I understand." And had any one observed the captain during the visit, they could not have failed to remark that he examined with the greatest minuteness that portion of the park surrounding Pavilion No. 17, and the different paths leading to the latter--probably in view of some prearranged scheme. The garden of the pavilion was near the high wall surrounding the property, from the foot of which on the other side the hill sloped gently to the right bank of the Neuse. The pavilion itself was a one-story building surmounted by a terrace in the Italian style. It contained two rooms and an ante-room with strongly-barred windows. On each side and in rear of the habitation were clusters of fine trees, which were then in full leaf. In front was a cool, green velvety lawn, ornamented with shrubs and brilliantly tinted flowers. The whole garden extended over about half an acre, and was reserved exclusively for the use of Thomas Roch, who was free to wander about it at pleasure under the surveillance of his guardian. When the Count d'Artigas, Captain Spade, and the director entered the garden, the first person they saw was the warder Gaydon, standing at the door of the pavilion. Unnoticed by the director the Count d'Artigas eyed the attendant with singular persistence. It was not the first time that strangers had come to see the occupant of Pavilion No. 17, for the French inventor was justly regarded as the most interesting inmate of Healthful House. Nevertheless, Gaydon's attention was attracted by the originality of the type presented by the two visitors, of whose nationality he was ignorant. If the name of the Count d'Artigas was not unfamiliar to him, he had never had occasion to meet that wealthy gentleman during the latter's sojourn in the eastern ports. He therefore had no idea as to who the Count was. Neither was he aware that the schooner _Ebba_ was then anchored at the entrance to the Neuse, at the foot of the hill upon which Healthful House was situated. "Gaydon," demanded the director, "where is Thomas Roch?" "Yonder," replied the warder, pointing to a man who was walking meditatively under the trees in rear of the pavilion. "The Count d'Artigas has been authorized to visit Healthful House," the director explained; "and does not wish to go away without having seen Thomas Roch, who was lately the subject of a good deal too much discussion." "And who would be talked about a great deal more," added the Count, "had the Federal Government not taken the precaution to confine him in this establishment." "A necessary precaution, Count." "Necessary, as you observe, Mr. Director. It is better for the peace of the world that his secret should die with him." After having glanced at the Count d'Artigas, Gaydon had not uttered a word; but preceding the two strangers he walked towards the clump of trees where the inventor was pacing back and forth. Thomas Roch paid no attention to them. He appeared to be oblivious of their presence. Meanwhile, Captain Spade, while being careful not to excite suspicion, had been minutely examining the immediate surroundings of the pavilion and the end of the park in which it was situated. From the top of the sloping alleys he could easily distinguish the peak of a mast which showed above the wall of the park. He recognized the peak at a glance as being that of the _Ebba_, and knew therefore that the wall at this part skirted the right bank of the Neuse. The Count d'Artigas' whole attention was concentrated upon the French inventor. The latter's health appeared to have suffered in no way from his eighteen months' confinement; but his queer attitude, his incoherent gestures, his haggard eye, and his indifference to what was passing around him testified only too plainly to the degeneration of his mental faculties. At length Thomas Roch dropped into a seat and with the end of a switch traced in the sand of the alley the outline of a fortification. Then kneeling down he made a number of little mounds that were evidently intended to represent bastions. He next plucked some leaves from a neighboring tree and stuck them in the mounds like so many tiny flags. All this was done with the utmost seriousness and without any attention whatever being paid to the onlookers. It was the amusement of a child, but a child would have lacked this characteristic gravity. "Is he then absolutely mad?" demanded the Count d'Artigas, who in spite of his habitual impassibility appeared to be somewhat disappointed. "I warned you, Count, that nothing could be obtained from him." "Couldn't he at least pay some attention to us?" "It would perhaps be difficult to induce him to do so." Then turning to the attendant: "Speak to him, Gaydon. Perhaps he will answer you." "Oh! he'll answer me right enough, sir, never fear," replied Gaydon. He went up to the inventor and touching him on the shoulder, said gently: "Thomas Roch!" The latter raised his head, and of the persons present he doubtless saw but his keeper, though Captain Spade had come up and all formed a circle about him. "Thomas Roch," continued Gaydon, speaking in English, "here are some visitors to see you. They are interested in your health--in your work." The last word alone seemed to rouse him from his indifference. "My work?" he replied, also in English, which he spoke like a native. Then taking a pebble between his index finger and bent thumb, as a boy plays at marbles, he projected it against one of the little sand-heaps. It scattered, and he jumped for joy. "Blown to pieces! The bastion is blown to pieces! My explosive has destroyed everything at one blow!" he shouted, the light of triumph flashing in his eyes. "You see," said the director, addressing the Count d'Artigas. "The idea of his invention never leaves him." "And it will die with him," affirmed the attendant. "Couldn't you, Gaydon, get him to talk about his fulgurator?" asked his chief. "I will try, if you order me to do so, sir." "Well, I do order you, for I think it might interest the Count d'Artigas." "Certainly," assented the Count, whose physiognomy betrayed no sign of the sentiments which were agitating him. "I ought to warn you that I risk bringing on another fit," observed Gaydon. "You can drop the conversation when you consider it prudent. Tell Thomas Roch that a foreigner wishes to negotiate with him for the purchase of his fulgurator." "But are you not afraid he may give his secret away?" questioned the Count. He spoke with such vivacity that Gaydon could not restrain a glance of distrust, which, however, did not appear to disturb the equanimity of that impenetrable nobleman. "No fear of that," said the warder. "No promise would induce him to divulge his secret. Until the millions he demands are counted into his hand he will remain as mute as a stone." "I don't happen to be carrying those millions about me," remarked the Count quietly. Gaydon again touched Roch on the shoulder and repeated: "Thomas Roch, here are some foreigners who are anxious to acquire your invention." The madman started. "My invention?" he cried. "My deflagrator?" And his growing animation plainly indicated the imminence of the fit that Gaydon had been apprehensive about, and which questions of this character invariably brought on. "How much will you give me for it--how much?" continued Roch. "How much--how much?" "Ten million dollars," replied Gaydon. "Ten millions! Ten millions! A fulgurator ten million times more powerful than anything hitherto invented! Ten millions for an autopropulsive projectile which, when it explodes, destroys everything in sight within a radius of over twelve thousand square yards! Ten millions for the only deflagrator that can provoke its explosion! Why, all the wealth of the world wouldn't suffice to purchase the secret of my engine, and rather than sell it at such a price I would cut my tongue in half with my teeth. Ten millions, when it is worth a billion--a billion--a billion!" It was clear that Roch had lost all notion of things, and had Gaydon offered him ten billions the madman would have replied in exactly the same manner. The Count d'Artigas and Captain Spade had not taken their eyes off him. The Count was impassible as usual, though his brow had darkened, but the captain shook his head in a manner that implied plainly: "Decidedly there is nothing to hope from this poor devil!" After his outburst Roch fled across the garden crying hoarsely: "Billions! Billions!" Gaydon turned to the director and remarked: "I told you how it would be." Then he rushed after his patient, caught him by the arm, and led him, without any attempt at resistance, into the pavilion and closed the door. The Count d'Artigas remained alone with the director, Captain Spade having strolled off again in the direction of the wall at the bottom of the park. "You see I was not guilty of exaggeration, Count," said the director. "It is obvious to every one that Thomas Roch is becoming daily worse. In my opinion his case is a hopeless one. If all the money he asks for were offered to him, nothing could be got from him." "Very likely," replied the Count, "still, if his pecuniary demands are supremely absurd, he has none the less invented an engine the power of which is infinite, one might say." "That is the opinion expressed by competent persons, Count. But what he has discovered will ere long be lost with himself in one of these fits which are becoming more frequent and intense. Very soon even the motive of interest, the only sentiment that appears to have survived in his mind, will become extinct." "Mayhap the sentiment of hatred will remain, though," muttered the Count, as Spade joined them at the garden gate. CHAPTER III. KIDNAPPED. Half an hour later the Count d'Artigas and Captain Spade were following the beech-lined road that separated the Healthful House estate from the right bank of the Neuse. Both had taken leave of the director, the latter declaring himself greatly honored by their visit, and the former thanking him warmly for his courteous reception. A hundred-dollar bill left as a tip for the staff of the establishment had certainly not belied the Count's reputation for generosity. He was--there could be no doubt about it--a foreigner of the highest distinction, if distinction be measured by generosity. Issuing by the gate at the main entrance to Healthful House, they had skirted the wall that surrounded the property, and which was high enough to preclude the possibility of climbing it. Not a word passed between them for some time; the Count was deep in thought and Captain Spade was not in the habit of addressing him without being first spoken to. At last when they stood beneath the rear wall behind which, though it was not visible, the Count knew Pavilion No. 17 was situated, he said: "You managed, I presume, to thoroughly explore the place, and are acquainted with every detail of it?" "Certainly, _Count_" replied Captain Spade, emphasizing the title. "You are perfectly sure about it?" "Perfectly. I could go through the park with my eyes shut. If you still persist in carrying out your scheme the pavilion can be easily reached." "I do persist, Spade." "Notwithstanding Thomas Roch's mental condition?" "Notwithstanding his condition; and if we succeed in carrying him off----" "That is my affair. When night comes on I undertake to enter the park of Healthful House, and then the pavilion garden without being seen by anybody." "By the entrance gate?" "No, on this side." "Yes, but on this side there is the wall, and if you succeed in climbing it, how are you going to get over it again with Thomas Roch? What if the madman cries out--what if he should resist--what if his keeper gives the alarm?" "Don't worry yourself in the least about that. We have only got to go in and come out by this door." Captain Spade pointed to a narrow door let into the wall a few paces distant, and which was doubtless used by the staff of the establishment when they had occasion to go out by the river. "That is the way I propose to go in. It's much easier than scaling the wall with a ladder." "But the door is closed." "It will open." "Has it no bolts?" "Yes, but I shot them back while we were strolling about, and the director didn't notice what I had done." "How are you going to open it?" queried the Count, going to the door. "Here is the key," replied Spade, producing it. He had withdrawn it from the lock, where it happened to be, when he had unbolted the door. "Capital!" exclaimed the Count. "It couldn't be better. The business will be easier than I expected. Let us get back to the schooner. At eight o'clock one of the boats will put you ashore with five men." "Yes, five men will do," said Captain Spade. "There will be enough of them to effect our object even if the keeper is aroused and it becomes necessary to put him out of the way." "Put him out of the way--well, if it becomes absolutely necessary of course you must, but it would be better to seize him too and bring him aboard the _Ebba_ Who knows but what he has already learned a part of Roch's secret?" "True." "Besides, Thomas Roch is used to him, and I don't propose to make him change his habitudes in any way." This observation was accompanied by such a significant smile that Captain Spade could entertain no doubt as to the rôle reserved for the warder of Healthful House. The plan to kidnap them both was thus settled, and appeared to have every chance of being successful; unless during the couple of hours of daylight that yet remained it was noticed that the key of the door had been stolen and the bolts drawn back, Captain Spade and his men could at least count upon being able to enter the park, and the rest, the captain affirmed, would be easy enough. Thomas Roch was the only patient in the establishment isolated and kept under special surveillance. All the other invalids lived in the main building, or occupied pavilions in the front of the park. The plan was to try and seize Roch and Gaydon separately and bind and gag them before they could cry out. The Count d'Artigas and his companion wended their way to a creek where one of the _Ebba's_ boats awaited them. The schooner was anchored two cable lengths from the shore, her sails neatly rolled upon her yards, which were squared as neatly as those of a pleasure yacht or of a man-of-war. At the peak of the mainmast a narrow red pennant was gently swayed by the wind, which came in fitful puffs from the east. The Count and the captain jumped into the boat and a few strokes of the four oars brought them alongside of the schooner. They climbed on deck and going forward to the jib-boom, leaned over the starboard bulwark and gazed at an object that floated on the water a few strokes ahead of the vessel. It was a small buoy that was rocked by the ripple of the ebbing tide. Twilight gradually set in, and the outline of New-Berne on the left bank of the sinuous Neuse became more and more indistinct until it disappeared in the deepening shades of night. A mist set in from the sea, but though it obscured the moon it brought no sign of rain. The lights gleamed out one by one in the houses of the town. The fishing smacks came slowly up the river to their anchorage, impelled by the oars of their crews which struck the water with sharp, rhythmical strokes, and with their sails distended on the chance of catching an occasional puff of the dropping wind to help them along. A couple of steamers passed, sending up volumes of black smoke and myriads of sparks from their double stacks, and lashing the water into foam with their powerful paddles. At eight o'clock the Count d'Artigas appeared on the schooner's deck accompanied by a man about fifty years of age, to whom he remarked: "It is time to go, Serko." "Very well, I will tell Spade," replied Serko. At that moment the captain joined them. "You had better get ready to go," said the Count. "All is ready." "Be careful to prevent any alarm being given, and arrange matters so that no one will for a minute suspect that Thomas Roch and his keeper have been brought on board the _Ebba_." "They wouldn't find them if they came to look for them," observed Serko, shrugging his shoulders and laughing heartily as though he had perpetrated a huge joke. "Nevertheless, it is better not to arouse their suspicion," said d'Artigas. The boat was lowered, and Captain Spade and five sailors took their places in it. Four of the latter got out the oars. The boatswain, Effrondat, who was to remain in charge of the boat, went to the stern beside Captain Spade and took the tiller. "Good luck, Spade," said Serko with a smile, "and don't make more noise about it than if you were a gallant carrying off his lady-love." "I won't--unless that Gaydon chap--" "We must have both Roch and Gaydon," insisted the Count d'Artigas. "That is understood," replied Spade. The boat pushed off, and the sailors on the deck of the schooner watched it till it was lost to sight in the darkness. Pending its return, no preparations for the _Ebba's_ departure were made. Perhaps there was no intention of quitting the port after the men had been kidnapped. Besides, how could the vessel have reached the open sea? Not a breath of air was now stirring, and in half an hour the tide would be setting in again, and rising strongly and rapidly for several miles above New-Berne. Anchored, as has already been said, a couple of cable-lengths from the shore, the _Ebba_ might have been brought much nearer to it, for the water was deep enough, and this would have facilitated the task of the kidnappers when they returned from their expedition. If, however, the Count d'Artigas preferred to let the vessel stay where she was, he probably had his reasons. Not a soul was in sight on the bank, and the road, with its borders of beech trees that skirted the wall of Healthful House estate, was equally deserted. The boat was made fast to the shore. Then Captain Spade and his four sailors landed, leaving the boatswain in charge, and disappeared amid the trees. When they reached the wall Captain Spade stopped and the sailors drew up on each side of the doorway. The captain had only to turn the key in the lock and push the door, unless one of the servants, noticing that the door was not secured as usual, had bolted it. In this event their task would be an extremely difficult one, even if they succeeded in scaling the high wall. The captain put his ear to the key-hole and listened. Not a sound was to be heard in the park. Not even a leaf was rustling in the branches of the beeches under which they were standing. The surrounding country was wrapt in the profoundest silence. Captain Spade drew the key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock and turned it noiselessly. Then he cautiously pushed the door, which opened inward. Things were, then, just as he had left them, and no one had noticed the theft of the key. After assuring himself that nobody happened to be in the neighborhood of the pavilion the captain entered, followed by his men. The door was left wide open, so that they could beat a hurried and uninterrupted retreat in case of necessity. The trees and bushes in this shady part of the park were very thick, and it was so dark that it would not have been easy to distinguish the pavilion had not a light shone brightly in one of the windows. No doubt this was the window of the room occupied by Roch and his guardian, Gaydon, seeing that the latter never left the patient placed in his charge either by night or day. Captain Spade had expected to find him there. The party approached cautiously, taking the utmost precaution to avoid kicking a pebble or stepping on a twig, the noise of which might have revealed their presence. In this way they reached the door of the pavilion near which was the curtained window of the room in which the light was burning. But if the door was locked, how were they going to get in? Captain Spade must have asked himself. He had no key, and to attempt to effect an entrance through the window would be hazardous, for, unless Gaydon could be prevented from giving the alarm, he would rouse the whole establishment. There was no help for it, however. The essential was to get possession of Roch. If they could kidnap Gaydon, too, in conformity with the intentions of the Count d'Artigas, so much the better. If not-- Captain Spade crept stealthily to the window, and standing on tiptoe, looked in. Through an aperture in the curtain he could see all over the room. Gaydon was standing beside Thomas Roch, who had not yet recovered from the fit with which he had been attacked during the Count d'Artigas' visit. His condition necessitated special attention, and the warder was ministering to the patient under the direction of a third person. The latter was one of the doctors attached to Healthful House, and had been at once sent to the pavilion by the director when Roch's paroxysm came on. His presence of course rendered the situation more complicated and the work of the kidnappers more difficult. Roch, fully dressed, was extended upon a sofa. He was now fairly calm. The paroxysm, which was abating, would be followed by several hours of torpor and exhaustion. Just as Captain Spade peeped through the window the doctor was making preparations to leave. The Captain heard him say to Gaydon that his (the doctor's) presence was not likely to be required any more that night, and that there was nothing to be done beyond following the instructions he had given. The doctor then walked towards the door, which, it will be remembered, was close to the window in front of which Spade and his men were standing. If they remained where they were they could not fail to be seen, not only by the doctor, but by the warder, who was accompanying him to the door. Before they made their appearance, however, the sailors, at a sign from their chief, had dispersed and hidden themselves behind the bushes, while Spade himself crouched in the shadow beneath the window. Luckily Gaydon had not brought the lamp with him, so that the captain was in no danger of being seen. As he was about to take leave of Gaydon, the doctor stopped on the step and remarked: "This is one of the worst attacks our patient has had. One or two more like that and he will lose the little reason he still possesses." "Just so," said Gaydon. "I wonder that the director doesn't prohibit all visitors from entering the pavilion. Roch owes his present attack to a Count d'Artigas, for whose amusement harmful questions were put to him." "I will call the director's attention to the matter," responded the doctor. He then descended the steps and Gaydon, leaving the door of the pavilion ajar, accompanied him to the end of the path. When they had gone Captain Spade stood up, and his men rejoined him. Had they not better profit by the chance thus unexpectedly afforded them to enter the room and secure Roch, who was in a semi-comatose condition, and then await Gaydon's return, and seize the warder as he entered? This would have involved considerable risk. Gaydon, at a glance, would perceive that his patient was missing and raise an alarm; the doctor would come running back; the whole staff of Healthful House would turn out, and Spade would not have time to escape with his precious prisoner and lock the door in the wall after him. He did not have much chance to deliberate about it, for the warder was heard returning along the gravel path. Spade decided that the best thing to be done was to spring upon him as he passed and stifle his cries and overpower him before he could attempt to offer any resistance. The carrying off of the mad inventor would be easy enough, inasmuch as he was unconscious, and could not raise a finger to help himself. Gaydon came round a clump of bushes and approached the entrance to the pavilion. As he raised his foot to mount the steps the four sailors sprang upon him, bore him backwards to the ground, and had gagged him, securely bound him hand and foot, and bandaged his eyes before he began to realize what had happened. Two of the men then kept guard over him, while Captain Spade and the others entered the house. As the captain had surmised, Thomas Roch had sunk into such a torpor that he could have heard nothing of what had been going on outside. Reclining at full length, with his eyes closed, he might have been taken for a dead man but for his heavy breathing. There was no need either to bind or gag him. One man took him by the head and another by the feet and started off with him to the schooner. Captain Spade was the last to quit the house after extinguishing the lamp and closing the door behind him. In this way there was no reason to suppose that the inmates would be missed before morning. Gaydon was carried off in the same way as Thomas Roch had been. The two remaining sailors lifted him and bore him quietly but rapidly down the path to the door in the wall. The park was pitch dark. Not even a glimmer of the lights in the windows of Healthful House could be seen through the thick foliage. Arrived at the wall, Spade, who had led the way, stepped aside to allow the sailors with their burdens to pass through, then followed and closed and locked the door. He put the key in his pocket, intending to throw it into the Neuse as soon as they were safely on board the schooner. There was no one on the road, nor on the bank of the river. The party made for the boat, and found that Effrondat, the boatswain, had made all ready to receive them. Thomas Roch and Gaydon were laid in the bottom of the boat, and the sailors again took their places at the oars. "Hurry up, Effrondat, and cast off the painter," ordered the captain. The boatswain obeyed, and pushed the boat off with his foot as he scrambled in. The men bent to their oars and rowed rapidly to the schooner, which was easily distinguishable, having hung out a light at her mizzenmast head. In two minutes they were alongside. The Count d'Artigas was leaning on the bulwarks by the gangway. "All right, Spade?" he questioned. "Yes, sir, all right!" "Both of them?" "Both the madman and his keeper." "Doesn't anybody know about it up at Healthful House? "Not a soul." It was not likely that Gaydon, whose eyes and ears were bandaged, but who preserved all his sang-froid, could have recognized the voices of the Count d'Artigas and Captain Spade. Nor did he have the chance to. No attempt was immediately made to hoist him on board. He had been lying in the bottom of the boat alongside the schooner for fully half an hour, he calculated, before he felt himself lifted, and then lowered, doubtless to the bottom of the hold. The kidnapping having been accomplished it would seem that it only remained for the _Ebba_ to weigh anchor, descend the estuary and make her way out to sea through Pamlico Sound. Yet no preparations for departure were made. Was it not dangerous to stay where they were after their daring raid? Had the Count d'Artigas hidden his prisoners so securely as to preclude the possibility of their being discovered if the _Ebba_, whose presence in proximity to Healthful House could not fail to excite suspicion, received a visit from the New-Berne police? However this might have been, an hour after the return of the expedition, every soul on board save the watch--the Count d'Artigas, Serko, and Captain Spade in their respective cabins, and the crew in the fore-castle, were sound asleep. CHAPTER IV. THE SCHOONER EBBA. It was not till the next morning, and then very leisurely, that the _Ebba_ began to make preparations for her departure. From the extremity of New-Berne quay the crew might have been seen holystoning the deck, after which they loosened the reef lines, under the direction of Effrondat, the boatswain, hoisted in the boats and cleared the halyards. At eight o'clock the Count d'Artigas had not yet appeared on deck. His companion, Serko the engineer, as he was called on board, had not quitted his cabin. Captain Spade was strolling quietly about giving orders. The _Ebba_ would have made a splendid racing yacht, though she had never participated in any of the yacht races either on the North American or British coasts. The height of her masts, the extent of the canvas she carried, her shapely, raking hull, denoted her to be a craft of great speed, and her general lines showed that she was also built to weather the roughest gales at sea. In a favorable wind she would probably make twelve knots an hour. Notwithstanding these advantages, however, she must in a dead calm necessarily suffer from the same disadvantages as other sailing vessels, and it might have been supposed that the Count d'Artigas would have preferred a steam-yacht with which he could have gone anywhere, at any time, in any weather. But apparently he was satisfied to stick to the old method, even when he made his long trips across the Atlantic. On this particular morning the wind was blowing gently from the west, which was very favorable to the _Ebba_, and would enable her to stand straight out of the Neuse, across Pamlico Sound, and through one of the inlets that led to the open sea. At ten o'clock the _Ebba_ was still rocking lazily at anchor, her stem up stream and her cable tautened by the rapidly ebbing tide. The small buoy that on the previous evening had been moored near the schooner was no longer to be seen, and had doubtless been hoisted in. Suddenly a gun boomed out and a slight wreath of white smoke arose from the battery. It was answered by other reports from the guns on the chain of islands along the coast. At this moment the Count d'Artigas and Engineer Serko appeared on deck. Captain Spade went to meet them. "Guns barking," he said laconically. "We expected it," replied Serko, shrugging his shoulders. "They are signals to close the passes." "What has that to do with us?" asked the Count d'Artigas quietly. "Nothing at all," said the engineer. They all, of course, knew that the alarm-guns indicated that the disappearance of Thomas Roch and the warder Gaydon from Healthful House had been discovered. At daybreak the doctor had gone to Pavilion No. 17 to see how his patient had passed the night, and had found no one there. He immediately notified the director, who had the grounds thoroughly searched. It was then discovered that the door in rear of the park was unbolted, and that, though locked, the key had been taken away. It was evident that Roch and his attendant had been carried out that way. But who were the kidnappers? No one could possibly imagine. All that could be ascertained was that at half-past seven on the previous night one of the doctors had attended Thomas Roch, who was suffering from one of his fits, and that when the medical man had left him the invalid was in an unconscious condition. What had happened after the doctor took leave of Gaydon at the end of the garden-path could not even be conjectured. The news of the disappearance was telegraphed to New Berne, and thence to Raleigh. On receipt of it the Governor had instantly wired orders that no vessel was to be allowed to quit Pamlico Sound without having been first subjected to a most rigorous search. Another dispatch ordered the cruiser _Falcon_, which was stationed in the port, to carry out the Governor's instructions in this respect. At the same time measures were taken to keep a strict lookout in every town and village in the State. The Count d'Artigas could see the _Falcon_, which was a couple of miles away to the east in the estuary, getting steam up and making hurried preparations to carry out her mission. It would take at least an hour before the warship could be got ready to steam out, and the schooner might by that time have gained a good start. "Shall I weigh anchor?" demanded Captain Spade. "Yes, as we have a fair wind; but you can take your time about it," replied the Count d'Artigas. "The passes of Pamlico Sound will be under observation," observed Engineer Serko, "and no vessel will be able to get out without receiving a visit from gentlemen as inquisitive as they will be indiscreet." "Never mind, get under way all the same," ordered the Count. "When the officers of the cruiser or the Custom-House officers have been over the _Ebba_ the embargo will be raised. I shall be indeed surprised if we are not allowed to go about our business." "With a thousand pardons for the liberty taken, and best wishes for a good voyage and speedy return," chuckled Engineer Serko, following the phrase with a loud and prolonged laugh. When the news was received at New-Berne, the authorities at first were puzzled to know whether the missing inventor and his keeper had fled or been carried off. As, however, Roch's flight could not have taken place without the connivance of Gaydon, this supposition was speedily abandoned. In the opinion of the director and management of Healthful House the warder was absolutely above suspicion. They must both, then, have been kidnapped. It can easily be imagined what a sensation the news caused in the town. What! the French inventor who had been so closely guarded had disappeared, and with him the secret of the wonderful fulgurator that nobody had been able to worm out of him? Might not the most serious consequences follow? Might not the discovery of the new engine be lost to America forever? If the daring act had been perpetrated on behalf of another nation, might not that nation, having Thomas Roch in its power, be eventually able to extract from him what the Federal Government had vainly endeavored to obtain? And was it reasonable, was it permissible, to suppose for an instant that he had been carried off for the benefit of a private individual? Certainly not, was the emphatic reply to the latter question, which was too ridiculous to be entertained. Therefore the whole power of the State was employed in an effort to recover the inventor. In every county of North Carolina a special surveillance was organized on every road and at every railroad station, and every house in town and country was searched. Every port from Wilmington to Norfolk was closed, and no craft of any description could leave without being thoroughly overhauled. Not only the cruiser _Falcon_, but every available cutter and launch was sent out with orders to patrol Pamlico Sound and board yachts, merchant vessels and fishing smacks indiscriminately whether anchored or not and search them down to the keelson. Still the crew of the _Ebba_ prepared calmly to weigh anchor, and the Count d'Artigas did not appear to be in the least concerned at the orders of the authorities and at the consequences that would ensue, if Thomas Roch and his keeper, Gaydon, were found on board. At last all was ready, the crew manned the capstan bars, the sails were hoisted, and the schooner glided gracefully through the water towards the Sound. Twenty miles from New-Berne the estuary curves abruptly and shoots off towards the northwest for about the same distance, gradually widening until it empties itself into Pamlico Sound. The latter is a vast expanse about seventy miles across from Sivan Island to Roanoke. On the seaward side stretches a chain of long and narrow islands, forming a natural breakwater north and south from Cape Lookout to Cape Hatteras and from the latter to Cape Henry, near Norfolk City, in Virginia. Numerous beacons on the islands and islets form an easy guide for vessels at night seeking refuge from the Atlantic gales, and once inside the chain they are certain of finding plenty of good anchoring grounds. Several passes afford an outlet from the Sound to the sea. Beyond Sivan Island lighthouse is Ocracoke inlet, and next is the inlet of Hatteras. There are also three others known as Logger Head inlet, New inlet, and Oregon inlet. The Ocracoke was the one nearest the _Ebba_, and she could make it without tacking, but the _Falcon_ was searching all vessels that passed through. This did not, however, make any particular difference, for by this time all the passes, upon which the guns of the forts had been trained, were guarded by government vessels. The _Ebba_, therefore, kept on her way, neither trying to avoid nor offering to approach the searchers. She seemed to be merely a pleasure-yacht out for a morning sail. No attempt had up to that time been made to accost her. Was she, then, specially privileged, and to be spared the bother of being searched? Was the Count d'Artigas considered too high and mighty a personage to be thus molested, and delayed even for an hour? It was unlikely, for though he was regarded as a distinguished foreigner who lived the life of luxury enjoyed by the favored of fortune, no one, as a matter of fact, knew who he was, nor whence he came, nor whither he was going. The schooner sped gracefully over the calm waters of the sound, her flag--a gold crescent in the angle of a red field--streaming proudly in the breeze. Count d'Artigas was cosily ensconced in a basket-work chair on the after-deck, conversing with Engineer Serko and Captain Spade. "They don't seem in a hurry to board us," remarked Serko. "They can come whenever they think proper," said the Count in a tone of supreme indifference. "No doubt they are waiting for us at the entrance to the inlet," suggested Captain Spade. "Let them wait," grunted the wealthy nobleman. Then he relapsed into his customary unconcerned impassibility. Captain Spade's hypothesis was doubtless correct. The _Falcon_ had as yet made no move towards the schooner, but would almost certainly do so as soon as the latter reached the inlet, and the Count would have to submit to a search of his vessel if he wished to reach the open sea. How was it then that he manifested such extraordinary unconcern? Were Thomas Roch and Gaydon so safely hidden that their hiding-place could not possibly be discovered? The thing was possible, but perhaps the Count d'Artigas would not have been quite so confident had he been aware that the _Ebba_ had been specially signalled to the warship and revenue cutters as a suspect. The Count's visit to Healthful House on the previous day had now attracted particular attention to him and his schooner. Evidently, at the time, the director could have had no reason to suspect the motive of his visit. But a few hours later, Thomas Roch and his keeper had been carried off. No one else from outside had been near the pavilion that day. It was admitted that it would have been an easy matter for the Count's companion, while the former distracted the director's attention, to push back the bolts of the door in the wall and steal the key. Then the fact that the _Ebba_ was anchored in rear of, and only a few hundred yards from, the estate, was in itself suspicious. Nothing would have been easier for the desperadoes than to enter by the door, surprise their victims, and carry them off to the schooner. These suspicions, neither the director nor the _personnel_ of the establishment had at first liked to give expression to, but when the _Ebba_ was seen to weigh anchor and head for the open sea, they appeared to be confirmed. They were communicated to the authorities of New-Berne, who immediately ordered the commander of the _Falcon_ to intercept the schooner, to search her minutely high and low, and from stem to stern, and on no account to let her proceed, unless he was absolutely certain that Roch and Gaydon were not on board. Assuredly the Count d'Artigas could have had no idea that his vessel was the object of such stringent orders; but even if he had, it is questionable whether this superbly haughty and disdainful nobleman would have manifested any particular anxiety. Towards three o'clock, the warship which was cruising before the inlet, after having sent search parties aboard a few fishing-smacks, suddenly manoeuvred to the entrance of the pass, and awaited the approaching schooner. The latter surely did not imagine that she could force a passage in spite of the cruiser, or escape from a vessel propelled by steam. Besides, had she attempted such a foolhardy trick, a couple of shots from the _Falcon's_ guns would speedily have constrained her to lay to. Presently a boat, manned by two officers and ten sailors, put off from the cruiser and rowed towards the _Ebba_. When they were only about half a cable's length off, one of the men rose and waved a flag. "That's a signal to stop," said Engineer Serko. "Precisely," remarked the Count d'Artigas. "We shall have to lay to." "Then lay to." Captain Spade went forward and gave the necessary orders, and in a few minutes the vessel slackened speed, and was soon merely drifting with the tide. The _Falcon's_ boat pulled alongside, and a man in the bows held on to her with a boat-hook. The gangway was lowered by a couple of hands on the schooner, and the two officers, followed by eight of their men, climbed on deck. They found the crew of the _Ebba_ drawn up in line on the forecastle. The officer in command of the boarding-party--a first lieutenant--advanced towards the owner of the schooner, and the following questions and answers were exchanged: "This schooner belongs to the Count d'Artigas, to whom, I presume, I have the honor of speaking?" "Yes, sir." "What is her name?" "The _Ebba_." "She is commanded by?--" "Captain Spade." "What is his nationality?" "Hindo-Malay." The officer scrutinized the schooner's flag, while the Count d'Artigas added: "Will you be good enough to tell me, sir, to what circumstance I owe the pleasure of your visit on board my vessel?" "Orders have been received," replied the officer, "to search every vessel now anchored in Pamlico Sound, or which attempts to leave it." He did not deem it necessary to insist upon this point since the _Ebba_, above every other, was to be subjected to the bother of a rigorous examination. "You, of course, sir, have no intention of refusing me permission to go over your schooner?" "Assuredly not, sir. My vessel is at your disposal from peaks to bilges. Only I should like to know why all the vessels which happen to be in Pamlico Sound to-day are being subjected to this formality." "I see no reason why you should not be informed, Monsieur the Count," replied the officer. "The governor of North Carolina has been apprised that Healthful House has been broken into and two persons kidnapped, and the authorities merely wish to satisfy themselves that the persons carried off have not been embarked during the night." "Is it possible?" exclaimed the Count, feigning surprise. "And who are the persons who have thus disappeared from Healthful House?" "An inventor--a madman--and his keeper." "A madman, sir? Do you, may I ask, refer to the Frenchman, Thomas Roch?" "The same." "The Thomas Roch whom I saw yesterday during my visit to the establishment--whom I questioned in presence of the director--who was seized with a violent paroxysm just as Captain Spade and I were leaving?" The officer observed the stranger with the keenest attention, in an effort to surprise anything suspicious in his attitude or remarks. "It is incredible!" added the Count, as though he had just heard about the outrage for the first time. "I can easily understand, sir, how uneasy the authorities must be," he went on, "in view of Thomas Roch's personality, and I cannot but approve of the measures taken. I need hardly say that neither the French inventor nor his keeper is on board the _Ebba_. However, you can assure yourself of the fact by examining the schooner as minutely as you desire. Captain Spade, show these gentlemen over the vessel." Then saluting the lieutenant of the _Falcon_ coldly, the Count d'Artigas sank into his deck-chair again and replaced his cigar between his lips, while the two officers and eight sailors, conducted by Captain Spade, began their search. In the first place they descended the main hatchway to the after saloon--a luxuriously-appointed place, filled with art objects of great value, hung with rich tapestries and hangings, and wainscotted with costly woods. It goes without saying that this and the adjoining cabins were searched with a care that could not have been surpassed by the most experienced detectives. Moreover, Captain Spade assisted them by every means in his power, obviously anxious that they should not preserve the slightest suspicion of the _Ebba's_ owner. After the grand saloon and cabins, the elegant dining-saloon was visited. Then the cook's galley, Captain Spade's cabin, and the quarters of the crew in the forecastle were overhauled, but no sign of Thomas Roch or Gaydon was to be seen. Next, every inch of the hold, etc., was examined, with the aid of a couple of lanterns. Water-kegs, wine, brandy, whisky and beer barrels, biscuit-boxes, in fact, all the provision boxes and everything the hold contained, including the stock of coal, was moved and probed, and even the bilges were scrutinized, but all in vain. Evidently the suspicion that the Count d'Artigas had carried off the missing men was unfounded and unjust. Even a rat could not have escaped the notice of the vigilant searchers, leave alone two men. When they returned on deck, however, the officers, as a matter of precaution looked into the boats hanging on the davits, and punched the lowered sails, with the same result. It only remained for them, therefore, to take leave of the Count d'Artigas. "You must pardon us for having disturbed you, Monsieur the Count," said the lieutenant. "You were compelled to obey your orders, gentlemen." "It was merely a formality, of course," ventured the officer. By a slight inclination of the head the Count signified that he was quite willing to accept this euphemism. "I assure you, gentlemen, that I have had no hand in this kidnapping." "We can no longer believe so, Monsieur the Count, and will withdraw." "As you please. Is the _Ebba_ now free to proceed?" "Certainly." "Then _au revoir_, gentlemen, _au revoir_, for I am an _habitué_ of this coast and shall soon be back again. I hope that ere my return you will have discovered the author of the outrage, and have Thomas Roch safely back in Healthful House. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished in the interest of the United States--I might even say of the whole world." The two officers courteously saluted the Count, who responded with a nod. Captain Spade accompanied them to the gangway, and they were soon making for the cruiser, which had steamed near to pick them up. Meanwhile the breeze had freshened considerably, and when, at a sign from d'Artigas, Captain Spade set sail again, the _Ebba_ skimmed swiftly through the inlet, and half an hour after was standing out to sea. For an hour she continued steering east-northeast, and then, the wind, being merely a land breeze, dropped, and the schooner lay becalmed, her sails limp, and her flag drooping like a wet rag. It seemed that it would be impossible for the vessel to continue her voyage that night unless a breeze sprang up, and of this there was no sign. Since the schooner had cleared the inlet Captain Spade had stood in the bows gazing into the water, now to port, now to starboard, as if on the lookout for something. Presently he shouted in a stentorian voice: "Furl sail!" The sailors rushed to their posts, and in an instant the sails came rattling down and were furled. Was it Count d'Artigas' intention to wait there till daybreak brought a breeze with it? Presumably, or the sails would have remained hoisted to catch the faintest puff. A boat was lowered and Captain Spade jumped into it, accompanied by a sailor, who paddled it towards an object that was floating on the water a few yards away. This object was a small buoy, similar to that which had floated on the bosom of the Neuse when the _Ebba_ lay off Healthful House. The buoy, with a towline affixed to it, was lifted into the boat that was then paddled to the bow of the _Ebba_, from the deck of which another hawser was cast to the captain, who made it fast to the towline of the buoy. Having dropped the latter overboard again, the captain and the sailor returned to the ship and the boat was hoisted in. Almost immediately the hawser tautened, and the _Ebba_, though not a stitch of canvas had been set, sped off in an easterly direction at a speed that could not have been less than ten knots an hour. Night was falling fast, and soon the rapidly receding lights along the American coast were lost in the mist on the horizon. CHAPTER V. WHERE AM I? (Notes by Simon Hart, the Engineer.) Where am I? What has happened since the sudden aggression of which I was the victim near the pavilion? I had just quitted the doctor, and was about to mount the steps, close the door and resume my post beside Thomas Roch when several men sprang upon me and knocked me down. Who are they? My eyes having been bandaged I was unable to recognize them. I could not cry for help, having been gagged. I could make no resistance, for they had bound me hand and foot. Thus powerless, I felt myself lifted and carried about one hundred paces, then hoisted, then lowered, then laid down. Where? Where? And Thomas Roch, what has become of him? It must have been he rather than I they were after. I was but Gaydon, the warder. None suspected that I was Simon Hart, the engineer, nor could they have suspected my nationality. Why, therefore, should they have desired to kidnap a mere hospital attendant? There can consequently be no doubt that the French inventor has been carried off; and if he was snatched from Healthful House it must have been in the hope of forcing his secret from him. But I am reasoning on the supposition that Thomas Roch was carried off with me. Is it so? Yes--it must be--it is. I can entertain no doubt whatever about it. I have not fallen into the hands of malefactors whose only intention is robbery. They would not have acted in this way. After rendering it impossible for me to cry out, after having thrown me into a clump of bushes in the corner of the garden, after having kidnapped Thomas Roch they would not have shut me up--where I now am. Where? This is the question which I have been asking myself for hours without being able to answer it. However, one thing is certain, and that is that I have embarked upon an extraordinary adventure, that will end?--In what manner I know not--I dare not even imagine what the upshot of it will be. Anyhow, it is my intention to commit to memory, minute by minute, the least circumstance, and then, if it be possible, to jot down my daily impressions. Who knows what the future has in store for me? And who knows but what, in my new position, I may finally discover the secret of Roth's fulgurator? If I am to be delivered one day, this secret must be made known, as well as who is the author, or who are the authors, of this criminal outrage, which may be attended with such serious consequences. I continually revert to this question, hoping that some incident will occur to enlighten me: Where am I? Let me begin from the beginning. After having been carried by the head and feet from Healthful House, I felt that I was laid, without any brutality, I must admit, upon the stretchers of a row-boat of small dimensions. The rocking caused by the weight of my body was succeeded shortly afterwards by a further rocking--which I attribute to the embarking of a second person. Can there be room for doubt that it was Thomas Roch? As far as he was concerned they would not have had to take the precaution of gagging him, or of bandaging his eyes, or of binding him. He must still have been in a state of prostration which precluded the possibility of his making any resistance, or even of being conscious of what was being done. The proof that I am not deceiving myself is that I could smell the unmistakable odor of ether. Now, yesterday, before taking leave of us, the doctor administered a few drops of ether to the invalid and--I remember distinctly--a little of this extremely volatile substance fell upon his clothing while he was struggling in his fit. There is therefore nothing astonishing in the fact that this odor should have clung to him, nor that I should have distinguished it, even beneath the bandages that covered my face. Yes, Thomas Roch was extended near me in the boat. And to think that had I not returned to the pavilion when I did, had I delayed a few minutes longer, I should have found him gone! Let me think. What could have inspired that Count d'Artigas with the unfortunate curiosity to visit Healthful House? If he had not been allowed to see my patient nothing of the kind would have happened. Talking to Thomas Roch about his inventions brought on a fit of exceptional violence. The director is primarily to blame for not heeding my warning. Had he listened to me the doctor would not have been called upon to attend him, the door of the pavilion would have been locked, and the attempt of the band would have been frustrated. As to the interest there could have been in carrying off Thomas Roch, either on behalf of a private person or of one of the states of the Old World, it is so evident that there is no need to dwell upon it. However, I can be perfectly easy about the result. No one can possibly succeed in learning what for fifteen months I have been unable to ascertain. In the condition of intellectual collapse into which my fellow-countryman has fallen, all attempts to force his secret from him will be futile. Moreover, he is bound to go from bad to worse until he is hopelessly insane, even as regards those points upon which he has hitherto preserved his reason intact. After all, however, it is less about Thomas Roch than myself that I must think just now, and this is what I have experienced, to resume the thread of my adventure where I dropped it: After more rocking caused by our captors jumping into it, the boat is rowed off. The distance must be very short, for a minute after we bumped against something. I surmise that this something must be the hull of a ship, and that we have run alongside. There is some scurrying and excitement. Indistinctly through my bandages I can hear orders being given and a confused murmur of voices that lasts for about five minutes, but I cannot distinguish a word that is said. The only thought that occurs to me now is that they will hoist me on board and lower me to the bottom of the hold and keep me there till the vessel is far out at sea. Obviously they will not allow either Thomas Roch or his keeper to appear on deck as long as she remains in Pamlico Sound. My conjecture is correct. Still gagged and bound I am at last lifted by the legs and shoulders. My impression, however, is that I am not being raised over a ship's bulwark, but on the contrary am being lowered. Are they going to drop me overboard to drown like a rat, so as to get rid of a dangerous witness? This thought flashes into my brain, and a quiver of anguish passes through my body from head to foot. Instinctively I draw a long breath, and my lungs are filled with the precious air they will speedily lack. No, there is no immediate cause for alarm. I am laid with comparative gentleness upon a hard floor, which gives me the sensation of metallic coldness. I am lying at full length. To my extreme surprise, I find that the ropes with which I was bound have been untied and loosened. The tramping about around me has ceased. The next instant I hear a door closed with a bang. Where am I? And, in the first place, am I alone? I tear the gag from my mouth, and the bandages from my head. It is dark--pitch dark. Not a ray of light, not even the vague perception of light that the eyes preserve when the lids are tightly closed. I shout--I shout repeatedly. No response. My voice is smothered. The air I breathe is hot, heavy, thick, and the working of my lungs will become difficult, impossible, unless the store of air is renewed. I extend my arms and feel about me, and this is what I conclude: I am in a compartment with sheet-iron walls, which cannot measure more than four cubic yards. I can feel that the walls are of bolted plates, like the sides of a ship's water-tight compartment. I can feel that the entrance to it is by a door on one side, for the hinges protrude somewhat. This door must open inwards, and it is through here, no doubt, that I was carried in. I place my ear to the door, but not a sound can be heard. The silence is as profound as the obscurity--a strange silence that is only broken by the sonorousness of the metallic floor when I move about. None of the dull noises usually to be heard on board a ship is perceptible, not even the rippling of the water along the hull. Nor is there the slightest movement to be felt; yet, in the estuary of the Neuse, the current is always strong enough, to cause a marked oscillation to any vessel. But does the compartment in which I am confined, really belong to a ship? How do I know that I am afloat on the Neuse, though I was conveyed a short distance in a boat? Might not the latter, instead of heading for a ship in waiting for it, opposite Healthful House, have been rowed to a point further down the river? In this case is it not possible that I was carried into the cellar of a house? This would explain the complete immobility of the compartment. It is true that the walls are of bolted plates, and that there is a vague smell of salt water, that odor _sui generis_ which generally pervades the interior of a ship, and which there is no mistaking. An interval, which I estimate at about four hours, must have passed since my incarceration. It must therefore be near midnight. Shall I be left here in this way till morning? Luckily, I dined at six o'clock, which is the regular dinner-hour at Healthful House. I am not suffering from hunger. In fact I feel more inclined to sleep than to eat. Still, I hope I shall have energy enough to resist the inclination. I will not give way to it. I must try and find out what is going on outside. But neither sound nor light can penetrate this iron box. Wait a minute, though; perhaps by listening intently I may hear some sound, however feeble. Therefore I concentrate all my vital power in my sense of hearing. Moreover, I try--in case I should really not be on _terra firma_--to distinguish some movement, some oscillation of my prison. Admitting that the ship is still at anchor, it cannot be long before it will start--otherwise I shall have to give up imagining why Thomas Roch and I have been carried off. At last--it is no illusion--a slight rolling proves to me, beyond a doubt, that I am not on land. We are evidently moving, but the motion is scarcely perceptible. It is not a jerky, but rather a gliding movement, as though we were skimming through the water without effort, on an even keel. Let me consider the matter calmly. I am on board a vessel that was anchored in the Neuse, waiting under sail or steam, for the result of the expedition. A boat brought me aboard, but, I repeat, I did not feel that I was lifted over her bulwarks. Was I passed through a porthole? But after all, what does it matter? Whether I was lowered into the hold or not, I am certainly upon something that is floating and moving. No doubt I shall soon be let out, together with Thomas Roch, supposing them to have locked him up as carefully as they have me. By being let out, I mean being accorded permission to go on deck. It will not be for some hours to come, however, that is certain, for they won't want us to be seen, so that there is no chance of getting a whiff of fresh air till we are well out at sea. If it is a sailing vessel, she must have waited for a breeze--for the breeze that freshens off shore at daybreak, and is favorable to ships navigating Pamlico Sound. It certainly cannot be a steamer. I could not have failed to smell the oil and other odors of the engine-room. And then I should feel the trembling of the machinery, the jerks of the pistons, and the movements of the screws or paddles. The best thing to do is to wait patiently. I shan't be taken out of this hole until to-morrow, anyway. Moreover, if I am not released, somebody will surely bring me something to eat. There is no reason to suppose that they intend to starve me to death. They wouldn't have taken the trouble to bring me aboard, but would have dropped me to the bottom of the river had they been desirous of getting rid of me. Once we are out at sea, what will they have to fear from me? No one could hear my shouts. As to demanding an explanation and making a fuss, it would be useless. Besides, what am I to the men who have carried us off? A mere hospital attendant--one Gaydon, who is of no consequence. It is Thomas Roch they were after. I was taken along too because I happened to return to the pavilion at the critical moment. At any rate, no matter what happens, no matter who our kidnappers may be, no matter where we are taken, I shall stick to this resolution: I will continue to play my role of warder. No one, no! none, can suspect that Gaydon is Simon Hart, the engineer. There are two advantages in this: in the first place, they will take no notice of a poor devil of a warder, and in the second, I may be able to solve the mystery surrounding this plot and turn my knowledge to profit, if I succeed in making my escape. But whither are my thoughts wandering? I must perforce wait till we arrive at our destination before thinking of escaping. It will be time enough to bother about that when the occasion presents itself. Until then the essential is that they remain ignorant as to my identity, and they cannot, and shall not, know who I am. I am now certain that we are going through the water. But there is one thing that puzzles me. It is not a sailing vessel, neither can it be a steamer. Yet it is incontestably propelled by some powerful machine. There are none of the noises, nor is there the trembling that accompanies the working of steam engines. The movement of the vessel is more continuous and regular, it is a sort of direct rotation that is communicated by the motor, whatever the latter may be. No mistake is possible: the ship is propelled by some special mechanism. But what is it? Is it one of those turbines that have been spoken of lately, which, fitted into a submerged tube, are destined to replace the ordinary screw, it being claimed that they utilize the resistance of the water better than the latter and give increased speed to a ship? In a few hours' time I shall doubtless know all about this means of locomotion. Meanwhile there is another thing that equally puzzles me. There is not the slightest rolling or pitching. How is it that Pamlico Sound is so extraordinarily calm? The varying currents continuously ruffle the surface of the Sound, even if nothing else does. It is true the tide may be out, and I remember that last night the wind had fallen altogether. Still, no matter, the thing is inexplicable, for a ship propelled by machinery, no matter at what speed she may be going, always oscillates more or less, and I cannot perceive the slightest rocking. Such are the thoughts with which my mind is persistently filled. Despite an almost overpowering desire to sleep, despite the torpor that is coming upon me in this suffocating atmosphere, I am resolved not to close my eyes. I will keep awake till daylight, and there will be no daylight for me till it is let into my prison from the outside. Perhaps even if the door were open it would not penetrate to this black hole, and I shall probably not see it again until I am taken on deck. I am squatting in a corner of my prison, for I have no stool or anything to sit upon, but as my eyelids are heavy and I feel somnolent in spite of myself, I get up and walk about. Then I wax wrathful, anger fills my soul, I beat upon the iron walls with my fists, and shout for help. In vain! I hurt my hands against the bolts of the plates, and no one answers my cries. Such conduct is unworthy of me. I flattered myself that I would remain calm under all circumstances and here I am acting like a child. The absence of any rolling or lurching movement at least proves that we are not yet at sea. Instead of crossing Pamlico Sound, may we not be going in the opposite direction, up the River Neuse? No! What would they go further inland for? If Thomas Roch has been carried off from Healthful House, his captors obviously mean to take him out of the United States--probably to a distant island in the Atlantic, or to some point on the European continent. It is, therefore, not up the Neuse that our maritime machine, whatever it may be, is going, but across Pamlico Sound, which must be as calm as a mirror. Very well, then, when we get to sea I shall soon, know, for the vessel will rock right enough in the swell off shore, even though there be no wind,--unless I am aboard a battleship, or big cruiser, and this I fancy can hardly be! But hark! If I mistake not--no, it was not imagination--I hear footsteps. Some one is approaching the side of the compartment where the door is. One of the crew no doubt. Are they going to let me out at last? I can now hear voices. A conversation is going on outside the door, but it is carried on in a language that I do not understand. I shout to them--I shout again, but no answer is vouchsafed. There is nothing to do, then, but wait, wait, wait! I keep repeating the word and it rings in my ears like a bell. Let me try to calculate how long I have been here. The ship must have been under way for at least four or five hours. I reckon it must be past midnight, but I cannot tell, for unfortunately my watch is of no use to me in this Cimmerian darkness. Now, if we have been going for five hours, we must have cleared Pamlico Sound, whether we issued by Ocracoke or Hatteras inlet, and must be off the coast a good mile, at least. Yet I haven't felt any motion from the swell of the sea. It is inexplicable, incredible! Come now, have I made a mistake? Am I the dupe of an illusion? Am I not imprisoned in the hold of a ship under way? Another hour has passed and the movement of the ship suddenly ceases; I realize perfectly that she is stationary. Has she reached her destination? In this event we can only be in one of the coast ports to the north or south of Pamlico Sound. But why should Thomas Roch be landed again? The abduction must soon have been discovered, and our kidnappers would run the greatest risk of falling into the hands of the authorities if they attempted to disembark. However this may be, if the vessel is coming to anchor I shall hear the noise of the chain as it is paid out, and feel the jerk as the ship is brought up. I know that sound and that jerk well from experience, and I am bound to hear and feel them in a minute or two. I wait--I listen. A dead and disquieting silence reigns on board. I begin to wonder whether I am not the only living being in the ship. Now I feel an irresistible torpor coming over me. The air is vitiated. I cannot breathe. My chest is bursting. I try to resist, but it is impossible to do so. The temperature rises to such a degree that I am compelled to divest myself of part of my clothing. Then I lie me down in a corner. My heavy eyelids close, and I sink into a prostration that eventually forces me into heavy slumber. How long have I been asleep? I cannot say. Is it night? Is it day? I know not. I remark, however, that I breathe more easily, and that the air is no longer poisoned carbonic acid. Was the air renewed while I slept? Has the door been opened? Has anybody been in here? Yes, here is the proof of it! In feeling about, my hand has come in contact with a mug filled with a liquid that exhales an inviting odor. I raise it to my lips, which, are burning, for I am suffering such an agony of thirst that I would even drink brackish water. It is ale--an ale of excellent quality--which refreshes and comforts me, and I drain the pint to the last drop. But if they have not condemned me to die of thirst, neither have they condemned me to die of hunger, I suppose? No, for in one of the corners I find a basket, and this basket contains some bread and cold meat. I fall to, eating greedily, and my strength little by little returns. Decidedly, I am not so abandoned as I thought I was. Some one entered this obscure hole, and the open door admitted a little of the oxygen from the outside, without which I should have been suffocated. Then the wherewithal to quench my thirst and appease the pangs of hunger was placed within my reach. How much longer will this incarceration last? Days? Months? I cannot estimate the hours that have elapsed since I fell asleep, nor have I any idea as to what time of the day or night it may be. I was careful to wind up my watch, though, and perhaps by feeling the hands--Yes, I think the little hand marks eight o'clock--in the morning, no doubt. What I do know, however, is that the ship is not in motion. There is not the slightest quiver. Hours and hours, weary, interminable hours go by, and I wonder whether they are again waiting till night comes on to renew my stock of air and provisions. Yes, they are waiting to take advantage of my slumbers. But this time I am resolved to resist. I will feign to be asleep--and I shall know how to force an answer from whoever enters! CHAPTER VI. ON DECK. Here I am in the open air, breathing freely once more. I have at last been hauled out of that stifling box and taken on deck. I gaze around me in every direction and see no sign of land. On every hand is that circular line which defines earth and sky. No, there is not even a speck of land to be seen to the west, where the coast of North America extends for thousands of miles. The setting sun now throws but slanting rays upon the bosom of the ocean. It must be about six o'clock in the evening. I take out my watch and it marks thirteen minutes past six. As I have already mentioned, I waited for the door of my prison to open, thoroughly resolved not to fall asleep again, but to spring upon the first person who entered and force him to answer my questions. I was not aware then that it was day, but it was, and hour after hour passed and no one came. I began to suffer again from hunger and thirst, for I had not preserved either bite or sup. As soon as I awoke I felt that the ship was in motion again, after having, I calculated, remained stationary since the previous day--no doubt in some lonely creek, since I had not heard or felt her come to anchor. A few minutes ago--it must therefore have been six o'clock--I again heard footsteps on the other side of the iron wall of my compartment. Was anybody coming to my cell? Yes, for I heard the creaking of the bolts as they were drawn back, and then the door opened, and the darkness in which I had been plunged since the first hour of my captivity was illumined by the light of a lantern. Two men, whom I had no time to look at, entered and seized me by the arms. A thick cloth was thrown over my head, which was enveloped in such a manner that I could see absolutely nothing. What did it all mean? What were they going to do with me? I struggled, but they held me in an iron grasp. I questioned them, but they made no reply. The men spoke to each other in a language that I could not understand, and had never heard before. They stood upon no ceremony with me. It is true I was only a madhouse warder, and they probably did not consider it necessary to do so; but I question very much whether Simon Hart, the engineer, would have received any more courtesy at their hands. This time, however, no attempt was made to gag me nor to bind either my arms or legs. I was simply restrained by main force from breaking away from them. In a moment I was dragged out of the compartment and pushed along a narrow passage. Next, the steps of a metallic stairway resounded under our feet. Then the fresh air blew in my face and I inhaled it with avidity. Finally they took their hands from off me, and I found myself free. I immediately tore the cloth off my head and gazed about me. I am on board a schooner which is ripping through the water at a great rate and leaving a long white trail behind her. I had to clutch at one of the stays for support, dazzled as I was by the light after my forty-eight hours' imprisonment in complete obscurity. On the deck a dozen men with rough, weather-beaten faces come and go--very dissimilar types of men, to whom it would be impossible to attribute any particular nationality. They scarcely take any notice of me. As to the schooner, I estimate that she registers from two hundred and fifty to three hundred tons. She has a fairly wide beam, her masts are strong and lofty, and her large spread of canvas must carry her along at a spanking rate in a good breeze. Aft, a grizzly-faced man is at the wheel, and he is keeping her head to the sea that is running pretty high. I try to find out the name of the vessel, but it is not to be seen anywhere, even on the life-buoys. I walk up to one of the sailors and inquire: "What is the name of this ship?" No answer, and I fancy the man does not understand me. "Where is the captain?" I continue. But the sailor pays no more heed to this than he did to the previous question. I turn on my heel and go forward. Above the forward hatchway a bell is suspended. Maybe the name of the schooner is engraved upon it. I examine it, but can find no name upon it. I then return to the stern and address the man at the wheel. He gazes at me sourly, shrugs his shoulders, and bending, grasps the spokes of the wheel solidly, and brings the schooner, which had been headed off by a large wave from port, stem on to sea again. Seeing that nothing is to be got from that quarter, I turn away and look about to see if I can find Thomas Roch, but I do not perceive him anywhere. Is he not on board? He must be. They could have had no reason for carrying me off alone. No one could have had any idea that I was Simon Hart, the engineer, and even had they known it what interest could they have had in me, and what could they expect of me? Therefore, as Roch is not on deck, I conclude that he is locked in one of the cabins, and trust he has met with better treatment than his ex-guardian. But what is this--and how on earth could I have failed to notice it before? How is this schooner moving? Her sails are furled--there is not an inch of canvas set--the wind has fallen, and the few puffs that occasionally come from the east are unfavorable, in view of the fact that we are going in that very direction. And yet the schooner speeds through the sea, her bows down, throwing off clouds of foam, and leaving a long, milky, undulating trail in her wake. Is she a steam-yacht? No--there is not a smokestack about her. Is she propelled by electricity--by a battery of accumulators, or by piles of great power that work her screw and send her along at this rate? I can come to no other conclusion. In any case she must be fitted with a screw, and by leaning over the stern I shall be able to see it, and can find out what sets it working afterwards. The man at the wheel watches me ironically as I approach, but makes no effort to prevent me from looking over. I gaze long and earnestly, but there is no foaming and seething of the water such as is invariably caused by the revolutions of the screw--naught but the long white furrow that a sailing vessel leaves behind is discernible in the schooner's wake. Then, what kind of a machine is it that imparts such a marvellous speed to the vessel? As I have already said, the wind is against her, and there is a heavy swell on. I must--I will know. No one pays the slightest attention, and I again go forward. As I approach the forecastle I find myself face to face with a man who is leaning nonchalantly on the raised hatchway and who is watching me. He seems to be waiting for me to speak to him. I recognize him instantly. He is the person who accompanied the Count d'Artigas during the latter's visit to Healthful House. There can be no mistake--it is he right enough. It was, then, that rich foreigner who abducted Thomas Roch, and I am on board the _Ebba_ his schooner-yacht which is so well known on the American coast! The man before me will enlighten me about what I want to know. I remember that he and the Count spoke English together. I take him to be the captain of the schooner. "Captain," I say, "you are the person I saw at Healthful House. You remember me, of course?" He looks me up and down but does not condescend to reply. "I am Warder Gaydon, the attendant of Thomas Roch," I continue, "and I want to know why you have carried me off and placed me on board this schooner?" The captain interrupts me with a sign. It is not made to me, however, but to some sailors standing near. They catch me by the arms, and taking no notice of the angry movement that I cannot restrain, bundle me down the hatchway. The hatchway stair in reality, I remark, is a perpendicular iron ladder, at the bottom of which, to right and left, are some cabins, and forward, the men's quarters. Are they going to put me back in my dark prison at the bottom of the hold? No. They turn to the left and push me into a cabin. It is lighted by a port-hole, which is open, and through which the fresh air comes in gusts from the briny. The furniture consists of a bunk, a chair, a chest of drawers, a wash-hand-stand and a table. The latter is spread for dinner, and I sit down. Then the cook's mate comes in with two or three dishes. He is a colored lad, and as he is about to withdraw, I try to question him, but he, too, vouchsafes no reply. Perhaps he doesn't understand me. The door is closed, and I fall to and eat with an excellent appetite, with the intention of putting off all further questioning till some future occasion when I shall stand a chance of getting answered. It is true I am a prisoner, but this time I am comfortable enough, and I hope I shall be permitted to occupy this cabin for the remainder of the voyage, and not be lowered into that black hole again. I now give myself up to my thoughts, the first of which is that it was the Count d'Artigas who planned the abduction; that it was he who is responsible for the kidnapping of Thomas Roch, and that consequently the French inventor must be just as comfortably installed somewhere on board the schooner. But who is this Count d'Artigas? Where does he hail from? If he has seized Thomas Roch, is it not because he is determined to secure the secret of the fulgurator at no matter what cost? Very likely, and I must therefore be careful not to betray my identity, for if they knew the truth, I should never be afforded a chance to get away. But what a lot of mysteries to clear up, how many inexplicable things to explain--the origin of this d'Artigas, his intentions as to the future, whither we are bound, the port to which the schooner belongs, and this mysterious progress through the water without sails and without screws, at a speed of at least ten knots an hour! The air becoming keener as night deepens, I close and secure the port-hole, and as my cabin is bolted on the outside, the best thing I can do is to get into my bunk and let myself be gently rocked to sleep by the broad Atlantic in this mysterious cradle, the _Ebba_. The next morning I rise at daybreak, and having performed my ablutions, dress myself and wait. Presently the idea of trying the door occurs to me. I find that it has been unbolted, and pushing it open, climb the iron ladder and emerge on deck. The crew are washing down the deck, and standing aft and conversing are two men, one of whom is the captain. The latter manifests no surprise at seeing me, and indicates my presence to his companion by a nod. This other man, whom I have never before seen, is an individual of about fifty years of age, whose dark hair is streaked with gray. His features are delicately chiselled, his eyes are bright, and his expression is intelligent and not at all displeasing. He is somewhat of the Grecian type, and I have no doubt that he is of Hellenic origin when I hear him called Serko--Engineer Serko--by the Captain of the _Ebba_. As to the latter, he is called Spade--Captain Spade--and this name has an Italian twang about it. Thus there is a Greek, an Italian, and a crew recruited from every corner of the earth to man a schooner with a Norwegian name! This mixture strikes me as being suspicious. And that Count d'Artigas, with his Spanish name and Asiatic type, where does he come from? Captain Spade and Engineer Serko continue to converse in a low tone of voice. The former is keeping a sharp eye on the man at the wheel, who does not appear to pay any particular attention to the compass in front of him. He seems to pay more heed to the gestures of one of the sailors stationed forward, and who signals to him to put the helm to port or to starboard. Thomas Roch is near them, gazing vacantly out upon the vast expanse which is not limited on the horizon by a single speck of land. Two sailors watch his every movement. It is evidently feared that the madman may possibly attempt to jump overboard. I wonder whether I shall be permitted to communicate with my ward. I walk towards him, and Captain Spade and Engineer Serko watch me. Thomas Roch doesn't see me coming, and I stand beside him. Still he takes no notice of me, and makes no movement. His eyes, which sparkle brightly, wander over the ocean, and he draws in deep breaths of the salt, vivifying atmosphere. Added to the air surcharged with oxygen is a magnificent sunset in a cloudless sky. Does he perceive the change in his situation? Has he already forgotten about Healthful House, the pavilion in which he was a prisoner, and Gaydon, his keeper? It is highly probable. The past has presumably been effaced from his memory and he lives solely in the present. In my opinion, even on the deck of the _Ebba_, in the middle of the sea, Thomas Roch is still the helpless, irresponsible man whom I tended for fifteen months. His intellectual condition has undergone no change, and his reason will return only when he is spoken to about his inventions. The Count d'Artigas is perfectly aware of this mental disposition, having had a proof of it during his visit, and he evidently relies thereon to surprise sooner or later the inventor's secret. But with what object? "Thomas Roch!" I exclaim. My voice seems to strike him, and after gazing at me fixedly for an instant he averts his eyes quickly. I take his hand and press it. He withdraws it brusquely and walks away, without having recognized me, in the direction of Captain Spade and Engineer Serko. Does he think of speaking to one or other of these men, and if they speak to him will he be more reasonable than he was with me, and reply to them? At this moment his physiognomy lights up with a gleam of intelligence. His attention, obviously, has been attracted by the queer progress of the schooner. He gazes at the masts and the furled sails. Then he turns back and stops at the place where, if the _Ebba_ were a steamer, the funnel ought to be, and which in this case ought to be belching forth a cloud of black smoke. What appeared so strange to me evidently strikes Thomas Roch as being strange, too. He cannot explain what I found inexplicable, and, as I did, he walks aft to see if there is a screw. On the flanks of the _Ebba_ a shoal of porpoises are sporting. Swift as is the schooner's course they easily pass her, leaping and gambolling in their native element with surprising grace and agility. Thomas Roch pays no attention to them, but leans over the stern. Engineer Serko and Captain Spade, fearful lest he should fall overboard, hurry to him and drag him gently, but firmly, away. I observe from long experience that Roch is a prey to violent excitement. He turns about and gesticulates, uttering incoherent phrases the while. It is plain to me that another fit is coming on, similar to the one he had in the pavilion of Healthful House on the night we were abducted. He will have to be seized and carried down to his cabin, and I shall perhaps be summoned to attend to him. Meanwhile Engineer Serko and Captain Spade do not lose sight of him for a moment. They are evidently curious to see what he will do. After walking towards the mainmast and assuring himself that the sails are not set, he goes up to it and flinging his arms around it, tries with all his might to shake it, as though seeking to pull it down. Finding his efforts futile, he quits it and goes to the foremast, where the same performance is gone through. He waxes more and more excited. His vague utterances are followed by inarticulate cries. Suddenly he rushes to the port stays and clings to them, and I begin to fear that he will leap into the rigging and climb to the cross-tree, where he might be precipitated into the sea by a lurch of the ship. On a sign from Captain Spade, some sailors run up and try to make him relinquish his grasp of the stays, but are unable to do so. I know that during his fits he is endowed with the strength of ten men, and many a time I have been compelled to summon assistance in order to overpower him. Other members of the crew, however, come up, and the unhappy madman is borne to the deck, where two big sailors hold him down, despite his extraordinary strength. The only thing to do is to convey him to his cabin, and let him lie there till he gets over his fit. This is what will be done in conformity with orders given by a new-comer whose voice seems familiar to me. I turn and recognize him. He is the Count d'Artigas, with a frown on his face and an imperious manner, just as I had seen him at Healthful House. I at once advance toward him. I want an explanation and mean to have it. "By what right, sir?"--I begin. "By the right of might," replies the Count. Then he turns on his heel, and Thomas Roch is carried below. CHAPTER VII. TWO DAYS AT SEA. Perhaps--should circumstances render it necessary--I may be induced to tell the Count d'Artigas that I am Simon Hart, the engineer. Who knows but what I may receive more consideration than if I remain Warder Gaydon? This measure, however, demands reflection. I have always been dominated by the thought that if the owner of the _Ebba_ kidnapped the French inventor, it was in the hope of getting possession of Roch's fulgurator, for which, neither the old nor new continent would pay the impossible price demanded. In that case the best thing I can do is to remain Warder Gaydon, on the chance that I may be allowed to continue in attendance upon him. In this way, if Thomas Roch should ever divulge his secret, I may learn what it was impossible to do at Healthful House, and can act accordingly. Meanwhile, where is the _Ebba_ bound?--first question. Who and what is the Count d'Artigas?--second question. The first will be answered in a few days' time, no doubt, in view of the rapidity with which we are ripping through the water, under the action of a means of propulsion that I shall end by finding out all about. As regards the second, I am by no means so sure that my curiosity will ever be gratified. In my opinion this enigmatical personage has an all important reason for hiding his origin, and I am afraid there is no indication by which I can gauge his nationality. If the Count d'Artigas speaks English fluently--and I was able to assure myself of that fact during his visit to Pavilion No. 17,--he pronounces it with a harsh, vibrating accent, which is not to be found among the peoples of northern latitudes. I do not remember ever to have heard anything like it in the course of my travels either in the Old or New World--unless it be the harshness characteristic of the idioms in use among the Malays. And, in truth, with his olive, verging on copper-tinted skin, his jet-black, crinkly hair, his piercing, deep-set, restless eyes, his square shoulders and marked muscular development, it is by no means unlikely that he belongs to one of the extreme Eastern races. I believe this name of d'Artigas is an assumed one, and his title of Count likewise. If his schooner bears a Norwegian name, he at any rate is not of Scandinavian origin. He has nothing of the races of Northern Europe about him. But whoever and whatever he may be, this man abducted Thomas Roch--and me with him--with no good intention, I'll be bound. But what I should like to know is, has he acted as the agent of a foreign power, or on his own account? Does he wish to profit alone by Thomas Roch's invention, and is he in the position to dispose of it profitably? That is another question that I cannot yet answer. Maybe I shall be able to find out from what I hear and see ere I make my escape, if escape be possible. The _Ebba_ continues on her way in the same mysterious manner. I am free to walk about the deck, without, however, being able to go beyond the fore hatchway. Once I attempted to go as far as the bows where I could, by leaning over, perceive the schooner's stem as it cut through the water, but acting, it was plain, on orders received, the watch on deck turned me back, and one of them, addressing me brusquely in harsh, grating English, said: "Go back! Go back! You are interfering with the working of the ship!" With the working of the ship! There was no working. Did they realize that I was trying to discover by what means the schooner was propelled? Very likely, and Captain Spade, who had looked on, must have known it, too. Even a hospital attendant could not fail to be astonished at the fact that a vessel without either screw or sails was going along at such a speed. However this may be, for some reason or other, the bows of the _Ebba_ are barred to me. Toward ten o'clock a breeze springs up--a northwest wind and very favorable--and Captain Spade gives an order to the boatswain. The latter immediately pipes all hands on deck, and the mainsail, the foresail, staysail and jibs are hoisted. The work could not have been executed with greater regularity and discipline on board a man-of-war. The _Ebba_ now has a slight list to port, and her speed is notably increased. But the motor continues to push her along, as is evident from the fact that the sails are not always as full as they ought to be if the schooner were bowling along solely under their action. However, they continue to render yeoman's service, for the breeze has set in steadily. The sky is clear, for the clouds in the west disappear as soon as they attain the horizon, and the sunlight dances on the water. My preoccupation now is to find out as near as possible where we are bound for. I am a good-enough sailor to be able to estimate the approximate speed of a ship. In my opinion the _Ebba_ has been travelling at the rate of from ten to eleven knots an hour. As to the direction we have been going in, it is always the same, and I have been able to verify this by casual glances at the binnacle. If the fore part of the vessel is barred to Warder Gaydon he has been allowed a free run of the remainder of it. Time and again I have glanced at the compass, and noticed that the needle invariably pointed to the east, or to be exact, east-southeast. These are the conditions in which we are navigating this part of the Atlantic Ocean, which is bounded on the west by the coast of the United States of America. I appeal to my memory. What are the islands or groups of islands to be found in the direction we are going, ere the continent of the Old World is reached? North Carolina, which the schooner quitted forty-eight hours ago, is traversed by the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude, and this parallel, extending eastward, must, if I mistake not, cut the African coast at Morocco. But along the line, about three thousand miles from America, are the Azores. Is it presumable that the _Ebba_ is heading for this archipelago, that the port to which she belongs is somewhere in these islands which constitute one of Portugal's insular domains? I cannot admit such an hypothesis. Besides, before the Azores, on the line of the thirty-fifth parallel, is the Bermuda group, which belongs to England. It seems to me to be a good deal less hypothetical that, if the Count d'Artigas was entrusted with the abduction of Thomas Roch by a European Power at all, it was by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The possibility, however, remains that he may be acting solely in his own interest. Three or four times during the day Count d'Artigas has come aft and remained for some time scanning the surrounding horizon attentively. When a sail or the smoke from a steamer heaves in sight he examines the passing vessel for a considerable time with a powerful telescope. I may add that he has not once condescended to notice my presence on deck. Now and then Captain Spade joins him and both exchange a few words in a language that I can neither understand nor recognize. It is with Engineer Serko, however, that the owner of the _Ebba_ converses more readily than with anybody else, and the latter appears to be very intimate with him. The engineer is a good deal more free, more loquacious and less surly than his companions, and I wonder what position he occupies on the schooner. Is he a personal friend of the Count d'Artigas? Does he scour the seas with him, sharing the enviable life enjoyed by the rich yachtsman? He is the only man of the lot who seems to manifest, if not sympathy with, at least some interest in me. I have not seen Thomas Roch all day. He must be shut in his cabin, still under the influence of the fit that came upon him last night. I feel certain that this is so, when about three o'clock in the afternoon, just as he is about to go below, the Count beckons me to approach. I do not know what he wishes to say to me, this Count d'Artigas, but I do know what I will say to him. "Do these fits to which Thomas Roch is subject last long?" he asks me in English. "Sometimes forty-eight hours," I reply. "What is to be done?" "Nothing at all. Let him alone until he falls asleep. After a night's sleep the fit will be over and Thomas Roch will be his own helpless self again." "Very well, Warder Gaydon, you will continue to attend him as you did at Healthful House, if it be necessary." "To attend to him!" "Yes--on board the schooner--pending our arrival." "Where?" "Where we shall be to-morrow afternoon," replies the Count. To-morrow, I say to myself. Then we are not bound for the coast of Africa, nor even the Azores. There only remains the hypothesis that we are making for the Bermudas. Count d'Artigas is about to go down the hatchway when I interrogate him in my turn: "Sir," I exclaim, "I desire to know, I have the right to know, where I am going, and----" "Here, Warder Gaydon," he interrupted, "you have no rights. All you have to do is to answer when you are spoken to." "I protest!" "Protest, then," replies this haughty and imperious personage, glancing at me menacingly. Then he disappears down the hatchway, leaving me face to face with Engineer Serko. "If I were you, Warder Gaydon, I would resign myself to the inevitable," remarks the latter with a smile. "When one is caught in a trap----" "One can cry out, I suppose?" "What is the use when no one is near to hear you?" "I shall be heard some day, sir." "Some day--that's a long way off. However, shout as much as you please." And with this ironical advice, Engineer Serko leaves me to my own reflections. Towards four o'clock a big ship is reported about six miles off to the east, coming in our direction. She is moving rapidly and grows perceptibly larger. Black clouds of smoke pour out of her two funnels. She is a warship, for a narrow pennant floats from her main-mast, and though she is not flying any flag I take her to be an American cruiser. I wonder whether the _Ebba_ will render her the customary salute as she passes. No; for the schooner suddenly changes her course with the evident intention of avoiding her. This proceeding on the part of such a suspicious yacht does not astonish me greatly. But what does cause me extreme surprise is Captain Spade's way of manoeuvring. He runs forward to a signalling apparatus in the bows, similar to that by which orders are transmitted to the engine room of a steamer. As soon as he presses one of the buttons of this apparatus the _Ebba_ veers off a point to the south-west. Evidently an order of "some kind" has been transmitted to the driver of the machine of "some kind" which causes this inexplicable movement of the schooner by the action of a motor of "some kind" the principle of which I cannot guess at. The result of this manoeuvre is that the _Ebba_ slants away from the cruiser, whose course does not vary. Why should this warship cause a pleasure-yacht to turn out of its way? I have no idea. But the _Ebba_ behaves in a very different manner when about six o'clock in the evening a second ship comes in sight on the port bow. This time, instead of seeking to avoid her, Captain Spade signals an order by means of the apparatus above referred to, and resumes his course to the east--which will bring him close to the said ship. An hour later, the two vessels are only about four miles from each other. The wind has dropped completely. The strange ship, which is a three-masted merchantman, is taking in her top-gallant sails. It is useless to expect the wind to spring up again during the night, and she will lay becalmed till morning. The _Ebba_, however, propelled by her mysterious motor, continues to approach her. It goes without saying, that Captain Spade has also begun to take in sail, and the work, under the direction of the boatswain Effrondat, is executed with the same precision and promptness that struck me before. When the twilight deepens into darkness, only a mile and a half separates the vessels. Captain Spade then comes up to me--I am standing on the starboard side--and unceremoniously orders me to go below. I can but obey. I remark, however, ere I go, that the boatswain has not lighted the head-lamps, whereas the lamps of the three-master shine brightly--green to starboard, and red to port. I entertain no doubt that the schooner intends to pass her without being seen; for though she has slackened speed somewhat, her direction has not been in any way modified. I enter my cabin under the impression of a vague foreboding. My supper is on the table, but uneasy, I know not why, I hardly touch it, and lie down to wait for sleep that does not come. I remain in this condition for two hours. The silence is unbroken save by the water that ripples along the vessel's sides. My mind is full of the events of the past two days, and other thoughts crowd thickly upon me. To-morrow afternoon we shall reach our destination. To-morrow, I shall resume, on land, my attendance upon Thomas Roch, "if it be necessary," said the Count d'Artigas. If, when I was thrown into that black hole at the bottom of the hold, I was able to perceive when the schooner started off across Pamlico Sound, I now feel that she has come to a stop. It must be about ten o'clock. Why has she stopped? When Captain Spade ordered me below, there was no land in sight. In this direction, there is no island until the Bermuda group is reached--at least there is none on the map--and we shall have to go another fifty or sixty miles before the Bermudas can be sighted by the lookout men. Not only has the _Ebba_ stopped, but her immobility is almost complete. There is not a breath of wind, and scarcely any swell, and her slight, regular rocking is hardly perceptible. Then my thoughts turn to the merchantman, which was only a mile and a half off, on our bow, when I came below. If the schooner continued her course towards her, she must be almost alongside now. We certainly cannot be lying more than one or two cables' length from her. The three-master, which was becalmed at sundown, could not have gone west. She must be close by, and if the night is clear, I shall be able to see her through the porthole. It occurs to me, that perhaps a chance of escape presents itself. Why should I not attempt it, since no hope of being restored to liberty is held out to me? It is true I cannot swim, but if I seize a life buoy and jump overboard, I may be able to reach the ship, if I am not observed by the watch on deck. I must quit my cabin and go up by the forward hatchway. I listen. I hear no noise, either in the men's quarters, or on deck. The sailors must all be asleep at this hour. Here goes. I try to open the door, and find it is bolted on the outside, as I might have expected. I must give up the attempt, which, after all, had small chance of success. The best thing I can do, is to go to sleep, for I am weary of mind, if not of body. I am restless and racked by conflicting thoughts, and apprehensions of I know not what. Oh! if I could but sink into the blessed oblivion of slumber! I must have managed to fall asleep, for I have just been awakened by a noise--an unusual noise, such as I have not hitherto heard on board the schooner. Day begins to peer through the glass of my port-hole, which is turned towards the east. I look at my watch. It is half-past four. The first thing I wonder is, whether the _Ebba_ has resumed her voyage. No, I am certain she has not, either by sail, or by her motor. The sea is as calm at sunrise as it was at sunset. If the _Ebba_ has been going ahead while I slept, she is at any rate, stationary now. The noise to which I referred, is caused by men hurrying to and fro on deck--by men heavily laden. I fancy I can also hear a similar noise in the hold beneath my cabin floor, the entrance to which is situated abaft the foremast. I also feel that something is scraping against the schooner's hull. Have boats come alongside? Are the crew engaged in loading or unloading merchandise? And yet we cannot possibly have reached our journey's end. The Count d'Artigas said that we should not reach our destination till this afternoon. Now, I repeat, she was, last night, fully fifty or sixty miles from the nearest land, the group of the Bermudas. That she could have returned westward, and can be in proximity to the American coast, is inadmissible, in view of the distance. Moreover, I have reason to believe that the _Ebba_ has remained stationary all night. Before I fell asleep, I know she had stopped, and I now know that she is not moving. However, I shall see when I am allowed to go on deck. My cabin door is still bolted, I find on trying it; but I do not think they are likely to keep me here when broad daylight is on. An hour goes by, and it gradually gets lighter. I look out of my porthole. The ocean is covered by a mist, which the first rays of the sun will speedily disperse. I can, however, see for a half a mile, and if the three-masted merchantman is not visible, it is probably because she is lying off the other, or port, side of the _Ebba_. Presently I hear a key turned in my door, and the bolts drawn. I push the door open and clamber up the iron ladder to the deck, just as the men are battening down the cover of the hold. I look for the Count d'Artigas, but do not see him. He has not yet left his cabin. Aft, Captain Spade and Engineer Serko are superintending the stowing of some bales, which have doubtless been hoisted from the hold. This explains the noisy operations that were going on when I was awakened. Obviously, if the crew are getting out the cargo, we are approaching the end of our voyage. We are not far from port, and perhaps in a few hours, the schooner will drop anchor. But what about the sailing ship that was to port of us? She ought to be in the same place, seeing that there has been and is no wind. I look for her, but she is nowhere to be seen. There is not a sail, not a speck on the horizon either east, west, north or south. After cogitating upon the circumstance I can only arrive at the following conclusion, which, however, can only be accepted under reserve: Although I did not notice it, the _Ebba_ resumed her voyage while I slept, leaving the three-master becalmed behind her, and this is why the merchantman is no longer visible. I am careful not to question Captain Spade about it, nor even Engineer Serko, as I should certainly receive no answer. Besides, at this moment Captain Spade goes to the signalling apparatus and presses one of the buttons on the upper disk. Almost immediately the _Ebba_ gives a jerk, then with her sails still furled, she starts off eastward again. Two hours later the Count d'Artigas comes up through the main hatchway and takes his customary place aft. Serko and Captain Spade at once approach and engage in conversation with him. All three raise their telescopes and sweep the horizon from southeast to northeast. No one will be surprised to learn that I gaze intently in the same direction; but having no telescope I cannot distinguish anything. The midday meal over we all return on deck--all with the exception of Thomas Roch, who has not quitted his cabin. Towards one o'clock land is sighted by the lookout man on the foretop cross-tree. Inasmuch as the _Ebba_ is bowling along at great speed I shall soon be able to make out the coast line. In effect, two hours later a vague semicircular line that curves outward is discernible about eight miles off. As the schooner approaches it becomes more distinct. It is a mountain, or at all events very high ground, and from its summit a cloud of smoke ascends. What! A volcano in these parts? It must then be---- CHAPTER VIII. BACK CUP. In my opinion the _Ebba_ could have struck no other group of islands but the Bermudas in this part of the Atlantic. This is clear from the distance covered from the American coast and the direction sailed in since we issued from Pamlico Sound. This direction has constantly been south-southeast, and the distance, judging from the _Ebba's_ rate of speed, which has scarcely varied, is approximately seven hundred and fifty miles. Still, the schooner does not slacken speed. The Count d'Artigas and Engineer Serko remain aft, by the man at the wheel. Captain Spade has gone forward. Are we not going to leave this island, which appears to be isolated, to the west? It does not seem likely, since it is still broad daylight, and the hour at which the _Ebba_ was timed to arrive. All the sailors are drawn up on deck, awaiting orders, and Boatswain Effrondat is making preparations to anchor. Ere a couple of hours have passed I shall know all about it. It will be the first answer to one of the many questions that have perplexed me since the schooner put to sea. And yet it is most unlikely that the port to which the _Ebba_ belongs is situated on one of the Bermuda islands, in the middle of an English archipelago--unless the Count d'Artigas has kidnapped Thomas Roch for the British government, which I cannot believe. I become aware that this extraordinary man is gazing at me with singular persistence. Although he can have no suspicion that I am Simon Hart, the engineer, he must be asking himself what I think of this adventure. If Warder Gaydon is but a poor devil, this poor devil will manifest as much unconcern as to what is in store for him as any gentleman could--even though he were the proprietor of this queer pleasure yacht. Still I am a little uneasy under his gaze. I dare say that if the Count d'Artigas could guess how certain things have suddenly become clear to me, he would not hesitate to have me thrown overboard. Prudence therefore commands me to be more circumspect than ever. Without giving rise to any suspicion--even in the mind of Engineer Serko--I have succeeded in raising a corner of the mysterious veil, and I begin to see ahead a bit. As the _Ebba_ draws nearer, the island, or rather islet, towards which she is speeding shows more sharply against the blue background of the sky. The sun which has passed the zenith, shines full upon the western side. The islet is isolated, or at any rate I cannot see any others of the group to which it belongs, either to north or south. This islet, of curious contexture, resembles as near as possible a cup turned upside down, from which a fuliginous vapor arises. Its summit--the bottom of the cup, if you like--is about three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and its flanks, which are steep and regular, are as bare as the sea-washed rocks at its base. There is another peculiarity about it which must render the islet easily recognizable by mariners approaching it from the west, and this is a rock which forms a natural arch at the base of the mountain--the handle of the cup, so to speak--and through which the waves wash as freely as the sunshine passes. Seen this way the islet fully justifies the name of Back Cup given to it. Well, I know and recognize this islet! It is situated at the extremity of the archipelago of the Bermudas. It is the "reversed cup" that I had occasion to visit a few years ago--No, I am not mistaken. I then climbed over the calcareous and crooked rocks at its base on the east side. Yes, it is Back Cup, sure enough! Had I been less self-possessed I might have uttered an exclamation of surprise--and satisfaction--which, with good reason, would have excited the attention and suspicion of the Count d'Artigas. These are the circumstances under which I came to explore Back Cup while on a visit to Bermuda. This archipelago, which is situated about seven hundred and fifty miles from North Carolina is composed of several hundred islands or islets. Its centre is crossed by the sixty-fourth meridian and the thirty-second parallel. Since the Englishman Lomer was shipwrecked and cast up there in 1609, the Bermudas have belonged to the United Kingdom, and in consequence the colonial population has increased to ten thousand inhabitants. It was not for its productions of cotton, coffee, indigo, and arrowroot that England annexed the group--seized it, one might say; but because it formed a splendid maritime station in that part of the Ocean, and in proximity to the United States of America. Possession was taken of it without any protest on the part of other powers, and Bermuda is now administered by a British governor with the addition of a council and a General Assembly. The principal islands of the archipelago are called St. David, Somerset, Hamilton, and St. George. The latter has a free port, and the town of the same name is also the capital of the group. The largest of these isles is not more than seventeen miles long and five wide. Leaving out the medium-sized ones, there remains but an agglomeration of islets and reefs scattered over an area of twelve square leagues. Although the climate of Bermuda is very healthy, very salubrious, the isles are nevertheless frightfully beaten by the heavy winter tempests of the Atlantic, and their approach by navigators presents certain difficulties. What the archipelago especially lacks are rivers and rios. However, as abundant rains fall frequently, this drawback is got over by the inhabitants, who treasure up the heaven-sent water for household and agricultural purposes. This has necessitated the construction of vast cisterns which the downfalls keep filled. These works of engineering skill justly merit the admiration they receive and do honor to the genius of man. It was in connection with the setting up of these cisterns that I made the trip, as well as out of curiosity to inspect the fine works. I obtained from the company of which I was the engineer in New Jersey a vacation of several weeks, and embarked at New York for the Bermudas. While I was staying on Hamilton Island, in the vast port of Southampton, an event occurred of great interest to geologists. One day a whole flotilla of fishers, men, women and children, entered Southampton Harbor. For fifty years these families had lived on the east coast of Back Cup, where they had erected log-cabins and houses of stone. Their position for carrying on their industry was an exceptionally favorable one, for the waters teem with fish all the year round, and in March and April whales abound. Nothing had hitherto occurred to disturb their tranquil existence. They were quite contented with their rough lot, which was rendered less onerous by the facility of communication with Hamilton and St. George. Their solid barks took cargoes of fish there, which they exchanged for the necessities of life. Why had they thus abandoned the islet with the intention, as it pretty soon appeared, of never returning to it? The reason turned out to be that they no longer considered themselves in safety there. A couple of months previously they had been at first surprised, then alarmed, by several distinct detonations that appeared to have taken place in the interior of the mountain. At the same time smoke and flames issued from the summit--or the bottom of the reversed cup, if you like. Now no one had ever suspected that the islet was of volcanic origin, or that there was a crater at the top, no one having been able to climb its sides. Now, however, there could be no possible doubt that the mountain was an ancient volcano that had suddenly become active again and threatened the village with destruction. During the ensuing two months internal rumblings and explosions continued to be heard, which were accompanied by bursts of flame from the top--especially at night. The island was shaken by the explosions--the shocks could be distinctly felt. All these phenomena were indicative of an imminent eruption, and there was no spot at the base of the mountain that could afford any protection from the rivers of lava that would inevitably pour down its smooth, steep slopes and overwhelm the village in their boiling flood. Besides, the very mountain might be destroyed in the eruption. There was nothing for the population exposed to such a dire catastrophe to do but leave. This they did. Their humble Lares and Penates, in fact all their belongings, were loaded into the fishing-smacks, and the entire colony sought refuge in Southhampton Harbor. The news that a volcano, that had presumably been smouldering for centuries at the western extremity of the group, showed signs of breaking out again, caused a sensation throughout the Bermudas. But while some were terrified, the curiosity of others was aroused, mine included. The phenomenon was worth investigation, even if the simple fisher-folk had exaggerated. Back Cup, which, as already stated, lies at the western extremity of the archipelago, is connected therewith by a chain of small islets and reefs, which cannot be approached from the east. Being only three hundred feet in altitude, it cannot be seen either from St. George or Hamilton. I joined a party of explorers and we embarked in a cutter that landed us on the island, and made our way to the abandoned village of the Bermudan fishers. The internal crackings and detonations could be plainly heard, and a sheaf of smoke was swayed by the wind at the summit. Beyond a peradventure the ancient volcano had been started again by the subterranean fire, and an eruption at any moment was to be apprehended. In vain we attempted to climb to the mouth of the crater. The mountain sheered down at an angle of from seventy-five to eighty degrees, and its smooth, slippery sides afforded absolutely no foothold. Anything more barren than this rocky freak of nature it would be difficult to conceive. Only a few tufts of wild herbs were to be seen upon the whole island, and these seemed to have no _raison d'être_. Our explorations were therefore necessarily limited, and in view of the active symptoms of danger that manifested themselves, we could but approve the action of the villagers in abandoning the place; for we entertained no doubt that its destruction was imminent. These were the circumstances in which I was led to visit Back Cup, and no one will consequently be surprised at the fact that I recognized it immediately we hove in sight of the queer structure. No, I repeat, the Count d'Artigas would probably not be overpleased if he were aware that Warder Gaydon is perfectly acquainted with this islet, even if the _Ebba_ was to anchor there--which, as there is no port, is, to say the least, extremely improbable. As we draw nearer, I attentively examine Back Cup. Not one of its former inhabitants has been induced to return, and, as it is absolutely deserted, I cannot imagine why the schooner should visit the place. Perhaps, however, the Count d'Artigas and his companions have no intention of landing there. Even though the _Ebba_ should find temporary shelter between the rocky sides of a narrow creek there is nothing to give ground to the supposition that a wealthy yachtsman would have the remotest idea of fixing upon as his residence an arid cone exposed to all the terrible tempests of the Western Atlantic. To live here is all very well for rustic fishermen, but not for the Count d'Artigas, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade and his crew. Back Cup is now only half a mile off, and the seaweed thrown up on its rocky base is plainly discernible. The only living things upon it are the sea-gulls and other birds that circle in clouds around the smoking crater. When she is only two cable's lengths off, the schooner slackens speed, and then stops at the entrance of a sort of natural canal formed by a couple of reefs that barely rise above the water. I wonder whether the _Ebba_ will venture to try the dangerous feat of passing through it. I do not think so. She will probably lay where she is--though why she should do so I do not know--for a few hours, and then continue her voyage towards the east. However this may be I see no preparations in progress for dropping anchor. The anchors are suspended in their usual places, the cables have not been cleared, and no motion has been made to lower a single boat. At this moment Count d'Artigas, Engineer Serko and Captain Spade go forward and perform some manoeuvre that is inexplicable to me. I walk along the port side of the deck until I am near the foremast, and then I can see a small buoy that the sailors are hoisting in. Almost immediately the water, at the same spot becomes dark and I observe a black mass rising to the surface. Is it a big whale rising for air, and is the _Ebba_ in danger of being shattered by a blow from the monster's tail? Now I understand! At last the mystery is solved. I know what was the motor that caused the schooner to go at such an extraordinary speed without sails and without a screw. Her indefatigable motor is emerging from the sea, after having towed her from the coast of America to the archipelago of the Bermudas. There it is, floating alongside--a submersible boat, a submarine tug, worked by a screw set in motion by the current from a battery of accumulators or powerful electric piles. On the upper part of the long cigar-shaped iron tug is a platform in the middle of which is the "lid" by which an entrance is effected. In the fore part of the platform projects a periscope, or lookout, formed by port-holes or lenses through which an electric searchlight can throw its gleam for some distance under water in front of and on each side of the tug. Now relieved of its ballast of water the boat has risen to the surface. Its lid will open and fresh air will penetrate it to every part. In all probability, if it remained submerged during the day it rose at night and towed the _Ebba_ on the surface. But if the mechanical power of the tug is produced by electricity the latter must be furnished by some manufactory where it is stored, and the means of procuring the batteries is not to be found on Back Cup, I suppose. And then, why does the _Ebba_ have recourse to this submarine towing system? Why is she not provided with her own means of propulsion, like other pleasure-boats? These are things, however, upon which I have at present no leisure to ruminate. The lid of the tug opens and several men issue on to the platform. They are the crew of this submarine boat, and Captain Spade has been able to communicate with them and transmit his orders as to the direction to be taken by means of electric signals connected with the tug by a wire that passes along the stem of the schooner. Engineer Serko approaches me and says, pointing to the boat: "Get in." "Get in!" I exclaim. "Yes, in the tug, and look sharp about it." As usual there is nothing for it but to obey. I hasten to comply with the order and clamber over the side. At the same time Thomas Roch appears on deck accompanied by one of the crew. He appears to be very calm, and very indifferent too, and makes no resistance when he is lifted over and lowered into the tug. When he has been taken in, Count d'Artigas and Engineer Serko follow. Captain Spade and the crew of the _Ebba_ remain behind, with the exception of four men who man the dinghy, which has been lowered. They have hold of a long hawser, with which the schooner is probably to be towed through the reef. Is there then a creek in the middle of the rocks where the vessel is secure from the breakers? Is this the port to which she belongs? They row off with the hawser and make the end fast to a ring in the reef. Then the crew on board haul on it and in five minutes the schooner is so completely lost to sight among the rocks that even the tip of her mast could not be seen from the sea. Who in Bermuda imagines that a vessel is accustomed to lay up in this secret creek? Who in America would have any idea that the rich yachtsman so well known in all the eastern ports abides in the solitude of Back Cup mountain? Twenty minutes later the dinghy returns with the four men towards the tug which was evidently waiting for them before proceeding--where? They climb on board, the little boat is made fast astern, a movement is felt, the screw revolves rapidly and the tug skims along the surface to Back Cup, skirting the reefs to the south. Three cable's lengths further on, another tortuous canal is seen that leads to the island. Into this the tug enters. When it gets close inshore, an order is given to two men who jump out and haul the dinghy up on a narrow sandy beach out of the reach of wave or weed, and where it will be easily get-at-able when wanted. This done the sailors return to the tug and Engineer Serko signs to me to go below. A short iron ladder leads into a central cabin where various bales and packages are stored, and for which no doubt there was not room in the hold of the schooner. I am pushed into a side cabin, the door is shut upon me, and here I am once more a prisoner in profound darkness. I recognize the cabin the moment I enter it. It is the place in which I spent so many long hours after our abduction from Healthful House, and in which I was confined until well out at sea off Pamlico Sound. It is evident that Thomas Roch has been placed in a similar compartment. A loud noise is heard, the banging of the lid as it closes, and the tug begins to sink as the water is admitted to the tanks. This movement is succeeded by another--a movement that impels the boat through the water. Three minutes later it stops, and I feel that we are rising to the surface again. Another noise made by the lid being raised. The door of my cabin opens, and I rush out and clamber on to the platform. I look around and find that the tug has penetrated to the interior of Back Cup mountain. This is the mysterious retreat where Count d'Artigas lives with his companions--out of the world, so to speak. CHAPTER IX. INSIDE BACK CUP. The next morning I am able to make a first inspection of the vast cavern of Back Cup. No one seeks to prevent me. What a night I have passed! What strange visions I have seen! With what impatience I waited for morning! I was conducted to a grotto about a hundred paces from the edge of the lake where the tug stopped. The grotto, twelve feet by ten, was lighted by an incandescent lamp, and fitted with an entrance door that was closed upon me. I am not surprised that electricity is employed in lighting the interior of the cavern, as it is also used in the submarine boat. But where is it generated? Where does it come from? Is there a manufactory installed somewhere or other in this vast crypt, with machinery, dynamos and accumulators? My cell is neatly furnished with a table on which provisions are spread, a bunk with bedding, a basket chair, a wash-hand-stand with toilet set, and a closet containing linen and various suits of clothes. In a drawer of the table I find paper, ink and pens. My dinner consists of fresh fish, preserved meat, bread of excellent quality, ale and whisky; but I am so excited that I scarcely touch it. Yet I feel that I ought to fortify myself and recover my calmness of mind. I must and will solve the mystery surrounding the handful of men who burrow in the bowels of this island. So it is under the carapace of Back Cup that Count d'Artigas has established himself! This cavity, the existence of which is not even suspected, is his home when he is not sailing in the _Ebba_ along the coasts of the new world or the old. This is the unknown retreat he has discovered, to which access is obtained by a submarine passage twelve or fifteen feet below the surface of the ocean. Why has he severed himself from the world? What has been his past? If, as I suspect, this name of d'Artigas and this title of Count are assumed, what motive has he for hiding his identity? Has he been banished, is he an outcast of society that he should have selected this place above all others? Am I not in the power of an evildoer anxious to ensure impunity for his crimes and to defy the law by seeking refuge in this undiscoverable burrow? I have the right of supposing anything in the case of this suspicious foreigner, and I exercise it. Then the question to which I have never been able to suggest a satisfactory answer once more surges into my mind. Why was Thomas Roch abducted from Healthful House in the manner already fully described? Does the Count d'Artigas hope to force from him the secret of his fulgurator with a view to utilizing it for the defence of Back Cup in case his retreat should by chance be discovered? Hardly. It would be easy enough to starve the gang out of Back Cup, by preventing the tug from supplying them with provisions. On the other hand, the schooner could never break through the investing lines, and if she did her description would be known in every port. In this event, of what possible use would Thomas Roch's invention be to the Count d'Artigas Decidedly, I cannot understand it! About seven o'clock in the morning I jump out of bed. If I am a prisoner in the cavern I am at least not imprisoned in my grotto cell. The door yields when I turn the handle and push against it, and I walk out. Thirty yards in front of me is a rocky plane, forming a sort of quay that extends to right and left. Several sailors of the _Ebba_ are engaged in landing bales and stores from the interior of the tug, which lays alongside a little stone jetty. A dim light to which my eyes soon grow accustomed envelops the cavern and comes from a hole in the centre of the roof, through which the blue sky can be seen. "It is from that hole that the smoke which can be seen for such a distance issues," I say to myself, and this discovery suggests a whole series of reflections. Back Cup, then, is not a volcano, as was supposed--as I supposed myself. The flames that were seen a few years ago, and the columns of smoke that still rise were and are produced artificially. The detonations and rumblings that so alarmed the Bermudan fishers were not caused by the internal workings of nature. These various phenomena were fictitious. They manifested themselves at the mere will of the owner of the island, who wanted to scare away the inhabitants who resided on the coast. He succeeded, this Count d'Artigas, and remains the sole and undisputed monarch of the mountain. By exploding gunpowder, and burning seaweed swept up in inexhaustible quantities by the ocean, he has been able to simulate a volcano upon the point of eruption and effectually scare would-be settlers away! The light becomes stronger as the sun rises higher, the daylight streams through the fictitious crater, and I shall soon be able to estimate the cavern's dimensions. This is how I calculate: Exteriorly the island of Back Cup, which is as nearly as possible circular, measures two hundred and fifty yards in circumference, and presents an interior superficies of about six acres. The sides of the mountain at its base vary in thickness from thirty to a hundred yards. It therefore follows that this excavation practically occupies the whole of that part of Back Cup island which appears above water. As to the length of the submarine tunnel by which communication is obtained with the outside, and through which the tug passed, I estimate that it is fifty yards in length. The size of the cavern can be judged from these approximate figures. But vast as it is, I remember that there are caverns of larger dimensions both in the old and new worlds. For instance in Carniole, Northumberland, Derbyshire, Piedmont, the Balearics, Hungary and California are larger grottoes than Back Cup, and those at Han-sur-Lesse in Belgium, and the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, are also more extensive. The latter contain no fewer than two hundred and twenty-six domes, seven rivers, eight cataracts, thirty two wells of unknown depth, and an immense lake which extends over six or seven leagues, the limit of which has never been reached by explorers. I know these Kentucky grottoes, having visited them, as many thousands of tourists have done. The principal one will serve as a comparison to Back Cup. The roof of the former, like that of the latter, is supported by pillars of various lengths, which give it the appearance of a Gothic cathedral, with naves and aisles, though it lacks the architectural regularity of a religious edifice. The only difference is that whereas the roof of the Kentucky grotto is over four hundred feet high, that of Back Cup is not above two hundred and twenty at that part of it where the round hole through which issue the smoke and flames is situated. Another peculiarity, and a very important one, that requires to be pointed out, is that whereas the majority of the grottoes referred to are easily accessible, and were therefore bound to be discovered some time or other, the same remark does not apply to Back Cup. Although it is marked on the map as an island forming part of the Bermuda group, how could any one imagine that it is hollow, that its rocky sides are only the walls of an enormous cavern? In order to make such a discovery it would be necessary to get inside, and to get inside a submarine apparatus similar to that of the Count d'Artigas would be necessary. In my opinion this strange yachtsman's discovery of the tunnel by which he has been able to found this disquieting colony of Back Cup must have been due to pure chance. Now I turn my attention to the lake and observe that it is a very small one, measuring not more than four hundred yards in circumference. It is, properly speaking, a lagoon, the rocky sides of which are perpendicular. It is large enough for the tug to work about in it, and holds enough water too, for it must be one hundred and twenty-five feet deep. It goes without saying that this crypt, given its position and structure, belongs to the category of those which are due to the encroachments of the sea. It is at once of Neptunian and Plutonian origin, like the grottoes of Crozon and Morgate in the bay of Douarnenez in France, of Bonifacio on the Corsican coast, Thorgatten in Norway, the height of which is estimated at over three hundred feet, the catavaults of Greece, the grottoes of Gibraltar in Spain, and Tourana in Cochin China, whose carapace indicates that they are all the product of this dual geological labor. The islet of Back Cup is in great part formed of calcareous rocks, which slope upwards gently from the lagoon towards the sides and are separated from each other by narrow beaches of fine sand. Thick layers of seaweed that have been swept through the tunnel by the tide and thrown up around the lake have been piled into heaps, some of which are dry and some still wet, but all of which exhale the strong odor of the briny ocean. This, however, is not the only combustible employed by the inhabitants of Back Cup, for I see an enormous store of coal that must have been brought by the schooner and the tug. But it is the incineration of masses of dried seaweed that causes the smoke vomited forth by the crater of the mountain. Continuing my walk I perceive on the northern side of the lagoon the habitations of this colony of troglodytes--do they not merit the appellation? This part of the cavern, which is known as the Beehive, fully justifies its name, for it is honeycombed by cells excavated in the limestone rock and in which these human bees--or perhaps they should rather be called wasps--reside. The lay of the cavern to the east is very different. Here hundreds of pillars of all shapes rise to the dome, and form a veritable forest of stone trees through the sinuous avenues of which one can thread one's way to the extreme limit of the place. By counting the cells of the Beehive I calculate that Count d'Artigas' companions number from eighty to one hundred. As my eye wanders over the place I notice that the Count is standing in front of one of the cells, which is isolated from the others, and talking to Engineer Serko and Captain Spade. After a while they stroll down to the jetty alongside which the tug is lying. A dozen men have been emptying the merchandise out of the tug and transporting the goods in boats to the other side, where great cellars have been excavated in the rocks and form the storehouses of the band. The orifice of the tunnel is not visible in the waters of the lagoon, and I remember that when I was brought here I felt the tug sink several feet before it entered. In this respect therefore Back Cup does not resemble either the grottoes of Staffa or Morgate, entrance to which is always open, even at high tide. There may be another passage communicating with the coast, either natural or artificial, and this I shall have to make my business to find out. The island well merits its name of Back Cup. It is indeed a gigantic cup turned upside down, not only to outward appearance, but inwardly, too, though people are ignorant of the fact. I have already remarked that the Beehive is situated to the north of the lagoon, that is to say to the left on entering by the tunnel. On the opposite side are the storerooms filled with provisions of all kinds, bales of merchandise, barrels of wine, beer, and spirits and various packets bearing different marks and labels that show that they came from all parts of the world. One would think that the cargoes of a score of ships had been landed here. A little farther on is a large wooden shed the nature of which is easily distinguishable. From a pole above it a network of thick copper wires extends which conducts the current to the powerful electric lights suspended from the roof or dome, and to the incandescent lamps in each of the cells of the hive. A large number of lamps are also installed among the stone pillars and light up the avenues to their extremities. "Shall I be permitted to roam about wherever I please?" I ask myself. I hope so. I cannot for the life of me see why the Count d'Artigas should prohibit me from doing so, for I cannot get farther than the surrounding walls of his mysterious domain. I question whether there is any other issue than the tunnel, and how on earth could I get through that? Besides, admitting that I am able to get through it, I cannot get off the island. My disappearance would be soon noticed, and the tug would take out a dozen men who would explore every nook and cranny. I should inevitably be recaptured, brought back to the Beehive, and deprived of my liberty for good. I must therefore give up all idea of making my escape, unless I can see that it has some chance of being successful, and if ever an opportunity does present itself I shall not be slow to take advantage of it. On strolling round by the rows of cells I am able to observe a few of these companions of the Count d'Artigas who are content to pass their monotonous existence in the depths of Back Cup. As I said before, calculating from the number of cells in the Beehive, there must be between eighty and a hundred of them. They pay no attention whatever to me as I pass, and on examining them closely it seems to me that they must have been recruited from every country. I do not distinguish any community of origin among them, not even a similarity by which they might be classed as North Americans, Europeans or Asiatics. The color of their skin shades from white to yellow and black--the black peculiar to Australia rather than to Africa. To sum up, they appear for the most part to pertain to the Malay races. I may add that the Count d'Artigas certainly belongs to that particular race which peoples the Dutch isles in the West Pacific, while Engineer Serko must be Levantine and Captain Spade of Italian origin. But if the inhabitants of Back Cup are not bound to each other by ties of race, they certainly are by instinct and inclination. What forbidding, savage-looking faces they have, to be sure! They are men of violent character who have probably never placed any restraint upon their passions, nor hesitated at anything, and it occurs to me that in all likelihood they have sought refuge in this cavern, where they fancy they can continue to defy the law with impunity, after a long series of crimes--robbery, murder, arson, and excesses of all descriptions committed together. In this case Back Cup is nothing but a lair of pirates, the Count d'Artigas is the leader of the band and Serko and Spade are his lieutenants. I cannot get this idea out of my head, and the more I consider the more convinced I am that I am right, especially as everything I see during my stroll about the cavern seems to confirm my opinion. However this may be, and whatever may be the circumstances that have brought them together in this place, Count d'Artigas' companions appear to accept his all-powerful domination without question. On the other hand, if he keeps them under his iron heel by enforcing the severest discipline, certain advantages, some compensation, must accrue from the servitude to which they bow. What can this compensation be? Having turned that part of the bank under which the tunnel passes, I find myself on the opposite side of the lagoon, where are situated the storerooms containing the merchandise brought by the _Ebba_ on each trip, and which contain a great quantity of bales. Beyond is the manufactory of electric energy. I gaze in at the windows as I pass and notice that it contains machines of the latest invention and highest attained perfection, which take up little space. Not one steam engine, with its more or less complicated mechanism and need of fuel, is to be seen in the place. As I had surmised, piles of extraordinary power supply the current to the lamps in the cavern, as well as to the dynamos of the tug. No doubt the current is also utilized for domestic purposes, such as warming the Beehive and cooking food, I can see that in a neighboring cavity it is applied to the alembics used to produce fresh water. At any rate the colonists of Back Cup are not reduced to catching the rain water that falls so abundantly upon the exterior of the mountain. A few paces from the electric power house is a large cistern that, save in the matter of proportions, is the counterpart of those I visited in Bermuda. In the latter place the cisterns have to supply the needs of over ten thousand people, this one of a hundred--what? I am not sure yet what to call them. That their chief had serious reasons for choosing the bowels of this island for his abiding place is obvious. But what were those reasons? I can understand monks shutting themselves behind their monastery walls with the intention of separating themselves from the world, but these subjects of the Count d'Artigas have nothing of the monk about them, and would not be mistaken for such by the most simple-minded of mortals. I continue my way through the pillars to the extremity of the cavern. No one has sought to stop me, no one has spoken to me, not a soul apparently has taken the very slightest notice of me. This portion of Back Cup is extremely curious, and comparable to the most marvellous of the grottoes of Kentucky or the Balearics. I need hardly say that nowhere is the labor of man apparent. All this is the handiwork of nature, and it is not without wonder, mingled with awe, that I reflect upon the telluric forces capable of engendering such prodigious substructions. The daylight from the crater in the centre only strikes this part of the cavern obliquely, so that it is very imperfectly lighted, but at night, when illuminated by the electric lamps, its aspect must be positively fantastic. I have examined the walls everywhere with minute attention, but have been unable to discover any means of communicating with the outside. Quite a colony of birds--gulls, sea-swallows and other feathery denizens of the Bermudan beaches have made their home in the cavern. They have apparently never been hunted, for they are in no way disturbed by the presence of man. But besides sea-birds, which are free to come and go as they please by the orifice in the dome, there is a whole farmyard of domestic poultry, and cows and pigs. The food supply is therefore no less assured than it is varied, when the fish of all kinds that abound in the lagoon and around the island are taken into consideration. Moreover, a mere glance at the colonists of Back Cup amply suffices to show that they are not accustomed to fare scantily. They are all vigorous, robust seafaring men, weatherbeaten and seasoned in the burning beat of tropical latitudes, whose rich blood is surcharged with oxygen by the breezes of the ocean. There is not a youth nor an old man among them. They are all in their prime, their ages ranging from thirty to fifty. But why do they submit to such an existence? Do they never leave their rocky retreat? Perhaps I shall find out ere I am much older. CHAPTER X. KER KARRAJE. The cell in which I reside is about a hundred paces from the habitation of the Count d'Artigas, which is one of the end ones of this row of the Beehive. If I am not to share it with Thomas Roch, I presume the latter's cell is not far off, for in order that Warder Gaydon may continue to care for the ex-patient of Healthful House, their respective apartments will have to be contiguous. However, I suppose I shall soon be enlightened on this point. Captain Spade and Engineer Serko reside separately in proximity to D'Artigas' mansion. Mansion? Yes, why not dignify it with the title since this habitation has been arranged with a certain art? Skillful hands have carved an ornamental façade in the rock. A large door affords access to it. Colored glass windows in wooden frames let into the limestone walls admit the light. The interior comprises several chambers, a dining-room and a drawing-room lighted by a stained-glass window, the whole being perfectly ventilated. The furniture is of various styles and shapes and of French, English and American make. The kitchen, larder, etc., are in adjoining cells in rear of the Beehive. In the afternoon, just as I issue from my cell with the firm intention of "obtaining an audience" of the Count d'Artigas, I catch sight of him coming along the shore of the lagoon towards the hive. Either he does not see me, or wishes to avoid me, for he quickens his steps and I am unable to catch him. "Well, he will have to receive me, anyhow!" I mutter to myself. I hurry up to the door through which he has just disappeared and which has closed behind him. It is guarded by a gigantic, dark-skinned Malay, who orders me away in no amiable tone of voice. I decline to comply with his injunction, and repeat to him twice the following request in my very best English: "Tell the Count d'Artigas that I desire to be received immediately." I might just as well have addressed myself to the surrounding rock. This savage, no doubt, does not understand a word of English, for he scowls at me and orders me away again with a menacing cry. I have a good mind to attempt to force the door and shout so that the Count d'Artigas cannot fail to hear me, but in all probability I shall only succeed in rousing the wrath of the Malay, who appears to be endowed with herculean strength. I therefore judge discretion to be the better part of valor, and put off the explanation that is owing to me--and which, sooner or later, I will have--to a more propitious occasion. I meander off in front of the Beehive towards the east, and my thoughts revert to Thomas Roch. I am surprised that I have not seen him yet. Can he be in the throes of a fresh paroxysm? This hypothesis is hardly admissible, for if the Count d'Artigas is to be believed, he would in this event have summoned me to attend to the inventor. A little farther on I encounter Engineer Serko. With his inviting manner and usual good-humor this ironical individual smiles when he perceives me, and does not seek to avoid me. If he knew I was a colleague, an engineer--providing he himself really is one--perhaps he might receive me with more cordiality than I have yet encountered, but I am not going to be such a fool as to tell him who and what I am. He stops, with laughing eyes and mocking mouth, and accompanies a "Good day, how do you do?" with a gracious gesture of salutation. I respond coldly to his politeness--a fact which he affects not to notice. "May Saint Jonathan protect you, Mr. Gaydon!" he continues in his clear, ringing voice. "You are not, I presume, disposed to regret the fortunate circumstance by which you were permitted to visit this surpassingly marvellous cavern--and it really is one of the finest, although the least known on this spheroid." This word of a scientific language used in conversation with a simple hospital attendant surprises me, I admit, and I merely reply: "I should have no reason to complain, Mr. Serko, if, after having had the pleasure of visiting this cavern, I were at liberty to quit it." "What! Already thinking of leaving us, Mr. Gaydon,--of returning to your dismal pavilion at Healthful House? Why, you have scarcely had time to explore our magnificent domain, or to admire the incomparable beauty with which nature has endowed it." "What I have seen suffices," I answer; "and should you perchance be talking seriously I will assure you seriously that I do not want to see any more of it." "Come, now, Mr. Gaydon, permit me to point out that you have not yet had the opportunity of appreciating the advantages of an existence passed in such unrivalled surroundings. It is a quiet life, exempt from care, with an assured future, material conditions such as are not to be met with anywhere, an even climate and no more to fear from the tempests which desolate the coasts in this part of the Atlantic than from the cold of winter, or the heat of summer. This temperate and salubrious atmosphere is scarcely affected by changes of season. Here we have no need to apprehend the wrath of either Pluto or Neptune." "Sir," I reply, "it is impossible that this climate can suit you, that you can appreciate living in this grotto of----" I was on the point of pronouncing the name of Back Cup. Fortunately I restrained myself in time. What would happen if they suspected that I am aware of the name of their island, and, consequently, of its position at the extremity of the Bermuda group? "However," I continue, "if this climate does not suit me, I have, I presume, the right to make a change." "The right, of course." "I understand from your remark that I shall be furnished with the means of returning to America when I want to go?" "I have no reason for opposing your desires, Mr. Gaydon," Engineer Serko replies, "and I regard your presumption as a very natural one. Observe, however, that we live here in a noble and superb independence, that we acknowledge the authority of no foreign power, that we are subject to no outside authority, that we are the colonists of no state, either of the old or new world. This is worth consideration by whomsoever has a sense of pride and independence. Besides, what memories are evoked in a cultivated mind by these grottoes which seem to have been chiselled by the hands of the gods and in which they were wont to render their oracles by the mouth of Trophonius." Decidedly, Engineer Serko is fond of citing mythology! Trophonius after Pluto and Neptune? Does he imagine that Warder Gaydon ever heard of Trophonius? It is clear this mocker continues to mock, and I have to exercise the greatest patience in order not to reply in the same tone. "A moment ago," I continue shortly, "I wanted to enter yon habitation, which, if I mistake not, is that of the Count d'Artigas, but I was prevented." "By whom, Mr. Gaydon?" "By a man in the Count's employ." "He probably had received strict orders about it." "Possibly, yet whether he likes it or not, Count d'Artigas will have to see me and listen to me." "Maybe it would be difficult, and even impossible to get him to do so," says Engineer Serko with a smile. "Why so?" "Because there is no such person as Count d'Artigas here." "You are jesting, I presume; I have just seen him." "It was not the Count d'Artigas whom you saw, Mr. Gaydon." "Who was it then, may I ask?" "The pirate Ker Karraje." This name was thrown at me in a hard tone of voice, and Engineer Serko walked off before I had presence of mind enough to detain him. The pirate Ker Karraje! Yes, this name is a revelation to me. I know it well, and what memories it evokes! It by itself explains what has hitherto been inexplicable to me. I now know into whose hands I have fallen. With what I already knew, with what I have learned since my arrival in Back Cup from Engineer Serko, this is what I am able to tell about the past and present of Ker Karraje: Eight or nine years ago, the West Pacific was infested by pirates who acted with the greatest audacity. A band of criminals of various origins, composed of escaped convicts, military and naval deserters, etc., operated with incredible audacity under the orders of a redoubtable chief. The nucleus of the band had been formed by men pertaining to the scum of Europe who had been attracted to New South Wales, in Australia, by the discovery of gold there. Among these gold-diggers, were Captain Spade and Engineer Serko, two outcasts, whom a certain community of ideas and character soon bound together in close friendship. These intelligent, well educated, resolute men would most assuredly have succeeded in any career. But being without conscience or scruples, and determined to get rich at no matter what cost, deriving from gambling and speculation what they might have earned by patient and steady work, they engaged in all sorts of impossible adventures. One day they were rich, the next day poor, like most of the questionable individuals who had hurried to the gold-fields in search of fortune. Among the diggers in New South Wales was a man of incomparable audacity, one of those men who stick at nothing--not even at crime--and whose influence upon bad and violent natures is irresistible. That man's name was Ker Karraje. The origin or nationality or antecedents of this pirate were never established by the investigations ordered in regard to him. He eluded all pursuit, and his name--or at least the name he gave himself--was known all over the world, and inspired horror and terror everywhere, as being that of a legendary personage, a bogey, invisible and unseizable. I have now reason to believe that Ker Karraje is a Malay. However, it is of little consequence, after all. What is certain is that he was with reason regarded as a formidable and dangerous villain who had many crimes, committed in distant seas, to answer for. After spending a few years on the Australian goldfields, where he made the acquaintance of Engineer Serko and Captain Spade, Ker Karraje managed to seize a ship in the port of Melbourne, in the province of Victoria. He was joined by about thirty rascals whose number was speedily tripled. In that part of the Pacific Ocean where piracy is still carried on with great facility, and I may say, profit, the number of ships pillaged, crews massacred, and raids committed in certain western islands which the colonists were unable to defend, cannot be estimated. Although the whereabouts of Ker Karraje's vessel, commanded by Captain Spade, was several times made known to the authorities, all attempts to capture it proved futile. The marauder would disappear among the innumerable islands of which he knew every cove and creek, and it was impossible to come across him. He maintained a perfect reign of terror. England, France, Germany, Russia and America vainly dispatched warships in pursuit of the phantom vessel which disappeared, no one knew whither, after robberies and murders that could not be prevented or punished had been committed by her crew. One day this series of crimes came to an end, and no more was heard of Ker Karraje. Had he abandoned the Pacific for other seas? Would this pirate break out in a fresh place? It was argued that notwithstanding what they must have spent in orgies and debauchery the pirate and his companions must still have an enormous amount of wealth hidden in some place known only to themselves, and that they were enjoying their ill-gotten gains. Where had the band hidden themselves since they had ceased their depredations? This was a question which everybody asked and none was able to answer. All attempts to run them to earth were vain. Terror and uneasiness having ceased with the danger, Ker Karraje's exploits soon began to be forgotten, even in the West Pacific. This is what had happened--and what will never be known unless I succeed in escaping from Back Cup: These wretches were, as a matter of fact, possessed of great wealth when they abandoned the Southern Seas. Having destroyed their ship they dispersed in different directions after having arranged to meet on the American continent. Engineer Serko, who was well versed in his profession, and was a clever mechanic to boot, and who had made a special study of submarine craft, proposed to Ker Karraje that they should construct one of these boats in order to continue their criminal exploits with greater secrecy and effectiveness. Ker Karraje at once saw the practical nature of the proposition, and as they had no lack of money the idea was soon carried out. While the so-called Count d'Artigas ordered the construction of the schooner _Ebba_ at the shipyards of Gotteborg, in Sweden, he gave to the Cramps of Philadelphia, in America, the plans of a submarine boat whose construction excited no suspicion. Besides, as will be seen, it soon disappeared and was never heard of again. The boat was constructed from a model and under the personal supervision of Engineer Serko, and fitted with all the known appliances of nautical science. The screw was worked with electric piles of recent invention which imparted enormous propulsive power to the motor. It goes without saying that no one imagined that Count d'Artigas was none other than Ker Karraje, the former pirate of the Pacific, and that Engineer Serko was the most formidable and resolute of his accomplices. The former was regarded as a foreigner of noble birth and great fortune, who for several months had been frequenting the ports of the United States, the _Ebba_ having been launched long before the tug was ready. Work upon the latter occupied fully eighteen months, and when the boat was finished it excited the admiration of all those interested in these engines of submarine navigation. By its external form, its interior arrangements, its air-supply system, the rapidity with which it could be immersed, the facility with which it could be handled and controlled, and its extraordinary speed, it was conceded to be far superior to the _Goubet,_ the _Gymnote_, the _Zede_, and other similar boats which had made great strides towards perfection. After several extremely successful experiments a public test was given in the open sea, four miles off Charleston, in presence of several American and foreign warships, merchant vessels, and pleasure boats invited for the occasion. Of course the _Ebba_ was among them, with the Count d'Artigas, Engineer Serko, and Captain Spade on board, and the old crew as well, save half a dozen men who manned the submarine machine, which was worked by a mechanical engineer named Gibson, a bold and very clever Englishman. The programme of this definite experiment comprised various evolutions on the surface of the water, which were to be followed by an immersion to last several hours, the boat being ordered not to rise again until a certain buoy stationed many miles out at sea had been attained. At the appointed time the lid was closed and the boat at first manoeuvred on the surface. Her speed and the ease with which she turned and twisted were loudly praised by all the technical spectators. Then at a signal given on board the _Ebba_ the tug sank slowly out of sight, and several vessels started for the buoy where she was to reappear. Three hours went by, but there was no sign of the boat. No one could suppose that in accordance with instructions received from the Count d'Artigas and Engineer Serko this submarine machine, which was destined to act as the invisible tug of the schooner, would not emerge till it had gone several miles beyond the rendezvous. Therefore, with the exception of those who were in the secret, no one entertained any doubt that the boat and all inside her had perished as the result of an accident either to her metallic covering or machinery. On board the _Ebba_ consternation was admirably simulated. On board the other vessels it was real. Drags were used and divers sent down along the course the boat was supposed to have taken, but it could not be found, and it was agreed that it had been swallowed up in the depths of the Atlantic. Two days later the Count d'Artigas put to sea again, and in forty-eight hours came up with the tug at the place appointed. This is how Ker Karraje became possessed of the admirable vessel which was to perform the double function of towing the schooner and attacking ships. With this terrible engine of destruction, whose very existence was ignored, the Count d'Artigas was able to recommence his career of piracy with security and impunity. These details I have learned from Engineer Serko, who is very proud of his handiwork,--and also very positive that the prisoner of Back Cup will never be able to disclose the secret. It will easily be realized how powerful was the offensive weapon Ker Karraje now possessed. During the night the tug would rush at a merchant vessel, and bore a hole in her with its powerful ram. At the same time the schooner which could not possibly have excited any suspicion, would run alongside and her horde of cutthroats would pour on to the doomed vessel's deck and massacre the helpless crew, after which they would hurriedly transfer that part of the cargo that was worth taking to the _Ebba_. Thus it happened that ship after ship was added to the long list of those that never reached port and were classed as having gone down with all on board. For a year after the odious comedy in the bay of Charleston Ker Karraje operated in the Atlantic, and his wealth increased to enormous proportions. The merchandise for which he had no use was disposed of in distant markets in exchange for gold and silver. But what was sadly needed was a place where the profits could be safely hidden pending the time when they were to be finally divided. Chance came to their aid. While exploring the bottom of the sea in the neighborhood of the Bermudas, Engineer Serko and Driver Gibson discovered at the base of Back Cup island the tunnel which led to the interior of the mountain. Would it have been possible for Ker Karraje to have found a more admirable refuge than this, absolutely safe as it was from any possible chance of discovery? Thus it came to pass that one of the islands of the Archipelago of Bermuda, erstwhile the haunt of buccaneers, became the lair of another gang a good deal more to be dreaded. This retreat having been definitely adopted, Count d'Artigas and his companions set about getting their place in order. Engineer Serko installed an electric power house, without having recourse to machines whose construction abroad might have aroused suspicion, simply employing piles that could be easily mounted and required but metal plates and chemical substances that the _Ebba_ procured during her visits to the American coast. What happened on the night of the 19th inst. can easily be divined. If the three-masted merchantman which lay becalmed was not visible at break of day it was because she had been scuttled by the tug, boarded by the cut-throat band on the _Ebba_, and sunk with all on board after being pillaged. The bales and things that I had seen on the schooner were a part of her cargo, and all unknown to me the gallant ship was lying at the bottom of the broad Atlantic! How will this adventure end? Shall I ever be able to escape from Back Cup, denounce the false Count d'Artigas and rid the seas of Ker Karraje's pirates? And if Ker Karraje is terrible as it is, how much more so will he become if he ever obtains possession of Roch's fulgurator! His power will be increased a hundred-fold! If he were able to employ this new engine of destruction no merchantman could resist him, no warship escape total destruction. I remain for some time absorbed and oppressed by the reflections with which the revelation of Ker Karraje's name inspires me. All that I have ever heard about this famous pirate recurs to me--his existence when he skimmed the Southern Seas, the useless expeditions organized by the maritime powers to hunt him down. The unaccountable loss of so many vessels in the Atlantic during the past few years is attributable to him. He had merely changed the scene of his exploits. It was supposed that he had been got rid of, whereas he is continuing his piratical practices in the most frequented ocean on the globe, by means of the tug which is believed to be lying at the bottom of Charleston Bay. "Now," I say to myself, "I know his real name and that of his lair--Ker Karraje and Back Cup;" and I surmise that if Engineer Serko has let me into the secret he must have been authorized to do so. Am I not meant to understand from this that I must give up all hope of ever recovering my liberty? Engineer Serko had manifestly remarked the impression created upon me by this revelation. I remember that on leaving me he went towards Ker Karraje's habitation, no doubt with the intention of apprising him of what had passed. After a rather long walk around the lagoon I am about to return to my cell, when I hear footsteps behind me. I turn and find myself face to face with the Count d'Artigas, who is accompanied by Captain Spade. He glances at me sharply, and in a burst of irritation that I cannot suppress, I exclaim: "You are keeping me here, sir, against all right. If it was to wait upon Thomas Roch that you carried me off from Healthful House, I refuse to attend to him, and insist upon being sent back." The pirate chief makes a gesture, but does not reply. Then my temper gets the better of me altogether. "Answer me, Count d'Artigas--or rather, for I know who you are--answer me, Ker Karraje!" I shout. "The Count d'Artigas is Ker Karraje," he coolly replies, "just as Warder Gaydon is Engineer Simon Hart; and Ker Karraje will never restore to liberty Engineer Simon Hart, who knows his secrets." CHAPTER XI. FIVE WEEKS IN BACK CUP. The situation is plain. Ker Karraje knows who I am. He knew who I was when he kidnapped Thomas Roch and his attendant. How did this man manage to find out what I was able to keep from the staff of Healthful House? How comes it that he knew that a French engineer was performing the duties of attendant to Thomas Roch? I do not know how he discovered it, but the fact remains that he did. Evidently he had means of information which must have been costly, but from which he has derived considerable profit. Besides, men of his kidney do not count the cost when they wish to attain an end they have in view. Henceforward Ker Karraje, or rather Engineer Serko, will replace me as attendant upon Thomas Roch. Will he succeed better than I did? God grant that he may not, that the civilized world may be spared such a misfortune! I did not reply to Ker Karraje's Parthian shot, for I was stricken dumb. I did not, however, collapse, as the alleged Count d'Artigas perhaps expected I would. No! I looked him straight in the eyes, which glittered angrily, and crossed my arms defiantly, as he had done. And yet he held my life in his hands! At a sign a bullet would have laid me dead at his feet. Then my body, cast into the lagoon, would have been borne out to sea through the tunnel and there would have been an end of me. After this scene I am left at liberty, just as before. No measure is taken against me, I can walk among the pillars to the very end of the cavern, which--it is only too clear--possesses no other issue except the tunnel. When I return to my cell, at the extremity of the Beehive, a prey to a thousand thoughts suggested by my situation, I say to myself: "If Ker Karraje knows I am Simon Hart, the engineer, he must at any rate never know that I am aware of the position of Back Cup Island." As to the plan of confiding Thomas Roch to my care, I do not think he ever seriously entertained it, seeing that my identity had been revealed to him. I regret this, inasmuch as the inventor will indubitably be the object of pressing solicitations, and as Engineer Serko will employ every means in his power to obtain the composition of the explosive and deflagrator, of which he will make such detestable use during future piratical exploits. Yes, it would have been far better if I could have remained Thomas Roch's keeper here, as in Healthful House. For fifteen days I see nothing of my late charge. No one, I repeat, has placed any obstacles in the way of my daily peregrinations. I have no need to occupy myself about the material part of my existence. My meals are brought to me regularly, direct from the kitchen of the Count d'Artigas--I cannot accustom myself to calling him by any other name. The food leaves nothing to be desired, thanks to the provisions that the _Ebba_ brings on her return from each voyage. It is very fortunate, too, that I have been supplied with all the writing materials I require, for during my long hours of idleness I have been able to jot down in my notebook the slightest incidents that have occurred since I was abducted from Healthful House, and to keep a diary day by day. As long as I am permitted to use a pen I shall continue my notes. Mayhap some day, they will help to clear up the mysteries of Back Cup. _From July 5 to July 25._--A fortnight has passed, and all my attempts to get near Thomas Roch have been frustrated. Orders have evidently been given to keep him away from my influence, inefficacious though the latter has hitherto been. My only hope is that the Count d'Artigas, Engineer Serko, and Captain Spade will waste their time trying to get at the inventor's secrets. Three or four times to my knowledge, at least, Thomas Roch and Engineer Serko have walked together around the lagoon. As far as I have been able to judge, the former listened with some attention to what the other was saying to him. Serko has conducted him over the whole cavern, shown him the electric power house and the mechanism of the tug. Thomas Roch's mental condition has visibly improved since his departure from Healthful House. Thomas Roch lives in a private room in Ker Karraje's "mansion." I have no doubt that he is daily sounded in regard to his discoveries, especially by Engineer Serko. Will he be able to resist the temptation if they offer him the exorbitant price that he demands? Has he any idea of the value of money? These wretches may dazzle him with the gold that they have accumulated by years of rapine. In the present state of his mind may he not be induced to disclose the composition of his fulgurator? They would then only have to fetch the necessary substances and Thomas Roch would have plenty of time in Back Cup to devote to his chemical combinations. As to the war-engines themselves nothing would be easier than to have them made in sections in different parts of the American continent. My hair stands on end when I think what they could and would do with them if once they gained possession of them. These intolerable apprehensions no longer leave me a minute's peace; they are wearing me out and my health is suffering in consequence. Although the air in the interior of Back Cup is pure, I become subject to attacks of suffocation, and I feel as though my prison walls were falling upon me and crushing me under their weight. I am, besides, oppressed by the feeling that I am cut off from the world, as effectually as though I were no longer upon our planet,--for I know nothing of what is going on outside. Ah! if it were only possible to escape through that submarine tunnel, or through the hole in the dome and slide to the base of the mountain! On the morning of the 25th I at last encounter Thomas Roch. He is alone on the other side of the lagoon, and I wonder, inasmuch as I have not seen them since the previous day, whether Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, and Captain Spade have not gone off on some expedition. I walk round towards Thomas Roch, and before he can see me I examine him attentively. His serious, thoughtful physiognomy is no longer that of a madman. He walks slowly, with his eyes bent on the ground, and under his arm a drawing-board upon which is stretched a sheet of paper covered with designs. Suddenly he raises his head, advances a step and recognizes me. "Ah! Gaydon, it is you, is it?" he cries, "I have then escaped from you! I am free!" He can, indeed, regard himself as being free--a good deal more at liberty in Back Cup than he was in Healthful House. But maybe my presence evokes unpleasant memories, and will bring on another fit, for he continues with extraordinary animation: "Yes, I know you, Gaydon.--Do not approach me! Stand off! stand off! You would like to get me back in your clutches, incarcerate me again in your dungeon! Never! I have friends here who will protect me. They are powerful, they are rich. The Count d'Artigas is my backer and Engineer Serko is my partner. We are going to exploit my invention! We are going to make my fulgurator! Hence! Get you gone!" Thomas Roch is in a perfect fury. He raises his voice, agitates his arms, and finally pulls from his pockets many rolls of dollar bills and banknotes, and handfuls of English, French, American and German gold coins, which slip through his fingers and roll about the cavern. How could he get all this money except from Ker Karraje, and as the price of his secret? The noise he makes attracts a number of men to the scene. They watch us for a moment, then seize Thomas Roch and drag him away. As soon as I am out of his sight he ceases-to struggle and becomes calm again. _July 27._--Two hours after meeting with Thomas Roch, I went down to the lagoon and walked out to the edge of the stone jetty. The tug is not moored in its accustomed place, nor can I see it anywhere about the lake. Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko had not gone yesterday, as I supposed, for I saw them in the evening. To-day, however, I have reason to believe that they really have gone away in the tug with Captain Spade and the crew of the _Ebba_, and that the latter must be sailing away. Have they set out on a piracy expedition? Very likely. It is equally likely that Ker Karraje, become once more the Count d'Artigas, travelling for pleasure on board his yacht, intends to put into some port on the American coast to procure the substances necessary to the preparation of Roch's fulgurator. Ah! if it had only been possible for me to hide in the tug, to slip into the _Ebba's_ hold, and stow myself away there until the schooner arrived in port! Then perchance I might have escaped and delivered the world from this band of pirates. It will be seen how tenaciously I cling to the thought of escape--of fleeing--fleeing at any cost from this lair. But flight is impossible, except through the tunnel, by means of a submarine boat. Is it not folly to think of such a thing? Sheer folly, and yet what other way is there of getting out of Back Cup? While I give myself up to these reflections the water of the lagoon opens a few yards from me and the tug appears. The lid is raised and Gibson, the engineer, and the men issue on to the platform. Other men come up and catch the line that is thrown to them. They haul upon it, and the tug is soon moored in its accustomed place. This time, therefore, at any rate, the schooner is not being towed, and the tug merely went out to put Ker Karraje and his companions aboard the _Ebba_. This only confirms my impression that the sole object of their trip is to reach an American port where the Count d'Artigas can procure the materials for making the explosive, and order the machines in some foundry. On the day fixed for their return the tug will go out through the tunnel again to meet the schooner and Ker Karraje will return to Back Cup. Decidedly, this evildoer is carrying out his designs and has succeeded sooner than I thought would be possible. _August 3._--An incident occurred to-day of which the lagoon was the theatre--a very curious incident that must be exceedingly rare. Towards three o'clock in the afternoon there was a prodigious bubbling in the water, which ceased for a minute or two and then recommenced in the centre of the lagoon. About fifteen pirates, whose attention had been attracted by this unaccountable phenomenon, hurried down to the bank manifesting signs of astonishment not unmingled with fear--at least I thought so. The agitation of the water was not caused by the tug, as the latter was lying alongside the jetty, and the idea that some other submarine boat had found its way through the tunnel was highly improbable. Almost at the same instant cries were heard on the opposite bank. The newcomers shouted something in a hoarse voice to the men on the side where I was standing, and these immediately rushed off towards the Beehive. I conjectured that they had caught sight of some sea-monster that had found its way in, and was floundering in the lagoon, and that they had rushed off to fetch arms and harpoons to try and capture it. I was right, for they speedily returned with the latter weapons and rifles loaded with explosive bullets. The monster in question was a whale, of the species that is common enough in Bermudan waters, which after swimming through the tunnel was plunging about in the narrow limits of the lake. As it was constrained to take refuge in Back Cup I concluded that it must have been hard pressed by whalers. Some minutes elapsed before the monster rose to the surface. Then the green shiny mass appeared spouting furiously and darting to and fro as though fighting with some formidable enemy. "If it was driven in here by whalers," I said to myself, "there must be a vessel in proximity to Back Cup--peradventure within a stone's throw of it. Her boats must have entered the western passes to the very foot of the mountain. And to think I am unable to communicate with them! But even if I could, I fail to see how I could go to them through these massive walls." I soon found, however, that it was not fishers, but sharks that had driven the whale through the tunnel, and which infest these waters in great numbers. I could see them plainly as they darted about, turning upon their backs and displaying their enormous mouths which were bristling with their cruel teeth. There were five or six of the monsters, and they attacked the whale with great viciousness. The latter's only means of defence was its tail, with which it lashed at them with terrific force and rapidity. But the whale had received several wounds and the water was tinged with its life-blood; for plunge and lash as it would, it could not escape the bites of its enemies. However, the voracious sharks were not permitted to vanquish their prey, for man, far more powerful with his instruments of death, was about to take a hand and snatch it from them. Gathered around the lagoon were the companions of Ker Karraje, every whit as ferocious as the sharks themselves, and well deserving the same name, for what else are they? Standing amid a group, at the extremity of the jetty, and armed with a harpoon, was the big Malay who had prevented me from entering Ker Karraje's house. When the whale got within shot, he hurled the harpoon with great force and skill, and it sank into the leviathan's flesh just under the left fin. The whale plunged immediately, followed by the relentless sharks. The rope attached to the weapon ran out for about sixty yards, and then slackened. The men at once began to haul on it, and the monster rose to the surface again near the end of the tunnel, struggling desperately in its death agony, and spurting great columns of water tinged with blood. One blow of its tail struck a shark, and hurled it clean out of water against the rocky side, where it dropped in again, badly, if not fatally injured. The harpoon was torn from the flesh by the jerk, and the whale went under. It came up again for the last time, and lashed the water so that it washed up from the tunnel end, disclosing the top of the orifice. Then the sharks again rushed on their prey, but were scared off by a hail of the explosive bullets. Two men then jumped into a boat and attached a line to the dead monster. The latter was hauled into the jetty, and the Malays started to cut it up with a dexterity that showed they were no novices at the work. No more sharks were to be seen, but I concluded that it would be as well to refrain from taking a bath in the lagoon for some days to come. I now know exactly where the entrance to the tunnel is situated. The orifice on this side is only ten feet below the edge of the western bank. But of what use is this knowledge to me? _August 7_.--Twelve days have elapsed since the Count d'Artigas, Engineer Serko, and Captain Spade put to sea. There is nothing to indicate that their return is expected, though the tug is always kept in readiness for immediate departure by Gibson, the engine-driver. If the _Ebba_ is not afraid to enter the ports of the United States by day, I rather fancy she prefers to enter the rocky channel of Back Cup at nightfall. I also fancy, somehow, that Ker Karraje and his companions will return to-night. _August 10_.--At ten o'clock last night, as I anticipated, the tug went under and out, just in time to meet the _Ebba_ and tow her through the channel to her creek, after which she returned with Ker Karraje and the others. When I look out this morning, I see Thomas Roch and Engineer Serko walking down to the lagoon, and talking. What they are talking about I can easily guess. I go forward and take a good look at my ex-patient. He is asking questions of Engineer Serko With great animation. His eyes gleam, his face is flushed, and he is all eagerness to reach the jetty. Engineer Serko can hardly keep up with him. The crew of the tug are unloading her, and they have just brought ashore ten medium-sized boxes. These boxes bear a peculiar red mark, which Thomas Roch examines closely. Engineer Serko orders the men to transport them to the storehouses on the left bank, and the boxes are forthwith loaded on a boat and rowed over. In my opinion, these boxes contain the substances by the combination or mixture of which, the fulgurator and deflagrator are to be made. The engines, doubtless, are being made in an American foundry, and when they are ready, the schooner will fetch them and bring them to Back Cup. For once in a while, anyhow, the _Ebba_ has not returned with any stolen merchandise. She went out and has returned with a clear bill. But with what terrible power Ker Karraje will be armed for both offensive and defensive operations at sea! If Thomas Roch is to be credited, this fulgurator could shatter the terrestrial spheroid at one blow. And who knows but what one day, he will try the experiment? CHAPTER XII. ENGINEER SERKO'S ADVICE. Thomas Roch has started work and spends hours and hours in a wooden shed on the left bank of the lagoon that has been set apart as his laboratory and workshop. No one enters it except himself. Does he insist upon preparing the explosive in secret and does he intend to keep the formula thereof to himself? I should not wonder. The manner of employing Roch's fulgurator is, I believe, very simple indeed. The projectile in which it is used requires neither gun nor mortar to launch it, nor pneumatic tube like the Zalinski shell. It is autopropulsive, it projects itself, and no ship within a certain zone when the engine explodes could escape utter destruction. With such a weapon as this at his command Ker Karraje would be invincible. _From August 11 to August 17_.--During the past week Thomas Roch has been working without intermission. Every morning the inventor goes to his laboratory and does not issue therefrom till night. I have made no attempt to stop him or speak to him, knowing that it would be useless to do so. Although he is still indifferent to everything that does not touch upon his work he appears to be perfectly self-possessed. Why should he not have recovered his reason? Has he not obtained what he has so long sought for? Is he not at last able to carry out the plans he formed years and years ago? _August 18_.--At one o'clock this morning I was roused by several detonations. "Has Back Cup been attacked?" was my first thought. "Has the schooner excited suspicion, and been chased to the entrance to the passes? Is the island being bombarded with a view to its destruction? Has justice at last overtaken these evil-doers ere Thomas Roch has been able to complete the manufacture of his explosive, and before the autopropulsive engine could be fetched from the continent?" The detonations, which are very violent, continue, succeeding each other at regular intervals, and it occurs to me that if the schooner has been destroyed, all communication with the bases of supply being impossible, Back Cup cannot be provisioned. It is true the tug would be able to land the Count d'Artigas somewhere on the American coast where, money being no object, he could easily buy or order another vessel. But no matter. If Back Cup is only destroyed before Ker Karraje has Roch's fulgurator at his disposal I shall render thanks to heaven. A few hours later, at the usual time, I quit my cell. All is quiet at the Beehive. The men are going about their business as usual. The tug is moored near the jetty. Thomas Roch is going to his laboratory, and Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko are tranquilly pacing backwards and forwards by the lake and chatting. The island therefore could not have been attacked during the night. Yet I was awakened by the report of cannon, this I will swear. At this moment Ker Karraje goes off towards his abode and Engineer Serko, smilingly ironical, as usual, advances to meet me. "Well, Mr. Simon Hart," he says, "are you getting accustomed to your tranquil existence? Do you appreciate at their just merit the advantages of this enchanted grotto? Have you given up all hope of recovering your liberty some day or other?" What is the use of waxing wroth with this jester? I reply calmly: "No, sir. I have not given up hope, and I still expect that I shall be released." "What! Mr. Hart, separate ourselves from a man whom we all esteem--and I from a colleague who perhaps, in the course of Thomas Roch's fits of delirium, has learned some of his secrets? You are not serious!" So this is why they are keeping me a prisoner in Back Cup! They suppose that I am in part familiar with Roch's invention, and they hope to force me to tell what I know if Thomas Roch refuses to give up his secret. This is the reason why I was kidnapped with him, and why I have not been accommodated with an involuntary plunge in the lagoon with a stone fastened to my neck. I see it all now, and it is just as well to know it. "Very serious," I affirm, in response to the last remark of my interlocutor. "Well," he continues, "if I had the honor to be Simon Hart, the engineer, I should reason as follows: 'Given, on the one hand, the personality of Ker Karraje, the reasons which incited him to select such a mysterious retreat as this cavern, the necessity of the said cavern being kept from any attempt to discover it, not only in the interest of the Count d'Artigas, but in that of his companions--'" "Of his accomplices, if you please." "'Of his accomplices,' then--'and on the other hand, given the fact that I know the real name of the Count d'Artigas and in what mysterious safe he keeps his riches--'" "Riches stolen, and stained with blood, Mr. Serko." "'Riches stolen and stained with blood,' if you like--'I ought to understand that this question of liberty cannot be settled in accordance with my desires.'" It is useless to argue the point under these conditions, and I switch the conversation on to another line. "May I ask," I continue, "how you came to find out that Gaydon, the warder, was Simon Hart, the engineer?" "I see no reason for keeping you in ignorance on the subject, my dear colleague. It was largely by hazard. We had certain relations with the manufactory in New Jersey with which you were connected, and which you quitted suddenly one day under somewhat singular circumstances. Well, during a visit I made to Healthful House some months before the Count d'Artigas went there, I saw and recognized you." "You?" "My very self, and from that moment I promised myself the pleasure of having you for a fellow-passenger on board the _Ebba_." I do not recall ever having seen this Serko at Healthful House, but what he says is very likely true. "I hope your whim of having me for a companion will cost you dear, some day or other," I say to myself. Then, abruptly, I go on: "If I am not mistaken, you have succeeded in inducing Thomas Roch to disclose the secret of his fulgurator?" "Yes, Mr. Hart. We paid millions for it. But millions, you know, are nothing to us. We have only the trouble of taking them! Therefore we filled all his pockets--covered him with millions!" "Of what use are these millions to him if he is not allowed to enjoy them outside?" "That, Mr. Hart, is a matter that does not trouble him a little bit! This man of genius thinks nothing of the future: he lives but in the present. While engines are being constructed from his plans over yonder in America, he is preparing his explosive with chemical substances with which he has been abundantly supplied. He! he! What an invention it is, this autopropulsive engine, which flies through the air of its own power and accelerates its speed till the goal is reached, thanks to the properties of a certain powder of progressive combustion! Here we have an invention that will bring about a radical change in the art of war." "Defensive war, Mr. Serko." "And offensive war, Mr. Hart." "Naturally," I answer. Then pumping him still more closely, I go on: "So, what no one else has been able to obtain from Thomas Roch--" "We obtained without much difficulty." "By paying him." "By paying him an incredible price--and, moreover, by causing to vibrate what in him is a very sensitive chord." "What chord?" "That of vengeance!" "Vengeance?--against whom?" "Against all those who have made themselves his enemies by discouraging him, by spurning him, expelling him, by constraining him to go a-begging from country to country with an invention of incontestable superiority! Now all notion of patriotism is extinct in his soul. He has now but one thought, one ferocious desire: to avenge himself upon those who have denied him--and even upon all mankind! Really, Mr. Hart, your governments of Europe and America committed a stupendous blunder in refusing to pay Roch the price his fulgurator is worth!" And Engineer Serko describes enthusiastically the various advantages of the new explosive which, he says, is incontestably superior to any yet invented. "And what a destructive effect it has," he adds. "It is analogous to that of the Zalinski shell, but is a hundred times more powerful, and requires no machine for firing it, as it flies through the air on its own wings, so to speak." I listen in the hope that Engineer Serko will give away a part of the secret, but in vain. He is careful not to say more than he wants to. "Has Thomas Roch," I ask, "made you acquainted with the composition of his explosive?" "Yes, Mr. Hart--if it is all the same to you--and we shall shortly have considerable quantities of it stored in a safe place." "But will there not be a great and ever-impending danger in accumulating large quantities of it? If an accident were to happen it would be all up with the island of----!" Once more the name of Back Cup was on the point of escaping me. They might consider me too well-informed if they were aware that in addition to being acquainted with the Count d'Artigas' real name I also know where his stronghold is situated. Luckily Engineer Serko has not remarked my reticence, and he replies: "There will be no cause for alarm. Thomas Roch's explosive will not burn unless subjected to a special deflagrator. Neither fire nor shock will explode it." "And has Thomas Roch also sold you the secret of his deflagrator?" "Not yet, Mr. Hart, but it will not be long before the bargain is concluded. Therefore, I repeat, no danger is to be apprehended, and you need not keep awake of nights on that account. A thousand devils, sir! We have no desire to be blown up with our cavern and treasures! A few more years of good business and we shall divide the profits, which will be large enough to enable each one of us to live as he thinks proper and enjoy life to the top of his bent--after the dissolution of the firm of Ker Karraje and Co. I may add that though there is no danger of an explosion, we have everything to fear from a denunciation--which you are in the position to make, Mr. Hart. Therefore, if you take my advice, you will, like a sensible man, resign yourself to the inevitable until the disbanding of the company. We shall then see what in the interest of our security is best to be done with you!" It will be admitted that these words are not exactly calculated to reassure me. However, a lot of things may happen ere then. I have learned one good thing from this conversation, and that is that if Thomas Roch has sold his explosive to Ker Karraje and Co., he has at any rate, kept the secret of his deflagrator, without which the explosive is of no more value than the dust of the highway. But before terminating the interview I think I ought to make a very natural observation to Mr. Serko. "Sir," I say, "you are now acquainted with the composition of Thomas Roch's explosive. Does it really possess the destructive power that the inventor attributes to it? Has it ever been tried? May you not have purchased a composition as inert as a pinch of snuff?" "You are doubtless better informed upon this point than you pretend, Mr. Hart. Nevertheless, I thank you for the interest you manifest in our affairs, and am able to reassure you. The other night we made a series of decisive experiments. With only a few grains of this substance great blocks of rock were reduced to impalpable dust!" This explanation evidently applies to the detonation I heard. "Thus, my dear colleague," continues Engineer Serko, "I can assure you that our expectations have been answered. The effects of the explosive surpass anything that could have been imagined. A few thousand tons of it would burst our spheroid and scatter the fragments into space. You can be absolutely certain that it is capable of destroying no matter what vessel at a distance considerably greater than that attained by present projectiles and within a zone of at least a mile. The weak point in the invention is that rather too much time has to be expended in regulating the firing." Engineer Serko stops short, as though reluctant to give any further information, but finally adds: "Therefore, I end as I began, Mr. Hart. Resign yourself to the inevitable. Accept your new existence without reserve. Give yourself up to the tranquil delights of this subterranean life. If one is in good health, one preserves it; if one has lost one's health, one recovers it here. That is what is happening to your fellow countryman. Yes, the best thing you can do is to resign yourself to your lot." Thereupon this giver of good advice leaves me, after saluting me with a friendly gesture, like a man whose good intentions merit appreciation. But what irony there is in his words, in his glance, in his attitude. Shall I ever be able to get even with him? I now know that at any rate it is not easy to regulate the aim of Roch's auto-propulsive engine. It is probable that it always bursts at the same distance, and that beyond the zone in which the effects of the fulgurator are so terrible, and once it has been passed, a ship is safe from its effects. If I could only inform the world of this vital fact! _August 20_.--For two days no incident worth recording has occurred. I have explored Back Cup to its extreme limits. At night when the long perspective of arched columns are illuminated by the electric lamps, I am almost religiously impressed when I gaze upon the natural wonders of this cavern, which has become my prison. I have never given up hope of finding somewhere in the walls a fissure of some kind of which the pirates are ignorant and through which I could make my escape. It is true that once outside I should have to wait till a passing ship hove in sight. My evasion would speedily be known at the Beehive, and I should soon be recaptured, unless--a happy thought strikes me--unless I could get at the _Ebba's_ boat that was drawn up high and dry on the little sandy beach in the creek. In this I might be able to make my way to St. George or Hamilton. This evening--it was about nine o'clock--I stretched myself on a bed of sand at the foot of one of the columns, about one hundred yards to the east of the lagoon. Shortly afterwards I heard footsteps, then voices. Hiding myself as best I could behind the rocky base of the pillar, I listened with all my ears. I recognized the voices as those of Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko. The two men stopped close to where I was lying, and continued their conversation in English--which is the language generally used in Back Cup. I was therefore able to understand all that they said. They were talking about Thomas Roch, or rather his fulgurator. "In a week's time," said Ker Karraje, "I shall put to sea in the _Ebba_, and fetch the sections of the engines that are being cast in that Virginian foundry." "And when they are here," observed Engineer Serko, "I will piece them together and fix up the frames for firing them. But beforehand, there is a job to be done which it seems to me is indispensable." "What is that?" "To cut a tunnel through the wall of the cavern." "Through the wall of the cavern?" "Oh! nothing but a narrow passage through which only one man at a time could squeeze, a hole easy enough to block, and the outside end of which would be hidden among the rocks." "Of what use could it be to us, Serko?" "I have often thought about the utility of having some other way of getting out besides the submarine tunnel. We never know what the future may have in store for us." "But the walls are so thick and hard," objected Ker Karraje. "Oh, with a few grains of Roch's explosive I undertake to reduce the rock to such fine powder that we shall be able to blow it away with our breath," Serko replied. It can easily be imagined with what interest and eagerness I listened to this. Here was a ray of hope. It. was proposed to open up communication with the outside by a tunnel in the wall, and this held out the possibility of escape. As this thought flashed through my mind, Ker Karraje said: "Very well, Serko, and if it becomes necessary some day to defend Back Cup and prevent any ship from approaching it----. It is true," he went on, without finishing the reflection, "our retreat would have to have been discovered by accident--or by denunciation." "We have nothing to fear either from accident or denunciation," affirmed Serko. "By one of our band, no, of course not, but by Simon Hart, perhaps." "Hart!" exclaimed Serko. "He would have to escape first and no one can escape from Back Cup. I am, by the bye, interested in this Hart. He is a colleague, after all, and I have always suspected that he knows more about Roch's invention than he pretends. I will get round him so that we shall soon be discussing physics, mechanics, and matters ballistic like a couple of friends." "No matter," replied the generous and sensible Count d'Artigas, "when we are in full possession of the secret we had better get rid of the fellow." "We have plenty of time to do that, Ker Karraje." "If God permits you to, you wretches," I muttered to myself, while my heart thumped against my ribs. And yet, without the intervention of Providence, what hope is there for me? The conversation then took another direction. "Now that we know the composition of the explosive, Serko," said Ker Karraje, "we must, at all cost, get that of the deflagrator from Thomas Roch." "Yes," replied Engineer Serko, "that is what I am trying to do. Unfortunately, however, Roch positively refuses to discuss it. Still he has already made a few drops of it with which those experiments were made, and he will furnish as with some more to blow a hole through the wall." "But what about our expeditions at sea?" queried Ker Karraje. "Patience! We shall end by getting Roch's thunderbolts entirely in our own hand, and then----" "Are you sure, Serko?" "Quite sure,--by paying the price, Ker Karraje." The conversation dropped at this point, and they strolled off without having seen me--very luckily for me, I guess. If Engineer Serko spoke up somewhat in defence of a colleague, Ker Karraje is apparently animated with much less benevolent sentiments in regard to me. On the least suspicion they would throw me into the lake, and if I ever got through the tunnel, it would only be as a corpse carried out by the ebbing tide. _August 21_.--Engineer Serko has been prospecting with a view to piercing the proposed passage through the wall, in such a way that its existence will never be dreamed of outside. After a minute examination he decided to tunnel through the northern end of the cavern about sixty feet from the first cells of the Beehive. I am anxious for the passage to be made, for who knows but what it may be the way to freedom for me? Ah! if I only knew how to swim, perhaps I should have attempted to escape through the submarine tunnel, as since it was disclosed by the lashing back of the waters by the whale in its death-struggle, I know exactly where the orifice is situated. It seems to me that at the time of the great tides, this orifice must be partly uncovered. At the full and new moon, when the sea attains its maximum depression below the normal level, it is possible that--I must satisfy myself about this. I do not know how the fact will help me in any way, even if the entrance to the tunnel is partly uncovered, but I cannot afford to miss any detail that may possibly aid in my escape from Back Cup. _August 29_.--This morning I am witnessing the departure of the tug. The Count d'Artigas is, no doubt, going off in the _Ebba_ to fetch the sections of Thomas Roch's engines. Before embarking, the Count converses long and earnestly with Engineer Serko, who, apparently, is not going to accompany him on this trip, and is evidently giving him some recommendations, of which I may be the object. Then, having stepped on to the platform, he goes below, the lid shuts with a bang, and the tug sinks out of sight, leaving a trail of bubbles behind it. The hours go by, night is coming on, yet the tug does not return. I conclude that it has gone to tow the schooner, and perhaps to destroy any merchant vessels that may come in their way. It cannot, however, be absent very long, as the trip to America and back will not take more than a week. Besides, if I can judge from the calm atmosphere in the interior of the cavern, the _Ebba_ must be favored with beautiful weather. This is, in fact, the fine season in this part of the world. Ah! if only I could break out of my prison! CHAPTER XIII. GOD BE WITH IT. _From August 29 to September 10_.--Thirteen days have gone by and the _Ebba_ has not returned. Did she then not make straight for the American coast? Has she been delayed by a buccaneering cruise in the neighborhood of Back Cup? It seems to me that Ker Karraje's only desire would be to get back with the sections of Roch's engines as soon as possible. Maybe the Virginian foundry had not quite finished them. Engineer Serko does not display the least anxiety or impatience. He continues to greet me with his accustomed ironical cordiality, and with a kindly air that I distrust--with good reason. He affects to be solicitous as to my health, urges me to make the best of a bad job, calls me Ali Baba, assures me that there is not, in the whole world, such an enchanting spot as this Arabian Nights cavern, observes that I am fed, warmed, lodged, and clothed, that I have no taxes to pay, and that even the inhabitants of the favored principality of Monaco do not enjoy an existence more free from care. Sometimes this ironical verbiage brings the blood to my face, and I am tempted to seize this cynical banterer by the throat and choke the life out of him. They would kill me afterwards. Still, what would that matter! Would it not be better to end in this way than to spend years and years amid these infernal and infamous surroundings? However, while there is life there is hope, I reflect, and this thought restrains me. I have scarcely set eyes upon Thomas Roch since the _Ebba_ went away. He shuts himself up in his laboratory and works unceasingly. If he utilizes all the substances placed at his disposition there will be enough to blow up Back Cup and the whole Bermudan archipelago with it! I cling to the hope that he will never consent to give up the secret of his deflagrator, and that Engineer Serko's efforts to acquire it will remain futile. _September 3_.--To-day I have been able to witness with my own eyes the power of Roch's explosive, and also the manner in which the fulgurator is employed. During the morning the men began to pierce the passage through the wall of the cavern at the spot fixed upon by Engineer Serko, who superintended the work in person. The work began at the base, where the rock is as hard as granite. To have continued it with pickaxes would have entailed long and arduous labor, inasmuch as the wall at this place is not less than from twenty to thirty yards in thickness, but thanks to Roch's fulgurator the passage will be completed easily and rapidly. I may well be astonished at what I have seen. The pickaxes hardly made any impression on the rock, but its disaggregation was effected with really remarkable facility by means of the fulgurator. A few grains of this explosive shattered the rocky mass and reduced it to almost impalpable powder that one's breath could disperse as easily as vapor. The explosion produced an excavation measuring fully a cubic yard. It was accompanied by a sharp detonation that may be compared to the report of a cannon. The first charge used, although a very small one, a mere pinch, blew the men in every direction, and two of them were seriously injured. Engineer Serko himself was projected several yards, and sustained some rather severe contusions. Here is how this substance, whose bursting force surpasses anything hitherto conceived, is employed. A small hole about an inch and a half in length is pierced obliquely in the rock. A few grains of the explosive are then inserted, but no wad is used. Then Thomas Roch steps forward. In his hand is a little glass phial containing a bluish, oily liquid that congeals almost as soon as it comes in contact with the air. He pours one drop on the entrance of the hole, and draws back, but not with undue haste. It takes a certain time--about thirty-five seconds, I reckon--before the combination of the fulgurator and deflagrator is effected. But when the explosion does take place its power of disaggregation is such--I repeat--that it may be regarded as unlimited. It is at any rate a thousand times superior to that of any known explosive. Under these circumstances it will probably not take more than a week to complete the tunnel. _September 19_.--For some time past I have observed that the tide rises and falls twice every twenty-four hours, and that the ebb and flow produce a rather swift current through the submarine tunnel. It is pretty certain therefore that a floating object thrown into the lagoon when the top of the orifice is uncovered would be carried out by the receding tide. It is just possible that during the lowest equinoctial tides the top of the orifice is uncovered. This I shall be able to ascertain, as this is precisely the time they occur. To-day, September 19, I could almost distinguish the summit of the hole under the water. The day after to-morrow, if ever, it will be uncovered. Very well then, if I cannot myself attempt to get through, may be a bottle thrown into the lagoon might be carried out during the last few minutes of the ebb. And might not this bottle by chance--an ultra-providential chance, I must avow--be picked up by a ship passing near Back Cup? Perhaps even it might be borne away by a friendly current and cast upon one of the Bermudan beaches. What if that bottle contained a letter? I cannot get this thought out of my mind, and it works me up into a great state of excitement. Then objections crop up--this one among others: the bottle might be swept against the rocks and smashed ere ever it could get out of the tunnel. Very true, but what if, instead of a bottle a diminutive, tightly closed keg were used? It would not run any danger of being smashed and would besides stand a much better chance of reaching the open sea. _September 20_.--This evening, I, unperceived, entered one of the store houses containing the booty pillaged from various ships and procured a keg very suitable for my experiment. I hid the keg under my coat, and returned to the Beehive and my cell. Then without losing an instant I set to work. Paper, pen, ink, nothing was wanting, as will be supposed from the fact that for three months I have been making notes and dotting down my impressions daily. I indite the following message: "On June 15 last Thomas Roch and his keeper Gaydon, or rather Simon Hart, the French engineer who occupied Pavilion No. 17, at Healthful House, near New-Berne, North Carolina, United States of America, were kidnapped and carried on board the schooner _Ebba_, belonging to the Count d'Artigas. Both are now confined in the interior of a cavern which serves as a lair for the said Count d'Artigas--who is really Ker Karraje, the pirate who some time ago carried on his depredations in the West Pacific--and for about a hundred men of which his band is composed. "When he has obtained possession of Roch's fulgurator whose power is, so to speak, without limit, Ker Karraje will be in a position to carry on his crimes with complete impunity. "It is therefore urgent that the states interested should destroy his lair without delay. "The cavern in which the pirate Ker Karraje has taken refuge is in the interior of the islet of Back Cup, which is wrongly regarded as an active volcano. It is situated at the western extremity of the archipelago of Bermuda, and on the east is bounded by a range of reefs, but on the north, south, and west is open. "Communication with the inside of the mountain is only possible through a tunnel a few yards under water in a narrow pass on the west. A submarine apparatus therefore is necessary to effect an entrance, at any rate until a tunnel they are boring through the northwestern wall of the cavern is completed. "The pirate Ker Karraje employs an apparatus of this kind--the submarine boat that the Count d'Artigas ordered of the Cramps and which was supposed to have been lost during the public experiment with it in Charleston Bay. This boat is used not only for the purpose of entering and issuing from Back Cup, but also to tow the schooner and attack merchant vessels in Bermudan waters. "This schooner _Ebba_, so well known on the American coast, is kept in a small creek on the western side of the island, behind a mass of rocks, and is invisible from the sea. "The best place to land is on the west coast formerly occupied by the colony of Bermudan fishers; but it would first be advisable to effect a breach in the side of the cavern by means of the most powerful melinite shells. "The fact that Ker Karraje may be in the position to use Roch's fulgurator for the defence of the island must also be taken into consideration. Let it be well borne in mind that if its destructive power surpasses anything ever conceived or dreamed of, it extends over a zone not exceeding a mile in extent. The distance of this dangerous zone is variable, but once the engines have been set, the modification of the distance occupies some time, and a warship that succeeds in passing the zone has nothing further to fear. "This document is written on the twentieth day of September at eight o'clock in the evening and is signed with my name "THOMAS HART, Engineer." The above is the text of the statement I have just drawn up. It says all that is necessary about the island, whose exact situation is marked on all modern charts and maps, and points out the expediency of acting without delay, and what to do in case Ker Karraje is in the position to employ Roch's fulgurator. I add a plan of the cavern showing its internal configuration, the situation of the lagoon, the lay of the Beehive, Ker Karraje's habitation, my cell, and Thomas Roch's laboratory. I wrap the document in a piece of tarpaulin and insert the package in the little keg, which measures six inches by three and a half. It is perfectly watertight and will stand any amount of knocking about against the rocks. There is one danger, however, and that is, that it may be swept back by the returning tide, cast up on the island, and fall into the hands of the crew of the _Ebba_ when the schooner is hauled into her creek. If Ker Karraje ever gets hold of it, it will be all up with me. It will be readily conceived with what anxiety I have awaited the moment to make the attempt: I am in a perfect fever of excitement, for it is a matter of life or death to me. I calculate from previous observations that the tide will be very low at about a quarter to nine. The top of the tunnel ought then to be a foot and a half above water, which is more than enough to permit of the keg passing through it. It will be another half hour at least before the flow sets in again, and by that time the keg may be far enough away to escape being thrown back on the coast. I peer out of my cell. There is no one about, and I advance to the side of the lagoon, where by the light of a nearby lamp, I perceive the arch of the tunnel, towards which the current seems to be setting pretty swiftly. I go down to the very edge, and cast in the keg which contains the precious document and all my hopes. "God be with it!" I fervently exclaim. "God be with it!" For a minute or two the little barrel remains stationary, and then floats back to the side again. I throw it out once more with all my strength. This time it is in the track of the current, which to my great joy sweeps it along and in twenty seconds, it has disappeared in the tunnel. Yes, God be with it! May Heaven guide thee, little barrel! May it protect all those whom Ker Karraje menaces and grant that this band of pirates may not escape from the justice of man! CHAPTER XIV. BATTLE BETWEEN THE "SWORD" AND THE TUG. Through all this sleepless night I have followed the keg in fancy. How many times I seem to see it swept against the rocks in the tunnel into a creek, or some excavation. I am in a cold perspiration from head to foot. Then I imagine that it has been carried out to sea. Heavens! if the returning tide should sweep it back to the entrance and then through the tunnel into the lagoon! I must be on the lookout for it. I rise before the sun and saunter down to the lagoon. Not a single object is floating on its calm surface. The work on the tunnel through the side of the cavern goes on, and at four o'clock in the afternoon on September 23, Engineer Serko blows away the last rock obstructing the issue, and communication with the outer world is established. It is only a very narrow hole, and one has to stoop to go through it. The exterior orifice is lost among the crannies of the rocky coast, and it would be easy to obstruct it, if such a measure became necessary. It goes without saying that the passage will be strictly guarded. No one without special authorization will be able either to go out or come in, therefore there is little hope of escape in that direction. _September 25._--This morning the tug rose from the depth of the lagoon to the surface, and has now run alongside the jetty. The Count d'Artigas and Captain Spade disembark, and the crew set to work to land the provisions--boxes of canned meat, preserves, barrels of wine and spirits, and other things brought by the _Ebba,_ among which are several packages destined for Thomas Roch. The men also land the various sections of Roch's engines which are discoid in shape. The inventor watches their operations, and his eyes glisten with eagerness. He seizes one of the sections, examines it, and nods approval. I notice that his joy no longer finds expression in incoherent utterances, that he is completely transformed from what he was while a patient at Healthful House. So much is this the case that I begin to ask myself whether his madness which was asserted to be incurable, has not been radically cured. At last Thomas Roch embarks in the boat used for crossing the lake and is rowed over to his laboratory. Engineer Serko accompanies him. In an hour's time the tug's cargo has all been taken out and transported to the storehouses. Ker Karraje exchanges a word or two with Engineer Serko and then enters his mansion. Later, in the afternoon, I see them walking up and down in front of the Beehive and talking earnestly together. Then they enter the new tunnel, followed by Captain Spade. If I could but follow them! If I could but breathe for awhile the bracing air of the Atlantic, of which the interior of Back Cup only receives attenuated puffs, so to speak. _From September 26 to October 10_.--Fifteen days have elapsed. Under the directions of Engineer Serko and Thomas Roch the sections of the engines have been fitted together. Then the construction of their supports is begun. These supports are simple trestles, fitted with transverse troughs or grooves of various degrees of inclination, and which could be easily installed on the deck of the _Ebba_, or even on the platform of the tug, which can be kept on a level with the surface. Thus Ker Karraje, will be ruler of the seas, with his yacht. No warship, however big, however powerful, will be able to cross the zone of danger, whereas the _Ebba_ will be out of range of its guns. If only my notice were found! If only the existence of this lair of Back Cup were known! Means would soon be found, if not of destroying the place, at least of starving the band into submission! _October 20_.--To my extreme surprise I find this morning that the tug has gone away again. I recall that yesterday the elements of the piles were renewed, but I thought it was only to keep them in order. In view of the fact that the outside can now be reached through the new tunnel, and that Thomas Roch has everything he requires, I can only conclude that the tug has gone off on another marauding expedition. Yet this is the season of the equinoctial gales, and the Bermudan waters are swept by frequent tempests. This is evident from the violent gusts that drive back the smoke through the crater and the heavy rain that accompanies it, as well as by the water in the lagoon, which swells and washes over the brown rocks on its shores. But it is by no means sure that the _Ebba_ has quitted her cove. However staunch she may be, she is, it seems to me, of too light a build to face such tempests as now rage, even with the help of the tug. On the other hand, although the tug has nothing to fear from the heavy seas, as it would be in calm water a few yards below the surface, it is hardly likely that it has gone on a trip unless to accompany the schooner. I do not know to what its departure can be attributed, but its absence is likely to be prolonged, for it has not yet returned. Engineer Serko has remained behind, but Ker Karraje, Captain Spade, and the crew of the schooner, I find, have left. Life in the cavern goes on with its usual dispiriting monotony. I pass hour after hour in my cell, meditating, hoping, despairing, following in fancy the voyage of my little barrel, tossed about at the mercy of the currents and whose chances of being picked up, I fear, are becoming fainter each day, and killing time by writing my diary, which will probably not survive me. Thomas Roch is constantly occupied in his laboratory manufacturing his deflagrator. I still entertain the conviction that nothing will ever induce him to give up the secret of the liquid's composition; but I am perfectly aware that he will not hesitate to place his invention at Ker Karraje's service. I often meet Engineer Serko when my strolls take me in the direction of the Beehive. He always shows himself disposed to chat with me, though, it is true, he does so in a tone of impertinent frivolity. We converse upon all sorts of subjects, but rarely of my position. Recrimination thereanent is useless and only subjects me to renewed bantering. _October 22_.--To-day I asked Engineer Serko whether the _Ebba_ had put to sea again with the tug. "Yes, Mr. Simon Hart," he replied, "and though the clouds gather and loud the tempest roars, be in no uneasiness in regard to our dear _Ebba_." "Will she be gone long?" "We expect her back within forty-eight hours. It is the last voyage Count d'Artigas proposes to make before the winter gales render navigation in these parts impracticable." "Is her voyage one of business or pleasure?" "Of business, Mr. Hart, of business," answered Engineer Serko with a smile. "Our engines are now completed, and when the fine weather returns we shall resume offensive operations." "Against unfortunate merchantmen." "As unfortunate as they are richly laden." "Acts of piracy, whose impunity will, I trust, not always be assured," I cried.. "Calm yourself, dear colleague, be calm! Be calm! No one, you know, can ever discover our retreat, and none can ever disclose the secret! Besides, with these engines, which are so easily handled and are of such terrible power, it would be easy for us to blow to pieces any ship that attempted to get within a certain radius of the island." "Providing," I said, "that Thomas Roch has sold you the composition of his deflagrator as he has sold you that of his fulgurator." "That he has done, Mr. Hart, and it behooves me to set your mind at rest upon that point." From this categorical response I ought to have concluded that the misfortune had been consummated, but a certain hesitation in the intonation of his voice warned me that implicit reliance was not to be placed upon Engineer Serko's assertions. _October 25_.--What a frightful adventure I have just been mixed up in, and what a wonder I did not lose my life! It is only by a miracle that I am able to resume these notes, which have been interrupted for forty-eight hours. With a little luck, I should have been delivered! I should now be in one of the Bermudan ports--St. George or Hamilton. The mysteries of Back Cup would have been cleared up. The description of the schooner would have been wired all over the world, and she would not dare to put into any port. The provisioning of Back Cup would be impossible, and Ker Karraje's bandits would be condemned to starve to death! This is what occurred: At eight o'clock in the evening on October 23, I quitted my cell in an indefinable state of nervousness, and with a presentiment that a serious event was imminent. In vain I had tried to seek calmness in sleep. It was impossible to do so, and I rose and went out. Outside Back Cup the weather must have been very rough. Violent gusts of wind swept in through the crater and agitated the water of the lagoon. I walked along the shore on the Beehive side. No one was about. It was rather cold, and the air was damp. The pirates were all snugly ensconced in their cells, with the exception of one man, who stood guard over the new passage, notwithstanding that the outer entrance had been blocked. From where he was this man could not see the lagoon, moreover there were only two lamps alight, one on each side of the lake, and the forest of pillars was wrapt in the profoundest obscurity. I was walking about in the shadow, when some one passed me. I saw that he was Thomas Roch. He was walking slowly, absorbed by his thoughts, his brain at work, as usual. Was this not a favorable opportunity to talk to him, to enlighten him about what he was probably ignorant, namely, the character of the people into whose hands he had fallen? "He cannot," I argued, "know that the Count d'Artigas is none other than Ker Karraje, the pirate. He cannot be aware that he has given up a part of his invention to such a bandit. I must open his eyes to the fact that he will never be able to enjoy his millions, that he is a prisoner in Back Cup, and will never be allowed to leave it, any more than I shall. Yes, I will make an appeal to his sentiments of humanity, and point out to him what frightful misfortunes he will be responsible for if he does not keep the secret of his deflagrator." All this I had said to myself, and was preparing to carry out my resolution, when I suddenly felt myself seized from behind. Two men held me by the arms, and another appeared in front of me. Before I had time to cry out the man exclaimed in English: "Hush! not a word! Are you not Simon Hart?" "Yes, how did you know?" "I saw you come out of your cell." "Who are you, then?" "Lieutenant Davon, of the British Navy, of H.M.S. _Standard_, which is stationed at the Bermudas." Emotion choked me so that it was impossible for me to utter a word. "We have come to rescue you from Ker Karraje, and also propose to carry off Thomas Roch," he added. "Thomas Roch?" I stammered. "Yes, the document signed by you was found on the beach at St. George----" "In a keg, Lieutenant Davon, which I committed to the waters of the lagoon." "And which contained," went on the officer, "the notice by which we were apprised that the island of Back Cup served as a refuge for Ker Karraje and his band--Ker Karraje, this false Count d'Artigas, the author of the double abduction from Healthful House." "Ah! Lieutenant Davon----" "Now we have not a moment to spare, we must profit by the obscurity." "One word, Lieutenant Davon, how did you penetrate to the interior of Back Cup?" "By means of the submarine boat _Sword_, with which we have been making experiments at St. George for six months past." "A submarine boat!" "Yes, it awaits us at the foot of the rocks. And now, Mr. Hart, where is Ker Karraje's tug?" "It has been away for three weeks." "Ker Karraje is not here, then?" "No, but we expect him back every day--every hour, I might say." "It matters little," replied Lieutenant Davon. "It is not after Ker Karraje, but Thomas Roch, we have come--and you also, Mr. Hart. The _Sword_ will not leave the lagoon till you are both on board. If she does not turn up at St. George again, they will know that I have failed--and they will try again." "Where is the _Sword_, Lieutenant?" "On this side, in the shadow of the bank, where it cannot be seen. Thanks to your directions, I and my crew were able to locate the tunnel. We came through all right, and ten minutes ago rose to the surface of the lake. Two men landed with me. I saw you issue from the cell marked on your plan. Do you know where Thomas Roch is?" "A few paces off. He has just passed me, on his way to his laboratory." "God be praised, Mr. Hart!" "Amen, Lieutenant Davon." The lieutenant, the two men and I took the path around the lagoon. We had not gone far when we perceived Thomas Roch in front of us. To throw ourselves upon him, gag him before he could utter a cry, bind him before he could offer any resistance, and bear him off to the place where the _Sword_ was moored was the work of a minute. The _Sword_ was a submersible boat of only twelve tons, and consequently much inferior to the tug, both in respect of dimensions and power. Her screw was worked by a couple of dynamos fitted with accumulators that had been charged twelve hours previously in the port of St. George. However, the _Sword_ would suffice to take us out of this prison, to restore us to liberty--that liberty of which I had given up all hope. Thomas Roch was at last to be rescued from the clutches of Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko. The rascals would not be able to utilize his invention, and nothing could prevent the warships from landing a storming party on the island, who would force the tunnel in the wall and secure the pirates! We saw no one while the two men were conveying Thomas Roch to the _Sword_, and all got on board without incident. The lid was shut and secured, the water compartments filled, and the _Sword_ sank out of sight. We were saved! The _Sword_ was divided into three water-tight compartments. The after one contained the accumulators and machinery. The middle one, occupied by the pilot, was surmounted by a periscope fitted with lenticular portholes, through which an electric search-lamp lighted the way through the water. Forward, in the other compartment, Thomas Roch and I were shut in. My companion, though the gag which was choking him had been removed, was still bound, and, I thought, knew what was going on. But we were in a hurry to be off, and hoped to reach St. George that very night if no obstacle was encountered. I pushed open the door of the compartment and rejoined Lieutenant Davon, who was standing by the man at the wheel. In the after compartment three other men, including the engineer, awaited the lieutenant's orders to set the machinery in motion. "Lieutenant Davon," I said, "I do not think there is any particular reason why I should stay in there with Roch. If I can help you to get through the tunnel, pray command me." "Yes, I shall be glad to have you by me, Mr. Hart." It was then exactly thirty-seven minutes past eight. The search-lamp threw a vague light through the water ahead of the _Sword_. From where we were, we had to cross the lagoon through its entire length to get to the tunnel. It would be pretty difficult to fetch it, we knew, but, if necessary, we could hug the sides of the lake until we located it. Once outside the tunnel the _Sword_ would rise to the surface and make for St. George at full speed. "At what depth are we now?" I asked the lieutenant. "About a fathom." "It is not necessary to go any lower," I said. "From what I was able to observe during the equinoctial tides, I should think that we are in the axis of the tunnel." "All right," he replied. Yes, it was all right, and I felt that Providence was speaking by the mouth of the officer. Certainly Providence could not have chosen a better agent to work its will. In the light of the lamp I examined him. He was about thirty years of age, cool, phlegmatic, with resolute physiognomy--the English officer in all his native impassibility--no more disturbed than if he had been on board the _Standard_, operating with extraordinary _sang-froid,_ I might even say, with the precision of a machine. "On coming through the tunnel I estimated its length at about fifty yards," he remarked. "Yes, Lieutenant, about fifty yards from one extremity to the other." This calculation must have been pretty exact, since the new tunnel cut on a level with the coast is thirty-five feet in length. The order was given to go ahead, and the _Sword_ moved forward very slowly for fear of colliding against the rocky side. Sometimes we came near enough to it to distinguish a black mass ahead of it, but a turn of the wheel put us in the right direction again. Navigating a submarine boat in the open sea is difficult enough. How much more so in the confines of a lagoon! After five minutes' manoeuvring, the _Sword_, which was kept at about a fathom below the surface, had not succeeded in sighting the orifice. "Perhaps it would be better to return to the surface, Lieutenant," I said. "We should then be able to see where we are." "I think you are right, Mr. Hart, if you can point out just about where the tunnel is located." "I think I can." "Very well, then." As a precaution the light was turned off. The engineer set the pumps in motion, and, lightened of its water ballast, the boat slowly rose in the darkness to the surface. I remained at my post so that I could peer through the lookouts. At last the ascensional movement of the _Sword_ stopped, and the periscope emerged about a foot. On one side of me, lighted by the lamp by the shore, I could see the Beehive. "What is your opinion?" demanded the lieutenant. "We are too far north. The orifice is in the west side of the cavern." "Is anybody about?" "Not a soul." "Capital, Mr. Hart. Then we will keep on a level with the surface, and when we are in front of the tunnel, and you give the signal, we will sink." It was the best thing to be done. We moved off again and the pilot kept her head towards the tunnel. When we were about twelve yards off I gave the signal to stop. As soon as the current was turned off the _Sword_ stopped, opened her water tanks and slowly sank again. Then the light in the lookout was turned on again, and there in front of us was a black circle that did not reflect the lamp's rays. "There it is, there is the tunnel!" I cried. Was it not the door by which I was going to escape from my prison? Was not liberty awaiting me on the other side? Gently the _Sword_ moved towards the orifice. Oh! the horrible mischance! How have I survived it? How is it that my heart is not broken? A dim light appeared in the depth of the tunnel, about twenty-five yards in front of us. The advancing light could be none other than that, projected through the lookout of Ker Karraje's submarine boat. "The tug! The tug!" I exclaimed. "Lieutenant, here is the tug returning to Back Cup!" "Full speed astern," ordered the officer, and the _Sword_ drew back just as she was about to enter the tunnel. One chance remained. The lieutenant had swiftly turned off the light, and it was just possible that we had not been seen by the people in the tug. Perhaps, in the dark waters of the lagoon, we should escape notice, and when the oncoming boat had risen and moored to the jetty, we should be able to slip out unperceived. We had backed close in to the south side and the _Sword_ was about to stop, but alas, for our hopes! Captain Spade had seen that another submarine boat was about to issue through the tunnel, and he was making preparations to chase us. How could a frail craft like the _Sword_ defend itself against the attacks of Ker Karraje's powerful machine? Lieutenant Davon turned to me and said: "Go back to the compartment where Thomas Roch is and shut yourself in. I will close the after-door. There is just a chance that if the tug rams us the water-tight compartments will keep us up." After shaking hands with the lieutenant, who was as cool as though we were in no danger, I went forward and rejoined Thomas Roch. I closed the door and awaited the issue in profound darkness. Then I could feel the desperate efforts made by the _Sword_ to escape from or ram her enemy. I could feel her rushing, gyrating and plunging. Now she would twist to avoid a collision. Now she would rise to the surface, then sink to the bottom of the lagoon. Can any one conceive such a struggle as that in which, like two marine monsters, these machines were engaged in beneath the troubled waters of this inland lake? A few minutes elapsed, and I began to think that the _Sword_ had eluded the tug and was rushing through the tunnel. Suddenly there was a collision. The shock was not, it seemed to me, very violent, but I could be under no illusion: the _Sword_ had been struck on her starboard quarter. Perhaps her plates had resisted, and if not, the water would only invade one of her compartments, I thought. Almost immediately after, however, there was another shock that pushed the _Sword_ with extreme violence. She was raised by the ram of the tug which sawed and ripped its way into her side. Then I could feel her heel over and sink straight down, stern foremost. Thomas Roch and I were tumbled over violently by. this movement. There was another bump, another ripping sound, and the _Sword_ lay still. Just what happened after that I am unable to say, for I lost consciousness. I have since learned that all this occurred many hours ago. I however distinctly remember that my last thought was: "If I am to die, at any rate Thomas Roch and his secret perish with me--and the pirates of Back Cup will not escape punishment for their crimes." CHAPTER XV. EXPECTATION. As soon as I recover my senses I find myself lying on my bed in my cell, where it appears I have been lying for thirty-six hours. I am not alone. Engineer Serko is near me. He has attended to me himself, not because he regards me as a friend, I surmise, but as a man from whom indispensable explanations are awaited, and who afterwards can be done away with if necessary. I am still so weak that I could not walk a step. A little more and I should have been asphyxiated in that narrow compartment of the _Sword_ at the bottom of the lagoon. Am I in condition to reply to the questions that Engineer Serko is dying to put to me? Yes--but I shall maintain the utmost reserve. In the first place I wonder what has become of Lieutenant Davon and the crew of the _Sword_. Did those brave Englishmen perish in the collision? Are they safe and sound like us--for I suppose that Thomas Roch has also survived? The first question that Engineer Serko puts to me is this: "Will you explain to me what happened, Mr. Hart?" Instead of replying it occurs to me to question him myself. "And Thomas Roch?" I inquire. "In good health, Mr. Hart." Then he adds in an imperious tone: "Tell me what occurred!" "In the first place, tell me what became of the others." "What others?" replies Serko, glancing at me savagely. "Why, those men who threw themselves upon Thomas Roch and me, who gagged, bound, and carried us off and shut us up, I know not where?" On reflection I had come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to pretend that I had been surprised before I knew where I was or who my aggressors were. "You will know what became of them later. But first, tell me how, the thing was done." By the threatening tone of his voice, as he for the third time puts this question, I understand the nature of the suspicions entertained of me. Yet to be in the position to accuse me of having had relations with the outside he would have had to get possession of my keg. This he could not have done, seeing that it is in the hands of the Bermudan authorities. The pirates cannot, I am convinced, have a single proof to back up their suspicions. I therefore recount how about eight o'clock on the previous evening I was walking along the edge of the lagoon, after Thomas Roch had passed me, going towards his laboratory, when I felt myself seized from behind; how having been gagged, bound, and blindfolded, I felt myself carried off and lowered into a hole with another person whom I thought I recognized from his groans as Thomas Roch; how I soon felt that I was on board a boat of some description and naturally concluded that it was the tug; how I felt it sink; how I felt a shock that threw me violently against the side, and how I felt myself suffocating and lost consciousness, since I remember nothing further. Engineer Serko listens with profound attention, a stern look in his eyes and a frown on his brow; and yet he can have no reason that authorizes him to doubt my word. "You claim that three men threw themselves upon you?" he asks. "Yes. I thought they were some of your people, for I did not see them coming. Who were they?" "Strangers, as you must have known from their language." "They did not utter a word!" "Have you no idea as to their nationality?" "Not the remotest." Do you know what were their intentions in entering the cavern?" "I do not." "What is your opinion about it?" "My opinion, Mr. Serko? I repeat I thought they were two or three of your pirates who had come to throw me into the lagoon by the Count d'Artigas' orders, and that they were going to do the same thing to Thomas Roch. I supposed that having obtained his secrets--as you informed me was the case--you had no further use for him and were about to get rid of us both." "Is it possible, Mr. Hart, that you could have thought such a thing!" continued Serko in his sarcastic way. "I did, until having been able to remove the bandage from my eyes, I perceived that I was in the tug." "It was not the tug, but a boat of the same kind that had got through the tunnel." "A submarine boat?" I ejaculate. "Yes, and manned by persons whose mission was to kidnap you and Thomas Roch." "Kidnap us?" I echo, continuing to feign surprise. "And," adds Engineer Serko, "I want to know what you think about the matter." "What I think about it? Well, it appears to me that there is only one plausible explanation possible. If the secret of your retreat has not been betrayed--and I cannot conceive how you could have been betrayed or what imprudence you or yours could have committed--my opinion is that this submarine boat was exploring the bottom of the sea in this neighborhood, that she must have found her way into the tunnel, that she rose to the surface of the lagoon, that her crew, greatly surprised to find themselves inside an inhabited cavern, seized hold of the first persons they came across, Thomas Roch and myself, and others as well perhaps, for of course I do not know----" Engineer Serko has become serious again. Does he realize the inanity of the hypothesis I try to pass off on him? Does he think I know more than I will say? However this may be, he accepts my professed view, and says: "In effect, Mr. Hart, it must have happened as you suggest, and when the stranger tried to make her way out through the tunnel just as the tug was entering, there was a collision--a collision of which she was the victim. But we are not the kind of people to allow our fellow-men to perish before our eyes. Moreover, the disappearance of Thomas Roch and yourself was almost immediately discovered. Two such valuable lives had to be saved at all hazards. We set to work. There are many expert divers among our men. They hastily donned their suits and descended to the bottom of the lagoon. They passed lines around the hull of the _Sword_----" "The _Sword_?" I exclaim. "That is the name we saw painted on the bow of the vessel when we raised her to the surface. What satisfaction we experienced when we recovered you--unconscious, it is true, but still breathing--and were able to bring you back to life! Unfortunately all our attentions to the officer who commanded the _Sword_, and to his crew were useless. The shock had torn open the after and middle compartments, and they paid with their lives the misfortune--due to chance, as you observe--of having discovered our mysterious retreat." On learning that Lieutenant Davon and his companions are dead, my heart is filled with anguish; but to keep up my role--as they were persons with whom, presumably, I was not acquainted, and had never seen--I am careful not to display any emotion. I must, on no account, afford ground for the suspicion that there was any connivance between the commander of the _Sword_ and me. For aught I know, Engineer Serko may have reason to be very skeptical about the discovery of the tunnel being accidental. What, however, I am most concerned about is that the unlooked-for occasion to recover my liberty was lost. Shall I ever be afforded another chance? However this may be, my notice reached the English authorities of the archipelago, and they now know where Ker Karraje is to be found. When it is seen that the _Sword_ does not return to Bermuda, there can be no doubt that another attempt will be made to get inside Back Cup, in which, had it not been for the inopportune return of the tug, I should no longer be a prisoner. I have resumed my usual existence, and having allayed all mistrust, am permitted to wander freely about the cavern, as usual. It is patent that the adventure has had no ill effect upon Thomas Roch. Intelligent nursing brought him around, as it did me. In full possession of his mental faculties he has returned to work, and spends the entire day in his laboratory. The _Ebba_ brought back from her last trip bales, boxes, and a quantity of objects of varied origin, and I conclude that a number of ships must have been pillaged during this marauding expedition. The work on the trestles for Roch's engine goes steadily forward, and there are now no fewer than fifty engines. If Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko are under the necessity of defending Back Cup, three or four will be sufficient to render the island unapproachable, as they will cover a zone which no vessel could enter without being blown to pieces. And it occurs to me that they intend to put Back Cup in a state of defence after having argued as follows: "If the appearance of the _Sword_ in the lagoon was due to chance the situation remains unchanged, and no power, not even England, will think of seeking for the _Sword_ inside the cavern. If, on the other hand, as the result of an incomprehensible revelation, it has been learned that Back Cup is become the retreat of Ker Karraje, if the expedition of the _Sword_ was a first effort against the island, another of a different kind--either a bombardment from a distance, or an attack by a landing party--is to be expected. Therefore, ere we can quit Back Cup and carry away our plunder, we shall have to defend ourselves by means of Roch's fulgurator." In my opinion the rascals must have gone on to reason still further in this wise: "Is there any connection between the disclosure of our secret--if it was, and however it may have been made--and the double abduction from Healthful House? Is it known that Thomas Roch and his keeper are confined in Back Cup? Is it known that the abduction was effected in the interest of Ker Karraje? Have Americans, English, French, Germans, and Russians reason to fear that an attack in force against the island would be doomed to failure?" Ker Karraje must know very well that these powers would not hesitate to attack him, however great the danger might be. The destruction of his lair is an urgent duty in the interest of public security and of humanity. After sweeping the West Pacific the pirate and his companions are infesting the West Atlantic, and must be wiped out at all costs. In any case, it is imperative that the inhabitants of Back Cup should be on their guard. This fact is realized, and, from the day on which the _Sword_ was destroyed, strict watch has been kept. Thanks to the new passage, they are able to hide among the rocks without having recourse to the submarine tunnel to get there, and day and night a dozen sentries are posted about the island. The moment a ship appears in sight the fact is at once made known inside the cavern. Nothing occurs for some days, and the latter succeed each other with dreadful monotony. The pirates, however, feel that Back Cup no longer enjoys its former security. Every moment an alarm from the sentries posted outside is expected. The situation is no longer the same since the advent of the _Sword_. Gallant Lieutenant Davon, gallant crew, may England, may the civilized nations, never forget that you have sacrificed your lives in the cause of humanity! It is evident that now, however powerful may be their means of defence, even more powerful than a network of torpedoes, Engineer Serko and Captain Spade are filled with an anxiety that they vainly essay to dissemble. They hold frequent conferences together. Maybe they discuss the advisability of quitting Back Cup with their wealth, for they are aware that if the existence of the cavern is known means will be found to reduce it, even if the inmates have to be starved out. This is, of course, mere conjecture on my part. What is essential to me is that they do not suspect me of having launched the keg that was so providentially picked up at Bermuda. Never, I must say, has Engineer Serko ever made any allusion to any such probability. No, I am not even suspected. If the contrary were the case I am sufficiently acquainted with Ker Karraje to know that he would long ago have sent me to rejoin Lieutenant Davon and the _Sword_ at the bottom of the lagoon. The winter tempests have set in with a vengeance. The wind howls though the hole in the roof, and rude gusts sweep through the forest of pillars producing sonorous sounds, so sonorous, so deep, that one might sometimes almost fancy they were produced by the firing of the guns of a squadron. Flocks of seabirds take refuge in the cavern from the gale, and at intervals, when it lulls, almost deafen us with their screaming. It is to be presumed that in such weather the schooner will make no attempt to put to sea, for the stock of provisions is ample enough to last all the season. Moreover, I imagine the Count d'Artigas will not be so eager in future to show his _Ebba_ along the American coast, where he risks being received, not, as hitherto, with the consideration due to a wealthy yachtsman, but in the manner Ker Karraje so richly merits. It occurs to me that if the apparition of the _Sword_ was the commencement of a campaign against the island, a question of great moment relative to the future of Back Cup arises. Therefore, one day, prudently, so as not to excite any suspicion, I ventured to pump Engineer Serko about it. We were in the neighborhood of Thomas Roch's laboratory, and had been conversing for some time, when Engineer Serko touched upon the extraordinary apparition of an English submarine boat in the lagoon. On this occasion he seemed to incline to the view that it might have been a premeditated expedition against Ker Karraje. "That is not my opinion," I replied, in order to bring him to the question that I wanted to put to him. "Why?" he demanded. "Because if your retreat were known a fresh attempt, if not to penetrate to the cavern, at least to destroy Back Cup, would ere this have been made." "Destroy it!" cried Serko. "It would be a dangerous undertaking, in view of the means of defence of which we now dispose." "They can know nothing about this matter, Mr. Serko. It is not imagined, either in the new world or the old, that the abduction from Healthful House was effected for your especial benefit, or that you have succeeded in coming to terms with Thomas Roch for his invention." Engineer Serko made no response to this observation, which, for that matter, was unanswerable. I continued: "Therefore a squadron sent by the maritime powers who have an interest in breaking up this island would not hesitate to approach and shell it. Now, I argue from this that as this squadron has not yet appeared, it is not likely to come at all, and that nothing is known as to Ker Karraje's whereabouts, and you must admit that this hypothesis is the most cheerful one, as far as you are concerned." "That may be," Engineer Serko replied, "but what is, is. Whether they are aware of the fact or no, if warships approach within five or six miles of this island they will be sunk before they have had time to fire a single shot!" "Well, and what then?" "What then? Why the probability is that no others would care to repeat the experiment." "That, again, may be. But these warships would invest you beyond the dangerous zone, and the _Ebba_ would not be able to put in to the ports she previously visited with the Count d'Artigas. In this event, how would you be able to provision the island?" Engineer Serko remained silent. This argument, which he must already have brooded over, was too logical to be refuted or dismissed, and I have an idea that the pirates contemplate abandoning Back Cup. Nevertheless, not relishing being cornered, he continued: "We should still have the tug, and what the _Ebba_ could not do, this would." "The tug?" I cried. "But if Ker Karraje's secrets are known, do you suppose the powers are not also aware of the existence of the Count d'Artigas' submarine boat?" Engineer Serko looked at me suspiciously. "Mr. Hart," he said, "you appear to me to carry your deductions rather far." "I, Mr. Serko?" "Yes, and I think you talk about all this like a man who knows more than he ought to." This remark brought me up abruptly. It was evident that my arguments might give rise to the suspicion that I was not altogether irresponsible for the recent incident. Engineer Serko scrutinized me sharply as though he would read my innermost thoughts. "Mr. Serko," I observed, "by profession, as well as by inclination, I am accustomed to reason upon everything. This is why I communicated to you the result of my reasoning, which you can take into consideration or not, as you like." Thereupon we separate. But I fancy my lack of reserve may have excited suspicions which may not be easy to allay. From this interview, however, I gleaned a precious bit of information, namely, that the dangerous zone of Roch's fulgurator is between five and six miles off. Perhaps, during the next equinoctial tides, another notice to this effect in another keg may also reach a safe destination. But how many weary months to wait before the orifice of the tunnel will again be uncovered! The rough weather continues, and the squalls are more violent than ever. Is it the state of the sea that delays another campaign against Back Cup? Lieutenant Davon certainly assured me that if his expedition failed, if the _Sword_ did not return to St. George, another attempt under different conditions would be made with a view to breaking up this bandits' lair. Sooner or later the work of justice must be done, and Back Cup be destroyed, even though I may not survive its destruction. Ah! why can I not go and breathe, if only for a single instant, the vivifying air outside? Why am I not permitted to cast one glance over the ocean towards the distant horizon of the Bermudas? My whole life is concentrated in one desire: to get through the tunnel in the wall and hide myself among the rocks. Perchance I might be the first to catch sight of the smoke of a squadron heading for the island. This project, alas! is unrealizable, as sentries are posted day and night at each extremity of the passage. No one can enter it without Engineer Serko's authorization. Were I to attempt it, I should risk being deprived of my liberty to walk about the cavern, and even worse might happen to me. Since our last conversation, Engineer Serko's attitude towards me has undergone a change. His gaze has lost its old-time sarcasm and is distrustful, suspicious, searching and as stern as Ker Karraje's. _November 17_.--This afternoon there was a great commotion in the Beehive, and the men rushed out of their cells with loud cries. I was reclining on my bed, but immediately rose and hurried out. All the pirates were making for the passage, in front of which were Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade, Boatswain Effrondat, Engine-driver Gibson and the Count d'Artigas' big Malay attendant. I soon learn the reason for the tumult, for the sentries rush in with shouts of alarm. Several vessels have been sighted to the northwest--warships steaming at full speed in the direction of Back Cup. CHAPTER XVI. ONLY A FEW MORE HOURS. What effect this news has upon me, and what emotion it awakens within my soul! The end, I feel, is at hand. May it be such as civilization and humanity are entitled to. Up to the present I have indited my notes day by day. Henceforward it is imperative that I should inscribe them hour by hour, minute by minute. Who knows but what Thomas Roch's last secret may be revealed to me and that I shall have time to commit it to paper! Should I die during the attack God grant that the account of the five months I have passed in Back Cup may be found upon my body! At first Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade, and several of their companions took up position on the exterior base of the island. What would I not give to be able follow to them, and in the friendly shelter of a rook watch the on-coming warships! An hour later they return after having left a score of men to keep watch. As the days at this season of the year are very short there is nothing to fear before the morrow. It is not likely that the ships will attempt a night attack and land a storming party, for they must imagine that the place is in a thorough condition of defence. All night long the pirates work, installing the trestles at different points of the coast. Six have been taken through the passage to places selected in advance. This done, Engineer Serko joins Thomas Roch in his laboratory. Is he going to tell him what is passing, that a squadron is in view of Back Cup, and that his fulgurator will be employed to defend the island? What is certain is that half a hundred engines, each charged with several pounds of the explosive and of the substance that ensures a trajectory superior to that of any other projectile, are ready for their work of destruction. As to the deflagrator liquid, Thomas Roch has a certain number of phials of it, and--I know only too well--will not refuse to help Ker Karraje's pirates with it. During these preparations night has come on. Only the lamps of the Beehive are lighted and a semi-obscurity reigns in the cavern. I return to my cell. It is to my interest to keep out of the way as much as possible, for Engineer Serko's suspicions might be revived now that the squadron is approaching Back Cup. But will the vessels sighted continue on their course in this direction? May they not be merely passing on their way to Bermuda? For an instant this doubt enters my mind. No, no, it cannot be! Besides, I have just heard Captain Spade declare that they are lying to in view of the island. To what nation do they belong? Have the English, desirous of avenging the destruction of the _Sword_, alone undertaken the expedition? May not cruisers of other nations be with them? I know not, and it is impossible to ascertain. And what does it matter, after all, so long as this haunt is destroyed, even though I should perish in the ruins like the heroic Lieutenant Davon and his brave crew? Preparations for defence continue with coolness and method under Engineer Serko's superintendence. These pirates are obviously certain that they will be able to annihilate their assailants as soon as the latter enter the dangerous zone. Their confidence in Roch's fulgurator is absolute. Absorbed by the idea that these warship are powerless against them, they think neither of the difficulties nor menaces held out by the future. I surmise that the trestles have been set up on the northwest coast with the grooves turned to send the engines to the north, west, and south. On the east, as already stated, the island is defended by the chain of reefs that stretches away to the Bermudas. About nine o'clock I venture out of my cell. They will pay little attention to me, and perhaps I may escape notice in the obscurity. Ah! if I could get through that passage and hide behind some rock, so that I could witness what goes on at daybreak! And why should I not succeed now that Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, Captain Spade, and the pirates have taken their posts outside? The shores of the lake are deserted, but the entrance to the passage is kept by Count d'Artigas' Malay. I saunter, without any fixed idea, towards Thomas Roch's laboratory. This reminds me of my compatriot. I am, on reflection, disposed to think that he knows nothing about the presence of a squadron off Back Cup. Probably not until the last moment will Engineer Serko apprise him of its proximity, not till he brusquely points out to him the vengeance he can accomplish. Then I conceive the idea of enlightening Thomas Roch, myself, of the responsibility he is incurring and of revealing to him in this supreme hour the character of the men who want him to co-operate in their criminal projects. Yes, I will, attempt it, and may I succeed in fanning into a flame any spark of patriotism that may still linger in his rebellious soul! Roch is shut up in his laboratory. He must be alone, for never does he allow any one to enter while he is preparing his deflagrator. As I pass the jetty I notice that the tug is moored in its accustomed place. Here I judge it prudent to walk behind the first row of pillars and approach the laboratory laterally--which will enable me to see whether anybody is with him. When I have gone a short distance along the sombre avenue I see a bright light on the opposite side of the lagoon. It is the electric light in Roch's laboratory as seen through a narrow window in the front. Except in that particular spot, the southern shore of the lake is in darkness, whereas, in the opposite direction, the Beehive is lit up to its extremity at the northern wall. Through the opening in the dome, over the lake I can see the stars shining. The sky is clear, the tempest has abated, and the squalls no longer penetrate to the interior of Back Cup. When near the laboratory, I creep along the wall and peep in at the window. Thomas Roch is there alone. The light shines full on his face. If it is somewhat drawn, and the lines on the forehead are more pronounced, his physiognomy, at least, denotes perfect calmness and self-possession. No, he is no longer the inmate of Pavilion No. 17, the madman of Healthful House, and I ask myself whether he is not radically cured, whether there is no further danger of his reason collapsing in a final paroxysm. He has just laid two glass phials upon the table, and holds a third in his hand. He holds it up to the light, and observes the limpidity of the liquid it contains. I have half a mind to rush in, seize the tubes and smash them, but I reflect that he would have time to make some more of the stuff. Better stick to my first plan. I push the door open and enter. "Thomas Roch!" I exclaim. He has not heard, nor has he seen me. "Thomas Roch!" I repeat. He raises his head, turns and gazes at me. "Ah! it is you, Simon Hart!" he replies calmly, even indifferently. He knows my name. Engineer Serko must have informed him that it was Simon Hart, and not Keeper Gaydon who was watching over him at Healthful House. "You know who I am?" I say. "Yes, as I know what your object was in undertaking such a position. You lived in hopes of surprising a secret that they would not pay for at its just value!" Thomas Roch knows everything, and perhaps it is just as well, in view of what I am going to say. "Well, you did not succeed, Simon Hart, and as far as this is concerned," he added, flourishing the phial, "no one else has succeeded, or ever will succeed." As I conjectured, he has not, then, made known the composition of his deflagrator. Looking him straight in the face, I reply: "You know who I am, Thomas Roch, but do you know in whose place you are?" "In my own place!" he cries. That is what Ker Karraje has permitted him to believe. The inventor thinks he is at home in Back Cup, that the riches accumulated in this cavern are his, and that if an attack is made upon the place, it will be with the object of stealing what belongs to him! And he will defend it under the impression that he has the right to do so! "Thomas Roch," I continue, "listen to me." "What do you want to say to me, Simon Hart?" "This cavern into which we have been dragged, is occupied by a band of pirates, and--" Roch does not give me time to complete the sentence--I doubt even whether he has understood me. "I repeat," he interrupts vehemently, "that the treasures stored here are the price of my invention. They have paid me what I asked for my fulgurator--what I was everywhere else refused--even in my own country--which is also yours--and I will not allow myself to be despoiled!" What can I reply to such insensate assertions? I, however, go on: "Thomas Roch, do you remember Healthful House?" "Healthful House, where I was sequestrated after Warder Gaydon had been entrusted with the mission of spying upon me in order to rob me of my secret? I do, indeed." "I never dreamed of depriving you of the benefit of your secret, Thomas Roch. I would never have accepted such a mission. But you were ill, your reason was affected, and your invention was too valuable to be lost. Yes, had you disclosed the secret during one of your fits you would have preserved all the benefit and all the honor of it." "Really, Simon Hart!" Roch replies disdainfully. "Honor and benefit! Your assurances come somewhat late in the day. You forget that on the pretext of insanity, I was thrown into a dungeon. Yes, it was a pretext; for my reason has never left me, even for an hour, as you can see from what I have accomplished since I am free." "Free! Do you imagine you are free, Thomas Roch? Are you not more closely confined within the walls of this cavern than you ever were at Healthful House?" "A man who is in his own home," he replies angrily, "goes out as he likes and when he likes. I have only to say the word and all the doors will open before me. This place is mine. Count d'Artigas gave it to me with everything it contains. Woe to those who attempt to attack it. I have here the wherewithal to annihilate them, Simon Hart!" The inventor waves the phial feverishly as he speaks." "The Count d'Artigas has deceived you," I cry, "as he has deceived so many others. Under this name is dissembled one of the most formidable monsters who ever scoured the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. He is a bandit steeped in crime--he is the odious Ker Karraje!" "Ker Karraje!" echoes Thomas Roch. And I wonder if this name has not impressed him, if he remembers who the man is who bears it. If it did impress him, it was only momentarily. "I do not know this Ker Karraje," he says, pointing towards the door to order me out. "I only know the Count d'Artigas." "Thomas Roch," I persist, in a final effort, "the Count d'Artigas and Ker Karraje are one and the same person. If this man has purchased your secret, it is with the intention of ensuring impunity for his crimes and facilities for committing fresh ones. He is the chief of these pirates." "Pirates!" cries Roch, whose irritation increases the more I press him. "The real pirates are those who dare to menace me even in this retreat, who tried it on with the _Sword_--for Serko has told me everything--who sought to steal in my own home what belongs to me, what is but the just price of my discovery." "No, Thomas Roch, the pirates are those who have imprisoned you in this cavern of Back Cup, who will utilize your genius to defend it, and who will get rid of you when they are in entire possession of your secrets!" Thomas Roch here interrupts me. He does not appear to listen to what I say. He has a fixed idea, that of vengeance, which has been skilfully worked upon by Engineer Serko, and in which his hatred is concentrated to the exclusion of everything else. "The bandits," he hisses, "are those who spurned me without a hearing, who heaped injustice and ignominy upon me, who drove me from country to country, whereas I offered them superiority, invincibleness, omnipotence!" It is the eternal story of the unappreciated inventor, to whom the indifferent or envious refuse the means of testing his inventions, to pay him the value he sets upon them. I know it well--and also know all the exaggeration that has been written upon this subject. It is clearly no time for reasoning with Thomas Roch. My arguments are entirely lost upon the hapless dupe of Ker Karraje and his accomplices. In revealing to him the real name of the Count d'Artigas, and denouncing to him this band and their chief I had hoped to wean him from their influence and make him realize the criminal end they have in view. My hope was vain. He does not believe me. And then what does he care whether the brigand's name is Count 'd'Artigas or Ker Karraje? Is not he, Thomas Roch, master of Back Cup? Is he not the owner of these riches accumulated by twenty years of murder and rapine? Disarmed before such moral degeneracy, knowing not how I can touch his ulcerated, irresponsible heart, I turn towards the door. It only remains for me to withdraw. What is to be, will be, since it is out of my power to prevent the frightful _dénouement_ that will occur in a few hours. Thomas Roch takes no more notice of me. He seems to have forgotten that I am here. He has resumed his manipulations without realizing that he is not alone. There is only one means of preventing the imminent catastrophe. Throw myself upon Roch, place him beyond the power of doing harm--strike him--kill him--yes, kill him! It is my right--it is my duty! I have no arms, but on a near-by shelf I see some tools--a chisel and a hammer. What is to prevent me from knocking his brains out? Once he is dead I have but to smash the phials and his invention dies with him. The warships can approach, land their men upon the island, demolish Back Cup with their shells. Ker Karraje and his band will be killed to a man. Can I hesitate at a murder that will bring about the chastisement of so many crimes? I advance to the shelf and stretch forth my hand to seize the chisel. As I do so, Thomas Roch turns round. It is too late to strike. A struggle would ensue. The noise and his cries would be heard, for there are still some pirates not far off, I can even now hear some one approaching, and have only just time to fly if I would not be seen. Nevertheless, I make one last attempt to awaken the sentiment of patriotism within him. "Thomas Roch," I say, "warships are in sight. They have come to destroy this lair. Maybe one of them flies the French flag!" He gazes at me. He was not aware that Back Cup is going to be attacked, and I have just apprised him of the fact. His brow darkens and his eyes flash. "Thomas Roch, would you dare to fire upon your country's flag--the tricolor flag?" He raises his head, shakes it nervously, and with a disdainful gesture: "What do you mean by 'your country?' I no longer have any country, Simon Hart. The inventor spurned no longer has a country. Where he finds an asylum, there is his fatherland! They seek to take what is mine. I will defend it, and woe, woe to those who dare to attack me!" Then rushing to the door of the laboratory and throwing it violently open he shouts so loudly that he must be heard at the Beehive: "Go! Get you gone!" I have not a second to lose, and I dash out. CHAPTER XVII. ONE AGAINST FIVE. For a whole hour I wander about among Back Cup's dark vaults, amid the stone trees, to the extreme limit of the cavern. It is here that I have so often sought an issue, a crevice, a crack through which I might squeeze to the shore of the island. My search has been futile. In my present condition, a prey to indefinable hallucinations it seems to me that these walls are thicker than ever, that they are gradually closing in upon and will crush me. How long this mental trouble lasts I cannot say. But I afterwards find myself on the Beehive side, opposite the cell in which I cannot hope for either repose or sleep. Sleep, when my brain is in a whirl of excitement? Sleep, when I am near the end of a situation that threatened to be prolonged for years and years? What will the end be as far as I am personally concerned? What am I to expect from the attack upon Back Cup, the success of which I have been unable to assure by placing Thomas Roch beyond the possibility of doing harm? His engines are ready to be launched, and as soon as the vessels have reached the dangerous zone they will be blown to atoms. However this may be, I am condemned to pass the remaining hours of the night in my cell. The time has come for me to go in. At daybreak I shall see what is best for me to do. Meanwhile, for aught I know I may hear the thunder of Roch's fulgurator as it destroys the ships approaching to make a night attack. I take a last look round. On the opposite side a light, a single light, is burning. It is the lamp in Roch's laboratory and it casts its reflection upon the waters of the lake. No one is about, and it occurs to me that the pirates must have taken up their lighting positions outside and that the Beehive is empty. Then, impelled by an irresistible instinct, instead of returning to my cell, I creep along the wall, listening, spying, ready to hide if I hear voices or footsteps. I at length reach the passage. God in heaven! No one is on guard there--the passage is free! Without giving myself time to reflect I dart into the dark hole, and grope my way along it. Soon I feel a fresher air--the salt, vivifying air of the sea, that I have not breathed for five months. I inspire it with avidity, with all the power of my lungs. The outer extremity of the passage appears against the star-studded sky. There is not even a shadow in the way. Perhaps I shall be able to get outside. I lay down, and crawl along noiselessly to the orifice and peer out. Not a soul is in sight! By skirting the rocks towards the east, to the side which cannot be approached from the sea on account of the reefs and which is not likely to be watched, I reach a narrow excavation about two hundred and twenty-five yards from where the point of the coast extends towards the northwest. At last I am out of the cavern. I am not free, but it is the beginning of freedom. On the point the forms of a few sentries stand out against the clear sky, so motionless that they might be mistaken for pieces of the rock. On the horizon to the west the position lights of the warship show in a luminous line. From a few gray patches discernable in the east, I calculate that it must be about five o'clock in the morning. _November 18_.--It is now light enough for me to be able to complete my notes relating the details of my visit to Thomas Roch's laboratory--the last lines my hand will trace, perhaps. I have begun to write, and shall dot down the incidents of the attack as they occur. The light damp mist that hangs over the water soon lifts under the influence of the breeze, and at last I can distinguish the warships. There are five of them, and they are lying in a line about six miles off, and consequently beyond the range of Roch's engines. My fear that after passing in sight of the Bermudas the squadron would continue on its way to the Antilles or Mexico was therefore unfounded. No, there it is, awaiting broad daylight in order to attack Back Cup. There is a movement on the coast. Three or four pirates emerge from the rocks, the sentries are recalled and draw in, and the entire band is soon assembled. They do not seek shelter inside the cavern, knowing full well that the ships can never get near enough for the shells of the big guns to reach, the island. I run no risk of being discovered, for only my head protrudes above the hole in the rock and no one is likely to come this way. The only thing that worries me is that Serko, or somebody else may take it into his head to see if I am in my cell, and if necessary to lock me in, though what they have to fear from me I cannot conceive. At twenty-five minutes past seven: Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko and Captain Spade advance to the extremity of the point, where they sweep the north-western horizon with their telescopes. Behind them the six trestles are installed, in the grooves of which are Roch's autopropulsive engines. Thirty-five minutes past seven: Smoke arises from the stacks of the warships, which are getting under way and will soon be within range of the engines. Horrible cries of joy, salvos of hurrahs--howls of wild beasts I might more appropriately say--arise from the pirate horde. At this moment Engineer Serko quits Ker Karraje, whom he leaves with Captain Spade, and enters the cavern, no doubt to fetch Thomas Roch. When Ker Karraje orders the latter to launch his engines against the ships will he remember what I told him? Will not his crime appear to him in all its horror? Will he refuse to obey? No, I am only too convinced of the contrary. It is useless to entertain any illusion on the subject. The inventor believes he is on his own property. They are going to attack it. He will defend it. The five warships slowly advance, making for the point. Perhaps they imagine on board that Thomas Roch has not given up his last and greatest secret to the pirates--and, as a matter of fact, he had not done so when I threw the keg into the lagoon. If the commanders propose to land storming parties and the ships advance into the zone of danger there will soon be nothing left of them but bits of shapeless floating wreckage. Here comes Thomas Roch accompanied by Engineer Serko. On issuing from the passage both go to the trestle that is pointing towards the leading warship. Ker Karraje and Captain Spade are awaiting them. As far as I am able to judge, Roch is calm. He knows what he is going to do. No hesitation troubles the soul of the hapless man whom hatred has led astray. Between his fingers shines the glass phial containing the deflagrator liquid. He then gazes towards the nearest ship, which is about five miles' distant. She is a cruiser of about two thousand five hundred tons--not more. She flies no flag, but from her build I take her to belong to a nation for which no Frenchman can entertain any particular regard. The four other warships remain behind. It is this cruiser which is to begin the attack. Let her use her guns, then, since the pirates allow her to approach, and may the first of her projectiles strike Thomas Roch! While Engineer Serko is estimating the distance, Roch places himself behind the trestle. Three engines are resting on it, charged with the explosive, and which are assured a long trajectory by the fusing matter without it being necessary to impart a gyratory movement to them--as in the case of Inventor Turpin's gyroscopic projectiles. Besides, if they drop within a few hundred yards of the vessel, they will be quite near enough to utterly destroy it. The time has come. "Thomas Roch!" Engineer Serko cries, and points to the cruiser. The latter is steaming slowly towards the northwestern point of the island and is between four and five miles off. Roch nods assent, and waves them back from the trestle. Ker Karraje, Captain Spade and the others draw back about fifty paces. Thomas Roch then takes the stopper from the phial which he holds in his right hand, and successively pours into a hole in the rear-end of each engine a few drops of the liquid, which mixes with the fusing matter. Forty-five seconds elapse--the time necessary for the combination to be effected--forty-five seconds during which it seems to me that my heart ceases to beat. A frightful whistling is then heard, and the three engines tear through the air, describing a prolonged curve at a height of three hundred feet, and pass the cruiser. Have they missed it? Is the danger over? No! the engines, after the manner of Artillery Captain Chapel's discoid projectile, return towards the doomed vessel like an Australian boomerang. The next instant the air is shaken with a violence comparable to that which would be caused by the explosion of a magazine of melinite or dynamite, Back Cup Island trembles to its very foundations. The cruiser has disappeared,--blown to pieces. The effect is that of the Zalinski shell, but centupled by the infinite power of Roch's fulgurator. What shouts the bandits raise as they rush towards the extremity of the point! Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko, and Captain Spade remain rooted to the spot, hardly able to credit the evidence of their own eyes. As to Thomas Roch, he stands with folded arms, and flashing eyes, his face radiant with pride and triumph. I understand, while I abhor his feelings. If the other warships approach they will share the same fate as the cruiser. They will inevitably be destroyed. Oh! if they would but give up the struggle and withdraw to safety, even though my last hope would go with them! The nations can consult and arrive at some other plan for destroying the island. They can surround the place with a belt of ships that the pirates cannot break through and starve them to death like so many rats in a hole. But I know that the warships will not retire, even though they know they are going to certain death. One after the other they will all make the attempt. And I am right. Signals are exchanged between them. Almost immediately clouds of black smoke arise and the vessels again advance. One of them, under forced draught, distances the others in her anxiety to bring her big guns quickly into action. At all risks I issue from my hole, and gaze at the on-coming warship with feverish eyes, awaiting, without being able to prevent it, another catastrophe. This vessel, which visibly grows larger as it comes nearer, is a cruiser of about the same tonnage as the one that preceded her. No flag is flying and I cannot guess her nationality. She continues steaming at full speed in an effort to pass the zone of danger before other engines can be launched. But how can she escape them since they will swoop back upon her? Thomas Roch places himself behind the second trestle as the cruiser passes on to the surface of the abysm in which she will in turn soon be swallowed up. No sound disturbs the stillness. Suddenly the rolling of drums and the blare of bugles is heard on board the warship. I know those bugle calls: they are French bugles! Great God! She is one of the ships of my own country's navy and a French inventor is about to destroy her! No! it shall not be. I will rush towards Thomas Roch--shout to him that she is a French ship. He does not, cannot, know it. At a sign from Engineer Serko the inventor has raised the phial. The bugles sound louder and more strident. It is the salute to the flag. A flag unfurls to the breeze--the tricolor, whose blue, white and red sections stand out luminously against the sky. Ah! What is this? I understand! Thomas Roch is fascinated at the sight of his national emblem. Slowly he lowers his arm as the flag flutters up to the mast-head. Then he draws back and covers his eyes with his hand. Heavens above! All sentiment of patriotism is not then dead in his ulcerated heart, seeing that it beats at the sight of his country's flag! My emotion is not less than his. At the risk of being seen--and what do I now care if I am seen?--I creep over the rocks. I will be there to sustain Thomas Roch and prevent him from weakening. If I pay for it with my life I will once more adjure him in the name of his country. I will cry to him: "Frenchman, it is the tricolor that flies on yonder ship! Frenchman, it is a very part of France that is approaching you! Frenchman, would you be so criminal as to strike it?" But my intervention will not be necessary. Thomas Roch is not a prey to one of the fits to which he was formerly subject. He is perfectly sane. When he found himself facing the flag he understood--and drew back. A few pirates approach to lead him to the trestle again. He struggles and pushes them from him. Ker Karraje and Engineer Serko run up. They point to the rapidly advancing ship. They order him to launch his engines. Thomas Roch refuses. Captain Spade and the others, mad with rage, menace him--curse him--strike him--try to wrest the phial from him. Roch throws it on the ground and crushes it under foot. Then panic seizes upon the crowd of wretches. The cruiser has passed the zone and they cannot return her fire. Shells begin to rain all over the island, bursting the rocks in every direction. But where is Thomas Roch? Has he been killed by one of the projectiles? No, I see him for the last time as he dashes into the passage. Ker Karraje, Engineer Serko and the others follow him to seek shelter inside of Back Cup. I will not return to the cavern at any price, even if I get killed by staying where I am. I will jot down my final notes and when the French sailors land on the point I will go-- END OF ENGINEER SIMON HART'S NOTES. CHAPTER XVIII. ON BOARD THE "TONNANT." After the failure of Lieutenant Davon's mission with the _Sword_, the English authorities waited in vain for the expedition to return, and the conviction at length gained ground that the bold sailors had perished; but whether the _Sword_ had been lost by striking against a rock or had been destroyed by Ker Karraje's pirates, could not, of course, be ascertained. The object of the expedition, based upon the indications of the document found in the keg that was thrown up on the shore at St. George, was to carry off Thomas Roch ere his engines were completed. The French inventor having been recovered--without forgetting Engineer Simon Hart--he was to be handed over to the care of the Bermudan authorities. That done, there would be nothing to fear from his fulgurator when the island was attacked. When, however, the _Sword_ had been given up for lost, another expedition of a different kind, was decided upon. The time that had elapsed--nearly eight weeks--from the date of the document found in the keg, had to be taken into consideration. It was thought that during the interval, Ker Karraje might have gained possession of Roch's secrets. An _entente_ concluded between the maritime powers, resulted in the sending of five warships to Bermudan waters. As there was a vast cavern inside Back Cup mountain, it was decided to attempt to bring the latter down like the walls of a bastion, by bombarding it with powerful modern artillery. The squadron assembled at the entrance to the Chesapeake, in Virginia, and sailed for the archipelago, which was sighted on the evening of November 17. The next morning the vessel selected for the first attack, steamed forward. It was about four and a half miles from the island, when three engines, after passing the vessel, swerved round and exploded about sixty yards from her. She sank immediately. The effect of the explosion, which was superior to any previously obtained by new explosives, was instantaneous. Even at the distance they were from the spot where it occurred, the four remaining ships felt the shock severely. Two things were to be deduced from this sudden catastrophe: 1.--The pirate Ker Karraje was in possession of Roch's fulgurator. 2.--The new engine possessed the destructive power attributed to it by its inventor. After the disappearance of the unfortunate cruiser, the other vessels lowered boats to pick up a few survivors who were clinging to the floating wreckage. Then it was that the signals were exchanged and the warships started towards the island. The swiftest of them, the _Tonnant_, a French cruiser, forged ahead while the others forced their draught in an effort to catch up with her. The _Tonnant_, at the risk of being blown to pieces in turn, penetrated the danger zone half a mile, and then ran up her flag while manoeuvring to bring her heavy guns into action. From the bridge the officers could see Ker Karraje's band scattered on the rocks of the island. The occasion was an excellent one for getting a shot at them before the bombardment of their retreat was begun, and fire was opened with the result that the pirates made a rush to get into the cavern. A few minutes later there was a shock terrific enough to shake the sky down. Where the mountain had been, naught but a heap of smoking, crumbling rocks was to be seen. Back Cup had become a group of jagged reefs against which the sea, that had been thrown back like a gigantic tidal wave, was beating and frothing. What was the cause of the explosion? Had it been voluntarily caused by the pirates when they realized that escape was impossible? The _Tonnant_ had not been seriously damaged by the flying rocks. Her boats were lowered and made towards all that was left of Back Cup. The landing parties explored the ruins, and found a few horribly mangled corpses. Not a vestige of the cavern was to be seen. One body, and one only, was found intact. It was lying on the northeast side of the reefs. In one hand, tightly clasped, was a note-book, the last line of which was incomplete. A close examination showed that the man was still breathing. He was conveyed on board the _Tonnant_, where it was learned from the note-book that he was Simon Hart. For some time his life was despaired of, but he was eventually brought round, and from the answers made to the questions addressed to him the following conclusion was reached: Moved to his very soul at the sight of the tricolor flag, being at last conscious of the crime of _lèse-patrie_ he was about to commit, Thomas Roch rushed through the passage to the magazine where a considerable quantity of his explosive was stored. Then, before he could be prevented, brought about the terrible explosion which destroyed the island of Back Cup. And now Ker Karraje and his pirates have disappeared--and with them Thomas Roch and the secret of his invention. THE END. End of the Voyage Extraordinaire 
35196	----	Gwen Wynn A Romance of the Wye By Captain Mayne Reid Published by Tinsley Brothers, 8 Catherine Street, Strand, London. This edition dated 1877. Volume One, Chapter I. THE HEROINE. A tourist descending the Wye by boat from the town of Hereford to the ruined Abbey of Tintern, may observe on its banks a small pagoda-like structure; its roof, with a portion of the supporting columns, o'er-topping a spray of evergreens. It is simply a summer-house, of the kiosk or pavilion pattern, standing in the ornamental grounds of a gentleman's residence. Though placed conspicuously on an elevated point, the boat traveller obtains view of it only from a reach of the river above. When opposite he loses sight of it; a spinney of tall poplars drawing curtain-like between him and the higher bank. These stand on an oblong island, which extends several hundred yards down the stream, formed by an old channel, now forsaken. With all its wanderings the Wye is not suddenly capricious; still, in the lapse of long ages it has here and there changed its course, forming _aits_, or _eyots_, of which this is one. The tourist will not likely take the abandoned channel. He is bound and booked for Tintern--possibly Chepstow--and will not be delayed by lesser "lions." Besides, his hired boatmen would not deviate from their terms of charter, without adding an extra to their fare. Were he free, and disposed for exploration, entering this unused water way, he would find it tortuous, with scarce any current, save in times of flood; on one side the eyot, a low marshy flat, thickly overgrown with trees; on the other a continuous cliff, rising forty feet sheer, its _facade_ grim and grey, with flakes of reddish hue, where the frost has detached pieces from the rock--the old red sandstone of Herefordshire. Near its entrance he would catch a glimpse of the kiosk on its crest; and, proceeding onward, will observe the tops of laurels and other exotic evergreens, mingling their glabrous foliage with that of the indigenous holly, ivy, and ferns; these last trailing over the cliff's brow, and wreathing it with fillets of verdure, as if to conceal its frowning corrugations. About midway down the old river's bed he will arrive opposite a little embayment in the high bank, partly natural, but in part quarried out of the cliff--as evinced by a flight of steps, leading up at back, chiselled out of the rock _in situ_. The cove thus contrived is just large enough to give room to a row-boat; and, if not out upon the river, one will be in it, riding upon its painter; this attached to a ring in the red sandstone. It is a light two-oared affair--a pleasure-boat, ornamentally painted, with cushioned thwarts, and tiller ropes of coloured cord athwart its stern, which the tourist will have turned towards him, in gold lettering, "The Gwendoline." Charmed by this Idyllic picture, he may forsake his own craft, and ascend to the top of the stair. If so, he will have before his eyes a lawn of park-like expanse, mottled with clumps of coppice, here and there a grand old tree--oak, elm, or chestnut--standing solitary; at the upper end a shrubbery of glistening evergreens, with gravelled walks, fronting a handsome house; or, in the parlance of the estate agent, a noble mansion. That is Llangorren Court, and there dwells the owner of the pleasure-boat, as also prospective owner of the house, with some two thousand acres of land lying adjacent. The boat bears her baptismal name, the surname being Wynn, while people, in a familiar way, speak of her as "Gwen Wynn;" this on account of her being a lady of proclivities and habits that make her somewhat of a celebrity in the neighbourhood. She not only goes boating, but hunts, drives a pair of spirited horses, presides over the church choir, plays its organ, looks after the poor of the parish--nearly all of it her own, or soon to be--and has a bright smile, with a pleasant word, for everybody. If she be outside, upon the lawn, the tourist, supposing him a gentleman, will withdraw; for across the grounds of Llangorren Court there is no "right of way," and the presence of a stranger upon them would be deemed an intrusion. Nevertheless, he would go back down the boat stair reluctantly, and with a sigh of regret, that good manners do not permit his making the acquaintance of Gwen Wynn without further loss of time, or any ceremony of introduction. But my readers are not thus debarred; and to them I introduce her, as she saunters over this same lawn, on a lovely April morn. She is not alone; another lady, by name Eleanor Lees, being with her. They are nearly of the same age--both turned twenty--but in all other respects unlike, even to contrast, though there is kinship between them. Gwendoline Wynn is tall of form, fully developed; face of radiant brightness, with blue-grey eyes, and hair of that chrome-yellow almost peculiar to the Cymri--said to have made such havoc with the hearts of the Roman soldiers, causing these to deplore the day when recalled home to protect their seven-hilled city from Goths and Visigoths. In personal appearance Eleanor Lees is the reverse of all this; being of dark complexion, brown-haired, black-eyed, with a figure slender and _petite_. Withal she is pretty; but it is only prettiness--a word inapplicable to her kinswoman, who is pronouncedly beautiful. Equally unlike are they in mental characteristics; the first-named being free of speech, courageous, just a trifle fast, and possibly a little imperious. The other of a reserved, timid disposition, and habitually of subdued mien, as befits her station; for in this there is also disparity between them--again a contrast. Both are orphans; but it is an orphanage under widely different circumstances and conditions: the one heiress to an estate worth some ten thousand pounds per annum; the other inheriting nought save an old family name--indeed, left without other means of livelihood, than what she may derive from a superior education she has received. Notwithstanding their inequality of fortune, and the very distant relationship--for they are not even near as cousins--the rich girl behaves towards the poor one as though they were sisters. No one seeing them stroll arm-in-arm through the shrubbery, and hearing them hold converse in familiar, affectionate tones, would suspect the little dark damsel to be the paid "companion" of the lady by her side. Yet in such capacity is she residing at Llangorren Court. It is just after the hour of breakfast, and they have come forth in morning robes of light muslin--dresses suitable to the day and the season. Two handsome ponies are upon the lawn, its herbage dividing their attention with the horns of a pet stag, which now and then threaten to assail them. All three, soon as perceiving the ladies, trot towards them; the ponies stretching out their necks to be patted; the cloven-hoofed creature equally courting caresses. They look especially to Miss Wynn, who is more their mistress. On this particular morning she does not seem in the humour for dallying with them; nor has she brought out their usual allowance of lump sugar; but, after a touch with her delicate fingers, and a kindly exclamation, passes on, leaving them behind, to all appearance disappointed. "Where are you going, Gwen?" asks the companion, seeing her step out straight, and apparently with thoughts preoccupied. Their arms are now disunited, the little incident with the animals having separated them. "To the summer-house," is the response. "I wish to have a look at the river. It should show fine this bright morning." And so it does; as both perceive after entering the pavilion, which commands a view of the valley, with a reach of the river above--the latter, under the sun, glistening like freshly polished silver. Gwen views it through a glass--a binocular she has brought out with her; this of itself proclaiming some purpose aforethought, but not confided to the companion. It is only after she has been long holding it steadily to her eye, that the latter fancies there must be some object within its field of view more interesting than the Wye's water, or the greenery on its banks. "What is it?" she naively asks. "You see something?" "Only a boat," answers Gwen, bringing down the glass with a guilty look, as if conscious of being caught. "Some tourist, I suppose, making down to Tintern Abbey--like as not, a London cockney." The young lady is telling a "white lie." She knows the occupant of that boat is nothing of the kind. From London he may be--she cannot tell-- but certainly no sprig of cockneydom--unlike it as Hyperion to the Satyr; at least so she thinks. But she does not give her thought to the companion; instead, concealing it, she adds,--"How fond those town people are of touring it upon our Wye!" "Can you wonder at that?" asks Ellen. "Its scenery is so grand--I should say, incomparable; nothing equal to it in England." "I don't wonder," says Miss Wynn, replying to the question. "I'm only a little bit vexed seeing them there. It's like the desecration of some sacred stream, leaving scraps of newspapers in which they wrap their sandwiches, with other picnicking debris on its banks! To say nought of one's having to encounter the rude fellows that in these degenerate days go a-rowing--shopboys from the towns, farm labourers, colliers, hauliers, all sorts. I've half a mind to set fire to the _Gwendoline_, burn her up, and never again lay hand on an oar." Ellen Lees laughs incredulously as she makes rejoinder. "It would be a pity," she says, in serio-comic tone. "Besides, the poor people are entitled to a little recreation. They don't have too much of it." "Ah, true," rejoins Gwen, who, despite her grandeeism, is neither Tory nor aristocrat. "Well, I've not yet decided on that little bit of incendiarism, and shan't burn the _Gwendoline_--at all events not till we've had another row out of her." Not for a hundred pounds would she set fire to that boat, and never in her life was she less thinking of such a thing. For just then she has other views regarding the pretty pleasure craft, and intends taking seat on its thwarts within less than twenty minutes' time. "By the way," she says, as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her, "we may as well have that row now--whether it's to be the last or not." Cunning creature! She has had it in her mind all the morning; first from her bed-chamber window, then from that of the breakfast-room, looking up the river's reach, with the binocular at her eye, too, to note if a certain boat, with a salmon-rod bending over it, passes down. For one of its occupants is an angler. "The day's superb," she goes on; "sun's not too hot--gentle breeze--just the weather for a row. And the river looks so inviting--seems calling us to come! What say you, Nell?" "Oh! I've no objections." "Let us in, then, and make ready. Be quick about it! Remember it's April, and there may be showers. We mustn't miss a moment of that sweet sunshine." At this the two forsake the summer-house; and, lightly recrossing the lawn, disappear within the dwelling. While the anglers boat is still opposite the grounds, going on, eyes are observing it from an upper window of the house; again those of Miss Wynn herself, inside her dressing-room, getting ready for the river. She had only short glimpses of it, over the tops of the trees on the eyot, and now and then through breaks in their thinner spray. Enough, however, to assure her that it contains two men, neither of them cockneys. One at the oars she takes to be a professional waterman. But he, seated in the stern is altogether unknown to her, save by sight-- that obtained when twice meeting him out on the river. She knows not whence he comes, or where he is residing; but supposes him a stranger to the neighbourhood, stopping at some hotel. If at the house of any of the neighbouring gentry, she would certainly have heard of it. She is not even acquainted with his name, though longing to learn it. But she is shy to inquire, lest that might betray her interest in him. For such she feels, has felt, ever since setting eyes on his strangely handsome face. As the boat again disappears behind the thick foliage, she sets, in haste, to effect the proposed change of dress, saying, in soliloquy--for she is now alone:-- "I wonder who, and what he can be? A gentleman, of course. But, then, there are gentlemen, and gentlemen; single ones and--" She has the word "married" on her tongue, but refrains speaking it. Instead, she gives utterance to a sigh, followed by the reflection-- "Ah, me! That would be a pity--a dis--" Again she checks herself, the thought being enough unpleasant without the words. Standing before the mirror, and sticking long pins into her hair, to keep its rebellious plaits in their place, she continues soliloquising-- "If one only had a word with that young waterman who rows him! And were it not that my own boatman is such a chatterer, I'd put him up to getting that word. But no! It would never do. He'd tell aunt about it; and then Madame la Chatelaine would be talking all sorts of serious things to me--the which I mightn't relish. Well; in six months more the old lady's trusteeship of this young lady is to terminate--at least legally. Then I'll be my own mistress; and then--'twill be time enough to consider whether I ought to have--a master. Ha, ha, ha!" So laughing, as she surveys her superb figure in a cheval glass, she completes the adjustment of her dress, by setting a hat upon her head, and tightening the elastic, to secure against its being blown off while in the boat. In fine, with a parting glance at the mirror, which shows a satisfied expression upon her features, she trips lightly out of the room, and on down the stairway. Volume One, Chapter II. THE HERO. Than Vivian Ryecroft--handsomer man never carried sling-jacket over his shoulder, or sabretasche on his hip. For he is in the Hussars--a captain. He is not on duty now, nor anywhere near the scene of it. His regiment is at Aldershot, himself rusticating in Herefordshire--whither he has come to spend a few weeks' leave of absence. Nor is he, at the time of our meeting him, in the saddle, which he sits so gracefully; but in a row-boat on the river Wye--the same just sighted by Gwen Wynn through the double lens of her lorgnette. No more is he wearing the braided uniform and "busby;" but, instead, attired in a suit of light Cheviots, piscator-cut, with a helmet-shaped cap of quilted cotton on his head, its rounded rim of spotless white in striking, but becoming, contrast with his bronzed complexion and dark military moustache. For Captain Ryecroft is no mere stripling nor beardless youth, but a man turned thirty, browned by exposure to Indian suns, experienced in Indian campaigns, from those of Scinde and the Punjaub to that most memorable of all--the Mutiny. Still is he personally as attractive as he ever was--to women, possibly more; among these causing a flutter, with _rapprochement_ towards him almost instinctive, when and wherever they may meet him. In the present many a bright English lady sighs for him, as in the past many a dark damsel of Hindostan. And without his heaving sigh, or even giving them a thought in return. Not that he is of cold nature, or in any sense austere; instead, warm-hearted, of cheerful disposition, and rather partial to female society. But he is not, and never has been, either man-flirt or frivolous trifler; else he would not be fly-fishing on the Wye--for that is what he is doing there--instead of in London, taking part in the festivities of the "season," by day dawdling in Rotten Row, by night exhibiting himself in opera-box or ball-room. In short, Vivian Ryecroft is one of those rare individuals, to a high degree endowed, physically as mentally, without being aware of it, or appearing so; while to all others it is very perceptible. He has been about a fortnight in the neighbourhood, stopping at the chief hotel of a riverine town much affected by fly-fishermen and tourists. Still, he has made no acquaintance with the resident gentry. He might, if wishing it; which he does not, his purpose upon the Wye not being to seek society, but salmon, or rather the sport of taking it. An ardent disciple of the ancient Izaak, he cares for nought else--at least, in the district where he is for the present sojourning. Such is his mental condition, up to a certain morning; when a change comes over it, sudden as the spring of a salmon at the gaudiest or most tempting of his flies--this brought about by a face, of which he has caught sight by merest accident, and while following his favourite occupation. Thus it has chanced:-- Below the town where he is staying, some four or five miles by the course of the stream, he has discovered one of those places called "catches," where the king of river fish delights to leap at flies, whether natural or artificial--a sport it has oft reason to rue. Several times so, at the end of Captain Ryecroft's line and rod; he having there twice hooked a twenty-pounder, and once a still larger specimen, which turned the scale at thirty. In consequence that portion of the stream has become his choicest angling ground, and at least three days in the week he repairs to it. The row is not much going down, but a good deal returning; five miles up stream, most of it strong adverse current. That, however, is less his affair than his oarsman's--a young waterman by name Wingate, whose boat and services the hussar officer has chartered by the week--indeed, engaged them for so long as he may remain upon the Wye. On the morning in question, dropping down the river to his accustomed whipping-place, but at a somewhat later hour than usual, he meets another boat coming up--a pleasure craft, as shown by its style of outside ornament and inside furniture. Of neither does the salmon fisher take much note; his eyes all occupied with those upon the thwarts. There are three of them, two being ladies seated in the stern sheets, the third an oarsman on a thwart well forward, to make better balance. And to the latter the hussar officer gives but a glance--just to observe that he is a serving-man--wearing some of its insignia in the shape of a cockaded hat, and striped stable-waistcoat. And not much more than a glance at one of the former; but a gaze, concentrated and long as good manners will permit, at the other, who is steering; when she passes beyond sight, her face remaining in his memory, vivid as if still before his eyes. All this at a first encounter; repeated in a second, which occurs on the day succeeding, under similar circumstances, and almost in the selfsame spot; then the face, if possible, seeming fairer, and the impression made by it on Vivian Ryecroft's mind sinking deeper--indeed, promising to be permanent. It is a radiant face, set in a luxuriance of bright amber hair--for it is that of Gwendoline Wynn. On the second occasion he has a better view of her, the boats passing nearer to one another; still, not so near as he could wish, good manners again interfering. For all, he feels well satisfied--especially with the thought, that his own gaze earnestly given, though under such restraint, has been with earnestness returned. Would that his secret admiration of its owner were in like manner reciprocated! Such is his reflective wish as the boats widen the distance between; one labouring slowly up, the other gliding swiftly down. His boatman cannot tell who the lady is, nor where she lives. On the second day he is not asked--the question having been put to him on that preceding. All the added knowledge now obtained is the name of the craft that carries her; which, after passing, the waterman, with face turned towards its stern, makes out to be the _Gwendoline_--just as on his own boat--the _Mary_,--though not in such grand golden letters. It may assist Captain Ryecroft in his inquiries, already contemplated, and he makes note of it. Another night passes; another sun shines over the Wye; and he again drops down stream to his usual place of sport--this day only to draw blank, neither catching salmon, nor seeing hair of amber hue; his reflecting on which is, perchance, a cause of the fish not taking to his flies, cast carelessly. He is not discouraged; but goes again on the day succeeding--that same when his boat is viewed through the binocular. He has already formed a half suspicion that the home of the interesting water nymph is not far from that pagoda-like structure, he has frequently noticed on the right bank of the river. For, just below the outlying eyot is where he has met the pleasure-boat, and the old oarsman looked anything but equal to a long pull up stream. Still, between that and the town are several other gentlemen's residences on the river side, with some standing inland. It may be any of them. But it is not, as Captain Ryecroft now feels sure, at sight of some floating drapery in the pavilion, with two female heads showing over its baluster rail; one of them with tresses glistening in the sunlight, bright as sunbeams themselves. He views it through a telescope--for he, too, has come out provided for distant observation--this confirming his conjectures just in the way he would wish. Now there will be no difficulty in learning who the lady is--for of one only does he care to make inquiry. He would order Wingate to hold way, but does not relish the idea of letting the waterman into his secret; and so, remaining silent, he is soon carried beyond sight of the summer-house, and along the outer edge of the islet, with its curtain of tall trees coming invidiously between. Continuing on to his angling ground, he gives way to reflections--at first of a pleasant nature. Satisfactory to think that she, the subject of them, at least lives in a handsome house; for a glimpse got of its upper storey tells it to be this. That she is in social rank a lady, he has hitherto had no doubt. The pretty pleasure craft and its appendages, with the venerable domestic acting as oarsman, are all proofs of something more than mere respectability--rather evidences of style. Marring these agreeable considerations is the thought, he may not to-day meet the pleasure-boat. It is the hour that, from past experience, he might expect it to be out--for he has so timed his own piscatorial excursion. But, seeing the ladies in the summer-house, he doubts getting nearer sight of them--at least for another twenty-four hours. In all likelihood they have been already on the river, and returned home again. Why did he not start earlier? While thus fretting himself, he catches sight of another boat--of a sort very different from the _Gwendoline_--a heavy barge-like affair, with four men in it; hulking fellows, to whom rowing is evidently a new experience. Notwithstanding this, they do not seem at all frightened at finding themselves upon the water. Instead, they are behaving in a way that shows them either very courageous, or very regardless of a danger-- which, possibly, they are not aware of. At short intervals one or other is seen starting to his feet, and rushing fore or aft--as if on an empty coal-waggon, instead of in a boat--and in such fashion, that were the craft at all crank, it would certainly be upset! On drawing nearer them Captain Ryecroft and his oarsman get the explanation of their seemingly eccentric behaviour--its cause made clear by a black bottle, which one of them is holding in his hand, each of the others brandishing tumbler, or tea cup. They are drinking; and that they have been so occupied for some time is evident by their loud shouts, and grotesque gesturing. "They look an ugly lot!" observes the young waterman, viewing them over his shoulder; for, seated at the oars, his back is towards them. "Coal fellows, from the Forest o' Dean, I take it." Ryecroft, with a cigar between his teeth, dreamily thinking of a boat with people in it so dissimilar, simply signifies assent with a nod. But soon he is roused from his reverie, at hearing an exclamation louder than common, followed by words whose import concerns himself and his companion. These are:-- "Dang it, lads! le's goo in for a bit o' a lark! Yonner be a boat coomin' down wi' two chaps in 't; some o' them spick-span city gents! S'pose we gie 'em a capsize?" "Le's do it! Le's duck 'em!" shouted the others, assentingly; he with the bottle dropping it into the boat's bottom, and laying hold of an oar instead. All act likewise, for it is a four-oared craft that carries them; and in a few seconds' time they are rowing it straight for that of the angler's. With astonishment, and fast gathering indignation, the Hussar officer sees the heavy barge coming bow-on for his light fishing skiff, and is thoroughly sensible of the danger; the waterman becoming aware of it at the same instant of time. "They mean mischief," mutters Wingate; "what'd we best do, Captain? If you like I can keep clear, and shoot the _Mary_ past 'em--easy enough." "Do so," returns the salmon fisher, with the cigar still between his teeth--but now held bitterly tight, almost to biting off the stump. "You can keep on!" he adds, speaking calmly, and with an effort to keep down his temper; "that will be the best way, as things stand now. They look like they'd come up from below; and, if they show any ill manners at meeting, we can call them to account on return. Don't concern yourself about your course. I'll see to the steering. There! hard on the starboard oar!" This last, as the two boats have arrived within less than three lengths of one another. At the same time Ryecroft, drawing tight the port tiller-cord, changes course suddenly, leaving just sufficient sea-way for his oarsman to shave past, and avoid the threatened collision. Which is done the instant after--to the discomfiture of the would-be capsizers. As the skiff glides lightly beyond their reach, dancing over the river swell, as if in triumph and to mock them, they drop their oars, and send after it a chorus of yells, mingled with blasphemous imprecations. In a lull between, the Hussar officer at length takes the cigar from his lips, and calls back to them-- "You ruffians! You shall rue it! Shout on--till you're hoarse. There's a reckoning for you, perhaps sooner than you expect." "Yes, ye damned scoun'rels!" adds the young waterman, himself so enraged as almost to foam at the mouth. "Ye'll have to pay dear for sich a dastartly attemp' to waylay Jack Wingate's boat. That will ye." "Bah!" jeeringly retorts one of the roughs. "To blazes wi' you, an' yer boat!" "Ay, to the blazes wi' ye!" echo the others in drunken chorus; and, while their voices are still reverberating along the adjacent cliffs, the fishing skiff drifts round a bend of the river, bearing its owner and his fare out of their sight, as beyond earshot of their profane speech. Volume One, Chapter III. A CHARON CORRUPTED. The lawn of Llangorren Court, for a time abandoned to the dumb quadrupeds, that had returned to their tranquil pasturing, is again enlivened by the presence of the two young ladies; but so transformed, that they are scarce recognisable as the same late seen upon it. Of course, it is their dresses that have caused the change; Miss Wynn now wearing a pea-jacket of navy blue, with anchor buttons, and a straw hat set coquettishly on her head, its ribbons of azure hue trailing over, and prettily contrasting with the plaits of her chrome-yellow hair, gathered in a grand coil behind. But for the flowing skirt below, she might be mistaken for a young mid, whose cheeks as yet show only the down--one who would "find sweethearts in every port." Miss Lees is less nautically attired; having but slipped over her morning dress a paletot of the ordinary kind, and on her head a plumed hat of the Neapolitan pattern. For all, a costume becoming; especially the brigand-like head gear which sets off her finely-chiselled features, and skin dark as any daughter of the South. They are about starting towards the boat-dock, when a difficulty presents itself--not to Gwen, but the companion. "We have forgotten Joseph!" she exclaims. Joseph is an ancient retainer of the Wynn family, who, in its domestic affairs, plays parts of many kinds--among them the _metier_ of boatman. It is his duty to look after the _Gwendoline_, see that she is snug in her dock, with oars and steering apparatus in order; go out with her when his young mistress takes a row on the river, or ferry any one of the family who has occasion to cross it--the last a need by no means rare, since for miles above and below there is nothing in the shape of bridge. "No, we haven't," rejoins Joseph's mistress, answering the exclamation of the companion. "I remembered him well enough--too well." "Why too well?" asks the other, looking a little puzzled. "Because we don't want him." "But surely, Gwen, you wouldn't think of our going alone." "Surely I would, and do. Why not?" "We've never done so before." "Is that any reason we shouldn't now?" "But Miss Linton will be displeased, if not very angry. Besides, as you know, there may be danger on the river." For a short while Gwen is silent, as if pondering on what the other has said. Not on the suggested danger. She is far from being daunted by that. But Miss Linton is her aunt--as already hinted, her legal guardian till of age--head of the house, and still holding authority, though exercising it in the mildest manner. And just on this account it would not be right to outrage it, nor is Miss Wynn the one to do so. Instead, she prefers a little subterfuge, which is in her mind as she makes rejoinder-- "I suppose we must take him along; though it's very vexatious, and for various reasons." "What are they? May I know them?" "You're welcome. For one, I can pull a boat just as well as he, if not better. And for another, we can't have a word of conversation without his hearing it--which isn't at all nice, besides being inconvenient. As I've reason to know, the old curmudgeon is an incorrigible gossip, and tattles all over the parish, I only wish we'd some one else. What a pity I haven't a brother, to go with us! _But not to-day_." The reserving clause, despite its earnestness, is not spoken aloud. In the aquatic excursion intended, she wants no companion of the male kind--above all, no brother. Nor will she take Joseph; though she signifies her consent to it, by desiring the companion to summon him. As the latter starts off for the stable-yard, where the ferryman is usually to be found, Gwen says, in soliloquy-- "I'll take old Joe as far as the boat stairs; but not a yard beyond. I know what will stay him there--steady as a pointer with a partridge six feet from its nose. By the way, have I got my purse with me?" She plunges her hand into one of her pea-jacket pockets; and, there feeling the thing sought for, is satisfied. By this Miss Lees has got back, bringing with her the versatile Joseph-- a tough old servitor of the respectable family type, who has seen some sixty summers, more or less. After a short colloquy, with some questions as to the condition of the pleasure-boat, its oars, and steering gear, the three proceed in the direction of the dock. Arrived at the bottom of the boat stairs, Joseph's mistress, turning to him, says-- "Joe, old boy, Miss Lees and I are going for a row. But, as the day's fine, and the water smooth as glass, there's no need for our having you along with us. So you can stay here till we return." The venerable retainer is taken aback by the proposal. He has never listened to the like before; for never before has the pleasure-boat gone to river without his being aboard. True, it is no business of his; still, as an ancient upholder of the family, with its honour and safety, he cannot assent to this strange innovation without entering protest. He does so, asking: "But, Miss Gwen; what will your aunt say to it? She mayent like you young ladies to go rowin' by yourselves? Besides, Miss, ye know there be some not werry nice people as moat meet ye on the river. 'Deed some v' the roughest and worst o' blaggarts." "Nonsense, Joseph! The Wye isn't the Niger, where we might expect the fate of poor Mungo Park. Why, man, we'll be as safe on it as upon our own carriage drive, or the little fishpond. As for aunt, she won't say anything, because she won't know. Shan't, can't, unless you peach on us. The which, my amiable Joseph, you'll not do--I'm sure you will not?" "How'm I to help it, Miss Gwen? When you've goed off, some o' the house sarvints'll see me here, an', hows'ever I keep my tongue in check--" "Check it now!" abruptly breaks in the heiress, "and stop palavering, Joe! The house servants won't see you--not one of them. When we're off on the river, you'll be lying at anchor in those laurel bushes above. And to keep you to your anchorage, here's some shining metal." Saying which, she slips several shillings into his hand, adding, as she notes the effect,-- "Do you think it sufficiently heavy? If not--but never mind now. In our absence you can amuse yourself weighing, and counting the coins. I fancy they'll do." She is sure of it, knowing the man's weakness to be money, as it now proves. Her argument is too powerful for his resistance, and he does not resist. Despite his solicitude for the welfare of the Wynn family, with his habitual regard of duty, the ancient servitor, refraining from further protest, proceeds to undo the knot of the _Gwendoline's_ painter. Stepping into the boat, the other Gwendoline takes the oars, Miss Lees seating herself to steer. "All right! Now, Joe, give us a push off." Joseph, having let all loose, does as directed; which sends the light craft clear out of its dock. Then, standing on the bottom step, with an adroit twirl of the thumb, he spreads the silver pieces over his palm-- so that he may see how many--and, after counting and contemplating with pleased expression, slips them into his pocket, muttering to himself-- "I dar say it'll be all right. Miss Gwen's a oner to take care o' herself; an' the old lady neen't a know any thin' about it." To make his last words good, he mounts briskly back up the boat stairs, and ensconces himself in the heart of a thick-leaved laurestinus--to the great discomfort of a pair of missel-thrushes, which have there made nest, and commenced incubation. Volume One, Chapter IV. ON THE RIVER. The fair rower, vigorously bending to the oars, soon brings through the bye-way, and out into the main channel of the river. Once in mid-stream, she suspends her stroke, permitting the boat to drift down with the current; which, for a mile below Llangorren, flows gently through meadow land, but a few feet above its own level, and flush with it in times of flood. On this particular day there is none such--no rain having fallen for a week--and the Wye's water is pure and clear. Smooth, too, as the surface of a mirror; only where, now and then, a light zephyr, playing upon it, stirs up the tiniest of ripples; a swallow dips its scimitar wings; or a salmon in bolder dash causes a purl, with circling eddies, whose wavelets extend wider and wider as they subside. So, with the trace of their boat's keel; the furrow made by it instantly closing up, and the current resuming its tranquillity; while their reflected forms-- too bright to be spoken of as shadows--now fall on one side, now on the other, as the capricious curving of the river makes necessary a change of course. Never went boat down the Wye carrying freight more fair. Both girls are beautiful, though of opposite types, and in a different degree; while with one--Gwendoline Wynn--no water Nymph, or Naiad, could compare; her warm beauty in its real embodiment far excelling any conception of fancy, or flight of the most romantic imagination. She is not thinking of herself now; nor, indeed, does she much at any time--least of all in this wise. She is anything but vain; instead, like Vivian Ryecroft, rather underrates herself. And possibly more than ever this morning; for it is with him her thoughts are occupied-- surmising whether his may be with her, but not in the most sanguine hope. Such a man must have looked on many a form fair as hers, won smiles of many a woman beautiful as she. How can she expect him to have resisted, or that his heart is still whole? While thus conjecturing, she sits half turned on the thwart, with oars out of water, her eyes directed down the river, as though in search of something there. And they are; that something a white helmet hat. She sees it not; and as the last thought has caused her some pain, she lets down the oars with a plunge, and recommences pulling; now, and as in spite, at each dip of the blades breaking her own bright image! During all this while Ellen Lees is otherwise occupied; her attention partly taken up with the steering, but as much given to the shores on each side--to the green pasture-land, of which, at intervals, she has a view, with the white-faced "Herefords" straying over it, or standing grouped in the shade of some spreading trees, forming pastoral pictures worthy the pencil of a Morland or Cuyp. In clumps, or apart, tower up old poplars, through whose leaves, yet but half unfolded, can be seen the rounded burrs of the mistletoe, looking like nests of rooks. Here and there, one overhangs the river's bank, shadowing still deep pools, where the ravenous pike lies in ambush for "salmon pink" and such small fry; while on a bare branch above may be observed another of their persecutors--the kingfisher--its brilliant azure plumage in strong contrast with everything on the earth around, and like a bit of sky fallen from above. At intervals it is seen darting from side to side, or in longer flight following the bend of the stream, and causing scamper among the minnows--itself startled and scared by the intrusion of the boat upon its normally peaceful domain. Miss Lees, who is somewhat of a naturalist, and has been out with the District Field Club on more than one "ladies' day," makes note of all these things. As the _Gwendoline_ glides on, she observes beds of the water ranunculus, whose snow-white corollas, bending to the current, are oft rudely dragged beneath; while on the banks above, their cousins of golden sheen, mingling with the petals of yellow and purple loosestrife--for both grow here--with anemones, and pale, lemon-coloured daffodils--are but kissed, and gently fanned, by the balmy breath of Spring. Easily guiding the craft down the slow-flowing stream, she has a fine opportunity of observing Nature in its unrestrained action--and takes advantage of it. She looks with delighted eye at the freshly-opened flowers, and listens with charmed ear to the warbling of the birds--a chorus, on the Wye, sweet and varied as anywhere on earth. From many a deep-lying dell in the adjacent hills she can hear the song of the thrush, as if endeavouring to outdo, and cause one to forget, the matchless strain of its nocturnal rival, the nightingale; or making music for its own mate, now on the nest, and occupied with the cares of incubation. She hears, too, the bold whistling carol of the blackbird, the trill of the lark soaring aloft, the soft sonorous note of the cuckoo, blending with the harsh scream of the jay, and the laughing cackle of the green woodpecker--the last loud beyond all proportion to the size of the bird, and bearing close resemblance to the cry of an eagle. Strange coincidence besides, in the woodpecker being commonly called "eekol"--a name, on the Wye, pronounced with striking similarity to that of the royal bird! Pondering upon this very theme, Ellen has taken no note of how her companion is employing herself. Nor is Miss Wynn thinking of either flowers, or birds. Only when a large one of the latter--a kite-- shooting out from the summit of a wooded hill, stays awhile soaring overhead, does she give thought to what so interests the other. "A pretty sight!" observes Ellen, as they sit looking up at the sharp, slender wings, and long bifurcated tail, cut clear as a cameo against the cloudless sky. "Isn't it a beautiful creature?" "Beautiful, but bad;" rejoins Gwen, "like many other animated things-- too like, and too many of them. I suppose, it's on the look-out for some innocent victim, and will soon be swooping down at it. Ah, me! it's a wicked world, Nell, with all its sweetness! One creature preying upon another--the strong seeking to devour the weak--these ever needing protection! Is it any wonder we poor women, weakest of all, should wish to--" She stays her interrogatory, and sits in silence, abstractedly toying with the handles of the oars, which she is balancing above water. "Wish to do what?" asked the other. "Get married!" answers the heiress of Llangorren, elevating her arms, and letting the blades fall with a plash, as if to drown a speech so bold; withal, watching its effect upon her companion, as she repeats the question in a changed form. "Is it strange, Ellen?" "I suppose not," Ellen timidly replies; blushingly too, for she knows how nearly the subject concerns herself, and half believes the interrogatory aimed at her. "Not at all strange," she adds, more affirmatively. "Indeed very natural, I should say--that is, for women who _are_ poor and weak, and really need a protector. But you, Gwen-- who are neither one nor the other, but instead rich and strong, have no such need." "I'm not so sure of that. With all my riches and strength--for I am a strong creature; as you see, can row this boat almost as ably as a man,"--she gives a vigorous pull or two, as proof, then continuing, "Yes; and I think I've got great courage too. Yet, would you believe it, Nelly, notwithstanding all, I sometimes have a strange fear upon me?" "Fear of what?" "I can't tell. That's the strangest part of it; for I know of no actual danger. Some sort of vague apprehension that now and then oppresses me--lies on my heart, making it heavy as lead--sad and dark as the shadow of that wicked bird upon the water. Ugh!" she exclaims, taking her eyes off it, as if the sight, suggestive of evil, had brought on one of the fear spells she is speaking of. "If it were a magpie," observes Ellen, laughingly, "you might view it with suspicion. Most people do--even some who deny being superstitious. But a kite--I never heard of that being ominous of evil. No more its shadow; which as you see it there is but a small speck compared with the wide bright surface around. If your future sorrows be only in like proportion to your joys, they won't signify much. See! Both the bird and its shadow are passing away--as will your troubles, if you ever have any." "Passing--perhaps, soon to return. Ha! look there. As I've said!" This, as the kite swoops down upon a wood-quest, and strikes at it with outstretched talons. Missing it, nevertheless; for the strong-winged pigeon, forewarned by the other's shadow, has made a quick double in its flight, and so shunned the deadly clutch. Still, it is not yet safe; its tree covert is far off on the wooded slope, and the tyrant continues the chase. But the hawk has its enemy too, in a gamekeeper with his gun. Suddenly it is seen to suspend the stroke of its wings, and go whirling downward; while a shot rings out on the air, and the cushat, unharmed, flies on for the hill. "Good!" exclaims Gwen, resting the oars across her knees, and clapping her hands in an ecstasy of delight. "The innocent has escaped!" "And for that _you_ ought to be assured, as well as gratified;" puts in the companion, "taking it as a symbol of yourself, and those imaginary dangers you've been dreaming about." "True," assents Miss Wynn, musingly, "but, as you see, the bird found a protector--just by chance, and in the nick of time." "So will you; without any chance, and at such time as may please you." "Oh!" exclaims Gwen, as if endowed with fresh courage. "I don't want one--not I! I'm strong to stand alone." Another tug at the oars to show it. "No," she continues, speaking between the plunges, "I want no protector--at least not yet--nor for a long while." "But there's one wants you," says the companion, accompanying her words with an interrogative glance. "And soon--soon as he can have you." "Indeed! I suppose you mean Master George Shenstone. Have I hit the nail upon the head?" "You have." "Well; what of him?" "Only that everybody observes his attentions to you." "Everybody is a very busy body. Being so observant, I wonder if this everybody has also observed how I receive them?" "Indeed, yes." "How then?" "With favour. 'Tis said you think highly of him." "And so I do. There are worse men in the world than George Shenstone-- possibly few better. And many a good woman would, and might, be glad to become his wife. For all, I know one of a very indifferent sort who wouldn't--that's Gwen Wynn." "But he's very good-looking?" Ellen urges; "the handsomest gentleman in the neighbourhood. Everybody says so." "There your everybody would be wrong again--if they thought as they say. But they don't. I know one who thinks somebody else much handsomer than he." "Who?" asks Miss Lees, looking puzzled. For she has never heard of Gwendoline having a preference, save that spoken of. "The Reverend William Musgrave," replies Gwen, in turn bending inquisitive eyes on her companion, to whose cheeks the answer has brought a flush of colour, with a spasm of pain at the heart. Is it possible her rich relative--the heiress of Llangorren Court--can have set her eyes upon the poor curate of Llangorren Church, where her own thoughts have been secretly straying? With an effort to conceal them now, as the pain caused her, she rejoins interrogatively, but in faltering tone-- "You think Mr Musgrave handsomer than Mr Shenstone?" "Indeed I don't. Who says I do?" "Oh--I thought," stammers out the other, relieved--too pleased just then to stand up for the superiority of the curate's personal appearance--"I thought you meant it that way." "But I didn't. All I said was, that somebody thinks so; and that isn't I. Shall I tell you who it is?" Ellen's heart is again quiet; she does not need to be told, already divining who it is--herself. "You may as well let me," pursues Gwen, in a bantering way. "Do you suppose, Miss Lees, I haven't penetrated your secret long ago? Why, I knew it last Christmas, when you were assisting his demure reverence to decorate the church! Who could fail to observe that pretty hand play, when you two were twining the ivy around the altar-rail? And the holly, you were both so careless in handling--I wonder it didn't prick your fingers to the bone! Why, Nell, 'twas as plain to me, as if I'd been at it myself. Besides, I've seen the same thing scores of times--so has everybody in the parish. Ha! you see, I'm not the only one with whose name this everybody has been busy; the difference being, that about me they've been mistaken, while concerning yourself they haven't; instead, speaking pretty near the truth. Come, now, confess! Am I not right? Don't have any fear, you can trust me." She does confess; though not in words. Her silence is equally eloquent; drooping eyelids, and blushing cheeks, making that eloquence emphatic. She loves Mr Musgrave. "Enough!" says Gwendoline, taking it in this sense; "and, since you've been candid with me, I'll repay you in the same coin. But mind you; it mustn't go further." "Oh! certainly not," assents the other, in her restored confidence about the curate, willing to promise anything in the world. "As I've said," proceeds Miss Wynn, "there are worse men in the world than George Shenstone, and but few better. Certainly none behind hounds, and I'm told he's the crack shot of the county, and the best billiard player of his club. All accomplishments that have weight with us women--some of us. More still; he's deemed good-looking, and is, as you say; known to be of good family and fortune. For all, he lacks one thing that's wanted by--" She stays her speech till dipping the oars--their splash, simultaneous with, and half-drowning, the words, "Gwen Wynn." "What is it?" asks Ellen, referring to the deficiency thus hinted at. "On my word, I can't tell--for the life of me I cannot. It's something undefinable; which one feels without seeing or being able to explain-- just as ether, or electricity. Possibly it is the last. At all events, it's the thing that makes us women fall in love; as no doubt you've found when your fingers were--were--well, so near being pricked by that holly. Ha, ha, ha!" With a merry peal she once more sets to rowing; and for a time no speech passes between them--the only sounds heard being the songs of the birds, in sweet symphony with the rush of the water along the boat's sides, and the rumbling of the oars in their rowlocks. But for a brief interval is there silence between them; Miss Wynn again breaking it by a startled exclamation:--"See!" "Where? where?" "Up yonder! We've been talking of kites and magpies. Behold, two birds of worse augury than either!" They are passing the mouth of a little influent stream, up which at some distance are seen two men, one of them seated in a small boat, the other standing on the bank, talking down to him. He in the boat is a stout, thick-set fellow in velveteens and coarse fur cap, the one above a spare thin man, habited in a suit of black--of clerical, or rather sacerdotal, cut. Though both are partially screened by the foliage, the little stream running between wooded banks, Miss Wynn has recognised them. So, too, does the companion; who rejoins, as if speaking to herself-- "One's the French priest who has a chapel up the river, on the opposite side; the other's that fellow who's said to be such an incorrigible poacher." "Priest and poacher it is! An oddly-assorted pair; though in a sense not so ill-matched either. I wonder what they're about up there, with their heads so close together. They appeared as if not wishing we should see them! Didn't it strike you so, Nelly?" The men are now out of sight; the boat having passed the rivulet's mouth. "Indeed, yes," answered Miss Lees; "the priest, at all events. He drew back among the bushes on seeing us." "I'm sure his reverence is welcome. I've no desire ever to set eyes on him--quite the contrary." "I often meet him on the roads." "I too--and off them. He seems to be about everywhere skulking and prying into people's affairs. I noticed him, the last day of our hunting, among the rabble--on foot, of course. He was close to my horse, and kept watching me out of his owlish eyes, all the time; so impertinently I could have laid the whip over his shoulders. There's something repulsive about the man; I can't bear the sight of him." "He's said to be a great friend and very intimate associate of your worthy cousin, Mr--" "Don't name _him_, Nell! I'd rather not think, much less talk of him. Almost the last words my father ever spoke--never to let Lewin Murdock cross the threshold of Llangorren. No doubt, he had his reasons. My word! this day with all its sunny brightness seems to abound in dark omens. Birds of prey, priests, and poachers! It's enough to bring on one of my fear fits. I now rather regret leaving Joseph behind. Well; we must make haste, and get home again." "Shall I turn the boat back?" asks the steerer. "No; not just yet. I don't wish to repass those two uncanny creatures. Better leave them awhile, so that on returning we mayn't see them, to disturb the priest's equanimity--more like his conscience." The reason is not exactly as assigned; but Miss Lees, accepting it without suspicion, holds the tiller-cords so as to keep the course on down stream. Volume One, Chapter V. DANGERS AHEAD. For another half mile, or so, the _Gwendoline_ is propelled onward, though not running trimly; the fault being in her at the oars. With thoughts still preoccupied, she now and then forgets her stroke, or gives it unequally--so that the boat zig-zags from side to side, and, but for a more careful hand at the tiller, would bring up against the bank. Observing her abstraction, as also her frequent turning to look down the river--but without suspicion of what is causing it--Miss Lees at length inquires,-- "What's the matter with you, Gwen?" "Oh, nothing," she evasively answers, bringing back her eyes to the boat, and once more giving attention to the oars. "But why are you looking so often below? I've noticed you do so at least a score of times." If the questioner could but divine the thoughts at that moment in the other's mind, she would have no need thus to interrogate, but would know that below there is another boat with a man in it, who possesses that unseen something, like ether or electricity, and to catch sight of whom Miss Wynn has been so oft straining her eyes. She has not given all her confidence to the companion. Not receiving immediate answer, Ellen again asks-- "Is there any danger you fear?" "None that I know of--at least, for a long way down. Then there are some rough places." "But you are pulling so unsteadily! It takes all my strength to keep in the middle of the river." "Then you pull, and let me do the steering," returns Miss Wynn, pretending to be in a pout; as she speaks starting up from the thwart, and leaving the oars in their thole pins. Of course, the other does not object; and soon they have changed places. But Gwen in the stern behaves no better, than when seated amidships. The boat still keeps going astray, the fault now in the steerer. Soon something more than a crooked course calls the attention of both, for a time engrossing it. They have rounded an abrupt bend, and got into a reach where the river runs with troubled surface and great velocity--so swift there is no need to use oars down stream, while upward 'twill take stronger arms than theirs. Caught in its current, and rapidly, yet smoothly, borne on, for awhile they do not think of this. Only a short while; then the thought comes to them in the shape of a dilemma--Miss Lees being the first to perceive it. "Gracious goodness!" she exclaims, "what are we to do? We can never row back up this rough water--it runs so strong here!" "That's true," says Gwen, preserving her composure. "I don't think we could." "But what's to be the upshot? Joseph will be waiting for us, and auntie sure to know all--if we shouldn't get back in time." "That's true also," again observes Miss Wynn, assentingly, and with an admirable _sang froid_, which causes surprise to the companion. Then succeeds a short interval of silence, broken by an exclamatory phrase of three short words from the lips of Miss Wynn. They are--"I have it!" "What have you?" joyfully asks Ellen. "The way to get back--without much trouble; and without disturbing the arrangements we've made with old Joe--the least bit." "Explain yourself!" "We'll keep on down the river to Rock Weir. There we can leave the boat, and walk across the neck to Llangorren. It isn't over a mile, though it's five times that by the course of the stream. At the Weir we can engage some water fellow to take back the _Gwendoline_ to her moorings. Meanwhile, we'll make all haste, slip into the grounds unobserved, get to the boat-dock in good time, and give Joseph the cue to hold his tongue about what's happened. Another half-crown will tie it firm and fast, I know." "I suppose there's no help for it," says the companion, assenting, "and we must do as you say." "Of course, we must. As you see, without thinking of it, we've drifted into a very cascade and are now a long way down it. Only a regular waterman could pull up again. Ah! 'twould take the toughest of them, I should say. So--_nolens volens_--we'll have to go on to Rock Weir, which can't be more than a mile now. You may feather your oars, and float a bit. But, by the way, I must look more carefully to the steering. Now, that I remember, there are some awkward bars and eddies about here, and we can't be far from them. I think they're just below the next bend." So saying, she sets herself square in the stern sheets, and closes her fingers firmly upon the tiller-cords. They glide on, but now in silence; the little flurry, with the prospect of peril ahead, making speech inopportune. Soon they are round the bend spoken of, discovering to their view a fresh reach of the river; when again the steerer becomes neglectful of her duty, the expression upon her features, late a little troubled, suddenly changing to cheerfulness, almost joy. Nor is it that the dangerous places have been passed; they are still ahead, and at some distance below. But there is something else ahead to account for the quick transformation--a row-boat drawn up by the river's edge, with men upon the bank beside. Over Gwen Wynn's countenance comes another change, sudden as before, and as before, its expression reversed. She has mistaken the boat; it is not that of the handsome fisherman! Instead, a four-oared craft, manned by four men, for there is this number on the bank. The anglers skiff had in it only two--himself and his oarsman. But she has no need to count heads, nor scrutinise faces. Those now before her eyes are all strange, and far from well favoured; not any of them in the least like the one which has so prepossessed her. And while making this observation another is forced upon her--that their natural plainness is not improved by what they have been doing, and are still-- drinking. Just as the young ladies make this observation, the four men, hearing oars, face towards them. For a moment there is silence, while they in the _Gwendoline_ are being scanned by the quartette on the shore. Through maudlin eyes, possibly, the fellows mistake them for ordinary country lasses, with whom they may take liberties. Whether or not one cries out-- "Petticoats, by gee--ingo!" "Ay!" exclaims another, "a pair o' them. An' sweet wenches they be, too. Look at she wi' the gooldy hair--bright as the sun itself. Lord, meeats! if we had she down in the pit, that head o' her ud gi'e as much light as a dozen Davy's lamps. An't she a bewty? I'm boun' to have a smack fra them red lips o' hers." "No," protests the first speaker, "she be myen. First spoke soonest sarved. That's Forest law." "Never mind, Rob," rejoins the other, surrendering his claim, "she may be the grandest to look at, but not the goodiest to go. I'll lay odds the black 'un beats her at kissin'. Le's get grup o' 'em an' see! Coom on, meeats!" Down go the drinking vessels, all four making for their boat, into which they scramble, each laying hold of an oar. Up to this time the ladies have not felt actual alarm. The strange men being evidently intoxicated, they might expect--were, indeed, half-prepared for--coarse speech; perhaps indelicate, but nothing beyond. Within a mile of their own home, and still within the boundary of the Llangorren land, how could they think of danger such as is threatening? For that there is danger they are now sensible--becoming convinced of it, as they draw nearer to the four fellows, and get a better view of them. Impossible to mistake the men--roughs from the Forest of Dean, or some other mining district, their but half-washed faces showing it; characters not very gentle at any time, but very rude, even dangerous, when drunk. This known, from many a tale told, many a Petty and Quarter Sessions report read in the county newspapers. But it is visible in their countenances, too intelligible in their speech--part of which the ladies have overheard--as in the action they are taking. They in the pleasure-boat no longer fear, or think of, bars and eddies below. No whirlpool--not Maelstrom itself, could fright them as those four men. For it is fear of a something more to be dreaded than drowning. Withal, Gwendoline Wynn is not so much dismayed as to lose presence of mind. Nor is she at all excited, but cool as when caught in the rapid current. Her feats in the hunting field, and dashing drives down the steep "pitches" of the Herefordshire roads, have given her strength of nerve to face any danger; and, as her timid companion trembles with affright, muttering her fears, she but says-- "Keep quiet, Nell! Don't let them see you're scared. It's not the way to treat such as they, and will only encourage them to come at us." This counsel, before the men have moved, fails in effect; for as they are seen rushing down the bank and into their boat, Ellen Lees utters a terrified shriek, scarcely leaving her breath to add the words--"Dear Gwen! what shall we do?" "Change places," is the reply, calmly but hurriedly made. "Give me the oars! Quick!" While speaking she has started up from the stern, and is making for 'midships. The other, comprehending, has risen at the same instant, leaving the oars to trail. By this the roughs have shoved off from the bank, and are making for mid-stream, their purpose evident--to intercept the _Gwendoline_. But the other Gwendoline has now got settled to the oars; and pulling with all her might, has still a chance to shoot past them. In a few seconds the boats are but a couple of lengths apart, the heavy craft coming bow-on for the lighter; while the faces of those in her, slewed over their shoulders, show terribly forbidding. A glance tells Gwen Wynn 'twould be idle making appeal to them; nor does she. Still she is not silent. Unable to restrain her indignation, she calls out-- "Keep back, fellows! If you run against us, 'twill go ill for you. Don't suppose you'll escape punishment." "Bah!" responds one, "we an't a-frightened at yer threats--not we. That an't the way wi' us Forest chaps. Besides, we don't mean ye any much harm. Only gi'e us a kiss all round, an' then--maybe, we'll let ye go." "Yes; kisses all round!" cries another. "That's the toll ye're got to pay at our pike; an' a bit o' squeeze by way o' boot." The coarse jest elicits a peal of laughter from the other three. Fortunately for those who are its butt, since it takes the attention of the rowers from their oars, and before they can recover a stroke or two lost--the pleasure-boat glides past them, and goes dancing on, as did the fishing skiff. With a yell of disappointment they bring their boat's head round, and row after; now straining at their oars with all strength. Luckily, they lack skill; which, fortunately for herself, the rower of the pleasure-boat possesses. It stands her in stead now, and, for a time, the _Gwendoline_ leads without losing ground. But the struggle is unequal--four to one--strong men, against a weak woman! Verily is she called on to make good her words, when saying she could row almost as ably as a man. And so does she for a time. Withal it may not avail her. The task is too much for her woman's strength, fast becoming exhausted. While her strokes grow feebler, those of the pursuers seem to get stronger. For they are in earnest now; and, despite the bad management of their boat, it is rapidly gaining on the other. "Pull, meeats!" cries one, the roughest of the gang, and apparently the ringleader, "pull like--hic--hic!"--his drunken tongue refuses the blasphemous word. "If ye lay me 'longside that girl wi' the gooe-- goeeldy hair, I'll stan' someat stiff at the `Kite's Nest' whens we get hic--'ome." "All right, Bob!" is the rejoinder, "we'll do that. Ne'er a fear." The prospect of "someat stiff" at the Forest hostelry inspires them to increase their exertion, and their speed proportionately augmented, no longer leaves a doubt of their being able to come up with the pursued boat. Confident of it they commence jeering the ladies--"wenches" they call them--in speech profane, as repulsive. For these, things look black. They are but a couple of boats' length ahead, and near below is a sharp turn in the river's channel; rounding which they will lose ground, and can scarcely fail to be overtaken. What then? As Gwen Wynn asks herself the question, the anger late flashing in her eyes gives place to a look of keen anxiety. Her glances are sent to right, to left, and again over her shoulder, as they have been all day doing, but now with very different design. Then she was searching for a man, with no further thought than to feast her eyes on him; now she is looking for the same, in hopes he may save her from insult--it may be worse. There is no man in sight--no human being on either side of the river! On the right a grim cliff rising sheer, with some goats clinging to its ledges. On the left a grassy slope with browsing sheep, their lambs astretch at their feet; but no shepherd, no one to whom she can call "Help!" Distractedly she continues to tug at the oars; despairingly as the boats draw near the bend. Before rounding it she will be in the hands of those horrid men--embraced by their brawny, bear-like arms! The thought re-strengthens her own, giving them the energy of desperation. So inspired, she makes a final effort to elude the ruffian pursuers, and succeeds in turning the point. Soon as round it, her face brightens up, joy dances in her eyes, as with panting breath she exclaims:-- "We're saved, Nelly! We're saved! Thank Heaven for it!" Nelly does thank Heaven, rejoiced to hear they are saved--but without in the least comprehending how! Volume One, Chapter VI. A DUCKING DESERVED. Captain Ryecroft has been but a few minutes at his favourite fishing place--just long enough to see his tackle in working condition, and cast his line across the water; as he does the last, saying-- "I shouldn't wonder, Wingate, if we don't see a salmon to-day. I fear that sky's too bright for his dainty kingship to mistake feathers for flies." "Ne'er a doubt the fish'll be a bit shy," returns the boatman; "but," he adds, assigning their shyness to a different cause, "'tain't so much the colour o' the sky; more like it's that lot of Foresters has frightened them, with their hulk o' a boat makin' as much noise as a Bristol steamer. Wonder what brings such rubbish on the river anyhow. They han't no business on't; an' in my opinion theer ought to be a law 'gainst it--same's for trespassin' after game." "That would be rather hard lines, Jack. These mining gentry need out-door recreation as much as any other sort of people. Rather more I should say, considering that they're compelled to pass the greater part of their time underground. When they emerge from the bowels of the earth to disport themselves on its surface, it's but natural they should like a little aquatics; which you, by choice, an amphibious creature, cannot consistently blame them for. Those we've just met are doubtless out for a holiday, which accounts for their having taken too much drink--in some sense an excuse for their conduct. I don't think it at all strange seeing them on the water." "Their faces han't seed much o' it anyhow," observes the waterman, seeming little satisfied with the Captain's reasoning. "And as for their being out on holiday, if I an't mistook, it be holiday as lasts all the year round. Two o' 'em may be miners--them as got the grimiest faces. As for t'other two, I don't think eyther ever touch't pick or shovel in their lives. I've seed both hangin' about Lydbrook, which be a queery place. Besides, one I've seed 'long wi' a man whose company is enough to gi'e a saint a bad character--that's Coracle Dick. Take my word for't, Captain, there ain't a honest miner 'mong that lot--eyther in the way of iron or coal. If there wor I'd be the last man to go again them havin' their holiday; 'cepting I don't think they ought to take it on the river. Ye see what comes o' sich as they humbuggin' about in a boat?" At the last clause of this speech--its Conservatism due to a certain professional jealousy--the Hussar officer cannot resist smiling. He had half forgiven the rudeness of the revellers--attributing it to intoxication--and more than half repented of his threat to bring them to a reckoning, which might not be called for, but might, and in all likelihood would be inconvenient. Now, reflecting on Wingate's words, the frown which had passed from off his face again returns to it. He says nothing, however, but sits rod in hand, less thinking of the salmon than how he can chastise the "damned scoun'rels," as his companion has pronounced them, should he, as he anticipates, again come in collision with them. "Lissen!" exclaims the waterman; "that's them shoutin'! Comin' this way, I take it. What should we do to 'em, Captain?" The salmon fisher is half determined to reel in his line, lay aside the rod, and take out a revolving pistol he chances to have in his pocket-- not with any intention to fire it at the fellows, but only frighten them. "Yes," goes on Wingate, "they be droppin' down again--sure; I dar' say, they've found the tide a bit too strong for 'em up above. An' I don't wonder; sich louty chaps as they thinkin' they cud guide a boat 'bout the Wye! Jist like mountin' hogs a-horseback!" At this fresh sally of professional spleen the soldier again smiles, but says nothing, uncertain what action he should take, or how soon he may be called on to commence it. Almost instantly after he is called on to take action, though not against the four riotous Foresters, but a silly salmon, which has conceived a fancy for his fly. A purl on the water, with a pluck quick succeeding, tells of one on the hook, while the whizz of the wheel and rapid rolling out of catgut proclaims it a fine one. For some minutes neither he nor his oarsman has eye or ear for aught save securing the fish, and both bend all their energies to "fighting" it. The line runs out, to be spun up and run off again; his river majesty, maddened at feeling himself so oddly and painfully restrained in his desperate efforts to escape, now rushing in one direction, now another, all the while the angler skilfully playing him, the equally skilled oarsman keeping the boat in concerted accordance. Absorbed by their distinct lines of endeavour they do not hear high words, mingled with exclamations, coming from above; or hearing, do not heed, supposing them to proceed from the four men they had met, in all likelihood now more inebriated than ever. Not till they have well-nigh finished their "fight," and the salmon, all but subdued, is being drawn towards the boat--Wingate, gaff in hand, bending over ready to strike it. Not till then do they note other sounds, which even at that critical moment make them careless about the fish, in its last feeble throes, when its capture is good as sure, causing Ryecroft to stop winding his wheel, and stand listening. Only for an instant. Again the voices of men, but now also heard the cry of a woman, as if she sending it forth were in danger or distress! They have no need for conjecture, nor are they long left to it. Almost simultaneously they see a boat sweeping round the bend, with another close in its wake, evidently in chase, as told by the attitudes and gestures of those occupying both--in the one pursued two young ladies, in that pursuing four rough men readily recognisable. At a glance the Hussar officer takes in the situation--the waterman as well. The sight saves a salmon's life, and possibly two innocent women from outrage. Down goes Ryecroft's rod, the boatman simultaneously dropping his gaff; as he does so hearing thundered in his ears-- "To yours oars, Jack! Make straight for them! Row with all your might!" Jack Wingate needs neither command to act nor word to stimulate him. As a man he remembers the late indignity to himself; as a gallant fellow he now sees others submitted to the like. No matter about their being ladies; enough that they are women suffering insult; and more than enough at seeing who are the insulters. In ten seconds' time he is on his thwart, oars in hand, the officer at the tiller; and in five more, the _Mary_, brought stem up stream, is surging against the current, going swiftly as if with it. She is set for the big boat pursuing--not now to shun a collision, but seek it. As yet some two hundred yards are between the chased craft and that hastening to its rescue. Ryecroft, measuring the distance with his eyes, is in thought tracing out a course of action. His first instinct was to draw a pistol, and stop the pursuit with a shot. But no. It would not be English. Nor does he need resort to such deadly weapon. True there will be four against two; but what of it? "I think we can manage them, Jack," he mutters through his teeth, "I'm good for two of them--the biggest and best." "An' I t'other two--sich clumsy chaps as them! Ye can trust me takin' care o' 'em, Captin." "I know it. Keep to your oars, till I give the word to drop them." "They don't 'pear to a sighted us yet. Too drunk I take it. Like as not when they see what's comin' they'll sheer off." "They shan't have the chance. I intend steering bow dead on to them. Don't fear the result. If the _Mary_ get damaged I'll stand the expense of repairs." "Ne'er a mind 'bout that, Captain. I'd gi'e the price o' a new boat to see the lot chastised--specially that big black fellow as did most o' the talkin'." "You shall see it, and soon!" He lets go the ropes, to disembarrass himself of his angling accoutrements; which he hurriedly does, flinging them at his feet. When he again takes hold of the steering tackle the _Mary_ is within six lengths of the advancing boats, both now nearly together, the bow of the pursuer overlapping the stern of the pursued. Only two of the men are at the oars; two standing up, one amidships, the other at the head. Both are endeavouring to lay hold of the pleasure-boat, and bring it alongside. So occupied they see not the fishing skiff, while the two rowing, with backs turned, are equally unconscious of its approach. They only wonder at the "wenches," as they continue to call them, taking it so coolly, for these do not seem so much frightened as before. "Coom, sweet lass!" cries he in the bow--the black fellow it is-- addressing Miss Wynn. "'Tain't no use you tryin' to get away. I must ha' my kiss. So drop yer oars, and ge'et to me!" "Insolent fellow!" she exclaims, her eyes ablaze with anger. "Keep your hands off my boat. I command you!" "But I ain't to be c'mmanded, ye minx. Not till I've had a smack o' them lips; an' by Gad I s'll have it." Saying which he reaches out to the full stretch of his long, ape-like arms, and with one hand succeeds in grasping the boat's gunwale, while with the other he gets hold of the lady's dress, and commences dragging her towards him. Gwen Wynn neither screams, nor calls "Help!" She knows it is near. "Hands off!" cries a voice in a volume of thunder, simultaneous with a dull thud against the side of the larger boat, followed by a continued crashing as her gunwale goes in. The roughs, facing round, for the first time see the fishing skiff, and know why it is there. But they are too far gone in drink to heed or submit--at least their leader seems determined to resist. Turning savagely on Ryecroft, he stammers out-- "Hic--ic--who the blazes be you, Mr White Cap! An' what d'ye want wi' me?" "You'll see." At the words he bounds from his own boat into the other; and, before the fellow can raise an arm, those of Ryecroft are around him in tight hug. In another minute the hulking scoundrel is hoisted from his feet, as though but a feather's weight, and flung overboard. Wingate has meanwhile also boarded, grappled on to the other on foot, and is threatening to serve him the same. A plunge, with a wild cry--the man going down like a stone; another, as he comes up among his own bubbles; and a third, yet wilder, as he feels himself sinking for the second time! The two at the oars, scared into a sort of sobriety, one of them cries out-- "Lor' o' mercy! Rob'll be drownded! He can't sweem a stroke." "He's a-drownin' now!" adds the other. It is true. For Rob has again come to the surface, and shouts with feebler voice, while his arms tossed frantically about tell of his being in the last throes of suffocation! Ryecroft looks regretful--rather alarmed. In chastising the fellow he had gone too far. He must save him! Quick as the thought off goes his coat, with his boots kicked into the bottom of the boat; then himself over its side! A splendid swimmer, with a few bold sweeps he is by the side of the drowning man. Not a moment too soon--just as the latter is going down for the third--likely the last time. With the hand of the officer grasping his collar, he is kept above water. But not yet saved. Both are now imperilled--the rescuer and he he would rescue. For, far from the boats, they have drifted into a dangerous eddy, and are being whirled rapidly round! A cry from Gwen Wynn--a cry of real alarm, now--the first she has uttered! But before she can repeat it, her fears are allayed--set to rest again--at sight of still another rescuer. The young waterman has leaped back to his own boat, and is pulling straight for the strugglers. A few strokes, and he is beside them; then, dropping his oars, he soon has both safe in the skiff. The half-drowned, but wholly frightened, Bob is carried back to his comrades' boat, and dumped in among them; Wingate handling him as though he were but a wet coal sack or piece of old tarpaulin. Then giving the "Forest chaps" a bit of his mind he bids them "be off!" And off go they, without saying word; as they drop down stream their downcast looks showing them subdued, if not quite sobered, and rather feeling grateful than aggrieved. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The other two boats soon proceed upward, the pleasure craft leading. But not now rowed by its owner; for Captain Ryecroft has hold of the oars. In the haste, or the pleasurable moments succeeding, he has forgotten all about the salmon left struggling on his line, or caring not to return for it, most likely will lose rod, line, and all. What matter? If he has lost a fine fish, he may have won the finest woman on the Wye! And she has lost nothing--risks nothing now--not even the chiding of her aunt! For now the pleasure-boat will be back in its dock in time to keep undisturbed the understanding with Joseph. Volume One, Chapter VII. AN INVETERATE NOVEL READER. While these exciting incidents are passing upon the river, Llangorren Court is wrapped in that stately repose becoming an aristocratic residence--especially where an elderly spinster is head of the house, and there are no noisy children to go romping about. It is thus with Llangorren, whose ostensible mistress is Miss Linton, the aunt and legal guardian already alluded to. But, though presiding over the establishment, it is rather in the way of ornamental figure-head; since she takes little to do with its domestic affairs, leaving them to a skilled housekeeper who carries the keys. Kitchen matters are not much to Miss Linton's taste, being a dame of the antique brocaded type, with pleasant memories of the past, that go back to Bath and Cheltenham; where, in their days of glory, as hers of youth, she was a belle, and did her share of dancing, with a due proportion of flirting, at the Regency balls. No longer able to indulge in such delightful recreations, the memory of them has yet charms for her, and she keeps it alive and warm by daily perusal of the _Morning Post_ with a fuller hebdomadal feast from the _Court Journal_, and other distributors of fashionable intelligence. In addition she reads no end of novels, her favourites being those which tell of Cupid in his most romantic escapades and experiences, though not always the chastest. Of the prurient trash there is a plenteous supply, furnished by scribblers of both sexes, who ought to know better, and doubtless do; but knowing also how difficult it is to make their lucubrations interesting within the legitimate lines of literary art, and how easy out of them, thus transgress the moralities. Miss Linton need have no fear that the impure stream will cease to flow, any more than the limpid waters of the Wye. Nor has she; but reads on, devouring volume after volume, in triunes as they issue from the press, and are sent her from the Circulating Library. At nearly all hours of the day, and some of the night, does she so occupy herself. Even on this same bright April morn, when all nature rejoices, and every living thing seems to delight in being out of doors--when the flowers expand their petals to catch the kisses of the warm Spring sun, Dorothea Linton is seated in a shady corner of the drawing-room, up to her ears in a three-volume novel, still odorous of printer's ink and binder's paste; absorbed in a love dialogue between a certain Lord Lutestring and a rustic damsel--daughter of one of his tenant-farmers--whose life he is doing his best to blight, and with much likelihood of succeeding. If he fail, it will not be for want of will on his part, nor desire of the author to save the imperilled one. He will make the tempted iniquitous as the tempter, should this seem to add interest to the tale, or promote the sale of the book. Just as his lordship has gained a point and the girl is about to give way, Miss Linton herself receives a shock, caused by a rat-tat at the drawing-room door, light, such as well-trained servants are accustomed to give before entering a room occupied by master or mistress. To her command "Come in!" a footman presents himself, silver waiter in hand, on which is a card. She is more than annoyed, almost angry, as taking the card, she reads-- "Reverend William Musgrave." Only to think of being thus interrupted on the eve of such an interesting climax, which seemed about to seal the fate of the farmer's daughter. It is fortunate for his Reverence, that before entering within the room another visitor is announced, and ushered in along with him. Indeed the second caller is shown in first; for, although George Shenstone rung the front door bell after Mr Musgrave had stepped inside the hall, there is no domestic of Llangorren but knows the difference between a rich baronet's son and a poor parish curate; as which should have precedence. To this nice, if not very delicate appreciation, the Reverend William is now indebted more than he is aware. It has saved him from an outburst of Miss Linton's rather tart temper, which, under the circumstances, otherwise he would have caught. For it so chances that the son of Sir George Shenstone is a great favourite with the old lady of Llangorren; welcome at all times, even amid the romantic gallantries of Lord Lutestring. Not that the young country gentleman has anything in common with the titled Lothario, who is habitually a dweller in cities. Instead, the former is a frank, manly fellow, devoted to field sports and rural pastimes, a little brusque in manner, but for all well-bred, and, what is even better, well-behaved. There is nothing odd in his calling at that early hour. Sir George is an old friend of the Wynn family--was an intimate associate of Gwen's deceased father--and both he and his son have been accustomed to look in at Llangorren Court _sans ceremonie_. No more is Mr Musgrave's matutinal visit out of order. Though but the curate, he is in full charge of parish duties, the rector being not only aged but an absentee--so long away from the neighbourhood as to have become almost a myth to it. For this reason his vicarial representative can plead scores of excuses for presenting himself at "The Court." There is the school, the church choir, and clothing club, to say nought of neighbouring news, which on most mornings make him a welcome visitor to Miss Linton; and no doubt would on this, but for the glamour thrown around her by the fascinations of the dear delightful Lutestring. It even takes all her partiality for Mr Shenstone to remove its spell, and get him vouchsafed friendly reception. "Miss Linton," he says, speaking first, "I've just dropped in to ask if the young ladies would go for a ride. The day's so fine, I thought they might like to." "Ah, indeed," returns the spinster, holding out her fingers to be touched, but, under the plea of being a little invalided, excusing herself from rising. "Yes; no doubt they would like it very much." Mr Shenstone is satisfied with the reply; but less the curate, who neither rides nor has a horse. And less Shenstone himself--indeed both--as the lady proceeds. They have been listening, with ears all alert, for the sound of soft footsteps and rustling dresses. Instead, they hear words, not only disappointing, but perplexing. "Nay, I am sure," continues Miss Linton, with provoking coolness, "they would have been glad to go riding with you; delighted--" "But why can't they?" asked Shenstone, impatiently interrupting. "Because the thing's impossible; they've already gone rowing." "Indeed!" cry both gentlemen in a breath, seeming alike vexed by the intelligence, Shenstone mechanically interrogating: "On the river?" "Certainly!" answers the lady, looking surprised. "Why, George; where else could they go rowing! You don't suppose they've brought the boat up to the fishpond!" "Oh, no," he stammers out. "I beg pardon. How very stupid of me to ask such a question. I was only wondering why Miss Gwen--that is, I am a little astonished--but--perhaps you'll think it impertinent of me to ask another question?" "Why should I? What is it?" "Only whether--whether she--Miss Gwen, I mean--said anything about riding to-day?" "Not a word--at least not to me." "How long since they went off--may I know, Miss Linton?" "Oh, hours ago! Very early, indeed--just after taking breakfast. I wasn't down myself--as I've told you, not feeling very well this morning. But Gwen's maid informs me they left the house then, and I presume they went direct to the river." "Do you think they'll be out long?" earnestly interrogates Shenstone. "I should hope not," returns the ancient toast of Cheltenham, with aggravating indifference, for Lutestring is not quite out of her thoughts. "There's no knowing, however. Miss Wynn is accustomed to come and go, without much consulting me." This with some acerbity--possibly from the thought that the days of her legal guardianship are drawing to a close, which will make her a less important personage at Llangorren. "Surely, they won't be out all day," timidly suggests the curate; to which she makes no rejoinder, till Mr Shenstone puts it in the shape of an inquiry. "Is it likely they will, Miss Linton?" "I should say not. More like they'll be hungry, and that will bring them home. What's the hour now? I've been reading a very interesting book, and quite forgot myself. Is it possible?" she exclaims, looking at the ormolu dial on the mantelshelf. "Ten minutes to one! How time does fly, to be sure! I couldn't have believed it near so late--almost luncheon time! Of course you'll stay, gentlemen? As for the girls, if they're not back in time they'll have to go without. Punctuality is the rule of this house--always will be with me. I shan't wait one minute for them." "But, Miss Linton; they may have returned from the river, and are now somewhere about the grounds. Shall I run down to the boat-dock and see?" It is Mr Shenstone who thus interrogates. "If you like--by all means. I shall be too thankful. Shame of Gwen to give us so much trouble! She knows our luncheon hour, and should have been back by this. Thanks, much, Mr Shenstone." As he is bounding off, she calls after--"Don't you be staying too, else you shan't have a pick. Mr Musgrave and I won't wait for any of you. Shall we, Mr Musgrave?" Shenstone has not tarried to hear either question or answer. A luncheon for Apicius were, at that moment, nothing to him; and little more to the curate, who, though staying, would gladly go along. Not from any rivalry with, or jealousy of, the baronet's son: they revolve in different orbits, with no danger of collision. Simply that he dislikes leaving Miss Linton alone--indeed, dare not. She may be expecting the usual budget of neighbourhood intelligence he daily brings her. He is mistaken. On this particular day it is not desired. Out of courtesy to Mr Shenstone, rather than herself, she had laid aside the novel; and it now requires all she can command to keep her eyes off it. She is burning to know what befel the farmer's daughter! Volume One, Chapter VIII. A SUSPICIOUS STRANGER. While Mr Musgrave is boring the elderly spinster about new scarlet cloaks for the girls of the church choir, and other parish matters, George Shenstone is standing on the topmost step of the boat stair, in a mood of mind even less enviable than hers. For he has looked down into the dock, and there sees no Gwendoline--neither boat nor lady--nor is there sign of either upon the water, far as he can command a view of it. No sounds, such as he would wish, and might expect to hear--no dipping of oars, nor, what would be still more agreeable to his ear, the soft voices of women. Instead only the note of a cuckoo, in monotonous repetition, the bird balancing itself on a branch near by; and, farther off, the _hiccol_, laughing, as if in mockery--and at him! Mocking his impatience; ay, something more, almost his misery! That it is so his soliloquy tells: "Odd her being out on the river! She promised me to go riding to-day. Very odd indeed! Gwen isn't the same she was--acting strange altogether for the last three or four days. Wonder what it means! By Jove, I can't comprehend it!" His noncomprehension does not hinder a dark shadow from stealing over his brow, and there staying. It is not unobserved. Through the leaves of the evergreen Joseph notes the pained expression, and interprets it in his own shrewd way--not far from the right one. The old servant soliloquising in less conjectural strain, says, or rather thinks-- "Master George be mad sweet on Miss Gwen. The country folk are all talkin' o't; thinkin' she's same on him, as if they knew anything about it. I knows better. An' he ain't no ways confident, else there wouldn't be that queery look on's face. It's the token o' jealousy for sure. I don't believe he have suspicion o' any rival particklar. Ah! it don't need that wi' sich a grand beauty as she be. He as love her might be jealous o' the sun kissing her cheeks, or the wind tossin' her hair!" Joseph is a Welshman of Bardic ancestry, and thinks poetry. He continues-- "I know what's took her on the river, if he don't. Yes--yes, my young lady! Ye thought yerself wonderful clever leavin' old Joe behind, tellin' him to hide hisself, and bribin' him to stay hid! And d'y 'spose I didn't obsarve them glances exchanged twixt you and the salmon fisher--sly, but for all that, hot as streaks o' fire? And d'ye think I didn't see Mr Whitecap going down, afore ye thought o' a row yerself. Oh, no; I noticed nothin' o' all that, not I? 'Twarn't meant for me-- not for Joe--ha, ha!" With a suppressed giggle at the popular catch coming in so _apropos_, he once more fixes his eyes on the face of the impatient watcher, proceeding with his soliloquy, though in changed strain: "Poor young gentleman! I do pity he to be sure. He are a good sort, an' everybody likes him. So do she, but not the way he want her to. Well; things o' that kind allers do go contrary wise--never seem to run smooth like. I'd help him myself if 'twar in my power, but it ain't. In such cases help can only come frae the place where they say matches be made--that's Heaven. Ha! he's lookin' a bit brighter! What's cheerin' him? The boat coming back? I can't see it from here, nor I don't hear any rattle o' oars!" The change he notes in George Shenstone's manner is not caused by the returning pleasure craft. Simply a reflection which crossing his mind, for the moment tranquillises him. "What a stupid I am!" he mutters self-accusingly. "Now I remember, there was nothing said about the hour we were to go riding, and I suppose she understood in the afternoon. It was so the last time we went out together. By Jove! yes. It's all right, I take it; she'll be back in good time yet." Thus reassured he remains listening. Still more satisfied, when a dull thumping sound, in regular repetition, tells him of oars working in their rowlocks. Were he learned in boating tactics he would know there are two pairs of them, and think this strange too; since the _Gwendoline_ carries only one. But he is not so skilled--instead, rather averse to aquatics--his chosen home the hunting field, his favourite seat in a saddle, not on a boat's thwart. It is only when the plashing of the oars in the tranquil water of the bye-way is borne clear along the cliff, that he perceives there are two pairs at work, while at the same time he observes two boats approaching the little dock, where but one belongs! Alone at that leading boat does he look; with eyes in which, as he continues to gaze, surprise becomes wonderment, dashed with something like displeasure. The boat he has recognised at the first glance--the _Gwendoline_--as also the two ladies in the stern. But there is also a man on the mid thwart plying the oars. "Who the deuce is he?" Thus to himself George Shenstone puts it. Not old Joe, not the least like him. Nor is it the family Charon who sits solitary on the thwarts of that following. Instead, Joseph is now by Mr Shenstone's side, passing him in haste--making to go down the boat stairs! "What's the meaning of all this, Joe?" asks the young man, in stark astonishment. "Meanin' o' what, sir?" returns the old boatman, with an air of assumed innocence. "Be there anythin' amiss?" "Oh, nothing," stammers Shenstone. "Only I supposed you were out with the young ladies. How is it you haven't gone?" "Well, sir, Miss Gwen didn't wish it. The day bein' fine, an' nothing o' flood in the river, she sayed she'd do the rowin' herself." "She hasn't been doing it for all that," mutters Shenstone to himself, as Joseph glides past and on down the stair; then repeating, "Who the deuce is he?" the interrogation as before, referring to him who rows the pleasure-boat. By this it has been brought, bow in, to the dock, its stern touching the bottom of the stair; and, as the ladies step out of it, George Shenstone overhears a dialogue, which, instead of quieting his perturbed spirit, but excites him still more--almost to madness. It is Miss Wynn who has commenced it, saying. "You'll come up to the house, and let me introduce you to my aunt?" This to the gentleman who has been pulling her boat, and has just abandoned the oars soon as seeing its painter in the hands of the servant. "Oh, thank you!" he returns. "I would, with pleasure; but, as you see, I'm not quite presentable just now--anything but fit for a drawing-room. So I beg you'll excuse me to-day." His saturated shirt-front, with other garments dripping, tells why the apology; but does not explain either that or aught else to him on the top of the stair; who, hearkening further, hears other speeches which, while perplexing him, do nought to allay the wild tempest now surging through his soul. Unseen himself--for he has stepped behind the tree lately screening Joseph--he sees Gwen Wynn hold out her hand to be pressed in parting salute--hears her address the stranger in words of gratitude, warm as though she were under some great obligation to him! Then the latter leaps out of the pleasure-boat into the other brought alongside, and is rowed away by his waterman; while the ladies ascend the stair--Gwen, lingeringly, at almost every step, turning her face towards the fishing skiff, till this, pulled around the upper end of the eyot, can no more be seen. All this George Shenstone observes, drawing deductions which send the blood in chill creep through his veins. Though still puzzled by the wet garments, the presence of the gentleman wearing them seems to solve that other enigma, unexplained as painful--the strangeness he has of late observed in the ways of Miss Wynn. Nor is he far out in his fancy, bitter though it be. Not until the two ladies have reached the stair head do they become aware of his being there; and not then, till Gwen has made some observations to the companion, which, as those addressed to the stranger, unfortunately for himself, George Shenstone overhears. "We'll be in time for luncheon yet, and aunt needn't know anything of what's delayed us--at least, not just now. True, if the like had happened to herself--say some thirty or forty years ago--she'd want all the world to hear of it, particularly that portion of the world yclept Cheltenham. The dear old lady! Ha, ha!" After a laugh, continuing: "But, speaking seriously, Nell, I don't wish any one to be the wiser about our bit of an escapade--least of all, a certain young gentleman, whose Christian name begins with a G, and surname with an S." "Those initials answer for mine," says George Shenstone, coming forward and confronting her. "If your observation was meant for me, Miss Wynn, I can only express regret for my bad luck in being within earshot of it." At his appearance, so unexpected and abrupt, Gwen Wynn had given a start--feeling guilty, and looking it. Soon, however, reflecting whence he has come, and hearing what said, she feels less self-condemned than indignant, as evinced by her rejoinder. "Ah! you've been overhearing us, Mr Shenstone! Bad luck, you call it. Bad or good, I don't think you are justified in attributing it to chance. When a gentleman deliberately stations himself behind a shady bush, like that laurustinus, for instance, and there stands listening-- intentionally--" Suddenly she interrupts herself, and stands silent too--this on observing the effect of her words, and that they have struck terribly home. With bowed head the baronet's son is stooping towards her, the cloud on his brow telling of sadness--not anger. Seeing it, the old tenderness returns to her, with its familiarity, and she exclaims:-- "Come, George! there must be no quarrel between you and me. What you've just seen and heard, will be all explained by something you have yet to hear. Miss Lees and I have had a little bit of an adventure; and if you'll promise it shan't go further, we'll make you acquainted with it." Addressed in this style, he readily gives the promise--gladly, too. The confidence so offered seems favourable to himself. But, looking for explanation on the instant, he is disappointed. Asking for it, it is denied him, with reason assigned thus: "You forget we've been full four hours on the river, and are as hungry as a pair of kingfishers--hawks, I suppose, you'd say, being a game preserver. Never mind about the simile. Let us in to luncheon, if not too late." She steps hurriedly off towards the house, the companion following, Shenstone behind both. However hungry they, never man went to a meal with less appetite than he. All Gwen's cajoling has not tranquillised his spirit, nor driven out of his thoughts that man with the bronzed complexion, dark moustache, and white helmet hat. Volume One, Chapter IX. JEALOUS ALREADY. Captain Ryecroft has lost more than rod and line; his heart is as good as gone too--given to Gwendoline Wynn. He now knows the name of the yellow haired Naiad--for this, with other particulars, she imparted to him on return up stream. Neither has her confidence thus extended, nor the conversation leading to it, belied the favourable impression made upon him by her appearance. Instead, so strengthened it, that for the first time in his life he contemplates becoming a benedict. He feels that his fate is sealed--or no longer in his hands, but hers. As Wingate pulls him on homeward, he draws out his cigar case, sets fire to a fresh weed, and, while the blue smoke wreaths up round the rim of his topee, reflects on the incidents of the day,--reviewing them in the order of their occurrence. Circumstances apparently accidental have been strangely in his favour. Helped as by Heaven's own hand, working with the rudest instruments. Through the veriest scum of humanity he has made acquaintance with one of its fairest forms. More than mere acquaintance, he hopes; for surely those warm words, and glances far from cold, could not be the sole offspring of gratitude! If so, a little service on the Wye goes a long way. Thus reflects he, in modest appreciation of himself, deeming that he has done but little. How different the value put upon it by Gwen Wynn! Still he knows not this, or at least cannot be sure of it. If he were, his thoughts would be all rose-coloured, which they are not. Some are dark as the shadows of the April showers now and then drifting across the sun's disc. One that has just settled on his brow is no reflection from the firmament above--no vague imagining--but a thing of shape and form--the form of a man, seen at the top of the boat stair, as the ladies were ascending, and not so far off as to have hindered him from observing the man's face, and noting that he was young, and rather handsome. Already the eyes of love have caught the keenness of jealousy. A gentleman evidently on terms of intimacy with Miss Wynn. Strange, though, that the look with which he regarded her on saluting, seemed to speak of something amiss! What could it mean! Captain Ryecroft has asked this question as his boat was rounding the end of the eyot, with another in the selfsame formulary of interrogation, of which but the moment before he was himself the subject:--"Who the deuce can _he_ be?" Out upon the river, and drawing hard at his Regalia, he goes on:-- "Wonderfully familiar the fellow seemed! Can't be a brother? I understood her to say she had none. Does he live at Llangorren? No. She said there was no one there in the shape of masculine relative--only an old aunt, and that little dark damsel, who is cousin or something of the kind. But who the deuce is the gentleman? Might _he_ be a cousin?" So propounding questions without being able to answer them, he at length addresses himself to the waterman, saying: "Jack, did you observe a gentleman at the head of the stair?" "Only the head and shoulders o' one, captain." "Head and shoulders; that's enough. Do you chance to know him?" "I ain't thorough sure; but I think he be a Mr Shenstone." "Who is Mr Shenstone?" "The son o' Sir George." "Sir George! What do you know of _him_?" "Not much to speak of--only that he be a big gentleman, whose land lies along the river, two or three miles below." The information is but slight, and slighter the gratification it gives. Captain Ryecroft has heard of the rich baronet whose estate adjoins that of Llangorren, and whose title, with the property attached, will descend to an only son. It is the _torso_ of this son he has seen above the red sandstone rock. In truth, a formidable rival! So he reflects, smoking away like mad. After a time, he again observes:--"You've said you don't know the ladies we've helped out of their little trouble?" "Parsonally, I don't, captain. But, now as I see where they live, I know who they be. I've heerd talk 'bout the biggest o' them--a good deal." The biggest of them! As if she were a salmon! In the boatman's eyes, bulk is evidently her chief recommendation! Ryecroft smiles, further interrogating:--"What have you heard of her?" "That she be a _tidy_ young lady. Wonderful fond o' field sport, such as hunting and that like. Fr' all, I may say that up to this day, I never set eyes on her afore." The Hussar officer has been long enough in Herefordshire to have learnt the local signification of "tidy"--synonymous with "well-behaved." That Miss Wynn is fond of field sports--flood pastimes included--he has gathered from herself while rowing her up the river. One thing strikes him as strange--that the waterman should not be acquainted with every one dwelling on the river's bank, at least for a dozen miles up and down. He seeks an explanation:-- "How is it, Jack, that you, living but a short league above, don't know all about these people?" He is unaware that Wingate, though born on the Wye's banks, as he has told him, is comparatively a stranger to its middle waters--his birthplace being far up in the shire of Brecon. Still, that is not the solution of the enigma, which the young waterman gives in his own way,-- "Lord love ye, sir! That shows how little you understand this river. Why, captain; it crooks an' crooks, and goes wobblin' about in such a way, that folks as lives less'n a mile apart knows no more o' one the other than if they wor ten. It comes o' the bridges bein' so few and far between. There's the ferry boats, true; but people don't take to 'em more'n they can help; 'specially women--seein' there be some danger at all times, and a good deal o't when the river's a-flood. That's frequent, summer well as winter." The explanation is reasonable; and, satisfied with it, Ryecroft remains for a time wrapt in a dreamy reverie, from which he is aroused as his eyes rest upon a house--a quaint antiquated structure, half timber, half stone, standing not on the river's edge, but at some distance from it up a dingle. The sight is not new to him; he has before noticed the house--struck with its appearance, so different from the ordinary dwellings. "Whose is it, Jack?" he asks. "B'longs to a man, name o' Murdock." "Odd-looking domicile!" "'Ta'nt a bit more that way than he be--if half what they say 'bout him be true." "Ah! Mr Murdock's a character, then?" "Ay; an' a queery one." "In what respect? what way?" "More'n one--a goodish many." "Specify, Jack?" "Well; for one thing, he a'nt sober to say half o' his time." "Addicted to dipsomania?" "'Dicted to getting dead drunk. I've seen him so, scores o' 'casions." "That's not wise of Mr Murdock." "No, captain; 'ta'nt neyther wise nor well. All the worse, considerin' the place where mostly he go to do his drinkin'." "Where may that be?" "The Welsh Harp--up at Rogue's Ferry." "Rogue's Ferry? Strange appellation! What sort of place is it? Not very nice, I should say--if the name be at all appropriate." "It's parfitly 'propriate, though I b'lieve it wa'nt that way bestowed. It got so called after a man the name o' Rugg, who once keeped the Welsh Harp and the ferry too. It's about two mile above, a little ways back. Besides the tavern, there be a cluster o' houses, a bit scattered about, wi' a chapel an' a grocery shop--one as deals trackways, an' a'nt partickler as to what they take in change--stolen goods welcome as any-- ay, welcomer, if they be o' worth. They got plenty o' them, too. The place be a regular nest o' poachers, an' worse than that--a good many as have sarved their spell in the Penitentiary." "Why, Wingate, you astonish me! I was under the impression your Wyeside was a sort of Arcadia, where one only met with innocence and primitive simplicity." "You won't meet much o' either at Rogue's Ferry. If there be an uninnocent set on earth it's they as live there. Them Forest chaps we came 'cross a'nt no ways their match in wickedness. Just possible drink made them behave as they did--some o' 'em. But drink or no drink it be all the same wi' the Ferry people--maybe worse when they're sober. Any ways they're a rough lot." "With a place of worship in their midst! That ought to do something towards refining them." "Ought; and would, I dare say, if 'twar the right sort--which it a'nt. Instead, o' a kind as only the more corrupts 'em--being Roman." "Oh! A Roman Catholic chapel. But how does it corrupt them?" "By makin' 'em believe they can get cleared of their sins, hows'ever black they be. Men as think that way a'nt like to stick at any sort of crime--'specialty if it brings 'em the money to buy what they calls absolution." "Well, Jack; it's very evident you're no friend, or follower, of the Pope." "Neyther o' Pope nor priest. Ah! captain; if you seed him o' the Rogue's Ferry Chapel, you wouldn't wonder at my havin' a dislike for the whole kit o' them." "What is there specially repulsive about him?" "Don't know as there be any thin' very special, in partickler. Them priests all look bout the same--such o' 'em as I've ever set eyes on. And that's like stoats and weasels, shootin' out o' one hole into another. As for him we're speakin' about, he's here, there, an' everywhere; sneakin' along the roads an' paths, hidin' behind bushes like a cat after birds, an' poppin' out where nobody expects him. If ever there war a spy meaner than another it's the priest of Rogue's Ferry." "_No_?" he adds, correcting himself. "There be one other in these parts worse than he--if that's possible. A different sort o' man, true; and yet they be a good deal thegither." "Who is this other?" "Dick Dempsey--better known by the name of Coracle Dick." "Ah, Coracle Dick! He appears to occupy a conspicuous place in your thoughts, Jack; and rather a low one in your estimation. Why, may I ask? What sort of fellow is he?" "The biggest blaggard as lives on the Wye, from where it springs out o' Plinlimmon to its emptying into the Bristol Channel. Talk o' poachers an' night netters. He goes out by night to catch somethin' beside salmon. 'Taint all fish as comes into his net, I know." The young waterman speaks in such hostile tone both about priest and poacher, that Ryecroft suspects a motive beyond the ordinary prejudice against men who wear the sacerdotal garb, or go trespassing after game. Not caring to inquire into it now, he returns to the original topic, saying:-- "We've strayed from our subject, Jack--which was the hard drinking owner of yonder house." "Not so far, captain; seein' as he be the most intimate friend the priest have in these parts; though if what's said be true, not nigh so much as his Missus." "Murdock is married, then?" "I won't say that--leastwise I shouldn't like to swear it. All I know is, a woman lives wi' him, s'posed to be his wife. Odd thing she." "Why odd?" "'Cause she beant like any other o' womankind 'bout here." "Explain yourself, Jack. In what does Mrs Murdock differ from the rest of your Herefordshire fair?" "One way, captain, in her not bein' fair at all. 'Stead, she be dark complected; most as much as one o' them women I've seed 'bout Cheltenham, nursin' the children o' old officers as brought 'em from India--_ayers_ they call 'em. She a'nt one o' 'em, but French, I've heerd say; which in part, I suppose explains the thickness 'tween her an' the priest--he bein' the same." "Oh! His reverence is a Frenchman, is he?" "All o' that, captain. If he wor English, he wouldn't--couldn't--be the contemptible sneakin' hound he is. As for Mrs Murdock, I can't say I've seed her more'n twice in my life. She keeps close to the house; goes nowhere; an' it's said nobody visits her nor him--leastwise none o' the old gentry. For all Mr Murdock belongs to the best of them." "He's a gentleman, is he?" "Ought to be--if he took after his father." "Why so?" "Because he wor a squire--regular of the old sort. He's not been so long dead. I can remember him myself, though I hadn't been here such a many years--the old lady too--this Murdock's mother. Ah! now I think on't, she wor t'other squire's sister--father to the tallest o' them two young ladies--the one with the reddish hair." "What! Miss Wynn?" "Yes, captain; her they calls Gwen." Ryecroft questions no farther. He has learnt enough to give him food for reflection--not only during the rest of that day, but for a week, a month--it may be throughout the remainder of his life. Volume One, Chapter X. THE CUCKOO'S GLEN. About a mile above Llangorren Court, but on the opposite side of the Wye, stands the house which had attracted the attention of Captain Ryecroft; known to the neighbourhood as "Glyngog"--Cymric synonym for "Cuckoo's Glen." Not immediately on the water's edge, but several hundred yards back, near the head of a lateral ravine which debouches on the valley of the river, to the latter contributing a rivulet. Glyngog House is one of those habitations, common in the county of Hereford as other western shires--puzzling the stranger to tell whether they be gentleman's residence, or but the dwelling of a farmer. This from an array of walls, enclosing yard, garden, even the orchard--a plenitude due to the red sandstone being near, and easily shaped for building purposes. About Glyngog House, however, there is something besides the circumvallation to give it an air of grandeur beyond that of the ordinary farm homestead; certain touches of architectural style which speak of the Elizabethan period--in short that termed Tudor. For its own walls are not altogether stone; instead a framework of oaken uprights, struts, and braces, black with age, the panelled masonry between plastered and white-washed, giving to the structure a quaint, almost fantastic, appearance, heightened by an irregular roof of steep pitch, with projecting dormers, gables acute angled, overhanging windows, and carving at the coigns. Of such ancient domiciles there are yet many to be met with on the Wye--their antiquity vouched for by the materials used in their construction, when bricks were a costly commodity, and wood to be had almost for the asking. About this one, the enclosing stone walls have been a later erection, as also the pillared gate entrance to its ornamental grounds, through which runs a carriage drive to the sweep in front. Many a glittering equipage may have gone round on that sweep; for Glyngog was once a Manor-house. Now it is but the remains of one, so much out of repair as to show smashed panes in several of its windows, while the _enceinte_ walls are only upright where sustained by the upholding ivy; the shrubbery run wild; the walks and carriage drive weed-covered; on the latter neither recent track of wheel, nor hoof-mark of horse. For all, the house is not uninhabited. Three or four of the windows appear sound, with blinds inside them; while at most hours smoke may be seen ascending from at least two of the chimneys. Few approach near enough the place to note its peculiarities. The traveller gets but a distant glimpse of its chimney-pots; for the country road, avoiding the dip of the ravine, is carried round its head, and far from the house. It can only be approached by a long, narrow lane, leading nowhere else, so steep as to deter any explorer save a pedestrian; while he, too, would have to contend with an obstruction of overgrowing thorns and trailing brambles. Notwithstanding these disadvantages, Glyngog has something to recommend it--a prospect not surpassed in the western shires of England. He who selected its site must have been a man of tastes rather aesthetic, than utilitarian. For the land attached and belonging--some fifty or sixty acres--is barely arable; lying against the abruptly sloping sides of the ravine. But the view is superb. Below, the Wye, winding through a partially wood-covered plain, like some grand constrictor snake; its sinuosities only here and there visible through the trees, resembling a chain of detached lakes--till sweeping past the Cuckoo's Glen, it runs on in straight reach towards Llangorren. Eye of man never looked upon lovelier landscape; mind of man could not contemplate one more suggestive of all that is, or ought to be, interesting in life. Peaceful smokes ascending out of far-off chimneys; farm-houses, with their surrounding walls, standing amid the greenery of old homestead trees--now in full leaf, for it is the month of June--here and there the sharp spire of a church, or the showy facade of a gentleman's mansion--in the distant background, the dark blue mountains of Monmouthshire; among them conspicuous the Blorenge, Skerrid, and Sugar Loaf. The man who could look on such a picture, without drawing from it inspirations of pleasure, must be out of sorts with the world, if not weary of it. And yet just such a man is now viewing it from Glyngog House, or rather the bit of shrubbery ground in front. He is seated on a rustic bench partly shattered, barely enough of it whole to give room beside him for a small japanned tray, on which are tumbler, bottle and jug--the two last respectively containing brandy and water; while in the first is an admixture of both. He is smoking a meerschaum pipe, which at short intervals he removes from his mouth to give place to the drinking glass. The personal appearance of this man is in curious correspondence with the bench on which he sits, the walls around, and the house behind. Like all these, he looks dilapidated. Not only is his apparel out of repair, but his constitution too, as shown by hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, with crows' feet ramifying around them. This due not, as with the surrounding objects, to age; for he is still under forty. Nor yet any of the natural infirmities to which flesh is heir; but evidently to drink. Some reddish spots upon his nose and flecks on the forehead, with the glass held in shaking hand, proclaims this the cause. And it is. Lewin Murdock--such is the man's name--has led a dissipated life. Not much of it in England; still less in Herefordshire; and only its earlier years in the house he now inhabits--his paternal home. Since boyhood he has been abroad, staying none can say where, and straying no one knows whither--often seen, however, at Baden, Homburg, and other "hells," punting high or low, as the luck has gone for or against him. At a later period in Paris, during the Imperial _regime_--worst hell of all. It has stripped him of everything; driven him out and home, to seek asylum at Glyngog, once a handsome property, now but a _pied a terre_, on which he may only set his foot, with a mortgage around his neck. For even the little land left to it is let out to a farmer, and the rent goes not to him. He is, in fact, only a tenant on his patrimonial estate; holding but the house at that, with the ornamental grounds and an acre or two of orchard, of which he takes no care. The farmer's sheep may scale the crumbling walls, and browse the weedy enclosure at will; give Lewin Murdock his meerschaum pipe, with enough brandy and water, and he but laughs. Not that he is of a jovial disposition, not at all given to mirth; only that it takes something more than the pasturage of an old orchard to excite his thoughts, or turn them to cupidity. For all, land does this--the very thing. No limited tract; but one of many acres in extent--even miles--the land of Llangorren. It is now before his face, and under his eyes, as a map unfolded. On the opposite side of the river it forms the foreground of the landscape; in its midst the many-windowed mansion, backed by stately trees, with well-kept grounds, and green pastures; at a little distance the "Grange," or home-farm, and farther off others that look of the same belonging--as they are. A smiling picture it is; spread before the eyes of Lewin Murdock, whenever he sits in his front window, or steps outside the door. And the brighter the sun shines on it, the darker the shadow on his brow! Not much of an enigma either. That land of Llangorren belonged to his grandfather, but now is, or soon will be, the property of his cousin-- Gwendoline Wynn. Were she not, it would be his. Between him and it runs the Wye, a broad deep river. But what its width or depth, compared with that other something between? A barrier stronger and more impassable than the stream, yet seeming slight as a thread. For it is but _the thread of a life_. Should it snap, or get accidentally severed, Lewin Murdock would only have to cross the river, proclaim himself master of Llangorren, and take possession. He would scarce he human not to think of all this. And being human he does--has thought of it oft, and many a time. With feelings too, beyond the mere prompting of cupidity. These due to a legend handed down to him, telling of an unfair disposal of the Llangorren property; but a pittance given to his mother who married Murdock of Glyngog; while the bulk went to her brother, the father of Gwen Wynn. All matters of testament, since the estate is unentailed; the only grace of the grandfather towards the Murdock branch being a clause entitling them to possession, in the event of the collateral heirs dying out. And of these but one is living--the heroine of our tale. "Only she--but she!" mutters Lewin Murdock, in a tone of such bitterness, that, as if to drown it, he plucks the pipe out of his mouth, and gulps down the last drop in the glass. Volume One, Chapter XI. A WEED BY THE WYESIDE. "Only she--but she!" he repeats, grasping the bottle by the neck, and pouring more brandy into the tumbler. Though speaking _sotto voce_, and not supposing himself overheard, he is, nevertheless--by a woman, who, coming forth from the house, has stepped silently behind him, there pausing. Odd-looking apparition she, seen upon the Wyeside; altogether unlike a native of it, but altogether like one born upon the banks of the Seine, and brought up to tread the Boulevards of Paris--like the latter from the crown of her head to the soles of her high-heeled boots, on whose toes she stands poised and balancing. In front of that ancient English manor-house, she seems grotesquely out of place--as much as a costermonger driving his moke-drawn cart among the Pyramids, or smoking a "Pickwick" by the side of the Sphinx. For all there is nothing mysterious, or even strange in her presence there. She is Lewin Murdoch's wife. If he has left his fortune in foreign lands, with the better part of his life and health, he has thence brought her, his better-half. Physically a fine-looking woman, despite some ravages due to time, and possibly more to crime. Tall and dark as the daughters of the Latinic race, with features beautiful in the past--even still attractive to those not repelled by the beguiling glances of sin. Such were hers, first given to him in a _cafe chantant_ of the Tuileries--oft afterwards repeated in _jardin, bois_, and _bals_ of the demi-monde, till at length she gave him her hand in the Eglise La Madeleine. Busied with his brandy, and again gazing at Llangorren, he has not yet seen her; nor is he aware of her proximity till hearing an exclamation:-- "_Eh, bien_?" He starts at the interrogatory, turning round. "You think too loud, Monsieur--that is if you wish to keep your thoughts to yourself. And you might--seeing that it's a love secret! May I ask who is this _she_ you're soliloquising about? Some of your old English _bonnes amies_, I suppose?" This, with an air of affected jealousy, she is far from feeling. In the heart of the _ex-cocotte_ there is no place for such a sentiment. "Got nothing to do with _bonnes amies_, young or old," he gruffly replies. "Just now I've got something else to think of than sweethearts. Enough occupation for my thoughts in the how I'm to support a wife--yourself, madame." "It wasn't me you meant. No, indeed. Some other, in whom you appear to feel a very profound interest." "There, you're right, it was one other, in whom I feel all that." "_Merci, Monsieur! Ma foi_! your candour deserves all thanks. Perhaps you'll extend it, and favour me with the lady's name? A lady, I presume. The grand Seigneur Lewin Murdock would not be giving his thoughts to less." Ignorance pretended. She knows, or surmises, to whom he has been giving them. For she has been watching him from a window, and observed the direction of his glances. And she has more than a suspicion as to the nature of his reflections; since she is well aware as he of that something besides a river separating them from Llangorren. "Her name?" she again asks, in tone of more demand, her eyes bent searchingly on his. Avoiding her glance, he still pulls away at his pipe, without making answer. "It is a love secret, then? I thought so. It's cruel of you, Lewin! This is the return for giving you--all I had to give!" She may well speak hesitatingly, and hint at a limited sacrifice. Only her hand; and it more than tenderly pressed by scores--ay hundreds--of others, before being bestowed upon him. No false pretence, however, on her part. He knew all that, or should have known it. How could he help? Olympe, the belle of the Jardin Mabille, was no obscurity in the _demi-monde_ of Paris--even in its days of glory under Napoleon le Petite. Her reproach is also a pretence, though possibly with some sting felt. She is drawing on to that term of life termed _passe_, and begins to feel conscious of it. He may be the same. Not that for his opinion she cares a straw--save in a certain sense, and for reasons altogether independent of slighted affection--the very purpose she is now working upon, and for which she needs to hold over him the power she has hitherto had. And well knows she how to retain it, rekindling love's fire when it seems in danger of dying out, either through appeal to his pity, or exciting his jealousy, which she can adroitly do, by her artful French ways and dark flashing eyes. As he looks in them now, the old flame flickers up, and he feels almost as much her slave as when he first became her husband. For all he does not show it. This day he is out of sorts with himself, and her and all the world besides; so instead of reciprocating her sham tenderness--as if knowing it such--he takes another swallow of brandy, and smokes on in silence. Now really incensed, or seeming so, she exclaims:-- "_Perfide_!" adding with a disdainful toss of the head, such as only the dames of the _demi-monde_ know how to give, "Keep your secret! What care I?" Then changing tone, "_Mon Dieu_! France--dear France! Why did I ever leave you?" "Because your dear France became too dear to live in." "Clever _double entendre_! No doubt you think it witty! Dear, or not, better a garret there--a room in its humblest _entresol_ than this. I'd rather serve in a cigar shop--keep a _gargot_ in the Faubourg Montmartre--than lead such a _triste_ life as we're now doing. Living in this wretched kennel of a house, that threatens to tumble on our heads!" "How would you like to live in that over yonder?" He nods towards Llangorren Court. "You are merry, Monsieur. But your jests are out of place--in presence of the misery around us." "You may some day," he goes on, without heeding her observation. "Yes; when the sky falls we may catch larks. You seem to forget that Mademoiselle Wynn is younger than either of us, and by the natural laws of life will outlive both. Must, unless she break her neck in the hunting field, get drowned out of a boat, or meet _some other mischance_." She pronounces the last three words slowly and with marked emphasis, pausing after she has spoken them, and looking fixedly in his face, as if to note their effect. Taking the meerschaum from his mouth, he returns her look--almost shuddering as his eyes meet hers, and he reads in them a glance such as might have been given by Messalina, or the murderess of Duncan. Hardened as his conscience has become through a long career of sin, it is yet tender in comparison with hers. And he knows it, knowing her history, or enough of it--her nature as well--to make him think her capable of anything, even the crime her speech seems to point to-- neither more nor less than-- He dares not think, let alone pronounce, the word. He is not yet up to that; though day by day, as his desperate fortunes press upon him, his thoughts are being familiarised with something akin to it--a dread, dark design, still vague, but needing not much to assume shape, and tempt to execution. And that the tempter is by his side he is more than half conscious. It is not the first time for him to listen to fell speech from those fair lips. To-day he would rather shun allusion to a subject so grave, yet so delicate. He has spent part of the preceding night at the Welsh Harp-- the tavern spoken of by Wingate--and his nerves are unstrung, yet not recovered from the revelry. Instead of asking her what she means by "some other mischance," he but remarks, with an air of careless indifference,-- "True, Olympe; unless something of that sort were to happen, there seems no help for us but to resign ourselves to patience, and live on expectations." "Starve on them, you mean?" This in a tone, and with a shrug, which seem to convey reproach for its weakness. "Well, _cherie_;" he rejoins, "we can at least feast our eyes on the source whence our fine fortunes are to come. And a pretty sight it is, isn't it? _Un coup d'oeil charmant_!" He again turns his eyes upon Llangorren, as also she, and for some time both are silent. Attractive at any time, the Court is unusually so on this same summer's day. For the sun, lighting up the verdant lawn, also shines upon a large white tent there erected--a marquee--from whose ribbed roof projects a signal staff, with flag floating at its peak. They have had no direct information of what all this is for--since to Lewin Murdock and his wife the society of Herefordshire is tabooed. But they can guess from the symbols that it is to be a garden party, or something of the sort, there often given. While they are still gazing its special kind is declared, by figures appearing upon the lawn and taking stand in groups before the tent. There are ladies gaily attired--in the distance looking like bright butterflies--some dressed _a la Diane_, with bows in hand, and quivers slung by their sides, the feathered shafts showing over their shoulders; a proportionate number of gentlemen attendant; while liveried servants stride to and fro erecting the ringed targets. Murdock himself cares little for such things. He has had his surfeit of fashionable life; not only sipped its sweets, but drank its dregs of bitterness. He regards Llangorren with something in his mind more substantial than its sports and pastimes. With different thoughts looks the Parisian upon them--in her heart a chagrin only known to those whose zest for the world's pleasure is of keenest edge, yet checked and baffled from indulgence--ambitions uncontrollable, but never to be attained. As Satan gazed back when hurled out of the Garden of Eden, so she at that scene upon the lawn of Llangorren. No _jardin_ of Paris--not the Bois itself--ever seemed to her so attractive as those grounds, with that aristocratic gathering--a heaven none of her kind can enter, and but few of her country. After long regarding it with envy in her eyes, and spleen in her soul-- tantalised, almost to torture--she faces towards her husband, saying-- "And you've told me, between all that and us, there's but one life--" "Two!" interrupts a voice--not his. Both turning, startled, behold--_Father Rogier_! Volume One, Chapter XII. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING. Father Rogier is a French priest of a type too well known over all the world--the Jesuitical. Spare of form, thin-lipped, nose with the cuticle drawn across it tight as drum parchment, skin dark and cadaverous, he looks Loyola from head to heel. He himself looks no one straight in the face. Confronted, his eyes fall to his feet, or turn to either side, not in timid abashment, but as those of one who feels himself a felon. And but for his habiliments he might well pass for such; though even the sacerdotal garb, and assumed air of sanctity, do not hinder the suspicion of a wolf in sheep's clothing--rather suggesting it. And in truth is he one; a very Pharisee--Inquisitor to boot, cruel and keen as ever sate in secret Council over an _Auto da Fe_. What is such a man doing in Herefordshire? What, in Protestant England? Time was, and not so long ago, when these questions would have been asked with curiosity, and some degree of indignation. As for instance, when our popular Queen added to her popularity, by somewhat ostentatiously declaring, that "no foreign priest should take tithe or toll in her dominions," even forbidding them their distinctive dress. Then they stole timidly, and sneakingly, through the streets, usually seen hunting in couples, and looking as if conscious their pursuit was criminal, or, at the least, illegal. All that is over now; the ban removed, the boast unkept--to all appearance forgotten! Now they stalk boldly abroad, or saunter in squads, exhibiting their shorn crowns and pallid faces, without fear or shame; instead, triumphantly flouting their vestments in public walks or parks, or loitering in the vestibules of convents and monasteries, which begin to show thick over the land--threatening us with a curse as that anterior to the time of bluff King Hal. No one now thinks it strange to see shovel-hatted priest, or sandalled monk--no matter in what part of England, nor would wonder at one of either being resident upon Wyeside. Father Rogier, one of the former, is there with similar motive, and for the same purpose, his sort are sent everywhere--to enslave the souls of men and get money out of their purses, in order that other men, princes, and priests like himself, may lead luxurious lives, without toil and by trickery. The same old story, since the beginning of the world, or man's presence upon it. The same craft as the rain maker of South Africa, or the medicine man of the North American Indian; differing only in some points of practice; the religious juggler of a higher civilisation, finding his readiest tools not in roots, snake-skins, and rattles, but the weakness of woman. Through this, as by sap and mine, many a strong citadel has been carried, after bidding defiance to the boldest and most determined assault. _Pere_ Rogier well knows all this; and by experience, having played the propagandist game with some success since his settling in Herefordshire. He has not been quite three years resident on Wyeside, and yet has contrived to draw around him a considerable coterie of weak-minded Marthas and Marys, built him a little chapel, with a snug dwelling-house, and is in a fair way of further feathering his nest. True, his neophytes are nearly all of the humbler class, and poor. But the Peter's pence count up in a remarkable manner, and are paid with a regularity which only blind devotion, or the zeal of religious partisanship, can exact. Fear of the Devil, and love of him, are like effective in drawing contributions to the box of the Rugg's Ferry chapel, and filling the pockets of its priest. And if he have no grand people among his flock, and few disciples of the class called middle, he can boast of at least two claiming to be genteel--the Murdocks. With the man no false assumption either; neither does he assume, or value it. Different the woman. Born in the Faubourg Montmartre, her father a common _ouvrier_, her mother a _blanchisseuse_--herself a beautiful girl--Olympe Renault soon found her way into a more fashionable quarter. The same ambition made her Lewin Murdock's wife, and has brought her on to England. For she did not many him without some knowledge of his reversionary interest in the land of which they have just been speaking, and at which they are still looking. That was part of the inducement held out for obtaining her hand; her heart he never had. That the priest knows something of the same, indeed all, is evident from the word he has respondingly pronounced. With step, silent and cat-like--his usual mode of progression--he has come upon them unawares, neither having note of his approach till startled by his voice. On hearing it, and seeing who, Murdock rises to his feet, as he does so saluting. Notwithstanding long years of a depraved life, his early training has been that of a gentleman, and its instincts at times return to him. Besides, born and brought up Roman Catholic, he has that respect for his priest, habitual to a proverb--would have, even if knowing the latter to be the veriest Pharisee that ever wore single-breasted black-coat. Salutations exchanged, and a chair brought out for the new comer to sit upon, Murdock demands explanation of the interrupting monosyllable, asking: "What do you mean, Father Rogier, by `two'?" "What I've said, M'sieu; that there are two between you and that over yonder, or soon will be--in time perhaps ten. A fair paysage it is!" he continues, looking across the river; "a very vale of Tempe, or Garden of the Hesperides. _Parbleu_! I never believed your England so beautiful. Ah! what's going on at Llangorren?" This as his eyes rest upon the tent, the flags, and gaily-dressed figures. "A _fete champetre_: Mademoiselle making, merry! In honour of the anticipated change, no doubt." "Still I don't comprehend," says Murdock, looking puzzled. "You speak in riddles, Father Rogier." "Riddles easily read, M'sieu. Of this particular one you'll find the interpretation there." This, pointing to a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of Mrs Murdock's left hand, put upon it by Murdock himself on the day he became her husband. He now comprehends--his quick-witted wife sooner. "Ha!" she exclaims, as if pricked by a pin, "Mademoiselle to be married?" The priest gives an assenting nod. "That's news to me," mutters Murdock, in a tone more like he was listening to the announcement of a death. "_Moi aussi_! Who, _Pere_? Not Monsieur Shenstone, after all?" The question shows how well she is acquainted with Miss Wynn--if not personally, with her surroundings and predilections! "No," answers the priest. "Not he." "Who then?" asked the two simultaneously. "A man likely to make many heirs to Llangorren--widen the breach between you and it--ah! to the impossibility of that ever being bridged." "_Pere Rogier_!" appeals Murdock, "I pray you speak out! Who is to do this? His name?" "_Le Capitaine Ryecroft_." "Captain Ryecroft! Who--what is he?" "An officer of Hussars--a fine-looking fellow--sort of combination of Mars and Apollo; strong as Hercules! As I've said, likely to be father to no end of sons and daughters, with Gwen Wynn for their mother. _Helas_! I can fancy seeing them now--at play over yonder, on the lawn!" "Captain Ryecroft!" repeats Murdock, musingly; "I never saw--never heard of the man!" "You hear of him now, and possibly see him too. No doubt he's among those gay toxophilites--Ha! no, he's nearer! What a strange coincidence! The old saw, `speak of the fiend.' There's _your_ fiend, Monsieur Murdock!" He points to a boat on the river with two men in it; one of them wearing a white cap. It is dropping down in the direction of Llangorren Court. "Which?" asks Murdock, mechanically. "He with the _chapeau blanc_. That's whom you have to fear. The other's but the waterman Wingate--honest fellow enough, whom no one need fear--unless indeed our worthy friend Coracle Dick, his competitor for the smiles of the pretty Mary Morgan. Yes, _mes amis_! Under that conspicuous _kepi_ you behold the future lord of Llangorren." "Never!" exclaims Murdock, angrily gritting his teeth. "Never!" The French priest and ci-devant French courtesan exchange secret, but significant, glances; a pleased expression showing on the faces of both. "You speak excitedly, M'sieu," says the priest, "emphatically, too. But how is it to be hindered?" "I don't know," sourly rejoins Murdock; "I suppose it can't be," he adds, drawing back, as if conscious of having committed himself. "Never mind, now; let's drop the disagreeable subject. You'll stay to dinner with us, Father Rogier?" "If not putting you to inconvenience." "Nay; it's you who'll be inconvenienced--starved, I should rather say. The butchers about here are not of the most amiable type; and, if I mistake not, our _menu_ for to-day is a very primitive one--bacon and potatoes, with some greens from the old garden." "Monsieur Murdock! It's not the fare, but the fashion, which makes a meal enjoyable. A crust and welcome is to me better cheer than a banquet with a grudging host at the head of the table. Besides, your English bacon is a most estimable dish, and with your succulent cabbages delectable. With a bit of Wye salmon to precede, and a pheasant to follow, it were food to satisfy Lucullus himself." "Ah! true," assents the broken-down gentleman, "with the salmon and pheasant. But where are they? My fishmonger, who is, conjointly also a game-dealer, is at present as much out with me as is the butcher; I suppose, from my being too much in with them--in their books. Still, they have not ceased acquaintance, so far as calling is concerned. That they do with provoking frequency. Even this morning, before I was out of bed, I had the honour of a visit from both the gentlemen. Unfortunately, they brought neither fish nor meat; instead, two sheets of that detestable blue paper, with red lines and rows of figures--an arithmetic not nice to be bothered with at one's breakfast. So, _Pere_; I am sorry I can't offer you any salmon; and as for pheasant--you may not be aware, that it is out of season." "It's never out of season, any more than barn-door fowl; especially if a young last year's _coq_, that hasn't been successful in finding a mate." "But it's close time now," urges the Englishman, stirred by his old instincts of gentleman sportsman. "Not to those who know how to open it," returns the Frenchman, with a significant shrug. "And suppose we do that to-day?" "I don't understand. Will your Reverence enlighten me?" "Well, M'sieu; being Whit-Monday, and coming to pay you a visit, I thought you mightn't be offended by my bringing along with me a little present--for Madame here--that we're talking of--salmon and pheasant." The husband, more than the wife, looks incredulous. Is the priest jesting? Beneath the _froc_, fitting tight his thin spare form, there is nothing to indicate the presence of either fish or bird. "Where are they?" asks Murdock mechanically. "You say you've brought them along?" "Ah! that was metaphorical. I meant to say I had sent them. And if I mistake not, they are near now. Yes; there's my messenger!" He points to a man making up the glen, threading his way through the tangle of wild bushes that grow along the banks of the rivulet. "Coracle Dick!" exclaims Murdock, recognising the poacher. "The identical individual," answers the priest, adding, "who, though a poacher, and possibly has been something worse, is not such a bad fellow in his way--for certain purposes. True, he's neither the most devout nor best behaved of my flock; still a useful individual, especially on Fridays, when one has to confine himself to a fish diet. I find him convenient in other ways as well; as so might you, Monsieur Murdock-- some day. Should you ever have need of a strong hard hand, with a heart in correspondence, Richard Dempsey possesses both, and would no doubt place them at your service--for a consideration." While Murdock is cogitating on what the last words are meant to convey, the individual so recommended steps upon the ground. A stout, thick-set fellow, with a shock of black curly hair coming low down, almost to his eyes, thus adding to their sinister and lowering look. For all a face not naturally uncomely, but one on which crime has set its stamp, deep and indelible. His garb is such as gamekeepers usually wear, and poachers almost universally affect, a shooting coat of velveteen, corduroy smalls, and sheepskin gaiters buttoned over thick-soled shoes iron-tipped at the toes. In the ample skirt pockets of the coat--each big as a game-bag-- appear two protuberances, that about balance one another--the present of which the priest has already delivered the invoice--in the one being a salmon "blotcher" weighing some three or four pounds, in the other a young cock pheasant. Having made obeisance to the trio in the grounds of Glyngog, he is about drawing them forth when the priest prevents him, exclaiming:-- "_Arretez_! They're not commodities that keep well in the sun. Should a water-bailiff, or one of the Llangorren gamekeepers chance to set eyes on them, they'd spoil at once. Those lynx-eyed fellows can see a long way, especially on a day bright as this. So, worthy Coracle, before uncarting, you'd better take them back to the kitchen." Thus instructed, the poacher strides off round to the rear of the house; Mrs Murdock entering by the front door to give directions about dressing the dinner. Not that she intends to take any hand in cooking it--not she. That would be _infra dig_ for the _ancien belle of Mabille_. Poor as is the establishment of Glyngog, it can boast of a plain cook, with a _slavey_ to assist. The other two remain outside, the guest joining his host in a glass of brandy and water. More than one; for Father Rogier, though French, can drink like a born Hibernian. Nothing of the Good Templar in him. After they have been for nigh an hour hobnobbing, conversing, Murdock still fighting shy of the subject, which is nevertheless uppermost in the minds of both, the priest once more approaches it, saying:-- "_Parbleu_! They appear to be enjoying themselves over yonder!" He is looking at the lawn where the bright forms are flitting to and fro. "And most of all, I should say, Monsieur White Cap--foretasting the sweets of which he'll ere long enter into full enjoyment; when he becomes master of Llangorren." "That--never!" exclaims Murdock, this time adding an oath. "Never while I live. When I'm dead--" "_Diner_!" interrupts a female voice from the house, that of its mistress seen standing on the doorstep. "Madame summons us," says the priest, "we must in, M'sieu. While picking the bones of the pheasant, you can complete your unfinished speech. _Allons_!" Volume One, Chapter XIII. AMONG THE ARROWS. The invited to the archery meeting have nearly all arrived, and the shooting has commenced; half a dozen arrows in the air at a time, making for as many targets. Only a limited number of ladies compete for the first score, each having a little coterie of acquaintances at her back. Gwen Wynn herself is in this opening contest. Good with the bow, as at the oar--indeed with county celebrity as an archer--carrying the champion badge of her club--it is almost a foregone conclusion she will come off victorious. Soon, however, those who are backing her begin to anticipate disappointment. She is not shooting with her usual skill, nor yet earnestness. Instead, negligently, and to all appearance, with thoughts abstracted; her eyes every now and then straying over the ground, scanning the various groups, as if in search of a particular individual. The gathering is large--nearly a hundred people present--and one might come or go without attracting observation. She evidently expects one to come who is not yet there; and oftener than elsewhere her glances go towards the boat-dock, as if the personage expected should appear in that direction. There is a nervous restlessness in her manner, and after each reconnaissance of this kind, an expression of disappointment on her countenance. It is not unobserved. A gentleman by her side notes it, and with some suspicion of its cause--a suspicion that pains him. It is George Shenstone; who is attending on her, handing the arrows--in short, acting as her _aide-de-camp_. Neither is he adroit in the exercise of his duty; instead performs it bunglingly; his thoughts preoccupied, and eyes wandering about. His glances, however, are sent in the opposite direction--to the gate entrance of the park, visible from the place where the targets are set up. They are both "prospecting" for the selfsame individual, but with very different ideas--one eagerly anticipating his arrival, the other as earnestly hoping he may not come. For the expected one is a gentleman-- no other than Vivian Ryecroft. Shenstone knows the Hussar officer has been invited; and, however hoping or wishing it, has but little faith he will fail. Were it himself no ordinary obstacle could prevent his being present at that archery meeting, any more than would five-barred gate, or bullfinch, hinder him from keeping up with hounds. As time passes without any further arrivals, and the tardy guest has not yet put in appearance, Shenstone begins to think he will this day have Miss Wynn to himself, or at least without any very formidable competitor. There are others present who seek her smiles--some aspiring to her hand--but none he fears so much as the one still absent. Just as he is becoming calm, and confident, he is saluted by a gentleman of the genus "swell," who, approaching, drawls out the interrogatory:-- "Who is that fella, Shenstone?" "What fellow?" "He with the vewy peculya head gear? Indian affair--_topee_, I bewieve they call it." "Where?" asks Shenstone, starting and staring to all sides. "Yondaw! Appwoaching from the diwection of the rivaw. Looks a fwesh awival. I take it, he must have come by bawt! Knaw him?" George Shenstone, strong man though he be, visibly trembles. Were Gwen Wynn at that moment to face about, and aim one of her arrows at his breast, it would not bring more pallor upon his cheeks, nor pain to his heart. For he wearing the "peculya head gear" is the man he most fears, and whom he had hoped not to see this day. So much is he affected, he does not answer the question put to him; nor indeed has he opportunity, as just then Miss Wynn, sighting the _topee_ too, suddenly turning, says to him:-- "George! be good enough to take charge of these things." She holds her bow with an arrow she had been affixing to the string. "Yonder's a gentleman just arrived; who you know is a stranger. Aunt will expect me to receive him. I'll be back soon as I've discharged my duty." Delivering the bow and unspent shaft, she glides off without further speech or ceremony. He stands looking after; in his eyes anything but a pleased expression. Indeed, sullen, almost angry, as watching her every movement, he notes the manner of her reception--greeting the new comer with a warmth and cordiality he, Shenstone, thinks uncalled for, however much stranger the man may be. Little irksome to her seems the discharge of that so-called duty; but so exasperating to the baronet's son, he feels like crushing the bow stick between his fingers, or snapping it in twain across his knee! As he stands with eyes glaring upon them, he is again accosted by his inquisitive acquaintance, who asks: "What's the matter, Jawge? Yaw haven't answered my intewogatowy!" "What was it? I forget." "Aw, indeed! That's stwange. I merely wished to know who Mr White Cap is?" "Just what I'd like to know myself. All I can tell you is, that he's an army fellow--in the Cavalry I believe--by name Ryecroft." "Aw yas; Cavalwy. That's evident by the bend of his legs. Wyquoft-- Wyquoft, you say?" "So he calls himself--a captain of Hussars--his own story." This in a tone and with a shrug of insinuation. "But yaw don't think he's an adventuwer?" "Can't say whether he is, or not." "Who's his endawser? How came he intwoduced at Llangowen?" "That I can't tell you." He could though; for Miss Wynn, true to her promise, has made him acquainted with the circumstances of the river adventure, though not those leading to it; and he, true to his, has kept them a secret. In a sense therefore, he could not tell, and the subterfuge is excusable. "By Jawve! The Light Bob appears to have made good use of his time-- however intwoduced. Miss Gwen seems quite familiaw with him; and yondaw the little Lees shaking hands, as though the two had been acquainted evaw since coming out of their cwadles! See! They're dwagging him up to the ancient spinster, who sits enthawned in her chair like a queen of the Tawnament times. Vewy mediaeval the whole affair--vewy!" "Instead, very modern; in my opinion, disgustingly so!" "Why d'y aw say that, Jawge?" "Why! Because in either olden or mediaeval times such a thing couldn't have occurred--here in Herefordshire." "What thing, pway?" "A man admitted into good society without endorsement or introduction. Now-a-days, any one may be so; claim acquaintance with a lady, and force his company upon her, simply from having had the chance to pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief, or offer his umbrella in a skiff of a shower!" "But, shawly, that isn't how the gentleman yondaw made acquaintance with the fair Gwendoline?" "Oh! I don't say that," rejoins Shenstone with forced attempt at a smile--more natural, as he sees Miss Wynn separate from the group they are gazing at, and come back to reclaim her bow. Better satisfied, now, he is rather worried by his importunate friend, and to get rid of him adds: "If you are really desirous to know how Miss Wynn became acquainted with him, you can ask the lady herself." Not for all the world would the swell put that question to Gwen Wynn. It would not be safe; and thus snubbed he saunters away, before she is up to the spot. Ryecroft, left with Miss Linton, remains in conversation with her. It is not his first interview; for several times already has he been a visitor at Llangorren--introduced by the young ladies as the gentleman who, when the pleasure-boat was caught in a dangerous whirl, out of which old Joseph was unable to extricate it, came to their rescue-- possibly to the saving of their lives! Thus, the version of the adventure, vouchsafed to the aunt--sufficient to sanction his being received at the Court. And the ancient toast of Cheltenham has been charmed with him. In the handsome Hussar officer she beholds the typical hero of her romance reading; so much like it, that Lord Lutestring has long ago gone out of her thoughts--passed from her memory as though he had been but a musical sound. Of all who bend before her this day, the worship of none is so welcome as that of the martial stranger. Resuming her bow, Gwen shoots no better than before. Her thoughts, instead of being concentrated on the painted circles, as her eyes, are half the time straying over her shoulders to him behind, still in a _tete-a-tete_ with the aunt. Her arrows fly wild and wide, scarce one sticking in the straw. In fine, among all the competitors, she counts lowest score--the poorest she has herself ever made. But what matters it? She is only too pleased when her quiver is empty, and she can have excuse to return to Miss Linton, on some question connected with the hospitalities of the house. Observing all this, and much more besides, George Shenstone feels aggrieved--indeed exasperated--so terribly, it takes all his best breeding to withhold him from an exhibition of bad behaviour. He might not succeed were he to remain much longer on the ground--which he does not. As if misdoubting his power of restraint, and fearing to make a fool of himself, he too frames excuse, and leaves Llangorren long before the sports come to a close. Not rudely, or with any show of spleen. He is a gentleman, even in his anger; and bidding a polite, and formal, adieu to Miss Linton, with one equally ceremonious, but more distant, to Miss Wynn, he slips round to the stables, orders his horse, leaps into the saddle, and rides off. Many the day he has entered the gates of Llangorren with a light and happy heart--this day he goes out of them with one heavy and sad. If missed from the archery meeting, it is not by Miss Wynn. Instead, she is glad of his being gone. Notwithstanding the love passion for another now occupying her heart--almost filling it--there is still room there for the gentler sentiment of pity. She knows how Shenstone suffers--how could she help knowing? and pities him. Never more than at this same moment, despite that distant, half disdainful adieu, vouchsafed to her at parting; by him intended to conceal his thoughts, as his sufferings, while but the better revealing them. How men underrate the perception of women! In matters of this kind a very intuition. None keener than that of Gwen Wynn. She knows why he has gone so short away,--well as if he had told her. And with the compassionate thought still lingering, she heaves a sigh; sad as she sees him ride out through the gate--going in reckless gallop--but succeeded by one of relief, soon as he is out of sight! In an instant after, she is gay and gladsome as ever; once more bending the bow, and making the catgut twang. But now shooting straight-- hitting the target every time, and not unfrequently lodging a shaft in the "gold." For he who now attends on her, not only inspires confidence, but excites her to the display of skill. Captain Ryecroft has taken George Shenstone's place, as her aide-de-camp; and while he hands the arrows, she spending them, others of a different kind pass between--the shafts of Cupid--of which there is a full quiver in the eyes of both. Volume One, Chapter XIV. BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH. Naturally, Captain Ryecroft is the subject of speculation among the archers at Llangorren. A man of his mien would be so anywhere--if stranger. The old story of the unknown knight suddenly appearing on the tourney's field with closed visor, only recognisable by a love-lock or other favour of the lady whose cause he comes to champion. He, too, wears a distinctive badge--in the white cap. For though our tale is of modern time, it antedates that when Brown began to affect the _pugaree_--sham of Manchester Mills--as an appendage to his cheap straw hat. That on the head of Captain Ryecroft is the regular forage cap with quilted cover. Accustomed to it in India--whence he has but lately returned--he adheres to it in England without thought of its attracting attention and as little caring whether it do or not. It does, however. Insular, we are supremely conservative--some might call it "caddish"--and view innovations with a jealous eye; as witness the so-called "moustache movement" not many years ago, and the fierce controversy it called forth. For other reasons the officer of Hussars is at this same archery gathering a cynosure of eyes. There is a perfume of romance about him; in the way he has been introduced to the ladies of Llangorren; a question asked by others besides the importunate friend of George Shenstone. The true account of the affair with the drunken foresters has not got abroad--these keeping dumb about their own discomfiture; while Jack Wingate, a man of few words, and on this special matter admonished to silence, has been equally close-mouthed; Joseph also mute for reasons already mentioned. Withal, a vague story has currency in the neighbourhood, of a boat, with two young ladies, in danger of being capsized--by some versions actually upset--and the ladies rescued from drowning by a stranger who chanced to be salmon fishing near by--his name, Ryecroft. And as this tale also circulates among the archers at Llangorren, it is not strange that some interest should attach to the supposed hero of it, now present. Still, in an assemblage so large, and composed of such distinguished people--many of whom are strangers to one another--no particular personage can be for long an object of special concern; and if Captain Ryecroft continue to attract observation, it is neither from curiosity as to how he came there, nor the peculiarity of his head-dress, but the dark handsome features beneath it. On these more than one pair of bright eyes occasionally become fixed, regarding them with admiration. None so warmly as those of Gwen Wynn; though hers neither openly nor in a marked manner. For she is conscious of being under the surveillance of other eyes, and needs to observe the proprieties. In which she succeeds; so well, that no one watching her could tell, much less say, there is aught in her behaviour to Captain Ryecroft beyond the hospitality of host--which in a sense she is--to guest claiming the privileges of a stranger. Even when during an interregnum of the sports the two go off together, and, after strolling for a time through the grounds, are at length seen to step inside the summer-house, it may cause, but does not merit, remark. Others are acting similarly, sauntering in pairs, loitering in shady places, or sitting on rustic benches. Good society allows the freedom, and to its credit. That which is corrupt alone may cavil at it, and shame the day when such confidence be abused and abrogated! Side by side they take stand in the little pavilion, under the shadow of its painted zinc roof. It may not have been all chance their coming thither--no more the archery party itself. That Gwendoline Wynn, who suggested giving it, can alone tell. But standing there with their eyes bent on the river, they are for a time silent--so much, that each can hear the beating of the other's heart--both brimful of love. At such moment one might suppose there could be no reserve or reticence, but confession full, candid, and mutual. Instead, at no time is this farther off. If _le joie fait peur_, far more _l'amour_. And with all that has passed is there fear between them. On her part springing from a fancy she has been over forward--in her gushing gratitude for that service done, given too free expression to it, and needs being more reserved now. On his side speech is stayed by a reflection somewhat akin, with others besides. In his several calls at the Court his reception has been both welcome and warm. Still, not beyond the bounds of well-bred hospitality. But why on each and every occasion has he found a gentleman there--the same every time--George Shenstone by name? There before him, and staying after! And this very day, what meant Mr Shenstone by that sudden and abrupt departure? Above all, why her distraught look, with the sigh accompanying it, as the baronet's son went galloping out of the gate? Having seen the one, and heard the other, Captain Ryecroft has misinterpreted both. No wonder his reluctance to speak words of love. And so for a time they are silent, the dread of misconception, with consequent fear of committal, holding their lips sealed. On a simple utterance now may hinge their life's happiness, or its misery. Nor is it so strange, that in a moment fraught with such mighty consequence, conversation should be not only timid, but commonplace. They who talk of love's eloquence, but think of it in its lighter phases--perhaps its lying. When truly, deeply, felt it is dumb, as devout worshipper in the presence of the divinity worshipped. Here, side by side, are two highly organised beings--a man handsome and courageous, a woman beautiful and aught but timid--both well up in the accomplishments, and gifted with the graces of life--loving each other to their souls' innermost depths, yet embarrassed in manner, and constrained in speech, as though they were a couple of rustics! More; for Corydon would fling his arms around his Phyllis, and give her an eloquent smack, which she with like readiness would return. Very different the behaviour of these in the pavilion. They stand for a time silent as statues--though not without a tremulous motion, scarce perceptible--as if the amorous electricity around stifled their breathing, for the time hindering speech. And when at length this comes, it is of no more significance than what might be expected between two persons lately introduced, and feeling but the ordinary interest in one another! It is the lady who speaks first:-- "I understand you've been but a short while resident in our neighbourhood, Captain Ryecroft?" "Not quite three months, Miss Wynn. Only a week or two before I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance." "Thank you for calling it a pleasure. Not much in the manner, I should say; but altogether the contrary," she laughs, adding-- "And how do you like our Wye?" "Who could help liking it?" "There's been much said of its scenery--in books and newspapers. You really admire it?" "I do, indeed." His preference is pardonable under the circumstances. "I think it the finest in the world." "What! you such a great traveller! In the tropics too; upon rivers that run between groves of evergreen trees, and over sands of gold! Do you really mean that, Captain Ryecroft?" "Really--truthfully. Why not, Miss Wynn?" "Because I supposed those grand rivers we read of were all so much superior to our little Herefordshire stream; in flow of water, scenery, everything--" "Nay, not everything!" he says, interruptingly. "In volume of water they may be; but far from it in other respects. In some it is superior to them all--Rhine, Rhone, ah! Hippocrene itself!" His tongue is at length getting loosed. "What other respects?" she asks. "The forms reflected in it," he answers hesitatingly. "Not those of vegetation! Surely our oaks, elms, and poplars cannot be compared with the tall palms and graceful tree ferns of the tropics?" "No; not those." "Our buildings neither, if photography tells truth, which it should. Those wonderful structures--towers, temples, pagodas--of which it has given us the _fac similes_--far excel anything we have on the Wye--or anything in England. Even our Tintern, which we think so very grand, were but as nothing to them. Isn't that so?" "True," he says, assentingly. "One must admit the superiority of Oriental architecture." "But you've not told me what form our English river reflects, so much to your admiration!" He has a fine opportunity for poetical reply. The image is in his mind--her own--with the word upon his tongue, "woman's." But he shrinks from giving it utterance. Instead, retreating from the position he had assumed, he rejoins evasively:-- "The truth is, Miss Wynn, I've had a surfeit of tropical scenery, and was only too glad once more to feast my eyes on the hill and dale landscapes of dear old England. I know none to compare with these of the Wyeside." "It's very pleasing to hear you say that--to me especially. It's but natural I should love our beautiful Wye--I, born on its banks, brought up on them, and, I suppose, likely to--" "What?" he asks, observing that she has paused in her speech. "Be buried on them!" she answers, laughingly. She intended to have said "Stay on them for the rest of my life." "You'll think that a very grave conclusion," she adds, keeping up the laugh. "One at all events very far off--it is to be hoped. An eventuality not to arise, till after you've passed many long and happy days--whether on the Wye, or elsewhere." "Ah! who can tell? The future is a sealed book to all of us." "Yours need not be--at least as regards its happiness. I think that is assured." "Why do you say so, Captain Ryecroft?" "Because it seems to me, as though you had yourself the making of it." He saying no more than he thinks; far less. For he believes she could make fate itself--control it, as she can his. And as he would now confess to her--is almost on the eve of it--but hindered by recalling that strange look and sigh sent after Shenstone. His fond fancies, the sweet dreams he has been indulging in ever since making her acquaintance, may have been but illusions. She may be playing with him, as he would with a fish on his hook. As yet, no word of love has passed her lips. Is there thought of it in her heart--for him? "In what way? What mean you?" she asks, her liquid eyes turned upon him with a look of searching interrogation. The question staggers him. He does not answer it as he would, and again replies evasively--somewhat confusedly. "Oh! I only meant, Miss Wynn--that you so young--so--well, with all the world before you--surely have your happiness in your own hands." If he knew how much it is in his he would speak more courageously, and possibly with greater plainness. But he knows not, nor does she tell him. She, too, is cautiously retentive, and refrains taking advantage of his words, full of suggestion. It will need another _seance_--possibly more than one--before the real confidence can be exchanged between them. Natures like theirs do not rush into confession as the common kind. With them it is as with the wooing of eagles. She simply rejoins: "I wish it were," adding with a sigh, "Far from it, I fear." He feels as if he had drifted into a dilemma--brought about by his own _gaucherie_--from which something seen up the river, on the opposite side, offers an opportunity to escape--a house. It is the quaint old habitation of Tudor times. Pointing to it, he says: "A very odd building, that! If I've been rightly informed, Miss Wynn, it belongs to a relative of yours?" "I have a cousin who lives there." The shadow suddenly darkening her brow, with the slightly explicit rejoinder, tells him he is again on dangerous ground. He attributes it to the character he has heard of Mr Murdock. His cousin is evidently disinclined to converse about him. And she is; the shadow still staying. If she knew what is at that moment passing within Glyngog--could but hear the conversation carried on at its dining table--it might be darker. It is dark enough in her heart, as on her face--possibly from a presentiment. Ryecroft more than ever embarrassed, feels it a relief when Ellen Lees, with the Rev Mr Musgrave as her cavalier attendant--they, too, straying solitarily--approach near enough to be hailed, and invited into the pavilion. So the dialogue between the cautious lovers comes to an end--to both of them unsatisfactory enough. For this day their love must remain unrevealed; though never man and woman more longed to learn the sweet secret of each other's heart. Volume One, Chapter XV. A SPIRITUAL ADVISER. While the sports are in progress outside Llangorren Court, inside Glyngog House is being eaten that dinner to commence with salmon in season and end with pheasant out. It is early; but the Murdocks, often glad to eat what Americans call a "square meal," have no set hours for eating, while the priest is not particular. In the faces of the trio seated at the table, a physiognomist might find interesting study, and note expressions that would puzzle Lavater himself. Nor could they be interpreted by the conversation which, at first, only refers to topics of a trivial nature. But now and then, a _mot_ of double meaning let down by Rogier, and a glance surreptitiously exchanged between him and his countryman, tell that the thoughts of these two are running upon themes different from those about which are their words. Murdock, by no means of a trusting disposition, but ofttimes furiously jealous--has nevertheless, in this respect, no suspicion of the priest, less from confidence than a sort of contempt for the pallid puny creature, whom he feels he could crush in a moment of mad anger. And broken though he be, the stalwart, and once strong, Englishman could still do that. To imagine such a man as Rogier a rival in the affections of his own wife, would be to be little himself. Besides, he holds fast to that proverbial faith in the spiritual adviser, not always well founded--in his case certainly misplaced. Knowing nought of this, however, their exchanged looks, however markedly significant, escape his observation. Even if he did observe, he could not read in them aught relating to love. For, this day there is not; the thoughts of both are absorbed by a different passion--cupidity. They are bent upon a scheme of no common magnitude, but grand and comprehensive--neither more nor less than to get possession of an estate worth 10,000 pounds a year-- that Llangorren. They know its value as well as the steward who gives receipts for its rents. It is no new notion with them; but one for some time entertained, and steps considered. Still nothing definite either conceived, or determined on. A task, so herculean, as dangerous and difficult, will need care in its conception, and time for its execution. True, it might be accomplished, almost instantaneously with six inches of steel, or as many drops of belladonna. Nor would two of the three seated at the table stick at employing such means. Olympe Renault, and Gregoire Rogier have entertained thoughts of them--if not more. In the third is the obstructor. Lewin Murdock would cheat at dice and cards, do moneylenders without remorse, and tradesmen without mercy, ay, steal, if occasion offered; but murder--that is different--being a crime not only unpleasant to contemplate, but perilous to commit. He would be willing to rob Gwendoline Wynn of her property--glad to do it--if he only knew how--but to take away her life, he is not yet up to that. But he is drawing up to it, urged by desperate circumstances, and spurred on by his wife, who loses no opportunity of bewailing their broken fortunes, and reproaching him for them; at her back the Jesuit secretly instructing, and dictating. Not till this day have they found him in the mood for being made more familiar with their design. Whatever his own disposition, his ear has been hitherto deaf to their hints, timidly, and ambiguously given. But to-day things appear more promising, as evinced by his angry exclamation "Never!" Hence their delight at hearing it. During the earlier stages of the dinner, as already said, they converse about ordinary subjects, like the lovers in the pavilion, silent upon that paramount in their minds. How different the themes--as love itself from murder! And just as the first word was unspoken in the summer-house at Llangorren, so is the last unheard in the dining-room of Glyngog. While the blotcher is being carved with a spoon--there is no fish slice among the chattels of Mr Murdock--the priest in good appetite, and high glee, pronounces it "crimp." He speaks English like a native, and is even up in its provincialisms; few in Herefordshire whose dialect is of the purest. The phrase of the fishmonger received smilingly, the salmon is distributed and handed across the table; the attendance of the slavey, with claws not over clean, and ears that might be unpleasantly sharp, having been dispensed with. There is wine without stint; for although Murdoch's town tradesmen may be hard of heart, in the Welsh Harp there is a tender string he can still play upon; the Boniface of the Rugg's Ferry hostelry having a belief in his _post obit_ expectations. Not such an indifferent wine either, but some of the choicest vintage. The guests of the Harp, however rough in external appearance and rude in behaviour--have wonderfully refined ideas about drink, and may be often heard calling for "fizz"--some of them as well acquainted with the qualities of Moet and Cliquot, as a connoisseur of the most fashionable club. Profiting by their aesthetic tastes, Lewin Murdock is enabled to set wines upon his table of the choicest brands. Light Bordeaux first with the fish, then sherry with the heavier greens and bacon, followed by champagne as they get engaged upon the pheasant. At this point the conversation approaches a topic, hitherto held in reserve, Murdock himself starting it:-- "So, my cousin Gwen's going to get married, eh! are you sure of that, Father Rogier?" "I wish I were as sure of going to heaven." "But what sort of man is he? you haven't told us." "Yes, I have. You forget my description, Monsieur--cross between Mars and Phoebus--strength herculean; sure to be father to a progeny numerous as that which spring from the head of Medusa--enough of them to make heirs for Llangorren to the end of time--keep you out of the property if you lived to be the age of Methuselah. Ah! a fine-looking fellow, I can assure you; against whom the baronet's son, with his rubicund cheeks and hay-coloured hair, wouldn't stand the slightest chance--even were there nothing: more to recommend the martial stranger. But there is." "What more?" "The mode of his introduction to the lady--that quite romantic." "How was he introduced?" "Well, he made her acquaintance on the water. It appears Mademoiselle Wynn and her companion Lees, were out on the river for a row alone. Unusual that! Thus out, some fellows--Forest of Dean dwellers--offered them insult; from which a gentleman angler, who chanced to be whipping the stream close by, saved them--he no other than _le Capitaine Ryecroft_. With such commencement of acquaintance, a man couldn't be much worth, who didn't know how to improve it--even to terminating in marriage if he wished. And with such a rich heiress as Mademoiselle Gwendoline Wynn--to say nought of her personal charms--there are few men who wouldn't wish it so to end. That he, the Hussar officer, captain, colonel, or whatever his rank, does, I've good reason to believe, as also that he will succeed in accomplishing his desires; no more doubt of it than of my being seated at this table. Yes; sure as I sit here that man will be the master of Llangorren." "I suppose he will;" "must," rejoins Murdock, drawing out the words as though not greatly concerned, one way, or the other. Olympe looks dissatisfied, but not Rogier nor she, after a glance from the priest, which seems to say "Wait." He himself intends waiting till the drink has done its work. Taking the hint she remains silent, her countenance showing calm, as with the content of innocence, while in her heart is the guilt of hell, and the deceit of the devil. She preserves her composure all through, and soon as the last course is ended, with a show of dessert placed upon the table--poor and _pro forma_--obedient to a look from Rogier, with a slight nod in the direction of the door, she makes her _conge_, and retires. Murdock lights his meerschaum, the priest one of his paper cigarettes-- of which he carries a case--and for some time they sit smoking and drinking; talking, too, but upon matters with no relation to that uppermost in their minds. They seem to fear touching it, as though it were a thing to contaminate. It is only after repeatedly emptying their glasses, their courage comes up to the standard required; that of the Frenchman first; who, nevertheless, approaches the delicate subject with cautious circumlocution. "By the way, M'sieu," he says, "we've forgotten what we were conversing about, when summoned to dinner--a meal I've greatly enjoyed-- notwithstanding your depreciation of the _menu_. Indeed, a very _bonne bouche_ your English bacon, and the greens excellent, as also the _pommes de terre_. You were speaking of some event, or circumstance, to be conditional on your death. What is it? Not the deluge, I hope! True, your Wye is subject to sudden floods; might it have ought to do with them?" "Why should it?" asks Murdock, not comprehending the drift. "Because people sometimes get drowned in these inundations; indeed, often. Scarce a week passes without some one falling into the river, and there remaining, at least till life is extinct. What with its whirls and rapids, it's a very dangerous stream. I wonder at Mademoiselle Wynne venturing so courageously--so _carelessly_ upon it." The peculiar intonation of the last speech, with emphasis on the word carelessly, gives Murdock a glimpse of what it is intended to point to. "She's got courage enough," he rejoins, without appearing to comprehend. "About her carelessness, I don't know." "But the young lady certainly is careless--recklessly so. That affair of her going out alone is proof of it. What followed may make her more cautious; still, boating is a perilous occupation, and boats, whether for pleasure or otherwise, are awkward things to manage--fickle and capricious as women themselves. Suppose hers should some day go to the bottom she being in it?" "That would be bad." "Of course it would. Though, Monsieur Murdock, many men situated as you, instead of grieving over such an accident, would but rejoice at it." "No doubt they would. But what's the use of talking of a thing not likely to happen?" "Oh, true! Still, boat accidents being of such common occurrence, one is as likely to befall Mademoiselle Wynn as anybody else. A pity if it should--a misfortune! But so is the other thing." "What other thing?" "That such a property as Llangorren should be in the hands of heretics, having but a lame title too. If what I've heard be true, you yourself have as much right to it as your cousin. It were better it belonged to a true son of the Church, as I know you to be, M'sieu." Murdock receives the compliment with a grimace. He is no hypocrite; still with all his depravity he has a sort of respect for religion, or rather its outward forms--regularly attends Rogier's chapel, and goes through all the ceremonies and genuflexions, just as the Italian bandit after cutting a throat will drop on his knees and repeat a _paternoster_ at hearing the distant bell of the Angelus. "A very poor one," he replies, with a half smile, half grin. "In a worldly sense, you mean? I'm aware, you're not very rich." "In more senses than that. Your Reverence, I've been a great sinner, I admit." "Admission is a good sign--giving promise of repentance, which need never come too late if a man be disposed to it. It is a deep sin the Church cannot condone--a dark crime indeed." "Oh, I haven't done anything deserving the name. Only such as a great many others." "But you might be tempted some day. Whether or not it's my duty, as your spiritual adviser, to point out the true doctrine--how the Vatican views such things. It's after all only a question of balance between good and evil; that is, how much evil a man may have done, and the amount of good he may do. This world is a ceaseless war between God and the devil; and those who wage it in the cause of the former have often to employ the weapons of the latter. In our service the end justifies the means, even though these be what the world calls criminal--ay, even to the taking of life, else why should the great and good Loyola have counselled drawing the sword, himself using it?" "True," grunts Murdock, smoking hard, "you're a great theologian, Father Rogier. I confess ignorance in such matters; still, I see reason in what you say." "You may see it clearer if I set the application before you. As for instance, if a man have the right to a certain property, or estate, and is kept out of it by a quibble, any steps he might take to possess himself would be justifiable providing he devote a portion of his gains to the good cause--that is, upholding the true faith, and so benefiting humanity at large. Such an act is held by the best of our Church authorities to compensate for any sin committed--supposing the money donation sufficient to make the amount of good it may do preponderate over the evil. And such a man would not only merit absolution, but freely receive it. Now, Monsieur, do you comprehend me?" "Quite," says Murdock, taking the pipe from his mouth and gulping down a half tumbler of brandy--for he has dropped the wine. Withal, he trembles at the programme thus metaphorically put before him, and fears admitting the application to himself. Soon the more potent spirit takes away his last remnant of timidity, which the tempter perceiving, says:-- "You say you have sinned, Monsieur. And if it were only for that you ought to make amends." "In what way could I?" "The way I've been speaking of. Bestow upon the Church the means of doing good, and so deserve indulgence." "Ah! where am I to find this means?" "On the other side of the river." "You forget that there's more than the stream between." "Not much to a man who would be true to himself." "I'm that man all over." The brandy has made him bold, at length untying his tongue, while unsteadying it. "Yes, Pere Rogier; I'm ready for anything that will release me from this damnable fix--debt over the ears--duns every day. Ha! I'd be true to myself, never fear!" "It needs being true to the Church as well." "I'm willing to be that when I have the chance, if ever I have it. And to get it I'd risk life. Not much if I lose it. It's become a burden to me, heavier than I can bear." "You may make it as light as a feather, M'sieu; cheerful as that of any of those gay gentry you saw disporting themselves on the lawn at Llangorren--even that of its young mistress." "How, _Pere_?" "By yourself becoming its master." "Ah! if I could." "You can!" "With safety?" "Perfect safety." "And without committing,"--he fears to speak the ugly English word, but expresses the idea in French--"_cette dernier coup_?" "Certainly! Who dreams of that? Not I, M'sieu." "But how is it to be avoided?" "Easily." "Tell me, Father Rogier!" "Not to-night, Murdock!"--he has dropped the distant M'sieu--"Not to-night. It's a matter that calls for reflection--consideration, calm and careful. Time, too. Ten thousand _livres esterlies_ per annum! We must both ponder upon it--sleep nights, and think days, over it-- possibly have to draw Coracle Dick into our deliberations. But not to-night--_Pardieu_! it's ten o'clock! And I have business to do before going to bed. I must be off." "No, your Reverence; not till you've had another glass of wine." "One more then. But let me take it standing--the _tasse d'estrope_, as you call it." Murdock assents; and the two rise up to drink the stirrup cup. But only the Frenchman keeps his feet till the glasses are emptied; the other, now dead drunk, dropping back into his chair. "_Bon soir, Monsieur_!" says the priest, slipping out of the room, his host answering only by a snore. For all, Father Rogier does not leave the house so unceremoniously. In the porch outside he takes more formal leave of a woman he there finds waiting for him. As he joins her going out, she asks, _sotto voce_:-- "_C'est arrange_?" "Pas encore serait tout suite." This the sole speech that passes between them; but something besides, which, if seen by her husband, would cause him to start from his chair--perhaps some little sober him. Volume One, Chapter XVI. CORACLE DICK. A traveller making the tour of the Wye will now and then see moving along its banks, or across the contiguous meadows, what he might take for a gigantic tortoise walking upon its tail! Mystified by a sight so abnormal, and drawing nigh to get an explanation of it, he will discover that the moving object is after all but a man, carrying a boat upon his back! Still the tourist will be astonished at a feat so herculean-- rival to that of Atlas--and will only be altogether enlightened when the boat-bearer lays down his burden--which, if asked, he will obligingly do--and permits him, the stranger, to satisfy his curiosity by an inspection of it. Set square on the sward at his feet, he will look upon a craft quaint as was ever launched on lake, stream, or tidal wave. For he will be looking at a "coracle." Not only quaint in construction, but singularly ingenious in design, considering the ends to be accomplished. In addition, historically interesting; so much as to deserve more than passing notice, even in the pages of a novel. Nor will I dismiss it without a word, however it may seem out of place. In shape the coracle bears resemblance to the half of a humming-top, or Swedish turnip cloven longitudinally, the cleft face scooped out leaving but the rind. The timbers consist of slender saplings--peeled and split to obtain lightness--disposed, some fore and aft, others athwart-ships, still others diagonally, as struts and ties, all having their ends in a band of wickerwork, which runs round the gunwale, holding them firmly in place, itself forming the rail. Over this framework is stretched a covering of tarred, and, of course, waterproof canvas, tight as a drum. In olden times it was the skin of ox or horse, but the modern material is better, because lighter, and less liable to decay, besides being cheaper. There is but one seat, or thwart, as the coracle is designed for only a single occupant, though in a pinch it can accommodate two. This is a thin board, placed nearly amidships, partly supported by the wicker rail, and in part by another piece of light scantling, set edgeways underneath. In all things ponderosity is as much as possible avoided, since one of the essential purposes of the coracle is "portage;" and to facilitate this it is furnished with a leathern strap, the ends attached near each extremity of the thwart, to be passed across the breast when the boat is borne overland. The bearer then uses his oar--there is but one, a broad-bladed paddle--by way of walking-stick; and so proceeds, as already said, like a tortoise travelling on its tail! In this convenience of carriage lies the ingenuity of the structure-- unique and clever beyond anything in the way of water-craft I have observed elsewhere, either among savage or civilised nations. The only thing approaching it in this respect is the birch bark canoe of the Esquimaux and the Chippeway Indians. But, though more beautiful this, it is far behind our native craft in an economic sense--in cheapness and readiness. For while the Chippewayan would be stripping his bark from the tree, and re-arming it--to say nought of fitting to the frame timbers, stitching, and paying it--a subject of King Caradoc would have launched his coracle upon the Wye, and paddled it from Plinlimmon to Chepstow; as many a modern Welshman would the same. Above all, is the coracle of rare historic interest--as the first venture upon water of a people--the ancestors of a nation that now rules the sea--their descendants proudly styling themselves its "Lords"--not without right and reason. Why called "coracle" is a matter of doubt and dispute; by most admitted as a derivative from the Latin _corum_--a skin; this being its original covering. But certainly a misconception; since we have historic evidence of the basket and hide boat being in use around the shores of Albion hundreds of years before these ever saw Roman ship or standard. Besides, at the same early period, under the almost homonym of "corragh," it floated--still floats--on the waters of the Lerne, far west of anywhere the Romans ever went. Among the common people on the Wye it bears a less ancient appellation--that of "truckle." From whatever source the craft derives its name, it has itself given a sobriquet to one of the characters of our tale--Richard Dempsey. Why the poacher is thus distinguished it is not easy to tell; possibly because he, more than any other in his neighbourhood, makes use of it, and is often seen trudging about the river bottoms with the huge carapace on his shoulders. It serves his purpose better than any other kind of boat, for Dick, though a snarer of hares and pheasants, is more of a salmon poacher, and for this--the water branch of his amphibious calling--the coracle has a special adaptation. It can be lifted out of the river, or launched upon it anywhere, without leaving trace; whereas with an ordinary skiff the moorings might be marked, the embarkation observed, and the night netter followed to his netting-place by the watchful water-bailiff. Despite his cunning and the handiness of his craft, Dick has not always come off scot-free. His name has several times figured in the reports of Quarter Sessions, and himself in the cells of the county gaol. This only for poaching; but he has also served a spell in prison for crime of a less venal kind--burglary. As the "job" was done in a distant shire, there has been nothing heard of it in that where he now resides. The worst known of him in the neighbourhood is his game and fish trespassing, though there is worse suspected. He whose suspicions are strongest being the waterman, Wingate. But Jack may be wronging him, for a certain reason--the most powerful that ever swayed the passion or warped the judgment of man--rivalry for the affections of a woman. No heart, however hardened, is proof against the shafts of Cupid; and one has penetrated the heart of Coracle Dick, as deeply as has another that of Jack Wingate. And both from the same how and quiver--the eyes of Mary Morgan. She is the daughter of a small farmer who lives by the Wyeside; and being a farmer's daughter, above both in social rank, still not so high but that Love's ladder may reach her, and each lives in hope he may some day scale it. For Evan Morgan holds as a tenant, and his land is of limited acreage. Dick Dempsey and Jack Wingate are not the only ones who wish to have him for a father-in-law, but the two most earnest, and whose chances seem best. Not that these are at all equal; on the contrary, greatly disproportionate, Dick having the advantage. In his favour is the fact that Farmer Morgan is a Roman Catholic--his wife fanatically so--he, Dempsey, professing the same faith; while Wingate is a Protestant of pronounced type. Under these circumstances Coracle has a friend at head-quarters, in Mrs Morgan, and an advocate who visits there, in the person of Father Rogier. With this united influence in his favour, the odds against the young waterman are great, and his chances might appear slight--indeed would he, were it not for an influence to counteract. He, too, has a partisan inside the citadel, and a powerful one; since it is the girl herself. He knows--is sure of it, as man may be of any truth, communicated to him by loving lips amidst showers of kisses. For all this has passed between Mary Morgan and himself. And nothing of it between her and Richard Dempsey. Instead, on her part, coldness and distant reserve. It would be disdain--ay, scorn--if she dare show it; for she hates the very sight of the man. But, controlled and close watched, she has learnt to smile when she would frown. The world--or that narrow circle of it immediately surrounding and acquainted with the Morgan family--wonders at the favourable reception it vouchsafes to Richard Dempsey--a known and noted poacher. But in justice to Mrs Morgan it should be said, she has but slight acquaintance with the character of the man--only knows it as represented by Rogier. Absorbed in her paternosters, she gives little heed to ought else; her thoughts, as her actions, being all of the dictation, and under the direction, of the priest. In her eyes Coracle Dick is as the latter has painted him, thus-- "A worthy fellow--poor it is true, but honest withal; a little addicted to fish and game taking, as many another good man. Who wouldn't with such laws--unrighteous--oppressive to the poor? Were they otherwise, the poacher would be a patriot. As for Dempsey, they who speak ill of him are only the envious--envying his good looks, and fine mental qualities. For he's clever, and they can't say nay--energetic, and likely to make his way in the world. Yet, one thing he would make-- that's a good husband to your daughter Mary--one who has the strength and courage to take care of her." So counsels the priest; and as he can make Mrs Morgan believe black white, she is ready to comply with his counsel. If the result rested on her, Coracle Dick would have nothing to fear. But it does not--he knows it does not--and is troubled. With all the influence in his favour, he fears that other influence against him--if against him, far more than a counterpoise to Mrs Morgan's religious predilections, or the partisanship of his priest. Still he is not sure; one day the slave of sweet confidence, the next a prey to black bitter jealousy. And thus he goes on doting and doubting, as if he were never to know the truth. A day comes when he is made acquainted with it, or, rather, a night; for it is after sundown the revelation reaches him--indeed, nigh on to midnight. His favoured, yet defeated, aspirations, are more than twelve months old. They have been active all through the preceding winter, spring, and summer. It is now autumn; the leaves are beginning to turn sere, and the last sheaves have been gathered to the stack. No shire than that of Hereford more addicted to the joys of the Harvest Home; this often celebrated in a public and general way, instead of at the private and particular farm-house. One such is given upon the summit of Garran Hill--a grand gathering, to which all go of the class who attend such assemblages--small farmers with their families, their servants too, male and female. There is a cromlech on the hill's top, around which they annually congregate, and beside this ancient relic are set up the symbols of a more modern time--the Maypole--though it is Autumn--with its strings and garlands; the show booths and the refreshment tents, with their display of cakes, fruits, perry, and cider. And there are sports of various kinds, pitching the stone, climbing the greased pole--that of May now so slippery--jumping, racing in sacks, dancing--among other dances the Morris--with a grand _finale_ of fireworks. At this year's fete Farmer Morgan is present, accompanied by his wife and daughter. It need not be said that Dick Dempsey and Jack Wingate are there too. They are, and have been all the afternoon--ever since the gathering began. But during the hours of daylight neither approaches the fair creature to which his thoughts tend, and on which his eyes are almost constantly turning. The poacher is restrained by a sense of his own unworthiness--a knowledge that there is not the place to make show of his aspirations to one all believe so much above him; while the waterman is kept back and aloof by the presence of the watchful mother. With all her watchfulness he finds opportunity to exchange speech with the daughter--only a few words, but enough to make hell in the heart of Dick Dempsey, who overhears them. It is at the closing scene of the spectacle, when the pyrotechnists are about to send up their final _feu de joie_, Mrs Morgan, treated by numerous acquaintances to aniseed and other toothsome drinks, has grown less thoughtful of her charge, which gives Jack Wingate the opportunity he has all along been looking for. Sidling up to the girl, he asks in a tone which tells of lovers _en rapport_, mutually, unmistakably-- "When, Mary?" "Saturday night next. The priest's coming to supper. I'll make an errand to the shop, soon as it gets dark." "Where?" "The old place under the big elm." "You're sure you'll be able?" "Sure, never fear, I'll find a way." "God bless you, dear girl. I'll be there, if anywhere on earth." This is all that passes between them. But enough--more than enough--for Richard Dempsey. As a rocket, just then going up, throws its glare over his face, as also the others, no greater contrast could be seen or imagined. On the countenances of the lovers an expression of contentment, sweet and serene; on his a look such as Mephistopheles gave to Gretchen escaping from his toils. The curse in Coracle's heart is but hindered from rising to his lips by a fear of its foiling the vengeance he there and then determines on. Volume One, Chapter XVII. THE "CORPSE-CANDLE." Jack Wingate lives in a little cottage whose bit of garden ground "brinks" the country road where the latter trends close to the Wye at one of its sharpest sinuosities. The cottage is on the convex side of the bend, having the river at back, with a deep drain, or wash, running up almost to its walls, and forming a fence to one side of the garden. This gives the waterman another and more needed advantage--a convenient docking place for his boat. There the _Mary_, moored, swings to her painter in safety; and when a rise in the river threatens he is at hand to see she be not swept off. To guard against such catastrophe he will start up from his bed at any hour of the night, having more than one reason to be careful of the boat; for, besides being his _gagne-pain_, it hears the name, by himself given, of her the thought of whom sweetens his toil and makes his labour light. For her he bends industriously to his oar, as though he believed every stroke made and every boat's length gained was bringing him nearer to Mary Morgan. And in a sense so is it, whichever way the boat's head may be turned; the farther he rows her the grander grows that heap of gold he is hoarding up against the day when he hopes to become a Benedict. He has a belief that if he could but display before the eyes of Farmer Morgan sufficient money to take a little farm for himself and stock it, he might then remove all obstacles between him and Mary--mother's objections and sinister and sacerdotal influence included. He is aware of the difference of rank--that social chasm between--being oft bitterly reminded of it; but, emboldened by Mary's smiles, he has little fear but that he will yet be able to bridge it. Favouring the programme thus traced out, there is, fortunately, no great strain on his resources by way of drawback; only the maintaining of his own mother, a frugal dame--thrifty besides--who, instead of adding to the current expenses, rather curtails them by the adroit handling of her needle. It would have been a distaff in the olden days. Thus helped in his housekeeping, the young waterman is enabled to put away almost every shilling he earns by his oar, and this same summer all through till autumn, which it now is, has been more than usually profitable to him, by reason of his so often having Captain Ryecroft as his fare; for although the Hussar officer no longer goes salmon fishing--he has somehow been spoilt for that--there are other excursions upon which he requires the boat, and as ever generously, even lavishly, pays for it. From one of these the young waterman has but returned; and, after carefully bestowing the _Mary_ at her moorings, stepped inside the cottage. It is Saturday--within one hour of sundown--that same Saturday spoken of "at the Harvest Home." But though Jack is just home, he shows no sign of an intention to stay there; instead, behaves as if he intended going out again, though not in his boat. And he does so intend, for a purpose unsuspected by his mother, to keep that appointment, made hurriedly, and in a half whisper, amid the fracas of the fireworks. The good dame had already set the table for tea, ready against his arrival, covered it with a cloth, snow-white of course. The tea-things superimposed, in addition a dining plate, knife and fork, these for a succulent beefsteak heard hissing on the gridiron almost as soon as the _Mary_ made appearance at the mouth of the wash, and, soon as the boat was docked, done. It is now on the table, alongside the teapot; its savoury odour mingling with the fragrance of the freshly "drawn" tea, fills the cottage kitchen with a perfume to delight the gods. For all, it gives no gratification to Jack Wingate the waterman. The appetising smell of the meat, and the more ethereal aroma of the Chinese shrub, are alike lost upon him. Appetite he has none, and his thoughts are elsewhere. Less from observing his abstraction, than the slow, negligent movements of his knife and fork, the mother asks-- "What's the matter with ye, Jack? Ye don't eat!" "I ain't hungry, mother." "But ye been out since mornin', and tooked nothing wi' you!" "True; but you forget who I ha' been out with. The captain ain't the man to let his boatman be a hungered. We war down the day far as Symond's yat, where he treated me to dinner at the hotel. The daintiest kind o' dinner, too. No wonder at my not havin' much care for eatin' now--nice as you've made things, mother." Notwithstanding the compliment, the old lady is little satisfied--less as she observes the continued abstraction of his manner. He fidgets uneasily in his chair, every now and then giving a glance at the little Dutch clock suspended against the wall, which in loud ticking seems to say, "You'll be late--you'll be late." She suspects something of the cause, but inquires nothing of it. Instead, she but observes, speaking of the patron:--"He be very good to ye, Jack." "Ah! that he be; good to every one as comes nigh o' him--and 's desarvin' it." "But ain't he stayin' in the neighbourhood longer than he first spoke of doin'?" "Maybe he is. Grand gentry such as he ain't like us poor folk. They can go and come whens'ever it please 'em. I suppose he have his reasons for remaining." "Now, Jack, you know he have, an' I've heerd something about 'em myself." "What have you heard, mother?" "Oh, what! Ye han't been a rowin' him up and down the river now nigh on five months without findin' out. An' if you haven't, others have. It's goin' all about that he's after a young lady as lives somewhere below. Tidy girl, they say, tho' I never seed her myself. Is it so, my son? Say!" "Well, mother, since you've put it straight at me in that way, I won't deny it to you, tho' I'm in a manner bound to saycrecy wi' others. It be true that the Captain have some notion o' such a lady." "There be a story, too, o' her bein' nigh drownded an' his saving her out o' a boat. Now, Jack, whose boat could that be if it wa'nt your'n?" "'Twor mine, mother; that's true enough. I would a told you long ago, but he asked me not to talk o' the thing. Besides, I didn't suppose you'd care to hear about it." "Well," she says, satisfied, "'tan't much to me, nor you neyther, Jack; only as the Captain being so kind, we'd both like to know the best about him. If he have took a fancy for the young lady, I hope she return it. She ought after his doin' what he did for her. I han't heerd her name; what be it?" "She's a Miss Wynn, mother. A very rich heiress. 'Deed I b'lieve she ain't a heiress any longer, or won't be, after next Thursday, sin' that day she comes o' age. An' that night there's to be a big party at her place, dancin' an' all sorts o' festivities. I know it because the Captain's goin' there, an' has bespoke the boat to take him." "Wynn, eh? That be a Welsh name. Wonder if she's any kin o' the great Sir Watkin." "Can't say, mother. I believe there be several branches o' the Wynn family." "Yes, and all o' the good sort. If she be one o' the Welsh Wynns, the Captain can't go far astray in having her for his wife." Mrs Wingate is herself of Cymric ancestry, originally from the shire of Pembroke, but married to a man of Montgomery, where Jack was born. It is only of late, in her widowhood, she has become a resident of Herefordshire. "So you think he have a notion o' her, Jack?" "More'n that, mother. I may as well tell ye; he be dead in love wi' her. An' if you seed the young lady herself, ye wouldn't wonder at it. She be most as good-looking as--" Jack suddenly interrupted himself on the edge of a revelation he would rather not make, to his mother nor any one else. For he has hitherto been as careful in keeping his own secret as that of his patron. "As who?" she asks, looking him straight in the face, and with an expression in her eyes of no common interest--that of maternal solicitude. "Who?--well--" he answers confusedly; "I wor goin' to mention the name o' a girl who the people 'bout here think the best-lookin' o' any in the neighbourhood--" "An' nobody more'n yourself, my son. You needn't gi'e her name. I know it." "Oh, mother! what d'ye mean?" he stammers out, with eyes on the but half-eaten beefsteak. "I take it they've been tellin' ye some stories 'bout me." "No, they han't. Nobody's sayed a word about ye relatin' to that. I've seed it for myself, long since, though you've tried hide it. I'm not goin' to blame ye eyther, for I believe she be a tidy proper girl. But she's far aboon you, my son; and ye maun mind how you behave yourself. If the young lady be anythin' like's good-lookin' as Mary Morgan--" "Yes, mother! that's the strangest thing o' all--" He interrupts her, speaking excitedly; again interrupting himself. "What's strangest?" she inquires with a look of wonderment. "Never mind, mother! I'll tell you all about it some other time. I can't now; you see it's nigh nine o' the clock." "Well; an' what if't be?" "Because I may be too late." "Too late for what? Surely you arn't goin' out again the night?" She asks this, seeing him rise up from his chair. "I must, mother." "But why?" "Well, the boat's painter's got frailed, and I want a bit o' whipcord to lap it with. They have the thing at the Ferry shop, and I must get there afores they shut up." A fib, perhaps pardonable, as the thing he designs lapping is not his boat's painter, but the waist of Mary Morgan, and not with slender whipcord, but his own stout arms. "Why won't it do in the mornin'?" asks the ill-satisfied mother. "Well, ye see, there's no knowin' but that somebody may come after the boat. The Captain mayent, but he may, changin' his mind. Anyhow, he'll want her to go down to them grand doin's at Llangowen Court?" "Llangowen Court?" "Yes; that's where the young lady lives." "That's to be on Thursday, ye sayed?" "True; but, then, there may come a fare the morrow, an' what if there do? 'Tain't the painter only as wants splicin', there's a bit o' a leak sprung close to the cutwater, an' I must hae some pitch to pay it." If Jack's mother would only step out, and down to the ditch where the _Mary_ is moored, with a look at the boat, she would make him out a liar. Its painter is smooth and clean as a piece of gimp, not a strand unravelled--while but two or three gallons of bilge water at the boat's bottom attest to there being little or no leakage. But she, good dame, is not thus suspicious, instead so reliant on her son's truthfulness, that, without questioning further, she consents to his going, only with a proviso against his staying, thus appealingly put--"Ye won't be gone long, my son! I know ye won't!" "Indeed I shan't, mother. But why be you so partic'lar about my goin' out--this night more'n any other?" "Because, Jack, this day, more'n most others, I've been feelin' bothered like, and a bit frightened." "Frightened o' what? There han't been nobody to the house--has there?" "No; ne'er a rover since you left me in the mornin'." "Then what's been a scarin' ye, mother?" "'Deed, I don't know, unless it ha' been brought on by the dream I had last night. 'Twer' a dreadful unpleasant one. I didn't tell you o' it 'fore ye went out, thinkin' it might worry ye." "Tell me now, mother." "It hadn't nought to do wi' us ourselves, after all. Only concernin' them as live nearest us." "Ha! the Morgans?" "Yes; the Morgans." "Oh, mother, what did you dream about them?" "That I wor standin' on the big hill above their house, in the middle o' the night, wi' black darkness all round me; and there lookin' down what should I see comin' out o' their door?" "What?" "The canwyll corph!" "The canwyll corph?" "Yes, my son; I seed it--that is I dreamed I seed it--coming just out o' the farm-house door, then through the yard, and over the foot-plank at the bottom o' the orchard, when it went flarin' up the meadows straight towards the ferry. Though ye can't see that from the hill, I dreamed I did; an' seed the candle go on to the chapel an' into the buryin' ground. That woked me." "What nonsense, mother! A ridiklous superstition! I thought you'd left all that sort o' stuff behind, in the mountains o' Montgomery, or Pembrokeshire, where the thing comes from, as I've heerd you say." "No, my son; it's not stuff, nor superstition neyther; though English people say that to put slur upon us Welsh. Your father before ye believed in the _Canwyll Corph_, and wi' more reason ought I, your mother. I never told you, Jack, but the night before your father died I seed it go past our own door, and on to the graveyard o' the church where he now lies. Sure as we stand here there be some one doomed in the house o' Evan Morgan. There be only three in the family. I do hope it an't her as ye might some day be wantin' me to call daughter." "Mother! You'll drive me mad! I tell ye it's all nonsense. Mary Morgan be at this moment healthy and strong--most as much as myself. If the dead candle ye've been dreamin' about we're all o' it true, it couldn't be a burnin' for her. More like for Mrs Morgan, who's half daft by believing in church candles and such things--enough to turn her crazy, if it doesn't kill her outright. As for you, my dear mother, don't let the dream bother you the least bit. An' ye mustn't be feeling lonely, as I shan't be long gone. I'll be back by ten sure." Saying which, he sets his straw hat jauntily on his thick curly hair, gives his guernsey a straightening twitch, and, with a last cheering look and encouraging word to his mother, steps out into the night. Left alone, she feels lonely withal, and more than ever afraid. Instead of sitting down to her needle, or making to remove the tea-things, she goes to the door, and there stays, standing on its threshold and peering into the darkness--for it is a pitch dark night--she sees, or fancies, a light moving across the meadows, as if it came from Farmer Morgan's house, and going in the direction of Rugg's Ferry. While she continues gazing, it twice crosses the Wye, by reason of the river's bend. As no mortal hand could thus carry it, surely it is the _canwyll corph_! Volume One, Chapter XVIII. A CAT IN THE CUPBOARD. Evan Morgan is a tenant-farmer, holding Abergann. By Herefordshire custom, every farm or its stead, has a distinctive appellation. Like the land belonging to Glyngog, that of Abergann lies against the sides of a sloping glen--one of the hundreds or thousands of lateral ravines that run into the valley of the Wye. But, unlike the old manor-house, the domicile of the farmer is at the glen's bottom and near the river's bank; nearer yet to a small influent stream, rapid and brawling, which sweeps past the lower end of the orchard in a channel worn deep into the soft sandstone. Though with the usual imposing array of enclosure walls, the dwelling itself is not large nor the outbuildings extensive; for the arable acreage is limited. This because the ridges around are too high pitched for ploughing, and if ploughed would be unproductive. They are not even in pasture, but overgrown with woods; less for the sake of the timber, which is only scrub, than as a covert for foxes. They are held in hand by Evan Morgan's landlord--a noted Nimrod. For the same reason the farm-house stands in a solitary spot, remote from any other dwelling. The nearest is the cottage of the Wingates-- distant about half a mile, but neither visible from the other. Nor is there any direct road between, only a footpath, which crosses the brook at the bottom of the orchard, thence running over a wooded ridge to the main highway. The last, after passing close to the cottage, as already said, is deflected away from the river by this same ridge, so that when Evan Morgan would drive anywhere beyond the boundaries of his farm, he must pass out through a long lane, so narrow that were he to meet any one driving in, there would be a deadlock. However, there is no danger; as the only vehicles having occasion to use this thoroughfare are his own farm waggon and a lighter `trap' in which he goes to market, and occasionally with his wife and daughter to merry-makings. When the three are in it there is none of his family at home. For he has but one child--a daughter. Nor would he long have her were a half-score of young fellows allowed their way. At least this number would be willing to take her off his hands and give her a home elsewhere. Remote as is the farm-house of Abergann, and narrow the lane leading to it, there are many who would be glad to visit there, if invited. In truth a fine girl is Mary Morgan, tall, bright haired, and with blooming cheeks, beside which red rose leaves would seem _fade_. Living in a town she would be its talk; in a village its belle. Even from that secluded glen has the fame of her beauty gone forth and afar. Of husbands she could have her choice, and among men much richer than her father. In her heart she has chosen one, not only much poorer, but lower in social rank--Jack Wingate. She loves the young waterman, and wants to be his wife; but knows she cannot without the consent of her parents. Not that either has signified opposition, since they have never been asked. Her longings in that direction she has kept secret from them. Nor does she so much dread refusal by the father. Evan Morgan had been himself poor--began life as a farm labourer--and, though now an employer of such, his pride had not kept pace with his prosperity. Instead, he is, as ever, the same modest, unpresuming man, of which the lower middle classes of the English people present many noble examples. From him Jack Wingate would have little to fear on the score of poverty. He is well acquainted with the young waterman's character, knows it to be good, and has observed the efforts he is making to better his condition in life; it may be with suspicion of the motive, at all events, admiringly--remembering his own. And although a Roman Catholic, he is anything but bigoted. Were he the only one to be consulted his daughter might wed with the man upon whom she has fixed her affections, at any time it pleases them--ay, at any place, too, even within the walls of a Protestant Church! By him neither would Jack Wingate be rejected on the score of religion. Very different with his wife. Of all the worshippers who compose the congregation at the Bugg's Ferry Chapel none bend the knee to Baal as low as she; and over no one does Father Rogier exercise such influence. Baneful it is like to be; since not only has he control of the mother's conduct, but through that may also blight the happiness of the daughter. Apart from religious fanaticism, Mrs Morgan is not a bad woman--only a weak one. As her husband, she is of humble birth, and small beginnings; like him, too, neither has prosperity affected her in the sense of worldly ambition. Perhaps better if it had. Instead of spoiling, a little social pride might have been a bar to the dangerous aspirations of Richard Dempsey--even with the priest standing sponsor for him. But she has none, her whole soul being absorbed by blind devotion to a faith which scruples not at anything that may assist in its propagandism. It is the Saturday succeeding the festival of the Harvest Home, a little after sunset, and the priest is expected at Abergann. He is a frequent visitor there; by Mrs Morgan ever made welcome, and treated to the best cheer the farm-house can afford; plate, knife, and fork always placed for him. And, to do him justice, he may be deemed in a way worthy of such hospitality; for he is, in truth, a most entertaining personage; can converse on any subject, and suit his conversation to the company, whether high or low. As much at home with the wife of the Welsh farmer as with the French _ex-cocotte_, and equally so in the companionship of Dick Dempsey, the poacher. In his hours of _far niente_ all are alike to him. This night he is to take supper at Abergann, and Mrs Morgan, seated in the farm house parlour, awaits his arrival. A snug little apartment, tastefully furnished, but with a certain air of austerity, observable in Roman Catholic houses: this by reason of some pictures of saints hanging against the walls, an image of the Virgin and, standing niche-like in a corner, one of the Crucifixion over the mantelshelf, with crosses upon books, and other like symbols. It is near nine o'clock, and the table is already set out. On grand occasions, as this, the farm-house parlour is transformed into dining or supper room, indifferently. The meal intended to be eaten now is more of the former, differing in there being a tea-tray upon the table, with a full service of cups and saucers, as also in the lateness of the hour. But the odoriferous steam escaping from the kitchen, drifted into the parlour when its door is opened, tells of something in preparation more substantial than a cup of tea, with its usual accompaniment of bread and butter. And there is a fat capon roasting upon the spit, with a frying-pan full of sausages on the dresser, ready to be clapped upon the fire at the proper moment--as soon as the expected guest makes his appearance. And in addition to the tea-things, there is a decanter of sherry on the table, and will be another of brandy when brought on--Father Rogier's favourite tipple, as Mrs Morgan has reason to know. There is a full bottle of this--Cognac of best brand--in the larder cupboard, still corked as it came from the "Welsh Harp," where it cost six shillings-- The Rugg's Ferry hostelry, as already intimated, dealing in drinks of a rather costly kind. Mary has been directed to draw the cork, decant, and bring the brandy in, and for this purpose has just gone off to the larder. Thence instantly returning, but without either decanter or Cognac! Instead with a tale which sends a thrill of consternation through her mother's heart. The cat has been in the cupboard, and there made havoc--upset the brandy bottle, and sent it rolling off the shelf on the stone flags of the floor! Broken, of course, and the contents-- No need for further explanation, Mrs Morgan does not seek it. Nor does she stay to reflect on the disaster, but how it may be remedied. It will not mend matters to chastise the cat, nor cry over the spilt brandy, any more than if it were milk. On short reflection she sees but one way to restore the broken bottle-- by sending to the "Welsh Harp" for a whole one. True, it will cost another six shillings, but she recks not of the expense. She is more troubled about a messenger. Where, and how, is one to be had? The farm labourers have long since left. They are all Benedicts, on board wages, and have departed for their respective wives and homes. There is a cow-boy, yet he is also absent; gone to fetch the kine from a far-off pasturing place, and not be back in time; while the one female domestic maid-of-all-work is busy in the kitchen, up to her ears among pots and pans, her face at a red heat over the range. She could not possibly be spared. "It's very vexatious!" exclaims Mrs Morgan, in a state of lively perplexity. "It is, indeed!" assents her daughter. A truthful girl, Mary, in the main; but just now the opposite. For she is not vexed by the occurrence, nor does she deem it a disaster, quite the contrary. And she knows it was no accident, having herself brought it about. It was her own soft fingers, not the cat's claws, that swept that bottle from the shelf, sending it smash upon the stones! Tipped over by no _maladroit_ handling of corkscrew, but downright deliberate intention! A stratagem that may enable her to keep the appointment made among the fireworks--that threat when she told Jack Wingate she would "find away." Thus is she finding it; and in furtherance she leaves her mother no time to consider longer about a messenger. "I'll go!" she says, offering herself as one. The deceit unsuspected, and only the willingness appreciated, Mrs Morgan rejoins: "Do! that's a dear girl! It's very good of you, Mary. Here's the money." While the delighted mother is counting out the shillings, the dutiful daughter whips on her cloak--the night is chilly--and adjusts her hat, the best holiday one, on her head; all the time thinking to herself how cleverly she has done the trick. And with a smile of pardonable deception upon her face, she trips lightly across the threshold, and on through the little flower garden in front. Outside the gate, at an angle of the enclosure wall, she stops, and stands considering. There are two ways to the Ferry, here forking--the long lane and the shorter footpath. Which is she to take? The path leads down along the side of the orchard; and across the brook by the bridge--only a single plank. This spanning the stream, and originally fixed to the rock at both ends, has of late come loose, and is not safe to be traversed, even by day. At night it is dangerous--still more on one dark as this. And danger of no common kind at any time. The channel through which the streams runs is twenty feet deep, with rough boulders in its bed. One falling from above would at least get broken bones. No fear of that to-night, but something as bad, if not worse. For it has been raining throughout the earlier hours of the day, and there in the brook, now a raging torrent. One dropping into it would be swept on to the river, and there surely drowned, if not before. It is no dread of any of these dangers which causes Mary Morgan to stand considering which route she will take. She has stepped that plank on nights dark as this, even since it became detached from the fastenings, and is well acquainted with its ways. Were there nought else, she would go straight over it, and along the footpath, which passes the `big elm.' But it is just because it passes the elm she has now paused and is pondering. Her errand calls for haste, and there she would meet a man sure to delay her. She intends meeting him for all that, and being delayed; but not till on her way back. Considering the darkness and obstructions on the footwalk she may go quicker by the road though roundabout. Returning she can take the path. This thought in her mind, with, perhaps, remembrance of the adage, `business before pleasure,' decides her; and drawing closer her cloak, she sets off along the lane. Volume One, Chapter XIX. A BLACK SHADOW BEHIND. In the shire of Hereford there is no such thing as a village--properly so called. The tourist expecting to come upon one, by the black dot on his guide-book map, will fail to find it. Indeed, he will see only a church with a congregation, not the typical cluster of houses around. But no street, nor rows of cottages, in their midst--the orthodox patch of trodden turf--the "green." Nothing of all that. Unsatisfied, and inquiring the whereabouts of the village itself, he will get answers, only farther confusing him. One will say "here be it," pointing to no place in particular; a second, "thear," with his eye upon the church; a third, "over yonner," nodding to a shop of miscellaneous wares, also intrusted with the receiving and distributing of letters; while a fourth, whose ideas run on drink, looks to a house larger than the rest, having a square pictorial signboard, with red lion _rampant_, fox _passant_, horse's head, or such like symbol--proclaiming it an inn, or public. Not far from, or contiguous to, the church, will be a dwelling-house of special pretension, having a carriage entrance, sweep, and shrubbery of well-grown evergreens--the rectory, or vicarage; at greater distance, two or three cottages of superior class, by their owners styled "villas," in one of which dwells the doctor, a young Esculapius, just beginning practice, or an old one who has never had much; in another, the relict of a successful shopkeeper left with an "independence;" while a third will be occupied by a retired military man--"captain," of course, whatever may have been his rank--possibly a naval officer, or an old salt of the merchant service. In their proper places stand the carpenters shop and smithy, with their array of reapers, rollers, ploughs, and harrows seeking repair; among them perhaps a huge steam-threshing machine, that has burst its boiler, or received other damage. Then there are the houses of the _hoi polloi_, mostly labouring men--their little cottages wide apart, or in twos and threes together, with no resemblance to the formality of town dwellings, but quaint in structure, ivy-clad or honeysuckled, looking and smelling of the country. Farther along the road is an ancient farmstead, its big barns, and other outbuildings, abutting on the highway, which for some distance is strewn with a litter of rotting straw; by its side a muddy pond with ducks and a half-dozen geese, the gander giving tongue as the tourist passes by; if a pedestrian with knapsack on his shoulders the dog barking at him, in the belief he is a tramp or beggar. Such is the Herefordshire village, of which many like may be met along Wyeside. The collection of houses known as Rugg's Ferry is in some respects different. It does not lie on any of the main county thoroughfares, but a cross-country road connecting the two, that lead along the hounding ridges of the river. That passing through it is but little frequented, as the ferry itself is only for foot passengers, though there is a horse boat which can be had when called for. But the place is in a deep crater-like hollow, where the stream courses between cliffs of the old red sandstone, and can only be approached by the steepest "pitches." Nevertheless, Rugg's Ferry has its mark upon the Ordnance map, though not with the little crosslet denoting a church. It could boast of no place of worship whatever till Father Rogier laid the foundation of his chapel. For all, it has once been a brisk place in its days of glory; ere the railroad destroyed the river traffic, and the bargees made it a stopping port, as often the scene of rude, noisy revelry. It is quieter now, and the tourist passing through might deem it almost deserted. He will see houses of varied construction--thirty or forty of them in all--clinging against the cliff in successive terraces, reached by long rows of steps carved out of the rock; cottages picturesque as Swiss _chalets_, with little gardens on ledges, here and there one trellised with grape vines or other climbers, and a round cone-topped cage of wicker holding captive a jackdaw, magpie, or it may be parrot or starling taught to speak. Viewing these symbols of innocence, the stranger will imagine himself to have lighted upon a sort of English Arcadia--a fancy soon to be dissipated perhaps by the parrot or starling saluting him with the exclamatory phrases, `God-damn-ye! go to the devil!--go to the devil!' And while he is pondering on what sort of personage could have instructed the creature in such profanity, he will likely enough see the instructor himself peering out through a partially opened door, his face in startling correspondence with the blasphemous exclamations of the bird. For there are other birds resident at Rugg's Ferry besides those in the cages--several who have themselves been caged in the county gaol. The slightly altered name bestowed upon the place by Jack Wingate, as others, is not so inappropriate. It may seem strange such characters congregating in a spot so primitive and rural, so unlike their customary haunts; incongruous as the ex-belle of Mabille in her high-heeled _bottines_ inhabiting the ancient manor-house of Glyngog. But more of an enigma--indeed, a moral, or psychological puzzle; since one would suppose it the very last place to find them in. And yet the explanation may partly lie in moral and psychological causes. Even the most hardened rogue has his spells of sentiment, during which he takes delight in rusticity; and as the "Ferry" has long enjoyed the reputation of being a place of abode for him and his sort, he is there sure of meeting company congenial. Or the scent after him may have become too hot in the town, or city, where he has been displaying his dexterity; while here the policeman is not a power. The one constable of the district station dislikes taking, and rather steals through it on his rounds. Notwithstanding all this, there are some respectable people among its denizens, and many visitors who are gentlemen. Its quaint picturesqueness attracts the tourist; while a stretch of excellent angling ground, above and below, makes it a favourite with amateur fishermen. Centrally on a platform of level ground, a little back from the river's bank, stands a large three-storey house--the village inn--with a swing sign in front, upon which is painted what resembles a triangular gridiron, though designed to represent a harp. From this the hostelry has its name--the "Welsh Harp!" But however rough the limning, and weather-blanched the board--however ancient the building itself--in its business there are no indications of decay, and it still does a thriving trade. Guests of the excursionist kind occasionally dine there; while in the angling season, _piscator_ stays at it all through spring and summer; and if a keen disciple of Izaak, or an ardent admirer of the Wye scenery, often prolonging his sojourn into late autumn. Besides, from towns not too distant, the sporting tradesmen and fast clerks, after early closing on Saturdays, come hither, and remain over till Monday, for the first train catchable at a station some two miles off. The "Welsh Harp" can provide beds for all, and sitting rooms besides. For it is a roomy _caravanserai_, and if a little rough in its culinary arrangements, has a cellar unexceptionable. Among those who taste its tap are many who know good wine from bad, with others who only judge of the quality by the price; and in accordance with this criterion the Boniface of the "Harp" can give them the very best. It is a Saturday night, and two of those last described connoisseurs, lately arrived at the Wyeside hostelry, are standing before its bar counter, drinking rhubarb sap, which they facetiously call "fizz," and believe to be champagne. As it costs them ten shillings the bottle they are justified in their belief; and quite as well will it serve their purpose. They are young drapers' assistants from a large manufacturing town, out for their hebdomadal holiday, which they have elected to spend in an excursion to the Wye, and a frolic at Rugg's Ferry. They have had an afternoon's boating on the river; and, now returned to the "Harp"--their place of put-up--are flush of talk over their adventures, quaffing the sham "shammy," and smoking "regalias," not anything more genuine. While thus indulging they are startled by the apparition of what seems an angel, but what they know to be a thing of flesh and blood--something that pleases them better--a beautiful woman. More correctly speaking a girl; since it is Mary Morgan who has stepped inside the room set apart for the distributing of drink. Taking the cigars from between their teeth--and leaving the rhubarb juice, just poured into their glasses, to discharge its pent-up gas-- they stand staring at the girl, with an impertinence rather due to the drink than any innate rudeness. They are harmless fellows in their way; would be quiet enough behind their own counters; though fast before that of the "Welsh Harp," and foolish with such a face as that of Mary Morgan beside them. She gives them scant time to gaze on it. Her business is simple, and speedily transacted. "A bottle of your best brandy--the French cognac?" As she makes the demand, placing ten shillings, the price understood, upon the lead-covered counter. The barmaid, a practised hand, quickly takes the article called for from a shelf behind, and passes it across the counter, and with like alertness counting the shillings laid upon it, and sweeping them into the till. It is all over in a few seconds' time; and with equal celerity Mary Morgan, slipping the purchased commodity into her cloak, glides out of the room--vision-like as she entered it. "Who is that young lady?" asks one of the champagne drinkers, interrogating the barmaid. "Young lady!" tartly returns the latter, with a flourish of her heavily chignoned head, "only a farmer's daughter." "Aw!" exclaims the second tippler, in drawling imitation of Swelldom, "only the offspring of a chaw-bacon! she's a monstrously crummy creetya, anyhow." "Devilish nice gal!" affirms the other, no longer addressing himself to the barmaid, who has scornfully shown them the back of her head, with its tower of twisted jute. "Devilish nice gal, indeed! Never saw spicier stand before a counter. What a dainty little fish for a farmer's daughter! Say, Charley! wouldn't you like to be sellin' her a pair of kids--Jouvin's best--helpin' her draw them on, eh?" "By Jove, yes! That would I." "Perhaps you'd prefer it being boots? What a stepper she is, too! S'pose we slide after, and see where she hangs out?" "Capital idea! Suppose we do?" "All right, old fellow! I'm ready with the yard stick--roll off!" And without further exchange of their professional phraseology, they rush out, leaving their glasses half full of the effervescing beverage-- rapidly on the spoil. They have sallied forth to meet disappointment. The night is black as Erebus, and the girl gone out of sight. Nor can they tell which way she has taken; and to inquire might get them "guyed," if not worse. Besides, they see no one of whom inquiry could be made. A dark shadow passes them, apparently the figure of a man; but so dimly descried, and going in such rapid gait, they refrain from hailing him. Not likely they will see more of the "monstrously crummy creetya" that night--they may on the morrow somewhere--perhaps at the little chapel close by. Registering a mental vow to do their devotions there, and recalling the bottle of fizz left uncorked on the counter they return to finish it. And they drain it dry, gulping down several goes of B-and-S, besides, ere ceasing to think of the "devilish nice gal," on whose dainty little fist they would so like fitting kid gloves. Meanwhile, she, who has so much interested the dry goods gentlemen, is making her way along the road which leads past the Widow Wingate's cottage, going at a rapid pace, but not continuously. At intervals she makes stops, and stands listening--her glances sent interrogatively to the front. She acts as one expecting to hear footsteps, or a voice in friendly salutation--and see him saluting, for it is a man. Footsteps are there besides her own, but not heard by her, nor in the direction she is hoping to hear them. Instead, they are behind, and light, though made by a heavy man. For he is treading gingerly as if on eggs--evidently desirous not to make known his proximity. Near he is, and were the light only a little clearer she would surely see him. Favoured by its darkness he can follow close, aided also by the shadowing trees, and still further from her attention being all given to the ground in advance, with thoughts preoccupied. But closely he follows her, but never coming up. When she stops he does the same, moving on again as she moves forward. And so for several pauses, with spells of brisk walking between. Opposite the Wingates' cottage she tarries longer than elsewhere. There was a woman standing in the door, who, however, does not observe her-- cannot--a hedge of holly between. Cautiously parting its spinous leaves and peering through, the young girl takes a survey, not of the woman, whom she well knows, but of a window--the only one in which there is a light. And less the window than the walls inside. On her way to the Ferry she had stopped to do the same; then seeing shadows--two of them-- one a woman's, the other of a man. The woman is there in the door--Mrs Wingate herself; the man, her son, must be elsewhere. "Under the elm, by this," says Mary Morgan, in soliloquy. "I'll find him there,"--she adds, silently gliding past the gate. "Under the elm," mutters the man who follows, adding, "I'll kill her there--ay, both!" Two hundred yards further on, and she reaches the place where the footpath debouches upon the road. There is a stile of the usual rough crossbar pattern, proclaiming a right of way. She stops only to see there is no one sitting upon it--for there might have been--then leaping lightly over, she proceeds along the path. The shadow behind does the same, as though it were a spectre pursuing. And now, in the deeper darkness of the narrow way, arcaded over by a thick canopy of leaves, he goes closer and closer, almost to touching. Were a light at this moment let upon his face, it would reveal features set in an expression worthy of hell itself; and cast farther down, would show a hand closed upon the haft of a long-bladed knife--nervously clutching--every now and then half drawing it from its sheath, as if to plunge its blade into the back of her who is now scarce six steps ahead! And with this dread danger threatening--so close--Mary Morgan proceeds along the forest path, unsuspectingly: joyfully, as she thinks of who is before, with no thought of that behind--no one to cry out, or even whisper, the word: "Beware!" Volume One, Chapter XX. UNDER THE ELM. In more ways than one has Jack Wingate thrown dust in his mother's eyes. His going to the Ferry after a piece of whipcord and a bit of pitch was fib the first; the second his not going there at all--for he has not. Instead, in the very opposite direction; soon as reaching the road, having turned his face towards Abergann, though his objective point is but the "big elm." Once outside the gate he glides along the holly hedge crouchingly, and with head ducked, so that it may not be seen by the good dame, who has followed him to the door. The darkness favouring him, it is not; and congratulating himself at getting off thus deftly, he continues rapidly up the road. Arrived at the stile, he makes stop, saying in soliloquy:-- "I take it she be sure to come; but I'd gi'e something to know which o' the two ways. Bein' so darkish, an' that plank a bit dangerous to cross, I ha' heard--'tan't often I cross it--just possible she may choose the roundabout o' the road. Still, she sayed the big elm, an' to get there she'll have to take the path comin' or goin' back. If I thought comin' I'd steer straight there an' meet her. But s'posin' she prefers the road, that 'ud make it longer to wait. Wonder which it's to be." With hand rested on the top rail of the stile, he stands considering. Since their stolen interchange of speech at the Harvest Home, Mary has managed to send him word she will make an errand to Rugg's Ferry; hence his uncertainty. Soon again he resumes his conjectured soliloquy:-- "'Tan't possible she ha' been to the Ferry, an' goed back again? God help me, I hope not! An' yet there's just a chance. I weesh the Captain hadn't kep' me so long down there. An' the fresh from the rain that delayed us nigh half a hour, I oughtn't to a stayed a minute after gettin' home. But mother cookin' that nice bit o' steak; if I hadn't ate it she'd a been angry, and for certain suspected somethin'. Then listenin' to all that dismal stuff 'bout the corpse-candle. An' they believe it in the shire o' Pembroke! Rot the thing! Tho' I an't myself noways superstishus, it gi'ed me the creeps. Queer, her dreamin' she seed it go out o' Abergann! I do weesh she hadn't told me that; an' I mustn't say word o't to Mary. Tho' she ain't o' the fearsome kind, a thing like that's enough to frighten anyone. Well, what 'd I best do? If she ha' been to the Ferry an's goed home again, then I've missed her, and no mistake! Still, she said she'd be at the elim, an's never broke her promise to me when she cud keep it. A man ought to take a woman at her word--a true woman--an' not be too quick to anticipate. Besides, the surer way's the safer. She appointed the old place, an' there I'll abide her. But what am I thinkin' o'? She may be there now, a waitin' for me!" He doesn't stay by the stile one instant longer, but, vaulting over it, strikes off along the path. Despite the obscurity of the night, the narrowness of the track, and the branches obstructing, he proceeds with celerity. With that part he is familiar--knows every inch of it, well as the way from his door to the place where he docks his boat--at least so far as the big elm, under whose spreading branches he and she have oft clandestinely met. It is an ancient patriarch of the forest; its timber is honeycombed with decay, not having tempted the axe by whose stroke its fellows have long ago fallen, and it now stands amid their progeny, towering over all. It is a few paces distant from the footpath, screened from it by a thicket of hollies interposed between, and extending around. From its huge hollow trunk a buttress, horizontally projected, affords a convenient seat for two, making it the very _beau ideal_ of a trysting-tree. Having got up and under it, Jack Wingate is a little disappointed-- almost vexed--at not finding his sweetheart there. He calls her name-- in the hope she may be among the hollies--at first cautiously and in a low voice, then louder. No reply; she has either not been, or has and is gone. As the latter appears probable enough, he once more blames Captain Ryecroft, the rain, the river flood, the beefsteak--above all, that long yarn about the _canwyll corph_, muttering anathemas against the ghostly superstition. Still she may come yet. It may be but the darkness that's delaying her. Besides, she is not likely to have the fixing of her time. She said she would "find a way;" and having the will--as he believes--he flatters himself she will find it, despite all obstructions. With confidence thus restored, he ceases to pace about impatiently, as he has been doing ever since his arrival at the tree; and, taking a seat on the buttress, sits listening with all ears. His eyes are of little use in the Cimmerian gloom. He can barely make out the forms of the holly bushes, though they are almost within reach of his hand. But his ears are reliable, sharpened by love; and, ere long they convey a sound, to him sweeter than any other ever heard in that wood--even the songs of its birds. It is a swishing, as of leaves softly brushed by the skirts of a woman's dress--which it is. He needs no telling who comes. A subtle electricity, seeming to precede, warns him of Mary Morgan's presence, as though she were already by his side. All doubts and conjectures at an end, he starts to his feet, and steps out to meet her. Soon as on the path he sees a cloaked figure, drawing nigh with a grace of movement distinguishable even in the dim glimmering light. "That you, Mary?" A question mechanical; no answer expected or waited for. Before any could be given she is in his arms, her lips hindered from words by a shower of kisses. Thus having saluted, he takes her hand and leads her among the hollies. Not from precaution, or fear of being intruded upon. Few besides the farm people of Abergann use the right-of-way path, and unlikely any of them being on it at that hour. It is only from habit they retire to the more secluded spot under the elm, hallowed to them by many a sweet remembrance. They sit down side by side; and close, for his arm is around her waist. How unlike the lovers in the painted pavilion at Llangorren! Here there is neither concealment of thought nor restraint of speech--no time given to circumlocution--none wasted in silence. There is none to spare, as she has told him at the moment of meeting. "It's kind o' you comin', Mary," he says, as soon as they are seated. "I knew ye would." "O Jack! What a work I had to get out--the trick I've played mother! You'll laugh when you hear it." "Let's hear it, darling!" She relates the catastrophe of the cupboard, at which he does laugh beyond measure, and with a sense of gratification. Six shillings thrown away--spilled upon the floor--and all for him! Where is the man who would not feel flattered, gratified, to be the shrine of such sacrifice, and from such a worshipper? "You've been to the Ferry, then?" "You see," she says, holding up the bottle. "I weesh I'd known that. I could a met ye on the road, and we'd had more time to be thegither. It's too bad, you havin' to go straight back." "It is. But there's no help for it. Father Rogier will be there before this, and mother mad impatient." Were in light she would see his brow darken at mention of the priest's name. She does not, nor does he give expression to the thoughts it has called up. In his heart he curses the Jesuit--often has with his tongue, but not now. He is too delicate to outrage her religious susceptibilities. Still he cannot be altogether silent on a theme so much concerning both. "Mary dear!" he rejoins in grave, serious tone, "I don't want to say a word against Father Rogier, seein' how much he be your mother's friend; or, to speak more truthful, her favourite; for I don't believe he's the friend o' anybody. Sartinly, not mine, nor yours; and I've got it on my mind that man will some day make mischief between us." "How can he, Jack?" "Ah, how! A many ways. One, his sayin' ugly things about me to your mother--tellin' her tales that ain't true." "Let him--as many as he likes; you don't suppose I'll believe them?" "No, I don't, darling--'deed I don't." A snatched kiss affirms the sincerity of his words; hers as well, in her lips not being drawn back, but meeting him halfway. For a short time there is silence. With that sweet exchange thrilling their hearts it is natural. He is the first to resume speech; and from a thought the kiss has suggested:-- "I know there be a good many who'd give their lives to get the like o' that from your lips, Mary. A soft word, or only a smile. I've heerd talk o' several. But one's spoke of, in particular, as bein' special favourite by your mother, and backed up by the French priest." "Who?" She has an idea who--indeed knows; and the question is only asked to give opportunity of denial. "I dislike mentionin' his name. To me it seems like insultin' ye. The very idea o' Dick Dempsey--" "You needn't say more," she exclaims, interrupting him. "I know what you mean. But you surely don't suppose I could think of him as a sweetheart? That _would_ insult me." "I hope it would; pleezed to hear you say't. For all, he thinks o' you, Mary; not only in the way o' sweetheart, but--" He hesitates. "What?" "I won't say the word. 'Tain't fit to be spoke--about him an' you." "If you mean _wife_--as I suppose you do--listen! Rather than have Richard Dempsey for a husband, I'd die--go down to the river and drown myself! That horrid wretch! I hate him!" "I'm glad to hear you talk that way--right glad." "But why, Jack? You know it couldn't be otherwise! You should--after all that's passed. Heaven be my witness! you I love, and you alone. You only shall ever call me wife. If not--then nobody!" "God bless ye!" he exclaims in answer to her impassioned speech. "God bless you, darling!" in the fervour of his gratitude flinging his arms around, drawing her to his bosom, and showering upon her lips an avalanche of kisses. With thoughts absorbed in the delirium of love, their souls for a time surrendered to it, they hear not a rustling among the late fallen leaves; or, if hearing, supposed it to proceed from bird or beast--the flight of an owl, with wings touching the twigs; or a fox quartering the cover in search of prey. Still less do they see a form skulking among the hollies, black and boding as their shadows. Yet such there is; the figure of a man, but with face more like that of demon--for it is he whose name has just been upon their lips. He has overheard all they have said; every word an added torture, every phrase sending hell to his heart. And now, with jealousy in its last dire throe, every remnant of hope extinguished--cruelly crushed out--he stands, after all, unresolved how to act. Trembling, too; for he is at bottom a coward. He might rush at them and kill both--cut them to pieces with the knife he is holding in his hand. But if only one, and that her, what of himself! He has an instinctive fear of Jack Wingate, who has more than once taught him a subduing lesson. That experience stands the young waterman in stead now, in all likelihood saving his life. For at this moment the moon, rising, flings a faint light through the branches of the trees; and like some ravenous nocturnal prowler that dreads the light of day, Richard Dempsey pushes his knife-blade back into its sheath, slips out from among the hollies, and altogether away from the spot. But not to go back to Rugg's Ferry, nor to his own home. Well for Mary Morgan if he had. By the same glimpse of silvery light warned as to the time, she knows she must needs hasten away; as her lover, that he can no longer detain her. The farewell kiss, so sweet yet painful, but makes their parting more difficult; and, not till after repeating it over and over, do they tear themselves asunder--he standing to look after, she moving off along the woodland path, as nymph or sylphide, with no suspicion that a satyr has preceded her and is waiting not far off, with foul fell intent--no less than the taking of her life. END OF VOLUME ONE. Volume Two, Chapter I. A TARDY MESSENGER. Father Rogier has arrived at Abergann; slipped off his goloshes, left them with his hat in the entrance passage; and stepped inside the parlour. There is a bright coal fire chirping in the grate; for, although not absolutely cold, the air is damp and raw from the rain which has fallen during the earlier hours of the day. He has not come direct from his house at the Ferry, but up the meadows from below, along paths that are muddy, with wet grass overhanging. Hence his having on india-rubber overshoes. Spare of flesh, and thin-blooded, he is sensitive to cold. Feeling it now, he draws a chair to the fire, and sits down with his feet rested on the fender. For a time he has it all to himself. The farmer is still outside, looking after his cattle, and setting things up for the night; while Mrs Morgan, after receiving him, has made excuse to the kitchen--to set the frying-pan on the coals. Already the sausages can be heard frizzling, while their savoury odour is borne everywhere throughout the house. Before sitting down the priest had helped himself to a glass of sherry; and, after taking a mouthful or two, set it on the mantelshelf, within convenient reach. It would have been brandy were there any on the table; but, for the time satisfied with the wine, he sits sipping it, his eyes now and then directed towards the door. This is shut, Mrs Morgan having closed it after her as she went out. There is a certain restlessness in his glances, as though he were impatient for the door to be reopened, and some one to enter. And so is he, though Mrs Morgan herself is not the some one--but her daughter. Gregoire Rogier has been a fast fellow in his youth--before assuming the cassock a very _mauvais sujet_. Even now in the maturer age, and despite his vows of celibacy, he has a partiality for the sex, and a keen eye to female beauty. The fresh, youthful charms of the farmer's daughter have many a time made it water, more than the now stale attractions of Olympe, _nee_ Renault. She is not the only disciple of his flock he delights in drawing to the confessional. But there is a vast difference between the mistress of Glyngog and the maiden of Abergann. Unlike are they as Lucrezia Borgia to that other Lucretia--victim of Tarquin _fils_. And the priest knows he must deal with them in a very different manner. He cannot himself have Mary Morgan for a wife--he does not wish to--but it may serve his purpose equally well were she to become the wife of Richard Dempsey. Hence his giving support to the pretensions of the poacher--not all unselfish. Eagerly watching the door, he at length sees it pushed open; and by a woman, but not the one he is wishing for. Only Mrs Morgan re-entering to speak apologies for delay in serving supper. It will be on the table in a trice. Without paying much attention to what she says, or giving thought to her excuses, he asks in a drawl of assumed indifference,-- "Where is Ma'mselle Marie? Not on the sick list, I hope?" "Oh no, your reverence. She was never in better health in her life, I'm happy to say." "Attending to culinary matters, I presume? Bothering herself--on my account, too! Really, madame, I wish you wouldn't take so much trouble when I come to pay you these little visits--calls of duty. Above all, that ma'mselle should be scorching her fair cheeks before a kitchen fire." "She's not--nothing of the kind, Father Rogier." "Dressing, may be? That isn't needed either--to receive poor me." "No; she's not dressing." "Ah! What then? Pardon me for appearing inquisitive. I merely wish to have a word with her before monsieur, your husband, comes in--relating to a matter of the Sunday school. She's at home, isn't she?" "Not just this minute. She soon will be." "What! Out at this hour?" "Yes; she has gone up to the Ferry on an errand. I wonder you didn't meet her! Which way did you come, Father Rogier--the path or the lane?" "Neither--nor from the Ferry. I've been down the river on visitation duty, and came up through the meadows. It's rather a dark night for your daughter to have gone upon an errand! Not alone, I take it?" "Yes; she went alone." "But why, madame?" Mrs Morgan had not intended to say anything about the nature of the message, but it must come out now. "Well, your reverence," she answers, laughing, "it's rather an amusing matter--as you'll say yourself, when I tell it you." "Tell it, pray!" "It's all through a cat--our big Tom." "Ah, Tom! What _jeu d'esprit_ has he been perpetrating?" "Not much of a joke, after all; but more the other way. The mischievous creature got into the pantry, and somehow upset a bottle--indeed, broke it to pieces." "_Chat maudit_! But what has that to do with your daughter's going to the Ferry?" "Everything. It was a bottle of best French brandy--unfortunately the only one we had in the house. And as they say misfortunes never do come single, it so happened our boy was away after the cows, and nobody else I could spare. So I've sent Mary to the Welsh Harp for another. I know your reverence prefers brandy to wine." "Madame, your very kind thoughtfulness deserves my warmest thanks. But I'm really sorry at your having taken all this trouble to entertain me. Above all, I regret its having entailed such a disagreeable duty upon your Mademoiselle Marie. Henceforth I shall feel reluctance in setting foot over your threshold." "Don't say that, Father Rogier. Please don't. Mary didn't think it disagreeable. I should have been angry with her if she had. On the contrary, it was herself proposed going; as the boy was out of the way, and our girl in the kitchen, busy about supper. But poor it is--I'm sorry to tell you--and will need the drop of Cognac to make it at all palatable." "You underrate your _menu_, madame; if it be anything like what I've been accustomed to at your table. Still, I cannot help feeling regret at ma'mselle's having been sent to the Ferry--the roads in such condition. And so dark, too--she may have a difficulty in finding her way. Which did she go by--the path or the lane? Your own interrogatory to myself--almost verbatim--_c'est drole_!" With but a vague comprehension of the interpolated French and Latin phrases, the farmer's wife makes rejoinder: "Indeed, I can't say which. I never thought of asking her. However, Mary's a sensible lass, and surely wouldn't think of venturing over the foot plank a night like this. She knows it's loose. Ah!" she continues, stepping to the window, and looking out, "there be the moon up! I'm glad of that; she'll see her way now, and get sooner home." "How long is it since she went off?" Mrs Morgan glances at the clock over the mantel; soon she sees where the hands are, exclaiming: "Mercy me! It's half-past nine! She's been gone a good hour!" Her surprise is natural. To Rugg's Ferry is but a mile, even by the lane and road. Twenty minutes to go and twenty more to return were enough. How are the other twenty being spent? Buying a bottle of brandy across the counter, and paying for it, will not explain; that should occupy scarce as many seconds. Besides, the last words of the messenger, at starting off, were a promise of speedy return. She has not kept it! And what can be keeping _her_? Her mother asks this question, but without being able to answer it. She can neither tell nor guess. But the priest, more suspicious, has his conjectures; one giving him pain--greatly exciting him, though he does not show it. Instead, with simulated calmness, he says: "Suppose I step out and see whether she be near at hand?" "If your reverence would. But please don't stay for her. Supper's quite ready, and Evan will be in by the time I get it dished. I wonder what's detaining Mary!" If she only knew what, she would be less solicitous about the supper, and more about the absent one. "No matter," she continues, cheering up, "the girl will surely be back before we sit down to the table. If not, she must go--" The priest had not stayed to hear the clause threatening to disentitle the tardy messenger. He is too anxious to learn the cause of delay; and, in the hope of discovering it, with a view to something besides, he hastily claps on his hat--without waiting to defend his feet with the goloshes--then glides out and off across the garden. Mrs Morgan remains in the doorway looking after him, with an expression on her face not all contented. Perhaps she too, has a foreboding of evil; or, it may be, she but thinks of her daughter's future, and that she is herself doing wrong by endeavouring to influence it in favour of a man about whom she has of late heard discreditable rumours. Or, perchance, some suspicion of the priest himself may be stirring within her: for there are scandals abroad concerning him, that have reached even her ears. Whatever the cause, there is shadow on her brow, as she watches him pass out through the gate; scarce dispelled by the bright blazing fire in the kitchen, as she returns thither to direct the serving of the supper. If she but knew the tale he, Father Rogier, is so soon to bring back, she might not have left the door so soon, or upon her own feet; more likely have dropped down on its threshold, to be carried from it fainting, if not dead! Volume Two, Chapter II. A FATAL STEP. Having passed out through the gate, Rogier turns along the wall; and, proceeding at a brisk pace to where it ends in an angle, there comes to a halt. On the same spot where about an hour before stopped Mary Morgan--for a different reason. She paused to consider which of the two ways she would take; he has no intention of taking either, or going a step farther. Whatever he wishes to say to her can be said where he now is, without danger of its being overheard at the house--unless spoken in a tone louder than that of ordinary conversation. But it is not on this account he has stopped; simply that he is not sure which of the two routes she will return by--and for him to proceed along either would be to risk the chance of not meeting her at all. But that he has some idea of the way she will come, with suspicion of why and what is delaying her, his mutterings tell: "_Morbleu_! over an hour since she set out! A tortoise could have crawled to the Ferry, and crept back within the time! For a demoiselle with limbs lithe and supple as hers--pah! It can't be the brandy bottle that's the obstruction. Nothing of the kind. Corked, capsuled, wrapped, ready for delivery--in all two minutes, or at most, three! She so ready to run for it, too--herself proposed going! Odd, that to say the least. Only understandable on the supposition of something prearranged. An assignation with the River Triton for sure! Yes; he's the anchor that's been holding her--holds her still. Likely, they're somewhat under the shadow of that wood, now--standing--sitting--ach! I wish I but knew the spot; I'd bring their billing and cooing to an abrupt termination. It will not do for me to go on guesses; I might miss the straying damsel with whom this night I want a word in particular--must have it. Monsieur Coracle may need binding a little faster, before he consents to the service required of him. To ensure an interview with her it is necessary to stay on this spot, however trying to patience." For a second or two he stands motionless, though all the while active in thought, his eyes also restless. These, turning to the wall, show him that it is overgrown with ivy. A massive cluster on its crest projects out, with hanging tendrils, whose tops almost touch the ground. Behind them there is ample room for a man to stand upright, and so be concealed from the eyes of anyone passing, however near. "_Grace a Dieu_!" he exclaims, observing this; "the very place. I must take her by surprise. That's the best way when one wants to learn how the cat jumps. Ha! _cette chat_ Tom; how very opportune his mischievous doings--for Mademoiselle! Well, I must give _Madame la mere_ counsel better to guard against such accidents hereafter; and how to behave when they occur." He has by this ducked his head, and stepped under the arcading evergreen. The position is all he could desire. It gives him a view of both ways by which on that side the farmhouse can be approached. The cart lane is directly before his face, as is also the footpath when he turns towards it. The latter leading, as already said, along a hedge to the orchard's bottom, there crosses the brook by a plank--this being about fifty yards distant from where he has stationed himself. And as there is now moonlight he can distinctly see the frail footbridge, with a portion of the path beyond, where it runs through straggling trees, before entering the thicker wood. Only at intervals has he sight of it, as the sky is mottled with masses of cloud, that every now and then, drifting over the moon's disc, shut off her light with the suddenness of a lamp extinguished. When she shines he can himself be seen. Standing in crouched attitude with the ivy tendrils festooned over his pale, bloodless face, he looks like a gigantic spider behind its web, on the wait for prey--ready to spring forward and seize it. For nigh ten minutes he thus remains watching, all the while impatiently chafing. He listens too; though with little hope of hearing aught to indicate the approach of her expected. After the pleasant _tete-a-tete_, he is now sure she must have held with the waterman, she will be coming along silently, her thoughts in sweet, placid contentment; or she may come on with timid, stealthy steps, dreading rebuke by her mother for having overstayed her time. Just as the priest in bitterest chagrin is promising himself that rebuked she shall be he sees what interrupts his resolves, suddenly and altogether withdrawing his thoughts from Mary Morgan. It is a form approaching the plank, on the opposite side of the stream; not hers, nor woman's; instead the figure of a man! Neither erect nor walking in the ordinary way, but with head held down and shoulders projected forward, as if he were seeking concealment under the bushes that beset the path, for all drawing nigh to the brook with the rapidity of one pursued, and who thinks there is safety only on its other side! "_Sainte Vierge_!" exclaims the priest, _sotto voce_. "What can all that mean? And who--" He stays his self-asked interrogatory, seeing that the skulker has paused too--at the farther end of the plank, which he has now reached. Why? It may be from fear to set foot on it; for indeed is there danger to one not intimately acquainted with it. The man may be a stranger-- some fellow on teams who intends trying the hospitality of the farmhouse--more likely its henroosts, judging by his manner of approach? While thus conjecturing, Rogier sees the skulker stoop down, immediately after hearing a sound, different from the sough of the stream; a harsh grating noise, as of a piece of heavy timber drawn over a rough surface of rock. "Sharp fellow?" thinks the priest; "with all his haste, wonderfully cautious! He's fixing the thing steady before venturing to tread upon it! Ha! I'm wrong; he don't design crossing it after all!" This as the crouching figure erects itself and, instead of passing over the plank, turns abruptly away from it. Not to go back along the path, but up the stream on that same side! And with bent body as before, still seeming desirous to shun observation. Now more than ever mystified, the priest watches him, with eyes keen as those of a cat set for nocturnal prowling. Not long till he learns who the man is. Just then the moon, escaping from a cloud, flashes her full light in his face, revealing features of diabolic expression--that of a murderer striding away from the spot where he has been spilling blood! Rogier recognises Coracle Dick, though still without the slightest idea of what the poacher is doing there. "_Que diantre_!" he exclaims, in surprise; "what can that devil be after! Coming up to the plank and not crossing--Ha! yonder's a very different sort of pedestrian approaching it? Ma'mselle Mary at last!" This as by the same intermittent gleam of moonlight he descries a straw hat, with streaming ribbons, over the tops of the bushes beyond the brook. The brighter image drives the darker one from his thoughts; and, forgetting all about the man, in his resolve to take the woman unawares, he steps out from under the ivy, and makes forward to meet her. He is a Frenchman, and to help her over the footplank will give him a fine opportunity for displaying his cheap gallantry. As he hastens down to the stream, the moon remaining unclouded, he sees the young girl close to it on the opposite side. She approaches with proud carriage, and confident step, her cheeks even under the pale light showing red--flushed with the kisses so lately received, as it were still clinging to them. Her heart yet thrilling with love, strong under its excitement, little suspects she how soon it will cease to beat. Boldly she plants her foot upon the plank, believing, late boasting, a knowledge of its tricks. Alas! there is one with which she is not acquainted--could not be--a new and treacherous one, taught it within the last two minutes. The daughter of Evan Morgan is doomed; one more step will be her last in life! She makes it, the priest alone being witness. He sees her arms flung aloft, simultaneously hearing a shriek; then arms, body, and bridge sink out of sight suddenly, as though the earth had swallowed them! Volume Two, Chapter III. A SUSPICIOUS WAIF. On returning homeward the young waterman bethinks him of a difficulty--a little matter to be settled with his mother. Not having gone to the shop, he has neither whipcord nor pitch to show. If questioned about these commodities, what answer is he to make? He dislikes telling her another lie. It came easy enough before the interview with his sweetheart, but now it is not so much worth while. On reflection he thinks it will be better to make a clean breast of it. He has already half confessed, and may as well admit his mother to full confidence about the secret he has been trying to keep from her-- unsuccessfully, as he now knows. While still undetermined, a circumstance occurs to hinder him from longer withholding it, whether he would or not. In his abstraction he has forgotten all about the moon, now up, and at intervals shining brightly. During one of these he has arrived at his own gate, as he opens it seeing his mother on the door-step. Her attitude shows she has already seen him, and observed the direction whence he has come. Her words declare the same. "Why, Jack!" she exclaims, in feigned astonishment, "ye beant a comin' from the Ferry that way?" The interrogatory, or rather the tone in which it is put, tells him the cat is out of the bag. No use attempting to stuff the animal in again; and seeing it is not, he rejoins, laughingly-- "Well, mother, to speak the truth, I ha'nt been to the Ferry at all. An' I must ask you to forgie me for practisin' a trifle o' deception on ye--that 'bout the _Mary_ wantin' repairs." "I suspected it, lad; an' that it wor the tother Mary as wanted something, or you wanted something wi' her. Since you've spoke repentful, an' confessed, I ain't a-goin' to worrit ye about it. I'm glad the boat be all right, as I ha' got good news for you." "What?" he asks, rejoiced at being so easily let off. "Well; you spoke truth when ye sayed there was no knowin' but that somebody might be wantin' to hire ye any minnit. There's been one arready." "Who? Not the Captain?" "No, not him. But a grand livery chap; footman or coachman--I ain't sure which--only that he came frae a Squire Powell's, 'bout a mile back." "Oh! I know Squire Powell--him o' New Hall, I suppose it be. What did the sarvint say?" "That if you wasn't engaged, his young master wants ye to take hisself, and some friends that be staying wi' him, for a row down the river." "How far did the man say? If they be bound to Chepstow or even but Tintern, I don't think I could go; unless they start Monday mornin'. I'm 'gaged to the Captain for Thursday, ye know; an if I went the long trip, there'd be all the bother o' gettin' the boat back--an' bare time." "Monday! Why, it's the morrow they want ye." "Sunday! That's queerish, too. Squire Powell's family be a sort o' strict religious, I've heerd." "That's just it. The livery chap sayed it be a church they're goin' to; some curious kind o' old worshippin' place, that lie in a bend o' the river, where carriages ha' difficulty in gettin' to it." "I think I know the one, an' can take them there well enough. What answer did you gie to the man?" "That ye could take 'em, an' would. I know'd you hadn't any other bespeak; and since it wor to a church wouldn't mind its bein' Sunday." "Sartinly not. Why should I?" asks Jack, who is anything but a Sabbatarian. "Where do they weesh the boat to be took? Or am I to wait for 'em here?" "Yes; the man spoke o' them comin' here, an' at a very early hour. Six o'clock. He sayed the clergyman be a friend o' the family, and they're to ha' their breakfasts wi' him, afore goin' to church." "All right! I'll be ready for 'em, come's as early as they may." "In that case, my son; ye better get to your bed at once. Ye've had a hard day o' it, and need rest. Should ye like take a drop o' somethin' 'fores you lie down?" "Well, mother; I don't mind. Just a glass o' your elderberry." She opens a cupboard, brings forth a black bottle, and fills him a tumbler of the dark red wine--home made, and by her own hands. Quaffing it, he observes:-- "It be the best stuff I know of to put spirit into a man, an' makes him feel cheery. I've heerd the Captain hisself say, it beats their _Spanish Port_ all to pieces." Though somewhat astray in his commercial geography, the young waterman, as his patron, is right about the quality of the beverage; for elderberry wine, made in the correct way, _is_ superior to that of Oporto. Curious scientific fact, I believe not generally known, that the soil where grows the _Sambucus_ is that most favourable to the growth of the grape. Without going thus deeply into the philosophy of the subject, or at all troubling himself about it, the boatman soon gets to the bottom of his glass, and bidding his mother good night, retires to his sleeping room. Getting into bed, he lies for a while sweetly thinking of Mary Morgan, and that satisfactory interview under the elm; then goes to sleep as sweetly to dream of her. There is just a streak of daylight stealing in through the window as he awakes; enough to warn him that it is time to be up and stirring. Up he instantly is and arrays himself, not in his everyday boating habiliments, but a suit worn only on Sundays and holidays. The mother, also astir betimes, has his breakfast on the table soon as he is rigged; and just as he finishes eating it, the rattle of wheels on the road in front, with voices, tells him his fare has arrived. Hastening out, he sees a grand carriage drawn up at the gate, double horsed, with coachman and footman on the box; inside young Mr Powell, his pretty sister, and two others--a lady and gentleman, also young. Soon they are all seated in the boat, the coachman having been ordered to take the carriage home, and bring it back at a certain hour. The footman goes with them--the _Mary_ having seats for six. Rowed down stream, the young people converse among themselves; gaily, now and then giving way to laughter, as though it were any other day than Sunday. But their boatman is merry also, with memories of the preceding night; and, though not called upon to take part in their conversation, he likes listening to it. Above all he is pleased with the appearance of Miss Powell, a very beautiful girl; and takes note of the attention paid her by the gentleman who sits opposite. Jack is rather interested in observing these, as they remind him of his own first approaches to Mary Morgan. His eyes, though, are for a time removed from them, while the boat is passing Abergann. Out of the farmhouse chimneys just visible over the tops of the trees, he sees smoke ascending. It is not yet seven o'clock, but the Morgans are early risers, and by this mother and daughter will be on their way to _Matins_, and possibly Confession at the Rugg's Ferry Chapel. He dislikes to reflect on the last, and longs for the day when he has hopes to cure his sweetheart of such a repulsive devotional practice. Pulling on down he ceases to think of it, and of her for the time, his attention being engrossed by the management of the boat. For just below Abergann the stream runs sharply, and is given to caprices. But further on, it once more flows in gentle tide along the meadow lands of Llangorren. Before turning the bend, where Gwen Wynn and Eleanor Lees were caught in the rapid current, at the estuary of a sluggish inflowing brook, whose waters are now beaten back by the flooded river, he sees what causes him to start, and hang on the stroke of his oar. "What is it, Wingate?" asks young Powell, observing his strange behaviour. "Oh! a waif--that plank floating yonder! I suppose you'd like to pick it up! But remember! it's Sunday, and we must confine ourselves to works of necessity and mercy." Little think the four who smile at this remark--five with the footman-- what a weird, painful impression the sight of that drifting thing has made on the sixth who is rowing them. Nor does it leave him all that day; but clings to him in the church, to which he goes; at the Rectory, where he is entertained; and while rowing back up the river--hangs heavy on his heart as lead! Returning, he looks out for the piece of timber; but cannot see it; for it is now after night, the young people having stayed dinner with their friend the clergyman. Kept later than they intended, on arrival at the boat's dock they do not remain there an instant; but, getting into the carriage, which has been some time awaiting them, are whirled off to New Hall. Impatient are they to be home. Far more--for a different reason--the waterman; who but stays to tie the boat's painter; and, leaving the oars in her thwarts, hastens into his house. The plank is still uppermost in his thoughts, the presentiment heavy on his heart. Not lighter, as on entering at the door he sees his mother seated with her head bowed down to her knees. He does not wait for her to speak, but asks excitedly:-- "What's the matter, mother?" The question is mechanical--he almost anticipates the answer, or its nature. "Oh, my son, my son! As I told ye. It _was the canwyll corph_!" Volume Two, Chapter IV. "THE FLOWER OF LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING." There is a crowd collected round the farmhouse of Abergann. Not an excited, or noisy one; instead, the people composing it are of staid demeanour, with that formal solemnity observable on the faces of those at a funeral. And a funeral it is, or soon to be. For, inside there is a chamber of death; a coffin with a corpse--that of her, who, had she lived, would have been Jack Wingate's wife. Mary Morgan has indeed fallen victim to the mad spite of a monster. Down went she into that swollen stream, which, ruthless and cruel as he who committed her to it, carried her off on its engulfing tide--her form tossed to and fro, now sinking, now coming to the surface, and again going down. No one to save her--not an effort at rescue made by the cowardly Frenchman; who, rushing on to the chasm's edge, there stopped,--only to gaze affrightedly at the flood surging below, foam-crested; only to listen to her agonised cry, further off and more freely put forth, as she was borne onward to her doom. Once again he heard it, in that tone which tells of life's last struggle with death--proclaiming death the conqueror. Then all was over. As he stood horror-stricken, half-bewildered, a cloud suddenly curtained the moon, bringing black darkness upon the earth, as if a pall had been thrown over it. Even the white froth on the water was for the while invisible. He could see nothing--nothing hear, save the hoarse, harsh torrent rolling relentlessly on. Of no avail, then, his hurrying back to the house, and raising the alarm. Too late it was to save Mary Morgan from drowning; and, only by the accident of her body being thrown up against a bank was it that night recovered. It is the third day after, and the funeral about to take place. Though remote the situation of the farm-stead, and sparsely inhabited the district immediately around, the assemblage is a large one. This partly from the unusual circumstances of the girl's death, but as much from the respect in which Evan Morgan is held by his neighbours, far and near. They are there in their best attire, men and women alike, Protestants as Catholics, to show a sympathy, which in truth many of them sincerely feel. Nor is there among the people assembled any conjecturing about the cause of the fatal occurrence. No hint, or suspicion, that there has been foul play. How could there? So clearly an accident, as pronounced by the coroner at his inquiry held the day after the drowning--brief and purely _pro forma_. Mrs Morgan herself told of her daughter sent on that errand from which she never returned; while the priest, eye-witness, stated the reason why. Taken together, this was enough; though further confirmed by the absent plank, found and brought back on the following day. Even had Wingate rowed back up the river during daylight, he would not have seen it again. The farm labourers and others, accustomed to cross by it, gave testimony as to its having been loose. But of all whose evidence was called for, one alone could have put a different construction on the tale. Father Rogier could have done this; but did not, having his reasons for withholding the truth. He is now in possession of a secret that will make Richard Dempsey his slave for life--his instrument, willing or unwilling, for such purpose as he may need him, no matter what its iniquity. The hour of interment has been fixed for twelve o'clock. It is now a little after eleven, and everybody has arrived at the house. The men stand outside in groups, some in the little flower garden in front, others straying into the farmyard to have a look at the fatting pigs, or about the pastures to view the white-faced Herefords and "Bye-land" sheep; of which last Evan Morgan is a noted breeder. Inside the house are the women--some relatives of the deceased, with the farmer's friends and more familiar acquaintances. All admitted to the chamber of death to take a last look at the dead. The corpse is in the coffin, but with lid not yet screwed on. There lies the corpse in its white drapery, still untouched by "decay's effacing fingers," beautiful as living bride, though now a bride for the altar of eternity. The stream passes in and out; but besides those only curious coming and going, there are some who remain in the room. Mrs Morgan herself sits beside the coffin, at intervals giving way to wildest grief; a cluster of women around vainly essaying to comfort her. There is a young man seated in the corner, who seems to need consoling almost as much as she. Every now and then his breast heaves in audible sobbing as though the heart within were about to break. None wonder at this; for it is Jack Wingate. Still, there are those who think it strange his being there--above all, as if made welcome. They know not the remarkable change that has taken place in the feelings of Mrs Morgan. Beside that bed of death all who were dear to her daughter, were dear to her now. And she is aware that the young waterman was so. For he has told her, with tearful eyes and sad, earnest words, whose truthfulness could not be doubted. But where is the other, the false one? Not there--never has been since the fatal occurrence. Came not to the inquest, came not to inquire or condole; comes not now to show sympathy, or take part in the rites of sepulture. There are some who make remark about his absence, though none lament it--not even Mrs Morgan herself. The thought of the bereaved mother is that he would have ill-befitted being her son. Only a fleeting reflection, her whole soul being engrossed in grief for her lost daughter. The hour for closing the coffin has come. They but await the priest to say some solemn words. He has not yet arrived, though every instant looked for. A personage so important has many duties to perform, and may be detained by them elsewhere. For all, he does not fail. While inside the death chamber they are conjecturing the cause of his delay, a buzz outside, with a shuffling of feet in the passage, tells of way being made for him. Presently he enters the room, and stepping up to the coffin stands beside it, all eyes turned towards him. His are upon the face of the corpse--at first with the usual look of official gravity and feigned grief. But continuing to gaze upon it, a strange expression comes over his features, as though he saw something that surprised, or unusually interested him. It affects him even to giving a start; so light, however, that no one seems to observe it. Whatever the emotion, he conceals it; and in calm voice pronounces the prayer, with all its formalities and gestures. The lid is laid on, covering the form of Mary Morgan--for ever veiling her face from the world. Then the pall is thrown over, and all carried outside. There is no hearse, no plumes, nor paid pall-bearers. Affection supplies the place of this heartless luxury of the tomb. On the shoulders of four men the coffin is borne away, the crowd forming into procession as it passes, and following. On to the Rugg's Ferry chapel,--into its cemetery, late consecrated. There lowered into a grave already prepared to receive it; and, after the usual ceremonial of the Roman Catholic religion covered up, and turfed over. Then the mourners scatter off for their homes, singly or in groups, leaving the remains of Mary Morgan in their last resting-place, only her near relatives with thought of ever again returning to stand over them. There is one exception; this is a mail not related to her, but who would have been had she lived. Wingate goes away with the intention ere long to return. The chapel burying-ground brinks upon the river, and when the shades of night have descended over it, he brings his boat alongside. Then, fixing her to the bank, he steps out, and proceeds in the direction of the new made grave. All this cautiously, and with circumspection, as if fearing to be seen. The darkness favouring him, he is not. Reaching the sacred spot he kneels down, and with a knife, taken from his pockets, scoops out a little cavity in the lately laid turf. Into this he inserts a plant, which he has brought along with him--one of a common kind, but emblematic of no ordinary feeling. It is that known to country people as "The Flower of Love-lies-bleeding" (_Amaranthus caudatus_). Closing the earth around its roots, and restoring the sods, he bends lower, till his lips are in contact with the grass upon the grave. One near enough might hear convulsive sobbing, accompanied by the words:-- "Mary, darling! you're wi' the angels now; and I know you'll forgie me, if I've done ought to bring about this dreadful thing. Oh, dear, dear Mary! I'd be only too glad to be lyin' in the grave along wi' ye. As God's my witness I would." For a time he is silent, giving way to his grief--so wild as to seem unbearable. And just for an instant he himself thinks it so, as he kneels with the knife still open in his hand, his eyes fixed upon it. A plunge with that shining blade with point to his heart, and all his misery would be over! "My mother--my poor mother--no!" These few words, with the filial thought conveyed, save him from suicide. Soon as repeating them, he shuts to his knife, rises to his feet, and returning to the boat again rows himself home--but never with so heavy a heart. Volume Two, Chapter V. A FRENCH FEMME DE CHAMBRE. Of all who assisted at the ceremony of Mary Morgan's funeral, no one seemed so impatient for its termination as the priest. In his official capacity he did all he could to hasten it; soon as it was over hurrying away from the grave, out of the burying-ground, and into his own house, near by. Such haste would have appeared strange--even indecent--but for the belief of his having some sacerdotal duty that called him elsewhere; a belief strengthened by their shortly after seeing him start off in the direction of the Ferry-boat. Arriving there, the Charon attendant rows him across the river; and, soon as setting foot on the opposite side, he turns face down stream, taking a path that meanders through fields and meadows. Along this he goes rapidly as his legs can carry him--in a walk. Clerical dignity hinders him from proceeding at a run, though judging by the expression of his countenance he is inclined to it. The route he is on would conduct to Llangorren Court--several miles distant--and thither is he bound; though the house itself is not his objective point. He does not visit, nor would it serve him to show his face there--least of all to Gwen Wynn. She might not be so rude as to use her riding whip on him, as she once felt inclined in the hunting-field; but she would certainly be surprised to see him at her home. Yet it is one within her house he wishes to see, and is now on the way for it, pretty sure of being able to accomplish his object. True to her fashionable instincts and _toilette_ necessities, Miss Linton keeps a French maid, and it is with this damsel Father Rogier designs having an interview. He is thoroughly _en rapport_ with the _femme de chambre_ and through her, aided by the Confession, kept advised of everything which transpires at the Court, or all he deems it worth while to be advised about. His confidence that he will not have long his walk for nothing rests on certain matters of pre-arrangement. With the foreign domestic he has succeeded in establishing a code of signals, by which he can communicate--with almost a certainty of being able to see her. Not inside the house, but at a place near enough to be convenient. Rare the park in Herefordshire through which there is not a right-of-way path, and one runs across that of Llangorren. Not through the ornamental grounds, nor at all close to the mansion--as is frequently the case, to the great chagrin of the owner--but several hundred yards distant. It passes from the river's bank to the county road, all the way through trees, that screen it from view of the house. There is a point, however, where it approaches the edge of the wood, and there one traversing it might be seen from the upper windows. But only for an instant, unless the party so passing should choose to make stop in the place exposed. It is a thoroughfare not much frequented, though free to Father Rogier as any one else; and, now hastening along it, he arrives at that spot where the break in the timber brings the house in view. Here he makes a halt, still keeping under the trees; to a branch of one of them, on the side towards the Court attaching a piece of white paper, he has taken out of his pocket. This done with due caution, and care that he be not observed in the act, he draws back to the path, and sits down upon a stile close by--to await the upshot of his telegraphy. His haste hitherto explained by the fact, only at certain times are his signals likely to be seen, or could they be attended to. One of the surest and safest is during the early afternoon hours, just after luncheon, when the ancient toast of Cheltenham takes her accustomed _siesta_--before dressing herself for the drive, or reception of callers. While the mistress sleeps the maid is free to dispose of herself, as she pleases. It was to hit this interlude of leisure Father Rogier has been hurrying; and that he has succeeded is soon known to him, by his seeing a form with floating drapery, recognisable as that of the _femme de chambre_. Gliding through the shrubbery, and evidently with an eye to escape observation, she is only visible at intervals; at length lost to his sight altogether as she enters among the thick standing trees. But he knows she will turn up again. And she does, after a short time; coming along the path towards the stile where here he is seated. "Ah! _ma bonne_!" he exclaims, dropping on his feet, and moving forward to meet her. "You've been prompt! I didn't expect you quite so soon. Madame la Chatelaine oblivious, I apprehend; in the midst of her afternoon nap?" "Yes, Pere; she was when I stole off. But she has given me directions about dressing her, to go out for a drive--earlier than usual. So I must get back immediately." "I'm not going to detain you very long. I chanced to be passing, and thought I might as well have a word with you--seeing it's the hour when you're off duty. By the way, I hear you're about to have grand doings at the Court--a ball, and what not?" "_Oui, m'sieu; oui_." "When is it to be?" "On Thursday. Mademoiselle celebrates _son jour de naissance_--the twenty-first, making her of age. It is to be a grand fete as you say. They've been all last week preparing for it." "Among the invited Le Capitaine Ryecroft, I presume?" "O yes. I saw madame write the note inviting him--indeed took it myself down to the hall table for the post-boy." "He visits often at the Court of late?" "Very often--once a week, sometimes twice." "And comes down the river by boat; doesn't he!" "In a boat. Yes--comes and goes that way." Her statement is reliable, as Father Rogier has reason to believe-- having an inkling of suspicion that the damsel has of late been casting sheep's eyes, not at Captain Ryecroft, but his young boatman, and is as much interested in the movements of the _Mary_ as either the boat's owner or charterer. "Always comes by water, and returns by it," observes the priest, as if speaking to himself. "You're quite sure of that, _ma fille_?" "Oh, quite, Pere!" "Mademoiselle appears to be very partial to him. I think, you told me she often accompanies him down to the boat stair, at his departure?" "Often! always." "Always?" "_Toujours_! I never knew it otherwise. Either the boat stair, or the pavilion." "Ah! the summer-house! They hold their _tete-a-tete_ there at times; do they?" "Yes; they do." "But not when he leaves at a late hour--as, for instance, when he dines at the Court; which I know he has done several times?" "Oh, yes; even then. Only last week he was there for dinner; and Ma'mselle Gwen went with him to his boat, or the pavilion--to bid adieus. No matter what the time to her. _Ma foi_! I'd risk my word she'll do the same after this grand ball that's to be. And why shouldn't she, Pere Rogier? Is there any harm in it?" The question is put with a view of justifying her own conduct, that would be somewhat similar were Jack Wingate to encourage it, which, to say truth, he never has. "Oh, no," answers the priest, with an assumed indifference; "no harm, whatever, and no business of ours. Mademoiselle Wynn is mistress of her own actions, and will be more, after the coming birthday number _vingt-un_. But," he adds, dropping the role of the interrogator, now that he has got all the information wanted, "I fear I'm keeping you too long. As I've said, chancing to come by I signalled--chiefly to tell you, that next Sunday we have High Mass in the chapel. With special prayers for a young girl, who was drowned last Saturday night, and whom we've just this day interred. I suppose you've heard?" "No, I haven't. Who Pere?" Her question may appear strange, Rugg's Ferry being so near to Llangorren Court and Abergann still nearer. But for reasons already stated, as others, the ignorance of the Frenchwoman as to what has occurred at the farmhouse, is not only intelligible, but natural enough. Equally natural, though in a sense very different, is the look of satisfaction appearing in her eyes, as the priest in answer gives the name of the drowned girl. "_Marie, la fille de fermier Morgan_." The expression that comes over her face is, under the circumstances, terribly repulsive--being almost that of joy! For not only has she seen Mary Morgan at the chapel, but something besides--heard her name coupled with that of the waterman, Wingate. In the midst of her strong, sinful emotions, of which the priest is fully cognisant, he finds it a good opportunity for taking leave. Going back to the tree where the bit of signal paper has been left, he plucks it off, and crumbles it into his pocket. Then, returning to the path, shakes hands with her, says "_Bonjour_!" and departs. She is not a beauty, or he would have made his adieus in a very different way. Volume Two, Chapter VI. THE POACHER AT HOME. Coracle Dick lives all alone. If he have relatives they are not near, nor does any one in the neighbourhood know aught about them. Only some vague report of a father away off in the colonies, where he went against his will; while the mother--is believed dead. Not less solitary is Coracle's place of abode. Situated in a dingle with sides thickly wooded, it is not visible from anywhere. Nor is it near any regular road; only approachable by a path, which there ends; the dell itself being a _cul-de-sac_. Its open end is toward the river, running in at a point where the bank is precipitous, so hindering thoroughfare along the stream's edge, unless when its waters are at their lowest. Coracle's house is but a hovel, no better than the cabin of a backwoods squatter. Timber structure, too, in part, with a filling up of rough mason work. Its half-dozen perches of garden ground, once reclaimed from the wood, have grown wild again, no spade having touched them for years. The present occupant of the tenement has no taste for gardening, nor agriculture of any kind; he is a poacher, _pur sang_--at least, so far as is known. And it seems to pay him better than would the cultivation of cabbages--with pheasants at nine shillings the brace, and salmon three shillings the pound. He has the river, if not the mere, for his net, and the land for his game; making as free with both as ever did Alan-a-dale. But, whatever the price of fish and game, be it high or low, Coracle is never without good store of cash, spending it freely at the Welsh Harp, as elsewhere; at times so lavishly, that people of suspicious nature think it cannot all be the product of night netting and snaring. Some of it, say scandalous tongues, is derived from other industries, also practised by night, and less reputable than trespassing after game. But, as already said, these are only rumours, and confined to the few. Indeed, only a very few have intimate acquaintance with the man. He is of a reserved, taciturn habit, somewhat surly: not talkative even in his cups. And though ever ready to stand treat in the Harp tap-room he rarely practises hospitality in his own house; only now and then, when some acquaintance of like kidney and calling pays him a visit. Then the solitary domicile has its silence disturbed by the talk of men, thick as thieves--often speech which, if heard beyond its walls, 'twould not be well for its owner. More than half time however, the poacher's dwelling is deserted, and oftener at night than by day. Its door shut, and padlocked, tells when the tenant is abroad. Then only a rough lurcher dog--a dangerous animal, too--is guardian of the place. Not that there are any chattels to tempt the cupidity of the kleptomaniac. The most valuable moveable inside were not worth carrying away; and outside is but the coracle standing in a lean-to shed, propped up by its paddle. It is not always there, and, when absent, it may be concluded that its owner is on some expedition up, down, or across the river. Nor is the dog always at home; his absence proclaiming the poacher engaged in the terrestrial branch of his profession--running down hares or rabbits. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It is the night of the same day that has seen the remains of Mary Morgan consigned to their resting-place in the burying-ground of the Rugg's Ferry chapel. A wild night it has turned out, dark and stormy. The autumnal equinox is on, and its gales have commenced stripping the trees of their foliage. Around the dwelling of Dick Dempsey the fallen leaves lie thick, covering the ground as with cloth of gold; at intervals torn to shreds, as the wind swirls them up and holds them suspended. Every now and then they are driven against the door, which is shut, but not locked. The hasp is hanging loose, the padlock with its bowed bolt open. The coracle is seen standing upright in the shed; the lurcher not anywhere outside--for the animal is within, lying upon the hearth in front of a cheerful fire. And before the same sits its master, regarding a pot which hangs over it on hooks; at intervals lifting off the lid, and stirring the contents with a long-handled spoon of white metal. What these are might be told by the aroma; a stew, smelling strongly of onions with game savour conjoined. Ground game at that, for Coracle is in the act of "jugging" a hare. Handier to no man than him were the recipe of Mrs Glass, for he comes up to all its requirements-- even the primary and essential one--knows how to catch his hare as well as cook it. The stew is done, dished, and set steaming upon the table, where already has been placed a plate--the time-honoured willow pattern--with a knife and two-pronged fork. There is, besides, a jug of water, a bottle containing brandy, and a tumbler. Drawing his chair up, Coracle commences eating. The hare is a young one--a leveret he has just taken from the stubble--tender and juicy-- delicious even without the red-currant jelly he has not got, and for which he does not care. Withal, he appears but little to enjoy the meal, and only eats as a man called upon to satisfy the cravings of hunger. Every now and then, as the fork is being carried to his head, he holds it suspended, with the morsel of flesh on its prongs, while listening to sounds outside! At such intervals the expression upon his countenance is that of the keenest apprehension; and as a gust of wind, unusually violent, drives a leafy branch in loud clout against the door, he starts in his chair, fancying it the knock of a policeman with his muffled truncheon! This night the poacher is suffering from no ordinary fear of being summoned for game trespass. Were that all, he could eat his leveret as composedly as if it had been regularly purchased and paid for. But there is more upon his mind; the dread of a writ being presented to him, with shackles at the same time--of being taken handcuffed to the county jail--thence before a court of assize--and finally to the scaffold! He has reason to apprehend all this. Notwithstanding his deep cunning, and the dexterity with which he accomplished his great crime, a man must have witnessed it. Above the roar of the torrent, mingling with the cries of the drowning girl as she struggled against it, were shouts in a man's voice, which he fancied to be that of Father Rogier. From what he has since heard he is now certain of it. The coroner's inquest, at which he was not present, but whose report has reached him, puts that beyond doubt. His only uncertainty is, whether Rogier saw him by the footbridge, and if so to recognise him. True, the priest has nothing said of him at the 'quest; for all he, Coracle, has his suspicions; now torturing him almost as much as if sure that he was detected tampering with the plank. No wonder he eats his supper with little relish, or that after every few mouthfuls he takes a swallow of the brandy, with a view to keeping up his spirits. Withal he has no remorse. When he recalls the hastily exchanged speeches he overheard upon Garran-hill, with that more prolonged dialogue under the trysting-tree, the expression upon his features is not one of repentance, but devilish satisfaction at the fell deed he has done. Not that his vengeance is yet satisfied. It will not be till he have the other life--that of Jack Wingate. He has dealt the young waterman a blow which at the same time afflicts himself; only by dealing a deadlier one will his own sufferings be relieved. He has been long plotting his rival's death, but without seeing a safe way to accomplish it. And now the thing seems no nearer than ever--this night farther off. In his present frame of mind--with the dread of the gallows upon it--he would be too glad to cry quits, and let Wingate live! Starting at every swish of the wind, he proceeds with his supper, hastily devouring it, like a wild beast; and when at length finished, he sets the dish upon the floor for the dog. Then lighting his pipe, and drawing the bottle nearer to his hand, he sits for a while smoking. Not long before being interrupted by a noise at the door; this time no stroke of wind-tossed waif, but a touch of knuckles. Though slight and barely audible, the dog knows it to be a knock, as shown by his behaviour. Dropping the half-gnawed bone, and springing to its feet, the animal gives out an angry growling. Its master has himself started from his chair, and stands trembling. There is a slit of a door at back convenient for escape; and for an instant his eye is on it, as though he had half a mind to make exit that way. He would blow out the light were it a candle; but cannot as it is the fire, whose faggots are still brightly ablaze. While thus undecided, he hears the knock repeated; this time louder, and with the accompaniment of a voice, saying: "Open your door, Monsieur Dick." Not a policeman, then; only the priest! Volume Two, Chapter VII. A MYSTERIOUS CONTRACT. "Only the priest!" muttered Coracle to himself, but little better satisfied than if it were the policeman. Giving the lurcher a kick to quiet the animal, he pulls back the bolt, and draws open the door, as he does so asking, "That you, Father Rogier?" "_C'est moi_!" answers the priest, stepping in without invitation. "Ah! _mon bracconier_! you're having something nice for supper. Judging by the aroma _ragout_ of hare. Hope I haven't disturbed you. Is it hare?" "It was, your Reverence, a bit of leveret." "Was! You've finished then. It is all gone?" "It is. The dog had the remains of it, as ye see." He points to the dish on the floor. "I'm sorry at that--having rather a relish for leveret. It can't be helped, however." "I wish I'd known ye were comin'. Dang the dog!" "No, no! Don't blame the poor dumb brute. No doubt, it too has a taste for hare, seeing it's half hound. I suppose leverets are plentiful just now, and easily caught, since they can no longer retreat to the standing corn?" "Yes, your Reverence. There be a good wheen o' them about." "In that case, if you should stumble upon one, and bring it to my house, I'll have it jugged for myself. By the way, what have you got in that black jack?" "It's brandy." "Well, Monsieur Dick; I'll thank you for a mouthful." "Will you take it neat, or mixed wi' a drop o' water?" "Neat--raw. The night's that, and the two raws will neutralise one another. I feel chilled to the bones, and a little fatigued, toiling against the storm." "It be a fearsome night. I wonder at your Reverence bein' out--exposin' yourself in such weather!" "All weathers are alike to me--when duty calls. Just now I'm abroad on a little matter of business that won't brook delay." "Business--wi' me?" "With you, _mon bracconier_!" "What may it be, your Reverence?" "Sit down, and I shall tell you. It's too important to be discussed standing." The introductory dialogue does not tranquillise the poacher; instead, further intensifies his fears. Obedient, he takes his seat one side the table, the priest planting himself on the other, the glass of brandy within reach of his hand. After a sip, he resumes speech with the remark: "If I mistake not, you are a poor man, Monsieur Dempsey?" "You ain't no ways mistaken 'bout that, Father Rogier." "And you'd like to be a rich one?" Thus encouraged, the poacher's face lights up a little. Smilingly, he makes reply: "I can't say as I'd have any particular objection. 'Stead, I'd like it wonderful well." "You can be, if so inclined." "I'm ever so inclined, as I've sayed. But how, your Reverence? In this hard work-o'-day world 'tant so easy to get rich." "For you, easy enough. No labour and not much more difficulty than transporting your coracle five or six miles across the meadows." "Somethin' to do wi' the coracle, have it?" "No; 'twill need a bigger boat--one that will carry three or four people. Do you know where you can borrow such, or hire it?" "I think I do. I've a friend, the name o' Rob Trotter, who's got just sich a boat. He'd lend it me, sure." "Charter it, if he doesn't. Never mind about the price. I'll pay." "When might you want it, your Reverence?" "On Thursday night, at ten, or a little later--say half-past." "And where am I to bring it?" "To the Ferry; you'll have it against the bank by the back of the Chapel burying-ground, and keep it there till I come to you. Don't leave it to go up to the `Harp,' or anywhere else; and don't let any one see either the boat or yourself, if you can possibly avoid it. As the nights are now dark at that hour, there need be no difficulty in your rowing up the river without being observed. Above all, you're to make no one the wiser of what you're to do, or anything I'm now saying to you. The service I want you for is one of a secret kind, and not to be prattled about." "May I have a hint o' what it is?" "Not now; you shall know in good time--when you meet me with the boat. There will be another along with me--may be two--to assist in the affair. What will be required of you is a little dexterity, _such as you displayed on Saturday night_." No need the emphasis on the last words to impress their meaning upon the murderer. Too well he comprehends, starting in his chair as if a hornet had stung him. "How--where?" he gasps out in the confusion of terror. The double interrogatory is but mechanical, and of no consequence. Hopeless any attempt at concealment or subterfuge; as he is aware on receiving the answer, cool and provokingly deliberate. "You have asked two questions, Monsieur Dick, that call for separate replies. To the first, `How?' I leave you to grope out the answer for yourself, feeling pretty sure you'll find it. With the second I'll be more particular, if you wish me. Place--where a certain foot plank bridges a certain brook, close to the farmhouse of Abergann. It--the plank, I mean--last Saturday night, a little after nine, took a fancy to go drifting down the Wye. Need I tell you who sent it, Richard Dempsey?" The man thus interrogated looks more than confused--horrified, well nigh crazed. Excitedly stretching out his hand, he clutches the bottle, half fills the tumbler with brandy, and drinks it down at a gulp. He almost wishes it were poison, and would instantly kill him! Only after dashing the glass down does he make reply--sullenly, and in a hoarse, husky voice: "I don't want to know, one way or the other. Damn the plank! What do I care?" "You shouldn't blaspheme, Monsieur Dick. That's not becoming--above all, in the presence of your spiritual adviser. However, you're excited, as I see, which is in some sense an excuse." "I beg your Reverence's pardon. I was a bit excited about something." He has calmed down a little, at thought that things may not be so bad for him after all. The priest's last words, with his manner, seem to promise secrecy. Still further quieted as the latter continues: "Never mind about what. We can talk of it afterwards. As I've made you aware--more than once, if I rightly remember--there's no sin so great but that pardon may reach it--if repented and atoned for. On Thursday night you shall have an opportunity to make some atonement. So, be there with the boat!" "I will, your Reverence; sure as my name's Richard Dempsey." Idle of him to be thus earnest in promising. He can be trusted to come as if led in a string. For he knows there is a halter around his neck, with one end of it in the hand of Father Rogier. "Enough!" returns the priest. "If there be anything else I think of communicating to you before Thursday I'll come again--to-morrow night. So be at home. Meanwhile, see to securing the boat. Don't let there be any failure about that, _coute que coute_. And let me again enjoin silence--not a word to any one, even your friend Rob. _Verbum sapientibus_! But as you're not much of a scholar, Monsieur Coracle, I suppose my Latin's lost on you. Putting it in your own vernacular, I mean: keep a close mouth, if you don't wish to wear a necktie of material somewhat coarser than either silk or cotton. You comprehend?" To the priest's satanical humour the poacher answers, with a sickly smile,-- "I do, Father Rogier; perfectly." "That's sufficient. And now, _mon bracconier_, I must be gone. Before starting out, however, I'll trench a little further on your hospitality. Just another drop, to defend me from these chill equinoctials." Saying which he leans towards the table, pours out a stoop of the brandy--best Cognac from the "Harp" it is--then quaffing it off, bids "bon soir!" and takes departure. Having accompanied him to the door, the poacher stands upon its threshold looking after, reflecting upon what has passed, anything but pleasantly. Never took he leave of a guest less agreeable. True, things are not quite so bad as he might have expected, and had reason to anticipate. And yet they are bad enough. He is in the toils--the tough, strong meshes of the criminal net, which at any moment may be drawn tight and fast around him; and between policeman and priest there is little to choose. For his own purposes the latter may allow him to live; but it will be as the life of one who has sold his soul to the devil! While thus gloomily cogitating he hears a sound, which but makes still more sombre the hue of his thoughts. A voice comes pealing up the glen--a wild, wailing cry, as of some one in the extreme of distress. He can almost fancy it the shriek of a drowning woman. But his ears are too much accustomed to nocturnal sounds, and the voices of the woods, to be deceived. That heard was only a little unusual by reason of the rough night--its tone altered by the whistling of the wind. "Bah!" he exclaims, recognising the call of the screech-owl, "it's only one o' them cursed brutes. What a fool fear makes a man!" And with this hackneyed reflection he turns back into the house, rebolts the door, and goes to his bed; not to sleep, but lie long awake--kept so by that same fear. Volume Two, Chapter VIII. THE GAME OF PIQUE. The sun has gone down upon Gwen Wynn's natal day--its twenty-first anniversary--and Llangorren Court is in a blaze of light. For a grand entertainment is there being given--a ball. The night is a dark one; but its darkness does not interfere with the festivities; instead, heightens their splendour, by giving effect to the illuminations. For although autumn, the weather is still warm, and the grounds are illuminated. Parti-coloured lamps are placed at intervals along the walks, and suspended in festoonery from the trees, while the casement windows of the house stand open, people passing in and out of them as if they were doors. The drawing-room is this night devoted to dancing; its carpet taken up, the floor made as slippery as a skating rink with beeswax--abominable custom! Though a large apartment, it does not afford space for half the company to dance in; and to remedy this, supplementary quadrilles are arranged on the smooth turf outside--a string and wind band from the neighbouring town making music loud enough for all. Besides, all do not care for the delightful exercise. A sumptuous spread in the dining-room, with wines at discretion, attracts a proportion of the guests; while there are others who have a fancy to go strolling about the lawn, even beyond the coruscation of the lamps; some who do not think it too dark anywhere, but the darker the better. The _elite_ of at least half the shire is present, and Miss Linton, who is still the hostess, reigns supreme in fine exuberance of spirits. Being the last entertainment at Llangorren over which she is officially to preside, one might imagine she would take things in a different way. But as she is to remain resident at the Court, with privileges but slightly, if at all, curtailed, she has no gloomy forecast of the future. Instead, on this night present she lives as in the past; almost fancies herself back at Cheltenham in its days of splendour, and dancing with the "first gentleman in Europe" redivivus. If her star be going down, it is going in glory, as the song of the swan is sweetest in its dying hour. Strange, that on such a festive occasion, with its circumstances attendant, the old spinster, hitherto mistress of the mansion, should be happier than the younger one, hereafter to be! But in truth, so is it. Notwithstanding her great beauty and grand wealth--the latter no longer in prospective, but in actual possession--despite the gaiety and grandeur surrounding her, the friendly greetings and warm congratulations received on all sides--Gwen Wynn is herself anything but gay. Instead, sad, almost to wretchedness! And from the most trifling of causes, though not as by her estimated; little suspecting she has but herself to blame. It has arisen out of an episode, in love's history of common and very frequent occurrence--the game of piques. She and Captain Ryecroft are playing it, with all the power and skill they can command. Not much of the last, for jealousy is but a clumsy fencer. Though accounted keen, it is often blind as love itself; and were not both under its influence they would not fail to see through the flimsy deceptions they are mutually practising on one another. In love with each other almost to distraction, they are this night behaving as though they were the bitterest enemies, or at all events as friends sorely estranged. She began it; blamelessly, even with praiseworthy motive; which, known to him, no trouble could have come up between them. But when, touched with compassion for George Shenstone, she consented to dance with him several times consecutively, and in the intervals remained conversing-- too familiarly, as Captain Ryecroft imagined--all this with an "engagement ring" on her finger, by himself placed upon it--not strange in him, thus _fiance_, feeling a little jealous; no more that he should endeavour to make her the same. Strategy, old as hills, or hearts themselves. In his attempt he is, unfortunately, too successful; finding the means near by--an assistant willing and ready to his hand. This in the person of Miss Powell; she also went to church on the Sunday before in Jack Wingate's boat--a young lady so attractive as to make it a nice point whether she or Gwen Wynn be the attraction of the evening. Though only just introduced, the Hussar officer is not unknown to her by name, with some repute of his heroism besides. His appearance speaks for itself, making such impression upon the lady as to set her pencil at work inscribing his name on her card for several dances, round and square, in rapid succession. And so between him and Gwen Wynn the jealous feeling, at first but slightly entertained, is nursed and fanned into a burning flame--the green-eyed monster growing bigger as the night gets later. On both sides it reaches its maximum, when Miss Wynn, after a waltz, leaning on George Shenstone's arm, walks out into the grounds, and stops to talk with him in a retired, shadowy spot. Not far off is Captain Ryecroft observing them, but too far to hear the words passing between. Were he near enough for this, it would terminate the strife raging in his breast, as the sham flirtation he is carrying on with Miss Powell--put at end to _her_ new sprung aspirations, if she has any. It does as much for the hopes of George Shenstone--long in abeyance, but this night rekindled and revived. Beguiled, first by his partner's amiability in so oft dancing with, then afterwards using him as a foil, he little dreams that he is but being made a catspaw. Instead, drawing courage from the deception, emboldened as never before, he does what he never dared before--make Gwen Wynn a proposal of marriage. He makes it without circumlocution, at a single bound, as he would take a hedge upon his hunter. "Gwen! you know how I love you--would give my life for you! Will you be--" Only now he hesitates, as if his horse baulked. "Be what?" she asks, with no intention to help him over, but mechanically, her thoughts being elsewhere. "My wife?" She starts at the words, touched by his manly way, yet pained by their appealing earnestness, and the thought she must give denying response. And how is she to give it, with least pain to him? Perhaps the bluntest way will be the best. So thinking, she says:-- "George, it can never be. Look at that!" She holds out her left hand, sparkling with jewels. "At what?" he asks, not comprehending. "That ring." She indicates a cluster of brilliants, on the fourth finger, by itself, adding the word "Engaged." "O God!" he exclaims, almost in a groan. "Is that so?" "It is." For a time there is silence; her answer less maddening than making him sad. With a desperate effort to resign himself, he at length replies:-- "Dear Gwen! for I must still call you--ever hold you so--my life hereafter will be as one who walks in darkness, waiting for death--ah, longing for it!" Despair has its poetry, as love; oft exceeding the last in fervour of expression, and that of George Shenstone causes surprise to Gwen Wynn, while still further paining her. So much she knows not how to make rejoinder, and is glad when a _fanfare_ of the band instruments gives note of another quadrille--the Lancers--about to begin. Still engaged partners for the dance, but not to be for life, they return to the drawing-room, and join in it; he going through its figures with a sad heart and many a sigh. Nor is she less sorrowful, only more excited; nigh unto madness, as she sees Captain Ryecroft _vis-a-vis_ with Miss Powell; on his face an expression of content, calm, almost cynical; hers radiant as with triumph! In this moment of Gwen Wynn's supreme misery--acme of jealous spite-- were George Shenstone to renew his proposal, she might pluck the betrothal ring from her finger, and give answer, "I will!" It is not to be so, however weighty the consequence. In the horoscope of her life there is yet a heavier. Volume Two, Chapter IX. JEALOUS AS A TIGER. It is a little after two a.m., and the ball is breaking up. Not a very late hour, as many of the people live at a distance, and have a long drive homeward, over hilly roads. By the fashion prevailing a _galop_ brings the dancing to a close. The musicians, slipping their instruments into cases and baize bags, retire from the room; soon after deserted by all, save a spare servant or two, who make the rounds to look to extinguishing the lamps, with a sharp eye for waifs in the shape of dropped ribbons or _bijouterie_. Gentlemen guests stay longer in the dining-room over claret and champagne "cup," or the more time-honoured B and S; while in the hallway there is a crush, and on the stairs a stream of ladies, descending cloaked and hooded. Soon the crowd waxes thinner, relieved by carriages called up, quickly filling, and whirled off. That of Squire Powell is among them; and Captain Ryecroft, not without comment from certain officious observers, accompanies the young lady, he has been so often dancing with, to the door. Having seen her off with the usual ceremonies of leave-taking, he returns into the porch, and there for a while remains. It is a large portico, with Corinthian columns, by one of which he takes stand, in shadow. But there is a deeper shadow on his own brow, and a darkness in his heart, such as he has never in his life experienced. He feels how he has committed himself, but not with any remorse or repentance. Instead, the jealous anger is still within his breast, ripe and ruthless as ever. Nor is it so unnatural. Here is a woman--not Miss Powell, but Gwen Wynn--to whom he has given his heart--acknowledged the surrender, and in return had acknowledgment of hers--not only this, but offered his hand in marriage--placed the pledge upon her finger, she assenting and accepting--and now, in the face of all, openly, and before his face, engaged in flirtation! It is not the first occasion for him to have observed familiarities between her and the son of Sir George Shenstone; trifling, it is true, but which gave him uneasiness. But to-night things have been more serious, and the pain caused him all-imbuing and bitter. He does not reflect how he has been himself behaving. For to none more than the jealous lover is the big beam unobservable, while the little mote is sharply descried. He only thinks of her ill-behaviour, ignoring his own. If she has been but dissembling, coquetting with him, even that were reprehensible. Heartless, he deems it--sinister--something more, an indiscretion. Flirting while engaged--what might she do when married? He does not wrong her by such direct self-interrogation. The suspicion were unworthy of himself, as of her; and as yet he has not given way to it. Still her conduct seems inexcusable, as inexplicable; and to get explanation of it he now tarries, while others are hastening away. Not resolutely. Besides the half sad, half indignant expression upon his countenance, there is also one of indecision. He is debating within himself what course to pursue, and whether he will go off without bidding her good-bye. He is almost mad enough to be ill-mannered; and possibly, were it only a question of politeness, he would not stand upon, or be stayed by it. But there is more. The very same spiteful rage hinders him from going. He thinks himself aggrieved, and, therefore, justifiable in demanding to know the reason--to use a slang, but familiar phrase, "having it out." Just as has reached this determination, an opportunity is offered him. Having taken leave of Miss Linton, he has returned to the door, where he stands hat in hand, his overcoat already on. Miss Wynn is now also there, bidding good night to some guests--intimate friends--who have remained till the last. As they move off, he approaches her; she, as if unconsciously, and by the merest chance, lingering near the entrance. It is all pretence on her part, that she has not seen him dallying about; for she has several times, while giving _conge_ to others of the company. Equally feigned her surprise, as she returns his salute, saying-- "Why, Captain Ryecroft! I supposed you were gone long ago!" "I am sorry, Miss Wynn, you should think me capable of such rudeness." "Captain Ryecroft" and "Miss Wynn," instead of "Vivian" and "Gwen!" It is a bad beginning, ominous of a worse ending. The rejoinder, almost a rebuke, places her at a disadvantage, and she says rather confusedly-- "O! certainly not, sir. But where there are so many people, of course, one does not look for the formalities of leave-taking." "True; and, availing myself of that, I might have been gone long since, as you supposed, but for--" "For what?" "A word I wish to speak with you--alone. Can I?" "Oh, certainly." "Not here?" he asks suggestingly. She glances around. There are servants hurrying about through the hall, crossing and recrossing, with the musicians coming forth from the dining-room, where they have been making a clearance of the cold fowl, ham, and heel-taps. With quick intelligence comprehending, but without further speech she walks out into the portico, he preceding. Not to remain there, where eyes would still be on them, and ears within hearing. She has an Indian shawl upon her arm--throughout the night carried while promenading--and again throwing it over her shoulders, she steps down upon the gravelled sweep, and on into the grounds. Side by side they proceed in the direction of the summer-house, as many times before, though never in the same mood as now. And never, as now, so constrained and silent; for not a word passes between them till they reach the pavilion. There is light in it. But a few hundred yards from the house, it came in for part of the illumination, and its lamps are not yet extinguished--only burning feebly. She is the first to enter--he to resume speech, saying-- "There was a day, Miss Wynn, when, standing on this spot, I thought myself the happiest man in Herefordshire. Now I know it was but a fancy--a sorry hallucination." "I do not understand you, Captain Ryecroft!" "Oh yes, you do. Pardon my contradicting you; you've given me reason." "Indeed! In what way? I beg, nay, demand, explanation." "You shall have it; though superfluous, I should think, after what has been passing--this night especially." "Oh! this night especially! I supposed you so much engaged with Miss Powell as not to have noticed anything or anybody else. What was it, pray?" "You understand, I take it, without need of my entering into particulars." "Indeed, I don't; unless you refer to my dancing with George Shenstone." "More than dancing with him--keeping his company all through!" "Not strange that; seeing I was left so free to keep it! Besides, as I suppose you know, his father was my father's oldest and most intimate friend." She makes this avowal condescendingly, observing he is really vexed, and thinking the game of contraries has gone far enough. He has given her a sight of his cards, and with the quick subtle instinct of woman she sees that among them Miss Powell is no longer chief trump. Were his perception keen as hers, their jealous conflict would now come to a close, and between them confidence and friendship, stronger than ever, be restored. Unfortunately it is not to be. Still miscomprehending, yet unyielding, he rejoins, sneeringly-- "And I suppose your father's daughter is determined to continue that intimacy with his fathers son; which might not be so very pleasant to him who should be your husband! Had I thought of that when I placed a ring upon your finger--" Before he can finish she has plucked it off, and drawing herself up to full height, says in bitter retort-- "You insult me, sir! Take it back!" With the words, the gemmed circlet is flung upon the little rustic table, from which it rolls off. He has not been prepared for such abrupt issue, though his rude speech tempted it. Somewhat sorry, but still too exasperated to confess or show it, he rejoins, defiantly:-- "If you wish it to end so, let it!" "Yes; let it!" They part without further speech. He, being nearest the door, goes out first, taking no heed of the diamond cluster which lies sparkling upon the floor. Neither does she touch, or think of it. Were it the Koh-i-noor, she would not care for it now. A jewel more precious--the one love of her life is lost--cruelly crushed--and, with heart all but breaking, she sinks down upon the bench, draws the shawl over her face, and weeps till its rich silken tissue is saturated with her tears. The wild spasm passed, she rises to her feet, and stands leaning upon the baluster rail, looking out and listening. Still dark, she sees nothing; but hears the stroke of a boat's oars in measured and regular repetition--listens on till the sound becomes indistinct, blending with the sough of the river, the sighing of the breeze, and the natural voices of the night. She may never hear _his_ voice, never look on his face again! At the thought she exclaims, in anguished accent, "This the ending! It is too--" What she designed saying is not said. Her interrupted words are continued into a shriek--one wild cry--then her lips are sealed, suddenly, as if stricken dumb, or dead! Not by the visitation of God. Before losing consciousness, she felt the embrace of brawny arms--knew herself the victim of man's violence. Volume Two, Chapter X. STUNNED AND SILENT. Down in the boat-dock, upon the thwarts of his skiff, sits the young waterman awaiting his fare. He has been up to the house and there hospitably entertained--feasted. But with the sorrow of his recent bereavement still fresh, the revelry of the servants' hall had no fascination for him--instead, only saddening the more. Even the blandishments of the French _femme de chambre_ could not detain him; and fleeing them, he has returned to his boat long before he expects being called upon to use the oars. Seated, pipe in mouth--for Jack too indulges in tobacco--he is endeavouring to put in the time as well as he can; irksome at best with that bitter grief upon him. And it is present all the while, with scarce a moment of surcease, his thoughts ever dwelling on her who is sleeping her last sleep in the burying-ground at Rugg's Ferry. While thus disconsolately reflecting, a sound falls upon his ears, which claims his attention, and for an instant or two occupies it. If anything, it was the dip of an oar; but so light that only one with ears well-trained to distinguish noises of the kind could tell it to be that. He, however, has no doubt of it, muttering to himself-- "Wonder whose boat can be on the river this time o' night--mornin', I ought to say? Wouldn't be a tourist party--starting off so early? No, can't be that. Like enough Dick Dempsey out a-salmon stealin'! The night so dark--just the sort for the rascal to be about on his unlawful business." While thus conjecturing, a scowl, dark as the night itself, flits over his own face. "Yes; a coracle!" he continues; "must 'a been the plash o' a paddle. If't had been a regular boat's oar I'd a heerd the thumpin' against the thole pins." For once the waterman is in error. It is no paddle whose stroke he has heard, nor a coracle impelled by it; but a boat rowed by a pair of oars. And why there is no "thumpin' against the thole pins" is because the oars are muffled. Were he out in the main channel--two hundred yards above the bye-way--he would see the craft itself with three men in it. But only at that instant; as in the next it is headed into a bed of "witheys"--flooded by the freshet--and pushed on through them to the bank beyond. Soon it touches _terra firma_, the men spring out; two of them going off towards the grounds of Llangorren Court. The third remains by the boat. Meanwhile, Jack Wingate, in his skiff, continues listening. But hearing no repetition of the sound that had so slightly reached his ear, soon ceases to think of it; again giving way to his grief, as he returns to reflect on what lies in the chapel cemetery. If he but knew how near the two things were together--the burying-ground and the boat--he would not be long in his own. Relieved he is, when at length voices are heard up at the house--calls for carriages--proclaiming the ball about to break up. Still more gratified, as the banging of doors, and the continuous rumble of wheels, tell of the company fast clearing off. For nigh half an hour the rattling is incessant; then there is a lull, and he listens for a sound of a different sort--a footfall on the stone stairs that lead down to the little dock--that of his fare, who may at any moment be expected. Instead of footstep, he hears voices on the cliff above, off in the direction of the summer-house. Nothing to surprise him that? It is not first time he has listened to the same, and under very similar circumstances; for soon as hearing he recognises them. But it is the first time for him to note their tone as it is now--to his astonishment that of anger. "They be quarrelling, I declare," he says to himself. "Wonder what for! Somethin' crooked's come between 'em at the ball--bit o' jealousy, maybe? I shudn't be surprised if it's about young Mr Shenstone. Sure as eggs is eggs, the Captain have ugly ideas consarnin' him. He needn't, though; an' wouldn't, if he seed through the eyes o' a sensible man. Course, bein' deep in love, he can't. I seed it long ago. She be mad about him as he o' her--if not madder. Well; I daresay it be only a lovers' quarrel an'll soon blow over. Woe's me! I weesh--" He would say "I weesh 'twar only that 'twixt myself an' Mary," but the words break upon his lips, while a scalding tear trickles down his cheek. Fortunately his anguished sorrow is not allowed further indulgence for the time. The footstep, so long listened for, is at length upon the boat stair; not firm, in its wonted way, but as though he making it were intoxicated! But Wingate does not believe it is that. He knows the Captain to be abstemious, or, at all events, not greatly given to drink. He has never seen him overcome by it; and surely he would not be, on this night in particular. Unless, indeed, it may have to do with the angry speech overheard, or the something thought of preceding it! The conjectures of the waterman, are brought to an end by the arrival of his fare at the bottom of the boat stair, where he stops only to ask--"Are you there, Jack?" The pitchy darkness accounts for the question. Receiving answer in the affirmative, he gropes his way along the ledge of rock, reeling like a drunken man. Not from drink, but the effects of that sharp, defiant rejoinder still ringing in his ears. He seems to hear, in every gust of the wind swirling down from the cliff above, the words, "Yes; let it!" He knows where the skiff should be--where it was left--beyond the pleasure boat. The dock is not wide enough for both abreast, and to reach his own he must go across the other--make a gang-plank of the _Gwendoline_. As he sets foot upon the thwarts of the pleasure craft, has he a thought of what were his feelings when he first planted it there, after ducking the Forest of Dean fellow? Or, stepping off, does he spurn the boat with angry heel, as in angry speech he has done her whose name it bears? Neither. He is too excited and confused to think of the past, or aught but the black bitter present. Still staggering, he drops down upon the stern sheets of the skiff, commanding the waterman to shove off. A command promptly obeyed, and in silence. Jack can see the Captain is out of sorts, and suspecting the reason, naturally supposes that speech at such time might not be welcome. He says nothing, therefore; but, bending to his oars, pulls on up the bye-way. Just outside its entrance a glimpse can be got of the little pavilion-- by looking back. And Captain Ryecroft does this, over his shoulder; for, seated at the tiller, his face is from it. The light is still there, burning dimly as ever. For all, he is enabled to trace the outlines of a figure, in shadowy _silhouette_--a woman standing by the baluster rail, as if looking out over it. He knows who it is; it can only be Gwen Wynn. Well were it for both could he but know what she is at that moment thinking. If he did, back would go his boat, and the two again be together--perhaps never more to part in spite. Just then, as if ominous, and in spiteful protest against such consummation, the sombre sandstone cliff draws between, and Captain Ryecroft is carried onward, with heart dark and heavy as the rock. Volume Two, Chapter XI. A STARTLING CRY. During all this while Wingate has not spoken a word, though he also has observed the same figure in the pavilion. With face that way he could not avoid noticing it, and easily guesses who she is. Had he any doubt the behaviour of the other would remove it. "Miss Wynn, for sartin," he thinks to himself, but says nothing. Again turning his eyes upon his patron, he notes the distraught air, with head drooping, and feels the effect in having to contend against the rudder ill directed. But he forbears making remark. At such a moment his interference might not be tolerated--perhaps resented. And so the silence continues. Not much longer. A thought strikes the waterman, and he ventures a word about the weather. It is done for a kindly feeling--for he sees how the other suffers--but in part because he has a reason for it. The observation is-- "We're goin' to have the biggest kind o' a rainpour Captain." The Captain makes no immediate response. Still in the morose mood, communing with his own thoughts, the words fall upon his ear unmeaningly, as if from a distant echo. After a time it occurs to him he has been spoken to and asks-- "What did you observe, Wingate?" "That there be a rain storm threatening o' the grandest sort. There's flood enough now; but afore long it'll be all over the meadows." "Why do you think that? I see no sign. The sky's very much clouded true; but it has been just the same for the last several days." "'Tan't the sky as tells me, Captain." "What then?" "The _heequall_." "The heequall?" "Yes. It's been a cacklin' all through the afternoon and evenin'-- especial loud just as the sun wor settin'. I niver know'd it do that 'ithout plenty o' wet comin' soon after." Ryecroft's interest is aroused, and for the moment forgetting his misery, he says:-- "You're talking enigmas, Jack! At least they are so to me. What is this barometer you seem to place such confidence in? Beast, bird, or fish?" "It be a bird, Captain? I believe the gentry folks calls it a woodpecker; but 'bout here it be more generally known by the name _heequall_." The orthography is according to Jack's orthoepy, for there are various spellings of the word. "Anyhow," he proceeds, "it gies warnin' o' rain, same as a weather-glass. When it ha' been laughin' in the mad way it wor most part o' this day, you may look out for a downpour. Besides, the owls ha' been a-doin' their best, too. While I wor waiting for ye in that darksome hole, one went sailin' up an' down the backwash, every now an' then swishin' close to my ear and giein' a screech--as if I hadn't enough o' the disagreeable to think o'. They allus come that way when one's feelin' out o' sorts--just as if they wanted to make things worse. Hark! Did ye hear that, Captain?" "I did." They speak of a sound that has reached their ears from below--down the river. Both show agitation, but most the waterman; for it resembled a shriek, as of a woman in distress. Distant, just as one he heard across the wooded ridge, on that fatal night after parting with Mary Morgan. He knows now, that must have been her drowning cry, and has often thought since whether, if aware of it at the time, he could have done aught to rescue her. Not strange, that with such a recollection he is now greatly excited by a sound so similar! "That waren't no heequall; nor screech-owl neyther," he says, speaking in a half whisper. "What do you think it was?" asks the Captain, also _sotto voce_. "The scream o' a female. I'm 'most sure 'twor that." "It certainly did seem a woman's voice. In the direction of the Court, too!" "Yes; it comed that way." "I've half a mind to put back, and see if there be anything amiss. What say you, Wingate?" "Gie the word, sir! I'm ready." The boatman has his oars out of water, and holds them so, Ryecroft still undecided. Both listen with bated breath. But, whether woman's voice, or whatever the sound, they hear nothing more of it; only the monotonous ripple of the river, the wind mournfully sighing through the trees upon its banks, and a distant "brattle," of thunder, bearing out the portent of the bird. "Like as not," says Jack, "'twor some o' them sarvint girls screechin' in play, fra havin' had a drop too much to drink. There's a Frenchy thing among 'em as wor gone nigh three sheets i' the wind 'fores I left. I think, Captain, we may as well keep on." The waterman has an eye to the threatening rain, and dreads getting a wet jacket. But his words are thrown away; for, meanwhile, the boat, left to itself, has drifted downward, nearly back to the entrance of the bye-way, and they are once more within sight of the kiosk on the cliff. There all is darkness; no figure distinguishable. The lamps have burnt out, or been removed by some of the servants. "She has gone away from it," is Ryecroft's reflection to himself. "I wonder if the ring be still on the floor--or, has she taken it with her! I'd give something to know that." Beyond he sees a light in the upper window of the house--that of a bedroom no doubt. She may be in it, unrobing herself, before retiring to rest. Perhaps standing in front of a mirror, which reflects that form of magnificent outline he was once permitted to hold in his arms, thrilled by the contact, and never to be thrilled so again! Her face in the glass--what the expression upon it? Sadness, or joy? If the former, she is thinking of him; if the latter of George Shenstone. As this reflection flits across his brain, the jealous rage returns, and he cries out to the waterman-- "Row back, Wingate! Pull hard, and let us home!" Once more the boat's head is turned upstream, and for a long spell no further conversation is exchanged--only now and then a word relating to the management of the craft, as between rower and steerer. Both have relapsed into abstraction--each dwelling on his own bereavement. Perhaps boat never carried two men with sadder hearts, or more bitter reflections. Nor is there so much difference in the degree of their bitterness. The sweetheart, almost bride, who has proved false, seems to her lover not less lost, than to hers she who has been snatched away by death! As the _Mary_ runs into the slip of backwater--her accustomed mooring-place--and they step out of her, the dialogue is renewed by the owner asking-- "Will ye want me the morrow, Captain?" "No, Jack." "How soon do you think? 'Scuse me for questionin'; but young Mr Powell have been here the day, to know if I could take him an' a friend down the river, all the way to the Channel. It's for sea fishin' or duck shootin' or somethin' o' that sort; an' they want to engage the boat most part o' a week. But, if you say the word, they must look out for somebody else. That be the reason o' my askin' when's you'd need me again." "Perhaps never." "Oh! Captain; don't say that. 'Tan't as I care 'bout the boat's hire, or the big pay you've been givin' me. Believe me it ain't. Ye can have me an' the _Mary_ 'ithout a sixpence o' expense--long's ye like. But to think I'm niver to row you again, that 'ud vex me dreadful--maybe more'n ye gi'e me credit for, Captain." "More than I give you credit for! It couldn't, Jack. We've been too long together for me to suppose you actuated by mercenary motives. Though I may never need your boat again, or see yourself, don't have any fear of my forgetting you. And now, as a souvenir, and some slight recompense of your services, take this." The waterman feels a piece of paper pressed into his hand, its crisp rustle proclaiming it a bank-note. It is a "tenner," but in the darkness he cannot tell, and believing it only a "fiver," still thinks it too much. For it is all extra of his fare. With a show of returning it, and, indeed, the desire to do so, he says protestingly-- "I can't take it, Captain. You ha' paid me too handsome, arredy." "Nonsense, man! I haven't done anything of the kind. Besides, that isn't for boat hire, nor yourself; only a little douceur, by way of present to the good dame inside the cottage--asleep, I take it." "That case I accept. But won't my mother be grieved to hear o' your goin' away--she thinks so much o' ye, Captain. Will ye let me wake her up? I'm sure she'd like to speak a partin' word, and thank you for this big gift." "No, no! don't disturb the dear old lady. In the morning you can give her my kind regards, and parting compliments. Say to her, when I return to Herefordshire--if I ever do--she shall see me. For yourself, take my word, should I ever again go rowing on this river it will be in a boat called the _Mary_, pulled by the best waterman on the Wye." Modest though Jack Wingate be, he makes no pretence of misunderstanding the recondite compliment, but accepts it in its fullest sense, rejoining-- "I'd call it flattery, Captain, if't had come from anybody but you. But I know ye never talk nonsense; an' that's just why I be so sad to hear ye say you're goin' off for good. I feeled so bad 'bout losin' poor Mary; it makes it worse now losin' you. Good night!" The Hussar officer has a horse, which has been standing in a little lean-to shed, under saddle. The lugubrious dialogue has been carried on simultaneously with the bridling, and the "Good night" is said as Ryecroft springs up on his stirrup. Then as he rides away into the darkness, and Jack Wingate stands listening to the departing hoof-stroke, at each repetition more indistinct, he feels indeed forsaken, forlorn; only one thing in the world now worth living for--but one to keep him anchored to life--his aged mother! Volume Two, Chapter XII. MAKING READY FOR THE ROAD. Having reached his hotel, Captain Ryecroft seeks neither rest nor sleep, but stays awake for the remainder of the night. The first portion of his time he spends in gathering up his _impedimenta_, and packing. Not a heavy task. His luggage is light, according to the simplicity of a soldier's wants; and as an old campaigner he is not long in making ready for the _route_. His fishing tackle, gun-case and portmanteau, with an odd bundle or two of miscellaneous effects, are soon strapped and corded. After which he takes a seat by a table to write out the labels. But now a difficulty occurs to him--the address! His name of course, but what the destination? Up to this moment he has not thought of where he is going; only that he must go somewhere--away from the Wye. There is no Lethe in that stream for memories like his. To his regiment he cannot return, for he has none now. Months since he ceased to be a soldier; having resigned his commission at the expiration of his leave of absence--partly in displeasure at being refused extension of it, but more because the attractions of the "Court" and the grove had made those of the camp uncongenial. Thus his visit to Herefordshire has not only spoilt him as a salmon fisher, but put an end to his military career. Fortunately he was not dependent on it; for Captain Ryecroft is a rich man. And yet he has no home he can call his own; the ten latest years of his life having been passed in Hindostan. Dublin is his native place; but what would or could he now do there? his nearest relatives are dead, his friends few, his schoolfellows long since scattered--many of them, as himself, waifs upon the world. Besides, since his return from India, he has paid a visit to the capital of the Emerald Isle; where, finding all so changed, he cares not to go back--at least, for the present. Whither then? One place looms upon the imagination--almost naturally as home itself-- the metropolis of the world. He will proceed thither, though not there to stay. Only to use it as a point of departure for another metropolis--the French one. In that focus and centre of gaiety and fashion--Maelstrom of dissipation--he may find some relief from his misery, if not happiness. Little hope has he; but it may be worth the trial and he will make it. So determining, he takes up the pen, and is about to put "London" on the labels. But as an experienced strategist, who makes no move with undue haste and without due deliberation, he sits a while longer considering. Strange as it may seem, and a question for psychologists, a man thinks best upon his back. Better still with a cigar between his teeth-- powerful help to reflection. Aware of this, Captain Ryecroft lights a "weed," and looks around him. He is in his sleeping apartment, where, besides the bed, there is a sofa--horsehair cushion and squab hard as stones--the orthodox hotel article. Along this he lays himself, and smokes away furiously. Spitefully, too; for he is not now thinking of either London or Paris. He cannot yet. The happy past, the wretched present, are too soul-absorbing to leave room for speculations of the future. The "fond rage of love" is still active within him. Is it to "blight his life's bloom," leaving him "an age all winters?" Or is there yet a chance of reconciliation? Can the chasm which angry words have created be bridged over? No. Not without confession of error--abject humiliation on his part--which in his present frame of mind he is not prepared to make--will not--could not. "Never!" he exclaims, plucking the cigar from between his lips, but soon returning it, to continue the train of his reflections. Whether from the soothing influence of the nicotine, or other cause, his thoughts after a time became more tranquillised--their hue sensibly changed, as betokened by some muttered words which escape him. "After all, I may be wronging her. If so, may God forgive, as I hope He will pity me. For if so, I am less deserving forgiveness, and more to be pitied than she." As in ocean's storm, between the rough surging billows foam-crested, are spots of smooth water, so in thought's tempest are intervals of calm. It is during one of these he speaks as above; and continuing to reflect in the same strain, things, if not quite _couleur de rose_, assume a less repulsive aspect. Gwen Wynn may have been but dissembling--playing with him--and he would now be contented, ready--even rejoiced--to accept it in that sense; ay, to the abject humiliation that but the moment before he had so defiantly rejected. So reversed his sentiments now-- modified from mad anger to gentle forgiveness--he is almost in the act of springing to his feet, tearing the straps from his packed paraphernalia, and letting all loose again! But just at this crisis he hears the town clock tolling six, and voices in conversation under his window. It is a hit of gossip between two stable-men--attaches of the hotel--an ostler and fly-driver. "Ye had a big time last night at Llangorren?" says the former, inquiringly. "Ah! that ye may say," returns the Jarvey, with a strongly accentuated hiccup, telling of heel-taps. "Never knowed a bigger, s'help me. Wine runnin' in rivers, as if 'twas only table-beer--an' the best kind o't too. I'm so full o' French champagne, I feel most like burstin'." "She be a grand gal, that Miss Wynn. An't she?" "In course is--one o' the grandest. But she an't going to be a _girl_ long. By what I heerd them say in the sarvints' hall, she's soon to be broke into pair-horse harness." "Wi' who?" "The son o' Sir George Shenstone." "A good match they'll make, I sh'd say. Tidier chap than he never stepped inside this yard. Many's the time he's tipped me." There is more of the same sort, but Captain Ryecroft does not hear it; the men having moved off beyond earshot. In all likelihood he would not have listened, had they stayed. For again he seems to hear those other words--that last spiteful rejoinder--"Yes; let it." His own spleen returning, in all its keen hostility, he springs upon his feet, hastily steps back to the table, and writes on the slips of parchment-- _Mr Vivian Ryecroft, Passenger to London_, _G.W.R_. He cannot attach them till the ink gets dry; and, while waiting for it to do so, his thoughts undergo still another revulsion; again leading him to reflect whether he may not be in the wrong, and acting inconsiderately--rashly. In fine, he resolves on a course which had not hitherto occurred to him--he will write to her. Not in repentance, nor any confession of guilt on his part. He is too proud, and still too doubting for that. Only a test letter to draw her out, and if possible, discover how she too feels under the circumstances. Upon the answer--if he receive one-- will depend whether it is to be the last. With pen still in hand, he draws a sheet of notepaper towards him. It bears the hotel stamp and name, so that he has no need to write an address--only the date. This done, he remains for a time considering--thinking what he should say. The larger portion of his manhood's life spent in camp, under canvas--not the place for cultivating literary tastes or epistolary style--he is at best an indifferent correspondent, and knows it. But the occasion supplies thoughts; and as a soldier accustomed to prompt brevity he puts them down--quickly and briefly as a campaigning despatch. With this, he does not wait for the ink to dry, but uses the blotter. He dreads another change of resolution. Folding up the sheet, he slips it into an envelope, on which he simply superscribes-- _Miss Wynn_, _Llangorren Court_. Then rings a bell--the hotel servants are now astir--and directs the letter to be dropped into the post box. He knows it will reach her that same day, at an early hour, and its answer him--should one be vouchsafed--on the following morning. It might that same night at the hotel where he is now staying; but not the one to which he is going--as his letter tells, the "Langham, London." And while it is being slowly carried by a pedestrian postman, along hilly roads towards Llangorren, he, seated in a first-class carriage of the Gr.W.R., is swiftly whisked towards the metropolis. Volume Two, Chapter XIII. A SLUMBERING HOUSEHOLD. As calm succeeds a storm, so at Llangorren Court on the morning after the ball there was quietude--up to a certain hour more than common. The domestics justifying themselves by the extra services of the preceding night, lie late. Outside is stirring only the gardener with an assistant, at his usual work, and in the yard a stable help or two looking after the needs of the horses. The more important functionaries of this department--coachman and head-groom still slumber, dreaming of champagne bottles brought back to the servants' hall three parts full with but half demolished pheasants, and other fragmentary delicacies. Inside the house things are on a parallel; there only a scullery and kitchen maid astir. The higher class servitors availing themselves of the licence allowed, are still abed, and it is ten as butler, cook, and footman make their appearance, entering on their respective _roles_ yawningly, and with reluctance. There are two lady's-maids in the establishment; the little French demoiselle attached to Miss Linton, and an English damsel of more robust build, whose special duties are to wait upon Miss Wynn. The former lies late on all days, her mistress not requiring early manipulation; but the maid "native and to the manner born," is wont to be up betimes. This morning is an exception. After such a night of revelry, slumber holds her enthralled, as in a trance; and she is abed late as any of the others, sleeping like a dormouse. As her dormitory window looks out upon the back yard, the stable clock, a loud striker, at length awakes her. Not in time to count the strokes, but a glance at the dial gives her the hour. While dressing herself she is in a flutter, fearing rebuke. Not for having slept so late, but because of having gone to sleep so early. The dereliction of duty, about which she is so apprehensive, has reference to a spell of slumber antecedent--taken upon a sofa in her young mistress's dressing-room. There awaiting Miss Wynn to assist in disrobing her after the ball, the maid dropped over and forgot everything--only remembering who she was, and what her duties, when too late to attend to them. Starting up from the sofa, and glancing at the mantel timepiece, she saw, with astonishment, its hands pointing to half-past 4 a.m! Reflection following:-- "Miss Gwen must be in her bed by this! Wonder why she didn't wake me up? Rang no bell? Surely I'd have heard it? If she did, and I haven't answered--Well; the dear young lady's just the sort not to make any ado about it. I suppose she thought I'd gone to my room, and didn't wish to disturb me? But how could she think that? Besides, she must have passed through here, and seen me on the sofa!" The dressing-room is an ante-chamber of Miss Wynn's sleeping apartment. "She mightn't though,"--the contradiction suggested by the lamp burning low and dim,--"Still, it _is_ strange, her not calling me, nor requiring my attendance?" Gathering herself up, the girl stands for a while in cogitation. The result is a move across the carpeted floor in soft stealthy step, and an ear laid close to the keyhole of the bedchamber door. "Sound asleep! I can't go in now. Mustn't--I daren't awake her." Saying which the negligent attendant slips off to her own sleeping room, a flight higher; and in ten minutes after, is herself once more in the arms of Morpheus; this time retained in them till released, as already said, by the tolling of the stable clock. Conscious of unpardonable remissness, she dresses in careless haste--any way, to be in time for attendance on her mistress, at morning toilet. Her first move is to hurry down to the kitchen, get the can of hot water, and take it up to Miss Wynn's sleeping room. Not to enter, but tap at the door and leave it. She does the tapping; and, receiving no response nor summons from inside, concludes that the young lady is still asleep and not to be disturbed. It is a standing order of the house, and pleased to be precise in its observance--never more than on this morning--she sets down the painted can, and hurries back to the kitchen, soon after taking her seat by a breakfast table, unusually well spread, for the time to forget about her involuntary neglect of duty. The first of the family proper, appearing down stairs is Eleanor Lees; she, too, much behind her accustomed time. Notwithstanding, she has to find occupation for nearly an hour before any of the others join her; and she endeavours to do this by perusing a newspaper which has come by the morning post. With indifferent success. It is a Metropolitan daily, having but little in it to interest her, or indeed any one else; almost barren of news, as if its columns were blank. Three or four long-winded "leaders," the impertinent outpourings of irresponsible anonymity; reports of Parliamentary speeches, four-fifths of them not worth reporting; chatter of sham statesmen, with their drivellings at public dinners; "Police intelligence," in which there is half a column devoted to Daniel Driscoll, of the Seven Dials, how he blackened the eye of Bridget Sullivan, and bit off Pat Kavanagh's ear, a _crim. con._ or two in all their prurience of detail; Court intelligence, with its odious plush and petty paltriness--this is the pabulum of a "London Daily" even the leading one supplies to its easily satisfied _clientele_ of readers! Scarce a word of the world's news, scarce a word to tell of its real life and action--how beats the pulse, or thrills the heart of humanity! If there be anything in England half a century behind the age it is its Metropolitan Press--immeasurably inferior to the Provincial. No wonder the "companion"--educated lady--with only such a sheet for her companion, cannot kill time for even so much as an hour. Ten minutes were enough to dispose of all its contents worth glancing at. And after glancing at them, Miss Lees drops the bald broadsheet--letting it fall to the floor to be scratched by the claws of a playful kitten-- about all it is worth. Having thus settled scores with the newspaper she hardly knows what next to do. She has already inspected the superscription of the letters, to see if there be any for herself. A poor, fortuneless girl, of course her correspondence is limited, and there is none. Two or three for Miss Linton, with quite half a dozen for Gwen. Of these last is one in a handwriting she recognises--knows it to be from Captain Ryecroft, even without the hotel stamp to aid identification. "There was a coolness between them last night," remarks Miss Lees to herself, "if not an actual quarrel; to which, very likely, this letter has reference. If I were given to making wagers, I'd bet that it tells of his repentance. So soon, though! It must have been written after he got back to his hotel, and posted to catch the early delivery. What!" she exclaims, taking up another letter, and scanning the superscription. "One from George Shenstone, too! It, I dare say, is in a different strain, if that I saw--Ha!" she ejaculates, instinctively turning to the window, and letting go Mr Shenstone's epistle, "William! Is it possible--so early?" Not only possible, but an accomplished fact. The reverend gentleman is inside the gates of the park, sauntering on towards the house. She does not wait for him to ring the bell, or knock; but meets him at the door, herself opening it. Nothing _outre_ in the act, on a day succeeding a night, with everything upside down, and the domestic, whose special duty it is to attend to door-opening, out of the way. Into the morning room Mr Musgrave is conducted, where the table is set for breakfast. He oft comes for luncheon, and Miss Lees knows he will be made equally welcome to the earlier meal; all the more to-day, with its heavier budget of news, and grander details of gossip, which Miss Linton will be expecting and delighted to revel in. Of course, the curate has been at the ball; but, like "Slippery Sam," erst Bishop of Oxford, not much in the dancing room. For all, he, too, has noticed certain peculiarities in the behaviour of Miss Wynn to Captain Ryecroft, with others having reference to the son of Sir George Shenstone--in short, a triangular play he but ill understood. Still, he could tell by the straws, as they blew about, that they were blowing adversely; though what the upshot he is yet ignorant, having, as became his cloth, forsaken the scene of revelry at a respectably early hour. Nor does he now care to inquire into it, any more than Miss Lees to respond to such interrogation. Their own affair is sufficient for the time; and engaging in an amorous duel of the milder type--so different from the stormy passionate combat between Gwendoline Wynn and Vivian Ryecroft--they forget all about these--even their existence--as little remembering that of George Shenstone. For a time are but two individuals in the world of whom either has a thought--one Eleanor Lees, the other William Musgrave. Volume Two, Chapter XIV. "WHERE'S GWEN?" Not for long are the companion and curate permitted to carry on the confidential dialogue, in which they had become interested. Too disagreeably soon is it interrupted by a third personage appearing upon the scene. Miss Linton has at length succeeded in dragging herself out of the embrace of the somnolent divinity, and enters the breakfast-room, supported by her French _femme de chambre_. Graciously saluting Mr Musgrave, she moves towards the table's head, where an antique silver urn sends up its curling steam--flanked by tea and coffee pot, with contents already prepared for pouring into their respectively shaped cups. Taking her seat, she asks: "Where's Gwen?" "Not down yet," meekly responds Miss Lees, "at least I haven't seen anything of her." "Ah! she beats us all to-day," remarks the ancient toast of Cheltenham, "in being late," she adds, with a laugh at her little _jeu d'esprit_. "Usually such an early riser, too. I don't remember having ever been up before her. Well, I suppose she's fatigued, poor thing!--quite done up. No wonder, after dancing so much, and with everybody." "Not everybody, aunt!" says her companion, with a significant emphasis on the everybody. "There was one gentleman she never danced with all the night. Wasn't it a little strange?" This in a whisper and aside. "Ah! true. You mean Captain Ryecroft?" "Yes." "It was a little strange. I observed it myself. She seemed distant with him, and he with her. Have you any idea of the reason, Nelly?" "Not in the least. Only I fancy something must have come between them." "The usual thing; lover's tiff I suppose. Ah, I've seen a great many of them in my time. How silly men and women are--when they're in love. Are they not, Mr Musgrave?" The curate answers in the affirmative but somewhat confusedly, and blushing, as he imagines it may be a thrust at himself. "Of the two," proceeds the garrulous spinster, "men are the most foolish under such circumstances. No!" she exclaims, contradicting herself, "when I think of it, no. I've seen ladies, high-born, and with titles, half beside themselves about Beau Brummel, distractedly quarrelling as to which should dance with him! Beau Brummel, who ended his days in a low lodging-house! Ha! ha! ha!" There is a _soupcon_ of spleen in the tone of Miss Linton's laughter, as though she had herself once felt the fascinations of the redoubtable dandy. "What could be more ridiculous?" she goes on. "When one looks back upon it, the very extreme of absurdity. Well;" taking hold of the _cafetiere_, and filling her cup, "it's time for that young lady to be downstairs. If she hasn't been lying awake ever since the people went off, she should be well rested by this. Bless me," glancing at the ormolu dial over the mantel, "it's after eleven, Clarisse," to the _femme de chambre_, still in attendance, "tell Miss Wynn's maid to say to her mistress we're waiting breakfast. _Veet, tray veet_!" she concludes, with a pronunciation and accent anything but Parisian. Off trips the French demoiselle, and upstairs; almost instantly returning down them, Miss Wynn's maid along, with a report which startles the trio at the breakfast table. It is the English damsel who delivers it in the vernacular. "Miss Gwen isn't in her room; nor hasn't been all the night long." Miss Linton is in the act of removing the top from a guinea fowl's egg, as the maid makes the announcement. Were it a bomb bursting between her fingers, the surprise could not be more sudden or complete. Dropping egg and cup, in stark astonishment, she demands: "What do you mean, Gibbons?" Gibbons is the girl's name. "Oh, ma'am! Just what I've said." "Say it again. I can't believe my ears." "That Miss Gwen hasn't slept in her room." "And where has she slept?" "The goodness only knows." "But you ought to know. You're her maid--you undressed her?" "I did not--I am sorry to say," stammered out the girl, confused and self-accused, "very sorry I didn't." "And why didn't you, Gibbons? explain that." Thus brought to book, the peccant Gibbons confesses to what has occurred in all its details. No use concealing aught--it must come out anyhow. "And you're quite sure she has not slept in her room?" interrogates Miss Linton, as yet unable to realise a circumstance so strange and unexpected. "Oh, yes, ma'am. The bed hasn't been lied upon by anybody--neither sheets or coverlet disturbed. And there's her nightdress over the chair, just as I laid it out for her." "Very strange," exclaims Miss Linton, "positively alarming." For all, the old lady is not alarmed yet--at least, not to any great degree. Llangorren Court is a "house of many mansions," and can boast of a half-score spare bedrooms. And she, now its mistress, is a creature of many caprices. Just possible she has indulged in one after the dancing--entered the first sleeping apartment that chanced in her way, flung herself on a bed or sofa in her ball dress, fallen asleep, and is there still slumbering. "Search them all!" commands Miss Linton, addressing a variety of domestics, whom the ringing of bells has brought around her. They scatter off in different directions, Miss Lees along with them. "It's very extraordinary. Don't you think so?" This to the curate, the only one remaining in the room with her. "I do, decidedly. Surely no harm has happened her. I trust not. How could there?" "True, how? Still I'm a little apprehensive, and won't feel satisfied till I see her. How my heart does palpitate, to be sure." She lays her spread palm over the cardiac region, with an expression less of pain, than the affectation of it. "Well, Eleanor," she calls out to the companion, re-entering the room with Gibbons behind. "What news?" "Not any, aunt." "And you really think she hasn't slept in her room?" "Almost sure she hasn't. The bed, as Gibbons told you, has never been touched, nor the sofa. Besides, the dress she wore last night isn't there." "Nor anywhere else, ma'am," puts in the maid; about such matters specially intelligent. "As you know, 'twas the sky-blue silk, with blonde lace over-skirt, and flower-de-loose on it. I've looked everywhere, and can't find a thing she had on--not so much as a ribbon!" The other searchers are now returning in rapid succession, all with a similar tale. No word of the missing one--neither sign nor trace of her. At length the alarm is serious and real, reaching fever height. Bells ring, and servants are sent in every direction. They go rushing about, no longer confining their search to the sleeping apartments, but extending it to rooms where only lumber has place--to cellars almost unexplored, garrets long unvisited, everywhere. Closet and cupboard doors are drawn open, screens dashed aside, and panels parted, with keen glances sent through the chinks. Just as in the baronial castle, and on that same night when young Lovel lost his "own fair bride." And while searching for their young mistress, the domestics of Llangorren Court have the romantic tale in their minds. Not one of them but knows the fine old song of the "Mistletoe Bough." Male and female-- all have heard it sung in that same house, at every Christmas-tide, under the "kissing bush," where the pale green branch and its waxen berries were conspicuous. It needs not the mystic memory to stimulate them to zealous exertion. Respect for their young mistress--with many of them almost adoration--is enough; and they search as if for sister, wife, or child according to their feelings and attachments. In vain--all in vain. Though certain that no "old oak chest" inside the walls of Llangorren Court encloses a form destined to become a skeleton, they cannot find Gwen Wynn. Dead, or living, she is not in the house. Volume Two, Chapter XV. AGAIN THE ENGAGEMENT RING. The first hurried search, with its noisy excitement, proving fruitless, there follows an interregnum calmer with suspended activity. Indeed, Miss Linton directs it so. Now convinced that her niece has really disappeared from the place, she thinks it prudent to deliberate before proceeding further. She has no thought that the young lady has acted otherwise than of her own will. To suppose her carried off is too absurd--a theory not to be entertained for an instant. And having gone so, the questions are, why and whither? After all, it may be, that at the ball's departing, in the last moment when the guests were departing, moved by a mad prank, she leaped into the carriage of some lady friends, and was whirled home with them, just in the dress she had been dancing in. With such an impulsive creature as Gwen Wynn, the freak was not improbable. Nor is there any one to say nay. In the bustle and confusion of departure the other domestics were busy with their own affairs, and Gibbons sound asleep. And if true a "hue and cry" raised and reaching the outside world would at least beget ridicule, if it did not cause absolute scandal. To avoid this the servants are forbidden to go beyond the confines of the Court, or carry any tale outward--for the time. Beguiled by this hopeful belief, Miss Linton, with the companion assisting, scribbles off a number of notes, addressed to the heads of three or four families in whose houses her niece must have so abruptly elected to take refuge for the night. Merely to ask if such was the case, the question couched in phrase guarded, and as possible suggestive. These are dispatched by trusted messengers, cautioned to silence; Mr Musgrave himself volunteering a round of calls, at other houses, to make personal inquiry. This matter settled, the old lady waits the result, though without any very sanguine expectations of success. For another theory has presented itself to her mind--that Gwen has run away with Captain Ryecroft! Improbable as the thing might appear--Miss Linton, nevertheless, for a while has faith in it. It was as she might have done, some forty years before, had she but met the right man--such as he. And measuring her niece by the same romantic standard--with Gwen's capriciousness thrown into the account--she ignores everything else; even the absurdity of such a step from its sheer causelessness. That to her is of little weight; no more the fact of the young lady taking flight in a thin dress, with only a shawl upon her shoulders. For Gibbons called upon to give account of her wardrobe, has taken stock, and found everything in its place--every article of her mistress's drapery save the blue silk dress and Indian shawl--hats and bonnets hung up, or in their boxes, but all there, proving her to have gone off bareheaded? Not the less natural, reasons Miss Linton--instead, only a component part in the chapter of contrarieties. So, too, the coolness observed between the betrothed sweethearts throughout the preceding night--their refraining from partnership in the dances--all dissembling on their part, possibly to make the surprise of the after event more piquant and complete. So runs the imagination of the novel-reading spinster, fresh and fervid as in her days of girlhood--passing beyond the trammels of reason-- leaving the bounds of probability. But her new theory is short lived. It receives a death blow from a letter which Miss Lees brings under her notice. It is that superscribed in the handwriting of Captain Ryecroft, which the companion had for the time forgotten; she having no thought that it would have anything to do with the young lady's disappearance. And the letter proves that he can have nothing to do with it. The hotel stamp, the postmark, the time of deposit and delivery are all understood, all contributing to show it must have been posted, if not written, that same morning. Were she with him it would not be there. Down goes the castle of romance Miss Linton has been constructing-- wrecked--scattered as a house of cards. It is quite possible that letter contains something that would throw light upon the mystery, perhaps clear all up; and the old lady would like to open it. But she may not, dare not. Gwen Wynn is not one to allow tampering with her correspondence; and as yet her aunt cannot realise the fact--nor even entertain the supposition--that she is gone for good and for ever. As time passes, however, and the different messengers return, with no news of the missing lady--Mr Musgrave is also back without tidings--the alarm is renewed, and search again set up. It extends beyond the precincts of the house, and the grounds already explored, off into woods and fields, along the banks of river and bye wash, everywhere that offers a likelihood, the slightest, of success. But neither in wood, spinney, or coppice can they find traces of Gwen Wynn; all "draw blank," as George Shenstone would say of a cover where no fox is found. And just as this result is reached, that gentleman himself steps upon the ground, to receive a shock such as he has rarely experienced. The news communicated is a surprise to him; for he has arrived at the Court, knowing nought of the strange incident which has occurred. He has come thither on an afternoon call, not altogether dictated by ceremony. Despite all that has passed--what Gwen Wynn told him, what she showed holding up her hand--he does not even yet despair. Who so circumstanced ever does? What man in love, profoundly, passionately as he, could believe his last chance eliminated; or have his ultimate hope extinguished? He had not. Instead, when bidding adieu to her, after the ball, he felt some revival of it, several causes having contributed to its rekindling. Among others, her gracious behaviour to himself, so gratifying; but more, her distant manner towards his rival, which he could not help observing, and saw with secret satisfaction. And still thus reflecting on it, he enters the gates at Llangorren, to be stunned by the strange intelligence there awaiting him--Miss Wynn missing! gone away! run away! perhaps carried off! lost, and cannot be found! For in these varied forms, and like variety of voices, is it conveyed to him. Needless to say, he joins in the search with ardour, but distractedly; suffering all the sadness of a torn and harrowed heart. But to no purpose; no result to soothe or console him. His skill at drawing a cover is of no service here. It is not for a fox "stole away," leaving hot scent behind; but a woman goes without print of foot or trace to indicate the direction; without word left to tell the cause of departure. Withal, George Shenstone continues to seek for her long after the others have desisted. For his views differ from those entertained by Miss Linton, and his apprehensions are of a keener nature. He remains at the Court throughout the evening, making excursions into the adjacent woods, searching, and again exploring everywhere. None of the servants think it strange; all know of his intimate relations with the family. Mr Musgrave remains also; both of them asked to stay dinner--a meal this day eaten _sans facon_, in haste, and under agitation. When, after it, the ladies retire to the drawing-room--the curate along with them--George Shenstone goes out again, and over the grounds. It is now night, and the darkness lures him on; for it was in such she disappeared. And although he has no expectation of seeing her there, some vague thought has drifted into his mind, that in darkness he may better reflect, and something be suggested to avail him. He strays on to the boat stair, looks down into the dock, and there sees the _Gwendoline_ at her moorings. But he thinks only of the other boat, which, as he now knows, on the night before lay alongside her. Has it indeed carried away Gwen Wynn? He fancies it has--he can hardly have a doubt of it. How else is her disappearance to be accounted for? But has she been borne off by force, or went she willingly? These are the questions which perplex him; the conjectured answer to either causing him keenest anxiety. After remaining a short while on the top of the stair, he turns away with a sigh, and saunters on towards the pavilion. Though under the shadow of its roof the obscurity is complete, he, nevertheless, enters and sits down. He is fatigued with the exertions of the afternoon, and the strain upon his nerves through the excitement. Taking a cigar from his case and nipping off the end, he rasps a fusee to light it. But, before the blue fizzing blaze dims down he drops the cigar--to clutch at an object on the floor, whose sparkle has caught his eye. He succeeds in getting hold of it, though not till the fusee has ceased flaming. But he needs no light to tell him what he has in his hand. He knows it is that which so pained him to see on one of Gwen Wynn's fingers--the engagement ring! Volume Two, Chapter XVI. A MYSTERIOUS EMBARKATION. Not in vain had the green woodpecker given out its warning note. As Jack Wingate predicted from it, soon after came a downpour of rain. It was raining as Captain Ryecroft returned to his hotel, as at intervals throughout that day; and now on the succeeding night it is again sluicing down as from a shower bath. The river is in full flood, its hundreds of affluents from Plinlimmon downward, having each contributed its quota, till Vaga, usually so pure, limpid, and tranquil, rolls on in vast turbulent volume, muddy and maddened. There is a strong wind as well, whose gusts now and then, striking the water's surface, lash it into furrows with white frothy crests. On the Wye this night there would be danger for any boat badly manned or unskilfully steered. And yet a boat is about to embark upon it; one which throughout the afternoon has been lying moored in a little branch stream that runs in opposite the lands of Llangorren, a tributary supplied by the dingle in which stands the dwelling of Richard Dempsey. It is the same near whose mouth the poacher and the priest were seen by Gwen Wynn and Eleanor Lees on the day of their remarkable adventure with the forest roughs. And almost in the same spot is the craft now spoken of; no coracle, however, but a regular pair-oared boat of a kind in common use among Wye watermen. It is lying with bow to the bank, its painter attached to a tree, whose branches extend over it. During the day no one has been near it, and it is not likely that any one has observed it. Some little distance up the brook, and drawn well in under the spreading boughs, that almost touching the water, darkly shadow the surface, it is not visible from the rivers channel: while, along the edge of the rivulet, there is no thoroughfare, nor path of any kind. No more a landing-place where boat is accustomed to put in or remain at moorings. That now there has evidently been brought thither for some temporary purpose. Not till after the going down of the sun is this declared. Then, just as the purple of twilight is changing to the inky blackness of night, and another dash of rain clatters on the already saturated foliage three men are seen moving among the trees that grow thick along the streamlet's edge. They seem not to mind it, although pouring down in torrents; for they have come through the dell, as from Dempsey's house, and are going in the direction of the boat, where there is no shelter. But if they regard not getting wet,--something they do regard; else why should they observe such caution in their movements, and talk in subdued voices? All the more strange this, in a place where there is so little likelihood of their being overheard, or encountering any one to take note of their proceedings. It is only between two of them that conversation is carried on; the third walking far in advance, beyond earshot of speech in the ordinary tone; besides, the noise of the tempest would hinder his hearing them. Therefore, it cannot be on his account they converse guardedly. More likely their constraint is due to the solemnity of the subject; for solemn it is, as their words show. "They'll be sure to find the body in a day or two. Possibly to-morrow, or if not, very soon. A good deal will depend on the state of the river. If this flood continue and the water remain discoloured as now, it may be several days before they light on it. No matter when; your course is clear, Monsieur Murdock." "But what do you advise my doing, _Pere_? I'd like you to lend me your counsel--give me minute directions about everything." "In the first place, then, you must show yourself on the other side of the water, and take an active part in the search. Such a near relative, as you are, 'twould appear strange if you didn't. All the world may not be aware of the little tiff--rather prolonged though--that's been between you. And if it were, your keeping away on such an occasion would give cause for greater scandal. Spite so rancorous! that of itself should excite curious thoughts--suspicions. Naturally enough. A man, whose own cousin is mysteriously missing, not caring to know what has become of her! And when knowing--when `Found drowned,' as she will be--not to show either sympathy or sorrow! _Ma foi_! they might mob you if you didn't!" "That's true enough," grunts Murdock, thinking of the respect in which his cousin is held, and her great popularity throughout the neighbourhood. "You advise my going over to Llangorren?" "Decidedly, I do. Present yourself there to-morrow, without fail. You may make the hour reasonably late; saying that the sinister intelligence has only just reached you at Glyngog--out of the way as it is. You'll find plenty of people at the Court on your arrival. From what I've learnt this afternoon, through my informant resident there, they'll be hot upon the search to-morrow. It would have been more earnest to-day, but for that quaint old creature with her romantic notions; the latest of them, as Clarisse tell me, that Mademoiselle had run away with the Hussar! But it appears a letter has reached the Court in his handwriting, which put a different construction on the affair; proving to them it could be no elopement--at least with him. Under these circumstances, then, to-morrow morning, soon as the sun is up, there'll be a hue and cry all over the country; so loud you couldn't fail to hear, and will be expected to have a voice in it. To do that effectually you must show yourself at Llangorren, and in good time." "There's sense in what you say. You're a very Solomon, Father Rogier. I'll be there, trust me. Is there anything else you think of." The Jesuit is for a time silent, apparently in deep thought. It is a ticklish game the two are playing, and needs careful consideration, with cautious action. "Yes," he at length answers. "There are a good many other things, I think of. But they depend upon circumstances not yet developed by which you will have to be guided. And you must guide yourself, M'sieu, as you best can. It will be quite four days, if not more, ere I can get back. They may even find the body to-morrow--if they should think of employing drags, or other searching apparatus. Still, I fancy, 'twill be some time before they come to a final belief in her being drowned. Don't you, on any account suggest it. And should there be such search, endeavour, in a quiet way, to have it conducted in any direction but the right one. The longer before fishing the thing up, the better it will be for our purposes: you comprehend?" "I do." "When found, as it must be in time, you will know how to show becoming grief; and, if opportunity offer, you may throw out a hint, having reference to _Le Capitaine Ryecroft_. His having gone away from his hotel this morning, no one knows why or whither--decamping in such haste too--that will be sure to fix suspicion upon him--possibly have him pursued and arrested as the murderer of Miss Wynn! Odd succession of events, is it not?" "It is indeed." "Seems as if the very Fates were in a conspiracy to favour our design. If we fail now, 'twill be our own fault. And that reminds me there should be no waste of time--must not. One hour of this darkness may be worth an age--or at all events ten thousand pounds per annum. _Allons! vite-vite_?" He steps briskly onward, drawing his caped cloak closer to protect him from the rain, now running in rivers down the drooping branches of the trees. Murdock follows; and the two, delayed by a dialogue of such grave character, draw closer to the third who had gone ahead. They do not overtake him, however, till after he has reached the boat, and therein deposited a bundle he has been bearing--of weight sufficient to make him stagger, where the ground was rough and uneven. It is a package of irregular oblong shape, and such size, that laid along the boat's bottom timbers it occupies most part of the space forward of the mid-thwart. Seeing that he who has thus disposed of it, is Coracle Dick, one might believe it poached salmon, or land game now in season in the act of being transported to some receiver of such commodities. But the words spoken by the priest as he comes up forbid this belief: they are an interrogatory:-- "Well, _mon bracconier_; have you stowed my luggage?" "It's in the boat, Father Rogier." "And all ready for starting?" "The minute your reverence steps in." "So, well! And now, M'sieu," he adds, turning to Murdock, and again speaking in undertone, "if you play _your_ part skilfully, on return I may find you in a fair way of getting installed as the Lord of Llangorren. Till then, adieu!" Saying which he steps over the boat's side, and takes seat in its stern. Shoved off by sinewy arms, it goes brushing out from under the branches, and is rapidly drifted down towards the river. Lewin Murdock is left standing on the brook's edge, free to go what way he wishes. Soon he starts off, not on return to the empty domicile of the poacher, nor yet direct to his own home: but first to the Welsh Harp--there to gather the gossip of the day, and learn whether the startling tale, soon to be told, has yet reached Rugg's Ferry. Volume Two, Chapter XVII. AN ANXIOUS WIFE. Inside Glyngog House is Mrs Murdock, alone, or with only the two female domestics. But these are back in the kitchen while the ex-cocotte is moving about in front at intervals opening the door, and gazing out into the night. A dark stormy one; for it is the same in which has occurred the mysterious embarkation of Father Rogier, only an hour later. To her no mystery; she knows whither the priest is bound, and on what errand. It is not him therefore she is expecting, but her husband to bring home word that her countryman has made a safe start. So anxiously does she await this intelligence, that, after a time, she stays altogether on the door-step, regardless of the raw night, and a fire in the drawing-room which blazes brightly. There is another in the dining-room, and a table profusely spread--set out for supper with dishes of many kinds--cold ham and tongue, fowl and game, flanked by decanters of different wines sparkling attractively. Whence all this plenty, within walls where of late and for so long, has been such scarcity? As no one visits at Glyngog save Father Rogier, there is no one but he to ask the question. And he would not, were he there; knowing the answer, better than anyone else. He ought. The cheer upon Lewin Murdock's table, with a cheerfulness observable on Mrs Murdock's face, are due to the same cause, by himself brought about, or to which he has largely contributed. As Moses lends money on _post obits_, at "shixty per shent," with other expectations, a stream of that leaven has found its way into the ancient manor-house of Glyngog, conducted thither by Gregoire Rogier, who has drawn it from a source of supply provided for such eventualities, and seemingly inexhaustible--the treasury of the Vatican. Yet only a tiny rivulet of silver, but soon, if all goes well, to become a flood of gold grand and yellow as that in the Wye itself, having something to do with the waters of this same stream. No wonder there is now brightness upon the face of Olympe Renault, so long shadowed. The sun of prosperity is again to shine upon the path of her life. Splendour, gaiety, volupte, be hers once more, and more than ever! As she stands in the door of Glyngog, looking down the river, at Llangorren, and through the darkness sees the Court with only one or two windows alight--they but in dim glimmer--she reflects less on how they blazed the night before, with lamps over the lawn like constellations of stars, than how they will flame hereafter, and ere long--when she herself be the ruling spirit and mistress of that mansion. But as the time passes and no husband home, a cloud steals over her features. From being only impatient, she becomes nervously anxious. Still standing in the door she listens for footsteps she has oft heard making approach unsteadily, little caring. Not so to-night. She dreads to see him return intoxicated. Though not with any solicitude of the ordinary woman's kind, but for reasons purely prudential. These are manifested in her muttered soliloquy:-- "Gregoire must have got off long ere this--at least two hours ago. He said they'd set out soon as it came night. Half an hour was enough for my husband to return up the meadows home. If he has gone to the Ferry first, and sets to drinking in the Harp? _Cette auberge maudit_. There's no knowing what he may do, or say. Saying would be worse than doing. A word in his cups--a hint of what has happened--might undo everything: draw danger upon us all! And such danger--_l'prise de corps, mon dieu_!" Her cheek blanches at thought of the ugly spectres thus conjured up. "Surely he will not be so stupid--so insane? Sober he can keep secrets well enough--guard them closely, like most of his countrymen. But the Cognac? Hark Footsteps! His I hope." She listens without stirring from the spot. The tread is heavy, with now and then a loud stroke against stones. Were her husband a Frenchman it would be different. But Lewin Murdock, like all English country gentlemen, affects substantial foot gear; and the step is undoubtedly his. Not as usual however; to-night firm and regular, telling him to be sober! "He isn't such a fool after all!" Her reflection followed by the inquiry, called out-- "_C'est vous, mon mari_?" "Of course it is. Who else could it be? You don't expect the Father, our only visitor, to-night? You'll not see him for several days to come." "He's gone then?" "Two hours ago. By this he should be miles away; unless he and Coracle have had a capsize, and been spilled out of their boat. No unlikely occurrence with the river running so madly." She still shows unsatisfied, though not from any apprehension of the boat's being upset. She is thinking of what may have happened at the Welsh Harp; for the long interval, since the priest's departure, her husband could only have been there. She is less anxious however, seeing the state in which he presents himself; so unusual coming from the "_auberge maudite_." "Two hours ago they got off, you say?" "About that; just as it was dark enough to set out with safety, and no chance of being observed." "They did so?" "Oh, yes." "_Le bagage bien arrange_?" "_Parfaitment_; or as we say in English, neat as a trivet. If you prefer another form; nice as ninepence." She is pleased at his facetiousness, quite a new mode for Lewin Murdock. Coupled with his sobriety, it gives her confidence that things have gone on smoothly, and will to the end. Indeed, for some days Murdock has been a new man--acting as one with some grave affair on his hands-- feat to accomplish, or negotiation to effect--resolved on carrying it to completeness. Now, less from anxiety as to what he has been saying at the Welsh Harp, than to know what he has there heard said by others, she further interrogates him:--"Where have you been meanwhile, monsieur?" "Part of the time at the Ferry; the rest of it I've spent on paths and roads coming and going. I went up to the Harp to hear what I could hear." "And what did you hear?" "Nothing much to interest us. As you know, Rugg's is an out of the way corner--none more so on the Wye--and the Llangorren news hasn't reached it. The talk of the Ferry folk is all about the occurrence at Abergann, which still continues to exercise them. The other don't appear to have got much abroad, if at all, anywhere--for reasons told Father Rogier by your countrywoman, Clarisse, with whom he held an interview sometime during the afternoon." "And has there been no search yet?" "Search, yes; but nothing found, and not much noise made, for the reasons I allude to." "What are they? You haven't told me." "Oh! various. Some of them laughable enough. Whimsies of that Quixotic old lady who has been so long doing the honours at Llangorren." "Ah! Madame Linton. How has she been taking it?" "I'll tell you after I've had something to eat and drink. You forget, Olympe, where I've been all the day long--under the roof of a poacher, who, of late otherwise employed, hadn't so much as a head of game in his house. True, I've since made call at an hotel, but you don't give me credit for my abstemiousness! What have you got to reward me for it?" "_Entrez_!" she exclaims, leading him into the dining-room, their dialogue so far having been carried on in the porch. "_Voila_!" He is gratified, though no ways surprised at the set out. He does not need to inquire whence it comes. He, too, knows it is a sacrifice to the rising sun. But he knows also what a sacrifice he will have to make in return for it--one third the estate of Llangorren. "Well, _ma cherie_," he says, as this reflection occurs to him, "we'll have to pay pretty dear for all this. But I suppose there's no help for it." "None," she answers with a comprehension of the circumstances--clearer and fuller than his. "We've made the contract, and must abide by it. If broken by us, it wouldn't be a question of property, but life. Neither yours nor mine would be safe for a single hour. Ah monsieur! you little comprehend the power of those gentry, _les Jesuites_--how sharp their claws, and far reaching!" "Confound them!" he exclaims, angrily dropping down upon a chair by the table's side. He eats ravenously, and drinks like a fish. His day's work is over, and he can afford the indulgence. And while they are at supper, he imparts all details of what he has done and heard; among them Miss Linton's reasons for having put restraint upon the search. "The old simpleton!" he says, concluding his narration, "she actually believed my cousin to have run away with that captain of Hussars--if she don't believe it still! Ha, ha, ha. She'll think differently when she sees that body brought out of the water. _It_ will settle the business!" Olympe Renault, retiring to rest, is long kept awake by the pleasant thought, not that for many more nights will she have to sleep in a mean bed at Glyngog, but on a grand couch in Llangorren Court. Volume Two, Chapter XVIII. IMPATIENT FOR THE POST. Never man looked with more impatience for a post, than Captain Ryecroft for the night mail from the West, its morning delivery in London. It may bring him a letter, on the contents of which will turn the hinges of his life's fate, assuring his happiness or dooming him to misery. And if no letter come, its failure will make misery for him all the same. It is scarce necessary to say, the epistle thus expected, and fraught with such grave consequence, is an answer to his own; that written in Herefordshire, and posted before leaving the Wyeside Hotel. Twenty-four hours have since elapsed; and now, on the morning after, he is at the Langham, London, where the response, if any, should reach him. He has made himself acquainted with the statistics of postal time, telling him when the night mail is due, and when the first distribution of letters in the metropolitan district. At earliest in the Langham, which has post and telegraph office within its own walls, this palatial hostelry, unrivalled for convenience, being in direct communication with all parts of the world. It is on the stroke of 8 a.m., and, the ex-Hussar-officer pacing the tesselated tiles, outside the deputy-manager's moderately-sized room with its front glass-protected, watches for the incoming of the post-carrier. It seems an inexorable certainty--though a very vexatious one--that person, or thing, awaited with unusual impatience, must needs be behind time--as if to punish the moral delinquency of the impatient one. Even postmen are not always punctual, as Vivian Ryecroft has reason to know. That amiable and active individual in coatee of coarse cloth, with red rag facings, flitting from door to door, brisk as a blue-bottle, on this particular morning does not step across the threshold of the Langham till nearly half-past eight. There is a thick fog, and the street flags are "greasy." That would be the excuse for his tardy appearance, were he called upon to give one. Dumping down his sack, and spilling its contents upon the lead-covered sill of the booking-office window, he is off again on a fresh and further flight. With no abatement of impatience Captain Ryecroft stands looking at the letters being sorted--a miscellaneous lot, bearing the post marks of many towns and many countries, with the stamps of nearly every civilised nation on the globe; enough of them to make the eyes of an ardent stamp collector shed tears of concupiscence. Scarcely allowing the sorter time to deposit them in their respective pigeon boles, Ryecroft approaches and asks if there be any for him--at the same time giving his name. "No, not any," answers the clerk, after drawing out all under letter R, and dealing them off as a pack of cards. "Are you quite sure, sir? Pardon me. I intend starting off within the hour, and expecting a letter of some importance, may I ask you to glance over them again?" In all the world there are no officials more affable than those of the Langham. They are in fact types of the highest _hotel civilisation_. Instead of showing nettled, he thus appealed to makes assenting rejoinder, accompanying his words with a re-examination of the letters under R; soon as completed saying,-- "No, sir; none for the name of Ryecroft." He bearing this name turns away, with an air of more than disappointment. The negative denoting that no letter had been written in reply, vexes--almost irritates him. It is like a blow repeated--a second slap in his face held up in humiliation--after having forgiven the first. He will not so humble himself--never forgive again. This his resolve as he ascends the great stairway to his room, once more to make ready for travel. The steam-packet service between Folkestone and Boulogne is "tidal." Consulting Bradshaw, he finds the boat on that day leaves the former place at 4 p.m.; the connecting train from the Charing Cross station, 1. Therefore have several hours to be put in meanwhile. How are they to be occupied? He is not in the mood for amusement. Nothing in London could give him that now--neither afford him a moment's gratification. Perhaps in Paris? And he will try. There men have buried their griefs--women as well: too oft laying in the same grave their innocence, honour, and reputation. In the days of Napoleon the Little, a grand cemetery of such; hosts entering it pure and stainless, to become tainted as the Imperial _regime_ itself. And he, too, may succumb to its influence, sinister as hell itself. In his present frame of mind it is possible. Nor would his be the first noble spirit broken down, wrecked on the reef of a disappointed passion--love thwarted, the loved one never again to be spoken to, in all likelihood never more met! While waiting for the Folkestone train, he is a prey to the most harrowing reflections, and in hope of escaping them, descends to the billiard-room--in the Langham a well-appointed affair, with tables the very best. The marker accommodates him to a hundred up, which he loses. It is not for that he drops the cue disheartened, and retires. Had he won, with Cook, Bennett, or Roberts as his adversary, 'twould have been all the same. Once more mounting to his room, he makes an appeal to the ever-friendly Nicotian. A cigar, backed by a glass of brandy, may do something to soothe his chafed spirit; and lighting the one, he rings for the other. This brought him, he takes seat by the window, throws up the sash, and looks down upon the street. There to see what gives him a fresh spasm of pain; though to two others, affording the highest happiness on earth. For it is a wedding ceremony being celebrated at "All Souls" opposite, a church before whose altar many fashionable couples join hands to be linked together for life. Such a couple is in the act of entering the sacred edifice; carriages drawing up and off in quick succession, coachmen with white rosettes and whips ribbon-bedecked, footmen wearing similar favours--an unusually stylish affair. As in shining and with smiling faces, the bridal train ascends the steps two by two disappearing within the portals of the church, the spectators on the nave and around the enclosure rails also looking joyous, as though each--even the raggedest--had a personal interest in the event, from the window opposite, Captain Ryecroft observes it with very different feelings. For the thought is before his mind, how near he has been himself to making one in such a procession--at its head--followed by the bitter reflection, he now never shall. A sigh, succeeded by a half angry ejaculation; then the bell rung with a violence which betrays how the sight has agitated him. On the waiter entering, he cries out-- "Call me a cab." "Hansom, sir?" "No! four-wheeler. And this luggage; get down stairs soon as possible." His impediments are all in travelling trim--but a few necessary articles having been unpacked, and a shilling tossed upon the strapped portmanteau ensures it, with the lot, speedy descent down the lift. A single pipe of Mr Trafford's silver whistle brings a cab to the Langham entrance in twenty seconds time; and in twenty more a traveller's luggage however heavy is slung to the top, with the lighter articles stowed inside. His departure so accelerated, Captain Ryecroft--who had already settled his bill--is soon seated in the cab, and carried off. But despatch ends on leaving the Langham. The cab being a four-wheeler crawls along like a tortoise. Fortunately for the fare he is in no haste now; instead will be too early for the Folkestone train. He only wanted to get away from the scene of that ceremony, so disagreeably suggestive. Shut up, imprisoned, in the plush-lined vehicle, shabby, and not over clean, he endeavours to beguile time by gazing out at the shop windows. The hour is too early for Regent Street promenaders. Some distraction, if not amusement, he derives from his "cabby's" arms; these working to and fro as if the man were rowing a boat. In burlesque it reminds him of the Wye, and his waterman Wingate! But just then something else recalls the western river, not ludicrously, but with another twinge of pain. The cab is passing through Leicester Square, one of the lungs of London, long diseased, and in process of being doctored. It is beset with hoardings, plastered against which are huge posters of the advertising kind. Several of them catch the eye of Captain Ryecroft, but only one holds it, causing him the sensation described. It is the announcement of a grand concert to be given at the St. James's Hall, for some charitable purpose of Welsh speciality. Programme with list of performers. At their head in largest lettering the queen of the eisteddfod:-- Edith Wynne! To him in the cab now a name of galling reminiscence, notwithstanding the difference of orthography. It seems like a Nemesis pursuing him! He grasps the leathern strap, and letting down the ill-fitting sash with a clatter, cries out to the cabman,-- "Drive on, Jarvey, or I'll be late for my train! A shilling extra for time." If cabby's arms sparred slowly before, they now work as though he were engaged in catching flies; and with their quickened action, aided by several cuts of a thick-thonged whip, the Rosinante goes rattling through the narrow defile of Heming's Row, down King William Street, and across the Strand into the Charing Cross station. Volume Two, Chapter XIX. JOURNEY INTERRUPTED. Captain Ryecroft takes a through ticket for Paris, without thought of breaking journey, and in due time reaches Boulogne. Glad to get out of the detestable packet, little better than a ferry-boat, which plies between Folkestone and the French seaport, he loses not a moment in scaling the equally detestable gang-ladder by which alone he can escape. Having set foot upon French soil, represented by a rough cobble-stone pavement, he bethinks of passport and luggage--how he will get the former _vised_ and the latter looked after with the least trouble to himself. It is not his first visit to France, nor is he unacquainted with that country's customs; therefore knows that a "tip" to _sergent de ville_ or _douanier_ will clear away the obstructions in the shortest possible time--quicker if it be a handsome one. Peeling in his pockets for a florin or a half-crown, he is accosted by a voice familiar and of friendly tone. "Captain Ryecroft!" it exclaims in a rich rolling brogue, as of Galway. "Is it yourself? By the powers of Moll Kelly, and it is." "Major Mahon!" "That same, old boy. Give us a grip of your fist, as on that night when you pulled me out of the ditch at Delhi, just in time to clear the bayonets of the pandys. A nate thing, and a close shave, wasn't it? But's what brought you to Boulogne?" The question takes the traveller aback. He is not prepared to explain the nature of his journey, and with a view to evasion he simply points to the steamer, out of which the passengers are still swarming. "Come, old comrade!" protests the Major, good-naturedly, "that won't do; it isn't satisfactory for bosom friends, as we've been, and still are, I trust. But, maybe, I make too free, asking your business in Boulogne?" "Not at all, Mahon. I have no business in Boulogne; I'm on the way to Paris." "Oh! a pleasure trip, I suppose." "Nothing of the kind. There's no pleasure for me in Paris or anywhere else." "Aha!" ejaculated the Major, struck by the words, and their despondent tone, "what's this, old fellow? Something wrong?" "Oh, not much--never mind." The reply is little satisfactory. But seeing that further allusion to private matters might not be agreeable, the Major continues, apologetically-- "Pardon me, Ryecroft. I've no wish to be inquisitive; but you have given me reason to think you out of sorts, somehow. It isn't your fashion to be low-spirited, and you shan't be, so long as you're in my company--if I can help it." "It's very kind of you, Mahon; and for the short time I'm to be with you I'll do the best I can to be cheerful. It shouldn't be a great effort. I suppose the train will be starting in a few minutes?" "What train?" "For Paris." "You're not going to Paris now--not this night?" "I am, straight on." "Neither straight nor crooked, _ma bohil_!" "I must." "Why must you? If you don't expect pleasure there, for what should you be in such haste to reach it? Bother, Ryecroft! you'll break your journey here, and stay a few days with me? I can promise you some little amusement. Boulogne isn't such a dull place just now. The smash of Agra and Masterman's, with Overend and Gurney following suite, has sent hither a host of old Indians, both soldiers and civilians. No doubt you'll find many friends among them. There are lots of pretty girls, too--I don't mean natives, but our countrywomen--to whom I'll have much pleasure in presenting you." "Not for the world, Mahon--not one! I have no desire to extend my acquaintance in that way." "What, turned hater, women too. Well, leaving the fair sex on one side, there's half a dozen of the other here--good fellows as ever stretched legs on mahogany. They're strangers to you, I think; but will be delighted to know you, and do their best to make Boulogne agreeable. Come, old boy. You'll stay? Say the word." "I would, Major, and with pleasure, were it any other time. But, I confess, just now I'm not in the mood for making new acquaintance--least of all among my countrymen.--To tell the truth, I'm going to Paris chiefly with a view of avoiding them." "Nonsense! You're not the man to turn _solitaire_, like Simon Stylites, and spend the rest of your days on the top of a stone pillar! Besides, Paris is not the place for that sort of thing. If you're really determined on keeping out of company for awhile--I won't ask why--remain with me, and we'll take strolls along the sea beach, pick up pebbles, gather shells, and make love to mermaids, or the Boulognese fish-fags, if you prefer it. Come, Ryecroft, don't deny me. It's so long since we've had a day together, I'm dying to talk over old times--recall our _camaraderie_ in India." For the first time in forty-eight hours Captain Ryecroft's countenance shows an indication of cheerfulness--almost to a smile, as he listens to the rattle of his jovial friend, all the pleasanter from its _patois_ recalling childhood's happy days. And as some prospect of distraction from his sad thoughts--if not a restoration of happiness--is held out by the kindly invitation, he is half inclined to accept it. What difference whether he find the grave of his griefs in Paris or Boulogne--if find it he can? "I'm booked to Paris," he says mechanically, and as if speaking to himself. "Have you a through ticket?" asks the Major, in an odd way. "Of course I have." "Let me have a squint at it?" further questions the other, holding out his hand. "Certainly. Why do you wish that?" "To see if it will allow you to shunt yourself here." "I don't think it will. In fact, I know it don't. They told me so at Charing Cross." "Then they told you what wasn't true. For it does. See here!" What the Major calls upon him to look at are some bits of pasteboard, like butterflies, fluttering in the air, and settling down over the copestone of the dock. They are the fragments of the torn ticket. "Now, old boy! You're booked for Boulogne." The melancholy smile, up to that time on Ryecroft's face, broadens into a laugh at the stratagem employed to detain him. With cheerfulness for the time restored, he says: "Well, Major, by that you've cost me at at least one pound sterling. But I'll make you recoup it in boarding and lodging me for--possibly a week." "A month--a year, if you should like your lodgings and will stay in them. I've got a snug little compound in the Rue Tintelleries, with room to swing hammocks for us both; besides a bin or two of wine, and, what's better, a keg of the `raal crayther.' Let's along and have a tumbler of it at once. You'll need it to wash the channel spray out of your throat. Don't wait for your luggage. These Custom-house gentry all know me, and will send it directly after. Is it labelled?" "It is; my name's on everything." "Let me have one of your cards." The card is handed to him. "There, Monsieur," he says, turning to a _douanier_, who respectfully salutes, "take this, and see that all the _baggage_ bearing the name on it be kept safely till called for. My servant will come for it. _Garcon_!" This to the driver of a _voiture_, who, for some time viewing them with expectant eye, makes response by a cut of his whip, and brisk approach to the spot where they are standing. Pushing Captain Ryecroft into the back, and following himself, the Major gives the French Jehu his address, and they are driven off over the rough, rib-cracking cobbles of Boulogne. Volume Two, Chapter XX. HUE AND CRY. The ponies and pet stag on the lawn at Llangorren wonder what it is all about. So different from the garden parties and archery-meetings, of which they have witnessed many a one! Unlike the latter in their quiet stateliness is the excited crowd at the Court this day; still more, from its being chiefly composed of men. There are a few women, also, but not the slender-waisted creatures, in silks and gossamer muslins, who make up an out-door assemblage of the aristocracy. The sturdy dames and robust damsels now rambling over its grounds and gravelled walks are the dwellers in roadside cottages, who at the words "Murdered or Missing," drop brooms upon half-swept floors, leave babies uncared-for in their cradles, and are off to the indicated spot. And such words have gone abroad from Llangorren Court, coupled with the name of its young mistress. Gwen Wynn is missing, if she be not also murdered. It is the second day after her disappearance, as known to the household; and now it is known throughout the neighbourhood, near and far. The slight scandal dreaded by Miss Linton no longer has influence with her. The continued absence of her niece, with the certainty at length reached that she is not in the house of any neighbouring friend, would make concealment of the matter a grave scandal in itself. Besides, since the half-hearted search of yesterday new facts have come to light; for one, the finding of that ring on the floor of the pavilion. It has been identified not only by the finder, but by Eleanor Lees and Miss Linton herself. A rare cluster of brilliants, besides of value, it has more than once received the inspection of these ladies--both knowing the giver, as the nature of the gift. How comes it to have been there in the summer-house? Dropped, of course; but under what circumstances? Questions perplexing, while the thing itself seriously heightens the alarm. No one, however rich or regardless, would fling such precious stones away; above all, gems so bestowed, and, as Miss Lees has reason to know, prized and fondly treasured. The discovery of the engagement ring deepens the mystery instead of doing aught towards its elucidation. But it also strengthens a suspicion, fast becoming belief, that Miss Wynn went not away of her own accord; instead, has been taken. Robbed, too, before being earned off. There were other rings upon her fingers--diamonds, emeralds, and the like. Possibly in the scramble, on the robbers first seizing hold and hastily stripping her, this particular one had slipped through their fingers, fallen to the floor, and so escaped observation. At night and in the darkness, all likely enough. So for a time run the surmises, despite the horrible suggestion attaching to them, almost as a consequence. For if Gwen Wynn had been robbed she may also be murdered. The costly jewels she wore, in rings, bracelets, and chains, worth many hundreds of pounds, may have been the temptation to plunder her; but the plunderers identified, and fearing punishment, would also make away with her person. It may be abduction, but it has now more the look of murder. By midday the alarm has reached its height--the hue and cry is at its loudest. No longer confined to the family and domestics--no more the relatives and intimate friends--people of all classes and kinds take part in it. The pleasure grounds of Llangorren, erst private and sacred as the Garden of the Hesperides, are now trampled by heavy, hobnailed shoes; while men in smocks, slops, and sheepskin gaiters, stride excitedly to and fro, or stand in groups, all wearing the same expression on their features--that of a sincere, honest anxiety, with a fear some sinister mischance has overtaken Miss Wynn. Many a young farmer is there who has ridden beside her in the hunting-field, often behind her no-ways nettled by her giving him the "lead;" instead, admiring her courage and style of taking fences over which, on his cart nag, he dares not follow--enthusiastically proclaiming her "pluck" at markets, race meetings, and other gatherings wherever came up talk of "Tally-ho." Besides those on the ground drawn thither by sympathetic friendship, and others the idly curious, still others are there in the exercise of official duty. Several magistrates have arrived at Llangorren, among them Sir George Shenstone, chairman of the district bench; the police superintendent also, with several of his blue-coated subordinates. There is a man present about whom remark is made, and who attracts more attention than either justice of the peace or policeman. It is a circumstance unprecedented--a strange sight, indeed--Lewin Murdock at the Court! He is there, nevertheless, taking an active part in the proceedings. It seems natural enough to those who but know him to be the cousin of the missing lady, ignorant of the long family estrangement. Only to intimate friends is there aught singular in his behaving as he now does. But to these, on reflection, his behaviour is quite comprehensible. They construe it differently from the others--the outside spectators. More than one of them, observing the anxious expression upon his face, believe it but a semblance--a mask to hide the satisfaction within his heart--to become joy if Gwen Wynn be found--dead. It is not a thing to be spoken of openly, and no one so speaks of it. The construction put upon Lewin Murdock's motives is confined to the few; for only a few know how much he is interested in the upshot of that search. Again it is set on foot, but not as on the day preceding. Now no mad rushing to and fro of mere physical demonstration. This day there is due deliberation; a council held, composed of the magistrates and other gentlemen of the neighbourhood, aided by a lawyer or two, and the talents of an experienced detective. As on the day before, the premises are inspected, the grounds gone over, the fields traversed, the woods as well, while parties proceed up and down the river, and along both sides of the backwash. The eyot also is quartered, and carefully explored from end to end. As yet the drag has not been called into requisition; the deep flood, with a swift, strong current preventing it. Partly that, but as much because the searchers do not as yet believe--cannot realise the fact-- that Gwendoline Wynn is dead, and her body at the bottom of the Wye! Robbed and drowned! Surely it cannot be? Equally incredible that she has drowned herself. Suicide is not thought of--incredible under the circumstances. A third supposition, that she has been the victim of revenge--of a jealous lover's spite--seems alike untenable. She, the heiress, owner of the vast Llangorren estates, to be so dealt with--pitched into the river like some poor cottage girl, who has quarrelled with a brutal sweetheart! The thing is preposterous! And yet this very thing begins to receive credence in the minds of many--of more, as new facts are developed by the magisterial enquiry, carried on inside the house. There a strange chapter of evidence comes out, or rather is elicited. Miss Linton's maid, Clarisse, is the author of it. This sportive creature confesses to having been out on the grounds as the ball was breaking up; and, lingering there till after the latest guest had taken departure, heard high voices, speaking as in anger. They came from the direction of the summer-house, and she recognised them as those of Mademoiselle and Le Capitaine--by the latter meaning Captain Ryecroft. Startling testimony this, when taken in connection with the strayed ring: collateral to the ugly suspicion the latter had already conjured up. Nor is the _femme de chambre_ telling any untruth. She was in the grounds at that same hour, and heard the voices as affirmed. She had gone down to the boat-dock in the hope of having a word with the handsome waterman; and returned from it reluctantly, finding he had betaken himself to his boat. She does not thus state her reason for so being abroad, but gives a different one. She was merely out to have a look at the illumination-- the lamps and transparencies, still unextinguished--all natural enough. And questioned as to why she said nothing of it on the day before, her answer is equally evasive. Partly that she did not suppose the thing worth speaking of, and partly because she did not like to let people know that Mademoiselle had been behaving in that way--quarrelling with a gentleman. In the flood of light just let in, no one any longer thinks that Miss Wynn has been robbed; though it may be that she has suffered something worse. What for could have been the angry words? And the quarrel; how did it end? And now the name Ryecroft is on every tongue, no longer in cautious whisperings, but loudly pronounced. Why is he not here? His absence is strange, unaccountable, under the circumstances. To none seeming more so than to those holding counsel inside, who have been made acquainted with the character of that waif--the gift ring--told he was the giver. He cannot be ignorant of what is passing at Llangorren. True, the hotel where he sojourns is in a town five miles off; but the affair has long since found its way thither, and the streets are full of it. "I think we had better send for him," observes Sir George Shenstone to his brother justices. "What say you, gentlemen?" "Certainly; of course," is the unanimous rejoinder. "And the waterman, too?" queries another. "It appears that Captain Ryecroft came to the ball in a boat. Does anyone know who was his boatman?" "A fellow named Wingate" is the answer given by young Shenstone. "He lives by the roadside, up the river, near Bugg's Ferry." "Possibly he may be here, outside," says Sir George. "Go see!" This to one of the policemen at the door, who hurries off. Almost immediately to return--told by the people that Jack Wingate is not among them. "That's strange, too!" remarks one of the magistrates. "Both should be brought hither at once--if they don't choose to come willingly." "Oh!" exclaims Sir George, "they'll come willingly," no doubt. Let a policeman be despatched for "Wingate. As for Captain Ryecroft, don't you think gentlemen, it would be only politeness to summon him in a different way. Suppose I write a note requesting his presence, with explanations?" "That will be better," say several assenting. This note is written, and a groom gallops off with it; while a policeman on foot makes his way to the cottage of the Widow Wingate. Nothing new transpires in their absence; but on their return--both arriving about the same time--the agitation is intense. For both come back unaccompanied; the groom bringing the report that Captain Ryecroft is no longer at the hotel--had left it on the day before by the first train for London! The policeman's tale is, that Jack Wingate went off on the same day, and about the same early hour; not by rail to London, but in his boat, down the river to the Bristol Channel! Within less than a hour after a police officer is despatched to Chepstow, and further if need be; while the detective, with one of the gentlemen accompanying, takes the next train for the metropolis. Volume Two, Chapter XXI. BOULOGNE-SUR-MER. Major Mahon is a soldier of the rollicking Irish type--good company as ever drank wine at a regimental mess-table, or whisky-and-water under the canvas of a tent. Brave in war, too, as evinced by sundry scars of wounds given by the sabres of rebellious sowars, and an empty sleeve dangling down by his side. This same token almost proclaims that he is no longer in the army. For he is not--having left it disabled at the close of the Indian Mutiny: after the relief of Lucknow, where he also parted with his arm. He is not rich; one reason for his being in Boulogne--convenient place for men of moderate means. There he has rented a house, in which for nearly a twelvemonth he has been residing: a small domicile, _meuble_. Still, large enough for his needs: for the Major, though nigh forty years of age, has never thought of getting married; or, if so, has not carried out the intention. As a bachelor in the French watering-place, his income of five hundred per annum supplies all his wants--far better than if it were in an English one. But economy is not his only reason for sojourning in Boulogne. There is another alike creditable to him, or more. He has a sister, much younger than himself, receiving education there; an only sister, for whom he feels the strongest affection, and likes to be beside her. For all he sees her only at stated times, and with no great frequency. Her school is attached to a convent, and she is in it as a _pensionnaire_. All these matters are made known to Captain Ryecroft on the day after his arrival at Boulogne. Not in the morning. It has been spent in promenading through the streets of the lower town and along the _jetee_, with a visit to the grand lion of the place, _l'Establissement de Bains_, ending in an hour or two passed at the "cercle" of which the Major is a member, and where his old campaigning comrade, against all protestations, is introduced to the half-dozen "good fellows as ever stretched legs under mahogany." It is not till a later hour, however, after a quiet dinner in the Major's own house, and during a stroll upon the ramparts of the _Haute Ville_, that these confidences are given to his guest, with all the exuberant frankness of the Hibernian heart. Ryecroft, though Irish himself, is of less communicative nature. A native of Dublin, he has Saxon in his blood, with some of its secretiveness; and the Major finds a difficulty in drawing him in reference to the particular reason of his interrupted journey to Paris. He essays, however, with as much skill as he can command, making approach as follows: "What a time it seems, Ryecroft, since you and I have been together--an age! And yet, if I'm not wrong in my reckoning, it was but a year ago. Yes; just twelve months, or thereabout. You remember, we met at the `Bag,' and dined there, with Russel, of the Artillery." "Of course I remember it." "I've seen Russel since; about three months ago, when I was over in England. And by the way, 'twas from him I last heard of yourself." "What had he to say about me?" "Only that you were somewhere down west--on the Wye I think--salmon fishing. I know you were always good at casting a fly." "That all he said?" "Well, no;" admits the Major, with a sly, inquisitive glance at the other's face. "There was a trifle of a codicil added to the information about your whereabouts and occupation." "What, may I ask?" "That you'd been wonderfully successful in your angling; had hooked a very fine fish--a big one, besides--and sold out of the army; so that you might be free to play it on your line; in fine, that you'd captured, safe landed, and intended staying by it for the rest of your days. Come, old boy! Don't be blushing about the thing; you know you can trust Charley Mahon. Is it true?" "Is what true?" asks the other, with an air of assumed innocence. "That you've caught the richest heiress in Herefordshire, or she you, or each the other, as Russel had it, and which is best for both of you. Down on your knees, Ryecroft! Confess!" "Major Mahon! If you wish me to remain your guest for another night-- another hour--you'll not ask me aught about that affair nor even name it. In time I may tell you all; but now to speak of it gives me a pain which even you, one of my oldest, and I believe, truest friends cannot fully understand." "I can at least understand that it's something serious." The inference is drawn less from Ryecroft's words than their tone and the look of utter desolation which accompanies them. "But," continues the Major, greatly moved, "you'll forgive me, old fellow, for being so inquisitive? I promise not to press you any more. So let's drop the subject, and speak of something else." "What then?" asks Ryecroft, scarce conscious of questioning. "My little sister, if you like. I call her little because she was so when I went out to India. She's now a grown girl, tall as that, and, as flattering friends say, a great beauty. What's better, she's good. You see that building below?" They are on the outer edge of the rampart, looking upon the ground adjacent to the _enceinte_ of the ancient _cite_. A slope in warlike days serving as the _glacis_, now occupied by dwellings, some of them pretentious, with gardens attached. That which the Major points to is one of the grandest, its enclosure large, with walls that only a man upon stilts of the Landes country could look over. "I see--what of it!" asks the ex-Hussar. "It's the convent where Kate is at school--the prison in which she's confined, I might better say," he adds, with a laugh, but in tone more serious than jocular. It need scarce be said that Major Mahon is a Roman Catholic. His sister being in such a seminary is evidence of that. But he is not bigoted, as Ryecroft knows, without drawing the deduction from his last remark. His old friend and fellow-campaigner does not even ask explanation of it, only observing-- "A very fine mansion it appears--walks, shade trees, arbours, fountains. I had no idea the nuns were so well bestowed. They ought to live happily in such a pretty place. But then, shut up, domineered over, coerced, as I've heard they are--ah, liberty! It's the only thing that makes the world worth living in." "Ditto, say I. I echo your sentiment, old fellow, and feel it. If I didn't I might have been long ago a Benedict, with a millstone around my neck in the shape of a wife, and half a score of smaller ones of the grindstone pattern--in piccaninnies. Instead, I'm free as the breezes, and by the Moll Kelly, intend remaining so!" The Major winds up the ungallant declaration with a laugh. But this is not echoed by his companion, to whom the subject touched upon is a tender one. Perceiving it so, Mahon makes a fresh start in the conversation, remarking-- "It's beginning to feel a bit chilly up here. Suppose we saunter down to the Cercle, and have a game of billiards!" "If it be all the same to you, Mahon, I'd rather not go there to night." "Oh! it's all the same to me. Let us home, then, and warm up with a tumbler of whisky toddy. There were orders left for the kettle to be kept on the boil. I see you still want cheering, and there's nothing will do that like a drop of the _crather_. _Allons_!" Without resisting, Ryecroft follows his friend down the stairs of the rampart. From the point where they descended the shortest way to the Rue Tintelleries is through a narrow lane not much used, upon which abut only the back walls of gardens, with their gates or doors. One of these, a gaol-like affair, is the entrance to the convent in which Miss Mahon is at school. As they approach it a _fiacre_ is standing in front, as if but lately drawn up to deliver its fare--a traveller. There is a lamp, and by its light, dim nevertheless, they see that luggage is being taken inside. Some one on a visit to the Convent, or returning after absence. Nothing strange in all that; and neither of the two men make remark upon it, but keep on. Just however, as they are passing the back, about to drive off again, Captain Ryecroft, looking towards the door still ajar, sees a face inside it which causes him to start. "What is it?" asks the Major, who feels the spasmodic movement--the two walking arm-in-arm. "Well! if it wasn't that I am in Boulogne instead of on the banks of the river Wye, I'd swear that I saw a man inside that doorway whom I met not many days ago in the shire of Hereford." "What sort of a man?" "A priest!" "Oh! black's no mark among sheep. The _pretres_ are all alike, as peas or policemen. I'm often puzzled myself to tell one from t'other." Satisfied with this explanation, the ex-Hussar says nothing further on the subject, and they continue on to the Rue Tintelleries. Entering his house, the Major calls for "matayrials," and they sit down to the steaming punch. But before their glasses are half emptied, there is a ring at the door bell, and soon after a voice inquiring for "Captain Ryecroft." The entrance-hall being contiguous to the dining-room where they are seated, they hear all this. "Who can be asking for me?" queries Ryecroft, looking towards his host. The Major cannot tell--cannot think--who. But the answer is given by his Irish manservant entering with a card, which he presents to Captain Ryecroft, saying:-- "It's for you, yer honner." The name on the card is-- "Mr George Shenstone." Volume Two, Chapter XXII. WHAT DOES HE WANT? "Mr George Shenstone?" queries Captain Ryecroft, reading from the card. "George Shenstone!" he repeats with a look of blank astonishment--"What the deuce does it mean?" "Does what mean?" asks the Major, catching the other's surprise. "Why, this gentleman being here. You see that?" He tosses the card across the table. "Well; what of it?" "Read the name!" "Mr George Shenstone. Don't know the man. Haven't the most distant idea who he is. Have you?" "O, yes." "Old acquaintance; friend, I presume? No enemy, I hope?" "If it be the son of a Sir George Shenstone, of Herefordshire, I can't call him either friend or enemy; and as I know nobody else of the name, I suppose it must be he. If so, what he wants with me is a question I can no more answer than the man in the moon. I must get the answer from himself. Can I take the liberty of asking him into your house, Mahon?" "Certainly, my dear boy! Bring him in here, if you like, and let him join us." "Thanks, Major!" interrupts Ryecroft. "But no, I'd prefer first having a word with him alone. Instead of drinking, he may want fighting with me." "O ho!" ejaculates the Major. "Murtagh!" to the servant, an old soldier of the 18th, "show the gentleman into the drawing-room." "Mr Shenstone and I," proceeds Ryecroft in explanation, "have but the very slightest acquaintance. I've only met him a few times in general company, the last at a ball--a private one--just three nights ago. 'Twas that very morning I met the priest, I supposed we'd seen up there. 'Twould seem as if everybody on the Wyeside had taken the fancy to follow me into France." "Ha--ha--ha! About the _pretre_, no doubt you're mistaken. And maybe this isn't your man, either. The same name, you're sure!" "Quite. The Herefordshire baronet's son is George, as his father, to whose title he is heir. I never heard of his having any other--" "Stay!" interrupts the Major, again glancing at the card, "here's something to help identification--an address--_Ormeston Hall_." "Ah! I didn't observe that." In his agitation he had not, the address being in small script at the corner. "Ormeston Hall? Yes, I remember, Sir George's residence is so called. Of course it's the son--must be." "But why do you think he means fight? Something happened between you, eh?" "No; nothing between us, directly." "Ah! Indirectly, then? Of course the old trouble--a woman." "Well; if it be fighting the fellow's after, I suppose it must be about that," slowly rejoins Ryecroft, half in soliloquy and pondering over what took place on the night of the ball. Now vividly recalling that scene in the summer-house, with the angry words there spoken, he feels good as certain George Shenstone has come after him on the part of Miss Wynn. The thought of such championship stirs his indignation, and he exclaims-- "By Heavens! he shall have what he wants. But I mustn't keep him waiting. Give me that card, Major!" The Major returns it to him, coolly observing-- "If it is to be a blue pill, instead of a whisky punch, I can accommodate you with a brace of barkers, good as can be got in Boulogne. You haven't told me what your quarrel's about; but from what I know of you, Ryecroft, I take it you're in the right, and you can count on me as a second. Lucky it's my left wing that's clipped. With the right I can shoot straight as ever--should there be need for making it a four-cornered affair." "Thanks, Mahon! You're just the man I'd have asked such a favour from." "The gentleman's inside the dhrawin-room, surr." This from the ex-Royal Irish, who has again presented himself, saluting. "Don't yield the _Sassenach_ an inch?" counsels the Major, a little of the old Celtic hostility stirring within him. "If he demand explanations, hand him over to me. I'll give them to his satisfaction. So, old fellow, be firm!" "Never fear!" returns Ryecroft, as he steps out to receive the unexpected visitor, whose business with him he fully believes to have reference to Gwendoline Wynn. And so has it. But not in the sense he anticipates, nor about the scene on which his thoughts have dwelt. George Shenstone is not there to call him to account for angry words, or rudeness of behaviour. Something more serious; since it was the baronet's son who left Llangorren Court in company with the plain clothes policeman. The latter is still along with him; though not inside the house. He is standing upon the street at a convenient distance; though not with any expectation of being called in, or required for any farther service now, professionally. Holding no writ, nor the right to serve such if he had it, his action hitherto has been simply to assist Mr Shenstone in finding the man suspected of either abduction or murder. But as neither crime is yet proved to have been committed, much less brought home to him, the English policeman has no further errand in Boulogne--while the English gentleman now feels that his is almost as idle and aimless. The impulse which carried him thither, though honourable and gallant, was begot in the heat of blind passion. Gwen Wynn having no brother, he determined to take the place of one, his father not saying nay. And so resolved he had set out to seek the supposed criminal, "interview" him, and then act according to the circumstances, as they should develop themselves. In the finding of his man he has experienced no difficulty. Luggage labelled "Langham Hotel, London," gave him hot scent, as far as the grand _caravanserai_ at the bottom of Portland Place. Beyond it was equally fresh, and lifted with like ease. The traveller's traps re-directed at the Langham "Paris _via_ Folkestone and Boulogne"--the new address there noted by porters and traffic manager--was indication sufficient to guide George Shenstone across the Channel; and cross it he did by the next day's packet for Boulogne. Arrived in the French seaport, he would have gone straight on to Paris-- had he been alone. But accompanied by the policeman the result was different. This--an old dog of the detective breed--soon as setting foot on French soil, went sniffing about among _serjents de ville_ and _douaniers_, the upshot of his investigations being to bring the chase to an abrupt termination--he finding that the game had gone no further. In short, from information received at the Custom House, Captain Ryecroft was run to earth in the Rue Tintelleries, under the roof of Major Mahon. And now that George Shenstone is himself under it, having sent in his card, and been ushered into the drawing-room, he does not feel at his ease; instead greatly embarrassed. Not from any personal fear; he has too much "pluck" for that. It is a sense of delicacy, consequent upon some dread of wrong doing. What, after all, if his suspicions prove groundless, and it turn out that Captain Ryecroft is entirely innocent? His heart, torn by sorrow, exasperated with anger, starting away from Herefordshire he did not thus interrogate. Then he supposed himself in pursuit of an abductor, who, when overtaken, would be found in the company of the abducted. But, meanwhile, both his suspicions and sentiments have undergone a change. How could they otherwise? He pursued, has been travelling openly and without any disguise, leaving traces at every turn and deflection of his route, plain as fingerposts! A man guilty of aught illegal--much more one who has committed a capital crime--would not be acting thus? Besides, Captain Ryecroft has been journeying alone, unaccompanied by man or woman; no one seen with him until meeting his friend, Major Mahon, on the packet landing at Boulogne! No wonder that Mr Shenstone, now _au fait_ to all this--easily ascertained along the route of travel--feels that his errand is an awkward one. Embarrassed when ringing Major Mahon's door bell, he is still more so inside that room, while awaiting the man to whom his card has been taken. For he has intruded himself into the house of a gentleman a perfect stranger to himself--to call his guest to account! The act is inexcusable, rude almost to grotesqueness! But there are other circumstances attendant, of themselves unpleasant enough. The thing he has been tracking up is no timid hare, or cowardly fox; but a man, a soldier, gentleman as himself, who, like a tiger of the jungles, may turn upon and tear him. It is no thought of this, no craven fear which makes him pace Major Mahon's drawing-room floor so excitedly. His agitation is due to a different and nobler cause--the sensibility of the gentleman, with the dread of shame, should he find himself mistaken. But he has a consoling thought. Prompted by honour and affection, he embarked in the affair, and still urged by them he will carry it to the conclusion _coute que coute_. Volume Two, Chapter XXIII. A GUAGE D'AMOUR. Pacing to and fro, with stride jerky and irregular, Shenstone at length makes stop in front of the fireplace, not to warm himself--there is no fire in the grate--nor yet to survey his face in the mirror above. His steps are arrested by something he sees resting upon the mantelshelf; a sparkling object--in short a cigar-case of the beaded pattern. Why should that attract the attention of the young Herefordshire squire, causing him to start, as it first catches his eye? In his lifetime he has seen scores of such, without caring to give them a second glance. But it is just because he has looked upon this one before, or fancies he has, that he now stands gazing at it; on the instant after reaching towards, and taking it up. Ay, more than once has he seen that same cigar-case--he is now sure as he holds it in hand, turning it over and over--seen it before its embroidery was finished; watched fair fingers stitching the beads on, cunningly combining the blue and amber and gold, tastefully arranging them in rows and figures--two hearts central transfixed by a barbed and feathered shaft--all save the lettering he now looks upon, and which was never shown him. Many a time during the months past, he had hoped, and fondly imagined, the skilful contrivance and elaborate workmanship might be for himself. Now he knows better; the knowledge revealed to him by the initials Y.R. entwined in monogram, and the words underneath "From Gwen." Three days ago, the discovery would have caused him a spasm of keenest pain. Not so now. After being shown that betrothal ring, no gift, no pledge, could move him to further emotion. He but tosses the headed thing back upon the mantel, with the reflection that he to whom it belongs has been born under a more propitious star than himself. Still the little incident is not without effect. It restores his firmness, with the resolution to act as originally intended. This is still further strengthened, as Ryecroft enters the room, and he looks upon the man who has caused him so much misery. A man feared but not hated--for Shenstone's noble nature and generous disposition hinder him from being blinded either to the superior personal or mental qualities of his rival. A rival he fears only in the field of love; in that of war or strife of other kind, the doughty young west-country squire would dare even the devil. No tremor in his frame; no unsteadfastness in the glance of his eye, as he regards the other stepping inside the open door, and with the card in hand, coming towards him. Long ago introduced, and several times in company together, but cool and distant, they coldly salute. Holding out the card Ryecroft says interrogatively-- "Is this meant for me, Mr Shenstone?" "Yes." "Some matter of business, I presume. May I ask what it is?" The formal inquiry, in tone passive and denying, throws the fox-hunter as upon his haunches. At the same time its evident cynicism stings him to a blunt if not rude rejoinder. "I want to know--what you have done with Miss Wynn." He so challenged starts aback, turning pale. And looking distraught at his challenger, while he repeats the words of the latter, with but the personal pronoun changed-- "What I have done with Miss Wynn!" Then adding, "Pray explain yourself, sir!" "Come, Captain Ryecroft; you know what I allude to?" "For the life of me I don't." "Do you mean to say you're not aware of what's happened?" "What's happened! When? Where?" "At Llangorren, the night of that hall. You were present; I saw you." "And I saw you, Mr Shenstone. But you don't tell me what happened." "Not at the hall, but after." "Well, and what after?" "Captain Ryecroft, you're either an innocent man, or, the most guilty on the face of the earth." "Stop, sir! Language like yours requires justification, of the gravest kind. I ask an explanation--demand it!" Thus brought to bay, George Shenstone looks straight in the face of the man he has so savagely assailed; there to see neither consciousness of guilt, nor fear of punishment. Instead, honest surprise mingled with keen apprehension; the last not on his own account, but hers of whom they are speaking. Intuitively, as if whispered by an angel in his ear, he says, or thinks to himself: "This man knows nothing of Gwendoline Wynn. If she has been carried off, it has not been by him; if murdered, he is not her murderer." "Captain Ryecroft," he at length cries out in hoarse voice, the revulsion of feeling almost choking him, "if I've been wronging you I ask forgiveness; and you'll forgive. For if I have, you do not--cannot know what has occurred." "I've told you I don't," affirms Ryecroft, now certain that the other speaks of something different, and more serious than the affair he had himself been thinking of. "For Heaven's sake, Mr Shenstone, explain! What _has_ occurred there?" "Miss Wynn is gone away!" "Miss Wynn gone away! But whither?" "Nobody knows. All that can be said is, she disappeared on the night of the ball, without telling any one--no trace left behind--except--" "Except what?" "A ring--a diamond cluster. I found it myself in the summer-house. You know the place--you know the ring too?" "I do, Mr Shenstone; have reasons, painful ones. But I am not called upon to give them now, nor to you. What could it mean?" he adds, speaking to himself, thinking of that cry he heard when being rowed off. It connects itself with what he hears now; seems once more resounding in his ears, more than ever resembling a shriek! "But, sir; please proceed! For God's sake, keep nothing back--tell me everything!" Thus appealed to, Shenstone answers by giving an account of what has occurred at Llangorren Court--all that had transpired previous to his leaving; and frankly confesses his own reasons for being in Boulogne. The manner in which it is received still further satisfying him of the other's guiltlessness, he again begs to be forgiven for the suspicions he had entertained. "Mr Shenstone," returns Ryecroft, "you ask what I am ready and willing to grant--God knows how ready, how willing. If any misfortune has befallen her we are speaking of, however great your grief, it cannot be greater than mine." Shenstone is convinced. Ryecroft's speech, his looks, his whole bearing, are those of a man not only guiltless of wrong to Gwendoline Wynn, but one who, on her account, feels anxiety keen as his own. He stays not to question further; but once more making apologies for his intrusion--which are accepted without anger--he bows himself back into the street. The business of his travelling companion in Boulogne was over some time ago. His is now equally ended; and though without having thrown any new light on the mystery of Miss Wynn's disappearance, still with some satisfaction to himself, he dares not dwell upon. Where is the man who would not rather know his sweetheart dead than see her in the arms of a rival? However ignoble the feeling, or base to entertain it, it is natural to the human heart tortured by jealousy. Too natural, as George Shenstone that night knows, with head tossing upon a sleepless pillow. Too late to catch the Folkestone packet, his bed is in Boulogne--no bed of roses but a couch Procrustean. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Meanwhile, Captain Ryecroft returns to the room where his friend the Major has been awaiting him. Impatiently, though not in the interim unemployed; as evinced by a flat mahogany box upon the table, and beside it a brace of duelling pistols, which have evidently been submitted to examination. They are the "best barkers that can be got in Boulogne." "We shan't need them, Major, after all." "The devil we shan't! He's shown the white feather?" "No, Mahon; instead, proved himself as brave a fellow as ever stood before sword point, or dared pistol bullet?" "Then there's no trouble between you?" "Ah! yes, trouble; but not between us. Sorrow shared by both. We're in the same boat." "In that case, why didn't you bring him in?" "I didn't think of it." "Well; we'll drink his health. And since you say you've both embarked in the same boat--a bad one--here's to your reaching a good haven, and in safety!" "Thanks, Major! The haven I now want to reach, and intend entering ere another sun sets, is the harbour of Folkestone." The Major almost drops his glass. "Why, Ryecroft, you're surely joking?" "No, Mahon; I'm in earnest--dead anxious earnest." "Well, I wonder! No, I don't," he adds, correcting himself. "A man needn't be surprised at anything where there's a woman concerned. May the devil take her, who's taking you away from me!" "Major Mahon!" "Well--well, old boy! Don't be angry. I meant nothing personal, knowing neither the lady, nor the reason for thus changing your mind, and so soon leaving me. Let my sorrow at that be my excuse." "You shall be told it, this night--now!" In another hour Major Mahon is in possession of all that relates to Gwendoline Wynn, known to Vivian Ryecroft; no more wondering at the anxiety of his guest to get back to England; nor doing aught to detain him. Instead, he counsels his immediate return; accompanies him to the first morning packet for Folkestone; and at the parting hand-shake again reminds him of that well-timed grip in the ditch of Delhi, exclaiming-- "God bless you, old boy! Whatever the upshot, remember you've a friend, and a bit of a tent to shelter you in Boulogne--not forgetting a little comfort from the _crayther_!" Volume Two, Chapter XXIV. SUICIDE, OR MURDER. Two more days have passed, and the crowd collected at Llangorren Court is larger than ever. But it is not now scattered, nor are people rushing excitedly about; instead, they stand thickly packed in a close clump, which covers all the carriage sweep in front of the house. For the search is over, the lost one has at length been found. Found, when the flood subsided, and the drag could do its work--_found drowned_! Not far away, nor yet in the main river; but that narrow channel, deep and dark, inside the eyot. In a little angular embayment at the cliff's base, almost directly under the summer-house was the body discovered. It came to the surface soon as touched by the grappling iron, which caught in the loose drapery around it. Left alone for another day it would have risen of itself. Taken out of the water, and borne away to the house, it is now lying in the entrance-hall, upon a long table there set centrally. The hall, though a spacious one, is filled with people; and but for two policemen stationed at the door would be densely crowded. These have orders to admit only the friends and intimates of the family, with those whose duty requires them to be there officially. There is again a council in deliberation; but not as on days preceding. Then it was to inquire into what had become of Gwendoline Wynn, and whether she were still alive; to-day, it is an inquest being held over her dead body! There lies it, just as it came out of the water. But, oh! how unlike what it was before being submerged! Those gossamer things, silks and laces--the dress worn by her at the ball--no more floating and feather-like, but saturated, mud-stained, "clinging like cerements" around a form whose statuesque outlines, even in death, show the perfection of female beauty. And her chrome yellow hair, cast in loose coils about, has lost its silken gloss, and grown darker in hue: while the rich rose red is gone from her cheeks, already swollen and discoloured; so soon had the ruthless water commenced its ravages! No one would know Gwen Wynn now. Seeing that form prostrate and pulseless, who could believe it the same, which but a few nights before was there moving about, erect, lissome, and majestic? Or in that face, dark and disfigured, who could recognise the once radiant countenance of Llangorren's young heiress? Sad to contemplate those mute motionless lips, so late wreathed with smiles, and speaking pleasant words! And those eyes, dulled with "muddy impurity," that so short while ago shone bright and gladsome, rejoicing in the gaiety of youth and the glory of beauty--sparkling, flashing, conquering! All is different now; her hair dishevelled, her dress disordered and dripping, the only things upon her person unchanged being the rings on her fingers, the wrist bracelets, the locket still pendant to her neck-- all gemmed and gleaming as ever, the impure water affecting not their costly purity. And their presence has a significance, proclaiming an important fact, soon to be considered. The Coroner, summoned in haste, has got upon the ground, selected his jury, and gone through the formularies for commencing the inquest. These over, the first point to be established is the identification of the body. There is little difficulty in this; and it is solely through routine, and for form's sake, that the aunt of the deceased lady, her cousin, the lady's-maid, and one or two other domestics are submitted to examination. All testify to their belief that the body before them is that of Gwendoline Wynn. Miss Linton, after giving her testimony, is borne off to her room in hysterics; while Eleanor Lees is led away weeping. Then succeeds inquiry as to how the death has been brought about; whether it be a case of suicide or assassination? If murder the motive cannot have been robbery. The jewellery, of grand value, forbids the supposition of this, checking all conjecture. And if suicide, why? That Miss Wynn should have taken her own life--made away with herself-- is equally impossible of belief. Some time is occupied in the investigation of facts, and drawing deductions. Witnesses of all classes and kinds thought worth the calling are called and questioned. Everything already known, or rumoured, is gone over again, till at length they arrive at the relations of Captain Ryecroft with the drowned lady. They are brought out in various ways, and by different witnesses; but only assume a sinister aspect in the eyes of the jury, on their hearing the tale of the French _femme de chambre_--strengthened, almost confirmed, by the incident of that ring found on the floor of the summer-house. The finder is not there to tell how; but Miss Linton, Miss Lees, and Mr Musgrave, vouch for the fact at second hand. The one most wanted is Vivian Ryecroft himself, and next to him the waterman Wingate. Neither has yet made appearance at Llangorren, nor has either been heard of. The policeman sent after the last has returned to report a bootless expedition. No word of the boatman at Chepstow, nor anywhere else down the river. And no wonder there is not; since young Powell and his friends have taken Jack's boat beyond the river's mouth--duck-shooting along the shores of the Severn sea--there camping out, and sleeping in places far from towns, or stations of the rural constabulary. And the first is not yet expected--cannot be. From London George Shenstone had telegraphed:--"Captain Ryecroft gone to Paris, where he (Shenstone) would follow him." There has been no _telegram_ later to know whether the followed has been found. Even if he have, there has not been time for return from the French metropolis. Just as this conclusion has been reached by the coroner, his jury, the justices, and other gentlemen interested in and assisting at the investigation inside the hall, to the surprise of those on the sweep without, George Shenstone presents himself in their midst; their excited movement with the murmur of voices proclaiming his advent. Still greater their astonishment when, shortly after--within a few seconds-- Captain Ryecroft steps upon the same ground, as though the two had come thither in companionship! And so might it have been believed, but for two hotel hackneys seen drawn up on the drive outside the skirts of the crowd where they delivered their respective fares, after having brought them separately from the railway station. Fellow travellers they have been, but whether friends or not, the people are surprised at the manner of their arrival; or rather, at seeing Captain Ryecroft so present himself. For in the days just past he has been the subject of a horrid suspicion, with the usual guesses and conjectures relating to it and him. Not only has he been freely calumniated, but doubts thrown out that Ryecroft is his real name, and denial of his being an officer of the army, or ever having been; with bold, positive asseveration that he is a swindler and adventurer! All that while Gwen Wynn was but missing. Now that her body is found, since its discovery, still harsher have been the terms applied to him; at length, to culminate, in calling him a murderer! Instead of voluntarily presenting himself at Llangorren alone, arms and limbs free, they expected to see him--if seen at all--with a policeman by his side, and manacles on his wrists! Astonished, also, are those within the hall, though in a milder degree, and from different causes. They did not look for the man to be brought before them handcuffed; but no more did they anticipate seeing him enter almost simultaneously, and side by side, with George Shenstone; they, not having the hackney carriages in sight, taking it for granted that the two have been travelling together. However strange or incongruous the companionship, those noting have no time to reflect about it; their attention being called to a scene that, for a while, fixes and engrosses it. Going wider apart as they approach the table, on which lies the body, Shenstone and Ryecroft take opposite sides--coming to a stand, each in his own attitude. From information already imparted to them they have been prepared to see a corpse, but not such as that! Where is the beautiful woman, by both beloved, fondly, passionately? Can it be possible, that what they are looking upon is she who once was Gwendoline Wynn? Whatever their reflections, or whether alike, neither makes them known in words. Instead, both stand speechless, stunned--withered-like, as two strong trees simultaneously scathed by lightning--the bolt which has blasted them lying between! Volume Two, Chapter XXV. A PLENTIFUL CORRESPONDENCE. If Captain Ryecroft's sudden departure from Herefordshire brought suspicion upon him, his reappearance goes far to remove it. For that this is voluntary soon becomes known. The returned policeman has communicated the fact to his fellow-professionals, it is by them further disseminated among the people assembled outside. From the same source other information is obtained in favour of the man they have been so rashly and gravely accusing. The time of his starting off, the mode of making his journey, without any attempt to conceal his route of travel or cover his tracks--instead, leaving them so marked that any messenger, even the simplest, might have followed and found him. Only a fool fleeing from justice would have so fled, or one seeking to escape punishment for some trivial offence. But not a man guilty of murder. Besides, is he not back there--come of his own accord--to confront his accusers, if any there still be? So runs the reasoning throughout the crowd on the carriage sweep. With the gentlemen inside the house, equally complete is the revolution of sentiment in his favour. For, after the first violent outburst of grief, young Shenstone, in a few whispered words, makes known to them the particulars of his expedition to Boulogne, with that interview in the house of Major Mahon. Himself convinced of his rival's innocence, he urges his conviction on the others. But before their eyes is a sight almost confirmatory of it. That look of concentrated anguish in Captain Ryecroft's eyes cannot be counterfeit. A soldier who sheds tears could not be an assassin; and as he stands in bent attitude, leaning over the table on which lies the corpse, tears are seen stealing down his cheeks, while his bosom rises and falls in quick, convulsive heaving. Shenstone is himself very similarly affected, and the bystanders beholding them are convinced that, in whatever way Gwendoline Wynn may have come by her death, the one is innocent of it as the other. For all, justice requires that the accusations already made, or menaced, against Captain Ryecroft be cleared up. Indeed, he himself demands this, for he is aware of the rumours that have been abroad about him. On this account he is called upon by the Coroner to state what he knows concerning the melancholy subject of their enquiry. But first George Shenstone is examined--as it were by way of skirmish, and to approach, in a manner delicate as possible, the man mainly, though doubtingly accused. The baronet's son, beginning with the night of the ball--the fatal night--tells how he danced repeatedly with Miss Wynn; between two sets walked out with her over the lawn, stopped, and stood for some time under a certain tree, where in conversation she made known to him the fact of her being betrothed by showing him the engagement ring. She did not say who gave it, but he surmised it to be Captain Ryecroft--was sure of its being he--even without the evidence of the engraved initials afterwards observed by him inside it. As it has already been identified by others, he is only asked to state the circumstances under which he found it. Which he does, telling how he picked it up from the floor of the summer-house; but without alluding to his own motives for being there, or acting as he has throughout. As he is not questioned about these, why should he? But there are many hearing him who guess them--not a few quite comprehending all. George Shenstone's mad love for Miss Wynn has been no secret, neither his pursuit of her for many long months, however hopeless it might have seemed to the initiated. His melancholy bearing now, which does not escape observation, would of itself tell the tale. His testimony makes ready the ground for him who is looked upon less in the light of a witness than as one accused, by some once more, and more than ever so. For there are those present who not only were at the ball, but noticed that triangular byplay upon which Shenstone's tale, without his intending it, has thrown a sinister light. Alongside the story of Clarisse, there seems to have been motive, almost enough for murder. An engagement angrily broken off--an actual quarrel--Gwendoline Wynn never afterwards seen alive! That quarrel, too, by the water's edge, on a cliff at whose base her body has been found! Strange-- altogether improbable--that she should have drowned herself. Far easier to believe that he, her _fiance_, in a moment of mad, headlong passion, prompted by fell jealousy, had hurled her over the high bank. Against this returned current of adverse sentiment, Captain Ryecroft is called upon to give his account, and state all he knows. What he will say is weighted with heavy consequences to himself. It may leave him at liberty to depart from the spot voluntarily, as he came, or be taken from it in custody. But he is yet free, and so left to tell his tale, no one interrupting. And without circumlocution he tells it, concealing nought that may be needed for its comprehension--not even his delicate relations to the unfortunate lady. He confesses his love--his proposal of marriage--its acceptance--the bestowal of the ring--his jealousy and its cause--the ebullition of angry words between him and his betrothed--the so-called quarrel--her returning the ring, with the way, and why he did not take it back--because at that painful crisis be neither thought of nor cared for such a trifle. Then parting with, and leaving her within the pavilion, he hastened away to his boat, and was rowed off. But, while passing up stream, he again caught sight of her, still standing in the summer-house, apparently leaning upon, and looking over, its baluster rail. His boat moving on, and trees coming between he no more saw her; but soon after heard a cry--his waterman as well--startling both. It is a new statement in evidence, which startles those listening to him. He could not comprehend, and cannot explain it; though now knowing it must have been the voice of Gwendoline Wynn--perhaps her last utterance in life. He had commanded his boatman to hold way, and they dropped back down stream again to get within sight of the summer-house, but then to see it dark, and to all appearance deserted. Afterwards he proceeded home to his hotel, there to sit up for the remainder of the night, packing and otherwise preparing for his journey--of itself a consequence of the angry parting with his betrothed, and the pledge so slightingly returned. In the morning he wrote to her, directing the letter to be dropped into the post office; which he knew to have been done before his leaving the hotel for the railway station. "Has any letter reached Llangorren Court?" enquires the Coroner, turning from the witness, and putting the question in a general way. "I mean for Miss Wynn--since the night of that ball?" The butler present, stepping forward, answers in the affirmative, saying-- "There are a good many for Miss Gwen since--some almost coming in every post." Although there is, or was, but one Miss Gwen Wynn at Llangorren, the head servant, as the others, from habit calls her `Miss Gwen,' speaking of her as if she were still alive. "It is your place to look after the letters, I believe?" "Yes; I attend to that." "What have you done with those addressed to Miss Wynn?" "I gave them to Gibbons, Miss Gwen's lady's-maid." "Let Gibbons be called again!" directs the Coroner. The girl is brought in the second time, having been already examined at some length, and, as before, confessing her neglect of duty. "Mr Williams," proceeds the examiner, "gave you some letters for your late mistress. What have you done with them?" "I took them upstairs to Miss Gwen's room." "Are they there still?" "Yes; on the dressing table, where she always had the letters left for her." "Be good enough to bring them down here. Bring all." Another pause in the proceedings while Gibbons is off after the now posthumous correspondence of the deceased lady, during which whisperings are interchanged between the Coroner and jurymen, asking questions of one another. They relate to a circumstance seeming strange; that nothing has been said about these letters before--at least to those engaged in the investigation. The explanation, however, is given--a reason evident and easily understood. They have seen the state of mind in which the two ladies of the establishment are--Miss Linton almost beside herself, Eleanor Lees not far from the same. In the excitement of occurrences neither has given thought to letters, even having forgotten the one which so occupied their attention on that day when Gwen was missed from her seat at the breakfast table. It might not have been seen by them then, but for Gibbons not being in the way to take it upstairs as usual. These facts, or rather deductions, are informal, and discussed while the maid is absent on her errand. She is gone but for a few seconds, returning, waiter in hand, with a pile of letters upon it, which she presents in the orthodox fashion. Counted there are more than a dozen of them, the deceased lady having largely corresponded. A general favourite--to say nothing of her youth, beauty, and riches--she had friends far and near; and, as the butler had stated, letters coming by "almost every post"--that but once a day, however, Llangorren lying far from a postal town, and having but one daily delivery. Those upon the tray are from ladies, as can be told by the delicate angular chirography--all except two, that show a rounder and bolder hand. In the presence of her to whom they were addressed-- now speechless and unprotesting--no breach of confidence to open them. One after another their envelopes are torn off, and they are submitted to the jury--those of the lady correspondents first. Not to be deliberately read, but only glanced at, to see if they contain aught relating to the matter in hand. Still, it takes time; and would more were they all of the same pattern--double sheets, with the scrip crossed, and full to the four corners. Fortunately, but a few of them are thus prolix and puzzling; the greater number being notes about the late ball, birthday congratulations, invitations to "at homes," dinner-parties, and such like. Recognising their character, and that they have no relation to the subject of inquiry, the jurymen pass them through their fingers speedily as possible, and then turn with greater expectancy to the two in masculine handwriting. These the Coroner has meanwhile opened, and read to himself, finding one signed "George Shenstone," the other "Vivian Ryecroft." Nobody present is surprised to hear that one of the letters is Ryecroft's. They have been expecting it so. But not that the other is from the son of Sir George Shenstone. A word, however, from the young man himself explains how it came there, leaving the epistle to tell its own tale. For as both undoubtedly bear upon the matter of inquiry, the Coroner has directed both to be read aloud. Whether by chance or otherwise, that of Shenstone is taken first. It is headed-- "Ormeston Hall, 4 a.m., Apres le bal." The date, thus oddly indicated, seems to tell of the writer being in better spirits than might have been expected just at that time; possibly from a still lingering belief that all is not yet hopeless with him. Something of the same runs through the tone of his letter, if not its contents, which are-- "Dear Gwen,--I've got home, but can't turn in without writing you a word, to say that, however sad I feel at what you've told me--and sad I am, God knows--if you think I shouldn't come near you any more--and from what I noticed last night, perhaps I ought not--only say so, and I will not. Your slightest word will be a command to one who, though no longer hoping to have your hand, will still hope and pray for your happiness. That one is,-- "Yours devotedly, if despairingly,-- "George Shenstone. "P.S.--Do not take the trouble of writing an answer. I would rather get it from your lips; and that you may have the opportunity of so giving it, I will call at the Court in the afternoon. Then you can say whether it is to be my last visit there.--G.S." The writer, present and listening, bravely bears himself. It is a terrible infliction, nevertheless, having his love secret thus revealed, his heart, as it were, laid open before all the world. But he is too sad to feel it now; and makes no remark, save a word or two explanatory, in answer to questions from the Coroner. Nor are any comments made upon the letter itself. All are too anxious as to the contents of that other, bearing the signature of the man who is to most of them a stranger. It carries the address of the hotel in which he has been all summer sojourning, and its date is only an hour or two later than that of Shenstone's. No doubt, at the self-same moment the two men were pondering upon the words they intended writing to Gwendoline Wynn--she who now can never read them. Very different in spirit are their epistles, unlike as the men themselves. But, so too, are the circumstances that dictated them, that of Ryecroft reads thus:-- "Gwendoline,--While you are reading this I shall be on my way to London, where I shall stay to receive your answer--if you think it worth while to give one. After parting as we've done, possibly you will not. When you so scornfully cast away that little love-token it told me a tale--I may say a bitter one--that you never really regarded the gift, nor cared for the giver. Is that true, Gwendoline? If not, and I am wronging you, may God forgive me. And I would crave your forgiveness; entreat you to let me replace the ring upon your finger. But if true--and you know best--then you can take it up--supposing it is still upon the floor where you flung it--fling it into the river, and forget him who gave it. "Vivian Ryecroft." To this half-doubting, half-defiant epistle there is also a postscript:-- "I shall be at the Langham Hotel, London, till to-morrow noon; where your answer, if any, will reach me. Should none come, I shall conclude that all is ended between us, and henceforth you will neither need, nor desire, to know my address. "Y.R." The contents of the letter make a vivid impression on all present. Its tone of earnestness, almost anger, could not be assumed or pretended. Beyond doubt, it was written under the circumstances stated; and, taken in conjunction with the writer's statement of other events, given in such a clear, straightforward manner, there is again complete revulsion of feeling in his favour, and once more a full belief in his innocence. Which questioning him by cross-examination fails to shake, instead strengthens; and, when, at length, having given explanation of everything, he is permitted to take his place among the spectators and mourners, it is with little fear of being dragged away from Llangorren Court in the character of a criminal. Volume Two, Chapter XXVI. FOUND DROWNED. As a pack of hounds thrown off the scent, but a moment before hot, now cold, are the Coroner and his jury. But only in one sense like the dogs these human searchers. There is nothing of the sleuth in their search, and they are but too glad to find the game they have been pursuing and lost is a noble stag, instead of a treacherous wicked wolf. Not a doubt remains in their minds of the innocence of Captain Ryecroft--not the shadow of one. If there were, it is soon to be dissipated. For while they are deliberating on what had best next be done, a noise outside, a buzz of voices, excited exclamations, at length culminating in a cheer, tell of some one fresh arrived and received triumphantly. They are not left long to conjecture who the new arrival is. One of the policemen stationed at the door stepping aside tells who--the man after Captain Ryecroft himself most wanted. No need saying it is Jack Wingate. But a word about how the waterman has come thither, arriving at such a time, and why not sooner. It is all in a nutshell. But the hour before he returned from the duck-shooting expedition on the shores of the Severn sea, with his boat brought back by road--on a donkey cart. On arrival at his home, and hearing of the great event at Llangorren, he had launched his skiff, leaped into it, and pulled himself down to the Court as if rowing in a regatta. In the _patois_ of the American prairies he is now "arrove," and, still panting for breath, is brought before the Coroner's Court, and submitted to examination. His testimony confirms that of his old fare--in every particular about which he can testify. All the more credible is it from his own character. The young waterman is well known as a man of veracity--incapable of bearing false witness. When he tells them that after the Captain had joined him, and was still with him in the boat, he not only saw a lady in the little house overhead, but recognised her as the young mistress of Llangorren--when he positively swears to the fact--no one any more thinks that she whose body lies dead was drowned or otherwise injured by the man standing bowed and broken over it. Least of all the other, who alike suffers and sorrows. For soon as Wingate has finished giving evidence, George Shenstone steps forward, and holding out his hand to his late rival, says, in the hearing of all-- "Forgive me, sir, for having wronged you by suspicion! I now make reparation for it in the only way I can--by declaring that I believe you as innocent as myself." The generous behaviour of the baronet's son strikes home to every heart, and his example is imitated by others. Hands from every side are stretched towards that of the stranger, giving it a grasp which tells of their owners being also convinced of his innocence. But the inquest is not yet ended--not for hours. Over the dead body of one in social rank as she, no mere perfunctory investigation would satisfy the public demand, nor would any Coroner dare to withdraw till everything has been thoroughly sifted, and to the bottom. In view of the new facts brought out by Captain Ryecroft and his boatman--above all that cry heard by them--suspicions of foul play are rife as ever, though no longer pointed at him. As everything in the shape of verbal testimony worth taking has been taken, the Coroner calls upon his jury to go with him to the place where the body was taken out of the water. Leaving it in charge of two policemen, they sally forth from the house two and two, he preceding, the crowd pressing close. First they visit the little dock, in which they see two boats--the _Gwendoline_ and _Mary_--lying just as they were on that night when Captain Ryecroft stepped across the one to take his seat in the other. He is with the Coroner--so is Wingate--and both questioned give minute account of that embarkation, again in brief _resume_ going over the circumstances that preceded and followed it. The next move is to the summer-house, to which the distance from the dock is noted, one of the jurymen stepping it--the object to discover how time will correspond to the incidents as detailed. Not that there is any doubt about the truth of Captain Ryecroft's statements, nor those of the boatman; for both are fully believed. The measuring is only to assist in making calculation how long time may have intervened between the lovers' quarrel and the death-like cry, without thought of their having any connection--much less that the one was either cause or consequence of the other. Again there is consultation at the summer-house, with questions asked, some of which are answered by George Shenstone, who shows the spot where he picked up the ring. And outside, standing on the cliff's brink, Ryecroft and the waterman point to the place, near as they can fix it, where their boat was when the sad sound reached their ears, again recounting what they did after. Remaining a while longer on the cliff, the Coroner and jury, with craned necks, look over its edge. Directly below is the little embayment in which the body was found. It is angular, somewhat horse-shoe shaped; the water within stagnant, which accounts for the corpse not having been swept away. There is not much current in the backwash at any part; enough to have carried it off had the drowning been done elsewhere. But beyond doubt it has been there. Such is the conclusion arrived at by the Coroner's jury, firmly established in their minds, at sight of something hitherto unnoticed by them. For though not in a body, individually each had already inspected the place, negligently. But now in official form, with wits on the alert, one looking over detects certain abrasions on the face of the cliff--scratches on the red sandstone--distinguishable by the fresher tint of the rock-- unquestionably made by something that had fallen from above, and what but the body of Gwendoline Wynn? They see, moreover, some branches of a juniper bush near the cliff's base, broken, but still clinging. Through that the falling form must have descended! There is no further doubting the fact. There went she over; the only questions undetermined being, whether with her own will, by misadventure, or man's violence. In other words, was it suicide, accident, or murder? To the last many circumstances point, and especially the fact of the body remaining where it went into the water. A woman being drowned accidentally, or drowning herself, in the death struggle would have worked away some distance from the spot she had fallen, or thrown herself in. Still the same would occur if thrown in by another; only that this other might by some means have extinguished life beforehand. This last thought, or surmise, carries Coroner and jury back to the house, and to a more particular examination of the body. In which they are assisted by medical men--surgeons and physicians--several of both being present, unofficially; among them the one who administers to the ailings of Miss Linton. There is none of them who has attended Gwendoline Wynn, who never knew ailment of any kind. Their _post-mortem_ examining does not extend to dissection. There is no need. Without it there are tests which tell the cause of death--that of drowning. Beyond this they can throw no light on the affair, which remains mysterious as ever. Flung back on reasoning of the analytical kind, the Coroner and his jury can come to no other conclusion than that the first plunge into the water, in whatever way made, was almost instantly fatal; and if a struggle followed it ended by the body returning to, and sinking in the same place where it first went down. Among the people outside pass many surmises, guesses, and conjectures. Suspicions also, but no more pointing to Captain Ryecroft. They take another, and more natural, direction. Still nothing has transpired to inculpate any one, or, in the finding of a Coroner's jury, connect man or woman with it. This is at length pronounced in the usual formula, with its customary tag:--"Found Drowned. But how, etc, etc." With such ambiguous rendering the once beautiful body of Gwendoline Wynn is consigned to a coffin, and in due time deposited in the family vault, under the chancel of Llangorren Church. Volume Two, Chapter XXVII. A MAN WHO THINKS IT MURDER. Had Gwendoline Wynn been a poor cottage girl, instead of a rich young lady--owner of estates--the world would soon have ceased to think of her. As it is most people have settled down to the belief that she has simply been the victim of a misadventure, her death due to accident. Only a few have other thoughts, but none that she has committed suicide. The theory of _felo de se_ is not entertained, because not entertainable. For, in addition to the testimony taken at the Coroner's inquest, other facts came out in examination by the magistrates, showing there was no adequate reason why she should put an end to her life. A lover's quarrel of a night's, still less an hour's duration, could not so result. And that there was nothing beyond this Miss Linton is able to say assuredly. Still more Eleanor Lees, who, by confidences exchanged, and mutually imparted, was perfectly _au fait_ to the feelings of her relative and friend--knew her hopes, and her fears, and that among the last there was none to justify the deed of despair. Doubts now and then, for when and where is love without them; but with Gwen Wynn slight, evanescent as the clouds in a summer sky. She was satisfied that Vivian Ryecroft loved her, as that she herself lived. How could it be otherwise? and her behaviour on the night of the ball was only a transient spite which would have passed off soon as the excitement was over, and calm reflection returned. Altogether impossible she could have given way to it so far as in wilful rage to take the last leap into eternity. More likely standing on the cliff's edge, anxiously straining her eyes after the boat which was bearing him away in anger, her foot slipped upon the rock, and she fell over into the flood. So argues Eleanor Lees, and such is the almost universal belief at the close of the inquest, and for some time after. And if not self-destruction, no more could it be murder with a view to robbery. The valuable effects left untouched upon her person forbade supposition of that. If murder, the motive must have been other than the possession of a few hundred pounds' worth of jewellery. So reasons the world at large, naturally enough. For all, there are a few who still cling to a suspicion of there having been foul play; but not now with any reference to Captain Ryecroft. Nor are they the same who had suspected him. Those yet doubting the accidental death are the intimate friends of the Wynn family, who knew of its affairs relating to the property with the conditions on which the Llangorren estates were held. Up to this time only a limited number of individuals has been aware of their descent to Lewin Murdock. And when at length this fact comes out, and still more emphatically by the gentleman himself taking possession of them, the thoughts of the people revert to the mystery of Miss Wynn's death, so unsatisfactory cleared up at the Coroner's inquest. Still the suspicions thus newly aroused, and pointing in another quarter, are confined to those acquainted with the character of the new man suspected. Nor are they many. Beyond the obscure corner of Bugg's Ferry there are few who have ever heard of, still fewer ever seen him. Outside the pale of "society," with most part of his life passed abroad, he is a stranger, not only to the gentry of the neighbourhood, but most of the common people as well. Jack Wingate chanced to have heard of him by reason of his proximity to Bugg's Ferry, and his own necessity for oft going there. But possibly as much on the account of the intimate relations existing between the owner of Glyngog House and Coracle Dick. Others less interested know little of either individual, and when it is told that a Mr Lewin Murdock has succeeded to the estates of Llangorren--at the same time it becoming known that he is the cousin of her whom death has deprived of them--to the general public the succession seems natural enough; since it has been long understood that the lady had no nearer relative. Therefore, only the few intimately familiar with the facts relating to the reversion of the property held fast to the suspicion thus excited. But as no word came out, either at the inquest or elsewhere, and nothing has since arisen to justify it, they also begin to share the universal belief, that for the death of Gwendoline Wynn nobody is to blame. Even George Shenstone, sorely grieving, accepts it thus. Of unsuspicious nature--incapable of believing in a crime so terrible--a deed so dark, as that would infer--he cannot suppose that the gentleman now his nearest neighbour--for the lands of Llangorren adjoin those of his father--has come into possession of them by such foul means as murder. His father may think differently, he knowing more of Lewin Murdock. Not much of his late life, but his earlier, with its surroundings and antecedents. Still Sir George is silent, whatever his thoughts. It is not a subject to be lightly spoken of, or rashly commented upon. There is one who, more than any other, reflects upon the sad fate of her whom he had so fondly loved, and differing from the rest as to how she came to her death--this one is Captain Ryecroft. He, too, might have yielded to the popular impression of its having been accidental, but for certain circumstances that have come to his knowledge, and which he has yet kept to himself. He had not forgotten what was, at an early period, communicated to him by the waterman Wingate, about the odd-looking old house up the glen; nor yet the uneasy manner of Gwendoline Wynn, when once in conversation with her he referred to the place and its occupier. This, with Jack's original story, and other details added, besides incidents that have since transpired, are recalled to him vividly on hearing that the owner of Glyngog has also become owner of Llangorren. It is some time before this news reaches him. For just after the inquest an important matter had arisen affecting some property of his own, which required his presence in Dublin--there for days detaining him. Having settled it, he has returned to the same town and hotel where he had been the summer sojourning. Nor came he back on errand aimless, but with a purpose. Ill-satisfied with the finding of the Coroner's jury, he is determined to investigate the affair in his own way. Accident he does not believe in--least of all, that the lady having made a false step, had fallen over the cliff. When he last saw her she was inside the pavilion, leaning over the baluster rail, breast high; protected by it. If gazing after him and his boat, the position gave her as good a view as she could have. Why should she have gone outside? And the cry heard so soon after? It was not like that of one falling, and so far. In descent it would have been repeated, which it was not! Of suicide he has never entertained a thought--above all, for the reason suggested--jealousy of himself. How could he, while so keenly suffering it for her! No, it could not be that; nor suicide from any cause. The more he ponders upon it, the surer grows he that Gwendoline Wynn has been the victim of a villainous murder. And it is for this reason he has returned to the Wye, first to satisfy himself of the fact; then, if possible, to find the perpetrator, and bring him to justice. As no robber has done the drowning, conjecture is narrowed to a point; his suspicions finally becoming fixed on Lewin Murdock. He may be mistaken, but will not surrender them until he find evidence of their being erroneous, or proof that they are correct. And to obtain it he will devote, if need be, all the rest of his days, with the remainder of his fortune. For what are either now to him? In life he has had but one love, real, and reaching the height of a passion. She who inspired it is now sleeping her last sleep--lying cold in her tomb-- his love and memory of her alone remaining warm. His grief has been great, but its first wild throes have passed and he can reflect calmly--more carefully consider, what he should do. From the first some thoughts about Murdock were in his mind; still only vague. Now, on returning to Herefordshire, and hearing what has happened meanwhile--for during his absence there has been a removal from Glyngog to Llangorren--the occurrence, so suggestive, restores his former train of reflection, placing things in a clearer light. As the hunter, hitherto pursuing upon a cold trail, is excited by finding the slot fresher, so he. And so will he follow it to the end-- the last trace or sign. For no game, however grand--elephant, lion, or tiger--could attract like that he believes himself to be after--a human tiger--a murderer. END OF VOLUME TWO. Volume Three, Chapter I. ONCE MORE UPON THE RIVER. Nowhere in England, perhaps nowhere in Europe, is the autumnal foliage more charmingly tinted than on the banks of the Wye, where it runs through the shire of Hereford. There Vaga threads her way amid woods that appear painted, and in colours almost as vivid as those of the famed American forests. The beech, instead of, as elsewhere, dying off dull bistre, takes a tint of bright amber; the chestnut turns translucent lemon; the oak leaves show rose-colours along their edges, and the wych-hazel coral red by its umbels of thickly clustering fruit. Here and there along the high-pitched hill sides flecks of crimson proclaim the wild cherry, spots of hoar white bespeak the climbing clematis, scarlet the holly with its wax-like berries, and maroon red the hawthorn; while interspersed and contrasting are dashes of green in all its varied shades, where yews, junipers, gorse, ivy, and other indigenous evergreens display their living verdure throughout all the year, daring winter's frosts, and defying its snows. It is autumn now, and the woods of the Wye have donned its dress; no livery of faded green, nor sombre russet, but a robe of gaudiest sheen, its hues scarlet, crimson, green, and golden. Brown October elsewhere, is brilliant here; and though leaves have fallen, and are falling, the sight suggests no thought of decay, nor brings sadness to the heart of the beholder. Instead, the gaudy tapestry hanging from the trees, and the gay-coloured carpet spread underneath, but gladden it. Still further is it rejoiced by sounds heard. For the woods of Wyeside are not voiceless, even in winter. Within them the birds ever sing, and although their autumn concert may not equal that of spring,--lacking its leading tenor, the nightingale--still is it alike vociferous and alike splendidly attuned. Bold as ever is the flageolet note of the blackbird; not less loud and sweet the carol of his shyer cousin the thrush; as erst soft and tender the cooing of the cushat; and with mirth unabated the cackle of the green woodpecker, as with long tongue, prehensile as human hand, it penetrates the ant-hive in search of its insect prey. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ October it is; and where the Wye's silver stream, like a grand glistening snake, meanders amid these woods of golden hue and glorious song, a small row-boat is seen dropping downward. There are two men in it; one rowing, the other seated in the stern sheets, steering. The same individuals have been observed before in like relative position and similarly occupied. For he at the oars is Jack Wingate, the steerer Captain Ryecroft. Little thought the young waterman, when that "big gift"--the ten pound bank-note--was thrust into his palm, he would so soon again have the generous donor for a fare. He has him now, without knowing why, or inquiring. Too glad once more to sit on his boat's thwarts, _vis-a-vis_ with the Captain, it would ill become him to be inquisitive. Besides, there is a feeling of solemnity in their thus again being together, with sadness pervading the thoughts of both, and holding speech in restraint. All he knows is that his old fare has hired him for a row down the river, but bent on no fishing business. For it is twilight. His excursion has a different object; but what the boatman cannot tell. No inference could be drawn from the laconic order he received at embarking. "Row me down the river, Jack!" distance and all else left undefined. And down Jack is rowing him in regular measured stroke, no words passing between them. Both are silent, as though listening to the plash of the oar-blades, or the roundelay of late singing birds on the river's bank. Yet neither of these sounds has place in their thoughts; instead, only the memory of one different and less pleasant. For they are thinking of cries--shrieks heard by them not so long ago, and still too fresh in their memory. Ryecroft is the first to break silence, saying,-- "This must be about the place where we heard it." Although not a word has been said of what the "it" is, and the remark seems made in soliloquy rather than as an interrogation, Wingate well knows what is meant, as shown by his rejoinder:-- "It's the very spot, Captain." "Ah! you know it?" "I do--am sure. You see that big poplar standing on the bank there?" "Yes; well?" "We wor just abreast o' it when ye bid me hold way. In course we must a heard the screech just then." "Hold way now! Pull back a length or two. Steady her. Keep opposite the tree!" The boatman obeys; first pulling the back stroke, then staying his craft against the current. Once more relapsing into silence, Ryecroft sends his gaze down stream, as though noting the distance to Llangorren Court, whose chimneys are visible in the moonlight now on. Then, as if satisfied with some mental observation, he directs the other to row off. But as the kiosk-like structure comes within sight, he orders another pause, while making a minute survey of the summer-house, and the stretch of water between. Part of this is the main channel of the river, the other portion being the narrow way behind the eyot; on approaching which the pavilion is again lost to view, hidden by a tope of tall trees. But once within the bye-way it can be again sighted; and when near the entrance to this the waterman gets the word to pull into it. He is somewhat surprised at receiving this direction. It is the way to Llangorren Court, by the boat-stair, and he knows the people now living there are not friends of his fare--not even acquaintances, so far as he has heard. Surely the Captain is not going to call on Mr Lewin Murdock--in amicable intercourse? So queries Jack Wingate, but only of himself, and without receiving answer. One way or other he will soon get it; and thus consoling himself, he rows on into the narrower channel. Not much farther before getting convinced that the Captain has no intention of making a call at the Court, nor is the _Mary_ to enter that little dock, where more than once she has lain moored beside the _Gwendoline_. When opposite the summer-house he is once more commanded to bring to, with the intimation added: "I'm not going any farther, Jack." Jack ceases stroke, and again holds the skiff so as to hinder it from drifting. Ryecroft sits with eyes turned towards the cliff, taking in its facade from base to summit, as though engaged in a geological study, or trigonometrical calculation. The waterman, for a while wondering what it is all about, soon begins to have a glimmer of comprehension. It is clearer when he is directed to scull the boat up into the little cove where the body was found. Soon as he has her steadied inside it, close up against the cliff's base, Ryecroft draws out a small lamp, and lights it. He then rises to his feet, and leaning forward, lays hold of a projecting point of rock. On that resting his hand, he continues for some time regarding the scratches on its surface, supposed to have been made by the feet of the drowned lady in her downward descent. Where he stands they are close to his eyes, and he can trace them from commencement to termination. And so doing, a shadow of doubt is seen to steal over his face, as though he doubted the finding of the Coroner's jury, and the belief of every one that Gwendoline Wynn had there fallen over. Bending lower, and examining the broken branches of the juniper, he doubts no more, but is sure--convinced of the contrary! Jack Wingate sees him start back with a strange surprised look, at the same time exclaiming,-- "I thought as much! No accident!--no suicide--murdered!" Still wondering, the waterman asks no questions. Whatever it may mean, he expects to be told in time, and is therefore patient. His patience is not tried by having to stay much longer there. Only a few moments more, during which Ryecroft bends over the boat's side, takes the juniper twigs in his hand, one after the other, raises them up as they were before being broken, then lets them gently down again! To his companion he says nothing to explain this apparently eccentric manipulation, leaving Jack to guesses. Only when it is over, and he is apparently satisfied, or with observation exhausted, giving the order,-- "Way, Wingate! Row back--up the river!" With alacrity the waterman obeys; but too glad to get out of that shadowy passage. For a weird feeling is upon him, as he remembers how there the screech owls mournfully cried, as if to make him sadder when thinking of his own lost love. Moving out into the main channel and on up stream, Ryecroft is once more silent and musing. But on reaching the place from which the pavilion can be again sighted, he turns round on the thwart and looks back. It startles him to see a form under the shadow of its roof--a woman!--how different from that he last saw there! The ex-cocotte of Paris--faded flower of the Jardin Mabille--has replaced the fresh beautiful blossom of Wyeside--blighted in its bloom! Volume Three, Chapter II. THE CRUSHED JUNIPER. Notwithstanding the caution with which Captain Ryecroft made his reconnaissance, it was nevertheless observed. And from beginning to end. Before his boat drew near the end of the eyot, above the place where for the second time it had stopped, it came under the eye of a man who chanced to be standing on the cliff by the side of the summer-house. That he was there by accident, or at all events not looking out for a boat could be told by his behaviour on first sighting this; neither by change of attitude nor glance of eye evincing any interest in it. His reflection is-- "Some fellows after salmon, I suppose. Have been up to that famous catching place by the Ferry, and are on the way home downward--to Rock Weir, no doubt? Ha!" The ejaculation is drawn from him by seeing the boat come to a stop, and remain stationary in the middle of the stream. "What's that for?" he asks himself, now more carefully examining the craft. It is still full four hundred yards from him, but the moonlight being in his favour he makes it out to be a pair-oared skiff with two men in it. "They don't seem to be dropping a net," he observes, "nor engaged about anything. That's odd!" Before they came to a stop he heard a murmur of voices, as of speech, a few words, exchanged between them, but too distant for him to distinguish what they had said. Now they are silent, sitting without stir; only a slight movement in the arms of the oarsman to keep the boat in its place. All this seems strange to him observing: not less when a flood of moonlight brighter than usual falls over the boat, and he can tell by the attitude of the man in the stern, with face turned upward, that he is regarding the structure on the cliff. He is not himself standing beside it now. Soon as becoming interested by the behaviour of the men in the boat, from its seeming eccentricity, he had glided back behind a bush, and there now crouches, an instinct prompting him to conceal himself. Soon after he sees the boat moving on, and then for a few seconds it is out of sight, again coming under his view near the upper end of the islet, evidently setting in for the old channel. And while he watches, it enters! As this is a sort of private way, the eyot itself being an adjunct of the ornamental grounds of Llangorren, he wonders whose boat it can be, and what its business there. By the backwash it must be making for the dock and stair; the men in it, or one of them, for the Court. While still surprisedly conjecturing, his ears admonish him that the oars are at rest, and another stoppage has taken place. He cannot see the skiff now, as the high bank hinders. Besides, the narrow passage is arcaded over by trees still in thick foliage; and, though the moon is shining brightly above, scarce a ray reaches the surface of the water. But an occasional creak of an oar in its rowlock, and some words spoken in low tone--so low he cannot make them out--tell him that the stoppage is directly opposite the spot where he is crouching--as predatory animal in wait for its prey. What was at first mere curiosity, and then matter of but slight surprise, is now an object of keen solicitude. For of all places in the world, to him there is none invested with greater interest than that where the boat has been brought to. Why has it stopped there? Why is it staying? For he can tell it is by the silence continuing. Above all, who are the men in it? He asks these questions of himself, but does not stay to reason out the answers. He will best get them by his eyes; and to obtain sight of the skiff and its occupants, he glides a little way along the cliff, looking out for a convenient spot. Finding one, he drops first to his knees, then upon all fours, and crawls out to its edge. Craning his head over, but cautiously, and with a care it shall be under cover of some fern leaves, he has a view of the water below, with the boat on it--only indistinct on account of the obscurity. He can make out the figures of the two men, though not their faces, nor anything by which he may identify them--if already known. But he sees that which helps to a conjecture, at the same sharpening his apprehensions. The boat once more in motion, not moving off, but up into the little cove, where a dead body late lay! Then, as one of the men strikes a match and sets light to a lamp, lighting up his own face with that of the other opposite, he on the bank above at length recognises both. But it is no longer a surprise to him. The presence of the skiff there, the movements of the men in it--like his own, evidently under restraint and stealthy--have prepared him for seeing whom he now sees--Captain Ryecroft and the waterman Wingate. Still he cannot think of what they are after, though he has his suspicions; the place, with something only known to himself, suggesting them--conjecture at first soon becoming certainty, as he sees the ex-officer of Hussars rise to his feet, hold his lamp close to the cliff's face, and inspect the abrasions on the rock! He is not more certain, but only more apprehensive, when the crushed juniper twigs are taken in hand, examined, and let go again. For he has by this divined the object of it all. If any doubt lingered, it is set at rest by the exclamatory words following, which, though but muttered, reach him on the cliff above, heard clear enough-- "No accident--no suicide--murdered!" They carry tremor to his heart, making him feel as a fox that hears the tongue of hound on its track. Still distant, but for all causing it fear, and driving it to think of subterfuge. And of this thinks he, as he lies with his face among the ferns; ponders upon it till the boat has passed back up the dark passage out into the river, and he hears the last light dipping of its oars in the far distance. He even forgets a woman, for whom he was waiting at the summer-house, and who there without finding him has flitted off again. At length rising to his feet, and going a little way, he too gets into a boat--one he finds, with oars aboard, down in the dock. It is not the _Gwendoline_--she is gone. Seating himself on the mid thwart, he takes up the oars, and pulls towards the place lately occupied by the skiff of the waterman. When inside the cove he lights a match, and holds it close to the face of the rock where Ryecroft held his lamp. It burns out and he draws a second across the sand paper; this to show him the broken branches of the juniper, which he also takes in hand and examines. Soon also dropping them, with a look of surprise, followed by the exclamatory phrases-- "Prodigiously strange! I see his drift now. Cunning fellow! On the track he has discovered the trick, and 'twill need another trick to throw him off it. This bush must be uprooted--destroyed." He is in the act of grasping the juniper to pluck it out by the roots. A dwarf thing, this could be easily done. But a thought stays him-- another precautionary forecast, as evinced by his words-- "That won't do." After repeating them, he drops back on the boat's thwart, and sits for a while considering, with eyes turned toward the cliff, ranging it up and down. "Ah!" he exclaims at length, "the very thing; as if the devil himself had fixed it for me! That _will_ do; smash the bush to atoms--blot out everything, as if an earthquake had gone over Llangorren." While thus oddly soliloquising, his eyes are still turned upward, apparently regarding a ledge which, almost loose as a boulder, projects from the bank above. It is directly over the juniper, and if detached from its bed, as it easily might be, would go crashing down, carrying the bush with it. And that same night it does go down. When the morning sun lights up the cliff, there is seen a breakage upon its face just underneath the summer-house. Of course, a landslip, caused by the late rains acting on the decomposed sandstone. But the juniper bush is no longer there; it is gone, root and branch! Volume Three, Chapter III. REASONING BY ANALYSIS. Captain Ryecroft's start at seeing: a woman within the pavilion was less from surprise than an emotion due to memory. When he last saw his betrothed alive it was in that same place, and almost in a similar attitude--leaning over the baluster rail. Besides, many other souvenirs cling around the spot, which the sight vividly recalls; and so painfully that he at once turns his eyes away from it, nor again looks back. He has an idea who the woman is, though personally knowing her not, nor ever having seen her. The incident agitates him a little; but he is soon calm again, and for some time after sits silent; in no dreamy reverie, but actively cogitating, though not of it or her. His thoughts are occupied with a discovery he has made in his exploration just ended. An important one, bearing on the suspicion he had conceived, almost proving it correct. Of all the facts that came before the coroner and his jury, none more impressed them, nor perhaps so much influenced their finding, as the tale-telling traces upon the face of the cliff. Nor did they arrive at their conclusion with any undue haste or light deliberation. Before deciding they had taken boat, and from below more minutely inspected them. But with their first impression unaltered--or only strengthened-- that the abrasions on the soft sandstone rock were made by a falling body, and the bush borne down by the same. And what but the body of Gwendoline Wynn? Living or dead, springing off, or pitched over, they could not determine. Hence the ambiguity of their verdict. Very different the result reached by Captain Ryecroft after viewing the same. In his Indian campaigns the ex-cavalry officer, belonging to the "Light," had his share of scouting experience. It enables him to read "sign" with the skill of trapper or prairie hunter; and on the moment his lamp threw its light against the cliff's face, he knew the scratches were not caused by anything that came _down_, since they had been _made from below_! And by some blunt instrument, as the blade of a boat oar. Then the branches of the juniper. Soon as getting his eyes close to them, he saw they had been broken _inward_, their drooping tops turned _toward_ the cliff, not _from_ it! A falling body would have bent them in an opposite direction, and the fracture been from the upper and inner side! Everything indicated their having been crushed from below; not by the same boat's oar, but likely enough by the hands that held it! It was on reaching this conclusion that Captain Ryecroft gave involuntary utterance to the exclamatory words heard by him lying flat among the ferns above, the last one sending a thrill of fear through his heart. And upon it the ex-officer of Hussars is still reflecting as he returns up stream. Since the command given to Wingate to row him back, he has not spoken, not even to make remark about that suggestive thing seen in the summer-house above--though the other has observed it also. Facing that way, the waterman has his eyes on it for a longer time. But the bearing of the Captain admonishes him that he is not to speak till spoken to; and he silently tugs at his oars, leaving the other to his reflections. These are: that Gwendoline Wynn has been surely assassinated: though not by being thrown over the cliff. Possibly not drowned at all, but her body dropped into the water where found--conveyed thither after life was extinct! The scoring of the rock and the snapping of the twigs, all that done to mislead; as it had misled everybody but himself. To him it has brought conviction that there has been a deed of blood--done by the hand of another. "No accident--no suicide--murdered!" He is not questioning the fact, nor speculating upon the motive now. The last has been already revolved in his mind, and is clear as daylight. To such a man as he has heard Lewin Murdock to be, an estate worth 10,000 pounds a-year would tempt to crime, even the capital one, which certainly he has committed. Ryecroft only thinks of how he can prove its committal--bring the deed of guilt home to the guilty one. It may be difficult, impossible; but he will do his best. Embarked in the enterprise, he is considering what will be the best course to pursue--pondering upon it. He is not the man to act rashly at any time, but in a matter of such moment caution is especially called for. He is already on the track of a criminal who has displayed no ordinary cunning, as proved by that misguiding sign. A false move made, or word spoken in careless confidence, by exposing his purpose, may defeat it. For this reason he has hitherto kept his intention to himself; not having given a hint of it to any one. From Jack Wingate it cannot be longer withheld, nor does he wish to withhold it. Instead, he will take him into his confidence, knowing he can do so with safety. That the young waterman is no prating fellow he has already had proof, while of his loyalty he never doubted. First, to find out what Jack's own thoughts are about the whole thing. For since their last being in a boat together, on that fatal night, little speech has passed between them. Only a few words on the day of the inquest; when Captain Ryecroft himself was too excited to converse calmly, and before the dark suspicion had taken substantial shape in his mind. Once more opposite the poplar he directs the skiff to be brought to. Which done, he sits just as when that sound startled him on return from the ball; apparently thinking of it, as in reality he is. For a minute or so he is silent; and one might suppose he listened, expecting to hear it again. But no; he is only, as on the way down, making note of the distance to the Llangorren grounds. The summer-house he cannot now see, but judges the spot where it stands by some tall trees he knows to be beside it. The waterman observing him, is not surprised when at length asked the question,--"Don't you believe, Wingate, the cry came from above--I mean from the top of the cliff?" "I'm a'most sure it did. I thought at the time it comed from higher ground still--the house itself. You remember my sayin' so, Captain; and that I took it to be some o' the sarvint girls shoutin' up there?" "I do remember--you did. It was not, alas! But their mistress." "Yes; she for sartin, poor young lady! We now know that." "Think back, Jack! Recall it to your mind; the tone, the length of time it lasted--everything. Can you?" "I can, an' do. I could all but fancy I hear it now!" "Well; did it strike you as a cry that would come from one falling over the cliff--by accident or otherwise?" "It didn't; an' I don't yet believe it wor--accydent or no accydent." "No! What are your reasons for doubting it?" "Why, if it had been a woman eyther fallin' over or flung, she'd a gied tongue a second time--aye, a good many times--'fore getting silenced. It must a been into the water; an' people don't drown at the first goin' down. She'd a riz to the surface once, if not twice; an' screeched sure. We couldn't a helped hearin' it. Ye remember, Captain, 'twor dead calm for a spell, just precedin' the thunderstorm. When that cry come ye might a heerd the leap o' a trout a quarter mile off. But it worn't repeated--not so much as a mutter." "Quite true. But what do you conclude from its not having been?" "That she who gied the shriek wor in the grasp o' somebody when she did it, an' wor silenced instant by bein' choked or smothered; same as they say's done by them scoundrels called garotters." "You said nothing of this at the inquest?" "No, I didn't; for several reasons. One, I wor so took by surprise, just home, an' hearin' what had happened. Besides, the crowner didn't question me on my feelins--only about the facts o' the case. I answered all his questions, clear as I could remember, an' far's I then understood things. But not as I understand them now." "Ah! You have learnt something since?" "Not a thing, Captain. Only what I've been thinkin' o'--by rememberin' a circumstance I'd forgot." "What?" "Well; whiles I wor sittin' in the skiff that night, waitin' for you to come, I heerd a sound different from the hootin' o' them owls." "Indeed! What sort of sound?" "The plashing o' oars. There wor sartin another boat about there, besides this one." "In what direction did you hear them?" "From above. It must ha' been that way. If't had been a boat gone up from below, I'd ha' noticed the stroke again, across the strip o' island. But I didn't." "The same if one had passed on down." "Just so; an' for that reason I now believe it wor comin' down, an' stopped; somewhere just outside the backwash." An item of intelligence new to the Captain, as it is significant. He recalls the hour--between two and three o'clock in the morning. What boat could have been there but his own? And if other, what its business? "You're quite sure there was a boat, Wingate?" he asks, after a pause. "The oars o' one--that I'm quite sure o'. An' where there's smoke fire can't be far off. Yes, Captain, there wor a boat about there. I'm willin' to swear to it." "Have you any idea whose?" "Well, no; only some conjecters. First hearin' the oar, I wor under the idea it might be Dick Dempsey, out salmon stealin'. But at the second plunge I could tell it wor no paddle, but a pair of regular oars. They gied but two or three strokes, an' then stopped suddintly; not as though the boat had been rowed back, but brought up against the bank, an' there layed." "You don't think it was Dick and his coracle, then?" "I'm sure it worn't the coracle, but ain't so sure about its not bein' him. 'Stead, from what happened that night, an's been a' happenin' ever since, I b'lieve he wor one o' the men in that boat." "You think there were others?" "I do--leastways suspect it." "And who do you suspect besides?" "For one, him as used live up there, but's now livin' in Llangorren." They have long since parted from the place where they made stop opposite the poplar, and are now abreast the Cuckoo's Glen, going on. It is to Glyngog House Wingate alludes, visible up the ravine, the moon gleaming upon its piebald walls and lightless windows--for it is untenanted. "You mean Mr Murdock?" "The same, Captain. Though he worn't at the ball, as I've heerd say-- and might a' know'd without tellin'--I've got an idea he beant far off when 'twor breakin' up. An' there wor another there, too, beside Dick Dempsey." "A third! Who?" "He as lives a bit further above." "You mean--?" "The French priest. Them three ain't often far apart; an' if I beant astray in my recknin', they were mighty close thegither that same night, an' nigh Llangorren Court. They're all in, or about, it now--the precious tribang--an' I'd bet big they've got foot in there by the foulest o' foul play. Yes, Captain; sure as we be sittin' in this boat, she as owned the place ha' been murdered--the men as done it bein' Lewin Murdock, Dick Dempsey, and the Roman priest o' Rogues!" Volume Three, Chapter IV. A SUSPICIOUS CRAFT. To the waterman's unreserved statement of facts and suspicions, Captain Ryecroft makes no rejoinder. The last are in exact consonance with his own already conceived, the first alone new to him. And on the first he now fixes his thoughts, directing them to that particular one of a boat being in the neighbourhood of the Llangorren grounds about the time he was leaving them. For it, too, has a certain correspondence with something on the same night observed by himself--a circumstance he had forgotten, or ceased to think of; but now recalled with vivid distinctness. All the more as he listens to the conjectures of Wingate--about three men having been in that boat, and whom he supposed them to be. The number is significant as corresponding with what occurred to himself. The time as well; since, but a few hours before, he also had his attention drawn to a boat, under circumstances somewhat mysterious. The place was different; for all not to contradict the supposition of the waterman--rather confirming it. On his way to the Court--his black dress kerseymere protected by India-rubber overalls--Ryecroft, as known, had ridden to Wingate's house, and was thence rowed to Llangorren. His going to a ball by boat, instead of carriage or hotel hackney, was not for the sake of convenience, nor yet due to eccentricity. The prospect of a private interview with his betrothed at parting, as on former occasions expected to be pleasant, was his ruling motive for this arrangement. Besides, his calls at the Court were usually made in the same way; his custom being to ride as far as the Wingate cottage, leave his roadster there, and thence take the skiff. Between his town and the waterman's house there is a choice of routes, the main country road keeping well away from the river, and a narrower one which follows the trend of the stream along its edge where practicable, but also here and there thrown off by meadows subject to inundations, or steep spurs of the parallel ridges. This, an ancient trackway now little used, was the route Captain Ryecroft had been accustomed to take on his way to Wingate's cottage, not from its being shorter or better, but for the scenery, which far excelling that of the other, equals any upon the Wyeside. In addition, the very loneliness of the road had its charm for him; since only at rare intervals is house seen by its side, and rarer still living creature encountered upon it. Even where it passes Rugg's Ferry, there intersecting the ford road, the same solitude characterises it. For this quaint conglomeration of dwellings is on the opposite side of the stream; all save the chapel, and the priest's house, standing some distance back from the bank, and screened by a spinney of trees. With the topography of this plan he is quite familiar; and now to-night it is vividly recalled to his mind by what the waterman has told him. For on that other night, so sadly remembered, as he was riding past Rugg's, he saw the boat thus brought back to his recollection. He had got a little beyond the crossing of the Ford road, where it leads out from the river--himself on the other going downwards--when his attention was drawn to a dark object against the bank on the opposite side of the stream. The sky at the time moonless he might not have noticed it, but for other dark objects seen in motion beside it--the thing itself being stationary. Despite the obscurity he could make them out to be men, busied around a boat. Something in their movements, which seemed made in a stealthy manner--too cautious for honesty--prompted him to pull up, and sit in his saddle observing them. He had himself no need to take precautions for concealment; the road at this point passing under old oaks, whose umbrageous branches; arcading over, shadowed the causeway, making it dark around as the interior of a cavern. Nor was he called upon to stay long there--only a few seconds after drawing bridle--just time enough for him to count the men, and see there were three of them--when they stepped over the sides of the boat, pushed her out from the bank, and rowed off down the river. Even then he fancied there was something surreptitious in their proceedings; for the oars, instead of rattling in their rowlocks made scarce any noise, while their dip was barely audible, though so near. Soon both boat and those on board were out of his sight, and the slight sound made by them beyond his hearing. Had the road kept along the river's bank he would have followed, and further watched them; but just below Rugg's it is carried off across a ridge, with steep pitch; and while ascending this, he ceased to think of them. He might not have thought of them at all, had they made their embarkation at the ordinary landing-place, by the ford and ferry. There such a sight would have been nothing unusual, nor a circumstance to excite curiosity. But the boat, when he first observed it, was lying below--up against the bank by the chapel ground, across which the men must have come. Recalling all this, with what Jack Wingate has just told him, connecting events together, and making comparison of time, place, and other circumstances, he thus interrogatively reflects: "Might not that boat have been the same whose oars Jack heard down below? And the men in it those whose names he has mentioned? Three of them--that at least in curious correspondence! But the time? About nine, or a little after, as I passed Rugg's Ferry. That appears too early for the after event? No! They may have had other arrangements to make before proceeding to their murderous work. Odd, though, their knowing _she_ would be out there. But they need not have known that-- likely did not. More like they meant to enter the house, after every one had gone away, and there do the deed. A night different from the common, everything in confusion, the servants sleeping sounder than usual from having indulged in drink--some of them overcome by it, as I saw myself before leaving. Yes; it's quite probable the assassins took all that into consideration--surprised, no doubt, to find their victim so convenient--in fact, as if she had come forth to receive them! Poor girl!" All this chapter of conjectures has been to himself, and in sombre silence; at length broken by the voice of his boatman, saying-- "You've come afoot, Captain; an' it be a longish walk to the town, most o' the road muddy. Ye'll let me row you up the river--leastways for a couple o' miles further? Then ye can take the footpath through Powell's meadows." Roused as from a reverie, the Captain looking out, sees they are nearly up to the boatman's cottage, which accounts for the proposal thus made. After a little reflection he says in reply:-- "Well, Jack; if it wasn't that I dislike over-working you--" "Don't mention it!" interrupts Jack, "I'll be only too pleased to take you all the way to the town itself, if ye say the word. It a'nt so late yet, but to leave me plenty of time. Besides, I've got to go up to the Ferry anyhow, to get some grocery for mother. I may as well do it in the boat--'deed better than dragglin' along them roughish roads." "In that case I consent. But you must let me take the oars." "No, Captain. I'd prefer workin' 'em myself; if it be all the same to you." The Captain does not insist, for in truth he would rather remain at the tiller. Not because he is indisposed for a spell of pulling. Nor is it from disinclination to walk, that he has so readily accepted the waterman's offer. After reflecting, he would have asked the favour so courteously extended. And for a reason having nothing to do with convenience, for the fear of fatigue; but a purpose which has just shaped itself in his thoughts, suggested by the mention of the Ferry. It is that he may consider this--be left free to follow the train of conjecture which the incident has interrupted--he yields to the boatman's wishes, and keeps his seat in the stern. By a fresh spurt the _Mary_ is carried beyond her mooring-place; as she passes it her owner for an instant feathering his oars and holding up his hat. It is a signal to one he sees there, standing outside in the moonlight--his mother. Volume Three, Chapter V. MATERNAL SOLICITUDE. "The poor lad! His heart be sore sad; at times most nigh breakin'! That's plain--spite o' all he try hide it." It is the Widow Wingate, who thus compassionately reflects--the subject her son. She is alone within her cottage, the waterman being away with his boat. Captain Ryecroft has taken him down the river. It is on this nocturnal exploration, when the cliff at Llangorren is inspected by lamplight. But she knows neither the purpose nor the place, any more than did Jack himself at starting. A little before sunset, the Captain came to the house, afoot and unexpectedly; called her son out, spoke a few words to him, when they started away in the skiff. She saw they went down stream--that is all. She was some little surprised, though; not at the direction taken, but the time of setting out. Had Llangorren been still in possession of the young lady, of whom her son has often spoken to her, she would have thought nothing strange of it. But in view of the late sad occurrence at the Court, with the change of proprietorship consequent--about all of which she has been made aware--she knows the Captain cannot be bound thither, and therefore wonders whither. Surely, not a pleasure excursion, at such an unreasonable hour--night just drawing down? She would have asked, but had no opportunity. Her son, summoned out of the house, did not re-enter; his oars were in the boat, having just come off a job; and the Captain appeared to be in haste. Hence, Jack's going off, without, as he usually does, telling his mother the why and the where. It is not this that is now fidgeting her. She is far from being of an inquisitive turn--least of all with her son--and never seeks to pry into his secrets. She knows his sterling integrity, and can trust him. Besides, she is aware that he is of a nature somewhat uncommunicative, especially upon matters that concern himself, and above all when he has a trouble on his mind--in short, one who keeps his sorrows locked up in his breast, as though preferring to suffer in silence. And just this it is she is now bemoaning. She observes how he is suffering, and has been, ever since that hour when a farm labourer from Abergann brought him tidings of Mary Morgan's fatal mishap. Of course she, his mother, expected him to grieve wildly and deeply, as he did; but not deeply so long. Many days have passed since that dark one; but since, she has not seen him smile--not once! She begins to fear his sorrow may never know an end. She has heard of broken hearts-- his may be one. Not strange her solicitude. "What make it worse," she says, continuing her soliloquy, "he keep thinkin' that he hae been partways to blame for the poor girl's death, by makin' her come out to meet him!"--Jack has told his mother of the interview under the big elm, all about it from beginning to end.--"That hadn't a thing to do wi' it. What happened wor ordained, long afore she left the house. When I dreamed that dream 'bout the corpse candle, I feeled most sure somethin' would come o't; but then seein' it go up the meadows, I wor' althegither convinced. When _it_ burn no human creetur' ha' lit it; an' none can put it out, till the doomed one be laid in the grave. Who could 'a carried it across the river--that night especial, wi' a flood lippin' full up to the banks? No mortal man, nor woman neyther!" As a native of Pembrokeshire, in whose treeless valleys the _ignis fatuus_ is oft seen, and on its dangerous coast cliffs, in times past, too oft the lanthorn of the smuggler, with the "stalking horse" of the inhuman wrecker, Mrs Wingate's dream of the _canwyll corph_ was natural enough--a legendary reflection from tales told her in childhood, and wild songs chaunted over her cradle. But her waking vision, of a light borne up the river bottom, was a phenomenon yet more natural; since in truth was it a real light, that of a lamp, carried in the hands of a man with a coracle on his back, which accounts for its passing over the stream. And the man was Richard Dempsey, who below had ferried Father Rogier across on his way to the farm of Abergann, where the latter intended remaining all night. The priest in his peregrinations, often nocturnal, accustomed to take a lamp along, had it with him on that night, having lit it before entering the coracle. But with the difficulty of balancing himself in the crank little craft he had set it down under the thwart, and at landing forgotten all about it. Thence the poacher, detained beyond time in reference to an appointment he meant being present at, had taken the shortest cut up the river bottom to Rugg's Ferry. This carried him twice across the stream, where it bends by the waterman's cottage; his coracle, easily launched and lifted out, enabling him to pass straight over and on, in his haste not staying to extinguish the lamp, nor even thinking of it. Not so much wonder, then, in Mrs Wingate believing she saw the _canwyll corph_. No more that she believes it still, but less, in view of what has since come to pass; as she supposes, but the inexorable fiat of fate. "Yes!" she exclaims, proceeding with her soliloquy; "I knowed it would come! Ah, me! it have come. Poor thing! I hadn't no great knowledge of her myself; but sure she wor a good girl, or my son couldn't a been so fond o' her. If she'd had badness in her, Jack wouldn't greet and grieve as he be doin' now." Though right in the premises--for Mary Morgan was a good girl--Mrs Wingate is unfortunately wrong in her deductions. But, fortunately for her peace of mind, she is so. It is some consolation to her to think that she whom her son loved, and for whom he so sorrows, was worthy of his love as his sorrow. It is wearing late, the sun having long since set; and still wondering why they went down the river, she steps outside to see if there he any sign of them returning. From the cottage but little can be seen of the stream, by reason of its tortuous course; only a short reach on either side, above and below. Placing herself to command a view of the latter, she stands gazing down it. In addition to maternal solicitude, she feels anxiety of another and less emotional nature. Her tea-caddy is empty, the sugar all expended, and other household things deficient. Jack was just about starting off for the Ferry to replace them when the Captain came. Now it is a question whether he will be home in time to reach Rugg's before the shop closes. If not, there will be a scant supper for him, and he must grope his way lightless to bed; for among the spent commodities were candles, the last one having been burnt out. In the widow Wingate's life candles seem to play an important part! However, from all anxieties on this score she is at length and ere long relieved; her mind set at rest by a sound heard on the tranquil air of the night, the dip of a boat's oars, distant but recognisable. Often before listening for the same, she instinctively knows them to be in the hands of her son. For Jack rows with a stroke no waterman on the Wye has but he--none equalling it in _timbre_ and regularity. His mother can tell it, as a hen the chirp of her own chick, or a ewe the bleat of its lamb. That it is his stroke she has soon other evidence than her ears. In a few seconds after hearing the oars she sees them, their wet blades glistening in the moonlight, the boat between. And now she only waits for it to be pulled up and into the wash--its docking place; when Jack will tell her where they have been, and what for; perhaps, too, the Captain will come inside the cottage and speak a friendly word with her, as he has frequently done. While thus pleasantly anticipating, she has a disappointment. The skiff is passing onward--proceeding up the river! But she is comforted by seeing a hat held aloft--the salute telling her she is herself seen; and that Jack has some good reason for the prolongation of the voyage. It will no doubt terminate at the Ferry, where he will get the candles and comestibles, saving him a second journey thither, and so killing two birds with one stone. Contenting herself with this construction of it, she returns inside the house, touches up the faggots on the fire, and by their cheerful blaze thinks no longer of candles, or any other light--forgetting even the _canwyll corph_. Volume Three, Chapter VI. A SACRILEGIOUS HAND. Between Wingate's cottage and Rugg's Captain Ryecroft has but slight acquaintance with the river, knows it only by a glimpse had here and there from the road. Now, ascending by boat, he makes note of certain things appertaining to it--chiefly, the rate of its current, the windings of its channel, and the distance between the two places. He seems considering how long a boat might be in passing from one to the other. And just this is he thinking of: his thoughts on that boat he saw starting downward. Whatever his object in all this, he does not reveal it to his companion. The time has not come for taking the waterman into full confidence. It will, but not to-night. He has again relapsed into silence, which continues till he catches sight of an object on the left bank, conspicuous against the sky, beside the moon's disc, now low. It is a cross surmounting a structure of ecclesiastical character, which he knows to be the Roman Catholic chapel at Rugg's. Soon as abreast of it he commands-- "Hold way, Jack! Keep her steady awhile!" The waterman obeys without questioning why this new stoppage. He is himself interrogated the instant after--thus:-- "You see that shadowed spot under the bank--by the wall?" "I do, Captain." "Is there any landing-place there for a boat?" "None, as I know of. Course a boat may put in anywhere, if the bank beant eyther a cliff or a quagmire. The reg'lar landin' place be above--where the ferry punt lays." "But have you ever known of a boat being moored in there?" The question has reference to the place first spoken of. "I have, Captain; my own. That but once, an' the occasion not o' the pleasantest kind. 'Twar the night after my poor Mary wor buried, when I comed to say a prayer over her grave, an' plant a flower on it. I may say I stole there to do it; not wishin' to be obsarved by that sneak o' a priest, nor any o' their Romish lot. Exceptin' my own, I never knew or heard o' another boat bein' laid along there." "All right! Now on!" And on the skiff is sculled up stream for another mile, with little further speech passing between oarsman and steerer; it confined to subjects having no relation to what they have been all the evening occupied with. For Ryecroft is once more in reverie, or rather silently thinking; his thoughts concentrated on the one theme--endeavouring to solve that problem, simple of itself--but with many complications and doubtful ambiguities--how Gwendoline Wynn came by her death. He is still absorbed in a sea of conjectures, far as ever from its shore, when he feels the skiff at rest; as it ceases motion its oarsman asking-- "Do you weesh me to set you out here, Captain? There be the right o' way path through Powell's meadows. Or would ye rather be took on up to the town? Say which you'd like best, an' don't think o' any difference it makes to me." "Thanks, Jack; it's very kind of you, but I prefer the walk up the meadows. There'll be moonlight enough yet. And as I shall want your boat to-morrow--it may be for the whole of the day--you'd better get home and well rested. Besides, you say you've an errand at Rugg's--to the shop there. You must make haste, or it will be closed." "Ah! I didn't think o' that. Obleeged to ye much for remindin' me. I promised mother to get them grocery things the night, and wouldn't like to disappoint her--for a good deal." "Pull in, then, quick, and tilt me out! And, Jack! not a word to any one about where I've been, or what doing. Keep that to yourself." "I will--you may rely on me, Captain." The boat is brought against the bank; Ryecroft leaps lightly to land, calls back "good night," and strikes off along the footpath. Not a moment delays the waterman; but shoving off, and setting head down stream, pulls with all his strength, stimulated by the fear of finding the shop shut. He is in good time, however; and reaches Rugg's to see a light in the shop window, with its door standing open. Going in he gets the groceries, and is on return to the landing-place, where he has left his skiff, when he meets with a man, who has come to the Ferry on an errand somewhat similar to his own. It is Joseph Preece, "Old Joe," erst boatman of Llangorren Court; but now, as all his former fellow-servants, at large. Though the acquaintance between him and Wingate is comparatively of recent date, a strong friendship has sprung up between them--stronger as the days passed, and each saw more of the other. For of late, in the exercise of their respective _metiers_, professionally alike, they have had many opportunities of being together, and more than one lengthened "confab" in the _Gwendoline's_ dock. It is days since they have met, and there is much to talk about, Joe being chief spokesman. And now that he has done his shopping, Jack can spare the time to listen. It will throw him a little later in reaching home; but his mother won't mind that. She saw him go up, and knows he will remember his errand. So the two stand conversing till the gossipy Joseph has discharged himself of a budget of intelligence, taking nigh half an hour in the delivery. Then they part, the ex-Charon going about his own business, the waterman returning to his skiff. Stepping into it, and seating himself, he pulls out and down. A few strokes bring him opposite the chapel burying-ground; when all at once, as if stricken by a palsy, his arms cease moving, and the oar-blades drag deep in the water. There is not much current, and the skiff floats slowly. He in it sits with eyes turned towards the graveyard. Not that he can see anything there, for the moon has gone down, and all is darkness. But he is not gazing, only thinking. A thought, followed by an impulse leading to instantaneous action. A back stroke or two of the starboard oar, then a strong tug, and the boat's bow is against the bank. He steps ashore; ties the painter to a withy; and, climbing over the wall, proceeds to the spot so sacred to him. Dark as is now the night he has no difficulty in finding it. He has gone over that ground before, and remembers every inch of it. There are not many gravestones to guide him, for the little cemetery is of late consecration, and its humble monuments are few and far between. But he needs not their guidance. As a faithful dog by instinct finds the grave of its master, so he, with memories quickened by affection, makes his way to the place where repose the remains of Mary Morgan. Standing over her grave he first gives himself up to an outpouring of grief, heartfelt as wild. Then becoming calmer he kneels down beside it, and says a prayer. It is the Lord's--he knows no other. Enough that it gives him relief; which it does, lightening his overcharged heart. Feeling better he is about to depart, and has again risen erect, when a thought stays him--a remembrance--"The flower of love-lies-bleeding." Is it growing? Not the flower, but the plant. He knows the former is faded, and must wait for the return of spring. But the latter--is it still alive and flourishing? In the darkness he cannot see, but will be able to tell by the touch. Once more dropping upon his knees, and extending his hands over the grave, he gropes for it. He finds the spot, but not the plant. It is gone! Nothing left of it--not a remnant! A sacrilegious hand has been there, plucked it up, torn it out root and stalk, as the disturbed turf tells him! In strange contrast with the prayerful words late upon his lips, are the angry exclamations to which he now gives utterance; some of them so profane as only under the circumstances to be excusable. "It's that d--d rascal, Dick Dempsey, as ha' done it. Can't a been anybody else? An' if I can but get proof o't, I'll make him repent o' the despicable trick. I will, by the livin' God!" Thus angrily soliloquising, he strides back to his skiff, and getting in rows off. But more than once, on the way homeward, he might be heard muttering words in the same wild strain--threats against Coracle Dick. Volume Three, Chapter VII. A LATE TEA. Mrs Wingate is again growing impatient at her son's continued absence, now prolonged beyond all reasonable time. The Dutch dial on the kitchen wall shows it to be after ten; therefore two hours since the skiff passed upwards. Jack has often made the return trip to Rugg's in less than one, while the shopping should not occupy him more than ten minutes, or, making every allowance, not twenty. How is the odd time being spent by him? Her impatience becomes uneasiness as she looks out of doors, and observes the hue of the sky. For the moon having gone down it is now very dark, which always means danger on the river. The Wye is not a smooth swan pond, and, flooded or not, annually claims its victims-- strong men as women. And her son is upon it! "Where?" she asks herself, becoming more and more anxious. He may have taken his fare on up to the town, in which case it will be still later before he can get back. While thus conjecturing a tinge of sadness steals over the widow's thoughts, with something of that weird feeling she experienced when once before waiting for him in the same way--on the occasion of his pretended errand after whipcord and pitch. "Poor lad!" she says, recalling the little bit of deception she pardoned, and which now more than ever seems pardonable; "he hain't no need now deceivin' his old mother that way. I only wish he had." "How black that sky do look," she adds, rising from her seat, and going to the door; "An' threatenin' storm, if I bean't mistook. Lucky, Jack ha' intimate acquaintance wi' the river 'tween here and Rugg's--if he hain't goed farther. What a blessin' the boy don't gie way to drink, an's otherways careful! Well, I 'spose there an't need for me feelin' uneasy. For all, I don't like his bein' so late. Mercy me! Nigh on the stroke o' eleven? Ha! What's that? Him I hope." She steps hastily out, and behind the house, which fronting the road, has its back towards the river. On turning the corner she hears a dull thump, as of a boat brought up against the bank; then a sharper concussion of timber striking timber--the sound of oars being unshipped. It comes from the _Mary_, at her mooring-place; as, in a few seconds after, Mrs Wingate is made aware, by seeing her son approach with his arms full--in one of them a large brown paper parcel, while under the other are his oars. She knows it is his custom to bring the latter up to the shed--a necessary precaution due to the road running so near, and the danger of larking fellows taking a fancy to carry off his skiff. Met by his mother outside, he delivers the grocery goods and together they go in; when he is questioned as to the cause of delay. "Whatever ha kep' ye, Jack? Ye've been a wonderful long time goin' up to the Ferry an' back!" "The Ferry! I went far beyond; up to the footpath over Squire Powell's meadows. There I set Captain out." "Oh! that be it." His answer being satisfactory he is not further interrogated. For she has become busied with an earthenware teapot, into which have been dropped three spoonfuls of "Horniman's" just brought home--one for her son, another for herself, and the odd one for the pot--the orthodox quantity. It is a late hour for tea; but their regular evening meal was postponed by the coming of the Captain, and Mrs Wingate would not consider supper as it should be, wanting the beverage which cheers without intoxicating. The pot set upon the hearthstone over some red-hot cinders, its contents are soon "mashed;" and, as nearly everything else had been got ready against Jack's arrival, it but needs for him to take seat by the table, on which one of the new composite candles, just lighted, stands in its stick. Occupied with pouring out the tea, and creaming it, the good dame does not notice anything odd in the expression of her son's countenance; for she has not yet looked at it, in a good light. Nor till she is handing the cup across to him. Then, the fresh lit candle gleaming full in his face, she sees what gives her a start. Not the sad melancholy cast to which she has of late been accustomed. That has seemingly gone off, replaced by sullen anger, as though he were brooding over some wrong done, or insult recently received! "Whatever be the matter wi' ye, Jack?" she asks, the teacup still held in trembling hand. "There ha' something happened?" "Oh! nothin' much, mother." "Nothin' much! Then why be ye looking so black?" "What makes you think I'm lookin' that way?" "How can I help thinkin' it? Why, lad; your brow be clouded, same's the sky outside. Come, now tell the truth! Bean't there somethin' amiss?" "Well, mother; since you axe me that way I will tell the truth. Somethin' be amiss; or I ought better say, _missin'_." "Missin'! Be't anybody ha' stoled the things out o' the boat? The balin' pan, or that bit o' cushion in the stern?" "No it ain't; no trifle o' that kind, nor anythin' stealed eyther. 'Stead a thing as ha' been destroyed." "What thing?" "The flower--the plant." "Flower! plant!" "Yes; the Love-lies-bleedin' I set on Mary's grave the night after she wor laid in it. Ye remember my tellin' you, mother?" "Yes--yes; I do." "Well, it ain't there now." "Ye ha' been into the chapel buryin' groun' then?" "I have." "But what made ye go there, Jack?" "Well, mother; passin' the place, I took a notion to go in--a sort o' sudden inclinashun, I couldn't resist. I thought that kneelin' beside her grave, an' sayin' a prayer might do somethin' to lift the weight off o' my heart. It would a done that, no doubt, but for findin' the flower warn't there. Fact, it had a good deal relieved me, till I discovered it wor gone." "But how gone? Ha' the thing been cut off, or pulled up?" "Clear plucked out by the roots. Not a vestige o' it left!" "Maybe 'twer the sheep or goats. They often get into a graveyard; and if I beant mistook I've seen some in that o' the Ferry Chapel. They may have ate it up?" The idea is new to him, and being plausible, he reflects on it, for a time misled. Not long, however; only till remembering what tells him it is fallacious; this, his having set the plant so firmly that no animal could have uprooted it. A sheep or goat might have eaten off the top, but nothing more. "No, mother!" he at length rejoins; "it han't been done by eyther; but by a human hand--I ought better to say the claw o' a human tiger. No, not tiger; more o' a stinkin' cat!" "Ye suspect somebody, then?" "Suspect! I'm sure, as one can be without seein', that bit o' desecrashun ha' been the work o' Dick Dempsey. But I mean plantin' another in its place, an' watchin' it too. If he pluck it up, an' I know it, they'll need dig another grave in the Rogue's Ferry buryin' groun'--that for receivin' as big a rogue as ever wor buried there, or anywhere else--the d--d scoundrel!" "Dear Jack! don't let your passion get the better o' ye, to speak so sinfully. Richard Dempsey be a bad man, no doubt; but the Lord will deal wi' him in his own way, an' sure punish him. So leave him to the Lord. After all, what do it matter--only a bit o' weed?" "Weed! Mother, you mistake. That weed, as ye call it, wor like a silken string, bindin' my heart to Mary's. Settin' it in the sod o' her grave gied me a comfort I can't describe to ye. An' now to find it tore up brings the bitter all back again. In the spring I hoped to see it in bloom, to remind me o' her love as ha' been blighted, an' like it lies bleedin'. But--well, it seems as I can't do nothin' for her now she's dead, as I warn't able while she wor livin'." He covers his face with his hands to hide the tears now coursing down his cheeks. "Oh, my son! don't take on so. Think that she be happy now--in Heaven. Sure she is, from all I ha' heerd o' her." "Yes, mother!" he earnestly affirms, "she is. If ever woman went to the good place, she ha' goed there." "Well, that ought to comfort ye." "It do some. But to think of havin' lost her for good--never again to look at her sweet face. Oh! that be dreadful!" "Sure, it be. But think also that ye an't the only one as ha' to suffer. Nobody escape affliction o' that sort, some time or the other. It's the lot o' all--rich folks as well as we poor ones. Look at the Captain, there! He be sufferin' like yourself. Poor man! I pity him, too." "So do I, mother. An' I ought, so well understandin' how he feel, though he be too proud to let people see it. I seed it the day--several times noticed tears in his eyes, when we wor talkin' about things that reminded him o' Miss Wynn. When a soldier--a grand fightin' soldier as he ha' been--gies way to weepin', the sorrow must be strong an' deep. No doubt, he be 'most heart-broke, same's myself." "But that an't right, Jack. It isn't intended we should always gie way to grief, no matter how dear they may a' been as are lost to us. Besides, it be sinful." "Well, mother, I'll try to think more cheerful; submittin' to the will o' Heaven." "Ah! There's a good lad! That's the way; an' be assured Heaven won't forsake, but comfort ye yet. Now, let's not say any more about it. You an't eating your supper!" "I han't no great appetite after all." "Never mind; ye must eat, an' the tea'll cheer ye. Hand me your cup, an' let me fill it again." He passes the empty cup across the table, mechanically. "It be very good tea," she says, telling a little untruth for the sake of abstracting his thoughts. "But I've something else for you that's better--before you go to bed." "Ye take too much care o' me, mother." "Nonsense, Jack. Ye've had a hard day's work o't. But ye hain't told me what the Captain tooked ye out for, nor where ye went down the river. How far?" "Only as far as Llangorren Court." "But there be new people there now, ye sayed?" "Yes; the Murdocks. Bad lot both man an' wife, though he wor the cousin o' the good young lady as be gone." "Sure, then, the Captain han't been to visit them?" "No, not likely. He an't the kind to consort wi' such as they, for all o' their bein' big folks now." "But there were other ladies livin' at Llangorren. What ha' become o' they?" "They ha' gone to another house somewhere down the river--a smaller one it's sayed. The old lady as wor Miss Wynn's aunt ha' money o' her own, an' the other be livin' 'long wi' her. For the rest there's been a clean out--all the sarvints sent about their business; the only one kep' bein' a French girl who wor lady's-maid to the old mistress--that's the aunt. She's now the same to the new one, who be French, like herself." "Where ha' ye heerd all this, Jack?" "From Joseph Preece. I met him up at the Ferry, as I wor comin' away from the shop." "He's out too, then?" asks Mrs Wingate, who has of late come to know him. "Yes; same's the others." "Where be the poor man abidin' now?" "Well; that's odd, too. Where do you suppose, mother?" "How should I know, my son? Where?" "In the old house where Coracle Dick used to live!" "What be there so odd in that?" "Why, because Dick's now in his house; ha' got his place at the Court, an's goin' to be somethin' far grander than ever he wor--head keeper." "Ah! poacher turned gamekeeper! That be settin' thief to catch thief!" "Somethin' besides thief, he! A deal worse than that!" "But," pursues Mrs Wingate, without reference to the reflection on Coracle's character, "ye han't yet tolt me what the Captain took down the river." "I an't at liberty to tell any one. Ye understand me, mother?" "Yes, yes; I do." "The Captain ha' made me promise to say nothin' o' his doin's; an', to tell truth, I don't know much about them myself. But what I do know, I'm honour bound to keep dark consarnin' it--even wi' you, mother." She appreciates his nice sense of honour; and, with her own of delicacy, does not urge him to any further explanation. "In time," he adds, "I'm like enough to know all o' what he's after. Maybe, the morrow." "Ye're to see him the morrow, then?" "Yes; he wants the boat." "What hour?" "He didn't say when, only that he might be needin' me all the day. So I may look out for him early--first thing in the mornin'." "That case ye must get to your bed at oncst, an' ha' a good sleep, so's to start out fresh. First take this. It be the somethin' I promised ye--better than tea." The something is a mug of mulled elderberry wine, which, whether or not better than tea, is certainty superior to port prepared in the same way. Quaffing it down, and betaking himself to bed, under its somniferous influence, the Wye waterman is soon in the land of dreams. Not happy ones, alas! but visions of a river flood-swollen, with a boat upon its seething frothy surface, borne rapidly on towards a dangerous eddy--then into it--at length capsized to a sad symphony--the shrieks of a drowning woman! Volume Three, Chapter VIII. THE NEW MISTRESS OF THE MANSION. At Llangorren Court all is changed, from owner down to the humblest domestic. Lewin Murdock has become its master, as the priest told him he some day might. There was none to say nay. By the failure of Ambrose Wynn's heirs--in the line through his son and bearing his name--the estate of which he was the original testator reverts to the children of his daughter, of whom Lewin Murdock, an only son, is the sole survivor. He of Glyngog is therefore indisputable heritor of Llangorren; and no one disputing it, he is now in possession, having entered upon it soon as the legal formularies could be gone through with. This they have been with a haste which causes invidious remark, if not actual scandal. Lewin Murdock is not the man to care; and, in truth, he is now scarce ever sober enough to feel sensitive, could he have felt so at any time. But in his new and luxurious home, waited on by a staff of servants, with wine at will, so unlike the days of misery spent in the dilapidated manor house, he gives loose rein to his passion for drink; leaving the management of affairs to his dexterous better half. She has not needed to take much trouble in the matter of furnishing. Her husband, as nearest of kin to the deceased, has also come in for the personal effects, furniture included; all but some belongings of Miss Linton, which had been speedily removed by her--transferred to a little house of her own, not far off. Fortunately, the old lady is not left impecunious; but has enough to keep her in comfort, with an economy, however, that precludes all idea of longer indulging in a lady's-maid, more especially one so expensive as Clarisse; who, as Jack Wingate said, has been dismissed from Miss Linton's establishment--at the same time discharging herself by notice formally given. That clever _demoiselle_ was not meant for service in a ten-roomed cottage, even though a detached one; and through the intervention of her patron, the priest, she still remains at the Court, to dance attendance on the _ancien belle_ of Mabille, as she did on the ancient toast of Cheltenham. Pleasantly so far; her new mistress being in fine spirits, and herself delighted with everything. The French adventuress has attained the goal of an ambition long cherished, though not so patiently awaited. Oft gazed she across the Wye at those smiling grounds of Llangorren, as the Fallen Angel back over its walls into the Garden of Eden; oft saw she there assemblages of people to her seeming as angels, not fallen, but in highest favour--ah! in her estimation, more than angels--women of rank and wealth, who could command what she coveted beyond any far-off joys celestial--the nearer pleasures of earth and sense. Those favoured fair ones are not there now, but she herself is; owner of the very Paradise in which they disported themselves! Nor does she despair of seeing them at Llangorren again, and having them around her in friendly intercourse, as had Gwendoline Wynn. Brought up under the _regime_ of Louis and trained in the school of Eugenie, why need she fear either social slight or exclusion? True, she is in England, not France; but she thinks it is all the same. And not without some reason for so thinking. The ethics of the two countries, so different in days past, have of late become alarmingly assimilated--ever since that hand, red with blood spilled upon the boulevards of Paris, was affectionately elapsed by a Queen on the dock head of Cherbourg. The taint of that touch felt throughout all England, has spread over it like a plague; no local or temporary epidemic, but one which still abides, still emitting its noisome effluvia in a flood of prurient literature--novel writers who know neither decency nor shame--newspaper scribblers devoid of either truth or sincerity--theatres little better than licensed _bagnios_, and Stock Exchange scandals smouching names once honoured in English history, with other scandals of yet more lamentable kind--all the old landmarks of England's morality being rapidly obliterated. And all the better for Olympe, _nee_ Renault. Like her sort living by corruption, she instinctively rejoices at it, glories in the _monde immonde_ of the Second Empire, and admires the abnormal monster who has done so much in sowing and cultivating the noxious crop. Seeing it flourish around her, and knowing it on the increase, the new mistress of Llangorren expects to profit by it. Nor has she the slightest fear of failure in any attempt she may make to enter Society. It will not much longer taboo her. She knows that, with very little adroitness, 10,000 pounds a-year will introduce her into a Royal drawing-room--aye, take her to the steps of a throne; and none is needed to pass through the gates of Hurlingham nor those of Chiswick's Garden. In this last she would not be the only flower of poisonous properties and tainted perfume; instead, would brush skirts with scores of dames wonderfully like those of the Restoration and Regency, recalling the painted dolls of the Second Charles, and the Delilahs of the Fourth George; in bold effrontery and cosmetic brilliance equalling either. The wife of Lewin Murdock hopes ere long to be among them--once more a _celebrite_, as she was in the Bois de Boulogne, and the _bals_ of the demi-monde. True, the county aristocracy have not yet called upon her. For by a singular perverseness--unlike Nature's laws in the animal and vegetable world--the outer tentacles of this called "Society" are the last to take hold. But they will yet. Money is all powerful in this free and easy age. Having that in sufficiency, it makes little difference whether she once sat by a sewing machine, or turned a mangle, as she once has done in the Faubourg Montmartre for her mother, _la blanchisseuse_. She is confident the gentry of the shire will in due time surrender, send in their cards and come of themselves; as they surely will, soon as they see her name in the _Court Journal_ or _Morning Post_ in the list of Royal receptions:--"_Mrs Lewin Murdock, presented by the Countess of Devilacare_." And to a certainty they shall so read it, with much about her besides, if Jenkins be true to his instincts. She need not fear him--he will. She can trust his fidelity to the star scintillating in a field of plush, as to the Polar that of magnetic needle. Her husband bears his new fortunes in a manner somewhat different; in one sense more soberly, as in another the reverse. If, during his adversity he indulged in drink, in prosperity he does not spare it. But there is another passion to which he now gives loose--his old, unconquerable vice--gaming. Little cares he for the cards of visitors, while those of the gambler delight him; and though his wife has yet received none of the former, he has his callers to take a hand with him at the latter--more than enough to make up a rubber of whist. Besides, some of his old cronies of the "Welsh Harp," who have now _entree_ at Llangorren, several young swells of the neighbourhood--the black sheep of their respective flocks--are not above being of his company. Where the carrion is the eagles congregate, as the vultures; and already two or three of the "leg" fraternity--in farther flight from London--have found their way into Herefordshire, and hover around the precincts of the Court. Night after night, tables are there set out for loo, _ecarte_, _rouge et noir_, or whatever may be called for--in a small way resembling the hells of Homburg, Baden, and Monaco--wanting only the women. Volume Three, Chapter IX. THE GAMBLERS AT LLANGORREN. Among the faces now seen at Llangorren--most of them new to the place, and not a few of forbidding aspect--there is one familiar to us. Sinister as any; since it is that of Father Rogier. At no rare intervals may it be there observed; but almost continuously. Frequent as were his visits to Glyngog, they are still more so to Llangorren, where he now spends the greater part of his time; his own solitary, and somewhat humble, dwelling at Rugg's Ferry seeing nothing of him for days together, while for nights its celibate bed is unslept in: the luxurious couch spread for him at the Court having greater attractions. Whether made welcome to this unlimited hospitality, or not, he comports himself as though he were; seeming noways backward in the reception of it; instead as if demanding it. One ignorant of his relations with the master of the establishment might imagine _him_ its master. Nor would the supposition be so far astray. As the King-mater controls the King, so can Gregoire Rogier the new Lord of Llangorren--influence him at his will. And this does he; though not openly, or ostensibly. That would be contrary to the tactics taught him, and the practice to which he is accustomed. The sword of Loyola in the hands of his modern apostles has become a dagger--a weapon more suitable to Ultramontanism. Only in Protestant countries to be wielded with secrecy, though elsewhere little concealed. But the priest of Rugg's Ferry is not in France; and, under the roof of an English gentleman, though a Roman Catholic, bears himself with becoming modesty--before strangers and the eyes of the outside world. Even the domestics of the house see nothing amiss. They are new to their places, and as yet unacquainted with the relationships around them. Nor would they think it strange in a priest having control there or anywhere. They are all of his persuasion, else they would not be in service at Llangorren Court. So proceed matters under its new administration. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On the same evening that Captain Ryecroft makes his quiet excursion down the river to inspect the traces on the cliff, there is a little dinner party at the Court; the diners taking seat by the table just about the time he was stepping into Wingate's skiff. The hour is early; but it is altogether a bachelor affair, and Lewin Murdock's guests are men not much given to follow fashions. Besides, there is another reason; something to succeed the dinner, on which their thoughts are more bent than upon either eating or drinking. No spread of fruit, nor dessert of any kind, but a bout at card-playing, or dice for those who prefer it. On their way to the dining-room they have caught glimpse of another apartment where whist and loo tables are seen, with all the gambling paraphernalia upon them--packs of new cards still in their wrappers, ivory counters, dice boxes with their spotted cubes lying alongside. Pretty sight to Mr Murdock's lately picked up acquaintances; a heterogeneous circle, but all alike in one respect--each indulging in the pleasant anticipation that he will that night leave his host's house with more or less of that host's money in his pocket. Murdock has himself come easily by it, and why should he not be made as easily to part with it? If he has a plethora of cash, they have a determination to relieve him of at least a portion of it. Hence dinner is eaten in haste, and with little appreciation of the dishes, however dainty; all so longing to be around those tables in another room, and get their fingers on the toys there displayed. Their host, aware of the universal desire, does nought to frustrate it. Instead, he is as eager as any for the fray. As said, gambling is his passion--has been for most part of his life--and he could now no more live without it than go wanting drink. A hopeless victim to the last, he is equally a slave to the first. Soon, therefore, as dessert is brought in, and a glass of the heavier wines gone round, he looks significantly at his wife--the only lady at the table--who, taking the hint, retires. The gentlemen, on their feet at her withdrawal, do not sit down again, but drink standing--only a _petit verre_ of cognac by way of "corrector." Then they hurry off in an unseemly ruck towards the room containing metal more attractive; from which soon after proceed the clinking of coin and the rattle of ebony counters; with words now and then spoken not over nice, but rough, even profane, as though the speakers were playing skittles in the backyard of a London beerhouse, instead of cards under the roof of a country gentleman's mansion! While the new master of Llangorren is thus entertaining his amiable company--as much as any of them engrossed in the game--its new mistress is also playing a part, which may be more reputable, but certainly is more mysterious. She is in the drawing-room, though not alone--Father Rogier alone with her. He, of course, has been one of the dining guests, and said an unctuous grace over the table. In his sacred sacerdotal character it could hardly be expected of him to keep along with the company; though he could take a hand at cards, and play them with as much skill as any gamester of that gathering. But just now he has other fish to fry, and wishes a word in private with the mistress of Llangorren, about the way things are going on. However much he may himself like a little game with its master, and win money from him, he does not relish seeing all the world do the same; no more she. Something must be done to put a stop to it; and it is to talk over this something the two have planned their present interview--some words about it having previously passed between them. Seated side by side on a lounge, they enter upon the subject. But before a dozen words have been exchanged they are compelled to discontinue, and for the time forego it. The interruption is caused by a third individual, who has taken a fancy to follow Mrs Murdock into the drawing-room; a young fellow of the squire class, but--as her husband late was--of somewhat damaged reputation and broken fortunes. For all having a whole eye to female beauty; which appears to him in great perfection in the face of the Frenchwoman--the rouge upon her cheeks looking the real rose-colour of that proverbial milk-maid nine times dipped in dew. The wine he has been quaffing gives it this hue; for he enters half intoxicated, and with a slight stagger in his gait; to the great annoyance of the lady, and the positive chagrin of the priest, who regards him with scowling glances. But the intruder is too tipsy to notice them; and advancing invites himself to a seat in front of Mrs Murdock, at the same time commencing a conversation with her. Rogier, rising, gives a significant side look, with a slight nod towards the window; then muttering a word of excuse saunters off out of the room. She knows what it means, as where to follow and find him. Knows also how to disembarrass herself of such as he who remained behind. Were it upon a bench of the Bois, or an arbour in the Jardin, she would make short work of it. But the ex-cocotte is now at the head of an aristocratic establishment, and must act in accordance. Therefore she allows some time to elapse, listening to the speech of her latest admirer; some of it in compliments coarse enough to give offence to ears more sensitive than hers. She at length gets rid of him, on the plea of having a headache, and going upstairs to get something for it. She will be down again by and by; and so bows herself out of the gentleman's presence, leaving him in a state of fretful disappointment. Once outside the room, instead of turning up the stair-way, she glides along the corridor; then on through the entrance-hall, and then out by the front door. Nor stays she an instant on the steps, or carriage sweep; but proceeds direct to the summer-house, where she expects to find the priest. For there have they more than once been together, conversing on matters of private and particular nature. On reaching the place she is disappointed--some little surprised. Rogier is not there; nor can she see him anywhere around! For all that, the gentleman is very near, without her knowing it--only a few paces off, lying flat upon his face among ferns, but so engrossed with thoughts, just then of an exciting nature, he neither hears her light footsteps, nor his own name pronounced. Not loudly though; since, while pronouncing it, she feared being heard by some other. Besides, she does not think it necessary; he will come yet, without calling. She steps inside the pavilion, and there stands waiting. Still he does not come, nor sees she anything of him; only a boat on the river above, being rowed upwards. But without thought of its having anything to do with her or her affairs. By this there is another boat in motion; for the priest has meanwhile forsaken his spying place upon the cliff, and proceeded down to the dock. "Where can Gregoire have gone?" she asks herself, becoming more and more impatient. Several times she puts the question without receiving answer; and is about starting on return to the house, when longer stayed by a rumbling noise which reaches her ears, coming up from the direction of the dock. "Can it be he?" Continuing to listen she hears the stroke of oars. It cannot be the boat she has seen rowing off above? That must now be far away, while this is near--in the bye-water just below her. But can it be the priest who is in it? Yes, it is he; as she discovers, after stepping outside, to the place he so late occupied, and looking over the cliff's edge. For then she had a view of his face, lit up by a lucifer match--itself looking like that of Lucifer! What can he be doing down there? Why examining those things, he already knows all about, as she herself? She would call down to him, and inquire. But possibly better not? He may be engaged upon some matter calling for secrecy, as he often is. Other eyes besides hers may be near, and her voice might draw them on him. She will wait for his coming up. And wait she does, at the boat's dock, on the top step of the stair; there receiving him as he returns from his short, but still unexplained, excursion. "What is it?" she asks, soon as he has mounted up to her, "_Quelque chose a tort_?" "More than that. A veritable danger!" "_Comment_? Explain!" "There's a hound upon our track! One of sharpest scent." "Who?" "_Le Capitaine de hussards_!" The dialogue that succeeds, between Olympe Renault and Gregoire Rogier, has no reference to Lewin Murdock gambling away his money, but the fear of his losing it in quite another way. Which, for the rest of that night, gives them something else to think of, as also something to do. Volume Three, Chapter X. AN UNWILLING NOVICE. "Am I myself? Dreaming? Or, is it insanity?" It is a young girl who thus strangely interrogates. A beautiful girl, woman grown, of tall stature, with bright face and a wealth of hair, golden hued. But what is beauty to her with all these adjuncts? As the flower born to blush unseen, eye of man may not look upon hers; though it is not wasting its sweetness on the desert air; but within the walls of a convent. An English girl, though the convent is in France--in the city of Boulogne-sur-mer; the same in whose attached _pensionnat_ the sister of Major Mahon is receiving education. She is not the girl, for Kate Mahon, though herself beautiful, is no blonde; instead, the very opposite. Besides, this creature of radiant complexion is not attending school--she is beyond the years for that. Neither is she allowed the freedom of the streets, but kept shut up within a cell in the innermost recesses of the establishment, where the _pensionnaires_ are not permitted, save one or two who are favourites with the Lady Superior. A small apartment the young girl occupies--bedchamber and sitting-room in one--in short, a nun's cloister. Furnished, as such, are, in a style of austere simplicity; pallet bed along the one side, the other taken up by a plain deal dressing table, a washstand with jug and basin--these little bigger than tea-bowl and ewer--and a couple of common rush-bottom chairs--that is all. The walls are lime-washed, but most of their surface is concealed by pictures of saints male and female; while the mother of all is honoured by an image, having a niche to itself, in a corner. On the table are some four or five books, including a Testament and Missal; their bindings, with the orthodox cross stamped upon them, proclaiming the nature of the contents. A literature that cannot be to the liking of the present occupant of the cloister; since she has been there several days without turning over a single leaf, or even taking up one of the volumes to look at it. That she is not there with her own will but against it, can be told by her words, and as their tone, her manner while giving utterance to them. Seated upon the side of the bed, she has sprung to her feet, and with arms raised aloft and tossed about, strides distractedly over the floor. One seeing her thus might well imagine her to be, what she half fancies herself--insane! A supposition strengthened by an unnatural lustre in her eyes, and a hectic flush on her cheeks unlike the hue of health. Still, not as with one suffering bodily sickness, or any physical ailment, but more as from a mind diseased. Seen for only a moment--that particular moment--such would be the conclusion regarding her. But her speech coming after tells she is in full possession of her senses--only under terrible agitation--distraught with some great trouble. "It must be a convent! But how have I come into it? Into France, too; for surely am I there? The woman who brings my meals is French. So the other--Sister of Mercy, as she calls herself, though she speaks my own tongue. The furniture--bed, table, chairs, washstand--everything of French manufacture. And in all England there is not such a jug and basin as those!" Regarding the lavatory utensils--so diminutive as to recall "Gulliver's Travels in Lilliput," if ever read by her--she for a moment seems to forget her misery, as will in its very midst, and keenest, at sight of the ludicrous and grotesque. It is quickly recalled, as her glance, wandering around the room, again rests on the little statue--not of marble, but a cheap plaster of Paris cast--and she reads the inscription underneath, "_La Mere de Dieu_." The symbols tell her she is inside a nunnery, and upon the soil of France! "Oh, yes!" she exclaims, "'tis certainly so! I am no more in my native land, but have been carried across the sea!" The knowledge, or belief, does nought to tranquillise her feelings or explain the situation, to her all mysterious. Instead, it but adds to her bewilderment, and she once more exclaims, almost repeating herself: "Am I myself? Is it a dream? Or have my senses indeed forsaken me?" She clasps her hands across her forehead, the white fingers threading the thick folds of her hair which hangs dishevelled. She presses them against her temples, as if to make sure her brain is still untouched! It is so, or she would not reason as she does. "Everything around shows I am in France. But how came I to it? Who has brought me? What offence have I given God or man, to be dragged from home, from country--and confined--imprisoned! Convent, or whatever it be, imprisoned I am! The door constantly kept locked! That window, so high, I cannot see over its sill! The dim light it lets in telling it was not meant for enjoyment. Oh! Instead of cheering it tantalises-- tortures me!" Despairingly she reseats herself upon the side of the bed, and with head still buried in her hands, continues her soliloquy; no longer of things present, but reverting to the past. "Let me think again! What can I remember? That night, so happy in its beginning, to end as it did! The end of my life, as I thought, if I had a thought at that time. It was not, though, or I shouldn't be here, but in heaven I hope. Would I were in heaven now! When I recall _his_ words--those last words and think--" "Your thoughts are sinful, child!" The remark, thus interrupting, is made by a woman, who appears on the threshold of the door, which she had just pushed open. A woman of mature age, dressed in a floating drapery of deep black--the orthodox garb of the Holy Sisterhood, with all its insignia, of girdle, bead-roll, and pendant crucifix. A tall thin personage, with skin like shrivelled parchment, and a countenance that would be repulsive but for the nun's coif, which partly concealing, tones down its sinister expression. Withal, a face disagreeable to gaze upon; not the less so from its air of sanctity, evidently affected. The intruder is "Sister Ursule." She has opened the door noiselessly--as cloister doors are made to open--and stands between its jambs, like a shadowy _silhouette_ in its frame, one hand still holding the knob, while in the other is a small volume, apparently well-thumbed. That she has had her ear to the keyhole before presenting herself is told by the rebuke having reference to the last words of the girl's soliloquy, in her excitement uttered aloud. "Yes?" she continues, "sinful--very sinful! You should be thinking of something else than the world and its wickedness. And of anything before that you have been thinking of--the wickedness of all." She thus spoken to had neither started at the intrusion, nor does she show surprise at what is said. It is not the first visit of Sister Ursule to her cell, made in like stealthy manner; nor the first austere speech she has heard from the same skinny lips. At the beginning she did not listen to it patiently; instead, with indignation; defiantly, almost fiercely, rejoining. But the proudest spirit can be humbled. Even the eagle, when its wings are beaten to exhaustion against the bars of its cage, will became subdued, if not tamed. Therefore the imprisoned English girl makes reply, meekly and appealingly-- "Sister of Mercy, as you are called; have mercy upon me! Tell me why I am here?" "For the good of your soul and its salvation." "But how can that concern any one save myself?" "Ah! there you mistake, child; which shows the sort of life you've been hitherto leading; and the sort of people surrounding you; who, in their sinfulness, imagine all as themselves. They cannot conceive that there are those who deem it a duty--nay, a direct command from God--to do all in their power for the redemption of lost sinners, and restoring them to his divine favour. He is all-merciful." "True: He is. I do not need to be told it. Only, who these redemptionists are that take such interest in my spiritual welfare, and how I have come to be here, surely I may know?" "You shall in time, _ma fille_. Now you cannot--must not--for many reasons." "What reasons?" "Well; for one, you have been very ill--nigh unto death, indeed." "I know that, without knowing how." "Of course. The accident which came so near depriving you of life was of that sudden nature; and your senses--but I mustn't speak further about it. The doctor has given strict directions that you're to be kept quiet, and it might excite you. Be satisfied with knowing, that they who have placed you here are the same who saved your life, and would now rescue your soul from perdition. I've brought you this little volume for perusal. It will help to enlighten you." She stretches out her long bony fingers, handing the book--one of those "Aids to Faith" relied upon by the apostles of the _Propaganda_. The girl mechanically takes it, without looking at, or thinking of it; still pondering upon the unknown and mysterious benefactors, who, as she is told, have done so much for her. "How good of them!" she rejoins, with an air of incredulity, and in tones that might be taken as derisive. "How wicked of you!" retorts the other, taking it in this sense. "Positively ungrateful!" she adds, with the acerbity of a baffled proselytiser. "I am sorry, child, you still cling to your sinful thoughts, and keep up a rebellious spirit in face of all that is being done for your good. But I shall leave you now, and go and pray for you; hoping, on my next visit, to find you in a more proper frame of mind." So saying, Sister Ursule glides out of the cloister, drawing to the door, and silently turning the key in its lock. "O God!" groans the young girl in despair, flinging herself along the pallet, and for the third time interrogating, "am I myself, and dreaming? Or am I mad? In mercy, Heaven, tell me what it means!" Volume Three, Chapter XI. A CHEERFUL KITCHEN. Of all the domestics turned adrift from Llangorren one alone interests us--Joseph Preece--"Old Joe," as his young mistress used familiarly to call him. As Jack Wingate has made his mother aware, Joe has moved into the house formerly inhabited by Coracle Dick; so far changing places with the poacher, who now occupies the lodge in which the old man ere while lived as one of the retainers of the Wynn family. Beyond this the exchange has not extended. Richard Dempsey, under the new _regime_ at Llangorren, has been promoted to higher office than was ever held by Joseph Preece; who, on the other hand, has neither turned poacher, nor intends doing so. Instead, the versatile Joseph, as if to keep up his character for versatility, has taken to a new calling altogether--that of basket-making, with the construction of bird-cages and other kinds of wicker-work. Rather is it the resumption of an old business to which he had been brought up, but abandoned long years agone on entering the service of Squire Wynn. Having considerable skill in this textile trade, he hopes in his old age to make it maintain him. Only in part; for, thanks to the generosity of his former master, and more still that of his late mistress, Joe has laid by a little _pecunium_, nearly enough for his needs; so that, in truth, he has taken to the wicker-working less from necessity than for the sake of having something to do. The old man of many _metiers_ has never led an idle life, and dislikes leading it. Is is not by any accident he has drifted into the domicile late in the occupation of Dick Dempsey, though Dick had nothing to do with it. The poacher himself was but a week-to-week tenant, and of course cleared out soon as obtaining his promotion. Then, the place being to let, at a low rent, the ex-Charon saw it would suit him; all the better because of a "withey bed" belonging to the same landlord, which was to let at the same time. This last being at the mouth of the dingle in which the solitary dwelling stands--and promising a convenient supply of the raw material for his projected manufacture--he has taken a lease of it along with the house. Under his predecessor the premises having fallen into dilapidation-- almost ruin--the old boatman had a bargain of them, on condition of his doing the repairs. He has done them; made the roof water-tight; given the walls a coat of plaster and whitewash; laid a new floor--in short, rendered the house habitable, and fairly comfortable. Among other improvements he has partitioned off a second sleeping apartment, and not only plastered but papered it. More still, neatly and tastefully furnished it; the furniture consisting of an iron bedstead, painted emerald green, with brass knobs; a new washstand, and dressing table with mahogany framed glass on top, three cane chairs, a towel horse, and other etceteras. For himself? No; he has a bedroom besides. And this, by the style of the plenishing, is evidently intended for one of the fair sex. Indeed, one has already taken possession of it, as evinced by some female apparel, suspended upon pegs against the wall; a pincushion, with a brooch in it, on the dressing table; bracelets and a necklace besides, with two or three scent bottles, and several other toilet trifles scattered about in front of the framed glass. They cannot be the belongings of "Old Joe's" wife, nor yet his daughter; for among the many parts he has played in life, that of Benedict has not been. A bachelor he is, and a bachelor he intends staying to the end of the chapter. Who, then, is the owner of the brooch, bracelets, and other bijouterie? In a word, his niece--a slip of a girl who was under-housemaid at Llangorren; like himself, set at large, and now transformed into a full-fledged housekeeper--his own. But before entering on parlour duties at the Court, she had seen service in the kitchen, under the cook; and some culinary skill, then and there acquired, now stands her old uncle in stead. By her deft manipulation, stewed rabbit becomes as jugged hare, so that it would be difficult to tell the difference; while she has at her fingers' ends many other feats of the _cuisine_ that give him gratification. The old servitor of Squire Wynn is in his way a _gourmet_, and has a tooth for toothsome things. His accomplished niece, with somewhat of his own cleverness, bears the pretty name of Amy--Amy Preece, for she is his brother's child. And she is pretty as her name, a bright blooming girl, rose-cheeked, with form well-rounded, and flesh firm as a Ribston pippin. Her cheerful countenance lights up the kitchen late shadowed by the presence and dark scowling features of Coracle Dick--brightens it even more than the brand-new tin-ware or the whitewash upon its walls. Old Joe rejoices; and if he have a regret, it is that he had not long ago taken up housekeeping for himself. But this thought suggests another contradicting it. How could he while his young mistress lived? She so much beloved by him, whose many beneficences have made him, as he is, independent for the rest of his days, never more to be harassed by care or distressed by toil, one of her latest largesses, the very last, being to bestow upon him the pretty pleasure craft bearing her own name. This she had actually done on the morning of that day, the twenty-first anniversary of her birth, as it was the last of her life; thus by an act of grand generosity commemorating two events so strangely, terribly, in contrast! And as though some presentiment forewarned her of her own sad fate, so soon to follow, she had secured the gift by a scrap of writing; thus at the change in the Llangorren household enabling its old boatman to claim the boat, and obtain it too. It is now lying just below, at the brook's mouth by the withey bed, where Joe has made a mooring-place for it. The handsome thing would fetch 50 pounds; and many a Wye waterman would give his year's earnings to possess it. Indeed, more than one has been after it, using arguments to induce its owner to dispose of it--pointing out how idle of him to keep a craft so little suited to his present calling! All in vain. Old Joe would sooner sell his last shirt, or the newly-bought furniture of his house--sooner go begging--than part with that boat. It oft bore him beside his late mistress, so much lamented; it will still bear him lamenting her--aye for the rest of his life. If he has lost the lady he will cling to the souvenir, which carries her honoured name! But, however, faithful the old family retainer, and affectionate in his memories, he does not let their sadness overpower him, nor always give way to the same. Only at times when something turns up more vividly than usual recalling Gwendoline Wynn to remembrance. On other and ordinary occasions he is cheerful enough, this being his natural habit. And never more than on a certain night shortly after that of his chance encounter with Jack Wingate, when both were a shopping at Rugg's Ferry. For there and then, in addition to the multifarious news imparted to the young waterman, he gave the latter an invitation to visit him in his new home; which was gladly and off-hand accepted. "A bit o' supper and a drop o' somethin' to send it down," were the old boatman's words specifying the entertainment. The night has come round, and the "bit o' supper" is being prepared by Amy, who is acting as though she was never more called upon to practise the culinary art; and, according to her own way of thinking, she never has been. For, to let out a little secret, the French lady's-maid was not the only feminine at Llangorren Court who had cast admiring eyes on the handsome boatman who came there rowing Captain Ryecroft. Raising the curtain still higher, Amy Preece's position is exposed; she, too, having been caught in that same net, spread for neither. Not strange then, but altogether natural. She is now exerting herself to cook a supper that will give gratification to the expected guest. She would work her fingers off for Jack Wingate. Possibly the uncle may have some suspicion of why she is moving about so alertly, and besides looking so pleased like. If not a suspicion, he has a wish and a hope. Nothing in life, now, would be so much to his mind as to see his niece married to the man he has invited to visit him. For never in all his life has old Joe met one he so greatly cottons to. His intercourse with the young waterman, though scarce six months old, seems as if it had been of twice as many years; so friendly and pleasant, he not only wants it continued, but wishes it to become nearer and dearer. If his niece be baiting a trap in the cooking of the supper, he has himself set that trap by the "invite" he gave to the expected guest. A gentle tapping at the door tells him the trigger is touched; and, responding to the signal, he calls out-- "That you, Jack Wingate? O' course it be. Come in!" And in Jack Wingate comes. Volume Three, Chapter XII. QUEER BRIC-A-BRAC. Stepping over the threshold, the young waterman is warmly received by his older brother of the oar, and blushingly by the girl, whose cheeks are already of a high colour, caught from the fire over which she has been stooping. Old Joe, seated in the chimney corner, in a huge wicker chair of his own construction, motions Jack to another opposite, leaving the space in front clear for Amy to carry on her culinary operations. There are still a few touches to be added--a sauce to be concocted--before the supper can be served; and she is concocting it. Host and guest converse without heeding her, chiefly on topics relating to the bore of the river, about which old Joe is an oracle. As the other, too, has spent all his days on Vaga's banks; but there have been more of them, and he longer resident in that particular neighbourhood. It is too early to enter upon subjects of a more serious nature, though a word now and then slips in about the late occurrence at Llangorren, still wrapped in mystery. If they bring shadows over the brow of the old boatman, these pass off, as he surveys the table which his niece has tastefully decorated with fruits and late autumn flowers. It reminds him of many a pleasant Christmas night in the grand servants' hall at the Court, under holly and mistletoe, besides bowls of steaming punch and dishes of blazing snapdragon. His guest knows something of that same hall; but cares not to recall its memories. Better likes he the bright room he is now seated in. Within the radiant circle of its fire, and the other pleasant surroundings, he is for the time cheerful--almost himself again. His mother told him it was not good to be for ever grieving--not righteous, but sinful. And now, as he watches the graceful creature moving about, actively engaged--and all on his account--he begins to think there may be truth in what she said. At all events his grief is more bearable than it has been for long days past. Not that he is untrue to the memory of Mary Morgan. Far from it. His feelings are but natural, inevitable. With that fair presence flitting before his eyes, he would not be man if it failed in some way to impress him. But his feelings for Amy Preece do not go beyond the bounds of respectful admiration. Still is it an admiration that may become warmer, gathering strength as time goes on. It even does somewhat on this same night; for, in truth the girl's beauty is a thing which cannot be glanced at without a wish to gaze upon it again. And she possesses something more than beauty--a gift not quite so rare, but perhaps as much prized by Jack Wingate--modesty. He has noted her shy, almost timid mien, ere now; for it is not the first time he has been in her company--contrasted it with the bold advances made to him by her former fellow-servant at the Court--Clarisse. And now, again, he observes the same bearing, as she moves about through that cheery place, in the light of glowing coals--best from the Forest of Dean. And he thinks of it while seated at the supper table; she at its head, _vis-a-vis_ to her uncle, and distributing the viands. These are no damper to his admiration of her, since the dishes she has prepared are of the daintiest. He has not been accustomed to eat such a meal, for his mother could not cook it; while, as already said, Amy is something of an _artiste de cuisine_. An excellent wife she would make, all things considered; and possibly at a later period, Jack Wingate might catch himself so reflecting. But not now; not to-night. Such a thought is not in his mind; could not be, with that sadder thought still overshadowing. The conversation at the table is mostly between the uncle and himself, the niece only now and then putting in a word; and the subjects are still of a general character, in the main relating to boats and their management. It continues so till the supper things have been cleared off; and in their place appear a decanter of spirits, a basin of lump sugar, and a jug of hot water, with a couple of tumblers containing spoons. Amy knows her uncle's weakness--which is a whisky toddy before going to bed; for it is the "barley bree" that sparkles in the decanter; and also aware that to-night he will indulge in more than one, she sets the kettle on its trivet against the bars of the grate. As the hour has now waxed late, and the host is evidently longing for a more confidential chat with his guest, she asks if there is anything more likely to be wanted. Answered in the negative, she bids both "Good night," withdraws to the little chamber so prettily decorated for her, and goes to her bed. But not immediately to fall asleep. Instead she lies awake thinking of Jack Wingate, whose voice, like a distant murmur, she can now and then hear. The French _femme de chambre_ would have had her cheek at the keyhole, to catch what he might say. Not so the young English girl, brought up in a very different school; and if she lies awake, it is from no prying curiosity, but kept so by a nobler sentiment. On the instant of her withdrawal, old Joe, who has been some time showing in a fidget for it, hitches his chair closer to the table, desiring his guest to do the same; and the whisky punches having been already prepared, they also bring their glasses together. "Yer good health, Jack." "Same to yerself, Joe." After this exchange the ex-Charon, no longer constrained by the presence of a third party, launches out into a dialogue altogether different from that hitherto held between them--the subject being the late tenant of the house in which they are hobnobbing. "Queer sort o' chap, that Coracle Dick! an't he, Jack?" "Course he be. But why do ye ask? You knowed him afore, well enough." "Not so well's now. He never comed about the Court, 'ceptin' once when fetched there--afore the old Squire on a poachin' case. Lor! what a change! He now head keeper o' the estate." "Ye say ye know him better than ye did? Ha' ye larned anythin' 'bout him o' late?" "That hae I; an' a goodish deal too. More'n one thing as seems kewrous." "If ye don't object tellin' me, I'd like to hear what they be." "Well, one are, that Dick Dempsey ha' been in the practice of somethin' besides poachin'." "That an't no news to me, I ha' long suspected him o' doin's worse than that." "Amongst them did ye include forgin'?" "No; because I never thought o' it. But I believe him to be capable o' it, or anything else. What makes ye think he a' been a forger?" "Well, I won't say forger, for he mayn't a made the things. But for sure he ha' been engaged in passin' them off." "Passin' what off!" "Them!" rejoins Joe, drawing a little canvas bag out of his pocket, and spilling its contents upon the table--over a score of coins to all appearance half-crown pieces. "Counterfeits--every one o' 'em!" he adds, as the other sits staring at them in surprise. "Where did you find them?" asks Jack. "In the corner o' an old cubbord. Furbishin' up the place, I comed across them--besides a goodish grist o' other kewrosities. What would ye think o' my predecessor here bein' a burglar as well as smasher?" "I wouldn't think that noways strange neyther. As I've sayed already, I b'lieve Dick Dempsey to be a man who'd not mind takin' a hand at any mortal thing, howsomever bad. Burglary, or even worse, if it wor made worth his while. But what led ye to think he ha' been also in the housebreaking line?" "These!" answers the old boatman, producing another and larger bag, the more ponderous contents of which he spills out on the floor, not the table; as he does so exclaiming, "Theere be a lot o' oddities! A complete set o' burglar's tools--far as I can understand them." And so are they, jemmies, cold chisels, skeleton keys--in short, every implement of the cracksman's calling. "And ye found them in the cubbert too?" "No, not there, nor yet inside; but on the premises. The big bag, wi' its contents, wor crammed up into a hole in the rocks--the clift at the back o' the house." "Odd, all o' it! An' the oddest his leavin' such things behind--to tell the tale o' his guilty doin's; I suppose bein' full o' his new fortunes, he's forgot all about them." "But ye han't waited for me to gie the whole o' the cat'logue. There be somethin' more to come." "What more?" asks the young waterman, suprisedly, and with renewed interest. "A thing as seems kewrouser than all the rest. I can draw conclusions from the counterfeet coins, an' the house-breakin' implements; but the other beats me dead down, an' I don't know what to make o't. Maybe you can tell. I foun' it stuck up the same hole in the rocks, wi' a stone in front exact fittin' to an' fillin' its mouth." While speaking, he draws open a chest, and takes from it a bundle of some white stuff--apparently linen--loosely rolled. Unfolding, and holding it up to the light, he adds:-- "Theer be the eydentical article!" No wonder he thought the thing strange, found where he had found it. For it is a _shroud_! White, with a cross and two letters in red stitched upon that part which, were it upon a body, both cross and lettering would lie over the breast! "O God!" cries Jack Wingate, as his eyes rest upon the symbol. "That's the shroud Mary Morgan wor buried in! I can swear to 't. I seed her mother stitch on that cross an' them letters--the ineetials o' her name. An' I seed it on herself in the coffin 'fore't wor closed. Heaven o' mercy! what do it mean?" Amy Preece, lying awake in her bed, hears Jack Wingate's voice excitedly exclaiming, and wonders what that means. But she is not told; nor learns she aught of a conversation which succeeds in more subdued tone; prolonged to a much later hour--even into morning. For before the two men part they mature a plan for ascertaining why that ghostly thing is still above ground instead of in the grave, where the body it covered is coldly sleeping! Volume Three, Chapter XIII. A BRACE OF BODY-SNATCHERS. What with the high hills that shut in the valley of the Wye, and the hanging woods that clothe their steep slopes, the nights there are often so dark as to justify the familiar saying, "You couldn't see your hand before you." I have been out on some, when a white kerchief held within three feet of the eye was absolutely invisible; and it required a skilful Jehu, with best patent lamps, to keep carriage wheels upon the causeway of the road. Such a night has drawn down over Rugg's Ferry, shrouding the place in impenetrable gloom. Situated in a concavity--as it were, at the bottom of an extinct volcanic crater--the obscurity is deeper than elsewhere; to-night alike covering the Welsh Harp, detached dwelling houses, chapel, and burying-ground, as with a pall. Not a ray of light scintillates anywhere; for the hour is after midnight, and everybody has retired to rest; the weak glimmer of candles from cottage windows, as the stronger glare through those of the hotel-tavern, no longer to be seen. In the last every lamp is extinguished, its latest-sitting guest--if it have any guest--having gone to bed. Some of the poachers and night-netters may be astir. If so they are abroad, and not about the place, since it is just at such hours they are away from it. For all, two men are near by, seemingly moving with as much stealth as any trespassers after fish or game, and with even more mystery in their movements. The place occupied by them is the shadowed corner under the wall of the chapel cemetery, where Captain Ryecroft saw three men embarking on a boat. These are also in a boat; but not one in the act of rowing off from the river's edge; instead, just being brought into it. Soon as its cutwater strikes against the bank, one of the men, rising to his feet, leaps out upon the land, and attaches the painter to a sapling, by giving it two or three turns around the stem. Then facing back towards the boat, he says:-- "Hand me them things; an' look out not to let 'em rattle!" "Ye need ha' no fear 'bout that," rejoins the other, who has now unshipped the oars, and stowed them fore and aft along the thwarts, they not being the things asked for. Then, stooping down, he lifts something out of the boat's bottom, and passes it over the side, repeating the movement three or four times. The things thus transferred from one to the other are handled by both as delicately, as though they were pheasant's or plover's eggs, instead of what they are--an ordinary set of grave-digger's tools--spade, shovel, and mattock. There is, besides, a bundle of something soft, which, as there is no danger of its making noise, is tossed up to the top of the bank. He who has flung follows it; and the two gathering up the hardware, after some words exchanged in muttered tone, mount over the cemetery wall. The younger first leaps it, stretching back, and giving a hand to the other--an old man, who finds some difficulty in the ascent. Inside the sacred precincts they pause; partly to apportion the tools, but as much to make sure that they have not hitherto been heard. Seen, they could not be, before or now. Becoming satisfied that the coast is clear, the younger man says in a whisper-- "It be all right, I think. Every livin' sinner--an' there be a good wheen o' that stripe 'bout here--have gone to bed. As for him, blackest o' the lot, who lives in the house adjoinin', ain't like he's at home. Good as sure down at Llangorren Court, where just now he finds quarters more comfortable. We hain't nothin' to fear, I take it. Let's on to the place. You lay hold o' my skirt, and I'll gie ye the lead. I know the way, every inch o' it." Saying which he moves off, the other doing as directed, and following step for step. A few paces further, and they arrive at a grave; beside which they again make stop. In daylight it would show recently made, though not altogether new. A month, or so, since the turf had been smoothed over it. The men are now about to disturb it, as evinced by their movements and the implements brought along. But, before going further in their design--body-snatching, or whatever it be--both drop down upon their knees, and again listen intently, as though still in some fear of being interrupted. Not a sound is heard save the wind, as it sweeps in mournful cadence through the trees along the hill slopes, and nearer below, the rippling of the river. At length, convinced they have the cemetery to themselves, they proceed to their work, which begins by their spreading out a sheet on the grass close to and alongside the grave--a trick of body-stealers--so as to leave no traces of their theft. That done, they take up the sods with their hands, carefully, one after another; and, with like care, lay them down upon the sheet, the grass sides underneath. Then, seizing hold of the tools--spade and shovel--they proceed to scoop out the earth, placing it in a heap beside. They have no need to make use of the mattock; the soil is loose, and lifts easily. Nor is their task as excavators of long continuance--even shorter than they anticipated. Within less than eighteen inches of the surface their tools come in contact with a harder substance, which they can tell to be timber--the lid of a coffin. Soon as striking it, the younger faces round to his companion, saying-- "I tolt ye so--listen!" With the spade's point he again gives the coffin a tap. It returns a hollow sound--too hollow for aught to be inside it! "No body in there!" he adds. "Hadn't we better keep on, an' make sure?" suggests the other. "Sartint we had--an' will." Once more they commence shovelling out the earth, and continue till it is all cleared from the coffin. Then, inserting the blade of the mattock under the edge of the lid, they raise it up; for it is not screwed down, only laid on loosely--the screws all drawn and gone! Flinging himself on his face, and reaching forward, the younger man gropes inside the coffin--not expecting to feel any body there, but mechanically, and to see if there be aught else. There is nothing--only emptiness. The house of the dead is untenanted-- its tenant has been taken away! "I know'd it!" he exclaims, drawing back. "I know'd my poor Mary wor no longer here!" It is no body-snatcher who speaks thus, but Jack Wingate, his companion being Joseph Preece. After which, the young waterman says not another word in reference to the discovery they have both made. He is less sad than thoughtful now. But he keeps his thoughts to himself, an occasional whisper to his companion being merely by way of direction, as they replace the lid upon the coffin, cover all up as before, shake in the last fragments of loose earth from the sheet, and restore the grave turf--adjusting the sods with as much exactitude, as though they were laying tesselated tiles! Then, taking up their tools, they glide back to the boat, step into it, and shove off. On return down stream they reflect in different ways; the old boatman of Llangorren still thinking it but a case of body-snatching, done by Coracle Dick, for the doctors--with a view to earning a dishonest penny. Far otherwise the thoughts of Jack Wingate. He thinks, nay hopes-- almost happily believes--that the body exhumed was not dead--never has been--but that Mary Morgan still lives, breathes, and has being! Volume Three, Chapter XIV. IN WANT OF HELP. "Drowned? No! Dead before she ever went under the water. Murdered, beyond the shadow of a doubt." It is Captain Ryecroft who thus emphatically affirms. And to himself, being alone, within his room in the Wyeside Hotel; for he is still in Herefordshire. More in conjecture, he proceeds--"They first smothered, I suppose, or in some way rendered her insensible; then carried her to the place and dropped her in, leaving the water to complete their diabolical work? A double death as it were; though she may not have suffered its agonies twice. Poor girl! I hope not." In prosecuting the inquiry to which he has devoted himself, beyond certain unavoidable communications with Jack Wingate, he has not taken any one into his confidence. This partly from having no intimate acquaintances in the neighbourhood, but more because he fears the betrayal of his purpose. It is not ripe for public exposure, far less bringing before a court of justice. Indeed, he could not yet shape an accusation against any one, all that he has learnt new serving only to satisfy him that his original suspicions were correct; which it has done, as shown by his soliloquy. He has since made a second boat excursion down the bye-channel--made it in the day time, to assure himself there was no mistake in his observations under the light of the lamp. It was for this he had bespoken Wingate's skiff for the following day; for certain reasons reaching Llangorren at the earliest hour of dawn. There and then to see what surprised him quite as much as the unexpected discovery of the night before--a grand breakage from the brow of the cliff. But not any more misleading him. If the first "sign" observed there failed to blind him, so does that which has obliterated it. No natural rock-slide, was the conclusion he came to, soon as setting eyes upon it; but the work of human hands! And within the hour, as he could see by the clods of loosened earth still dropping down and making muddy the water underneath; while bubbles were ascending from the detached boulder lying invisible below! Had he been there only a few minutes earlier, himself invisible, he would have seen a man upon the cliff's crest, busy with a crowbar, levering the rock from its bed, and tilting it over--then carefully removing the marks of the iron implement, as also his own footprints! That man saw him through the blue-grey dawn, in his skiff coming down the river; just as on the preceding night under the light of the moon. For he thus early astir and occupied in a task as that of Sysiphus, was no other than Father Rogier. The priest had barely time to retreat and conceal himself, as the boat drew down to the eyot. Not this time crouching among the ferns; but behind some evergreens, at a farther and safer distance. Still near enough for him to observe the other's look of blank astonishment on beholding the _debacle_, and note the expression change to one of significant intelligence as he continued gazing at it. "_Un limier veritable_! A hound that has scented blood, and's determined to follow it up, till he find the body whence it flowed. Aha! The game must be got out of his way. Llangorren will have to change owners once again, and the sooner the better." At the very moment these thoughts were passing through the mind of Gregoire Rogier, the "veritable bloodhound" was mentally repeating the same words he had used on the night before: "No accident--no suicide-- murdered!" adding, as his eyes ranged over the surface of red sandstone, so altered in appearance, "This makes me all the more sure of it. Miserable trick! Not much Mr Lewin Murdock will gain by it." So thought he then. But now, days after, though still believing Murdock to be the murderer, he thinks differently about the "trick." For the evidence afforded by the former traces, though slight, and pointing to no one in particular, was, nevertheless, a substantial indication of guilt against somebody; and these being blotted out, there is but his own testimony of their having ever existed. Though himself convinced that Gwendoline Wynn has been assassinated, he cannot see his way to convince others--much less a legal tribunal. He is still far from being in a position openly to accuse, or even name the criminals who ought to be arraigned. He now knows there are more than one, or so supposes; still believing that Murdock has been the principal actor in the tragedy; though others besides have borne part in it. "The man's wife must know all about it?" he says, going on in conjectural chain; "and that French priest--he probably the instigator of it? Aye! possibly had a hand in the deed itself? There have been such cases recorded--many of them. Exercising great authority at Llangorren--as Jack has learned from his friend Joe--there commanding everybody and everything! And the fellow Dempsey--poacher, and what not--he, too, become an important personage about the place! Why all this? Only intelligible on the supposition that they have had to do with a death by which they have been all benefited. Yes; all four acting conjointly have brought it about! "And how am I to bring it home to them? 'Twill be difficult, indeed, if at all possible. Even that slight sign destined has increased the difficulty. "No use taking the `great unpaid' into my confidence, nor yet the sharper stipendiaries. To submit my plans to either magistrate or policeman might be but to defeat them. 'Twould only raise a hue and cry, putting the guilty ones on their guard. That isn't the way--will not do! "And yet I must have some one to assist me. For there is truth in the old saw `Two heads better than one.' Wingate is good enough in his way, and willing, but he can't help me in mine. I want a man of my own class; one who--stay! George Shenstone? No! The young fellow is true as steel and brave as a lion, but--well, lacking brains. I could trust his heart, not his head. Where is he who has both to be relied upon? Ha! Mahon! The man--the very man! Experienced in the world's wickedness, courageous, cool--except when he gets his Irish blood up against the Sassenachs--above all devoted to me, as I know; has never forgotten that little service I did him at Delhi. And he has nothing to do--plenty of time at his disposal. Yes; the Major's my man! "Shall I write and ask him to come over here. On second thoughts, No! Better for me to go thither; see him first, and explain all the circumstances. To Boulogne and back's but a matter of forty-eight hours, and a day or two can't make much difference in an affair like this. The scent's cold as it can be, and may be taken up weeks hence as well as now. If we ever succeed in finding evidence of their guilt it will, no doubt, be mainly of the circumstantial sort; and much will depend on the character of the individuals accused. Now I think of it, something may be learnt about them in Boulogne itself; or at all events of the priest. Since I've had a good look at his forbidding face, I feel certain it's the same I saw inside the doorway of that convent. If not, there are two of the sacerdotal tribe so like it would be a toss up which is one and which t'other. "In any case there can be no harm in my making a scout across to Boulogne, and instituting inquiries about him. Mahon's sister being at school in the establishment will enable us to ascertain whether a priest named Rogier holds relations with it, and we may learn something of the repute he bears. Perchance, also, a trifle concerning Mr and Mrs Lewin Murdock. It appears that both husband and wife are well known at Homburg, Baden, and other like resorts. Gaming, if not game, birds, in some of their migratory flights they have made short sojourn at the French seaport, to get their hands in for those grander Hells beyond. I'll go over to Boulogne!" A knock at the door. On the permission to enter, called out, a hotel porter presents himself. "Well?" "Your waterman, sir, Wingate, says he'd like to see you, if convenient?" "Tell him to step up!" "What can Jack be coming after? Anyhow I'm glad he has come. 'Twill save me the trouble of sending for him; as I'd better settle his account before starting off." [Jack has a new score against the Captain for boat hire, his services having been retained, exclusively, for some length of time past.] "Besides there's something I wish to say--a long chapter of instructions to leave with him. Come in, Jack!" This, as a shuffling in the corridor outside, tells that the waterman is wiping his feet on the door mat. The door opening, displays him; but with an expression on his countenance very different from that of a man coming to dun for wages due. More like one entering to announce a death, or some event which greatly agitates him. "What is it?" asks the Captain, observing his distraught manner. "Somethin' queer, sir; very queer indeed." "Ah! Let me hear it!" demands Ryecroft, with an air of eagerness, thinking it relates to himself and the matter engrossing his mind. "I will, Captain. But it'll take time in the tellin'." "Take as much as you like. I'm at your service. Be seated." Jack clutches hold of a chair, and draws it up close to where the Captain is sitting--by a table. Then glancing over his shoulder, and all round the room, to assure himself there is no one within earshot, he says, in grave, solemn voice: "I do believe, Captain, _she be still alive_!" Volume Three, Chapter XV. STILL ALIVE. Impossible to depict the expression on Vivian Ryecroft's face, as the words of the waterman fall upon his ear. It is more than surprise--more than astonishment--intensely interrogative, as though some secret hope once entertained, but long gone out of his heart, had suddenly returned to it. "Still alive!" he exclaims, springing to his feet, and almost upsetting the table. "Alive!" he mechanically repeats. "What do you mean, Wingate? And who?" "My poor girl, Captain. You know." "_His_ girl, not _mine_! Mary Morgan, not Gwendoline Wynn!" reflects Ryecroft within himself, dropping back upon his chair as one stunned by a blow. "I'm almost sure she be still livin'," continues the waterman, in wonder at the emotion his words have called up, though little suspecting why. Controlling it, the other asks, with diminished interest, still earnestly:-- "What leads you to think that way, Wingate? Have you a reason?" "Yes, have I; more'n one. It's about that I ha' come to consult ye." "You've come to astonish me! But proceed!" "Well, sir, as I ha' sayed, it'll take a good bit o' tellin', and a lot o' explanation beside. But since ye've signified I'm free to your time, I'll try and make the story short's I can." "Don't curtail it in any way. I wish to hear all!" The waterman thus allowed latitude, launches forth into a full account of his own life--those chapters of it relating to his courtship of, and betrothal to, Mary Morgan. He tells of the opposition made by her mother, the rivalry of Coracle Dick, and the sinister interference of Father Rogier. In addition, the details of that meeting of the lovers under the elm--their last--and the sad episode soon after succeeding. Something of all this Ryecroft has heard before, and part of it suspected. What he now hears new to him is the account of a scene in the farm-house of Abergann, while Mary Morgan lay in the chamber of death, with a series of incidents that came under the observation of her sorrowing lover. The first, his seeing a shroud being made by the girl's mother, white, with a red cross, and the initial letters of her name braided over the breast: the same soon afterwards appearing upon the corpse. Then the strange behaviour of Father Rogier on the day of the funeral; the look with which he stood regarding the girl's face as she lay in her coffin; his abrupt exit out of the room; as afterwards his hurried departure from the side of the grave before it was finally closed up--a haste noticed by others as well as Jack Wingate. "But what do you make of all that?" asks Ryecroft, the narrator having paused to gather himself for other, and still stranger revelations. "How can it give you a belief in the girl being still alive? Quite its contrary, I should say." "Stay, Captain! There be more to come." The Captain does stay, listening on. To hear the story of the planted and plucked up flower; of another and later visit made by Wingate to the cemetery in daylight, then seeing what led him to suspect, that not only had the plant been destroyed, but all the turf on the grave disturbed! He speaks of his astonishment at this, with his perplexity. Then goes on to give account of the evening spent with Joseph Preece in his new home; of the waifs and strays there shown him; the counterfeit coins, burglars' tools, and finally the shroud--that grim remembrancer, which he recognised at sight! His narrative concludes with his action taken after, assisted by the old boatman. "Last night," he says, proceeding with the relation, "or I ought to say this same mornin'--for 'twar after midnight hour--Joe an' myself took the skiff, an' stole up to the chapel graveyard; where we opened her grave, an' foun' the coffin empty! Now, Captain, what do ye think o' the whole thing?" "On my word, I hardly know what to think of it. Mystery seems the measure of the time! This you tell me of is strange--if not stranger than any! What are your own thoughts about it, Jack?" "Well, as I've already sayed, my thoughts be, an' my hopes, that Mary's still in the land o' the livin'." "I hope she is." The tone of Ryecroft's rejoinder tells of his incredulity, further manifested by his questions following. "But you saw her in her coffin? Waked for two days, as I understood you; then laid in her grave? How could she have lived throughout all that? Surely she was dead!" "So I thought at the time, but don't now." "My good fellow, I fear you are deceiving yourself. I'm sorry having to think so. Why the body has been taken up again is of itself a sufficient puzzle; but alive--that seems physically impossible!" "Well, Captain, it's just about the possibility of the thing I come to ask your opinion; thinkin' ye'd be acquainted wi' the article itself." "What article?" "The new medicine; it as go by the name o' chloryform." "Ha! you have a suspicion--" "That she ha' been chloryformed, an' so kep' asleep--to be waked up when they wanted her. I've heerd say, they can do such things." "But then she was drowned also? Fell from a foot plank, you told me? And was in the water some time?" "I don't believe it, a bit. It be true enough she got somehow into the water, an' wor took out insensible, or rather drifted out o' herself, on the bank just below, at the mouth o' the brook. But that wor short after, an' she might still a' ben alive not with standin'. My notion be, that the priest had first put the chloryform into her, or did it then, an' knew all along she warn't dead, nohow." "My dear Jack, the thing cannot be possible. Even if it were, you seem to forget that her mother, father--all of them--must have been cognisant of these facts--if facts?" "I don't forget it, Captain. 'Stead I believe they all wor cognisant o' them--leastways, the mother." "But why should she assist in such a dangerous deception--at risk of her daughter's life?" "That's easy answered. She did it partly o' herself; but more at the biddin' o' the priest, whom she daren't disobey--the weak-minded creature most o' her time given up to sayin' prayers and paternosters. They all knowed the girl loved me, and wor sure to be my wife, whatever they might say or do against it. Wi' her willing I could a' defied the whole lot o' them. Bein' aware o' that their only chance wor to get her out o' my way by some trick--as they ha' indeed got her. Ye may think it strange their takin' all that trouble; but if ye'd seen her ye wouldn't. There worn't on all Wyeside so good lookin' a girl!" Ryecroft again looks incredulous; not smilingly, but with a sad cast of countenance. Despite its improbability, however, he begins to think there may be some truth in what the waterman says--Jack's earnest convictions sympathetically impressing him. "And supposing her to be alive," he asks, "where do you think she is now? Have you any idea?" "I have--leastways a notion." "Where?" "Over the water--in France--the town o' Bolone." "Boulogne!" exclaims the Captain, with a start. "What makes you suppose she is there?" "Something, sir, I han't yet spoke to ye about. I'd a'most forgot the thing, an' might never a thought o't again, but for what ha' happened since. Ye'll remember the night we come up from the ball, my tellin' ye I had an engagement the next day to take the young Powells down the river?" "I remember it perfectly." "Well; I took them, as agreed; an' that day we went down's fur's Chepstow. But they wor bound for the Severn side a duck shootin'; and next mornin' we started early, afore daybreak. As we were passin' the wharf below Chepstow Bridge, where there wor several craft lyin' in, I noticed one sloop-rigged ridin' at anchor a bit out from the rest, as if about clearin' to put to sea. By the light o' a lamp as hung over the taffrail, I read the name on her starn, showin' she wor French, an' belonged to Bolone. I shouldn't ha' thought that anythin' odd, as there be many foreign craft o' the smaller kind puts in at Chepstow. But what did appear odd, an' gied me a start too, wor my seein' a boat by the sloop's side wi' a man in it, who I could a'most sweared wor the Rogue's Ferry priest. There wor others in the boat besides, an' they appeared to be gettin' some sort o' bundle out o' it, an' takin' it up the man-ropes, aboard o' the sloop. But I didn't see any more, as we soon passed out o' sight, goin' on down. Now, Captain, it's my firm belief that man must ha' been the priest, and that thing, I supposed to be a bundle o' marchandise, neyther more nor less than the body o' Mary Morgan--not dead, but livin'!" "You astound me, Wingate! Certainly a most singular circumstance! Coincidence too! Boulogne--Boulogne!" "Yes, Captain; by the letterin' on her starn the sloop must ha' belonged there; an' _I'm goin' there myself_." "I too, Jack! We shall go together!" Volume Three, Chapter XVI. A STRANGE FATHER CONFESSOR. "He's gone away--given it up! Be glad, madame!" Father Rogier so speaks on entering the drawing-room of Llangorren Court, where Mrs Murdock is seated. "What, Gregoire?"--were her husband present it would be "Pere;" but she is alone--"Who's gone away? And why am I to rejoice?" "_Le Capitaine_." "Ha!" she ejaculates, with a pleased look, showing that the two words have answered all her questions in one. "Are you sure of it? The news seems too good for truth." "It's true, nevertheless; so far as his having gone away. Whether to stay away is another matter. We must hope he will." "I hope it with all my heart." "And well you may, madame; as I myself. We had more to fear from that _chien de chasse_ than all the rest of the pack--ay, have still, unless he's found the scent too cold, and in despair abandoned the pursuit; which I fancy he has, thrown off by that little rock-slide. A lucky chance my having caught him at his reconnaissance; and rather a clever bit of strategy so to baffle him! Wasn't it, _cherie_?" "Superb! The whole thing from beginning to end! You've proved yourself a wonderful man, Gregoire Rogier." "And I hope worthy of Olympe Renault?" "You have." "_Merci_! So far that's satisfactory; and your slave feels he has not been toiling in vain. But there's a good deal more to be done before we can take our ship safe into port. And it must be done quickly, too. I pine to cast off this priestly garb--in which I've been so long miserably masquerading--and enter into the real enjoyments of life. But there's another, and more potent reason, for using despatch; breakers around us, on which we may be wrecked, ruined any day--any hour. Le Capitaine Ryecroft was not, or is not, the only one." "Richard--_le braconnier_--you're thinking of?" "No, no, no! Of him we needn't have the slightest fear. I hold his lips sealed, by a rope around his neck; whose noose I can draw tight at the shortest notice. I am far more apprehensive of Monsieur, _votre mari_!" "In what way?" "More than one; but for one, his tongue. There's no knowing what a drunken man may do or say in his cups; and Monsieur Murdock is hardly ever out of them. Suppose he gets to babbling, and lets drop something about--well, I needn't say what. There's still suspicion abroad--plenty of it,--and like a spark applied to tinder, a word would set it ablaze." "_C'est vrai_!" "Fortunately, Mademoiselle had no very near relatives of the male sex, nor any one much interested in her fate, save the _fiance_ and the other lover--the rustic and rejected one--Shenstone _fils_. Of him we need take no account. Even if suspicious, he hasn't the craft to unravel a clue so cunningly rolled as ours; and for the _ancien hussard_, let us hope he has yielded to despair, and gone back whence he came. Luck too, in his having no intimacies here, or I believe anywhere in the shire of Hereford. Had it been otherwise, we might not so easily have got disembarrassed of him." "And you do think he has gone for good?" "I do; at least it would seem so. On his second return to the hotel--in haste as it was--he had little luggage; and that he has all taken away with him. So I learnt from one of the hotel people, who professes our faith. Further, at the railway station, that he took ticket for London. Of course that means nothing. He may be _en route_ for anywhere beyond--round the globe, if he feel inclined to circumnavigation. And I shall be delighted if he do." He would not be much delighted had he heard at the railway station of what actually occurred--that in getting his ticket Captain Ryecroft had inquired whether he could not be booked through for Boulogne. Still less might Father Rogier have felt gratification to know, that there were two tickets taken for London; a first-class for the Captain himself, and a second for the waterman Wingate--travelling together, though in separate carriages, as befitted their different rank in life. Having heard nothing of this, the sham priest--as he has now acknowledged himself--is jubilant at the thought that another hostile pawn in the game he has been so skilfully playing has disappeared from the chess-board. In short, all have been knocked over, queen, bishops, knights, and castles. Alone the king stands, he tottering; for Lewin Murdock is fast drinking himself to death. It is of him the priest speaks as king:-- "Has he signed the will?" "_Oui_." "When?" "This morning, before he went out. The lawyer who drew it up came, with his clerk to witness--" "I know all that," interrupts the priest, "as I should, having sent them. Let me have a look at the document. You have it in the house, I hope?" "In my hand," she answers, diving into a drawer of the table by which she sits, and drawing forth a folded sheet of parchment; "_Le voila_!" She spreads it out, not to read what is written upon it, only to look at the signatures, and see they are right. Well knows he every word of that will, he himself having dictated it. A testament made by Lewin Murdock, which, at his death, leaves the Llangorren estate--as sole owner and last in tail he having the right so to dispose of it--to his wife Olympe--_nee_ Renault--for her life; then to his children, should there be any surviving; failing such, to Gregoire Rogier, Priest of the Roman Catholic Church; and in the event of his demise preceding that of the other heirs hereinbefore mentioned, the estate, or what remains of it, to become the property of the Convent of --, Boulogne-sur-mer, France. "For that last clause, which is yours, Gregoire, the nuns of Boulogne should be grateful to you, or at all events, the abbess, Lady Superior, or whatever she's called." "So she will," he rejoins with a dry laugh, "when she gets the property so conveyed. Unfortunately for her the reversion is rather distant, and having to pass through so many hands there may be no great deal left of it, on coming into hers. Nay!" he adds in exclamation, his jocular tone suddenly changing to the serious, "if some step be not taken to put a stop to what's going on, there won't be much of the Llangorren estate left for any one--not even for yourself, madame. Under the fingers of Monsieur, with the cards in them, it's being melted down as snow on the sunny side of a hill. Even at this self-same moment it may be going off in large slices--avalanches!" "_Mon Dieu_!" she exclaims, with an alarmed air, quite comprehending the danger thus figuratively portrayed. "I wouldn't be surprised," he continues, "if to-day he were made a thousand pounds the poorer. When I left the Ferry he was in the Welsh Harp, as I was told, tossing sovereigns upon its bar counter, `Heads and tails, who wins?' Not he, you may be sure. No doubt he's now at a gaming-table inside, engaged with that gang of sharpers who have lately got around him, staking large sums on every turn of the cards--Jews' eyes, ponies, and monkeys, as these _chevaliers d'industrie_ facetiously term their money. If we don't bring all this to a termination, that will you have in your hand won't be worth the price of the parchment it's written upon. _Comprenez-vous, cherie_?" "_Parfaitement_! But how is it to be brought to a termination. For myself I haven't an idea. Has any occurred to you, Gregoire?" As the ex-courtesan asks the question, she leans across the little table, and looks the false priest straight in the face. He knows the bent of her inquiry, told it by the tone and manner in which it has been put--both significant of something more than the words might otherwise convey. Still he does not answer it directly. Even between these two fiends in human form, despite their mutual understanding of each other's wickedness, and the little reason either has for concealing it, there is a sort of intuitive reticence upon the matter which is in the minds of both. For it is murder--the murder of Lewin Murdock! "_Le pauvre homme_!" ejaculates the man, with a pretence at compassionating, under the circumstances ludicrous. "The cognac is killin' him, not by inches, but ells; and I don't believe he can last much longer. It seems but a question of weeks; may be only days. Thanks to the school in which I was trained, I have sufficient medical knowledge to prognosticate that." A gleam as of delight passes over the face of the woman--an expression almost demoniacal; for it is a wife hearing this about her husband! "You think only _days_?" she asks, with an eagerness as if apprehensive about that husband's health. But the tone tells different, as the hungry look in her eye while awaiting the answer. Both proclaim she wishes it in the affirmative; as it is. "Only days!" he says, as if his voice were an echo. "Still days count in a thing of this kind--aye, even hours. Who knows but that in a fit of drunken bravado he may stake the whole estate on a single turn of cards or cast of dice? Others have done the like before now--gentlemen grander than he, with titles to their names--rich in one hour, beggars in the next. I can remember more than one." "Ah! so can I." "Englishmen, too; who usually wind up such matters by putting a pistol to their heads, and blowing out their brains. True, Monsieur hasn't any much to blow out; but that isn't a question which affects us--myself as well as you. I've risked everything--reputation, which I care least about, if the affair can be brought to a proper conclusion; but should it fail, then--I need not tell you. What we've done, if known, would soon make us acquainted with the inside of an English gaol. Monsieur, throwing away his money in this reckless fashion must be restrained, or he'll bring ruin to all of us. Therefore some steps must be taken to restrain him, and promptly." "_Vraiment_! I ask you again--have you thought of anything, Gregoire?" He does not make immediate answer, but seems to ponder over, or hang back upon it. When at length given it is itself an interrogation, apparently unconnected with what they have been speaking about. "Would it greatly surprise you, if to-night your husband didn't come home to you?" "Certainly not--in the least. Why should it? It wouldn't be the first time by scores--hundreds--for him to stay all night away from me. Aye, and at that same Welsh Harp, too--many's the night." "To your great annoyance, no doubt; if it did not make you dreadfully jealous?" She breaks out into a laugh, hollow and heartless, as was ever heard in an _allee_ of the Jardin Mabille. When it is ended she adds gravely:-- "The time was when he might have made me so; I may as well admit that. Not now, as you know, Gregoire. Now, instead of feeling annoyed by it, I'd only be too glad to think I should never see his face again. _Le brute ivrogne_!" To this monstrous declaration Rogier laconically rejoins:-- "You may not." Then placing his lips close to her ear, he adds in a whisper, "If all prosper, as planned, _you will not_!" She neither starts, nor seeks to inquire further. She knows he has conceived some scheme to disembarrass her of a husband, she no longer care? for, to both become inconvenient. And from what has gone before, she can rely on Rogier with its execution. Volume Three, Chapter XVII. A QUEER CATECHIST. A boat upon the Wye, being polled upward, between Llangorren Court and Rugg's Ferry. There are two men in it, not Vivian Ryecroft and Jack Wingate, but Gregoire Rogier and Richard Dempsey. The _ci-devant_ poacher is at the oars; for in addition to his new post as gamekeeper, he has occasional charge of a skiff, which has replaced the _Gwendoline_. This same morning he rowed his master up to Rugg's, leaving him there; and now, at night, he is on return to fetch him home. The two places being on opposite sides of the river, and the road round about, besides difficult for wheeled vehicles, Lewin Murdock moreover an indifferent horseman, he prefers the water route, and often takes it, as he has done to-day. It is the same on which Father Rogier held that dialogue of sinister innuendo with Madame, and the priest, aware of the boat having to return to the Ferry, avails himself of a seat in it. Not that he dislikes walking, or is compelled to it. For he now keeps a cob, and does his rounds on horseback. But on this particular day he has left his roadster in its stable, and gone down to Llangorren afoot, knowing there would be the skiff to take him back. No scheme of mere convenience dictated this arrangement to Gregoire Rogier. Instead, one of Satanic wickedness, preconceived, and all settled before holding that _tete-a-tete_ with her he has called "cherie." Though requiring a boat for its execution and an oarsman of a peculiar kind--adroit at something besides the handling of oars--not a word of it has yet been imparted to the one who is rowing him. For all, the ex-poacher, accustomed to the priest's moods, and familiar with his ways, can see there is something unusual in his mind, and that he himself is on the eve of being called upon for some new service or sacrifice. No supply of poached fish or game. Things have gone higher than that, and he anticipates some demand of a more serious nature. Still he has not the most distant idea of what it is to be; though certain interrogatories put to him are evidently leading up to it. The first is-- "You're not afraid of water, are you, Dick?" "Not partickler, your Reverence. Why should I?" "Well, your being so little in the habit of washing your face--if I am right in my reckoning, only once a week--may plead my excuse for asking the question." "Oh, Father Rogier! That wor only in the time past, when I lived alone, and the thing worn't worth while. Now, going more into respectable company, I do a little washin' every day." "I'm glad to hear of your improved habits, and that they keep pace with the promotion you've had. But my inquiry had no reference to your ablutions; rather to your capabilities as a swimmer. If I mistake not, you can swim like a fish?" "No, not equal to a fish. That ain't possible." "An otter, then?" "Somethin' nearer he, if ye like," answers Coracle, laughingly. "I supposed as much. Never mind. About the degree of your natatory powers we needn't dispute. I take it they're sufficient for reaching either bank of this river, supposing the skiff to get capsized and you in it?" "Lor, Father Rogier! That wouldn't be nothin'! I could swim to eyther shore, if 'twor miles off." "But could you as you are now--with clothes on, boots, and everything?" "Sartin could I, and carry weight beside." "That will do," rejoins the questioner, apparently satisfied. Then lapsing into silence, and leaving Dick in a very desert of conjectures why he has been so interrogated. The speechless interregnum is not for long. After a minute or two, Rogier, as if freshly awaking from a reverie, again asks-- "Would it upset this skiff if I were to step on the side of it--I mean bearing upon it with all the weight of my body?" "That would it, your Reverence; though ye be but a light weight; tip it over like a tub." "Quite turn it upside down--as your old truckle, eh?" "Well; not so ready as the truckle. Still 'twould go bottom upward. Though a biggish boat, it be one o' the crankiest kind, and would sure capsize wi' the lightiest o' men standin' on its gunn'l rail." "And surer with a heavier one, as yourself, for instance?" "I shouldn't like to try--your Reverence bein' wi' me in the boat." "How would you like, somebody else being with you in it--_if made worth your while_?" Coracle starts at this question, asked in a tone that makes more intelligible the others preceding it, and which have been hitherto puzzling him. He begins to see the drift of the _sub Jove_ confessional to which he is being submitted. "How'd I like it, your Reverence? Well enough; if, as you say, made worth my while. I don't mind a bit o' a wettin' when there's anythin' to be gained by it. Many's the one I've had on a chilly winter's night, as this same be, all for the sake o' a salmon, I wor 'bleeged to sell at less'n half-price. If only showed the way to earn a honest penny by it, I wouldn't wait for the upsettin' o' the boat, but jump overboard at oncst." "That's game in you, Monsieur Dick. But to earn the honest penny you speak of, the upsetting of the boat might be a necessary condition." "Be it so, your Reverence. I'm willing to fulfil that, if ye only bid me. Maybe," he continues in tone of confidential suggestion, "there be somebody as you think ought to get a duckin' beside myself?" "There is somebody, who ought," rejoins the priest, coming nearer to his point. "Nay, must," he continues, "for if he don't the chances are we shall all go down together, and that soon." Coracle sculls on without questioning. He more than half comprehends the figurative speech, and is confident he will ere long receive complete explanation of it. He is soon led a little way further by the priest observing-- "No doubt, _mon ancien braconnier_, you've been gratified by the change that's of late taken place in your circumstances. But perhaps it hasn't quite satisfied you, and you expect to have something more; as I have the wish you should. And you would ere this, but for one who obstinately sets his face against it." "May I know who that one is, Father Rogier?" "You may, and shall; though I should think you scarce need telling. Without naming names, it's he who will be in this boat with you going back to Llangorren." "I thought so. An' if I an't astray, he be the one your Reverence thinks would not be any the worse o' a wettin'?" "Instead, all the better for it. It may cure him of his evil courses-- drinking, card-playing, and the like. If he's not cured of them by some means, and soon, there won't be an acre left him of the Llangorren lands, nor a shilling in his purse. He'll have to go back to beggary, as at Glyngog; while you, Monsieur Coracle, in place of being head-gamekeeper, with other handsome preferments in prospect, will be compelled to return to your shifty life of poaching, night-netting, and all the etceteras. Would you desire that?" "Daanged if I would! An' won't do it if I can help. Shan't if your Reverence'll only show me the way." "There's but one I can think of." "What may that be, Father Rogier?" "Simply to set your foot on the side of this skiff, and tilt it bottom upwards." "It shall be done. When, and where?" "When you are coming back down. The where you may choose for yourself-- such place as may appear safe and convenient. Only take care you don't drown yourself." "No fear o' that. There an't water in the Wye as'll ever drown Dick Dempsey." "No," jocularly returns the priest; "I don't suppose there is. If it be your fate to perish by asphyxia--as no doubt it is--strong tough hemp, and not weak water, will be the agent employed--that being more appropriate to the life you have led. Ha! ha! ha!" Coracle laughs too, but with the grimace of wolf baying the moon. For the moonlight shining full in his face, shows him not over satisfied with the coarse jest. But remembering how he shifted that treacherous plank bridging the brook at Abergann he silently submits to it. He may not much longer. He, too, is gradually getting his hand upon a lever, which will enable him to have a say in the affairs of Llangorren Court, that they dwelling therein will listen to him, or, like the Philistines of Gaza, have it dragged down about their ears. But the ex-poacher is not yet prepared to enact the _role_ of Samson; and however galling the _jeu d'esprit_ of the priest, he swallows it without showing chagrin, far less speaking it. In truth there is no time for further exchange of speech, at least in the skiff. By this they have arrived at the Rugg's Ferry landing-place, where Father Rogier, getting out, whispers a few words in Coracle's ear, and then goes off. His words were-- "A hundred pounds, Dick, if you do it. Twice that for your doing it adroitly!" Volume Three, Chapter XVIII. ALMOST A "VERT." Major Mahon is standing at one of the front windows of his house waiting for his dinner to be served, when he sees a _fiacre_ driven up to the door, and inside it the face of a friend. He does not stay for the bell to be rung, but with genuine Irish impulsiveness rushes forth, himself opening the door. "Captain Ryecroft!" he exclaims, grasping the new arrival by the hand, and hauling him out of the hackney. "Glad to see you back in Boulogne." Then adding, as he observes a young man leap down from the box where he has had seat beside the driver, "Part of your belongings, isn't he?" "Yes, Major; my old Wye waterman, Jack Wingate, of whom I spoke to you. And if it be convenient to you to quarter both of us for a day or two--" "Don't talk about convenience, and bar all mention of time. The longer you stay with me you'll be conferring the greater favour. Your old room is gaping to receive you; and Murtagh will rig up a berth for your boatman. Murt!" to the ex-Royal Irish, who, hearing the _fracas_, has also come forth, "take charge of Captain Ryecroft's traps, along with Mr Wingate here, and see all safety bestowed. Now, old fellow, step inside. They'll look after the things. You're just in time to do dinner with me. I was about sitting down to it _solus_, awfully lamenting my loneliness. Well; one never knows what luck's in the wind. Rather hard lines for you, however. If I mistake not, my pot's of the poorest this blessed day. But I know you're neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_; and that's some consolation. In!" In go they, leaving the old soldier to settle the _fiacre_ fare, look after the luggage, and extend the hospitalities of the kitchen to Jack Wingate. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Soon as Captain Ryecroft has performed some slight ablutions--necessary after a sea voyage however short--his host hurries him down to the dining-room. When seated at the table, the Major asks-- "What on earth has delayed you, Vivian? You promised to be back in a week at most. Its months now! Despairing of your return, I had some thought of advertising the luggage you left with me, `if not claimed within a certain time, to be sold for the payment of expenses.' Ha! ha!" Ryecroft echoes the laugh; but so faintly, his friend can see the cloud has not yet lifted; instead, lies heavy and dark as ever. In hopes of doing something to dissipate it, the Major rolls on in his rich Hibernian brogue-- "You've just come in time to save your chattels from the hammer. And now I have you here I mean to keep you. So, old boy, make up your mind to an unlimited sojourn in Boulogne-sur-mer. You will, won't you?" "It's very kind of you, Mahon; but that must depend on--" "On what?" "How I prosper in my errand." "Oh! this time you _have_ an errand? Some business?" "I have." "Well, as you had none before, it gives reason to hope that other matters may be also reversed, and instead of shooting off like a comet, you'll play the part of a fixed star; neither to shoot nor be shot at, as looked likely on the last occasion. But speaking seriously, Ryecroft, as you say you're on business, may I know its nature?" "Not only may, but it's meant you should. Nay, more, Mahon; I want your help in it." "That you can count upon, whatever it be--from pitch-and-toss up to manslaughter. Only say how I can serve you." "Well, Major, in the first place I would seek your assistance in some inquiries I am about to make." "Inquiries! Have they regard to that young lady you said was lost-- missing from her home! Surely she has been found?" "She has--found drowned!" "Found drowned! God bless me!" "Yes, Mahon. The home from which she was missing knows her no more. Gwendoline Wynn is now in her long home--in Heaven!" The solemn tone of voice, with the woe-begone expression on the speaker's face, drives all thoughts of hilarity out of the listener's mind. It is a moment too sacred for mirth; and between the two friends, old comrades in arms, for an interval even speech is suspended; only a word of courtesy as the host presses his guest to partake of the viands before them. The Major does not question further, leaving the other to take up the broken thread of the conversation. Which he at length does, holding it in hand, till he has told all that happened since they last sat at that table together. He gives only the facts, reserving his own deductions from them. But Mahon, drawing them for himself, says searchingly-- "Then you have a suspicion there's been what's commonly called foul play?" "More than a suspicion. I'm sure of it." "The devil! But who do you suspect?" "Who should I, but he now in possession of the property--her cousin, Mr Lewin Murdock. Though I've reason to believe there are others mixed up in it; one of them a Frenchman. Indeed, it's chiefly to make inquiry about him I've come over to Boulogne." "A Frenchman. You know his name?" "I do; at least that he goes by on the other side of the Channel. You remember that night as we were passing the back entrance of the convent where your sister's at school, our seeing a carriage there--a hackney, or whatever it was?" "Certainly I do." "And my saying that the man who had just got out of it, and gone inside, resembled a priest I'd seen but a day or two before?" "Of course I remember all that; and my joking you at the time as to the idleness of you fancying a likeness among sheep; where all are so nearly of the same hue--that black. Something of the sort I said. But what's your argument?" "No argument at all, but a conviction, that the man we saw that night was my Herefordshire priest. I've seen him several times since--had a good square look at him--and feel sure 'twas he." "You haven't yet told me his name?" "Rogier--Father Rogier. So he is called upon the Wye." "And, supposing him identified, what follows?" "A great deal follows, or rather depends on his identification." "Explain, Ryecroft. I shall listen with patience." Ryecroft does explain, continuing his narrative into a second chapter, which includes the doings of the Jesuit on Wyeside, so far as known to him; the story of Jack Wingate's love and loss--the last so strangely resembling his own--the steps afterwards taken by the waterman; in short, everything he can think of that will throw light upon the subject. "A strange tale, truly!" observes the Major, after hearing it to the end. "But does your boatman really believe the priest has resuscitated his dead sweetheart and brought her over here with the intention of of shutting her up in a nunnery?" "He does all that; and certainly not without show of reason. Dead or alive, the priest or some one else has taken the girl out of her coffin, and her grave." "'Twould be a wonderful story, if true--I mean the resuscitation, or resurrection; not the mere disinterment of a body. That's possible, and probable where priests of the Jesuitical school are concerned. And so should the other be, when one considers that they can make statues wink, and pictures shed tears. Oh! yes; Ultramontane magicians can do anything!" "But why," asks Ryecroft, "should they have taken all this trouble about a poor girl--the daughter of a small Herefordshire farmer,--with possibly at the most a hundred pounds, or so, for her dowry? That's what mystifies me!" "It needn't," laconically observes the Major. "These Jesuit gentry have often other motives than money for caging such birds in their convents. Was the girl good looking?" he asks after musing a moment. "Well, of myself I never saw her. By Jack's description she must have been a superb creature--on a par with the angels. True, a lover's judgment is not much to be relied on, but I've heard from others, that Miss Morgan was really a rustic belle--something beyond the common." "Faith! and that may account for the whole thing. I know they like their nuns to be nice looking; prefer that stripe; I suppose, for purposes of proselytising, if nothing more. They'd give a good deal to receive the services of my own sister in that way; have been already bidding for her. By Heavens! I'd rather see her laid in her grave!" The Major's strong declaration is followed by a spell of silence; after which, cooling down a little, he continues-- "You've come, then, to inquire into this convent matter, about--what's the girl's name?--ah! Morgan." "More than the convent matter; though it's in the same connection. I've come to learn what can be learnt about this priest; get his character, with his antecedents. And, if possible, obtain some information respecting the past lives of Mr Lewin Murdock and his French wife; for which I may probably go on to Paris, if not further. To sum up everything, I've determined to sift this mystery to the bottom--unravel it to its last thread. I've already commenced unwinding the clue, and made some little progress. But I want one to assist me. Like a lone hunter on a lost trail, I need counsel from a companion--and help too. You'll stand by me, Mahon?" "To the death, my dear boy! I was going to say the last shilling in my purse. As you don't need that, I say, instead, to the last breath in my body!" "You shall be thanked with the last in mine." "I'm sure of that. And now for a drop of the `crayther,' to warm us to our work. Ho! there, Murt! bring in the `matayreals.'" Which Murtagh does, the dinner-dishes having been already removed. Soon as punches have been mixed, the Major returns to the subject, saying-- "Now then; to enter upon particulars. What step do you wish me to take, first?" "First, to find out who Father Rogier is, and what. That is, on this side; I know what he is on the other. If we can but learn his relations with the convent it might give us a key, capable of opening more than one lock." "There won't be much difficulty in doing that, I take it. All the less, from my little sister Kate being a great pet of the Lady Superior, who has hopes of making a nun of her! Not if I know it! Soon as her schooling's completed she walks out of that seminary, and goes to a place where the moral atmosphere is a trifle purer. You see, old fellow, I'm not very bigoted about our Holy Faith, and in some danger of becoming a `vert.' As for my sister, were it not for a bit of a legacy left on condition of her being educated in a convent, she'd never have seen the inside of one, with my consent; and never will again when out of this one. But money's money; and though the legacy isn't a large one, for her sake I couldn't afford to forfeit it. You comprehend?" "Quite. And you think she will be able to obtain the information, without in any way compromising herself?" "Pretty sure of it. Kate's no simpleton, though she be but a child in years. She'll manage it for me, with the instructions I mean giving her. After all, it may not be so much trouble. In these nunneries, things which are secrets to the world without, are known to every mother's child of them--nuns and novices alike. Gossip's the chief occupation of their lives. If there's been an occurrence such as you speak of--a new bird caged there--above all an English one--it's sure to have got wind--that is inside the walls. And I can trust Kate to catch the breath, and blow it outside. So, Vivian, old boy, drink your toddy, and take things coolly. I think I can promise you that, before many days, or it may be only hours, you shall know whether such a priest as you speak of, be in the habit of coming to that convent; and if so, what for, when he was there last, and everything about the reverend gentleman worth knowing." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kate Mahon proves equal to the occasion; showing herself quick witted, as her brother boasted her to be. On the third day after, she is able to report to him; that some time previously, how long not exactly known, a young English girl came to the convent, brought thither by a priest named Rogier. The girl is a candidate for the Holy Sisterhood--voluntary of course--to take the veil, soon as her probation be completed. Miss Mahon has not seen the new novice; only heard of her as being a great beauty; for personal charms make noise even in a nunnery. Nor have any of the other _pensionnaires_ been permitted to see or speak with her. All they as yet know is, that she is a blonde, with yellow hair--a grand wealth of it--and goes by the name of "Soeur Marie." "Sister Mary!" exclaims Jack Wingate, as Ryecroft at second-hand communicates the intelligence--at the same time translating the "Soeur Marie." "It's Mary Morgan--my Mary! An' by the Heavens of Mercy," he adds, his arms angrily thrashing the air, "she shall come out o' that convent, or I'll lay my life down at its door." Volume Three, Chapter XIX. THE LAST OF LEWIN MURDOCK. Once more a boat upon the Wye, passing between Rugg's Ferry and Llangorren Court, but this time descending. It is the same boat, and as before with two men in it; though they are not both the same who went up. One of them is--Coracle Dick, still at the oars; while Father Rogier's place in the stern is now occupied by another; not sitting upright as was the priest, but lying along the bottom timbers with head coggled over, and somewhat uncomfortably supported by the thwart. This man is Lewin Murdock, in a state of helpless inebriety--in common parlance, drunk. He has been brought to the boat landing by the landlord of the "Welsh Harp," where he has been all day carousing; and delivered to Dempsey, who now at a late hour of the night is conveying him homeward. His hat is down by his feet, instead of upon his head; and the moonbeams, falling unobstructed on his face, show it of a sickly whitish hue; while his eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, have each a demi-lune of dark purplish colour underneath. But for an occasional twitching of the facial muscles, with a spasmodic movement of the lips, and at intervals, a raucous noise through his nostrils, he might pass for dead, as readily as dead drunk. Verily, is the priest's prognosis based upon reliable data; for by the symptoms now displayed Lewin Murdock is doing his best to destroy himself--drinking suicidally! For all, he is not destined thus to die. His end will come even sooner, and it may be easier. It is not distant now, but ominously near, as may be told by looking into the eyes of the man who sits opposite, and recalling the conversation late exchanged between him and Father Rogier. For in those dark orbs a fierce light scintillates, such as is seen in the eyes of the assassin contemplating assassination, or the jungle tiger when within springing distance of its prey. Nothing of all this sees the sot, but lies unconscious, every now and then giving out a snore, regardless of danger, as though everything around were innocent as the pale moonbeams shimmering down upon his cadaverous cheeks. Possibly he is dreaming, and if so, in all likelihood it is of a grand gas-lighted _salon_, with tables of _tapis vert_, carrying packs of playing cards, dice cubes, and ivory counters. Or the _mise en scene_ of his visionary vagaries may be a drinking saloon, where he carouses with boon companions, their gambling limited to a simple tossing of odd and even, "heads or tails." But if dreaming at all, it is not of what is near him. Else, far gone as he is, he would be aroused--instinctively--to make a last struggle for life. For the thing so near is death! The fiend who sits regarding him in this helpless condition--as it were holding Lewin Murdock's life, or the little left of it, in his hand--has unquestionably determined upon taking it. Why he does not do so at once is not because he is restrained by any motive of mercy, or reluctance to the spilling of blood. The heart of the _ci-devant_ poacher, counterfeiter, and cracksman, has been long ago steeled against such silly and sensitive scruples. The postponement of his hellish purpose is due to a mere question of convenience. He dislikes the idea of having to trudge over miles of meadow in dripping garments! True, he could drown the drunken man, and keep himself dry--every stitch. But that would not do. For there will be another coroner's inquest, at which he will have to be present. He has escaped the two preceding; but at this he will be surely called upon, and as principal witness. Therefore he must be able to say he was wet, and prove it as well. Into the river, then, will he go, along with his victim; though there is no need for his taking the plunge till he has got nearer to Llangorren. So ingeniously contriving, he sits with arms mechanically working the oars; his eyes upon the doomed man, as those of a cat having a crippled mouse within easy reach of her claws, at any moment to be drawn in and destroyed! Silently, but rapidly, he rows on, needing no steerer. Between Rugg's Ferry and Llangorren Court he is as familiar with the river's channel as a coachman with the carriage-drive to and from his master's mansion; knows its every curve and crook, every purl and pool, having explored them while paddling his little "truckle." And now, sculling the larger craft, it is all the same. And he pulls on, without once looking over his shoulder; his eyes alone given to what is directly in front of him; Lewin Murdock lying motionless at his feet. As if himself moved by a sudden impulse--impatience, or the thought it might be as well to have the dangerous work over--he ceases pulling, and acts as though he were about to unship the oars. But again he seems suddenly to change his intention; on observing a white fleck by the river's edge, which he knows to be the lime-washed walls of the widow Wingate's cottage, at the same time remembering that the main road passes by it. What if there be some one on the road, or the river's bank, and be seen in the act of capsizing his own boat? True, it is after midnight, and not likely any one abroad--even the latest wayfarer. But there might be; and in such clear moonlight his every movement could be made out. That place will not do for the deed of darkness he is contemplating; and he trembles to think how near he has been to committing himself! Thus warned to the taking of precautions hitherto not thought of, he proceeds onward; summoning up before his mind the different turns and reaches of the river, all the while mentally anathematising the moon. For, besides convenience of place, time begins to press, even trouble him, as he recalls the proverb of the cup and the lip. He is growing nervously impatient--almost apprehensive of failure, through fear of being seen--when rounding a bend he has before him the very thing he is in search of--the place itself. It is a short straight reach, where the channel is narrow, with high banks on both sides, and trees overhanging, whose shadows meeting across shut off the hated light, shrouding the whole water surface in deep obscurity. It is but a little way above the lone farm-house of Abergann, and the mouth of the brook which there runs in. But Coracle Dick is not thinking of either; only of the place being appropriate for his diabolical design. And, becoming satisfied it is so, he delays no longer, but sets about its execution--carrying it out with an adroitness which should fairly entitle him to the double reward promised by the priest. Having unshipped the oars, he starts to his feet; and mounting upon the thwart, there for a second or two stands poised and balancing. Then, stepping to the side, he sets foot on the gunwale rail with his whole body's weight borne upon it. In an instant over goes the boat, careening bottom upwards, and spilling Lewin Murdock, as himself, into the mad surging river! The drunken man goes down like a lump of lead; possibly without pain, or the consciousness of being drowned; only supposing it the continuation of his dream! Satisfied he has gone down, the assassin cares not how. He has enough to think of in saving himself, enough to do swimming in his clothes, even to the boots. He reaches the bank, nevertheless, and climbs up it, exhausted; shivering like a water spaniel, for snow has fallen on Plinlimmon, and its thaw has to do with the freshet in the stream. But the chill of the Wye's water is nought compared with that sent through his flesh, to the very marrow of his bones, on discovering he has crawled out upon the spot--the self-same spot--where the waves gave back another body he had consigned to them--that of Mary Morgan! For a moment he stands horror-struck, with hair on end. The blood curdling in his veins. Then, nerving himself to the effort, he hitches up his dripping trousers, and hurries away from the accursed place--by himself accursed--taking the direction of Llangorren, but giving a wide berth to Abergann. He has no fear of approaching the former in wet garments; instead knows that in this guise he will be all the more warmly welcomed--as he is! Mrs Murdock sits up late for Lewin--though with little expectation of his coming home. Looking out of the window, in the moonlight she sees a man, who comes striding across the carriage sweep, and up into the portico. Rushing to the door to receive him, she exclaims in counterfeit surprise-- "You, Monsieur Richard! Not my husband!" When Coracle Dick has told his sad tale, shaped to suit the circumstances, her half-hysterical ejaculation might be supposed a cry of distress. Instead, it is one of ecstatic delight, she is unable to restrain, at knowing herself now sole owner of the house over her head, and the land for miles around it! Volume Three, Chapter XX. A CHAPTER DIPLOMATIC. Another day has dawned, another sun set upon Boulogne; and Major Mahon is again in his dining-room, with Captain Ryecroft, his sole guest. The cloth has been removed, the Major's favourite after-dinner beverage brought upon the table, and, with punches "brewed" and cigars set alight, they have commenced conversation upon the incidents of the day-- those especially relating to Ryecroft's business in Boulogne. The Major has had another interview with his sister--a short one, snatched while she was out with her school companions for afternoon promenade. It has added some further particulars to those they had already learnt, both about the English girl confined within the nunnery and the priest who conveyed her thither. That the latter was Father Rogier is placed beyond a doubt by a minute description of his person given to Miss Mahon, well known to the individual who gave it. To the nuns within that convent the man's name is familiar--even to his baptismal appellation, Gregoire; for although the Major has pronounced all the sacerdotal fraternity alike, in being black, this particular member of it is of a shade deeper than common--a circumstance of itself going a good way towards his identification. Even within that sacred precinct where he is admitted, a taint attaches to him; though what its nature the young lady has not yet been able to ascertain. The information thus obtained tallies with the estimate of the priest's character, already formed; in correspondence, too, with the theory that he is capable of the crime Captain Ryecroft believes him to have abetted, if not actually committed. Nor is it contradicted by the fact of his being a frequent visitor to the nunnery, and a favourite with the administration thereof; indeed an intimate friend of the Abbess herself. Something more, in a way accounting for all: that the new novice is not the first _agneau d'Angleterre_ he has brought over to Boulogne, and guided into that same fold, more than one of them having ample means, not only to provision themselves, but a surplus for the support of the general sisterhood. There is no word about any of these English lambs having been other than voluntary additions to the French flock; but a whisper circulates within the convent walls, that Father Rogier's latest contribution is a recusant, and if she ever become a nun it will be a _forced_ one; that the thing is _contre coeur_--in short, she protests against it. Jack Wingate can well believe that; still under full conviction that "Soeur Marie" is Mary Morgan; and, despite all its grotesque strangeness and wild improbability, Captain Ryecroft has pretty nearly come to the same conclusion; while the Major, with less knowledge of antecedent circumstances, but more of nunneries, never much doubted it. "About the best way to get the girl out. What's your idea, Mahon?" Ryecroft asks the question in no careless or indifferent way; on the contrary, with a feeling earnestness. For, although the daughter of the Wyeside farmer is nought to him, the Wye waterman is; and he has determined on seeing the latter through--to the end of the mysterious affair. In difficulties Jack Wingate has stood by him, and he will stand by Jack, _coute-qui-coute_. Besides, figuratively speaking, they are still in the same boat. For if Wingate's dead sweetheart, so strangely returned to life, can be also restored to liberty, the chances are she may be the very one wanted to throw light on the other and alas! surer death. Therefore, Captain Ryecroft is not all unselfish in backing up his boatman; nor, as he puts the question, being anxious about the answer. "We'll have to use strategy," returns the Major; not immediately, but after taking a grand gulp out of his tumbler, and a vigorous draw at his _regalia_. "But why should we?" impatiently demands the Captain. "If the girl have been forced in there, and's kept against her will--which by all the probabilities she is--surely she can be got out, on demand being made by her friends?" "That's just what isn't sure--though the demand were made by her own mother, with the father to back it. You forget, old fellow, that you're in France, not England." "But there's a British Consul in Boulogne." "Aye, and a British Foreign Minister, who gives that Consul his instructions; with some queer ideas besides, neither creditable to himself nor his country. I'm speaking of that jaunty diplomat--the `judicious bottle-holder,' who is accustomed to cajole the British public with his blarney about `Civis Romanus sum.'" "True, but does that bear upon our affair?" "It does--almost directly." "In what way? I do not comprehend." "Because you're not up to what's passing over here--I mean at headquarters--the Tuilleries, or St. Cloud, if you prefer it. There the man--if man he can be called--is ruled by the woman; she in her turn the devoted partisan of Pio Nono and the unprincipled Antonelli." "I can understand all that; still I don't quite see its application, or how the English Foreign Minister can be interested in those you allude to?" "I do. But for him, not one of the four worthies spoken of would be figuring as they are. In all probability France would still be a republic instead of an empire, wicked as the world ever saw; and Rome another republic--it maybe all Italy--with either Mazzini or Garibaldi at its head. For, certain as you sit there, old boy, it was the judicious bottle-holder who hoisted Nap into an imperial throne, over that Presidential chair, so ungratefully spurned--scurvily kicked behind after it had served his purpose. A fact of which the English people appear to be yet in purblind ignorance! As they are of another, equally notable, and alike misunderstood: that it was this same _civis Romanus sum_ who restored old Pio to his apostolic chair; those red-breeched ruffians, the Zouaves, being but so much dust thrown into people's eyes--a bone to keep the British bull-dog quiet. He would have growled then, and will yet, when he comes to understand all these transactions; when the cloak of that scoundrelly diplomacy which screens them has rotted into shreds, letting the light of true history shine upon them." "Why, Mahon! I never knew you were such a politician! Much less such a Radical!" "Nothing much of either, old fellow. Only a man who hates tyranny in every shape and form--whether religious or political. Above all, that which owes its existence to the cheapest--the very shabbiest chicanery the world was ever bamboozled with. I like open dealing in all things." "But you are not recommending it, now--in this little convent matter?" "All! that's quite a different affair! There are certain ends that justify certain means--when the Devil must be fought with his own weapons. Ours is of that kind, and we must either use strategy, or give the thing up altogether. By open measures there wouldn't be the slightest chance of our getting this girl out of the convent's clutches. Even then we may fail; but, if successful, it will only be by great craft, some luck, and possibly a good deal of time spent before we accomplish our purpose." "Poor fellow!" rejoins Ryecroft, speaking of the Wye waterman, "he won't like the idea of long waiting. He's madly, terribly impatient. This afternoon as we were passing the Convent I had a difficulty to restrain him from rushing up to its door, ringing the bell, and demanding an interview with the `Soeur Marie'--having his Mary, as he calls her, restored to him on the instant." "It's well you succeeded in hindering that little bit of rashness. Had he done so, 'twould have ended not only in the door being slammed in his face, but another door shut behind his back--that of a gaol; from which he would never have issued till embarking on a voyage to New Caledonia or Cayenne. Aye, both of you might have been so served. For would you believe it Ryecroft, that you, an officer of the boasted H.B.R.A.; rich, and with powerful friends--even you could be not only here imprisoned, but _deporte_, without any one who has interest in you being the wiser; or, if so, having no power to prevent it. France, under the regime of Napoleon le Petit, is not so very different from what it was under the rule of Louis le Grand, and _lettres de cachet_ are now rife as then. Nay, more of them now written, consigning men to a hundred Bastilles instead of one. Never was a people so enslaved as these Johnny Crapauds are at this present time; not only their speech fettered, but their very thoughts held in bondage, or so constrained, they may not impart them to one another. Even intimate friends forbear exchanging confidences, lest one prove false to the other! Nothing free but insincerity and sin; both fostered and encouraged from that knowledge intuitive among tyrants; that wickedness weakens a people, making them easier to rule and ride over. So, my boy, you perceive the necessity of our acting with caution in this business, whatever trouble or time it may take-- don't you?" "I do." "After all," pursues the Major, "it seems to me that time isn't of so much consequence. As regards the girl, they're not going to eat her up. And for the other matters concerning yourself, they'll keep, too. As you say, the scent's become cold; and a few days more or less can't make any difference. Beside, the trails we intend following may in the end all run into one. I shouldn't be at all surprised if this captive damsel has come to the knowledge of something connected with the other affair. Faith, that may be the very reason for their having her conveyed over here, to be cooped up for the rest of her life. In any case, the fact of her abduction, in such an odd outrageous way, would of itself be damning collateral evidence against whoever has done it, showing him or them good for anything. So, the first work on our hands, as the surest, is to get the waterman's sweetheart out of the convent, and safe back to her home in Herefordshire. "That's our course, clearly. But have you any thoughts as to how we should proceed?" "I have; more than thoughts--hopes of success--and sanguine ones." "Good! I'm glad to hear it. Upon what do you base them?" "On that very near relative of mine--Sister Kate. As I've told you, she's a pet of the Lady Superior; admitted into the very _arcana_ of the establishment. And with such privilege, if she can't find a way to communicate with any one therein closeted, she must have lost the mother wit born to her, and brought thither from the `brightest gem of the say.' I don't think she has, or that it's been a bit blunted in Boulogne. Instead, somewhat sharpened by communion with these Holy Sisters; and I've no fear but that 'twill be sharp enough to serve us in the little scheme I've in part sketched out." "Let me hear it, Mahon?" "Kate must obtain an interview with the English girl; or, enough if she can slip a note into her hand. That would go some way towards getting her out--by giving her intimation that friends are near." "I see what you mean," rejoins the Captain, pulling away at his cigar, the other left to finish giving details of the plan he has been mentally projecting. "We'll have to do a little bit of burglary, combined with abduction. Serve them out in their own coin; as it were hoisting the priest on his own petard!" "It will be difficult, I fear." "Of course it will; and dangerous. Likely more the last than the first. But it'll have to be done; else we may drop the thing entirely." "Never, Mahon! No matter what the danger, I for one am willing to risk it. And we can reckon on Jack Wingate. He'll be only too ready to rush into it." "Ah! there might be more danger through his rashness. But it must be held in check. After all, I don't apprehend so much difficulty if things be dexterously managed. Fortunately there's a circumstance in our favour." "What is it?" "A window." "Ah! Where?" "In the Convent of course. That which gives light--not much of it either--to the cloister where the girl is confined. By a lucky chance my sister has learnt the particular one, and seen the window from the outside. It looks over the grounds where the nuns take recreation, now and then allowed intercourse with the school girls. She says it's high up, but not higher than the top of the garden wall; so a ladder that will enable us to scale the one should be long enough to reach the other. I'm more dubious about the dimensions of the window itself. Kate describes it as only a small affair, with an upright bar in the middle--iron, she believes. Wood or iron, we may manage to remove that; but if the Herefordshire bacon has made your farmer's daughter too big to screw herself through the aperture, then it'll be all up a tree with us. However, we must find out before making the attempt to extract her. From what sister has told me, I fancy we can see the window from the Ramparts above. If so, we may make a distant measurement of it by guess work. Now," continues the Major, coming to his programme of action, "what's got to be done first is that your Wye boatman write a billet doux to his old sweetheart--in the terms I shall dictate to him. Then my sister must contrive, in some way, to put it in the girl's hands, or see that she gets it." "And what after?" "Well, nothing much after; only that we must make preparations for the appointment the waterman will make in his epistle." "It may as well be written now--may it not?" "Certainly; I was just thinking of that. The sooner the better. Shall I call him in?" "Do as you think proper, Mahon. I trust everything to you." The Major, rising, rings a bell; which brings Murtagh to the dining-room door. "Murt, tell your guest in the kitchen, we wish a word with him." The face of the Irish soldier vanishes from view, soon after replaced by that of the Welsh waterman. "Step inside, Wingate!" says the Captain; which the other does, and remains standing to hear what the word was wanted. "You can write, Jack--can't you?" It is Ryecroft who puts the inquiry. "Well, Captain; I ain't much o' a penman; but I can scribble a sort o' rough hand after a fashion." "A fair enough hand for Mary Morgan to read it, I dare say." "Oh, sir, I only weesh there wor a chance o' her gettin' a letter from me!" "There is a chance. I think we can promise that. If you'll take this pen and put down what my friend Major Mahon dictates to you, it will in all probability be in her hands ere long." Never was pen more eagerly laid hold of than that offered to Jack Wingate. Then, sitting down to the table as directed, he waits to be told what he is to write. The Major, bent over him, seems cogitating what it should be. Not so, however. Instead, he is occupied with an astronomical problem which is puzzling him. For its solution he appeals to Ryecroft, asking:-- "How about the moon?" "The moon?" "Yes. Which quarter is she in? For the life of me, I can't tell." "Nor I," rejoins the Captain. "I never think of such a thing." "She's in her last," puts in the boatman, accustomed to take note of lunar changes. "It be an old moon now shining all the night, when the sky an't clouded." "You're right, Jack!" says Ryecroft. "Now I remember; it is the old moon." "In which case," adds the Major, "we must wait for the new one. We want darkness after midnight--must have it--else we cannot act. Let me see; when will that be?" "The day week," promptly responds the waterman. "Then she'll be goin' down, most as soon as the sun's self." "That'll do," says the Major. "Now to the pen!" Squaring himself to the table, and the sheet of paper spread before him, Wingate writes to dictation. No words of love, but what inspires him with a hope he may once more speak such in the ears of his beloved Mary! Volume Three, Chapter XXI. A QUICK CONVERSION. "When is this horror to have an end? Only with my life? Am I, indeed, to pass the remainder of my days within this dismal cell? Days so happy, till that the happiest of all--its ill-starred night! And my love so strong, so confident--its reward seeming so nigh--all to be for nought--sweet dreams and bright hopes suddenly, cruelly extinguished! Nothing but darkness now; within my heart, in this gloomy place, everywhere around me! Oh, it is agony! When will it be over?" It is the English girl who thus bemoans her fate--still confined in the convent, and the same cloister. Herself changed, however. Though but a few weeks have passed, the roses of her cheeks have become lilies, her lips wan, her features of sharper outline, the eyes retired in their sockets, with a look of woe unspeakable. Her form, too, has fallen away from the full ripe rounding that characterised it, though the wreck is concealed by a loose drapery of ample folds. For Soeur Marie now wears the garb of the Holy Sisterhood--hating it, as her words show. She is seated on the pallet's edge while giving utterance to her sombre soliloquy; and without change of attitude continues it:-- "Imprisoned I am--that certain! And for no crime. It may be without hostility on the part of those who have done it. Perhaps, better it were so? Then there might be hope of my captivity coming to an end. As it is, there is none--none! I comprehend all now--the reason for bringing me here--keeping me--everything. And that reason remains-- must, as long as I am alive! Merciful heaven!" The exclamatory phrase is almost a shriek; despair sweeping through her soul, as she thinks of why she is there shut up. For hingeing upon that is the hopelessness, almost a dead, drear certainty, she will never have deliverance! Stunned by the terrible reflection, she pauses--even thought for the time stayed. But the throe passing, she again pursues her soliloquy, now in more conjectural strain:-- "Strange that no friend has come after me? No one caring for my fate-- even to inquire! And _he_--no, that is not strange--only sadder, harder to think of. How could I expect, or hope, he would? "But surely it is not so? I may be wronging them all--friends-- relatives--even him? They may not know where I am? Cannot! How could they? I know not myself! Only that it is France, and in a nunnery. But what part of France, and how I came to it, likely they are ignorant as I. "And they may never know! Never find out! If not, oh! what is to become of me? Father in Heaven! Merciful Saviour! help me in my helplessness!" After this frenzied outburst a calmer interval succeeds; in which human instincts as thoughts direct her. She thinks:-- "If I could but find means to communicate with my friends--make known to them where I am, and how, then--Ah! 'tis hopeless. No one allowed near me but the attendant and that Sister Ursule. For compassion from either, I might just as well make appeal to the stones of the floor! The Sister seems to take delight in torturing me--every day doing or saying some disagreeable thing. I suppose, to humble, break, bring me to her purpose--that the taking of the veil. A nun! Never! It is not in my nature, and I would rather die than dissemble it!" "Dissemble!" she repeats in a different accent. "That word helps me to a thought. Why should I not dissemble? I _will_." Thus emphatically pronouncing, she springs to her feet, the expression of her features changing suddenly as her attitude. Then paces the floor to and fro, with hands clasped across her forehead, the white attenuated fingers writhingly entwined in her hair. "They want me to take the veil--the _black_ one! So shall I; the blackest in all the convent's wardrobe if they wish it--aye, crape if they insist on it? Yes, I am resigned now--to that--anything. They can prepare the robes, vestments, all the adornments of their detested mummery; I am prepared, willing, to put them on. It's the only way--my only hope of regaining liberty. I see--am sure of it!" She pauses, as if still but half resolved, then goes on-- "I am compelled to this deception! Is it a sin? If so, God forgive me! But no--it cannot be! 'Tis justified by my wrongs--my sufferings!" Another and longer pause, during which she seems profoundly to reflect. After it--saying: "I shall do so--pretend compliance. And begin this day--this very hour, if the opportunity arise. What should be my first pretence? I must think of it; practice, rehearse it. Let me see. Ah! I have it. The world has forsaken, forgotten me. Why then should I cling to it! Instead, why not in angry spite fling it off--as it has me. That's the way!" A creaking at the cloister door tells of its key turning in the lock. Slight as is the sound, it acts on her as an electric shock, suddenly and altogether changing the cast of her countenance. The instant before half angry, half sad, it is now a picture of pious resignation! Her attitude different also. From striding tragically over the floor she has taken a seat, with a book in her hand, which she seems industriously perusing. It is that "Aid to Faith" recommended, but hitherto unread. She is to all appearance so absorbed in its pages as not to notice the opening of the door, nor the footsteps of one entering. How natural her start, as she hears a voice, and looking up beholds Soeur Ursule! "Ah!" ejaculates the latter, with an exultant air, as of a spider that sees a fly upon the edge of its web, "Glad, Marie, to find you so employed! It promises well, both for the peace of your mind and the good of your soul. You've been foolishly lamenting the world left behind: wickedly too. What is to compare with that to come? As dross-dirt, to gold or diamonds! The book you hold in your hand will tell you so. Doesn't it?" "It does, indeed." "Then profit by its instructions; and be sorry you have not sooner taken counsel from it." "I am sorry, sister Ursule." "It would have comforted you--will now." "It has already. Ah! so much! I would not have believed any book could give me the view of life it has done. I begin to understand what you've been telling me--to see the vanities of this earthly existence, how poor and empty they are in comparison with the bright joys of that other life. Oh! why did I not know it before?" At this moment a singular tableau is exhibited within that Convent cell--two female figures, one seated, the other standing--novice and nun; the former fair and young, the latter ugly as old. And still in greater contrast, the expression upon their faces. That of the girl's downcast, demure, lids over the eyes less as if in innocence than repentant of some sin, while the glances of the woman show pleased surprise, struggling against incredulity! Her suspicion still in the ascendant, Soeur Ursule stands regarding the disciple, so suddenly converted, with a look which seems to penetrate her very soul. It is borne without sign of quailing, and she at length comes to believe the penitence sincere, and that her proselytising powers have not been exerted in vain. Nor is it strange she should so deceive herself. It is far from being the first novice _contre coeur_ she has broken upon the wheel of despair and made content to taking a vow of life-long seclusion from the world. Convinced she has subdued the proud spirit of the English girl, and gloating over a conquest she knows will bring substantial reward to herself, she exclaims prayerfully, in mock pious tone: "Blessed be Holy Mary for this new mercy! On your knees _ma fille_, and pray to her to complete the work she has begun!" And upon her knees drops the novice, while the nun as if deeming herself _de trop_ in the presence of prayer, slips out of the cloister, silently shutting the door. Volume Three, Chapter XXII. A SUDDEN RELAPSE. For some time after the exit of Soeur Ursule, the English girl retains her seat, with the same demure look she had worn in the presence of the nun; while before her face the book is again open, as though she had returned to reading it. One seeing this might suppose her intensely interested in its contents. But she is not even thinking of them! Instead, of a sharp skinny ear, and a steel grey eye--one or other of which she suspects to be covering the keyhole. Her own ear is on the alert to catch sounds outside--the shuffling of feet, the rattle of rosary beads, or the swishing of a dress against the door. She hears none; and at length satisfied that Sister Ursule's suspicions are spent, or her patience exhausted, she draws a free breath--the first since the _seance_ commenced. Then rising to her feet, she steps to a corner of the cell, not commanded by the keyhole; and there dashes the hook down, as though it had been burning her fingers! "My first scene of deception," she mutters to herself--"first act of hypocrisy. Have I not played it to perfection?" She draws a chair into the angle, and sits down upon it. For she is still not quite sure that the spying eye has been withdrawn from the aperture, or whether it may not have returned to it. "Now that I've made a beginning," she murmurs on, "I must think what's to be done in continuance; and how the false pretence is to be kept up. What will _they_ do?--and think? They'll be suspicious for a while, no doubt; look sharply after me, as ever! But that cannot last always; and surely they won't doom me to dwell for ever in this dingy hole. When I've proved my conversion real, by penance, obedience, and the like, I may secure their confidence, and by way of reward, get transferred to a more comfortable chamber. Ah! little care I for the comfort, if convenient,--with a window out of which one could look. Then I might have a hope of seeing--speaking to some one--with heart less hard than Sister Ursule's, and that other creature--a very hag!" "I wonder where the place is? Whether in the country, or in a town among houses? It may be the last--in the very heart of a great city, for all this death-like stillness! They build these religious prisons with walls so thick! And the voices, I from time to time hear, are all women's. Not one of a man amongst them! They must be the Convent people themselves! Nuns and novices! Myself one of the latter! Ha! ha! I shouldn't have known it if Sister Ursule hadn't informed me. Novice, indeed--soon to be a nun! No! but a free woman--or dead! Death would be better than life like this!" The derisive smile that for a moment played upon her features passes off, replaced by the same forlorn woe-begone look, as despair comes back to her heart. For she again recalls what she has read in books--very different from that so contemptuously tossed aside--of girls, young and beautiful as herself--high-born ladies--surreptitiously taken from their homes--shut up as she--never more permitted to look on the sun's light, or bask in its beams, save within the gloomy cloisters of a convent, or its dismally shadowed grounds. The prospect of such future for herself appals her, eliciting an anguished sigh--almost a groan. "Ha!" she exclaims the instant after, and again with altered air, as though something had arisen to relieve her. "There are voices now! Still of women! Laughter! How strange it sounds! So sweet! I've not heard such since I've been here. It's the voice of a girl? It must be--so clear, so joyous. Yes! Surely it cannot come from any of the sisters? They are never joyful--never laugh." She remains listening, soon to hear the laughter again, a second voice joining in it, both with the cheery ring of school girls at play. The sound comes in with the light--it could not well enter otherwise--and aware of this, she stands facing that way, with eyes turned upward. For the window is far above her head. "Would that I could see out! If I only had something on which to stand!" She sweeps the cell with her eyes, to see only the pallet, the frail chairs, a little table with slender legs, and a washstand--all too low. Standing upon the highest, her eyes would still be under the level of the sill. She is about giving it up, when an artifice suggests itself. With wits sharpened, rather than dulled by her long confinement--she bethinks her of a plan, by which she may at least look out of the window. She can do that by upending the bedstead! Rash she would raise it on the instant. But she is not so; instead considerate, more than ever cautious. And so proceeding, she first places a chair against the door in such position that its back blocks the keyhole. Then, dragging bed clothes, mattress, and all to the floor, she takes hold of the wooden framework; and, exerting her whole strength, hoists it on end, tilted like a ladder against the wall. And as such it will answer her purpose, the strong webbing, crossed and stayed, to serve for steps. A moment more, and she has mounted up, and stands, her chin resting on the window's ledge. The window itself is a casement on hinges; one of those antique affairs, iron framed, with the panes set in lead. Small, though big enough for a human body to pass through, but for an upright bar centrally bisecting it. She balancing upon the bedstead, and looking out, thinks not of the bar now, nor takes note of the dimensions of the aperture. Her thoughts, as her glances, are all given to what she sees outside. At the first _coup d'oeil_, the roofs and chimneys of houses, with all their appurtenances of patent smoke-curers, weathercocks, and lightning conductors; among them domes and spires, showing it a town with several churches. Dropping her eyes lower they rest upon a garden, or rather a strip of ornamental grounds, tree shaded, with walks, arbours, and seats, girt by a grey massive wall, high almost as the houses. At a glance she takes in these inanimate objects; but does not dwell on any of them. For, soon as looking below, her attention becomes occupied with living forms, standing in groups, or in twos or threes strolling about the grounds. They are all women, and of every age; most of them wearing the garb of the nunnery, loose flowing robes of sombre hue. A few, however, are dressed in the ordinary fashion of young ladies at a boarding school; and such they are--the _pensionnaires_ of the establishment. Her eyes wandering from group to group, after a time become fixed upon two of the school girls; who linked arm in arm are walking backward and forward, directly in front. Why she particularly notices them, is that one of the two is acting in a singular manner; every time she passes under the window looking up to it, as though with a knowledge of something inside in which she feels an interest! Her glances interrogative, are at the same time evidently snatched by stealth--as in fear of being observed by the others. Even her promenading companion seems unaware of them. She inside the cloister, soon as her first surprise is over, regards this young lady with a fixed stare, forgetting all the others. "What can it mean?" she asks herself. "So unlike the rest! Surely not French! Can she be English? She is very--very beautiful!" The last, at least, is true, for the girl is, indeed, a beautiful creature, with features quite different from those around--all of them being of the French facial type, while hers are pronouncedly Irish. By this the two are once more opposite the window, and the girl again looking up, sees behind the glass--dim with dust and spiders' webs--a pale face, with a pair of bright eyes gazing steadfastly at her. She starts; but quickly recovering, keeps on as before. Then as she faces round at the end of the walk, still within view of the window, she raises her hand, with a finger laid upon her lips, seeming to say, plain as words could speak it-- "Keep quiet! I know all about you, and why you are there." The gesture is not lost upon the captive. But before she can reflect upon its significance the great convent bell breaks forth in noisy clangour, causing a flutter among the figures outside, with a scattering helter skelter. For it is the first summons to vespers, soon followed by the tinier tinkle of the _angelus_. In a few seconds the grounds are deserted by all save one--the schoolgirl with the Irish features and eyes. She, having let go her companion's arm, and lingering behind the rest, makes a quick slant towards the window she has been watching; as she approaches it significantly exposing something white, she holds half hidden between her fingers! It needs no further gesture to make known her intent. The English girl has already guessed it, as told by the iron casement grating back on its rusty hinges, and left standing ajar. On the instant of its opening the white object parts from the hand that has been holding it, and like a flash of light passes through into the darksome cell, falling with a thud upon the floor. Not a word goes with it; for she who has shown such dexterity, soon as delivering the missile, glides away; so speedily she is still in time to join the _queue_ moving on towards the convent chapel. Cautiously reclosing the window, Soeur Marie descends the steps of her improvised ladder, and takes up the thing that had been tossed in; which she finds to be a letter shotted inside! Despite her burning impatience she does not open it, till after restoring the bedstead to the horizontal, and replacing all as before. For now, as ever, she has need to be circumspect, and with better reasons. At length, feeling secure, all the more from knowing the nuns are at their vesper devotions, she tears off the envelope, and reads:-- "Mary,--Monday night next after midnight--if you look out of your window you will see friends; among them:-- "Jack Wingate." "Jack Wingate!" she exclaims, with a look of strange intelligence lighting up her face. "A voice from dear old Wyeside! Hope of delivery at last!" And overcome by her emotion she sinks down upon the pallet; no longer looking sad, but with an expression contented, and beatified as that of the most _devotee_ nun in the convent. Volume Three, Chapter XXIII. A JUSTIFIABLE ABDUCTION. It is a moonless November night, and a fog drifting down from the _Pas de Calais_ envelopes Boulogne in its damp, clammy embrace. The great cathedral clock is tolling twelve midnight, and the streets are deserted, the last wooden-heeled _soulier_ having ceased clattering over their cobble-stone pavements. If a foot passenger be abroad he is some belated individual groping his way home from the _Cafe de billars_ he frequents, or the _Cercle_ to which he belongs. Even the _sergens de ville_ are scarcer than usual; those seen being huddled up under the shelter of friendly porches, while the invisible ones are making themselves yet more snug inside _cabarets_, whose openness beyond licensed hours they wink at in return for the accommodation afforded. It is, in truth, a most disagreeable night: cold as dark, for the fog has frost in it. For all, there are three men in the streets of Boulogne who regard neither its chillness nor obscurity. Instead, this last is just what they desire, and for days past have been waiting for. They who thus delight in darkness are Major Mahon, Captain Ryecroft, and the waterman, Wingate. Not because they have thoughts of doing evil, for their purpose is of the very opposite character--to release a captive from captivity. The night has arrived when, in accordance with the promise made on that sheet of paper so dexterously pitched into her cloister, the Soeur Marie is to see friends in front of her window. They are the friends; about to attempt taking her out of it. They are not going blindly about the thing. Unlikely old campaigners as Mahon and Ryecroft would. During the interval since that warning summons was sent in, they have made thorough reconnaissance of the ground, taken stock of the convent's precincts and surroundings; in short, considered every circumstance of difficulty and danger. They are therefore prepared with all the means and appliances for effecting their design. Just as the last stroke of the clock ceases its booming reverberation, they issue forth from Mahon's house; and, turning up the Rue Tintelleries, strike along a narrower street, which leads on toward the ancient _cite_. The two officers walk arm in arm, Ryecroft, stranger to the place, needing guidance; while the boatman goes behind, with that carried aslant his shoulder, which, were it on the banks of the Wye, might be taken for a pair of oars. It is nevertheless a thing altogether different--a light ladder; though were it hundreds weight he would neither stagger nor groan under it. The errand he is upon knits his sinews, giving him the strength of a giant. They proceed with extreme caution, all three silent as spectres. When any sound comes to their ears, as the shutting to of a door, or distant footfall upon the ill-paved _trottoirs_, they make instant stop, and stand listening--speech passing among themselves only in whispers. But as these interruptions are few, they make fair progress; and, in less than twenty minutes after leaving the Major's house, they have reached the spot where the real action is to commence. This is in the narrow lane which runs along: the _enceinte_ of the convent at back; a thoroughfare little used even in daytime, but after night solitary as a desert, and on this especial night dark as dungeon itself. They know the _allee_ well; have traversed it scores of times within the last few days, as nights, and could go through it blindfold. And they also know the enclosure wall, with its exact height, just that of the cloister window beyond, and a little less than their ladder, which has been selected with an eye to dimensions. While its bearer is easing it off his shoulders, and planting it firmly in place, a short whispered dialogue occurs between the other two, the Major saying-- "We won't all three be needed for the work inside. One of us may remain here--nay, must! Those _sergens de ville_ might be prowling about, or some of the convent people themselves: in which case we'll need warning before we dare venture back over the wall. If caught on the top of it, the petticoats obstructing--aye, or without them--'twould go ill with us." "Quite true," assents the Captain. "Which of us do you propose staying here? Jack?" "Yes, certainly. And for more reasons than one. Excited as he is now, once getting his old flame into his arms he'd be all on fire--perhaps with noise enough to awake the whole sleeping sisterhood, and bring them clamouring around us, like crows about an owl, that had intruded into the rookery. Besides, there's a staff of male servants--for they have such--half a score of stout fellows, who'd show fight. A big bell, too, by ringing which they can rouse the town. Therefore, master Jack _must_ remain here. You tell him he must." Jack is told, with reasons given, though not exactly the real ones. Endorsing them, the Major says-- "Don't be so impatient, my good fellow! It will make but a few seconds' difference; and then you'll have your girl by your side, sure. Whereas, acting inconsiderately, you may never set eyes on her. The fight in the front will be easy. Our greatest danger's from behind; and you can do better in every way, as for yourself, by keeping the rear guard." He thus counselled is convinced: and, though much disliking it, yields prompt obedience. How could he otherwise? He is in the hands of men his superiors in rank as experience. And is it not for him they are there; risking liberty--it may be life? Having promised to keep his impulsiveness in check, he is instructed what to do. Simply to lie concealed under the shadow of the wall, and should any one be outside when he hears a low whistle, he is _not_ to reply to it. The signal so arranged, Mahon and Ryecroft mount over the wall, taking the ladder along with them, and leaving the waterman to reflect, in nervous anxiety, how near his Mary is, and yet how far off she still may be! Once inside the garden, the other two strike off along a walk leading in the direction of the spot, which is their objective point. They go as if every grain of sand pressed by their feet had a friend's life in it. The very cats of the Convent could not traverse its grounds more silently. Their caution is rewarded; for they arrive at the cloister sought, without interruption, to see its casement open, with a pale face in it-- a picture of Madonna on a back ground of black, through the white film looking as if it were veiled. But though dense the fog, it does not hinder them from perceiving, that the expression of that face is one of expectancy; nor her from recognising them as the friends who were to be under the window. With that voice from the Wyeside still echoing in her ears, she sees her deliverers at hand! They have indeed come. A woman of weak nerves would under the circumstances be excited-- possibly cry out. But Soeur Marie is not such; and without uttering a word, even the slightest ejaculation, she stands still, and patiently, waits while a wrench is applied to the rotten bar of iron, soon snapping it from its support, as though it were but a stick of macaroni. It is Ryecroft who performs this burglarious feat, and into his arms she delivers herself, to be conducted down the ladder; which is done without as yet a word having been exchanged between them. Only after reaching the ground, and there is some feeling of safety, he whispers to her:-- "Keep up your courage, Mary! Your Jack is waiting for you outside the wall. Here, take my hand--" "Mary! My Jack! And you--you--" Her voice becomes inaudible, and she totters back against the wall! "She's swooning--has fainted!" mutters the Major; which Ryecroft already knows, having stretched out his arms, and caught her as she is sinking to the earth. "It's the sudden change into the open air," he says. "We must carry her, Major. You go ahead with the ladder, I can manage the girl myself." While speaking he lifts the unconscious form, and bears it away. No light weight either, but to strength as his, only a feather. The Major going in advance with the ladder guides him through the mist; and in a few seconds they reach the outer wall, Mahon giving a low whistle as he approachs. It is almost instantly answered by another from the outside, telling them the coast is clear. And in three minutes after they are also on the outside, the girl still resting in Ryecroft's arms. The waterman wishes to relieve him, agonised by the thought that his sweetheart, who has passed unscathed, as it were, through the very gates of death, may after all be dead! He urges it; but Mahon, knowing the danger of delay, forbids any sentimental interference, commanding Jack to re-shoulder the ladder and follow as before. Then striking off in Indian file, the Major first, the Captain with his burden in the centre, the boatman bringing up behind, they retrace their steps towards the Rue Tintelleries. If Ryecroft but knew who he is carrying, he would bear her, if not more tenderly, with far different emotions, and keener solicitude about her recovery from that swoon. It is only after she is out of his arms; and lying upon a couch in Major Mahon's house--the hood drawn back and the light shining on her face-- that he experiences a thrill, strange and wild as ever felt by mortal man! No wonder--seeing it is Gwendoline Wynn! "Gwen!" he exclaims, in a very ecstasy of joy, as her pulsing breast and opened eyes tell of returned consciousness. "Vivian!" is the murmured rejoinder, their lips meeting in delirious contact. Poor Jack Wingate! Volume Three, Chapter XXIV. STARTING ON A CONTINENTAL TOUR. Lewin Murdock is dead, and buried--has been for days. Not in the family vault of the Wynns, though he had the right of having his body there laid. But his widow, who had control of the interment, willed it otherwise. She has repugnance to opening that receptacle of the dead, holding a secret she may well dread disclosure of. There was no very searching enquiry into the cause of the man's death; none such seeming needed. A coroner's inquest, true; but of the most perfunctory kind. Several habitues of the Welsh Harp; with its staff of waiters, testified to having seen him at that hostelry till a late hour of the night on which he was drowned, and far gone in drink. The landlord advanced the narrative a stage, by telling how he conveyed him to the boat, and delivered him to his boatman, Richard Dempsey--all true enough; while Coracle capped the story by a statement of circumstances, in part facts, but the major part fictitious:--how the inebriate gentleman, after lying a while quiet at the bottom of the skiff, suddenly sprung upon his feet, and staggering excitedly about, capsized the craft, spilling both into the water! Some corroboration of this, in the boat having been found floating keel upwards, and the boatman arriving home at Llangorren soaking wet. To his having been in this condition several of the Court domestics, at the time called out of their beds, with purpose _prepense_, were able to bear witness. But Dempsey's testimony is further strengthened, even to confirmation, by himself having since taken to bed, where he now lies dangerously ill of a fever, the result of a cold caught from that chilling _douche_. In this latest inquest the finding of the jury is set forth in two simple words, "Drowned accidentally." No suspicion attaches to any one; and his widow, now wearing the weeds of sombre hue, sorrows profoundly. But her grief is great only in the eyes of the outside world, and the presence of the Llangorren domestics. Alone within her chamber she shows little signs of sorrow; and if possible less when Gregoire Rogier is her companion; which he almost constantly is. If more than half his time at the Court while Lewin Murdock was alive, he is now there nearly the whole of it. No longer as a guest, but as much its master as she is its mistress! For that, matter indeed more; if inference _may_ be drawn from a dialogue occurring between them some time after her husband's death. They are in the library, where there is a strong chest, devoted to the safe keeping of legal documents, wills, leases, and the like--all the paraphernalia of papers relating to the administration of the estate. Rogier is at a table upon which many of these lie, with writing materials besides. A sheet of foolscap is before him, on which he has just scribbled the rough copy of an advertisement intended to be sent to several newspapers. "I think this will do," he says to the widow, who, in an easy chair drawn up in front of the fire, is sipping Chartreuse, and smoking paper cigarettes. "Shall I read it to you?" "No. I don't want to be bothered with the thing in detail. Enough, if you let me hear its general purport." He gives her this in briefest epitome:-- "_The Llangorren estates to be sold by public auction, with all the appurtenances, mansion, park, ornamental grounds, home and out farms, manorial rights, presentation to church living, etc, etc_." "_Tres bien_! Have you put down the date? It should be soon." "You're right, _cherie_. Should, and must be. So soon, I fear we won't realise three-fourths of the value. But there's no help for it, with the ugly thing threatening--hanging over our necks like a very sword of Damocles." "You mean the tongue of _le braconnier_?" She has reason to dread it. "No I don't; not in the slightest. There's a sickle too near his own-- in the hands of the reaper, Death." "He's dying, then?" She speaks with an earnestness in which there is no feeling of compassion, but the very reverse. "He is," the other answers, in like unpitying tone; "I've just come from his bedside." "From the cold he caught that night, I suppose?" "Yes; that's partly the cause. But," he adds, with a diabolical grin, "more the medicine he has taken for it." "What mean you, Gregoire?" "Only that Monsieur Dick has been delirious, and I saw danger in it. He was talking too wildly." "You've done something to keep him quiet?" "I have." "What?" "Given him a sleeping draught." "But he'll wake up again; and then--" "Then I'll administer another dose of the anodyne." "What sort of anodyne?" "A _hypodermic_." "Hypodermic! I've never heard of the thing; not even the name!" "A wonderful cure it is--for noisy tongues!" "You excite one's curiosity. Tell me something of its nature?" "Oh, it's very simple; exceedingly so. Only a drop of liquid introduced into the blood; not in the common roundabout way, by pouring down the throat, but direct injection into the veins. The process in itself is easy enough, as every medical practitioner knows. The skill consists in the _kind_ of liquid to be injected. That's one of the occult sciences I learnt in Italy, land of Lucrezia and Tophana; where such branches of knowledge still flourish. Elsewhere it's not much known, and perhaps it's well it isn't; or there might be more widowers, with a still larger proportion of widows." "Poison!" she exclaims involuntarily, adding, in a timid whisper, "Was it, Gregoire?" "Poison!" he echoes, protestingly. "That's too plain a word, and the idea it conveys too vulgar, for such a delicate scientific operation as that I've performed. Possibly, in Monsieur Coracle's case the effect will be somewhat similar; but not the after symptoms. If I haven't made miscalculation as to quantity, ere three days are over it will send him to his eternal sleep; and I'll defy all the medical experts in England to detect traces of poison in him. So don't enquire further, _cherie_. Be satisfied to know the hypodermic will do you a service. And," he adds, with sardonic smile, "grateful if it be never given to yourself." She starts, recoiling in horror. Not at the repulsive confessions she has listened to, but more through personal fear. Though herself steeped in crime, he beside her seems its very incarnation! She has long known him morally capable of anything, and now fancies he may have the power of the famed basilisk to strike her dead with a glance of his eyes! "Bah!" he exclaims, observing her trepidation, but pretending to construe it otherwise. "Why all this emotion about such a _miserable_? He'll have no widow to lament him--inconsolable like yourself. Ha! ha! Besides, for our safety--both of us--his death is as much needed as was the other. After killing the bird that threatened to devour our crops, it would be blind buffoonery to keep the scarecrow standing. I only wish, there were nothing but he between us, and complete security." "But is there still?" she asks, her alarm taking a new turn, as she observes a slight shade of apprehension pass over his face. "Certainly there is." "What?" "That little convent matter." "_Mon Dieu_! I supposed it arranged beyond the possibility of danger." "Probability is the word you mean. In this sweet world there's nothing sure except money--that, too, in hard cash coin. Even at the best we'll have to sacrifice a large slice of the estate to satisfy the greed of those who have assisted us--_Messieurs les Jesuites_. If I could only, as by some magician's wand, convert these clods of Herefordshire into a portable shape, I'd cheat them yet; as I've done already, in making them believe me one of their most ardent _doctrinaires_. Then, _chere amie_, we could at once move from Llangorren Court to a palace by some Lake of Como, glassing softest skies, with whispering myrtles, and all the other fal-lals, by which Monsieur Bulwer's sham prince humbugged the Lyonese shopkeeper's daughter. Ha! ha! ha!" "But why can't it be done?" "Ah! There the word _impossible_, if you like. What! Convert a landed estate of several thousand acres into cash, _presto-instanter_, as though one were but selling a flock of sheep! The thing can't be accomplished anywhere; least of all in this slow-moving Angleterre, where men look at their money twice--twenty times--before parting with it. Even a mortgage couldn't be managed for weeks--may be months-- without losing quite the moiety of value. But a _bona fide_ sale, for which we must wait, and with that cloud hanging over us! Oh! it's damnable. The thing's been a blunder from beginning to end; all through the squeamishness of Monsieur, _votre mari_. Had he agreed to what I first proposed, and done with Mademoiselle, what should have been done, he might himself still--The simpleton, sot--soft heart, and softer head! Well; it's of no use reviling him now. He paid the forfeit for being a fool. And 'twill do no good our giving way to apprehensions, that after all may turn out shadows, however dark. In the end everything may go right, and we can make our midnight flitting in a quiet, comfortable way. But what a flutter there'll be among my flock at the Rugg's Ferry Chapel, when they wake up some fine morning, and rub their eyes--only to see that their good shepherd has forsaken them! A comical scene, of which I'd like being a spectator. Ha! ha! ha!" She joins him in the laugh, for the sally is irresistible. And while they are still ha-ha-ing, a touch at the door tells of a servant seeking admittance. It is the butler who presents himself, salver in hand, on which rests a chrome-coloured envelope--at a glance seen to be a telegraphic despatch. It bears the address "Rev. Gregoire Rogier, Rugg's Ferry, Herefordshire," and when opened the telegram is seen to have been sent from Folkestone. Its wording is:-- "_The bird has escaped from its cage. Prenez garde_!" Well for the pseudo-priest, and his _chere amie_, that before they read it, the butler had left the room. For though figurative the form of expression, and cabalistic the words, both man and woman seem instantly to comprehend them. And with such comprehension, as almost to drive them distracted! He is silent, as if struck dumb, his face showing blanched and bloodless; while she utters a shriek, half terrified, half in frenzied anger! It is the last loud cry, or word, to which she gives utterance at Llangorren. And no longer there speaks the priest loudly, or authoritatively. The after hours of that night are spent by both of them, not as the owners of the house, but burglars in the act of breaking it! Up till the hour of dawn, the two might be seen silently flitting from room to room--attended only by Clarisse, who carries the candle-- ransacking drawers and secretaires, selecting articles of _bijouterie_ and _vertu_, of little weight but large value, and packing them in trunks and travelling bags. All of which, under the grey light of morning are taken to the nearest railway station in one of the Court carriages--a large drag-barouche--inside which ride Rogier and Madame Murdock _veuve_; her _femme de chambre_ having a seat beside the coachman, who has been told they are starting on a continental tour. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ And so were they; but it was a tour from which they never returned. Instead, it was extended to a greater distance than they themselves designed, and in a direction neither dreamt of. Since their career, after a years interval, ended in _deportation_ to Cayenne, for some crime committed by them in the South of France. So said the _Semaphore_ of Marseilles. Volume Three, Chapter XXV. CORACLE DICK ON HIS DEATH-BED. As next morning's sun rises over Llangorren Court, it shows a mansion without either master or mistress! Not long to remain so. If the old servants of the establishment had short notice of dismissal, still more brief is that given to its latest retinue. About meridian of that day, after the departure of their mistress, while yet in wonder where she has gone, they receive another shock of surprise, and a more unpleasant one, at seeing a hackney carriage-drive up to the hall door, out of which step two men, evidently no friends to her from whom they have their wages. For one of the men is Captain Ryecroft, the other a police superintendent; who, after the shortest possible parley, directs the butler to parade the complete staff of his fellow domestics, male and female. This with an air and in a tone of authority, which precludes supposition that the thing is a jest. Summoned from all quarters, cellar to garret, and out doors as well, their names, with other particulars, are taken down; and they are told that their services will be no longer required at Llangorren. In short, they are one and all dismissed, without a word about the month's wages or warning! If they get either, 'twill be only as a grace. Then they receive orders to pack up and be off; while Joseph Preece, ex-Charon, who has crossed the river in his boat, with appointment to meet the hackney there, is authorised to take temporary charge of the place; Jack Wingate, similarly bespoke, having come down in his skiff, to stand by him in case of any opposition. None arises. However chagrined by their hasty _sans facon_ discharge, the outgoing domestics seem not so greatly surprised at it. From what they have observed for some time going on, as also something whispered about, they had no great reliance on their places being permanent. So, in silence all submit, though somewhat sulkily; and prepare to vacate quarters they had found fairly snug. There is one, however, who cannot be thus conveniently, or unceremoniously, dismissed--the head-gamekeeper, Richard Dempsey. For, while the others are getting their _mandamus_ to move, the report is brought in that he is lying on his death-bed! So the parish doctor has prognosticated. Also, that he is just then delirious, and saying queer things; some of which repeated to the police "super," tell him his proper place, at that precise moment, is by the bedside of the sick man. Without a second's delay he starts off towards the lodge in which Coracle has been of late domiciled--under the guidance of its former occupant Joseph Preece--accompanied by Captain Ryecroft and Jack Wingate. The house being but a few hundred yards distant from the Court, they are soon inside it, and standing over the bed on which lies the fevered patient; not at rest, but tossing to and fro--at intervals, in such violent manner as to need restraint. The superintendent at once sees it would be idle putting questions to him. If asked his own name, he could not declare it. For he knows not himself--far less those who are around. His face is something horrible to behold. It would but harrow sensitive feelings to give a portraiture of it. Enough to say, it is more like that of demon than man. And his speech, poured as in a torrent from his lips, is alike horrifying--admission of many and varied crimes; in the same breath denying them and accusing others; his contradictory ravings garnished with blasphemous ejaculations. A specimen will suffice, omitting the blasphemy. "It's a lie!" he cries out, just as they are entering the room. "A lie, every word o't! I didn't murder Mary Morgan. Served her right if I had, the jade! She jilted me; an' for that wasp Wingate--dog--cur! I didn't kill her. No; only fixed the plank. If she wor fool enough to step on't that warn't my fault. She did--she did! Ha! ha! ha!" For a while he keeps up the horrid cachinnation, as the glee of Satan exulting over some feat of foul _diablerie_. Then his thoughts changing to another crime, he goes on:-- "The grand girl--the lady! She arn't drowned; nor dead eyther! The priest carried her off in that French schooner. I had nothing to do with it. 'Twar the priest and Mr Murdock. Ha! Murdock! I _did_ drown _him_. No, I didn't. That's another lie! 'Twas himself upset the boat. Let me see--was it? No! he couldn't, he was too drunk. I stood up on the skiff's rail. Slap over it went. What a duckin' I had for it, and a devil o' a swim too! But I did the trick--neatly! Didn't I, your Reverence? Now for the hundred pounds. And you promised to double it--you did! Keep to your bargain, or I'll peach upon you--on all the lot of you--the woman, too--the French woman! She kept that fine shawl, Indian they said it wor. She's got it now. She wanted the diamonds, too, but daren't keep _them_. The shroud! Ha! the shroud! That's all they left _me_. I ought to a' burnt it. But then the devil would a' been after and burned me! How fine Mary looked in that grand dress, wi' all them gewgaws, rings,--chains, an' bracelets, all pure gold! But I drownded her, an' she deserved it. Drownded her twice-- ha--ha--ha!" Again he breaks off with a peal of demoniac laughter, long continued. More than an hour they remain listening to his delirious ramblings, and with interest intense. For despite its incoherence, the disconnected threads joined together make up a tale they can understand; though so strange, so brimful of atrocities, as to seem incredible. All the while he is writhing about on the bed; till at length, exhausted, his head droops over upon the pillow, and he lies for a while quiet--to all appearance dead! But no; there is another throe yet, one horrible as any that has preceded. Looking up, he sees the superintendent's uniform and silver buttons; a sight which produces a change in the expression of his features, as though it had recalled him to his senses. With arms flung out as in defence, he shrieks:-- "Keep back, you--policeman! Hands off, or I'll brain you! Hach! You've got the rope round my neck! Curse the thing! It's choking me. Hach!" And with his fingers clutching at his throat, as if to undo a noose, he gasps out in husky voice: "Gone by God." At this he drops over dead, his last word an oath, his last thought a fancy, that there is a rope around his neck! What he has said in his unconscious confessions lays open many seeming mysteries of this romance, hitherto unrevealed. How the pseudo-priest, Father Rogier, observing a likeness between Miss Wynn and Mary Morgan-- causing him that start as he stood over the coffin, noticed by Jack Wingate--had exhumed the dead body of the latter, the poacher and Murdock assisting him. Then how they had taken it down in the boat to Dempsey's house; soon after, going over to Llangorren, and seizing the young lady, as she stood in the summer-house, having stifled her cries by chloroform. Then, how they carried her across to Dempsey's, and substituted the corpse for the living body--the grave clothes changed for the silken dress with all its adornments--this the part assigned to Mrs Murdock, who had met them at Coracle's cottage. Then, Dick himself hiding away the shroud, hindered by superstitious fear from committing it to the flames. In fine, how Gwendoline Wynn, drugged and still kept in a state of coma, was taken down in a boat to Chepstow, and there put aboard the French schooner _La Chouette_; carried across to Boulogne, to be shut up in a convent for life! All these delicate matters, managed by Father Rogier, backed by _Messieurs les Jesuites_, who had furnished him with the means! One after another, the astounding facts come forth as the raving man continues his involuntary admissions. Supplemented by others already known to Ryecroft and the rest, with the deductions drawn, they complete the unities of a drama, iniquitous as ever enacted. Its motives declare themselves; all wicked save one. This a spark of humanity that had still lingered in the breast of Lewin Murdock; but for which Gwendoline Wynn would never have seen the inside of a nunnery. Instead, while under the influence of the narcotic, her body would have been dropped into the Wye, just as was that wearing her ball dress! And that same body is now wearing another dress, supposed to have been prepared for her--another shroud--reposing in the tomb where all believed Gwen Wynn to have been laid! This last fact is brought to light on the following day; when the family vault of the Wynns is re-opened, and Mrs Morgan--by marks known only to herself--identifies the remains found there as those of her own daughter! Volume Three, Chapter XXVI. THE CALM AFTER THE STORM. Twelve months after the events recorded in this romance of the Wye, a boat-tourist descending the picturesque river, and inquiring about a pagoda-like structure he will see on its western side, would be told it is a summer-house, standing in the ornamental grounds of a gentleman's residence. If he ask who the gentleman is, the answer would be, Captain Vivian Ryecroft! For the ex-officer of Hussars is now the master of Llangorren; and, what he himself values higher, the husband of Gwendoline Wynn, once more its mistress. Were the tourist an acquaintance of either, and on his way to make call at the Court, bringing in by the little dock, he would there see a row-boat, on its stern board, in gold lettering "_The Gwendoline_." For the pretty pleasure craft has been restored to its ancient moorings. Still, however, remaining the property of Joseph Preece, who no longer lives in the cast-off cottage of Coracle Dick, but, like the boat itself, is again back and in service at Llangorren. If the day be fine this venerable and versatile individual will be loitering beside it, or seated on one of its thwarts, pipe in mouth, indulging in the _dolce far niente_. And little besides has he to do, since his pursuits are no longer varied, but now exclusively confined to the calling of waterman to the Court. He and his craft are under charter for the remainder of his life, should he wish it so--as he surely will. The friendly visitor keeping on up to the house, if at the hour of luncheon, will in all likelihood there meet a party of old acquaintances--ours, if not his. Besides the beautiful hostess at the table's head, he will see a lady of the "antique brocaded type," who herself once presided there, by name Miss Dorothea Linton; another known as Miss Eleanor Lees; and a fourth, youngest of the quartette, _yclept_ Kate Mahon. For the school girl of the Boulogne Convent has escaped from its austere studies; and is now most; part of her time resident with the friend she helped to escape from its cloisters. Men there will also be at the Llangorren luncheon table; likely three of them, in addition to the host himself. One will be Major Mahon; a second the Reverend William Musgrave; and the third, Mr George Shenstone! Yes; George Shenstone, under the roof, and seated at the table of Gwendoline Wynn, now the wife of Vivian Ryecroft! To explain a circumstance seemingly so singular, it is necessary to call in the aid of a saying, culled from that language richest of all others in moral and metaphysical imagery--the Spanish. It has a proverb, _un claco saca otro claco_--"one nail drives out the other." And, watching the countenance of the baronet's son, so long sad and clouded, seeing how, at intervals, it brightens up--these intervals when his eyes meet those of Kate Mahon--it were easy predicting that in his case the adage will ere long have additional verification. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Were the same tourist to descend the Wye at a date posterior, and again make a call at Llangorren, he would find that some changes had taken place in the interval of his absence. At the boat dock Old Joe would likely be. But not as before in sole charge of the pleasure craft; only pottering about, as a pensioner retired on full pay; the acting and active officer being a younger man, by name Wingate, who is now waterman to the Court. Between these two, however, there is no spite about the displacement--no bickerings nor heartburnings. How could there, since the younger addresses the older as "uncle"; himself in return being styled "nevvy?" No need to say, that this relationship has been brought about by the bright eyes of Amy Preece. Nor is it so new. In the lodge where Jack and Joe live together is a brace of chubby chicks; one of them a boy-- the possible embryo of a Wye waterman--who, dandled upon old Joe's knees, takes delight in weeding his frosted whiskers, while calling him "good grandaddy." As Jack's mother--who is also a member of this happy family--forewarned him, the wildest grief must in time give way, and Nature's laws assert their supremacy. So has he found it; and though still holding Mary Morgan in sacred, honest remembrance, he--as many a true man before, and others as true to come--has yielded to the inevitable. Proceeding on to the Court the friendly visitor will at certain times there meet the same people he met before; but the majority of them having new names or titles. An added number in two interesting olive branches there also, with complexions struggling between _blonde_ and _brunette_, who call Captain and Mrs Ryecroft their papa and mamma; while the lady who was once Eleanor Lees--the "companion"--is now Mrs Musgrave, life companion not to the _curate_ of Llangorren Church, but its _rector_. The living having become vacant, and in the bestowal of Llangorren's heiress, has been worthily bestowed on the Reverend William. Two other old faces, withal young ones, the returned tourist will see at Llangorren--their owners on visit as himself. He might not know either of them by the names they now bear--Sir George and Lady Shenstone. For when he last saw them the gentleman was simply Mr Shenstone, and the lady Miss Mahon. The old baronet is dead, and the young one, succeeding to the title, has also taken upon himself another title--that of husband--proving the Spanish apothegm true, both in the spirit and to the letter. If there be any nail capable of driving out another, it is that sent home by the glance of an Irish girl's eye--at least so thinks Sir George Shenstone, with good reason for thinking it. There are two other individuals, who come and go at the Court--the only ones holding out, and likely to hold, against change of any kind. For Major Mahon is still Major Mahon, rolling on in his rich Irish brogue as ever abhorrent of matrimony. No danger of his becoming a Benedict! And as little of Miss Linton being transformed into a sage woman. It would be strange if she should, with the love novels she continues to devour, and the "Court Intelligence" she gulps down, keeping alive the hallucination that she is still a belle at Bath and Cheltenham. So ends our "Romance of the Wye;" a drama of happy _denouement_ to most of the actors in it; and, as hoped, satisfactory to all who have been spectators. THE END. 
35784	----	GWEN WYNN: A Romance of the Wye. BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. 1905 [Illustration: "I THOUGHT AS MUCH!--NO ACCIDENT!--NO SUICIDE!--MURDERED!"] CONTENTS. PROLOGUE I. THE HEROINE II. THE HERO III. A CHARON CORRUPTED IV. ON THE RIVER V. DANGERS AHEAD VI. A DUCKING DESERVED VII. AN INVETERATE NOVEL READER VIII. A SUSPICIOUS STRANGER IX. JEALOUS ALREADY X. THE CUCKOO'S GLEN XI. A WEED BY THE WYESIDE XII. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING XIII. AMONG THE ARROWS XIV. BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH XV. A SPIRITUAL ADVISER XVI. CORACLE DICK XVII. THE "CORPSE CANDLE" XVIII. A CAT IN THE CUPBOARD XIX. A BLACK SHADOW BEHIND XX. UNDER THE ELM XXI. A TARDY MESSENGER XXII. A FATAL STEP XXIII. A SUSPICIOUS WAIF XXIV. "THE FLOWER OF LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING" XXV. A FRENCH FEMME DE CHAMBRE XXVI. THE POACHER AT HOME XXVII. A MYSTERIOUS CONTRACT XXVIII. THE GAME OF PIQUE XXIX. JEALOUS AS A TIGER XXX. STUNNED AND SILENT XXXI. A STARTLING CRY XXXII. MAKING READY FOR THE ROAD XXXIII. A SLUMBERING HOUSEHOLD XXXIV. "WHERE'S GWEN?" XXXV. AGAIN THE ENGAGEMENT RING XXXVI. A MYSTERIOUS EMBARKATION XXXVII. AN ANXIOUS WIFE XXXVIII. IMPATIENT FOR THE POST XXXIX. JOURNEY INTERRUPTED XL. HUE AND CRY XLI. BOULOGNE-SUR-MER XLII. WHAT DOES HE WANT? XLIII. A GAGE D'AMOUR XLIV. SUICIDE, OR MURDER XLV. A PLENTIFUL CORRESPONDENCE XLVI. FOUND DROWNED XLVII. A MAN WHO THINKS IT MURDER XLVIII. ONCE MORE UPON THE RIVER XLIX. THE CRUSHED JUNIPER L. REASONING BY ANALYSIS LI. A SUSPICIOUS CRAFT LII. MATERNAL SOLICITUDE LIII. A SACRILEGIOUS HAND LIV. A LATE TEA LV. THE NEW MISTRESS OF THE MANSION LVI. THE GAMBLERS AT LLANGORREN LVII. AN UNWILLING NOVICE LVIII. A CHEERFUL KITCHEN LIX. QUEER BRIC-A-BRAC LX. A BRACE OF BODY-SNATCHERS LXI. IN WANT OF HELP LXII. STILL ALIVE LXIII. A STRANGE FATHER CONFESSOR LXIV. A QUEER CATECHIST LXV. ALMOST A "VERT" LXVI. THE LAST OF LEWIN MURDOCK LXVII. A CHAPTER DIPLOMATIC LXVIII. A QUICK CONVERSION LXIX. A SUDDEN RELAPSE LXX. A JUSTIFIABLE ABDUCTION LXXI. STARTING ON A CONTINENTAL TOUR LXXII. CORACLE DICK ON HIS DEATH-BED LXXIII. THE CALM AFTER THE STORM GWEN WYNN: A Romance of the Wye. PROLOGUE. Hail to thee, Wye--famed river of Siluria! Well deserving fame, worthy of warmest salutation! From thy fountain-head on Plinlimmon's far slope, where thou leapest forth, gay as a girl on her skip-rope, through the rugged rocks of Brecon and Radnor, that like rude men would detain thee, snatching but a kiss for their pains--on, as woman grown, with statelier step, amid the wooded hills of Herefordshire, which treat thee with more courtly consideration--still on, and once more rudely assailed by the bold ramparts of Monmouth--through all thou makest way--in despite all, preserving thy purity! If defiled before espousing the ocean, the fault is not thine, but Sabrina's--sister born of thy birth, she too cradled on Plinlimmon's breast, but since childhood's days separated from thee, and straying through other shrines--perchance leading a less reputable life. No blame to thee, beautiful Vaga--from source to Severn pure as the spring that begets thee--fair to the eye, and full of interest to reflect on. Scarce a reach of thy channel, or curve of thy course, but is redolent of romance, and rich in the lore of history. On thy shores, through the long centuries, has been enacted many a scene of gayest pleasure and sternest strife; many an exciting episode, in which love and hate, avarice and ambition--in short, every human passion has had play. Overjoyed were the Roman Legionaries to behold their silver eagles reflected from thy pellucid wave; though they did not succeed in planting them on thy western shore till after many a tough struggle with the gallant, but ill-starred, Caractacus. Long, too, had the Saxons to battle before they could make good their footing on the Silurian side--as witness the Dyke of Offa. Later, the Normans obtained it only through treachery, by the murder of the princely Llewellyn; and, later still, did the bold Glendower make thy banks the scene of patriotic strife; while, last of all, sawest thou conflict in still nobler cause--as of more glorious remembrance--when the earnest soldiers of the Parliament encountered the so-called Cavaliers, and purged thy shores of the ribald rout, making them pure as thy waters. But, sweet Wye! not all the scenes thou hast witnessed have been of war. Love, too, has stamped thee with many a tender souvenir, many a tale of warm, wild passion. Was it not upon thy banks that the handsome "Harry of Monmouth," hero of Agincourt, first saw the light; there living, till manhood-grown, when he appeared "armed _cap-à-pie_, with beaver on"? And did not thy limpid waters bathe the feet of Fair Rosamond, in childhood's days, when she herself was pure? In thee, also, was mirrored the comely form of Owen Tudor, which caught the eye of a queen--the stately Catherine--giving to England a race of kings; and by thy side the beauteous Saxon, Ædgitha, bestowed her heart and hand on a Cymric prince. Nor are such episodes all of the remote past, but passing now; now, as ever, pathetic--as ever impassioned. For still upon thy banks, Vaga, are men brave, and women fair, as when Adelgisa excited the jealousy of the Druid priestess, or the maid of Clifford Castle captured a king's heart, to become the victim of a queen's vengeance. Not any fairer than the heroine of my tale; and she was born there, there brought up, and there---- Ah! that is the story to be told. CHAPTER I. THE HEROINE. A tourist descending the Wye by boat from the town of Hereford to the ruined Abbey of Tintern, may observe on its banks a small pagoda-like structure; its roof, with a portion of the supporting columns, o'er-topping a spray of evergreens. It is simply a summer-house, of the kiosk or pavilion pattern, standing in the ornamental grounds of a gentleman's residence. Though placed conspicuously on an elevated point, the boat traveller obtains view of it only from a reach of the river above. When opposite he loses sight of it; a spinny of tall poplars drawing curtain-like between him and the higher bank. These stand on an oblong island, which extends several hundred yards down the stream, formed by an old channel, now forsaken. With all its wanderings the Wye is not suddenly capricious; still, in the lapse of long ages it has here and there changed its course, forming _aits_, or _eyots_, of which this is one. The tourist will not likely take the abandoned channel. He is bound and booked for Tintern--possibly Chepstow--and will not be delayed by lesser "lions." Besides, his hired boatmen would not deviate from their terms of charter, without adding an extra to their fare. Were he free, and disposed for exploration, entering this unused water-way he would find it tortuous, with scarce any current, save in times of flood; on one side the eyot, a low marshy flat, thickly overgrown with trees; on the other a continuous cliff, rising forty feet sheer, its _façade_ grim and grey, with flakes of reddish hue, where the frost has detached pieces from the rock--the old red sandstone of Herefordshire. Near its entrance he would catch a glimpse of the kiosk on its crest; and, proceeding onward, will observe the tops of laurels and other exotic evergreens, mingling their glabrous foliage with that of the indigenous holly, ivy, and ferns; these last trailing over the cliff's brow, and wreathing it with fillets of verdure, as if to conceal its frowning corrugations. About midway down the old river's bed he will arrive opposite a little embayment in the high bank, partly natural, but in part quarried out of the cliff--as evinced by a flight of steps, leading up at back, chiselled out of the rock _in situ_. The cove thus contrived is just large enough to give room to a row-boat, and if not out upon the river, one will be in it, riding upon its painter; this attached to a ring in the red sandstone. It is a light, two-oared affair--a pleasure-boat, ornamentally painted, with cushioned thwarts, and tiller ropes of coloured cord athwart its stern, which the tourist will have turned towards him, in gold lettering, "THE GWENDOLINE." Charmed by this idyllic picture, he may forsake his own craft, and ascend to the top of the stair. If so, he will have before his eyes a lawn of park-like expanse, mottled with clumps of coppice, here and there a grand old tree--oak, elm, or chestnut--standing solitary; at the upper end a shrubbery of glistening evergreens, with gravelled walks, fronting a handsome house; or, in the parlance of the estate agent, a noble mansion. That is Llangorren Court, and there dwells the owner of the pleasure-boat, as also prospective owner of the house, with some two thousand acres of land lying adjacent. The boat bears her baptismal name, the surname being Wynn, while people, in a familiar way, speak of her as "Gwen Wynn"; this on account of her being a lady of proclivities and habits that make her somewhat of a celebrity in the neighbourhood. She not only goes boating, but hunts, drives a pair of spirited horses, presides over the church choir, plays its organ, looks after the poor of the parish--nearly all of it her own, or soon to be--and has a bright smile, with a pleasant word, for everybody. If she be outside, upon the lawn, the tourist, supposing him a gentleman, will withdraw; for across the grounds of Llangorren Court there is no "right of way," and the presence of a stranger upon them would be deemed an intrusion. Nevertheless, he would go back down the boat-stair reluctantly, and with a sigh of regret, that good manners do not permit his making the acquaintance of Gwen Wynn without further loss of time, or any ceremony of introduction. But my readers are not thus debarred; and to them I introduce her, as she saunters over this same lawn, on a lovely April morn. She is not alone; another lady, by name Eleanor Lees, being with her. They are nearly of the same age--both turned twenty--but in all other respects unlike, even to contrast, though there is kinship between them. Gwendoline Wynn is tall of form, fully developed; face of radiant brightness, with blue-grey eyes, and hair of that chrome yellow almost peculiar to the Cymri--said to have made such havoc with the hearts of the Roman soldiers, causing these to deplore the day when recalled home to protect their seven-hilled city from Goths and Visigoths. In personal appearance Eleanor Lees is the reverse of all this; being of dark complexion, brown-haired, black-eyed, with a figure slender and _petite_. Witha she is pretty; but it is only prettiness--a word inapplicable to her kinswoman, who is pronouncedly beautiful. Equally unlike are they in mental characteristics; the first-named being free of speech, courageous, just a trifle fast, and possibly a little imperious. The other of a reserved, timid disposition, and habitually of subdued mien, as befits her station; for in this there is also disparity between them--again a contrast. Both are orphans; but it is an orphanage under widely different circumstances and conditions: the one heiress to an estate worth some ten thousand pounds per annum, the other inheriting nought save an old family name--indeed, left without other means of livelihood than what she may derive from a superior education she has received. Notwithstanding their inequality of fortune, and the very distant relationship--for they are not even near as cousins--the rich girl behaves towards the poor one as though they were sisters. No one seeing them stroll arm-in-arm through the shrubbery, and hearing them hold converse in familiar, affectionate tones, would suspect the little dark damsel to be the paid "companion" of the lady by her side. Yet in such capacity is she residing at Llangorren Court. It is just after the hour of breakfast, and they have come forth in morning robes of light muslin--dresses suitable to the day and the season. Two handsome ponies are upon the lawn, its herbage dividing their attention with the horns of a pet stag, which now and then threaten to assail them. All three, soon as perceiving the ladies, trot towards them; the ponies stretching out their necks to be patted, the cloven-hoofed creature equally courting caresses. They look especially to Miss Wynn, who is more their mistress. On this particular morning she does not seem in the humour for dallying with them; nor has she brought out their usual allowance of lump sugar; but, after a touch with her delicate fingers, and a kindly exclamation, passes on, leaving them behind, to all appearance disappointed. "Where are you going, Gwen?" asks the companion, seeing her step out straight, and apparently with thoughts preoccupied. Their arms are now disunited, the little incident with the animals having separated them. "To the summer-house," is the response. "I wish to have a look at the river. It should show fine this bright morning." And so it does; as both perceive after entering the pavilion, which commands a view of the valley, with a reach of the river above--the latter, under the sun, glistening like freshly polished silver. Gwen views it through a glass--a binocular she has brought out with her; this of itself proclaiming some purpose aforethought, but not confided to the companion. It is only after she has been long holding it steadily to her eye, that the latter fancies there must be some object within its field of view more interesting than the Wye's water, or the greenery on its banks. "What is it?" she naïvely asks. "You see something?" "Only a boat," answers Gwen, bringing down the glass with a guilty look, as if conscious of being caught. "Some tourist, I suppose, making down to Tintern Abbey--like as not a London cockney." The young lady is telling a "white lie." She knows the occupant of that boat is nothing of the kind. From London he may be--she cannot tell--but certainly no sprig of cockneydom--unlike it as Hyperion to the Satyr; at least so she thinks. But she does not give her thought to the companion; instead, concealing it, she adds,-- "How fond those town people are of touring it upon our Wye!" "Can you wonder at that?" asks Ellen. "Its scenery is so grand--I should say, incomparable; nothing equal to it in England." "I don't wonder," says Miss Wynn, replying to the question. "I'm only a little bit vexed seeing them there. It's like the desecration of some sacred stream, leaving scraps of newspapers in which they wrap their sandwiches, with other picnicing débris on its banks! To say nought of one's having to encounter the rude fellows that in these degenerate days go a-rowing--shopboys from the towns, farm labourers, colliers, hauliers, all sorts. I've half a mind to set fire to the _Gwendoline_, burn her up, and never again lay hand on an oar." Ellen Lees laughs incredulously as she makes rejoinder. "It would be a pity," she says, in serio-comic tone. "Besides, the poor people are entitled to a little recreation. They don't have too much of it." "Ah, true," rejoins Gwen, who, despite her grandeeism, is neither Tory nor aristocrat. "Well, I've not yet decided on that little bit of incendiarism, and shan't burn the _Gwendoline_--at all events not till we've had another row out of her." Not for a hundred pounds would she set fire to that boat, and never in her life was she less thinking of such a thing. For just then she has other views regarding the pretty pleasure craft, and intends taking seat on its thwarts within less than twenty minutes' time. "By the way," she says, as if the thought had suddenly occurred to her, "we may as well have that row now--whether it's to be the last or not." Cunning creature! She has had it in her mind all the morning; first from her bed-chamber window, then from that of the breakfast-room, looking up the river's reach, with the binocular at her eye too, to note if a certain boat, with a salmon-rod bending over it, passes down. For one of its occupants is an angler. "The day's superb," she goes on; "sun's not too hot--gentle breeze--just the weather for a row. And the river looks so inviting--seems calling us to come! What say you, Nell?" "Oh! I've no objections." "Let us in, then, and make ready. Be quick about it! Remember it's April, and there may be showers. We mustn't miss a moment of that sweet sunshine." At this the two forsake the summer-house; and, lightly recrossing the lawn, disappear within the dwelling. * * * * * While the angler's boat is still opposite the grounds, going on, eyes are observing it from an upper window of the house; again those of Miss Wynn herself, inside her dressing-room, getting ready for the river. She had only short glimpses of it, over the tops of the trees on the eyot, and now and then through breaks in their thinner spray. Enough, however, to assure her that it contains two men, neither of them cockneys. One at the oars she takes to be a professional waterman. But he seated in the stern is altogether unknown to her, save by sight--that obtained when twice meeting him out on the river. She knows not whence he comes, or where he is residing; but supposes him a stranger to the neighbourhood, stopping at some hotel. If at the house of any of the neighbouring gentry, she would certainly have heard of it. She is not even acquainted with his name, though longing to learn it. But she is shy to inquire, lest that might betray her interest in him. For such she feels, has felt, ever since setting eyes on his strangely handsome face. As the boat again disappears behind the thick foliage she sets, in haste, to affect the proposed change of dress, saying, in soliloquy--for she is now alone,-- "I wonder who, and what he can be? A gentleman, of course. But, then, there are gentlemen and gentlemen; single ones and----" She has the word "married" on her tongue, but refrains speaking it. Instead, she gives utterance to a sigh, followed by the reflection-- "Ah, me! That would be a pity--a dis--" Again she checks herself, the thought being enough unpleasant without the words. Standing before the mirror, and sticking long pins into her hair, to keep its rebellious plaits in their place, she continues soliloquising-- "If one only had a word with that young waterman who rows him! And were it not that my own boatman is such a chatterer, I'd put him up to getting that word. But no! It would never do. He'd tell aunt about it; and then Madame la Chatelaine would be talking all sorts of serious things to me--the which I mightn't relish. Well, in six months more the old lady's trusteeship of this young lady is to terminate--at least legally. Then I'll be my own mistress; and then 'twill be time enough to consider whether I ought to have--a master. Ha, ha, ha!" So laughing, as she surveys her superb figure in a cheval glass, she completes the adjustment of her dress by setting a hat upon her head, and tightening the elastic, to secure against its being blown off while in the boat. In fine, with a parting glance at the mirror, which shows a satisfied expression upon her features, she trips lightly out of the room, and on down the stairway. CHAPTER II. THE HERO. Than Vivian Ryecroft handsomer man never carried sling-jacket over his shoulder, or sabretasche on his hip. For he is in the Hussars--a captain. He is not on duty now, nor anywhere near the scene of it. His regiment is at Aldershot, himself rusticating in Herefordshire--whither he has come to spend a few weeks' leave of absence. Nor is he, at the time of our meeting him, in the saddle, which he sits so gracefully; but in a row-boat on the river Wye--the same just sighted by Gwen Wynn through the double lens of her lorgnette. No more is he wearing the braided uniform and "busby"; but, instead, attired in a suit of light Cheviots, piscator-cut, with a helmet-shaped cap of quilted cotton on his head, its rounded rim of spotless white in striking, but becoming, contrast with his bronzed complexion and dark military moustache. For Captain Ryecroft is no mere stripling nor beardless youth, but a man turned thirty, browned by exposure to Indian suns, experienced in Indian campaigns, from those of Scinde and the Punjaub to that most memorable of all--the Mutiny. Still is he personally as attractive as he ever was--to women, possibly more; among these causing a flutter, with _rapprochement_ towards him almost instinctive, when and wherever they may meet him. In the present many a bright English lady sighs for him, as in the past many a dark damsel of Hindostan; and without his heaving sigh, or even giving them a thought in return. Not that he is of cold nature, or in any sense austere; instead, warm-hearted, of cheerful disposition, and rather partial to female society. But he is not, and never has been, either man-flirt or frivolous trifler; else he would not be fly-fishing on the Wye--for that is what he is doing there--instead of in London, taking part in the festivities of the "season," by day dawdling in Rotten Row, by night exhibiting himself in opera-box or ball-room. In short, Vivian Ryecroft is one of those rare individuals, to a high degree endowed, physically as mentally, without being aware of it, or appearing so; while to all others it is very perceptible. He has been about a fortnight in the neighbourhood, stopping at the chief hotel of a riverine town much affected by fly-fishermen and tourists. Still he has made no acquaintance with the resident gentry. He might, if wishing it; which he does not, his purpose upon the Wye not being to seek society, but salmon, or rather the sport of taking it. An ardent disciple of the ancient Izaak, he cares for nought else--at least, in the district where he is for the present sojourning. Such is his mental condition up to a certain morning; when a change comes over it, sudden as the spring of a salmon at the gaudiest or most tempting of his flies--this brought about by a face, of which he has caught sight by merest accident, and while following his favourite occupation. Thus it has chanced:-- Below the town where he is staying, some four or five miles by the course of the stream, he has discovered one of those places called "catches," where the king of river fish delights to leap at flies, whether natural or artificial--a sport it has oft reason to rue. Several times so at the end of Captain Ryecroft's line and rod; he having there twice hooked a twenty-pounder, and once a still larger specimen, which turned the scale at thirty. In consequence that portion of the stream has become his choicest angling ground, and at least three days in the week he repairs to it. The row is not much going down, but a good deal returning; five miles up stream, most of it strong adverse current. That, however, is less his affair than his oarsman's--a young waterman by name Wingate, whose boat and services the Hussar officer has chartered by the week--indeed, engaged them for so long as he may remain upon the Wye. On the morning in question, dropping down the river to his accustomed whipping-place, but at a somewhat later hour than usual, he meets another boat coming up--a pleasure craft, as shown by its style of outside ornament and inside furniture. Of neither does the salmon fisher take much note; his eyes all occupied with those upon the thwarts. There are three of them, two being ladies seated in the stern sheets, the third an oarsman on a thwart well forward, to make better balance. And to the latter the Hussar officer gives but a glance--just to observe that he is a serving-man, wearing some of its insignia in the shape of a cockaded hat, and striped sable-waistcoat. And not much more than a glance at one of the former; but a gaze, concentrated and long as good manners will permit, at the other, who is steering; when she passes beyond sight, her face remaining in his memory, vivid as if still before his eyes. All this at a first encounter; repeated in a second, which occurs on the day succeeding, under similar circumstances, and almost in the self-same spot; then the face, if possible, seeming fairer, and the impression made by it on Vivian Ryecroft's mind sinking deeper--indeed, promising to be permanent. It is a radiant face, set in a luxuriance of bright amber hair--for it is that of Gwendoline Wynn. On the second occasion he has a better view of her, the boats passing nearer to one another; still, not so near as he could wish, good manners again interfering. For all, he feels well satisfied--especially with the thought, that his own gaze earnestly given, though under such restraint, has been with earnestness returned. Would that his secret admiration of its owner were in like manner reciprocated! Such is his reflective wish as the boats widen the distance between; one labouring slowly up, the other gliding swiftly down. His boatman cannot tell who the lady is, nor where she lives. On the second day he is not asked--the question having been put to him on that preceding. All the added knowledge now obtained is the name of the craft that carries her; which, after passing, the waterman, with face turned towards its stern, makes out to be the _Gwendoline_--just as on his own boat--the _Mary_,--though not in such grand golden letters. It may assist Captain Ryecroft in his inquiries, already contemplated, and he makes note of it. Another night passes; another sun shines over the Wye; and he again drops down stream to his usual place of sport--this day only to draw blank, neither catching salmon, nor seeing hair of amber hue; his reflecting on which is, perchance, a cause of the fish not taking to his flies, cast carelessly. He is not discouraged; but goes again on the day succeeding--that same when his boat is viewed through the binocular. He has already formed a half suspicion that the home of the interesting water nymph is not far from that pagoda-like structure he has frequently noticed on the right bank of the river. For, just below the outlying eyot is where he has met the pleasure-boat, and the old oarsman looked anything but equal to a long pull up stream. Still, between that and the town are several other gentlemen's residences on the river side, with some standing inland. It may be any of them. But it is not, as Captain Ryecroft now feels sure, at sight of some floating drapery in the pavilion, with two female heads showing over its baluster rail; one of them with tresses glistening in the sunlight, bright as sunbeams themselves. He views it through a telescope--for he, too, has come out provided for distant observation--this confirming his conjectures just in the way he would wish. Now there will be no difficulty in learning who the lady is--for of one only does he care to make inquiry. He would order Wingate to hold way, but does not relish the idea of letting the waterman into his secret; and so, remaining silent, he is soon carried beyond sight of the summer-house, and along the outer edge of the islet, with its curtain of tall trees coming invidiously between. Continuing on to his angling ground, he gives way to reflections--at first of a pleasant nature. Satisfactory to think that she, the subject of them, at least lives in a handsome house; for a glimpse got of its upper storey tells it to be this. That she is in social rank a lady, he has hitherto had no doubt. The pretty pleasure craft and its appendages, with the venerable domestic acting as oarsman, are all proofs of something more than mere respectability--rather evidences of style. Marring these agreeable considerations is the thought he may not to-day meet the pleasure-boat. It is the hour that, from past experience, he might expect it to be out--for he has so timed his own piscatorial excursion. But, seeing the ladies in the summer-house, he doubts getting nearer sight of them--at least for another twenty-four hours. In all likelihood they have been already on the river, and returned home again. Why did he not start earlier? While thus fretting himself, he catches sight of another boat--of a sort very different from the _Gwendoline_--a heavy barge-like affair, with four men in it; hulking fellows, to whom rowing is evidently a new experience. Notwithstanding this, they do not seem at all frightened at finding themselves upon the water. Instead, they are behaving in a way that shows them either very courageous, or very regardless of a danger--which, possibly, they are not aware of. At short intervals one or other is seen starting to his feet, and rushing fore or aft--as if on an empty coal-waggon, instead of in a boat--and in such fashion, that were the craft at all crank it would certainly be upset! On drawing nearer them Captain Ryecroft and his oarsman get the explanation of their seemingly eccentric behaviour--its cause made clear by a black bottle, which one of them is holding in his hand, each of the others brandishing tumbler, or teacup. They are drinking; and that they have been so occupied for some time is evident by their loud shouts and grotesque gesturing. "They look an ugly lot!" observes the young waterman, viewing them over his shoulder; for, seated at the oars, his back is towards them. "Coal fellows, from the Forest o' Dean, I take it." Ryecroft, with a cigar between his teeth, dreamily thinking of a boat with people in it so dissimilar, simply signifies assent with a nod. But soon he is roused from his reverie, at hearing an exclamation louder than common, followed by words whose import concerns himself and his companion. These are:-- "Dang it, lads! le's goo in for a bit o' a lark! Yonner be a boat coomin' down wi' two chaps in 't: some o' them spickspan city gents! S'pose we gie 'em a capsize?" "Le's do it! Le's duck 'em!" shouted the others assentingly; he with the bottle dropping it into the boat's bottom, and laying hold of an oar instead. All act likewise, for it is a four-oared craft that carries them; and in a few seconds' time they are rowing it straight for that of the angler's. With astonishment, and fast gathering indignation, the Hussar officer sees the heavy barge coming bow on for his light fishing skiff, and is thoroughly sensible of the danger; the waterman becoming aware of it at the same instant of time. "They mean mischief," mutters Wingate; "what'd we best do, Captain? If you like I can keep clear, and shoot the _Mary_ past 'em--easy enough." "Do so," returns the salmon fisher, with the cigar still between his teeth--but now held bitterly tight, almost to biting off the stump. "You can keep on!" he adds, speaking calmly, and with an effort to keep down his temper; "that will be the best way, as things stand now. They look like they'd come up from below; and, if they show any ill manners at meeting, we can call them to account on return. Don't concern yourself about your course. I'll see to the steering. There! hard on the starboard oar!" This last, as the two boats have arrived within less than three lengths of one another. At the same time Ryecroft, drawing tight the port tiller-cord, changes course suddenly, leaving just sufficient sea-way for his oarsman to shave past, and avoid the threatened collision. Which is done the instant after--to the discomfiture of the would-be capsizers. As the skiff glides lightly beyond their reach, dancing over the river swell, as if in triumph and to mock them, they drop their oars, and send after it a chorus of yells, mingled with blasphemous imprecations. In a lull between, the Hussar officer at length takes the cigar from his lips, and calls back to them-- "You ruffians! You shall rue it! Shout on--till you're hoarse. There's a reckoning for you, perhaps sooner than you expect." "Yes, ye d--d scoun'rels!" adds the young waterman, himself so enraged as almost to foam at the mouth. "Ye'll have to pay dear for sich a dastartly attemp' to waylay Jack Wingate's boat. That will ye." "Bah!" jeeringly retorts one of the roughs. "To blazes wi' you, an' yer boat!" "Ay, to the blazes wi' ye!" echo the others in drunken chorus; and, while their voices are still reverberating along the adjacent cliffs, the fishing skiff drifts round a bend of the river, bearing its owner and his fare out of their sight, as beyond earshot of their profane speech. CHAPTER III. A CHARON CORRUPTED. The lawn of Llangorren Court, for a time abandoned to the dumb quadrupeds, that had returned to their tranquil pasturing, is again enlivened by the presence of the two young ladies; but so transformed, that they are scarce recognisable as the same late seen upon it. Of course, it is their dresses that have caused the change; Miss Wynn now wearing a pea jacket of navy blue, with anchor buttons, and a straw hat set coquettishly on her head, its ribbons of azure hue trailing over, and prettily contrasting with the plaits of her chrome-yellow hair, gathered in a grand coil behind. But for the flowing skirt below, she might be mistaken for a young mid, whose cheeks as yet show only the down--one who would "find sweethearts in every port." Miss Lees is less nautically attired; having but slipped over her morning dress a paletot of the ordinary kind, and on her head a plumed hat of the Neopolitan pattern. For all, a costume becoming; especially the brigand-like head-gear which sets off her finely-chiselled features and skin, dark as any daughter of the South. They are about starting towards the boat-dock, when a difficulty presents itself--not to Gwen, but the companion. "We have forgotten Joseph!" she exclaims. Joseph is an ancient retainer of the Wynn family, who, in its domestic affairs, plays parts of many kinds--among them the _métier_ of boatman. It is his duty to look after the _Gwendoline_, see that she is snug in her dock, with oars and steering apparatus in order; go out with her when his young mistress takes a row on the river, or ferry any one of the family who has occasion to cross it--the last a need by no means rare, since for miles above and below there is nothing in the shape of a bridge. "No, we haven't," rejoins Joseph's mistress, answering the exclamation of the companion. "I remembered him well enough--too well." "Why too well?" asks the other, looking a little puzzled. "Because we don't want him." "But surely, Gwen, you wouldn't think of our going alone." "Surely I would, and do. Why not?" "We've never done so before." "Is that any reason we shouldn't now?" "But Miss Linton will be displeased, if not very angry. Besides, as you know, there may be danger on the river." For a short while Gwen is silent, as if pondering on what the other has said. Not on the suggested danger. She is far from being daunted by that. But Miss Linton is her aunt--as already hinted, her legal guardian till of age--head of the house, and still holding authority, though exercising it in the mildest manner. And just on this account it would not be right to outrage it, nor is Miss Wynn the one to do so. Instead, she prefers a little subterfuge, which is in her mind as she makes rejoinder-- "I suppose we must take him along; though it's very vexatious, and for various reasons." "What are they? May I know them?" "You're welcome. For one, I can pull a boat just as well as he, if not better. And for another, we can't have a word of conversation without his hearing it--which isn't at all nice, besides being inconvenient. As I've reason to know, the old curmudgeon is an incorrigible gossip, and tattles all over the parish; I only wish we'd someone else. What a pity I haven't a brother to go with us! _But not to-day._" The reserving clause, despite its earnestness, is not spoken aloud. In the aquatic excursion intended, she wants no companion of the male kind--above all, no brother. Nor will she take Joseph, though she signifies her consent to it, by desiring the companion to summon him. As the latter starts off for the stable-yard, where the ferryman is usually to be found, Gwen says, in soliloquy-- "I'll take old Joe as far as the boat stairs, but not a yard beyond. I know what will stay him there--steady as a pointer with a partridge six feet from its nose. By the way, have I got my purse with me?" She plunges her hand into one of her pea-jacket pockets; and, there feeling the thing sought for, is satisfied. By this Miss Lees has got back, bringing with her the versatile Joseph--a tough old servitor of the respectable family type, who has seen some sixty summers, more or less. After a short colloquy, with some questions as to the condition of the pleasure-boat, its oars, and steering gear, the three proceed in the direction of the dock. Arrived at the bottom of the boat stairs, Joseph's mistress, turning to him, says-- "Joe, old boy, Miss Lees and I are going for a row; but, as the day's fine, and the water smooth as glass, there's no need for our having you along with us. So you can stay here till we return." The venerable retainer is taken aback by the proposal. He has never listened to the like before; for never before has the pleasure-boat gone to river without his being aboard. True, it is no business of his; still, as an ancient upholder of the family, with its honour and safety, he cannot assent to this strange innovation without entering protest. He does so, asking: "But, Miss Gwen, what will your aunt say to it? She mayent like you young ladies to go rowin' by yourselves? Besides, miss, ye know there be some not werry nice people as moat meet ye on the river. 'Deed some v' the roughiest and worst o' blaggarts." "Nonsense, Joseph! The Wye isn't the Niger, where we might expect the fate of Mungo Park. Why, man, we'll be as safe on it as upon our own carriage drive, or the little fishpond. As for aunt, she won't say anything, because she won't know. Shan't, can't, unless you peach on us. The which, my amiable Joseph, you'll not do--I'm sure you will not." "How'm I to help it, Miss Gwen? When you've goed off, some o' the house sarvints 'll see me here, an', hows'ever I keep my tongue in check----" "Check it now!" abruptly breaks in the heiress, "and stop palavering, Joe. The house servants won't see you--not one of them. When we're off on the river, you'll be lying at anchor in those laurel bushes above. And to keep you to your anchorage, here's some shining metal." Saying which, she slips several shillings into his hand, adding, as she notes the effect-- "Do you think it sufficiently heavy? If not--but never mind now. In our absence you can amuse yourself weighing and counting the coins. I fancy they'll do." She is sure of it, knowing the man's weakness to be money, as it now proves. Her argument is too powerful for his resistance, and he does not resist. Despite his solicitude for the welfare of the Wynn family, with his habitual regard of duty, the ancient servitor, refraining from further protest, proceeds to undo the knot of the _Gwendoline's_ painter. Stepping into the boat, the other Gwendoline takes the oars, Miss Lees seating herself to steer. "All right! Now, Joe, give us a push off." Joseph, having let all loose, does as directed, which sends the light craft clear out of its dock. Then, standing on the bottom step, with an adroit twirl of the thumb, he spreads the silver pieces over his palm--so that he may see how many--and, after counting and contemplating with pleased expression, slips them into his pocket, muttering to himself-- "I dar say it'll be all right. Miss Gwen's a oner to take care o' herself; an' the old lady neen't a know anythin' about it." To make his last words good, he mounts briskly back up the boat stairs, and ensconces himself in the heart of a thick-leaved laurestinus--to the great discomfort of a pair of missel-thrushes, which have there made nest, and commenced incubation. CHAPTER IV. ON THE RIVER. The fair rower, vigorously bending to the oars, soon brings through the bye-way, and out into the main channel of the river. Once in mid-stream she suspends her stroke, permitting the boat to drift down with the current; which, for a mile below Llangorren, flows gently through meadow land but a few feet above its own level, and flush with it in times of flood. On this particular day there is none such--no rain having fallen for a week--and the Wye's water is pure and clear. Smooth, too, as the surface of a mirror; only where, now and then, a light zephyr, playing upon it, stirs up the tiniest of ripples; a swallow dips its scimitar wings; or a salmon in bolder dash causes a purl, with circling eddies, whose wavelets extend wider and wider as they subside. So, with the trace of their boat's keel; the furrow made by it instantly closing up, and the current resuming its tranquillity; while their reflected forms--too bright to be spoken of as shadows--now fall on one side, now on the other, as the capricious curving of the river makes necessary a change of course. Never went boat down the Wye carrying freight more fair. Both girls are beautiful, though of opposite types, and in a different degree; while with one--Gwendolyn Wynn--no water Nymph, or Naiad, could compare; her warm beauty in its real embodiment far excelling any conception of fancy, or flight of the most romantic imagination. She is not thinking of herself now; nor, indeed, does she much at any time--least of all in this wise. She is anything but vain; instead, like Vivian Ryecroft, rather underrates herself. And possibly more than ever this morning; for it is with him her thoughts are occupied--surmising whether his may be with her, but not in the most sanguine hope. Such a man must have looked on many a form fair as hers, won smiles of many a woman beautiful as she. How can she expect him to have resisted, or that his heart is still whole? While thus conjecturing, she sits half turned on the thwart, with oars out of water, her eyes directed down the river, as though in search of something there. And they are; that something a white helmet hat. She sees it not; and as the last thought has caused her some pain, she lets down the oars with a plunge, and recommences pulling; now, and as in spite, at each dip of the blades breaking her own bright image! During all this while Ellen Lees is otherwise occupied; her attention partly taken up with the steering, but as much given to the shores on each side--to the green pasture-land, of which, at intervals, she has a view, with the white-faced "Herefords" straying over it, or standing grouped in the shade of some spreading trees, forming pastoral pictures worthy the pencil of a Morland or Cuyp. In clumps, or apart, tower up old poplars, through whose leaves, yet but half unfolded, can be seen the rounded burrs of the mistletoe, looking like nests of rooks. Here and there one overhangs the river's bank, shadowing still deep pools, where the ravenous pike lies in ambush for "salmon pink" and such small fry; while on a bare branch above may be observed another of their persecutors, the kingfisher, its brilliant azure plumage in strong contrast with everything on the earth around, and like a bit of sky fallen from above. At intervals it is seen darting from side to side, or in longer flight following the bend of the stream, and causing scamper among the minnows--itself startled and scared by the intrusion of the boat upon its normally peaceful domain. Miss Lees, who is somewhat of a naturalist, and has been out with the District Field Club on more than one "ladies' day," makes note of all these things. As the _Gwendoline_ glides on, she observes beds of the water ranunculus, whose snow-white corollas, bending to the current, are oft rudely dragged beneath; while on the banks above, their cousins of golden sheen, mingling with the petals of yellow and purple loose-strife--for both grow here--with anemones, and pale, lemon-coloured daffodils--are but kissed, and gently fanned, by the balmy breath of spring. Easily guiding the craft down the slow-flowing stream, she has a fine opportunity of observing Nature in its unrestrained action, and takes advantage of it. She looks with delighted eye at the freshly-opened flowers, and listens with charmed ear to the warbling of the birds--a chorus, on the Wye, sweet and varied as anywhere on earth. From many a deep-lying dell in the adjacent hills she can hear the song of the thrush, as if endeavouring to outdo, and cause one to forget, the matchless strain of its nocturnal rival, the nightingale; or making music for its own mate, now on the nest, and occupied with the cares of incubation. She hears, too, the bold whistling carol of the blackbird, the trill of the lark soaring aloft, the soft sonorous note of the cuckoo, blending with the harsh scream of the jay, and the laughing cackle of the green woodpecker--the last loud beyond all proportion to the size of the bird, and bearing close resemblance to the cry of an eagle. Strange coincidence besides, in the woodpecker being commonly called "eekol"--a name, on the Wye, pronounced with striking similarity to that of the royal bird! Pondering upon this very theme, Ellen has taken no note of how her companion is employing herself. Nor is Miss Wynn thinking of either flowers, or birds. Only when a large one of the latter, a kite, shooting out from the summit of a wooded hill, stays awhile soaring overhead, does she give thought to what so interests the other. "A pretty sight!" observes Ellen, as they sit looking up at the sharp, slender wings, and long bifurcated tail, cut clear as a cameo against the cloudless sky. "Isn't it a beautiful creature?" "Beautiful, but bad," rejoins Gwen, "like many other animated things--too like, and too many of them. I suppose it's on the look-out for some innocent victim, and will soon be swooping down at it. Ah, me! it's a wicked world, Nell, with all its sweetness! One creature preying upon another, the strong seeking to devour the weak--these ever needing protection! Is it any wonder we poor women, weakest of all, should wish to----" She stays her interrogatory, and sits in silence, abstractedly toying with the handles of the oars, which she is balancing above water. "Wish to do what?" asked the other. "Get married!" answers the heiress of Llangorren, elevating her arms, and letting the blades fall with a plash, as if to drown a speech so bold; withal, watching its effect upon her companion, as she repeats the question in a changed form. "Is it strange, Ellen?" "I suppose not," Ellen timidly replies; blushingly too, for she knows how nearly the subject concerns herself, and half believes the interrogatory aimed at her. "Not at all strange," she adds, more affirmatively. "Indeed very natural, I should say--that is, for women who _are_ poor and weak, and really need a protector. But you, Gwen, who are neither one nor the other, but instead rich and strong, have no such need." "I'm not so sure of that. With all my riches and strength--for I am a strong creature; as you see, can row this boat almost as ably as a man"--she gives a vigorous pull or two, as proof, then continuing, "Yes, and I think I've got great courage too. Yet, would you believe it, Nelly, notwithstanding all, I sometimes have a strange fear upon me?" "Fear of what?" "I can't tell. That's the strangest part of it; for I know of no actual danger. Some sort of vague apprehension that now and then oppresses me--lies on my heart, making it heavy as lead--sad and dark as the shadow of that wicked bird upon the water. Ugh!" she exclaims, taking her eyes off it, as if the sight, suggestive of evil, had brought on one of the fear spells she is speaking of. "If it were a magpie," observes Ellen laughingly, "you might view it with suspicion. Most people do--even some who deny being superstitious. But a kite--I never heard of that being ominous of evil. No more its shadow; which as you see it there is but a small speck compared with the wide bright surface around. If your future sorrows be only in like proportion to your joys, they won't signify much. See! Both the bird and its shadow are passing away--as will your troubles, if you ever have any." "Passing--perhaps, soon to return. Ha! look there. As I've said!" This, as the kite swoops down upon a wood-quest, and strikes at it with outstretched talons. Missing it, nevertheless; for the strong-winged pigeon, forewarned by the other's shadow, has made a quick double in its flight, and so shunned the deadly clutch. Still, it is not yet safe; its tree covert is far off on the wooded slope, and the tyrant continues the chase. But the hawk has its enemy too, in a gamekeeper with his gun. Suddenly it is seen to suspend the stroke of its wings, and go whirling downward; while a shot rings out on the air, and the cushat, unharmed, flies on for the hill. "Good!" exclaims Gwen, resting the oars across her knees, and clapping her hands in an ecstasy of delight. "The innocent has escaped!" "And for that _you_ ought to be assured, as well as gratified," puts in the companion, "taking it as a symbol of yourself, and those imaginary dangers you've been dreaming about." "True," assents Miss Wynn musingly; "but, as you see, the bird found a protector--just by chance, and in the nick of time." "So will you; without any chance, and at such time as may please you." "Oh!" exclaims Gwen, as if endowed with fresh courage. "I don't want one--not I! I'm strong to stand alone." Another tug at the oars to show it. "No," she continues, speaking between the plunges, "I want no protector--at least not yet: nor for a long while." "But there's one wants you," says the companion, accompanying her words with an interrogative glance. "And soon--soon as he can have you." "Indeed! I suppose you mean Master George Shenstone. Have I hit the nail upon the head?" "You have." "Well; what of him?" "Only that everybody observes his attentions to you." "Everybody is a very busy body. Being so observant, I wonder if this everybody has also observed how I receive them?" "Indeed, yes." "How then?" "With favour. 'Tis said you think highly of him." "And so I do. There are worse men in the world than George Shenstone--possibly few better. And many a good woman would, and might, be glad to become his wife. For all, I know one of a very indifferent sort who wouldn't--that's Gwen Wynn." "But he's very good-looking!" Ellen urges; "the handsomest gentleman in the neighbourhood. Everybody says so." "There your everybody would be wrong again--if they thought as they say. But they don't. I know one who thinks somebody else much handsomer than he." "Who?" asks Miss Lees, looking puzzled; for she has never heard of Gwendoline having a preference, save that spoken of. "The Rev. William Musgrave," replies Gwen, in turn bending inquisitive eyes on her companion, to whose cheeks the answer has brought a flush of colour, with a spasm of pain at the heart. Is it possible her rich relative--the heiress of Llangorren Court--can have set her eyes upon the poor curate of Llangorren Church, where her own thoughts have been secretly straying? With an effort to conceal them now, as the pain caused her, she rejoins interrogatively, but in faltering tone,-- "You think Mr. Musgrave handsomer than Mr. Shenstone?" "Indeed I don't! Who says I do?" "Oh--I thought," stammers out the other, relieved--too pleased just then to stand up for the superiority of the curate's personal appearance--"I thought you meant it that way." "But I didn't. All I said was, that somebody thinks so; and that isn't I. Shall I tell you who it is?" Ellen's heart is again quiet; she does not need to be told, already divining who it is--herself. "You may as well let me," pursues Gwen, in a bantering way. "Do you suppose, Miss Lees, I haven't penetrated your secret long ago? Why, I knew it last Christmas, when you were assisting his demure reverence to decorate the church! Who could fail to observe that pretty hand play, when you two were twining the ivy around the altar-rail? And the holly, you were both so careless in handling, I wonder it didn't prick your fingers to the bone! Why, Nell, 'twas as plain to me, as if I'd been at it myself. Besides, I've seen the same thing scores of times, so has everybody in the parish. Ha! you see, I'm not the only one with whose name this everybody has been busy; the difference being, that about me they've been mistaken, while concerning yourself they haven't; instead, speaking pretty near the truth. Come, now, confess! Am I not right? Don't have any fear; you can trust me." She does confess; though not in words. Her silence is equally eloquent; drooping eyelids, and blushing cheeks, making that eloquence emphatic. She loves Mr. Musgrave. "Enough!" says Gwendoline, taking it in this sense; "and, since you have been candid with me, I'll repay you in the same coin. But, mind you, it mustn't go further." "Oh! certainly not," assents the other, in her restored confidence about the curate willing to promise anything in the world. "As I've said," proceeds Miss Wynn, "there are worse men in the world than George Shenstone, and but few better. Certainly none behind hounds, and I'm told he's the crack shot of the county, and the best billiard player of his club--all accomplishments that have weight with us women--some of us. More still; he's deemed good-looking, and is, as you say, known to be of good family and fortune. For all, he lacks one thing that's wanted by----" She stays her speech till dipping the oars--their splash, simultaneous with, and half-drowning, the words, "Gwen Wynn." "What is it?" asks Ellen, referring to the deficiency thus hinted at. "On my word, I can't tell--for the life of me I cannot. It's something undefinable; which one feels without seeing or being able to explain--just as ether, or electricity. Possibly it is the last. At all events, it's the thing that makes us women fall in love; as no doubt you've found when your fingers were--were--well, so near being pricked by that holly. Ha, ha, ha!" With a merry peal she once more sets to rowing; and for a time no speech passes between them, the only sounds heard being the songs of the birds, in sweet symphony with the rush of the water along the boat's sides, and the rumbling of the oars in their rowlocks. But for a brief interval is their silence between them, Miss Wynn again breaking it by a startled exclamation:-- "See!" "Where? where?" "Up yonder! We've been talking of kites and magpies. Behold, two birds of worse augury than either!" They are passing the mouth of a little influent stream, up which at some distance are seen two men, one of them seated in a small boat, the other standing on the bank talking down to him. He in the boat is a stout, thick-set fellow in velveteens and coarse fur cap, the one above a spare thin man, habited in a suit of black--of clerical, or rather sacerdotal, cut. Though both are partially screened by the foliage, the little stream running between wooded banks, Miss Wynn has recognised them. So, too, does the companion; who rejoins, as if speaking to herself-- "One's the French priest who has a chapel up the river, on the opposite side; the other's that fellow who's said to be such an incorrigible poacher." "Priest and poacher it is! An oddly-assorted pair; though in a sense not so ill-matched either. I wonder what they're about up there, with their heads so close together. They appeared as if not wishing we should see them. Didn't it strike you so, Nelly?" The men are now out of sight, the boat having passed the rivulet's mouth. "Indeed, yes," answered Miss Lees; "the priest, at all events. He drew back among the bushes on seeing us." "I'm sure his reverence is welcome. I've no desire ever to set eyes on him--quite the contrary." "I often meet him on the roads." "I too--and off them. He seems to be about everywhere skulking and prying into people's affairs. I noticed him the last day of our hunting, among the rabble--on foot, of course. He was close to my horse, and kept watching me out of his owlish eyes all the time; so impertinently I could have laid the whip over his shoulders. There's something repulsive about the man; I can't bear the sight of him." "He's said to be a great friend and very intimate associate of your worthy cousin, Mr.----." "Don't name _him_, Nell! I'd rather not think, much less talk of him. Almost the last words my father ever spoke--never to let Lewin Murdock cross the threshold of Llangorren. No doubt, he had his reasons. My word! this day with all its sunny brightness seems to abound in dark omens. Birds of prey, priests, and poachers! It's enough to bring on one of my fear fits. I now rather regret leaving Joseph behind. Well, we must make haste and get home again." "Shall I turn the boat back?" asks the steerer. "No; not just yet. I don't wish to repass those two uncanny creatures. Better leave them awhile, so that on returning we mayn't see them, to disturb the priest's equanimity--more like his conscience." The reason is not exactly as assigned; but Miss Lees, accepting it without suspicion, holds the tiller cords so as to keep the course on down stream. CHAPTER V. DANGERS AHEAD. For another half-mile, or so, the _Gwendoline_ is propelled onward, though not running trimly; the fault being in her at the oars. With thoughts still preoccupied, she now and then forgets her stroke, or gives it unequally--so that the boat zig-zags from side to side, and, but for a more careful hand at the tiller, would bring up against the bank. Observing her abstraction, as also her frequent turning to look down the river--but without suspicion of what is causing it--Miss Lees at length inquires,-- "What's the matter with you, Gwen?" "Oh, nothing," she evasively answers, bringing back her eyes to the boat, and once more giving attention to the oars. "But why are you looking so often below? I've noticed you do so at least a score of times." If the questioner could but divine the thoughts at that moment in the other's mind, she would have no need thus to interrogate, but would know that below there is another boat, with a man in it who possesses that unseen something, like ether or electricity, and to catch sight of whom Miss Wynn has been so oft straining her eyes. She has not given all her confidence to the companion. Not receiving immediate answer, Ellen again asked-- "Is there any danger you fear?" "None that I know of--at least, for a long way down. Then there are some rough places." "But you are pulling so unsteadily! It takes all my strength to keep in the middle of the river." "Then you pull, and let me do the steering," returns Miss Wynn, pretending to be in a pout; as she speaks starting up from the thwart, and leaving the oars in their thole pins. Of course, the other does not object; and soon they have changed places. But Gwen in the stern behaves no better than when seated amidships. The boat still keeps going astray, the fault now in the steerer. Soon something more than a crooked course calls the attention of both, for a time engrossing it. They have rounded an abrupt bend, and got into a reach where the river runs with troubled surface and great velocity--so swift there is no need to use oars down stream, while upward 'twill take stronger arms than theirs. Caught in its current, and rapidly, yet smoothly, borne on, for a while they do not think of this. Only a short while; then the thought comes to them in the shape of a dilemma--Miss Lees being the first to perceive it. "Gracious goodness!" she exclaims, "what are we to do? We can never row back up this rough water--it runs so strong here!" "That's true," says Gwen, preserving her composure. "I don't think we could." "But what's to be the upshot? Joseph will be waiting for us, and auntie sure to know all, if we shouldn't get back in time." "That's true also," again observes Miss Wynn assentingly, and with an admirable _sang froid_, which causes surprise to the companion. Then succeeds a short interval of silence, broken by an exclamatory phrase of three short words from the lips of Miss Wynn. They are--"I have it!" "What have you?" joyfully asks Ellen. "The way to get back--without much trouble, and without disturbing the arrangements we've made with old Joe the least bit." "Explain yourself!" "We'll keep on down the river to Rock Weir. There we can leave the boat, and walk across the neck to Llangorren. It isn't over a mile, though it's five times that by the course of the stream. At the Weir we can engage some water fellow to take back the _Gwendoline_ to her moorings. Meanwhile, we'll make all haste, slip into the grounds unobserved, get to the boat-dock in good time, and give Joseph the cue to hold his tongue about what's happened. Another half-crown will tie it firm and fast, I know." "I suppose there's no help for it," says the companion, assenting, "and we must do as you say." "Of course we must. As you see, without thinking of it, we've drifted into a very cascade, and are now a long way down it. Only a regular waterman could pull up again. Ah! 'twould take the toughest of them, I should say. So--_nolens volens_--we'll have to go on to Rock Weir, which can't be more than a mile now. You may feather your oars, and float a bit. But, by the way, I must look more carefully to the steering. Now, that I remember, there are some awkward bars and eddies about here, and we can't be far from them. I think they're just below the next bend." So saying, she sets herself square in the stern sheets, and closes her fingers firmly upon the tiller cords. They glide on, but now in silence; the little flurry, with the prospect of peril ahead, making speech inopportune. Soon they are round the bend spoken of, discovering to their view a fresh reach of the river; when again the steerer becomes neglectful of her duty, the expression upon her features, late a little troubled, suddenly changing to cheerfulness--almost joy. Nor is it that the dangerous places have been passed; they are still ahead, and at some distance below. But there is something else ahead to account for the quick transformation--a row-boat drawn up by the river's edge, with men upon the bank beside. Over Gwen Wynn's countenance comes another change, sudden as before, and as before, its expression reversed. She has mistaken the boat; it is not that of the handsome fisherman! Instead, a four-oared craft, manned by four men, for there is this number on the bank. The angler's skiff had in it only two--himself and his oarsman. But she has no need to count heads, nor scrutinise faces. Those now before her eyes are all strange, and far from well favoured; not any of them in the least like the one which has so prepossessed her. And while making this observation another is forced upon her--that their natural plainness is not improved by what they have been doing, and are still--drinking. Just as the young ladies made this observation, the four men, hearing oars, face towards them. For a moment there is silence, while they in the _Gwendoline_ are being scanned by the quartette on the shore. Through maudlin eyes, possibly, the fellows mistake them for ordinary country lasses, with whom they may take liberties. Whether or not one cries out-- "Petticoats, by gee--ingo!" "Ay!" exclaims another, "a pair o' them. An' sweet wenches they be, too. Look at she wi' the gooldy hair--bright as the sun itself. Lord, meeats! if we had she down in the pit, that head o' her ud gi'e as much light as a dozen Davy's lamps. An't she a bewty? I'm boun' to have a smack fra them red lips o' hers." "No," protests the first speaker, "she be myen. First spoke soonest sarved. That's Forest law." "Never mind, Rob," rejoins the other, surrendering his claim, "she may be the grandest to look at, but not the goodiest to go. I'll lay odds the black 'un beats her at kissin'. Le's get grup o' 'em an' see! Coom on, meeats!" Down go the drinking vessels, all four making for their boat, into which they scramble, each laying hold of an oar. Up to this time the ladies have not felt actual alarm. The strange men being evidently intoxicated, they might expect--were, indeed, half-prepared for--coarse speech; perhaps indelicate, but nothing beyond. Within a mile of their own home, and still within the boundary of the Llangorren land, how could they think of danger such as is threatening? For that there is danger they are now sensible--becoming convinced of it as they draw nearer to the four fellows, and get a better view of them. Impossible to mistake the men--roughs from the Forest of Dean, or some other mining district, their but half-washed faces showing it; characters not very gentle at any time, but very rude, even dangerous, when drunk. This known from many a tale told, many a Petty and Quarter Sessions report read in the county newspapers. But it is visible in their countenances, too intelligible in their speech--part of which the ladies have overheard--as in the action they are taking. They in the pleasure-boat no longer fear, or think of bars and eddies below. No whirlpool, not Maelstrom itself, could fright them as those four men. For it is fear of a something more to be dreaded than drowning. Withal, Gwendoline Wynn is not so much dismayed as to lose presence of mind. Nor is she at all excited, but cool as when caught in the rapid current. Her feats in the hunting field, and dashing drives down the steep "pitches" of the Herefordshire roads, have given her strength of nerve to face any danger; and, as her timid companion trembles with affright, muttering her fears, she but says-- "Keep quiet, Nell! Don't let them see you're scared. It's not the way to treat such as they, and will only encourage them to come at us." This counsel, before the men have moved, fails in effect; for as they are seen rushing down the bank and into their boat, Ellen Lees utters a terrified shriek, scarcely leaving her breath to add the words-- "Dear Gwen! what shall we do?" "Change places," is the reply, calmly but hurriedly made. "Give me the oars! Quick!" While speaking she has started up from the stern, and is making for 'midships. The other, comprehending, has risen at the same instant, leaving the oars to trail. By this the roughs has shoved off from the bank, and are making for mid-stream, their purpose evident--to intercept the _Gwendoline_. But the other Gwendoline has now got settled to the oars; and pulling with all her might, has still a chance to shoot past them. In a few seconds the boats are but a couple of lengths apart, the heavy craft coming bow-on for the lighter; while the faces of those in her, slewed over their shoulders, show terribly forbidding. A glance tells Gwen Wynn 'twould be idle making appeal to them; nor does she. Still she is not silent. Unable to restrain her indignation, she calls out-- "Keep back, fellows! If you run against us 'twill go ill for you. Don't suppose you'll escape punishment." "Bah!" responds one, "we an't a-frightened at yer threats--not we. That an't the way wi' us Forest chaps. Besides, we don't mean ye any much harm. Only gi'e us a kiss all round, an' then--maybe, we'll let ye go." "Yes; kisses all round!" cries another. "That's the toll ye're got to pay at our pike; an' a bit o' squeeze by way o' boot." The coarse jest elicits a peal of laughter from the other three. Fortunately for those who are its butt, since it takes the attention of the rowers from their oars, and before they can recover a stroke or two lost, the pleasure-boat glides past them, and goes dancing on, as did the fishing skiff. With a yell of disappointment they bring their boat's head round, and row after; now straining at their oars with all strength. Luckily, they lack skill; which, fortunately for herself, the rower of the pleasure-boat possesses. It stands her in stead now, and, for a time, the _Gwendoline_ leads without losing ground. But the struggle is unequal, four to one--strong men against a weak woman! Verily is she called on to make good her words, when saying she could row almost as ably as a man. And so does she for a time. Withal it may not avail her. The task is too much for her woman's strength, fast becoming exhausted. While her strokes grow feebler, those of the pursuers seem to get stronger. For they are in earnest now; and, despite the bad management of their boat, it is rapidly gaining on the other. "Pull, meeats!" cries one, the roughest of the gang, and apparently the ringleader, "pull like--hic--hic!"--his drunken tongue refuses the blasphemous word. "If ye lay me 'longside that girl wi' the gooc--goeeldy hair, I'll stan' someat stiff at the 'Kite's Nest' whens we get hic--'ome." "All right, Bob!" is the rejoinder, "we'll do that. Ne'er a fear." The prospect of "someat stiff" at the Forest hostelry inspires them to increase their exertion, and their speed proportionately augmented, no longer leaves a doubt of their being able to come up with the pursued boat. Confident, of it they commence jeering the ladies--"wenches" they call them--in speech profane, as repulsive. For these, things look black. They are but a couple of boats' length ahead, and near below is a sharp turn in the river's channel; rounding which they will lose ground, and can scarcely fail to be overtaken. What then? As Gwen Wynn asks herself the question, the anger late flashing in her eyes gives place to a look of keen anxiety. Her glances are sent to right, to left, and again over her shoulder, as they have been all day doing, but now with very different design. Then she was searching for a man, with no further thought than to feast her eyes on him; now she is looking for the same, in hopes he may save her from insult--it may be worse. There is no man in sight--no human being on either side of the river! On the right a grim cliff rising sheer, with some goats clinging to its ledges. On the left a grassy slope with browsing sheep, their lambs astretch at their feet; but no shepherd, no one to whom she can call "Help!" Distractedly she continues to tug at the oars; despairingly as the boats draw near the bend. Before rounding it she will be in the hands of those horrid men--embraced by their brawny, bear-like arms! The thought restrengthens her own, giving them the energy of desperation. So inspired, she makes a final effort to elude the ruffian pursuers, and succeeds in turning the point. Soon as round it, her face brightens up, joy dances in her eyes, as with panting breath she exclaims,-- "We're saved, Nelly! We're saved! Thank Heaven for it!" Nelly does thank Heaven, rejoiced to hear they are saved; but without in the least comprehending how! CHAPTER VI. A DUCKING DESERVED. Captain Ryecroft has been but a few minutes at his favourite fishing-place--just long enough to see his tackle in working condition, and cast his line across the water; as he does the last, saying-- "I shouldn't wonder, Wingate, if we don't see a salmon to-day. I fear that sky's too bright for his dainty kingship to mistake feathers for flies." "Ne'er a doubt the fish'll be a bit shy," returns the boatman; "but," he adds, assigning their shyness to a different cause, "'tain't so much the colour o' the sky; more like it's that lot of Foresters has frightened them, with their hulk o' a boat makin' as much noise as a Bristol steamer. Wonder what brings such rubbish on the river anyhow. They han't no business on't; an' in my opinion theer ought to be a law 'gainst it--same's for trespassin' after game." "That would be rather hard lines, Jack. These mining gentry need outdoor recreation as much as any other sort of people. Rather more I should say, considering that they're compelled to pass the greater part of their time underground. When they emerge from the bowels of the earth to disport themselves on its surface, it's but natural they should like a little aquatics; which you, by choice, an amphibious creature, cannot consistently blame them for. Those we've just met are doubtless out for a holiday, which accounts for their having taken too much drink--in some sense an excuse for their conduct. I don't think it at all strange seeing them on the water." "Their faces han't seed much o' it anyhow," observes the waterman, seeming little satisfied with the Captain's reasoning. "And as for their being out on holiday, if I an't mistook, it be holiday as lasts all the year round. Two o' 'em may be miners--them as got the grimiest faces. As for t'other two, I don't think eyther ever touch't pick or shovel in their lives. I've seed both hangin' about Lydbrook, which be a queery place. Besides, one I've seed 'long wi' a man whose company is enough to gi'e a saint a bad character--that's Coracle Dick. Take my word for 't, Captain, there ain't a honest miner 'mong that lot--eyther in the way of iron or coal. If there wor I'd be the last man to go again them havin' their holiday; 'cepting I don't think they ought to take it on the river. Ye see what comes o' sich as they humbuggin' about in a boat?" At the last clause of this speech--its Conservatism due to a certain professional jealousy--the Hussar officer cannot resist smiling. He had half forgotten the rudeness of the revellers--attributing it to intoxication--and more than half repented of his threat to bring them to a reckoning, which might not be called for, but might, and in all likelihood would, be inconvenient. Now, reflecting on Wingate's words, the frown which had passed from off his face again returns to it. He says nothing, however, but sits rod in hand, less thinking of the salmon than how he can chastise the "d--d scoun'rels," as his companion has pronounced them, should he, as he anticipates, again come in collision with them. "Lissen!" exclaims the waterman; "that's them shoutin'! Comin' this way, I take it. What should we do to 'em, Captain?" The salmon-fisher is half determined to reel in his line, lay aside the rod, and take out a revolving pistol he chances to have in his pocket--not with any intention to fire it at the fellows, but only frighten them. "Yes," goes on Wingate, "they be droppin' down again--sure; I dar' say they've found the tide a bit too strong for 'em up above. An' I don't wonder; sich louty chaps as they thinkin' they cud guide a boat 'bout the Wye! Jist like mountin' hogs a-horseback!" At this fresh sally of professional spleen the soldier again smiles, but says nothing, uncertain what action he should take, or how soon he may be called on to commence it. Almost instantly after he is called on to take action, though not against the four riotous Foresters, but a silly salmon, which has conceived a fancy for his fly. A purl on the water, with a pluck quick succeeding, tells of one on the hook, while the whizz of the wheel and rapid rolling out of catgut proclaims it a fine one. For some minutes neither he nor his oarsman has eye or ear for aught save securing the fish, and both bend all their energies to "fighting" it. The line runs out, to be spun up and run off again; his river majesty, maddened at feeling himself so oddly and painfully restrained in his desperate efforts to escape, now rushing in one direction, now another, all the while the angler skilfully playing him, the equally skilled oarsman keeping the boat in concerted accordance. Absorbed by their distinct lines of endeavour they do not hear high words, mingled with exclamations, coming from above; or hearing, do not heed, supposing them to proceed from the four men they had met, in all likelihood now more inebriated than ever. Not till they have well-nigh finished their "fight," and the salmon, all but subdued, is being drawn towards the boat--Wingate, gaff in hand, bending over ready to strike it--not till then do they note other sounds, which even at that critical moment make them careless about the fish, in its last feeble throes, when its capture is good as sure, causing Ryecroft to stop winding his wheel, and stand listening. Only for an instant. Again the voices of men, but now also heard the cry of a woman, as if she sending it forth were in danger or distress! They have no need for conjecture, nor are they long left to it. Almost simultaneously they see a boat sweeping round the bend, with another close in its wake, evidently in chase, as told by the attitudes and gestures of those occupying both--in the one pursued two young ladies, in that pursuing four rough men readily recognisable. At a glance the Hussar officer takes in the situation--the waterman as well. The sight saves a salmon's life, and possibly two innocent women from outrage. Down goes Ryecroft's rod, the boatman simultaneously dropping his gaff; as he does so hearing thundered in his ears-- "To your oars, Jack! Make straight for them! Row with all your might!" Jack Wingate needs neither command to act nor word to stimulate him. As a man he remembers the late indignity to himself; as a gallant fellow he now sees others submitted to the like. No matter about their being ladies; enough that they are women suffering insult; and more than enough at seeing who are the insulters. In ten seconds' time he is on his thwart, oars in hand, the officer at the tiller; and in five more, the _Mary_, brought stem up stream, is surging against the current, going swiftly as if with it. She is set for the big boat pursuing--not now to shun a collision, but seek it. As yet some two hundred yards are between the chased craft and that hastening to its rescue. Ryecroft, measuring the distance with his eyes, is in thought tracing out a course of action. His first instinct was to draw a pistol, and stop the pursuit with a shot. But no; it would not be English. Nor does he need resort to such deadly weapon. True there will be four against two; but what of it? "I think we can manage them, Jack," he mutters through his teeth, "I'm good for two of them--the biggest and best." "An' I t'other two--sich clumsy chaps as them! Ye can trust me takin' care o' 'em, Captin." "I know it. Keep to your oars till I give the word to drop them." "They don't 'pear to a sighted us yet. Too drunk I take it. Like as not when they see what's comin' they'll sheer off." "They shan't have the chance. I intend steering bow dead on to them. Don't fear the result. If the _Mary_ gets damaged I'll stand the expense of repairs." "Ne'er a mind 'bout that, Captain. I'd gi'e the price o' a new boat to see the lot chestised--specially that big black fellow as did most o' the talkin'." "You shall see it, and soon!" He lets go the ropes, to disembarrass himself of his angling accoutrements; which he hurriedly does, flinging them at his feet. When he again takes hold of the steering tackle the _Mary_ is within six lengths of the advancing boats, both now nearly together, the bow of the pursuer overlapping the stern of the pursued. Only two of the men are at the oars; two standing up, one amidships, the other at the head. Both are endeavouring to lay hold of the pleasure-boat, and bring it alongside. So occupied they see not the fishing skiff, while the two rowing, with backs turned, are equally unconscious of its approach. They only wonder at the "wenches," as they continue to call them, taking it so coolly, for these do not seem so much frightened as before. "Coom, sweet lass!" cries he in the bow--the black fellow it is--addressing Miss Wynn. "Tain't no use you tryin' to get away. I must ha' my kiss. So drop yer oars, and ge'et to me!" "Insolent fellow!" she exclaims, her eyes ablaze with anger. "Keep your hands off my boat! I command you!" "But I ain't to be c'mmanded, ye minx. Not till I've had a smack o' them lips; an' by G-- I s'll have it." Saying which he reaches out to the full stretch of his long, ape-like arms, and with one hand succeeds in grasping the boat's gunwale, while with the other he gets hold of the lady's dress, and commences dragging her towards him. Gwen Wynn neither screams, nor calls "Help!" She knows it is near. "Hands off!" cries a voice in a volume of thunder, simultaneous with a dull thud against the side of the larger boat, followed by a continued crashing as her gunwale goes in. The roughs, facing round, for the first time see the fishing skiff, and know why it is there. But they are too far gone in drink to heed or submit--at least their leader seems determined to resist. Turning savagely on Ryecroft, he stammers out-- "Hic--ic--who the blazes be you, Mr. White Cap? An' what d'ye want wi' me?" "You'll see." At the words he bounds from his own boat into the other; and, before the fellow can raise an arm, those of Ryecroft are around him in tight hug. In another minute the hulking scoundrel is hoisted from his feet, as though but a feather's weight, and flung overboard. [Illustration: IN ANOTHER MINUTE THE HULKING SCOUNDREL IS FLUNG OVERBOARD.] Wingate has meanwhile also boarded, grappled on to the other on foot, and is threatening to serve him the same. A plunge, with a wild cry--the man going down like a stone; another, as he comes up among his own bubbles; and a third, yet wilder, as he feels himself sinking for the second time! The two at the oars, scared into a sort of sobriety, one of them cries out-- "Lor' o' mercy! Rob'll be drownded! He can't sweem a stroke." "He's a-drownin' now!" adds the other. It is true. For Rob has again come to the surface, and shouts with feebler voice, while his arms tossed frantically about tell of his being in the last throes of suffocation! Ryecroft looks regretful--rather alarmed. In chastising the fellow he had gone too far. He must save him! Quick as the thought off goes his coat, with his boots kicked into the bottom of the boat; then himself over its side! A splendid swimmer, with a few bold sweeps he is by the side of the drowning man. Not a moment too soon--just as the latter is going down for the third, likely the last time. With the hand of the officer grasping his collar, he is kept above water. But not yet saved. Both are now imperilled--the rescuer and he he would rescue. For, far from the boats, they have drifted into a dangerous eddy, and are being whirled rapidly round! A cry from Gwen Wynn--a cry of real alarm, now--the first she has uttered! But before she can repeat it, her fears are allayed--set to rest again--at sight of still another rescuer. The young waterman has leaped back to his own boat, and is pulling straight for the strugglers. A few strokes, and he is beside them; then, dropping his oars, he soon has both safe in the skiff. The half-drowned, but wholly frightened Rob is carried back to his comrades' boat, and dumped in among them; Wingate handling him as though he were but a wet coal sack, or piece of old tarpaulin. Then giving the "Forest chaps" a bit of his mind he bids them "be off." And off go they, without saying word; as they drop down stream their downcast looks showing them subdued, if not quite sobered, and rather feeling grateful than aggrieved. * * * * * The other two boats soon proceed upward, the pleasure craft leading. But not now rowed by its owner; for Captain Ryecroft has hold of the oars. In the haste, or the pleasurable moments succeeding, he has forgotten all about the salmon left struggling on his line, or caring not to return for it, most likely will lose rod, line, and all. What matter? If he has lost a fine fish, he may have won the finest woman on the Wye! And she has lost nothing--risks nothing now--not even the chiding of her aunt! For now the pleasure-boat will be back in its dock in time to keep undisturbed the understanding with Joseph. CHAPTER VII. AN INVETERATE NOVEL READER. While these exciting incidents are passing upon the river, Llangorren Court is wrapped in that stately repose becoming an aristocratic residence--especially where an elderly spinster is head of the house, and there are no noisy children to go romping about. It is thus with Llangorren, whose ostensible mistress is Miss Linton, the aunt and legal guardian already alluded to. But, though presiding over the establishment, it is rather in the way of ornamental figure-head; since she takes little to do with its domestic affairs, leaving them to a skilled housekeeper who carries the keys. Kitchen matters are not much to Miss Linton's taste, being a dame of the antique brocaded type, with pleasant memories of the past, that go back to Bath and Cheltenham; where, in their days of glory, as hers of youth, she was a belle, and did her share of dancing, with a due proportion of flirting, at the Regency balls. No longer able to indulge in such delightful recreations, the memory of them has yet charms for her, and she keeps it alive and warm by daily perusal of the _Morning Post_ with a fuller hebdomadal feast from the _Court Journal_, and other distributors of fashionable intelligence. In addition she reads no end of novels, her favourites being those which tell of Cupid in his most romantic escapades and experiences, though not always the chastest. Of the prurient trash there is a plenteous supply, furnished by scribblers of both sexes, who ought to know better, and doubtless do; but knowing also how difficult it is to make their lucubrations interesting within the legitimate lines of literary art, and how easy out of them, thus transgress the moralities. Miss Linton need have no fear that the impure stream will cease to flow, any more than the limpid waters of the Wye. Nor has she; but reads on, devouring volume after volume, in triunes as they issue from the press, and are sent her from the Circulating Library. At nearly all hours of the day, and some of the night, does she so occupy herself. Even on this same bright April morn, when all nature rejoices, and every living thing seems to delight in being out of doors--when the flowers expand their petals to catch the kisses of the warm Spring sun--Dorothea Linton is seated in a shady corner of the drawing-room, up to her ears in a three-volume novel, still odorous of printer's ink and binder's paste; absorbed in a love dialogue between a certain Lord Lutestring and a rustic damsel--daughter of one of his tenant farmers--whose life he is doing his best to blight, and with much likelihood of succeeding. If he fail, it will not be for want of will on his part, nor desire of the author to save the imperilled one. He will make the tempted iniquitous as the tempter, should this seem to add interest to the tale, or promote the sale of the book. Just as his lordship has gained a point and the girl is about to give way, Miss Linton herself receives a shock, caused by a rat-tat at the drawing-room door, light, such as well-trained servants are accustomed to give before entering a room occupied by master or mistress. To her command "Come in!" a footman presents himself, silver waiter in hand, on which is a card. She is more than annoyed, almost angry, as taking the card, she reads-- "REVEREND WILLIAM MUSGRAVE." Only to think of being thus interrupted on the eve of such an interesting climax, which seemed about to seal the fate of the farmer's daughter. It is fortunate for his Reverence, that before entering within the room another visitor is announced, and ushered in along with him. Indeed the second caller is shown in first; for, although George Shenstone rung the front door bell after Mr. Musgrave had stepped inside the hall, there is no domestic of Llangorren but knows the difference between a rich baronet's son and a poor parish curate, as which should have precedence. To this nice, if not very delicate appreciation, the Reverend William is now indebted more than he is aware. It has saved him from an outburst of Miss Linton's rather tart temper, which, under the circumstances, otherwise he would have caught. For it so chances that the son of Sir George Shenstone is a great favourite with the old lady of Llangorren; welcome at all times, even amid the romantic gallantries of Lord Lutestring. Not that the young country gentleman has anything in common with the titled Lothario, who is habitually a dweller in cities. Instead, the former is a frank, manly fellow, devoted to field sports and rural pastimes, a little brusque in manner, but for all well-bred, and, what is even better, well-behaved. There is nothing odd in his calling at that early hour. Sir George is an old friend of the Wynn family--was an intimate associate of Gwen's deceased father--and both he and his son have been accustomed to look in at Llangorren Court _san ceremonie_. No more is Mr. Musgrave's matutinal visit out of order. Though but the curate, he is in full charge of parish duties, the rector being not only aged but an absentee--so long away from the neighbourhood as to have become almost a myth to it. For this reason his vicarial representative can plead scores of excuses for presenting himself at "The Court." There is the school, the church choir, and clothing club, to say nought of neighbouring news, which on most mornings make him a welcome visitor to Miss Linton; and no doubt would on this, but for the glamour thrown around her by the fascinations of the dear delightful Lutestring. It even takes all her partiality for Mr. Shenstone to remove its spell, and get him vouchsafed friendly reception. "Miss Linton," he says, speaking first, "I've just dropped in to ask if the young ladies would go for a ride. The day's so fine, I thought they might like to." "Ah, indeed," returns the spinster, holding out her fingers to be touched, but, under the plea of being a little invalided, excusing herself from rising. "Yes; no doubt they would like it very much." Mr. Shenstone is satisfied with the reply; but less the curate, who neither rides nor has a horse. And less Shenstone himself--indeed both--as the lady proceeds. They have been listening, with ears all alert, for the sound of soft footsteps and rustling dresses. Instead, they hear words, not only disappointing, but perplexing. "Nay, I am sure," continues Miss Linton, with provoking coolness, "they would have been glad to go riding with you; delighted--" "But why can't they?" asked Shenstone impatiently, interrupting. "Because the thing's impossible; they've already gone rowing." "Indeed!" cry both gentlemen in a breath, seeming alike vexed by the intelligence, Shenstone mechanically interrogating: "On the river?" "Certainly?" answers the lady, looking surprised. "Why, George; where else could they go rowing? You don't suppose they've brought the boat up to the fishpond!" "Oh, no," he stammers out. "I beg pardon. How very stupid of me to ask such a question. I was only wondering why Miss Gwen--that is, I am a little astonished--but--perhaps you'll think it impertinent of me to ask another question?" "Why should I? What is it?" "Only whether--whether she--Miss Gwen, I mean--said anything about riding to-day?" "Not a word--at least not to me." "How long since they went off--may I know, Miss Linton?" "Oh, hours ago! Very early, indeed--just after taking breakfast. I wasn't down myself--as I've told you, not feeling very well this morning. But Gwen's maid informs me they left the house then, and I presume they went direct to the river." "Do you think they'll be out long?" earnestly interrogates Shenstone. "I should hope not," returns the ancient toast of Cheltenham, with aggravating indifference, for Lutestring is not quite out of her thoughts. "There's no knowing, however. Miss Wynn is accustomed to come and go, without much consulting me." This with some acerbity--possibly from the thought that the days of her legal guardianship are drawing to a close, which will make her a less important personage at Llangorren. "Surely they won't be out all day," timidly suggests the curate; to which she makes no rejoinder, till Mr. Shenstone puts it in the shape of an inquiry. "Is it likely they will, Miss Linton?" "I should say not. More like they'll be hungry, and that will bring them home. What's the hour now? I've been reading a very interesting book, and quite forgot myself. Is it possible?" she exclaims, looking at the ormolu dial on the mantel-shelf. "Ten minutes to one! How time does fly, to be sure! I couldn't have believed it near so late--almost luncheon time! Of course you'll stay, gentlemen? As for the girls, if they are not back in time they'll have to go without. Punctuality is the rule of this house--always will be with me. I shan't wait one minute for them." "But, Miss Linton, they may have returned from the river, and are now somewhere about the grounds. Shall I run down to the boat-dock and see?" It is Mr. Shenstone who thus interrogates. "If you like--by all means. I shall be too thankful. Shame of Gwen to give us so much trouble. She knows our luncheon hour, and should have been back by this. Thanks, much, Mr. Shenstone." As he is bounding off, she calls after-- "Don't you be staying too, else you shan't have a pick. Mr. Musgrave and I won't wait for any of you. Shall we, Mr. Musgrave?" Shenstone has not tarried to hear either question or answer. A luncheon for Apicius were, at that moment, nothing to him; and little more to the curate, who, though staying, would gladly go along. Not from any rivalry with, or jealousy of, the baronet's son: they revolve in different orbits, with no danger of collision. Simply that he dislikes leaving Miss Linton alone--indeed, dare not. She may be expecting the usual budget of neighbourhood intelligence he daily brings her. He is mistaken. On this particular day it is not desired. Out of courtesy to Mr. Shenstone, rather than herself, she had laid aside the novel; and it now requires all she can command to keep her eyes off it. She is burning to know what befel the farmer's daughter! CHAPTER VIII. A SUSPICIOUS STRANGER. While Mr. Musgrave is boring the elderly spinster about new scarlet cloaks for the girls of the church choir, and other parish matters, George Shenstone is standing on the topmost step of the boat stair, in a mood of mind even less enviable than hers. For he has looked down into the dock, and there sees no Gwendoline--neither boat nor lady--nor is there sign of either upon the water, far as he can command a view of it. No sounds, such as he would wish, and might expect to hear--no dipping of oars, nor, what would be still more agreeable to his ear, the soft voices of women. Instead only the note of a cuckoo, in monotonous repetition, the bird balancing itself on a branch near by; and, farther off, the _hiccol_, laughing, as if in mockery--and at him! Mocking his impatience; ay, something more, almost his misery! That it is so his soliloquy tells: "Odd her being out on the river! She promised me to go riding to-day. Very odd indeed! Gwen isn't the same she was--acting strange altogether for the last three or four days. Wonder what it means? By Jove, I can't comprehend it!" His noncomprehension does not hinder a dark shadow from stealing over his brow, and there staying. It is not unobserved. Through the leaves of the evergreen Joseph notes the pained expression, and interprets it in his own shrewd way--not far from the right one. The old servant soliloquizing in less conjectural strain, says, or rather thinks-- "Master George be mad sweet on Miss Gwen. The country folk are all talkin' o't; thinking she's same on him, as if they knew anything about it. I knows better. An' he ain't no ways confident, else there wouldn't be that queery look on's face. It's the token o' jealousy for sure. I don't believe he have suspicion o' any rival particklar. Ah! it don't need that wi' sich a grand beauty as she be. He as love her might be jealous o' the sun kissing her cheeks, or the wind tossin' her hair!" Joseph is a Welshman of Bardic ancestry, and thinks poetry. He continues-- "I know what's took her on the river, if he don't. Yes--yes, my young lady. Ye thought yerself wonderful clever, leavin' old Joe behind, tellin' him to hide hisself, and bribin' him to stay hid! And d'y 'spose I didn't obsarve them glances exchanged twixt you and the salmon fisher--sly, but, for all that, hot as streaks o' fire? And d'ye think I didn't see Mr. Whitecap going down, afore ye thought o' a row yerself? Oh, no; I noticed nothin' o' all that, not I! 'Twarn't meant for me--not for Joe--ha, ha!" With a suppressed giggle at the popular catch coming in so _apropos_, he once more fixes his eyes on the face of the impatient watcher, proceeding with his soliloquy, though in changed strain: "Poor young gentleman! I do pity he to be sure. He are a good sort, an' everybody likes him. So do she, but not the way he want her to. Well; things o' that kind allers do go contrarywise--never seem to run smooth like. I'd help him myself if 'twar in my power, but it ain't. In such cases help can only come frae the place where they say matches be made--that's Heaven. Ha! he's lookin' a bit brighter! What's cheerin' him? The boat coming back? I can't see it from here, nor I don't hear any rattle o' oars!" The change he notes in George Shenstone's manner is not caused by the returning pleasure craft. Simply a reflection, which crossing his mind, for the moment tranquillizes him. "What a stupid I am!" he mutters self-accusingly. "Now I remember, there was nothing said about the hour we were to go riding, and I suppose she understood in the afternoon. It was so the last time we went out together. By Jove! yes. It's all right, I take it; she'll be back in good time yet." Thus reassured he remains listening. Still more satisfied, when a dull thumping sound, in regular repetition, tells him of oars working in their rowlocks. Were he learned in boating tactics he would know there are two pairs of them, and think this strange too; since the _Gwendoline_ carries only one. But he is not so skilled--instead, rather averse to aquatics--his chosen home the hunting-field, his favourite seat in a saddle, not on a boat's thwart. It is only when the plashing of the oars in the tranquil water of the bye-way is borne clear along the cliff, that he perceives there are two pairs at work, while at the same time he observes two boats approaching the little dock, where but one belongs! Alone at that leading boat does he look: with eyes in which, as he continues to gaze, surprise becomes wonderment, dashed with something like displeasure. The boat he has recognised at the first glance--the _Gwendoline_--as also the two ladies in the stern. But there is also a man on the mid thwart, plying the oars. "Who the deuce is he?" Thus to himself George Shenstone puts it. Not old Joe, not the least like him. Nor is it the family Charon who sits solitary on the thwarts of that following. Instead, Joseph is now by Mr. Shenstone's side, passing him in haste--making to go down the boat stair! "What's the meaning of all this, Joe?" asks the young man, in stark astonishment. "Meanin' o' what, sir?" returns the old boatman, with an air of assumed innocence. "Be there anythin' amiss?" "Oh, nothing," stammers Shenstone. "Only I supposed you were out with the young ladies. How is it you haven't gone?" "Well, sir, Miss Gwen didn't wish it. The day bein' fine, an' nothing o' flood in the river, she sayed she'd do the rowin' herself." "She hasn't been doing it for all that," mutters Shenstone to himself, as Joseph glides past and on down the stair; then repeating, "Who the deuce is he?" the interrogation as before referring to him who rows the pleasure boat. By this it has been brought, bow in, to the dock, its stern touching the bottom of the stair; and, as the ladies step out of it, George Shenstone overhears a dialogue, which, instead of quieting his perturbed spirit, but excites him still more--almost to madness. It is Miss Wynn who has commenced it, saying,-- "You'll come up to the house, and let me introduce you to my aunt?" This to the gentleman who has been pulling her boat, and has just abandoned the oars soon as seeing its painter in the hands of the servant. "Oh, thank you!" he returns. "I would, with pleasure; but, as you see, I'm not quite presentable just now--anything but fit for a drawing-room. So I beg you'll excuse me to-day." His saturated shirt-front, with other garments dripping, tells why the apology; but does not explain either that or aught else to him on the top of the stair, who, hearkening further, hears other speeches, which, while perplexing him, do nought to allay the wild tempest now surging through his soul. Unseen himself--for he has stepped behind the tree lately screening Joseph--he sees Gwen Wynn holding out her hand to be pressed in parting salute--hears her address the stranger in words of gratitude, warm as though she were under some great obligation to him! Then the latter leaps out of the pleasure boat into the other brought alongside, and is rowed away by his waterman: while the ladies ascend the stair--Gwen lingeringly, at almost every step, turning her face towards the fishing skiff, till this, pulled around the upper end of the eyot, can no more be seen. All this George Shenstone observes, drawing deductions which send the blood in chill creep through his veins. Though still puzzled by the wet garments, the presence of the gentleman wearing them seems to solve that other enigma, unexplained as painful--the strangeness he has of late observed in the ways of Miss Wynn. Nor is he far out in his fancy, bitter though it be. Not until the two ladies have reached the stair head do they become aware of his being there; and not then, till Gwen has made some observations to the companion, which, as those addressed to the stranger, unfortunately for himself, George Shenstone overhears. "We'll be in time for luncheon yet, and aunt needn't know anything of what's delayed us--at least, not just now. True, if the like had happened to herself--say some thirty or forty years ago--she'd want all the world to hear of it, particularly that part of the world yclept Cheltenham. The dear old lady! Ha, ha!" After a laugh, continuing: "But, speaking seriously, Nell, I don't wish any one to be the wiser about our bit of an escapade--least of all, a certain young gentleman, whose Christian name begins with a G., and surname with an S." "Those initials answer for mine," says George Shenstone, coming forward and confronting her. "If your observation was meant for me, Miss Wynn, I can only express regret for my bad luck in being within earshot of it." At his appearance, so unexpected and abrupt, Gwen Wynn had given a start, feeling guilty, and looking it. Soon, however, reflecting whence he has come, and hearing what said, she feels less self-condemned than indignant, as evinced by her rejoinder. "Ah! you've been overhearing us, Mr. Shenstone! Bad luck, you call it. Bad or good, I don't think you are justified in attributing it to chance. When a gentleman deliberately stations himself behind a shady bush, like that laurestinus for instance, and there stands listening--intentionally--" Suddenly she interrupts herself, and stands silent too--this on observing the effect of her words, and that they have struck terribly home. With bowed head the baronet's son is stooping towards her, the cloud on his brow telling of sadness--not anger. Seeing it, the old tenderness returns to her, with its familiarity, and she exclaims:-- "Come, George! There must be no quarrel between you and me. What you've just seen and heard, will be all explained by something you have yet to hear. Miss Lees and I have had a little bit of an adventure; and if you'll promise it shan't go further, we'll make you acquainted with it." Addressed in this style, he readily gives the promise--gladly, too. The confidence so offered seems favourable to himself. But, looking for explanation on the instant, he is disappointed. Asking for it, it is denied him, with reason assigned thus: "You forget we've been full four hours on the river, and are as hungry as a pair of kingfishers--hawks, I suppose, you'd say, being a game preserver. Never mind about the simile. Let us in to luncheon, if not too late." She steps hurriedly off towards the house, the companion following, Shenstone behind both. However hungry they, never man went to a meal with less appetite than he. All Gwen's cajoling has not tranquillized his spirit, nor driven out of his thoughts that man with the bronzed complexion, dark moustache, and white helmet hat. CHAPTER IX. JEALOUS ALREADY. Captain Ryecroft has lost more than rod and line; his heart is as good as gone too--given to Gwendoline Wynn. He now knows the name of the yellow-haired Naiad--for this, with other particulars, she imparted to him on return up stream. Neither has her confidence thus extended, nor the conversation leading to it, belied the favourable impression made upon him by her appearance. Instead, so strengthened it, that for the first time in his life he contemplates becoming a benedict. He feels that his fate is sealed--or no longer in his hands, but hers. As Wingate pulls him on homeward, he draws out his cigar case, sets fire to a fresh weed, and, while the blue smoke wreaths up round the rim of his topee, reflects on the incidents of the day,--reviewing them in the order of their occurrence. Circumstances apparently accidental have been strangely in his favour. Helped as by Heaven's own hand, working with the rudest instruments. Through the veriest scum of humanity he has made acquaintance with one of its fairest forms. More than mere acquaintance, he hopes; for surely those warm words, and glances far from cold, could not be the sole offspring of gratitude! If so a little service on the Wye goes a long way. Thus reflects he in modest appreciation of himself, deeming that he has done but little. How different the value put upon it by Gwen Wynn! Still he knows not this, or at least cannot be sure of it. If he were, his thoughts would be all rose-coloured, which they are not. Some are dark as the shadows of the April showers now and then drifting across the sun's disc. One that has just settled on his brow is no reflection from the firmament above--no vague imagining--but a thing of shape and form--the form of a man, seen at the top of the boat-stair, as the ladies were ascending, and not so far off as to have hindered him from observing the man's face, and noting that he was young and rather handsome. Already the eyes of love have caught the keenness of jealousy. A gentleman evidently on terms of intimacy with Miss Wynn. Strange, though, that the look with which he regarded her on saluting seemed to speak of something amiss! What could it mean? Captain Ryecroft has asked this question as his boat was rounding the end of the eyot, with another in the self-same formulary of interrogation, of which but the moment before he was himself the subject:-- "Who the deuce can _he_ be?" Out upon the river, and drawing hard at his Regalia, he goes on:-- "Wonderfully familiar the fellow seemed! Can't be a brother! I understood her to say she had none. Does he live at Llangorren? No. She said there was no one there in the shape of masculine relative--only an old aunt, and that little dark damsel, who is cousin or something of the kind. But who in the deuce is the gentleman? Might _he_ be a cousin?" So propounding questions without being able to answer them, he at length addresses himself to the waterman--saying: "Jack, did you observe a gentleman at the head of the stair?" "Only the head and shoulders o' one, captain." "Head and shoulders? that's enough. Do you chance to know him?" "I ain't thorough sure; but I think he be a Mr. Shenstone." "Who is Mr. Shenstone?" "The son o' Sir George." "Sir George! What do you know of _him_?" "Not much to speak of--only that he be a big gentleman, whose land lies along the river, two or three miles below." The information is but slight, and slighter the gratification it gives. Captain Ryecroft has heard of the rich baronet whose estate adjoins that of Llangorren, and whose title, with the property attached, will descend to an only son. It is the _torso_ of this son he has seen above the red sandstone rock. In truth, a formidable rival! So he reflects, smoking away like mad. After a time, he again observes,-- "You've said you don't know the ladies we've helped out of their little trouble?" "Parsonally, I don't, captain. But, now as I see where they live, I know who they be. I've heerd talk 'bout the biggest o' them--a good deal." The biggest of them! As if she were a salmon! In the boatman's eyes, bulk is evidently her chief recommendation! Ryecroft smiles, further interrogating:-- "What have you heard of her?" "That she be a _tidy_ young lady. Wonderful fond o' field sport, such as hunting and that like. Fr' all, I may say that up to this day, I never set eyes on her afore." The Hussar officer has been long enough in Herefordshire to have learnt the local signification of "tidy"--synonymous with "well-behaved." That Miss Wynn is fond of field sports--flood pastimes included--he has gathered from herself while rowing her up the river. One thing strikes him as strange--that the waterman should not be acquainted with every one dwelling on the river's bank, at least for a dozen miles up and down. He seeks an explanation. "How is it, Jack, that you, living but a short league above, don't know all about these people?" He is unaware that Wingate though born on the Wye's banks, as he has told him, is comparatively a stranger to its middle waters--his birthplace being far up in the shire of Brecon. Still that is not the solution of the enigma, which the young waterman gives in his own way,-- "Lord love ye, sir! That shows how little you understand this river. Why, captain, it crooks an' crooks, and goes wobblin' about in such a way, that folks as lives less'n a mile apart knows no more o' one the other than if they wor ten. It comes o' the bridges bein' so few and far between. There's the ferry boats, true; but people don't take to 'em more'n they can help 'specially women--seein' there be some danger at all times, and a good deal o't when the river's aflood. That's frequent, summer well as winter." The explanation is reasonable; and, satisfied with it, Ryecroft remains for a time wrapt in a dreamy reverie, from which he is aroused as his eyes rest upon a house--a quaint antiquated structure, half timber, half stone, standing not on the river's edge, but at some distance from it up a dingle. The sight is not new to him; he has before noticed the house--struck with its appearance, so different from the ordinary dwellings. "Whose is it, Jack?" he asks. "B'longs to a man, name o' Murdock." "Odd looking domicile!" "Ta'nt a bit more that way than he be--if half what they say 'bout him be true." "Ah! Mr. Murdock's a character, then?" "Ay; an' a queery one." "In what respect? what way?" "More'n one--a goodish many." "Specify, Jack." "Well; for one thing, he a'nt sober to say half o' his time." "Addicted to dipsomania." "'Dicted to getting dead drunk. I've seen him so, scores o' 'casions." "That's not wise of Mr. Murdock." "No, captain; 'ta'nt neyther wise nor well. All the worse, considerin' the place where mostly he go to do his drinkin'." "Where may that be?" "The Welsh Harp--up at Rogue's Ferry." "Rogue's Ferry? Strange appellation! What sort of place is it? Not very nice, I should say--if the name be at all appropriate." "It's parfitly 'propriate, though I b'lieve it wa'nt that way bestowed. It got so called after a man the name o' Rugg, who once keeped the Welsh Harp and the ferry too. It's about two mile above, a little ways back. Besides the tavern, there be a cluster o' houses, a bit scattered about, wi' a chapel an' a grocery shop--one as deals truckways, an' a'nt partickler as to what they take in change--stolen goods welcome as any--ay, welcomer, if they be o' worth. They got plenty o' them, too. The place be a regular nest o' poachers, an' worse than that--a good many as have sarved their spell in the Penitentiary." "Why, Wingate, you astonish me! I was under the impression your Wyeside was a sort of Arcadia, where one only met with innocence and primitive simplicity." "You won't meet much o' either at Rogue's Ferry. If there be an uninnocent set on earth it's they as live there. Them Forest chaps we came 'cross a'nt no ways their match in wickedness. Just possible drink made them behave as they did--some o' 'em. But drink or no drink it be all the same wi' the Ferry people--maybe worse when they're sober. Any ways they're a rough lot." "With a place of worship in their midst! That ought to do something towards refining them." "Ought; and would, I daresay, if 'twar the right sort--which it a'nt. Instead, o' a kind as only the more corrupts 'em--being Roman." "Oh! A Roman Catholic chapel. But how does it corrupt them?" "By makin' 'em believe they can get cleared of their sins, hows'ever black they be. Men as think that way a'nt like to stick at any sort of crime--'specially if it brings 'em the money to buy what they calls absolution." "Well, Jack, it's very evident you're no friend, or follower, of the Pope." "Neyther o' Pope nor priest. Ah! captain; if you seed him o' the Rogue's Ferry Chapel, you wouldn't wonder at my havin' a dislike for the whole kit o' them." "What is there 'specially repulsive about him?" "Don't know as there be anythin' very special, in partickler. Them priests all look 'bout the same--such o' 'em as I've ever set eyes on. And that's like stoats and weasels, shootin' out o' one hole into another. As for him we're speakin' about, he's here, there, an' everywhere; sneakin' along the roads an' paths, hidin' behind bushes like a cat after birds, an' poppin' out where nobody expects him. If ever there war a spy meaner than another it's the priest of Rogue's Ferry." "No," he adds, correcting himself. "There be one other in these parts worse that he--if that's possible. A different sort o' man, true; and yet they be a good deal thegither." "Who is this other?" "Dick Dempsey--better known by the name of Coracle Dick." "Ah, Coracle Dick! He appears to occupy a conspicuous place in your thoughts, Jack; and rather a low one in your estimation. Why, may I ask? What sort of fellow is he?" "The biggest blaggard as lives on the Wye, from where it springs out o' Plinlimmon to its emptying into the Bristol Channel. Talk o' poachers an' night netters. He goes out by night to catch somethin' beside salmon. 'Taint all fish as comes into his net, I know." The young waterman speaks in such hostile tone both about priest and poacher, that Ryecroft suspects a motive beyond the ordinary prejudice against men who wear the sacerdotal garb, or go trespassing after game. Not caring to inquire into it now, he returns to the original topic, saying,-- "We've strayed from our subject, Jack--which was the hard-drinking owner of yonder house." "Not so far, captain; seein' as he be the most intimate friend the priest have in these parts; though if what's said be true, not nigh so much as his Missus." "Murdock is married, then?" "I won't say that--leastwise I shouldn't like to swear it. All I know is, a woman lives wi' him, s'posed to be his wife. Odd thing she." "Why odd?" "'Cause she beant like any other o' womankind 'bout here." "Explain yourself, Jack. In what does Mrs. Murdock differ from the rest of your Herefordshire fair?" "One way, captain, in her not bein' fair at all. 'Stead, she be dark complected; most as much as one o' them women I've seed 'bout Cheltenham, nursin' the children o' old officers as brought 'em from India--_ayers_ they call 'em. She a'nt one o' 'em, but French, I've heerd say; which in part, I suppose explains the thickness 'tween her an' the priest--he bein' the same." "Oh! His reverence is a Frenchman, is he?" "All o' that, captain. If he wor English, he woudn't--coudn't--be the contemptible sneakin' hound he is. As for Mrs. Murdock, I can't say I've seed her more'n twice in my life. She keeps close to the house; goes nowhere! an' it's said nobody visits her nor him--leastwise none o' the old gentry. For all Mr. Murdock belongs to the best of them." "He's a gentleman, is he?" "Ought to be--if he took after his father." "Why so?" "Because he wor a squire--regular of the old sort. He's not been so long dead. I can remember him myself, though I hadn't been here such a many years--the old lady too--this Murdock's mother. Ah! now I think on't, she wor t'other squire's sister--father to the tallest o' them two young ladies--the one with the reddish hair." "What! Miss Wynn?" "Yes, captain; her they calls Gwen." Ryecroft questions no farther. He has learnt enough to give him food for reflection--not only during the rest of that day, but for a week, a month--it may be throughout the remainder of his life. CHAPTER X. THE CUCKOO'S GLEN. About a mile above Llangorren Court, but on the opposite side of the Wye, stands the house which had attracted the attention of Captain Ryecroft; known to the neighbourhood as "Glyngog"--Cymric synonym for "Cuckoo's Glen." Not immediately on the water's edge, but several hundred yards back, near the head of a lateral ravine which debouches on the valley of the river, to the latter contributing a rivulet. Glyngog House is one of those habitations, common in the county of Hereford as other western shires--puzzling the stranger to tell whether they be gentleman's residence, or but the dwelling of a farmer. This from an array of walls, enclosing yard, garden, even the orchard--a plenitude due to the red sandstone being near, and easily shaped for building purposes. About Glyngog House, however, there is something besides the circumvallation to give it an air of grandeur beyond that of the ordinary farm homestead; certain touches of architectural style which speak of the Elizabethan period--in short that termed Tudor. For its own walls are not altogether stone; instead, a framework of oaken uprights, struts, and braces, black with age, the panelled masonry between plastered and white-washed, giving to the structure a quaint, almost fantastic, appearance, heightened by an irregular roof of steep pitch, with projecting dormers, gables acute angled, overhanging windows, and carving at the coigns. Of such ancient domiciles there are yet many to be met with on the Wye--their antiquity vouched for by the materials used in their construction, when bricks were a costly commodity, and wood to be had almost for the asking. About this one, the enclosing stone walls have been a later erection, as also the pillared gate entrance to its ornamental grounds, through which runs a carriage drive to the sweep in front. Many a glittering equipage may have gone round on that sweep; for Glyngog was once a manor-house. Now it is but the remains of one, so much out of repair as to show smashed panes in several of its windows, while the _enceinte_ walls are only upright where sustained by the upholding ivy; the shrubbery run wild; the walks and carriage drive weed-covered; on the latter neither recent track of wheel, nor hoof-mark of horse. For all, the house is not uninhabited. Three or four of the windows appear sound, with blinds inside them; while at most hours smoke may be seen ascending from at least two of the chimneys. Few approach near enough the place to note its peculiarities. The traveller gets but a distant glimpse of its chimney-pots; for the country road, avoiding the dip of the ravine, is carried round its head, and far from the house. It can only be approached by a long, narrow lane, leading nowhere else, so steep as to deter any explorer save a pedestrian; while he, too, would have to contend with an obstruction of over-growing thorns and trailing brambles. Notwithstanding these disadvantages, Glyngog has something to recommend it--a prospect not surpassed in the western shires of England. He who selected its site must have been a man of tastes rather æsthetic than utilitarian. For the land attached and belonging--some fifty or sixty acres--is barely arable; lying against the abruptly sloping sides of the ravine. But the view is superb. Below, the Wye, winding through a partially wood-covered plain, like some grand constrictor snake; its sinuosities only here and there visible through the trees, resembling a chain of detached lakes--till sweeping past the Cuckoo's Glen, it runs on in straight reach towards Llangorren. Eye of man never looked upon lovelier landscape; mind of man could not contemplate one more suggestive of all that is, or ought to be, interesting in life. Peaceful smokes ascending out of far-off chimneys; farm-houses, with their surrounding walls, standing amid the greenery of old homestead trees--now in full leaf, for it is the month of June--here and there the sharp spire of a church, or the showy façade of a gentleman's mansion--in the distant background, the dark blue mountains of Monmouthshire; among them conspicuous the Blorenge, Skerrid, and Sugar Loaf. The man who could look on such a picture, without drawing from it inspirations of pleasure, must be out of sorts with the world, if not weary of it. And yet just such a man is now viewing it from Glyngog House, or rather the bit of shrubbery ground in front. He is seated on a rustic bench partly shattered, barely enough of it whole to give room beside him for a small japanned tray on which are tumbler, bottle and jug--the two last respectively containing brandy and water; while in the first is an admixture of both. He is smoking a meerschaum pipe, which at short intervals he removes from his mouth to give place to the drinking glass. The personal appearance of this man is in curious correspondence with the bench on which he sits, the walls around, and the house behind. Like all these, he looks dilapidated. Not only is his apparel out of repair, but his constitution too, as shown by hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, with crows feet ramifying around them. This due not, as with the surrounding objects, to age; for he is still under forty. Nor yet any of the natural infirmities to which flesh is heir; but evidently to drink. Some reddish spots upon his nose and flecks on the forehead, with the glass held in shaking hand, proclaims this the cause. And it is. Lewin Murdock--such is the man's name--has led a dissipated life. Not much of it in England; still less in Herefordshire; and only its earlier years in the house he now inhabits--his paternal home. Since boyhood he has been abroad, staying none can say where, and straying no one knows whither--often seen, however, at Baden, Homburg, and other "hells," punting high or low, as the luck has gone for or against him. At a later period in Paris, during the Imperial _régime_--worst hell of all. It has stripped him of everything; driven him out and home, to seek asylum at Glyngog, once a handsome property, now but a _pied à terre_, on which he may only set his foot with a mortgage around his neck. For even the little land left to it is let out to a farmer, and the rent goes not to him. He is, in fact, only a tenant on his patrimonial estate; holding but the house at that, with the ornamental grounds and an acre or two of orchard, of which he takes no care. The farmer's sheep may scale the crumbling walls, and browse the weedy enclosure at will: give Lewin Murdock his meerschaum pipe, with enough brandy and water, and he but laughs. Not that he is of a jovial disposition, not at all given to mirth; only that it takes something more than the pasturage of an old orchard to excite his thoughts, or turn them to cupidity. For all, land does this--the very thing. No limited tract; but one of many acres in extent--even miles--the land of Llangorren. It is now before his face, and under his eyes, as a map unfolded. On the opposite side of the river it forms the foreground of the landscape; in its midst the many-windowed mansion, backed by stately trees, with well-kept grounds, and green pastures; at a little distance the "Grange," or home-farm, and farther off others that look of the same belonging--as they are. A smiling picture it is; spread before the eyes of Lewin Murdock, whenever he sits in his front window, or steps outside the door. And the brighter the sun shines on it, the darker the shadow on his brow. Not much of an enigma either. That land of Llangorren belonged to his grandfather, but now is, or soon will be, the property of his cousin--Gwendoline Wynn. Were she not, it would be his. Between him and it runs the Wye, a broad, deep river. But what its width or depth, compared with that other something between? A barrier stronger and more impassable than the stream, yet seeming slight as a thread. For it is but the _thread of a life_. Should it snap, or get accidentally severed, Lewin Murdock would only have to cross the river, proclaim himself master of Llangorren, and take possession. He would scarce be human not to think of all this. And being human he does--has thought of it oft, and many a time. With feelings too, beyond the mere prompting of cupidity. These due to a legend handed down to him, telling of an unfair disposal of the Llangorren property; but a pittance given to his mother, who married Murdock of Glyngog; while the bulk went to her brother, the father of Gwen Wynn. All matters of testament, since the estate is unentailed; the only grace of the grandfather towards the Murdock branch being a clause entitling them to possession, in the event of the collateral heirs dying out. And of these but one is living--the heroine of our tale. "Only she--but she!" mutters Lewin Murdock, in a tone of such bitterness, that, as if to drown it, he plucks the pipe out of his mouth, and gulps down the last drop in the glass. CHAPTER XI. A WEED BY THE WYESIDE. "Only she--but she!" he repeats, grasping the bottle by the neck, and pouring more brandy into the tumbler. Though speaking _sotto voce_, and not supposing himself overheard, he is, nevertheless--by a woman, who, coming forth from the house, has stepped silently behind him, there pausing. Odd-looking apparition she, seen upon the Wyeside; altogether unlike a native of it, but altogether like one born upon the banks of the Seine, and brought up to tread the Boulevards of Paris--like the latter from the crown of her head to the soles of her high-heeled boots, on whose toes she stands poised and balancing. In front of that ancient English manor-house, she seems grotesquely out of place--as much as a costermonger, driving his moke-drawn cart among the Pyramids, or smoking a "Pickwick" by the side of the Sphinx. For all there is nothing mysterious, or even strange in her presence there. She is Lewin Murdock's wife. If he has left his fortune in foreign lands, with the better part of his life and health, he has thence brought her, his better-half. Physically a fine-looking woman, despite some ravages due to time, and possibly more to crime. Tall and dark as the daughters of the Latinic race, with features beautiful in the past--even still attractive to those not repelled by the beguiling glances of sin. Such were hers, first given to him in a _café chantant_ of the Tuileries--oft afterwards repeated in _jardin_, _bois_, and _bals_ of the demi-monde, till at length she gave him her hand in the Eglise La Madeleine. Busied with his brandy, and again gazing at Llangorren, he has not yet seen her; nor is he aware of her proximity till hearing an exclamation:-- "_Eh, bien?_" He starts at the interrogatory, turning round. "You think too loud, Monsieur--that is if you wish to keep your thoughts to yourself. And you might--seeing that it's a love secret! May I ask who is this _she_ you're soliloquising about? Some of your old English _bonnes amies_, I suppose?" This, with an air of affected jealousy she is far from feeling. In the heart of the _ex-cocotte_ there is no place for such a sentiment. "Got nothing to do with _bonnes amies_, young or old," he gruffly replies. "Just now I've got something else to think of than sweethearts. Enough occupation for my thoughts in the how I'm to support a wife--yourself, madame." "It wasn't me you meant. No, indeed. Some other, in whom you appear to feel a very profound interest." "There you're right, it was one other, in whom I feel all that." "_Merci, Monsieur! Ma foi!_ your candour deserves all thanks. Perhaps you'll extend it, and favour me with the lady's name? A lady, I presume. The grand Seigneur Lewin Murdock would not be giving his thoughts to less." Ignorance pretended. She knows, or surmises, to whom he has been giving them; for she has been watching him from a window, and observed the direction of his glances. And she has more than a suspicion as to the nature of his reflections; since she is well aware as he of that something besides a river separating them from Llangorren. "Her name?" she again asks, in tone of more demand, her eyes bent searchingly on his. Avoiding her glance, he still pulls away at his pipe, without making answer. "It is a love secret, then? I thought so. It's cruel of you, Lewin! This is the return for giving you--all I had to give!" She may well speak hesitatingly, and hint at a limited sacrifice. Only her hand; and it more than tenderly pressed by scores--ay hundreds--of others, before being bestowed upon him. No false pretence, however, on her part. He knew all that, or should have known it. How could he help? Olympe, the belle of the Jardin Mabille, was no obscurity in the _demi-monde_ of Paris--even in its days of glory under Napoleon le Petite. Her reproach is also a pretence, though possibly with some sting felt. She is drawing on to that term of life termed _passé_; and begins to feel conscious of it. He may be the same. Not that for his opinion she cares a straw--save in a certain sense, and for reasons altogether independent of slighted affection--the very purpose she is now working upon, and for which she needs to hold over him the power she has hitherto had. And well knows she how to retain it, rekindling love's fire when it seems in danger of dying out, either through appeal to his pity, or exciting his jealousy, which she can adroitly do, by her artful French ways and dark flashing eyes. As he looks in them now, the old flame flickers up, and he feels almost as much her slave as when he first became her husband. For all he does not show it. This day he is out of sorts with himself, and her, and all the world besides; so instead of reciprocating her sham tenderness--as if knowing it such--he takes another swallow of brandy, and smokes on in silence. Now really incensed, or seeming so, she exclaims:-- "_Perfide!_" adding with a disdainful toss of the head, such as only the dames of the _demi-monde_ know how to give, "Keep your secret! What care I?" Then changing tone, "_Mon Dieu!_ France--dear France! Why did I ever leave you?" "Because your dear France became too dear to live in." "Clever _double entendre_! No doubt you think it witty! Dear, or not, better a garret there--a room in its humblest _entresol_ than this. I'd rather serve in a cigar shop--keep a _gargot_ in the Faubourg Montmartre--than lead such a _triste_ life as we're now doing. Living in this wretched kennel of a house, that threatens to tumble on our heads!" "How would you like to live in that over yonder?" He nods towards Llangorren Court. "You are merry, Monsieur. But your jests are out of place--in presence of the misery around us." "You may some day," he goes on, without heeding her observation. "Yes; when the sky falls we may catch larks. You seem to forget that Mademoiselle Wynn is younger than either of us, and by the natural laws of life will outlive both. Must, unless she break her neck in the hunting-field, get drowned out of a boat, or meet _some other mischance_." She pronounces the last three words slowly and with marked emphasis, pausing after she has spoken them, and looking fixedly in his face, as if to note their effect. Taking the meerschaum from his mouth, he returns her look--almost shuddering as his eyes meet hers, and he reads in them a glance such as might have been given by Messalina, or the murderess of Duncan. Hardened as his conscience has become through a long career of sin, it is yet tender in comparison with hers. And he knows it, knowing her history, or enough of it--her nature as well--to make him think her capable of anything, even the crime her speech seems to point to--neither more nor less than-- He dares not think, let alone pronounce, the word. He is not yet up to that; though day by day, as his desperate fortunes press upon him, his thoughts are being familiarised with something akin to it--a dread, dark design, still vague, but needing not much to assume shape, and tempt to execution. And that the tempter is by his side he is more than half conscious. It is not the first time for him to listen to fell speech from those fair lips. To-day he would rather shun allusion to a subject so grave, yet so delicate. He has spent part of the preceding night at the Welsh Harp--the tavern spoken of by Wingate--and his nerves are unstrung, yet not recovered from the revelry. Instead of asking her what she means by "some other mischance," he but remarks, with an air of careless indifference,-- "True, Olympe; unless something of that sort were to happen, there seems no help for us but to resign ourselves to patience, and live on expectations." "Starve on them, you mean." This in a tone, and with a shrug, which seem to convey reproach for its weakness. "Well, _chèrie_," he rejoins, "we can at least feast our eyes on the source whence our fine fortunes are to come. And a pretty sight it is, isn't it? _Un coup d'oeil charmant!_" He again turns his eyes upon Llangorren, as also she, and for some time both are silent. Attractive at any time, the Court is unusually so on this same summer's day. For the sun, lighting up the verdant lawn, also shines upon a large white tent there erected--a marquee--from whose ribbed roof projects a signal staff, with flag floating at its peak. They have had no direct information of what all this is for--since to Lewin Murdock and his wife the society of Herefordshire is tabooed. But they can guess from the symbols that it is to be a garden party, or something of the sort, there often given. While they are still gazing its special kind is declared, by figures appearing upon the lawn and taking stand in groups before the tent. There are ladies gaily attired--in the distance looking like bright butterflies--some dressed _à la Diane_, with bows in hand, and quivers slung by their sides, the feathered shafts showing over their shoulders; a proportionate number of gentlemen attendant; while liveried servants stride to and fro erecting the ringed targets. Murdock himself cares little for such things. He has had his surfeit of fashionable life; not only sipped its sweets, but drank its dregs of bitterness. He regards Llangorren with something in his mind more substantial than its sports and pastimes. With different thoughts looks the Parisian upon them--in her heart a chagrin only known to those whose zest for the world's pleasure is of keenest edge, yet checked and baffled from indulgence--ambitions uncontrollable, but never to be attained. As Satan gazed back when hurled out of the Garden of Eden, so she at that scene upon the lawn of Llangorren. No _jardin_ of Paris--not the Bois itself--ever seemed to her so attractive as those grounds, with that aristocratic gathering--a heaven none of her kind can enter, and but few of her country. After long regarding it with envy in her eyes, and spleen in her soul--tantalized, almost to torture--she faces towards her husband, saying-- "And you've told me, between all that and us, there's but one life----" "Two!" interrupts a voice--not his. Both turning, startled, behold--_Father Rogier_! CHAPTER XII. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING. Father Rogier is a French priest of a type too well known over all the world--the Jesuitical. Spare of form, thin-lipped, nose with the cuticle drawn across it tight as drum parchment, skin dark and cadaverous, he looks Loyola from head to heel. He himself looks no one straight in the face. Confronted, his eyes fall to his feet, or turn to either side, not in timid abashment, but as those of one who feels himself a felon. And but for his habiliments he might well pass for such; though even the sacerdotal garb, and assumed air of sanctity, do not hinder the suspicion of a wolf in sheep's clothing--rather suggesting it. And in truth is he one; a very Pharisee--Inquisitor to boot, cruel and keen as ever sate in secret Council over an _Auto da Fé_. What is such a man doing in Herefordshire? What, in Protestant England? Time was, and not so long ago, when these questions would have been asked with curiosity, and some degree of indignation. As for instance, when our popular Queen added to her popularity, by somewhat ostentatiously declaring, that "no foreign priest should take tithe or toll in her dominions," even forbidding them their distinctive dress. Then they stole timidly, and sneakingly, through the streets, usually seen hunting in couples, and looking as if conscious their pursuit was criminal, or, at the least, illegal. All that is over now; the ban removed, the boast unkept--to all appearance forgotten! Now they stalk boldly abroad, or saunter in squads, exhibiting their shorn crowns and pallid faces, without fear or shame; instead, triumphantly flouting their vestments in public walks or parks, or loitering in the vestibules of convents and monasteries, which begin to show thick over the land--threatening us with a curse as that anterior to the time of bluff King Hal. No one now thinks it strange to see shovel-hatted priest, or sandalled monk--no matter in what part of England, nor would wonder at one of either being resident upon Wyeside. Father Rogier, one of the former, is there with similar motive, and for the same purpose, his sort are sent everywhere--to enslave the souls of men and get money out of their purses, in order that other men, princes, and priests like himself, may lead luxurious lives, without toil and by trickery. The same old story, since the beginning of the world, or man's presence upon it. The same craft as the rain-maker of South Africa, or the medicine man of the North American Indian; differing only in some points of practice; the religious juggler of a higher civilization, finding his readiest tools not in roots, snake-skins, and rattles, but the weakness of woman. Through this, as by sap and mine, many a strong citadel has been carried, after bidding defiance to the boldest and most determined assault. _Père_ Rogier well knows all this; and by experience, having played the propagandist game with some success since his settling in Herefordshire. He has not been quite three years resident on Wyeside, and yet has contrived to draw around him a considerable coterie of weak-minded Marthas and Marys, built him a little chapel, with a snug dwelling house, and is in a fair way of further feathering his nest. True, his neophytes are nearly all of the humbler class, and poor. But the Peter's pence count up in a remarkable manner, and are paid with a regularity which only blind devotion, or the zeal of religious partizanship, can exact. Fear of the Devil, and love of him, are like effective in drawing contributions to the box of the Rugg's Ferry chapel, and filling the pockets of its priest. And if he have no grand people among his flock, and few disciples of the class called middle, he can boast of at least two claiming to be genteel--the Murdocks. With the man no false assumption either; neither does he assume, or value it. Different the woman. Born in the Faubourg Montmartre, her father a common _ouvrier_, her mother a _blanchisseuse_--herself a beautiful girl--Olympe Renault soon found her way into a more fashionable quarter. The same ambition made her Lewin Murdock's wife, and has brought her on to England. For she did not marry him without some knowledge of his reversionary interest in the land of which they have just been speaking, and at which they are still looking. That was part of the inducement held out for obtaining her hand; her heart he never had. That the priest knows something of the same, indeed all, is evident from the word he has respondingly pronounced. With step, silent and cat-like--his usual mode of progression--he has come upon them unawares, neither having note of his approach till startled by his voice. On hearing it, and seeing who, Murdock rises to his feet, as he does so saluting. Notwithstanding long years of a depraved life, his early training has been that of a gentleman, and its instincts at times return to him. Besides, born and brought up Roman Catholic, he has that respect for his priest habitual to a proverb--would have, even if knowing the latter to be the veriest Pharisee that ever wore single-breasted black coat. Salutations exchanged, and a chair brought out for the new comer to sit upon, Murdock demands explanation of the interrupting monosyllable, asking: "What do you mean, Father Rogier, by 'two'?" "What I've said, M'sieu; that there are two between you and that over yonder, or soon will be--in time perhaps ten. A fair _paysage_ it is!" he continues, looking across the river; "a very vale of Tempé, or Garden of the Hesperides. _Parbleu!_ I never believed your England so beautiful. Ah! what's going on at Llangorren?" This as his eyes rest upon the tent, the flags, and gaily-dressed figures. "A _fête champêtre_: Mademoiselle making merry! In honour of the anticipated change, no doubt." "Still I don't comprehend," says Murdock, looking puzzled. "You speak in riddles, Father Rogier." "Riddles easily read, M'sieu. Of this particular one you'll find the interpretation there." This, pointing to a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of Mrs. Murdock's left hand, put upon it by Murdock himself on the day he became her husband. He now comprehends--his quick-witted wife sooner. "Ha!" she exclaims, as if pricked by a pin, "Mademoiselle to be married?" The priest gives an assenting nod. "That's news to me," mutters Murdock, in a tone more like he was listening to the announcement of a death. "_Moi aussi!_ Who, _Père_? Not Monsieur Shenstone, after all?" The question shows how well she is acquainted with Miss Wynn--if not personally, with her surroundings and predilections! "No," answers the priest. "Not he." "Who then?" asked the two simultaneously. "A man likely to make many heirs to Llangorren--widen the breach between you and it--ah! to the impossibility of that ever being bridged." "_Père Rogier!_" appeals Murdock, "I pray you speak out! Who is to do this? His name?" "_Le Capitaine Ryecroft._" "Captain Ryecroft! Who--what is he?" "An officer of Hussars--a fine-looking fellow--sort of combination of Mars and Apollo; strong as Hercules! As I've said, likely to be father to no end of sons and daughters, with Gwen Wynn for their mother. _Helas!_ I can fancy seeing them now--at play over yonder, on the lawn!" "Captain Ryecroft!" repeats Murdock musingly; "I never saw--never heard of the man!" "You hear of him now, and possibly see him too. No doubt he's among those gay toxophilites--Ha! no, he's nearer! What a strange coincidence! The old saw, 'speak of the fiend.' There's _your_ fiend, Monsieur Murdock!" He points to a boat on the river with two men in it; one of them wearing a white cap. It is dropping down in the direction of Llangorren Court. "Which?" asks Murdock mechanically. "He with the _chapeau blanc_. That's whom you have to fear. The other's but the waterman Wingate--honest fellow enough, whom no one need fear--unless indeed our worthy friend Coracle Dick, his competitor for the smiles of the pretty Mary Morgan. Yes, _mes amis_! Under that conspicuous _kepi_ you behold the future lord of Llangorren." "Never!" exclaims Murdock, angrily gritting his teeth. "Never!" The French priest and ci-devant French courtezan exchange secret, but significant, glances; a pleased expression showing on the faces of both. "You speak excitedly, M'sieu," says the priest, "emphatically, too. But how is it to be hindered?" "I don't know," sourly rejoins Murdock; "I suppose it can't be," he adds, drawing back, as if conscious of having committed himself. "Never mind, now; let's drop the disagreeable subject. You'll stay to dinner with us, Father Rogier?" "If not putting you to inconvenience." "Nay; it's you who'll be inconvenienced--starved, I should rather say. The butchers about here are not of the most amiable type; and, if I mistake not, our _menu_ for to-day is a very primitive one--bacon and potatoes, with some greens from the old garden." "Monsieur Murdock! It's not the fare, but the fashion, which makes a meal enjoyable. A crust and welcome is to me better cheer than a banquet with a grudging host at the head of the table. Besides, your English bacon is a most estimable dish, and with your succulent cabbages delectable. With a bit of Wye salmon to precede, and a pheasant to follow, it were food to satisfy Lucullus himself." "Ah! true," assents the broken-down gentleman, "with the salmon and pheasant. But where are they? My fishmonger, who is conjointly also a game-dealer, is at present as much out with me as is the butcher; I suppose, from my being too much in with them--in their books. Still, they have not ceased acquaintance, so far as calling is concerned. That they do with provoking frequency. Even this morning, before I was out of bed, I had the honour of a visit from both the gentlemen. Unfortunately, they brought neither fish nor meat; instead, two sheets of that detestable blue paper, with red lines and rows of figures--an arithmetic not nice to be bothered with at one's breakfast. So, _Père_, I am sorry I can't offer you any salmon; and as for pheasant--you may not be aware, that it is out of season." "It's never out of season, any more than barn-door fowl; especially if a young last year's _coq_, that hasn't been successful in finding a mate." "But it's close time now," urges the Englishman, stirred by his old instincts of gentleman sportsman. "Not to those who know how to open it," returns the Frenchman with a significant shrug. "And suppose we do that to-day?" "I don't understand. Will your Reverence enlighten me?" "Well, M'sieu; being Whit-Monday, and coming to pay you a visit, I thought you mightn't be offended by my bringing along with me a little present--for Madame here--that we're talking of--salmon and pheasant." The husband, more than the wife, looks incredulous. Is the priest jesting? Beneath the _froc_, fitting tight his thin spare form, there is nothing to indicate the presence of either fish or bird. "Where are they?" asks Murdock mechanically. "You say you've brought them along?" "Ah! that was metaphorical. I meant to say I had sent them. And if I mistake not, they are near now. Yes; there's my messenger!" He points to a man making up the glen, threading his way through the tangle of wild bushes that grow along the banks of the rivulet. "Coracle Dick!" exclaims Murdock, recognising the poacher. "The identical individual," answers the priest, adding, "who, though a poacher, and possibly has been something worse, is not such a bad fellow in his way--for certain purposes. True, he's neither the most devout nor best behaved of my flock; still a useful individual, especially on Fridays, when one has to confine himself to a fish diet. I find him convenient in other ways as well; as so might you, Monsieur Murdock--some day. Should you ever have need of a strong hard hand, with a heart in correspondence, Richard Dempsey possesses both, and would no doubt place them at your service--for a consideration." While Murdock is cogitating on what the last words are meant to convey, the individual so recommended steps upon the ground. A stout thick-set fellow, with a shock of black curly hair coming low down, almost to his eyes, thus adding to their sinister and lowering look. For all a face not naturally uncomely, but one on which crime has set its stamp, deep and indelible. His garb is such as gamekeepers usually wear, and poachers almost universally affect, a shooting coat of velveteen, corduroy smalls, and sheepskin gaiters buttoned over thick-soled shoes iron-tipped at the toes. In the ample skirt pockets of the coat--each big as a game-bag--appear two protuberances, that about balance one another--the present of which the priest has already delivered the invoice--in the one being a salmon "blotcher" weighing some three or four pounds, in the other a young cock pheasant. Having made obeisance to the trio in the grounds of Glyngog, he is about drawing them forth when the priest prevents him, exclaiming:-- "_Arretez!_ They're not commodities that keep well in the sun. Should a water-bailiff, or one of the Llangorren gamekeepers chance to set eyes on them, they'd spoil at once. Those lynx-eyed fellows can see a long way, especially on a day bright as this. So, worthy Coracle, before uncarting, you'd better take them back to the kitchen." Thus instructed the poacher strides off round to the rear of the house; Mrs. Murdock entering by the front door to give directions about dressing the dinner. Not that she intends to take any hand in cooking it--not she. That would be _infra dig._ for the _ancien belle of Mabille_. Poor as is the establishment of Glyngog, it can boast of a plain cook, with a _slavey_ to assist. The other two remain outside, the guest joining his host in a glass of brandy and water. More than one; for Father Rogier, though French, can drink like a born Hibernian. Nothing of the Good Templar in him. After they have been for nigh an hour hobnobbing, conversing, Murdock still fighting shy of the subject, which is nevertheless uppermost in the minds of both, the priest once more approaches it, saying:-- "_Parbleu!_ They appear to be enjoying themselves over yonder!" He is looking at the lawn where the bright forms are flitting to and fro. "And most of all, I should say, Monsieur White Cap--foretasting the sweets of which he'll ere long enter into full enjoyment; when he becomes master of Llangorren." "That--never!" exclaims Murdock, this time adding an oath. "Never while I live. When I'm dead----" "_Diner!_" interrupts a female voice from the house--that of its mistress seen standing on the doorstep. "Madame summons us," says the priest, "we must in, M'sieu. While picking the bones of the pheasant, you can complete your unfinished speech. _Allons!_" CHAPTER XIII. AMONG THE ARROWS. The invited to the archery meeting have nearly all arrived, and the shooting has commenced; half a dozen arrows in the air at a time, making for as many targets. Only a limited number of ladies compete for the first score, each having a little coterie of acquaintances at her back. Gwen Wynn herself is in this opening contest. Good with the bow, as at the oar--indeed with county celebrity as an archer--carrying the champion badge of her club--it is almost a foregone conclusion she will come off victorious. Soon, however, those who are backing her begin to anticipate disappointment. She is not shooting with her usual skill, nor yet earnestness. Instead, negligently, and, to all appearance, with thoughts abstracted; her eyes every now and then straying over the ground, scanning the various groups, as if in search of a particular individual. The gathering is large--nearly a hundred people present--and one might come or go without attracting observation. She evidently expects one to come who is not yet there; and oftener than elsewhere her glances go towards the boat-dock, as if the personage expected should appear in that direction. There is a nervous restlessness in her manner, and after each reconnaissance of this kind, an expression of disappointment on her countenance. It is not unobserved. A gentleman by her side notes it, and with some suspicion of its cause--a suspicion that pains him. It is George Shenstone; who is attending on her, handing the arrows--in short acting as her _aide-de-camp_. Neither is he adroit in the exercise of his duty; instead performs it bunglingly; his thoughts preoccupied, and eyes wandering about. His glances, however, are sent in the opposite direction--to the gate entrance of the park, visible from the place where the targets are set up. They are both "prospecting" for the self-same individual, but with very different ideas--one eagerly anticipating his arrival, the other as earnestly hoping he may not come. For the expected one is a gentleman--no other than Vivian Ryecroft. Shenstone knows the Hussar officer has been invited, and, however hoping or wishing it, has but little faith he will fail. Were it himself, no ordinary obstacle could prevent his being present at that archery meeting, any more than would five-barred gate, or bullfinch, hinder him from keeping up with hounds. As time passes without any further arrivals, and the tardy guest has not yet put in appearance, Shenstone begins to think he will this day have Miss Wynn to himself, or at least without any very formidable competitor. There are others present who seek her smiles--some aspiring to her hand--but none he fears so much as the one still absent. Just as he is becoming calm and confident, he is saluted by a gentleman of the genus "swell," who, approaching, drawls out the interrogatory:-- "Who is that fella, Shenstone?" "What fellow?" "He with the vewy peculya head gear. Indian affair--_topee_, I bewieve they call it." "Where?" asks Shenstone, starting and staring to all sides. "Yondaw! Appwoaching from the diwection of the rivaw. Looks a fwesh awival. I take it he must have come by bawt! Knaw him?" George Shenstone, strong man though he be, visibly trembles. Were Gwen Wynn at that moment to face about, and aim one of her arrows at his breast, it would not bring more pallor upon his cheeks, nor pain to his heart. For he wearing the "peculya head gear" is the man he most fears, and whom he had hoped not to see this day. So much is he affected, he does not answer the question put to him; nor indeed has he opportunity, as just then Miss Wynn, sighting the _topee_ too, suddenly turning, says to him:-- "George! be good enough to take charge of these things." She holds her bow with an arrow she had been affixing to the string. "Yonder's a gentleman just arrived; who you know is a stranger. Aunt will expect me to receive him. I'll be back soon as I've discharged my duty." Delivering the bow and unspent shaft, she glides off without further speech or ceremony. He stands looking after; in his eyes anything but a pleased expression. Indeed sullen, almost angry, as watching her every movement he notes the manner of her reception--greeting the new comer with a warmth and cordiality he, Shenstone, thinks uncalled for, however much stranger the man may be. Little irksome to her seems the discharge of that so-called duty; but so exasperating to the baronet's son, he feels like crushing the bow stick between his fingers, or snapping it in twain across his knee! As he stands with eyes glaring upon them, he is again accosted by his inquisitive acquaintance, who asks: "What's the matter, Jawge? Yaw haven't answered my intewogatowy!" "What was it? I forget." "Aw, indeed! That's stwange. I merely wished to knaw who Mr. White Cap is?" "Just what I'd like to know myself. All I can tell you is, that he's an army fellow--in the Cavalry I believe--by name Ryecroft." "Aw yas; Cavalwy. That's evident by the bend of his legs. Wyquoft--Wyquoft, you say?" "So he calls himself--a captain of Hussars--his own story." This in a tone and with a shrug of insinuation. "But yaw don't think he's an adventuwer?" "Can't say whether he is, or not." "Who's his endawser? How came he intwoduced at Llangowen?" "That I can't tell you." He could though; for Miss Wynn, true to her promise, has made him acquainted with the circumstances of the river adventure, though not those leading to it; and he, true to his, has kept them a secret. In a sense therefore, he could not tell, and the subterfuge is excusable. "By Jawve! The Light Bob appears to have made good use of his time--however intwoduced. Miss Gwen seems quite familiaw with him; and yondaw the little Lees shaking hands, as though the two had been acquainted evaw since coming out of their cwadles! See! They're dwagging him up to the ancient spinster, who sits enthawned in her chair like a queen of the Tawnament times. Vewy mediæval the whole affair--vewy!" "Instead, very modern; in my opinion disgustingly so!" "Why d'yaw say that, Jawge?" "Why! Because in either olden or mediæval times such a thing couldn't have occurred--here in Herefordshire." "What thing, pway?" "A man admitted into good society without endorsement or introduction. Now-a-days any one may be so; claim acquaintance with a lady, and force his company upon her, simply from having had the chance to pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief, or offer his umbrella in a skiff of a shower!" "But, shawly, that isn't how the gentleman yondaw made acquaintance with the fair Gwendoline?" "Oh! I don't say that," rejoins Shenstone, with forced attempt at a smile--more natural, as he sees Miss Wynn separate from the group they are gazing at, and come back to reclaim her bow. Better satisfied, now, he is rather worried by his importunate friend, and to get rid of him adds: "If you are really desirous to know how Miss Wynn became acquainted with him, you can ask the lady herself." Not for all the world would the swell put that question to Gwen Wynn. It would not be safe; and thus snubbed he saunters away, before she is up to the spot. Ryecroft, left with Miss Linton, remains in conversation with her. It is not his first interview; for several times already has he been a visitor at Llangorren--introduced by the young ladies as the gentleman who, when the pleasure-boat was caught in a dangerous whirl, out of which old Joseph was unable to extricate it, came to their rescue--possibly to the saving of their lives! Thus, the version of the adventure vouchsafed to the aunt--sufficient to sanction his being received at the Court. And the ancient toast of Cheltenham has been charmed with him. In the handsome Hussar officer she beholds the typical hero of her romance reading; so much like it, that Lord Lutestring has long ago gone out of her thoughts--passed from her memory as though he had been but a musical sound. Of all who bend before her this day, the worship of none is so welcome as that of the martial stranger. * * * * * Resuming her bow, Gwen shoots no better than before. Her thoughts, instead of being concentrated on the painted circles, as her eyes, are half the time straying over her shoulders to him behind, still in a _tête-à-tête_ with the aunt. Her arrows fly wild and wide, scarce one sticking in the straw. In fine, among all the competitors, she counts lowest score--the poorest she has herself ever made. But what matters it? She is only too pleased when her quiver is empty, and she can have excuse to return to Miss Linton, on some question connected with the hospitalities of the house. Observing all this, and much more besides, George Shenstone feels aggrieved--indeed exasperated--so terribly, it takes all his best breeding to withhold him from an exhibition of bad behaviour. He might not succeed were he to remain much longer on the ground--which he does not. As if misdoubting his power of restraint, and fearing to make a fool of himself, he too frames excuse, and leaves Llangorren long before the sports come to a close. Not rudely, or with any show of spleen. He is a gentleman, even in his anger; and bidding a polite, and formal, adieu to Miss Linton, with one equally ceremonious, but more distant, to Miss Wynn, he slips round to the stables, orders his horse, leaps into the saddle, and rides off. Many the day he has entered the gates of Llangorren with a light and happy heart--this day he goes out of them with one heavy and sad. If missed from the archery meeting, it is not by Miss Wynn. Instead, she is glad of his being gone. Notwithstanding the love passion for another now occupying her heart--almost filling it--there is still room there for the gentler sentiment of pity. She knows how Shenstone suffers--how could she help knowing?--and pities him. Never more than at this same moment, despite that distant, half-disdainful adieu, vouchsafed to her at parting; by him intended to conceal his thoughts, as his sufferings, while but the better revealing them. How men underrate the perception of women! In matters of this kind a very intuition. None keener than that of Gwen Wynn. She knows why he has gone so short away--well as if he had told her. And with the compassionate thought still lingering, she heaves a sigh; sad as she sees him ride out through the gate--going in reckless gallop--but succeeded by one of relief, soon as he is out of sight! In an instant after, she is gay and gladsome as ever; once more bending the bow, and making the catgut twang. But now shooting straight--hitting the target every time, and not unfrequently lodging a shaft in the "gold." For he who now attends on her, not only inspires confidence, but excites her to the display of skill. Captain Ryecroft has taken George Shenstone's place as her aide-de-camp; and while he hands the arrows, she spending them, others of a different kind pass between them--the shafts of Cupid--of which there is a full quiver in the eyes of both. CHAPTER XIV. BEATING ABOUT THE BUSH. Naturally, Captain Ryecroft is the subject of speculation among the archers at Llangorren. A man of his mien would be so anywhere--if stranger. The old story of the unknown knight suddenly appearing on the tourney's field with closed visor, only recognisable by a love-lock or other favour of the lady whose cause he comes to champion. He, too, wears a distinctive badge--in the white cap. For though our tale is of modern time, it antedates than when Brown began to affect the _pugaree_--sham of Manchester Mills--as an appendage to his cheap straw hat. That on the head of Captain Ryecroft is the regular forage cap, with quilted cover. Accustomed to it in India--whence he has but lately returned--he adheres to it in England, without thought of its attracting attention, and as little caring whether it does or not. It does, however. Insular, we are supremely conservative--some might call it "caddish"--and view innovations with a jealous eye; as witness the so-called "moustache movement" not many years ago, and the fierce controversy it called forth. For other reasons the officer of Hussars is at this same archery gathering a cynosure of eyes. There is a perfume of romance about him; in the way he has been introduced to the ladies of Llangorren; a question asked by others besides the importunate friend of George Shenstone. The true account of the affair with the drunken foresters has not got abroad--these keeping dumb about their own discomfiture; while Jack Wingate, a man of few words, and on this special matter admonished to silence, has been equally close-mouthed; Joseph also mute for reasons already mentioned. Withal, a vague story has currency in the neighbourhood, of a boat, with two young ladies, in danger of being capsized--by some versions actually upset--and the ladies rescued from drowning by a stranger who chanced to be salmon-fishing near by--his name, Ryecroft. And as this tale also circulates among the archers at Llangorren, it is not strange that some interest should attach to the supposed hero of it, now present. Still, in an assemblage so large, and composed of such distinguished people--many of whom are strangers to one another--no particular personage can be for long an object of special concern; and if Captain Ryecroft continue to attract observation, it is neither from curiosity as to how he came there, nor the peculiarity of his head-dress, but the dark handsome features beneath it. On these more than one pair of bright eyes occasionally become fixed, regarding them with admiration. None so warmly as those of Gwen Wynn; though hers neither openly nor in a marked manner. For she is conscious of being under the surveillance of other eyes, and needs to observe the proprieties. In which she succeeds; so well, that no one watching her could tell, much less say, there is aught in her behaviour to Captain Ryecroft beyond the hospitality of host--which in a sense she is--to guest claiming the privileges of a stranger. Even when during an interregnum of the sports the two go off together, and, after strolling for a time through the grounds, are at length seen to step inside the summer-house, it may cause, but does not merit, remark. Others are acting similarly, sauntering in pairs, loitering in shady places, or sitting on rustic benches. Good society allows the freedom, and to its credit. That which is corrupt alone may cavil at it, and shame the day when such confidence be abused and abrogated. Side by side they take stand in the little pavilion, under the shadow of its painted zinc roof. It may not have been all chance their coming thither--no more the archery party itself. That Gwendoline Wynn, who suggested giving it, can alone tell. But standing there with their eyes bent on the river, they are for a time silent, so much, that each can hear the beating of the other's heart--both brimful of love. At such moment one might suppose there could be no reserve or reticence, but confession, full, candid, and mutual. Instead, at no time is this farther off. If _le joie fait peur_, far more _l'amour_. And with all that has passed is there fear between them. On her part springing from a fancy she has been over forward--in her gushing gratitude for that service done, given too free expression to it, and needs being more reserved now. On his side speech is stayed by a reflection somewhat akin, with others besides. In his several calls at the Court his reception has been both welcome and warm. Still, not beyond the bounds of well-bred hospitality. But why on each and every occasion has he found a gentleman there--the same every time--George Shenstone by name? There before him, and staying after! And this very day, what meant Mr. Shenstone by that sudden and abrupt departure? Above all, why her distraught look, with the sigh accompanying it, as the baronet's son went galloping out of the gate? Having seen the one, and heard the other, Captain Ryecroft has misinterpreted both. No wonder his reluctance to speak words of love. And so for a time they are silent, the dread of misconception, with consequent fear of committal, holding their lips sealed. On a simple utterance now may hinge their life's happiness, or its misery. Nor is it so strange, that in a moment fraught with such mighty consequence, conversation should be not only timid, but commonplace. They who talk of love's eloquence, but think of it in its lighter phases--perhaps its lying. When truly, deeply felt, it is dumb, as devout worshipper in the presence of the Divinity worshipped. Here, side by side, are two highly organized beings--a man handsome and courageous, a woman beautiful and aught but timid--both well up in the accomplishments, and gifted with the graces of life--loving each other to their souls' innermost depths, yet embarrassed in manner, and constrained in speech, as though they were a couple of rustics! More; for Corydon would fling his arms around his Phyllis, and give her an eloquent smack, which she, with like readiness would return. Very different the behaviour of these in the pavilion. They stand for a time silent as statues--though not without a tremulous motion, scarce perceptible--as if the amorous electricity around stifled their breathing, for the time hindering speech. And when at length this comes, it is of no more significance than what might be expected between two persons lately introduced, and feeling but the ordinary interest in one another! It is the lady who speaks first:-- "I understand you've been but a short while resident in our neighbourhood, Captain Ryecroft?" "Not quite three months, Miss Wynn. Only a week or two before I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance." "Thank you for calling it a pleasure. Not much in the manner, I should say; but altogether the contrary," she laughs, adding-- "And how do you like our Wye?" "Who could help liking it?" "There's been much said of its scenery--in books and newspapers. You really admire it?" "I do, indeed." His preference is pardonable under the circumstances. "I think it the finest in the world." "What! you such a great traveller! In the tropics too; upon rivers that run between groves of evergreen trees, and over sands of gold! Do you really mean that, Captain Ryecroft?" "Really--truthfully. Why not, Miss Wynn?" "Because I supposed those grand rivers we read of were all so much superior to our little Herefordshire stream; in flow of water, scenery, everything----" "Nay, not everything!" he says interruptingly. "In volume of water they may be; but far from it in other respects. In some it is superior to them all--Rhine, Rhone, ah! Hippocrene itself!" His tongue is at length getting loosed. "What other respects?" she asks. "The forms reflected in it," he answers hesitatingly. "Not those of vegetation! Surely our oaks, elms, and poplars cannot be compared with the tall palms and graceful tree ferns of the tropics?" "No; not those." "Our buildings neither, if photography tells truth, which it should. Those wonderful structures--towers, temples, pagodas--of which it has given us the _fac similes_--far excel anything we have on the Wye--or anything in England. Even our Tintern, which we think so very grand, were but as nothing to them. Isn't that so?" "True," he says assentingly. "One must admit the superiority of Oriental architecture." "But you've not told me what form our English river reflects, so much to your admiration!" He has a fine opportunity for poetical reply. The image is in his mind--her own--with the word upon his tongue, "woman's." But he shrinks from giving it utterance. Instead, retreating from the position he had assumed, he rejoins evasively:-- "The truth is, Miss Wynn, I've had a surfeit of tropical scenery, and was only too glad once more to feast my eyes on the hill and dale landscapes of dear old England. I know none to compare with these of the Wyeside." "It's very pleasing to hear you say that--to me especially. It's but natural I should love our beautiful Wye--I, born on its banks, brought up on them, and, I suppose, likely to----" "What?" he asks, observing that she has paused in her speech. "Be buried on them!" she answers laughingly. She intended to have said "Stay on them the rest of my life." "You'll think that a very grave conclusion," she adds, keeping up the laugh. "One at all events very far off--it is to be hoped. An eventuality not to arise, till after you've passed many long and happy days--whether on the Wye, or elsewhere." "Ah! who can tell? The future is a sealed book to all of us." "Yours need not be--at least as regards its happiness. I think that is assured." "Why do you say so, Captain Ryecroft?" "Because it seems to me, as though you had yourself the making of it." He is saying no more than he thinks; far less. For he believes she could make fate itself--control it, as she can his. And as he would now confess to her--is almost on the eve of it--but hindered by recalling that strange look and sigh sent after Shenstone. His fond fancies, the sweet dreams he has been indulging in ever since making her acquaintance, may have been but illusions. She may be playing with him, as he would with a fish on his hook. As yet, no word of love has passed her lips. Is there thought of it in her heart--for him? "In what way? What mean you?" she asks, her liquid eyes turned upon him with a look of searching interrogation. The question staggers him. He does not answer it as he would, and again replies evasively--somewhat confusedly-- "Oh! I only meant, Miss Wynn--that you so young--so--well, with all the world before you--surely have your happiness in your own hands." If he knew how much it is in his he would speak more courageously, and possibly with greater plainness. But he knows not, nor does she tell him. She, too, is cautiously retentive, and refrains taking advantage of his words, full of suggestion. It will need another _séance_--possibly more than one--before the real confidence can be exchanged between them. Natures like theirs do not rush into confession as the common kind. With them it is as with the wooing of eagles. She simply rejoins: "I wish it were," adding with a sigh, "Far from it, I fear." He feels as if he had drifted into a dilemma--brought about by his own _gaucherie_--from which something seen up the river, on the opposite side, offers an opportunity to escape--a house. It is the quaint old habitation of Tudor times. Pointing to it, he says: "A very odd building, that! If I've been rightly informed, Miss Wynn, it belongs to a relative of yours?" "I have a cousin who lives there." The shadow suddenly darkening her brow, with the slightly explicit rejoinder, tells him he is again on dangerous ground. He attributes it to the character he has heard of Mr. Murdock. His cousin is evidently disinclined to converse about him. And she is; the shadow still staying. If she knew what is at that moment passing within Glyngog--could but hear the conversation carried on at its dining table--it might be darker. It is dark enough in her heart, as on her face--possibly from a presentiment. Ryecroft more than ever embarrassed, feels it a relief when Ellen Lees, with the Rev. Mr. Musgrave as her cavalier attendant--they, too, straying solitarily--approach near enough to be hailed, and invited into the pavilion. So the dialogue between the cautious lovers comes to an end--to both of them unsatisfactory enough. For this day their love must remain unrevealed; though never man and woman more longed to learn the sweet secret of each other's heart. CHAPTER XV. A SPIRITUAL ADVISER. While the sports are in progress outside Llangorren Court, inside Glyngog House is being eaten that dinner to commence with salmon in season and end with pheasant out. It is early; but the Murdocks often glad to eat what Americans call a "square meal," have no set hours for eating, while the priest is not particular. In the faces of the trio seated at the table a physiognomist might find interesting study, and note expressions that would puzzle Lavater himself. Nor could they be interpreted by the conversation which, at first, only refers to topics of a trivial nature. But now and then, a _mot_ of double meaning let down by Rogier, and a glance surreptitiously exchanged between him and his countryman, tell that the thoughts of these two are running upon themes different from those about which are their words. Murdock, by no means of a trusting disposition, but ofttimes furiously jealous, has nevertheless, in this respect, no suspicion of the priest, less from confidence than a sort of contempt for the pallid puny creature, whom he feels he could crush in a moment of mad anger. And broken though he be, the stalwart, and once strong, Englishman could still do that. To imagine such a man as Rogier a rival in the affections of his own wife, would be to be little himself. Besides, he holds fast to that proverbial faith in the spiritual adviser, not always well founded--in his case certainly misplaced. Knowing nought of this, however, their exchanged looks, however markedly significant, escape his observation. Even if he did observe, he could not read in them aught relating to love. For, this day there is not; the thoughts of both are absorbed by a different passion--cupidity. They are bent upon a scheme of no common magnitude, but grand and comprehensive--neither more nor less than to get possession of an estate worth £10,000 a year--that Llangorren. They know its value as well as the steward who gives receipts for its rents. It is no new notion with them; but one for some time entertained, and steps considered; still nothing definite either conceived, or determined on. A task, so herculean, as dangerous and difficult, will need care in its conception, and time for its execution. True, it might be accomplished almost instantaneously with six inches of steel, or as many drops of belladonna. Nor would two of the three seated at the table stick at employing such means. Olympe Renault, and Gregorie Rogier have entertained thoughts of them--if not more. In the third is the obstructor. Lewin Murdock would cheat at dice and cards, do money-lenders without remorse, and tradesmen without mercy, ay, steal, if occasion offered; but murder--that is different--being a crime not only unpleasant to contemplate, but perilous to commit. He would be willing to rob Gwendoline Wynn of her property--glad to do it, if he only knew how--but to take away her life, he is not yet up to that. But he is drawing up to it, urged by desperate circumstances, and spurred on by his wife, who loses no opportunity of bewailing their broken fortunes, and reproaching him for them; at her back the Jesuit secretly instructing, and dictating. Not till this day have they found him in the mood for being made more familiar with their design. Whatever his own disposition, his ear has been hitherto deaf to their hints, timidly, and ambiguously given. But to-day things appear more promising, as evinced by his angry exclamation "Never!" Hence their delight at hearing it. During the earlier stages of the dinner, as already said, they converse about ordinary subjects, like the lovers in the pavilion silent upon that paramount in their minds. How different the themes--as love itself from murder! And just as the first word was unspoken in the summer-house at Llangorren, so is the last unheard in the dining-room of Glyngog. While the blotcher is being carved with a spoon--there is no fish slice among the chattels of Mr. Murdock--the priest in good appetite, and high glee pronounces it "crimp." He speaks English like a native, and is even up in its provincialisms; few in Herefordshire whose dialect is of the purest. The phrase of the fishmonger received smilingly, the salmon is distributed and handed across the table; the attendance of the slavey, with claws not over clean, and ears that might be unpleasantly sharp, having been dispensed with. There is wine without stint; for although Murdock's town tradesmen may be hard of heart, in the Welsh Harp there is a tender string he can still play upon; the Boniface of the Rugg's Ferry hostelry having a belief in his _post obit_ expectations. Not such an indifferent wine either, but some of the choicest vintage. The guests of the Harp, however rough in external appearance and rude in behaviour, have wonderfully refined ideas about drink, and may be often heard calling for "fizz"--some of them as well acquainted with the qualities of Möet and Cliquot, as a connoisseur of the most fashionable club. Profiting by their æsthetic tastes, Lewin Murdock is enabled to set wines upon his table of the choicest brands. Light Bordeaux first with the fish, then sherry with the heavier greens and bacon, followed by champagne as they get engaged upon the pheasant. At this point the conversation approaches a topic hitherto held in reserve, Murdock himself starting it:-- "So my Cousin Gwen's going to get married, eh! Are you sure of that, Father Rogier?" "I wish I were as sure of going to heaven." "But what sort of man is he? you haven't told us." "Yes, I have. You forget my description, Monsieur--cross between Mars and Phoebus--strength herculean; sure to be father to a progeny numerous as that which spring from the head of Medusa--enough of them to make heirs for Llangorren to the end of time--keep you out of the property if you lived to be the age of Methuselah. Ah! a fine looking fellow, I can assure you; against whom the baronet's son, with his rubicund cheeks and hay-coloured hair, wouldn't stand the slightest chance--even were there nothing more to recommend the martial stranger. But there is." "What more?" "The mode of his introduction to the lady--that quite romantic." "How was he introduced?" "Well, he made her acquaintance on the water. It appears Mademoiselle Wynn and her companion Lees, were out on the river for a row alone. Unusual that! Thus out, some fellows--Forest of Dean dwellers--offered them insult; from which a gentleman angler, who chanced to be whipping the stream close by, saved them--he no other than _le Capitaine Ryecroft_. With such commencement of acquaintance, a man couldn't be much worth who didn't know how to improve it--even to terminating in marriage if he wished. And with such a rich heiress as Mademoiselle Gwendoline Wynn--to say nought of her personal charms--there are few men who wouldn't wish it so to end. That he, the Hussar officer--captain, colonel, or whatever his rank--does, I've good reason to believe, as also that he will succeed in accomplishing his desires; no more doubt of it than of my being seated at this table. Yes; sure as I sit here that man will be the master of Llangorren." "I suppose he will--must," rejoins Murdock, drawing out the words as though not greatly concerned, one way or the other. Olympe looks dissatisfied, but not Rogier, nor she after a glance from the priest, which seems to say "Wait." He himself intends waiting till the drink has done its work. Taking the hint, she remains silent, her countenance showing calm, as with the content of innocence, while in her heart is the guilt of hell, and the deceit of the devil. She preserves her composure all through, and soon as the last course is ended, with a show of dessert placed upon the table--poor and _pro forma_--obedient to a look from Rogier, with a slight nod in the direction of the door, she makes her _congè_, and retires. Murdock lights his meerschaum, the priest one of his paper cigarettes--of which he carries a case--and for some time they sit smoking and drinking; talking, too, but upon matters with no relation to that uppermost in their minds. They seem to fear touching it, as though it were a thing to contaminate. It is only after repeatedly emptying their glasses, their courage comes up to the standard required; that of the Frenchman first; who, nevertheless, approaches the delicate subject with cautious circumlocution. "By the way, M'sieu," he says, "we've forgotten what we were conversing about, when summoned to dinner--a meal I've greatly enjoyed--notwithstanding your depreciation of the _menu_. Indeed, a very _bonne bouche_ your English bacon, and the greens excellent, as also the _pommes de terre_. You were speaking of some event, or circumstance, to be conditional on your death. What is it? Not the deluge, I hope! True, your Wye is subject to sudden floods; might it have aught to do with them?" "Why should it?" asks Murdock, not comprehending the drift. "Because people sometimes get drowned in these inundations; indeed, often. Scarce a week passes without some one falling into the river, and there remaining, at least till life is extinct. What with its whirls and rapids, it's a very dangerous stream. I wonder at Mademoiselle Wynn venturing so courageously--so _carelessly_ upon it." The peculiar intonation of the last speech, with emphasis on the word carelessly, gives Murdock a glimpse of what it is intended to point to. "She's got courage enough," he rejoins, without appearing to comprehend. "About her carelessness I don't know." "But the young lady certainly is careless--recklessly so. That affair of her going out alone is proof of it. What followed may make her more cautious; still, boating is a perilous occupation, and boats, whether for pleasure or otherwise, are awkward things to manage--fickle and capricious as women themselves. Suppose hers should some day go to the bottom, she being in it?" "That would be bad." "Of course it would. Though, Monsieur Murdock, many men situated as you, instead of grieving over such an accident, would but rejoice at it." "No doubt they would. But what's the use of talking of a thing not likely to happen?" "Oh, true! Still, boat accidents being of such common occurrence, one is as likely to befall Mademoiselle Wynn as anybody else. A pity if it should--a misfortune! But so is the other thing." "What other thing?" "That such a property as Llangorren should be in the hands of heretics, having but a lame title too. If what I've heard be true, you yourself have as much right to it as your cousin. It were better it belonged to a true son of the Church, as I know you to be, M'sieu." Murdock receives the compliment with a grimace. He is no hypocrite; still with all his depravity he has a sort of respect for religion, or rather its outward forms--regularly attends Rogier's chapel, and goes through all the ceremonies and genuflexions, just as the Italian bandit, after cutting a throat, will drop on his knees and repeat a _paternoster_ at hearing the distant bell of the Angelus. "A very poor one," he replies, with a half smile, half grin. "In a worldly sense you mean? I'm aware you're not very rich." "In more senses than that. Your Reverence, I've been a great sinner, I admit." "Admission is a good sign--giving promise of repentance, which need never come too late if a man be disposed to it. It is a deep sin the Church cannot condone--a dark crime indeed." "Oh, I haven't done anything deserving the name. Only such as a great many others." "But you might be tempted some day. Whether or not it's my duty, as your spiritual adviser, to point out the true doctrine--how the Vatican views such things. It's after all only a question of balance between good and evil; that is, how much evil a man may have done, and the amount of good he may do. This world is a ceaseless war between God and the devil; and those who wage it in the cause of the former have often to employ the weapons of the latter. In our service the end justifies the means, even though these be what the world calls criminal--ay, even to the TAKING OF LIFE, else why should the great and good Loyola have counselled drawing the sword, himself using it?" "True," grunts Murdock, smoking hard, "you're a great theologian, Father Rogier. I confess ignorance in such matters; still, I see reason in what you say." "You may see it clearer if I set the application before you. As for instance, if a man have a right to a certain property, or estate, and is kept out of it by a quibble, any steps he might take to possess himself would be justifiable providing he devote a portion of his gains to the good cause--that is, upholding the true faith, and so benefitting humanity at large. Such an act is held by the best of our Church authorities to compensate for any sin committed--supposing the money donation sufficient to make the amount of good it may do preponderate over the evil. And such a man would not only merit absolution, but freely receive it. Now, Monsieur, do you comprehend me?" "Quite," says Murdock, taking the pipe from his mouth and gulping down a half-tumbler of brandy--for he has dropped the wine. Withal, he trembles at the programme thus metaphorically put before him, and fears admitting the application to himself. Soon the more potent spirit takes away his last remnant of timidity, which the tempter perceiving, says:-- "You say you have sinned, Monsieur. And if it were only for that, you ought to make amends." "In what way could I?" "The way I've been speaking of. Bestow upon the Church the means of doing good, and so deserve indulgence." "Ah! where am I to find this means?" "On the other side of the river." "You forget that there's more than the stream between." "Not much to a man who would be true to himself." "I'm that man all over." The brandy has made him bold, at length untying his tongue, while unsteadying it. "Yes, Père Rogier; I'm ready for anything that will release me from this damnable fix--debt over the ears--duns every day. Ha! I'd be true to myself, never fear!" "It needs being true to the Church as well." "I'm willing to be that when I have the chance, if ever I have it. And to get it I'd risk life. Not much if I lose it. It's become a burden to me, heavier than I can bear." "You may make it as light as a feather, M'sieu; cheerful as that of any of those gay gentry you saw disporting themselves on the lawn at Llangorren--even that of its young mistress." "How, _Pére_?" "By yourself becoming its master." "Ah! if I could." "You can!" "With safety?" "Perfect safety." "And without committing"--he fears to speak the ugly English word, but expresses the idea in French--"_cette dernier coup_?" "Certainly! Who dreams of that? Not I, M'sieu." "But how is it to be avoided?" "Easily." "Tell me, Father Rogier!" "Not to-night, Murdock!"--he has dropped the distant M'sieu--"Not to-night. It's a matter that calls for reflection--consideration, calm and careful. Time, too. Ten thousand _livres esterlies_ per annum! We must both ponder upon it--sleep nights, and think days, over it--possibly have to draw Coracle Dick into our deliberations. But not to-night--_Par-dieu!_ it's ten o'clock! And I have business to do before going to bed. I must be off." "No, your Reverence; not till you've had another glass of wine." "One more, then. But let me take it standing--the _tasse d'estrope_, as you call it." Murdock assents; and the two rise up to drink the stirrup cup. But only the Frenchman keeps his feet till the glasses are emptied; the other, now dead drunk, dropping back into his chair. "_Bon soir Monsieur!_" says the priest, slipping out of the room, his host answering only by a snore. For all, Father Rogier does not leave the house so unceremoniously. In the porch outside he takes more formal leave of a woman he there finds waiting for him. As he joins her going out, she asks, _sotto voce_:-- "_C'est arrangé?_" "_Pas encore serait tout suite._" This the sole speech that passes between them; but something besides, which, if seen by her husband, would cause him to start from his chair--perhaps some little sober him. CHAPTER XVI. CORACLE DICK. A traveller making the tour of the Wye will now and then see moving along its banks, or across the contiguous meadows, what he might take for a gigantic tortoise, walking upon his tail! Mystified by a sight so abnormal, and drawing nigh to get an explanation of it, he will discover that the moving object is after all but a man, carrying a boat upon his back! Still the tourist will be astonished at a feat so herculean--rival to that of Atlas--and will only be altogether enlightened when the boat-bearer lays down his burden--which, if asked, he will obligingly do--and permits him, the stranger, to satisfy his curiosity by an inspection of it. Set square on the sward at his feet, he will look upon a craft quaint as was ever launched on lake, stream, or tidal wave. For he will be looking at a "coracle." Not only quaint in construction, but singularly ingenious in design, considering the ends to be accomplished. In addition, historically interesting; so much as to deserve more than passing notice, even in the pages of a novel. Nor will I dismiss it without a word, however it may seem out of place. In shape the coracle bears resemblance to the half of a humming-top, or Swedish turnip cloven longitudinally, the cleft face scooped out leaving but the rind. The timbers consist of slender saplings--peeled and split to obtain lightness--disposed, some fore and aft, others athwart-ships, still others diagonally, as struts and ties, all having their ends in a band of wicker-work, which runs round the gunwale, holding them firmly in place, itself forming the rail. Over this framework is stretched a covering of tarred, and, of course, waterproof canvas, tight as a drum. In olden times it was the skin of ox or horse, but the modern material is better, because lighter, and less liable to decay, besides being cheaper. There is but one seat, or thwart, as the coracle is designed for only a single occupant, though in a pinch it can accommodate two. This is a thin board, placed nearly amidships, partly supported by the wicker rail, and in part by another piece of light scantling, set edgeways underneath. In all things ponderosity is as much as possible avoided, since one of the essential purposes of the coracle is "portage"; and to facilitate this it is furnished with a leathern strap, the ends attached near each extremity of the thwart, to be passed across the breast when the boat is borne overland. The bearer then uses his oar--there is but one, a broad-bladed paddle--by way of walking-stick; and so proceeds, as already said, like a tortoise travelling on its tail! In this convenience of carriage lies the ingenuity of the structure--unique and clever beyond anything in the way of water-craft I have observed elsewhere, either among savage or civilized nations. The only thing approaching it in this respect is the birch bark canoe of the Esquimaux and the Chippeway Indians. But though more beautiful this, it is far behind our native craft in an economic sense--in cheapness and readiness. For while the Chippewayan would be stripping his bark from the tree, and re-arming it--to say nought of fitting to the frame timbers, stitching, and paying it--a subject of King Caradoc would have launched his coracle upon the Wye, and paddled it from Plinlimmon to Chepstow; as many a modern Welshman would the same. Above all, is the coracle of rare historic interest--as the first venture upon water of a people--the ancestors of a nation that now rules the sea--their descendants proudly styling themselves its "Lords"--not without right and reason. Why called "coracle" is a matter of doubt and dispute; by most admitted as a derivative from the Latin _corum_--a skin; this being its original covering. But certainly a misconception; since we have historic evidence of the basket and hide boat being in use around the shores of Albion hundreds of years before these ever saw Roman ship or standard. Besides, at the same early period, under the almost homonym of "corragh," it floated--still floats--on the waters of the Lerne, far west of anywhere the Romans ever went. Among the common people on the Wye it bears a less ancient appellation--that of "truckle." From whatever source the craft derives its name, it has itself given a sobriquet to one of the characters of our tale--Richard Dempsey. Why the poacher is thus distinguished it is not easy to tell; possibly because he, more than any other in his neighbourhood, makes use of it, and is often seen trudging about the river bottoms with the huge carapace on his shoulders. It serves his purpose better than any other kind of boat, for Dick, though a snarer of hares and pheasants, is more of a salmon poacher, and for this--the water branch of his amphibious calling--the coracle has a special adaptation. It can be lifted out of the river, or launched upon it anywhere, without leaving trace; whereas with an ordinary skiff the moorings might be marked, the embarkation observed, and the night netter followed to his netting-place by the watchful water bailiff. Despite his cunning and the handiness of his craft, Dick has not always come off scot-free. His name has several times figured in the reports of Quarter Sessions, and himself in the cells of the county gaol. This only for poaching; but he has also served a spell in prison for crime of a less venal kind--burglary. As the "job" was done in a distant shire, there has been nothing heard of it in that where he now resides. The worst known of him in the neighbourhood is his game and fish trespassing, though there is worse suspected. He whose suspicions are strongest being the waterman Wingate. But Jack may be wronging him, for a certain reason--the most powerful that ever swayed the passion or warped the judgment of man--rivalry for the affections of a woman. No heart, however hardened, is proof against the shafts of Cupid; and one has penetrated the heart of Coracle Dick, as deeply as has another that of Jack Wingate. And both from the same bow and quiver--the eyes of Mary Morgan. She is the daughter of a small farmer who lives by the Wyeside; and being a farmer's daughter, above both in social rank, still not so high but that Love's ladder may reach her, and each lives in hope he may some day scale it. For Evan Morgan holds as a tenant, and his land is of limited acreage. Dick Dempsey and Jack Wingate are not the only ones who wish to have him for a father-in-law, but the two most earnest, and whose chances seem best. Not that these are at all equal; on the contrary, greatly disproportionate, Dick having the advantage. In his favour is the fact that Farmer Morgan is a Roman Catholic--his wife fanatically so--he, Dempsey, professing the same faith; while Wingate is a Protestant of pronounced type. Under these circumstances Coracle has a friend at headquarters, in Mrs. Morgan, and an advocate who visits there, in the person of Father Rogier. With this united influence in his favour, the odds against the young waterman are great, and his chances might appear slight--indeed would be, were it not for an influence to counteract. He, too, has a partisan inside the citadel, and a powerful one; since it is the girl herself. He knows--is sure of it, as man may be of any truth, communicated to him by loving lips amidst showers of kisses. For all this has passed between Mary Morgan and himself. And nothing of it between her and Richard Dempsey. Instead, on her part, coldness and distant reserve. It would be disdain--ay, scorn--if she dare show it; for she hates the very sight of the man. But, controlled and close watched, she has learnt to smile when she would frown. The world--or that narrow circle of it immediately surrounding and acquainted with the Morgan family--wonders at the favourable reception it vouchsafes to Richard Dempsey--a known and noted poacher. But in justice to Mrs. Morgan it should be said, she has but slight acquaintance with the character of the man--only knows it as represented by Rogier. Absorbed in her paternosters, she gives little heed to ought else; her thoughts, as her actions, being all of the dictation, and under the direction, of the priest. In her eyes Coracle Dick is as the latter has painted him, thus-- "A worthy fellow--poor it is true, but honest withal; a little addicted to fish and game taking, as many another good man. Who wouldn't with such laws--unrighteous, oppressive to the poor? Were they otherwise, the poacher would be a patriot. As for Dempsey, they who speak ill of him are only the envious--envying his good looks, and fine mental qualities. For he's clever, and they can't say nay--energetic, and likely to make his way in the world. Yet, one thing he would make, that's a good husband to your daughter Mary--one who has the strength and courage to take care of her." So counsels the priest; and as he can make Mrs. Morgan believe black white, she is ready to comply with his counsel. If the result rested on her, Coracle Dick would have nothing to fear. But it does not--he knows it does not, and is troubled. With all the influence in his favour, he fears that other influence against him--if against him--far more than a counterpoise to Mrs. Morgan's religious predilections, or the partisanship of his priest. Still he is not sure; one day the slave of sweet confidence, the next a prey to black bitter jealousy. And thus he goes on doting and doubting, as if he were never to know the truth. A day comes when he is made acquainted with it, or, rather, a night; for it is after sundown the revelation reaches him--indeed, nigh on to midnight. His favoured, yet defeated, aspirations, are more than twelve months old. They have been active all through the preceding winter, spring, and summer. It is now autumn; the leaves are beginning to turn sere, and the last sheaves have been gathered to the stack. No shire than that of Hereford more addicted to the joys of the Harvest Home; this often celebrated in a public and general way, instead of at the private and particular farmhouse. One such is given upon the summit of Garran Hill--a grand gathering, to which all go of the class who attend such assemblages--small farmers with their families, their servants too, male and female. There is a cromlech on the hill's top, around which they annually congregate, and beside this ancient relic are set up the symbols of a more modern time--the Maypole--though it is Autumn--with its strings and garlands; the show booths and the refreshment tents, with their display of cakes, fruits, perry, and cider. And there are sports of various kinds, pitching the stone, climbing the greased pole--that of May now so slippery--jumping, racing in sacks, dancing--among other dances the Morris--with a grand _finale_ of fireworks. At this year's fête Farmer Morgan is present, accompanied by his wife and daughter. It need not be said that Dick Dempsey and Jack Wingate are there too. They are, and have been all the afternoon--ever since the gathering began. But during the hours of daylight neither approaches the fair creature to which his thoughts tend, and on which his eyes are almost constantly turning. The poacher is restrained by a sense of his unworthiness--a knowledge that there is not the place to make show of his aspirations to one all believe so much above him; while the waterman is kept back and aloof by the presence of the watchful mother. With all her watchfulness he finds opportunity to exchange speech with the daughter--only a few words, but enough to make hell in the heart of Dick Dempsey, who overhears them. It is at the closing scene of the spectacle, when the pyrotechnists are about to send up their final _feu de joie_, Mrs. Morgan, treated by numerous acquaintances to aniseed and other toothsome drinks, has grown less thoughtful of her charge, which gives Jack Wingate the opportunity he has all along been looking for. Sidling up to the girl, he asks, in a tone which tells of lovers _en rapport_, mutually, unmistakably-- "When, Mary?" "Saturday night next. The priest's coming to supper. I'll make an errand to the shop, soon as it gets dark." "Where?" "The old place under the big elm." "You're sure you'll be able?" "Sure, never fear, I'll find a way." "God bless you, dear girl. I'll be there, if anywhere on earth." That is all that passes between them. But enough--more than enough--for Richard Dempsey. As a rocket, just then going up, throws its glare over his face, as also the others, no greater contrast could be seen or imagined. On the countenances of the lovers an expression of contentment, sweet and serene; on his a look such as Mephistopheles gave to Gretchen, escaping from his toils. The curse in Coracle's heart is but hindered from rising to his lips by a fear of its foiling the vengeance he there and then determines on. CHAPTER XVII. THE "CORPSE CANDLE." Jack Wingate lives in a little cottage whose bit of garden ground "brinks" the country road where the latter trends close to the Wye at one of its sharpest sinuosities. The cottage is on the convex side of the bend, having the river at back, with a deep drain, or wash, running up almost to its walls, and forming a fence to one side of the garden. This gives the waterman another and more needed advantage--a convenient docking place for his boat. There the _Mary_, moored, swings to her painter in safety; and when a rise in the river threatens, he is at hand to see she be not swept off. To guard against such catastrophe he will start up from his bed at any hour of the night, having more than one reason to be careful of the boat; for, besides being his _gagne-pain_, it bears the name, by himself given, of her the thought of whom sweetens his toil and makes his labour light. For her he bends industriously to his oar, as though he believed every stroke made and every boat's length gained was bringing him nearer to Mary Morgan. And in a sense so is it, whichever way the boat's head may be turned; the farther he rows her, the grander grows that heap of gold he is hoarding up against the day when he hopes to become a Benedict. He has a belief that if he could but display before the eyes of Farmer Morgan sufficient money to take a little farm for himself and stock it, he might then remove all obstacles between him and Mary--mother's objections and sinister and sacerdotal influence included. He is aware of the difference of rank--that social chasm between--being oft bitterly reminded of it; but emboldened by Mary's smiles, he has little fear but that he will yet be able to bridge it. Favouring the programme thus traced out, there is, fortunately, no great strain on his resources by way of drawback; only the maintaining of his own mother, a frugal dame--thrifty besides--who, instead of adding to the current expenses, rather curtails them by the adroit handling of her needle. It would have been a distaff in the olden days. Thus helped in his housekeeping, the young waterman is enabled to put away almost every shilling he earns by his oar, and this same summer all through till autumn, which it now is, has been more than usually profitable to him, by reason of his so often having Captain Ryecroft as his fare; for although the Hussar officer no longer goes salmon fishing--he has somehow been spoilt for that--there are other excursions upon which he requires the boat, and as ever generously, even lavishly, pays for it. From one of these the young waterman has but returned; and, after carefully bestowing the _Mary_ at her moorings, stepped inside the cottage. It is Saturday--within one hour of sundown--that same Saturday spoken of "at the Harvest Home." But though Jack is just home, he shows no sign of an intention to stay there; instead, behaves as if he intended going out again, though not in his boat. And he does so intend, for a purpose unsuspected by his mother,--to keep that appointment made hurriedly and in a half whisper, amid the fracas of the fireworks. The good dame had already set the table for tea, ready against his arrival, covered it with a cloth, snow-white of course. The tea-things superimposed, in addition a dining plate, knife and fork, these for a succulent beefsteak heard hissing on the gridiron almost as soon as the _Mary_ made appearance at the mouth of the wash, and, soon as the boat was docked, done. It is now on the table, alongside the teapot; its savoury odour, mingling with the fragrance of the freshly "drawn" tea, fills the cottage kitchen with a perfume to delight the gods. For all, it gives no gratification to Jack Wingate the waterman. The appetizing smell of the meat, and the more ethereal aroma of the Chinese shrub, are alike lost upon him. Appetite he has none, and his thoughts are elsewhere. Less from observing his abstraction, than the slow, negligent movements of his knife and fork, the mother asks-- "What's the matter with ye, Jack? Ye don't eat!" "I ain't hungry, mother." "But ye been out since mornin', and tooked nothing wi' you!" "True; but you forget who I ha' been out with. The captain ain't the man to let his boatman be a hungered. We war down the day far as Symond's yat, where he treated me to dinner at the hotel. The daintiest kind o' dinner, too. No wonder at my not havin' much care for eatin' now--nice as you've made things, mother." Notwithstanding the compliment, the old lady is little satisfied--less as she observes the continued abstraction of his manner. He fidgets uneasily in his chair, every now and then giving a glance at the little Dutch clock suspended against the wall, which in loud ticking seems to say, "You'll be late--you'll be late." She suspects something of the cause, but inquires nothing of it. Instead, she but observes, speaking of the patron:-- "He be very good to ye, Jack." "Ah! that he be; good to every one as comes nigh o' him--and's desarvin' it." "But ain't he stayin' in the neighbourhood longer than he first spoke of doin'?" "Maybe he is. Grand gentry such as he ain't like us poor folk. They can go and come whens'ever it please 'em. I suppose he have his reasons for remaining." "Now, Jack, you know he have, an' I've heerd something about 'em myself." "What have you heard, mother?" "Oh, what! Ye han't been a rowin' him up and down the river now nigh on five months without findin' out. An' if you haven't, others have. It's goin' all about that he's after a young lady as lives somewhere below. Tidy girl, they say, tho' I never seed her myself. Is it so, my son? Say!" "Well, mother, since you've put it straight at me in that way, I won't deny it to you, tho' I'm in a manner bound to saycrecy wi' others. It be true that the Captain have some notion o' such a lady." "There be a story, too, o' her bein' nigh drownded an' his saving her out o' a boat. Now, Jack, whose boat could that be if it wa'nt your'n?" "'Twor mine, mother; that's true enough. I would a-told you long ago, but he asked me not to talk o' the thing. Besides, I didn't suppose you'd care to hear about it." "Well," she says, satisfied, "tan't much to me, nor you neyther, Jack; only as the Captain being so kind, we'd both like to know the best about him. If he have took a fancy for the young lady, I hope she return it. She ought after his doin' what he did for her. I han't heerd her name; what be it?" "She's a Miss Wynn, mother. A very rich heiress. 'Deed I b'lieve she ain't a heiress any longer, or won't be, after next Thursday, sin' that day she comes o' age. An' that night there's to be a big party at her place, dancin' an' all sorts o' festivities. I know it because the Captain's goin' there, an' has bespoke the boat to take him." "Wynn, eh? That be a Welsh name. Wonder if she's any kin o' the great Sir Watkin." "Can't say, mother. I believe there be several branches o' the Wynn family." "Yes, and all o' the good sort. If she be one o' the Welsh Wynns, the Captain can't go far astray in having her for his wife." Mrs. Wingate is herself of Cymric ancestry, originally from the shire of Pembroke, but married to a man of Montgomery, where Jack was born. It is only of late, in her widowhood, she has become a resident of Herefordshire. "So you think he have a notion o' her, Jack?" "More'n that, mother. I may as well tell ye; he be dead in love wi' her. An' if you seed the young lady herself, ye wouldn't wonder at it. She be most as good-looking as----" Jack suddenly interrupted himself on the edge of a revelation he would rather not make, to his mother nor anyone else. For he has hitherto been as careful in keeping his own secret as that of his patron. "As who?" she asks, looking him straight in the face, and with an expression in her eyes of no common interest--that of maternal solicitude. "Who?--well--" he answers confusedly; "I wor goin' to mention the name o' a girl who the people 'bout here think the best lookin' o' any in the neighbourhood----" "An' nobody more'n yourself, my son. You needn't gie her name. I know it." "Oh, mother! what d'ye mean?" he stammers out, with eyes on the but half-eaten beefsteak. "I take it they've been tellin' ye some stories about me." "No, they han't. Nobody's sayed a word about ye relatin' to that. I've seed it for myself, long since, though you've tried to hide it. I'm not goin' to blame ye eyther, for I believe she be a tidy proper girl. But she's far aboon you, my son; and ye maun mind how you behave yourself. If the young lady be anythin' likes good-lookin' as Mary Morgan----" "Yes, mother! that's the strangest thing o' all----" He interrupts her, speaking excitedly; again interrupting himself. "What's strangest?" she inquires, with a look of wonderment. "Never mind, mother! I'll tell you all about it some other time. I can't now; you see its nigh nine o' the clock." "Well; an' what if 't be?" "Because I may be too late." "Too late for what? Surely you arn't goin' out again the night?" She asks this, seeing him rise up from his chair. "I must, mother." "But why?" "Well, the boat's painter's got frailed, and I want a bit o' whipcord to lap it with. They have the thing at the Ferry shop, and I must get there afores they shut up." A fib, perhaps pardonable, as the thing he designs lapping is not his boat's painter, but the waist of Mary Morgan, and not with slender whipcord, but his own stout arms. "Why won't it do in the mornin'?" asks the ill-satisfied mother. "Well, ye see, there's no knowin' but that somebody may come after the boat. The Captain mayent but he may, changin' his mind. Anyhow, he'll want her to go down to them grand doin's at Llangorren Court?" "Llangorren Court?" "Yes; that's where the young lady lives." "That's to be on Thursday, ye sayed?" "True; but, then, there may come a fare the morrow, an' what if there do? 'Tain't the painter only as wants splicing there's a bit o' leak sprung close to the cutwater, and I must hae some pitch to pay it." If Jack's mother would only step out, and down to the ditch where the _Mary_ is moored, with a look at the boat, she would make him out a liar. Its painter is smooth and clean as a piece of gimp, not a strand unravelled--while but two or three gallons of bilge water at the boat's bottom attest to there being little or no leakage. But she, good dame, is not thus suspicious, instead so reliant on her son's truthfulness, that without questioning further, she consents to his going, only with a proviso against his staying, thus appealingly put-- "Ye won't be gone long, my son! I know ye won't!" "Indeed I shan't, mother. But why be you so partic'lar about my goin' out--this night more'n any other?" "Because, Jack, this day, more'n most others, I've been feelin' bothered like, and a bit frightened." "Frightened o' what? There han't been nobody to the house--has there?" "No; ne'er a rover since you left me in the mornin'." "Then what's been a scarin' ye, mother?" "'Deed, I don't know, unless it ha' been brought on by the dream I had last night. 'Twer a dreadful unpleasant one. I didn't tell you o' it 'fore ye went out, thinkin' it might worry ye." "Tell me now, mother." "It hadn't nought to do wi' us ourselves, after all. Only concernin' them as live nearest us." "Ha! the Morgans?" "Yes; the Morgans." "Oh, mother, what did you dream about them?" "That I were standin' on the big hill above their house, in the middle o' the night, wi' black darkness all round me; and there lookin' down what should I see comin' out o' their door?" "What?" "The canwyll corph!" "The canwyll corph?" "Yes, my son; I seed it--that is I dreamed I seed it--coming just out o' the farmhouse door, then through the yard, and over the foot-plank at the bottom o' the orchard, when it went flarin' up the meadows straight towards the ferry. Though ye can't see that from the hill, I dreamed I did; an' seed the candle go on to the chapel an' into the buryin' ground. That woked me." "What nonsense, mother! A ridiklous superstition! I thought you'd left all that sort o' stuff behind, in the mountains o' Montgomery, or Pembrokeshire, where the thing comes from, as I've heerd you say." "No, my son; it's not stuff, nor superstition neyther; though English people say that to put slur upon us Welsh. Your father before ye believed in the _Canwyll Corph_, and wi' more reason ought I, your mother. I never told you, Jack, but the night before your father died I seed it go past our own door, and on to the graveyard o' the church where he now lies. Sure as we stand here there be some one doomed in the house o' Evan Morgan. There be only three in the family. I do hope it an't her as ye might some day be wantin' me to call daughter." "Mother! You'll drive me mad! I tell ye it's all nonsense. Mary Morgan be at this moment healthy and strong--most as much as myself. If the dead candle ye've been dreamin' about were all o' it true, it couldn't be a burnin' for her. More like for Mrs. Morgan, who's half daft by believing in church candles and such things--enough to turn her crazy, if it doesn't kill her outright. As for you, my dear mother, don't let the dream bother you the least bit. An' ye mustn't be feeling lonely, as I shan't be long gone. I'll be back by ten sure." Saying which, he sets his straw hat jauntily on his thick curly hair, gives his guernsey a straightening twitch, and, with a last cheering look and encouraging word to his mother, steps out into the night. Left alone, she feels lonely withal, and more than ever afraid. Instead of sitting down to her needle, or making to remove the tea-things, she goes to the door, and there stays, standing on its threshold and peering into the darkness--for it is a pitch dark night--she sees, or fancies, a light moving across the meadows, as if it came from Farmer Morgan's house, and going in the direction of Rugg's Ferry. While she continues gazing, it twice crosses the Wye, by reason of the river's bend. As no mortal hand could thus carry it, surely it is the _canwyll corph_! CHAPTER XVIII. A CAT IN THE CUPBOARD. Evan Morgan is a tenant-farmer, holding Abergann. By Herefordshire custom, every farm or its stead, has a distinctive appellation. Like the land belonging to Glyngog, that of Abergann lies against the sides of a sloping glen--one of the hundreds or thousands of lateral ravines that run into the valley of the Wye. But, unlike the old manor-house, the domicile of the farmer is at the glen's bottom, and near the river's bank; nearer yet to a small influent stream, rapid and brawling, which sweeps past the lower end of the orchard in a channel worn deep into the soft sandstone. Though with the usual imposing array of enclosure walls, the dwelling itself is not large, nor the outbuildings extensive; for the arable acreage is limited. This because the ridges around are too high pitched for ploughing, and if ploughed would be unproductive. They are not even in pasture, but overgrown with woods; less for the sake of the timber, which is only scrub, than as a covert for foxes. They are held in hand by Evan Morgan's landlord--a noted Nimrod. For the same reason the farmhouse stands in a solitary spot, remote from any other dwelling. The nearest is the cottage of the Wingates--distant about half a mile, but neither visible from the other. Nor is there any direct road between, only a footpath, which crosses the brook at the bottom of the orchard, thence cunning over a wooded ridge to the main highway. The last, after passing close to the cottage, as already said, is deflected away from the river by this same ridge, so that when Evan Morgan would drive anywhere beyond the boundaries of his farm, he must pass out through a long lane, so narrow that were he to meet any one driving in, there would be a dead-lock. However, there is no danger; as the only vehicles having occasion to use this thoroughfare are his own farm waggon and a lighter "trap" in which he goes to market, and occasionally with his wife and daughter to merry-makings. When the three are in it there is none of his family at home. For he has but one child--a daughter. Nor would he long have her were a half-score of young fellows allowed their way. At least this number would be willing to take her off his hands, and give her a home elsewhere. Remote as is the farmhouse of Abergann, and narrow the lane leading to it, there are many who would be glad to visit there, if invited. In truth a fine girl is Mary Morgan, tall, bright-haired, and with blooming cheeks, beside which red rose leaves would seem _fade_. Living in a town she would be its talk; in a village its belle. Even from that secluded glen has the fame of her beauty gone forth and afar. Of husbands she could have her choice, and among men much richer than her father. In her heart she has chosen one, not only much poorer, but lower in social rank--Jack Wingate. She loves the young waterman, and wants to be his wife; but knows she cannot without the consent of her parents. Not that either has signified opposition, since they have never been asked. Her longings in that direction she has kept secret from them. Nor does she so much dread refusal by the father. Evan Morgan had been himself poor--began life as a farm labourer--and, though now an employer of such, his pride had not kept pace with his prosperity. Instead, he is, as ever, the same modest, unpresuming man, of which the lower middle classes of the English people present many noble examples. From him Jack Wingate would have little to fear on the score of poverty. He is well acquainted with the young waterman's character, knows it to be good, and has observed the efforts he is making to better his condition in life; it may be with suspicion of the motive, at all events, admiringly--remembering his own. And although a Roman Catholic, he is anything but bigoted. Were he the only one to be consulted, his daughter might wed with the man upon whom she has fixed her affections, at any time it pleases them--ay, at any place, too, even within the walls of a Protestant Church! By him neither would Jack Wingate be rejected on the score of religion. Very different with his wife. Of all the worshippers who compose the congregation at the Rugg's Ferry Chapel, none bend the knee to Baal as low as she; and over no one does Father Rogier exercise such influence. Baneful it is like to be; since not only has he control of the mother's conduct, but through that may also blight the happiness of the daughter. Apart from religious fanaticism, Mrs. Morgan is not a bad woman--only a weak one. As her husband, she is of humble birth, and small beginnings; like him, too, neither has prosperity affected her in the sense of worldly ambition. Perhaps better if it had. Instead of spoiling, a little social pride might have been a bar to the dangerous aspirations of Richard Dempsey--even with the priest standing sponsor for him. But she has none, her whole soul being absorbed by blind devotion to a faith which scruples not at anything that may assist in its propagandism. * * * * * It is the Saturday succeeding the festival of the Harvest Home, a little after sunset, and the priest is expected at Abergann. He is a frequent visitor there; by Mrs. Morgan ever made welcome, and treated to the best cheer the farmhouse can afford; plate, knife, and fork always placed for him. And, to do him justice, he may be deemed in a way worthy of such hospitality; for he is, in truth, a most entertaining personage; can converse on any subject, and suit his conversation to the company, whether high or low. As much at home with the wife of the Welsh farmer as with the French _ex-cocotte_, and equally so in the companionship of Dick Dempsey, the poacher. In his hours of _far niente_ all are alike to him. This night he is to take supper at Abergann, and Mrs. Morgan, seated in the farmhouse parlour, awaits his arrival. A snug little apartment, tastefully furnished, but with a certain air of austerity, observable in Roman Catholic houses; this by reason of some pictures of saints hanging against the walls, an image of the Virgin and, standing niche-like in a corner, one of the Crucifixion over the mantel-shelf, with crosses upon books, and other like symbols. It is near nine o'clock, and the table is already set out. On grand occasions, as this, the farmhouse parlour is transformed into dining or supper room, indifferently. The meal intended to be eaten now is more of the former, differing in there being a tea-tray upon the table, with a full service of cups and saucers, as also in the lateness of the hour. But the odoriferous steam escaping from the kitchen, drifted into the parlour when its door is opened, tells of something in preparation more substantial than a cup of tea, with its usual accompaniment of bread and butter. And there is a fat capon roasting upon the spit, with a frying-pan full of sausages on the dresser, ready to be clapped upon the fire at the proper moment--as soon as the expected guest makes his appearance. And in addition to the tea-things, there is a decanter of sherry on the table, and will be another of brandy when brought on--Father Rogier's favourite tipple, as Mrs. Morgan has reason to know. There is a full bottle of this--Cognac of best brand--in the larder cupboard, still corked as it came from the "Welsh Harp," where it cost six shillings--the Rugg's Ferry hostelry, as already intimated, dealing in drinks of a rather costly kind. Mary has been directed to draw the cork, decant, and bring the brandy in, and for this purpose has just gone off to the larder. Thence instantly returning, but without either decanter or Cognac! Instead, with a tale which sends a thrill of consternation through her mother's heart. The cat has been in the cupboard, and there made havoc--upset the brandy bottle, and sent it rolling off the shelf on the stone flags of the floor! Broken, of course, and the contents-- No need for further explanation. Mrs. Morgan does not seek it. Nor does she stay to reflect on the disaster, but how it may be remedied. It will not mend matters to chastise the cat, nor cry over the spilt brandy, any more than if it were milk. On short reflection she sees but one way to restore the broken bottle--by sending to the "Welsh Harp" for a whole one. True, it will cost another six shillings, but she recks not of the expense. She is more troubled about a messenger. Where, and how, is one to be had? The farm labourers have long since left. They are all Benedicts, on board wages, and have departed for their respective wives and homes. There is a cowboy, yet he is also absent; gone to fetch the kine from a far-off pasturing place, and not be back in time; while the one female domestic maid-of-all-work is busy in the kitchen, up to her ears among pots and pans, her face at a red heat over the range. She could not possibly be spared. "It's very vexatious!" exclaims Mrs. Morgan, in a state of lively perplexity. "It is indeed!" assents her daughter. A truthful girl, Mary, in the main; but just now the opposite. For she is not vexed by the occurrence, nor does she deem it a disaster--quite the contrary. And she knows it was no accident, having herself brought it about. It was her own soft fingers, not the cat's claws, that swept that bottle from the shelf, sending it smash upon the stones! Tipped over by no _maladroit_ handling of corkscrew, but downright deliberate intention! A stratagem that may enable her to keep the appointment made among the fireworks--that threat when she told Jack Wingate she would "find a way." Thus is she finding it; and in furtherance she leaves her mother no time to consider longer about a messenger. "I'll go!" she says, offering herself as one. The deceit unsuspected, and only the willingness appreciated, Mrs. Morgan rejoins: "Do! that's a dear girl! It's very good of you, Mary. Here's the money." While the delighted mother is counting out the shillings, the dutiful daughter whips on her cloak--the night is chilly--and adjusts her hat, the best holiday one, on her head; all the time thinking to herself how cleverly she has done the trick. And with a smile of pardonable deception upon her face, she trips lightly across the threshold, and on through the little flower garden in front. Outside the gate, at an angle of the enclosure wall, she stops, and stands considering. There are two ways to the Ferry, here forking--the long lane and the shorter footpath. Which is she to take? The path leads down along the side of the orchard, and across the brook by the bridge--only a single plank. This spanning the stream, and originally fixed to the rock at both ends, has of late come loose, and is not safe to be traversed, even by day. At night it is dangerous--still more on one dark as this. And danger of no common kind at any time. The channel through which the stream runs is twenty feet deep, with rough boulders in its bed. One falling from above would at least get broken bones. No fear of that to-night, but something as bad, if not worse. For it has been raining throughout the earlier hours of the day, and there in the brook, now a raging torrent. One dropping into it would be swept on to the river, and there surely drowned, if not before. It is no dread of any of these dangers which causes Mary Morgan to stand considering which route she will take. She has stepped that plank on nights dark as this, even since it became detached from the fastenings, and is well acquainted with its ways. Were there nought else, she would go straight over it, and along the footpath, which passes the "big elm." But it is just because it passes the elm she has now paused, and is pondering. Her errand calls for haste, and there she would meet a man sure to delay her. She intends meeting him for all that, and being delayed; but not till on her way back. Considering the darkness and obstructions on the footwalk she may go quicker by the road, though roundabout. Returning she can take the path. This thought in her mind, with, perhaps, remembrance of the adage, "business before pleasure," decides her; and drawing closer her cloak, she sets off along the lane. CHAPTER XIX. A BLACK SHADOW BEHIND. In the shire of Hereford there is no such thing as a village--properly so called. The tourist expecting to come upon one, by the black dot on his guide-book map, will fail to find it. Indeed, he will see only a church with a congregation, not the typical cluster of houses around. But no street, nor rows of cottages, in their midst--the orthodox patch of trodden turf--the "green." Nothing of all that. Unsatisfied, and inquiring the whereabouts of the village itself, he will get answers only farther confusing him. One will say "here be it," pointing to no place in particular; a second, "thear," with his eye upon the church; a third, "over yonner," nodding to a shop of miscellaneous wares, also intrusted with the receiving and distributing of letters; while a fourth, whose ideas run on drink, looks to a house larger than the rest, having a square pictorial signboard, with red lion _rampant_, fox _passant_, horse's head, or such like symbol--proclaiming it an inn, or public. Not far from, or contiguous to, the church will be a dwelling-house of special pretension, having a carriage entrance, sweep, and shrubbery of well-grown evergreens--the rectory, or vicarage; at greater distance, two or three cottages of superior class, by their owners styled "villas," in one of which dwells the doctor, a young Esculapius, just beginning practice, or an old one who has never had much; in another the relict of a successful shopkeeper left with an "independence"; while a third will be occupied by a retired military man--"captain," of course, whatever may have been his rank--possibly a naval officer, or an old salt of the merchant service. In their proper places stand the carpenter's shop and smithy, with their array of reapers, rollers, ploughs, and harrows seeking repair: among them perhaps a huge steam-threshing machine, that has burst its boiler, or received other damage. Then there are the houses of the _oi polloi_, mostly labouring men--their little cottages wide apart, or in twos and threes together, with no resemblance to the formality of town dwellings, but quaint in structure, ivy-clad or honeysuckled, looking and smelling of the country. Farther along the road is an ancient farmstead, its big barns and other outbuildings abutting on the highway, which for some distance is strewn with a litter of rotting straw; by its side a muddy pond with ducks and a half-dozen geese, the gander giving tongue as the tourist passes by; if a pedestrian with knapsack on his shoulders the dog barking at him, in the belief he is a tramp or beggar. Such is the Herefordshire village, of which many like may be met along Wyeside. The collection of houses known as Rugg's Ferry is in some respects different. It does not lie on any of the main county thoroughfares, but a cross-country road connecting the two, that lead along the bounding ridges of the river. That passing through it is but little frequented, as the ferry itself is only for foot passengers, though there is a horse boat which can be had when called for. But the place is in a deep crater-like hollow, where the stream courses between cliffs of the old red sandstone, and can only be approached by the steepest "pitches." Nevertheless, Rugg's Ferry has its mark upon the Ordnance map, though not with the little crosslet denoting a church. It could boast of no place of worship whatever till Father Rogier laid the foundation of his chapel. For all, it has once been a brisk place in its days of glory; ere the railroad destroyed the river traffic, and the bargees made it a stopping port, as often the scene of rude, noisy revelry. It is quieter now, and the tourist passing through might deem it almost deserted. He will see houses of varied construction--thirty or forty of them in all--clinging against the cliff in successive terraces, reached by long rows of steps carved out of the rock; cottages picturesque as Swiss _chalets_, with little gardens on ledges, here and there one trellised with grape vines or other climbers, and a round cone-topped cage of wicker holding captive a jackdaw, magpie, or it may be parrot or starling taught to speak. Viewing these symbols of innocence, the stranger will imagine himself to have lighted upon a sort of English Arcadia--a fancy soon to be dissipated perhaps by the parrot or starling saluting him with the exclamatory phrases "God-damn-ye! go to the devil!--go to the devil!" And while he is pondering on what sort of personage could have instructed the creature in such profanity, he will likely enough see the instructor himself peering out through a partially opened door, his face in startling correspondence with the blasphemous exclamations of the bird. For there are other birds resident at Rugg's Ferry besides those in the cages--several who have themselves been caged in the county gaol. The slightly altered name bestowed upon the place by Jack Wingate, as others, is not so inappropriate. It may seem strange such characters congregating in a spot so primitive and rural, so unlike their customary haunts; incongruous as the ex-belle of Mabille in her high-heeled _bottines_ inhabiting the ancient manor-house of Glyngog. But more of an enigma--indeed, a moral, or psychological puzzle; since one would suppose it the very last place to find them in. And yet the explanation may partly lie in moral and psychological causes. Even the most hardened rogue has his spells of sentiment, during which he takes delight in rusticity; and as the "Ferry" has long enjoyed the reputation of being a place of abode for him and his sort, he is there sure of meeting company congenial. Or the scent after him may have become too hot in the town, or city, where he has been displaying his dexterity; while here the policeman is not a power. The one constable of the district station dislikes taking, and rather steals through it on his rounds. Notwithstanding all this, there are some respectable people among its denizens, and many visitors who are gentlemen. Its quaint picturesqueness attracts the tourist; while a stretch of excellent angling ground, above and below, makes it a favourite with amateur fishermen. Centrally on a platform of level ground, a little back from the river's bank, stands a large three-story house--the village inn--with a swing sign in front, upon which is painted what resembles a triangular gridiron, though designed to represent a harp. From this the hostelry has its name--the "Welsh Harp!" But however rough the limning, and weather-blanched the board--however ancient the building itself--in its business there are no indications of decay, and it still does a thriving trade. Guests of the excursionist kind occasionally dine there; while in the angling season, _piscator_ stays at it all through spring and summer; and if a keen disciple of Izaak, or an ardent admirer of the Wye scenery, often prolonging his sojourn into late autumn. Besides, from towns not too distant, the sporting tradesmen and fast clerks, after early closing on Saturdays, come hither, and remain over till Monday, for the first train catchable at a station some two miles off. The "Welsh Harp" can provide beds for all, and sitting rooms besides. For it is a roomy _caravanserai_, and if a little rough in its culinary arrangements, has a cellar unexceptionable. Among those who taste its tap are many who know good wine from bad, with others who only judge of the quality by the price; and in accordance with this criterion the Boniface of the "Harp" can give them the very best. It is a Saturday night, and two of those last described connoisseurs, lately arrived at the Wyeside hostelry, are standing before its bar counter, drinking rhubarb sap, which they facetiously call "fizz," and believe to be champagne. As it costs them ten shillings the bottle they are justified in their belief; and quite as well will it serve their purpose. They are young drapers' assistants from a large manufacturing town, out for their hebdomadal holiday, which they have elected to spend in an excursion to the Wye, and a frolic at Rugg's Ferry. They have had an afternoon's boating on the river; and, now returned to the "Harp"--their place of put-up--are flush of talk over their adventures, quaffing the sham "shammy," and smoking "regalias," not anything more genuine. While thus indulging they are startled by the apparition of what seems an angel, but what they know to be a thing of flesh and blood--something that pleases them better--a beautiful woman. More correctly speaking a girl; since it is Mary Morgan who has stepped inside the room set apart for the distributing of drink. Taking the cigars from between their teeth--and leaving the rhubarb juice, just poured into their glasses, to discharge its pent-up gas--they stand staring at the girl, with an impertinence rather due to the drink than any innate rudeness. They are harmless fellows in their way; would be quiet enough behind their own counters, though fast before that of the "Welsh Harp," and foolish with such a face as that of Mary Morgan beside them. She gives them scant time to gaze on it. Her business is simple, and speedily transacted. "A bottle of your best brandy--the French cognac?" As she makes the demand, placing six shillings, the price understood, upon the lead-covered counter. The barmaid, a practised hand, quickly takes the article called for from a shelf behind, and passes it across the counter, and with like alertness counting the shillings laid upon it, and sweeping them into the till. It is all over in a few seconds' time; and with equal celerity Mary Morgan, slipping the purchased commodity into her cloak, glides out of the room--vision-like as she entered it. "Who is that young lady?" asks one of the champagne drinkers, interrogating the barmaid. "Young lady!" tartly returns the latter, with a flourish of her heavily chignoned head, "only a farmer's daughter." "Aw!" exclaims the second tippler, in drawling imitation of Swelldom, "only the offspring of a chaw-bacon! she's a monstrously crummy creetya, anyhow." "Devilish nice gal!" affirms the other, no longer addressing himself to the barmaid, who has scornfully shown them the back of her head, with its tower of twisted jute. "Devilish nice gal, indeed! Never saw spicier stand before a counter. What a dainty little fish for a farmer's daughter! Say, Charley! wouldn't you like to be sellin' her a pair of kids--Jouvin's best--helpin' her draw them on, eh?" "By Jove, yes! That would I." "Perhaps you'd prefer it being boots? What a stepper she is, too! S'pose we slide after, and see where she hangs out?" "Capital idea! Suppose we do?" "All right, old fellow! I'm ready with the yard stick--roll off!" And without further exchange of their professional phraseology, they rush out, leaving their glasses half-full of the effervescing beverage--rapidly on the spoil. They have sallied forth to meet disappointment. The night is black as Erebus, and the girl gone out of sight. Nor can they tell which way she has taken; and to inquire might get them "guyed," if not worse. Besides, they see no one of whom inquiry could be made. A dark shadow passes them, apparently the figure of a man; but so dimly descried, and going in such rapid gait, they refrain from hailing him. Not likely they will see more of the "monstrously crummy creetya" that night--they may on the morrow somewhere--perhaps at the little chapel close by. Registering a mental vow to do their devotions there, and recalling the bottle of fizz left uncorked on the counter, they return to finish it. And they drain it dry, gulping down several goes of B.-and-S., besides, ere ceasing to think of the "devilish nice gal," on whose dainty little fist they would so like fitting kid gloves. Meanwhile, she, who has so much interested the dry goods gentlemen, is making her way along the road which leads past the Widow Wingate's cottage, going at a rapid pace, but not continuously. At intervals she makes stops, and stands listening--her glances sent interrogatively to the front. She acts as one expecting to hear footsteps, or a voice in friendly salutation, and see him saluting--for it is a man. Footsteps are there besides her own, but not heard by her, nor in the direction she is hoping to hear them. Instead, they are behind, and light, though made by a heavy man. For he is treading gingerly as if on eggs--evidently desirous not to make known his proximity. Near he is, and were the light only a little clearer she would surely see him. Favoured by its darkness he can follow close, aided also by the shadowing trees, and still further from her attention being all given to the ground in advance, with thoughts preoccupied. But closely he follows her, but never coming up. When she stops he does the same, moving on again as she moves forward. And so for several pauses, with spells of brisk walking between. Opposite the Wingates' cottage she tarries longer than elsewhere. There was a woman standing in the door, who, however, does not observe her--cannot--a hedge of holly between. Cautiously parting its spinous leaves and peering through, the young girl takes a survey not of the woman, whom she well knows, but of a window--the only one in which there is a light. And less the window than the walls inside. On her way to the Ferry she had stopped to do the same; then seeing shadows--two of them--one a woman's, the other of a man. The woman is there in the door--Mrs. Wingate herself; the man, her son, must be elsewhere. "Under the elm by this," says Mary Morgan, in soliloquy. "I'll find him there," she adds, silently gliding past the gate. "Under the elm," mutters the man who follows, adding, "I'll kill her there--ay, both!" Two hundred yards further on, and she reaches the place where the footpath debouches upon the road. There is a stile of the usual rough crossbar pattern, proclaiming a right of way. She stops only to see there is no one sitting upon it--for there might have been--then leaping lightly over she proceeds along the path. The shadow behind does the same, as though it were a spectre pursuing. And now, in the deeper darkness of the narrow way, arcaded over by a thick canopy of leaves, he goes closer and closer, almost to touching. Were a light at this moment let upon his face, it would reveal features set in an expression worthy of hell itself; and cast farther down, would show a hand closed upon the haft of a long-bladed knife--nervously clutching--every now and then half drawing it from its sheath, as if to plunge its blade into the back of her who is now scarce six steps ahead! And with this dread danger threatening--so close--Mary Morgan proceeds along the forest path, unsuspectingly: joyfully as she thinks of who is before, with no thought of that behind--no one to cry out, or even whisper, the word, "Beware!" CHAPTER XX. UNDER THE ELM. In more ways than one has Jack Wingate thrown dust in his mother's eyes. His going to the Ferry after a piece of whipcord and a bit of pitch was fib the first; the second his not going there at all--for he has not. Instead, in the very opposite direction; soon as reaching the road, having turned his face towards Abergann, though his objective point is but the "big elm." Once outside the gate he glides along the holly hedge crouchingly, and with head ducked, so that it may not be seen by the good dame, who has followed him to the door. The darkness favouring him, it is not; and congratulating himself at getting off thus deftly, he continues rapidly up the road. Arrived at the stile, he makes stop, saying in soliloquy:-- "I take it she be sure to come; but I'd gi'e something to know which o' the two ways. Bein' so darkish, an' that plank a bit dangerous to cross, I ha' heard--'tan't often I cross it--just possible she may choose the roundabout o' the road. Still, she sayed the big elm, an' to get there she'll have to take the path comin' or goin' back. If I thought comin' I'd steer straight there an' meet her. But s'posin' she prefers the road, that 'ud make it longer to wait. Wonder which it's to be." With hand rested on the top rail of the stile, he stands considering. Since their stolen interchange of speech at the Harvest Home, Mary has managed to send him word she will make an errand to Rugg's Ferry; hence his uncertainty. Soon again he resumes his conjectured soliloquy:-- "'Tan't possible she ha' been to the Ferry, an' goed back again? God help me, I hope not! An' yet there's just a chance. I weesh the Captain hadn't kep' me so long down there. An' the fresh from the rain that delayed us nigh half an hour, I oughtn't to a stayed a minute after gettin' home. But mother cookin' that nice bit o' steak; if I hadn't ate it she'd a been angry, and for certain suspected somethin'. Then listenin' to all that dismal stuff 'bout the corpse-candle. An' they believe it in the shire o' Pembroke. Rot the thing! Tho' I an't myself noways superstishus, it gi'ed me the creeps. Queer, her dreamin' she seed it go out o' Abergann! I do weesh she hadn't told me that; an' I mustn't say word o't to Mary. Tho' she ain't o' the fearsome kind, a thing like that's enough to frighten any one. Well, what'd I best do? If she ha' been to the Ferry an's goed home again, then I've missed her, and no mistake! Still, she said she'd be at the elim, an's never broke her promise to me when she cud keep it. A man ought to take a woman at her word--a true woman--an' not be too quick to anticipate. Besides, the surer way's the safer. She appointed the old place, an' there I'll abide her. But what am I thinkin' o'? She may be there now, a-waitin' for me!" He doesn't stay by the stile one instant longer, but, vaulting over it, strikes off along the path. Despite the obscurity of the night, the narrowness of the track, and the branches obstructing, he proceeds with celerity. With that part he is familiar--knows every inch of it, well as the way from his door to the place where he docks his boat--at least so far as the big elm, under whose spreading branches he and she have oft clandestinely met. It is an ancient patriarch of the forest; its timber is honeycombed with decay, not having tempted the axe, by whose stroke its fellows have long ago fallen, and it now stands amid their progeny, towering over all. It is a few paces distant from the footpath, screened from it by a thicket of hollies interposed between, and extending around. From its huge hollow trunk a buttress, horizontally projected, affords a convenient seat for two, making it the very _beau ideal_ of a trysting-tree. Having got up and under it, Jack Wingate is a little disappointed--almost vexed--at not finding his sweetheart there. He calls her name--in the hope she may be among the hollies--at first cautiously and in a low voice, then louder. No reply; she has either not been, or has and is gone. As the latter appears probable enough, he once more blames Captain Ryecroft, the rain, the river flood, the beefsteak--above all, that long yarn about the _canwyll corph_, muttering anathemas against the ghostly superstition. Still she may come yet. It may be but the darkness that's delaying her. Besides, she is not likely to have the fixing of her time. She said she would "find a way"; and having the will--as he believes--he flatters himself she will find it, despite all obstructions. With confidence thus restored, he ceases to pace about impatiently, as he has been doing ever since his arrival at the tree; and, taking a seat on the buttress, sits listening with all ears. His eyes are of little use in the Cimmerian gloom. He can barely make out the forms of the holly bushes, though they are almost within reach of his hand. But his ears are reliable, sharpened by love; and, ere long they convey a sound, to him sweeter than any other ever heard in that wood--even the songs of its birds. It is a swishing, as of leaves softly brushed by the skirts of a woman's dress--which it is. He needs no telling who comes. A subtle electricity, seeming to precede, warns him of Mary Morgan's presence, as though she were already by his side. All doubts and conjectures at an end, he starts to his feet, and steps out to meet her. Soon as on the path he sees a cloaked figure, drawing nigh with a grace of movement distinguishable even in the dim glimmering light. "That you, Mary?" A question mechanical; no answer expected or waited for. Before any could be given she is in his arms, her lips hindered from words by a shower of kisses. Thus having saluted, he takes her hand and leads her among the hollies. Not from precaution, or fear of being intruded upon. Few besides the farm people of Abergann use the right-of-way path, and unlikely any of them being on it at that hour. It is only from habit they retire to the more secluded spot under the elm, hallowed to them by many a sweet remembrance. They sit down side by side; and close, for his arm is around her waist. How unlike the lovers in the painted pavilion at Llangorren! Here there is neither concealment of thought nor restraint of speech--no time given to circumlocution--none wasted in silence. There is none to spare, as she has told him at the moment of meeting. "It's kind o' you comin', Mary," he says, as soon as they are seated. "I knew ye would." "O Jack! What a work I had to get out--the trick I've played mother! You'll laugh when you hear it." "Let's hear it, darling!" She relates the catastrophe of the cupboard, at which he does laugh beyond measure, and with a sense of gratification. Six shillings thrown away--spilled upon the floor--and all for him! Where is the man who would not feel flattered, gratified, to be the shrine of such sacrifice, and from such a worshipper? "You've been to the Ferry, then?" "You see," she says, holding up the bottle. "I weesh I'd known that. I could a met ye on the road, and we'd had more time to be thegither. It's too bad, you havin' to go straight back." "It is. But there's no help for it. Father Rogier will be there before this, and mother mad impatient." Were it light she would see his brow darken at mention of the priest's name. She does not, nor does he give expression to the thoughts it has called up. In his heart he curses the Jesuit--often has with his tongue, but not now. He is too delicate to outrage her religious susceptibilities. Still he cannot be altogether silent on a theme so much concerning both. "Mary, dear!" he rejoins in grave, serious tone, "I don't want to say a word against Father Rogier, seein' how much he be your mother's friend; or, to speak more truthful, her favourite; for I don't believe he's the friend o' anybody. Sartinly, not mine, nor yours; and I've got it on my mind that man will some day make mischief between us." "How can he, Jack?" "Ah, how! A many ways. One, his sayin' ugly things about me to your mother--tellin' her tales that ain't true." "Let him--as many as he likes; you don't suppose I'll believe them?" "No, I don't, darling--'deed I don't." A snatched kiss affirms the sincerity of his words; hers as well, in her lips not being drawn back, but meeting him half-way. For a short time there is silence. With that sweet exchange thrilling their hearts it is natural. He is the first to resume speech; and from a thought the kiss has suggested:-- "I know there be a good many who'd give their lives to get the like o' that from your lips, Mary. A soft word, or only a smile. I've heerd talk o' several. But one's spoke of, in particular, as bein' special favourite by your mother, and backed up by the French priest." "Who?" She has an idea who--indeed knows; and the question is only asked to give opportunity of denial. "I dislike mentionin' his name. To me it seems like insultin' ye. The very idea o' Dick Dempsey----" "You needn't say more," she exclaims, interrupting him. "I know what you mean. But you surely don't suppose I could think of him as a sweetheart? That _would_ insult me." "I hope it would; pleezed to hear you say't. For all, he thinks o' you, Mary; not only in the way o' sweetheart, but----" He hesitates. "What?" "I won't say the word. 'Tain't fit to be spoke--about him an' you." "If you mean _wife_--as I suppose you do--listen! Rather than have Richard Dempsey for a husband, I'd die--go down to the river and drown myself! That horrid wretch! I hate him!" "I'm glad to hear you talk that way--right glad." "But why, Jack? You know it couldn't be otherwise! You should--after all that's passed. Heaven be my witness! you I love, and you alone. You only shall ever call me wife. If not--then nobody!" "God bless ye!" he exclaims in answer to her impassioned speech. "God bless you, darling!" in the fervour of his gratitude flinging his arms around, drawing her to his bosom, and showering upon her lips an avalanche of kisses. With thoughts absorbed in the delirium of love, their souls for a time surrendered to it, they hear not a rustling among the late fallen leaves; or, if hearing, supposed it to proceed from bird or beast--the flight of an owl, with wings touching the twigs; or a fox quartering the cover in search of prey. Still less do they see a form skulking among the hollies, black and boding as their shadows. Yet such there is; the figure of a man, but with face more like that of demon--for it is he whose name has just been upon their lips. He has overheard all they have said; every word an added torture, every phrase sending hell to his heart. And now, with jealousy in its last dire throe, every remnant of hope extinguished--cruelly crushed out--he stands, after all, unresolved how to act. Trembling, too; for he is at bottom a coward. He might rush at them and kill both--cut them to pieces with the knife he is holding in his hand. But if only one, and that her, what of himself? He had an instinctive fear of Jack Wingate, who has more than once taught him a subduing lesson. That experience stands the young waterman in stead now, in all likelihood saving his life. For at this moment the moon, rising, flings a faint light through the branches of the trees; and like some ravenous nocturnal prowler that dreads the light of day, Richard Dempsey pushes his knife-blade back into its sheath, slips out from among the hollies, and altogether away from the spot. But not to go back to Rugg's Ferry, nor to his own home. Well for Mary Morgan if he had. By the same glimpse of silvery light warned as to the time, she knows she must needs hasten away; as her lover, that he can no longer detain her. The farewell kiss, so sweet yet painful, but makes their parting more difficult; and, not till after repeating it over and over, do they tear themselves asunder--he standing to look after, she moving off along the woodland path, as nymph or sylphide, with no suspicion that a satyr has preceded her, and is waiting not far off, with foul fell intent--no less than the taking of her life. CHAPTER XXI. A TARDY MESSENGER. Father Rogier has arrived at Abergann; slipped off his goloshes, left them with his hat in the entrance passage; and stepped inside the parlour. There is a bright coal fire chirping in the grate; for, although not absolutely cold, the air is damp and raw from the rain which has fallen during the earlier hours of the day. He has not come direct from his house at the Ferry, but up the meadows from below, along paths that are muddy, with wet grass overhanging. Hence his having on india-rubber overshoes. Spare of flesh, and thin-blooded, he is sensitive to cold. Feeling it now, he draws a chair to the fire, and sits down with his feet rested on the fender. For a time he has it all to himself. The farmer is still outside, looking after his cattle, and setting things up for the night; while Mrs. Morgan, after receiving him, has made excuse to the kitchen--to set the frying-pan on the coals. Already the sausages can be heard frizzling, while their savoury odour is borne everywhere throughout the house. Before sitting down the priest had helped himself to a glass of sherry; and, after taking a mouthful or two, set it on the mantel-shelf, within convenient reach. It would have been brandy were there any on the table; but, for the time satisfied with the wine, he sits sipping it, his eyes now and then directed towards the door. This is shut, Mrs. Morgan having closed it after her as she went out. There is a certain restlessness in his glances, as though he were impatient for the door to be re-opened, and someone to enter. And so is he, though Mrs. Morgan herself is not the someone--but her daughter. Gregorie Rogier has been a fast fellow in his youth--before assuming the cassock a very _mauvais sujet_. Even now in the maturer age, and despite his vows of celibacy, he has a partiality for the sex, and a keen eye to female beauty. The fresh, youthful charms of the farmer's daughter have many a time made it water, more than the now stale attractions of Olympe, _née_ Renault. She is not the only disciple of his flock he delights in drawing to the confessional. But there is a vast difference between the mistress of Glyngog and the maiden of Abergann. Unlike are they as Lucrezia Borgia to that other Lucretia--victim of Tarquin _fils_. And the priest knows he must deal with them in a very different manner. He cannot himself have Mary Morgan for a wife--he does not wish to--but it may serve his purpose equally well were she to become the wife of Richard Dempsey. Hence his giving support to the pretensions of the poacher--not all unselfish. Eagerly watching the door, he at length sees it pushed open; and by a woman, but not the one he is wishing for. Only Mrs. Morgan re-entering to speak apologies for delay in serving supper. It will be on the table in a trice. Without paying much attention to what she says, or giving thought to her excuses, he asks, in a drawl of assumed indifference,-- "Where is Ma'mselle Marie? Not on the sick list, I hope?" "Oh no, your reverence. She was never in better health in her life, I'm happy to say." "Attending to culinary matters, I presume? Bothering herself--on my account, too! Really, madame, I wish you wouldn't take so much trouble when I come to pay you these little visits--calls of duty. Above all, that ma'mselle should be scorching her fair cheeks before a kitchen fire." "She's not--nothing of the kind, Father Rogier." "Dressing, may be? That isn't needed either--to receive poor me." "No; she's not dressing." "Ah! What then? Pardon me for appearing inquisitive. I merely wish to have a word with her before monsieur, your husband, comes in--relating to a matter of the Sunday school. She's at home, isn't she?" "Not just this minute. She soon will be." "What! Out at this hour?" "Yes; she has gone up to the Ferry on an errand. I wonder you didn't meet her! Which way did you come, Father Rogier--the path or the lane?" "Neither--nor from the Ferry. I've been down the river on visitation duty, and came up through the meadows. It's rather a dark night for your daughter to have gone upon an errand! Not alone, I take it?" "Yes; she went alone." "But why, madame?" Mrs. Morgan had not intended to say anything about the nature of the message, but it must come out now. "Well, your reverence," she answers, laughing, "it's rather an amusing matter--as you'll say yourself, when I tell it you." "Tell it, pray!" "It's all through a cat--our big Tom." "Ah, Tom! What _jeu d'esprit_ has he been perpetrating?" "Not much of a joke, after all; but more the other way. The mischievous creature got into the pantry, and somehow upset a bottle--indeed, broke it to pieces." "_Chat maudit!_ But what has that to do with your daughter's going to the Ferry?" "Everything. It was a bottle of best French brandy--unfortunately the only one we had in the house. And as they say misfortunes never do come single, it so happened our boy was away after the cows, and nobody else I could spare. So I've sent Mary to the Welsh Harp for another. I know your reverence prefers brandy to wine." "Madame, your very kind thoughtfulness deserves my warmest thanks. But I'm really sorry at your having taken all this trouble to entertain me. Above all, I regret its having entailed such a disagreeable duty upon your Mademoiselle Marie. Henceforth I shall feel reluctance in setting foot over your threshold." "Don't say that, Father Rogier. Please don't. Mary didn't think it disagreeable. I should have been angry with her if she had. On the contrary, it was herself proposed going; as the boy was out of the way, and our girl in the kitchen, busy about supper. But poor it is--I'm sorry to tell you--and will need the drop of Cognac to make it at all palatable." "You underrate your _menu_, madame, if it be anything like what I've been accustomed to at your table. Still, I cannot help feeling regret at ma'mselle's having been sent to the Ferry--the roads in such condition. And so dark, too--she may have a difficulty in finding her way. Which did she go by--the path or the lane? Your own interrogatory to myself--almost verbatim--_c'est drole_!" With but a vague comprehension of the interpolated French and Latin phrases, the farmer's wife makes rejoinder: "Indeed, I can't say which. I never thought of asking her. However, Mary's a sensible lass, and surely wouldn't think of venturing over the foot-plank a night like this. She knows it's loose. Ah!" she continues, stepping to the window, and looking out, "there be the moon up! I'm glad of that; she'll see her way now, and get sooner home." "How long is it since she went off?" Mrs. Morgan glances at the clock over the mantel; soon she sees where the hands are, exclaiming: "Mercy me! It's half-past nine! She's been gone a good hour!" Her surprise is natural. To Rugg's Ferry is but a mile, even by the lane and road. Twenty minutes to go and twenty more to return were enough. How are the other twenty being spent? Buying a bottle of brandy across the counter, and paying for it, will not explain; that should occupy scarce as many seconds. Besides, the last words of the messenger, at starting off, were a promise of speedy return. She has not kept it! And what can be keeping _her_? Her mother asks this question, but without being able to answer it. She can neither tell nor guess. But the priest, more suspicious, has his conjectures; one giving him pain--greatly exciting him, though he does not show it. Instead, with simulated calmness, he says: "Suppose I step out and see whether she be near at hand?" "If your reverence would. But please don't stay for her. Supper's quite ready, and Evan will be in by the time I get it dished. I wonder what's detaining Mary!" If she only knew what, she would be less solicitous about the supper, and more about the absent one. "No matter," she continues, cheering up, "the girl will surely be back before we sit down to the table. If not, she must go----" The priest had not stayed to hear the clause threatening to disentitle the tardy messenger. He is too anxious to learn the cause of delay; and, in the hope of discovering it, with a view to something besides, he hastily claps on his hat--without waiting to defend his feet with the goloshes--then glides out and off across the garden. Mrs. Morgan remains in the doorway looking after him, with an expression on her face not all contented. Perhaps she too has a foreboding of evil; or, it may be, she but thinks of her daughter's future, and that she is herself doing wrong by endeavouring to influence it in favour of a man about whom she has of late heard discreditable rumours. Or, perchance, some suspicion of the priest himself may be stirring within her: for there are scandals abroad concerning him, that have reached even her ears. Whatever the cause, there is shadow on her brow, as she watches him pass out through the gate; scarce dispelled by the bright blazing fire in the kitchen, as she returns thither to direct the serving of the supper. If she but knew the tale he, Father Rogier, is so soon to bring back, she might not have left the door so soon, or upon her own feet; more likely have dropped down on its threshold, to be carried from it fainting, if not dead! CHAPTER XXII. A FATAL STEP. Having passed out through the gate, Rogier turns along the wall; and, proceeding at a brisk pace to where it ends in an angle, there comes to a halt. On the same spot where about an hour before stopped Mary Morgan--for a different reason. She paused to consider which of the two ways she would take; he has no intention of taking either, or going a step farther. Whatever he wishes to say to her can be said where he now is, without danger of its being overheard at the house--unless spoken in a tone louder than that of ordinary conversation. But it is not on this account he has stopped; simply that he is not sure which of the two routes she will return by--and for him to proceed along either would be to risk the chance of not meeting her at all. But that he has some idea of the way she will come, with suspicion of why and what is delaying her, his mutterings tell: "_Morbleu!_ over an hour since she set out! A tortoise could have crawled to the Ferry, and crept back within the time! For a demoiselle with limbs lithe and supple as hers--pah! It can't be the brandy bottle that's the obstruction. Nothing of the kind. Corked, capsuled, wrapped, ready for delivery--in all two minutes, or at most, three! She so ready to run for it, too--herself proposed going! Odd, that, to say the least. Only understandable on the supposition of something prearranged. An assignation with the River Triton for sure! Yes; he's the anchor that's been holding her--holds her still. Likely, they're somewhat under the shadow of that wood, now--standing--sitting--ach! I wish I but knew the spot; I'd bring their billing and cooing to an abrupt termination. It will not do for me to go on guesses; I might miss the straying damsel with whom this night I want a word in particular--must have it. Monsieur Coracle may need binding a little faster, before he consents to the service required of him. To ensure an interview with her it is necessary to stay on this spot, however trying to patience." For a second or two he stands motionless, though all the while active in thought, his eyes also restless. These, turning to the wall, show him that it is overgrown with ivy. A massive cluster on its crest projects out, with hanging tendrils, whose tops almost touch the ground. Behind them there is ample room for a man to stand upright, and so be concealed from the eyes of anyone passing, however near. "_Grace à Dieu!_" he exclaims, observing this; "the very place. I must take her by surprise. That's the best way when one wants to learn how the cat jumps. Ha! _cette chat_ Tom; how very opportune his mischievous doings--for Mademoiselle! Well, I must give _Madame la mère_ counsel better to guard against such accidents hereafter; and how to behave when they occur." He has by this ducked his head, and stepped under the arcading evergreen. The position is all he could desire. It gives him a view of both ways by which on that side the farmhouse can be approached. The cart lane is directly before his face, as is also the footpath when he turns towards it. The latter leading, as already said, along a hedge to the orchard's bottom, there crosses the brook by a plank--this being about fifty yards distant from where he has stationed himself. And as there is now moonlight he can distinctly see the frail footbridge, with a portion of the path beyond, where it runs through straggling trees, before entering the thicker wood. Only at intervals has he sight of it, as the sky is mottled with masses of cloud, that every now and then, drifting over the moon's disc, shut off her light with the suddenness of a lamp extinguished. When she shines he can himself be seen. Standing in crouched attitude with the ivy tendrils festooned over his pale, bloodless face, he looks like a gigantic spider behind its web, on the wait for prey--ready to spring forward and seize it. For nigh ten minutes he thus remains watching, all the while impatiently chafing. He listens too; though with little hope of hearing aught to indicate the approach of her expected. After the pleasant _tête-à-tête_, he is now sure she must have held with the waterman, she will be coming along silently, her thoughts in sweet, placid contentment; or she may come on with timid, stealthy steps, dreading rebuke by her mother for having overstayed her time. Just as the priest in bitterest chagrin is promising himself that rebuked she shall be, he sees what interrupts his resolves, suddenly and altogether withdrawing his thoughts from Mary Morgan. It is a form approaching the plank, on the opposite side of the stream; not hers, nor woman's; instead the figure of a man! Neither erect nor walking in the ordinary way, but with head held down and shoulders projected forward, as if he were seeking concealment under the bushes that beset the path, for all drawing nigh to the brook with the rapidity of one pursued, and who thinks there is safety only on its other side! "_Sainte Vierge!_" exclaims the priest, _sotto voce_. "What can all that mean? And who----" He stays his self-asked interrogatory, seeing that the skulker has paused too--at the farther end of the plank, which he has now reached. Why? It may be from fear to set foot on it; for indeed is there danger to one not intimately acquainted with it. The man may be a stranger--some fellow on teamo who intends trying the hospitality of the farmhouse--more likely its henroosts, judging by his manner of approach. While thus conjecturing, Rogier sees the skulker stoop down, immediately after hearing a sound, different from the sough of the stream; a harsh grating noise, as of a piece of heavy timber drawn over a rough surface of rock. "Sharp fellow!" thinks the priest; "with all his haste, wonderfully cautious! He's fixing the thing steady before venturing to tread upon it! Ha! I'm wrong; he don't design crossing it after all!" This as the crouching figure erects itself and, instead of passing over the plank, turns abruptly away from it. Not to go back along the path, but up the stream on that same side! And with bent body as before, still seeming desirous to shun observation. Now more than ever mystified, the priest watches him, with eyes keen as those of a cat set for nocturnal prowling. Not long till he learns who the man is. Just then the moon, escaping from a cloud, flashes her full light in his face, revealing features of diabolic expression--that of a murderer striding away from the spot where he has been spilling blood! Rogier recognises Coracle Dick, though still without the slightest idea of what the poacher is doing there. "_Que diantre!_" he exclaims, in surprise; "what can that devil be after! Coming up to the plank and not crossing! Ha! yonder's a very different sort of pedestrian approaching it? Ma'mselle Mary at last!" This as by the same intermittent gleam of moonlight he descries a straw hat, with streaming ribbons, over the tops of the bushes beyond the brook. The brighter image drives the darker one from his thoughts; and, forgetting all about the man, in his resolve to take the woman unawares, he steps out from under the ivy, and makes forward to meet her. He is a Frenchman, and to help her over the foot-plank will give him a fine opportunity for displaying his cheap gallantry. As he hastens down to the stream, the moon remaining unclouded, he sees the young girl close to it on the opposite side. She approaches with proud carriage, and confident step, her cheeks even under the pale light showing red--flushed with the kisses so lately received, as it were still clinging to them. Her heart yet thrilling with love, strong under its excitement, little suspects she how soon it will cease to beat. Boldly she plants her foot upon the plank, believing, late boasting, a knowledge of its tricks. Alas! there is one with which she is not acquainted--could not be--a new and treacherous one, taught it within the last two minutes. The daughter of Evan Morgan is doomed; one more step will be her last in life. [Illustration: THE DAUGHTER OF EVAN MORGAN IS DOOMED. ONE MORE STEP WILL BE HER LAST.] She makes it, the priest alone being witness. He sees her arms flung aloft, simultaneously hearing a shriek; then arms, body, and bridge sink out of sight suddenly, as though the earth had swallowed them! CHAPTER XXIII. A SUSPICIOUS WAIF. On returning homeward the young waterman bethinks him of a difficulty--a little matter to be settled with his mother. Not having gone to the shop, he has neither whipcord nor pitch to show. If questioned about these commodities, what answer is he to make? He dislikes telling her another lie. It came easy enough before the interview with his sweetheart, but now it is not so much worth while. On reflection, he thinks it will be better to make a clean breast of it. He has already half confessed, and may as well admit his mother to full confidence about the secret he has been trying to keep from her--unsuccessfully, as he now knows. While still undetermined, a circumstance occurs to hinder him from longer withholding it, whether he would or not. In his abstraction he has forgotten all about the moon, now up, and at intervals shining brightly. During one of these he has arrived at his own gate, as he opens it seeing his mother on the doorstep. Her attitude shows she has already seen him, and observed the direction whence he has come. Her words declare the same. "Why, Jack!" she exclaims, in feigned astonishment, "ye bean't a comin' from the Ferry that way?" The interrogatory, or rather the tone in which it is put, tells him the cat is out of the bag. No use attempting to stuff the animal in again; and seeing it is not, he rejoins, laughingly,-- "Well, mother, to speak the truth, I ha'nt been to the Ferry at all. An' I must ask you to forgie me for practisin' a trifle o' deception on ye--that 'bout the _Mary_ wantin' repairs." "I suspected it, lad; an' that it wor the tother Mary as wanted something, or you wanted something wi' her. Since you've spoke repentful, an' confessed, I ain't agoin' to worrit ye about it. I'm glad the boat be all right, as I ha' got good news for you." "What?" he asks, rejoiced at being so easily let off. "Well; you spoke truth when ye sayed there was no knowin' but that somebody might be wantin' to hire ye any minnit. There's been one arready." "Who? Not the Captain?" "No, not him. But a grand livery chap; footman or coachman--I ain't sure which--only that he came frae a Squire Powell's, 'bout a mile back." "Oh! I know Squire Powell--him o' New Hall, I suppose it be. What did the sarvint say?" "That if you wasn't engaged, his young master wants ye to take hisself, and some friends that be staying wi' him, for a row down the river." "How far did the man say? If they be bound to Chepstow, or even but Tintern, I don't think I could go--unless they start Monday mornin'. I'm 'gaged to the Captain for Thursday, ye know; an' if I went the long trip, there'd be all the bother o' gettin' the boat back--an' bare time." "Monday! Why it's the morrow they want ye." "Sunday! That's queerish, too. Squire Powell's family be a sort o' strict religious, I've heerd." "That's just it. The livery chap sayed it be a church they're goin' to; some curious kind o' old worshippin' place, that lie in a bend o' the river, where carriages ha' difficulty in gettin' to it." "I think I know the one, an' can take them there well enough. What answer did you gie to the man?" "That ye could take 'em, an' would. I know'd you hadn't any other bespeak; and since it wor to a church, wouldn't mind its bein' Sunday." "Sartinly not. Why should I?" asks Jack, who is anything but a Sabbatarian. "Where do they weesh the boat to be took? Or am I to wait for 'em here?" "Yes; the man spoke o' them comin' here, an' at a very early hour. Six o'clock. He sayed the clergyman be a friend o' the family, an' they're to ha' their breakfasts wi' him, afore goin' to church." "All right! I'll be ready for 'em, come's as early as they may." "In that case, my son, ye' better get to your bed at once. Ye've had a hard day o' it, and need rest. Should ye like take a drop o' somethin' 'fores you lie down?" "Well, mother, I don't mind. Just a glass o' your elderberry." She opens a cupboard, brings forth a black bottle, and fills him a tumbler of the dark red wine--home made, and by her own hands. Quaffing it, he observes,-- "It be the best stuff that I know of to put spirit into a man, an' makes him feel cheery. I've heerd the Captain hisself say it beats their _Spanish Port_ all to pieces." Though somewhat astray in his commercial geography, the young waterman, as his patron, is right about the quality of the beverage; for elderberry wine, made in the correct way, _is_ superior to that of Oporto. Curious scientific fact, I believe not generally known, that the soil where grows the _Sambucus_ is that most favourable to the growth of the grape. Without going thus deeply into the philosophy of the subject, or at all troubling himself about it, the boatman soon gets to the bottom of his glass, and bidding his mother good-night, retires to his sleeping room. Getting into bed, he lies for a while sweetly thinking of Mary Morgan, and that satisfactory interview under the elm; then goes to sleep as sweetly to dream of her. * * * * * There is just a streak of daylight stealing in through the window as he awakes; enough to warn him that it is time to be up and stirring. Up he instantly is, and arrays himself, not in his everyday boating habiliments, but a suit worn only on Sundays and holidays. The mother, also astir betimes, has his breakfast on the table soon as he is rigged; and just as he finishes eating it, the rattle of wheels on the road in front, with voices, tells him his fare has arrived. Hastening out, he sees a grand carriage drawn up at the gate, double horsed, with coachman and footman on the box; inside young Mr. Powell, his pretty sister, and two others--a lady and gentleman, also young. Soon they are all seated in the boat, the coachman having been ordered to take the carriage home, and bring it back at a certain hour. The footman goes with them--the _Mary_ having seats for six. Rowed down stream, the young people converse among themselves, gaily now and then giving way to laughter, as though it were any other day than Sunday. But their boatman is merry also with memories of the preceding night; and, though not called upon to take part in their conversation, he likes listening to it. Above all, he is pleased with the appearance of Miss Powell, a very beautiful girl, and takes note of the attention paid her by the gentleman who sits opposite. Jack is rather interested in observing these, as they remind him of his own first approaches to Mary Morgan. His eyes, though, are for a time removed from them, while the boat is passing Abergann. Out of the farmhouse chimneys just visible over the tops of the trees, he sees smoke ascending. It is not yet seven o'clock, but the Morgans are early-risers, and by this mother and daughter will be on their way to _Matins_, and possibly Confession at the Rugg's Ferry Chapel. He dislikes to reflect on the last, and longs for the day when he has hopes to cure his sweetheart of such a repulsive devotional practice. Pulling on down, he ceases to think of it, and of her for the time, his attention being engrossed by the management of the boat. For just below Abergann the stream runs sharply, and is given to caprices; but farther on, it once more flows in gentle tide along the meadow-lands of Llangorren. Before turning the bend, where Gwen Wynn and Eleanor Lees were caught in the rapid current, at the estuary of a sluggish inflowing brook, whose waters are now beaten back by the flooded river, he sees what causes him to start, and hang on the stroke of his oar. "What is it, Wingate?" asks young Powell, observing his strange behaviour. "Oh! a waif--that plank floating yonder! I suppose you'd like to pick it up! But remember! it's Sunday, and we must confine ourselves to works of necessity and mercy." Little think the four who smiled at this remark--five with the footman--what a weird, painful impression the sight of that drifting thing has made on the sixth who is rowing them. Nor does it leave him all that day; but clings to him in the church, to which he goes; at the Rectory, where he is entertained; and while rowing back up the river--hangs heavy on his heart as lead! Returning, he looks out for the piece of timber, but cannot see it; for it is now after night, the young people having stayed dinner with their friend the clergyman. Kept later than they intended, on arrival at the boat's dock they do not remain there an instant; but, getting into the carriage, which has been some time awaiting them, are whirled off to New Hall. Impatient are they to be home. Far more--for a different reason--the waterman, who but stays to tie the boat's painter; and, leaving the oars in her thwarts, hastens into his house. The plank is still uppermost in his thoughts, the presentiment heavy on his heart. Not lighter, as on entering at the door he sees his mother seated with her head bowed down to her knees. He does not wait for her to speak; but asks excitedly:-- "What's the matter, mother?" The question is mechanical--he almost anticipates the answer, or its nature. "Oh, my son, my son! As I told ye. It _was the canwyll corph_!" CHAPTER XXIV. "THE FLOWER OF LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING." There is a crowd collected round the farmhouse of Abergann. Not an excited, or noisy one; instead, the people composing it are of staid demeanour, with that formal solemnity observable on the faces of those at a funeral. And a funeral it is, or soon to be. For, inside there is a chamber of death; a coffin with a corpse--that of her, who, had she lived, would have been Jack Wingate's wife. Mary Morgan has indeed fallen victim to the mad spite of a monster. Down went she into that swollen stream, which, ruthless and cruel as he who committed her to it, carried her off on its engulfing tide--her form tossed to and fro, now sinking, now coming to the surface, and again going down. No one to save her--not an effort at rescue made by the cowardly Frenchman, who, rushing on to the chasm's edge, there stopped, only to gaze affrightedly at the flood surging below, foam crested--only to listen to her agonized cry, farther off and more freely put forth, as she was borne onward to her doom. Once again he heard it, in that tone which tells of life's last struggle with death--proclaiming death the conqueror. Then all was over. As he stood horror-stricken, half-bewildered, a cloud suddenly curtained the moon, bringing black darkness upon the earth, as if a pall had been thrown over it. Even the white froth on the water was for the while invisible. He could see nothing--nothing hear, save the hoarse, harsh torrent rolling relentlessly on. Of no avail, then, his hurrying back to the house, and raising the alarm. Too late it was to save Mary Morgan from drowning; and, only by the accident of her body being thrown up against a bank was it that night recovered. It is the third day after, and the funeral about to take place. Though remote the situation of the farmstead, and sparsely inhabited the district immediately around, the assemblage is a large one. This partly from the unusual circumstances of the girl's death, but as much from the respect in which Evan Morgan is held by his neighbours far and near. They are there in their best attire, men and women alike, Protestants as Catholics, to show a sympathy, which in truth many of them sincerely feel. Nor is there among the people assembled any conjecturing about the cause of the fatal occurrence. No hint or suspicion that there has been foul play. How could there? So clearly an accident, as pronounced by the coroner at his inquiry held the day after the drowning--brief and purely _pro forma_. Mrs. Morgan herself told of her daughter sent on that errand from which she never returned; while the priest, eye-witness, stated the reason why. Taken together, this was enough; though further confirmed by the absent plank, found and brought back on the following day. Even had Wingate rowed back up the river during daylight, he would not have seen it again. The farm labourers and others accustomed to cross by it gave testimony as to its having been loose. But of all whose evidence was called for, one alone could have put a different construction on the tale. Father Rogier could have done this; but did not, having his reasons for withholding the truth. He is now in possession of a secret that will make Richard Dempsey his slave for life--his instrument, willing or unwilling, for such purpose as he may need him, no matter what its iniquity. The hour of interment has been fixed for twelve o'clock. It is now a little after eleven, and everybody has arrived at the house. The men outside in groups, some in the little flower-garden in front, others straying into the farmyard to have a look at the fatting pigs, or about the pastures to view the white-faced Herefords and "Ryeland" sheep, of which last Evan Morgan is a noted breeder. Inside the house are the women--some relatives of the deceased, with the farmer's friends and more familiar acquaintances. All admitted to the chamber of death to take a last look at the dead. The corpse is in the coffin, but with lid not yet screwed on. There lies the corpse in its white drapery, still untouched by "decay's effacing finger," beautiful as living bride, though now a bride for the altar of eternity. The stream passes in and out; but besides those only curious coming and going, there are some who remain in the room. Mrs. Morgan herself sits beside the coffin, at intervals giving way to wildest grief, a cluster of women around vainly essaying to comfort her. There is a young man seated in the corner, who seems to need consoling almost as much as she. Every now and then his breast heaves in audible sobbing, as though the heart within were about to break. None wonder at this; for it is Jack Wingate. Still, there are those who think it strange his being there--above all, as if made welcome. They know not the remarkable change that has taken place in the feelings of Mrs. Morgan. Beside that bed of death, all who were dear to her daughter were dear to her now. And she is aware that the young waterman was so; for he has told her, with tearful eyes and sad, earnest words, whose truthfulness could not be doubted. But where is the other, the false one? Not there--never has been since the fatal occurrence. Came not to the inquest, came not to inquire or condole; comes not now to show sympathy, or take part in the rites of sepulture. There are some who make remark about his absence, though none lament it--not even Mrs. Morgan herself. The thought of the bereaved mother is that he would have ill-befitted being her son. Only a fleeting reflection, her whole soul being engrossed in grief for her lost daughter. The hour for closing the coffin has come. They but await the priest to say some solemn words. He has not yet arrived, though every instant looked for. A personage so important has many duties to perform, and may be detained by them elsewhere. For all, he does not fail. While inside the death chamber they are conjecturing the cause of his delay, a buzz outside, with a shuffling of feet in the passage, tells of way being made for him. Presently he enters the room, and stepping up to the coffin, stands beside it, all eyes turned towards him. His are upon the face of the corpse--at first with the usual look of official gravity and feigned grief. But continuing to gaze upon it, a strange expression comes over his features, as though he saw something that surprised or unusually interested him. It affects him even to giving a start; so light, however, that no one seems to observe it. Whatever the emotion, he conceals it; and in calm voice pronounces the prayer, with all its formalities and gestures. The lid is laid on, covering the form of Mary Morgan--for ever veiling her face from the world. Then the pall is thrown over, and all carried outside. There is no hearse, no plumes, nor paid pall-bearers. Affection supplies the place of this heartless luxury of the tomb. On the shoulders of four men the coffin is borne away, the crowd forming into procession as it passes, and following. On to the Rugg's Ferry chapel,--into its cemetery, late consecrated. There lowered into a grave already prepared to receive it; and, after the usual ceremonial of the Roman Catholic religion, covered up and turfed over. Then the mourners scatter off for their homes, singly or in groups, leaving the remains of Mary Morgan in their last resting-place, only her near relatives with thought of ever again returning to stand over them. There is one exception; this is a man not related to her, but who would have been had she lived. Wingate goes away with the intention ere long to return. The chapel burying ground brinks upon the river, and when the shades of night have descended over it, he brings his boat alongside. Then, fixing her to the bank, he steps out, and proceeds in the direction of the new-made grave. All this cautiously, and with circumspection, as if fearing to be seen. The darkness favouring him, he is not. Reaching the sacred spot, he kneels down, and with a knife, taken from his pockets, scoops out a little cavity in the lately laid turf. Into this he inserts a plant, which he has brought along with him--one of a common kind, but emblematic of no ordinary feeling. It is that known to country people as "The Flower of Love-lies-bleeding" (_Amaranthus caudatus_). Closing the earth around its roots, and restoring the sods, he bends lower, till his lips are in contact with the grass upon the grave. One near enough might hear convulsive sobbing, accompanied by the words:-- "Mary, darling! you're wi' the angels now; and I know you'll forgie me if I've done ought to bring about this dreadful thing. Oh, dear, dear Mary! I'd be only too glad to be lyin' in the grave along wi' ye. As God's my witness, I would." For a time he is silent, giving way to his grief--so wild as to seem unbearable. And just for an instant he himself thinks it so, as he kneels with the knife still open in his hand, his eyes fixed upon it. A plunge with that shining blade with point to his heart, and all his misery would be over! "My mother--my poor mother--no!" These few words, with the filial thought conveyed, save him from suicide. Soon as repeating them, he shuts to his knife, rises to his feet, and, returning to the boat again, rows himself home; but never with so heavy a heart. CHAPTER XXV. A FRENCH FEMME DE CHAMBRE. Of all who assisted at the ceremony of Mary Morgan's funeral, no one seemed so impatient for its termination as the priest. In his official capacity, he did all he could to hasten it--soon as it was over, hurrying away from the grave, out of the burying ground, and into his house near by. Such haste would have appeared strange--even indecent--but for the belief of his having some sacerdotal duty that called him elsewhere; a belief strengthened by their shortly after seeing him start off in the direction of the ferry-boat. Arriving there, the Charon attendant rows him across the river; and, soon as setting foot on the opposite side, he turns face down stream, taking a path that meanders through fields and meadows. Along this he goes rapidly as his legs can carry him--in a walk. Clerical dignity hinders him from proceeding at a run, though, judging by the expression of his countenance, he is inclined to it. The route he is on would conduct to Llangorren Court--several miles distant--and thither is he bound; though the house itself is not his objective point. He does not visit, nor would it serve him to show his face there--least of all to Gwen Wynn. She might not be so rude as to use her riding whip on him, as she once felt inclined in the hunting-field; but she would certainly be surprised to see him at her home. Yet it is one within her house he wishes to see, and is now on the way for it, pretty sure of being able to accomplish his object. True to her fashionable instincts and _toilette_ necessities, Miss Linton keeps a French maid, and it is with this damsel Father Rogier designs having an interview. He is thoroughly _en rapport_ with the _femme de chambre_, and through her, aided by the Confession, kept advised of everything which transpires at the Court, or all he deems it worth while to be advised about. His confidence that he will not have his long walk for nothing rests on certain matters of pre-arrangement. With the foreign domestic he has succeeded in establishing a code of signals, by which he can communicate, with almost a certainty of being able to see her--not inside the house, but at a place near enough to be convenient. Rare the park in Herefordshire through which there is not a right-of-way path, and one runs across that of Llangorren. Not through the ornamental grounds, nor at all close to the mansion--as is frequently the case, to the great chagrin of the owner--but several hundred yards distant. It passes from the river's bank to the county road, all the way through trees, that screen it from view of the house. There is a point, however, where it approaches the edge of the wood, and there one traversing it might be seen from the upper windows. But only for an instant, unless the party so passing should choose to make stop in the place exposed. It is a thoroughfare not much frequented, though free to Father Rogier as any one else; and, now hastening along it, he arrives at that spot where the break in the timber brings the house in view. Here he makes a halt, still keeping under the trees; to a branch of one of them, on the side towards the Court, attaching a piece of white paper he has taken out of his pocket. This done, with due caution and care, that he be not observed in the act, he draws back to the path, and sits down upon a stile close by, to await the upshot of his telegraphy. His haste hitherto explained by the fact, only at certain times are his signals likely to be seen, or could they be attended to. One of the surest and safest is during the early afternoon hours, just after luncheon, when the ancient toast of Cheltenham takes her accustomed _siesta_, before dressing herself for the drive, or reception of callers. While the mistress sleeps, the maid is free to dispose of herself as she pleases. It was to hit this interlude of leisure Father Rogier has been hurrying; and that he has succeeded is soon known to him, by his seeing a form with floating drapery, recognisable as that of the _femme de chambre_. Gliding through the shrubbery, and evidently with an eye to escape observation, she is only visible at intervals; at length lost to his sight altogether as she enters among the thick standing trees. But he knows she will turn up again. And she does after a short time, coming along the path towards the stile where here he is seated. "Ah! _ma bonne!_" he exclaims, dropping on his feet, and moving forward to meet her. "You've been prompt! I didn't expect you quite so soon. Madame la Chatelaine oblivious, I apprehend; in the midst of her afternoon nap?" "Yes, Père; she was when I stole off. But she has given me directions about dressing her, to go out for a drive--earlier than usual. So I must get back immediately." "I'm not going to detain you very long. I chanced to be passing, and thought I might as well have a word with you--seeing it's the hour when you're off duty. By the way, I hear you're about to have grand doings at the Court--a ball, and what not?" "_Oui, m'ssieu; oui._" "When is it to be?" "On Thursday. Mademoiselle celebrates _son jour de naissance_--the twenty-first, making her of age. It is to be a grand fête as you say. They've been all last week preparing for it." "Among the invited, Le Capitaine Ryecroft, I presume?" "Oh, yes. I saw madame write the note inviting him--indeed, took it myself down to the hall table for the post-boy." "He visits often at the Court of late?" "Very often--once a week, sometimes twice." "And comes down the river by boat, doesn't he?" "In a boat. Yes--comes and goes that way." Her statement is reliable, as Father Rogier has reason to believe--having an inkling of suspicion that the damsel has of late been casting sheep's eyes, not at Captain Ryecroft, but his young boatman, and is as much interested in the movements of the _Mary_ as either the boat's owner or charterer. "Always comes by water, and returns by it," observes the priest, as if speaking to himself. "You're quite sure of that, _ma fille_?" "Oh, quite, Père!" "Mademoiselle appears to be very partial to him. I think you told me she often accompanies him down to the boat stair at his departure?" "Often! Always." "Always?" "_Toujours!_ I never knew it otherwise. Either the boat stair or the pavilion." "Ah! the summer-house! They hold their _téte-à-téte_ there at times, do they?" "Yes, they do." "But not when he leaves at a late hour--as, for instance, when he dines at the Court; which I know he has done several times?" "Oh, yes; even then. Only last week he was there for dinner, and Ma'mselle Gwen went with him to his boat, or the pavilion, to bid adieus. No matter what the time to her. _Ma foi!_ I'd risk my word she'll do the same after this grand ball that's to be. And why shouldn't she, Père Rogier? Is there any harm in it?" The question is put with a view of justifying her own conduct, that would be somewhat similar were Jack Wingate to encourage it, which, to say truth, he never has. "Oh, no," answers the priest, with an assumed indifference; "no harm whatever, and no business of ours. Mademoiselle Wynn is mistress of her own actions, and will be more after the coming birthday, number _vingt-un_. But," he adds, dropping the _rôle_ of the interrogator, now that he has got all the information wanted, "I fear I'm keeping you too long. As I've said, chancing to come by, I signalled--chiefly to tell you that next Sunday we have High Mass in the chapel, with special prayers for a young girl who was drowned last Saturday night, and whom we've just this day interred. I suppose you've heard?" "No, I haven't. Who, Père?" Her question may appear strange, Rugg's Ferry being so near to Llangorren Court, and Abergann still nearer. But for reasons already stated, as others, the ignorance of the Frenchwoman as to what has occurred at the farmhouse is not only intelligible, but natural enough. Equally natural, though in a sense very different, is the look of satisfaction appearing in her eyes, as the priest in answer gives the name of the drowned girl. "_Marie, la fille de fermier Morgan._" The expression that comes over her face is, under the circumstances, terribly repulsive--being almost that of joy! For not only has she seen Mary Morgan at the chapel, but something besides--heard her name coupled with that of the waterman, Wingate. In the midst of her strong, sinful emotions, of which the priest is fully cognizant, he finds it a good opportunity for taking leave. Going back to the tree where the bit of signal paper has been left, he plucks it off, and crumbles it into his pocket. Then, returning to the path, shakes hands with her, says "_Bon jour!_" and departs. She is not a beauty, or he would have made his adieus in a very different way. CHAPTER XXVI. THE POACHER AT HOME. Coracle Dick lives all alone. If he have relatives, they are not near, nor does any one in the neighbourhood know aught about them. Only some vague report of a father away off in the colonies, where he went against his will; while the mother--is believed dead. Not less solitary is Coracle's place of abode. Situated in a dingle with sides thickly wooded, it is not visible from anywhere. Nor is it near any regular road; only approachable by a path, which there ends--the dell itself being a _cul-de-sac_. Its open end is toward the river, running in at a point where the bank is precipitous, so hindering thoroughfare along the stream's edge, unless when its waters are at their lowest. Coracle's house is but a hovel, no better than the cabin of a backwoods squatter. Timber structure, too, in part, with a filling up of rough mason work. Its half-dozen perches of garden ground, once reclaimed from the wood, have grown wild again, no spade having touched them for years. The present occupant of the tenement has no taste for gardening, nor agriculture of any kind; he is a poacher, _pur sang_--at least, so far as is known. And it seems to pay him better than would the cultivation of cabbages--with pheasants at nine shillings the brace, and salmon three shillings the pound. He has the river, if not the mere, for his net, and the land for his game--making as free with both as ever did Alan-a-dale. But, whatever the price of fish and game, be it high or low, Coracle is never without good store of cash, spending it freely at the Welsh Harp, as elsewhere; at times so lavishly, that people of suspicious nature think it cannot all be the product of night netting and snaring. Some of it, say scandalous tongues, is derived from other industries, also practised by night, and less reputable than trespassing after game. But, as already said, these are only rumours, and confined to the few. Indeed, only a very few have intimate acquaintance with the man. He is of a reserved, taciturn habit, somewhat surly: not talkative even in his cups. And though ever ready to stand treat in the Harp taproom, he rarely practises hospitality in his own house; only now and then, when some acquaintance of like kidney and calling pays him a visit. Then the solitary domicile has its silence disturbed by the talk of men, thick as thieves--often speech which, if heard beyond its walls, 'twould not be well for its owner. More than half time, however, the poacher's dwelling is deserted, and oftener at night than by day. Its door, shut and padlocked, tells when the tenant is abroad. Then only a rough lurcher dog--a dangerous animal, too--is guardian of the place. Not that there are any chattels to tempt the cupidity of the kleptomaniac. The most valuable movable inside was not worth carrying away; and outside is but the coracle standing in a lean-to shed, propped up by its paddle. It is not always there, and, when absent, it may be concluded that its owner is on some expedition up, down, or across the river. Nor is the dog always at home; his absence proclaiming the poacher engaged in the terrestrial branch of his profession--running down hares or rabbits. * * * * * It is the night of the same day that has seen the remains of Mary Morgan consigned to their resting-place in the burying-ground of the Rugg's Ferry chapel. A wild night it has turned out, dark and stormy. The autumnal equinox is on, and its gales have commenced stripping the trees of their foliage. Around the dwelling of Dick Dempsey the fallen leaves lie thick, covering the ground as with cloth of gold; at intervals torn to shreds, as the wind swirls them up and holds them suspended. Every now and then they are driven against the door, which is shut, but not locked. The hasp is hanging loose, the padlock with its bowed bolt open. The coracle is seen standing upright in the shed; the lurcher not anywhere outside--for the animal is within, lying upon the hearth in front of a cheerful fire. And before the same sits its master, regarding a pot which hangs over it on hooks; at intervals lifting off the lid, and stirring the contents with a long-handled spoon of white metal. What these are might be told by the aroma: a stew, smelling strongly of onions with game savour conjoined. Ground game at that, for Coracle is in the act of "jugging" a hare. Handier to no man than him were the recipe of Mrs. Glass, for he comes up to all its requirements--even the primary and essential one--knows how to catch his hare as well as cook it. The stew is done, dished, and set steaming upon the table, where already has been placed a plate--the time-honoured willow pattern--with a knife and two-pronged fork. There is, besides, a jug of water, a bottle containing brandy, and a tumbler. Drawing his chair up, Coracle commences eating. The hare is a young one--a leveret he has just taken from the stubble--tender and juicy--delicious even without the red-currant jelly he has not got, and for which he does not care. Withal, he appears but little to enjoy the meal, and only eats as a man called upon to satisfy the cravings of hunger. Every now and then, as the fork is being carried to his head, he holds it suspended, with the morsel of flesh on its prongs, while listening to sounds outside! At such intervals the expression upon his countenance is that of the keenest apprehension; and as a gust of wind, unusually violent, drives a leafy branch in loud clout against the door, he starts in his chair, fancying it the knock of a policeman with his muffled truncheon! This night the poacher is suffering from no ordinary fear of being summoned for game trespass. Were that all, he could eat his leveret as composedly as if it had been regularly purchased and paid for. But there is more upon his mind; the dread of a writ being presented to him, with shackles at the same time--of being taken handcuffed to the county jail--thence before a court of assize--and finally to the scaffold! He has reason to apprehend all this. Notwithstanding his deep cunning, and the dexterity with which he accomplished his great crime, a man must have witnessed it. Above the roar of the torrent, mingling with the cries of the drowning girl as she struggled against it, were shouts in a man's voice, which he fancied to be that of Father Rogier. From what he has since heard, he is now certain of it. The coroner's inquest, at which he was not present, but whose report has reached him, puts that beyond doubt. His only uncertainty is, whether Rogier saw him by the footbridge, and if so to recognise him. True, the priest has nothing said of him at the 'quest; for all he, Coracle, has his suspicions; now torturing him almost as much as if sure that he was detected tampering with the plank. No wonder he eats his supper with little relish, or that after every few mouthfuls he takes a swallow of the brandy, with a view to keeping up his spirits. Withal he has no remorse. When he recalls the hastily exchanged speeches he overheard upon Garranhill, with that more prolonged dialogue under the trysting-tree, the expression upon his features is not one of repentance, but devilish satisfaction at the fell deed he has done. Not that his vengeance is yet satisfied. It will not be till he have the other life--that of Jack Wingate. He has dealt the young waterman a blow which at the same time afflicts himself; only by dealing a deadlier one will his own sufferings be relieved. He has been long plotting his rival's death, but without seeing a safe way to accomplish it. And now the thing seems no nearer than ever--this night farther off. In his present frame of mind--with the dread of the gallows upon it--he would be too glad to cry quits, and let Wingate live! Starting at every swish of the wind, he proceeds with his supper, hastily devouring it, like a wild beast; and when at length finished, he sets the dish upon the floor for the dog. Then lighting his pipe, and drawing the bottle nearer to his hand, he sits for a while smoking. Not long before being interrupted by a noise at the door; this time no stroke of wind-tossed waif, but a touch of knuckles. Though slight and barely audible, the dog knows it to be a knock, as shown by his behaviour. Dropping the half-gnawed bone, and springing to its feet, the animal gives out an angry growling. Its master has himself started from his chair, and stands trembling. There is a slit of a door at back convenient for escape; and for an instant his eye is on it, as though he had half a mind to make exit that way. He would blow out the light were it a candle; but cannot as it is the fire, whose faggots are still brightly ablaze. While thus undecided, he hears the knock repeated--this time louder, and with the accompaniment of a voice, saying,-- "Open your door, Monsieur Dick." Not a policeman, then; only the priest! CHAPTER XXVII. A MYSTERIOUS CONTRACT. "Only the priest!" muttered Coracle to himself, but little better satisfied than if it were the policeman. Giving the lurcher a kick to quiet the animal, he pulls back the bolt, and draws open the door, as he does so asking, "That you, Father Rogier?" "_C'est moi!_" answers the priest, stepping in without invitation. "Ah! _mon bracconier!_ you're having something nice for supper. Judging by the aroma ragout of hare. Hope I haven't disturbed you. Is it hare?" "It was, your Reverence, a bit of leveret." "Was! You've finished then. It is all gone?" "It is. The dog had the remains of it, as ye see." He points to the dish on the floor. "I'm sorry at that--having rather a relish for leveret. It can't be helped, however." "I wish I'd known ye were comin'. Dang the dog!" "No, no! Don't blame the poor dumb brute. No doubt it too has a taste for hare, seeing it's half hound. I suppose leverets are plentiful just now, and easily caught, since they can no longer retreat to the standing corn?" "Yes, your Reverence. There be a good wheen o' them about." "In that case, if you should stumble upon one, and bring it to my house, I'll have it jugged for myself. By the way, what have you got in that black jack?" "It's brandy." "Well, Monsieur Dick, I'll thank you for a mouthful." "Will you take it neat, or mixed wi' a drop o' water?" "Neat--raw. The night's that, and the two raws will neutralize one another. I feel chilled to the bones, and a little fatigued, toiling against the storm." "It be a fearsome night. I wonder at your Reverence bein' out--exposin' yourself in such weather!" "All weathers are alike to me--when duty calls. Just now I'm abroad on a little matter of business that won't brook delay." "Business--wi' me?" "With you, _mon bracconier_!" "What may it be, your Reverence?" "Sit down, and I shall tell you. It's too important to be discussed standing." The introductory dialogue does not tranquillize the poacher; instead, further intensifies his fears. Obedient, he takes his seat one side the table, the priest planting himself on the other, the glass of brandy within reach of his hand. After a sip, he resumes speech with the remark,-- "If I mistake not, you are a poor man, Monsieur Dempsey?" "You ain't no ways mistaken 'bout that, Father Rogier." "And you'd like to be a rich one?" Thus encouraged, the poacher's face lights up a little. Smilingly he makes reply,-- "I can't say as I'd have any particular objection. 'Stead, I'd like it wonderful well." "You can be, if so inclined." "I'm ever so inclined, as I've sayed. But how, your Reverence? In this hard work-o'-day world 'tan't so easy to get rich." "For you, easy enough. No labour, and not much more difficulty than transporting your coracle five or six miles across the meadows." "Somethin' to do wi' the coracle, have it?" "No; 'twill need a bigger boat--one that will carry three or four people. Do you know where you can borrow such, or hire it?" "I think I do. I've a friend, the name o' Rob Trotter, who's got just sich a boat. He'd lend it me, sure." "Charter it, if he doesn't. Never mind about the price. I'll pay." "When might you want it, your Reverence?" "On Thursday night, at ten, or a little later--say half-past." "And where am I to bring it?" "To the Ferry; you'll have it against the bank by the back of the Chapel burying-ground, and keep it there till I come to you. Don't leave it to go up to the 'Harp,' or anywhere else; and don't let any one see either the boat or yourself, if you can possibly avoid it. As the nights are now dark at that hour, there need be no difficulty in your rowing up the river without being observed. Above all, you're to make no one the wiser of what you're to do, or anything I'm now saying to you. The service I want you for is one of a secret kind, and not to be prattled about." "May I have a hint o' what it is?" "Not now; you shall know in good time--when you meet me with the boat. There will be another along with me--maybe two--to assist in the affair. What will be required of you is a little dexterity, _such as you displayed on Saturday night_." No need the emphasis on the last words to impress their meaning upon the murderer. Too well he comprehends, starting in his chair as if a hornet had stung him. "How--where?" he gasps out in the confusion of terror. The double interrogatory is but mechanical, and of no consequence. Hopeless any attempt at concealment or subterfuge; as he is aware on receiving the answer, cool and provokingly deliberate. "You have asked two questions, Monsieur Dick, that call for separate replies. To the first, 'How?' I leave you to grope out the answer for yourself, feeling pretty sure you'll find it. With the second I'll be more particular, if you wish me. Place--where a certain foot-plank bridges a certain brook, close to the farmhouse of Abergann. It--the plank, I mean--last Saturday night, a little after nine, took a fancy to go drifting down the Wye. Need I tell you who sent it, Richard Dempsey?" The man thus interrogated looks more than confused--horrified, well-nigh crazed. Excitedly stretching out his hand, he clutches the bottle, half fills the tumbler with brandy, and drinks it down at a gulp. He almost wishes it were poison, and would instantly kill him! Only after dashing the glass down does he make reply--sullenly, and in a hoarse, husky voice,-- "I don't want to know one way or the other. D----n the plank! What do I care?" "You shouldn't blaspheme, Monsieur Dick. That's not becoming--above all, in the presence of your spiritual adviser. However, you're excited, as I see, which is in some sense an excuse." "I beg your Reverence's pardon. I was a bit excited about something." He has calmed down a little at thought that things may not be so bad for him after all. The priest's last words, with his manner, seem to promise secrecy. Still further quieted as the latter continues: "Never mind about what. We can talk of it afterwards. As I've made you aware--more than once, if I rightly remember--there's no sin so great but that pardon may reach it--if repented and atoned for. On Thursday night you shall have an opportunity to make some atonement. So be there with the boat!" "I will, your Reverence, sure as my name's Richard Dempsey." Idle of him to be thus earnest in promising. He can be trusted to come as if led on a string. For he knows there is a halter around his neck, with one end of it in the hand of Father Rogier. "Enough!" returns the priest. "If there be anything else I think of communicating to you before Thursday, I'll come again--to-morrow night. So be at home. Meanwhile, see to securing the boat. Don't let there be any failure about that, _coûte que coûte_. And let me again enjoin silence--not a word to any one, even your friend Rob. _Verbum sapientibus!_ But as you're not much of a scholar, Monsieur Coracle, I suppose my Latin's lost on you. Putting it in your own vernacular, I mean: keep a close mouth, if you don't wish to wear a necktie of material somewhat coarser than either silk or cotton. You comprehend?" To the priest's satanical humour the poacher answers, with a sickly smile,-- "I do, Father Rogier--perfectly." "That's sufficient. And now, _mon bracconier_, I must be gone. Before starting out, however, I'll trench a little further on your hospitality. Just another drop, to defend me from these chill equinoctials." Saying which he leans towards the table, pours out a stoop of the brandy--best Cognac from the "Harp" it is--then quaffing it off, bids "bon soir!" and takes departure. Having accompanied him to the door, the poacher stands upon its threshold looking after, reflecting upon what has passed, anything but pleasantly. Never took he leave of a guest less agreeable. True, things are not quite so bad as he might have expected, and had reason to anticipate. And yet they are bad enough. He is in the toils--the tough, strong meshes of the criminal net, which at any moment may be drawn tight and fast around him; and between policeman and priest there is little to choose. For his own purposes the latter may allow him to live; but it will be as the life of one who has sold his soul to the devil! While thus gloomily cogitating, he hears a sound, which but makes still more sombre the hue of his thoughts. A voice comes pealing up the glen--a wild, wailing cry, as of some one in the extreme of distress. He can almost fancy it the shriek of a drowning woman. But his ears are too much accustomed to nocturnal sounds, and the voices of the woods, to be deceived. That heard was only a little unusual by reason of the rough night--its tone altered by the whistling of the wind. "Bah!" he exclaims, recognising the call of the screech owl, "it's only one o' them cursed brutes. What a fool fear makes a man!" And with this hackneyed reflection he turns back into the house, rebolts the door, and goes to his bed--not to sleep, but lie long awake, kept so by that same fear. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE GAME OF PIQUE. The sun has gone down upon Gwen Wynn's natal day--its twenty-first anniversary--and Llangorren Court is in a blaze of light, for a grand entertainment is there being given--a ball. The night is a dark one; but its darkness does not interfere with the festivities; instead, heightens their splendour, by giving effect to the illuminations. For although autumn, the weather is still warm, and the grounds are illuminated. Parti-coloured lamps are placed at intervals along the walks, and suspended in festoonery from the trees, while the casement windows of the house stand open, people passing in and out of them as if they were doors. The drawing-room is this night devoted to dancing; its carpet taken up, the floor made as slippery as a skating rink with beeswax--abominable custom! Though a large apartment, it does not afford space for half the company to dance in; and to remedy this, supplementary quadrilles are arranged on the smooth turf outside--a string and wind band from the neighbouring town making music loud enough for all. Besides, all do not care for the delightful exercise. A sumptuous spread in the dining-room, with wines at discretion, attracts a proportion of the guests; while there are others who have a fancy to go strolling about the lawn, even beyond the coruscation of the lamps; some who do not think it too dark anywhere, but the darker the better. The _elite_ of at least half the shire is present, and Miss Linton, who is still the hostess, reigns supreme in fine exuberance of spirits. Being the last entertainment at Llangorren over which she is officially to preside, one might imagine she would take things in a different way; but as she is to remain resident at the Court, with privileges but slightly, if at all, curtailed, she has no gloomy forecast of the future. Instead, on this night present she lives as in the past; almost fancies herself back at Cheltenham in its days of splendour, and dancing with the "first gentleman in Europe" redivivus. If her star be going down, it is going in glory, as the song of the swan is sweetest in its dying hour. Strange that on such a festive occasion, with its circumstances attendant, the old spinster, hitherto mistress of the mansion, should be happier than the younger one, hereafter to be! But, in truth so is it. Notwithstanding her great beauty and grand wealth--the latter no longer in prospective, but in actual possession--despite the gaiety and grandeur surrounding her, the friendly greetings and warm congratulations received on all sides--Gwen Wynn is herself anything but gay. Instead, sad, almost to wretchedness! And from the most trifling of causes, though not as by her estimated; little suspecting she has but herself to blame. It has arisen out of an episode, in love's history of common and very frequent occurrence--the game of pique. She and Captain Ryecroft are playing it, with all the power and skill they can command. Not much of the last, for jealousy is but a clumsy fencer. Though accounted keen, it is often blind as love itself; and were not both under its influence, they would not fail to see through the flimsy deceptions they are mutually practising on one another. In love with each other almost to distraction, they are this night behaving as though they were the bitterest enemies, or at all events, as friends sorely estranged. She began it; blamelessly, even with praiseworthy motive; which, known to him, no trouble could have come up between them. But when, touched with compassion for George Shenstone, she consented to dance with him several times consecutively, and in the intervals remained conversing--too familiarly, as Captain Ryecroft imagined--all this with an "engagement ring" on her finger, by himself placed upon it--not strange in him, thus _fiancé_ feeling a little jealous; no more that he should endeavour to make her the same. Strategy, old as hills, or hearts themselves. In his attempt he is, unfortunately, too successful; finding the means near by--an assistant willing and ready to his hand. This in the person of Miss Powell; she who went to church on the Sunday before in Jack Wingate's boat--a young lady so attractive as to make it a nice point whether she or Gwen Wynn be the attraction of the evening. Though only just introduced, the Hussar officer is not unknown to her by name, with some repute of his heroism besides. His appearance speaks for itself, making such impression upon the lady as to set her pencil at work inscribing his name on her card for several dances, round and square, in rapid succession. And so between him and Gwen Wynn the jealous feeling, at first but slightly entertained, is nursed and fanned into a burning flame--the green-eyed monster growing bigger as the night gets later. On both sides it reaches its maximum when Miss Wynn, after a waltz, leaning on George Shenstone's arm, walks out into the grounds, and stops to talk with him in a retired, shadowy spot. Not far off is Captain Ryecroft observing them, but too far to hear the words passing between. Were he near enough for this, it would terminate the strife raging in his breast, as the sham flirtation he is carrying on with Miss Powell--put an end to _her_ new-sprung aspirations, if she has any. It does as much for the hopes of George Shenstone--long in abeyance, but this night rekindled and revived. Beguiled, first by his partner's amiability in so oft dancing with, then afterwards using him as a foil, he little dreams that he is but being made a cat's-paw. Instead, drawing courage from the deception, emboldened as never before, he does what he never dared before--make Gwen Wynn a proposal of marriage. He makes it without circumlocution, at a single bound, as he would take a hedge upon his hunter. "Gwen! you know how I love you--would give my life for you! Will you be----" Only now he hesitates, as if his horse baulked. "Be what?" she asks, with no intention to help him over, but mechanically, her thoughts being elsewhere. "My wife?" She starts at the words, touched by his manly way, yet pained by their appealing earnestness, and the thought she must give denying response. And how is she to give it, with least pain to him? Perhaps the bluntest way will be the best. So thinking, she says,-- "George, it can never be. Look at that!" She holds out her left hand, sparkling with jewels. "At what?" he asks, not comprehending. "That ring." She indicates a cluster of brilliants, on the fourth finger, by itself, adding the word "Engaged." "O God!" he exclaims, almost in a groan. "Is that so?" "It is." For a time there is silence; her answer less maddening than making him sad. With a desperate effort to resign himself, he at length replies,-- "Dear Gwen! for I must still call you--ever hold you so--my life hereafter will be as one who walks in darkness, waiting for death--ah, longing for it!" Despair has its poetry, as love; oft exceeding the last in fervour of expression, and that of George Shenstone causes surprise to Gwen Wynn, while still further paining her. So much she knows not how to make rejoinder, and is glad when a _fanfare_ of the band instrument gives note of another quadrille--the Lancers--about to begin. Still engaged partners for the dance, but not to be for life, they return to the drawing-room, and join in it; he going through its figures with a sad heart and many a sigh. Nor is she less sorrowful--only more excited; nigh unto madness as she sees Captain Ryecroft _vis-à-vis_ with Miss Powell; on his face an expression of content, calm, almost cynical; hers radiant as with triumph! In this moment of Gwen Wynn's supreme misery--acme of jealous spite--were George Shenstone to renew his proposal, she might pluck the betrothal ring from her finger, and give answer, "I will!" It is not to be so, however weighty the consequences. In the horoscope of her life there is yet a heavier. CHAPTER XXIX. JEALOUS AS A TIGER. It is a little after two a.m., and the ball is breaking up. Not a very late hour, as many of the people live at a distance, and have a long drive homeward, over hilly roads. By the fashion prevailing a _galop_ brings the dancing to a close. The musicians, slipping their instruments into cases and baize bags, retire from the room; soon after deserted by all, save a spare servant or two, who make the rounds to look to extinguishing the lamps, with a sharp eye for waifs in the shape of dropped ribbons or _bijouterie_. Gentlemen guests stay longer in the dining-room over claret and champagne "cup," or the more time-honoured B. and S.; while in the hallway there is a crush, and on the stairs a stream of ladies, descending cloaked and hooded. Soon the crowd waxes thinner, relieved by carriages called up, quickly filling, and whirled off. That of Squire Powell is among them; and Captain Ryecroft, not without comment from certain officious observers, accompanies the young lady he has been so often dancing with to the door. Having seen her off with the usual ceremonies of leave-taking, he returns into the porch, and there for a while remains. It is a large portico, with Corinthian columns, by one of which he takes stand, in shadow. But there is a deeper shadow on his own brow, and a darkness in his heart, such as he has never in his life experienced. He feels how he has committed himself, but not with any remorse or repentance. Instead, the jealous anger is still within his breast, ripe and ruthless as ever. Nor is it so unnatural. Here is a woman--not Miss Powell, but Gwen Wynn--to whom he has given his heart--acknowledged the surrender, and in return had acknowledgment of hers--not only this, but offered his hand in marriage--placed the pledge upon her finger, she assenting and accepting--and now, in the face of all, openly, and before his face, engaged in flirtation! It is not the first occasion for him to have observed familiarities between her and the son of Sir George Shenstone; trifling, it is true, but which gave him uneasiness. But to-night things have been more serious, and the pain caused him all-imbuing and bitter. He does not reflect how he has been himself behaving. For to none more than the jealous lover is the big beam unobservable, while the little mote is sharply descried. He only thinks of her ill-behaviour, ignoring his own. If she has been but dissembling, coquetting with him, even that were reprehensible. Heartless, he deems it--sinister--something more, an indiscretion. Flirting while engaged--what might she do when married? He does not wrong her by such direct self-interrogation. The suspicion were unworthy of himself, as of her; and as yet he has not given way to it. Still her conduct seems inexcusable, as inexplicable; and to get explanation of it he now tarries, while others are hastening away. Not resolutely. Besides the half-sad, half-indignant expression upon his countenance, there is also one of indecision. He is debating within himself what course to pursue, and whether he will go off without bidding her good-bye. He is almost mad enough to be ill-mannered; and possibly, were it only a question of politeness, he would not stand upon, or be stayed by, it. But there is more. The very same spiteful rage hinders him from going. He thinks himself aggrieved, and, therefore, justifiable in demanding to know the reason--to use a slang, but familiar phrase "having it out." Just as he has reached this determination, an opportunity is offered him. Having taken leave of Miss Linton, he has returned to the door, where he stands hat in hand, his overcoat already on. Miss Wynn is now also there, bidding good-night to some guests--intimate friends--who have remained till the last. As they move off, he approaches her; she, as if unconsciously, and by the merest chance, lingering near the entrance. It is all pretence on her part, that she has not seen him dallying about; for she has several times, while giving _congè_ to others of the company. Equally feigned her surprise, as she returns his salute, saying,-- "Why, Captain Ryecroft! I supposed you were gone long ago!" "I am sorry, Miss Wynn, you should think me capable of such rudeness." "Captain Ryecroft" and "Miss Wynn," instead of "Vivian" and "Gwen"! It is a bad beginning, ominous of a worse ending. The rejoinder, almost a rebuke, places her at a disadvantage, and she says rather confusedly-- "Oh! certainly not, sir. But where there are so many people, of course one does not look for the formalities of leave-taking." "True; and, availing myself of that, I might have been gone long since, as you supposed, but for----" "For what?" "A word I wish to speak with you--alone. Can I?" "Oh, certainly." "Not here?" he asks suggestingly. She glances around. There are servants hurrying about through the hall, crossing and recrossing, with the musicians coming forth from the dining-room, where they have been making a clearance of the cold fowl, ham, and heel-taps. With quick intelligence comprehending, but without further speech, she walks out into the portico, he preceding. Not to remain there, where eyes would still be on them, and ears within hearing. She has an Indian shawl upon her arm--throughout the night carried while promenading--and again throwing it over her shoulders, she steps down upon the gravelled sweep, and on into the grounds. Side by side they proceed in the direction of the summer-house, as many times before, though never in the same mood as now; and never, as now, so constrained and silent--for not a word passes between them till they reach the pavilion. There is light in it. But a few hundred yards from the house, it came in for part of the illumination, and its lamps are not yet extinguished--only burning feebly. She is the first to enter--he to resume speech, saying,-- "There was a day, Miss Wynn, when, standing on this spot, I thought myself the happiest man in Herefordshire. Now I know it was but a fancy--a sorry hallucination." "I do not understand you, Captain Ryecroft!" "Oh, yes, you do. Pardon my contradicting you; you've given me reason." "Indeed! In what way? I beg, nay, demand, explanation." "You shall have it; though superfluous, I should think, after what has been passing--this night especially." "Oh! this night especially! I supposed you so much engaged with Miss Powell as not to have noticed anything or anybody else. What was it, pray?" "You understand, I take it, without need of my entering into particulars." "Indeed, I don't--unless you refer to my dancing with George Shenstone." "More than dancing with him--keeping his company all through!" "Not strange that, seeing I was left so free to keep it! Besides, as I suppose you know, his father was my father's oldest and most intimate friend." She makes this avowal condescendingly, observing he is really vexed, and thinking the game of contraries has gone far enough. He has given her a sight of his cards, and with the quick, subtle instinct of woman, she sees that among them Miss Powell is no longer chief trump. Were his perception as keen as hers, their jealous conflict would now come to a close, and between them confidence and friendship, stronger than ever, be restored. Unfortunately it is not to be. Still miscomprehending, yet unyielding, he rejoins sneeringly,-- "And I suppose your father's daughter is determined to continue that intimacy with his father's son, which might not be so very pleasant to him who should be your husband! Had I thought of that when I placed a ring upon your finger----" Before he can finish, she has plucked it off, and, drawing herself up to full height, says in bitter retort,-- "You insult me, sir! Take it back!" With the words, the gemmed circlet is flung upon the little rustic table, from which it rolls off. He has not been prepared for such abrupt issue, though his rude speech tempted it. Somewhat sorry, but still too exasperated to confess or show it, he rejoins defiantly,-- "If you wish it to end so, let it!" "Yes; let it!" They part without further speech. He, being nearest the door, goes out first, taking no heed of the diamond cluster which lies sparkling upon the floor. Neither does she touch, or think of it. Were it the Koh-i-noor, she would not care for it now. A jewel more precious--the one love of her life--is lost, cruelly crushed--and, with heart all but breaking, she sinks down upon the bench, draws the shawl over her face, and weeps till its rich silken tissue is saturated with her tears. The wild spasm passed, she rises to her feet, and stands leaning upon the baluster rail, looking out and listening. Still dark, she sees nothing, but hears the stroke of a boat's oars in measured and regular repetition--listens on till the sound becomes indistinct, blending with the sough of the river, the sighing of the breeze, and the natural voices of the night. She may never hear _his_ voice, never look on his face again! At the thought she exclaims, in anguished accent, "This the ending! It is too----" What she designed saying is not said. Her interrupted words are continued into a shriek--one wild cry--then her lips are sealed, suddenly, as if stricken dumb, or dead! Not by the visitation of God. Before losing consciousness, she felt the embrace of brawny arms--knew herself the victim of man's violence. CHAPTER XXX. STUNNED AND SILENT. Down in the boat-dock, upon the thwarts of his skiff, sits the young waterman awaiting his fare. He has been up to the house, and there hospitably entertained--feasted. But with the sorrow of his recent bereavement still fresh, the revelry of the servants' hall had no fascination for him--instead, only saddening him the more. Even the blandishments of the French _femme de chambre_ could not detain him; and fleeing them, he has returned to his boat long before he expects being called upon to use the oars. Seated, pipe in mouth--for Jack too indulges in tobacco--he is endeavouring to put in the time as well as he can; irksome at best with that bitter grief upon him. And it is present all the while, with scarce a moment of surcease, his thoughts ever dwelling on her who is sleeping her last sleep in the burying-ground at Rugg's Ferry. While thus disconsolately reflecting, a sound falls upon his ears which claims his attention, and for an instant or two occupies it. If anything, it was the dip of an oar; but so light that only one with ears well trained to distinguish noises of the kind could tell it to be that. He, however, has no doubt of it, muttering to himself,-- "Wonder whose boat can be on the river this time o' night--mornin', I ought to say? Wouldn't be a tourist party--starting off so early. No; can't be that. Like enough Dick Dempsey out a-salmon stealin'! The night so dark--just the sort for the rascal to be about on his unlawful business." While thus conjecturing, a scowl, dark as the night itself, flits over his own face. "Yes; a coracle!" he continues; "must 'a been the plash o' a paddle. If't had been a regular boat's oar, I'd a heerd the thumpin' against the thole pins." For once the waterman is in error. It is no paddle whose stroke he has heard, nor a coracle impelled by it; but a boat rowed by a pair of oars. And why there is no "thumpin' against the thole pins" is because the oars are muffled. Were he out in the main channel--two hundred yards above the byway--he would see the craft itself with three men in it. But only at that instant, as in the next it is headed into a bed of "witheys"--flooded by the freshet--and pushed on through them to the bank beyond. Soon it touches _terra firma_, the men spring _out_; two of them going off towards the grounds of Llangorren Court. The third remains by the boat. Meanwhile, Jack Wingate, in his skiff, continues listening; but hearing no repetition of the sound that had so slightly reached his ear, soon ceases to think of it, again giving way to his grief, as he returns to reflect on what lies in the chapel cemetery. If he but knew how near the two things were together--the burying-ground and the boat--he would not be long in his own. Relieved he is when at length voices are heard up at the house--calls for carriages--proclaiming the ball about to break up. Still more gratified, as the banging of doors, and the continuous rumble of wheels, tell of the company fast clearing off. For nigh half an hour the rattling is incessant; then there is a lull, and he listens for a sound of a different sort--a footfall on the stone stairs that lead down to the little dock--that of his fare, who may at any moment be expected. Instead of footsteps, he hears voices on the cliff above, off in the direction of the summer-house. Nothing to surprise him that. It is not the first time he has listened to the same, and under very similar circumstances; for soon as hearing he recognises them. But it is the first time for him to note their tone as it is now--to his astonishment that of anger. "They be quarrellin', I declare," he says to himself. "Wonder what for! Somethin' crooked's come between 'em at the ball--bit o' jealousy, maybe. I shudn't be surprised if it's about young Mr. Shenstone. Sure as eggs is eggs, the Captain have ugly ideas consarnin' him. He needn't though, an' wouldn't, if he seed through the eyes o' a sensible man. Course, bein' deep in love, he can't. I seed it long ago. She be mad about him as he o' her--if not madder. Well; I daresay it be only a lovers' quarrel, an'll soon blow over. Woe's me! I weesh----" He would say, "I weesh 'twar only that 'twixt myself an' Mary," but the words break upon his lips, while a scalding tear trickles down his cheek. Fortunately his anguished sorrow is not allowed further indulgence for the time. The footstep so long listened for is at length upon the boat stair; not firm, in its wonted way, but as though he making it were intoxicated! But Wingate does not believe it is that. He knows the Captain to be abstemious, or, at all events, not greatly given to drink. He has never seen him overcome by it; and surely he would not be, on this night in particular. Unless, indeed, it may have to do with the angry speech overheard, or the something thought of preceding it! The conjectures of the waterman are brought to an end by the arrival of his fare at the bottom of the boat stair, where he stops only to ask-- "Are you there, Jack?" The pitchy darkness accounts for the question. Receiving answer in the affirmative, he gropes his way along the ledge of rock, reeling like a drunken man. Not from drink, but the effects of that sharp, defiant rejoinder still ringing in his ears. He seems to hear, in every gust of the wind swirling down from the cliff above, the words, "Yes; let it!" He knows where the skiff should be--where it was left--beyond the pleasure boat. The dock is not wide enough for both abreast, and to reach his own he must go across the other--make a gang-plank of the _Gwendoline_. As he sets foot upon the thwarts of the pleasure craft, has he a thought of what were his feelings when he first planted it there, after ducking the Forest of Dean fellow? Or, stepping off, does he spurn the boat with angry heel, as in angry speech he has done her whose name it bears? Neither. He is too excited and confused to think of the past, or aught but the black, bitter present. Still staggering, he drops down upon the stern sheets of the skiff, commanding the waterman to shove off. A command promptly obeyed, and in silence. Jack can see the Captain is out of sorts, and, suspecting the reason, naturally supposes that speech at such time might not be welcome. He says nothing, therefore; but, bending to his oars, pulls on up the byway. Just outside its entrance a glimpse can be got of the little pavilion--by looking back. And Captain Ryecroft does this, over his shoulder; for, seated at the tiller, his face is from it. The light is still there, burning dimly as ever. For all, he is enabled to trace the outlines of a figure, in shadowy _silhouette_--a woman standing by the baluster rail, as if looking out over it. He knows who it is: it can only be Gwen Wynn. Well were it for both could he but know what she is at that moment thinking. If he did, back would go his boat, and the two again be together--perhaps never more to part in spite. Just then, as if ominous, and in spiteful protest against such consummation, the sombre sandstone cliff draws between, and Captain Ryecroft is carried onward, with heart dark and heavy as the rock. CHAPTER XXXI. A STARTLING CRY. During all this while Wingate has not spoken a word, though he also has observed the same figure in the pavilion. With face that way, he could not avoid noticing it, and easily guesses who she is. Had he any doubt, the behaviour of the other would remove it. "Miss Wynn, for sartin," he thinks to himself, but says nothing. Again turning his eyes upon his patron, he notes the distraught air, with head drooping, and feels the effect in having to contend against the rudder ill-directed. But he forbears making remark. At such a moment his interference might not be tolerated--perhaps resented. And so the silence continues. Not much longer. A thought strikes the waterman, and he ventures a word about the weather. It is done for a kindly feeling--for he sees how the other suffers--but in part because he has a reason for it. The observation is,-- "We're goin' to have the biggest kind o' a rain-pour, Captain." The Captain makes no immediate response. Still in the morose mood, communing with his own thoughts, the words fall upon his ear unmeaningly, as if from a distant echo. After a time it occurs to him he has been spoken to, and asks,-- "What did you observe, Wingate?" "That there be a rain storm threatenin', o' the grandest sort. There's flood enough now; but afore long it'll be all over the meadows." "Why do you think that? I see no sign. The sky's very much clouded, true; but it has been just the same for the last several days." "'Tain't the sky as tells me, Captain." "What then?" "The _heequall_." "The heequall?" "Yes; it's been a-cacklin' all through the afternoon and evenin'--especial loud just as the sun wor settin'. I nivir know'd it do that 'ithout plenty o' wet comin' soon after." Ryecroft's interest is aroused, and for the moment forgetting his misery, he says,-- "You're talking enigmas, Jack! At least, they are so to me. What is this barometer you seem to place such confidence in? Beast, bird, or fish?" "It be a bird, Captain. I believe the gentry folks calls it a woodpecker, but 'bout here it be more generally known by the name _heequall_." The orthography is according to Jack's orthoepy, for there are various spellings of the word. "Anyhow," he proceeds, "it gies warnin' o' rain, same as a weather-glass. When it ha' been laughin' in the mad way it wor most part o' this day, you may look out for a downpour. Besides, the owls ha' been a-doin' their best, too. While I wor waiting for ye in that darksome hole, one went sailin' up an' down the backwash, every now an' then swishin' close to my ear and giein' a screech--as if I hadn't enough o' the disagreeable to think o'. They allus come that way when one's feelin' out o' sorts--just as if they wanted to make things worse. Hark! D'd ye hear that, Captain?" "I did." They speak of a sound that has reached their ears from below--down the river. Both show agitation, but most the waterman; for it resembled a shriek, as of a woman in distress. Distant, just as one he heard across the wooded ridge, on that fatal night after parting with Mary Morgan. He knows now, that must have been her drowning cry, and has often thought since whether, if aware of it at the time, he could have done aught to rescue her. Not strange, that with such a recollection he is now greatly excited by a sound so similar! "That waren't no heequall, nor screech-owl neyther," he says, speaking in a half whisper. "What do you think it was?" asks the Captain, also _sotto voce_. "The scream o' a female. I'm 'most sure 'twor that." "It certainly did seem a woman's voice. In the direction of the Court, too!" "Yes; it comed that way." "I've half a mind to put back, and see if there be anything amiss. What say you, Wingate?" "Gie the word, sir! I'm ready." The boatman has his oars out of water, and holds them so, Ryecroft still undecided. Both listen with bated breath. But, whether woman's voice, or whatever the sound, they hear nothing more of it; only the monotonous ripple of the river, the wind mournfully sighing through the trees upon its banks, and a distant "brattle" of thunder, bearing out the portent of the bird. "Like as not," says Jack, "'twor some o' them sarvint girls screechin' in play, fra havin' had a drop too much to drink. There's a Frenchy thing among 'em as wor gone nigh three sheets i' the wind 'fores I left. I think, Captain, we may as well keep on." The waterman has an eye to the threatening rain, and dreads getting a wet jacket. But his words are thrown away; for, meanwhile, the boat, left to itself, has drifted downward, nearly back to the entrance of the byway, and they are once more within sight of the kiosk on the cliff. There all is darkness--no figure distinguishable. The lamps have burnt out, or been removed by some of the servants. "She has gone away from it," is Ryecroft's reflection to himself. "I wonder if the ring be still on the floor--or, has she taken it with her! I'd give something to know that." Beyond he sees a light in the upper window of the house--that of a bedroom, no doubt. She may be in it, unrobing herself, before retiring to rest. Perhaps standing in front of a mirror, which reflects that form of magnificent outline he was once permitted to hold in his arms, thrilled by the contact, and never to be thrilled so again! Her face in the glass--what the expression upon it? Sadness, or joy? If the former, she is thinking of him; if the latter, of George Shenstone. As this reflection flits across his brain, the jealous rage returns, and he cries out to the waterman,-- "Row back, Wingate! Pull hard, and let us home!" Once more the boat's head is turned upstream, and for a long spell no further conversation is exchanged--only now and then a word relating to the management of the craft, as between rower and steerer. Both have relapsed into abstraction--each dwelling on his own bereavement. Perhaps boat never carried two men with sadder hearts, or more bitter reflections. Nor is there so much difference in the degree of their bitterness. The sweetheart, almost bride, who has proved false, seems to her lover not less lost, than to hers, she who has been snatched away by death! As the _Mary_ runs into the slip of backwater--her accustomed mooring-place--and they step out of her, the dialogue is renewed by the owner asking,-- "Will ye want me the morrow, Captain?" "No, Jack." "How soon do you think? 'Scuse me for questionin'; but young Mr. Powell have been here the day, to know if I could take him an' a friend down the river, all the way to the Channel. It's for sea-fishin' or duck-shootin', or somethin' o' that sort; an' they want to engage the boat most part o' a week. But, if you say the word, they must look out for somebody else. That be the reason o' my askin' when's you'd need me again." "Perhaps never." "Oh! Captain; don't say that. 'Tan't as I care 'bout the boat's hire, or the big pay you've been givin' me. Believe me, it ain't. Ye can have me an' the _Mary_ 'ithout a sixpence o' expense--long's ye like. But to think I'm niver to row you again, that 'ud vex me dreadful--maybe more'n ye gi'e me credit for, Captain." "More than I give you credit for! It couldn't, Jack. We've been too long together for me to suppose you actuated by mercenary motives. Though I may never need your boat again, or see yourself, don't have any fear of my forgetting you. And now, as a souvenir, and some slight recompense of your services, take this." The waterman feels a piece of paper pressed into his hand, its crisp rustle proclaiming it a bank-note. It is a "tenner," but in the darkness he cannot tell, and believing it only a "fiver," still thinks it too much; for it is all extra of his fare. With a show of returning it, and, indeed, the desire to do so, he says protestingly,-- "I can't take it, Captain. You ha' paid me too handsome arready." "Nonsense, man! I haven't done anything of the kind. Besides, that isn't for boat-hire, nor yourself; only a little _douceur_, by way of present to the good dame inside the cottage--asleep, I take it." "That case, I accept. But won't my mother be grieved to hear o' your goin' away--she thinks so much o' ye, Captain. Will ye let me wake her up? I'm sure she'd like to speak a partin' word, and thank you for this big gift." "No, no! don't disturb the dear old lady. In the morning you can give her my kind regards and parting compliments. Say to her, when I return to Herefordshire--if I ever do--she shall see me. For yourself, take my word, should I ever again go rowing on this river, it will be in a boat called the _Mary_, pulled by the best waterman on the Wye." Modest though Jack Wingate be, he makes no pretence of misunderstanding the recondite compliment, but accepts it in its fullest sense, rejoining,-- "I'd call it flattery, Captain, if't had come from anybody but you. But I know ye never talk nonsense, an' that's just why I be so sad to hear ye say you're goin' off for good. I feeled so bad 'bout losin' poor Mary; it makes it worse now losin' you. Good-night!" The Hussar officer has a horse, which has been standing in a little lean-to shed, under saddle. The lugubrious dialogue has been carried on simultaneously with the bridling, and the "Good-night" is said as Ryecroft springs up on his stirrup. Then as he rides away into the darkness, and Jack Wingate stands listening to the departing hoof-stroke, at each repetition more indistinct, he feels indeed forsaken, forlorn; only one thing in the world now worth living for--but one to keep him anchored to life--his aged mother! CHAPTER XXXII. MAKING READY FOR THE ROAD. Having reached his hotel, Captain Ryecroft seeks neither rest nor sleep, but stays awake for the remainder of the night. The first portion of his time he spends in gathering up his _impedimenta_, and packing. Not a heavy task. His luggage is light, according to the simplicity of a soldier's wants; and as an old campaigner, he is not long in making ready for the _route_. His fishing tackle, guncase and portmanteau, with an odd bundle or two of miscellaneous effects, are soon strapped and corded--after which he takes a seat by a table to write out the labels. But now a difficulty occurs to him--the address. His name, of course; but what the destination? Up to this moment he has not thought of where he is going; only that he must go somewhere--away from the Wye. There is no Lethe in that stream for memories like his. To his regiment he cannot return, for he has none now. Months since he ceased to be a soldier, having resigned his commission at the expiration of his leave of absence--partly in displeasure at being refused extension of it, but more because the attractions of the "Court" and the grove had made those of the camp uncongenial. Thus his visit to Herefordshire has not only spoilt him as a salmon-fisher, but put an end to his military career. Fortunately he was not dependent on it; for Captain Ryecroft is a rich man. And yet he has no home he can call his own; the last ten years of his life having been passed in Hindostan. Dublin is his native place; but what would or could he now do there? his nearest relatives are dead, his friends few, his schoolfellows long since scattered--many of them, as himself, waifs upon the world. Besides, since his return from India, he has paid a visit to the capital of the Emerald Isle; where, finding all so changed, he cares not to go back--at least, for the present. Whither then? One place looms upon the imagination--almost naturally as home itself--the metropolis of the world. He will proceed thither, though not there to stay. Only to use it as a point of departure for another metropolis--the French one. In that focus and centre of gaiety and fashion--Maelstrom of dissipation--he may find some relief from his misery, if not happiness. Little hope has he; but it may be worth the trial, and he will make it. So determining, he takes up the pen, and is about to put "London" on the labels. But as an experienced strategist, who makes no move with undue haste and without due deliberation, he sits a while longer considering. Strange as it may seem, and a question for psychologists, a man thinks best upon his back; better still with a cigar between his teeth--powerful help to reflection. Aware of this Captain Ryecroft lights a "weed," and looks around him. He is in his sleeping apartment, where, beside the bed, there is a sofa--horsehair cushion and squab hard as stones--the orthodox hotel article. Along this he lays himself, and smokes away furiously. Spitefully, too; for he is not now thinking of either London or Paris. He cannot yet. The happy past, the wretched present, are too soul-absorbing to leave room for speculations of the future. The "fond rage of love" is still active within him. It is to "blight his life's bloom," leaving him "an age all winters?" Or is there yet a chance of reconciliation? Can the chasm which angry words have created be bridged over? No. Not without confession of error--abject humiliation on his part--which in his present frame of mind he is not prepared to make--will not--could not. "Never!" he exclaims, plucking the cigar from between his lips, but soon returning it, to continue the train of his reflections. Whether from the soothing influence of the nicotine, or other cause, his thoughts after a time became more tranquillized--their hue sensibly changed, as betokened by some muttered words which escape him. "After all, I may be wronging her. If so, may God forgive, as I hope He will pity me. For if so, I am less deserving forgiveness, and more to be pitied than she." As in ocean's storm, between the rough, surging billows, foam-crested, are spots of smooth water, so in thought's tempest are intervals of calm. It is during one of these he speaks as above; and continuing to reflect in the same strain, things, if not quite _couleur de rose_, assume a less repulsive aspect. Gwen Wynn may have been but dissembling--playing with him--and he would now be contented, ready--even rejoiced--to accept it in that sense; ay, to the abject humiliation that but the moment before he had so defiantly rejected. So reversed his sentiments now--modified from mad anger to gentle forgiveness--he is almost in the act of springing to his feet, tearing the straps from his packed paraphernalia, and letting all loose again! But just at this crisis he hears the town clock tolling six, and voices in conversation under his window. It is a bit of a gossip between two stable-men--_attachés_ of the hotel--an ostler and fly-driver. "Ye had a big time last night at Llangorren?" says the former inquiringly. "Ah! that ye may say," returns the Jarvey, with a strongly accentuated hiccup, telling of heel-taps. "Never knowed a bigger, s'help me. Wine runnin' in rivers, as if 'twas only table-beer--an' the best kind o't too. I'm so full o' French champagne, I feel most like burstin'." "She be a grand gal, that Miss Wynn. An't she?" "In course is--one of the grandest. But she an't going to be a _girl_ long. By what I heerd them say in the sarvints' hall, she's soon to be broke into pair-horse harness." "Wi' who?" "The son o' Sir George Shenstone." "A good match they'll make, I sh'd say. Tidier chap than he never stepped inside this yard. Many's the time he's tipped me." There is more of the same sort, but Captain Ryecroft does not hear it; the men have moved off beyond ear shot. In all likelihood he would not have listened had they stayed. For again he seems to hear those other words--that last spiteful rejoinder, "Yes; let it." His own spleen returning, in all its keen hostility, he springs upon his feet, hastily steps back to the table, and writes on the slip of parchment,-- _Mr. Vivian Ryecroft,_ _Passenger to London._ _G.W.R._ He cannot attach them till the ink gets dry; and, while waiting for it to do so, his thoughts undergo still another revulsion, again leading him to reflect whether he may not be in the wrong, and acting inconsiderately--rashly. In fine, he resolves on a course which had not hitherto occurred to him--he will write to her. Not in repentance, nor any confession of guilt on his part. He is too proud, and still too doubting for that. Only a test letter to draw her out, and, if possible, discover how she too feels under the circumstances. Upon the answer--if he receive one--will depend whether it is to be the last. With pen still in hand, he draws a sheet of note-paper towards him. It bears the hotel stamp and name, so that he has no need to write an address--only the date. This done, he remains for a time considering--thinking what he should say. The larger portion of his manhood's life spent in camp, under canvas--not the place for cultivating literary tastes or epistolary style--he is at best an indifferent correspondent, and knows it. But the occasion supplies thoughts; and as a soldier accustomed to prompt brevity, he puts them down--quickly and briefly as a campaigning despatch. With this, he does not wait for the ink to dry, but uses the blotter. He dreads another change of resolution. Folding up the sheet, he slips it into an envelope, on which he simply superscribes-- _Miss Wynn,_ _Llangorren Court_. Then rings a bell--the hotel servants are now astir--and directs the letter to be dropped into the post-box. He knows it will reach her that same day at an early hour, and its answer him--should one be vouchsafed--on the following morning. It might that same night at the hotel where he is now staying; but not the one to which he is going--as his letter tells, the "Langham, London." And while it is being slowly carried by a pedestrian postman along hilly roads towards Llangorren, he, seated in a first-class carriage of the G.W.R., is swiftly whisked towards the metropolis. CHAPTER XXXIII. A SLUMBERING HOUSEHOLD. As calm succeeds a storm, so at Llangorren Court on the morning after the ball there was quietude--up to a certain hour more than common. The domestics justifying themselves by the extra services of the preceding night, lie late. Outside is stirring only the gardener with an assistant, at his usual work, and in the yard a stable help or two looking after the needs of the horses. The more important functionaries of this department--coachman and headgroom--still slumber, dreaming of champagne bottles brought back to the servants' hall three parts full, with but half-demolished pheasants, and other fragmentary delicacies. Inside the house, things are on a parallel; there only a scullery and kitchen maid astir. The higher class servitors availing themselves of the license allowed, are still abed, and it is ten as butler, cook, and footman make their appearance, entering on their respective _rôles_ yawningly, and with reluctance. There are two lady's-maids in the establishment--the little French demoiselle attached to Miss Linton, and an English damsel of more robust build, whose special duties are to wait upon Miss Wynn. The former lies late on all days, her mistress not requiring early manipulation; but the maid, "native and to the manner born," is wont to be up betimes. This morning is an exception. After such a night of revelry, slumber holds her enthralled, as in a trance; and she is abed late as any of the others, sleeping like a dormouse. As her dormitory window looks out upon the back yard, the stable clock, a loud striker, at length awakes her--not in time to count the strokes, but a glance at the dial gives her the hour. While dressing herself, she is in a flutter, fearing rebuke--not for having slept so late, but because of having gone to sleep so early. The dereliction of duty, about which she is so apprehensive, has reference to a spell of slumber antecedent--taken upon a sofa in her young mistress's dressing-room. There awaiting Miss Wynn to assist in disrobing her after the ball, the maid dropped over and forgot everything--only remembering who she was, and what her duties, when too late to attend to them. Starting up from the sofa, and glancing at the mantel timepiece, she saw, with astonishment, its hands pointing to half-past 4 a.m.! Reflection following:-- "Miss Gwen must be in bed by this! Wonder why she didn't wake me up? Rang no bell? Surely I'd have heard it? If she did, and I haven't answered--well, the dear young lady's just the sort not to make any ado about it. I suppose she thought I'd gone to my room, and didn't wish to disturb me? But how could she think that? Besides, she must have passed through here, and seen me on the sofa!" The dressing-room is an ante-chamber of Miss Wynn's sleeping apartment. "She mightn't though,"--the contradiction suggested by the lamp burning low and dim. "Still, it _is_ strange, her not calling me, nor requiring my attendance?" Gathering herself up, the girl stands for a while in cogitation. The result is a move across the carpeted floor in soft, stealthy step, and an ear laid close to the keyhole of the bed-chamber door. "Sound asleep! I can't go in now. Mustn't--I daren't awake her." Saying which, the negligent attendant slips to her own sleeping room, a flight higher; and in ten minutes after, is herself once more in the arms of Morpheus; this time retained in them till released, as already said, by the tolling of the stable clock. Conscious of unpardonable remissness, she dresses in careless haste--any way, to be in time for attendance on her mistress, at morning toilet. Her first move is to hurry down to the kitchen, get the can of hot water, and take it up to Miss Wynn's sleeping room. Not to enter, but tap at the door and leave it. She does the tapping; and, receiving no response nor summons from inside, concludes that the young lady is still asleep and not to be disturbed. It is a standing order of the house, and, pleased to be precise in its observance--never more than on this morning--she sets down the painted can, and hurries back to the kitchen, soon after taking her seat by a breakfast table, unusually well spread, for the time to forget about her involuntary neglect of duty. The first of the family proper appearing downstairs is Eleanor Lees; she, too, much behind her accustomed time. Notwithstanding, she has to find occupation for nearly an hour before any of the others join her; and she endeavours to do this by perusing a newspaper which has come by the morning post. With indifferent success. It is a Metropolitan daily, having but little in it to interest her, or indeed any one else; almost barren of news, as if its columns were blank. Three or four long-winded "leaders," the impertinent outpourings of irresponsible anonymity; reports of Parliamentary speeches, four-fifths of them not worth reporting; chatter of sham statesmen, with their drivellings at public dinners; "Police intelligence," in which there is half a column devoted to Daniel Driscoll, of the Seven Dials, how he blackened the eye of Bridget Sullivan, and bit off Pat Kavanagh's ear, a _crim. con._ or two in all their prurience of detail; Court intelligence, with its odious plush and petty paltriness--this is the pabulum of a "London Daily" even the leading one supplies to its easily satisfied _clientèle_ of readers! Scarce a word of the world's news, scarce a word to tell of its real life and action--how beats the pulse, or thrills the heart of humanity! If there be anything in England half a century behind the age, it is its Metropolitan Press--immeasurably inferior to the Provincial. No wonder the "companion"--educated lady--with only such a sheet for her companion, cannot kill time for even so much as an hour. Ten minutes were enough to dispose of all its contents worth glancing at. And after glancing at them, Miss Lees drops the bald broadsheet--letting it fall to the floor to be scratched by the claws of a playful kitten--about all it is worth. Having thus settled scores with the newspaper, she hardly knows what next to do. She has already inspected the superscription of the letters, to see if there be any for herself. A poor, fortuneless girl, of course her correspondence is limited, and there is none. Two or three for Miss Linton, with quite half a dozen for Gwen. Of these last is one in a handwriting she recognises--knows it to be from Captain Ryecroft, even without the hotel stamp to aid identification. "There was a coolness between them last night," remarks Miss Lees to herself, "if not an actual quarrel; to which, very likely, this letter has reference. If I were given to making wagers, I'd bet that it tells of his repentance. So soon, though! It must have been written after he got back to his hotel, and posted to catch the early delivery." "What!" she exclaims, taking up another letter, and scanning the superscription. "One from George Shenstone, too! It, I dare say, is in a different strain, if that I saw----Ha!" she ejaculates, instinctively turning to the window, and letting go Mr. Shenstone's epistle, "William! Is it possible--so early?" Not only possible, but an accomplished fact. The reverend gentleman is inside the gates of the park, sauntering on towards the house. She does not wait for him to ring the bell, or knock; but meets him at the door, herself opening it. Nothing _outre_ in the act, on a day succeeding a night, with everything upside down, and the domestic, whose special duty it is to attend to door-opening, out of the way. Into the morning-room Mr. Musgrave is conducted, where the table is set for breakfast. He oft comes for luncheon, and Miss Lees knows he will be made equally welcome to the earlier meal; all the more to-day, with its heavier budget of news, and grander details of gossip, which Miss Linton will be expecting and delighted to revel in. Of course the curate has been at the ball; but, like "Slippery Sam," erst Bishop of Oxford, not much in the dancing room. For all, he, too, has noticed certain peculiarities in the behaviour of Miss Wynn to Captain Ryecroft, with others having reference to the son of Sir George Shenstone--in short, a triangular play he but ill understood. Still, he could tell by the straws, as they blew about, that they were blowing adversely; though what the upshot, he is yet ignorant, having, as became his cloth, forsaken the scene of revelry at a respectably early hour. Nor does he now care to inquire into it, any more than Miss Lees to respond to such interrogation. Their own affair is sufficient for the time; and engaging in an amorous duel of the milder type--so different from the stormy, passionate combat between Gwendoline Wynn and Vivian Ryecroft--they forget all about these--even their existence--as little remembering that of George Shenstone. For a time there are but two individuals in the world of whom either has a thought--one Eleanor Lees, the other William Musgrave. CHAPTER XXXIV. "WHERE'S GWEN?" Not for long are the companion and curate permitted to carry on the confidential dialogue, in which they had become interested. Too disagreeably soon is it interrupted by a third personage appearing upon the scene. Miss Linton has at length succeeded in dragging herself out of the embrace of the somnolent divinity, and enters the breakfast room, supported by her French _femme de chambre_. Graciously saluting Mr. Musgrave, she moves towards the table's head, where an antique silver urn sends up its curling steam--flanked by tea and coffee pot, with contents already prepared for pouring into their respectively shaped cups. Taking her seat, she asks: "Where's Gwen?" "Not down yet," meekly responds Miss Lees; "at least, I haven't seen anything of her." "Ah! she beats us all to-day," remarks the ancient toast of Cheltenham, "in being late," she adds, with a laugh at her little _jeu d'esprit_. "Usually such an early riser, too. I don't remember having ever been up before her. Well, I suppose she's fatigued, poor thing!--quite done up. No wonder, after dancing so much, and with everybody." "Not everybody, aunt!" says her companion, with a significant emphasis on the everybody. "There was one gentleman she never danced with all the night. Wasn't it a little strange?" This in a whisper, and aside. "Ah! true. You mean Captain Ryecroft?" "Yes." "It was a little strange. I observed it myself. She seemed distant with him, and he with her. Have you any idea of the reason, Nelly?" "Not in the least. Only I fancy something must have come between them." "The usual thing; lovers' tiff, I suppose. Ah, I've seen a great many of them in my time. How silly men and women are--when they're in love! Are they not, Mr. Musgrave?" The curate answers in the affirmative, but somewhat confusedly, and blushing, as he imagines it may be a thrust at himself. "Of the two," proceeds the garrulous spinster, "men are the most foolish under such circumstances. No!" she exclaims, contradicting herself--"when I think of it, no. I've seen ladies, high-born, and with titles, half beside themselves about Beau Brummel, distractedly quarrelling as to which should dance with him! Beau Brummel, who ended his days in a low lodging-house! Ha! ha! ha!" There is a _soupçon_ of spleen in the tone of Miss Linton's laughter, as though she had herself once felt the fascinations of the redoubtable dandy. "What could be more ridiculous?" she goes on. "When one looks back upon it, the very extreme of absurdity. Well," taking hold of the _cafetière_, and filling her cup, "it's time for that young lady to be downstairs. If she hasn't been lying awake ever since the people went off, she should be well rested by this. Bless me," glancing at the ormolu dial over the mantel, "it's after eleven, Clarisse," to the _femme de chambre_, still in attendance; "tell Miss Wynn's maid to say to her mistress we're waiting breakfast. _Veet, tray veet!_" she concludes, with a pronunciation and accent anything but Parisian. Off trips the French demoiselle, and upstairs; almost instantly returning down them, Miss Wynn's maid along, with a report which startles the trio at the breakfast table. It is the English damsel who delivers it in the vernacular. "Miss Gwen isn't in her room; nor hasn't been all the night long." Miss Linton is in the act of removing the top from a guinea-fowl's egg, as the maid makes the announcement. Were it a bomb bursting between her fingers, the surprise could not be more sudden or complete. Dropping egg and cup, in stark astonishment, she demands: "What do you mean, Gibbons?" Gibbons is the girl's name. "Oh, ma'am! just what I've said." "Say it again. I can't believe my ears." "That Miss Gwen hasn't slept in her room." "And where has she slept?" "The goodness only knows." "But you ought to know. You're her maid--you undressed her." "I did not, I am sorry to say," stammered out the girl, confused and self-accused; "very sorry I didn't." "And why didn't you, Gibbons? Explain that." Thus brought to book, the peccant Gibbons confesses to what has occurred in all its details. No use concealing aught--it must come out anyhow. "And you're quite sure she has not slept in her room?" interrogates Miss Linton, as yet unable to realize a circumstance so strange and unexpected. "Oh, yes, ma'am. The bed hasn't been lied upon by anybody--neither sheets or coverlet disturbed. And there's her nightdress over the chair, just as I laid it out for her." "Very strange," exclaims Miss Linton; "positively alarming." For all, the old lady is not alarmed yet--at least, not to any great degree. Llangorren Court is a "house of many mansions," and can boast of a half-score spare bedrooms. And she, now its mistress, is a creature of many caprices. Just possible she has indulged in one after the dancing--entered the first sleeping apartment that chanced in her way, flung herself on a bed or sofa in her ball dress, fallen asleep, and is there still slumbering. "Search them all!" commands Miss Linton, addressing a variety of domestics, whom the ringing of bells has brought around her. They scatter off in different directions, Miss Lees along with them. "It's very extraordinary. Don't you think so?" This to the curate, the only one remaining in the room with her. "I do, decidedly. Surely no harm has happened her. I trust not. How could there?" "True, how? Still, I'm a little apprehensive, and won't feel satisfied till I see her. How my heart does palpitate, to be sure!" She lays her spread palm over the cardiac region, with an expression less of pain, than the affectation of it. "Well, Eleanor," she calls out to the companion, re-entering the room with Gibbons behind. "What news?" "Not any, aunt." "And you really think she hasn't slept in her room?" "Almost sure she hasn't. The bed, as Gibbons told you, has never been touched, nor the sofa. Besides, the dress she wore last night isn't there." "Nor anywhere else, ma'am," puts in the maid; about such matters specially intelligent. "As you know, 'twas the sky-blue silk, with blonde lace over-skirt, and flower-de-loose on it. I've looked everywhere, and can't find a thing she had on--not so much as a ribbon!" The other searchers are now returning in rapid succession, all with a similar tale. No word of the missing one--neither sign nor trace of her. At length the alarm is serious and real, reaching fever height. Bells ring, and servants are sent in every direction. They go rushing about, no longer confining their search to the sleeping apartments, but extending it to rooms where only lumber has place--to cellars almost unexplored, garrets long unvisited, everywhere. Closet and cupboard doors are drawn open, screens dashed aside, and panels parted, with keen glances sent through the chinks. Just as in the baronial castle, and on that same night when young Lovel lost his "own fair bride." And while searching for their young mistress, the domestics of Llangorren Court have the romantic tale in their minds. Not one of them but knows the fine old song of the "Mistletoe Bough." Male and female--all have heard it sung in that same house, at every Christmas-tide, under the "kissing bush," where the pale green branch and its waxen berries were conspicuous. It needs not the mystic memory to stimulate them to zealous exertions. Respect for their young mistress--with many of them almost adoration--is enough; and they search as if for sister, wife, or child, according to their feelings and attachments. In vain--all in vain. Though certain that no "old oak chest" inside the walls of Llangorren Court encloses a form destined to become a skeleton, they cannot find Gwen Wynn. Dead or living, she is not in the house. CHAPTER XXXV. AGAIN THE ENGAGEMENT RING. The first hurried search, with its noisy excitement, proving fruitless, there follows an interregnum calmer with suspended activity. Indeed, Miss Linton directs it so. Now convinced that her niece has really disappeared from the place, she thinks it prudent to deliberate before proceeding further. She has no thought that the young lady has acted otherwise than of her own will. To suppose her carried off is too absurd--a theory not to be entertained for an instant. And having gone so, the questions are, why, and whither? After all, it may be, that at the ball's departing, moved by a mad prank, she leaped into the carriage of some lady friends, and was whirled home with them, just in the dress she had been dancing in. With such an impulsive creature as Gwen Wynn, the freak was not improbable. Nor is there any one to say nay. In the bustle and confusion of departure, the other domestics were busy with their own affairs, and Gibbons sound asleep. And if true, a "hue and cry" raised and reaching the outside world would at least beget ridicule, if it did not cause absolute scandal. To avoid this, the servants are forbidden to go beyond the confines of the Court, or carry any tale outward--for the time. Beguiled by this hopeful belief, Miss Linton, with the companion assisting, scribbles off a number of notes, addressed to the head of three or four families in whose houses her niece must have so abruptly elected to take refuge for the night--merely to ask if such was the case, the question couched in phrase guarded, and as possible suggestive. These are dispatched by trusted messengers, cautioned to silence; Mr. Musgrave himself volunteering a round of calls at other houses, to make personal inquiry. This matter settled, the old lady waits the result, though without any very sanguine expectations of success. For another theory has presented itself to her mind--that Gwen has run away with Captain Ryecroft! Improbable as the thing might appear, Miss Linton, nevertheless for a while has faith in it. It was as she might have done some forty years before, had she but met the right man--such as he. And measuring her niece by the same romantic standard--with Gwen's capriciousness thrown into the account--she ignores everything else; even the absurdity of such a step from its sheer causelessness. That to her is of little weight; no more the fact of the young lady taking flight in a thin dress, with only a shawl upon her shoulders. For Gibbons, called upon to give an account of her wardrobe, has taken stock, and found everything in its place--every article of her mistress's drapery save the blue silk dress and Indian shawl--hats and bonnets hung up or in their boxes, but all there, proving her to have gone off bareheaded? Not the less natural, reasons Miss Linton--instead, only a component part in the chapter of contrarieties. So, too, the coolness observed between the betrothed sweethearts throughout the preceding night--their refraining from partnership in the dances--all dissembling on their part, possibly to make the surprise of the after event more piquant and complete. So runs the imagination of the novel-reading spinster, fresh and fervid as in her days of girlhood--passing beyond the trammels of reason--leaving the bounds of probability. But her theory is short-lived. It receives a death blow from a letter which Miss Lees brings under her notice. It is that superscribed in the handwriting of Captain Ryecroft, which the companion had for the time forgotten; she having no thought that it would have anything to do with the young lady's disappearance. And the letter proves that he can have nothing to do with it. The hotel stamp, the post-mark, the time of deposit and delivery are all understood, all contributing to show it must have been posted, if not written, that same morning. Were she with him, it would not be there. Down goes the castle of romance Miss Linton has been constructing--wrecked--scattered as a house of cards. It is quite possible that letter contains something that would throw light upon the mystery, perhaps clear all up; and the old lady would like to open it. But she may not--dare not. Gwen Wynn is not one to allow tampering with her correspondence; and as yet her aunt cannot realize the fact--nor even entertain the supposition--that she is gone for good and for ever. As time passes, however, and the different messengers return, with no news of the missing lady--Mr. Musgrave is also back without tidings--the alarm is renewed, and search again set up. It extends beyond the precincts of the house, and the grounds already explored, off into woods and fields, along the banks of river and byewash, everywhere that offers a likelihood, the slightest, of success. But neither in wood, spinney, or coppice can they find traces of Gwen Wynn; all "draw blank," as George Shenstone would say of a cover where no fox is found. And just as this result is reached, that gentleman himself steps upon the ground to receive a shock such as he has rarely experienced. The news communicated is a surprise to him, for he has arrived at the Court, knowing nought of the strange incident which has occurred. He has come thither on an afternoon call, not altogether dictated by ceremony. Despite all that has passed--what Gwen Wynn told him, what she showed holding up her hand--he does not even yet despair. Who so circumstanced ever does? What man in love, profoundly, passionately as he, could believe his last chance eliminated, or have his ultimate hope extinguished? He had not. Instead, when bidding adieu to her after the ball, he felt some revival of it, several causes having contributed to its rekindling. Among others, her gracious behaviour to himself, so gratifying; but more, her distant manner towards his rival, which he could not help observing, and saw with secret satisfaction. And still thus reflecting on it, he enters the gates at Llangorren, to be stunned by the strange intelligence there awaiting him--Miss Wynn missing! gone away! run away! perhaps carried off! lost! and cannot be found! For in these varied forms, and like variety of voices, is it conveyed to him. Needless to say, he joins in the search with ardour, but distractedly, suffering all the sadness of a torn and harrowed heart. But to no purpose; no result to soothe or console him. His skill at drawing a cover is of no service here. It is not for a fox "stole away," leaving hot scent behind; but a woman goes without print of foot or trace to indicate the direction, without word left to tell the cause of departure. Withal, George Shenstone continues to seek for her long after the others have desisted. For his views differ from those entertained by Miss Linton, and his apprehensions are of a keener nature. He remains at the Court throughout the evening, making excursions into the adjacent woods, searching, and again exploring everywhere. None of the servants think it strange; all know of his intimate relations with the family. Mr. Musgrave remains also; both of them asked to stay dinner--a meal this day eaten _sans façon_, in haste, and under agitation. When, after it, the ladies retire to the drawing-room--the curate along with them--George Shenstone goes out again, and over the grounds. It is now night, and the darkness lures him on; for it was in such she disappeared. And although he has no expectation of seeing her there, some vague thought has drifted into his mind, that in darkness he may better reflect, and something be suggested to avail him. He strays on to the boat stair, looks down into the dock, and there sees the _Gwendoline_ at her moorings. But he thinks only of the other boat, which, as he now knows, on the night before lay alongside her. Has it indeed carried away Gwen Wynn? He fancies it has--he can hardly have a doubt of it. How else is her disappearance to be accounted for? But has she been borne off by force, or went she willingly? These are the questions which perplex him; the conjectured answer to either causing him keenest anxiety. After remaining a short while on the top of the stair, he turns away with a sigh, and saunters on towards the pavilion. Though under the shadow of its roof the obscurity is complete, he, nevertheless, enters and sits down. He is fatigued with the exertions of the afternoon, and the strain upon his nerves through the excitement. Taking a cigar from his case and nipping off the end, he rasps a fusee to light it. But before the blue fizzing blaze dims down, he drops the cigar to clutch at an object on the floor, whose sparkle has caught his eye. He succeeds in getting hold of it, though not till the fusee has ceased flaming. But he needs no light to tell him what he has got in his hand. He knows it is that which so pained him to see on one of Gwen Wynn's fingers--the engagement ring! CHAPTER XXXVI. A MYSTERIOUS EMBARKATION. Not in vain had the green woodpecker given out its warning note. As Jack Wingate predicted from it, soon after came a downpour of rain. It was raining as Captain Ryecroft returned to his hotel, as at intervals throughout that day; and now on the succeeding night it is again sluicing down as from a shower-bath. The river is in full flood, its hundreds of affluents, from Plinlimmon downward, having each contributed its quota, till Vaga, usually so pure, limpid, and tranquil, rolls on in vast turbulent volume, muddy and maddened. There is a strong wind as well, whose gusts, now and then striking the water's surface, lash it into furrows with white frothy crests. On the Wye this night there would be danger for any boat badly manned or unskilfully steered. And yet a boat is about to embark upon it--one which throughout the afternoon has been lying moored in a little branch stream that runs in opposite the lands of Llangorren, a tributary supplied by the dingle in which stands the dwelling of Richard Dempsey. It is the same near whose mouth the poacher and the priest were seen by Gwen Wynn and Eleanor Lees on the day of their remarkable adventure with the forest roughs. And almost in the same spot is the craft now spoken of; no coracle, however, but a regular pair-oared boat of a kind in common use among Wye watermen. It is lying with bow on the bank, its painter attached to a tree, whose branches extend over it. During the day no one has been near it, and it is not likely that any one has observed it. Some little distance up the brook, and drawn well in under the spreading boughs, that, almost touching the water, darkly shadow the surface, it is not visible from the river's channel: while, along the edge of the rivulet, there is no thoroughfare, nor path of any kind. No more a landing-place where boat is accustomed to put in or remain at moorings. That now there has evidently been brought thither for some temporary purpose. Not till after the going down of the sun is this declared. Then, just as the purple of twilight is changing to the inky blackness of night, and another dash of rain clatters on the already saturated foliage, three men are seen moving among the trees that grow thick along the streamlet's edge. They seem not to mind it, although pouring down in torrents; for they have come through the dell, as from Dempsey's house, and are going in the direction of the boat, where there is no shelter. But if they regard not getting wet,--something they do regard; else why should they observe such caution in their movements, and talk in subdued voices? All the more strange this, in a place where there is so little likelihood of their being overheard, or encountering any one to take note of their proceedings. It is only between two of them that conversation is carried on; the third walking far in advance, beyond earshot of speech in the ordinary tone; besides, the noise of the tempest would hinder his hearing them. Therefore, it cannot be on his account they converse guardedly. More likely their constraint is due to the solemnity of the subject; for solemn it is, as their words show. "They'll be sure to find the body in a day or two. Possibly to-morrow, or, if not, very soon. A good deal will depend on the state of the river. If this flood continue, and the water remain discoloured as now, it may be several days before they light on it. No matter when; your course is clear, Monsieur Murdock." "But what do you advise my doing, _Père_? I'd like you to lend me your counsel--give me minute directions about everything." "In the first place, then, you must show yourself on the other side of the water, and take an active part in the search. Such a near relative, as you are, 'twould appear strange if you didn't. All the world may not be aware of the little tiff--rather prolonged though--that's been between you. And if it were, your keeping away on such an occasion would give cause for greater scandal. Spite so rancorous! that of itself should excite curious thoughts--suspicions. Naturally enough. A man, whose own cousin is mysteriously missing, not caring to know what has become of her! And when knowing--when 'Found drowned,' as she will be--not to show either sympathy or sorrow! _Ma foi!_ they might mob you if you didn't!" "That's true enough," grunts Murdock, thinking of the respect in which his cousin is held, and her great popularity throughout the neighbourhood. "You advise my going over to Llangorren?" "Decidedly I do. Present yourself there to-morrow, without fail. You may make the hour reasonably late, saying that the sinister intelligence has only just reached you at Glyngog--out of the way as it is. You'll find plenty of people at the Court on your arrival. From what I've learnt this afternoon, through my informant resident there, they'll be hot upon the search to-morrow. It would have been more earnest to-day, but for that quaint old creature with her romantic notions; the latest of them, as Clarisse tells me, that Mademoiselle had run away with the Hussar! But it appears a letter has reached the Court in his handwriting, which put a different construction on the affair, proving to them it could be no elopement--at least, with him. Under these circumstances, then, to-morrow morning, soon as the sun is up, there'll be a hue and cry all over the country; so loud you couldn't fail to hear, and will be expected to have a voice in it. To do that effectually, you must show yourself at Llangorren, and in good time." "There's sense in what you say. You're a very Solomon, Father Rogier. I'll be there, trust me. Is there anything else you think of?" The Jesuit is for a time silent, apparently in deep thought. It is a ticklish game the two are playing, and needs careful consideration, with cautious action. "Yes," he at length answers. "There are a good many other things I think of; but they depend upon circumstances not yet developed by which you will have to be guided. And you must yourself, M'ssieu, as you best can. It will be quite four days, if not more, ere I can get back. They may even find the body to-morrow--if they should think of employing drags, or other searching apparatus. Still, I fancy, 'twill be some time before they come to a final belief in her being drowned. Don't you on any account suggest it. And should there be such search, endeavour, in a quiet way, to have it conducted in any direction but the right one. The longer before fishing the thing up, the better it will be for our purposes: you comprehend?" "I do." "When found, as it must be in time, you will know how to show becoming grief; and, if opportunity offer, you may throw out a hint having reference to _Le Capitaine Ryecroft_. His having gone away from his hotel this morning, no one knows why or whither--decamping in such haste too--that will be sure to fix suspicion upon him--possibly have him pursued and arrested as the murderer of Miss Wynn! Odd succession of events, is it not?" "It is indeed." "Seems as if the very Fates were in a conspiracy to favour our design. If we fail now, 'twill be our own fault. And that reminds me there should be no waste of time--must not. One hour of this darkness may be worth an age--or, at all events, ten thousand pounds per annum. _Allons! vite-vite?_" He steps briskly onward, drawing his caped cloak closer to protect him from the rain, now running in rivers down the drooping branches of the trees. Murdock follows; and the two, delayed by a dialogue of such grave character, draw closer to the third who had gone ahead. They do not overtake him, however, till after he has reached the boat, and therein deposited a bundle he has been bearing--of weight sufficient to make him stagger, where the ground was rough and uneven. It is a package of irregular oblong shape, and such size, that, laid along the boat's bottom timbers, it occupies most part of the space forward of the mid-thwart. Seeing that he who has thus disposed of it is Coracle Dick, one might believe it poached salmon, or land game now in season in the act of being transported to some receiver of such commodities. But the words spoken by the priest as he comes up forbid this belief: they are an interrogatory:-- "Well, _mon bracconier_; have you stowed my luggage?" "It's in the boat, Father Rogier." "And all ready for starting?" "The minute your reverence steps in." "So, well! And now, M'ssieu," he adds, turning to Murdock, and again speaking in undertone, "if you play _your_ part skilfully, on return I may find you in a fair way of getting installed as the Lord of Llangorren. Till then, adieu!" Saying which, he steps over the boat's side, and takes seat in its stern. Shoved off by sinewy arms, it goes brushing out from under the branches, and is rapidly drifted down towards the river. Lewin Murdock is left standing on the brook's edge, free to go what way he wishes. Soon he starts off, not on return to the empty domicile of the poacher, nor yet direct to his own home: but first to the Welsh Harp--there to gather the gossip of the day, and learn whether the startling tale, soon to be told, has yet reached Rugg's Ferry. CHAPTER XXXVII. AN ANXIOUS WIFE. Inside Glyngog House is Mrs. Murdock, alone, or with only the two female domestics. But these are back in the kitchen while the ex-cocotte is moving about in front, at intervals opening the door, and a-gazing out into the night--a dark, stormy one; for it is the same in which has occurred the mysterious embarkation of Father Rogier, only an hour later. To her no mystery; she knows whither the priest is bound, and on what errand. It is not him, therefore, she is expecting, but her husband to bring home word that her countryman has made a safe start. So anxiously does she await this intelligence, that, after a time, she stays altogether on the doorstep, regardless of the raw night, and a fire in the drawing-room which blazes brightly. There is another in the dining-room, and a table profusely spread--set out for supper with dishes of many kinds--cold ham and tongue, fowl and game, flanked by decanters of different wines sparkling attractively. Whence all this plenty, within walls where of late and for so long has been such scarcity? As no one visits at Glyngog save Father Rogier, there is no one but he to ask the question. And he would not, were he there; knowing the answer better than any one else. He ought. The cheer upon Lewin Murdock's table, with a cheerfulness observable on Mrs. Murdock's face, are due to the same cause, by himself brought about, or to which he has largely contributed. As Moses lends money on _post obits_, at "shixty per shent," with other expectations, a stream of that leaven has found its way into the ancient manor-house of Glyngog, conducted thither by Gregoire Rogier, who has drawn it from a source of supply provided for such eventualities, and seemingly inexhaustible--the treasury of the Vatican. Yet only a tiny rivulet of silver, but soon, if all goes well, to become a flood of gold grand and yellow as that in the Wye itself, having something to do with the waters of this same stream. No wonder there is now brightness upon the face of Olympe Renault, so long shadowed. The sun of prosperity is again to shine upon the path of her life. Splendour, gaiety, _voluptè_, be hers once more, and more than ever! As she stands in the door of Glyngog, looking down the river, at Llangorren, and through the darkness sees the Court with only one or two windows alight--they but in dim glimmer--she reflects less on how they blazed the night before, with lamps over the lawn, like constellations of stars, than how they will flame hereafter, and ere long--when she herself be the ruling spirit and mistress of the mansion. But as the time passes and no husband home, a cloud steals over her features. From being only impatient, she becomes nervously anxious. Still standing in the door, she listens for footsteps she has oft heard making approach unsteadily, little caring. Not so to-night. She dreads to see him return intoxicated. Though not with any solicitude of the ordinary woman's kind, but for reasons purely prudential. They are manifested in her muttered soliloquy:-- "Gregoire must have got off long ere this--at least two hours ago. He said they'd set out soon as it came night. Half an hour was enough for my husband to return up the meadows home. If he has gone to the Ferry first, and sets to drinking in the Harp! Cette _auberge maudit_. There's no knowing what he may do or say. Saying would be worse than doing. A word in his cups--a hint of what has happened--might undo everything: draw danger upon us all! And such danger--_l'prise de corps, mon Dieu!_" Her cheek blanches at thought of the ugly spectres thus conjured up. "Surely he will not be so stupid--so insane? Sober, he can keep secrets well enough--guard them closely, like most of his countrymen. But the Cognac? Hark! Footsteps! His, I hope." She listens without stirring from the spot. The tread is heavy, with now and then a loud stroke against stones. Were her husband a Frenchman, it would be different. But Lewin Murdock, like all English country gentlemen, affects substantial foot gear; and the step is undoubtedly his. Not as usual, however; to-night firm and regular, telling him to be sober! "He isn't such a fool after all!" Her reflection followed by the inquiry, called out-- "_C'est vous, mon mari?_" "Of course it is. Who else could it be? You don't expect the Father, our only visitor, to-night? You'll not see him for several days to come." "He's gone then?" "Two hours ago. By this he should be miles away; unless he and Coracle have had a capsize, and been spilled out of their boat. No unlikely occurrence with the river running so madly." She still shows unsatisfied, though not from any apprehension of the boat's being upset. She is thinking of what may have happened at the Welsh Harp; for the long interval, since the priest's departure, her husband could only have been there. She is less anxious, however, seeing the state in which he presents himself; so unusual, coming from the "_auberge maudite_." "Two hours ago they got off, you say?" "About that; just as it was dark enough to set out with safety, and no chance of being observed." "They did so?" "Oh, yes." "_Le bagage bien arrangé?_" "_Parfaitement_; or, as we say in English, neat as a trivet. If you prefer another form--nice as nine-pence." She is pleased at his facetiousness, quite a new mode for Lewin Murdock. Coupled with his sobriety, it gives her confidence that things have gone on smoothly, and will to the end. Indeed, for some days Murdock has been a new man--acting as one with some grave affair on his hands--a feat to accomplish, or negotiation to effect--resolved on carrying it to completeness. Now, less from anxiety as to what he has been saying at the Welsh Harp, than to know what he has there heard said by others, she further interrogates him:-- "Where have you been meanwhile, monsieur?" "Part of the time at the Ferry; the rest of it I've spent on paths and roads coming and going. I went up to the Harp to hear what I could hear." "And what did you hear?" "Nothing much to interest us. As you know, Rugg's is an out-of-the-way corner--none more so on the Wye--and the Llangorren news hasn't reached it. The talk of the Ferry folk is all about the occurrence at Abergann, which still continues to exercise them. The other don't appear to have got much abroad, if at all, anywhere--for reasons told Father Rogier by your countrywoman, Clarisse, with whom he held an interview sometime during the afternoon." "And has there been no search yet?" "Search, yes; but nothing found, and not much noise made, for the reasons I allude to." "What are they? You haven't told me." "Oh! various. Some of them laughable enough. Whimsies of that Quixotic old lady who has been so long doing the honours at Llangorren." "Ah! Madame Linton. How has she been taking it?" "I'll tell you after I've had something to eat and drink. You forget, Olympe, where I've been all the day long--under the roof of a poacher, who, of late otherwise employed, hadn't so much as a head of game in his house. True, I've since made call at an hotel, but you don't give me credit for my abstemiousness! What have you got to reward me for it?" "_Entrez!_" she exclaims, leading him into the dining-room, their dialogue so far having been carried on in the porch. "_Voilà!_" He is gratified, though no ways surprised at the set out. He does not need to inquire whence it comes. He, too, knows it is a sacrifice to the rising sun. But he knows also what a sacrifice he will have to make in return for it--one third the estate of Llangorren. "Well, _ma chèrie_," he says, as this reflection occurs to him, "we'll have to pay pretty dear for all this. But I suppose there's no help for it." "None," she answers, with a comprehension of the circumstances clearer and fuller than his. "We've made the contract, and must abide by it. If broken by us, it wouldn't be a question of property, but life. Neither yours nor mine would be safe for a single hour. Ah, monsieur! you little comprehend the power of those gentry, _les Jesuites_--how sharp their claws, and far reaching!" "Confound them!" he exclaims, angrily dropping down upon a chair by the table's side. He eats ravenously, and drinks like a fish. His day's work is over, and he can afford the indulgence. And while they are at supper, he imparts all details of what he has done and heard; among them Miss Linton's reasons for having put restraint upon the search. "The old simpleton!" he says, concluding his narration; "she actually believed my cousin to have run away with that captain of Hussars--if she don't believe it still! Ha, ha, ha! She'll think differently when she sees that body brought out of the water. _It_ will settle the business!" Olympe Renault, retiring to rest, is long kept awake by the pleasant thought, not that for many more nights will she have to sleep in a mean bed at Glyngog, but on a grand couch in Llangorren Court. CHAPTER XXXVIII. IMPATIENT FOR THE POST. Never man looked with more impatience for a post than Captain Ryecroft for the night mail from the West, its morning delivery in London. It may bring him a letter, on the contents of which will turn the hinges of his life's fate, assuring his happiness, or dooming him to misery. And if no letter come, its failure will make misery for him all the same. It is scarce necessary to say the epistle thus expected, and fraught with such grave consequence, is an answer to his own; that written in Herefordshire, and posted before leaving the Wyeside Hotel. Twenty-four hours have since elapsed; and now, on the morning after, he is at the Langham, London, where the response, if any, should reach him. He has made himself acquainted with the statistics of postal time, telling him when the night mail is due, and when the first distribution of letters in the metropolitan district. At earliest in the Langham, which has post and telegraph office within its own walls, this palatial hostelry, unrivalled for convenience, being in direct communication with all parts of the world. It is on the stroke of 8 a.m., and, the ex-Hussar officer, pacing the tesselated tiles outside the deputy-manager's moderately sized room with its front glass-protected, watches for the incoming of the post-carrier. It seems an inexorable certainty--though a very vexatious one--that person, or thing, awaited with unusual impatience, must needs be behind time--as if to punish the moral delinquency of the impatient one. Even postmen are not always punctual, as Vivian Ryecroft has reason to know. That amiable and active individual in coatee of coarse cloth, with red rag facings, flitting from door to door, brisk as a blue-bottle, on this particular morning does not step across the threshold of the Langham till nearly half-past eight. There is a thick fog, and the street flags are "greasy." That would be the excuse for his tardy appearance, were he called upon to give one. Dumping down his sack, and spilling its contents upon the lead-covered sill of the booking-office window, he is off again on a fresh and further flight. With no abatement of impatience, Captain Ryecroft stands looking at the letters being sorted--a miscellaneous lot, bearing the post-marks of many towns and many countries, with the stamps of nearly every civilized nation on the globe; enough of them to make the eyes of an ardent stamp-collector shed tears of concupiscence. Scarcely allowing the sorter time to deposit them in their respective pigeon holes, Ryecroft approaches and asks if there be any for him--at the same time giving his name. "No, not any," answers the clerk, after drawing out all under letter R, and dealing them off as a pack of cards. "Are you quite sure, sir? Pardon me. I intend starting off within the hour, and, expecting a letter of some importance, may I ask you to glance over them again?" In all the world there are no officials more affable than those of the Langham. They are, in fact, types of the highest _hotel civilization_. Instead of showing nettled, he thus appealed to makes assenting rejoinder, accompanying his words with a re-examination of the letters under R; soon as completed saying,-- "No, sir; none for the name of Ryecroft." He bearing this name turns away, with an air of more than disappointment. The negative denoting that no letter had been written in reply, vexes--almost irritates him. It is like a blow repeated--a second slap in his face held up in humiliation--after having forgiven the first. He will not so humble himself--never forgive again. This his resolve as he ascends the great stairway to his room, once more to make ready for travel. The steam-packet service between Folkestone and Boulogne is "tidal." Consulting Bradshaw, he finds the boat on that day leaves the former place at 4 p.m.; the connecting train from the Charing Cross station, 1. Therefore have several hours to be put in meanwhile. How are they to be occupied? He is not in the mood for amusement. Nothing in London could give him that now--neither afford him a moment's gratification. Perhaps in Paris? And he will try. There men have buried their griefs--women as well: too oft laying in the same grave their innocence, honour, and reputation. In the days of Napoleon the Little, a grand cemetery of such; hosts entering it pure and stainless, to become tainted as the Imperial _regimé_ itself. And he, too, may succumb to its influence, sinister as hell itself. In his present frame of mind it is possible. Nor would his be the first noble spirit broken down, wrecked on the reef of a disappointed passion--love thwarted, the loved one never again to be spoken to--in all likelihood never more met! While waiting for the Folkestone train, he is a prey to the most harrowing reflections, and in hope of escaping them, descends to the billiard-room--in the Langham a well-appointed affair, with tables the very best. The marker accommodates him to a hundred up, which he loses. It is not for that he drops the cue disheartened, and retires. Had he won, with Cook, Bennett, or Roberts as his adversary, 'twould have been all the same. Once more mounting to his room, he makes an appeal to the ever-friendly Nicotian. A cigar, backed by a glass of brandy, may do something to soothe, his chafed spirit; and lighting the one, he rings for the other. This brought him, he takes seat by the window, throws up the sash, and looks down upon the street--there to see what gives him a fresh spasm of pain; though to two others affording the highest happiness on earth. For it is a wedding ceremony being celebrated at "All Souls" opposite, a church before whose altar many fashionable couples join hands to be linked together for life. Such a couple is in the act of entering the sacred edifice; carriages drawing up and off in quick succession, coachmen with white rosettes and whips ribbon-decked, footmen wearing similar favours--an unusually stylish affair. As in shining and with smiling faces, the bridal train ascends the steps two by two, disappearing within the portals of the church, the spectators on the nave and around the enclosure rails also looking joyous, as though each--even the raggedest--had a personal interest in the event, from the window opposite Captain Ryecroft observes it with very different feelings. For the thought is before his mind, how near he has been himself to making one in such a procession--at its head--followed by the bitter reflection, he now never shall. A sigh, succeeded by a half-angry ejaculation; then the bell rung with a violence which betrays how the sight has agitated him. On the waiter entering, he cries out,-- "Call me a cab." "Hansom, sir?" "No! four-wheeler. And this luggage get downstairs soon as possible." His impediments are all in travelling trim--but a few necessary articles having been unpacked--and a shilling tossed upon the strapped portmanteau ensures it, with the lot, a speedy descent down the lift. A single pipe of Mr. Trafford's silver whistle brings a cab to the Langham entrance in twenty seconds time, and in twenty more a traveller's luggage, however heavy, is slung to the top, with the lighter articles stowed inside. His departure so accelerated, Captain Ryecroft--who had already settled his bill--is soon seated in the cab, and carried off. But despatch ends on leaving the Langham. The cab, being a four-wheeler, crawls along like a tortoise. Fortunately for the fare he is in no haste now; instead, will be too early for the Folkestone train. He only wanted to get away from the scene of that ceremony, so disagreeably suggestive. Shut up, imprisoned, in the plush-lined vehicle, shabby, and not over clean, he endeavours to beguile time by gazing out at the shop windows. The hour is too early for Regent Street promenaders. Some distraction, if not amusement, he derives from his "cabby's" arms; these working to and fro as if the man were rowing a boat. In burlesque it reminds him of the Wye, and his waterman Wingate! But just then something else recalls the western river not ludicrously, but with another twinge of pain. The cab is passing through Leicester Square, one of the lungs of London, long diseased, and in process of being doctored. It is beset with hoardings, plastered against which are huge posters of the advertising kind. Several of them catch the eye of Captain Ryecroft, but only one holds it, causing him the sensation described. It is the announcement of a grand concert to be given at the St. James's Hall, for some charitable purpose of Welsh speciality. Programme with list of performers. At their head, in largest lettering, the queen of the eisteddfod-- EDITH WYNNE! To him in the cab now a name of galling reminiscence notwithstanding the difference of orthography. It seems like a Nemesis pursuing him! He grasps the leathern strap, and letting down the ill-fitting sash with a clatter, cries out to the cabman,-- "Drive on, Jarvey, or I'll be late for my train! A shilling extra for time." If cabby's arms sparred slowly before, they now work as though he were engaged in catching flies; and with their quickened action, aided by several cuts of a thick-thonged whip, the Rosinante goes rattling through the narrow defile of Heming's Row, down King William Street, and across the Strand into the Charing Cross station. CHAPTER XXXIX. JOURNEY INTERRUPTED. Captain Ryecroft takes a through ticket for Paris, without thought of breaking journey, and in due time reaches Boulogne. Glad to get out of the detestable packet, little better than a ferry-boat, which plies between Folkestone and the French seaport, he loses not a moment in scaling the equally detestable gang-ladder by which alone he can escape. Having set foot upon French soil, represented by a rough cobble-stone pavement, he bethinks of passport and luggage--how he will get the former _vised_ and the latter looked after with the least trouble to himself. It is not his first visit to France, nor is he unacquainted with that country's customs; therefore knows that a "tip" to _sergent de ville_ or _douanier_ will clear away the obstructions in the shortest possible time--quicker if it be a handsome one. Feeling in his pockets for a florin or a half-crown, he is accosted by a voice familiar and of friendly tone. "Captain Ryecroft!" it exclaims, in a rich, rolling brogue, as of Galway. "Is it yourself? By the powers of Moll Kelly, and it is." "Major Mahon!" "The same, old boy. Give us a grip of your fist, as on that night when you pulled me out of the ditch at Delhi, just in time to clear the bayonets of the pandys. A nate thing, and a close shave, wasn't it? But what's brought you to Boulogne?" The question takes the traveller aback. He is not prepared to explain the nature of his journey, and with a view to evasion he simply points to the steamer, out of which the passengers are still swarming. "Come, old comrade!" protests the Major, good-naturedly, "that won't do; it isn't satisfactory for bosom friends, as we've been, and still are, I trust. But, maybe, I make too free, asking your business in Boulogne?" "Not at all, Mahon. I have no business in Boulogne; I'm on the way to Paris." "Oh! a pleasure trip, I suppose?" "Nothing of the kind. There's no pleasure for me in Paris or anywhere else." "Aha!" ejaculated the Major, struck by the words, and their despondent tone, "what's this, old fellow? Something wrong?" "Oh, not much--never mind." The reply is little satisfactory. But seeing that further allusion to private matters might not be agreeable, the Major continues, apologetically-- "Pardon me, Ryecroft. I've no wish to be inquisitive, but you have given me reason to think you out of sorts, somehow. It isn't your fashion to be low-spirited, and you shan't be so long as you're in my company--if I can help it." "It's very kind of you, Mahon; and for the short time I'm to be with you, I'll do the best I can to be cheerful. It shouldn't be a great effort. I suppose the train will be starting in a few minutes?" "What train?" "For Paris." "You're not going to Paris now--not this night?" "I am, straight on." "Neither straight nor crooked, _ma bohil_!" "I must." "Why must you? If you don't expect pleasure there, for what should you be in such haste to reach it? Bother, Ryecroft! you'll break your journey here, and stay a few days with me? I can promise you some little amusement. Boulogne isn't such a dull place just now. The smash of Agra & Masterman's, with Overend & Gurney following suit, has sent hither a host of old Indians, both soldiers and civilians. No doubt you'll find many friends among them. There are lots of pretty girls, too--I don't mean natives, but our countrywomen--to whom I'll have much pleasure in presenting you." "Not for the world, Mahon--not one! I have no desire to extend my acquaintance in that way." "What, turned hater! women too. Well, leaving the fair sex on one side, there's half a dozen of the other here--good fellows as ever stretched legs on mahogany. They're strangers to you, I think; but will be delighted to know you, and do their best to make Boulogne agreeable. Come, old boy. You'll stay? Say the word." "I would, Major, and with pleasure, were it any other time. But, I confess, just now I'm not in the mood for making new acquaintance--least of all among my countrymen. To tell the truth, I'm going to Paris chiefly with a view of avoiding them." "Nonsense! You're not the man to turn _solitaire_, like Simon Stylites, and spend the rest of your days on the top of a stone pillar! Besides, Paris is not the place for that sort of thing. If you're really determined on keeping out of company for awhile--I won't ask why--remain with me, and we'll take strolls along the sea-beach, pick up pebbles, gather shells, and make love to mermaids, or the Boulognese fish-fags, if you prefer it. Come, Ryecroft, don't deny me. It's so long since we've had a day together, I'm dying to talk over old times--recall our _camaraderie_ in India." For the first time in forty-eight hours Captain Ryecroft's countenance shows an indication of cheerfulness--almost to a smile, as he listens to the rattle of his jovial friend, all the pleasanter from its patois recalling childhood's happy days. And as some prospect of distraction from his sad thoughts--if not a restoration of happiness--is held out by the kindly invitation, he is half inclined to accept it. What difference whether he find the grave of his griefs in Paris or Boulogne--if find it he can? "I'm booked to Paris," he says mechanically, and as if speaking to himself. "Have you a through ticket?" asks the Major, in an odd way. "Of course I have." "Let me have a squint at it?" further questions the other, holding out his hand. "Certainly. Why do you wish that?" "To see if it will allow you to shunt yourself here." "I don't think it will. In fact, I know it don't. They told me so at Charing Cross." "Then they told you what wasn't true; for it does. See here!" What the Major calls upon him to look at are some bits of pasteboard, like butterflies, fluttering in the air, and settling down over the copestone of the dock. They are the fragments of the torn ticket. "Now, old boy! you're booked for Boulogne." The melancholy smile, up to that time on Ryecroft's face, broadens into a laugh at the stratagem employed to detain him. With cheerfulness for the time restored, he says: "Well, Major, by that you've cost me at least one pound sterling. But I'll make you recoup it in boarding and lodging me for--possibly a week." "A month--a year, if you should like your lodgings and will stay in them. I've got a snug little compound in the Rue Tintelleries, with room to swing hammocks for us both; besides a bin or two of wine, and, what's better, a keg of the 'raal crayther.' Let's along and have a tumbler of it at once. You'll need it to wash the channel spray out of your throat. Don't wait for your luggage. These Custom-house gentry all know me, and will send it directly after. Is it labelled?" "It is; my name's on everything." "Let me have one of your cards." The card is handed to him. "There, Monsieur," he says, turning to a _douanier_, who respectfully salutes, "take this, and see that all the _bagage_ bearing the name on it be kept safely till called for. My servant will come for it. _Garçon!_" This to the driver of a _voiture_, who, for some time viewing them with expectant eye, makes response by a cut of his whip, and brisk approach to the spot where they are standing. Pushing Captain Ryecroft into the hack, and following himself, the Major gives the French Jehu his address, and they are driven off over the rough, rib-cracking cobbles of Boulogne. CHAPTER XL. HUE AND CRY. The ponies and pet stag on the lawn at Llangorren wonder what it is all about. So different from the garden parties and archery meetings, of which they have witnessed many a one! Unlike the latter in their quiet stateliness is the excited crowd at the Court this day; still more, from its being chiefly composed of men. There are a few women, also, but not the slender-waisted creatures, in silks and gossamer muslins, who make up an outdoor assemblage of the aristocracy. The sturdy dames and robust damsels now rambling over its grounds and gravelled walks are the dwellers in roadside cottages, who at the words "Murdered or Missing," drop brooms upon half-swept floors, leave babies uncared-for in their cradles, and are off to the indicated spot. And such words have gone abroad from Llangorren Court, coupled with the name of its young mistress. Gwen Wynn is missing, if she be not also murdered. It is the second day after her disappearance, as known to the household; and now it is known throughout the neighbourhood, near and far. The slight scandal dreaded by Miss Linton no longer has influence with her. The continued absence of her niece, with the certainty at length reached that she is not in the house of any neighbouring friend, would make concealment of the matter a grave scandal in itself. Besides, since the half-hearted search of yesterday, new facts have come to light; for one, the finding of that ring on the floor of the pavilion. It has been identified not only by the finder, but by Eleanor Lees, and Miss Linton herself. A rare cluster of brilliants, besides of value, it has more than once received the inspection of these ladies--both knowing the giver, as the nature of the gift. How comes it to have been there in the summer-house? Dropped, of course; but under what circumstances? Questions perplexing, while the thing itself seriously heightens the alarm. No one, however rich or regardless, would fling such precious stones away; above all, gems so bestowed, and, as Miss Lees has reason to know, prized and fondly treasured. The discovery of the engagement ring deepens the mystery instead of doing aught towards its elucidation. But it also strengthens a suspicion, fast becoming belief, that Miss Wynn went not away of her own accord; instead, has been taken. Robbed, too, before being carried off. There were other rings upon her fingers--diamonds, emeralds, and the like. Possibly in the scramble, on the robbers first seizing hold and hastily stripping her, this particular one had slipped through their fingers, fallen to the floor, and so escaped observation. At night and in the darkness, all likely enough. So for a time run the surmises, despite the horrible suggestion attaching to them, almost as a consequence. For if Gwen Wynn had been robbed, she may also be murdered. The costly jewels she wore, in rings, bracelets, and chains, worth many hundreds of pounds, may have been the temptation to plunder her; but the plunderers identified, and, fearing punishment, would also make away with her person. It may be abduction, but it has now more the look of murder. By midday the alarm has reached its height--the hue and cry is at its loudest. No longer confined to the family and domestics--no more the relatives and intimate friends--people of all classes and kinds take part in it. The pleasure grounds of Llangorren, erst private and sacred as the Garden of the Hesperides, are now trampled by heavy, hobnailed shoes; while men in smocks, slops, and sheepskin gaiters, stride excitedly to and fro, or stand in groups, all wearing the same expression on their features--that of a sincere, honest anxiety, with a fear some sinister mischance has overtaken Miss Wynn. Many a young farmer is there who has ridden beside her in the hunting-field, often behind her, noways nettled by her giving him the "lead"; instead, admiring her courage and style of taking fences over which, on his cart nag, he dares not follow--enthusiastically proclaiming her "pluck" at markets, race meetings, and other gatherings wherever came up talk of "Tally-ho." Besides those on the ground drawn thither by sympathetic friendship, and others the idly curious, still others are there in the exercise of official duty. Several magistrates have arrived at Llangorren, among them Sir George Shenstone, chairman of the district bench; the police superintendent also, with several of his blue-coated subordinates. There is a man present about whom remark is made, and who attracts more attention than either justice of the peace or policeman. It is a circumstance unprecedented--a strange sight, indeed--Lewin Murdock at the Court! He is there, nevertheless, taking an active part in the proceedings. It seems natural enough to those who but know him to be the cousin of the missing lady, ignorant of the long family estrangement. Only to intimate friends is there aught singular in his behaving as he now does. But to these, on reflection, his behaviour is quite comprehensible. They construe it differently from the others--the outside spectators. More than one of them, observing the anxious expression on his face, believe it but a semblance, a mask to hide the satisfaction within his heart, to become joy if Gwen Wynn be found--dead. It is not a thing to be spoken of openly, and no one so speaks of it. The construction put upon Lewin Murdock's motives is confined to the few, for only a few know how much he is interested in the upshot of that search. Again it is set on foot, but not as on the day preceding. Now no mad rushing to and fro of mere physical demonstration. This day there is due deliberation--a council held, composed of the magistrates and other gentlemen of the neighbourhood, aided by a lawyer or two, and the talents of an experienced detective. As on the day before, the premises are inspected, the grounds gone over, the fields traversed, the woods as well, while parties proceed up and down the river, and along both sides of the backwash. The eyot also is quartered, and carefully explored from end to end. As yet the drag has not been called into requisition, the deep flood, with a swift, strong current, preventing it. Partly that, but as much because the searchers do not as yet believe, cannot realize the fact, that Gwendoline Wynn is dead, and her body at the bottom of the Wye! Robbed and drowned! Surely it cannot be! Equally incredible that she has drowned herself. Suicide is not thought of--incredible under the circumstances. A third supposition, that she has been the victim of revenge--of a jealous lover's spite--seems alike untenable. She, the heiress, owner of the vast Llangorren estates, to be so dealt with--pitched into the river like some poor cottage girl, who has quarrelled with a brutal sweetheart! The thing is preposterous! And yet this very thing begins to receive credence in the minds of many--of more, as new facts are developed by the magisterial inquiry, carried on inside the house. There a strange chapter of evidence comes out, or rather, is elicited. Miss Linton's maid, Clarisse, is the author of it. This sportive creature confesses to having been out in the grounds as the ball was breaking up, and, lingering there till after the latest guest had taken departure, heard high voices, speaking as in anger. They came from the direction of the summer-house, and she recognised them as those of Mademoiselle and Le Capitaine--by the latter meaning Captain Ryecroft. Startling testimony this, when taken in connection with the strayed ring; collateral to the ugly suspicion the latter had already conjured up. Nor is the _femme de chambre_ telling any untruth. She was in the grounds at that same hour, and heard the voices as affirmed. She had gone down to the boat dock in the hope of having a word with the handsome waterman; and returned from it reluctantly, finding he had betaken himself to his boat. She does not thus state her reason for so being abroad, but gives a different one. She was merely out to have a look at the illumination--the lamps and transparencies, still unextinguished--all natural enough. And questioned as to why she said nothing of it on the day before, her answer is equally evasive. Partly that she did not suppose the thing worth speaking of, and partly because she did not like to let people know that Mademoiselle had been behaving in that way--quarrelling with a gentleman. In the flood of light just let in, no one any longer thinks that Miss Wynn has been robbed; though it may be that she has suffered something worse. What for could have been angry words? And the quarrel--how did it end? And now the name Ryecroft is on every tongue, no longer in cautious whisperings, but loudly pronounced. Why is he not here? His absence is strange, unaccountable under the circumstances. To none seeming more so than to those holding counsel inside, who have been made acquainted with the character of that waif--the gift ring--told he was the giver. He cannot be ignorant of what is passing at Llangorren. True, the hotel where he sojourns is in a town five miles off; but the affair has long since found its way thither, and the streets are full of it. "I think we had better send for him," observes Sir George Shenstone to his brother justices. "What say you, gentlemen?" "Certainly; of course," is the unanimous rejoinder. "And the waterman too?" queries another. "It appears that Captain Ryecroft came to the ball in a boat. Does any one know who was his boatman?" "A fellow named Wingate," is the answer given by young Shenstone. "He lives by the roadside, up the river, near Rugg's Ferry." "Possibly he may be here, outside," says Sir George. "Go, see!" This to one of the policemen at the door, who hurries off. Almost immediately to return--told by the people that Jack Wingate is not among them. "That's strange, too!" remarks one of the magistrates. "Both should be brought hither at once--if they don't choose to come willingly." "Oh!" exclaims Sir George, "they'll come willingly, no doubt. Let a policeman be despatched for Wingate. As for Captain Ryecroft, don't you think, gentlemen, it would be only politeness to summon him in a different way. Suppose I write a note requesting his presence, with explanations?" "That will be better," say several assenting. This note is written, and a groom gallops off with it; while a policeman on foot makes his way to the cottage of the Widow Wingate. Nothing new transpires in their absence; but on their return--both arriving about the same time--the agitation is intense. For both come back unaccompanied; the groom bringing the report that Captain Ryecroft is no longer at the hotel--had left it on the day before by the first train for London! The policeman's tale is, that Jack Wingate went off on the same day, and about the same early hour; not by rail to London, but in his boat, down the river to the Bristol Channel! Within less than a hour after, a police officer is despatched to Chepstow, and further, if need be; while the detective, with one of the gentlemen accompanying, takes the next train for the metropolis. CHAPTER XLI. BOULOGNE-SUR-MER. Major Mahon is a soldier of the rollicking Irish type--good company as ever drank wine at a regimental mess-table, or whisky-and-water under the canvas of a tent. Brave in war, too, as evinced by sundry scars of wounds given by the sabres of rebellious sowars, and an empty sleeve dangling down by his side. This same token also proclaims that he is no longer in the army. For he is not--having left it disabled at the close of the Indian Mutiny: after the relief of Lucknow, where he also parted with his arm. He is not rich; one reason for his being in Boulogne--convenient place for men of moderate means. There he has rented a house, in which for nearly a twelve-month he has been residing: a small domicile, _meublé_. Still, large enough for his needs: for the Major, though nigh forty years of age, has never thought of getting married; or, if so, has not carried out the intention. As a bachelor in the French watering-place, his income of five hundred per annum supplies all his wants--far better than if it were in an English one. But economy is not his only reason for sojourning in Boulogne. There is another alike creditable to him, or more. He has a sister, much younger than himself, receiving education there--an only sister, for whom he feels the strongest affection, and likes to be beside her. For all he sees her only at stated times, and with no great frequency. Her school is attached to a convent, and she is in it as a _pensionnaire_. All these matters are made known to Captain Ryecroft on the day after his arrival at Boulogne. Not in the morning. It has been spent in promenading through the streets of the lower town and along the _jetée_, with a visit to the grand lion of the place, _l'Establissement de Bains_, ending in an hour or two passed at the "cercle," of which the Major is a member, and where his old campaigning comrades, against all protestations, is introduced to the half-dozen "good fellows as ever stretched legs under mahogany." It is not till a later hour, however, after a quiet dinner in the Major's own house, and during a stroll upon the ramparts of the _Haute Ville_, that these confidences are given to his guest, with all the exuberant frankness of the Hibernian heart. Ryecroft, though Irish himself, is of a less communicative nature. A native of Dublin, he has Saxon in his blood, with some of its secretiveness; and the Major finds a difficulty in drawing him in reference to the particular reason of his interrupted journey to Paris. He essays, however, with as much skill as he can command, making approach as follows: "What a time it seems, Ryecroft, since you and I have been together--an age! And yet, if I'm not wrong in my reckoning, it was but a year ago. Yes; just twelve months, or thereabout. You remember we met at the 'Rag,' and dined there with Russel, of the Artillery." "Of course I remember it." "I've seen Russel since--about three months ago, when I was over in England. And, by the way, 'twas from him I last heard of yourself." "What had he to say about me?" "Only that you were somewhere down west--on the Wye, I think--salmon-fishing. I know you were always good at casting a fly." "That all he said?" "Well, no," admits the Major, with a sly, inquisitive glance at the other's face. "There was a trifle of a codicil added to the information about your whereabouts and occupation." "What, may I ask?" "That you'd been wonderfully successful in your angling; had hooked a very fine fish--a big one, besides--and sold out of the army; so that you might be free to play it on your line; in fine, that you'd captured, safe landed, and intended staying by it for the rest of your days. Come, old boy! don't be blushing about the thing; you know you can trust Charley Mahon. Is it true?" "Is what true?" asks the other, with an air of assumed innocence. "That you've caught the richest heiress in Herefordshire, or she you, or each the other, as Russel had it, and which is best for both of you. Down on your knees, Ryecroft! Confess!" "Major Mahon! If you wish me to remain your guest for another night--another hour--you'll not ask me aught about that affair, nor even name it. In time I may tell you all; but now, to speak of it gives me a pain which even you, one of my oldest, and, I believe, truest friends, cannot fully understand." "I can at least understand that it's something serious." The inference is drawn less from Ryecroft's words than their tone and the look of utter desolation which accompanies them. "But," continues the Major, greatly moved, "you'll forgive me, old fellow, for being so inquisitive? I promise not to press you any more. So let's drop the subject, and speak of something else." "What, then?" asks Ryecroft, scarce conscious of questioning. "My little sister, if you like. I call her little because she was so when I went out to India. She's now a grown girl, tall as that, and, as flattering friends say, a great beauty. What's better, she's good. You see that building below?" They are on the outer edge of the rampart, looking upon the ground adjacent to the _enceinte_ of the ancient _cité_. A slope in warlike days serving as the _glacis_, now occupied by dwellings, some of them pretentious, with gardens attached. That which the Major points to is one of the grandest, its enclosure large, with walls that only a man upon stilts of the Landes country could look over. "I see--what of it?" asks the ex-Hussar. "It's the convent where Kate is at school--the prison in which she's confined, I might better say," he adds, with a laugh, but in tone more serious than jocular. It need scarce be said that Major Mahon is a Roman Catholic. His sister being in such a seminary is evidence of that. But he is not bigoted, as Ryecroft knows, without drawing the deduction from his last remark. His old friend and fellow-campaigner does not even ask explanation of it, only observing-- "A very fine mansion it appears--walks, shade-trees, arbours, fountains. I had no idea the nuns were so well bestowed. They ought to live happily in such a pretty place. But then, shut up, domineered over, coerced, as I've heard they are--ah, liberty! It's the only thing that makes the world worth living in." "Ditto, say I. I echo your sentiment, old fellow, and feel it. If I didn't, I might have been long ago a Benedict, with a millstone around my neck in the shape of a wife, and half a score of smaller ones of the grindstone pattern--in piccaninnies. Instead, I'm free as the breezes, and by the Moll Kelly, intend remaining so." The Major winds up the ungallant declaration with a laugh. But this is not echoed by his companion, to whom the subject touched upon is a tender one. Perceiving it so, Mahon makes a fresh start in the conversation, remarking-- "It's beginning to feel a bit chilly up here. Suppose we saunter down to the Cercle, and have a game of billiards!" "If it be all the same to you, Mahon, I'd rather not go there to-night." "Oh! it's all the same to me. Let us home, then, and warm up with a tumbler of whisky toddy. There were orders left for the kettle to be kept on the boil. I see you still want cheering, and there's nothing will do that like a drop of the _crather_. _Allons!_" Without resisting, Ryecroft follows his friend down the stairs of the rampart. From the point where they descended the shortest way to the Rue Tintelleries is through a narrow lane not much used, upon which abut only the back walls of gardens, with their gates or doors. One of these, a gaol-like affair, is the entrance to the convent in which Miss Mahon is at school. As they approach it, a _fiâcre_ is standing in front, as if but lately drawn up to deliver its fare--a traveller. There is a lamp, and by its light, dim, nevertheless, they see that luggage is being taken inside. Some one on a visit to the Convent, or returning after absence. Nothing strange in all that; and neither of the two men make remark upon it, but keep on. Just, however, as they are passing the hack, about to drive off again, Captain Ryecroft, looking towards the door still ajar, sees a face inside it which causes him to start. "What is it?" asks the Major, who feels the spasmodic movement--the two walking arm-in-arm. "Well! if it wasn't that I am in Boulogne instead of on the banks of the river Wye, I'd swear that I saw a man inside that doorway whom I met not many days ago in the shire of Hereford." "What sort of a man?" "A priest!" "Oh! black's no mark among sheep. The _prêtres_ are all alike, as peas or policemen. I'm often puzzled myself to tell one from t'other." Satisfied with this explanation, the ex-Hussar says nothing further on the subject, and they continue on to the Rue Tintelleries. Entering his house, the Major calls for "matayrials," and they sit down to the steaming punch. But before their glasses are half emptied, there is a ring at the door bell, and soon after a voice inquiring for "Captain Ryecroft." The entrance-hall being contiguous to the dining-room where they are seated, they hear all this. "Who can be asking for me?" queries Ryecroft, looking towards his host. The Major cannot tell--cannot think--who; but the answer is given by his Irish manservant entering with a card, which he presents to Captain Ryecroft, saying, "It's for you, yer honner." The name on the card is-- "MR. GEORGE SHENSTONE." CHAPTER XLII. WHAT DOES HE WANT? "Mr. George Shenstone?" queries Captain Ryecroft, reading from the card. "George Shenstone!" he repeats, with a look of blank astonishment--"What the deuce does it mean?" "Does what mean?" asks the Major, catching the other's surprise. "Why, this gentleman being here. You see that?" He tosses the card across the table. "Well, what of it?" "Read the name!" "Mr. George Shenstone. Don't know the man. Haven't the most distant idea who he is. Have you?" "Oh, yes." "Old acquaintance; friend, I presume? No enemy, I hope?" "If it be the son of a Sir George Shenstone, of Herefordshire, I can't call him either friend or enemy; and as I know nobody else of the name, I suppose it must be he. If so, what he wants with me is a question I can no more answer than the man in the moon. I must get the answer from himself. Can I take the liberty of asking him into your house, Mahon!" "Certainly, my dear boy! Bring him in here, if you like, and let him join us--" "Thanks, Major!" interrupts Ryecroft. "But no; I'd prefer first having a word with him alone. Instead of drinking, he may want fighting with me." "Oh, oh!" ejaculates the Major. "Murtagh!" to the servant, an old soldier of the 18th, "show the gentleman into the drawing-room." "Mr. Shenstone and I," proceeds Ryecroft in explanation, "have but the very slightest acquaintance. I've only met him a few times in general company, the last at a ball--a private one--just three nights ago. 'Twas that very morning I met the priest I supposed we'd seen up there. 'Twould seem as if everybody on the Wyeside had taken the fancy to follow me into France." "Ha--ha--ha! About the _prêtre_, no doubt you're mistaken. And maybe this isn't your man, either. The same name, you're sure?" "Quite. The Herefordshire baronet's son is George, as his father, to whose title he is heir. I never heard of his having any other----" "Stay!" interrupts the Major, again glancing at the card, "here's something to help identification--an address--_Ormeston Hall_." "Ah! I didn't observe that." In his agitation he had not, the address being in small script at the corner. "Ormeston Hall? Yes, I remember, Sir George's residence is so called. Of course it's the son--must be." "But why do you think he means fight? Something happened between you, eh?" "No, nothing between us, directly." "Ah! Indirectly, then? Of course the old trouble--a woman." "Well, if it be fighting the fellow's after, I suppose it must be about that," slowly rejoins Ryecroft, half in soliloquy and pondering over what took place on the night of the ball. Now vividly recalling that scene in the summer-house, with the angry words there spoken, he feels good as certain George Shenstone has come after him on the part of Miss Wynn. The thought of such championship stirs his indignation, and he exclaims-- "By Heavens! he shall have what he wants. But I mustn't keep him waiting. Give me that card, Major!" The Major returns it to him, coolly observing-- "If it is to be a blue pill, instead of a whisky punch, I can accommodate you with a brace of barkers, good as can be got in Boulogne. You haven't told me what your quarrel's about; but from what I know of you, Ryecroft, I take it you're in the right, and you can count on me as a second. Lucky it's my left wing that's clipped. With the right I can shoot straight as ever, should there be need for making it a four-cornered affair." "Thanks, Mahon! You're just the man I'd have asked such a favour from." "The gentleman's inside the dhrawin-room, surr." This from the ex-Royal Irish, who has again presented himself, saluting. "Don't yield the _Sassenach_ an inch!" counsels the Major, a little of the old Celtic hostility stirring within him. "If he demands explanations, hand him over to me. I'll give them to his satisfaction. So, old fellow, be firm!" "Never fear!" returns Ryecroft, as he steps out to receive the unexpected visitor, whose business with him he fully believes to have reference to Gwendoline Wynn. And so has it. But not in the sense he anticipates, nor about the scene on which his thoughts have dwelt. George Shenstone is not there to call him to account for angry words, or rudeness of behaviour. Something more serious, since it was the baronet's son who left Llangorren Court in company with the plain-clothes policeman. The latter is still along with him, though not inside the house. He is standing upon the street at a convenient distance, though not with any expectation of being called in, or required for any further service now, professionally. Holding no writ, nor the right to serve such if he had it, his action hitherto has been simply to assist Mr. Shenstone in finding the man suspected of either abduction or murder. But as neither crime is yet proved to have been committed, much less brought home to him, the English policeman has no further errand in Boulogne--while the English gentleman now feels that his is almost as idle and aimless. The impulse which carried him thither, though honourable and gallant, was begot in the heat of blind passion. Gwen Wynn having no brother, he determined to take the place of one, his father not saying nay. And so resolved, he had set out to seek the supposed criminal, "interview" him, and then act according to the circumstances, as they should develop themselves. In the finding of his man he has experienced no difficulty. Luggage labelled "LANGHAM HOTEL, LONDON," gave him hot scent, as far as the grand _caravanserai_ at the bottom of Portland Place. Beyond it was equally fresh, and lifted with like ease. The traveller's traps re-directed at the Langham, "PARIS _via_ FOLKESTONE and BOULOGNE"--the new address there noted by porters and traffic manager--was indication sufficient to guide George Shenstone across the Channel; and cross it he did by the next day's packet for Boulogne. Arrived in the French seaport, he would have gone straight on to Paris had he been alone. But, accompanied by the policeman, the result was different. This--an old dog of the detective breed--soon as setting foot on French soil, went sniffing about among _serjents de ville_ and _douaniers_, the upshot of his investigations being to bring the chase to an abrupt termination--he finding that the game had gone no further. In short, from information received at the Custom House, Captain Ryecroft was run to earth in the Rue Tintelleries, under the roof of Major Mahon. And now that George Shenstone is himself under it, having sent in his card, and been ushered into the drawing-room, he does not feel at his ease; instead, greatly embarrassed; not from any personal fear--he has too much "pluck" for that. It is a sense of delicacy, consequent upon some dread of wrong-doing. What, after all, if his suspicions prove groundless, and it turn out that Captain Ryecroft is entirely innocent? His heart, torn by sorrow, exasperated with anger, starting away from Herefordshire, he did not thus interrogate. Then he supposed himself in pursuit of an abductor, who, when overtaken, would be found in the company of the abducted. But, meanwhile, both his suspicions and sentiments have undergone a change. How could they otherwise? He pursued, has been travelling openly and without any disguise, leaving traces at every turn and deflection of his route, plain as fingerposts! A man guilty of aught illegal, much more one who has committed a capital crime, would not be acting thus. Besides, Captain Ryecroft has been journeying alone, unaccompanied by man or woman; no one seen with him until meeting his friend, Major Mahon, on the packet landing at Boulogne. No wonder that Mr. Shenstone, now _au fait_ to all this--easily ascertained along the route of travel--feels that his errand is an awkward one. Embarrassed when ringing Major Mahon's door-bell, he is still more so inside that room, while awaiting the man to whom his card has been taken. For he has intruded himself into the house of a gentleman a perfect stranger to himself, to call his guest to account. The act is inexcusable, rude almost to grotesqueness! But there are other circumstances attendant, of themselves unpleasant enough. The thing he has been tracking up is no timid hare or cowardly fox; but a man, a soldier, gentleman as himself, who, like a tiger of the jungles, may turn upon and tear him. It is no thought of this, no craven fear, which makes him pace Major Mahon's drawing-room floor so excitedly. His agitation is due to a different and nobler cause--the sensibility of the gentleman, with the dread of shame should he find himself mistaken. But he has a consoling thought. Prompted by honour and affection, he embarked in the affair, and, still urged by them, he will carry it to the conclusion, _coûte que coûte_. CHAPTER XLIII. A GAGE D'AMOUR. Pacing to and fro, with stride jerky and irregular, Shenstone at length makes stop in front of the fireplace, not to warm himself--there is no fire in the grate--nor yet to survey his face in the mirror above. His steps are arrested by something he sees resting upon the mantel-shelf; a sparkling object--in short, a cigar-case of the beaded pattern. Why should that attract the attention of the young Herefordshire squire, causing him to start, as it first catches his eye? In his lifetime he has seen scores of such, without caring to give them a second glance. But it is just because he has looked upon this one before, or fancies he has, that he now stands gazing at it, on the instant after reaching towards and taking it up. Ay, more than once has he seen that same cigar-case--he is now sure as he holds it in his hand, turning it over and over--seen it before its embroidery was finished; watched fair fingers stitching the beads on, cunningly combining the blue and amber and gold, tastefully arranging them in rows and figures--two hearts central, transfixed by a barbed and feathered shaft--all save the lettering he now looks upon, and which was never shown him. Many a time during the months past, he had hoped, and fondly imagined, the skilful contrivance and elaborate workmanship might be for himself. Now he knows better; the knowledge revealed to him by the initials V. R. entwined in a monogram, and the words underneath "FROM GWEN." Three days ago the discovery would have caused him a spasm of keenest pain. Not so now. After being shown that betrothal ring, no gift, no pledge, could move him to further emotion. He but tosses the beaded thing back upon the mantel, with the reflection that he to whom it belongs has been born under a more propitious star than himself. Still, the little incident is not without effect. It restores his firmness, with the resolution to act as originally intended. This is still further strengthened as Ryecroft enters the room, and he looks upon the man who has caused him so much misery. A man feared, but not hated, for Shenstone's noble nature and generous disposition hinder him from being blinded either to the superior personal or mental qualities of his rival. A rival he fears only in the field of love; in that of war or strife of other kind, the doughty young west-country squire would dare even the devil. No tremor in his frame, no unsteadfastness in the glance of his eye, as he regards the other stepping inside the open door, and with the card in his hand, coming towards him. Long ago introduced, and several times in company together, but cool and distant, they coldly salute. Holding out the card, Ryecroft says interrogatively-- "Is this meant for me, Mr. Shenstone?" "Yes." "Some matter of business, I presume. May I ask what it is?" The formal inquiry, in a tone passive and denying, throws the fox-hunter as upon his haunches. At the same time its evident cynicism stings him to a blunt if not rude rejoinder. "I want to know--what you have done with Miss Wynn." He so challenged starts aback, turning pale, and looking distraught at his challenger, while he repeats the words of the latter, with but the personal pronoun changed-- "What I have done with Miss Wynn!" Then adding, "Pray explain yourself, sir!" "Come, Captain Ryecroft, you know what I allude to." "For the life of me I don't." "Do you mean to say you're not aware of what's happened?" "What's happened! When? Where?" "At Llangorren, the night of that ball. You were present--I saw you." "And I saw you, Mr. Shenstone. But you don't tell me what happened." "Not at the ball, but after." "Well, and what after?" "Captain Ryecroft, you're either an innocent man, or the most guilty on the face of the earth." "Stop, sir! Language like yours requires justification of the gravest kind. I ask an explanation--demand it!" Thus brought to bay, George Shenstone looks straight in the face of the man he has so savagely assailed, there to see neither consciousness of guilt, nor fear of punishment. Instead, honest surprise, mingled with keen apprehension; the last, not on his own account, but hers of whom they are speaking. Intuitively, as if whispered by an angel in his ear, he says, or thinks to himself: "This man knows nothing of Gwendoline Wynn. If she has been carried off, it has not been by him; if murdered, he is not her murderer." "Captain Ryecroft," he at length cries out in hoarse voice, the revulsion of feeling almost choking him, "if I've been wronging you, I ask forgiveness, and you'll forgive; for if I have, you do not, cannot know what has occurred." "I've told you I don't," affirms Ryecroft, now certain that the other speaks of something different, and more serious than the affair he had himself been thinking of. "For Heaven's sake, Mr. Shenstone, explain! What _has_ occurred there?" "Miss Wynn is gone away!" "Miss Wynn gone away! But whither?" "Nobody knows. All that can be said is, she disappeared on the night of the ball, without telling any one; no trace left behind--except----" "Except what?" "A ring--a diamond cluster. I found it myself in the summer-house. You know the place--you know the ring, too?" "I do, Mr. Shenstone; have reasons--painful ones. But I am not called upon to give them now, nor to you. What could it mean?" he adds, speaking to himself, thinking of that cry he heard when being rowed off. It connects itself with what he hears now; seems once more resounding in his ears, more than ever resembling a shriek! "But, sir, please proceed! For God's sake keep nothing back; tell me everything!" Thus appealed to, Shenstone answers by giving an account of what has occurred at Llangorren Court--all that had transpired previous to his leaving, and frankly confesses his own reasons for being in Boulogne. The manner in which it is received still further satisfying him of the other's guiltlessness, he again begs to be forgiven for the suspicions he had entertained. "Mr. Shenstone," returns Ryecroft, "you ask what I am ready and willing to grant--God knows how ready, how willing. If any misfortune has befallen her we are speaking of, however great your grief, it cannot be greater than mine." Shenstone is convinced. Ryecroft's speech, his looks, his whole bearing, are those of a man not only guiltless of wrong to Gwendoline Wynn, but one who, on her account, feels anxiety keen as his own. He stays not to question further; but once more making apologies for his intrusion--which are accepted without anger--he bows himself back into the street. The business of his travelling companion in Boulogne was over some time ago. His is now equally ended; and though without having thrown any new light on the mystery of Miss Wynn's disappearance, still with some satisfaction to himself he dares not dwell upon. Where is the man who would not rather know his sweetheart dead than see her in the arms of a rival? However ignoble the feeling, or base to entertain it, it is natural to the human heart tortured by jealousy--too natural, as George Shenstone that night knows, with head tossing upon a sleepless pillow. Too late to catch the Folkestone packet, his bed is in Boulogne--no bed of roses, but a couch of Procrustean. * * * * * Meanwhile, Captain Ryecroft returns to the room where his friend the Major has been awaiting him. Impatiently, though not in the interim unemployed; as evinced by a flat mahogany box upon the table, and beside it a brace of duelling pistols, which have evidently been submitted to examination. They are the "best barkers that can be got in Boulogne." "We shan't need them, Major, after all." "The devil we shan't! He's shown the white feather?" "No, Mahon; instead, proved himself as brave a fellow as ever stood before sword-point, or dared pistol bullet." "Then there's no trouble between you?" "Ah! yes, trouble; but not between us. Sorrow shared by both. We're in the same boat." "In that case, why didn't you bring him in?" "I didn't think of it." "Well, we'll drink his health. And since you say you've both embarked in the same boat--a bad one--here's to your reaching a good haven, and in safety!" "Thanks, Major! The haven I now want to reach, and intend entering ere another sun sets, is the harbour of Folkestone." The Major almost drops his glass. "Why, Ryecroft, you're surely joking?" "No, Mahon; I'm in earnest--dead, anxious earnest." "Well, I wonder! No, I don't," he adds, correcting himself. "A man needn't be surprised at anything where there's a woman concerned. May the devil take her who's taking you away from me!" "Major Mahon!" "Well--well, old boy! Don't be angry. I meant nothing personal, knowing neither the lady, nor the reason for thus changing your mind, and so soon leaving me. Let my sorrow at that be my excuse." "You shall be told it this night--now!" In another hour Major Mahon is in possession of all that relates to Gwendoline Wynn, known to Vivian Ryecroft; no more wondering at the anxiety of his guest to get back to England, nor doing aught to detain him. Instead, he counsels his immediate return; accompanies him to the first morning packet for Folkestone; and at the parting hand-shake again reminds him of that well-timed grip in the ditch of Delhi, exclaiming, "God bless you, old boy! Whatever the upshot, remember you've a friend, and a bit of a tent to shelter you in Boulogne--not forgetting a little comfort from the _crayther_!" CHAPTER XLIV. SUICIDE, OR MURDER. Two more days have passed, and the crowd collected at Llangorren Court is larger than ever. But it is not now scattered, nor are people rushing excitedly about; instead, they stand thickly packed in a close clump, which covers all the carriage sweep in front of the house. For the search is over, the lost one has at length been found--found when the flood subsided, and the drag could do its work--_found drowned_! Not far away, nor yet in the main river; but that narrow channel, deep and dark, inside the eyot. In a little angular embayment at the cliff's base, almost directly under the summer-house was the body discovered. It came to the surface soon as touched by the grappling iron, which caught in the loose drapery around it. Left alone for another day, it would have risen of itself. Taken out of the water, and borne away to the house, it is now lying in the entrance hall, upon a long table there set centrally. The hall, though a spacious one, is filled with people; and but for two policemen stationed at the door, would be densely crowded. These have orders to admit only the friends and intimates of the family, with those whose duty requires them to be there officially. There is again a council in deliberation; but not as on days preceding. Then it was to inquire into what had become of Gwendoline Wynn, and whether she were still alive; to-day it is an inquest being held over her dead body! There lies it, just as it came out of the water. But, oh! how unlike what it was before being submerged! Those gossamer things, silks and laces--the dress worn by her at the ball--no more floating and feather-like, but saturated, mud-stained, "clinging like cerements" around a form whose statuesque outlines, even in death, show the perfection of female beauty. And her chrome yellow hair, cast in loose coils about, has lost its silken gloss, and grown darker in hue: while the rich rose red is gone from her cheeks, already swollen and discoloured; so soon had the ruthless water commenced its ravages! No one would know Gwen Wynn now. Seeing that form prostrate and pulseless, who could believe the same, which but a few nights before was there moving about, erect, lissome, and majestic? Or in that face, dark and disfigured, who could recognise the once radiant countenance of Llangorren's young heiress? Sad to contemplate those mute motionless lips, so late wreathed with smiles, and pleasant words! And those eyes, dulled with "muddy impurity," that so short while ago shone bright and gladsome, rejoicing in the gaiety of youth and the glory of beauty--sparkling, flashing, conquering! All is different now; her hair dishevelled, her dress disordered and dripping, the only things upon her person unchanged being the rings on her fingers, the wrist bracelets, the locket still pendant to her neck--all gemmed and gleaming as ever, the impure water affecting not their costly purity. And their presence has a significance, proclaiming an important fact, soon to be considered. The coroner, summoned in haste, has got upon the ground, selected his jury, and gone through the formularies for commencing the inquest. These over, the first point to be established is the identification of the body. There is little difficulty in this; and it is solely through routine, and for form's sake, that the aunt of the deceased lady, her cousin, the lady's maid, and one or two other domestics, are submitted to examination. All testify to their belief that the body before them is that of Gwendoline Wynn. Miss Linton, after giving her testimony, is borne off to her room in hysterics, while Eleanor Lees is led away weeping. Then succeeds inquiry as to how the death has been brought about; whether it be a case of suicide or assassination? If murder, the motive cannot have been robbery. The jewellery, of grand value, forbids the supposition of this, checking all conjecture. And if suicide, why? That Miss Wynn should have taken her own life--made away with herself--is equally impossible of belief. Some time is occupied in the investigation of facts, and drawing deductions. Witnesses of all classes and kinds thought worth the calling are called and questioned. Everything already known, or rumoured, is gone over again, till at length they arrive at the relations of Captain Ryecroft with the drowned lady. They are brought out in various ways, and by different witnesses; but only assume a sinister aspect in the eyes of the jury on their hearing the tale of the French _femme de chambre_--strengthened, almost confirmed, by the incident of that ring found on the floor of the summer-house. The finder is not there to tell how; but Miss Linton, Miss Lees, and Mr. Musgrave, vouch for the fact at second hand. The one most wanted is Vivian Ryecroft himself, and next him the waterman Wingate. Neither has yet made appearance at Llangorren, nor has either been heard of. The policeman sent after the last has returned to report a bootless expedition. No word of the boatman at Chepstow, nor anywhere else down the river. And no wonder there is not, since young Powell and his friends have taken Jack's boat beyond the river's mouth--duck-shooting along the shores of the Severn sea--there camping out, and sleeping in places far from towns, or stations of the rural constabulary. And the first is not yet expected--cannot be. From London, George Shenstone had telegraphed: "Captain Ryecroft gone to Paris, where he (Shenstone) would follow him." There has been no _telegram_ later to know whether the followed has been found. Even if he have, there has not been time for return from the French metropolis. Just as this conclusion has been reached by the coroner, his jury, the justices, and other gentlemen interested in and assisting at the investigation inside the hall, to the surprise of those on the sweep without, George Shenstone presents himself in their midst; their excited movement with the murmur of voices proclaiming his advent. Still greater their astonishment when, shortly after--within a few seconds--Captain Ryecroft steps upon the same ground, as though the two had come thither in companionship! And so might it have been believed, but for two hotel hackneys seen drawn up on the drive outside the skirts of the crowd, where they delivered their respective fares, after having brought them separately from the railway station. Fellow-travellers they have been, but whether friends or not, the people are surprised at the manner of their arrival; or rather, at seeing Captain Ryecroft so present himself. For in the days just past he has been the subject of a horrid suspicion, with the usual guesses and conjectures relating to it and him. Not only has he been freely calumniated, but doubts thrown out that Ryecroft is his real name, and denial of his being an officer of the army, or ever having been; with bold, positive asseveration that he is a swindler and adventurer! All that while Gwen Wynn was but missing. Now that her body is found, since its discovery, still harsher have been the terms applied to him; at length to culminate in calling him a murderer! Instead of voluntarily presenting himself at Llangorren alone, arms and limbs free, they expected to see him--if seen at all--with a policeman by his side, and manacles on his wrists! Astonished, also, are those within the hall, though in a milder degree, and from different causes. They did not look for the man to be brought before them handcuffed; but no more did they anticipate seeing him enter almost simultaneously, and side by side, with George Shenstone; they, not having the hackney carriages in sight, taking it for granted that the two have been travelling together. However strange or incongruous the companionship, those noting have no time to reflect about it; their attention being called to a scene that, for a while, fixes and engrosses it. Going wider apart as they approach the table on which lies the body, Shenstone and Ryecroft take opposite sides--coming to a stand, each in his own attitude. From information already imparted to them, they have been prepared to see a corpse, but not such as that! Where is the beautiful woman, by both beloved, fondly, passionately? Can it be possible that what they are looking upon is she who once was Gwendoline Wynn! Whatever their reflections, or whether alike, neither makes them known in words. Instead, both stand speechless, stunned--withered-like, as two strong trees simultaneously scathed by lightning--the bolt which has blasted them lying between! CHAPTER XLV. A PLENTIFUL CORRESPONDENCE. If Captain Ryecroft's sudden departure from Herefordshire brought suspicion upon him, his reappearance goes far to remove it. For that this is voluntary soon becomes known. The returned policeman has communicated the fact to his fellow-professionals, it is by them further disseminated among the people assembled outside. From the same source other information is obtained in favour of the man they have been so rashly and gravely accusing. The time of his starting off, the mode of making his journey, without any attempt to conceal his route of travel or cover his tracks--instead, leaving them so marked that any messenger, even the simplest, might have followed and found him. Only a fool fleeing from justice would have so fled, or one seeking to escape punishment for some trivial offence; but not a man guilty of murder. Besides, is he not back there--come of his own accord--to confront his accusers, if any there still be? So runs the reasoning throughout the crowd on the carriage sweep. With the gentlemen inside the house, equally complete is the revolution of sentiment in his favour. For, after the first violent outburst of grief, young Shenstone, in a few whispered words, makes known to them the particulars of his expedition to Boulogne, with that interview in the house of Major Mahon. Himself convinced of his rival's innocence, he urges his conviction on the others. But before their eyes is a sight almost confirmatory of it. That look of concentrated anguish in Captain Ryecroft's eyes cannot be counterfeit. A soldier who sheds tears could not be an assassin; and as he stands in bent attitude leaning over the table on which lies the corpse, tears are seen stealing down his cheeks, while his bosom rises and falls in quick, convulsive heaving. Shenstone is himself very similarly affected, and the bystanders beholding them are convinced that, in whatever way Gwendoline Wynn may have come by her death, the one is innocent of it as the other. For all, justice requires that the accusations already made, or menaced, against Captain Ryecroft be cleared up. Indeed, he himself demands this, for he is aware of the rumours that have been abroad about him. On this account he is called upon by the coroner to state what he knows concerning the melancholy subject of their inquiry. But first George Shenstone is examined--as it were by way of skirmish, and to approach, in a manner delicate as possible, the man mainly, though doubtingly accused. The baronet's son, beginning with the night of the ball--the fatal night--tells how he danced repeatedly with Miss Wynn; between two sets walked out with her over the lawn, stopped, and stood for some time under a certain tree, where in conversation she made known to him the fact of her being betrothed by showing him the engagement ring. She did not say who gave it, but he surmised it to be Captain Ryecroft--was sure of its being he--even without the evidence of the engraved initials afterwards observed by him inside it. As it has already been identified by others, he is only asked to state the circumstances under which he found it. Which he does, telling how he picked it up from the floor of the summer-house; but without alluding to his own motives for being there, or acting as he has throughout. As he is not questioned about these, why should he? But there are many hearing who guess them--not a few quite comprehending all. George Shenstone's mad love for Miss Wynn has been no secret, neither his pursuit of her for many long months, however hopeless it might have seemed to the initiated. His melancholy bearing now, which does not escape observation, would of itself tell the tale. His testimony makes ready the ground for him who is looked upon less in the light of a witness than as one accused, by some once more, and more than ever so. For there are those present who not only were at the ball, but noticed that triangular byplay upon which Shenstone's tale, without his intending it, has thrown a sinister light. Alongside the story of Clarisse, there seems to have been motive, almost enough for murder. An engagement angrily broken off--an actual quarrel--Gwendoline Wynn never afterwards seen alive! That quarrel, too, by the water's edge, on a cliff at whose base her body has been found! Strange--altogether improbable--that she should have drowned herself. Far easier to believe that he, her _fiancé_, in a moment of mad, headlong passion, prompted by fell jealousy, had hurled her over the high bank. Against this returned current of adverse sentiment, Captain Ryecroft is called upon to give his account, and state all he knows. What he will say is weighted with heavy consequences to himself. It may leave him at liberty to depart from the spot voluntarily, as he came, or be taken from it in custody. But he is yet free, and so left to tell his tale, no one interrupting. And without circumlocution he tells it, concealing nought that may be needed for its comprehension--not even his delicate relations to the unfortunate lady. He confesses his love--his proposal of marriage--its acceptance--the bestowal of the ring--his jealousy and its cause--the ebullition of angry words between him and his betrothed--the so-called quarrel--her returning the ring, with the way, and why he did not take it back--because at that painful crisis he neither thought of nor cared for such a trifle. Then parting with, and leaving her within the pavilion, he hastened away to his boat, and was rowed off. But, while passing up stream, he again caught sight of her, still standing in the summer-house, apparently leaning upon, and looking over, its baluster rail. His boat moving on, and trees coming between, he no more saw her; but soon after heard a cry--his waterman as well--startling both. It is a new statement in evidence, which startles those listening to him. He could not comprehend, and cannot explain it; though now knowing it must have been the voice of Gwendoline Wynn--perhaps her last utterance in life. He had commanded his boatman to hold way, and they dropped back down stream again to get within sight of the summer-house, but then to see it dark, and to all appearance deserted. Afterwards he proceeded home to his hotel, there to sit up for the remainder of the night, packing and otherwise preparing for his journey--of itself a consequence of the angry parting with his betrothed, and the pledge so slightingly returned. In the morning he wrote to her, directing the letter to be dropped into the post office; which he knew to have been done before his leaving the hotel for the railway station. "Has any letter reached Llangorren Court?" inquires the coroner, turning from the witness, and putting the question in a general way. "I mean for Miss Wynn, since the night of that ball?" The butler present, stepping forward, answers in the affirmative, saying,-- "There are a good many for Miss Gwen since--some almost coming in every post." Although there is, or was, but one Miss Gwen Wynn at Llangorren, the head servant, as the others, from habit calls her "Miss Gwen," speaking of her as if she were still alive. "It is your place to look after the letters, I believe?" "Yes, I attend to that." "What have you done with those addressed to Miss Wynn?" "I gave them to Gibbons, Miss Gwen's lady's-maid." "Let Gibbons be called again!" directs the coroner. The girl is brought in the second time, having been already examined at some length, and, as before, confessing her neglect of duty. "Mr. Williams," proceeds the examiner, "gave you some letters for your late mistress. What have you done with them?" "I took them upstairs to Miss Gwen's room." "Are they there still?" "Yes; on the dressing table, where she always had the letters left for her." "Be good enough to bring them down here. Bring all." Another pause in the proceedings while Gibbons is off after the now posthumous correspondence of the deceased lady, during which whisperings are interchanged between the coroner and the jurymen, asking questions of one another. They relate to a circumstance seeming strange; that nothing has been said about these letters before--at least, to those engaged in the investigation. The explanation, however, is given--a reason evident and easily understood. They have seen the state of mind in which the two ladies of the establishment are--Miss Linton almost beside herself, Eleanor Lees not far from the same. In the excitement of occurrences, neither has given thought to letters, even having forgotten the one which so occupied their attention on that day when Gwen was missed from her seat at the breakfast table. It might not have been seen by them then, but for Gibbons not being in the way to take it upstairs as usual. These facts, or rather deductions, are informal, and discussed while the maid is absent on her errand. She is gone but for a few seconds, returning, waiter in hand, with a pile of letters upon it, which she presents in the orthodox fashion. Counted, there are more than a dozen of them, the deceased lady having largely corresponded. A general favourite--to say nothing of her youth, beauty, and riches--she had friends far and near; and, as the butler had stated, letters coming by "almost every post"--that but once a day, however, Llangorren lying far from a postal town, and having but one daily delivery. Those upon the tray are from ladies, as can be told by the delicate angular chirography--all except two, that show a rounder and bolder hand. In the presence of her to whom they were addressed--now speechless and unprotesting--no breach of confidence to open them. One after another their envelopes are torn off, and they are submitted to the jury--those of the lady correspondents first. Not to be deliberately read, but only glanced at, to see if they contain aught relating to the matter in hand. Still, it takes time; and would more were they all of the same pattern--double sheets, with the scrip crossed, and full to the four corners. Fortunately, but a few of them are thus prolix and puzzling; the greater number being notes about the late ball, birthday congratulations, invitations to "at homes," dinner parties, and such like. Recognising their character, and that they have no relation to the subject of inquiry, the jurymen pass them through their fingers speedily as possible, and then turn with greater expectancy to the two in masculine handwriting. These the coroner has meanwhile opened, and read to himself, finding one signed "George Shenstone," the other "Vivian Ryecroft." Nobody present is surprised to hear that one of the letters is Ryecroft's. They have been expecting it so. But not that the other is from the son of Sir George Shenstone. A word, however, from the young man himself explains how it came there, leaving the epistle to tell its own tale. For as both undoubtedly bear upon the matter of inquiry, the Coroner has directed both to be read aloud. Whether by chance or otherwise, that of Shenstone is taken first. It is headed-- "Ormeston Hall, 4 a.m., _Après le bal_." The date, thus oddly indicated, seems to tell of the writer being in better spirits than might have been expected just at that time; possibly from a still lingering belief that all is not yet hopeless with him. Something of the same runs through the tone of his letter, if not its contents, which are-- "DEAR GWEN,--I've got home, but can't turn in without writing you a word, to say that, however sad I feel at what you've told me--and sad I am, God knows--if you think I shouldn't come near you any more--and from what I noticed last night, perhaps I ought not--only say so, and I will not. Your slightest word will be a command to one who, though no longer hoping to have your hand, will still hope and pray for your happiness. That one is, "Yours devotedly, if despairingly, "GEORGE SHENSTONE. "P.S.--Do not take the trouble of writing an answer. I would rather get it from your lips; and that you may have the opportunity of so giving it, I will call at the Court in the afternoon. Then you can say whether it is to be my last visit there.--G. S." The writer, present and listening, bravely bears himself. It is a terrible infliction, nevertheless, having his love secret thus revealed--his heart, as it were, laid open before all the world. But he is too sad to feel it now, and makes no remark, save a word or two explanatory, in answer to questions from the coroner. Nor are any comments made upon the letter itself. All are too anxious as to the contents of that other, bearing the signature of the man who is to most of them a stranger. It carries the address of the hotel in which he has been all summer sojourning, and its date is only an hour or two later than that of Shenstone's. No doubt, at the self-same moment, the two men were pondering upon the words they intended writing to Gwendoline Wynn--she who now can never read them. Very different in spirit are their epistles, unlike as the men themselves. But, so too, are the circumstances that dictated them; that of Ryecroft reads thus:-- "GWENDOLINE,--While you are reading this, I shall be on my way to London, where I shall stay to receive your answer--if you think it worth while to give one. After parting as we've done, possibly you will not. When you so scornfully cast away that little love-token, it told me a tale--I may say a bitter one--that you never really regarded the gift, nor cared for the giver. Is that true, Gwendoline? If not, and I am wronging you, may God forgive me. And I would crave your forgiveness; entreat you to let me replace the ring upon your finger. But if true--and you know best--then you can take it up--supposing it is still upon the floor where you flung it--fling it into the river, and forget him who gave it. "VIVIAN RYECROFT." To this half-doubting, half-defiant epistle there is also a postscript:-- "I shall be at the Langham Hotel, London, till to-morrow noon, where your answer, if any, will reach me. Should none come, I shall conclude that all is ended between us, and henceforth you will neither need, nor desire, to know my address. "V. R." The contents of the letter make a vivid impression on all present. Its tone of earnestness, almost anger, could not be assumed or pretended. Beyond doubt, it was written under the circumstances stated; and, taken in conjunction with the writer's statement of other events, given in such a clear, straightforward manner, there is again complete revulsion of feeling in his favour, and once more a full belief in his innocence which questioning him by cross-examination fails to shake, instead strengthens; and when, at length, having given explanation of everything, he is permitted to take his place among the spectators and mourners, it is with little fear of being dragged away from Llangorren Court in the character of a criminal. CHAPTER XLVI. FOUND DROWNED. As a pack of hounds thrown off the scent, but a moment before hot, now cold, are the coroner and his jury. But only in one sense like the dogs these human searchers. There is nothing of the sleuth in their search, and they are but too glad to find the game they have been pursuing and lost is a noble stag, instead of a treacherous, wicked wolf. Not a doubt remains in their minds of the innocence of Captain Ryecroft--not the shadow of one. If there were, it is soon to be dissipated. For while they are deliberating on what had best next be done, a noise outside, a buzz of voices, excited exclamations, at length culminating in a cheer, tell of someone fresh arrived and received triumphantly. They are not left long to conjecture who the new arrival is. One of the policemen stationed at the door stepping aside tells who--the man after Captain Ryecroft himself most wanted. No need saying it is Jack Wingate. But a word about how the waterman has come thither, arriving at such a time, and why not sooner. It is all in a nutshell. But the hour before he returned from the duck-shooting expedition on the shores of the Severn sea, with his boat brought back by road--on a donkey-cart. On arrival at his home, and hearing of the great event at Llangorren, he had launched his skiff, leaped into it, and pulled himself down to the Court as if rowing in a regatta. In the _patois_ of the American prairies he is now "arrove," and, still panting for breath, is brought before the Coroner's Court, and submitted to examination. His testimony confirms that of his old fare--in every particular about which he can testify. All the more credible is it from his own character. The young waterman is well known as a man of veracity--incapable of bearing false witness. When he tells them that after the Captain had joined him, and was still with him in the boat, he not only saw a lady in the little house overhead, but recognised her as the young mistress of Llangorren--when he positively swears to the fact--no one any more thinks that she whose body lies dead was drowned or otherwise injured by the man standing bowed and broken over it. Least of all the other, who alike suffers and sorrows. For soon as Wingate has finished giving evidence, George Shenstone steps forward, and holding out his hand to his late rival, says, in the hearing of all,-- "Forgive me, sir, for having wronged you by suspicion! I now make reparation for it in the only way I can--by declaring that I believe you as innocent as myself." The generous behaviour of the baronet's son strikes home to every heart, and his example is imitated by others. Hands from every side are stretched towards that of the stranger, giving it a grasp which tells of their owners being also convinced of his innocence. But the inquest is not yet ended--not for hours. Over the dead body of one in social rank as she, no mere perfunctory investigation would satisfy the public demand, nor would any coroner dare to withdraw till everything has been thoroughly sifted, and to the bottom. In view of the new facts brought out by Captain Ryecroft and his boatman--above all, that cry heard by them--suspicions of foul play are rife as ever, though no longer pointed at him. As everything in the shape of verbal testimony worth taking has been taken, the coroner calls upon his jury to go with him to the place where the body was taken out of the water. Leaving it in charge of two policemen, they sally forth from the house two and two, he preceding, the crowd pressing close. First they visit the little dock, in which they see two boats--the _Gwendoline_ and _Mary_--lying just as they were on that night when Captain Ryecroft stepped across the one to take his seat in the other. He is with the coroner, so is Wingate, and both questioned give minute account of that embarkation, again in brief _résumé_ going over the circumstances that preceded and followed it. The next move is to the summer-house, to which the distance from the dock is noted, one of the jurymen stepping it--the object to discover how time will correspond to the incidents as detailed. Not that there is any doubt about the truth of Captain Ryecroft's statements, nor those of the boatman; for both are fully believed. The measuring is only to assist in making calculation how long time may have intervened between the lovers' quarrel and the death-like cry, without thought of their having any connection--much less that the one was either cause or consequence of the other. Again there is consultation at the summer-house, with questions asked, some of which are answered by George Shenstone, who shows the spot where he picked up the ring. And outside, standing on the cliff's brink, Ryecroft and the waterman point to the place, near as they can fix it, where their boat was when the sad sound reached their ears, again recounting what they did after. Remaining a while longer on the cliff, the coroner and jury, with craned necks, look over its edge. Directly below is the little embayment in which the body was found. It is angular, somewhat horse-shoe shaped; the water within stagnant, which accounts for the corpse not having been swept away. There is not much current in the backwash at any part; enough to have carried it off had the drowning been done elsewhere. But beyond doubt it has been there. Such is the conclusion arrived at by the Coroner's jury, firmly established in their minds, at sight of something hitherto unnoticed by them. For though not in a body, individually each had already inspected the place, negligently. But now in official form, with wits on the alert, one looking over detects certain abrasions on the face of the cliff--scratches on the red sandstone--distinguishable by the fresher tint of the rock--unquestionably made by something that had fallen from above, and what but the body of Gwendoline Wynn? They see, moreover, some branches of a juniper bush near the cliff's base, broken, but still clinging. Through that the falling form must have descended! There is no further doubting the fact. There went she over; the only questions undetermined being, whether with her own will, by misadventure, or man's violence. In other words, was it suicide, accident, or murder. To the last many circumstances point, and especially the fact of the body remaining where it went into the water. A woman being drowned accidentally, or drowning herself, in the death-struggle would have worked away some distance from the spot she had fallen, or thrown herself in. Still, the same would occur if thrown in by another; only that this other might by some means have extinguished life before-hand. This last thought, or surmise, carries coroner and jury back to the house, and to a more particular examination of the body. In which they are assisted by medical men--surgeons and physicians--several of both being present, unofficially; among them the one who administers to the ailings of Miss Linton. There is none of them who has attended Gwendoline Wynn, who never knew ailment of any kind. Their _post-mortem_ examining does not extend to dissection. There is no need. Without it there are tests which tell the cause of death--that of drowning. Beyond this they can throw no light on the affair, which remains mysterious as ever. Flung back on reasoning of the analytical kind, the coroner and his jury can come to no other conclusion than that the first plunge into the water, in whatever way made, was almost instantly fatal; and if a struggle followed, it ended by the body returning to, and sinking in the same place where it first went down. Among the people outside pass many surmises, guesses, and conjectures. Suspicions also, but no more pointing to Captain Ryecroft. They take another, and more natural, direction. Still nothing has transpired to inculpate any one, or, in the finding of a coroner's jury, connect man or woman with it. This is at length pronounced in the usual formula, with its customary tag:--"FOUND DROWNED. BUT HOW, etc., etc." With such ambiguous rendering, the once beautiful body of Gwendoline Wynn is consigned to a coffin, and in due time deposited in the family vault, under the chancel of Llangorren Church. CHAPTER XLVII. A MAN WHO THINKS IT MURDER. Had Gwendoline Wynn been a poor cottage girl, instead of a rich young lady--owner of estates--the world would soon have ceased to think of her. As it is, most people have settled down to the belief that she has simply been the victim of a misadventure, her death due to accident. Only a few have other thoughts, but none that she has committed suicide. The theory of _felo de se_ is not entertained, because not entertainable. For, in addition to the testimony taken at the coroner's inquest, other facts came out in examination by the magistrates, showing there was no adequate reason why she should put an end to her life. A lover's quarrel of a night's, still less an hour's, duration, could not so result. And that there was nothing beyond this, Miss Linton is able to say assuredly. Still more Eleanor Lees, who, by confidences exchanged, and mutually imparted, was perfectly _au fait_ to the feelings of her relative and friend--knew her hopes and her fears, and that among the last there was none to justify the deed of despair. Doubts now and then, for when and where is love without them; but with Gwen Wynn slight, evanescent as the clouds in a summer sky. She was satisfied that Vivian Ryecroft loved her, as that she herself lived. How could it be otherwise? and her behaviour on the night of the ball was only a transient spite which would have passed off soon as the excitement was over, and calm reflection returned. Altogether impossible she could have given way to it so far as in wilful rage to take the last leap into eternity. More likely standing on the cliff's edge, anxiously straining her eyes after the boat which was bearing him away in anger, her foot slipped upon the rock, and she fell over into the flood. So argues Eleanor Lees, and such is the almost universal belief at the close of the inquest, and for some time after. And if not self-destruction, no more could it be murder with a view to robbery. The valuable effects left untouched upon her person forbade supposition of that. If murder, the motive must have been other than the possession of a few hundred pounds' worth of jewellery. So reasons the world at large, naturally enough. For all, there are a few who still cling to a suspicion of there having been foul play; but not now with any reference with Captain Ryecroft. Nor are they the same who had suspected him. Those yet doubting the accidental death are the intimate friends of the Wynn family, who knew of its affairs relating to the property with the conditions on which the Llangorren estates were held. Up to this time only a limited number of individuals has been aware of their descent to Lewin Murdock. And when at length this fact comes out, and still more emphatically by the gentleman himself taking possession of them, the thoughts of the people revert to the mystery of Miss Wynn's death, so unsatisfactorily cleared up at the coroner's inquest. Still, the suspicions thus newly aroused, and pointing in another quarter, are confined to those acquainted with the character of the new man suspected. Nor are they many. Beyond the obscure corner of Rugg's Ferry there are few who have ever heard of, still fewer ever seen him. Outside the pale of "society," with most part of his life passed abroad, he is a stranger, not only to the gentry of the neighbourhood, but most of the common people as well. Jack Wingate chanced to have heard of him by reason of his proximity to Rugg's Ferry, and his own necessity for oft going there. But possibly as much on the account of the intimate relations existing between the owner of Glyngog House and Coracle Dick. Others less interested know little of either individual, and when it is told that a Mr. Lewin Murdock has succeeded to the estates of Llangorren--at the same time it becoming known that he is the cousin of her whom death has deprived of them--to the general public the succession seems natural enough; since it has been long understood that the lady had no nearer relative. Therefore, only the few intimately familiar with the facts relating to the reversion of the property held fast to the suspicion thus excited. But as no word came out, either at the inquest or elsewhere, and nothing has since arisen to justify it, they also begin to share the universal belief, that for the death of Gwendoline Wynn nobody is to blame. Even George Shenstone, sorely grieving, accepts it thus. Of unsuspicious nature, incapable of believing in a crime so terrible, a deed so dark, as that would infer, he cannot suppose that the gentleman, now his nearest neighbour--for the lands of Llangorren adjoin those of his father--has come into possession of them by such foul means as murder. His father may think differently, he knowing more of Lewin Murdock. Not much of his late life, but his earlier, with its surroundings and antecedents. Still Sir George is silent, whatever his thoughts. It is not a subject to be lightly spoken of, or rashly commented upon. There is one who, more than any other, reflects upon the sad fate of her whom he had so fondly loved, and differing from the rest as to how she came to her death; this one is Captain Ryecroft. He, too, might have yielded to the popular impression of its having been accidental, but for certain circumstances that have come to his knowledge, and which he has yet kept to himself. He has not forgotten what was, at an early period, communicated to him by the waterman Wingate, about the odd-looking old house up the glen; nor yet the uneasy manner of Gwendoline Wynn, when once, in conversation with her, he referred to the place and its occupier. This, with Jack's original story, and other details added, besides incidents that have since transpired, are recalled to him vividly on hearing that the owner of Glyngog has also become owner of Llangorren. It is some time before this news reaches him; for, just after the inquest, an important matter had arisen affecting some property of his own, which required his presence in Dublin, there for days detaining him. Having settled it, he has returned to the same town and hotel where he had been the summer sojourning. Nor came he back on errand aimless, but with a purpose. Ill-satisfied with the finding of the coroner's jury, he is determined to investigate the affair in his own way. Accident he does not believe in--least of all that the lady, having made a false step, had fallen over the cliff. When he last saw her, she was inside the pavilion, leaning over the baluster rail, breast high, protected by it. If gazing after him and his boat, the position gave her as good a view as she could have. Why should she have gone outside? And the cry heard so soon after? It was not like that of one falling, and so far. In descent, it would have been repeated, which it was not. Of suicide he has never entertained a thought, above all, for the reason suggested--jealousy of himself. How could he, while so keenly suffering it for her? No; it could not be that--nor suicide from any cause. The more he ponders upon it, the surer grows he that Gwendoline Wynn has been the victim of a villainous murder. And it is for this reason he has returned to the Wye, first to satisfy himself of the fact, then, if possible, to find the perpetrator, and bring him to justice. As no robber has done the drowning, conjecture is narrowed to a point, his suspicions finally becoming fixed on Lewin Murdock. He may be mistaken, but will not surrender them until he find evidence of their being erroneous, or proof that they are correct. And to obtain it he will devote, if need be, all the rest of his days, with the remainder of his fortune. For what are either now to him? In life he has had but one love, real, and reaching the height of a passion. She who inspired it is now sleeping her last sleep--lying cold in her tomb--his love and memory of her alone remaining warm. His grief has been great, but its first wild throes have passed, and he can reflect calmly--more carefully consider what he should do. From the first some thoughts about Murdock were in his mind; still only vague. Now, on returning to Herefordshire, and hearing what has happened meanwhile--for during his absence there has been a removal from Glyngog to Llangorren--the occurrence, so suggestive, restores his former train of reflection, placing things in a clearer light. As the hunter, hitherto pursuing upon a cold trail, is excited by finding the slot fresher, so he. And so will he follow it to the end--the last trace or sign. For no game, however grand--elephant, lion, or tiger--could attract like that he believes himself to be after--a human tiger--a murderer. CHAPTER XLVIII. ONCE MORE UPON THE RIVER. Nowhere in England--perhaps nowhere in Europe--is the autumnal foliage more charmingly tinted than on the banks of the Wye, where it runs through the shire of Hereford. There Vaga threads her way amid woods that appear painted, and in colours almost as vivid as those of the famed American forests. The beech, instead of, as elsewhere, dying off dull bistre, takes a tint of bright amber; the chestnut turns translucent lemon; the oak leaves show rose colours along their edges, and the wych-hazel coral red by its umbels of thickly clustering fruit. Here and there along the high-pitched hill-sides flecks of crimson proclaim the wild cherry, spots of hoar white bespeak the climbing clematis, scarlet the holly with its wax-like berries, and maroon red the hawthorn; while interspersed and contrasting are dashes of green in all its varied shades, where yews, junipers, gorse, ivy, and other indigenous evergreens display their living verdure throughout all the year, daring winter's frosts, and defying its snows. It is autumn now, and the woods of the Wye have donned its dress; no livery of faded green, nor sombre russet, but a robe of gaudiest sheen, its hues scarlet, crimson, green, and golden. Brown October elsewhere, is brilliant here; and though leaves have fallen, and are falling, the sight suggests no thought of decay, nor brings sadness to the heart of the beholder. Instead, the gaudy tapestry, hanging from the trees, and the gay-coloured carpet spread underneath, but gladden it. Still further is it rejoiced by sounds heard. For the woods of Wyeside are not voiceless, even in winter. Within them the birds ever sing, and although their autumn concert may not equal that of spring,--lacking its leading tenor, the nightingale--still is it alike vociferous and alike splendidly attuned. Bold as ever is the flageolet note of the blackbird; not less loud and sweet the carol of his shier cousin the thrush; as erst soft and tender the cooing of the cushat; and with mirth unabated the cackle of the green woodpecker, as with long tongue, prehensile as human hand, it penetrates the ant-hive in search of its insect prey. * * * * * October it is; and where the Wye's silver stream, like a grand glistening snake, meanders amid these woods of golden hue and glorious song, a small row-boat is seen dropping downward. There are two men in it--one rowing, the other seated in the stern sheets, steering. The same individuals have been observed before in like relative position and similarly occupied. For he at the oars is Jack Wingate, the steerer Captain Ryecroft. Little thought the young waterman, when that "big gift"--the ten pound bank-note--was thrust into his palm, he would so soon again have the generous donor for a fare. He has him now, without knowing why, or inquiring. Too glad once more to sit on his boat's thwarts, _vis-à-vis_ with the Captain, it would ill become him to be inquisitive. Besides, there is a feeling of solemnity in their thus again being together, with sadness pervading the thoughts of both, and holding speech in restraint. All he knows is that his old fare has hired him for a row down the river, but bent on no fishing business, for it is twilight. His excursion has a different object; but what, the boatman cannot tell. No inference could be drawn from the laconic order he received at embarking. "Row me down the river, Jack!" distance and all else left undefined. And down Jack is rowing him in regular measured stroke, no words passing between them. Both are silent, as though listening to the plash of the oar-blades, or the roundelay of late singing birds on the river's bank. Yet neither of these sounds has place in their thoughts; instead, only the memory of one different and less pleasant. For they are thinking of cries--shrieks heard by them not so long ago, and still too fresh in their memory. Ryecroft is the first to break silence, saying,-- "This must be about the place where we heard it." Although not a word has been said of what the "it" is, and the remark seems made in soliloquy rather than as an interrogation, Wingate well knows what is meant, as shown by his rejoinder:-- "It's the very spot, Captain." "Ah! you know it?" "I do--am sure. You see that big poplar standing on the bank there?" "Yes; well?" "We wor just abreast o' it when ye bid me hold way. In course we must a heard the screech just then." "Hold way now! Pull back a length or two. Steady her. Keep opposite the tree!" The boatman obeys, first pulling the back stroke, then staying his craft against the current. Once more relapsing into silence, Ryecroft sends his gaze down stream, as though noting the distance to Llangorren Court, whose chimneys are visible in the moonlight now on. Then, as if satisfied with some mental observation, he directs the other to row off. But as the kiosk-like structure comes within sight, he orders another pause, while making a minute survey of the summer-house, and the stretch of water between. Part of this is the main channel of the river, the other portion being the narrow way behind the eyot; on approaching which the pavilion is again lost to view, hidden by a tope of tall trees. But once within the bye-way, it can be again sighted; and when near the entrance to this the waterman gets the word to pull into it. He is somewhat surprised at receiving this direction. It is the way to Llangorren Court, by the boat-stair, and he knows the people now living there are not friends of his fare--not even acquaintances, so far as he has heard. Surely the Captain is not going to call on Mr. Lewin Murdock--in amicable intercourse? So queries Jack Wingate, but only of himself, and without receiving answer. One way or other he will soon get it; and thus consoling himself, he rows on into the narrower channel. Not much farther before getting convinced that the Captain has no intention of making a call at the Court, nor is the _Mary_ to enter that little dock, where more than once she had lain moored beside the _Gwendoline_. When opposite the summer-house, he is once more commanded to bring to, with the intimation added,-- "I'm not going any farther, Jack." Jack ceases stroke, and again holds the skiff so as to hinder it from drifting. Ryecroft sits with eyes turned towards the cliff, taking in its _façade_ from base to summit, as though engaged in a geological study, or trigonometrical calculation. The waterman, for a while wondering what it is all about, soon begins to have a glimmer of comprehension. It is clearer when he is directed to scull the boat up into the little cove where the body was found. Soon as he has her steadied inside it, close up against the cliff's base, Ryecroft draws out a small lamp, and lights it. He then rises to his feet, and, leaning forward, lays hold of a projecting point of rock. On that resting his hand, he continues for some time regarding the scratches on its surface, supposed to have been made by the feet of the drowned lady in her downward descent. Where he stands they are close to his eyes, and he can trace them from commencement to termination. And so doing, a shadow of doubt is seen to steal over his face, as though he doubted the finding of the coroner's jury, and the belief of every one that Gwendoline Wynn had there fallen over. Bending lower, and examining the broken branches of the juniper, he doubts no more, but is sure--convinced of the contrary! Jack Wingate sees him start back with a strange surprised look, at the same time exclaiming,-- "I thought as much! No accident!--no suicide--murdered!" Still wondering, the waterman asks no questions. Whatever it may mean, he expects to be told in time, and is therefore patient. His patience is not tried by having to stay much longer there. Only a few moments more, during which Ryecroft bends over the boat's side, takes the juniper twigs in his hand, one after the other, raises them up as they were before being broken, then lets them gently down again! To his companion he says nothing to explain this apparently eccentric manipulation, leaving Jack to guesses. Only when it is over, and he is apparently satisfied, or with observation exhausted, giving the order,-- "Way, Wingate! Row back--up the river!" With alacrity the waterman obeys, but too glad to get out of that shadowy passage; for a weird feeling is upon him, as he remembers how there the screech owls mournfully cried, as if to make him sadder when thinking of his own lost love. Moving out into the main channel and on up stream, Ryecroft is once more silent and musing. But on reaching the place from which the pavilion can be again sighted, he turns round on the thwart and looks back. It startles him to see a form under the shadow of its roof--a woman!--how different from that he last saw there! The ex-cocotte of Paris--faded flower of the Jardin Mabille--has replaced the fresh beautiful blossom of Wyeside--blighted in its bloom! CHAPTER XLIX. THE CRUSHED JUNIPER. Notwithstanding the caution with which Captain Ryecroft made his reconnaisance, it was nevertheless observed, and from beginning to end. Before his boat drew near the end of the eyot, above the place where for the second time it had stopped, it came under the eye of a man who chanced to be standing on the cliff by the side of the summer-house. That he was there by accident, or at all events not looking out for a boat, could be told by his behaviour on first sighting this; neither by change of attitude nor glance of eye evincing any interest in it. His reflection is,-- "Some fellows after salmon, I suppose. Have been up to that famous catching place by the ferry, and are on the way home downward--to Rock Weir, no doubt! Ha!" The ejaculation is drawn from him by seeing the boat come to a stop, and remain stationary in the middle of the stream. "What's that for?" he asks himself, now more carefully examining the craft. It is still full four hundred yards from him, but the moonlight being in his favour, he makes it out to be a pair-oared skiff with two men in it. "They don't seem to be dropping a net," he observes, "nor engaged about anything. That's odd!" Before they came to a stop, he heard a murmur of voices, as of speech, a few words, exchanged between them, but too distant for him to distinguish what they had said. Now they are silent, sitting without stir; only a slight movement in the arms of the oarsman to keep the boat in its place. All this seems strange to him observing: not less when a flood of moonlight brighter than usual falls over the boat, and he can tell by the attitude of the man in the stern, with face turned upward, that he is regarding the structure on the cliff. He is not himself standing beside it now. Soon as becoming interested by the behaviour of the men in the boat, from its seeming eccentricity, he had glided back behind a bush, and there now crouches, an instinct prompting him to conceal himself. Soon after he sees the boat moving on, and then for a few seconds it is out of sight, again coming under his view near the upper end of the islet, evidently setting in for the old channel. And while he watches, it enters! As this is a sort of private way, the eyot itself being an adjunct of the ornamental grounds of Llangorren, he wonders whose boat it can be, and what its business there. By the backwash, it must be making for the dock and stair; the men in it, or one of them, for the Court. While still surprisedly conjecturing, his ears admonish him that the oars are at rest, and another stoppage has taken place. He cannot see the skiff now, as the high bank hinders. Besides, the narrow passage is arcaded over by trees still in thick foliage; and, though the moon is shining brightly above, scarce a ray reaches the surface of the water. But an occasional creak of an oar in its rowlock, and some words spoken in low tone--so low he cannot make them out--tell him that the stoppage is directly opposite the spot where he is crouching--as predatory animal in wait for its prey. What was at first mere curiosity, and then matter of but slight surprise, is now an object of keen solicitude. For of all places in the world, to him there is none invested with greater interest than that where the boat has been brought to. Why has it stopped there? Why is it staying? For he can tell it is by the silence continuing. Above all, who are the men in it? He asks these questions of himself, but does not stay to reason out the answers. He will best get them by his eyes; and to obtain sight of the skiff and its occupants, he glides a little way along the cliff, looking out for a convenient spot. Finding one, he drops first to his knees, then upon all fours, and crawls out to its edge. Craning his head over, but cautiously, and with a care it shall be under cover of some fern leaves, he has a view of the water below, with the boat on it--only indistinct on account of the obscurity. He can make out the figures of the two men, though not their faces, nor anything by which he may identify them--if already known. But he sees that which helps to a conjecture, at the same sharpening his apprehensions--the boat once more in motion, not moving off, but up into the little cove, where a dead body late lay! Then, as one of the men strikes a match and sets light to a lamp, lighting up his own face with that of the other opposite, he on the bank above at length recognises both. But it is no longer a surprise to him. The presence of the skiff there, the movements of the men in it--like his own, evidently under restraint and stealthy--have prepared him for seeing whom he now sees--Captain Ryecroft and the waterman Wingate. Still, he cannot think of what they are after, though he has his suspicions; the place, with something only known to himself, suggesting them--conjecture at first soon becoming certainty, as he sees the ex-officer of Hussars rise to his feet, hold his lamp close to the cliff's face, and inspect the abrasions on the rock! He is not more certain, but only more apprehensive, when the crushed juniper twigs are taken in hand, examined, and let go again. For he has by this divined the object of it all. If any doubt lingered, it is set at rest by the exclamatory words following, which, though but muttered, reach him on the cliff above, heard clear enough-- "No accident--no suicide--murdered!" They carry tremor to his heart, making him feel as a fox that hears the tongue of hound on its track. Still distant, but for all causing it fear, and driving it to think of subterfuge. And of this thinks he, as he lies with his face among the ferns; ponders upon it till the boat has passed back up the dark passage out into the river, and he hears the last light dipping of its oars in the far distance. He even forgets a woman, for whom he was waiting at the summer-house, and who there without finding him has flitted off again. At length rising to his feet, and going a little way, he too gets into a boat--one he finds, with oars aboard, down in the dock. It is not the _Gwendoline_--she is gone. Seating himself on the mid thwart, he takes up the oars, and pulls towards the place lately occupied by the skiff of the waterman. When inside the cove, he lights a match, and holds it close to the face of the rock where Ryecroft held his lamp. It burns out, and he draws a second across the sand-paper; this to show him the broken branches of the juniper, which he also takes in hand and examines--soon also dropping them, with a look of surprise, followed by the exclamatory phrases-- "Prodigiously strange! I see his drift now. Cunning fellow! On the track he has discovered the trick, and 'twill need another trick to throw him off it. This bush must be uprooted--destroyed." He is in the act of grasping the juniper, to pluck it out by the roots. A dwarf thing, this could be easily done. But a thought stays him--another precautionary forecast, as evinced by his words-- "That won't do." After repeating them, he drops back on the boat's thwart, and sits for a while considering, with eyes turned toward the cliff, ranging it up and down. "Ah!" he exclaims at length, "the very thing; as if the devil himself had fixed it for me! That _will_ do; smash the bush to atoms--blot out everything, as if an earthquake had gone over Llangorren." While thus oddly soliloquising, his eyes are still turned upward, apparently regarding a ledge which, almost loose as a boulder, projects from the bank above. It is directly over the juniper, and if detached from its bed, as it easily might be, would go crashing down, carrying the bush with it. And that same night it does go down. When the morning sun lights up the cliff, there is seen a breakage upon its face just underneath the summer-house. Of course, a landslip, caused by the late rains acting on the decomposed sandstone. But the juniper bush is no longer there; it is gone, root and branch! CHAPTER L. REASONING BY ANALYSIS. Captain Ryecroft's start at seeing a woman within the pavilion was less from surprise than an emotion due to memory. When he last saw his betrothed alive, it was in that same place, and almost in a similar attitude--leaning over the baluster rail. Besides, many other souvenirs cling around the spot, which the sight vividly recalls; and so painfully, that he at once turns his eyes away from it, nor again looks back. He has an idea who the woman is, though personally knowing her not, nor ever having seen her. The incident agitates him a little; but he is soon calm again, and for some time after sits silent--in no dreamy reverie, but actively cogitating, though not of it or her. His thoughts are occupied with a discovery he has made in his exploration just ended. An important one, bearing on the suspicion he had conceived almost proving it correct. Of all the facts that came before the coroner and his jury, none more impressed them, nor perhaps so much influenced their finding, as the tale-telling traces upon the face of the cliff. Nor did they arrive at their conclusion with any undue haste or light deliberation. Before deciding, they had taken boat, and from below more minutely inspected them. But with their first impression unaltered--or only strengthened--that the abrasions on the soft sandstone rock were made by a falling body, and the bush borne down by the same. And what but the body of Gwendoline Wynn? Living or dead, springing off, or pitched over, they could not determine. Hence the ambiguity of their verdict. Very different the result reached by Captain Ryecroft after viewing the same. In his Indian campaigns, the ex-cavalry officer, belonging to the "Light," had his share of scouting experience. It enables him to read "sign" with the skill of trapper or prairie hunter; and on the moment his lamp threw its light against the cliff's face, he knew the scratches were not caused by anything that came _down_, since they had been _made from below_! And by some blunt instrument, as the blade of a boat oar. Then the branches of the juniper. Soon as getting his eyes close to them, he saw they had been broken _inward_, their drooping tops turned _toward_ the cliff, not _from_ it! A falling body would have bent them in an opposite direction, and the fracture been from the upper and inner side! Everything indicated their having been crushed from below--not by the same boat's oar, but likely enough by the hands that held it! It was on reaching this conclusion that Captain Ryecroft gave involuntary utterance to the exclamatory words heard by him lying flat among the ferns above, the last one sending a thrill of fear through his heart. And upon it the ex-officer of Hussars is still reflecting as he returns up stream. Since the command given to Wingate to row him back, he has not spoken, not even to make remark about that suggestive thing seen in the summer-house above--though the other has observed it also. Facing that way, the waterman has his eyes on it for a longer time. But the bearing of the Captain admonishes him that he is not to speak till spoken to; and he silently tugs at his oars, leaving the other to his reflections. These are, that Gwendoline Wynn has been surely assassinated, though not by being thrown over the cliff. Possibly not drowned at all, but her body dropped into the water where found--conveyed thither after life was extinct! The scoring of the rock and the snapping of the twigs, all that done to mislead, as it had misled everybody but himself. To him it has brought conviction that there has been a deed of blood--done by the hand of another. "No accident--no suicide--murdered!" He is not questioning the fact, nor speculating upon the motive now. The last has been already revolved in his mind, and is clear as daylight. To such a man as he has heard Lewin Murdock to be, an estate worth £10,000 a year would tempt to crime, even the capital one, which certainly he has committed. Ryecroft only thinks of how he can prove its committal--bring the deed of guilt home to the guilty one. It may be difficult--impossible; but he will do his best. Embarked in the enterprise, he is considering what will be the best course to pursue--pondering upon it. He is not the man to act rashly at any time, but in a matter of such moment caution is especially called for. He is already on the track of a criminal who has displayed no ordinary cunning, as proved by that misguiding sign. A false move made, or word spoken in careless confidence, by exposing his purpose, may defeat it. For this reason he has hitherto kept his intention to himself--not having given a hint of it to any one. From Jack Wingate it cannot be longer withheld, nor does he wish to withhold it. Instead, he will take him into his confidence, knowing he can do so with safety. That the young waterman is no prating fellow he has already had proof, while of his loyalty he never doubted. First, to find out what Jack's own thoughts are about the whole thing. For since their last being in a boat together, on that fatal night, little speech has passed between them. Only a few words on the day of the inquest, when Captain Ryecroft himself was too excited to converse calmly, and before the dark suspicion had taken substantial shape in his mind. Once more opposite the poplar, he directs the skiff to be brought to. Which done, he sits just as when that sound startled him on return from the ball--apparently thinking of it, as in reality he is. For a minute or so he is silent; and one might suppose he listened, expecting to hear it again. But no; he is only, as on the way down, making note of the distance to the Llangorren grounds. The summer-house he cannot now see, but judges the spot where it stands by some tall trees he knows to be beside it. The waterman observing him, is not surprised when at length asked the question,-- "Don't you believe, Wingate, the cry came from above--I mean from the top of the cliff?" "I'm a'most sure it did. I thought at the time it comed from higher ground still--the house itself. You remember my sayin' so, Captain; and that I took it to be some o' the sarvint girls shoutin' up there." "I do remember--you did. It was not, alas! but their mistress." "Yes; she for sartin, poor young lady! We now know that." "Think back, Jack! Recall it to your mind; the tone, the length of time it lasted--everything. Can you?" "I can, an' do. I could all but fancy I hear it now!" "Well, did it strike you as a cry that would come from one falling over the cliff--by accident, or otherwise?" "It didn't; an' I don't yet believe it wor--accydent or no accydent." "No! What are your reasons for doubting it?" "Why, if it had a been a woman eyther fallin' over or flung, she'd ha' gied tongue a second time--ay, a good many times--'fore getting silenced. It must ha' been into the water, an' people don't drown at the first goin' down. She'd ha' riz to the surface once, if not twice; an' screeched sure. We couldn't ha' helped hearin' it. Ye remember, Captain, 'twor dead calm for a spell just precedin' the thunderstorm. When that cry come, ye might ha' heerd the leap o' a trout a quarter mile off. But it worn't repeated--not so much as a mutter." "Quite true. But what do you conclude from its not having been?" "That she who gied the shriek wor in the grasp o' somebody when she did it, an' wor silenced instant by bein' choked or smothered; same as they say's done by them scoundrels called garroters." "You said nothing of this at the inquest?" "No, I didn't, for several reasons. One, I wor so took by surprise, just home, an' hearin' what had happened. Besides, the crowner didn't question me on my feelin's--only about the facts o' the case. I answered all his questions, clear as I could remember, an' far's I then understood things; but not as I understand them now." "Ah! you have learnt something since?" "Not a thing, Captain--only what I've been thinkin' o', by rememberin' a circumstance I'd forgot." "What?" "Well, whiles I wor sittin' in the skiff that night, waitin' for you to come, I heerd a sound different from the hootin' o' them owls." "Indeed! What sort of sound?" "The plashing o' oars. There wor sartin another boat about there besides this one." "In what direction did you hear them?" "From above. It must ha' been that way. If't had been a boat gone up from below, I'd ha' noticed the stroke again across the strip o' island. But I didn't." "The same if one had passed on down." "Just so; an' for that reason I now believe it wor comin' down, an' stopped somewhere just outside the backwash." An item of intelligence new to the Captain as it is significant. He recalls the hour--between two and three o'clock in the morning. What boat could have been there but his own? And if other, what its business? "You're quite sure there was a boat, Wingate?" he asks, after a pause. "The oars o' one--that I'm quite sure o'. An' where there's smoke, fire can't be far off. Yes, Captain, there wor a boat about there. I'm willin' to swear to it." "Have you any idea whose?" "Well, no; only some conjecter. First hearin' the oar, I wor under the idea it might be Dick Dempsey, out salmon-stealin'. But at the second plunge I could tell it wor no paddle, but a pair of regular oars. They gied but two or three strokes, an' then stopped suddintly; not as though the boat had been rowed back, but brought up against the bank, an' there layed." "You don't think it was Dick and his coracle, then?" "I'm sure it worn't the coracle, but ain't so sure about its not bein' him. 'Stead, from what happened that night, an's been a-happenin' ever since, I b'lieve he wor one o' the men in that boat." "You think there were others?" "I do--leastways, suspect it." "And who do you suspect besides?" "For one, him as used live up there, but's now livin' in Llangorren." They have long since parted from the place where they made stop opposite the poplar, and are now abreast the Cuckoo's Glen, going on. It is to Glyngog House Wingate alludes, visible up the ravine, the moon gleaming upon its piebald walls and lightless windows--for it is untenanted. "You mean Mr. Murdock?" "The same, Captain. Though he worn't at the ball, as I've heerd say--and might ha' know'd without tellin'--I've got an idea he bean't far off when 'twor breakin' up. An' there wor another there, too, beside Dick Dempsey." "A third! Who?" "He as lives a bit further above." "You mean----?" "The French priest. Them three ain't often far apart; an' if I bean't astray in my reck'nin', they were mighty close thegither that same night, an' nigh Llangorren Court. They're all in or about it now, the precious tribang, an' I'd bet big they've got footin' there by the foulest o' foul play. Yes, Captain, sure as we be sittin' in this boat, she as owned the place ha' been murdered, the men as done it bein' Lewin Murdock, Dick Dempsey, and the Roman priest o' Rogues!" CHAPTER LI. A SUSPICIOUS CRAFT. To the waterman's unreserved statement of facts and suspicions, Captain Ryecroft makes no rejoinder. The last are in exact consonance with his own already conceived, the first alone new to him. And on the first he now fixes his thoughts, directing them to that particular one of a boat being in the neighbourhood of the Llangorren grounds about the time he was leaving them. For it, too, has a certain correspondence with something on the same night observed by himself--a circumstance he had forgotten, or ceased to think of, but now recalled with vivid distinctness. All the more as he listens to the conjectures of Wingate, about three men having been in that boat, and whom he supposed them to be. The number is significant as corresponding with what occurred to himself. The time as well, since, but a few hours before, he also had his attention drawn to a boat, under circumstances somewhat mysterious. The place was different; for all not to contradict the supposition of the waterman, rather confirming it. On his way to the Court, his black dress kerseymere protected by india-rubber overalls, Ryecroft, as known, had ridden to Wingate's house, and was thence rowed to Llangorren. His going to a ball by boat, instead of carriage or hotel hackney, was not for the sake of convenience, nor yet due to eccentricity. The prospect of a private interview with his betrothed at parting, as on former occasions expected to be pleasant, was his ruling motive for this arrangement. Besides, his calls at the Court were usually made in the same way, his custom being to ride as far as the Wingate cottage, leave his roadster there, and thence take the skiff. Between his town and the waterman's house, there is a choice of routes, the main country road keeping well away from the river, and a narrower one, which follows the trend of the stream along its edge, where practicable, but also here and there thrown off by meadows subject to inundations, or steep spurs of the parallel ridges. This, an ancient trackway now little used, was the route Captain Ryecroft had been accustomed to take on his way to Wingate's cottage, not from its being shorter or better, but for the scenery, which, far excelling that of the other, equals any upon the Wyeside. In addition, the very loneliness of the road had its charm for him, since only at rare intervals is a house seen by its side, and rarer still living creature encountered upon it. Even where it passes Rugg's Ferry, there intersecting the ford road, the same solitude characterizes it. For this quaint conglomeration of dwellings is on the opposite side of the stream--all save the chapel and the priest's house, standing some distance back from the bank, and screened by a spinney of trees. With the topography of this place he is quite familiar; and now to-night it is vividly recalled to his mind by what the waterman has told him. For on that other night, so sadly remembered, as he was riding past Rugg's, he saw the boat thus brought back to his recollection. He had got a little beyond the crossing of the Ford road, where it leads out from the river--himself on the other going downwards--when his attention was drawn to a dark object against the bank on the opposite side of the stream. The sky at the time moonless, he might not have noticed it, but for other dark objects seen in motion beside it, the thing itself being stationary. Despite the obscurity, he could make them out to be men busied around a boat. Something in their movements, which seemed made in a stealthy manner--too cautious for honesty--prompted him to pull up, and sit in his saddle observing them. He had himself no need to take precautions for concealment, the road at this point passing under old oaks, whose umbrageous branches, arcading over, shadowed the causeway, making it dark around as the interior of a cavern. Nor was he called upon to stay long there--only a few seconds after drawing bridle--just time enough for him to count the men, and see there were three of them, when they stepped over the sides of the boat, pushed her out from the bank, and rowed off down the river. Even then he fancied there was something surreptitious in their proceedings; for the oars, instead of rattling in their rowlocks, made scarce any noise, while their dip was barely audible, though so near. Soon both boat and those on board were out of his sight, and the slight sound made by them beyond his hearing. Had the road kept along the river's bank, he would have followed, and further watched them; but just below Rugg's it is carried off across a ridge, with steep pitch, and while ascending this he ceased to think of them. He might not have thought of them at all, had they made their embarkation at the ordinary landing-place, by the ford and ferry. There such a sight would have been nothing unusual, nor a circumstance to excite curiosity. But the boat, when he first observed it, was lying below, up against the bank by the chapel ground, across which the men must have come. Recalling all this, with what Jack Wingate had just told him, connecting events together, and making comparison of time, place, and other circumstances, he thus interrogatively reflects: "Might not that boat have been the same whose oars Jack heard down below? and the men in it those whose names he had mentioned? Three of them--that at least in curious correspondence? But the time? About nine, or a little after, as I passed Rugg's Ferry. That appears too early for the after event? No; they may have had other arrangements to make before proceeding to their murderous work. Odd, though, their knowing _she_ would be out there. But they need not have known that--likely did not. More like they meant to enter the house after every one had gone away, and there do the deed. A night different from the common, everything in confusion; the servants sleeping sounder than usual, from having indulged in drink--some of them overcome by it, as I saw myself before leaving. Yes; it's quite probable the assassins took all that into consideration--surprised, no doubt, to find their victim so convenient--in fact, as if she had come forth to receive them. Poor girl!" All this chapter of conjectures has been to himself, and in sombre silence, at length broken by the voice of his boatman, saying,-- "You've come afoot, Captain; an' it be a longish walk to the town, most o' the road muddy. Ye'll let me row you up the river--leastways, for a couple o' miles further; then ye can take the footpath through Powell's meadows." Roused as from a reverie, the Captain, looking out, sees they are nearly up to the boatman's cottage, which accounts for the proposal thus made. After a little reflection, he says in reply,-- "Well, Jack, if it wasn't that I dislike overworking you----" "Don't mention it!" interrupts Jack. "I'll be only too pleased to take you all the way to the town itself, if ye say the word. It a'nt so late yet, but to leave me plenty of time. Besides, I've got to go up to the ferry, anyhow, to get some grocery for mother. I may as well do it in the boat--'deed better than dragglin' along them roughish roads." "In that case I consent. But you must let me take the oars." "No, Captain; I'd prefer workin' 'em myself, if it be all the same to you." The Captain does not insist, for in truth he would rather remain at the tiller. Not because he is indisposed for a spell of pulling, nor is it from disinclination to walk, that he has so readily accepted the waterman's offer. After reflecting, he would have asked the favour so courteously extended. And for a reason having nothing to do with convenience, or the fear of fatigue; but a purpose which has just shaped itself in his thoughts, suggested by the mention of the ferry. It is that he may consider this--be left free to follow the train of conjecture which the incident has interrupted--he yields to the boatman's wishes, and keeps his seat in the stern. By a fresh spurt the _Mary_ is carried beyond her mooring place--as she passes it her owner for an instant feathering his oars and holding up his hat. It is a signal to one he sees there, standing outside in the moonlight--his mother. CHAPTER LII. MATERNAL SOLICITUDE. "The poor lad! His heart be sore sad; at times most nigh breakin'! That's plain--spite o' all he try hide it." It is the Widow Wingate who thus compassionately reflects--the subject, her son. She is alone within her cottage, the waterman being away with his boat. Captain Ryecroft has taken him down the river. It is on this nocturnal exploration, when the cliff at Llangorren is inspected by lamp-light. But she knows neither the purpose nor the place, any more than did Jack himself at starting. A little before sunset, the Captain came to the house, afoot and unexpectedly; called her son out, spoke a few words to him, when they started away in the skiff. She saw they went down stream--that is all. She was some little surprised, though--not at the direction taken, but the time of setting out. Had Llangorren been still in possession of the young lady, of whom her son has often spoken to her, she would have thought nothing strange of it. But in view of the late sad occurrence at the Court, with the change of proprietorship consequent--about all of which she has been made aware--she knows the Captain cannot be bound thither, and therefore wonders whither. Surely, not a pleasure excursion, at such an unreasonable hour--night just drawing down? She would have asked, but had no opportunity. Her son, summoned out of the house, did not re-enter; his oars were in the boat, having just come off a job; and the Captain appeared to be in haste. Hence Jack's going off, without, as he usually does, telling his mother the why and the where. It is not this that is now fidgeting her. She is far from being of an inquisitive turn--least of all with her son--and never seeks to pry into his secrets. She knows his sterling integrity, and can trust him. Besides, she is aware that he is of a nature somewhat uncommunicative, especially upon matters that concern himself, and above all when he has a trouble on his mind--in short, one who keeps his sorrows locked up in his breast, as though preferring to suffer in silence. And just this it is she is now bemoaning. She observes how he is suffering, and has been, ever since that hour when a farm labourer from Abergann brought him tidings of Mary Morgan's fatal mishap. Of course she, his mother, expected him to grieve wildly and deeply, as he did; but not deeply so long. Many days have passed since that dark one; but since, she has not seen him smile--not once! She begins to fear his sorrow may never know an end. She has heard of broken hearts--his may be one. Not strange her solicitude. "What make it worse," she says, continuing her soliloquy, "he keep thinkin' that he hae been partways to blame for the poor girl's death, by makin' her come out to meet him!"--Jack has told his mother of the interview under the big elm, all about it, from beginning to end.--"That hadn't a thing to do wi' it. What happened wor ordained, long afore she left the house. When I dreamed that dream 'bout the corpse candle, I feeled most sure somethin' would come o't; but then seein' it go up the meadows, I wor' althegither convinced. When _it_ burn, no human creetur' ha' lit it; an' none can put it out, till the doomed one be laid in the grave. Who could 'a carried it across the river--that night especial, wi' a flood lippin' full up to the banks? No mortal man, nor woman neyther!" As a native of Pembrokeshire, in whose treeless valleys the _ignis fatuus_ is oft seen, and on its dangerous coast cliffs, in times past, too oft the lanthorn of the smuggler, with the "stalking horse" of the inhuman wrecker, Mrs. Wingate's dream of the _canwyll corph_ was natural enough--a legendary reflection from tales told her in childhood, and wild songs chanted over her cradle. But her waking vision, of a light borne up the river bottom, was a phenomenon yet more natural; since in truth was it a real light, that of a lamp, carried in the hands of a man with a coracle on his back, which accounts for its passing over the stream. And the man was Richard Dempsey, who below had ferried Father Rogier across on his way to the farm of Abergann, where the latter intended remaining all night. The priest in his peregrinations, often nocturnal, accustomed to take a lamp along, had it with him on that night, having lit it before entering the coracle; but, with the difficulty of balancing himself in the crank little craft, he had set it down under the thwart, and at landing forgotten all about it. Thence the poacher, detained beyond time in reference to an appointment he meant being present at, had taken the shortest cut up the river bottom to Rugg's Ferry. This carried him twice across the stream, where it bends by the waterman's cottage; his coracle, easily launched and lifted out, enabling him to pass straight over and on, in his haste not staying to extinguish the lamp, nor even thinking of it. Not so much wonder, then, in Mrs. Wingate believing she saw the _canwyll corph_. No more that she believes it still, but less, in view of what has since come to pass; as she supposes, but the inexorable fiat of fate. "Yes!" she exclaims, proceeding with her soliloquy; "I knowed it would come. Poor thing! I hadn't no great knowledge of her myself; but sure she wor a good girl, or my son couldn't had been so fond o' her. If she'd had badness in her, Jack wouldn't greet and grieve as he be doin' now." Though right in the premises--for Mary Morgan was a good girl--Mrs. Wingate is unfortunately wrong in her deductions. But, fortunately for her peace of mind, she is so. It is some consolation to her to think that she whom her son loved, and for whom he so sorrows, was worthy of his love as his sorrow. It is wearing late, the sun having long since set; and still wondering why they went down the river, she steps outside to see if there be any sign of them returning. From the cottage but little can be seen of the stream, by reason of its tortuous course; only a short reach on either side, above and below. Placing herself to command a view of the latter, she stands gazing down it. In addition to maternal solicitude, she feels anxiety of another and less emotional nature. Her tea-caddy is empty, the sugar all expended, and other household things deficient. Jack was just about starting off for the Ferry to replace them when the Captain came. Now it is a question whether he will be home in time to reach Rugg's before the shop closes. If not, there will be a scant supper for him, and he must grope his way lightless to bed; for among the spent commodities were candles, the last one having been burnt out. In the Widow Wingate's life candles seem to play an important part! However, from all anxieties on this score she is at length and ere long relieved; her mind set at rest by a sound heard on the tranquil air of the night, the dip of a boat's oars, distant, but recognisable. Often before listening for the same, she instinctively knows them to be in the hands of her son; for Jack rows with a stroke no waterman on the Wye has but he--none equalling it in _timbre_ and regularity. His mother can tell it as a hen the chirp of her own chick, or a ewe the bleat of its lamb. That it is his stroke she has soon other evidence than her ears. In a few seconds after hearing the oars she sees them, their wet blades glistening in the moonlight, the boat between. And now she only waits for it to be pulled up and into the wash--its docking place--when Jack will tell her where they have been, and what for; perhaps, too, the Captain will come inside the cottage and speak a friendly word with her, as he has frequently done. While thus pleasantly anticipating, she has a disappointment. The skiff is passing onward--proceeding up the river! But she is comforted by seeing a hat held aloft--the salute telling her she is herself seen, and that Jack has some good reason for the prolongation of the voyage. It will no doubt terminate at the ferry, where he will get the candles and comestibles, saving him a second journey thither, and so killing two birds with one stone. Contenting herself with this construction of it, she returns inside the house, touches up the faggots on the fire, and by their cheerful blaze thinks no longer of candles, or any other light--forgetting even the _canwyll corph_. CHAPTER LIII. A SACRILEGIOUS HAND. Between Wingate's cottage and Rugg's, Captain Ryecroft has but slight acquaintance with the river, knows it only by a glimpse had here and there from the road. Now, ascending by boat, he makes note of certain things appertaining to it--chiefly, the rate of its current, the windings of its channel, and the distance between the two places. He seems considering how long a boat might be in passing from one to the other. And just this is he thinking of, his thoughts on that boat he saw starting downward. Whatever his object in all this, he does not reveal it to his companion. The time has not come for taking the waterman into full confidence. It will, but not to-night. He has again relapsed into silence, which continues till he catches sight of an object on the left bank, conspicuous against the sky, beside the moon's disc, now low. It is a cross surmounting a structure of ecclesiastical character, which he knows to be the Roman Catholic chapel at Rugg's. Soon as abreast of it, he commands-- "Hold way, Jack! Keep her steady awhile!" The waterman obeys without questioning why this new stoppage. He is himself interrogated the instant after, thus,-- "You see that shadowed spot under the bank--by the wall?" "I do, Captain." "Is there any landing-place there for a boat?" "None, as I know of. Course a boat may put in anywhere, if the bank bean't eyther a cliff or a quagmire. The reg'lar landin'-place be above, where the ferry punt lays." "But have you ever known of a boat being moored in there?" The question has reference to the place first spoken of. "I have, Captain; my own. That but once, an' the occasion not o' the pleasantest kind. 'Twar the night after my poor Mary wor buried, when I comed to say a prayer over her grave, an' plant a flower on it. I may say I stole there to do it, not wishin' to be obsarved by that sneak o' a priest, nor any o' their Romish lot. Exceptin' my own, I never knew or heard o' another boat bein' laid long there." "All right! Now on!" And on the skiff is sculled up stream for another mile, with little further speech passing between oarsman and steerer; it confined to subjects having no relation to what they have been all the evening occupied with. For Ryecroft is once more in reverie, or rather silently thinking, his thoughts concentrated on the one theme--endeavouring to solve that problem, simple of itself, but with many complications and doubtful ambiguities--how Gwendoline Wynn came by her death. He is still observed in a sea of conjectures, far as ever from its shore, when he feels the skiff at rest; as it ceases motion its oarsman asking-- "Do you weesh me to set you out here, Captain? There be the right-o'-way path through Powell's meadows. Or would ye rather be took on up to the town? Say which you'd like best, an' don't think o' any difference it makes to me." "Thanks, Jack; it's very kind of you, but I prefer the walk up the meadows. There'll be moonlight enough yet. And as I shall want your boat to-morrow--it may be for the whole of the day--you'd better get home and well rested. Besides, you say you've an errand at Rugg's--to the shop there. You must make haste, or it will be closed." "Ah! I didn't think o' that. Obleeged to ye much for remindin' me. I promised mother to get them grocery things the night, and wouldn't like to disappoint her--for a good deal." "Pull in, then, quick, and tilt me out! And, Jack! not a word to any one about where I've been, or what doing. Keep that to yourself." "I will, you may rely on me, Captain." The boat is brought against the bank; Ryecroft leaps lightly to land, calls back, "Good-night," and strikes off along the footpath. Not a moment delays the waterman; but, shoving off, and setting head down stream, pulls with all his strength, stimulated by the fear of finding the shop shut. He is in good time, however, and reaches Rugg's to see a light in the shop window, with its door standing open. Going in, he gets the groceries, and is on return to the landing-place, where he has left his skiff, when he meets with a man who has come to the ferry on an errand somewhat similar to his own. It is Joseph Preece, "Old Joe," erst boatman of Llangorren Court; but now, as all his former fellow-servants, at large. Though the acquaintance between him and Wingate is comparatively of recent date, a strong friendship has sprung up between them--stronger as the days passed, and each saw more of the other. For of late, in the exercise of their respective _metiers_, professionally alike, they have had many opportunities of being together, and more than one lengthened "confab" in the _Gwendoline's_ dock. It is days since they have met, and there is much to talk about, Joe being chief spokesman. And now that he has done his shopping, Jack can spare the time to listen. It will throw him a little later in reaching home; but his mother won't mind that. She saw him go up, and knows he will remember his errand. So the two stand conversing till the gossipy Joseph has discharged himself of a budget of intelligence, taking nigh half an hour in delivery. Then they part, the ex-Charon going about his own business, the waterman returning to his skiff. Stepping into it, and seating himself, he pulls out and down. A few strokes bring him opposite the chapel burying-ground; when all at once, as if stricken by a palsy, his arms cease moving, and the oar-blades drag deep in the water. There is not much current, and the skiff floats slowly. He in it sits with eyes turned towards the graveyard. Not that he can see anything there, for the moon has gone down, and all is darkness. But he is not gazing--only thinking. A thought, followed by an impulse leading to instantaneous action. A back stroke or two of the starboard oar, then a strong tug, and the boat's bow is against the bank. He steps ashore, ties the painter to a withy, and, climbing over the wall, proceeds to the spot so sacred to him. Dark as is now the night, he has no difficulty in finding it. He has gone over that ground before, and remembers every inch of it. There are not many gravestones to guide him, for the little cemetery is of late consecration, and its humble monuments are few and far between. But he needs not their guidance. As a faithful dog by instinct finds the grave of his master, so he, with memories quickened by affection makes his way to the place where repose the remains of Mary Morgan. Standing over her grave, he first gives himself up to an outpouring of grief, heartfelt as wild. Then, becoming calmer, he kneels down beside it, and says a prayer. It is the Lord's--he knows no other. Enough that it gives him relief; which it does, lightening his over-charged heart. Feeling better, he is about to depart, and has again risen erect, when a thought stays him--a remembrance--"The flower of Love-lies-bleeding." Is it growing? Not the flower, but the plant. He knows the former is faded, and must wait for the return of spring. But the latter--is it still alive and flourishing? In the darkness he cannot see, but will be able to tell by the touch. Once more dropping upon his knees, and extending his hands over the grave, he gropes for it. He finds the spot, but not the plant. It is gone! Nothing left of it--not a remnant! A sacrilegious hand has been there, plucked it up, torn it out root and stalk, as the disturbed turf tells him! In strange contrast with the prayerful words late upon his lips, are the angry exclamations to which he now gives utterance; some of them so profane as only under the circumstances to be excusable. "It's that d--d rascal, Dick Dempsey, as ha' done it. Can't ha' been anybody else. An' if I can but get proof o't, I'll make him repent o' the despicable trick. I will, by the livin' G----!" Thus angrily soliloquizing, he strides back to his skiff, and, getting in, rows off. But more than once, on the way homeward, he might be heard muttering words in the same wild strain--threats against Coracle Dick. CHAPTER LIV. A LATE TEA. Mrs. Wingate is again growing impatient at her son's continued absence, now prolonged beyond all reasonable time. The Dutch dial on the kitchen wall shows it to be after ten; therefore two hours since the skiff passed upwards. Jack has often made the return trip to Rugg's in less than one, while the shopping should not occupy him more than ten minutes, or, making every allowance, not twenty. How is the odd time being spent by him? Her impatience becomes uneasiness as she looks out of doors, and observes the hue of the sky. For the moon having gone down, it is now very dark, which always means danger on the river. The Wye is not a smooth swan-pond, and, flooded or not, annually claims its victims--strong men as women. And her son is upon it! "Where?" she asks herself, becoming more and more anxious. He may have taken his fare on up to the town, in which case it will be still later before he can get back. While thus conjecturing, a tinge of sadness steals over the widow's thoughts, with something of that weird feeling she experienced when once before waiting for him in the same way--on the occasion of his pretended errand after whipcord and pitch. "Poor lad!" she says, recalling the little bit of deception she pardoned, and which now more than ever seems pardonable; "he hain't no need now deceivin' his old mother that way. I only wish he had." "How black that sky do look!" she adds, rising from her seat, and going to the door; "an' threatenin' storm, if I bean't mistook. Lucky Jack ha' intimate acquaintance wi' the river 'tween here and Rugg's--if he hain't goed farther. What a blessin' the boy don't gi'e way to drink, an's otherways careful! Well, I s'pose there an't need for me feelin' uneasy. For all, I don't like his bein' so late. Mercy me! nigh on the stroke o' eleven? Ha! What's that? Him, I hope." She steps hastily out, and behind the house, which, fronting the road, has its back towards the river. On turning the corner, she hears a dull thump, as of a boat brought up against the bank; then a sharper concussion of timber striking timber--the sound of oars being unshipped. It comes from the _Mary_, at her mooring-place; as, in a few seconds after, Mrs. Wingate is made aware, by seeing her son approach with his arms full--in one of them a large brown paper parcel, while under the other are his oars. She knows it is his custom to bring the latter up to the shed--a necessary precaution due to the road running so near, and the danger of larking fellows taking a fancy to carry off his skiff. Met by his mother outside, he delivers the grocery goods, and together they go in, when he is questioned as to the cause of delay. "Whatever ha' kep' ye, Jack? Ye've been a wonderful long time goin' up to the ferry an' back!" "The ferry! I went far beyond, up to the footpath over Squire Powell's meadow. There I set Captain out." "Oh! that be it." His answer being satisfactory, he is not further interrogated, for she has become busied with an earthen-ware teapot, into which have been dropped three spoonfuls of "Horniman's" just brought home--one for her son, another for herself, and the odd one for the pot--the orthodox quantity. It is a late hour for tea; but their regular evening meal was postponed by the coming of the Captain, and Mrs. Wingate would not consider supper, as it should be, wanting the beverage which cheers without intoxicating. The pot set upon the hearthstone over some red-hot cinders, its contents are soon "mashed"; and, as nearly everything else had been got ready against Jack's arrival, it but needs for him to take seat by the table, on which one of the new composite candles, just lighted, stands in its stick. Occupied with pouring out the tea, and creaming it, the good dame does not notice anything odd in the expression of her son's countenance; for she has not yet looked at it, in a good light, nor till she is handing the cup across to him. Then, the fresh-lit candle gleaming full in his face, she sees what gives her a start. Not the sad, melancholy cast to which she has of late been accustomed. That has seemingly gone off, replaced by sullen anger, as though he were brooding over some wrong done, or insult recently received! "Whatever be the matter wi' ye, Jack?" she asks, the teacup still held in trembling hand. "There ha' something happened?" "Oh! nothin' much, mother." "Nothin' much! Then why be ye looking so black?" "What makes you think I'm lookin' that way?" "How can I help thinkin' it? Why, lad, your brow be clouded, same's the sky outside. Come now, tell the truth! Bean't there somethin' amiss?" "Well, mother, since you axe me that way, I will tell the truth. Somethin' be amiss; or I ought better say, _missin'_." "Missin'! Be't anybody ha' stoled the things out o' the boat? The balin' pan, or that bit o' cushion in the stern?" "No, it ain't; no trifle o' that kind, nor anythin' stealed eyther. 'Stead, a thing as ha' been destroyed." "What thing?" "The flower--the plant." "Flower! plant!" "Yes; the Love-lies-bleedin' I set on Mary's grave the night after she wor laid in it. Ye remember my tellin' you, mother?" "Yes--yes; I do." "Well, it ain't there now." "Ye ha' been into the chapel buryin' groun', then?" "I have." "But what made ye go there, Jack?" "Well, mother, passin' the place, I took a notion to go in--a sort o' sudden inclinashun I couldn't resist. I thought that kneelin' beside her grave, an' sayin' a prayer, might do somethin' to left the weight off o' my heart. It would ha' done that, no doubt, but for findin' the flower wan't there. Fact, it had a good deal relieved me, till I discovered it wor gone." "But how gone? Ha' the thing been cut off, or pulled up?" "Clear plucked out by the roots. Not a vestige o' it left!" "Maybe 'twer the sheep or goats. They often get into a graveyard; and if I bean't mistook, I've seen some in that o' the ferry chapel. They may have ate it up!" The idea is new to him, and being plausible, he reflects on it, for a time misled. Not long, however, only till remembering what tells him it is fallacious; this, his having set the plant so firmly that no animal could have uprooted it. A sheep or goat might have eaten off the top, but nothing more. "No, mother!" he at length rejoins; "it han't been done by eyther; but by a human hand--I ought better to say the claw o' a human tiger. No, not tiger; more o' a stinkin' cat!" "Ye suspect somebody, then?" "Suspect! I'm sure, as one can be without seein', that bit o' desecrashun ha' been the work o' Dick Dempsey. But I mean plantin' another in its place, an' watchin' it too. If he pluck it up, an' I know it, they'll need dig another grave in the Rogue's Ferry buryin' groun'--that for receivin' as big a rogue as ever wor buried there, or anywhere else, the d----d scoundrel!" "Dear Jack! don't let your passion get the better o' ye, to speak so sinfully. Richard Dempsey be a bad man, no doubt; but the Lord will deal wi' him in His own way, an' sure punish him. So leave him to the Lord. After all, what do it matter--only a bit o' weed?" "Weed! Mother, you mistake. That weed, as ye call it, wor like a silken string, bindin' my heart to Mary's. Settin' it in the sod o' her grave gied me a comfort I can't describe to ye. An' now to find it tore up brings the bitter all back again. In the spring I hoped to see it in bloom, to remind me o' her love as ha' been blighted, an', like it, lies bleedin'. But--well, it seems as I can't do nothin' for her now she's dead, as I warn't able while she wor livin'." He covers his face with his hands to hide the tears now coursing down his cheeks. "Oh, my son! don't take on so. Think that she be happy now--in heaven. Sure she is, from all I ha' heerd o' her." "Yes, mother," he earnestly affirms, "she is. If ever woman went to the good place, she ha' goed there." "Well, that ought to comfort ye." "It do some. But to think of havin' lost her for good--never again to look at her sweet face. Oh! that be dreadful!" "Sure it be. But think also that ye an't the only one as ha' to suffer. Nobody escape affliction o' that sort, some time or the other. It's the lot o' all--rich folks as well as we poor ones. Look at the Captain there! He be sufferin' like yourself. Poor man! I pity him, too." "So do I, mother. An' I ought, so well understandin' how he feel, though he be too proud to let people see it. I seed it the day--several times noticed tears in his eyes when we wor talkin' about things that reminded him o' Miss Wynn. When a soldier--a grand fightin' soldier as he ha' been--gies way to weepin', the sorrow must be strong an' deep. No doubt he be 'most heart-broke, same's myself." "But that an't right, Jack. It isn't intended we should always gie way to grief, no matter how dear they may a' been as are lost to us. Besides, it be sinful." "Well, mother, I'll try to think more cheerful, submittin' to the will o' Heaven." "Ah! There's a good lad! That's the way; an' be assured Heaven won't forsake, but comfort ye yet. Now, let's not say any more about it. You an't eating your supper!" "I han't no great appetite after all." "Never mind; ye must eat, and the tea 'll cheer ye. Hand me your cup, an' let me fill it again." He passes the empty cup across the table, mechanically. "It be very good tea," she says, telling a little untruth for the sake of abstracting his thoughts. "But I've something else for you that's better, before you go to bed." "Ye take too much care o' me, mother." "Nonsense, Jack. Ye've had a hard day's work o't. But ye hain't told me what the Captain tooked ye out for, nor where he went down the river. How far?" "Only as far as Llangorren Court." "But there be new people there now, ye sayed?" "Yes; the Murdocks. Bad lot, both man an' wife, though he wor the cousin o' the good young lady as be gone." "Sure, then, the Captain han't been to visit them?" "No, not likely. He an't the kind to consort wi' such as they, for all o' their bein' big folks now." "But there were other ladies livin' at Llangorren. What ha' become o' they?" "They ha' gone to another house somewhere down the river--a smaller one, it's sayed. The old lady as wor Miss Wynn's aunt ha' money o' her own, and the other be livin' 'long wi' her. For the rest there's been a clean out--all the sarvints sent about their business; the only one kep' bein' a French girl who wor lady's-maid to the old mistress--that's the aunt. She's now the same to the new one, who be French, like herself." "Where ha' ye heerd all this, Jack?" "From Joseph Preece. I met him up at the Ferry, as I wor comin' away from the shop." "He's out too, then?" asks Mrs. Wingate, who has of late come to know him. "Yes; same's the others." "Where be the poor man abidin' now?" "Well, that's odd too. Where do you suppose, mother?" "How should I know, my son? Where?" "In the old house where Coracle Dick used to live!" "What be there so odd in that?" "Why, because Dick's now in his house; ha' got his place at the Court, an's goin' to be somethin' far grander than ever he wor--head keeper." "Ah! poacher turned gamekeeper! That be settin' thief to catch thief!" "Somethin' besides thief, he! A deal worse than that!" "But," pursues Mrs. Wingate, without reference to the reflection on Coracle's character, "ye han't yet tolt me what the Captain took down the river." "I an't at liberty to tell any one. Ye understand me, mother?" "Yes, yes; I do." "The Captain ha' made me promise to say nothin' o' his doin's; an', to tell truth, I don't know much about them myself. But what I do know, I'm honour bound to keep dark consarnin' it--even wi' you, mother." She appreciates his nice sense of honour; and, with her own of delicacy, does not urge him to any further explanation. "In time," he adds, "I'm like enough to know all o' what he's after. Maybe, the morrow." "Ye're to see him the morrow, then?" "Yes; he wants the boat." "What hour?" "He didn't say when, only that he might be needin' me all the day. So I may look out for him early--first thing in the mornin'." "That case ye must get to your bed at oncst, an' ha' a good sleep, so's to start out fresh. First take this. It be the somethin' I promised ye--better than tea." The something is a mug of mulled elderberry wine, which, whether or not better than tea, is certainly superior to port prepared in the same way. Quaffing it down, and betaking himself to bed, under its somniferous influence, the Wye waterman is soon in the land of dreams. Not happy ones, alas! but visions of a river flood-swollen, with a boat upon its seething, frothy surface, borne rapidly on towards a dangerous eddy--then into it--at length capsized to a sad symphony--the shrieks of a drowning woman! CHAPTER LV. THE NEW MISTRESS OF THE MANSION. At Llangorren Court all is changed, from owner down to the humblest domestic. Lewin Murdock has become its master, as the priest told him he some day might. There was none to say nay. By the failure of Ambrose Wynne's heirs--in the line through his son, and bearing his name--the estate of which he was the original testator reverts to the children of his daughter, of whom Lewin Murdock, an only son, is the sole survivor. He of Glyngog is therefore indisputable heritor of Llangorren; and no one disputing it, he is now in possession, having entered upon it soon as the legal formularies could be gone through with. This they have been with a haste which causes invidious remark, if not actual scandal. Lewin Murdock is not the man to care; and, in truth, he is now scarce ever sober enough to feel sensitive, could he have felt so at any time. But in his new and luxurious home, waited on by a staff of servants, with wine at will, so unlike the days of misery spent in the dilapidated manor house, he gives loose rein to his passion for drink; leaving the management of affairs to his dexterous better-half. She has not needed to take much trouble in the matter of furnishing. Her husband, as nearest of kin to the deceased, has also come in for the personal effects, furniture included; all but some belongings of Miss Linton, which had been speedily removed by her--transferred to a little house of her own, not far off. Fortunately, the old lady is not left impecunious; but has enough to keep her in comfort, with an economy, however, that precludes all idea of longer indulging in a lady's maid, more especially one so expensive as Clarisse; who, as Jack Wingate said, has been dismissed from Miss Linton's establishment--at the same time discharging herself by notice formally given. That clever _demoiselle_ was not meant for service in a ten-roomed cottage, even though a detached one; and through the intervention of her patron, the priest, she still remains at the Court, to dance attendance on the _ancien belle_ of Mabille, as she did on the ancient toast of Cheltenham. Pleasantly so far, her new mistress being in fine spirits, and herself delighted with everything. The French adventuress has attained the goal of an ambition long cherished, though not so patiently awaited. Oft gazed she across the Wye at those smiling grounds of Llangorren, as the Fallen Angel back over its walls into the Garden of Eden; oft saw she there assemblages of people to her seeming as angels, not fallen, but in highest favour--ah! in her estimation, more than angels--women of rank and wealth, who could command what she coveted beyond any far-off joys celestial--the nearer pleasures of earth and sense. Those favoured fair ones are not there now, but she herself is; owner of the very Paradise in which they disported themselves! Nor does she despair of seeing them at Llangorren again, and having them around her in friendly intercourse, as had Gwendoline Wynn. Brought up under the _regimé_ of Louis and trained in the school of Eugenie, why need she fear either social slight or exclusion? True, she is in England, not France; but she thinks it is all the same. And not without some reason for so thinking. The ethics of the two countries, so different in days past, have of late become alarmingly assimilated--ever since that hand, red with blood spilled upon the boulevards of France, was affectionately clasped by a Queen on the dock head of Cherbourg. The taint of that touch felt throughout England, has spread over it like a plague; no local or temporary epidemic, but one which still abides, still emitting its noisome effluvia in a flood of prurient literature--novel-writers who know neither decency nor shame--newspaper scribblers devoid of either truth or sincerity--theatres little better than licensed _bagnios_, and Stock Exchange scandals smouching names once honoured in English history, with other scandals of yet more lamentable kind--all the old landmarks of England's morality being rapidly obliterated. And all the better for Olympe, _née_ Renault. Like her sort living by corruption, she instinctively rejoices at it, glories in the _monde immonde_ of the Second Empire, and admires the abnormal monster who has done so much in sowing and cultivating the noxious crop. Seeing it flourish around her, and knowing it on the increase, the new mistress of Llangorren expects to profit by it. Nor has she slightest fear of failure in any attempt she may make to enter Society. It will not much longer taboo her. She knows that, with very little adroitness, £10,000 a year will introduce her into a Royal drawing-room--ay, take her to the steps of a throne; and none is needed to pass through the gates of Hurlingham nor those of Chiswick's Garden. In this last she would not be the only flower of poisonous properties and tainted perfume; instead, would brush skirts with scores of dames wonderfully like those of the Restoration and Regency, recalling the painted dolls of the Second Charles, and the Delilahs of the Fourth George; in bold effrontery and cosmetic brilliance equalling either. The wife of Lewin Murdock hopes ere long to be among them--once more a _célebrité_, as she was in the Bois de Boulogne, and the _bals_ of the demi-monde. True, the county aristocracy have not yet called upon her. For by a singular perverseness--unlike Nature's laws in the animal and vegetable world--the outer tentacles of this called "Society" are the last to take hold. But they will yet. Money is all powerful in this free and easy age. Having that in sufficiency, it makes little difference whether she once sat by a sewing machine, or turned a mangle, as she once has done in the Faubourg Montmartre for her mother, _la blanchisseuse_. She is confident the gentry of the shire will in due time surrender, send in their cards and come of themselves; as they surely will, soon as they see her name in the _Court Journal_ or _Morning Post_, in the list of Royal receptions:--"_Mrs. Lewin Murdock, presented by the Countess of Devilacare_." And to a certainty they shall so read it, with much about her besides, if Jenkins be true to his instincts, she need not fear him--he will. She can trust his fidelity to the star scintillating in a field of plush, as to the Polar that of magnetic needle. Her husband bears his new fortunes in a manner somewhat different; in one sense more soberly, as in another the reverse. If, during his adversity, he indulged in drink, in prosperity he does not spare it. But there is another passion to which he now gives loose--his old, unconquerable vice--gaming. Little cares he for the cards of visitor, while those of the gambler delight him: and though his wife has yet received none of the former, he has his callers to take a hand with him at the latter--more than enough to make up a rubber of whist. Besides, some of his old cronies of the "Welsh Harp," who have now _entrée_ at Llangorren, several young swells of the neighbourhood--the black sheep of their respective flocks--are not above being of his company. Where the carrion is, the eagles congregate, as the vultures; and already two or three of the "leg" fraternity--in farther flight from London--have found their way into Herefordshire, and hover around the precincts of the Court. Night after night, tables are there set out for loo, _écarté, rouge et noir_, or whatever may be called for--in a small way resembling the hells of Homburg, Baden, and Monaco--wanting only the women. CHAPTER LVI. THE GAMBLERS AT LLANGORREN. Among the faces now seen at Llangorren--most of them new to the place, and not a few of forbidding aspect--there is one familiar to us. Sinister as any, since it is that of Father Rogier. At no rare intervals may it be there observed; but almost continuously. Frequent as were his visits to Glyngog, they are still more so to Llangorren, where he now spends the greater part of his time; his own solitary and somewhat humble dwelling at Rugg's Ferry seeing nothing of him for days together, while for nights its celibate bed is unslept in, the luxurious couch spread for him at the Court having greater attractions. Whether made welcome to this unlimited hospitality or not, he comports himself as though he were; seeming noways backward in the reception of it; instead, as if demanding it. One ignorant of his relations with the master of the establishment might imagine _him_ its master. Nor would the supposition be so far astray. As the King-maker controls the King, so can Gregoire Rogier the new Lord of Llangorren--influence him at his will. And this does he; though not openly, or ostensibly. That would be contrary to the tactics taught him, and the practice to which he is accustomed. The sword of Loyola in the hands of his modern apostles has become a dagger--a weapon more suitable to Ultramontanism. Only in Protestant countries to be wielded with secrecy, though elsewhere little concealed. But the priest of Rugg's Ferry is not in France; and, under the roof of an English gentleman, though a Roman Catholic, bears himself with becoming modesty--before strangers and the eyes of the outside world. Even the domestics of the house see nothing amiss. They are new to their places, and as yet unacquainted with the relationships around them. Nor would they think it strange in a priest having control there or anywhere. They are all of his persuasion, else they would not be in service at Llangorren Court. So proceed matters under its new administration. * * * * * On the same evening that Captain Ryecroft makes his quiet excursion down the river to inspect the traces on the cliff, there is a little dinner party at the Court, the diners taking seat by the table just about the time he was stepping into Wingate's skiff. The hour is early; but it is altogether a bachelor affair, and Lewin Murdock's guests are men not much given to follow fashions. Besides, there is another reason; something to succeed the dinner, on which their thoughts are more bent than upon either eating or drinking. No spread of fruit, nor dessert of any kind, but a bout at card-playing, or dice for those who prefer it. On their way to the dining-room they have caught glimpse of another apartment where whist and loo tables are seen, with all the gambling paraphernalia upon them--packs of new cards still in their wrappers, ivory counters, dice boxes with their spotted cubes lying alongside. Pretty sight to Mr. Murdock's lately picked up acquaintances; a heterogeneous circle, but all alike in one respect--each indulging in the pleasant anticipation that he will that night leave his host's house with more or less of that host's money in his pocket. Murdock has himself come easily by it, and why should he not be made as easily to part with it? If he has a plethora of cash, they have a determination to relieve him of at least a portion of it. Hence dinner is eaten in haste, and with little appreciation of the dishes, however dainty; all so longing to be around those tables in another room, and get their fingers on the toys there displayed. Their host, aware of the universal desire, does nought to frustrate it. Instead, he is as eager as any for the fray. As said, gambling is his passion, has been for most part of his life, and he could now no more live without it than go wanting drink. A hopeless victim to the last, he is equally a slave to the first. Soon, therefore, as dessert is brought in, and a glass of the heavier wines gone round, he looks significantly at his wife--the only lady at the table--who, taking the hint, retires. The gentlemen, on their feet at her withdrawal, do not sit down again, but drink standing--only a _petit verre_ of cognac by way of "corrector." Then they hurry off in an unseemly ruck towards the room containing metal more attractive, from which soon after proceed the clinking of coin and the rattle of ebony counters, with words now and then spoken not over nice, but rough, even profane, as though the speakers were playing skittles in the back yard of a London beerhouse, instead of cards under the roof of a country gentleman's mansion! While the new master of Llangorren is thus entertaining his amiable company, as much as any of them engrossed in the game, its new mistress is also playing a part, which may be more reputable, but certainly is more mysterious. She is in the drawing-room, though not alone--Father Rogier alone with her. He, of course, has been one of the dining guests, and said an unctuous grace over the table. In his sacred sacerdotal character it could hardly be expected of him to keep along with the company, though he could take a hand at cards, and play them with as much skill as any gamester of that gathering. But just now he has other fish to fry, and wishes a word in private with the mistress of Llangorren, about the way things are going on. However much he may himself like a little game with its master, and win money from him, he does not relish seeing all the world do the same; no more she. Something must be done to put a stop to it; and it is to talk over this something the two have planned their present interview, some words about it having previously passed between them. Seated side by side on a lounge, they enter upon the subject. But before a dozen words have been exchanged, they are compelled to discontinue, and for the time forego it. The interruption is caused by a third individual, who has taken a fancy to follow Mrs. Murdock into the drawing-room; a young fellow of the squire class, but as her husband late was, of somewhat damaged reputation and broken fortunes. For all having a whole eye to female beauty, which appears to him in great perfection in the face of the Frenchwoman, the rouge upon her cheeks looking the real rose-colour of that proverbial milkmaid nine times dipped in dew. The wine he has been quaffing gives it this hue, for he enters half intoxicated, and with a slight stagger in his gait--to the great annoyance of the lady, and the positive chagrin of the priest, who regards him with scowling glances. But the intruder is too tipsy to notice them, and advancing, invites himself to a seat in front of Mrs. Murdock, at the same time commencing a conversation with her. Rogier, rising, gives a significant side look, with a slight nod towards the window; then, muttering a word of excuse, saunters off out of the room. She knows what it means, as where to follow and find him. Knows also how to disembarrass herself of such as he who remained behind. Were it upon a bench of the Bois, or an arbour in the Jardin, she would make short work of it. But the ex-cocotte is now at the head of an aristocratic establishment, and must act in accordance. Therefore she allows some time to elapse, listening to the speech of her latest admirer--some of it in compliments coarse enough to give offence to ears more sensitive than hers. She at length gets rid of him on the plea of having a headache, and going upstairs to get something for it. She will be down again by-and-by; and so bows herself out of the gentleman's presence, leaving him in a state of fretful disappointment. Once outside the room, instead of turning up the stairway, she glides along the corridor, then on through the entrance hall, and then out by the front door. Nor stays she an instant on the steps or carriage-sweep, but proceeds direct to the summer-house, where she expects to find the priest. For there have they more than once been together, conversing on matters of private and particular nature. On reaching the place, she is disappointed--some little surprised. Rogier is not there, nor can she see him anywhere around. For all that, the gentleman is very near, without her knowing it--only a few paces off, lying flat upon his face among ferns, but so engrossed with thoughts--just then of an exciting nature--he neither hears her light footsteps, nor his own name pronounced. Not loudly, though, since, while pronouncing it, she feared being heard by some other. Besides, she does not think it necessary. He will come yet, without calling. She steps inside the pavilion, and there stands waiting. Still he does not come, nor sees she anything of him--only a boat on the river above, being rowed upwards; but without thought of its having anything to do with her or her affairs. By this there is another boat in motion, for the priest has meanwhile forsaken his spying place upon the cliff, and proceeded down to the dock. "Where can Gregoire have gone?" she asks herself, becoming more and more impatient. Several times she puts the question without receiving answer, and is about starting on return to the house, when longer stayed by a rumbling noise which reaches her ears, coming up from the direction of the dock. "Can it be he?" Continuing to listen, she hears the stroke of oars. It cannot be the boat she has seen rowing off above. That must now be far away, while this is near--in the bye-water just below her. But can it be the priest who is in it? Yes, it is he, as she discovers, after stepping outside to the place he so late occupied, and looking over the cliff's edge; for then she had a view of his face, lit up by a lucifer match--itself looking like that of Lucifer. What can he be doing down there? Why, examining those things he already knows all about, as she herself. She would call down to him and inquire, but possibly better not. He may be engaged upon some matter calling for secrecy, as he often is. Other eyes besides hers may be near, and her voice might draw them on him. She will wait for his coming up. And wait she does, at the boat's dock, on the top step of the stair, there receiving him, as he returns from his short, but still unexplained, excursion. "What is it?" she asks, soon as he has mounted up to her. "_Quelque chose à tort?_" "More than that. A veritable danger!" "_Comment?_ Explain!" "There's a hound upon our track! One of sharpest scent." "Who?" "_Le Capitaine de hussards!_" The dialogue that succeeds between Olympe Renault and Gregoire Rogier has no reference to Lewin Murdock gambling away his money, but the fear of his losing it in quite another way; which, for the rest of that night, gives them something else to think of, as also something to do. CHAPTER LVII. AN UNWILLING NOVICE. "Am I myself? Dreaming? Or is it insanity?" It is a young girl who thus strangely interrogates, a beautiful girl, woman grown, of tall stature, with bright face, and a wealth of hair, golden hued. But what is beauty to her with all these adjuncts? As the flower born to blush unseen, eye of man may not look upon hers, though it is not wasting its sweetness on the desert air, but within the walls of a convent. An English girl, though the convent is in France--in the city of Boulogne-sur-mer; the same in whose attached _pensionnat_ the sister of Major Mahon is receiving education. She is not the girl, for Kate Mahon, though herself beautiful, is no blonde--instead, the very opposite. Besides, this creature of radiant complexion is not attending school: she is beyond the years for that. Neither is she allowed the freedom of the streets, but kept shut up within a cell in the innermost recesses of the establishment, where the _pensionnaires_ are not permitted, save one or two who are favourites with the Lady Superior. A small apartment the young girl occupies--bed-chamber and sitting-room in one; in short, a nun's cloister--furnished, as such are, in a style of austere simplicity: pallet bed along the one side, the other taken up by a plain deal dressing-table, a washstand with jug and basin--these little bigger than tea-bowl and ewer--and a couple of common rush-bottom chairs; that is all. The walls are lime-washed, but most of their surface is concealed by pictures of saints, male and female; while the mother of all is honoured by an image, having a niche to itself, in a corner. On the table are some four or five books, including a Testament and Missal; their bindings, with the orthodox cross stamped upon them, proclaiming the nature of the contents. A literature that cannot be to the liking of the present occupant of the cloister, since she has been there several days without turning over a single leaf, or even taking up one of the volumes to look at it. That she is not there with her own will, but against it, can be told by her words, and as their tone, her manner while giving utterance to them. Seated upon the side of the bed, she has sprung to her feet, and with arms raised aloft and tossed about, strides distractedly over the floor. One seeing her thus might well imagine her to be, what she half fancies herself, insane!--a supposition strengthened by an unnatural lustre in her eyes, and a hectic flush on her cheeks, unlike the hue of health. Still, not as with one suffering bodily sickness, or any physical ailment, but more as from a mind diseased. Seen for only a moment--that particular moment--such would be the conclusion regarding her. But her speech coming after, tells she is in full possession of her senses, only under terrible agitation, distraught with some great trouble. "It must be a convent! But how have I come into it? Into France, too; for surely am I there? The woman who brings my meals is French. So the other--Sister of Mercy, as she calls herself, though she speaks my own tongue. The furniture--bed, table, chairs, washstand--everything of French manufacture. And in all England there is not such a jug and basin as those!" Regarding the lavatory utensils--so diminutive as to recall "Gulliver's travels in Lilliput," if ever read by her--she for a moment seems to forget her misery, even in its very midst, and keenest, at sight of the ludicrous and grotesque. It is quickly recalled, as her glance, wandering around the room, again rests on the little statue--not of marble, but a cheap plaster of Paris cast--and she reads the inscription underneath, "_La Mère de Dieu_." The symbols tell her she is inside a nunnery, and upon the soil of France! "Oh, yes!" she exclaims, "'tis certainly so! I am no more in my native land, but have been carried across the sea!" The knowledge, or belief, does nought to tranquillize her feelings, or explain the situation, to her all mysterious. Instead, it but adds to her bewilderment, and she once more exclaims, almost repeating herself,-- "Am I myself? Is it a dream? Or have my senses indeed forsaken me?" She clasps her hands across her forehead, the white fingers threading the thick folds of her hair, which hangs dishevelled. She presses them against her temples, as if to make sure her brain is still untouched! It is so, or she would not reason as she does. "Everything around shows I am in France. But how came I to it? Who has brought me? What offence have I given God or man, to be dragged from home, from country, and confined--imprisoned! Convent, or whatever it be, imprisoned I am! The door constantly kept locked! That window, so high, I cannot see over its sill! The dim light it lets in telling it was not meant for enjoyment. Oh! Instead of cheering, it tantalizes--tortures me!" Despairingly she reseats herself upon the side of the bed, and with head still buried in her hands, continues her soliloquy--no longer of things present, but reverting to the past. "Let me think again! What can I remember? That night, so happy in its beginning, to end as it did! The end of my life, as I thought, if I had a thought at that time. It was not, though, or I shouldn't be here, but in heaven, I hope. Would I were in heaven now! When I recall _his_ words--those last words and think----" "Your thoughts are sinful, child!" The remark, thus interrupting, is made by a woman, who appears on the threshold of the door, which she had just pushed open. A woman of mature age, dressed in a floating drapery of deep black--the orthodox garb of the Holy Sisterhood, with all its insignia of girdle, bead-roll, and pendant crucifix. A tall, thin personage, with skin like shrivelled parchment, and a countenance that would be repulsive but for the nun's coif, which, partly concealing, tones down its sinister expression. Withal, a face disagreeable to gaze upon; not the less so from its air of sanctity, evidently affected. The intruder is Sister Ursule. She has opened the door noiselessly--as cloister doors are made to open--and stands between its jambs, like a shadowy _silhouette_ in its frame, one hand still holding the knob, while in the other is a small volume, apparently well thumbed. That she has had her ear to the keyhole before presenting herself is told by the rebuke having reference to the last words of the girl's soliloquy, in her excitement uttered aloud. "Yes," she continues, "sinful--very sinful! You should be thinking of something else than the world and its wickedness, and of anything before that you have been thinking of--the wickedness of all." She thus spoken to had neither started at the intrusion, nor does she show surprise at what is said. It is not the first visit of Sister Ursule to her cell, made in like stealthy manner; nor the first austere speech she has heard from the same skinny lips. At the beginning she did not listen to it patiently; instead, with indignation--defiantly, almost fiercely, rejoining. But the proudest spirit can be humbled. Even the eagle, when its wings are beaten to exhaustion against the bars of its cage, will become subdued, if not tamed. Therefore the imprisoned English girl makes reply meekly and appealingly,-- "Sister of Mercy, as you are called, have mercy upon me! Tell me why I am here?" "For the good of your soul and its salvation." "But how can that concern any one save myself?" "Ah! there you mistake, child; which shows the sort of life you've been hitherto leading, and the sort of people surrounding you; who, in their sinfulness, imagine all as themselves. They cannot conceive that there are those who deem it a duty--nay, a direct command from God--to do all in their power for the redemption of lost sinners, and restoring them to his Divine favour. He is all-merciful." "True--He is. I do not need to be told it. Only, who these redemptionists are that take such interest in my spiritual welfare, and how I have come to be here, surely I may know?" "You shall in time, _ma fille_. Now you cannot--must not--for many reasons." "What reasons?" "Well, for one, you have been very ill--nigh unto death, indeed." "I know that, without knowing how." "Of course. The accident which came near depriving you of your life was of that sudden nature; and your senses----But I mustn't speak further about it. The doctor has given strict directions that you're to be kept quiet, and it might excite you. Be satisfied with knowing that they who placed you here are the same who saved your life, and would now rescue your soul from perdition. I've brought you this little volume for perusal. It will help to enlighten you." She stretches out her long bony fingers, handing the book--one of those "Aids to Faith" relied upon by the apostles of the _Propaganda_. The girl mechanically takes it, without looking at or thinking of it; still pondering upon the unknown benefactors, who, as she is told, have done so much for her. "How good of them!" she rejoins, with an air of incredulity, and in tones that might be taken as derisive. "How wicked of you!" retorts the other, taking it in this sense. "Positively ungrateful!" she adds, with the acerbity of a baffled proselytiser. "I am sorry, child, you still cling to your sinful thoughts, and keep up a rebellious spirit in face of all that is being done for your good. But I shall leave you now, and go and pray for you; hoping, on my next visit, to find you in a more proper frame of mind." So saying, Sister Ursule glides out of the cloister, drawing to the door, and silently turning the key in its lock. "O God!" groans the young girl in despair, flinging herself along the pallet, and for the third time interrogating, "Am I myself, and dreaming? Or am I mad? In mercy, Heaven, tell me what it means!" CHAPTER LVIII. A CHEERFUL KITCHEN. Of all the domestics turned adrift from Llangorren, one alone interests us--Joseph Preece--"Old Joe," as his young mistress used familiarly to call him. As Jack Wingate has made his mother aware, Joe has moved into the house formerly inhabited by Coracle Dick; so far changing places with the poacher, who now occupies the lodge in which the old man erewhile lived as one of the retainers of the Wynn family. Beyond this the exchange has not extended. Richard Dempsey, under the new _regimé_ at Llangorren, has been promoted to higher office than was ever held by Joseph Preece; who, on the other hand, has neither turned poacher, nor intends doing so. Instead, the versatile Joseph, as if to keep up his character for versatility, has taken to a new calling altogether--that of basket-making, with the construction of bird-cages, and other kinds of wicker-work. Rather is it the resumption of an old business to which he had been brought up, but abandoned long years agone on entering the service of Squire Wynn. Having considerable skill in this textile trade, he hopes in his old age to make it maintain him. Only in part; for, thanks to the generosity of his former master, and more still that of his late mistress, Joe has laid by a little _pecunium_, nearly enough for his needs; so that, in truth, he has taken to the wicker-working less from necessity than for the sake of having something to do. The old man of many _metiers_ has never led an idle life, and dislikes leading it. It is not by any accident he has drifted into the domicile late in the occupation of Dick Dempsey, though Dick had nothing to do with it. The poacher himself was but a week-to-week tenant, and of course cleared out soon as obtaining his promotion. Then, the place being to let, at a low rent, the ex-charon saw it would suit him; all the better because of a "withey bed" belonging to the same landlord, which was to let at the same time. This last being at the mouth of the dingle in which the solitary dwelling stands--and promising a convenient supply of the raw material for his projected manufacture--he has taken a lease of it along with the house. Under his predecessor the premises having fallen into dilapidation--almost ruin--the old boatman had a bargain of them, on condition of his doing the repairs. He has done them; made the roof water-tight; given the walls a coat of plaster and whitewash; laid a new floor--in short, rendered the house habitable, and fairly comfortable. Among other improvements, he has partitioned off a second sleeping apartment, and not only plastered but papered it. More still, neatly and tastefully furnished it, the furniture consisting of an iron bedstead, painted emerald green, with brass knobs; a new washstand, and dressing table with mahogany-framed glass on the top, three cane chairs, a towel horse, and other etceteras. For himself? No; he has a bedroom besides. And this, by the style of the plenishing, is evidently intended for one of the fair sex. Indeed, one has already taken possession of it, as evinced by some female apparel suspended upon pegs against the wall; a pin-cushion, with a brooch in it, on the dressing table; bracelets and a necklace besides, with two or three scent bottles, and several other toilet trifles scattered about in front of the framed glass. They cannot be the belongings of "Old Joe's" wife nor yet his daughter; for among the many parts he has played in life, that of Benedict has not been. A bachelor he is, and a bachelor he intends staying to the end of the chapter. Who, then, is the owner of the brooch, bracelets, and other bijouterie? In a word, his niece--a slip of a girl who was under-housemaid at Llangorren; like himself, set at large, and now transformed into a full-fledged housekeeper--his own. But before entering on parlour duties at the Court, she had seen service in the kitchen, under the cook; and some culinary skill, then and there acquired, now stands her old uncle in stead. By her deft manipulation, stewed rabbit becomes as jugged hare, so that it would be difficult to tell the difference; while she has at her fingers' ends many other feats of the _cuisine_ that give him gratification. The old servitor of Squire Wynn is in his way a _gourmet_, and has a tooth for toothsome things. His accomplished niece, with somewhat of his own cleverness, bears the pretty name of Amy--Amy Preece, for she is his brother's child. And she is pretty as her name, a bright, blooming girl, rose-cheeked, with form well rounded, and flesh firm as a Ribston pippin. Her cheerful countenance lights up the kitchen late shadowed by the presence and dark, scowling features of Coracle Dick--brightens it even more than the brand-new tin-ware, or the whitewash upon its walls. Old Joe rejoices; and if we have a regret, it is that he had not long ago taken up housekeeping for himself. But this thought suggests another contradicting it. How could he while his young mistress lived? She so much beloved by him, whose many beneficences have made him, as he is, independent for the rest of his days, never more to be harassed by care or distressed by toil, one of her latest largesses, the very last, being to bestow upon him the pretty pleasure craft bearing her own name. This she had actually done on the morning of that day, the twenty-first anniversary of her birth, as it was the last of her life; thus by an act of grand generosity commemorating two events so strangely, terribly in contrast! And as though some presentiment forewarned her of her own sad fate, so soon to follow, she had secured the gift by a scrap of writing; thus at the change in the Llangorren household enabling its old boatman to claim the boat, and obtain it too. It is now lying just below, at the brook's mouth, by the withey bed, where Joe has made a mooring place for it. The handsome thing would fetch £50; and many a Wye waterman would give his year's earnings to possess it. Indeed, more than one has been after it, using arguments to induce its owner to dispose of it--pointing out how idle of him to keep a craft so little suited to his present calling! All in vain. Old Joe would sooner sell his last shirt, or the newly-bought furniture of his house--sooner go begging--than part with that boat. It oft bore him beside his late mistress, so much lamented; it will still bear him lamenting her--ay, for the rest of his life. If he has lost the lady, he will cling to the souvenir which carries her honoured name! But, however faithful the old family retainer, and affectionate in his memories, he does not let their sadness overpower him, nor always give way to the same. Only at times when something turns up more vividly than usual recalling Gwendoline Wynn to remembrance. On other and ordinary occasions he is cheerful enough, this being his natural habit. And never more than on a certain night shortly after that of his chance encounter with Jack Wingate, when both were a-shopping at Rugg's Ferry. For there and then, in addition to the multifarious news imparted to the young waterman, he gave the latter an invitation to visit him in his new home, which was gladly and off-hand accepted. "A bit o' supper and a drop o' somethin' to send it down," were the old boatman's words specifying the entertainment. The night has come round, and the "bit o' supper" is being prepared by Amy, who is acting as though she was never more called upon to practise the culinary art; and, according to her own way of thinking, she never has been. For, to let out a little secret, the French lady's-maid was not the only feminine at Llangorren Court who had cast admiring eyes on the handsome boatman who came there rowing Captain Ryecroft. Raising the curtain still higher, Amy Preece's position is exposed; she, too, having been caught in that same net, spread for neither. Not strange then, but altogether natural. She is now exerting herself to cook a supper that will give gratification to the expected guest. She would work her fingers off for Jack Wingate. Possibly the uncle may have some suspicion of why she is moving about so alertly, and besides looking so pleased like. If not a suspicion, he has a wish and a hope. Nothing in life, now, would be so much to his mind as to see his niece married to the man he has invited to visit him. For never in all his life has old Joe met one he so greatly cottons to. His intercourse with the young waterman, though scarce six months old, seems as if it had been of twice as many years; so friendly and pleasant, he not only wants it continued, but wishes it to become nearer and dearer. If his niece be baiting a trap in the cooking of the supper, he has himself set that trap by the "invite" he gave to the expected guest. A gentle tapping at the door tells him the triangle is touched; and, responding to the signal, he calls out,-- "That you, Jack Wingate? O' course it be. Come in!" And in Jack Wingate comes. CHAPTER LIX. QUEER BRIC-A-BRAC. Stepping over the threshold, the young waterman is warmly received by his older brother of the oar, and blushingly by the girl, whose cheeks are already of a high colour, caught from the fire over which she has been stooping. Old Joe, seated in the chimney corner, in a huge wicker chair of his own construction, motions Jack to another opposite, leaving the space in front clear for Amy to carry on her culinary operations. There are still a few touches to be added--a sauce to be concocted--before the supper can be served; and she is concocting it. Host and guest converse without heeding her, chiefly on topics relating to the bore of the river, about which old Joe is an oracle. As the other, too, has spent all his days on Vaga's banks; but there have been more of them, and he longer resident in that particular neighbourhood. It is too early to enter upon subjects of a more serious nature, though a word now and then slips in about the late occurrence at Llangorren, still wrapped in mystery. If they bring shadows over the brow of the old boatman, these pass off, as he surveys the table which his niece has tastefully decorated with fruits and late autumn flowers. It reminds him of many a pleasant Christmas night in the grand servants' hall at the Court, under holly and mistletoe, besides bowls of steaming punch and dishes of blazing snapdragon. His guest knows something of that same hall; but cares not to recall its memories. Better likes he the bright room he is now seated in. Within the radiant circle of its fire, and the other pleasant surroundings, he is for the time cheerful--almost himself again. His mother told him it was not good to be for ever grieving--not righteous, but sinful. And now, as he watches the graceful creature moving about, actively engaged--and all on his account--he begins to think there may be truth in what she said. At all events, his grief is more bearable than it has been for long days past. Not that he is untrue to the memory of Mary Morgan. Far from it. His feelings are but natural, inevitable. With that fair presence flitting before his eyes, he would not be man if it failed in some way to impress him. But his feelings for Amy Preece do not go beyond the bounds of respectful admiration. Still is it an admiration that may become warmer, gathering strength as time goes on. It even does somewhat on this same night; for, in truth, the girl's beauty is a thing which cannot be glanced at without a wish to gaze upon it again. And she possesses something more than beauty--a gift not quite so rare, but perhaps as much prized by Jack Wingate--modesty. He has noted her shy, almost timid mien, ere now; for it is not the first time he has been in her company--contrasted it with the bold advances made to him by her former fellow-servant at the Court--Clarisse. And now, again, he observes the same bearing, as she moves about through that cheery place, in the light of glowing coals--best from the Forest of Dean. And he thinks of it while seated at the supper table; she at its head, _vis-à-vis_ to her uncle, and distributing the viands. These are no damper to his admiration of her, since the dishes she has prepared are of the daintiest. He has not been accustomed to eat such a meal, for his mother could not cook it; while, as already said, Amy is something of an _artiste de cuisine_. An excellent wife she would make, all things considered; and possibly at a later period, Jack Wingate might catch himself so reflecting; but not now--not to-night. Such a thought is not in his mind; could not be, with that sadder thought still overshadowing. The conversation at the table is mostly between the uncle and himself, the niece only now and then putting in a word; and the subjects are still of a general character, in the main relating to boats and their management. It continues so till the supper things have been cleared off; and in their place appear a decanter of spirits, a basin of lump sugar, and a jug of hot water, with a couple of tumblers containing spoons. Amy knows her uncle's weakness--which is a whisky toddy before going to bed; for it is the "barley bree" that sparkles in the decanter; and also aware that to-night he will indulge in more than one, she sets the kettle on its trivet against the bars of the grate. As the hour has now waxed late, and the host is evidently longing for a more confidential chat with his guest, she asks if there is anything more likely to be wanted. Answered in the negative, she bids both "Good-night," withdraws to the little chamber so prettily decorated for her, and goes to her bed. But not immediately to fall asleep. Instead, she lies awake thinking of Jack Wingate, whose voice, like a distant murmur, she can now and then hear. The _femme de chambre_ would have had her cheek at the keyhole, to catch what he might say. Not so the young English girl, brought up in a very different school; and if she lies awake, it is from no prying curiosity, but kept so by a nobler sentiment. On the instant of her withdrawal, old Joe, who has been some time showing in a fidget for it, hitches his chair closer to the table, desiring his guest to do the same; and the whisky punches having been already prepared, they also bring their glasses together. "Yer good health, Jack." "Same to yerself, Joe." After this exchange, the ex-Charon, no longer constrained by the presence of a third party, launches out into a dialogue altogether different from that hitherto held between them--the subject being the late tenant of the house in which they are hobnobbing. "Queer sort o' chap, that Coracle Dick! an't he, Jack?" "Course he be. But why do ye ask? You knowed him afore, well enough." "Not so well's now. He never comed about the Court, 'ceptin' once when fetched there--afore the old Squire on a poachin' case. Lor! what a change! He now head-keeper o' the estate." "Ye say ye know him better than ye did? Ha' ye larned anythin' 'bout him o' late?" "That hae I, an' a goodish deal too. More'n one thing as seems kewrous." "If ye don't object tellin' me, I'd like to hear what they be." "Well, one are, that Dick Dempsey ha' been in the practice of somethin' besides poachin'." "That an't no news to me. I ha' long suspected him o' doin's worse than that." "Amongst them did ye include forgin'?" "No; because I never thought o' it. But I believe him to be capable o' it, or anything else. What makes ye think he ha' been a forger?" "Well, I won't say forger, for he mayn't ha' made the things. But for sure he ha' been engaged in passin' them off." "Passin' what off!" "Them!" rejoins Joe, drawing a little canvas bag out of his pocket, and spilling its contents upon the table--over a score of coins, to all appearance half-crown pieces. "Counterfeits--every one o' 'em!" he adds, as the other sits staring at them in surprise. "Where did you find them?" asks Jack. "In the corner o' an old cubbord. Furbishin' up the place, I comed across them--besides a goodish grist o' other kewrosities. What would ye think o' my predecessor here bein' a burglar as well as smasher?" "I wouldn't think that noways strange neyther. As I've sayed already, I b'lieve Dick Dempsey to be a man who'd not mind takin' a hand at any mortal thing, howsomever bad--burglary, or even worse, if it wor made worth his while. But what led ye to think he ha' been also in the housebreakin' line?" "These!" answers the old boatman, producing another and larger bag, the more ponderous contents of which he spills out on the floor--not the table--as he does so exclaiming, "Theere be a lot o' oddities! A complete set o' burglar's tools--far as I can understand them." And so are they, jemmies, cold chisels, skeleton keys--in short, every implement of the cracksman's calling. "And ye found them in the cubbert too?" "No, not there, nor yet inside; but on the premises. The big bag, wi' its contents, wor crammed up into a hole in the rocks--the clift at the back o' the house." "Odd, all o' it! An' the oddest his leavin' such things behind--to tell the tale o' his guilty doin's. I suppose bein' full o' his new fortunes, he's forgot all about them." "But ye han't waited for me to gie the whole o' the cat'logue. There be somethin' more to come." "What more?" asks the young waterman, surprisedly, and with renewed interest. "A thing as seems kewrouser than all the rest. I can draw conclusions from the counterfeet coins, an' the housebreakin' implements; but the other beats me dead down, an' I don't know what to make o't. Maybe you can tell. I foun' it stuck up the same hole in the rocks, wi' a stone in front exact fittin' to an' fillin' its mouth." While speaking, he draws open a chest, and takes from it a bundle of some white stuff--apparently linen--loosely rolled. Unfolding, and holding it up to the light, he adds,-- "Theer be the eydentical article!" No wonder he thought the thing strange, found where he had found it; for it is a _shroud_! White, with a cross and two letters in red stitched upon that part which, were it upon a body, both cross and lettering would lie over the breast! "O God!" cries Jack Wingate, as his eyes rest upon the symbol. "That's the shroud Mary Morgan wor buried in! I can swear to 't. I seed her mother stitch on that cross an' them letters--the ineetials o' her name. An' I seed it on herself in the coffin 'fore 't wor closed. Heaven o' mercy! what do it mean?" Amy Preece, lying awake in her bed, hears Jack Wingate's voice excitedly exclaiming, and wonders what that means. But she is not told; nor learns she aught of a conversation which succeeds in more subdued tone; prolonged to a much later hour--even into morning. For before the two men part, they mature a plan for ascertaining why that ghostly thing is still above ground instead of in the grave, where the body it covered is coldly sleeping! CHAPTER LX. A BRACE OF BODY-SNATCHERS. What with the high hills that shut in the valley of the Wye, and the hanging woods that clothe their steep slopes, the nights there are often so dark as to justify the familiar saying, "You couldn't see your hand before you." I have been out on some, when a white kerchief held within three feet of the eye was absolutely invisible; and it required a skilful Jehu, with best patent lamps, to keep carriage wheels upon the causeway of the road. Such a night has drawn down over Rugg's Ferry, shrouding the place in impenetrable gloom. Situated in a concavity--as it were, at the bottom of an extinct volcanic crater--the obscurity is deeper than elsewhere; to-night alike covering the Welsh Harp, detached dwelling houses, chapel, and burying-ground, as with a pall. Not a ray of light scintillates anywhere; for the hour is after midnight, and everybody has retired to rest; the weak glimmer of candles from cottage windows, as the stronger glare through those of the hotel-tavern, are no longer to be seen. In the last every lamp is extinguished, its latest-sitting guest--if it have any guest--having gone to bed. Some of the poachers and night-netters may be astir. If so, they are abroad, and not about the place, since it is just at such hours they are away from it. For all, two men are near by, seemingly moving with as much stealth as any trespassers after fish or game, and with even more mystery in their movements. The place occupied by them is the shadowed corner under the wall of the chapel cemetery, where Captain Ryecroft saw three men embarking on a boat. These are also in a boat; but not one in the act of rowing off from the river's edge; instead, just being brought into it. Soon as its cutwater strikes against the bank, one of the men, rising to his feet, leaps out upon the land, and attaches the painter to a sapling, by giving it two or three turns around the stem. Then facing back towards the boat, he says,-- "Hand me them things; an' look out not to let 'em rattle!" "Ye need ha' no fear 'bout that," rejoins the other, who has now unshipped the oars, and stowed them fore and aft along the thwarts, they not being the things asked for. Then, stooping down, he lifts something out of the boat's bottom, and passes it over the side, repeating the movement three or four times. The things thus transferred from one to the other are handled by both as delicately as though they were pheasant's or plover's eggs, instead of what they are--an ordinary set of grave-digger's tools--spade, shovel, and mattock. There is, besides, a bundle of something soft, which, as there is no danger of its making noise, is tossed up to the top of the bank. He who has flung follows it; and the two gathering up the hardware, after some words exchanged in muttered tone, mount over the cemetery wall. The younger first leaps it, stretching back, and giving a hand to the other--an old man, who finds some difficulty in the ascent. Inside the sacred precincts they pause, partly to apportion the tools, but as much to make sure that they have not hitherto been heard. Seen, they could not be, before or now. Becoming satisfied that the coast is clear, the younger man says in a whisper,-- "It be all right, I think. Every livin' sinner--an' there be a good wheen o' that stripe 'bout here--have gone to bed. As for him, blackest o' the lot, who lives in the house adjoinin', ain't like he's at home. Good as sure down at Llangorren Court, where just now he finds quarters more comfortable. We hain't nothin' to fear, I take it. Let's on to the place. You lay hold o' my skirt, and I'll gie ye the lead. I know the way, every inch o' it." Saying which he moves off, the other doing as directed, and following step for step. A few paces further, and they arrive at a grave, beside which they again make stop. In daylight it would show recently made, though not altogether new. A month or so since the turf had been smoothed over it. The men are now about to disturb it, as evinced by their movements and the implements brought along. But, before going further in their design--body-snatching, or whatever it be--both drop down upon their knees, and again listen intently, as though still in some fear of being interrupted. Not a sound is heard save the wind, as it sweeps in mournful cadence through the trees along the hill slopes, and nearer below, the rippling of the river. At length, convinced they have the cemetery to themselves, they proceed to their work, which begins by their spreading out a sheet on the grass close to and alongside the grave--a trick of body-stealers--so as to leave no traces of their theft. That done, they take up the sods with their hands, carefully, one after another; and, with like care, lay them down upon the sheet, the grass sides underneath. Then, seizing hold of the tools--spade and shovel--they proceed to scoop out the earth, placing it in a heap beside. They have no need to make use of the mattock; the soil is loose, and lifts easily. Nor is their task as excavators of long continuance--even shorter than they anticipated. Within less than eighteen inches of the surface, their tools come into contact with a harder substance, which they can tell to be timber--the lid of a coffin. Soon as striking it, the younger faces round to his companion, saying,-- "I tolt ye so--listen!" With the spade's point he again gives the coffin a tap. It returns a hollow sound--too hollow for aught to be inside it! "No body in there!" he adds. "Hadn't we better keep on, an' make sure?" suggests the other. "Sartint we had--an' will." Once more they commence shovelling out the earth, and continue till it is all cleared from the coffin. Then, inserting the blade of the mattock under the edge of the lid, they raise it up; for it is not screwed down, only laid on loosely--the screws all drawn and gone! Flinging himself on his face, and reaching forward, the younger man gropes inside the coffin--not expecting to feel any body there, but mechanically, and to see if there be aught else. There is nothing--only emptiness. The house of the dead is untenanted--its tenant has been taken away! "I know'd it!" he exclaims, drawing back. "I know'd my poor Mary wor no longer here!" It is no body-snatcher who speaks thus, but Jack Wingate, his companion being Joseph Preece. After which, the young waterman says not another word in reference to the discovery they have both made. He is less sad than thoughtful now. But he keeps his thoughts to himself, an occasional whisper to his companion being merely by way of direction, as they replace the lid upon the coffin, cover all up as before, shake in the last fragments of loose earth from the sheet, and restore the grave turf--adjusting the sods with as much exactitude as though they were laying tesselated tiles! Then, taking up their tools, they glide back to the boat, step into it, and shove off. On return down stream they reflect in different ways, the old boatman of Llangorren still thinking it but a case of body-snatching, done by Coracle Dick, for the doctors, with a view to earning a dishonest penny. Far otherwise the thoughts of Jack Wingate. He thinks, nay, hopes--almost happily believes--that the body exhumed was not dead--never has been--but that Mary Morgan still lives, breathes, and has being! CHAPTER LXI. IN WANT OF HELP. "Drowned? No! Dead before she ever went under the water. Murdered, beyond the shadow of a doubt." It is Captain Ryecroft who thus emphatically affirms. And to himself, being alone, within his room in the Wyeside Hotel; for he is still in Herefordshire. More in conjecture, he proceeds,-- "They first smothered, I suppose, or in some way rendered her insensible; then carried her to the place and dropped her in, leaving the water to complete their diabolical work? A double death, as it were; though she may not have suffered its agonies twice. Poor girl! I hope not." In prosecuting the inquiry to which he has devoted himself, beyond certain unavoidable communications with Jack Wingate, he has not taken any one into his confidence. This partly from having no intimate acquaintances in the neighbourhood, but more because he fears the betrayal of his purpose. It is not ripe for public exposure, far less bringing before a court of justice. Indeed, he could not yet shape an accusation against any one, all that he has learnt now serving only to satisfy him that his original suspicions were correct; which it has done, as shown by his soliloquy. He has since made a second boat excursion down the bye-channel--made it in the daytime, to assure himself there was no mistake in his observations under the light of the lamp. It was for this he had bespoken Wingate's skiff for the following day; for certain reasons reaching Llangorren at the earliest hour of dawn. There and then to see what surprised him quite as much as the unexpected discovery of the night before--a grand breakage from the brow of the cliff; but not any more misleading him. If the first "sign" observed there failed to blind him, so does that which has obliterated it. No natural rock-slide, was the conclusion he came to, soon as setting eyes upon it; but the work of human hands! And within the hour, as he could see by the clods of loosened earth still dropping down and making muddy the water underneath; while bubbles were ascending from the detached boulder lying invisible below! Had he been there only a few minutes earlier, himself invisible, he would have seen a man upon the cliff's crest, busy with a crowbar, levering the rock from its bed, and tilting it over--then carefully removing the marks of the iron implement, as also his own footprints! The man saw him through the blue-grey dawn, in his skiff, coming down the river; just as on the preceding night under the light of the moon. For he thus early astir and occupied in a task as that of Sysiphus, was no other than Father Rogier. The priest had barely time to retreat and conceal himself, as the boat drew down to the eyot--not this time crouching among the ferns, but behind some evergreens, at a farther and safer distance. Still, near enough for him to observe the other's look of blank astonishment on beholding the _debâcle_, and note the expression change to one of significant intelligence as he continued gazing at it. "_Un limier veritable!_" A hound that has scented blood, and's determined to follow it up, till he find the body whence it flowed. Aha! The game must be got out of his way. Llangorren will have to change owners once again, and the sooner, the better. At the very moment these thoughts were passing through the mind of Gregoire Rogier, the "veritable bloodhound" was mentally repeating the same words he had used on the night before: "No accident--no suicide--murdered!" adding, as his eyes ranged over the surface of red sandstone, so altered in appearance, "This makes me all the more sure of it. Miserable trick! Not much Mr. Lewin Murdock will gain by it." So thought he then. But now, days after, though still believing Murdock to be the murderer, he thinks differently about the "trick." For the evidence afforded by the former traces, though slight, and pointing to no one in particular, was, nevertheless, a substantial indication of guilt against somebody; and these being blotted out, there is but his own testimony of their having ever existed. Though himself convinced that Gwendoline Wynn has been assassinated, he cannot see his way to convince others--much less a legal tribunal. He is still far from being in a position openly to accuse, or even name the criminals who ought to be arraigned. He now knows there are more than one, or so supposes, still believing that Murdock has been the principal actor in the tragedy; though others besides have borne part in it. "The man's wife must know all about it," he says, going on in conjectural chain; "and that French priest--he probably the instigator of it. Ay! possibly had a hand in the deed itself. There have been such cases recorded--many of them. Exercising great authority at Llangorren--as Jack has learned from his friend Joe--there commanding everybody and everything! And the fellow Dempsey--poacher, and what not--he, too, become an important personage about the place! Why all this? Only intelligible on the supposition that they have had to do with a death by which they have been all benefited. Yes; all four, acting conjointly, have brought it about! "And how am I to bring it home to them? 'Twill be difficult indeed, if at all possible. Even that slight sign destroyed has increased the difficulty. "No use taking the 'great unpaid' into my confidence, nor yet the sharper stipendiaries. To submit my plans to either magistrate or policeman might be but to defeat them. 'Twould only raise a hue and cry, putting the guilty ones on their guard. That isn't the way--will not do! "And yet I must have some one to assist me; for there is truth in the old saw, 'Two heads better than one,' Wingate is good enough in his way, and willing, but he can't help me in mine. I want a man of my own class; one who----Stay! George Shenstone? No! The young fellow is true as steel and brave as a lion, but--well, lacking brains. I could trust his heart, not his head. Where is he who has both to be relied upon? Ha! Mahon! The man--the very man! Experienced in the world's wickedness, courageous, cool--except when he gets his Irish blood up against the Sassenachs--above all, devoted to me, as I know; he has never forgotten that little service I did him at Delhi. And he has nothing to do--plenty of time at his disposal. Yes; the Major's my man! "Shall I write and ask him to come over here. On second thoughts, no! Better for me to go thither; see him first, and explain all the circumstances. To Boulogne and back's but a matter of forty-eight hours, and a day or two can't make much difference in an affair like this. The scent's cold as it can be, and may be taken up weeks hence 's well as now. If we ever succeed in finding evidence of their guilt, it will, no doubt, be mainly of the circumstantial sort; and much will depend on the character of the individuals accused. Now I think of it, something may be learnt about it in Boulogne itself; or, at all events, of the priest. Since I've had a good look at his forbidding face, I feel certain it's the same I saw inside the doorway of that convent. If not, there are two of the sacerdotal tribe so like, it would be a toss up which is one and which t'other. "In any case, there can be no harm in my making a scout across to Boulogne, and instituting inquiries about him. Mahon's sister being at school in the establishment will enable us to ascertain whether a priest named Rogier holds relations with it, and we may learn something of the repute he bears. Perchance, also, a trifle concerning Mr. and Mrs. Lewin Murdock. It appears that both husband and wife are well known at Homburg, Baden, and other like resorts. Gaming, if not game, birds, in some of their migratory flights they have made short sojourn at the French seaport, to get their hands in for those grander hells beyond. I'll go over to Boulogne!" A knock at the door. On the permission to enter, called out, a hotel porter presents himself. "Well?" "Your waterman, sir, Wingate, says he'd like to see you, if convenient?" "Tell him to step up!" "What can Jack be coming after? Anyhow, I'm glad he has come. 'Twill save me the trouble of sending for him, as I'd better settle his account before starting off." [Jack has a new score against the Captain for boat hire, his services having been retained, exclusively, for some length of time past.] "Besides, there's something I wish to say--a long chapter of instructions to leave with him. Come in, Jack!" This, as a shuffling in the corridor outside tells that the waterman is wiping his feet on the door-mat. The door opening, displays him; but with an expression on his countenance very different from that of a man coming to dun for wages due. More like one entering to announce a death, or some event which greatly agitates him. "What is it?" asks the Captain, observing his distraught manner. "Somethin' queer, sir; very queer indeed." "Ah! Let me hear it!" demands Ryecroft, with an air of eagerness, thinking it relates to himself and the matter engrossing his mind. "I will, Captain. But it'll take time in the tellin'." "Take as much as you like. I'm at your service. Be seated." Jack clutches hold of a chair, and draws it up close to where the Captain is sitting--by a table. Then glancing over his shoulder, and all round the room, to assure himself there is no one within earshot, he says, in a grave, solemn voice,-- "I do believe, Captain, _she be still alive_!" CHAPTER LXII. STILL ALIVE. Impossible to depict the expression on Vivian Ryecroft's face, as the words of the waterman fall upon his ear. It is more than surprise--more than astonishment--intensely interrogative, as though some secret hope once entertained, but long gone out of his heart, had suddenly returned to it. "Still alive!" he exclaims, springing to his feet, and almost upsetting the table. "Alive!" he mechanically repeats. "What do you mean, Wingate? And who?" "My poor girl, Captain. You know." "_His_ girl--not _mine_! Mary Morgan--not Gwendoline Wynn!" reflects Ryecroft within himself, dropping back upon his chair as one stunned by a blow. "I'm almost sure she be still livin'," continues the waterman, in wonder at the emotion his words have called up, though little suspecting why. Controlling it, the other asks, with diminished interest, still earnestly,-- "What leads you to think that way, Wingate? Have you a reason?" "Yes, have I; more'n one. It's about that I ha' come to consult ye." "You've come to astonish me! But proceed!" "Well, sir, as I ha' sayed, it'll take a good bit o' tellin', and a lot o' explanation beside. But since ye've signified I'm free to your time, I'll try and make the story short's I can." "Don't curtail it in any way. I wish to hear all!" The waterman thus allowed latitude, launches forth into a full account of his own life--those chapters of it relating to his courtship of, and betrothal to, Mary Morgan. He tells of the opposition made by her mother, the rivalry of Coracle Dick, and the sinister interference of Father Rogier. In addition, the details of that meeting of the lovers under the elm--their last--and the sad episode soon after succeeding. Something of all this Ryecroft has heard before, and part of it suspected. What he now hears new to him is the account of a scene in the farmhouse of Abergann, while Mary Morgan lay in the chamber of death, with a series of incidents that came under the observation of her sorrowing lover. The first, his seeing a shroud being made by the girl's mother, white, with a red cross, and the initial letters of her name braided over the breast: the same soon afterwards appearing upon the corpse. Then the strange behaviour of Father Rogier on the day of the funeral; the look with which he stood regarding the girl's face as she lay in her coffin; his abrupt exit out of the room; as afterwards his hurried departure from the side of the grave before it was finally closed up--a haste noticed by others as well as Jack Wingate. "But what do you make of all that?" asks Ryecroft, the narrator having paused to gather himself for other and still stranger revelations. "How can it give you a belief in the girl being still alive? Quite its contrary, I should say." "Stay, Captain! There be more to come." The Captain does stay, listening on. To hear the story of the planted and plucked up flower; of another and later visit made by Wingate to the cemetery in daylight, then seeing what led him to suspect, that not only had the plant been destroyed, but all the turf on the grave disturbed! He speaks of his astonishment at this, with his perplexity. Then goes on to give account of the evening spent with Joseph Preece in his new home; of the waifs and strays there shown him; the counterfeit coins, burglars' tools, and finally the shroud--that grim remembrancer, which he recognised at sight! His narrative concludes with his action taken after, assisted by the old boatman. "Last night," he says, proceeding with the relation, "or I ought to say the same mornin'--for 'twar after midnight hour--Joe an' myself took the skiff, an' stole up to the chapel graveyard, where we opened her grave, an' foun' the coffin empty! Now, Captain, what do ye think o' the whole thing?" "On my word, I hardly know what to think of it. Mystery seems the measure of the time! This you tell me of is strange--if not stranger than any! What are your own thoughts about it, Jack?" "Well, as I've already sayed, my thoughts be, an' my hopes, that Mary's still in the land o' the livin'." "I hope she is." The tone of Ryecroft's rejoinder tells of his incredulity, further manifested by his questions following. "But you saw her in her coffin? Waked for two days, as I understood you; then laid in her grave? How could she have lived throughout all that? Surely she was dead!" "So I thought at the time, but don't now." "My good fellow, I fear you are deceiving yourself. I'm sorry having to think so. Why the body has been taken up again is of itself a sufficient puzzle; but alive--that seems physically impossible!" "Well, Captain, it's just about the possibility of the thing I come to ask your opinion; thinkin' ye'd be acquainted wi' the article itself." "What article?" "The new medicine; it as go by the name o' chloryform." "Ha! you have a suspicion----" "That she ha' been chloryformed, an' so kep' asleep--to be waked up when they wanted her. I've heerd say they can do such things." "But then she was drowned also? Fell from a foot plank, you told me? And was in the water some time?" "I don't believe it, a bit. It be true enough she got somehow into the water, an' wor took out insensible, or rather drifted out o' herself, on the bank just below, at the mouth o' the brook. But that wor short after, an' she might still ha' ben alive notwithstandin'. My notion be, that the priest had first put the chloryform into her, or did it then, an' knew all along she warn't dead, nohow." "My dear Jack, the thing cannot be possible. Even if it were, you seem to forget that her mother, father--all of them--must have been cognizant of these facts--if facts?" "I don't forget it, Captain. 'Stead, I believe they all wor cognizant o' them--leastways, the mother." "But why should she assist in such a dangerous deception--at risk of her daughter's life?" "That's easy answered. She did it partly o' herself; but more at the biddin' o' the priest, whom she daren't disobey--the weak-minded creature, most o' her time given up to sayin' prayers and paternosters. They all knowed the girl loved me, and wor sure to be my wife, whatever they might say or do against it. Wi' her willin', I could a' defied the whole lot o' them. Bein' aware o' that, their only chance wor to get her out o' my way by some trick--as they ha' indeed got her. Ye may think it strange their takin' all that trouble; but if ye'd seen her, ye wouldn't. There worn't on all Wyeside so good-lookin' a girl!" Ryecroft again looks incredulous; not smilingly, but with a sad cast of countenance. Despite its improbability, however, he begins to think there may be some truth in what the waterman says--Jack's earnest convictions sympathetically impressing him. "And supposing her to be alive," he asks, "where do you think she is now? Have you any idea?" "I have--leastways, a notion." "Where?" "Over the water--in France--the town o' Bolone." "Boulogne!" exclaims the Captain, with a start. "What makes you suppose she is there?" "Something, sir, I han't yet spoke to ye about. I'd a'most forgot the thing, an' might never ha' thought o't again, but for what ha' happened since. Ye'll remember the night we come up from the ball, my tellin' ye I had an engagement the next day to take the young Powells down the river?" "I remember it perfectly." "Well, I took them, as agreed; an' that day we went down's fur's Chepstow. But they wor bound for the Severn side a duck-shootin'; and next mornin' we started early, afore daybreak. As we were passin' the wharf below Chepstow Bridge, where there wor several craft lyin' in, I noticed one sloop-rigged ridin' at anchor a bit out from the rest, as if about clearin' to put to sea. By the light o' a lamp as hung over the taffrail, I read the name on her starn, showin' she wor French, an' belonged to Bolone. I shouldn't ha' thought than anythin' odd, as there be many foreign craft o' the smaller kind puts in at Chepstow. But what did appear odd, an' gied me a start too, wor my seein' a boat by the sloop's side wi' a man in it, who I could a'most sweared wor the Rogue's Ferry priest. There wor others in the boat besides, an' they appeared to be gettin' some sort o' bundle out o' it, an' takin' it up the man-ropes, aboard o' the sloop. But I didn't see anymore, as we soon passed out o' sight, goin' on down. Now, Captain, it's my firm belief that man must ha' been the priest, and that thing I supposed to be a bundle o' marchandise, neyther more nor less than the body o' Mary Morgan--not dead, but livin'!" "You astound me, Wingate! Certainly a most singular circumstance! Coincidence too! Boulogne--Boulogne!" "Yes, Captain; by the letterin' on her starn the sloop must ha' belonged there; an' _I'm goin' there myself_." "I too, Jack! We shall go together!" CHAPTER LXIII. A STRANGE FATHER CONFESSOR. "He's gone away--given it up! Be glad, madame!" Father Rogier so speaks on entering the drawing-room of Llangorren Court, where Mrs. Murdock is seated. "What, Gregoire?" (Were her husband present, it would be "Père"; but she is alone.) "Who's gone away? And why am I to rejoice?" "_Le Capitaine._" "Ha!" she ejaculates, with a pleased look, showing that the two words have answered all her questions in one. "Are you sure of it? The news seems too good for truth." "It's true, nevertheless; so far as his having gone away. Whether to stay away is another matter. We must hope he will." "I hope it with all my heart." "And well you may, madame; as I myself. We had more to fear from that _chien de chasse_ than all the rest of the pack--ay, have still, unless he's found the scent too cold, and in despair abandoned the pursuit; which I fancy he has, thrown off by that little rock slide. A lucky chance my having caught him at his reconnaisance; and rather a clever bit of strategy so to baffle him! Wasn't it, _chèrie_?" "Superb! The whole thing from beginning to end! You've proved yourself a wonderful man, Gregoire Rogier." "And I hope worthy of Olympe Renault?" "You have." "_Merci!_ So far that's satisfactory; and your slave feels he has not been toiling in vain. But there's a good deal more to be done before we can take our ship safe into port. And it must be done quickly, too. I pine to cast off this priestly garb--in which I've been so long miserably masquerading--and enter into the real enjoyments of life. But there's another, and more potent reason, for using despatch; breakers around us, on which we may be wrecked, ruined any day, any hour. Le Capitaine Ryecroft was not, or is not, the only one." "Richard--_le braconnier_--you're thinking of?" "No, no, no! Of him we needn't have the slightest fear. I hold his lips sealed, by a rope around his neck; whose noose I can draw tight at the shortest notice. I am far more apprehensive of Monsieur, _votre mari_!" "In what way?" "More than one; but for one, his tongue. There's no knowing what a drunken man may do or say in his cups; and Monsieur Murdock is hardly ever out of them. Suppose he gets to babbling, and lets drop something about--well, I needn't say what. There's still suspicion abroad--plenty of it,--and, like a spark applied to tinder, a word would set it ablaze." "_C'est vrai!_" "Fortunately, Mademoiselle had no very near relatives of the male sex, nor any one much interested in her fate, save the _fiancé_ and the other lover--the rustic and rejected one--Shenstone _fils_. Of him we need take no account. Even if suspicious, he hasn't the craft to unravel a clue so cunningly rolled as ours; and for the _ancien hussard_, let us hope he has yielded to despair, and gone back whence he came. Luck, too, in his having no intimacies here, or, I believe, anywhere in the shire of Hereford. Had it been otherwise, we might not so easily have got disembarrassed of him." "And you do think he has gone for good?" "I do; at least, it would seem so. On his second return to the hotel--in haste as it was--he had little luggage; and that he has all taken away with him. So I learnt from one of the hotel people, who professes our faith. Further, at the railway station, that he took ticket for London. Of course that means nothing. He may be _en route_ for anywhere beyond--round the globe, if he feel inclined for circumnavigation. And I shall be delighted if he do." He would not be much delighted had he heard at the railway station of what actually occurred--that in getting his ticket Captain Ryecroft had inquired whether he could not be booked through for Boulogne. Still less might Father Rogier have felt gratification to know, that there were two tickets taken for London; a first-class for the Captain himself, and a second for the waterman Wingate--travelling together, though in separate carriages, as befitted their different rank in life. Having heard nothing of this, the sham priest--as he has now acknowledged himself--is jubilant at the thought that another hostile pawn in the game he has been so skilfully playing has disappeared from the chess-board. In short, all have been knocked over, queen, bishops, knights, and castles. Alone the king stands, he tottering; for Lewin Murdock is fast drinking himself to death. It is of him the priest speaks as king,-- "Has he signed the will?" "_Oui._" "When?" "This morning, before he went out. The lawyer who drew it up came, with his clerk to witness----" "I know all that," interrupts the priest, "as I should, having sent them. Let me have a look at the document. You have it in the house, I hope?" "In my hand," she answers, diving into a drawer of the table by which she sits, and drawing forth a folded sheet of parchment: "_Le voilà!_" She spreads it out, not to read what is written upon it--only to look at the signatures, and see they are right. Well knows he every word of that will, he himself having dictated it. A testament made by Lewin Murdock, which, at his death, leaves the Llangorren estate--as sole owner and last in tail he having the right so to dispose of it--to his wife Olympe--_née_ Renault--for her life; then to his children, should there be any surviving; failing such, to Gregoire Rogier, Priest of the Roman Catholic Church; and in the event of his demise preceding that of the other heirs hereinbefore mentioned, the estate, or what remains of it, to become the property of the Convent of----, Boulogne-sur-mer, France. "For that last clause, which is yours, Gregoire, the nuns of Boulogne should be grateful to you; or at all events, the abbess, Lady Superior, or whatever she's called." "So she will," he rejoins, with a dry laugh, "when she gets the property so conveyed. Unfortunately for her, the reversion is rather distant, and having to pass through so many hands, there may be no great deal left of it, on coming into hers. Nay!" he adds, in exclamation, his jocular tone suddenly changing to the serious, "if some step be not taken to put a stop to what's going on, there won't be much of the Llangorren estate left for any one--not even for yourself, madame. Under the fingers of Monsieur, with the cards in them, it's being melted down as snow on the sunny side of a hill. Even at this self-same moment it may be going off in large slices--avalanches!" "_Mon Dieu!_" she exclaims, with an alarmed air, quite comprehending the danger thus figuratively portrayed. "I wouldn't be surprised," he continues, "if to-day he were made a thousand pounds the poorer. When I left the ferry, he was in the Welsh Harp, as I was told, tossing sovereigns upon its bar counter, 'Heads and tails, who wins?' Not he, you may be sure. No doubt he's now at a gaming-table inside, engaged with that gang of sharpers who have lately got around him, staking large sums on every turn of the cards--Jews' eyes, ponies, and monkeys, as these _chevaliers d'industrie_ facetiously term their money. If we don't bring all this to a termination, that you will have in your hand won't be worth the price of the parchment it's written upon. _Comprenez-vous, chèrie?_" "_Parfaitement!_ But how is it to be brought to a termination. For myself, I haven't an idea. Has any occurred to you, Gregoire?" As the ex-courtesan asks the question, she leans across the little table, and looks the false priest straight in the face. He knows the bent of her inquiry, told it by the tone and manner in which it has been put--both significant of something more than the words might otherwise convey. Still, he does not answer it directly. Even between these two fiends in human form, despite their mutual understanding of each other's wickedness, and the little reason either has for concealing it, there is a sort of intuitive reticence upon the matter which is in the minds of both. For it is murder--the murder of Lewin Murdock! "_Le pauvre homme!_" ejaculates the man, with a pretence at compassionating, under the circumstances ludicrous. "The cognac is killin' him, not by inches, but ells; and I don't believe he can last much longer. It seems but a question of weeks; may be only days. Thanks to the school in which I was trained, I have sufficient medical knowledge to prognosticate that." A gleam as of delight passes over the face of the woman--an expression almost demoniacal; for it is a wife hearing this about her husband! "You think only _days_?" she asks, with an eagerness as if apprehensive about that husband's health. But the tone tells different, as the hungry look in her eye while awaiting the answer. Both proclaim she wishes it in the affirmative; as it is. "Only days!" he says, as if his voice were an echo. "Still, days count in a thing of this kind--ay, even hours. Who knows but that in a fit of drunken bravado he may stake the whole estate on a single turn of cards or cast of dice? Others have done the like before now--gentlemen grander than he, with titles to their names-rich in one hour, beggars in the next. I can remember more than one." "Ah! so can I." "Englishmen, too, who usually wind up such matters by putting a pistol to their heads, and blowing out their brains. True, Monsieur hasn't very much to blow out; but that isn't a question which affects us--myself as well as you. I've risked everything--reputation, which I care least about, if the affair can be brought to a proper conclusion; but should it fail, then--I need not tell you. What we've done, if known, would soon make us acquainted with the inside of an English gaol. Monsieur, throwing away his money in this reckless fashion, must be restrained, or he'll bring ruin to all of us. Therefore some steps must be taken to restrain him, and promptly." "_Vraiment!_ I ask you again--have you thought of anything, Gregoire?" He does not make immediate answer, but seems to ponder over, or hang back upon it. When at length given, it is itself an interrogation, apparently unconnected with what they have been speaking about. "Would it greatly surprise you if to-night your husband didn't come home to you?" "Certainly not--in the least. Why should it? It wouldn't be the first time by scores--hundreds--for him to stay all night away from me. Ay, and at that same Welsh Harp, too--many's the night." "To your great annoyance, no doubt, if it did not make you dreadfully jealous?" She breaks out into a laugh, hollow and heartless as was ever heard in an _allée_ of the Jardin Mabille. When it is ended, she adds gravely,-- "The time was when he might have made me so; I may as well admit that; not now, as you know, Gregoire. Now, instead of feeling annoyed by it, I'd only be too glad to think I should never see his face again. _Le brute ivrogne!_" To this monstrous declaration, Rogier laconically rejoins,-- "You may not." Then, placing his lips close to her ear, he adds in a whisper, "If all prosper, as planned, _you will not_!" She neither starts, nor seeks to inquire further. She knows he has conceived some scheme to disembarrass her of a husband she no longer cares for--to both become inconvenient. And from what has gone before, she can rely on Rogier with its execution. CHAPTER LXIV. A QUEER CATECHIST. A boat upon the Wye, being pulled upward, between Llangorren Court and Rugg's Ferry. There are two men in it--not Vivian Ryecroft and Jack Wingate, but Gregoire Rogier and Richard Dempsey. The _ci-devant_ poacher is at the oars--for, in addition to his new post as gamekeeper, he has occasional charge of a skiff which has replaced the _Gwendoline_. This same morning he rowed his master up to Rugg's, leaving him there; and now, at night, he is on return to fetch him home. The two places being on opposite sides of the river, and the road roundabout, besides difficult for wheeled vehicles, Lewin Murdock, moreover, an indifferent horseman, he prefers the water route, and often takes it, as he has done to-day. It is the same on which Father Rogier held that dialogue of sinister innuendo with Madame, and the priest, aware of the boat having to return to the ferry, avails himself of a seat in it. Not that he dislikes walking, or is compelled to it; for he now keeps a cob, and does his rounds on horseback. But on this particular day he has left his roadster in its stable, and gone down to Llangorren afoot, knowing there would be the skiff to take him back. No scheme of mere convenience dictated this arrangement to Gregoire Rogier. Instead, one of Satanic wickedness, preconceived, and all settled before holding that _tête-à-tête_ with her he has called "chèrie." Though requiring a boat for its execution, and an oarsman of a peculiar kind--adroit at something besides the handling of oars--not a word of it has yet been imparted to the one who is rowing him. For all, the ex-poacher, accustomed to the priest's moods, and familiar with his ways, can see there is something unusual in his mind, and that he himself is on the eve of being called upon for some new service or sacrifice. No supply of poached fish or game. Things have gone higher than that, and he anticipates some demand of a more serious nature. Still, he has not the most distant idea of what it is to be, though certain interrogatories put to him are evidently leading up to it. The first is,-- "You're not afraid of water, are you, Dick?" "Not partickler, your Reverence. Why should I?" "Well, your being so little in the habit of washing your face--if I am right in my reckoning, only once a week--may plead my excuse for asking the question." "Oh, Father Rogier! that wor only in the time past, when I lived alone, and the thing worn't worth while. Now, going more into respectable company, I do a little washin' every day." "I'm glad to hear of your improved habits, and that they keep pace with the promotion you've had. But my inquiry had no reference to your ablutions--rather to your capabilities as a swimmer. If I mistake not, you can swim like a fish?" "No, not equal to a fish. That ain't possible." "An otter, then?" "Somethin' nearer he, if ye like," answers Coracle, laughingly. "I supposed as much. Never mind. About the degree of your natatory powers we needn't dispute. I take it they're sufficient for reaching either bank of this river, supposing the skiff to get capsized, and you in it?" "Lor, Father Rogier! that wouldn't be nothin'! I could swim to eyther shore, if 'twor miles off." "But could you as you are now, with clothes on, boots, and everything?" "Sartin could I, and carry weight beside." "That will do," rejoins the questioner, apparently satisfied; then lapsing into silence, and leaving Dick in a very desert of conjectures why he has been so interrogated. The speechless interregnum is not for long. After a minute or two, Rogier, as if freshly awaking from a reverie, again asks,-- "Would it upset this skiff if I were to step on the side of it--I mean, bearing upon it with all the weight of my body?" "That would it, your Reverence, though ye be but a light weight--tip it over like a tub." "Quite turn it upside down--as your old truckle, eh?" "Well, not so ready as the truckle. Still, 'twould go bottom upward. Though a biggish boat, it be one o' the crankiest kind, and would sure capsize wi' the lightest o' men standin' on its gunn'l rail." "And surer with a heavier one, as yourself, for instance?" "I shouldn't like to try, your Reverence bein' wi' me in the boat." "How would you like, somebody else being with you in it--_if made worth your while_?" Coracle starts at this question, asked in a tone that makes more intelligible the others preceding it, and which have been hitherto puzzling him. He begins to see the drift of the _sub Jove_ confessional to which he is being submitted. "How'd I like it, your Reverence? Well enough, if, as you say, made worth my while. I don't mind a bit o' a wettin' when there's anythin' to be gained by it. Many's the one I've had on a chilly winter's night, as this same be, all for the sake o' a salmon I wor 'bleeged to sell at less'n half-price. If only showed the way to earn a honest penny by it, I wouldn't wait for the upsettin' o' the boat, but jump overboard at onest." "That's game in you, Monsieur Dick. But to earn the honest penny you speak of, the upsetting of the boat might be a necessary condition." "Be it so, your Reverence. I'm willing to fulfil that, if ye only bid me. Maybe," he continues, in a tone of confidential suggestion, "there be somebody as you think ought to get a duckin' beside myself?" "There is somebody who ought," rejoins the priest, coming nearer to his point. "Nay, must," he continues; "for if he don't, the chances are we shall all go down together, and that soon." Coracle skulls on without questioning. He more than half comprehends the figurative speech, and is confident he will ere long receive complete explanation of it. He is soon led a little way further by the priest observing,-- "No doubt, _mon ancien bracconnier_, you've been gratified by the change that's of late taken place in your circumstances. But perhaps it hasn't quite satisfied you, and you expect to have something more--as I have the wish you should. And you would ere this, but for one who obstinately sets his face against it." "May I know who that one is, Father Rogier?" "You may, and shall; though I should think you scarce need telling. Without naming names, it's he who will be in this boat with you going back to Llangorren." "I thought so. An' if I an't astray, he be the one your Reverence thinks would not be any the worse o' a wettin'?" "Instead, all the better for it. It may cure him of his evil courses--drinking, card-playing, and the like. If he's not cured of them by some means, and soon, there won't be an acre left him of the Llangorren lands, nor a shilling in his purse. He'll have to go back to beggary, as at Glyngog; while you, Monsieur Coracle, in place of being head-gamekeeper, with other handsome preferments in prospect, will be compelled to return to your shifty life of poaching, night netting, and all the etceteras. Would you desire that?" "Daanged if I would! An' won't do it if I can help. Shan't, if your Reverence 'll only show me the way." "There's but one I can think of." "What may that be, Father Rogier?" "Simply to set your foot on the side of this skiff, and tilt it bottom upwards." "It shall be done. When, and where?" "When you are coming back down. The where you may choose for yourself--such place as may appear safe and convenient. Only take care you don't drown yourself." "No fear o' that. There an't water in the Wye as'll ever drown Dick Dempsey." "No," jocularly returns the priest; "I don't suppose there is. If it be your fate to perish by asphyxia--as no doubt it is--strong tough hemp, and not weak water, will be the agent employed--that being more appropriate to the life you have led. Ha! ha! ha!" Coracle laughs too, but with the grimace of wolf baying the moon. For the moonlight shining full in his face, shows him not over satisfied with the coarse jest. But remembering how he shifted that treacherous plank bridging the brook at Abergann, he silently submits to it. He, too, is gradually getting his hand upon a lever, which will enable him to have a say in the affairs of Llangorren Court, that they dwelling therein will listen to him, or, like the Philistines of Gaza, have it dragged down about their ears. But the ex-poacher is not yet prepared to enact the _rôle_ of Samson; and however galling the _jeu d'esprit_ of the priest, he swallows it without showing chagrin, far less speaking it. In truth there is no time for further exchange of speech--at least, in the skiff. By this time they have arrived at the Rugg's Ferry landing-place, where Father Rogier, getting out, whispers a few words in Coracle's ear, and then goes off. His words were-- "A hundred pounds, Dick, if you do it. Twice that for your doing it adroitly!" CHAPTER LXV. ALMOST A "VERT." Major Mahon is standing at one of the front windows of his house, waiting for his dinner to be served, when he sees a _fiâcre_ driven up to the door, and inside it the face of a friend. He does not stay for the bell to be rung, but with genuine Irish impulsiveness rushes forth, himself opening the door. "Captain Ryecroft!" he exclaims, grasping the new arrival by the hand, and hauling him out of the hackney. "Glad to see you back in Boulogne." Then adding, as he observes a young man leap down from the box where he has had seat beside the driver, "Part of your belongings, isn't he?" "Yes, Major; my old Wye waterman, Jack Wingate, of whom I spoke to you. And if it be convenient to you to quarter both of us for a day or two----" "Don't talk about convenience, and bar all mention of time. The longer you stay with me, you'll be conferring the greater favour. Your old room is gaping to receive you; and Murtagh will rig up a berth for your boatman. Murt!" to the ex-Royal Irish, who, hearing the _fracas_, has also come forth, "take charge of Captain Ryecroft's traps, along with Mr. Wingate here, and see all safely bestowed. Now, old fellow, step inside. They'll look after the things. You're just in time to do dinner with me. I was about sitting down to it _solus_, awfully lamenting my loneliness. Well, one never knows what luck's in the wind. Rather hard lines for you, however. If I mistake not, my pot's of the poorest this blessed day. But I know you're neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet;_ and that's some consolation. In!" In go they, leaving the old soldier to settle the _fiâcre_ fare, look after the luggage, and extend the hospitalities of the kitchen to Jack Wingate. * * * * * Soon as Captain Ryecroft has performed some slight ablutions--necessary after a sea voyage however short--his host hurries him down to the dining-room. When seated at the table, the Major asks,-- "What on earth has delayed you, Vivian? You promised to be back in a week at most. It's months now! Despairing of your return, I had some thought of advertising the luggage you left with me, 'if not claimed within a certain time, to be sold for the payment of expenses.' Ha! ha!" Ryecroft echoes the laugh; but so faintly, his friend can see the cloud has not yet lifted; instead, lies heavy and dark as ever. In hopes of doing something to dissipate it, the Major rolls on in his rich Hibernian brogue,-- "You've just come in time to save your chattels from the hammer. And now I have you here, I mean to keep you. So, old boy, make up your mind to an unlimited sojourn in Boulogne-sur-mer. You will, won't you?" "It's very kind of you, Mahon; but that must depend on----" "On what?" "How I prosper in my errand." "Oh! this time you _have_ an errand? Some business?" "I have." "Well, as you had none before, it gives reason to hope that other matters may be also reversed, and instead of shooting off like a comet, you'll play the part of a fixed star; neither to shoot nor be shot at, as looked likely on the last occasion. But speaking seriously, Ryecroft, as you say you're on business, may I know its nature?" "Not only may, but it's meant you should. Nay, more, Mahon; I want your help in it." "That you can count upon, whatever it be--from pitch-and-toss up to manslaughter. Only say how I can serve you." "Well, Major, in the first place I would seek your assistance in some inquiries that I am about to make here." "Inquiries! Have they regard to that young lady you said was lost--missing from her home! Surely she has been found?" "She has--found drowned!" "Found drowned! God bless me!" "Yes, Mahon. The home from which she was missing knows her no more. Gwendoline Wynn is now in her long home--in heaven!" The solemn tone of voice, with the woe-begone expression on the speaker's face, drives all thoughts of hilarity out of the listener's mind. It is a moment too sacred for mirth; and between the two friends, old comrades in arms, for an interval even speech is suspended; only a word of courtesy as the host presses his guest to partake of the viands before them. The Major does not question further, leaving the other to take up the broken thread of the conversation. Which he at length does, holding it in hand, till he has told all that happened since they last sat at that table together. He gives only the facts, reserving his own deductions from them. But Mahon, drawing them for himself, says searchingly-- "Then you have a suspicion there's been what's commonly called foul play?" "More than a suspicion. I'm sure of it." "The devil! But whom do you suspect?" "Whom should I but he now in possession of the property--her cousin, Mr. Lewin Murdock. Though I've reason to believe there are others mixed up in it; one of them a Frenchman. Indeed, it's chiefly to make inquiry about him I've come over to Boulogne." "A Frenchman. You know his name?" "I do; at least, that he goes by on the other side of the Channel. You remember that night as we were passing the back entrance of the convent where your sister's at school, our seeing a carriage there--a hackney, or whatever it was?" "Certainly I do." "And my saying that the man who had just got out of it, and gone inside, resembled a priest I'd seen but a day or two before?" "Of course I remember all that, and my joking you at the time as to the idleness of you fancying a likeness among sheep, where all are so nearly of the same hue--that black. Something of the sort I said. But what's your argument?" "No argument at all, but a conviction, that the man we saw that night was my Herefordshire priest. I've seen him several times since--had a good square look at him--and feel sure 'twas he." "You haven't yet told me his name?" "Rogier--Father Rogier. So he is called upon the Wye." "And, supposing him identified, what follows?" "A great deal follows, or rather, depends on his identification." "Explain, Ryecroft. I shall listen with patience." Ryecroft does explain, continuing his narrative into a second chapter, which includes the doings of the Jesuit on Wyeside, so far as known to him; the story of Jack Wingate's love and loss--the last so strangely resembling his own--the steps afterwards taken by the waterman; in short, everything he can think of that will throw light upon the subject. "A strange tale, truly!" observes the Major, after hearing it to the end. "But does your boatman really believe the priest has resuscitated his dead sweetheart, and brought her over here with the intention of shutting her up in a nunnery?" "He does all that; and certainly not without show of reason. Dead or alive, the priest or some one else has taken the girl out of her coffin, and her grave." "'Twould be a wonderful story, if true--I mean the resuscitation, or resurrection; not the mere disinterment of a body. That's possible, and probable where priests of the Jesuitical school are concerned. And so should the other be, when one considers that they can make statues wink, and pictures shed tears. Oh! yes; Ultramontane magicians can do anything!" "But why," asks Ryecroft, "should they have taken all this trouble about a poor girl--the daughter of a small Herefordshire farmer,--with possibly at the most a hundred pounds or so for her dowry? That's what mystifies me!" "It needn't," laconically observes the Major. "These Jesuit gentry have often other motives than money for caging such birds in their convents. Was the girl good looking?" he asks, after musing a moment. "Well, of myself I never saw her. By Jack's description she must have been a superb creature--on a par with the angels. True, a lover's judgment is not much to be relied on, but I've heard from others, that Miss Morgan was really a rustic belle--something beyond the common." "Faith! and that may account for the whole thing. I know they like their nuns to be nice looking; prefer that stripe; I suppose, for purposes of proselytizing, if nothing more. They'd give a good deal to receive the services of my own sister in that way: have been already bidding for her. By Heavens! I'd rather see her laid in her grave!" The Major's strong declaration is followed by a spell of silence; after which, cooling down a little, he continues,-- "You've come, then, to inquire into this convent matter, about--what's the girl's name?--ah! Morgan." "More than the convent matter; though it's in the same connection. I've come to learn what can be learnt about this priest; get his character, with his antecedents. And, if possible, obtain some information respecting the past lives of Mr. Lewin Murdock and his French wife; for which I may probably go on to Paris, if not farther. To sum up everything, I've determined to sift this mystery to the bottom--unravel it to its last thread. I've already commenced unwinding the clue, and made some little progress. But I want one to assist me. Like a lone hunter on a lost trail, I need counsel from a companion--and help too. You'll stand by me, Mahon?" "To the death, my dear boy! I was going to say the last shilling in my purse. As you don't need that, I say, instead, to the last breath in my body!" "You shall be thanked with the last in mine." "I'm sure of that. And now for a drop of the 'crayther,' to warm us to our work. Ho! there, Murt! bring in the 'matayreals.'" Which Murtagh does, the dinner-dishes having been already removed. Soon as punches have been mixed, the Major returns to the subject, saying,-- "Now then, to enter upon particulars. What step do you wish me to take first?" "First, to find out who Father Rogier is, and what. That is, on this side; I know what he is on the other. If we can but learn his relations with the convent, it might give us a key capable of opening more than one lock." "There won't be much difficulty in doing that, I take it. All the less, from my little sister Kate being a great pet of the Lady Superior, who has hopes of making a nun of her! Not if I know it! Soon as her schooling's completed, she walks out of that seminary, and goes to a place where the moral atmosphere is a trifle purer. You see, old fellow, I'm not very bigoted about our Holy Faith, and in some danger of becoming a 'vert.' As for my sister, were it not for a bit of a legacy left on condition of her being educated in a convent, she'd never have seen the inside of one with my consent; and never will again when out of this one. But money's money; and though the legacy isn't a large one, for her sake, I couldn't afford to forfeit it. You comprehend?" "Quite. And you think she will be able to obtain the information, without in any way compromising herself?" "Pretty sure of it. Kate's no simpleton, though she be but a child in years. She'll manage it for me, with the instructions I mean giving her. After all, it may not be so much trouble. In these nunneries, things which are secrets to the world without, are known to every mother's child of them--nuns and novices alike. Gossip's the chief occupation of their lives. If there's been an occurrence such as you speak of--a new bird caged there--above all, an English one--it's sure to have got wind--that is, inside the walls. And I can trust Kate to catch the breath, and blow it outside. So, Vivian, old boy, drink your toddy, and take things coolly. I think I can promise you that, before many days, or it may be only hours, you shall know whether such a priest as you speak of be in the habit of coming to that convent; and if so, what for, when he was there last, and everything about the reverend gentleman worth knowing." * * * * * Kate Mahon proves equal to the occasion, showing herself quick-witted, as her brother boasted her to be. On the third day after, she is able to report to him, that some time previously--how long not exactly known--a young English girl came to the convent, brought thither by a priest named Rogier. The girl is a candidate for the Holy Sisterhood--voluntary, of course--to take the veil, soon as her probation be completed. Miss Mahon has not seen the new novice--only heard of her as being a great beauty; for personal charms make noise even in a nunnery. Nor have any of the other _pensionaires_ been permitted to see or speak with her. All they as yet know is, that she is a blonde, with yellow hair--a grand wealth of it--and goes by the name of "Soeur Marie." "Sister Mary!" exclaims Jack Wingate, as Ryecroft at second-hand communicates the intelligence--at the same time translating the "Soeur Marie." "It's Mary Morgan--my Mary! An' by the Heavens of Mercy," he adds, his arms angrily thrashing the air, "she shall come out o' that convent, or I'll lay my life down at its door." CHAPTER LXVI. THE LAST OF LEWIN MURDOCK. Once more a boat upon the Wye, passing between Rugg's Ferry and Llangorren Court, but this time descending. It is the same boat, and, as before, with two men in it; though they are not both the same who went up. One of them is Coracle Dick, still at the oars; while Father Rogier's place in the stern is now occupied by another--not sitting upright, as was the priest, but lying along the bottom timbers with head coggled over, and somewhat uncomfortably supported by the thwart. This man is Lewin Murdock, in a state of helpless inebriety--in common parlance, drunk. He has been brought to the boat landing by the landlord of the Welsh Harp, where he has been all day carousing, and delivered to Dempsey, who now, at a late hour of the night, is conveying him homeward. His hat is down by his feet, instead of upon his head; and the moonbeams, falling unobstructed on his face, show it of a sickly whitish hue; while his eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, have each a demilune of dark purplish colour underneath. But for an occasional twitching of the facial muscles, with a spasmodic movement of the lips, and at intervals, a raucous noise through his nostrils, he might pass for dead, as readily as dead drunk. Verily is the priest's prognosis based upon reliable data; for by the symptoms now displayed, Lewin Murdock is doing his best to destroy himself--drinking suicidally! For all, he is not destined thus to die. His end will come even sooner, and, it may be, easier. It is not distant now, but ominously near, as may be told by looking into the eyes of the man who sits opposite, and recalling the conversation late exchanged between him and Father Rogier. For in those dark orbs a fierce light scintillates, such as is seen in the eyes of the assassin contemplating assassination, or the jungle tiger when within springing distance of its prey. Nothing of all this sees the sot, but lies unconscious, every now and then giving out a snore, regardless of danger, as though everything around were innocent as the pale moonbeams shimmering down upon his cadaverous cheeks. Possibly he is dreaming, and if so, in all likelihood it is of a grand gas-lighted _salon_, with tables of _tapis vert_, carrying packs of playing cards, dice cubes, and ivory counters. Or the _mise en scène_ of his visionary vagaries may be a drinking saloon, where he carouses with boon companions, their gambling limited to a simple tossing of odd and even, "heads or tails." But if dreaming at all, it is not of what is near him; else, far gone as he is, he would be aroused--instinctively--to make a last struggle for life. For the thing so near is death. The fiend who sits regarding him in this helpless condition--as it were holding Lewin Murdock's life, or the little left of it, in his hand--has unquestionably determined upon taking it. Why he does not do so at once is not because he is restrained by any motive of mercy, or reluctance to the spilling of blood. The heart of the _ci-devant_ poacher, counterfeiter, and cracksman, has been long ago steeled against such silly and sensitive scruples. The postponement of his hellish purpose is due to a mere question of convenience. He dislikes the idea of having to trudge over miles of meadow in dripping garments! True, he could drown the drunken man, and keep himself dry--every stitch. But that would not do; for there will be another coroner's inquest, at which he will have to be present. He has escaped the two preceding; but at this he will be surely called upon, and as principal witness. Therefore he must be able to say he was wet, and prove it as well. Into the river, then, will he go, along with his victim; though there is no need for his taking the plunge till he has got nearer to Llangorren. So ingeniously contriving, he sits with arms mechanically working the oars; his eyes upon the doomed man, as those of a cat having a crippled mouse within easy reach of her claws, at any moment to be drawn in and destroyed! Silently, but rapidly, he rows on, needing no steerer. Between Rugg's Ferry and Llangorren Court he is as familiar with the river's channel as a coachman with the carriage-drive to and from his master's mansion; knows its every curve and crook, every purl and pool, having explored them while paddling his little "truckle." And now, sculling the larger craft, it is all the same. And he pulls on, without once looking over his shoulder; his eyes alone given to what is directly in front of him--Lewin Murdock lying motionless at his feet. As if himself moved by a sudden impulse--impatience, or the thought it might be as well to have the dangerous work over--he ceases pulling, and acts as though he were about to unship the oars. But again he seems suddenly to change his intention; on observing a white fleck by the river's edge, which he knows to be the lime-washed walls of the widow Wingate's cottage, at the same time remembering that the main road passes by it. What if there be some one on the road, or the river's bank, and be seen in the act of capsizing his own boat? True, it is after midnight, and not likely any one abroad--even the latest wayfarer. But there might be; and in such clear moonlight his every movement could be made out. That place will not do for the deed of darkness he is contemplating; and he trembles to think how near he has been to committing himself! Thus warned to the taking of precautions hitherto not thought of, he proceeds onward, summoning up before his mind the different turns and reaches of the river, all the while mentally anathematising the moon. For, besides convenience of place, time begins to press, even trouble him, as he recalls the proverb of the cup and the lip. He is growing nervously impatient--almost apprehensive of failure, through fear of being seen--when, rounding a bend, he has before him the very thing he is in search of--the place itself. It is a short, straight reach, where the channel is narrow, with high banks on both sides, and trees overhanging, whose shadows, meeting across, shut off the hated light, shrouding the whole water surface in deep obscurity. It is but a little way above the lone farmhouse of Abergann, and the mouth of the brook which there runs in. But Coracle Dick is not thinking of either--only of the place being appropriate for his diabolical design. And, becoming satisfied it is so, he delays no longer, but sets about its execution--carrying it out with an adroitness which should fairly entitle him to the double reward promised by the priest. Having unshipped the oars, he starts to his feet; and mounting upon the thwart, there for a second or two stands poised and balancing. Then, stepping to the side, he sets foot on the gunwale rail with his whole body's weight borne upon it. In an instant over goes the boat, careening bottom upwards, and spilling Lewin Murdock, as himself, into the mad, surging river! The drunken man goes down like a lump of lead; possibly without pain, or the consciousness of being drowned; only supposing it the continuation of his dream! Satisfied he has gone down, the assassin cares not how. He has enough to think of in saving himself, enough to do swimming in his clothes, even to the boots. He reaches the bank, nevertheless, and climbs up it, exhausted; shivering like a water spaniel, for snow has fallen on Plinlimmon, and its thaw has to do with the freshet in the stream. But the chill of the Wye's water is nought compared with that sent through his flesh, to the very marrow of his bones, on discovering he has crawled out upon the spot--the self-same spot--where the waves gave back another body he had consigned to them--that of Mary Morgan! For a moment he stands horror-struck, with hair on end, the blood curdling in his veins. Then, nerving himself to the effort, he hitches up his dripping trousers, and hurries away from the accursed place--by himself accursed--taking the direction of Llangorren, but giving a wide berth to Abergann. He has no fear of approaching the former in wet garments; instead, knows that in this guise he will be all the more warmly welcomed--as he is! Mrs. Murdock sits up late for Lewin--though with little expectation of his coming home. Looking out of the window, in the moonlight she sees a man, who comes striding across the carriage sweep, and up into the portico. Rushing to the door to receive him, she exclaims, in counterfeit surprise,-- "You, Monsieur Richard! Not my husband!" When Coracle Dick has told his sad tale, shaped to suit the circumstances, her half-hysterical ejaculation might be supposed a cry of distress. Instead, it is one of ecstatic delight she is unable to restrain at knowing herself now sole owner of the house over her head, and the land for miles around it! CHAPTER LXVII. A CHAPTER DIPLOMATIC. Another day has dawned, another sun set upon Boulogne; and Major Mahon is again in his dining-room, with Captain Ryecroft, his sole guest. The cloth has been removed, the Major's favourite after-dinner beverage brought upon the table, and, with punches "brewed" and cigars set alight, they have commenced conversation upon the incidents of the day--those especially relating to Ryecroft's business in Boulogne. The Major has had another interview with his sister--a short one, snatched while she was out with her school companions for afternoon promenade. It has added some further particulars to those they had already learnt, both about the English girl confined within the nunnery, and the priest who conveyed her thither. That the latter was Father Rogier is placed beyond a doubt by a minute description of his person given to Miss Mahon, well known to the individual who gave it. To the nuns within that convent the man's name is familiar--even to his baptismal appellation, Gregoire; for although the Major has pronounced all the sacerdotal fraternity alike, in being black, this particular member of it is of a shade deeper than common--a circumstance of itself going a good way towards his identification. Even within that sacred precinct where he is admitted, a taint attaches to him; though what its nature the young lady has not yet been able to ascertain. The information thus obtained tallies with the estimate of the priest's character, already formed; in correspondence, too, with the theory that he is capable of the crime Captain Ryecroft believes him to have abetted, if not actually committed. Nor is it contradicted by the fact of his being a frequent visitor to the nunnery, and a favourite with the administration thereof; indeed, an intimate friend of the Abbess herself. Something more, in a way accounting for all: that the new novice is not the first _agneau d'Angleterre_ he has brought over to Boulogne, and guided into that same fold, more than one of them having ample means, not only to provision themselves, but a surplus for the support of the general sisterhood. There is no word about any of these English lambs having been other than voluntary additions to the French flock; but a whisper circulates within the convent walls, that Father Rogier's latest contribution is a recusant, and if she ever becomes a nun, it will be a _forced_ one; that the thing is _contre coeur_--in short, she protests against it. Jack Wingate can well believe that; still under full conviction that "Soeur Marie" is Mary Morgan; and, despite all its grotesque strangeness and wild improbability, Captain Ryecroft has pretty nearly come to the same conclusion; while the Major, with less knowledge of antecedent circumstances, but more of nunneries, never much doubted it. "About the best way to get the girl out. What's your idea, Mahon?" Ryecroft asks the question in no careless or indifferent way; on the contrary, with a feeling earnestness. For, although the daughter of the Wyeside farmer is nought to him, the Wye waterman is; and he has determined on seeing the latter through--to the end of the mysterious affair. In difficulties Jack Wingate has stood by him, and he will stand by Jack, _coûte-que-coûte_. Besides, figuratively speaking, they are still in the same boat. For if Wingate's dead sweetheart, so strangely returned to life, can be also restored to liberty, the chances are she may be the very one wanted to throw light on the other and, alas! surer death. Therefore, Captain Ryecroft is not all unselfish in backing up his boatman; nor, as he puts the question, being anxious about the answer. "We'll have to use strategy," returns the Major; not immediately, but after taking a grand gulp out of his tumbler, and a vigorous draw at his _regalia_. "But why should we?" impatiently demands the Captain. "If the girl have been forced in there, and's kept against her will--which, by all the probabilities, she is--surely she can be got out, on demand being made by her friends?" "That's just what isn't sure--though the demand were made by her own mother, with the father to back it. You forget, old fellow, that you're in France, not England." "But there's a British Consul in Boulogne." "Ay, and a British Foreign Minister, who gives that Consul his instructions; with some queer ideas besides, neither creditable to himself nor his country. I'm speaking of that jaunty diplomat--the "judicious bottle-holder," who is accustomed to cajole the British public with his blarney about _civis Romanus sum_." "True; but does that bear upon our affair?" "It does--almost directly." "In what way? I do not comprehend." "Because you're not up to what's passing over here--I mean at headquarters--the Tuilleries, or St. Cloud, if you prefer it. There the man--if man he can be called--is ruled by the woman; she in her turn the devoted partisan of Pio Nono and the unprincipled Antonelli." "I can understand all that; still, I don't quite see its application, or how the English Foreign Minister can be interested in those you allude to!" "I do. But for him, not one of the four worthies spoken of would be figuring as they are. In all probability France would still be a republic instead of an empire, wicked as the world ever saw; and Rome another republic--it may be all Italy--with either Mazzini or Garibaldi at its head. For, certain as you sit there, old boy, it was the judicious bottle-holder who hoisted Nap into an imperial throne, over that Presidential chair, so ungratefully spurned--scurvily kicked behind after it had served his purpose. A fact of which the English people appear to be yet in purblind ignorance! as they are of another, equally notable, and alike misunderstood: that it was this same _civis Romanus sum_ who restored old Pio to his apostolic chair; those red-breeched ruffians, the Zouaves, being but so much dust thrown into people's eyes--a bone to keep the British bull-dog quiet. He would have growled then, and will yet, when he comes to understand all these transactions; when the cloak of that scoundrelly diplomacy which screens them has rotted into shreds, letting the light of true history shine upon them." "Why, Mahon! I never knew you were such a politician! much less such a Radical!" "Nothing much of either, old fellow; only a man who hates tyranny in every shape and form--whether religious or political. Above all, that which owes its existence to the cheapest, the very shabbiest, chicanery the world was ever bamboozled with. I like open dealing in all things." "But you are not recommending it now--in this little convent matter?" "Ah! that's quite a different affair! There are certain ends that justify certain means--when the devil must be fought with his own weapons. Ours is of that kind, and we must either use strategy, or give the thing up altogether. By open measures there wouldn't be the slightest chance of our getting this girl out of the convent's clutches. Even then we may fail; but, if successful, it will only be by great craft, some luck, and possibly a good deal of time spent before we accomplish our purpose." "Poor fellow!" rejoins Ryecroft, speaking of the Wye waterman, "he won't like the idea of long waiting. He's madly, terribly impatient. This afternoon, as we were passing the convent, I had a difficulty to restrain him from rushing up to its door, ringing the bell, and demanding an interview with the 'Soeur Marie'--having his Mary, as he calls her, restored to him on the instant." "It's well you succeeded in hindering that little bit of rashness. Had he done so, 'twould have ended not only in the door being slammed in his face, but another door shut behind his back--that of a gaol, from which he would never have issued till embarking on a voyage to New Caledonia or Cayenne. Ay, both of you might have been so served. For would you believe it, Ryecroft, that you, an officer of the boasted H.B.R.A., rich, and with powerful friends--even you could be not only here imprisoned, but _deporté_, without any one who has interest in you being the wiser; or, if so, having no power to prevent it. France, under the _régime_ of Napoleon le Petit, is not so very different from what it was under the rule of Louis le Grand, and _lettres de cachet_ are now rife as then. Nay, more of them now written, consigning men to a hundred bastilles instead of one. Never was a people so enslaved as these Johnny Crapauds are at this present time; not only their speech fettered, but their very thoughts held in bondage, or so constrained, they may not impart them to one another. Even intimate friends forbear exchanging confidences, lest one prove false to the other! Nothing free but insincerity and sin; both fostered and encouraged from that knowledge intuitive among tyrants; that wickedness weakens a people, making them easier to rule and ride over. So, my boy, you perceive the necessity of our acting with caution in this business, whatever trouble or time it may take--don't you?" "I do." "After all," pursues the Major, "it seems to me that time isn't of so much consequence. As regards the girl, they're not going to eat her up. And for the other matters concerning yourself, they'll keep, too. As you say, the scent's become cold; and a few days more or less can't make any difference. Beside, the trails we intend following may in the end all run into one. I shouldn't be at all surprised if this captive damsel has come to the knowledge of something connected with the other affair. Faith, that may be the very reason for their having her conveyed over here, to be cooped up for the rest of her life. In any case, the fact of her abduction, in such an odd, outrageous way, would of itself be damning collateral evidence against whoever has done it, showing him or them good for anything. So, the first work on our hands, as the surest, is to get the waterman's sweetheart out of the convent, and safe back to her home in Herefordshire." "That's our course, clearly. But have you any thoughts as to how we should proceed?" "I have; more than thoughts--hopes of success--and sanguine ones." "Good! I'm glad to hear it. Upon what do you base them?" "On that very near relative of mine--Sister Kate. As I've told you, she's a pet of the Lady Superior; admitted into the very _arcana_ of the establishment. And with such privilege, if she can't find a way to communicate with any one therein closeted, she must have lost the mother wit born to her, and brought thither from the 'brightest gem of the say.' I don't think she has, or that it's been a bit blunted in Boulogne. Instead, somewhat sharpened by communion with these Holy Sisters; and I've no fear but that 'twill be sharp to serve us in the little scheme I've in part sketched out." "Let me hear it, Mahon." "Kate must obtain an interview with the English girl; or, enough if she can slip a note into her hand. That would go some way towards getting her out--by giving her intimation that friends are near." "I see what you mean," rejoins the Captain, pulling away at his cigar, the other left to finish giving details of the plan he has been mentally projecting. "We'll have to do a little bit of burglary, combined with abduction. Serve them out in their own coin; as it were, hoisting the priest on his own petard!" "It will be difficult, I fear." "Of course it will, and dangerous. Likely more the last than the first. But it'll have to be done, else we may drop the thing entirely." "Never, Mahon! No matter what the danger, I for one am willing to risk it. And we can reckon on Jack Wingate. He'll be only too ready to rush into it." "Ah! there might be more danger through his rashness. But it must be held in check. After all, I don't apprehend so much difficulty if things be dexterously managed. Fortunately there's a circumstance in our favour." "What is it?" "A window." "Ah! Where?" "In the convent, of course. That which gives light--not much of it either--to the cloister where the girl is confined. By a lucky chance my sister has learnt the particular one, and seen the window from the outside. It looks over the grounds where the nuns take recreation, now and then allowed intercourse with the school girls. She says it's high up, but not higher than the top of the garden wall; so a ladder that will enable us to scale the one should be long enough to reach the other. I'm more dubious about the dimensions of the window itself. Kate describes it as only a small affair, with an upright bar in the middle--iron, she believes. Wood or iron, we may manage to remove that; but if the Herefordshire bacon has made your farmer's daughter too big to screw herself through the aperture, then it'll be all up a tree with us. However, we must find out before making the attempt to extract her. From what sister has told me, I fancy we can see the window from the Ramparts above. If so, we may make a distant measurement of it by guess work. Now," continues the Major, coming to his programme of action, "what's got to be done first is that your Wye boatman write a _billet doux_ to his old sweetheart--in the terms I shall dictate to him. Then my sister must contrive, in some way, to put it in the girl's hands, or see that she gets it." "And what after?" "Well, nothing much after; only that we must make preparations for the appointment the waterman will make in his epistle." "It may as well be written now--may it not?" "Certainly; I was just thinking of that. The sooner, the better. Shall I call him in?" "Do as you think proper, Mahon. I trust everything to you." The Major, rising, rings a bell, which brings Murtagh to the dining-room door. "Murt, tell your guest in the kitchen we wish a word with him." The face of the Irish soldier vanishes from view, soon after replaced by that of the Welsh waterman. "Step inside, Wingate!" says the Captain; which the other does, and remains standing to hear what the word was wanted. "You can write, Jack, can't you?" It is Ryecroft who puts the inquiry. "Well, Captain, I ain't much o' a penman, but I can scribble a sort o' rough hand after a fashion." "A fair enough hand for Mary Morgan to read it, I dare say." "Oh, sir, I only weesh there wor a chance o' her gettin' a letter from me!" "There is a chance. I think we can promise that. If you'll take this pen and put down what my friend Major Mahon dictates to you, it will in all probability be in her hands ere long." Never was pen more eagerly laid hold of than that offered to Jack Wingate. Then, sitting down to the table as directed, he waits to be told what he is to write. The Major, bent over him, seems cogitating what it should be. Not so, however. Instead, he is occupied with an astronomical problem which is puzzling him. For its solution he appeals to Ryecroft, asking,-- "How about the moon?" "The moon?" "Yes. Which quarter is she in? For the life of me, I can't tell." "Nor I," rejoins the Captain. "I never think of such a thing." "She's in her last," puts in the boatman, accustomed to take note of lunar changes. "It be an old moon now shining all the night, when the sky an't clouded." "You're right, Jack!" says Ryecroft. "Now I remember; it is the old moon." "In which case," adds the Major, "we must wait for the new one. We want darkness after midnight--must have it--else we cannot act. Let me see; when will that be?" "The day week," promptly responds the waterman. "Then she'll be goin' down, most as soon as the sun's self." "That'll do," says the Major. "Now to the pen!" Squaring himself to the table, and the sheet of paper spread before him, Wingate writes to dictation. No words of love, but what inspires him with a hope he may once more speak such in the ears of his beloved Mary! CHAPTER LXVIII. A QUICK CONVERSION. "When is this horror to have an end? Only with my life? Am I, indeed, to pass the remainder of my days within this dismal cell? Days so happy, till that the happiest of all--its ill-starred night! And my love so strong, so confident--its reward seeming so nigh--all to be for nought--sweet dreams and bright hopes suddenly, cruelly extinguished! Nothing but darkness now; within my heart, in this gloomy place, everywhere around me! Oh, it is agony! When will it be over?" It is the English girl who thus bemoans her fate--still confined in the convent, and the same cloister. Herself changed, however. Though but a few weeks have passed, the roses of her cheeks have become lilies, her lips wan, her features of sharper outline, the eyes retired in their sockets, with a look of woe unspeakable. Her form, too, has fallen away from the full ripe rounding that characterized it, though the wreck is concealed by a loose drapery of ample folds. For Soeur Marie now wears the garb of the Holy Sisterhood--hating it, as her words show. She is seated on the pallet's edge while giving utterance to her sombre soliloquy; and without change of attitude, continues it,-- "Imprisoned I am--that's certain! And for no crime. It may be without hostility on the part of those who have done it. Perhaps, better it were so. Then there might be hope of my captivity coming to an end. As it is, there is none--none! I comprehend all now--the reason for bringing me here--keeping me--everything. And that reason remains--must, as long as I am alive! Merciful heaven!" This exclamatory phrase is almost a shriek; despair sweeping through her soul, as she thinks of why she is there shut up. For hinging upon that is the hopelessness, almost a dead, drear certainty, she will never have deliverance! Stunned by the terrible reflection, she pauses--even thought for the time stayed. But the throe passing, she again pursues her soliloquy, now in more conjectural strain,-- "Strange that no friend has come after me! No one caring for my fate--even to inquire! And _he_--no, that is not strange--only sadder, harder to think of. How could I expect or hope he would? "But surely it is not so. I may be wronging them all--friends--relatives--even him. They may not know where I am? Cannot! How could they? I know not myself! only that it is France, and in a nunnery. But what part of France, and how I came to it, likely they are ignorant as I. "And they may never know--never find out! If not, oh! what is to become of me? Father in heaven! Merciful Saviour! help me in my helplessness!" After this phrensied outburst, a calmer interval succeeds, in which human instincts as thoughts direct her. She thinks,-- "If I could but find means to communicate with my friends--make known to them where I am, and how, then--Ah! 'tis hopeless. No one allowed near me but the attendant and that Sister Ursule. For compassion from either, I might just as well make appeal to the stones of the floor! The Sister seems to take delight in torturing me--every day doing or saying some disagreeable thing. I suppose, to humble, break, bring me to her purpose--that the taking of the veil. A nun! Never! It is not in my nature, and I would rather die than dissemble it!" "Dissemble!" she repeats in a different accent. "That word helps me to a thought. Why should I not dissemble? I _will_." Thus emphatically pronouncing, she springs to her feet, the expression of her features changing suddenly as her attitude. Then paces the floor to and fro, with hands clasped across her forehead, the white, attenuated fingers writhingly entwined in her hair. "They want me to take the veil--the _black_ one! So shall I, the blackest in all the convent's wardrobe if they wish it--ay, crape if they insist on it. Yes, I am resigned now--to that--anything. They can prepare the robes, vestments, all the adornments of their detested mummery; I am prepared, willing, to put them on. It's the only way--my only hope of regaining liberty. I see--am sure of it!" She pauses, as if still but half resolved, then goes on,-- "I am compelled to this deception! Is it a sin? If so, God forgive me! But no--it cannot be! 'Tis justified by my wrongs--my sufferings!" Another and longer pause, during which she seems profoundly to reflect. After it, saying,-- "I shall do so--pretend compliance; and begin this day--this very hour, if the opportunity arise. What should be my first pretence? I must think of it; practise, rehearse it. Let me see. Ah! I have it. The world has forsaken, forgotten me. Why then should I cling to it? Instead, why not in angry spite fling it off--as it has me? That's the way!" A creaking at the cloister door tells of its key turning in the lock. Slight as is the sound, it acts on her as an electric shock, suddenly and altogether changing the cast of her countenance. The instant before half angry, half sad, it is now a picture of pious resignation. Her attitude different also. From striding tragically over the floor she has taken a seat, with a book in her hand, which she seems industriously perusing. It is that "Aid to Faith" recommended, but hitherto unread. She is to all appearance so absorbed in its pages as not to notice the opening of the door, nor the footsteps of one entering. How natural her start, as she hears a voice, and, looking up, beholds Soeur Ursule! "Ah!" ejaculates the latter, with an exultant air, as of a spider that sees a fly upon the edge of its web, "Glad, Marie, to find you so employed! It promises well, both for the peace of your mind and the good of your soul. You've been foolishly lamenting the world left behind: wickedly too. What is to compare with that to come? As dross-dirt, to gold or diamonds! The book you hold in your hand will tell you so. Doesn't it?" "It does, indeed." "Then profit by its instructions, and be sorry you have not sooner taken counsel from it." "I am sorry, Sister Ursule." "It would have comforted you--will now." "It has already. Ah! so much! I would not have believed any book could give me the view of life it has done. I begin to understand what you've been telling me--to see the vanities of this earthly existence, how poor and empty they are in comparison with the bright joys of that other life. Oh! why did I not know it before?" At this moment a singular tableau is exhibited within that convent cell--two female figures, one seated, the other standing--novice and nun; the former fair and young, the latter ugly and old. And still in greater contrast the expression upon their faces. That of the girl's downcast, demure lids over the eyes, less as if in innocence than repentant of some sin, while the glances of the woman show pleased surprise, struggling against incredulity! Her suspicion still in the ascendant, Soeur Ursule stands regarding the disciple, so suddenly converted, with a look which seems to penetrate her very soul. It is borne without sign of quailing, and she at length comes to believe the penitence sincere, and that her proselytising powers have not been exerted in vain. Nor is it strange she should so deceive herself. It is far from being the first novice _contre coeur_ she has broken upon the wheel of despair, and made content to taking a vow of lifelong seclusion from the world. Convinced she has subdued the proud spirit of the English girl, and gloating over a conquest she knows will bring substantial reward to herself, she exclaims prayerfully, in mock-pious tone,-- "Blessed be Holy Mary for this new mercy! On your knees _ma fille_, and pray to her to complete the work she has begun!" And upon her knees drops the novice, while the nun, as if deeming herself _de trop_ in the presence of prayer, slips out of the cloister, silently shutting the door. CHAPTER LXIX. A SUDDEN RELAPSE. For some time after the exit of Soeur Ursule, the English girl retains her seat, with the same demure look she had worn in the presence of the nun; while before her face the book is again open, as though she had returned to reading it. One seeing this might suppose her intensely interested in its contents. But she is not even thinking of them! Instead, of a sharp skinny ear, and a steel-grey eye--one or other of which she suspects to be covering the keyhole. Her own ear is on the alert to catch sounds outside--the shuffling of feet, the rattle of rosary beads, or the swishing of a dress against the door. She hears none; and at length satisfied that Sister Ursule's suspicions are spent, or her patience exhausted, she draws a free breath--the first since the _séance_ commenced. Then rising to her feet, she steps to a corner of the cell not commanded by the keyhole, and there dashes the book down, as though it had been burning her fingers! "My first scene of deception," she mutters to herself--"first act of hypocrisy. Have I not played it to perfection?" She draws a chair into the angle, and sits down upon it. For she is still not quite sure that the spying eye has been withdrawn from the aperture, or whether it may not have returned to it. "Now that I've made a beginning," she murmurs on, "I must think what's to be done in continuance, and how the false pretence is to be kept up. What will _they_ do?--and think? They'll be suspicious for a while, no doubt; look sharply after me, as ever! But that cannot last always; and surely they won't doom me to dwell for ever in this dingy hole! When I've proved my conversion real, by penance, obedience, and the like, I may secure their confidence, and by way of reward, get transferred to a more comfortable chamber. Ah! little care I for the comfort, if convenient,--with a window out of which one could look. Then I might have a hope of seeing--speaking to some one with heart less hard than Sister Ursule's, and that other creature--a very hag!" "I wonder where the place is? Whether in the country, or in a town among houses? It may be the last--in the very heart of a great city, for all this death-like stillness! They build these religious prisons with walls so thick! And the voices I from time to time hear are all women's. Not one of a man amongst them! They must be the convent people themselves! Nuns and novices! Myself one of the latter! Ha! ha! I shouldn't have known it if Sister Ursule hadn't informed me. Novice, indeed--soon to be a nun! No! but a free woman--or dead! Death would be better than life like this!" The derisive smile that for a moment played upon her features passes off, replaced by the same forlorn woe-begone look, as despair comes back to her heart. For she again recalls what she has read in books--very different from that so contemptuously tossed aside--of girls young and beautiful as herself--high-born ladies--surreptitiously taken from their homes--shut up as she--never more permitted to look on the sun's light, or bask in its beams, save within the gloomy cloisters of a convent, or its dismally shadowed grounds. The prospect of such future for herself appals her, eliciting an anguished sigh--almost a groan. "Ha!" she exclaims the instant after, and again with altered air, as though something had arisen to relieve her. "There are voices now! Still of women! Laughter! How strange it sounds! So sweet! I've not heard such since I've been here. It's the voice of a girl! It must be--so clear, so joyous. Yes! Surely it cannot come from any of the sisters? They are never joyful--never laugh." She remains listening, soon to hear the laughter again, a second voice joining in it, both with the cheery ring of school girls at play. The sound comes in with the light--it could not well enter otherwise--and aware of this, she stands facing that way, with eyes turned upward. For the window is far above her head. "Would that I could see out! If I only had something on which to stand!" She sweeps the cell with her eyes, to see only the pallet, the frail chairs, a little table with slender legs, and a washstand--all too low. Standing upon the highest, her eyes would still be under the level of the sill. She is about giving it up, when an artifice suggests itself. With wits sharpened, rather than dulled by her long confinement--she bethinks her of a plan, by which she may at least look out of the window. She can do that by upending the bedstead! Rash, she would raise it on the instant. But she is not so; instead, considerate, more than ever cautious. And so proceeding, she first places a chair against the door in such position that its back blocks the keyhole. Then, dragging bed-clothes, mattress, and all to the floor, she takes hold of the wooden framework; and, exerting her whole strength, hoists it on end, tilted like a ladder against the wall. And as such it will answer her purpose, the strong webbing, crossed and stayed, to serve for steps. A moment more, and she has mounted up, and stands, her chin resting on the window's ledge. The window itself is a casement on hinges; one of those antique affairs, iron framed, with the panes set in lead. Small, though big enough for a human body to pass through, but for an upright bar centrally bisecting it. She, balancing upon the bedstead, and looking out, thinks not of the bar now, nor takes note of the dimensions of the aperture. Her thoughts, as her glances, are all given to what she sees outside. At the first _coup d'oeil_, the roofs and chimneys of houses, with all their appurtenances of patent smoke-curers, weathercocks, and lightning conductors; among them domes and spires, showing it a town with several churches. Dropping her eyes lower, they rest upon a garden, or rather a strip of ornamental grounds, tree shaded, with walks, arbours, and seats, girt by a grey massive wall, high almost as the houses. At a glance she takes in these inanimate objects; but does not dwell on any of them. For, soon as looking below, her attention becomes occupied with living forms, standing in groups, or in twos or threes strolling about the grounds. They are all women, and of every age; most of them wearing the garb of the nunnery, loose-flowing robes of sombre hue. A few, however, are dressed in the ordinary fashion of young ladies at a boarding school; and such they are--the _pensionaires_ of the establishment. Her eyes wandering from group to group, after a time become fixed upon two of the school-girls, who, linked arm in arm, are walking backward and forward directly in front. Why she particularly notices them, is that one of the two is acting in a singular manner; every time she passes under the window looking up to it, as though with a knowledge of something inside, in which she feels an interest! Her glances interrogative, are at the same time evidently snatched by stealth--as in fear of being observed by the others. Even her promenading companion seems unaware of them. She inside the cloister, soon as her first surprise is over, regards this young lady with a fixed stare, forgetting all the others. "What can it mean?" she asks herself. "So unlike the rest! Surely not French! Can she be English? She is very--very beautiful!" The last, at least, is true, for the girl is, indeed, a beautiful creature, with features quite different from those around--all of them being of the French facial type, while hers are pronouncedly Irish. By this the two are once more opposite the window, and the girl again looking up, sees behind the glass--dim with dust and spiders' webs--a pale face, with a pair of bright eyes gazing steadfastly at her. She starts; but quickly recovering, keeps on as before. Then as she faces round at the end of the walk, still within view of the window, she raises her hand, with a finger laid upon her lips, seeming to say, plain as words could speak it,-- "Keep quiet! I know all about you, and why you are there." The gesture is not lost upon the captive. But before she can reflect upon its significance, the great convent bell breaks forth in noisy clangour, causing a flutter among the figures outside, with a scattering helter-skelter; for it is the first summons to vespers, soon followed by the tinier tinkle of the _angelus_. In a few seconds the grounds are deserted by all save one--the school-girl with the Irish features and eyes. She, having let go her companion's arm, and lingering behind the rest, makes a quick slant towards the window she has been watching; as she approaches it, significantly exposing something white she holds half hidden between her fingers! It needs no further gesture to make known her intent. The English girl has already guessed it, as told by the iron casement grating back on its rusty hinges, and left standing ajar. On the instant of its opening, the white object parts from the hand that has been holding it, and, like a flash of light, passes through into the darksome cell, falling with a thud upon the floor. Not a word goes with it; for she who has shown such dexterity, soon as delivering the missile, glides away--so speedily, she is still in time to join the _queue_ moving on towards the convent chapel. Cautiously reclosing the window, Soeur Marie descends the steps of her improvised ladder, and takes up the thing that had been tossed in; which she finds to be a letter shotted inside! Despite her burning impatience, she does not open it till after restoring the bedstead to the horizontal, and replacing all as before. For now, as ever, she has need to be circumspect, and with better reasons. At length, feeling secure, all the more from knowing the nuns are at their vesper devotions, she tears off the envelope, and reads,-- "_Mary,--Monday night next, after midnight, if you look out of your window, you will see friends--among them_ "JACK WINGATE." "Jack Wingate!" she exclaims, with a look of strange intelligence lighting up her face. "A voice from dear old Wyeside! Hope of delivery at last!" And overcome by her emotion, she sinks down upon the pallet; no longer looking sad, but with an expression contented, and beatified as that of the most _devoté_ nun in the convent. CHAPTER LXX. A JUSTIFIABLE ABDUCTION. It is a moonless November night, and a fog drifting down from the _Pas de Calais_ envelopes Boulogne in its damp, clammy embrace. The great cathedral clock is tolling twelve midnight, and the streets are deserted, the last wooden-heeled _soulier_ having ceased clattering over their cobble-stone pavements. If a foot passenger be abroad, he is some belated individual groping his way home from the _Café de billars_ he frequents, or the _Cercle_ to which he belongs. Even the _sergens de ville_ are scarcer than usual, those seen being huddled up under the shelter of friendly porches, while the invisible ones are making themselves yet more snug inside _cabarets_, whose openness beyond licensed hours they wink at in return for the accommodation afforded. It is, in truth, a most disagreeable night: cold as dark, for the fog has frost in it. For all, there are three men in the streets of Boulogne who regard neither its chillness nor obscurity. Instead, this last is just what they desire, and for days past have been waiting for. They who thus delight in darkness are Major Mahon, Captain Ryecroft, and the waterman, Wingate. Not because they have thoughts of doing evil, for their purpose is of the very opposite character--to release a captive from captivity. The night has arrived when, in accordance with the promise made on that sheet of paper so dexterously pitched into her cloister, the Soeur Marie is to see friends in front of her window. They are the friends about to attempt taking her out of it. They are not going blindly about the thing. Unlikely old campaigners as Mahon and Ryecroft would. During the interval since that warning summons was sent in, they have made thorough reconnaissance of the ground, taken stock of the convent's precincts and surroundings; in short, considered every circumstance of difficulty and danger. They are therefore prepared with all the means and appliances for effecting their design. Just as the last stroke of the clock ceases its booming reverberation, they issue forth from Mahon's house; and, turning up the Rue Tintelleries, strike along a narrower street, which leads on toward the ancient _cité_. The two officers walk arm in arm, Ryecroft, stranger to the place, needing guidance; while the boatman goes behind, with that carried aslant his shoulder, which, were it on the banks of the Wye, might be taken for a pair of oars. It is, nevertheless, a thing altogether different--a light ladder; though were it hundreds weight he would neither stagger nor groan under it. The errand he is upon knits his sinews, giving him the strength of a giant. They proceed with extreme caution, all three silent as spectres. When any sound comes to their ears, as the shutting to of a door, or distant footfall upon the ill-paved _trottoirs_, they make instant stop, and stand listening--speech passing among themselves only in whispers. But as these interruptions are few, they make fair progress; and in less than twenty minutes after leaving the Major's house, they have reached the spot where the real action is to commence. This is in the narrow lane which runs along the _enciente_ of the convent at back; a thoroughfare little used even in daytime, but after night solitary as a desert, and on this especial night dark as dungeon itself. They know the _allée_ well; have traversed it scores of times within the last few days and nights, and could go through it blindfold. And they also know the enclosure wall, with its exact height, just that of the cloister window beyond, and a little less than their ladder, which has been selected with an eye to dimensions. While its bearer is easing it off his shoulder, and planting it firmly in place, a short whispered dialogue occurs between the other two, the Major saying,-- "We won't all three be needed for the work inside. One of us may remain here--nay, must! Those _sergens de ville_ might be prowling about, or some of the convent people themselves: in which case we'll need warning before we dare venture back over the wall. If caught on the top of it, the petticoats obstructing--ay, or without them--'twould go ill with us." "Quite true," assents the Captain. "Which of us do you propose staying here? Jack?" "Yes, certainly. And for more reasons than one. Excited as he is now, once getting his old flame into his arms, he'd be all on fire--perhaps with noise enough to awake the whole sleeping sisterhood, and bring them clamouring around us, like crows about an owl that had intruded into the rookery. Besides, there's a staff of male servants--for they have such--half a score of stout fellows, who'd show fight. A big bell, too, by ringing which they can rouse the town. Therefore, Master Jack _must_ remain here. You tell him he must." Jack is told, with reasons given, though not exactly the real ones. Endorsing them, the Major says,-- "Don't be so impatient, my good fellow! It will make but a few seconds' difference; and then you'll have your girl by your side, sure. Whereas, acting inconsiderately, you may never set eyes on her. The fight in the front will be easy. Our greatest danger's from behind; and you can do better in every way, as for yourself, by keeping the rear-guard." He thus counselled is convinced: and, though much disliking it, yields prompt obedience. How could he otherwise? He is in the hands of men his superiors in rank as experience. And is it not for him they are there; risking liberty--it may be life? Having promised to keep his impulsiveness in check, he is instructed what to do: simply to lie concealed under the shadow of the wall, and should any one be outside when he hears a low whistle, he is _not_ to reply to it. The signal so arranged, Mahon and Ryecroft mount over the wall, taking the ladder along with them, and leaving the waterman to reflect, in nervous anxiety, how near his Mary is, and yet how far off she still may be! Once inside the garden, the other two strike off along a walk leading in the direction of the spot which is their objective point. They go as if every grain of sand pressed by their feet had a friend's life in it. The very cats of the convent could not traverse its grounds more silently. Their caution is rewarded; for they arrive at the cloister sought, without interruption, to see its casement open, with a pale face in it--a picture of Madonna on a background of black, through the white film looking as if it were veiled. But though dense the fog, it does not hinder them from perceiving that the expression of that face is one of expectancy; nor her from recognising them as the friends who were to be under the window. With that voice from the Wyeside still echoing in her ears, she sees her deliverers at hand! They have indeed come. A woman of weak nerves would, under the circumstances, be excited--possibly cry out. But Soeur Marie is not such; and without uttering a word, even the slightest ejaculation, she stands still, and patiently waits while a wrench is applied to the rotten bar of iron, soon snapping it from its support, as though it were but a stick of maccaroni. [Illustration: A WRENCH IS APPLIED TO THE ROTTEN BAR OF IRON, SOON SNAPPING.] It is Ryecroft who performs this burglarious feat, and into his arms she delivers herself, to be conducted down the ladder; which is done without as yet a word having been exchanged between them. Only after reaching the ground, and there is some feeling of safety, he whispers to her,-- "Keep up your courage, Mary! Your Jack is waiting for you outside the wall. Here, take my hand----" "Mary! My Jack! And you--you----" Her voice becomes inaudible, and she totters back against the wall! "She's swooning--has fainted!" mutters the Major; which Ryecroft already knows, having stretched out his arms, and caught her as she is sinking to the earth. "It's the sudden change into the open air," he says. "We must carry her, Major. You go ahead with the ladder; I can manage the girl myself." While speaking, he lifts the unconscious form, and bears it away. No light weight either, but to strength as his, only a feather. The Major, going in advance with the ladder, guides him through the mist; and in a few seconds they reach the outer wall, Mahon giving a low whistle as he approaches. It is almost instantly answered by another from the outside, telling them the coast is clear. And in three minutes after they are also on the outside, the girl still resting in Ryecroft's arms. The waterman wishes to relieve him, agonized by the thought that his sweetheart, who had passed unscathed, as it were, through the very gates of death, may, after all, be dead! He urges it; but Mahon, knowing the danger of delay, forbids any sentimental interference, commanding Jack to re-shoulder the ladder, and follow as before. Then striking off in Indian file, the Major first, the Captain with his burden in the centre, the boatman bringing up behind, they retrace their steps towards the Rue Tintelleries. If Ryecroft but knew whom he is carrying, he would bear her, if not more tenderly, with far different emotions, and keener solicitude about her recovery from that swoon. It is only after she is out of his arms, and lying upon a couch in Major Mahon's house--the hood drawn back, and the light shining on her face--that he experiences a thrill, strange and wild as ever felt by mortal man! No wonder--seeing it is Gwendoline Wynn! "Gwen!" he exclaims, in a very ecstasy of joy, as her pulsing breast and opened eyes tell of returned consciousness. "Vivian!" is the murmured rejoinder, their lips meeting in delirious contact. Poor Jack Wingate! CHAPTER LXXI. STARTING ON A CONTINENTAL TOUR. Lewin Murdock is dead, and buried--has been for days. Not in the family vault of the Wynns, though he had the right of having his body there laid. But his widow, who had control of the interment, willed it otherwise. She has repugnance to opening that receptacle of the dead, holding a secret she may well dread disclosure of. There was no very searching inquiry into the cause of the man's death--none such seeming needed. A coroner's inquest, true; but of the most perfunctory kind. Several _habitués_ of the Welsh Harp, with its staff of waiters, testified to having seen him at that hostelry till a late hour of the night on which he was drowned, and far gone in drink. The landlord advanced the narrative a stage, by telling how he conveyed him to the boat, and delivered him to his boatman, Richard Dempsey--all true enough; while Coracle capped the story by a statement of circumstances, in part facts, but the major part fictitious: how the inebriate gentleman, after lying awhile quiet at the bottom of the skiff, suddenly sprung upon his feet, and, staggering excitedly about, capsized the craft, spilling both into the water. Some corroboration of this, in the boat having been found floating keel upwards, and the boatman arriving home at Llangorren soaking wet. To his having been in this condition, several of the Court domestics, at the time called out of their beds, with purpose _prepense_, were able to bear witness. But Dempsey's testimony is further strengthened, even to confirmation, by himself having since taken to bed, where he now lies dangerously ill of a fever, the result of a cold caught from that chilling _douche_. In this latest inquest the finding of the jury is set forth in two simple words, "Drowned accidentally." No suspicion attaches to any one; and his widow, now wearing the weeds of sombre hue, sorrows profoundly. But her grief is great only in the eyes of the outside world, and the presence of the Llangorren domestics. Alone within her chamber she shows little signs of sorrow; and, if possible, less when Gregoire Rogier is her companion; which he almost constantly is. If more than half his time at the Court while Lewin Murdock was alive, he is now there nearly the whole of it--no longer as a guest, but as much its master as she is its mistress! For that matter, indeed, more; if inference may be drawn from a dialogue occurring between them some time after her husband's death. They are in the library, where there is a strong chest, devoted to the safe keeping of legal documents, wills, leases, and the like--all the paraphernalia of papers relating to the administration of the estate. Rogier is at a table upon which many of these lie, with writing materials besides. A sheet of foolscap is before him, on which he has just scribbled the rough copy of an advertisement intended to be sent to several newspapers. "I think this will do," he says to the widow, who, in an easy chair drawn up in front of the fire, is sipping Chartreuse, and smoking paper cigarettes. "Shall I read it to you?" "No. I don't want to be bothered with the thing in detail. Enough, if you let me hear its general purport." He gives her this in briefest epitome:-- "_The Llangorren estates to be sold by public auction, with all the appurtenances, mansion, park, ornamental grounds, home and out farms, manorial rights, presentation to church living, etc., etc._" "_Tres-bien!_ Have you put down the date? It should be soon." "You're right, _chèrie_. Should, and must be. So soon, I fear we won't realize three-fourths of the value. But there's no help for it, with the ugly thing threatening--hanging over our necks like a very sword of Damocles." "You mean the tongue of _le braconnier_?" She has reason to dread it. "No, I don't; not in the slightest. There's a sickle too near his own--in the hands of the reaper, Death." "He's dying, then?" She speaks with an earnestness in which there is no feeling of compassion, but the very reverse. "He is," the other answers, in like unpitying tone. "I've just come from his bedside." "From the cold he caught that night, I suppose?" "Yes; that's partly the cause. But," he adds, with a diabolical grin, "more the medicine he has taken for it." "What mean you, Gregoire?" "Only that Monsieur Dick has been delirious, and I saw danger in it. He was talking too wildly." "You've done something to keep him quiet?" "I have." "What?" "Given him a sleeping draught." "But he'll wake up again, and then----" "Then I'll administer another dose of the anodyne." "What sort of anodyne?" "A _hypodermic_." "Hypodermic! I've never heard of the thing--not even the name!" "A wonderful cure it is--for noisy tongues!" "You excite one's curiosity. Tell me something of its nature." "Oh, it's very simple--exceedingly so. Only a drop of liquid introduced into the blood--not in the common roundabout way, by pouring down the throat, but direct injection into the veins. The process in itself is easy enough, as every medical practitioner knows. The skill consists in the _kind_ of liquid to be injected. That's one of the occult sciences I learnt in Italy, land of Lucrezia and Tophana, where such branches of knowledge still flourish. Elsewhere it's not much known. And perhaps it's well it isn't, or there might be more widowers, with a still larger proportion of widows." "Poison!" she exclaims involuntarily, adding, in a timid whisper, "Was it, Gregoire?" "Poison!" he echoes, protestingly. "That's too plain a word, and the idea it conveys too vulgar, for such a delicate scientific operation as that I've performed. Possibly, in Monsieur Coracle's case, the effect will be somewhat similar, but not the after symptoms. If I haven't made miscalculation as to quantity, ere three days are over, it will send him to his eternal sleep; and I'll defy all the medical experts in England to detect traces of poison in him. So don't inquire further, _chèrie_. Be satisfied to know the hypodermic will do you a service. And," he adds, with sardonic smile, "grateful if it be never given to yourself." She starts, recoiling in horror--not at the repulsive confessions she has listened to, but more through personal fear. Though herself steeped in crime, he beside her seems its very incarnation! She has long known him morally capable of anything, and now fancies he may have the power of the famed basilisk, to strike her dead with a glance of his eyes! "Bah!" he exclaims, observing her trepidation, but pretending to construe it otherwise. "Why all this emotion about such a _misérable_? He'll have no widow to lament him--inconsolable like yourself. Ha! ha! Besides, for our safety--both of us--his death is as much needed as was the other. After killing the bird that threatened to devour our crops, it would be blind buffoonery to keep the scarecrow standing. I only wish there were nothing but he between us and complete security." "But is there still?" she asks, her alarm taking a new turn, as she observes a slight shade of apprehension pass over his face. "Certainly there is." "What?" "That little convent matter." "_Mon Dieu!_ I supposed it arranged beyond the possibility of danger." "Probability is the word you mean. In this sweet world there's nothing sure except money--that, too, in hard cash coin. Even at the best we'll have to sacrifice a large slice of the estate to satisfy the greed of those who have assisted us--_Messieurs les Jesuites_. If I could only, as by some magician's wand, convert these clods of Herefordshire into a portable shape, I'd cheat them yet; as I've done already, in making them believe me one of their most ardent _doctrinaires_. Then, _chère amie_, we could at once move from Llangorren Court to a palace by some lake of Como, glassing softest skies, with whispering myrtles, and all the other fal-lals, by which Monsieur Bulwer's sham prince humbugged the Lyonese shopkeeper's daughter. Ha! ha! ha!" "But why can't it be done?" "Ah! There the word _impossible_, if you like. What! Convert a landed estate of several thousand acres into cash, _presto-instanter_, as though one were but selling a flock of sheep! The thing can't be accomplished anywhere, least of all in this slow-moving Angleterre, where men look at their money twice--twenty times--before parting with it. Even a mortgage couldn't be managed for weeks--maybe months--without losing quite the moiety of value. But a _bonâ fide_ sale, for which we must wait, and with that cloud hanging over us! Oh, it's damnable! The thing's been a blunder from beginning to end, all through the squeamishness of Monsieur, _votre mari_. Had he agreed to what I first proposed, and done with Mademoiselle what should have been done, he might himself still--the simpleton, sot, soft-heart, and softer head! Well, it's of no use reviling him now. He paid the forfeit for being a fool. And 'twill do no good our giving way to apprehensions, that after all may turn out shadows, however dark. In the end everything may go right, and we can make our midnight flitting in a quiet, comfortable way. But what a flutter there'll be among my flock at the Rugg's Ferry Chapel, when they wake up some fine morning, and rub their eyes, only to see that their good shepherd has forsaken them! A comical scene, of which I'd like being a spectator. Ha! ha! ha!" She joins him in the laugh, for the sally is irresistible. And while they are still ha-ha-ing, a touch at the door tells of a servant seeking admittance. It is the butler who presents himself, salver in hand, on which rests a chrome-coloured envelope--at a glance seen to be a telegraphic despatch. It bears the address "Rev. Gregoire Rogier, Rugg's Ferry, Herefordshire," and when opened, the telegram is seen to have been sent from Folkestone. Its wording is,-- "_The bird has escaped from its cage. Prenez garde!_" Well for the pseudo-priest and his _chère amie_ that before they read it the butler had left the room. For though figurative the form of expression, and cabalistic the words, both man and woman seem instantly to comprehend them; and with such comprehension, as almost to drive them distracted. He is silent, as if struck dumb, his face showing blanched and bloodless, while she utters a shriek, half terrified, half in frenzied anger. It is the last loud cry, or word, to which she gives utterance at Llangorren. And no longer there speaks the priest loudly, or authoritatively. The after hours of that night are spent by both of them, not as the owners of the house, but burglars in the act of breaking it. Up till the hour of dawn, the two might be seen silently flitting from room to room--attended only by Clarisse, who carries the candle--ransacking drawers and secretaires, selecting articles of _bijouterie_ and _vertu_, of little weight, but large value, and packing them in trunks and travelling bags; all of which under the grey light of morning are taken to the nearest railway station in one of the Court carriages--a large drag-barouche--inside which ride Rogier and Madame Murdock _veuve_; her _femme de chambre_ having a seat beside the coachman, who has been told they are starting on a continental tour. * * * * * And so were they; but it was a tour from which they never returned. Instead, it was extended to a greater distance than they themselves designed, and in a direction neither dreamt of; since their career, after a year's interval, ended in _deportation_ to Cayenne, for some crime committed by them in the South of France. So said the _Semaphore_ of Marseilles. CHAPTER LXXII. CORACLE DICK ON HIS DEATH-BED. As next morning's sun rises over Llangorren Court, it shows a mansion without either master or mistress! Not long to remain so. If the old servants of the establishment had short notice of dismissal, still more brief is that given to its latest retinue. About meridian of that day, after the departure of their mistress, while yet in wonder where she has gone, they receive another shock of surprise, and a more unpleasant one, at seeing a hackney carriage drive up to the hall door, out of which step two men, evidently no friends to her from whom they have their wages. For one of the men is Captain Ryecroft, the other a police superintendent; who, after the shortest possible parley, directs the butler to parade the complete staff of his fellow-domestics, male and female. This with an air and in a tone of authority which precludes supposition that the thing is a jest. Summoned from all quarters, cellar to garret, and outdoors as well, their names, with other particulars, are taken down; and they are told that their services will be no longer required at Llangorren. In short, they are one and all dismissed, without a word about the month's wages or warning! If they get either, 'twill be only as a grace. Then they receive orders to pack up and be off; while Joseph Preece, ex-Charon, who has crossed the river in his boat, with appointment to meet the hackney there, is authorized to take temporary charge of the place; Jack Wingate, similarly bespoke, having come down in his skiff, to stand by him in case of any opposition. None arises. However chagrined by their hasty _sans façon_ discharge, the outgoing domestics seem not so greatly surprised at it. From what they have observed for some time going on, as also something whispered about, they had no great reliance on their places being permanent. So, in silence all submit, though somewhat sulkily; and prepare to vacate quarters they had found fairly snug. There is one, however, who cannot be thus conveniently, or unceremoniously, dismissed--the head gamekeeper, Richard Dempsey. For, while the others are getting their _mandamus_ to move, the report is brought in that he is lying on his death-bed! So the parish doctor has prognosticated. Also, that he is just then delirious, and saying queer things; some of which repeated to the police "super," tell him his proper place at that precise moment is by the bedside of the sick man. Without a second's delay, he starts off towards the lodge in which Coracle has been of late domiciled--under the guidance of its former occupant, Joseph Preece--accompanied by Captain Ryecroft and Jack Wingate. The house being but a few hundred yards distant from the Court, they are soon inside it, and standing over the bed on which lies the fevered patient; not at rest, but tossing to and fro--at intervals, in such violent manner as to need restraint. The superintendent at once sees it would be idle putting questions to him. If asked his own name, he could not declare it; for he knows not himself--far less those who are around. His face is something horrible to behold. It would but harrow sensitive feelings to give a portraiture of it. Enough to say, it is more like that of demon than man. And his speech, poured as in a torrent from his lips, is alike horrifying--admission of many and varied crimes, in the same breath denying them and accusing others, his contradictory ravings garnished with blasphemous ejaculations. A specimen will suffice, omitting the blasphemy. "It's a lie!" he cries out, just as they are entering the room. "A lie, every word o't! I didn't murder Mary Morgan. Served her right if I had, the jade! She jilted me; an' for that wasp Wingate--dog--cur! I didn't kill her. No; only fixed the plank. If she wor fool enough to step on't, that warn't my fault. She did--she did! Ha! ha! ha!" For a while he keeps up the horrid cachinnation, as the glee of Satan exulting over some feat of foul _diablerie_. Then his thoughts changing to another crime, he goes on,-- "The grand girl--the lady! She arn't drowned; nor dead eyther! The priest carried her off in that French schooner. I had nothing to do with it. 'Twar the priest and Mr. Murdock. Ha! Murdock! I _did_ drown _him_. No, I didn't. That's another lie! T'was himself upset the boat. Let me see--was it? No! he couldn't--he was too drunk. I stood up on the skiff's rail. Slap over it went. What a duckin' I had for it, and a devil o' a swim too! But I did the trick--neatly! Didn't I, your Reverence? Now for the hundred pounds. And you promised to double it--you did! Keep to your bargain, or I'll peach upon you--on all the lot of you--the woman, too--the French woman! She kept that fine shawl--Indian they said it wor. She's got it now. She wanted the diamonds, too, but daren't keep _them_. The shroud! Ha! the shroud! That's all they left _me_. I ought to 'a burnt it. But then the devil would 'a been after and burned me! How fine Mary looked in that grand dress, wi' all them gewgaws, rings,--chains an' bracelets, all pure gold! But I drownded her, an' she deserved it, that she did. Drownded her twice--ha--ha--ha!" Again he breaks off with a peal of demoniac laughter, long continued. More than an hour they remain listening to his delirious ramblings, and with interest intense. For, despite its incoherence, the disconnected threads joined together make up a tale they can understand; though so strange, so brimful of atrocities, as to seem incredible. All the while he is writhing about on the bed; till at length, exhausted, his head droops over upon the pillow, and he lies for a while quiet--to all appearance dead! But no; there is another throe yet--one horrible as any that has preceded. Looking up, he sees the superintendent's uniform and silver buttons--a sight which produces a change in the expression of his features, as though it had recalled him to his senses. With arms flung out as in defence, he shrieks,-- "Keep back, you ---- policeman! Hands off, or I'll brain you! Hach! You've got the rope round my neck! Curse the thing! It's choking me. Hach!" And with his fingers clutching at his throat, as if to undo a noose, he gasps out in husky voice,-- "Gone, by G----." At this he drops over dead, his last word an oath, his last thought a fancy that there is a rope around his neck! What he has said in his unconscious confessions lays open many seeming mysteries of this romance, hitherto unrevealed. How the pseudo-priest, Father Rogier, observing a likeness between Miss Wynn and Mary Morgan--causing him that start as he stood over the coffin, noticed by Jack Wingate--had exhumed the dead body of the latter, the poacher and Murdock assisting him. Then how they had taken it down in the boat to Dempsey's house; soon after, going over to Llangorren, and seizing the young lady, as she stood in the summer-house, having stifled her cries by chloroform. Then, how they carried her across to Dempsey's, and substituted the corpse for the living body--the grave-clothes changed for the silken dress with all its adornments--this the part assigned to Mrs. Murdock, who had met them at Coracle's cottage. Then, Dick himself hiding away the shroud, hindered by superstitious fear from committing it to the flames. In fine, how Gwendoline Wynn, drugged and still kept in a state of coma, was taken down in a boat to Chepstow, and there put aboard the French schooner _La Chouette_; carried across to Boulogne, to be shut up in a convent for life! All these delicate matters, managed by Father Rogier, backed by _Messieurs les Jesuites_, who had furnished him with the means! One after another the astounding facts come forth as the raving man continues his involuntary admissions. Supplemented by others already known to Ryecroft and the rest, with the deductions drawn, they complete the unities of a drama, iniquitous as ever enacted. Its motives declare themselves--all wicked save one: this a spark of humanity that had still lingered in the breast of Lewin Murdock, but for which Gwendoline Wynn would never have seen the inside of a nunnery. Instead, while under the influence of the narcotic, her body would have been dropped into the Wye, just as was that wearing her ball dress! And that same body is now wearing another dress, supposed to have been prepared for her--another shroud--reposing in the tomb where all believed Gwen Wynn to have been laid! This last fact is brought to light on the following day, when the family vault of the Wynns is re-opened, and Mrs. Morgan--by marks known only to herself--identifies the remains found there as those of her own daughter! CHAPTER LXXIII. THE CALM AFTER THE STORM. Twelve months after the events recorded in this romance of the Wye, a boat-tourist descending the picturesque river, and inquiring about a pagoda-like structure he will see on its western side, would be told it is a summer-house, standing in the ornamental grounds of a gentleman's residence. If he ask who the gentleman is, the answer would be, Captain Vivian Ryecroft! For the ex-officer of Hussars is now the master of Llangorren; and, what he himself values higher, the husband of Gwendoline Wynn, once more its mistress. Were the tourist an acquaintance of either, and on his way to make call at the Court, bringing in by the little dock, he would there see a row boat, on its stern board, in gold lettering, "_The Gwendoline_." For the pretty pleasure craft has been restored to its ancient moorings. Still, however, remaining the property of Joseph Preece, who no longer lives in the cast-off cottage of Coracle Dick, but, like the boat itself, is again back and in service at Llangorren. If the day be fine, this venerable and versatile individual will be loitering beside it, or seated on one of its thwarts, pipe in mouth, indulging in the _dolce far niente_. And little besides has he to do, since his pursuits are no longer varied, but now exclusively confined to the calling of waterman to the Court. He and his craft are under charter for the remainder of his life, should he wish it so--as he surely will. The friendly visitor keeping on up to the house, if at the hour of luncheon, will in all likelihood there meet a party of old acquaintances--ours, if not his. Besides the beautiful hostess at the table's head, he will see a lady of the "antique brocaded type," who herself once presided there, by name Miss Dorothea Linton; another known as Miss Eleanor Lees; and a fourth, youngest of the quartette, _yclept_ Kate Mahon. For the school girl of the Boulogne Convent has escaped from its austere studies, and is now most part of her time resident with the friend she helped to escape from its cloisters. Men there will also be at the Llangorren luncheon table; likely three of them, in addition to the host himself. One will be Major Mahon; a second the Reverend William Musgrave; and the third, Mr. George Shenstone! Yes; George Shenstone, under the roof, and seated at the table of Gwendoline Wynn, now the wife of Vivian Ryecroft! To explain a circumstance seemingly so singular, it is necessary to call in the aid of a saying, culled from that language richest of all others in moral and metaphysical imagery--the Spanish. It has a proverb, _un claco saca otro claco_--"one nail drives out the other." And, watching the countenance of the baronet's son, so long sad and clouded, seeing how, at intervals, it brightens up--these intervals when his eyes meet those of Kate Mahon--it were easy predicting that in his case the adage will ere long have additional verification. * * * * * Were the same tourist to descend the Wye at a date posterior, and again make a call at Llangorren, he would find that some changes had taken place in the interval of his absence. At the boat dock Old Joe would likely be. But not as before in sole charge of the pleasure craft; only pottering about, as a pensioner retired on full pay; the acting and active officer being a younger man, by name Wingate, who is now waterman to the Court. Between these two, however, there is no spite about the displacement--no bickerings nor heartburnings. How could there, since the younger addresses the older as "uncle"; himself in return being styled "nevvy"? No need to say that this relationship has been brought about by the bright eyes of Amy Preece. Nor is it so new. In the lodge where Jack and Joe live together is a brace of chubby chicks; one of them a boy--the possible embryo of a Wye waterman--who, dandled upon old Joe's knees, takes delight in weeding his frosted whiskers, while calling him "good granddaddy." As Jack's mother--who is also a member of this happy family--forewarned him, the wildest grief must in time give way, and Nature's laws assert their supremacy. So has he found it; and though still holding Mary Morgan in sacred, honest remembrance, he--as many a true man before, and others as true to come--has yielded to the inevitable. Proceeding on to the Court, the friendly visitor will at certain times there meet the same people he met before; but the majority of them having new names or titles. An added number in two interesting olive branches there also, with complexions struggling between _blonde_ and _brunette_, who call Captain and Mrs. Ryecroft their papa and mamma; while the lady who was once Eleanor Lees--the "companion"--is now Mrs. Musgrave, life companion, not to the _curate_ of Llangorren Church, but its _rector_. The living having become vacant, and in the bestowal of Llangorren's heiress, has been worthily bestowed on the Reverend William. Two other old faces, withal young ones, the returned tourist will see at Llangorren--their owners on visit as himself. He might not know either of them by the names they now bear--Sir George and Lady Shenstone--for when he last saw them, the gentleman was simply Mr. Shenstone, and the lady Miss Mahon. The old baronet is dead, and the young one, succeeding to the title, has also taken upon himself another title--that of husband--proving the Spanish apothegm true, both in the spirit and to the letter. If there be any nail capable of driving out another, it is that sent home by the glance of an Irish girl's eye--at least, so thinks Sir George Shenstone, with good reason for thinking it. There are two other individuals, who come and go at the Court--the only ones holding out, and likely to hold, against change of any kind. For Major Mahon is still Major Mahon, rolling on in his rich Irish brogue, as ever abhorrent of matrimony. No danger of his becoming a benedict! And as little of Miss Linton being transformed into a sage woman. It would be strange if she should, with the love novels she continues to devour, and the "Court Intelligence" she gulps down, keeping alive the hallucination that she is still a belle at Bath and Cheltenham. So ends our "Romance of the Wye"--a drama of happy _denouement_ to most of the actors in it; and, as hoped, satisfactory to all who have been spectators. THE END