The Merry Men
and
Other Tales and Fables

by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

tenth edition

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1904

Three of the following Tales have appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_;
one in _Longman’s_; one in Mr. Henry Norman’s Christmas Annual; and one
in the _Court and Society Review_. The Author desires to make proper
acknowledgements to the Publishers concerned.

Dedication


_My dear Lady Taylor_,

_To your name_, _if I wrote on brass_, _I could add nothing_; _it has
been already written higher than I could dream to reach_, _by a strong
and dear hand_; _and if I now dedicate to you these tales_, _it is not
as the writer who brings you his work_, _but as the friend who would
remind you of his affection_.

_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON_

Skerryvore, Bournemouth.


Contents

 THE MERRY MEN
 CHAPTER 1. EILEAN AROS
 CHAPTER 2. WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS
 CHAPTER 3. LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY
 CHAPTER 4. THE GALE
 CHAPTER 5. A MAN OUT OF THE SEA

 WILL O’ THE MILL
 CHAPTER 1. THE PLAIN AND THE STARS
 CHAPTER 2. THE PARSON’S MARJORY
 CHAPTER 3. DEATH

 MARKHEIM

 THRAWN JANET

 OLALLA

 THE TREASURE OF FRANCHARD
 CHAPTER 1. BY THE DYING MOUNTEBANK
 CHAPTER 2.  MORNING TALK
 CHAPTER 3. THE ADOPTION
 CHAPTER 4. THE EDUCATION OF A PHILOSOPHER
 CHAPTER 5. TREASURE TROVE
 CHAPTER 6. A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, IN TWO PARTS
 CHAPTER 7. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ
 CHAPTER 8. THE WAGES OF PHILOSOPHY




THE MERRY MEN




CHAPTER I.
EILEAN AROS.


It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot
for the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before
at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and,
leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by
sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from
an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after
a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in
the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and
when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm,
had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means
of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had
pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a
fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at
destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought
neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the
lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my
father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to
die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I
was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own
charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to
Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held
blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence,
and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to
spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society
and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was
that now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with
so light a heart that July day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as
rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it,
full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen—all overlooked
from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben
Kyaw. _The Mountain of the Mist_, they say the words signify in the
Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more
than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come
blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it
must make them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea
level, there would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water,
too, and was mossy[5] to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting
in broad sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape
upon the mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more
beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides,
there were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even
as far as Aros, fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It twisted so as nearly to
double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a
man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the
moss came nearly to the knee. There was no cultivation anywhere, and
not one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course
there were—three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the
other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large
part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger
than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather
in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was
always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as
moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your
eye would kindle with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of
the land, on a day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost
roaring, like a battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful
voices of the breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself—Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it
means _the House of God_—Aros itself was not properly a piece of the
Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south-west corner of the
land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the
coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.
When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land
river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the
water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in
the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you
could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good
pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was
better because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level
of the Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was
a good one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over
a bay, with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could
watch the vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer’s day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their
sides instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the
base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days
you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following
you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man
that hears that cauldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick
as a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the
tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear,
westerly blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great
rollers breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried
reefs. But it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the
tide, here running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken
water—a _Roost_ we call it—at the tail of the land. I have often been
out there in a dead calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place
it is, with the sea swirling and combing up and boiling like the
cauldrons of a linn, and now and again a little dancing mutter of sound
as though the _Roost_ were talking to itself. But when the tide begins
to run again, and above all in heavy weather, there is no man could
take a boat within half a mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could
either steer or live in such a place. You can hear the roaring of it
six miles away. At the seaward end there comes the strongest of the
bubble; and it’s here that these big breakers dance together—the dance
of death, it may be called—that have got the name, in these parts, of
the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they run fifty feet high; but
that must be the green water only, for the spray runs twice as high as
that. Whether they got the name from their movements, which are swift
and antic, or from the shouting they make about the turn of the tide,
so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our
archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the reefs,
and weathered the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south
coast of Aros, in Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our
family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these dangers, in the
place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome the works now going
forward to set lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels
of our iron-bound, inhospitable islands.

The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from
my uncle’s man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had
transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the
marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie,
that dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the
boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag
beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer’s night, so that
in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward,
till the day he died, said only one form of words; what they were in
the original Gaelic I cannot tell, but they were thus translated: “Ah,
the sweet singing out of the sea.” Seals that haunted on that coast
have been known to speak to man in his own tongue, presaging great
disasters. It was here that a certain saint first landed on his voyage
out of Ireland to convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had
some claim to be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to
make so rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely
not far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his
monkish underlings who had a cell there, that the islet owes its holy
and beautiful name, the House of God.

Among these old wives’ stories there was one which I was inclined to
hear with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which
scattered the ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and
west of Scotland, one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the
eyes of some solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with
all hands, her colours flying even as she sank. There was some
likelihood in this tale; for another of that fleet lay sunk on the
north side, twenty miles from Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with
more detail and gravity than its companion stories, and there was one
particularity which went far to convince me of its truth: the name,
that is, of the ship was still remembered, and sounded, in my ears,
Spanishly. The _Espirito Santo_ they called it, a great ship of many
decks of guns, laden with treasure and grandees of Spain, and fierce
soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to all eternity, done with her wars
and voyages, in Sandag bay, upon the west of Aros. No more salvos of
ordnance for that tall ship, the “Holy Spirit,” no more fair winds or
happy ventures; only to rot there deep in the sea-tangle and hear the
shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran high about the island. It
was a strange thought to me first and last, and only grew stranger as I
learned the more of Spain, from which she had set sail with so proud a
company, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that sent her on that
voyage.

And now I must tell you, as I walked from Grisapol that day, the
_Espirito Santo_ was very much in my reflections. I had been favourably
remarked by our then Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous
writer, Dr. Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some papers
of an ancient date to rearrange and sift of what was worthless; and in
one of these, to my great wonder, I found a note of this very ship, the
_Espirito Santo_, with her captain’s name, and how she carried a great
part of the Spaniard’s treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross of
Grisapol; but in what particular spot, the wild tribes of that place
and period would give no information to the king’s inquiries. Putting
one thing with another, and taking our island tradition together with
this note of old King Jamie’s perquisitions after wealth, it had come
strongly on my mind that the spot for which he sought in vain could be
no other than the small bay of Sandag on my uncle’s land; and being a
fellow of a mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to
weigh that good ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, and
doubloons, and bring back our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten
dignity and wealth.

This was a design of which I soon had reason to repent. My mind was
sharply turned on different reflections; and since I became the witness
of a strange judgment of God’s, the thought of dead men’s treasures has
been intolerable to my conscience. But even at that time I must acquit
myself of sordid greed; for if I desired riches, it was not for their
own sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart—my
uncle’s daughter, Mary Ellen. She had been educated well, and had been
a time to school upon the mainland; which, poor girl, she would have
been happier without. For Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the
servant, and her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in Scotland,
plainly bred up in a country place among Cameronians, long a skipper
sailing out of the Clyde about the islands, and now, with infinite
discontent, managing his sheep and a little “long shore fishing for the
necessary bread. If it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but
a month or two, you may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same
desert all the year round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the
Merry Men singing and dancing in the Roost!




CHAPTER II.
WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS.


It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing
for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the
boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was
at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old
long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For
all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I
observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over
curiously into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and
haggard, and I thought he avoided my eye. The coble had been repaired,
with two new thwarts and several patches of some rare and beautiful
foreign wood, the name of it unknown to me.

“Why, Rorie,” said I, as we began the return voyage, “this is fine
wood. How came you by that?”

“It will be hard to cheesel,” Rorie opined reluctantly; and just then,
dropping the oars, he made another of those dives into the stern which
I had remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on
my shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.

“What is wrong?” I asked, a good deal startled.

“It will be a great feesh,” said the old man, returning to his oars;
and nothing more could I get out of him, but strange glances and an
ominous nodding of the head. In spite of myself, I was infected with a
measure of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The water
was still and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay,
exceeding deep. For some time I could see naught; but at last it did
seem to me as if something dark—a great fish, or perhaps only a
shadow—followed studiously in the track of the moving coble. And then I
remembered one of Rorie’s superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in
some great, exterminating feud among the clans; a fish, the like of it
unknown in all our waters, followed for some years the passage of the
ferry-boat, until no man dared to make the crossing.

“He will be waiting for the right man,” said Rorie.

Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of
Aros. Outside and inside there were many changes. The garden was fenced
with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in
the kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from
the window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was
swinging from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of
linen and silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain
old kitchen that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the
stools, and the closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun
shone into, and the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the
mantelshelf and the three-cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells
instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare
wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole
adornment—poor man’s patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven
with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of
rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that
country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed
by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind
of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling
was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first moment, in my
heart.

“Mary, girl,” said I, “this is the place I had learned to call my home,
and I do not know it.”

“It is my home by nature, not by the learning,” she replied; “the place
I was born and the place I’m like to die in; and I neither like these
changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I would
have liked better, under God’s pleasure, they had gone down into the
sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on them now.”

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared
with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was
even graver than of custom.

“Ay,” said I, “I feared it came by wreck, and that’s by death; yet when
my father died, I took his goods without remorse.”

“Your father died a clean strae death, as the folk say,” said Mary.

“True,” I returned; “and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she
called?”

“They ca’d her the _Christ-Anna_,” said a voice behind me; and, turning
round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;
fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat
between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He
never laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like
the Cameronians he had been brought up among; and indeed, in many ways,
used to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times
before the Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I
used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits when
he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would
look back with envy, and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.

As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his
head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to
have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his
face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory,
or the bones of the dead.

“Ay” he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, “the
_Christ-Anna_. It’s an awfu’ name.”

I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of
health; for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

“I’m in the body,” he replied, ungraciously enough; “aye in the body
and the sins of the body, like yoursel’. Denner,” he said abruptly to
Mary, and then ran on to me: “They’re grand braws, thir that we hae
gotten, are they no? Yon’s a bonny knock[15], but it’ll no gang; and
the napery’s by ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; it’s for the like o’ them
folk sells the peace of God that passeth understanding; it’s for the
like o’ them, an’ maybe no even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to
His face and burn in muckle hell; and it’s for that reason the
Scripture ca’s them, as I read the passage, the accursed thing. Mary,
ye girzie,” he interrupted himself to cry with some asperity, “what for
hae ye no put out the twa candlesticks?”

“Why should we need them at high noon?” she asked.

But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. “We’ll bruik[16] them
while we may,” he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought
silver were added to the table equipage, already so unsuited to that
rough sea-side farm.

“She cam’ ashore Februar’ 10, about ten at nicht,” he went on to me.
“There was nae wind, and a sair run o’ sea; and she was in the sook o’
the Roost, as I jaloose. We had seen her a’ day, Rorie and me, beating
to the wind. She wasnae a handy craft, I’m thinking, that
_Christ-Anna_; for she would neither steer nor stey wi’ them. A sair
day they had of it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it
perishin’ cauld—ower cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o’
wind, and awa’ again, to pit the emp’y hope into them. Eh, man! but
they had a sair day for the last o’t! He would have had a prood, prood
heart that won ashore upon the back o’ that.”

“And were all lost?” I cried. “God held them!”

“Wheesht!” he said sternly. “Nane shall pray for the deid on my
hearth-stane.”

I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and he seemed to accept
my disclaimer with unusual facility, and ran on once more upon what had
evidently become a favourite subject.

“We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an’ me, and a’ thae braws in the
inside of her. There’s a kittle bit, ye see, about Sandag; whiles the
sook rins strong for the Merry Men; an’ whiles again, when the tide’s
makin’ hard an’ ye can hear the Roost blawin’ at the far-end of Aros,
there comes a back-spang of current straucht into Sandag Bay. Weel,
there’s the thing that got the grip on the _Christ-Anna_. She but to
have come in ram-stam an’ stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften
under, and the back-side of her is clear at hie-water o’ neaps. But,
man! the dunt that she cam doon wi’ when she struck! Lord save us a’!
but it’s an unco life to be a sailor—a cauld, wanchancy life. Mony’s
the gliff I got mysel’ in the great deep; and why the Lord should hae
made yon unco water is mair than ever I could win to understand. He
made the vales and the pastures, the bonny green yaird, the halesome,
canty land—

And now they shout and sing to Thee,
For Thou hast made them glad,


as the Psalms say in the metrical version. No that I would preen my
faith to that clink neither; but it’s bonny, and easier to mind. ‘Who
go to sea in ships,’ they hae’t again—

And in
Great waters trading be,
Within the deep these men God’s works
And His great wonders see.


Weel, it’s easy sayin’ sae. Maybe Dauvit wasnae very weel acquant wi’
the sea. But, troth, if it wasnae prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be
temp’it to think it wasnae the Lord, but the muckle, black deil that
made the sea. There’s naething good comes oot o’t but the fish; an’ the
spentacle o’ God riding on the tempest, to be shure, whilk would be
what Dauvit was likely ettling at. But, man, they were sair wonders
that God showed to the _Christ-Anna_—wonders, do I ca’ them? Judgments,
rather: judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons o’ the deep. And
their souls—to think o’ that—their souls, man, maybe no prepared! The
sea—a muckle yett to hell!”

I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice was unnaturally moved and
his manner unwontedly demonstrative. He leaned forward at these last
words, for example, and touched me on the knee with his spread fingers,
looking up into my face with a certain pallor, and I could see that his
eyes shone with a deep-seated fire, and that the lines about his mouth
were drawn and tremulous.

Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning of our meal, did not
detach him from his train of thought beyond a moment. He condescended,
indeed, to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I
thought it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace,
which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his
preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would “remember in mercy
fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane
beside the great and dowie waters.”

Soon there came an interchange of speeches between him and Rorie.

“Was it there?” asked my uncle.

“Ou, ay!” said Rorie.

I observed that they both spoke in a manner of aside, and with some
show of embarrassment, and that Mary herself appeared to colour, and
looked down on her plate. Partly to show my knowledge, and so relieve
the party from an awkward strain, partly because I was curious, I
pursued the subject.

“You mean the fish?” I asked.

“Whatten fish?” cried my uncle. “Fish, quo’ he! Fish! Your een are fu’
o’ fatness, man; your heid dozened wi’ carnal leir. Fish! it’s a
bogle!”

He spoke with great vehemence, as though angry; and perhaps I was not
very willing to be put down so shortly, for young men are disputatious.
At least I remember I retorted hotly, crying out upon childish
superstitions.

“And ye come frae the College!” sneered Uncle Gordon. “Gude kens what
they learn folk there; it’s no muckle service onyway. Do ye think, man,
that there’s naething in a’ yon saut wilderness o’ a world oot wast
there, wi’ the sea grasses growin’, an’ the sea beasts fechtin’, an’
the sun glintin’ down into it, day by day? Na; the sea’s like the land,
but fearsomer. If there’s folk ashore, there’s folk in the sea—deid
they may be, but they’re folk whatever; and as for deils, there’s nane
that’s like the sea deils. There’s no sae muckle harm in the land
deils, when a’s said and done. Lang syne, when I was a callant in the
south country, I mind there was an auld, bald bogle in the Peewie Moss.
I got a glisk o’ him mysel’, sittin’ on his hunkers in a hag, as gray’s
a tombstane. An’, troth, he was a fearsome-like taed. But he steered
naebody. Nae doobt, if ane that was a reprobate, ane the Lord hated,
had gane by there wi’ his sin still upon his stamach, nae doobt the
creature would hae lowped upo’ the likes o’ him. But there’s deils in
the deep sea would yoke on a communicant! Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon
wi’ the puir lads in the _Christ-Anna_, ye would ken by now the mercy
o’ the seas. If ye had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would hate the
thocht of it as I do. If ye had but used the een God gave ye, ye would
hae learned the wickedness o’ that fause, saut, cauld, bullering
creature, and of a’ that’s in it by the Lord’s permission: labsters an’
partans, an’ sic like, howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing
whales; an’ fish—the hale clan o’ them—cauld-wamed, blind-eed uncanny
ferlies. O, sirs,” he cried, “the horror—the horror o’ the sea!”

We were all somewhat staggered by this outburst; and the speaker
himself, after that last hoarse apostrophe, appeared to sink gloomily
into his own thoughts. But Rorie, who was greedy of superstitious lore,
recalled him to the subject by a question.

“You will not ever have seen a teevil of the sea?” he asked.

“No clearly,” replied the other. “I misdoobt if a mere man could see
ane clearly and conteenue in the body. I hae sailed wi’ a lad—they ca’d
him Sandy Gabart; he saw ane, shure eneueh, an’ shure eneueh it was the
end of him. We were seeven days oot frae the Clyde—a sair wark we had
had—gaun north wi’ seeds an’ braws an’ things for the Macleod. We had
got in ower near under the Cutchull’ns, an’ had just gane about by soa,
an’ were off on a lang tack, we thocht would maybe hauld as far’s
Copnahow. I mind the nicht weel; a mune smoored wi’ mist; a fine gaun
breeze upon the water, but no steedy; an’—what nane o’ us likit to
hear—anither wund gurlin’ owerheid, amang thae fearsome, auld stane
craigs o’ the Cutchull’ns. Weel, Sandy was forrit wi’ the jib sheet; we
couldnae see him for the mains’l, that had just begude to draw, when a’
at ance he gied a skirl. I luffed for my life, for I thocht we were
ower near Soa; but na, it wasnae that, it was puir Sandy Gabart’s deid
skreigh, or near hand, for he was deid in half an hour. A’t he could
tell was that a sea deil, or sea bogle, or sea spenster, or sic-like,
had clum up by the bowsprit, an’ gi’en him ae cauld, uncanny look. An’,
or the life was oot o’ Sandy’s body, we kent weel what the thing
betokened, and why the wund gurled in the taps o’ the Cutchull’ns; for
doon it cam’—a wund do I ca’ it! it was the wund o’ the Lord’s
anger—an’ a’ that nicht we foucht like men dementit, and the niest that
we kenned we were ashore in Loch Uskevagh, an’ the cocks were crawin’
in Benbecula.”

“It will have been a merman,” Rorie said.

“A merman!” screamed my uncle with immeasurable scorn. “Auld wives’
clavers! There’s nae sic things as mermen.”

“But what was the creature like?” I asked.

“What like was it? Gude forbid that we suld ken what like it was! It
had a kind of a heid upon it—man could say nae mair.”

Then Rorie, smarting under the affront, told several tales of mermen,
mermaids, and sea-horses that had come ashore upon the islands and
attacked the crews of boats upon the sea; and my uncle, in spite of his
incredulity, listened with uneasy interest.

“Aweel, aweel,” he said, “it may be sae; I may be wrang; but I find nae
word o’ mermen in the Scriptures.”

“And you will find nae word of Aros Roost, maybe,” objected Rorie, and
his argument appeared to carry weight.

When dinner was over, my uncle carried me forth with him to a bank
behind the house. It was a very hot and quiet afternoon; scarce a
ripple anywhere upon the sea, nor any voice but the familiar voice of
sheep and gulls; and perhaps in consequence of this repose in nature,
my kinsman showed himself more rational and tranquil than before. He
spoke evenly and almost cheerfully of my career, with every now and
then a reference to the lost ship or the treasures it had brought to
Aros. For my part, I listened to him in a sort of trance, gazing with
all my heart on that remembered scene, and drinking gladly the sea-air
and the smoke of peats that had been lit by Mary.

Perhaps an hour had passed when my uncle, who had all the while been
covertly gazing on the surface of the little bay, rose to his feet and
bade me follow his example. Now I should say that the great run of tide
at the south-west end of Aros exercises a perturbing influence round
all the coast. In Sandag Bay, to the south, a strong current runs at
certain periods of the flood and ebb respectively; but in this northern
bay—Aros Bay, as it is called—where the house stands and on which my
uncle was now gazing, the only sign of disturbance is towards the end
of the ebb, and even then it is too slight to be remarkable. When there
is any swell, nothing can be seen at all; but when it is calm, as it
often is, there appear certain strange, undecipherable marks—sea-runes,
as we may name them—on the glassy surface of the bay. The like is
common in a thousand places on the coast; and many a boy must have
amused himself as I did, seeking to read in them some reference to
himself or those he loved. It was to these marks that my uncle now
directed my attention, struggling, as he did so, with an evident
reluctance.

“Do ye see yon scart upo’ the water?” he inquired; “yon ane wast the
gray stane? Ay? Weel, it’ll no be like a letter, wull it?”

“Certainly it is,” I replied. “I have often remarked it. It is like a
C.”

He heaved a sigh as if heavily disappointed with my answer, and then
added below his breath: “Ay, for the _Christ-Anna_.”

“I used to suppose, sir, it was for myself,” said I; “for my name is
Charles.”

“And so ye saw’t afore?”, he ran on, not heeding my remark. “Weel,
weel, but that’s unco strange. Maybe, it’s been there waitin’, as a man
wad say, through a’ the weary ages. Man, but that’s awfu’.” And then,
breaking off: “Ye’ll no see anither, will ye?” he asked.

“Yes,” said I. “I see another very plainly, near the Ross side, where
the road comes down—an M.”

“An M,” he repeated very low; and then, again after another pause: “An’
what wad ye make o’ that?” he inquired.

“I had always thought it to mean Mary, sir,” I answered, growing
somewhat red, convinced as I was in my own mind that I was on the
threshold of a decisive explanation.

But we were each following his own train of thought to the exclusion of
the other’s. My uncle once more paid no attention to my words; only
hung his head and held his peace; and I might have been led to fancy
that he had not heard me, if his next speech had not contained a kind
of echo from my own.

“I would say naething o’ thae clavers to Mary,” he observed, and began
to walk forward.

There is a belt of turf along the side of Aros Bay, where walking is
easy; and it was along this that I silently followed my silent kinsman.
I was perhaps a little disappointed at having lost so good an
opportunity to declare my love; but I was at the same time far more
deeply exercised at the change that had befallen my uncle. He was never
an ordinary, never, in the strict sense, an amiable, man; but there was
nothing in even the worst that I had known of him before, to prepare me
for so strange a transformation. It was impossible to close the eyes
against one fact; that he had, as the saying goes, something on his
mind; and as I mentally ran over the different words which might be
represented by the letter M—misery, mercy, marriage, money, and the
like—I was arrested with a sort of start by the word murder. I was
still considering the ugly sound and fatal meaning of the word, when
the direction of our walk brought us to a point from which a view was
to be had to either side, back towards Aros Bay and homestead, and
forward on the ocean, dotted to the north with isles, and lying to the
southward blue and open to the sky. There my guide came to a halt, and
stood staring for awhile on that expanse. Then he turned to me and laid
a hand on my arm.

“Ye think there’s naething there?” he said, pointing with his pipe; and
then cried out aloud, with a kind of exultation: “I’ll tell ye, man!
The deid are down there—thick like rattons!”

He turned at once, and, without another word, we retraced our steps to
the house of Aros.

I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was not till after supper,
and then but for a short while, that I could have a word with her. I
lost no time beating about the bush, but spoke out plainly what was on
my mind.

“Mary,” I said, “I have not come to Aros without a hope. If that should
prove well founded, we may all leave and go somewhere else, secure of
daily bread and comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that,
which it would seem extravagant in me to promise. But there’s a hope
that lies nearer to my heart than money.” And at that I paused. “You
can guess fine what that is, Mary,” I said. She looked away from me in
silence, and that was small encouragement, but I was not to be put off.
“All my days I have thought the world of you,” I continued; “the time
goes on and I think always the more of you; I could not think to be
happy or hearty in my life without you: you are the apple of my eye.”
Still she looked away, and said never a word; but I thought I saw that
her hands shook. “Mary,” I cried in fear, “do ye no like me?”

“O, Charlie man,” she said, “is this a time to speak of it? Let me be,
a while; let me be the way I am; it’ll not be you that loses by the
waiting!”

I made out by her voice that she was nearly weeping, and this put me
out of any thought but to compose her. “Mary Ellen,” I said, “say no
more; I did not come to trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your
time too; and you have told me all I wanted. Only just this one thing
more: what ails you?”

She owned it was her father, but would enter into no particulars, only
shook her head, and said he was not well and not like himself, and it
was a great pity. She knew nothing of the wreck. “I havenae been near
it,” said she. “What for would I go near it, Charlie lad? The poor
souls are gone to their account long syne; and I would just have wished
they had ta’en their gear with them—poor souls!”

This was scarcely any great encouragement for me to tell her of the
_Espirito Santo_; yet I did so, and at the very first word she cried
out in surprise. “There was a man at Grisapol,” she said, “in the month
of May—a little, yellow, black-avised body, they tell me, with gold
rings upon his fingers, and a beard; and he was speiring high and low
for that same ship.”

It was towards the end of April that I had been given these papers to
sort out by Dr. Robertson: and it came suddenly back upon my mind that
they were thus prepared for a Spanish historian, or a man calling
himself such, who had come with high recommendations to the Principal,
on a mission of inquiry as to the dispersion of the great Armada.
Putting one thing with another, I fancied that the visitor “with the
gold rings upon his fingers” might be the same with Dr. Robertson’s
historian from Madrid. If that were so, he would be more likely after
treasure for himself than information for a learned society. I made up
my mind, I should lose no time over my undertaking; and if the ship lay
sunk in Sandag Bay, as perhaps both he and I supposed, it should not be
for the advantage of this ringed adventurer, but for Mary and myself,
and for the good, old, honest, kindly family of the Darnaways.




CHAPTER III.
LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY.


I was early afoot next morning; and as soon as I had a bite to eat, set
forth upon a tour of exploration. Something in my heart distinctly told
me that I should find the ship of the Armada; and although I did not
give way entirely to such hopeful thoughts, I was still very light in
spirits and walked upon air. Aros is a very rough islet, its surface
strewn with great rocks and shaggy with fernland heather; and my way
lay almost north and south across the highest knoll; and though the
whole distance was inside of two miles it took more time and exertion
than four upon a level road. Upon the summit, I paused. Although not
very high—not three hundred feet, as I think—it yet outtops all the
neighbouring lowlands of the Ross, and commands a great view of sea and
islands. The sun, which had been up some time, was already hot upon my
neck; the air was listless and thundery, although purely clear; away
over the north-west, where the isles lie thickliest congregated, some
half-a-dozen small and ragged clouds hung together in a covey; and the
head of Ben Kyaw wore, not merely a few streamers, but a solid hood of
vapour. There was a threat in the weather. The sea, it is true, was
smooth like glass: even the Roost was but a seam on that wide mirror,
and the Merry Men no more than caps of foam; but to my eye and ear, so
long familiar with these places, the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a
sound of it, like a long sigh, mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet
as it was, the Roost itself appeared to be revolving mischief. For I
ought to say that all we dwellers in these parts attributed, if not
prescience, at least a quality of warning, to that strange and
dangerous creature of the tides.

I hurried on, then, with the greater speed, and had soon descended the
slope of Aros to the part that we call Sandag Bay. It is a pretty large
piece of water compared with the size of the isle; well sheltered from
all but the prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low
sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several fathoms deep
along a ledge of rocks. It is upon that side that, at a certain time
each flood, the current mentioned by my uncle sets so strong into the
bay; a little later, when the Roost begins to work higher, an undertow
runs still more strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action
of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep. Nothing
is to be seen out of Sandag Bay, but one small segment of the horizon
and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef.

From half-way down the hill, I had perceived the wreck of February
last, a brig of considerable tonnage, lying, with her back broken, high
and dry on the east corner of the sands; and I was making directly
towards it, and already almost on the margin of the turf, when my eyes
were suddenly arrested by a spot, cleared of fern and heather, and
marked by one of those long, low, and almost human-looking mounds that
we see so commonly in graveyards. I stopped like a man shot. Nothing
had been said to me of any dead man or interment on the island; Rorie,
Mary, and my uncle had all equally held their peace; of her at least, I
was certain that she must be ignorant; and yet here, before my eyes,
was proof indubitable of the fact. Here was a grave; and I had to ask
myself, with a chill, what manner of man lay there in his last sleep,
awaiting the signal of the Lord in that solitary, sea-beat
resting-place? My mind supplied no answer but what I feared to
entertain. Shipwrecked, at least, he must have been; perhaps, like the
old Armada mariners, from some far and rich land over-sea; or perhaps
one of my own race, perishing within eyesight of the smoke of home. I
stood awhile uncovered by his side, and I could have desired that it
had lain in our religion to put up some prayer for that unhappy
stranger, or, in the old classic way, outwardly to honour his
misfortune. I knew, although his bones lay there, a part of Aros, till
the trumpet sounded, his imperishable soul was forth and far away,
among the raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or the pangs of hell; and
yet my mind misgave me even with a fear, that perhaps he was near me
where I stood, guarding his sepulchre, and lingering on the scene of
his unhappy fate.

Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat over-shadowed that I turned
away from the grave to the hardly less melancholy spectacle of the
wreck. Her stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in
two a little abaft the foremast—though indeed she had none, both masts
having broken short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was
very sharp and sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the
fracture gaped widely open, and you could see right through her poor
hull upon the farther side. Her name was much defaced, and I could not
make out clearly whether she was called _Christiania_, after the
Norwegian city, or _Christiana_, after the good woman, Christian’s
wife, in that old book the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” By her build she was a
foreign ship, but I was not certain of her nationality. She had been
painted green, but the colour was faded and weathered, and the paint
peeling off in strips. The wreck of the mainmast lay alongside, half
buried in sand. She was a forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not look
without emotion at the bits of rope that still hung about her, so often
handled of yore by shouting seamen; or the little scuttle where they
had passed up and down to their affairs; or that poor noseless angel of
a figure-head that had dipped into so many running billows.

I do not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but
I fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with
one hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men and even
of inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in
upon my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an
unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of
something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary, I
took heart again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent
marriage, nor would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full
approval. It behoved me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I
thought with a laugh how long it was since that great sea-castle, the
_Espirito Santo_, had left her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it
would be to consider rights so long extinguished and misfortunes so
long forgotten in the process of time.

I had my theory of where to seek for her remains. The set of the
current and the soundings both pointed to the east side of the bay
under the ledge of rocks. If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if,
after these centuries, any portion of her held together, it was there
that I should find it. The water deepens, as I have said, with great
rapidity, and even close along-side the rocks several fathoms may be
found. As I walked upon the edge I could see far and wide over the
sandy bottom of the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in
the deeps; the bay seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as
one sees them in a lapidary’s shop; there was naught to show that it
was water but an internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints
and netted shadows, and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble
round the edge. The shadows of the rocks lay out for some distance at
their feet, so that my own shadow, moving, pausing, and stooping on the
top of that, reached sometimes half across the bay. It was above all in
this belt of shadows that I hunted for the _Espirito Santo_; since it
was there the undertow ran strongest, whether in or out. Cool as the
whole water seemed this broiling day, it looked, in that part, yet
cooler, and had a mysterious invitation for the eyes. Peer as I
pleased, however, I could see nothing but a few fishes or a bush of
sea-tangle, and here and there a lump of rock that had fallen from
above and now lay separate on the sandy floor. Twice did I pass from
one end to the other of the rocks, and in the whole distance I could
see nothing of the wreck, nor any place but one where it was possible
for it to be. This was a large terrace in five fathoms of water, raised
off the surface of the sand to a considerable height, and looking from
above like a mere outgrowth of the rocks on which I walked. It was one
mass of great sea-tangles like a grove, which prevented me judging of
its nature, but in shape and size it bore some likeness to a vessel’s
hull. At least it was my best chance. If the _Espirito Santo_ lay not
there under the tangles, it lay nowhere at all in Sandag Bay; and I
prepared to put the question to the proof, once and for all, and either
go back to Aros a rich man or cured for ever of my dreams of wealth.

I stripped to the skin, and stood on the extreme margin with my hands
clasped, irresolute. The bay at that time was utterly quiet; there was
no sound but from a school of porpoises somewhere out of sight behind
the point; yet a certain fear withheld me on the threshold of my
venture. Sad sea-feelings, scraps of my uncle’s superstitions, thoughts
of the dead, of the grave, of the old broken ships, drifted through my
mind. But the strong sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and
I stooped forward and plunged into the sea.

It was all that I could do to catch a trail of the sea-tangle that grew
so thickly on the terrace; but once so far anchored I secured myself by
grasping a whole armful of these thick and slimy stalks, and, planting
my feet against the edge, I looked around me. On all sides the clear
sand stretched forth unbroken; it came to the foot of the rocks,
scoured into the likeness of an alley in a garden by the action of the
tides; and before me, for as far as I could see, nothing was visible
but the same many-folded sand upon the sun-bright bottom of the bay.
Yet the terrace to which I was then holding was as thick with strong
sea-growths as a tuft of heather, and the cliff from which it bulged
hung draped below the water-line with brown lianas. In this complexity
of forms, all swaying together in the current, things were hard to be
distinguished; and I was still uncertain whether my feet were pressed
upon the natural rock or upon the timbers of the Armada treasure-ship,
when the whole tuft of tangle came away in my hand, and in an instant I
was on the surface, and the shores of the bay and the bright water swam
before my eyes in a glory of crimson.

I clambered back upon the rocks, and threw the plant of tangle at my
feet. Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin. I
stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay
an iron shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to
the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy.
I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me
like the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his
sailor’s hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the
very foot that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the
swerving decks—the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself,
with hair and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary
place, not like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely
injured. Was the great treasure ship indeed below there, with her guns
and chain and treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a
garden for the seaweed, her cabin a breeding place for fish, soundless
but for the dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle
upon her battlements—that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef
in Sandag Bay? Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the
disaster of the foreign brig—was this shoe-buckle bought but the other
day and worn by a man of my own period in the world’s history, hearing
the same news from day to day, thinking the same thoughts, praying,
perhaps, in the same temple with myself? However it was, I was assailed
with dreary thoughts; my uncle’s words, “the dead are down there,”
echoed in my ears; and though I determined to dive once more, it was
with a strong repugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of the
rocks.

A great change passed at that moment over the appearance of the bay. It
was no more that clear, visible interior, like a house roofed with
glass, where the green, submarine sunshine slept so stilly. A breeze, I
suppose, had flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and blackness
filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds of shadow tossed
confusedly together. Even the terrace below obscurely rocked and
quivered. It seemed a graver thing to venture on this place of
ambushes; and when I leaped into the sea the second time it was with a
quaking in my soul.

I secured myself as at first, and groped among the waving tangle. All
that met my touch was cold and soft and gluey. The thicket was alive
with crabs and lobsters, trundling to and fro lopsidedly, and I had to
harden my heart against the horror of their carrion neighbourhood. On
all sides I could feel the grain and the clefts of hard, living stone;
no planks, no iron, not a sign of any wreck; the _Espirito Santo_ was
not there. I remember I had almost a sense of relief in my
disappointment, and I was about ready to leave go, when something
happened that sent me to the surface with my heart in my mouth. I had
already stayed somewhat late over my explorations; the current was
freshening with the change of the tide, and Sandag Bay was no longer a
safe place for a single swimmer. Well, just at the last moment there
came a sudden flush of current, dredging through the tangles like a
wave. I lost one hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and,
instinctively grasping for a fresh support, my fingers closed on
something hard and cold. I think I knew at that moment what it was. At
least I instantly left hold of the tangle, leaped for the surface, and
clambered out next moment on the friendly rocks with the bone of a
man’s leg in my grasp.

Mankind is a material creature, slow to think and dull to perceive
connections. The grave, the wreck of the brig, and the rusty
shoe-buckle were surely plain advertisements. A child might have read
their dismal story, and yet it was not until I touched that actual
piece of mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon
my spirit. I laid the bone beside the buckle, picked up my clothes, and
ran as I was along the rocks towards the human shore. I could not be
far enough from the spot; no fortune was vast enough to tempt me back
again. The bones of the drowned dead should henceforth roll undisturbed
by me, whether on tangle or minted gold. But as soon as I trod the good
earth again, and had covered my nakedness against the sun, I knelt down
over against the ruins of the brig, and out of the fulness of my heart
prayed long and passionately for all poor souls upon the sea. A
generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be
refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some
gracious visitation. The horror, at least, was lifted from my mind; I
could look with calm of spirit on that great bright creature, God’s
ocean; and as I set off homeward up the rough sides of Aros, nothing
remained of my concern beyond a deep determination to meddle no more
with the spoils of wrecked vessels or the treasures of the dead.

I was already some way up the hill before I paused to breathe and look
behind me. The sight that met my eyes was doubly strange.

For, first, the storm that I had foreseen was now advancing with almost
tropical rapidity. The whole surface of the sea had been dulled from
its conspicuous brightness to an ugly hue of corrugated lead; already
in the distance the white waves, the “skipper’s daughters,” had begun
to flee before a breeze that was still insensible on Aros; and already
along the curve of Sandag Bay there was a splashing run of sea that I
could hear from where I stood. The change upon the sky was even more
remarkable. There had begun to arise out of the south-west a huge and
solid continent of scowling cloud; here and there, through rents in its
contexture, the sun still poured a sheaf of spreading rays; and here
and there, from all its edges, vast inky streamers lay forth along the
yet unclouded sky. The menace was express and imminent. Even as I
gazed, the sun was blotted out. At any moment the tempest might fall
upon Aros in its might.

The suddenness of this change of weather so fixed my eyes on heaven
that it was some seconds before they alighted on the bay, mapped out
below my feet, and robbed a moment later of the sun. The knoll which I
had just surmounted overflanked a little amphitheatre of lower hillocks
sloping towards the sea, and beyond that the yellow arc of beach and
the whole extent of Sandag Bay. It was a scene on which I had often
looked down, but where I had never before beheld a human figure. I had
but just turned my back upon it and left it empty, and my wonder may be
fancied when I saw a boat and several men in that deserted spot. The
boat was lying by the rocks. A pair of fellows, bareheaded, with their
sleeves rolled up, and one with a boathook, kept her with difficulty to
her moorings for the current was growing brisker every moment. A little
way off upon the ledge two men in black clothes, whom I judged to be
superior in rank, laid their heads together over some task which at
first I did not understand, but a second after I had made it out—they
were taking bearings with the compass; and just then I saw one of them
unroll a sheet of paper and lay his finger down, as though identifying
features in a map. Meanwhile a third was walking to and fro, polling
among the rocks and peering over the edge into the water. While I was
still watching them with the stupefaction of surprise, my mind hardly
yet able to work on what my eyes reported, this third person suddenly
stooped and summoned his companions with a cry so loud that it reached
my ears upon the hill. The others ran to him, even dropping the compass
in their hurry, and I could see the bone and the shoe-buckle going from
hand to hand, causing the most unusual gesticulations of surprise and
interest. Just then I could hear the seamen crying from the boat, and
saw them point westward to that cloud continent which was ever the more
rapidly unfurling its blackness over heaven. The others seemed to
consult; but the danger was too pressing to be braved, and they bundled
into the boat carrying my relies with them, and set forth out of the
bay with all speed of oars.

I made no more ado about the matter, but turned and ran for the house.
Whoever these men were, it was fit my uncle should be instantly
informed. It was not then altogether too late in the day for a descent
of the Jacobites; and may be Prince Charlie, whom I knew my uncle to
detest, was one of the three superiors whom I had seen upon the rock.
Yet as I ran, leaping from rock to rock, and turned the matter loosely
in my mind, this theory grew ever the longer the less welcome to my
reason. The compass, the map, the interest awakened by the buckle, and
the conduct of that one among the strangers who had looked so often
below him in the water, all seemed to point to a different explanation
of their presence on that outlying, obscure islet of the western sea.
The Madrid historian, the search instituted by Dr. Robertson, the
bearded stranger with the rings, my own fruitless search that very
morning in the deep water of Sandag Bay, ran together, piece by piece,
in my memory, and I made sure that these strangers must be Spaniards in
quest of ancient treasure and the lost ship of the Armada. But the
people living in outlying islands, such as Aros, are answerable for
their own security; there is none near by to protect or even to help
them; and the presence in such a spot of a crew of foreign
adventurers—poor, greedy, and most likely lawless—filled me with
apprehensions for my uncle’s money, and even for the safety of his
daughter. I was still wondering how we were to get rid of them when I
came, all breathless, to the top of Aros. The whole world was shadowed
over; only in the extreme east, on a hill of the mainland, one last
gleam of sunshine lingered like a jewel; rain had begun to fall, not
heavily, but in great drops; the sea was rising with each moment, and
already a band of white encircled Aros and the nearer coasts of
Grisapol. The boat was still pulling seaward, but I now became aware of
what had been hidden from me lower down—a large, heavily sparred,
handsome schooner, lying to at the south end of Aros. Since I had not
seen her in the morning when I had looked around so closely at the
signs of the weather, and upon these lone waters where a sail was
rarely visible, it was clear she must have lain last night behind the
uninhabited Eilean Gour, and this proved conclusively that she was
manned by strangers to our coast, for that anchorage, though good
enough to look at, is little better than a trap for ships. With such
ignorant sailors upon so wild a coast, the coming gale was not unlikely
to bring death upon its wings.




CHAPTER IV.
THE GALE.


I found my uncle at the gable end, watching the signs of the weather,
with a pipe in his fingers.

“Uncle,” said I, “there were men ashore at Sandag Bay—”

I had no time to go further; indeed, I not only forgot my words, but
even my weariness, so strange was the effect on Uncle Gordon. He
dropped his pipe and fell back against the end of the house with his
jaw fallen, his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. We
must have looked at one another silently for a quarter of a minute,
before he made answer in this extraordinary fashion: “Had he a hair kep
on?”

I knew as well as if I had been there that the man who now lay buried
at Sandag had worn a hairy cap, and that he had come ashore alive. For
the first and only time I lost toleration for the man who was my
benefactor and the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.

“These were living men,” said I, “perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the
French, perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the
Spanish treasure ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to
your daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man, the
dead sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this morning by his
grave; he will not wake before the trump of doom.”

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his
eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but
it was plain that he was past the power of speech.

“Come,” said I. “You must think for others. You must come up the hill
with me, and see this ship.”

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient
strides. The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he
scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was
wont, from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to
make better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like
one in bodily pain: “Ay, ay, man, I’m coming.” Long before we had
reached the top, I had no other thought for him but pity. If the crime
had been monstrous the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around
us. All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had
vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to
the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was the
interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there
last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and
already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first,
in vain for the schooner.

“There she is,” I said at last. But her new position, and the course
she was now lying, puzzled me. “They cannot mean to beat to sea,” I
cried.

“That’s what they mean,” said my uncle, with something like joy; and
just then the schooner went about and stood upon another tack, which
put the question beyond the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a
gale on hand, had thought first of sea-room. With the wind that
threatened, in these reef-sown waters and contending against so violent
a stream of tide, their course was certain death.

“Good God!” said I, “they are all lost.”

“Ay,” returned my uncle, “a’—a’ lost. They hadnae a chance but to rin
for Kyle Dona. The gate they’re gaun the noo, they couldnae win through
an the muckle deil were there to pilot them. Eh, man,” he continued,
touching me on the sleeve, “it’s a braw nicht for a shipwreck! Twa in
ae twalmonth! Eh, but the Merry Men’ll dance bonny!”

I looked at him, and it was then that I began to fancy him no longer in
his right mind. He was peering up to me, as if for sympathy, a timid
joy in his eyes. All that had passed between us was already forgotten
in the prospect of this fresh disaster.

“If it were not too late,” I cried with indignation, “I would take the
coble and go out to warn them.”

“Na, na,” he protested, “ye maunnae interfere; ye maunnae meddle wi’
the like o’ that. It’s His”—doffing his bonnet—“His wull. And, eh, man!
but it’s a braw nicht for’t!”

Something like fear began to creep into my soul and, reminding him that
I had not yet dined, I proposed we should return to the house. But no;
nothing would tear him from his place of outlook.

“I maun see the hail thing, man, Cherlie,” he explained—and then as the
schooner went about a second time, “Eh, but they han’le her bonny!” he
cried. “The _Christ-Anna_ was naething to this.”

Already the men on board the schooner must have begun to realise some
part, but not yet the twentieth, of the dangers that environed their
doomed ship. At every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen
how fast the current swept them back. Each tack was made shorter, as
they saw how little it prevailed. Every moment the rising swell began
to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker
would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, and the brown
reef and streaming tangle appear in the hollow of the wave. I tell you,
they had to stand to their tackle: there was no idle men aboard that
ship, God knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible to any
human-hearted man that my misguided uncle now pored and gloated like a
connoisseur. As I turned to go down the hill, he was lying on his belly
on the summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching in the
heather. He seemed rejuvenated, mind and body.

When I got back to the house already dismally affected, I was still
more sadly downcast at the sight of Mary. She had her sleeves rolled up
over her strong arms, and was quietly making bread. I got a bannock
from the dresser and sat down to eat it in silence.

“Are ye wearied, lad?” she asked after a while.

“I am not so much wearied, Mary,” I replied, getting on my feet, “as I
am weary of delay, and perhaps of Aros too. You know me well enough to
judge me fairly, say what I like. Well, Mary, you may be sure of this:
you had better be anywhere but here.”

“I’ll be sure of one thing,” she returned: “I’ll be where my duty is.”

“You forget, you have a duty to yourself,” I said.

“Ay, man?” she replied, pounding at the dough; “will you have found
that in the Bible, now?”

“Mary,” I said solemnly, “you must not laugh at me just now. God knows
I am in no heart for laughing. If we could get your father with us, it
would be best; but with him or without him, I want you far away from
here, my girl; for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your
father’s too, I want you far—far away from here. I came with other
thoughts; I came here as a man comes home; now it is all changed, and I
have no desire nor hope but to flee—for that’s the word—flee, like a
bird out of the fowler’s snare, from this accursed island.”

She had stopped her work by this time.

“And do you think, now,” said she, “do you think, now, I have neither
eyes nor ears? Do ye think I havenae broken my heart to have these
braws (as he calls them, God forgive him!) thrown into the sea? Do ye
think I have lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you saw
in an hour or two? No,” she said, “I know there’s wrong in it; what
wrong, I neither know nor want to know. There was never an ill thing
made better by meddling, that I could hear of. But, my lad, you must
never ask me to leave my father. While the breath is in his body, I’ll
be with him. And he’s not long for here, either: that I can tell you,
Charlie—he’s not long for here. The mark is on his brow; and better
so—maybe better so.”

I was a while silent, not knowing what to say; and when I roused my
head at last to speak, she got before me.

“Charlie,” she said, “what’s right for me, neednae be right for you.
There’s sin upon this house and trouble; you are a stranger; take your
things upon your back and go your ways to better places and to better
folk, and if you were ever minded to come back, though it were twenty
years syne, you would find me aye waiting.”

“Mary Ellen,” I said, “I asked you to be my wife, and you said as good
as yes. That’s done for good. Wherever you are, I am; as I shall answer
to my God.”

As I said the words, the wind suddenly burst out raving, and then
seemed to stand still and shudder round the house of Aros. It was the
first squall, or prologue, of the coming tempest, and as we started and
looked about us, we found that a gloom, like the approach of evening,
had settled round the house.

“God pity all poor folks at sea!” she said. “We’ll see no more of my
father till the morrow’s morning.”

And then she told me, as we sat by the fire and hearkened to the rising
gusts, of how this change had fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he
had been dark and fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, or,
as Mary said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out for
hours together on the Head, if it were at night, or on the top of Aros
by day, watching the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for a
sail. After February the tenth, when the wealth-bringing wreck was cast
ashore at Sandag, he had been at first unnaturally gay, and his
excitement had never fallen in degree, but only changed in kind from
dark to darker. He neglected his work, and kept Rorie idle. They two
would speak together by the hour at the gable end, in guarded tones and
with an air of secrecy and almost of guilt; and if she questioned
either, as at first she sometimes did, her inquiries were put aside
with confusion. Since Rorie had first remarked the fish that hung about
the ferry, his master had never set foot but once upon the mainland of
the Ross. That once—it was in the height of the springs—he had passed
dryshod while the tide was out; but, having lingered overlong on the
far side, found himself cut off from Aros by the returning waters. It
was with a shriek of agony that he had leaped across the gut, and he
had reached home thereafter in a fever-fit of fear. A fear of the sea,
a constant haunting thought of the sea, appeared in his talk and
devotions, and even in his looks when he was silent.

Rorie alone came in to supper; but a little later my uncle appeared,
took a bottle under his arm, put some bread in his pocket, and set
forth again to his outlook, followed this time by Rorie. I heard that
the schooner was losing ground, but the crew were still fighting every
inch with hopeless ingenuity and course; and the news filled my mind
with blackness.

A little after sundown the full fury of the gale broke forth, such a
gale as I have never seen in summer, nor, seeing how swiftly it had
come, even in winter. Mary and I sat in silence, the house quaking
overhead, the tempest howling without, the fire between us sputtering
with raindrops. Our thoughts were far away with the poor fellows on the
schooner, or my not less unhappy uncle, houseless on the promontory;
and yet ever and again we were startled back to ourselves, when the
wind would rise and strike the gable like a solid body, or suddenly
fall and draw away, so that the fire leaped into flame and our hearts
bounded in our sides. Now the storm in its might would seize and shake
the four corners of the roof, roaring like Leviathan in anger. Anon, in
a lull, cold eddies of tempest moved shudderingly in the room, lifting
the hair upon our heads and passing between us as we sat. And again the
wind would break forth in a chorus of melancholy sounds, hooting low in
the chimney, wailing with flutelike softness round the house.

It was perhaps eight o’clock when Rorie came in and pulled me
mysteriously to the door. My uncle, it appeared, had frightened even
his constant comrade; and Rorie, uneasy at his extravagance, prayed me
to come out and share the watch. I hastened to do as I was asked; the
more readily as, what with fear and horror, and the electrical tension
of the night, I was myself restless and disposed for action. I told
Mary to be under no alarm, for I should be a safeguard on her father;
and wrapping myself warmly in a plaid, I followed Rorie into the open
air.

The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as
January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of
utter blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these
changes in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out
of a man’s nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one
huge sail; and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear
the gusts dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of
the Ross, the wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and
God only knows the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw.
Sheets of mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round
the isle of Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat
upon the reefs and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in
another, like the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass
of sound was hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all this
hurly-burly I could hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the
intermittent roaring of the Merry Men. At that hour, there flashed into
my mind the reason of the name that they were called. For the noise of
them seemed almost mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the
night; or if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality.
Nay, and it seemed even human. As when savage men have drunk away their
reason, and, discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by the
hour; so, to my ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the
night.

Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind, Rorie and I won every yard
of ground with conscious effort. We slipped on the wet sod, we fell
together sprawling on the rocks. Bruised, drenched, beaten, and
breathless, it must have taken us near half an hour to get from the
house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost. There, it seemed, was
my uncle’s favourite observatory. Right in the face of it, where the
cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump of earth, like a parapet, makes
a place of shelter from the common winds, where a man may sit in quiet
and see the tide and the mad billows contending at his feet. As he
might look down from the window of a house upon some street
disturbance, so, from this post, he looks down upon the tumbling of the
Merry Men. On such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of
blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where the waves joust
together with the noise of an explosion, and the foam towers and
vanishes in the twinkling of an eye. Never before had I seen the Merry
Men thus violent. The fury, height, and transiency of their spoutings
was a thing to be seen and not recounted. High over our heads on the
cliff rose their white columns in the darkness; and the same instant,
like phantoms, they were gone. Sometimes three at a time would thus
aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust took them, and the spray would fall
about us, heavy as a wave. And yet the spectacle was rather maddening
in its levity than impressive by its force. Thought was beaten down by
the confounding uproar—a gleeful vacancy possessed the brains of men, a
state akin to madness; and I found myself at times following the dance
of the Merry Men as it were a tune upon a jigging instrument.

I first caught sight of my uncle when we were still some yards away in
one of the flying glimpses of twilight that chequered the pitch
darkness of the night. He was standing up behind the parapet, his head
thrown back and the bottle to his mouth. As he put it down, he saw and
recognised us with a toss of one hand fleeringly above his head.

“Has he been drinking?” shouted I to Rorie.

“He will aye be drunk when the wind blaws,” returned Rorie in the same
high key, and it was all that I could do to hear him.

“Then—was he so—in February?” I inquired.

Rorie’s “Ay” was a cause of joy to me. The murder, then, had not sprung
in cold blood from calculation; it was an act of madness no more to be
condemned than to be pardoned. My uncle was a dangerous madman, if you
will, but he was not cruel and base as I had feared. Yet what a scene
for a carouse, what an incredible vice, was this that the poor man had
chosen! I have always thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful
pleasure, rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out here in
the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above that hell of
waters, the man’s head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on
the edge of death, his ear watching for the signs of ship-wreck, surely
that, if it were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a man
like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a damnatory creed and haunted by
the darkest superstitions. Yet so it was; and, as we reached the bight
of shelter and could breathe again, I saw the man’s eyes shining in the
night with an unholy glimmer.

“Eh, Charlie, man, it’s grand!” he cried. “See to them!” he continued,
dragging me to the edge of the abyss from whence arose that deafening
clamour and those clouds of spray; “see to them dancin’, man! Is that
no wicked?”

He pronounced the word with gusto, and I thought it suited with the
scene.

“They’re yowlin’ for thon schooner,” he went on, his thin, insane voice
clearly audible in the shelter of the bank, “an’ she’s comin’ aye
nearer, aye nearer, aye nearer an’ nearer an’ nearer; an’ they ken’t,
the folk kens it, they ken wool it’s by wi’ them. Charlie, lad, they’re
a’ drunk in yon schooner, a’ dozened wi’ drink. They were a’ drunk in
the _Christ-Anna_, at the hinder end. There’s nane could droon at sea
wantin’ the brandy. Hoot awa, what do you ken?” with a sudden blast of
anger. “I tell ye, it cannae be; they droon withoot it. Ha’e,” holding
out the bottle, “tak’ a sowp.”

I was about to refuse, but Rorie touched me as if in warning; and
indeed I had already thought better of the movement. I took the bottle,
therefore, and not only drank freely myself, but contrived to spill
even more as I was doing so. It was pure spirit, and almost strangled
me to swallow. My kinsman did not observe the loss, but, once more
throwing back his head, drained the remainder to the dregs. Then, with
a loud laugh, he cast the bottle forth among the Merry Men, who seemed
to leap up, shouting to receive it.

“Ha’e, bairns!” he cried, “there’s your han’sel. Ye’ll get bonnier nor
that, or morning.”

Suddenly, out in the black night before us, and not two hundred yards
away, we heard, at a moment when the wind was silent, the clear note of
a human voice. Instantly the wind swept howling down upon the Head, and
the Roost bellowed, and churned, and danced with a new fury. But we had
heard the sound, and we knew, with agony, that this was the doomed ship
now close on ruin, and that what we had heard was the voice of her
master issuing his last command. Crouching together on the edge, we
waited, straining every sense, for the inevitable end. It was long,
however, and to us it seemed like ages, ere the schooner suddenly
appeared for one brief instant, relieved against a tower of glimmering
foam. I still see her reefed mainsail flapping loose, as the boom fell
heavily across the deck; I still see the black outline of the hull, and
still think I can distinguish the figure of a man stretched upon the
tiller. Yet the whole sight we had of her passed swifter than
lightning; the very wave that disclosed her fell burying her for ever;
the mingled cry of many voices at the point of death rose and was
quenched in the roaring of the Merry Men. And with that the tragedy was
at an end. The strong ship, with all her gear, and the lamp perhaps
still burning in the cabin, the lives of so many men, precious surely
to others, dear, at least, as heaven to themselves, had all, in that
one moment, gone down into the surging waters. They were gone like a
dream. And the wind still ran and shouted, and the senseless waters in
the Roost still leaped and tumbled as before.

How long we lay there together, we three, speechless and motionless, is
more than I can tell, but it must have been for long. At length, one by
one, and almost mechanically, we crawled back into the shelter of the
bank. As I lay against the parapet, wholly wretched and not entirely
master of my mind, I could hear my kinsman maundering to himself in an
altered and melancholy mood. Now he would repeat to himself with
maudlin iteration, “Sic a fecht as they had—sic a sair fecht as they
had, puir lads, puir lads!” and anon he would bewail that “a’ the gear
was as gude’s tint,” because the ship had gone down among the Merry Men
instead of stranding on the shore; and throughout, the name—the
_Christ-Anna_—would come and go in his divagations, pronounced with
shuddering awe. The storm all this time was rapidly abating. In half an
hour the wind had fallen to a breeze, and the change was accompanied or
caused by a heavy, cold, and plumping rain. I must then have fallen
asleep, and when I came to myself, drenched, stiff, and unrefreshed,
day had already broken, grey, wet, discomfortable day; the wind blew in
faint and shifting capfuls, the tide was out, the Roost was at its
lowest, and only the strong beating surf round all the coasts of Aros
remained to witness of the furies of the night.




CHAPTER V.
A MAN OUT OF THE SEA.


Rorie set out for the house in search of warmth and breakfast; but my
uncle was bent upon examining the shores of Aros, and I felt it a part
of duty to accompany him throughout. He was now docile and quiet, but
tremulous and weak in mind and body; and it was with the eagerness of a
child that he pursued his exploration. He climbed far down upon the
rocks; on the beaches, he pursued the retreating breakers. The merest
broken plank or rag of cordage was a treasure in his eyes to be secured
at the peril of his life. To see him, with weak and stumbling
footsteps, expose himself to the pursuit of the surf, or the snares and
pitfalls of the weedy rock, kept me in a perpetual terror. My arm was
ready to support him, my hand clutched him by the skirt, I helped him
to draw his pitiful discoveries beyond the reach of the returning wave;
a nurse accompanying a child of seven would have had no different
experience.

Yet, weakened as he was by the reaction from his madness of the night
before, the passions that smouldered in his nature were those of a
strong man. His terror of the sea, although conquered for the moment,
was still undiminished; had the sea been a lake of living flames, he
could not have shrunk more panically from its touch; and once, when his
foot slipped and he plunged to the midleg into a pool of water, the
shriek that came up out of his soul was like the cry of death. He sat
still for a while, panting like a dog, after that; but his desire for
the spoils of shipwreck triumphed once more over his fears; once more
he tottered among the curded foam; once more he crawled upon the rocks
among the bursting bubbles; once more his whole heart seemed to be set
on driftwood, fit, if it was fit for anything, to throw upon the fire.
Pleased as he was with what he found, he still incessantly grumbled at
his ill-fortune.

“Aros,” he said, “is no a place for wrecks ava’—no ava’. A’ the years
I’ve dwalt here, this ane maks the second; and the best o’ the gear
clean tint!”

“Uncle,” said I, for we were now on a stretch of open sand, where there
was nothing to divert his mind, “I saw you last night, as I never
thought to see you—you were drunk.”

“Na, na,” he said, “no as bad as that. I had been drinking, though. And
to tell ye the God’s truth, it’s a thing I cannae mend. There’s nae
soberer man than me in my ordnar; but when I hear the wind blaw in my
lug, it’s my belief that I gang gyte.”

“You are a religious man,” I replied, “and this is sin’.

“Ou,” he returned, “if it wasnae sin, I dinnae ken that I would care
for’t. Ye see, man, it’s defiance. There’s a sair spang o’ the auld sin
o’ the warld in you sea; it’s an unchristian business at the best o’t;
an’ whiles when it gets up, an’ the wind skreights—the wind an’ her are
a kind of sib, I’m thinkin’—an’ thae Merry Men, the daft callants,
blawin’ and lauchin’, and puir souls in the deid thraws warstlin’ the
leelang nicht wi’ their bit ships—weel, it comes ower me like a
glamour. I’m a deil, I ken’t. But I think naething o’ the puir sailor
lads; I’m wi’ the sea, I’m just like ane o’ her ain Merry Men.”

I thought I should touch him in a joint of his harness. I turned me
towards the sea; the surf was running gaily, wave after wave, with
their manes blowing behind them, riding one after another up the beach,
towering, curving, falling one upon another on the trampled sand.
Without, the salt air, the scared gulls, the widespread army of the
sea-chargers, neighing to each other, as they gathered together to the
assault of Aros; and close before us, that line on the flat sands that,
with all their number and their fury, they might never pass.

“Thus far shalt thou go,” said I, “and no farther.” And then I quoted
as solemnly as I was able a verse that I had often before fitted to the
chorus of the breakers:—

But yet the Lord that is on high,
Is more of might by far,
Than noise of many waters is,
As great sea billows are.


“Ay,” said my kinsinan, “at the hinder end, the Lord will triumph; I
dinnae misdoobt that. But here on earth, even silly men-folk daur Him
to His face. It is nae wise; I am nae sayin’ that it’s wise; but it’s
the pride of the eye, and it’s the lust o’ life, an’ it’s the wale o’
pleesures.”

I said no more, for we had now begun to cross a neck of land that lay
between us and Sandag; and I withheld my last appeal to the man’s
better reason till we should stand upon the spot associated with his
crime. Nor did he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a
firmer step. The call that I had made upon his mind acted like a
stimulant, and I could see that he had forgotten his search for
worthless jetsam, in a profound, gloomy, and yet stirring train of
thought. In three or four minutes we had topped the brae and begun to
go down upon Sandag. The wreck had been roughly handled by the sea; the
stem had been spun round and dragged a little lower down; and perhaps
the stern had been forced a little higher, for the two parts now lay
entirely separate on the beach. When we came to the grave I stopped,
uncovered my head in the thick rain, and, looking my kinsman in the
face, addressed him.

“A man,” said I, “was in God’s providence suffered to escape from
mortal dangers; he was poor, he was naked, he was wet, he was weary, he
was a stranger; he had every claim upon the bowels of your compassion;
it may be that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, and kind;
it may be he was a man laden with iniquities to whom death was the
beginning of torment. I ask you in the sight of heaven: Gordon
Darnaway, where is the man for whom Christ died?”

He started visibly at the last words; but there came no answer, and his
face expressed no feeling but a vague alarm.

“You were my father’s brother,” I continued; “You, have taught me to
count your house as if it were my father’s house; and we are both
sinful men walking before the Lord among the sins and dangers of this
life. It is by our evil that God leads us into good; we sin, I dare not
say by His temptation, but I must say with His consent; and to any but
the brutish man his sins are the beginning of wisdom. God has warned
you by this crime; He warns you still by the bloody grave between our
feet; and if there shall follow no repentance, no improvement, no
return to Him, what can we look for but the following of some memorable
judgment?”

Even as I spoke the words, the eyes of my uncle wandered from my face.
A change fell upon his looks that cannot be described; his features
seemed to dwindle in size, the colour faded from his cheeks, one hand
rose waveringly and pointed over my shoulder into the distance, and the
oft-repeated name fell once more from his lips: “The _Christ-Anna_!”

I turned; and if I was not appalled to the same degree, as I return
thanks to Heaven that I had not the cause, I was still startled by the
sight that met my eyes. The form of a man stood upright on the
cabin-hutch of the wrecked ship; his back was towards us; he appeared
to be scanning the offing with shaded eyes, and his figure was relieved
to its full height, which was plainly very great, against the sea and
sky. I have said a thousand times that I am not superstitious; but at
that moment, with my mind running upon death and sin, the unexplained
appearance of a stranger on that sea-girt, solitary island filled me
with a surprise that bordered close on terror. It seemed scarce
possible that any human soul should have come ashore alive in such a
sea as had rated last night along the coasts of Aros; and the only
vessel within miles had gone down before our eyes among the Merry Men.
I was assailed with doubts that made suspense unbearable, and, to put
the matter to the touch at once, stepped forward and hailed the figure
like a ship.

He turned about, and I thought he started to behold us. At this my
courage instantly revived, and I called and signed to him to draw near,
and he, on his part, dropped immediately to the sands, and began slowly
to approach, with many stops and hesitations. At each repeated mark of
the man’s uneasiness I grew the more confident myself; and I advanced
another step, encouraging him as I did so with my head and hand. It was
plain the castaway had heard indifferent accounts of our island
hospitality; and indeed, about this time, the people farther north had
a sorry reputation.

“Why,” I said, “the man is black!”

And just at that moment, in a voice that I could scarce have
recognised, my kinsman began swearing and praying in a mingled stream.
I looked at him; he had fallen on his knees, his face was agonised; at
each step of the castaway’s the pitch of his voice rose, the volubility
of his utterance and the fervour of his language redoubled. I call it
prayer, for it was addressed to God; but surely no such ranting
incongruities were ever before addressed to the Creator by a creature:
surely if prayer can be a sin, this mad harangue was sinful. I ran to
my kinsman, I seized him by the shoulders, I dragged him to his feet.

“Silence, man,” said I, “respect your God in words, if not in action.
Here, on the very scene of your transgressions, He sends you an
occasion of atonement. Forward and embrace it; welcome like a father
yon creature who comes trembling to your mercy.”

With that, I tried to force him towards the black; but he felled me to
the ground, burst from my grasp, leaving the shoulder of his jacket,
and fled up the hillside towards the top of Aros like a deer. I
staggered to my feet again, bruised and somewhat stunned; the negro had
paused in surprise, perhaps in terror, some halfway between me and the
wreck; my uncle was already far away, bounding from rock to rock; and I
thus found myself torn for a time between two duties. But I judged, and
I pray Heaven that I judged rightly, in favour of the poor wretch upon
the sands; his misfortune was at least not plainly of his own creation;
it was one, besides, that I could certainly relieve; and I had begun by
that time to regard my uncle as an incurable and dismal lunatic. I
advanced accordingly towards the black, who now awaited my approach
with folded arms, like one prepared for either destiny. As I came
nearer, he reached forth his hand with a great gesture, such as I had
seen from the pulpit, and spoke to me in something of a pulpit voice,
but not a word was comprehensible. I tried him first in English, then
in Gaelic, both in vain; so that it was clear we must rely upon the
tongue of looks and gestures. Thereupon I signed to him to follow me,
which he did readily and with a grave obeisance like a fallen king; all
the while there had come no shade of alteration in his face, neither of
anxiety while he was still waiting, nor of relief now that he was
reassured; if he were a slave, as I supposed, I could not but judge he
must have fallen from some high place in his own country, and fallen as
he was, I could not but admire his bearing. As we passed the grave, I
paused and raised my hands and eyes to heaven in token of respect and
sorrow for the dead; and he, as if in answer, bowed low and spread his
hands abroad; it was a strange motion, but done like a thing of common
custom; and I supposed it was ceremonial in the land from which he
came. At the same time he pointed to my uncle, whom we could just see
perched upon a knoll, and touched his head to indicate that he was mad.

We took the long way round the shore, for I feared to excite my uncle
if we struck across the island; and as we walked, I had time enough to
mature the little dramatic exhibition by which I hoped to satisfy my
doubts. Accordingly, pausing on a rock, I proceeded to imitate before
the negro the action of the man whom I had seen the day before taking
bearings with the compass at Sandag. He understood me at once, and,
taking the imitation out of my hands, showed me where the boat was,
pointed out seaward as if to indicate the position of the schooner, and
then down along the edge of the rock with the words “Espirito Santo,”
strangely pronounced, but clear enough for recognition. I had thus been
right in my conjecture; the pretended historical inquiry had been but a
cloak for treasure-hunting; the man who had played on Dr. Robertson was
the same as the foreigner who visited Grisapol in spring, and now, with
many others, lay dead under the Roost of Aros: there had their greed
brought them, there should their bones be tossed for evermore. In the
meantime the black continued his imitation of the scene, now looking up
skyward as though watching the approach of the storm now, in the
character of a seaman, waving the rest to come aboard; now as an
officer, running along the rock and entering the boat; and anon bending
over imaginary oars with the air of a hurried boatman; but all with the
same solemnity of manner, so that I was never even moved to smile.
Lastly, he indicated to me, by a pantomime not to be described in
words, how he himself had gone up to examine the stranded wreck, and,
to his grief and indignation, had been deserted by his comrades; and
thereupon folded his arms once more, and stooped his head, like one
accepting fate.

The mystery of his presence being thus solved for me, I explained to
him by means of a sketch the fate of the vessel and of all aboard her.
He showed no surprise nor sorrow, and, with a sudden lifting of his
open hand, seemed to dismiss his former friends or masters (whichever
they had been) into God’s pleasure. Respect came upon me and grew
stronger, the more I observed him; I saw he had a powerful mind and a
sober and severe character, such as I loved to commune with; and before
we reached the house of Aros I had almost forgotten, and wholly
forgiven him, his uncanny colour.

To Mary I told all that had passed without suppression, though I own my
heart failed me; but I did wrong to doubt her sense of justice.

“You did the right,” she said. “God’s will be done.” And she set out
meat for us at once.

As soon as I was satisfied, I bade Rorie keep an eye upon the castaway,
who was still eating, and set forth again myself to find my uncle. I
had not gone far before I saw him sitting in the same place, upon the
very topmost knoll, and seemingly in the same attitude as when I had
last observed him. From that point, as I have said, the most of Aros
and the neighbouring Ross would be spread below him like a map; and it
was plain that he kept a bright look-out in all directions, for my head
had scarcely risen above the summit of the first ascent before he had
leaped to his feet and turned as if to face me. I hailed him at once,
as well as I was able, in the same tones and words as I had often used
before, when I had come to summon him to dinner. He made not so much as
a movement in reply. I passed on a little farther, and again tried
parley, with the same result. But when I began a second time to
advance, his insane fears blazed up again, and still in dead silence,
but with incredible speed, he began to flee from before me along the
rocky summit of the hill. An hour before, he had been dead weary, and I
had been comparatively active. But now his strength was recruited by
the fervour of insanity, and it would have been vain for me to dream of
pursuit. Nay, the very attempt, I thought, might have inflamed his
terrors, and thus increased the miseries of our position. And I had
nothing left but to turn homeward and make my sad report to Mary.

She heard it, as she had heard the first, with a concerned composure,
and, bidding me lie down and take that rest of which I stood so much in
need, set forth herself in quest of her misguided father. At that age
it would have been a strange thing that put me from either meat or
sleep; I slept long and deep; and it was already long past noon before
I awoke and came downstairs into the kitchen. Mary, Rorie, and the
black castaway were seated about the fire in silence; and I could see
that Mary had been weeping. There was cause enough, as I soon learned,
for tears. First she, and then Rorie, had been forth to seek my uncle;
each in turn had found him perched upon the hill-top, and from each in
turn he had silently and swiftly fled. Rorie had tried to chase him,
but in vain; madness lent a new vigour to his bounds; he sprang from
rock to rock over the widest gullies; he scoured like the wind along
the hill-tops; he doubled and twisted like a hare before the dogs; and
Rorie at length gave in; and the last that he saw, my uncle was seated
as before upon the crest of Aros. Even during the hottest excitement of
the chase, even when the fleet-footed servant had come, for a moment,
very near to capture him, the poor lunatic had uttered not a sound. He
fled, and he was silent, like a beast; and this silence had terrified
his pursuer.

There was something heart-breaking in the situation. How to capture the
madman, how to feed him in the meanwhile, and what to do with him when
he was captured, were the three difficulties that we had to solve.

“The black,” said I, “is the cause of this attack. It may even be his
presence in the house that keeps my uncle on the hill. We have done the
fair thing; he has been fed and warmed under this roof; now I propose
that Rorie put him across the bay in the coble, and take him through
the Ross as far as Grisapol.”

In this proposal Mary heartily concurred; and bidding the black follow
us, we all three descended to the pier. Certainly, Heaven’s will was
declared against Gordon Darnaway; a thing had happened, never
paralleled before in Aros; during the storm, the coble had broken
loose, and, striking on the rough splinters of the pier, now lay in
four feet of water with one side stove in. Three days of work at least
would be required to make her float. But I was not to be beaten. I led
the whole party round to where the gut was narrowest, swam to the other
side, and called to the black to follow me. He signed, with the same
clearness and quiet as before, that he knew not the art; and there was
truth apparent in his signals, it would have occurred to none of us to
doubt his truth; and that hope being over, we must all go back even as
we came to the house of Aros, the negro walking in our midst without
embarrassment.

All we could do that day was to make one more attempt to communicate
with the unhappy madman. Again he was visible on his perch; again he
fled in silence. But food and a great cloak were at least left for his
comfort; the rain, besides, had cleared away, and the night promised to
be even warm. We might compose ourselves, we thought, until the morrow;
rest was the chief requisite, that we might be strengthened for unusual
exertions; and as none cared to talk, we separated at an early hour.

I lay long awake, planning a campaign for the morrow. I was to place
the black on the side of Sandag, whence he should head my uncle towards
the house; Rorie in the west, I on the east, were to complete the
cordon, as best we might. It seemed to me, the more I recalled the
configuration of the island, that it should be possible, though hard,
to force him down upon the low ground along Aros Bay; and once there,
even with the strength of his madness, ultimate escape was hardly to be
feared. It was on his terror of the black that I relied; for I made
sure, however he might run, it would not be in the direction of the man
whom he supposed to have returned from the dead, and thus one point of
the compass at least would be secure.

When at length I fell asleep, it was to be awakened shortly after by a
dream of wrecks, black men, and submarine adventure; and I found myself
so shaken and fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped
out before the house. Within, Rorie and the black were asleep together
in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here
and there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was
near the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the
windless quiet of the night. Never, not even in the height of the
tempest, had I heard their song with greater awe. Now, when the winds
were gathered home, when the deep was dandling itself back into its
summer slumber, and when the stars rained their gentle light over land
and sea, the voice of these tide-breakers was still raised for havoc.
They seemed, indeed, to be a part of the world’s evil and the tragic
side of life. Nor were their meaningless vociferations the only sounds
that broke the silence of the night. For I could hear, now shrill and
thrilling and now almost drowned, the note of a human voice that
accompanied the uproar of the Roost. I knew it for my kinsman’s; and a
great fear fell upon me of God’s judgments, and the evil in the world.
I went back again into the darkness of the house as into a place of
shelter, and lay long upon my bed, pondering these mysteries.

It was late when I again woke, and I leaped into my clothes and hurried
to the kitchen. No one was there; Rorie and the black had both
stealthily departed long before; and my heart stood still at the
discovery. I could rely on Rorie’s heart, but I placed no trust in his
discretion. If he had thus set out without a word, he was plainly bent
upon some service to my uncle. But what service could he hope to render
even alone, far less in the company of the man in whom my uncle found
his fears incarnated? Even if I were not already too late to prevent
some deadly mischief, it was plain I must delay no longer. With the
thought I was out of the house; and often as I have run on the rough
sides of Aros, I never ran as I did that fatal morning. I do not
believe I put twelve minutes to the whole ascent.

My uncle was gone from his perch. The basket had indeed been torn open
and the meat scattered on the turf; but, as we found afterwards, no
mouthful had been tasted; and there was not another trace of human
existence in that wide field of view. Day had already filled the clear
heavens; the sun already lighted in a rosy bloom upon the crest of Ben
Kyaw; but all below me the rude knolls of Aros and the shield of sea
lay steeped in the clear darkling twilight of the dawn.

“Rorie!” I cried; and again “Rorie!” My voice died in the silence, but
there came no answer back. If there were indeed an enterprise afoot to
catch my uncle, it was plainly not in fleetness of foot, but in
dexterity of stalking, that the hunters placed their trust. I ran on
farther, keeping the higher spurs, and looking right and left, nor did
I pause again till I was on the mount above Sandag. I could see the
wreck, the uncovered belt of sand, the waves idly beating, the long
ledge of rocks, and on either hand the tumbled knolls, boulders, and
gullies of the island. But still no human thing.

At a stride the sunshine fell on Aros, and the shadows and colours
leaped into being. Not half a moment later, below me to the west, sheep
began to scatter as in a panic. There came a cry. I saw my uncle
running. I saw the black jump up in hot pursuit; and before I had time
to understand, Rorie also had appeared, calling directions in Gaelic as
to a dog herding sheep.

I took to my heels to interfere, and perhaps I had done better to have
waited where I was, for I was the means of cutting off the madman’s
last escape. There was nothing before him from that moment but the
grave, the wreck, and the sea in Sandag Bay. And yet Heaven knows that
what I did was for the best.

My uncle Gordon saw in what direction, horrible to him, the chase was
driving him. He doubled, darting to the right and left; but high as the
fever ran in his veins, the black was still the swifter. Turn where he
would, he was still forestalled, still driven toward the scene of his
crime. Suddenly he began to shriek aloud, so that the coast re-echoed;
and now both I and Rorie were calling on the black to stop. But all was
vain, for it was written otherwise. The pursuer still ran, the chase
still sped before him screaming; they avoided the grave, and skimmed
close past the timbers of the wreck; in a breath they had cleared the
sand; and still my kinsman did not pause, but dashed straight into the
surf; and the black, now almost within reach, still followed swiftly
behind him. Rorie and I both stopped, for the thing was now beyond the
hands of men, and these were the decrees of God that came to pass
before our eyes. There was never a sharper ending. On that steep beach
they were beyond their depth at a bound; neither could swim; the black
rose once for a moment with a throttling cry; but the current had them,
racing seaward; and if ever they came up again, which God alone can
tell, it would be ten minutes after, at the far end of Aros Roost,
where the seabirds hover fishing.




WILL O’ THE MILL.




CHAPTER I.
THE PLAIN AND THE STARS.


The Mill here Will lived with his adopted parents stood in a falling
valley between pinewoods and great mountains. Above, hill after hill,
soared upwards until they soared out of the depth of the hardiest
timber, and stood naked against the sky. Some way up, a long grey
village lay like a seam or a ray of vapour on a wooded hillside; and
when the wind was favourable, the sound of the church bells would drop
down, thin and silvery, to Will. Below, the valley grew ever steeper
and steeper, and at the same time widened out on either hand; and from
an eminence beside the mill it was possible to see its whole length and
away beyond it over a wide plain, where the river turned and shone, and
moved on from city to city on its voyage towards the sea. It chanced
that over this valley there lay a pass into a neighbouring kingdom; so
that, quiet and rural as it was, the road that ran along beside the
river was a high thoroughfare between two splendid and powerful
societies. All through the summer, travelling-carriages came crawling
up, or went plunging briskly downwards past the mill; and as it
happened that the other side was very much easier of ascent, the path
was not much frequented, except by people going in one direction; and
of all the carriages that Will saw go by, five-sixths were plunging
briskly downwards and only one-sixth crawling up. Much more was this
the case with foot-passengers. All the light-footed tourists, all the
pedlars laden with strange wares, were tending downward like the river
that accompanied their path. Nor was this all; for when Will was yet a
child a disastrous war arose over a great part of the world. The
newspapers were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with
cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles around the
coil of battle terrified good people from their labours in the field.
Of all this, nothing was heard for a long time in the valley; but at
last one of the commanders pushed an army over the pass by forced
marches, and for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril, drum
and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill. All day the child
stood and watched them on their passage—the rhythmical stride, the
pale, unshaven faces tanned about the eyes, the discoloured regimentals
and the tattered flags, filled him with a sense of weariness, pity, and
wonder; and all night long, after he was in bed, he could hear the
cannon pounding and the feet trampling, and the great armament sweeping
onward and downward past the mill. No one in the valley ever heard the
fate of the expedition, for they lay out of the way of gossip in those
troublous times; but Will saw one thing plainly, that not a man
returned. Whither had they all gone? Whither went all the tourists and
pedlars with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with
servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing
downward and ever renewed from above? Even the wind blew oftener down
the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall. It
seemed like a great conspiracy of things animate and inanimate; they
all went downward, fleetly and gaily downward, and only he, it seemed,
remained behind, like a stock upon the wayside. It sometimes made him
glad when he noticed how the fishes kept their heads up stream. They,
at least, stood faithfully by him, while all else were posting downward
to the unknown world.

One evening he asked the miller where the river went.

“It goes down the valley,” answered he, “and turns a power of mills—six
score mills, they say, from here to Unterdeck—and is none the wearier
after all. And then it goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great
corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say)
where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walling up
and down before the door. And it goes under bridges with stone men upon
them, looking down and smiling so curious it the water, and living
folks leaning their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then
it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it
falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and tobacco
from the Indies. Ay, it has a long trot before it as it goes singing
over our weir, bless its heart!”

“And what is the sea?” asked Will.

“The sea!” cried the miller. “Lord help us all, it is the greatest
thing God made! That is where all the water in the world runs down into
a great salt lake. There it lies, as flat as my hand and as
innocent-like as a child; but they do say when the wind blows it gets
up into water-mountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down
great ships bigger than our mill, and makes such a roaring that you can
hear it miles away upon the land. There are great fish in it five times
bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old
as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on
her head.”

Will thought he had never heard anything like this, and he kept on
asking question after question about the world that lay away down the
river, with all its perils and marvels, until the old miller became
quite interested himself, and at last took him by the hand and led him
to the hilltop that overlooks the valley and the plain. The sun was
near setting, and hung low down in a cloudless sky. Everything was
defined and glorified in golden light. Will had never seen so great an
expanse of country in his life; he stood and gazed with all his eyes.
He could see the cities, and the woods and fields, and the bright
curves of the river, and far away to where the rim of the plain
trenched along the shining heavens. An over-mastering emotion seized
upon the boy, soul and body; his heart beat so thickly that he could
not breathe; the scene swam before his eyes; the sun seemed to wheel
round and round, and throw off, as it turned, strange shapes which
disappeared with the rapidity of thought, and were succeeded by others.
Will covered his face with his hands, and burst into a violent fit of
tears; and the poor miller, sadly disappointed and perplexed, saw
nothing better for it than to take him up in his arms and carry him
home in silence.

From that day forward Will was full of new hopes and longings.
Something kept tugging at his heart-strings; the running water carried
his desires along with it as he dreamed over its fleeting surface; the
wind, as it ran over innumerable tree-tops, hailed him with encouraging
words; branches beckoned downward; the open road, as it shouldered
round the angles and went turning and vanishing fast and faster down
the valley, tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles
on the eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat
lowlands, and watched the clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish
wind and trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger
by the wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled
downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that
went that way, were it cloud or carriage, bird or brown water in the
stream, he felt his heart flow out after it in an ecstasy of longing.

We are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the
sea, all that counter-marching of tribes and races that confounds old
history with its dust and rumour, sprang from nothing more abstruse
than the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural instinct for
cheap rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and
pitiful explanation. The tribes that came swarming out of the North and
East, if they were indeed pressed onward from behind by others, were
drawn at the same time by the magnetic influence of the South and West.
The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal city
rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they
travelled towards wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set
on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of
humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failure,
the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus
into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on
their perilous march. There is one legend which profoundly represents
their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers encountered a
very old man shod with iron. The old man asked them whither they were
going; and they answered with one voice: “To the Eternal City!” He
looked upon them gravely. “I have sought it,” he said, “over the most
part of the world. Three such pairs as I now carry on my feet have I
worn out upon this pilgrimage, and now the fourth is growing slender
underneath my steps. And all this while I have not found the city.” And
he turned and went his own way alone, leaving them astonished.

And yet this would scarcely parallel the intensity of Will’s feeling
for the plain. If he could only go far enough out there, he felt as if
his eyesight would be purged and clarified, as if his hearing would
grow more delicate, and his very breath would come and go with luxury.
He was transplanted and withering where he was; he lay in a strange
country and was sick for home. Bit by bit, he pieced together broken
notions of the world below: of the river, ever moving and growing until
it sailed forth into the majestic ocean; of the cities, full of brisk
and beautiful people, playing fountains, bands of music and marble
palaces, and lighted up at night from end to end with artificial stars
of gold; of the great churches, wise universities, brave armies, and
untold money lying stored in vaults; of the high-flying vice that moved
in the sunshine, and the stealth and swiftness of midnight murder. I
have said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was like
some one lying in twilit, formless preexistence, and stretching out his
hands lovingly towards many-coloured, many-sounding life. It was no
wonder he was unhappy, he would go and tell the fish: they were made
for their life, wished for no more than worms and running water, and a
hole below a falling bank; but he was differently designed, full of
desires and aspirations, itching at the fingers, lusting with the eyes,
whom the whole variegated world could not satisfy with aspects. The
true life, the true bright sunshine, lay far out upon the plain. And O!
to see this sunlight once before he died! to move with a jocund spirit
in a golden land! to hear the trained singers and sweet church bells,
and see the holiday gardens! “And O fish!” he would cry, “if you would
only turn your noses down stream, you could swim so easily into the
fabled waters and see the vast ships passing over your head like
clouds, and hear the great water-hills making music over you all day
long!” But the fish kept looking patiently in their own direction,
until Will hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

Hitherto the traffic on the road had passed by Will, like something
seen in a picture: he had perhaps exchanged salutations with a tourist,
or caught sight of an old gentleman in a travelling cap at a carriage
window; but for the most part it had been a mere symbol, which he
contemplated from apart and with something of a superstitious feeling.
A time came at last when this was to be changed. The miller, who was a
greedy man in his way, and never forewent an opportunity of honest
profit, turned the mill-house into a little wayside inn, and, several
pieces of good fortune falling in opportunely, built stables and got
the position of post master on the road. It now became Will’s duty to
wait upon people, as they sat to break their fasts in the little arbour
at the top of the mill garden; and you may be sure that he kept his
ears open, and learned many new things about the outside world as he
brought the omelette or the wine. Nay, he would often get into
conversation with single guests, and by adroit questions and polite
attention, not only gratify his own curiosity, but win the goodwill of
the travellers. Many complimented the old couple on their serving-boy;
and a professor was eager to take him away with him, and have him
properly educated in the plain. The miller and his wife were mightily
astonished and even more pleased. They thought it a very good thing
that they should have opened their inn. “You see,” the old man would
remark, “he has a kind of talent for a publican; he never would have
made anything else!” And so life wagged on in the valley, with high
satisfaction to all concerned but Will. Every carriage that left the
inn-door seemed to take a part of him away with it; and when people
jestingly offered him a lift, he could with difficulty command his
emotion. Night after night he would dream that he was awakened by
flustered servants, and that a splendid equipage waited at the door to
carry him down into the plain; night after night; until the dream,
which had seemed all jollity to him at first, began to take on a colour
of gravity, and the nocturnal summons and waiting equipage occupied a
place in his mind as something to be both feared and hoped for.

One day, when Will was about sixteen, a fat young man arrived at sunset
to pass the night. He was a contented-looking fellow, with a jolly eye,
and carried a knapsack. While dinner was preparing, he sat in the
arbour to read a book; but as soon as he had begun to observe Will, the
book was laid aside; he was plainly one of those who prefer living
people to people made of ink and paper. Will, on his part, although he
had not been much interested in the stranger at first sight, soon began
to take a great deal of pleasure in his talk, which was full of good
nature and good sense, and at last conceived a great respect for his
character and wisdom. They sat far into the night; and about two in the
morning Will opened his heart to the young man, and told him how he
longed to leave the valley and what bright hopes he had connected with
the cities of the plain. The young man whistled, and then broke into a
smile.

“My young friend,” he remarked, “you are a very curious little fellow
to be sure, and wish a great many things which you will never get. Why,
you would feel quite ashamed if you knew how the little fellows in
these fairy cities of yours are all after the same sort of nonsense,
and keep breaking their hearts to get up into the mountains. And let me
tell you, those who go down into the plains are a very short while
there before they wish themselves heartily back again. The air is not
so light nor so pure; nor is the sun any brighter. As for the beautiful
men and women, you would see many of them in rags and many of them
deformed with horrible disorders; and a city is so hard a place for
people who are poor and sensitive that many choose to die by their own
hand.”

“You must think me very simple,” answered Will. “Although I have never
been out of this valley, believe me, I have used my eyes. I know how
one thing lives on another; for instance, how the fish hangs in the
eddy to catch his fellows; and the shepherd, who makes so pretty a
picture carrying home the lamb, is only carrying it home for dinner. I
do not expect to find all things right in your cities. That is not what
troubles me; it might have been that once upon a time; but although I
live here always, I have asked many questions and learned a great deal
in these last years, and certainly enough to cure me of my old fancies.
But you would not have me die like a dog and not see all that is to be
seen, and do all that a man can do, let it be good or evil? you would
not have me spend all my days between this road here and the river, and
not so much as make a motion to be up and live my life?—I would rather
die out of hand,” he cried, “than linger on as I am doing.”

“Thousands of people,” said the young man, “live and die like you, and
are none the less happy.”

“Ah!” said Will, “if there are thousands who would like, why should not
one of them have my place?”

It was quite dark; there was a hanging lamp in the arbour which lit up
the table and the faces of the speakers; and along the arch, the leaves
upon the trellis stood out illuminated against the night sky, a pattern
of transparent green upon a dusky purple. The fat young man rose, and,
taking Will by the arm, led him out under the open heavens.

“Did you ever look at the stars?” he asked, pointing upwards.

“Often and often,” answered Will.

“And do you know what they are?”

“I have fancied many things.”

“They are worlds like ours,” said the young man. “Some of them less;
many of them a million times greater; and some of the least sparkles
that you see are not only worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turning
about each other in the midst of space. We do not know what there may
be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our difficulties or the
cure of all our sufferings: and yet we can never reach them; not all
the skill of the craftiest of men can fit out a ship for the nearest of
these our neighbours, nor would the life of the most aged suffice for
such a journey. When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend is
dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are unweariedly
shining overhead. We may stand down here, a whole army of us together,
and shout until we break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We
may climb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer them. All we can
do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats; the
starshine lights upon our heads, and where mine is a little bald, I
dare say you can see it glisten in the darkness. The mountain and the
mouse. That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with Arcturus or
Aldebaran. Can you apply a parable?” he added, laying his hand upon
Will’s shoulder. “It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually
vastly more convincing.”

Will hung his head a little, and then raised it once more to heaven.
The stars seemed to expand and emit a sharper brilliancy; and as he
kept turning his eyes higher and higher, they seemed to increase in
multitude under his gaze.

“I see,” he said, turning to the young man. “We are in a rat-trap.”

“Something of that size. Did you ever see a squirrel turning in a cage?
and another squirrel sitting philosophically over his nuts? I needn’t
ask you which of them looked more of a fool.”




CHAPTER II.
THE PARSON’S MARJORY.


After some years the old people died, both in one winter, very
carefully tended by their adopted son, and very quietly mourned when
they were gone. People who had heard of his roving fancies supposed he
would hasten to sell the property, and go down the river to push his
fortunes. But there was never any sign of such in intention on the part
of Will. On the contrary, he had the inn set on a better footing, and
hired a couple of servants to assist him in carrying it on; and there
he settled down, a kind, talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet
three in his stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice.
He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it
was not much to be wondered at from the first, for he was always full
of notions, and kept calling the plainest common-sense in question; but
what most raised the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his
courtship with the parson’s Marjory.

The parson’s Marjory was a lass about nineteen, when Will would be
about thirty; well enough looking, and much better educated than any
other girl in that part of the country, as became her parentage. She
held her head very high, and had already refused several offers of
marriage with a grand air, which had got her hard names among the
neighbours. For all that she was a good girl, and one that would have
made any man well contented.

Will had never seen much of her; for although the church and parsonage
were only two miles from his own door, he was never known to go there
but on Sundays. It chanced, however, that the parsonage fell into
disrepair, and had to be dismantled; and the parson and his daughter
took lodgings for a month or so, on very much reduced terms, at Will’s
inn. Now, what with the inn, and the mill, and the old miller’s
savings, our friend was a man of substance; and besides that, he had a
name for good temper and shrewdness, which make a capital portion in
marriage; and so it was currently gossiped, among their ill-wishers,
that the parson and his daughter had not chosen their temporary lodging
with their eyes shut. Will was about the last man in the world to be
cajoled or frightened into marriage. You had only to look into his
eyes, limpid and still like pools of water, and yet with a sort of
clear light that seemed to come from within, and you would understand
at once that here was one who knew his own mind, and would stand to it
immovably. Marjory herself was no weakling by her looks, with strong,
steady eyes and a resolute and quiet bearing. It might be a question
whether she was not Will’s match in stedfastness, after all, or which
of them would rule the roost in marriage. But Marjory had never given
it a thought, and accompanied her father with the most unshaken
innocence and unconcern.

The season was still so early that Will’s customers were few and far
between; but the lilacs were already flowering, and the weather was so
mild that the party took dinner under the trellice, with the noise of
the river in their ears and the woods ringing about them with the songs
of birds. Will soon began to take a particular pleasure in these
dinners. The parson was rather a dull companion, with a habit of dozing
at table; but nothing rude or cruel ever fell from his lips. And as for
the parson’s daughter, she suited her surroundings with the best grace
imaginable; and whatever she said seemed so pat and pretty that Will
conceived a great idea of her talents. He could see her face, as she
leaned forward, against a background of rising pinewoods; her eyes
shone peaceably; the light lay around her hair like a kerchief;
something that was hardly a smile rippled her pale cheeks, and Will
could not contain himself from gazing on her in an agreeable dismay.
She looked, even in her quietest moments, so complete in herself, and
so quick with life down to her finger tips and the very skirts of her
dress, that the remainder of created things became no more than a blot
by comparison; and if Will glanced away from her to her surroundings,
the trees looked inanimate and senseless, the clouds hung in heaven
like dead things, and even the mountain tops were disenchanted. The
whole valley could not compare in looks with this one girl.

Will was always observant in the society of his fellow-creatures; but
his observation became almost painfully eager in the case of Marjory.
He listened to all she uttered, and read her eyes, at the same time,
for the unspoken commentary. Many kind, simple, and sincere speeches
found an echo in his heart. He became conscious of a soul beautifully
poised upon itself, nothing doubting, nothing desiring, clothed in
peace. It was not possible to separate her thoughts from her
appearance. The turn of her wrist, the still sound of her voice, the
light in her eyes, the lines of her body, fell in tune with her grave
and gentle words, like the accompaniment that sustains and harmonises
the voice of the singer. Her influence was one thing, not to be divided
or discussed, only to be felt with gratitude and joy. To Will, her
presence recalled something of his childhood, and the thought of her
took its place in his mind beside that of dawn, of running water, and
of the earliest violets and lilacs. It is the property of things seen
for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers
in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that
impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life
with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews
a man’s character from the fountain upwards.

One day after dinner Will took a stroll among the firs; a grave
beatitude possessed him from top to toe, and he kept smiling to himself
and the landscape as he went. The river ran between the stepping-stones
with a pretty wimple; a bird sang loudly in the wood; the hill-tops
looked immeasurably high, and as he glanced at them from time to time
seemed to contemplate his movements with a beneficent but awful
curiosity. His way took him to the eminence which overlooked the plain;
and there he sat down upon a stone, and fell into deep and pleasant
thought. The plain lay abroad with its cities and silver river;
everything was asleep, except a great eddy of birds which kept rising
and falling and going round and round in the blue air. He repeated
Marjory’s name aloud, and the sound of it gratified his ear. He shut
his eyes, and her image sprang up before him, quietly luminous and
attended with good thoughts. The river might run for ever; the birds
fly higher and higher till they touched the stars. He saw it was empty
bustle after all; for here, without stirring a feet, waiting patiently
in his own narrow valley, he also had attained the better sunlight.

The next day Will made a sort of declaration across the dinner-table,
while the parson was filling his pipe.

“Miss Marjory,” he said, “I never knew any one I liked so well as you.
I am mostly a cold, unkindly sort of man; not from want of heart, but
out of strangeness in my way of thinking; and people seem far away from
me. ’Tis as if there were a circle round me, which kept every one out
but you; I can hear the others talking and laughing; but you come quite
close. Maybe, this is disagreeable to you?” he asked.

Marjory made no answer.

“Speak up, girl,” said the parson.

“Nay, now,” returned Will, “I wouldn’t press her, parson. I feel
tongue-tied myself, who am not used to it; and she’s a woman, and
little more than a child, when all is said. But for my part, as far as
I can understand what people mean by it, I fancy I must be what they
call in love. I do not wish to be held as committing myself; for I may
be wrong; but that is how I believe things are with me. And if Miss
Marjory should feel any otherwise on her part, mayhap she would be so
kind as shake her head.”

Marjory was silent, and gave no sign that she had heard.

“How is that, parson?” asked Will.

“The girl must speak,” replied the parson, laying down his pipe.
“Here’s our neighbour who says he loves you, Madge. Do you love him, ay
or no?”

“I think I do,” said Marjory, faintly.

“Well then, that’s all that could be wished!” cried Will, heartily. And
he took her hand across the table, and held it a moment in both of his
with great satisfaction.

“You must marry,” observed the parson, replacing his pipe in his mouth.

“Is that the right thing to do, think you?” demanded Will.

“It is indispensable,” said the parson.

“Very well,” replied the wooer.

Two or three days passed away with great delight to Will, although a
bystander might scarce have found it out. He continued to take his
meals opposite Marjory, and to talk with her and gaze upon her in her
father’s presence; but he made no attempt to see her alone, nor in any
other way changed his conduct towards her from what it had been since
the beginning. Perhaps the girl was a little disappointed, and perhaps
not unjustly; and yet if it had been enough to be always in the
thoughts of another person, and so pervade and alter his whole life,
she might have been thoroughly contented. For she was never out of
Will’s mind for an instant. He sat over the stream, and watched the
dust of the eddy, and the poised fish, and straining weeds; he wandered
out alone into the purple even, with all the blackbirds piping round
him in the wood; he rose early in the morning, and saw the sky turn
from grey to gold, and the light leap upon the hill-tops; and all the
while he kept wondering if he had never seen such things before, or how
it was that they should look so different now. The sound of his own
mill-wheel, or of the wind among the trees, confounded and charmed his
heart. The most enchanting thoughts presented themselves unbidden in
his mind. He was so happy that he could not sleep at night, and so
restless, that he could hardly sit still out of her company. And yet it
seemed as if he avoided her rather than sought her out.

One day, as he was coming home from a ramble, Will found Marjory in the
garden picking flowers, and as he came up with her, slackened his pace
and continued walking by her side.

“You like flowers?” he said.

“Indeed I love them dearly,” she replied. “Do you?”

“Why, no,” said he, “not so much. They are a very small affair, when
all is done. I can fancy people caring for them greatly, but not doing
as you are just now.”

“How?” she asked, pausing and looking up at him.

“Plucking them,” said he. “They are a deal better off where they are,
and look a deal prettier, if you go to that.”

“I wish to have them for my own,” she answered, “to carry them near my
heart, and keep them in my room. They tempt me when they grow here;
they seem to say, ‘Come and do something with us;’ but once I have cut
them and put them by, the charm is laid, and I can look at them with
quite an easy heart.”

“You wish to possess them,” replied Will, “in order to think no more
about them. It’s a bit like killing the goose with the golden eggs.
It’s a bit like what I wished to do when I was a boy. Because I had a
fancy for looking out over the plain, I wished to go down there—where I
couldn’t look out over it any longer. Was not that fine reasoning?
Dear, dear, if they only thought of it, all the world would do like me;
and you would let your flowers alone, just as I stay up here in the
mountains.” Suddenly he broke off sharp. “By the Lord!” he cried. And
when she asked him what was wrong, he turned the question off and
walked away into the house with rather a humorous expression of face.

He was silent at table; and after the night hid fallen and the stars
had come out overhead, he walked up and down for hours in the courtyard
and garden with an uneven pace. There was still a light in the window
of Marjory’s room: one little oblong patch of orange in a world of dark
blue hills and silver starlight. Will’s mind ran a great deal on the
window; but his thoughts were not very lover-like. “There she is in her
room,” he thought, “and there are the stars overhead:—a blessing upon
both!” Both were good influences in his life; both soothed and braced
him in his profound contentment with the world. And what more should he
desire with either? The fat young man and his councils were so present
to his mind, that he threw back his head, and, putting his hands before
his mouth, shouted aloud to the populous heavens. Whether from the
position of his head or the sudden strain of the exertion, he seemed to
see a momentary shock among the stars, and a diffusion of frosty light
pass from one to another along the sky. At the same instant, a corner
of the blind was lifted and lowered again at once. He laughed a loud
ho-ho! “One and another!” thought Will. “The stars tremble, and the
blind goes up. Why, before Heaven, what a great magician I must be! Now
if I were only a fool, should not I be in a pretty way?” And he went
off to bed, chuckling to himself: “If I were only a fool!”

The next morning, pretty early, he saw her once more in the garden, and
sought her out.

“I have been thinking about getting married,” he began abruptly; “and
after having turned it all over, I have made up my mind it’s not
worthwhile.”

She turned upon him for a single moment; but his radiant, kindly
appearance would, under the circumstances, have disconcerted an angel,
and she looked down again upon the ground in silence. He could see her
tremble.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he went on, a little taken aback. “You ought
not. I have turned it all over, and upon my soul there’s nothing in it.
We should never be one whit nearer than we are just now, and, if I am a
wise man, nothing like so happy.”

“It is unnecessary to go round about with me,” she said. “I very well
remember that you refused to commit yourself; and now that I see you
were mistaken, and in reality have never cared for me, I can only feel
sad that I have been so far misled.”

“I ask your pardon,” said Will stoutly; “you do not understand my
meaning. As to whether I have ever loved you or not, I must leave that
to others. But for one thing, my feeling is not changed; and for
another, you may make it your boast that you have made my whole life
and character something different from what they were. I mean what I
say; no less. I do not think getting married is worth while. I would
rather you went on living with your father, so that I could walk over
and see you once, or maybe twice a week, as people go to church, and
then we should both be all the happier between whiles. That’s my
notion. But I’ll marry you if you will,” he added.

“Do you know that you are insulting me?” she broke out.

“Not I, Marjory,” said he; “if there is anything in a clear conscience,
not I. I offer all my heart’s best affection; you can take it or want
it, though I suspect it’s beyond either your power or mine to change
what has once been done, and set me fancy-free. I’ll marry you, if you
like; but I tell you again and again, it’s not worth while, and we had
best stay friends. Though I am a quiet man I have noticed a heap of
things in my life. Trust in me, and take things as I propose; or, if
you don’t like that, say the word, and I’ll marry you out of hand.”

There was a considerable pause, and Will, who began to feel uneasy,
began to grow angry in consequence.

“It seems you are too proud to say your mind,” he said. “Believe me
that’s a pity. A clean shrift makes simple living. Can a man be more
downright or honourable, to a woman than I have been? I have said my
say, and given you your choice. Do you want me to marry you? or will
you take my friendship, as I think best? or have you had enough of me
for good? Speak out for the dear God’s sake! You know your father told
you a girl should speak her mind in these affairs.”

She seemed to recover herself at that, turned without a word, walked
rapidly through the garden, and disappeared into the house, leaving
Will in some confusion as to the result. He walked up and down the
garden, whistling softly to himself. Sometimes he stopped and
contemplated the sky and hill-tops; sometimes he went down to the tail
of the weir and sat there, looking foolishly in the water. All this
dubiety and perturbation was so foreign to his nature and the life
which he had resolutely chosen for himself, that he began to regret
Marjory’s arrival. “After all,” he thought, “I was as happy as a man
need be. I could come down here and watch my fishes all day long if I
wanted: I was as settled and contented as my old mill.”

Marjory came down to dinner, looking very trim and quiet; and no sooner
were all three at table than she made her father a speech, with her
eyes fixed upon her plate, but showing no other sign of embarrassment
or distress.

“Father,” she began, “Mr. Will and I have been talking things over. We
see that we have each made a mistake about our feelings, and he has
agreed, at my request, to give up all idea of marriage, and be no more
than my very good friend, as in the past. You see, there is no shadow
of a quarrel, and indeed I hope we shall see a great deal of him in the
future, for his visits will always be welcome in our house. Of course,
father, you will know best, but perhaps we should do better to leave
Mr. Will’s house for the present. I believe, after what has passed, we
should hardly be agreeable inmates for some days.”

Will, who had commanded himself with difficulty from the first, broke
out upon this into an inarticulate noise, and raised one hand with an
appearance of real dismay, as if he were about to interfere and
contradict. But she checked him at once looking up at him with a swift
glance and an angry flush upon her cheek.

“You will perhaps have the good grace,” she said, “to let me explain
these matters for myself.”

Will was put entirely out of countenance by her expression and the ring
of her voice. He held his peace, concluding that there were some things
about this girl beyond his comprehension, in which he was exactly
right.

The poor parson was quite crestfallen. He tried to prove that this was
no more than a true lovers’ tiff, which would pass off before night;
and when he was dislodged from that position, he went on to argue that
where there was no quarrel there could be no call for a separation; for
the good man liked both his entertainment and his host. It was curious
to see how the girl managed them, saying little all the time, and that
very quietly, and yet twisting them round her finger and insensibly
leading them wherever she would by feminine tact and generalship. It
scarcely seemed to have been her doing—it seemed as if things had
merely so fallen out—that she and her father took their departure that
same afternoon in a farm-cart, and went farther down the valley, to
wait, until their own house was ready for them, in another hamlet. But
Will had been observing closely, and was well aware of her dexterity
and resolution. When he found himself alone he had a great many curious
matters to turn over in his mind. He was very sad and solitary, to
begin with. All the interest had gone out of his life, and he might
look up at the stars as long as he pleased, he somehow failed to find
support or consolation. And then he was in such a turmoil of spirit
about Marjory. He had been puzzled and irritated at her behaviour, and
yet he could not keep himself from admiring it. He thought he
recognised a fine, perverse angel in that still soul which he had never
hitherto suspected; and though he saw it was an influence that would
fit but ill with his own life of artificial calm, he could not keep
himself from ardently desiring to possess it. Like a man who has lived
among shadows and now meets the sun, he was both pained and delighted.

As the days went forward he passed from one extreme to another; now
pluming himself on the strength of his determination, now despising his
timid and silly caution. The former was, perhaps, the true thought of
his heart, and represented the regular tenor of the man’s reflections;
but the latter burst forth from time to time with an unruly violence,
and then he would forget all consideration, and go up and down his
house and garden or walk among the fir-woods like one who is beside
himself with remorse. To equable, steady-minded Will this state of
matters was intolerable; and he determined, at whatever cost, to bring
it to an end. So, one warm summer afternoon he put on his best clothes,
took a thorn switch in his hand, and set out down the valley by the
river. As soon as he had taken his determination, he had regained at a
bound his customary peace of heart, and he enjoyed the bright weather
and the variety of the scene without any admixture of alarm or
unpleasant eagerness. It was nearly the same to him how the matter
turned out. If she accepted him he would have to marry her this time,
which perhaps was, all for the best. If she refused him, he would have
done his utmost, and might follow his own way in the future with an
untroubled conscience. He hoped, on the whole, she would refuse him;
and then, again, as he saw the brown roof which sheltered her, peeping
through some willows at an angle of the stream, he was half inclined to
reverse the wish, and more than half ashamed of himself for this
infirmity of purpose.

Marjory seemed glad to see him, and gave him her hand without
affectation or delay.

“I have been thinking about this marriage,” he began.

“So have I,” she answered. “And I respect you more and more for a very
wise man. You understood me better than I understood myself; and I am
now quite certain that things are all for the best as they are.”

“At the same time—,” ventured Will.

“You must be tired,” she interrupted. “Take a seat and let me fetch you
a glass of wine. The afternoon is so warm; and I wish you not to be
displeased with your visit. You must come quite often; once a week, if
you can spare the time; I am always so glad to see my friends.”

“O, very well,” thought Will to himself. “It appears I was right after
all.” And he paid a very agreeable visit, walked home again in capital
spirits, and gave himself no further concern about the matter.

For nearly three years Will and Marjory continued on these terms,
seeing each other once or twice a week without any word of love between
them; and for all that time I believe Will was nearly as happy as a man
can be. He rather stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he
would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again,
as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road,
whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the
valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by
way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and
moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants got so much
into the habit of finding him there in the twilight that they gave it
the name of “Will o’ the Mill’s Corner.”

At the end of the three years Marjory played him a sad trick by
suddenly marrying somebody else. Will kept his countenance bravely, and
merely remarked that, for as little as he knew of women, he had acted
very prudently in not marrying her himself three years before. She
plainly knew very little of her own mind, and, in spite of a deceptive
manner, was as fickle and flighty as the rest of them. He had to
congratulate himself on an escape, he said, and would take a higher
opinion of his own wisdom in consequence. But at heart, he was
reasonably displeased, moped a good deal for a month or two, and fell
away in flesh, to the astonishment of his serving-lads.

It was perhaps a year after this marriage that Will was awakened late
one night by the sound of a horse galloping on the road, followed by
precipitate knocking at the inn-door. He opened his window and saw a
farm servant, mounted and holding a led horse by the bridle, who told
him to make what haste he could and go along with him; for Marjory was
dying, and had sent urgently to fetch him to her bedside. Will was no
horseman, and made so little speed upon the way that the poor young
wife was very near her end before he arrived. But they had some
minutes’ talk in private, and he was present and wept very bitterly
while she breathed her last.




CHAPTER III.
DEATH


Year after year went away into nothing, with great explosions and
outcries in the cities on the plain: red revolt springing up and being
suppressed in blood, battle swaying hither and thither, patient
astronomers in observatory towers picking out and christening new
stars, plays being performed in lighted theatres, people being carried
into hospital on stretchers, and all the usual turmoil and agitation of
men’s lives in crowded centres. Up in Will’s valley only the winds and
seasons made an epoch; the fish hung in the swift stream, the birds
circled overhead, the pine-tops rustled underneath the stars, the tall
hills stood over all; and Will went to and fro, minding his wayside
inn, until the snow began to thicken on his head. His heart was young
and vigorous; and if his pulses kept a sober time, they still beat
strong and steady in his wrists. He carried a ruddy stain on either
cheek, like a ripe apple; he stooped a little, but his step was still
firm; and his sinewy hands were reached out to all men with a friendly
pressure. His face was covered with those wrinkles which are got in
open air, and which rightly looked at, are no more than a sort of
permanent sunburning; such wrinkles heighten the stupidity of stupid
faces; but to a person like Will, with his clear eyes and smiling
mouth, only give another charm by testifying to a simple and easy life.
His talk was full of wise sayings. He had a taste for other people; and
other people had a taste for him. When the valley was full of tourists
in the season, there were merry nights in Will’s arbour; and his views,
which seemed whimsical to his neighbours, were often enough admired by
learned people out of towns and colleges. Indeed, he had a very noble
old age, and grew daily better known; so that his fame was heard of in
the cities of the plain; and young men who had been summer travellers
spoke together in _cafés_ of Will o’ the Mill and his rough philosophy.
Many and many an invitation, you may be sure, he had; but nothing could
tempt him from his upland valley. He would shake his head and smile
over his tobacco-pipe with a deal of meaning. “You come too late,” he
would answer. “I am a dead man now: I have lived and died already.
Fifty years ago you would have brought my heart into my mouth; and now
you do not even tempt me. But that is the object of long living, that
man should cease to care about life.” And again: “There is only one
difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner,
the sweets come last.” Or once more: “When I was a boy, I was a bit
puzzled, and hardly knew whether it was myself or the world that was
curious and worth looking into. Now, I know it is myself, and stick to
that.”

He never showed any symptom of frailty, but kept stalwart and firm to
the last; but they say he grew less talkative towards the end, and
would listen to other people by the hour in an amused and sympathetic
silence. Only, when he did speak, it was more to the point and more
charged with old experience. He drank a bottle of wine gladly; above
all, at sunset on the hill-top or quite late at night under the stars
in the arbour. The sight of something attractive and unatttainable
seasoned his enjoyment, he would say; and he professed he had lived
long enough to admire a candle all the more when he could compare it
with a planet.

One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in bed in such
uneasiness of body and mind that he arose and dressed himself and went
out to meditate in the arbour. It was pitch dark, without a star; the
river was swollen, and the wet woods and meadows loaded the air with
perfume. It had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder
for the morrow. A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two!
Whether it was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of
fever in his old limbs, Will’s mind was besieged by tumultuous and
crying memories. His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the
death of his adopted parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of
those small circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet
the very gist of a man’s own life to himself—things seen, words heard,
looks misconstrued—arose from their forgotten corners and usurped his
attention. The dead themselves were with him, not merely taking part in
this thin show of memory that defiled before his brain, but revisiting
his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid dreams. The fat
young man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory came and
went with an apronful of flowers between the garden and the arbour; he
could hear the old parson knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant
nose. The tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed: he was sometimes
half-asleep and drowned in his recollections of the past; and sometimes
he was broad awake, wondering at himself. But about the middle of the
night he was startled by the voice of the dead miller calling to him
out of the house as he used to do on the arrival of custom. The
hallucination was so perfect that Will sprang from his seat and stood
listening for the summons to be repeated; and as he listened he became
conscious of another noise besides the brawling of the river and the
ringing in his feverish ears. It was like the stir of horses and the
creaking of harness, as though a carriage with an impatient team had
been brought up upon the road before the courtyard gate. At such an
hour, upon this rough and dangerous pass, the supposition was no better
than absurd; and Will dismissed it from his mind, and resumed his seat
upon the arbour chair; and sleep closed over him again like running
water. He was once again awakened by the dead miller’s call, thinner
and more spectral than before; and once again he heard the noise of an
equipage upon the road. And so thrice and four times, the same dream,
or the same fancy, presented itself to his senses: until at length,
smiling to himself as when one humours a nervous child, he proceeded
towards the gate to set his uncertainty at rest.

From the arbour to the gate was no great distance, and yet it took Will
some time; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the court,
and crossed his path at every step. For, first, he was suddenly
surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if his
garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot,
damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath. Now the
heliotrope had been Marjory’s favourite flower, and since her death not
one of them had ever been planted in Will’s ground.

“I must be going crazy,” he thought. “Poor Marjory and her
heliotropes!”

And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once been
hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified;
for there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as
of yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the
night when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity. The
illusion only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned,
rubbing his eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black
night behind it. While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have
stood there quite a long time, there came a renewal of the noises on
the road: and he turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing
to meet him across the court. There was something like the outline of a
great carriage discernible on the road behind the stranger, and, above
that, a few black pine-tops, like so many plumes.

“Master Will?” asked the new-comer, in brief military fashion.

“That same, sir,” answered Will. “Can I do anything to serve you?”

“I have heard you much spoken of, Master Will,” returned the other;
“much spoken of, and well. And though I have both hands full of
business, I wish to drink a bottle of wine with you in your arbour.
Before I go, I shall introduce myself.”

Will led the way to the trellis, and got a lamp lighted and a bottle
uncorked. He was not altogether unused to such complimentary
interviews, and hoped little enough from this one, being schooled by
many disappointments. A sort of cloud had settled on his wits and
prevented him from remembering the strangeness of the hour. He moved
like a person in his sleep; and it seemed as if the lamp caught fire
and the bottle came uncorked with the facility of thought. Still, he
had some curiosity about the appearance of his visitor, and tried in
vain to turn the light into his face; either he handled the lamp
clumsily, or there was a dimness over his eyes; but he could make out
little more than a shadow at table with him. He stared and stared at
this shadow, as he wiped out the glasses, and began to feel cold and
strange about the heart. The silence weighed upon him, for he could
hear nothing now, not even the river, but the drumming of his own
arteries in his ears.

“Here’s to you,” said the stranger, roughly.

“Here is my service, sir,” replied Will, sipping his wine, which
somehow tasted oddly.

“I understand you are a very positive fellow,” pursued the stranger.

Will made answer with a smile of some satisfaction and a little nod.

“So am I,” continued the other; “and it is the delight of my heart to
tramp on people’s corns. I will have nobody positive but myself; not
one. I have crossed the whims, in my time, of kings and generals and
great artists. And what would you say,” he went on, “if I had come up
here on purpose to cross yours?”

Will had it on his tongue to make a sharp rejoinder; but the politeness
of an old innkeeper prevailed; and he held his peace and made answer
with a civil gesture of the hand.

“I have,” said the stranger. “And if I did not hold you in a particular
esteem, I should make no words about the matter. It appears you pride
yourself on staying where you are. You mean to stick by your inn. Now I
mean you shall come for a turn with me in my barouche; and before this
bottle’s empty, so you shall.”

“That would be an odd thing, to be sure,” replied Will, with a chuckle.
“Why, sir, I have grown here like an old oak-tree; the Devil himself
could hardly root me up: and for all I perceive you are a very
entertaining old gentleman, I would wager you another bottle you lose
your pains with me.”

The dimness of Will’s eyesight had been increasing all this while; but
he was somehow conscious of a sharp and chilling scrutiny which
irritated and yet overmastered him.

“You need not think,” he broke out suddenly, in an explosive, febrile
manner that startled and alarmed himself, “that I am a stay-at-home,
because I fear anything under God. God knows I am tired enough of it
all; and when the time comes for a longer journey than ever you dream
of, I reckon I shall find myself prepared.”

The stranger emptied his glass and pushed it away from him. He looked
down for a little, and then, leaning over the table, tapped Will three
times upon the forearm with a single finger. “The time has come!” he
said solemnly.

An ugly thrill spread from the spot he touched. The tones of his voice
were dull and startling, and echoed strangely in Will’s heart.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with some discomposure. “What do you
mean?”

“Look at me, and you will find your eyesight swim. Raise your hand; it
is dead-heavy. This is your last bottle of wine, Master Will, and your
last night upon the earth.”

“You are a doctor?” quavered Will.

“The best that ever was,” replied the other; “for I cure both mind and
body with the same prescription. I take away all pain and I forgive all
sins; and where my patients have gone wrong in life, I smooth out all
complications and set them free again upon their feet.”

“I have no need of you,” said Will.

“A time comes for all men, Master Will,” replied the doctor, “when the
helm is taken out of their hands. For you, because you were prudent and
quiet, it has been long of coming, and you have had long to discipline
yourself for its reception. You have seen what is to be seen about your
mill; you have sat close all your days like a hare in its form; but now
that is at an end; and,” added the doctor, getting on his feet, “you
must arise and come with me.”

“You are a strange physician,” said Will, looking steadfastly upon his
guest.

“I am a natural law,” he replied, “and people call me Death.”

“Why did you not tell me so at first?” cried Will. “I have been waiting
for you these many years. Give me your hand, and welcome.”

“Lean upon my arm,” said the stranger, “for already your strength
abates. Lean on me as heavily as you need; for though I am old, I am
very strong. It is but three steps to my carriage, and there all your
trouble ends. Why, Will,” he added, “I have been yearning for you as if
you were my own son; and of all the men that ever I came for in my long
days, I have come for you most gladly. I am caustic, and sometimes
offend people at first sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such
as you.”

“Since Marjory was taken,” returned Will, “I declare before God you
were the only friend I had to look for.” So the pair went arm-in-arm
across the courtyard.

One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses
pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night
there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards
the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o’
the Mill had gone at last upon his travels.




MARKHEIM


“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some
customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior
knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that
the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he
continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes
had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the
shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the
flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he resumed,
“when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and
make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that;
you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my
books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I
remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and
ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the
eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then,
changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of
irony, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into
the possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s
cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe,
looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with
every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of
infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

“This time,” said he, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but
to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to
the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock
Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my
errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a
lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he
had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing
you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I
must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well
know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this
statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious
lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near
thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

“Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after
all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be
it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he
went on, “this hand glass—fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a
good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my
customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole
heir of a remarkable collector.”

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had
stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a
shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a
sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as
swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the
hand that now received the glass.

“A glass,” he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more
clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

“And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask
me why not?” he said. “Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do
you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man.”

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted
him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on
hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard
favoured,” said he.

“I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas present, and you give me
this—this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this
hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell
me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself.
I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim
did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an
eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

“What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

“Not charitable?” returned the other, gloomily. “Not charitable; not
pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe
to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

“I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness,
and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love
match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

“Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in
love? Tell me about that.”

“I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the
time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

“Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand
here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry
away from any pleasure—no, not even from so mild a one as this. We
should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a
cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it—a cliff a
mile high—high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of
humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each
other: why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows,
we might become friends?”

“I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make
your purchase, or walk out of my shop!”

“True true,” said Markheim. “Enough, fooling. To business. Show me
something else.”

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the
shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim
moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he
drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different
emotions were depicted together on his face—terror, horror, and
resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard
lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer: and then, as he began
to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long,
skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen,
striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a
heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow
as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All
these told out the seconds in an intricate, chorus of tickings. Then
the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in
upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness
of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on
the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that
inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless
bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross
blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces
of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images
in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of
shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body
of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small
and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in
that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim
had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed,
this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent
voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or
direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was found.
Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that
would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit.
Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the
brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind.
Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had closed for the
victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with
every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral
turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz-the
clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered
him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle,
beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance
reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from
Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were
an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of
his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And
still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with a
sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should
have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he
should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and
only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have
been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all
things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the
mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to
be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all
this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted
attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand
of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would
jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock,
the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a
besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of
the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their
curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them
sitting motionless and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to
spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now
startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties
struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised
finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths,
prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.
Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of
the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by
the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And
then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence
of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and
freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud
among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado,
the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one
portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on
the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold
on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his
window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the
pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the
brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But
here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched
the servant set forth sweet-hearting, in her poor best, “out for the
day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course;
and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a
stir of delicate footing—he was surely conscious, inexplicably
conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the
house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and
yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet
again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and
hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which
still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small
and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to
the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the
threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness,
did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to
beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts
and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name.
Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay
quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and
shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which
would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had
become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from
his knocking, and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth
from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London
multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of
safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come: at any
moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the
deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure.
The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the
keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was
still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the
mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his
victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit
half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on
the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and
inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to
the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its
back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had
been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all
expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with
blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing
circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain
fair-day in a fishers’ village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon
the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice
of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the
crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the
chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with
pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured: Brown-rigg with her
apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the
death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing
was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was
looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at
these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums.
A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for
the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden
weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these
considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his
mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a
while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale
mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable
energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been
arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the
beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more
remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the
painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he
felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all
those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one
who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a
tremor.

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the
keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. Outside, it had
begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had
banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house
were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled
with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door,
he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of
another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated
loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his
muscles, and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs;
on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing;
and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against
the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain
through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be
distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the
tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the
counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to
mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of
the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him
to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by
presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop,
he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great
effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed
stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he
would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening with ever fresh
attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the
outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned
continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their
orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as
with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty
steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three
ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never
again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s
observing eyes, he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of
his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitions
terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some
wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on
the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as
the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould
of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said)
when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might
befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal
his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might
yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch;
ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for
instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his
victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen
invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense,
these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against
sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless
exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and
not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind
him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite
dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and
incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld
himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures,
framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine
Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with
tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good
fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this
concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It
was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides;
for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on
the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the
tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time
directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate
of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the
street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the
notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of
many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable
was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it
smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with
answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of
the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on
the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky;
and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the
somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson
(which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs,
and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his
feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went
over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted
the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the
knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the
dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some
chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But
when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room,
looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and
then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke
loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the
visitant returned.

“Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the
room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a
film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new comer seemed to change
and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the
shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he
bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror,
there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the
earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood
looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking
for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

“I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her
sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be
found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

“You know me?” cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favourite of mine,” he said;
“and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

“What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

“What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I
propose to render you.”

“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by
you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!”

“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or
rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

“Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty
and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all
men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them.
You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and
muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see
their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out
for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid;
my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose
myself.”

“To me?” inquired the visitant.

“To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were
intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of the
heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it;
my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have
dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants
of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not
look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you
not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any
wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me
for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—the unwilling
sinner?”

“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards
me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care
not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so
as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the
servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures
on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it
is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the
Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you
where to find the money?”

“For what price?” asked Markheim.

“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.
“No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of
thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should
find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing
to commit myself to evil.”

“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from
a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man
has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion,
or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak
compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance,
he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus
to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving
followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please
yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply,
spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and
the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that
you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your
conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from
such a deathbed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening
to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had
been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you
think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and
sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the
thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because
you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this
crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of
good?”

“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are
murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving
mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and
feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their
acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my
eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on
a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a
murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues
also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes
for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in
action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,
whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling
cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the
rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but
because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape.”

“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on
which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many
lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been
driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,
driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these
temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,
and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power
and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor
in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents
of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past;
something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of
the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble
books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my
life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of
destination.”

“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked
the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some
thousands?”

“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.

“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

“That also you will lose,” said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he
exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall
one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override
the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do
not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds,
renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as
murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows
their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I
love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth
but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life,
and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the
mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you
have been in this world,” said be, “through many changes of fortune and
varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years
ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have
blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any
cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I
shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor
can anything but death avail to stop you.”

“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied
with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise
of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their
surroundings.”

“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as
you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in
many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so—and at any
account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any
one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your
own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration.
“No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you
will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are
irrevocably written down.”

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor
who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show
you the money?”

“And grace?” cried Markheim.

“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago,
did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your
voice the loudest in the hymn?”

“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by
way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are
opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house;
and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which
he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.

“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there
is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say,
is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious
countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once
the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has
already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in
your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if
needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your
safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he
cried; “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and
act!”

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil
acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease
from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I
be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet,
by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love
of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have
still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment,
you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even
as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet
haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop,
where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely
silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood
gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your
master.”




THRAWN JANET


The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without
relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse
under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features,
his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon
on lst Peter, v. and 8th, “The devil as a roaring lion,” on the Sunday
after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass
himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and
the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened
into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all
that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself,
where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the
Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold,
moorish hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early
period of Mr. Soulis’s ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all
who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the
clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing
late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more
particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood
between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its
back was towards the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in
front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land
between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with
two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a
causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and
closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the
stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young
parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked
there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his
unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was
locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to
“follow my leader” across that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of
spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and
subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or
business into that unknown, outlying country. But many even of the
people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had
marked the first year of Mr. Soulis’s ministrations; and among those
who were better informed, some were naturally reticent, and others shy
of that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk
would warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause
of the minister’s strange looks and solitary life.


Fifty years syne, when Mr. Soulis cam first into Ba’weary, he was still
a young man—a callant, the folk said—fu’ o’ book learnin’ and grand at
the exposition, but, as was natural in sae young a man, wi’ nae leevin’
experience in religion. The younger sort were greatly taken wi’ his
gifts and his gab; but auld, concerned, serious men and women were
moved even to prayer for the young man, whom they took to be a
self-deceiver, and the parish that was like to be sae ill-supplied. It
was before the days o’ the moderates—weary fa’ them; but ill things are
like guid—they baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time; and there
were folk even then that said the Lord had left the college professors
to their ain devices, an’ the lads that went to study wi’ them wad hae
done mair and better sittin’ in a peat-bog, like their forbears of the
persecution, wi’ a Bible under their oxter and a speerit o’ prayer in
their heart. There was nae doubt, onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been
ower lang at the college. He was careful and troubled for mony things
besides the ae thing needful. He had a feck o’ books wi’ him—mair than
had ever been seen before in a’ that presbytery; and a sair wark the
carrier had wi’ them, for they were a’ like to have smoored in the
Deil’s Hag between this and Kilmackerlie. They were books o’ divinity,
to be sure, or so they ca’d them; but the serious were o’ opinion there
was little service for sae mony, when the hail o’ God’s Word would gang
in the neuk of a plaid. Then he wad sit half the day and half the nicht
forbye, which was scant decent—writin’, nae less; and first, they were
feared he wad read his sermons; and syne it proved he was writin’ a
book himsel’, which was surely no fittin’ for ane of his years an’ sma’
experience.

Onyway it behoved him to get an auld, decent wife to keep the manse for
him an’ see to his bit denners; and he was recommended to an auld
limmer—Janet M’Clour, they ca’d her—and sae far left to himsel’ as to
be ower persuaded. There was mony advised him to the contrar, for Janet
was mair than suspeckit by the best folk in Ba’weary. Lang or that, she
had had a wean to a dragoon; she hadnae come forrit[140] for maybe
thretty year; and bairns had seen her mumblin’ to hersel’ up on Key’s
Loan in the gloamin’, whilk was an unco time an’ place for a
God-fearin’ woman. Howsoever, it was the laird himsel’ that had first
tauld the minister o’ Janet; and in thae days he wad have gane a far
gate to pleesure the laird. When folk tauld him that Janet was sib to
the deil, it was a’ superstition by his way of it; an’ when they cast
up the Bible to him an’ the witch of Endor, he wad threep it doun their
thrapples that thir days were a’ gane by, and the deil was mercifully
restrained.

Weel, when it got about the clachan that Janet M’Clour was to be
servant at the manse, the folk were fair mad wi’ her an’ him thegether;
and some o’ the guidwives had nae better to dae than get round her door
cheeks and chairge her wi’ a’ that was ken’t again her, frae the
sodger’s bairn to John Tamson’s twa kye. She was nae great speaker;
folk usually let her gang her ain gate, an’ she let them gang theirs,
wi’, neither Fair-guid-een nor Fair-guid-day; but when she buckled to,
she had a tongue to deave the miller. Up she got, an’ there wasnae an
auld story in Ba’weary but she gart somebody lowp for it that day; they
couldnae say ae thing but she could say twa to it; till, at the hinder
end, the guidwives up and claught haud of her, and clawed the coats aff
her back, and pu’d her doun the clachan to the water o’ Dule, to see if
she were a witch or no, soum or droun. The carline skirled till ye
could hear her at the Hangin’ Shaw, and she focht like ten; there was
mony a guidwife bure the mark of her neist day an’ mony a lang day
after; and just in the hettest o’ the collieshangie, wha suld come up
(for his sins) but the new minister.

“Women,” said he (and he had a grand voice), “I charge you in the
Lord’s name to let her go.”

Janet ran to him—she was fair wud wi’ terror—an’ clang to him, an’
prayed him, for Christ’s sake, save her frae the cummers; an’ they, for
their pairt, tauld him a’ that was ken’t, and maybe mair.

“Woman,” says he to Janet, “is this true?”

“As the Lord sees me,” says she, “as the Lord made me, no a word o’t.
Forbye the bairn,” says she, “I’ve been a decent woman a’ my days.”

“Will you,” says Mr. Soulis, “in the name of God, and before me, His
unworthy minister, renounce the devil and his works?”

Weel, it wad appear that when he askit that, she gave a girn that
fairly frichtit them that saw her, an’ they could hear her teeth play
dirl thegether in her chafts; but there was naething for it but the ae
way or the ither; an’ Janet lifted up her hand and renounced the deil
before them a’.

“And now,” says Mr. Soulis to the guidwives, “home with ye, one and
all, and pray to God for His forgiveness.”

And he gied Janet his arm, though she had little on her but a sark, and
took her up the clachan to her ain door like a leddy of the land; an’
her scrieghin’ and laughin’ as was a scandal to be heard.

There were mony grave folk lang ower their prayers that nicht; but when
the morn cam’ there was sic a fear fell upon a’ Ba’weary that the
bairns hid theirsels, and even the men folk stood and keekit frae their
doors. For there was Janet comin’ doun the clachan—her or her likeness,
nane could tell—wi’ her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a
body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit
corp. By an’ by they got used wi’ it, and even speered at her to ken
what was wrang; but frae that day forth she couldnae speak like a
Christian woman, but slavered and played click wi’ her teeth like a
pair o’ shears; and frae that day forth the name o’ God cam never on
her lips. Whiles she wad try to say it, but it michtnae be. Them that
kenned best said least; but they never gied that Thing the name o’
Janet M’Clour; for the auld Janet, by their way o’t, was in muckle hell
that day. But the minister was neither to haud nor to bind; he preached
about naething but the folk’s cruelty that had gi’en her a stroke of
the palsy; he skelpt the bairns that meddled her; and he had her up to
the manse that same nicht, and dwalled there a’ his lane wi’ her under
the Hangin’ Shaw.

Weel, time gaed by: and the idler sort commenced to think mair lichtly
o’ that black business. The minister was weel thocht o’; he was aye
late at the writing, folk wad see his can’le doon by the Dule water
after twal’ at e’en; and he seemed pleased wi’ himsel’ and upsitten as
at first, though a’ body could see that he was dwining. As for Janet
she cam an’ she gaed; if she didnae speak muckle afore, it was reason
she should speak less then; she meddled naebody; but she was an
eldritch thing to see, an’ nane wad hae mistrysted wi’ her for Ba’weary
glebe.

About the end o’ July there cam’ a spell o’ weather, the like o’t never
was in that country side; it was lown an’ het an’ heartless; the herds
couldnae win up the Black Hill, the bairns were ower weariet to play;
an’ yet it was gousty too, wi’ claps o’ het wund that rumm’led in the
glens, and bits o’ shouers that slockened naething. We aye thocht it
but to thun’er on the morn; but the morn cam, an’ the morn’s morning,
and it was aye the same uncanny weather, sair on folks and bestial. Of
a’ that were the waur, nane suffered like Mr. Soulis; he could neither
sleep nor eat, he tauld his elders; an’ when he wasnae writin’ at his
weary book, he wad be stravaguin’ ower a’ the countryside like a man
possessed, when a’ body else was blythe to keep caller ben the house.

Abune Hangin’ Shaw, in the bield o’ the Black Hill, there’s a bit
enclosed grund wi’ an iron yett; and it seems, in the auld days, that
was the kirkyaird o’ Ba’weary, and consecrated by the Papists before
the blessed licht shone upon the kingdom. It was a great howff o’ Mr.
Soulis’s, onyway; there he would sit an’ consider his sermons; and
indeed it’s a bieldy bit. Weel, as he cam ower the wast end o’ the
Black Hill, ae day, he saw first twa, an syne fower, an’ syne seeven
corbie craws fleein’ round an’ round abune the auld kirkyaird. They
flew laigh and heavy, an’ squawked to ither as they gaed; and it was
clear to Mr. Soulis that something had put them frae their ordinar. He
wasnae easy fleyed, an’ gaed straucht up to the wa’s; an’ what suld he
find there but a man, or the appearance of a man, sittin’ in the inside
upon a grave. He was of a great stature, an’ black as hell, and his
e’en were singular to see.[144] Mr. Soulis had heard tell o’ black men,
mony’s the time; but there was something unco about this black man that
daunted him. Het as he was, he took a kind o’ cauld grue in the marrow
o’ his banes; but up he spak for a’ that; an’ says he: “My friend, are
you a stranger in this place?” The black man answered never a word; he
got upon his feet, an’ begude to hirsle to the wa’ on the far side; but
he aye lookit at the minister; an’ the minister stood an’ lookit back;
till a’ in a meenute the black man was ower the wa’ an’ rinnin’ for the
bield o’ the trees. Mr. Soulis, he hardly kenned why, ran after him;
but he was sair forjaskit wi’ his walk an’ the het, unhalesome weather;
and rin as he likit, he got nae mair than a glisk o’ the black man
amang the birks, till he won doun to the foot o’ the hill-side, an’
there he saw him ance mair, gaun, hap, step, an’ lowp, ower Dule water
to the manse.

Mr. Soulis wasnae weel pleased that this fearsome gangrel suld mak’ sae
free wi’ Ba’weary manse; an’ he ran the harder, an’, wet shoon, ower
the burn, an’ up the walk; but the deil a black man was there to see.
He stepped out upon the road, but there was naebody there; he gaed a’
ower the gairden, but na, nae black man. At the hinder end, and a bit
feared as was but natural, he lifted the hasp and into the manse; and
there was Janet M’Clour before his een, wi’ her thrawn craig, and nane
sae pleased to see him. And he aye minded sinsyne, when first he set
his een upon her, he had the same cauld and deidly grue.

“Janet,” says he, “have you seen a black man?”

“A black man?” quo’ she. “Save us a’! Ye’re no wise, minister. There’s
nae black man in a Ba’weary.”

But she didnae speak plain, ye maun understand; but yam-yammered, like
a powney wi’ the bit in its moo.

“Weel,” says he, “Janet, if there was nae black man, I have spoken with
the Accuser of the Brethren.”

And he sat down like ane wi’ a fever, an’ his teeth chittered in his
heid.

“Hoots,” says she, “think shame to yoursel’, minister;” an’ gied him a
drap brandy that she keept aye by her.

Syne Mr. Soulis gaed into his study amang a’ his books. It’s a lang,
laigh, mirk chalmer, perishin’ cauld in winter, an’ no very dry even in
the tap o’ the simmer, for the manse stands near the burn. Sae doun he
sat, and thocht of a’ that had come an’ gane since he was in Ba’weary,
an’ his hame, an’ the days when he was a bairn an’ ran daffin’ on the
braes; and that black man aye ran in his heid like the ower-come of a
sang. Aye the mair he thocht, the mair he thocht o’ the black man. He
tried the prayer, an’ the words wouldnae come to him; an’ he tried,
they say, to write at his book, but he could nae mak’ nae mair o’ that.
There was whiles he thocht the black man was at his oxter, an’ the swat
stood upon him cauld as well-water; and there was other whiles, when he
cam to himsel’ like a christened bairn and minded naething.

The upshot was that he gaed to the window an’ stood glowrin’ at Dule
water. The trees are unco thick, an’ the water lies deep an’ black
under the manse; an’ there was Janct washin’ the cla’es wi’ her coats
kilted. She had her back to the minister, an’ he, for his pairt, hardly
kenned what he was lookin’ at. Syne she turned round, an’ shawed her
face; Mr. Soulis had the same cauld grue as twice that day afore, an’
it was borne in upon him what folk said, that Janet was deid lang syne,
an’ this was a bogle in her clay-cauld flesh. He drew back a pickle and
he scanned her narrowly. She was tramp-trampin’ in the cla’es, croonin’
to hersel’; and eh! Gude guide us, but it was a fearsome face. Whiles
she sang louder, but there was nae man born o’ woman that could tell
the words o’ her sang; an’ whiles she lookit side-lang doun, but there
was naething there for her to look at. There gaed a scunner through the
flesh upon his banes; and that was Heeven’s advertisement. But Mr.
Soulis just blamed himsel’, he said, to think sae ill of a puir, auld
afflicted wife that hadnae a freend forbye himsel’; an’ he put up a bit
prayer for him and her, an’ drank a little caller water—for his heart
rose again the meat—an’ gaed up to his naked bed in the gloaming.

That was a nicht that has never been forgotten in Ba’weary, the nicht
o’ the seeventeenth of August, seventeen hun’er’ an twal’. It had been
het afore, as I hae said, but that nicht it was hetter than ever. The
sun gaed doun amang unco-lookin’ clouds; it fell as mirk as the pit; no
a star, no a breath o’ wund; ye couldnae see your han’ afore your face,
and even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds and lay pechin’
for their breath. Wi’ a’ that he had upon his mind, it was gey and
unlikely Mr. Soulis wad get muckle sleep. He lay an’ he tummled; the
gude, caller bed that he got into brunt his very banes; whiles he
slept, and whiles he waukened; whiles he heard the time o’ nicht, and
whiles a tyke yowlin’ up the muir, as if somebody was deid; whiles he
thocht he heard bogles claverin’ in his lug, an’ whiles he saw spunkies
in the room. He behoved, he judged, to be sick; an’ sick he was—little
he jaloosed the sickness.

At the hinder end, he got a clearness in his mind, sat up in his sark
on the bed-side, and fell thinkin’ ance mair o’ the black man an’
Janet. He couldnae weel tell how—maybe it was the cauld to his feet—but
it cam’ in upon him wi’ a spate that there was some connection between
thir twa, an’ that either or baith o’ them were bogles. And just at
that moment, in Janet’s room, which was neist to his, there cam’ a
stramp o’ feet as if men were wars’lin’, an’ then a loud bang; an’ then
a wund gaed reishling round the fower quarters of the house; an’ then
a’ was aince mair as seelent as the grave.

Mr. Soulis was feared for neither man nor deevil. He got his
tinder-box, an’ lit a can’le, an’ made three steps o’t ower to Janet’s
door. It was on the hasp, an’ he pushed it open, an’ keeked bauldly in.
It was a big room, as big as the minister’s ain, an’ plenished wi’
grand, auld, solid gear, for he had naething else. There was a
fower-posted bed wi’ auld tapestry; and a braw cabinet of aik, that was
fu’ o’ the minister’s divinity books, an’ put there to be out o’ the
gate; an’ a wheen duds o’ Janet’s lying here and there about the floor.
But nae Janet could Mr. Soulis see; nor ony sign of a contention. In he
gaed (an’ there’s few that wad ha’e followed him) an’ lookit a’ round,
an’ listened. But there was naethin’ to be heard, neither inside the
manse nor in a’ Ba’weary parish, an’ naethin’ to be seen but the muckle
shadows turnin’ round the can’le. An’ then a’ at aince, the minister’s
heart played dunt an’ stood stock-still; an’ a cauld wund blew amang
the hairs o’ his heid. Whaten a weary sicht was that for the puir man’s
een! For there was Janat hangin’ frae a nail beside the auld aik
cabinet: her heid aye lay on her shoother, her een were steeked, the
tongue projekit frae her mouth, and her heels were twa feet clear abune
the floor.

“God forgive us all!” thocht Mr. Soulis; “poor Janet’s dead.”

He cam’ a step nearer to the corp; an’ then his heart fair whammled in
his inside. For by what cantrip it wad ill-beseem a man to judge, she
was hingin’ frae a single nail an’ by a single wursted thread for
darnin’ hose.

It’s an awfu’ thing to be your lane at nicht wi’ siccan prodigies o’
darkness; but Mr. Soulis was strong in the Lord. He turned an’ gaed his
ways oot o’ that room, and lockit the door ahint him; and step by step,
doon the stairs, as heavy as leed; and set doon the can’le on the table
at the stairfoot. He couldnae pray, he couldnae think, he was dreepin’
wi’ caul’ swat, an’ naething could he hear but the dunt-dunt-duntin’ o’
his ain heart. He micht maybe have stood there an hour, or maybe twa,
he minded sae little; when a’ o’ a sudden, he heard a laigh, uncanny
steer upstairs; a foot gaed to an’ fro in the cha’mer whaur the corp
was hingin’; syne the door was opened, though he minded weel that he
had lockit it; an’ syne there was a step upon the landin’, an’ it
seemed to him as if the corp was lookin’ ower the rail and doun upon
him whaur he stood.

He took up the can’le again (for he couldnae want the licht), and as
saftly as ever he could, gaed straucht out o’ the manse an’ to the far
end o’ the causeway. It was aye pit-mirk; the flame o’ the can’le, when
he set it on the grund, brunt steedy and clear as in a room; naething
moved, but the Dule water seepin’ and sabbin’ doon the glen, an’ yon
unhaly footstep that cam’ ploddin doun the stairs inside the manse. He
kenned the foot over weel, for it was Janet’s; and at ilka step that
cam’ a wee thing nearer, the cauld got deeper in his vitals. He
commanded his soul to Him that made an’ keepit him; “and O Lord,” said
he, “give me strength this night to war against the powers of evil.”

By this time the foot was comin’ through the passage for the door; he
could hear a hand skirt alang the wa’, as if the fearsome thing was
feelin’ for its way. The saughs tossed an’ maned thegether, a lang sigh
cam’ ower the hills, the flame o’ the can’le was blawn aboot; an’ there
stood the corp of Thrawn Janet, wi’ her grogram goun an’ her black
mutch, wi’ the heid aye upon the shouther, an’ the girn still upon the
face o’t—leevin’, ye wad hae said—deid, as Mr. Soulis weel kenned—upon
the threshold o’ the manse.

It’s a strange thing that the saul of man should be that thirled into
his perishable body; but the minister saw that, an’ his heart didnae
break.

She didnae stand there lang; she began to move again an’ cam’ slowly
towards Mr. Soulis whaur he stood under the saughs. A’ the life o’ his
body, a’ the strength o’ his speerit, were glowerin’ frae his een. It
seemed she was gaun to speak, but wanted words, an’ made a sign wi’ the
left hand. There cam’ a clap o’ wund, like a cat’s fuff; oot gaed the
can’le, the saughs skrieghed like folk; an’ Mr. Soulis kenned that,
live or die, this was the end o’t.

“Witch, beldame, devil!” he cried, “I charge you, by the power of God,
begone—if you be dead, to the grave—if you be damned, to hell.”

An’ at that moment the Lord’s ain hand out o’ the Heevens struck the
Horror whaur it stood; the auld, deid, desecrated corp o’ the
witch-wife, sae lang keepit frae the grave and hirsled round by deils,
lowed up like a brunstane spunk and fell in ashes to the grund; the
thunder followed, peal on dirling peal, the rairing rain upon the back
o’ that; and Mr. Soulis lowped through the garden hedge, and ran, wi’
skelloch upon skelloch, for the clachan.

That same mornin’, John Christie saw the Black Man pass the Muckle
Cairn as it was chappin’ six; before eicht, he gaed by the change-house
at Knockdow; an’ no lang after, Sandy M’Lellan saw him gaun linkin’
doun the braes frae Kilmackerlie. There’s little doubt but it was him
that dwalled sae lang in Janet’s body; but he was awa’ at last; and
sinsyne the deil has never fashed us in Ba’weary.

But it was a sair dispensation for the minister; lang, lang he lay
ravin’ in his bed; and frae that hour to this, he was the man ye ken
the day.




OLALLA


“Now,” said the doctor, “my part is done, and, I may say, with some
vanity, well done. It remains only to get you out of this cold and
poisonous city, and to give you two months of a pure air and an easy
conscience. The last is your affair. To the first I think I can help
you. It falls indeed rather oddly; it was but the other day the Padre
came in from the country; and as he and I are old friends, although of
contrary professions, he applied to me in a matter of distress among
some of his parishioners. This was a family—but you are ignorant of
Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you;
suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen
to the brink of destitution. Nothing now belongs to them but the
residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part
of which not even a goat could support life. But the house is a fine
old place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most
salubriously; and I had no sooner heard my friend’s tale, than I
remembered you. I told him I had a wounded officer, wounded in the good
cause, who was now able to make a change; and I proposed that his
friends should take you for a lodger. Instantly the Padre’s face grew
dark, as I had maliciously foreseen it would. It was out of the
question, he said. Then let them starve, said I, for I have no sympathy
with tatterdemalion pride. There-upon we separated, not very content
with one another; but yesterday, to my wonder, the Padre returned and
made a submission: the difficulty, he said, he had found upon enquiry
to be less than he had feared; or, in other words, these proud people
had put their pride in their pocket. I closed with the offer; and,
subject to your approval, I have taken rooms for you in the residencia.
The air of these mountains will renew your blood; and the quiet in
which you will there live is worth all the medicines in the world.”

“Doctor,” said I, “you have been throughout my good angel, and your
advice is a command. But tell me, if you please, something of the
family with which I am to reside.”

“I am coming to that,” replied my friend; “and, indeed, there is a
difficulty in the way. These beggars are, as I have said, of very high
descent and swollen with the most baseless vanity; they have lived for
some generations in a growing isolation, drawing away, on either hand,
from the rich who had now become too high for them, and from the poor,
whom they still regarded as too low; and even to-day, when poverty
forces them to unfasten their door to a guest, they cannot do so
without a most ungracious stipulation. You are to remain, they say, a
stranger; they will give you attendance, but they refuse from the first
the idea of the smallest intimacy.”

I will not deny that I was piqued, and perhaps the feeling strengthened
my desire to go, for I was confident that I could break down that
barrier if I desired. “There is nothing offensive in such a
stipulation,” said I; “and I even sympathise with the feeling that
inspired it.”

“It is true they have never seen you,” returned the doctor politely;
“and if they knew you were the handsomest and the most pleasant man
that ever came from England (where I am told that handsome men are
common, but pleasant ones not so much so), they would doubtless make
you welcome with a better grace. But since you take the thing so well,
it matters not. To me, indeed, it seems discourteous. But you will find
yourself the gainer. The family will not much tempt you. A mother, a
son, and a daughter; an old woman said to be halfwitted, a country
lout, and a country girl, who stands very high with her confessor, and
is, therefore,” chuckled the physician, “most likely plain; there is
not much in that to attract the fancy of a dashing officer.”

“And yet you say they are high-born,” I objected.

“Well, as to that, I should distinguish,” returned the doctor. “The
mother is; not so the children. The mother was the last representative
of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father
was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the
residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with
him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever,
until at last she married, Heaven knows whom, a muleteer some say,
others a smuggler; while there are some who uphold there was no
marriage at all, and that Felipe and Olalla are bastards. The union,
such as it was, was tragically dissolved some years ago; but they live
in such seclusion, and the country at that time was in so much
disorder, that the precise manner of the man’s end is known only to the
priest—if even to him.”

“I begin to think I shall have strange experiences,” said I.

“I would not romance, if I were you,” replied the doctor; “you will
find, I fear, a very grovelling and commonplace reality. Felipe, for
instance, I have seen. And what am I to say? He is very rustic, very
cunning, very loutish, and, I should say, an innocent; the others are
probably to match. No, no, senor commandante, you must seek congenial
society among the great sights of our mountains; and in these at least,
if you are at all a lover of the works of nature, I promise you will
not be disappointed.”

The next day Felipe came for me in a rough country cart, drawn by a
mule; and a little before the stroke of noon, after I had said farewell
to the doctor, the innkeeper, and different good souls who had
befriended me during my sickness, we set forth out of the city by the
Eastern gate, and began to ascend into the Sierra. I had been so long a
prisoner, since I was left behind for dying after the loss of the
convoy, that the mere smell of the earth set me smiling. The country
through which we went was wild and rocky, partially covered with rough
woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and
frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents. The sun shone,
the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city
had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind
us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my
drive. To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made
country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active,
but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most
observers final. What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering
talk; so strangely inconsistent with the terms on which I was to be
received; and partly from his imperfect enunciation, partly from the
sprightly incoherence of the matter, so very difficult to follow
clearly without an effort of the mind. It is true I had before talked
with persons of a similar mental constitution; persons who seemed to
live (as he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual
object of the moment and unable to discharge their minds of that
impression. His seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of
conversation proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great
vacancy of the intellect and threading the sights of a familiar
country. But this was not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he
was a home-keeper; “I wish I was there now,” he said; and then, spying
a tree by the wayside, he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a
crow among its branches.

“A crow?” I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and
thinking I had heard imperfectly.

But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with
a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he
struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace. Then he smiled and shook
his head.

“What did you hear?” I asked.

“O, it is all right,” he said; and began encouraging his mule with
cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls.

I looked at him more closely. He was superlatively well-built, light,
and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very
large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he
was a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond
that he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairyness; two
characteristics that I disliked. It was his mind that puzzled, and yet
attracted me. The doctor’s phrase—an innocent—came back to me; and I
was wondering if that were, after all, the true description, when the
road began to go down into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent. The
waters thundered tumultuously in the bottom; and the ravine was filled
full of the sound, the thin spray, and the claps of wind, that
accompanied their descent. The scene was certainly impressive; but the
road was in that part very securely walled in; the mule went steadily
forward; and I was astonished to perceive the paleness of terror in the
face of my companion. The voice of that wild river was inconstant, now
sinking lower as if in weariness, now doubling its hoarse tones;
momentary freshets seemed to swell its volume, sweeping down the gorge,
raving and booming against the barrier walls; and I observed it was at
each of these accessions to the clamour, that my driver more
particularly winced and blanched. Some thoughts of Scottish
superstition and the river Kelpie, passed across my mind; I wondered if
perchance the like were prevalent in that part of Spain; and turning to
Felipe, sought to draw him out.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“O, I am afraid,” he replied.

“Of what are you afraid?” I returned. “This seems one of the safest
places on this very dangerous road.”

“It makes a noise,” he said, with a simplicity of awe that set my
doubts at rest.

The lad was but a child in intellect; his mind was like his body,
active and swift, but stunted in development; and I began from that
time forth to regard him with a measure of pity, and to listen at first
with indulgence, and at last even with pleasure, to his disjointed
babble.

By about four in the afternoon we had crossed the summit of the
mountain line, said farewell to the western sunshine, and began to go
down upon the other side, skirting the edge of many ravines and moving
through the shadow of dusky woods. There rose upon all sides the voice
of falling water, not condensed and formidable as in the gorge of the
river, but scattered and sounding gaily and musically from glen to
glen. Here, too, the spirits of my driver mended, and he began to sing
aloud in a falsetto voice, and with a singular bluntness of musical
perception, never true either to melody or key, but wandering at will,
and yet somehow with an effect that was natural and pleasing, like that
of the of birds. As the dusk increased, I fell more and more under the
spell of this artless warbling, listening and waiting for some
articulate air, and still disappointed; and when at last I asked him
what it was he sang—“O,” cried he, “I am just singing!” Above all, I
was taken with a trick he had of unweariedly repeating the same note at
little intervals; it was not so monotonous as you would think, or, at
least, not disagreeable; and it seemed to breathe a wonderful
contentment with what is, such as we love to fancy in the attitude of
trees, or the quiescence of a pool.

Night had fallen dark before we came out upon a plateau, and drew up a
little after, before a certain lump of superior blackness which I could
only conjecture to be the residencia. Here, my guide, getting down from
the cart, hooted and whistled for a long time in vain; until at last an
old peasant man came towards us from somewhere in the surrounding dark,
carrying a candle in his hand. By the light of this I was able to
perceive a great arched doorway of a Moorish character: it was closed
by iron-studded gates, in one of the leaves of which Felipe opened a
wicket. The peasant carried off the cart to some out-building; but my
guide and I passed through the wicket, which was closed again behind
us; and by the glimmer of the candle, passed through a court, up a
stone stair, along a section of an open gallery, and up more stairs
again, until we came at last to the door of a great and somewhat bare
apartment. This room, which I understood was to be mine, was pierced by
three windows, lined with some lustrous wood disposed in panels, and
carpeted with the skins of many savage animals. A bright fire burned in
the chimney, and shed abroad a changeful flicker; close up to the blaze
there was drawn a table, laid for supper; and in the far end a bed
stood ready. I was pleased by these preparations, and said so to
Felipe; and he, with the same simplicity of disposition that I held
already remarked in him, warmly re-echoed my praises. “A fine room,” he
said; “a very fine room. And fire, too; fire is good; it melts out the
pleasure in your bones. And the bed,” he continued, carrying over the
candle in that direction—“see what fine sheets—how soft, how smooth,
smooth;” and he passed his hand again and again over their texture, and
then laid down his head and rubbed his cheeks among them with a
grossness of content that somehow offended me. I took the candle from
his hand (for I feared he would set the bed on fire) and walked back to
the supper-table, where, perceiving a measure of wine, I poured out a
cup and called to him to come and drink of it. He started to his feet
at once and ran to me with a strong expression of hope; but when he saw
the wine, he visibly shuddered.

“Oh, no,” he said, “not that; that is for you. I hate it.”

“Very well, Senor,” said I; “then I will drink to your good health, and
to the prosperity of your house and family. Speaking of which,” I
added, after I had drunk, “shall I not have the pleasure of laying my
salutations in person at the feet of the Senora, your mother?”

But at these words all the childishness passed out of his face, and was
succeeded by a look of indescribable cunning and secrecy. He backed
away from me at the same time, as though I were an animal about to leap
or some dangerous fellow with a weapon, and when he had got near the
door, glowered at me sullenly with contracted pupils. “No,” he said at
last, and the next moment was gone noiselessly out of the room; and I
heard his footing die away downstairs as light as rainfall, and silence
closed over the house.

After I had supped I drew up the table nearer to the bed and began to
prepare for rest; but in the new position of the light, I was struck by
a picture on the wall. It represented a woman, still young. To judge by
her costume and the mellow unity which reigned over the canvas, she had
long been dead; to judge by the vivacity of the attitude, the eyes and
the features, I might have been beholding in a mirror the image of
life. Her figure was very slim and strong, and of a just proportion;
red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden
brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped,
was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in
both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo
of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood
awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the
resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been
originally designed for such high dames as the one now looking on me
from the canvas, had fallen to baser uses, wearing country clothes,
sitting on the shaft and holding the reins of a mule cart, to bring
home a lodger. Perhaps an actual link subsisted; perhaps some scruple
of the delicate flesh that was once clothed upon with the satin and
brocade of the dead lady, now winced at the rude contact of Felipe’s
frieze.

The first light of the morning shone full upon the portrait, and, as I
lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency;
its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one
after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign
and seal one’s own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she
were alive, I should love her. Day after day the double knowledge of
her wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer. She came to be the
heroine of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and
sufficiently rewarded, crimes. She cast a dark shadow on my fancy; and
when I was out in the free air of heaven, taking vigorous exercise and
healthily renewing the current of my blood, it was often a glad thought
to me that my enchantress was safe in the grave, her wand of beauty
broken, her lips closed in silence, her philtre spilt. And yet I had a
half-lingering terror that she might not be dead after all, but
re-arisen in the body of some descendant.

Felipe served my meals in my own apartment; and his resemblance to the
portrait haunted me. At times it was not; at times, upon some change of
attitude or flash of expression, it would leap out upon me like a
ghost. It was above all in his ill tempers that the likeness triumphed.
He certainly liked me; he was proud of my notice, which he sought to
engage by many simple and childlike devices; he loved to sit close
before my fire, talking his broken talk or singing his odd, endless,
wordless songs, and sometimes drawing his hand over my clothes with an
affectionate manner of caressing that never failed to cause in me an
embarrassment of which I was ashamed. But for all that, he was capable
of flashes of causeless anger and fits of sturdy sullenness. At a word
of reproof, I have seen him upset the dish of which I was about to eat,
and this not surreptitiously, but with defiance; and similarly at a
hint of inquisition. I was not unnaturally curious, being in a strange
place and surrounded by staring people; but at the shadow of a
question, he shrank back, lowering and dangerous. Then it was that, for
a fraction of a second, this rough lad might have been the brother of
the lady in the frame. But these humours were swift to pass; and the
resemblance died along with them.

In these first days I saw nothing of any one but Felipe, unless the
portrait is to be counted; and since the lad was plainly of weak mind,
and had moments of passion, it may be wondered that I bore his
dangerous neighbourhood with equanimity. As a matter of fact, it was
for some time irksome; but it happened before long that I obtained over
him so complete a mastery as set my disquietude at rest.

It fell in this way. He was by nature slothful, and much of a vagabond,
and yet he kept by the house, and not only waited upon my wants, but
laboured every day in the garden or small farm to the south of the
residencia. Here he would be joined by the peasant whom I had seen on
the night of my arrival, and who dwelt at the far end of the enclosure,
about half a mile away, in a rude out-house; but it was plain to me
that, of these two, it was Felipe who did most; and though I would
sometimes see him throw down his spade and go to sleep among the very
plants he had been digging, his constancy and energy were admirable in
themselves, and still more so since I was well assured they were
foreign to his disposition and the fruit of an ungrateful effort. But
while I admired, I wondered what had called forth in a lad so
shuttle-witted this enduring sense of duty. How was it sustained? I
asked myself, and to what length did it prevail over his instincts? The
priest was possibly his inspirer; but the priest came one day to the
residencia. I saw him both come and go after an interval of close upon
an hour, from a knoll where I was sketching, and all that time Felipe
continued to labour undisturbed in the garden.

At last, in a very unworthy spirit, I determined to debauch the lad
from his good resolutions, and, way-laying him at the gate, easily
pursuaded him to join me in a ramble. It was a fine day, and the woods
to which I led him were green and pleasant and sweet-smelling and alive
with the hum of insects. Here he discovered himself in a fresh
character, mounting up to heights of gaiety that abashed me, and
displaying an energy and grace of movement that delighted the eye. He
leaped, he ran round me in mere glee; he would stop, and look and
listen, and seem to drink in the world like a cordial; and then he
would suddenly spring into a tree with one bound, and hang and gambol
there like one at home. Little as he said to me, and that of not much
import, I have rarely enjoyed more stirring company; the sight of his
delight was a continual feast; the speed and accuracy of his movements
pleased me to the heart; and I might have been so thoughtlessly unkind
as to make a habit of these wants, had not chance prepared a very rude
conclusion to my pleasure. By some swiftness or dexterity the lad
captured a squirrel in a tree top. He was then some way ahead of me,
but I saw him drop to the ground and crouch there, crying aloud for
pleasure like a child. The sound stirred my sympathies, it was so fresh
and innocent; but as I bettered my pace to draw near, the cry of the
squirrel knocked upon my heart. I have heard and seen much of the
cruelty of lads, and above all of peasants; but what I now beheld
struck me into a passion of anger. I thrust the fellow aside, plucked
the poor brute out of his hands, and with swift mercy killed it. Then I
turned upon the torturer, spoke to him long out of the heat of my
indignation, calling him names at which he seemed to wither; and at
length, pointing toward the residencia, bade him begone and leave me,
for I chose to walk with men, not with vermin. He fell upon his knees,
and, the words coming to him with more cleanness than usual, poured out
a stream of the most touching supplications, begging me in mercy to
forgive him, to forget what he had done, to look to the future. “O, I
try so hard,” he said. “O, commandante, bear with Felipe this once; he
will never be a brute again!” Thereupon, much more affected than I
cared to show, I suffered myself to be persuaded, and at last shook
hands with him and made it up. But the squirrel, by way of penance, I
made him bury; speaking of the poor thing’s beauty, telling him what
pains it had suffered, and how base a thing was the abuse of strength.
“See, Felipe,” said I, “you are strong indeed; but in my hands you are
as helpless as that poor thing of the trees. Give me your hand in mine.
You cannot remove it. Now suppose that I were cruel like you, and took
a pleasure in pain. I only tighten my hold, and see how you suffer.” He
screamed aloud, his face stricken ashy and dotted with needle points of
sweat; and when I set him free, he fell to the earth and nursed his
hand and moaned over it like a baby. But he took the lesson in good
part; and whether from that, or from what I had said to him, or the
higher notion he now had of my bodily strength, his original affection
was changed into a dog-like, adoring fidelity.

Meanwhile I gained rapidly in health. The residencia stood on the crown
of a stony plateau; on every side the mountains hemmed it about; only
from the roof, where was a bartizan, there might be seen between two
peaks, a small segment of plain, blue with extreme distance. The air in
these altitudes moved freely and largely; great clouds congregated
there, and were broken up by the wind and left in tatters on the
hilltops; a hoarse, and yet faint rumbling of torrents rose from all
round; and one could there study all the ruder and more ancient
characters of nature in something of their pristine force. I delighted
from the first in the vigorous scenery and changeful weather; nor less
in the antique and dilapidated mansion where I dwelt. This was a large
oblong, flanked at two opposite corners by bastion-like projections,
one of which commanded the door, while both were loopholed for
musketry. The lower storey was, besides, naked of windows, so that the
building, if garrisoned, could not be carried without artillery. It
enclosed an open court planted with pomegranate trees. From this a
broad flight of marble stairs ascended to an open gallery, running all
round and resting, towards the court, on slender pillars. Thence again,
several enclosed stairs led to the upper storeys of the house, which
were thus broken up into distinct divisions. The windows, both within
and without, were closely shuttered; some of the stone-work in the
upper parts had fallen; the roof, in one place, had been wrecked in one
of the flurries of wind which were common in these mountains; and the
whole house, in the strong, beating sunlight, and standing out above a
grove of stunted cork-trees, thickly laden and discoloured with dust,
looked like the sleeping palace of the legend. The court, in
particular, seemed the very home of slumber. A hoarse cooing of doves
haunted about the eaves; the winds were excluded, but when they blew
outside, the mountain dust fell here as thick as rain, and veiled the
red bloom of the pomegranates; shuttered windows and the closed doors
of numerous cellars, and the vacant arches of the gallery, enclosed it;
and all day long the sun made broken profiles on the four sides, and
paraded the shadow of the pillars on the gallery floor. At the ground
level there was, however, a certain pillared recess, which bore the
marks of human habitation. Though it was open in front upon the court,
it was yet provided with a chimney, where a wood fire would he always
prettily blazing; and the tile floor was littered with the skins of
animals.

It was in this place that I first saw my hostess. She had drawn one of
the skins forward and sat in the sun, leaning against a pillar. It was
her dress that struck me first of all, for it was rich and brightly
coloured, and shone out in that dusty courtyard with something of the
same relief as the flowers of the pomegranates. At a second look it was
her beauty of person that took hold of me. As she sat back—watching me,
I thought, though with invisible eyes—and wearing at the same time an
expression of almost imbecile good-humour and contentment, she showed a
perfectness of feature and a quiet nobility of attitude that were
beyond a statue’s. I took off my hat to her in passing, and her face
puckered with suspicion as swiftly and lightly as a pool ruffles in the
breeze; but she paid no heed to my courtesy. I went forth on my
customary walk a trifle daunted, her idol-like impassivity haunting me;
and when I returned, although she was still in much the same posture, I
was half surprised to see that she had moved as far as the next pillar,
following the sunshine. This time, however, she addressed me with some
trivial salutation, civilly enough conceived, and uttered in the same
deep-chested, and yet indistinct and lisping tones, that had already
baffled the utmost niceness of my hearing from her son. I answered
rather at a venture; for not only did I fail to take her meaning with
precision, but the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me. They
were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe’s, but the pupil at
that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what
affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its
consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard. A look more
blankly stupid I have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I
spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled
and embarrassed. Yet, when I came there and saw the face of the
portrait, I was again reminded of the miracle of family descent. My
hostess was, indeed, both older and fuller in person; her eyes were of
a different colour; her face, besides, was not only free from the
ill-significance that offended and attracted me in the painting; it was
devoid of either good or bad—a moral blank expressing literally naught.
And yet there was a likeness, not so much speaking as immanent, not so
much in any particular feature as upon the whole. It should seem, I
thought, as if when the master set his signature to that grave canvas,
he had not only caught the image of one smiling and false-eyed woman,
but stamped the essential quality of a race.

From that day forth, whether I came or went, I was sure to find the
Senora seated in the sun against a pillar, or stretched on a rug before
the fire; only at times she would shift her station to the top round of
the stone staircase, where she lay with the same nonchalance right
across my path. In all these days, I never knew her to display the
least spark of energy beyond what she expended in brushing and
re-brushing her copious copper-coloured hair, or in lisping out, in the
rich and broken hoarseness of her voice, her customary idle salutations
to myself. These, I think, were her two chief pleasures, beyond that of
mere quiescence. She seemed always proud of her remarks, as though they
had been witticisms: and, indeed, though they were empty enough, like
the conversation of many respectable persons, and turned on a very
narrow range of subjects, they were never meaningless or incoherent;
nay, they had a certain beauty of their own, breathing, as they did, of
her entire contentment. Now she would speak of the warmth, in which
(like her son) she greatly delighted; now of the flowers of the
pomegranate trees, and now of the white doves and long-winged swallows
that fanned the air of the court. The birds excited her. As they raked
the eaves in their swift flight, or skimmed sidelong past her with a
rush of wind, she would sometimes stir, and sit a little up, and seem
to awaken from her doze of satisfaction. But for the rest of her days
she lay luxuriously folded on herself and sunk in sloth and pleasure.
Her invincible content at first annoyed me, but I came gradually to
find repose in the spectacle, until at last it grew to be my habit to
sit down beside her four times in the day, both coming and going, and
to talk with her sleepily, I scarce knew of what. I had come to like
her dull, almost animal neighbourhood; her beauty and her stupidity
soothed and amused me. I began to find a kind of transcendental good
sense in her remarks, and her unfathomable good nature moved me to
admiration and envy. The liking was returned; she enjoyed my presence
half-unconsciously, as a man in deep meditation may enjoy the babbling
of a brook. I can scarce say she brightened when I came, for
satisfaction was written on her face eternally, as on some foolish
statue’s; but I was made conscious of her pleasure by some more
intimate communication than the sight. And one day, as I set within
reach of her on the marble step, she suddenly shot forth one of her
hands and patted mine. The thing was done, and she was back in her
accustomed attitude, before my mind had received intelligence of the
caress; and when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no
answerable sentiment. It was plain she attached no moment to the act,
and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.

The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother
confirmed the view I had already taken of the son. The family blood had
been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a
common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was
to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in
shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as
sharply from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled
upon me from the portrait. But the intelligence (that more precious
heirloom) was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and
it had required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain
contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into
the active oddity of the son. Yet of the two, it was the mother I
preferred. Of Felipe, vengeful and placable, full of starts and
shyings, inconstant as a hare, I could even conceive as a creature
possibly noxious. Of the mother I had no thoughts but those of
kindness. And indeed, as spectators are apt ignorantly to take sides, I
grew something of a partisan in the enmity which I perceived to
smoulder between them. True, it seemed mostly on the mother’s part. She
would sometimes draw in her breath as he came near, and the pupils of
her vacant eyes would contract as if with horror or fear. Her emotions,
such as they were, were much upon the surface and readily shared; and
this latent repulsion occupied my mind, and kept me wondering on what
grounds it rested, and whether the son was certainly in fault.

I had been about ten days in the residencia, when there sprang up a
high and harsh wind, carrying clouds of dust. It came out of malarious
lowlands, and over several snowy sierras. The nerves of those on whom
it blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust;
their legs ached under the burthen of their body; and the touch of one
hand upon another grew to be odious. The wind, besides, came down the
gullies of the hills and stormed about the house with a great, hollow
buzzing and whistling that was wearisome to the ear and dismally
depressing to the mind. It did not so much blow in gusts as with the
steady sweep of a waterfall, so that there was no remission of
discomfort while it blew. But higher upon the mountain, it was probably
of a more variable strength, with accesses of fury; for there came down
at times a far-off wailing, infinitely grievous to hear; and at times,
on one of the high shelves or terraces, there would start up, and then
disperse, a tower of dust, like the smoke of an explosion.

I no sooner awoke in bed than I was conscious of the nervous tension
and depression of the weather, and the effect grew stronger as the day
proceeded. It was in vain that I resisted; in vain that I set forth
upon my customary morning’s walk; the irrational, unchanging fury of
the storm had soon beat down my strength and wrecked my temper; and I
returned to the residencia, glowing with dry heat, and foul and gritty
with dust. The court had a forlorn appearance; now and then a glimmer
of sun fled over it; now and then the wind swooped down upon the
pomegranates, and scattered the blossoms, and set the window shutters
clapping on the wall. In the recess the Senora was pacing to and fro
with a flushed countenance and bright eyes; I thought, too, she was
speaking to herself, like one in anger. But when I addressed her with
my customary salutation, she only replied by a sharp gesture and
continued her walk. The weather had distempered even this impassive
creature; and as I went on upstairs I was the less ashamed of my own
discomposure.

All day the wind continued; and I sat in my room and made a feint of
reading, or walked up and down, and listened to the riot overhead.
Night fell, and I had not so much as a candle. I began to long for some
society, and stole down to the court. It was now plunged in the blue of
the first darkness; but the recess was redly lighted by the fire. The
wood had been piled high, and was crowned by a shock of flames, which
the draught of the chimney brandished to and fro. In this strong and
shaken brightness the Senora continued pacing from wall to wall with
disconnected gestures, clasping her hands, stretching forth her arms,
throwing back her head as in appeal to heaven. In these disordered
movements the beauty and grace of the woman showed more clearly; but
there was a light in her eye that struck on me unpleasantly; and when I
had looked on awhile in silence, and seemingly unobserved, I turned
tail as I had come, and groped my way back again to my own chamber.

By the time Felipe brought my supper and lights, my nerve was utterly
gone; and, had the lad been such as I was used to seeing him, I should
have kept him (even by force had that been necessary) to take off the
edge from my distasteful solitude. But on Felipe, also, the wind had
exercised its influence. He had been feverish all day; now that the
night had come he was fallen into a low and tremulous humour that
reacted on my own. The sight of his scared face, his starts and pallors
and sudden harkenings, unstrung me; and when he dropped and broke a
dish, I fairly leaped out of my seat.

“I think we are all mad to-day,” said I, affecting to laugh.

“It is the black wind,” he replied dolefully. “You feel as if you must
do something, and you don’t know what it is.”

I noted the aptness of the description; but, indeed, Felipe had
sometimes a strange felicity in rendering into words the sensations of
the body. “And your mother, too,” said I; “she seems to feel this
weather much. Do you not fear she may be unwell?”

He stared at me a little, and then said, “No,” almost defiantly; and
the next moment, carrying his hand to his brow, cried out lamentably on
the wind and the noise that made his head go round like a millwheel.
“Who can be well?” he cried; and, indeed, I could only echo his
question, for I was disturbed enough myself.

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the
poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent
uproar, would not suffer me to sleep. I lay there and tossed, my nerves
and senses on the stretch. At times I would doze, dream horribly, and
wake again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time. But
it must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by
an outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries. I leaped from my bed,
supposing I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the
house, cries of pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so
savage and discordant that they shocked the heart. It was no illusion;
some living thing, some lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully
tortured. The thought of Felipe and the squirrel flashed into my mind,
and I ran to the door, but it had been locked from the outside; and I
might shake it as I pleased, I was a fast prisoner. Still the cries
continued. Now they would dwindle down into a moaning that seemed to be
articulate, and at these times I made sure they must be human; and
again they would break forth and fill the house with ravings worthy of
hell. I stood at the door and gave ear to them, till at, last they died
away. Long after that, I still lingered and still continued to hear
them mingle in fancy with the storming of the wind; and when at last I
crept to my bed, it was with a deadly sickness and a blackness of
horror on my heart.

It was little wonder if I slept no more. Why had I been locked in? What
had passed? Who was the author of these indescribable and shocking
cries? A human being? It was inconceivable. A beast? The cries were
scarce quite bestial; and what animal, short of a lion or a tiger,
could thus shake the solid walls of the residencia? And while I was
thus turning over the elements of the mystery, it came into my mind
that I had not yet set eyes upon the daughter of the house. What was
more probable than that the daughter of the Senora, and the sister of
Felipe, should be herself insane? Or, what more likely than that these
ignorant and half-witted people should seek to manage an afflicted
kinswoman by violence? Here was a solution; and yet when I called to
mind the cries (which I never did without a shuddering chill) it seemed
altogether insufficient: not even cruelty could wring such cries from
madness. But of one thing I was sure: I could not live in a house where
such a thing was half conceivable, and not probe the matter home and,
if necessary, interfere.

The next day came, the wind had blown itself out, and there was nothing
to remind me of the business of the night. Felipe came to my bedside
with obvious cheerfulness; as I passed through the court, the Senora
was sunning herself with her accustomed immobility; and when I issued
from the gateway, I found the whole face of nature austerely smiling,
the heavens of a cold blue, and sown with great cloud islands, and the
mountain-sides mapped forth into provinces of light and shadow. A short
walk restored me to myself, and renewed within me the resolve to plumb
this mystery; and when, from the vantage of my knoll, I had seen Felipe
pass forth to his labours in the garden, I returned at once to the
residencia to put my design in practice. The Senora appeared plunged in
slumber; I stood awhile and marked her, but she did not stir; even if
my design were indiscreet, I had little to fear from such a guardian;
and turning away, I mounted to the gallery and began my exploration of
the house.

All morning I went from one door to another, and entered spacious and
faded chambers, some rudely shuttered, some receiving their full charge
of daylight, all empty and unhomely. It was a rich house, on which Time
had breathed his tarnish and dust had scattered disillusion. The spider
swung there; the bloated tarantula scampered on the cornices; ants had
their crowded highways on the floor of halls of audience; the big and
foul fly, that lives on carrion and is often the messenger of death,
had set up his nest in the rotten woodwork, and buzzed heavily about
the rooms. Here and there a stool or two, a couch, a bed, or a great
carved chair remained behind, like islets on the bare floors, to
testify of man’s bygone habitation; and everywhere the walls were set
with the portraits of the dead. I could judge, by these decaying
effigies, in the house of what a great and what a handsome race I was
then wandering. Many of the men wore orders on their breasts and had
the port of noble offices; the women were all richly attired; the
canvases most of them by famous hands. But it was not so much these
evidences of greatness that took hold upon my mind, even contrasted, as
they were, with the present depopulation and decay of that great house.
It was rather the parable of family life that I read in this succession
of fair faces and shapely bodies. Never before had I so realised the
miracle of the continued race, the creation and recreation, the weaving
and changing and handing down of fleshly elements. That a child should
be born of its mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know
not how) with humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head
with the manner of one ascendant, and offer its hand with the gesture
of another, are wonders dulled for us by repetition. But in the
singular unity of look, in the common features and common bearing, of
all these painted generations on the walls of the residencia, the
miracle started out and looked me in the face. And an ancient mirror
falling opportunely in my way, I stood and read my own features a long
while, tracing out on either hand the filaments of descent and the
bonds that knit me with my family.

At last, in the course of these investigations, I opened the door of a
chamber that bore the marks of habitation. It was of large proportions
and faced to the north, where the mountains were most wildly figured.
The embers of a fire smouldered and smoked upon the hearth, to which a
chair had been drawn close. And yet the aspect of the chamber was
ascetic to the degree of sternness; the chair was uncushioned; the
floor and walls were naked; and beyond the books which lay here and
there in some confusion, there was no instrument of either work or
pleasure. The sight of books in the house of such a family exceedingly
amazed me; and I began with a great hurry, and in momentary fear of
interruption, to go from one to another and hastily inspect their
character. They were of all sorts, devotional, historical, and
scientific, but mostly of a great age and in the Latin tongue. Some I
could see to bear the marks of constant study; others had been torn
across and tossed aside as if in petulance or disapproval. Lastly, as I
cruised about that empty chamber, I espied some papers written upon
with pencil on a table near the window. An unthinking curiosity led me
to take one up. It bore a copy of verses, very roughly metred in the
original Spanish, and which I may render somewhat thus—

Pleasure approached with pain and shame,
Grief with a wreath of lilies came.
Pleasure showed the lovely sun;
Jesu dear, how sweet it shone!
Grief with her worn hand pointed on,
          Jesu dear, to thee!


Shame and confusion at once fell on me; and, laying down the paper, I
beat an immediate retreat from the apartment. Neither Felipe nor his
mother could have read the books nor written these rough but feeling
verses. It was plain I had stumbled with sacrilegious feet into the
room of the daughter of the house. God knows, my own heart most sharply
punished me for my indiscretion. The thought that I had thus secretly
pushed my way into the confidence of a girl so strangely situated, and
the fear that she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like
guilt. I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before;
wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one
of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with
maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and
dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives;
and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into
the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed and somnolent
woman, who just then stretched herself and delicately licked her lips
as in the very sensuality of sloth, my mind swiftly compared the scene
with the cold chamber looking northward on the mountains, where the
daughter dwelt.

That same afternoon, as I sat upon my knoll, I saw the Padre enter the
gates of the residencia. The revelation of the daughter’s character had
struck home to my fancy, and almost blotted out the horrors of the
night before; but at sight of this worthy man the memory revived. I
descended, then, from the knoll, and making a circuit among the woods,
posted myself by the wayside to await his passage. As soon as he
appeared I stepped forth and introduced myself as the lodger of the
residencia. He had a very strong, honest countenance, on which it was
easy to read the mingled emotions with which he regarded me, as a
foreigner, a heretic, and yet one who had been wounded for the good
cause. Of the family at the residencia he spoke with reserve, and yet
with respect. I mentioned that I had not yet seen the daughter,
whereupon he remarked that that was as it should be, and looked at me a
little askance. Lastly, I plucked up courage to refer to the cries that
had disturbed me in the night. He heard me out in silence, and then
stopped and partly turned about, as though to mark beyond doubt that he
was dismissing me.

“Do you take tobacco powder?” said he, offering his snuff-box; and
then, when I had refused, “I am an old man,” he added, “and I may be
allowed to remind you that you are a guest.”

“I have, then, your authority,” I returned, firmly enough, although I
flushed at the implied reproof, “to let things take their course, and
not to interfere?”

He said “yes,” and with a somewhat uneasy salute turned and left me
where I was. But he had done two things: he had set my conscience at
rest, and he had awakened my delicacy. I made a great effort, once more
dismissed the recollections of the night, and fell once more to
brooding on my saintly poetess. At the same time, I could not quite
forget that I had been locked in, and that night when Felipe brought me
my supper I attacked him warily on both points of interest.

“I never see your sister,” said I casually.

“Oh, no,” said he; “she is a good, good girl,” and his mind instantly
veered to something else.

“Your sister is pious, I suppose?” I asked in the next pause.

“Oh!” he cried, joining his hands with extreme fervour, “a saint; it is
she that keeps me up.”

“You are very fortunate,” said I, “for the most of us, I am afraid, and
myself among the number, are better at going down.”

“Senor,” said Felipe earnestly, “I would not say that. You should not
tempt your angel. If one goes down, where is he to stop?”

“Why, Felipe,” said I, “I had no guess you were a preacher, and I may
say a good one; but I suppose that is your sister’s doing?”

He nodded at me with round eyes.

“Well, then,” I continued, “she has doubtless reproved you for your sin
of cruelty?”

“Twelve times!” he cried; for this was the phrase by which the odd
creature expressed the sense of frequency. “And I told her you had done
so—I remembered that,” he added proudly—“and she was pleased.”

“Then, Felipe,” said I, “what were those cries that I heard last night?
for surely they were cries of some creature in suffering.”

“The wind,” returned Felipe, looking in the fire.

I took his hand in mine, at which, thinking it to be a caress, he
smiled with a brightness of pleasure that came near disarming my
resolve. But I trod the weakness down. “The wind,” I repeated; “and yet
I think it was this hand,” holding it up, “that had first locked me
in.” The lad shook visibly, but answered never a word. “Well,” said I,
“I am a stranger and a guest. It is not my part either to meddle or to
judge in your affairs; in these you shall take your sister’s counsel,
which I cannot doubt to be excellent. But in so far as concerns my own
I will be no man’s prisoner, and I demand that key.” Half an hour later
my door was suddenly thrown open, and the key tossed ringing on the
floor.

A day or two after I came in from a walk a little before the point of
noon. The Senora was lying lapped in slumber on the threshold of the
recess; the pigeons dozed below the eaves like snowdrifts; the house
was under a deep spell of noontide quiet; and only a wandering and
gentle wind from the mountain stole round the galleries, rustled among
the pomegranates, and pleasantly stirred the shadows. Something in the
stillness moved me to imitation, and I went very lightly across the
court and up the marble staircase. My foot was on the topmost round,
when a door opened, and I found myself face to face with Olalla.
Surprise transfixed me; her loveliness struck to my heart; she glowed
in the deep shadow of the gallery, a gem of colour; her eyes took hold
upon mine and clung there, and bound us together like the joining of
hands; and the moments we thus stood face to face, drinking each other
in, were sacramental and the wedding of souls. I know not how long it
was before I awoke out of a deep trance, and, hastily bowing, passed on
into the upper stair. She did not move, but followed me with her great,
thirsting eyes; and as I passed out of sight it seemed to me as if she
paled and faded.

In my own room, I opened the window and looked out, and could not think
what change had come upon that austere field of mountains that it
should thus sing and shine under the lofty heaven. I had seen
her—Olalla! And the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb,
unfathomable azure answered, Olalla! The pale saint of my dreams had
vanished for ever; and in her place I beheld this maiden on whom God
had lavished the richest colours and the most exuberant energies of
life, whom he had made active as a deer, slender as a reed, and in
whose great eyes he had lighted the torches of the soul. The thrill of
her young life, strung like a wild animal’s, had entered into me; the
force of soul that had looked out from her eyes and conquered mine,
mantled about my heart and sprang to my lips in singing. She passed
through my veins: she was one with me.

I will not say that this enthusiasm declined; rather my soul held out
in its ecstasy as in a strong castle, and was there besieged by cold
and sorrowful considerations. I could not doubt but that I loved her at
first sight, and already with a quivering ardour that was strange to my
experience. What then was to follow? She was the child of an afflicted
house, the Senora’s daughter, the sister of Felipe; she bore it even in
her beauty. She had the lightness and swiftness of the one, swift as an
arrow, light as dew; like the other, she shone on the pale background
of the world with the brilliancy of flowers. I could not call by the
name of brother that half-witted lad, nor by the name of mother that
immovable and lovely thing of flesh, whose silly eyes and perpetual
simper now recurred to my mind like something hateful. And if I could
not marry, what then? She was helplessly unprotected; her eyes, in that
single and long glance which had been all our intercourse, had
confessed a weakness equal to my own; but in my heart I knew her for
the student of the cold northern chamber, and the writer of the
sorrowful lines; and this was a knowledge to disarm a brute. To flee
was more than I could find courage for; but I registered a vow of
unsleeping circumspection.

As I turned from the window, my eyes alighted on the portrait. It had
fallen dead, like a candle after sunrise; it followed me with eyes of
paint. I knew it to be like, and marvelled at the tenacity of type in
that declining race; but the likeness was swallowed up in difference. I
remembered how it had seemed to me a thing unapproachable in the life,
a creature rather of the painter’s craft than of the modesty of nature,
and I marvelled at the thought, and exulted in the image of Olalla.
Beauty I had seen before, and not been charmed, and I had been often
drawn to women, who were not beautiful except to me; but in Olalla all
that I desired and had not dared to imagine was united.

I did not see her the next day, and my heart ached and my eyes longed
for her, as men long for morning. But the day after, when I returned,
about my usual hour, she was once more on the gallery, and our looks
once more met and embraced. I would have spoken, I would have drawn
near to her; but strongly as she plucked at my heart, drawing me like a
magnet, something yet more imperious withheld me; and I could only bow
and pass by; and she, leaving my salutation unanswered, only followed
me with her noble eyes.

I had now her image by rote, and as I conned the traits in memory it
seemed as if I read her very heart. She was dressed with something of
her mother’s coquetry, and love of positive colour. Her robe, which I
know she must have made with her own hands, clung about her with a
cunning grace. After the fashion of that country, besides, her bodice
stood open in the middle, in a long slit, and here, in spite of the
poverty of the house, a gold coin, hanging by a ribbon, lay on her
brown bosom. These were proofs, had any been needed, of her inborn
delight in life and her own loveliness. On the other hand, in her eyes
that hung upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and
sadness, lights of poetry and hope, blacknesses of despair, and
thoughts that were above the earth. It was a lovely body, but the
inmate, the soul, was more than worthy of that lodging. Should I leave
this incomparable flower to wither unseen on these rough mountains?
Should I despise the great gift offered me in the eloquent silence of
her eyes? Here was a soul immured; should I not burst its prison? All
side considerations fell off from me; were she the child of Herod I
swore I should make her mine; and that very evening I set myself, with
a mingled sense of treachery and disgrace, to captivate the brother.
Perhaps I read him with more favourable eyes, perhaps the thought of
his sister always summoned up the better qualities of that imperfect
soul; but he had never seemed to me so amiable, and his very likeness
to Olalla, while it annoyed, yet softened me.

A third day passed in vain—an empty desert of hours. I would not lose a
chance, and loitered all afternoon in the court where (to give myself a
countenance) I spoke more than usual with the Senora. God knows it was
with a most tender and sincere interest that I now studied her; and
even as for Felipe, so now for the mother, I was conscious of a growing
warmth of toleration. And yet I wondered. Even while I spoke with her,
she would doze off into a little sleep, and presently awake again
without embarrassment; and this composure staggered me. And again, as I
marked her make infinitesimal changes in her posture, savouring and
lingering on the bodily pleasure of the movement, I was driven to
wonder at this depth of passive sensuality. She lived in her body; and
her consciousness was all sunk into and disseminated through her
members, where it luxuriously dwelt. Lastly, I could not grow
accustomed to her eyes. Each time she turned on me these great
beautiful and meaningless orbs, wide open to the day, but closed
against human inquiry—each time I had occasion to observe the lively
changes of her pupils which expanded and contracted in a breath—I know
not what it was came over me, I can find no name for the mingled
feeling of disappointment, annoyance, and distaste that jarred along my
nerves. I tried her on a variety of subjects, equally in vain; and at
last led the talk to her daughter. But even there she proved
indifferent; said she was pretty, which (as with children) was her
highest word of commendation, but was plainly incapable of any higher
thought; and when I remarked that Olalla seemed silent, merely yawned
in my face and replied that speech was of no great use when you had
nothing to say. “People speak much, very much,” she added, looking at
me with expanded pupils; and then again yawned and again showed me a
mouth that was as dainty as a toy. This time I took the hint, and,
leaving her to her repose, went up into my own chamber to sit by the
open window, looking on the hills and not beholding them, sunk in
lustrous and deep dreams, and hearkening in fancy to the note of a
voice that I had never heard.

I awoke on the fifth morning with a brightness of anticipation that
seemed to challenge fate. I was sure of myself, light of heart and
foot, and resolved to put my love incontinently to the touch of
knowledge. It should lie no longer under the bonds of silence, a dumb
thing, living by the eye only, like the love of beasts; but should now
put on the spirit, and enter upon the joys of the complete human
intimacy. I thought of it with wild hopes, like a voyager to El Dorado;
into that unknown and lovely country of her soul, I no longer trembled
to adventure. Yet when I did indeed encounter her, the same force of
passion descended on me and at once submerged my mind; speech seemed to
drop away from me like a childish habit; and I but drew near to her as
the giddy man draws near to the margin of a gulf. She drew back from me
a little as I came; but her eyes did not waver from mine, and these
lured me forward. At last, when I was already within reach of her, I
stopped. Words were denied me; if I advanced I could but clasp her to
my heart in silence; and all that was sane in me, all that was still
unconquered, revolted against the thought of such an accost. So we
stood for a second, all our life in our eyes, exchanging salvos of
attraction and yet each resisting; and then, with a great effort of the
will, and conscious at the same time of a sudden bitterness of
disappointment, I turned and went away in the same silence.

What power lay upon me that I could not speak? And she, why was she
also silent? Why did she draw away before me dumbly, with fascinated
eyes? Was this love? or was it a mere brute attraction, mindless and
inevitable, like that of the magnet for the steel? We had never spoken,
we were wholly strangers: and yet an influence, strong as the grasp of
a giant, swept us silently together. On my side, it filled me with
impatience; and yet I was sure that she was worthy; I had seen her
books, read her verses, and thus, in a sense, divined the soul of my
mistress. But on her side, it struck me almost cold. Of me, she knew
nothing but my bodily favour; she was drawn to me as stones fall to the
earth; the laws that rule the earth conducted her, unconsenting, to my
arms; and I drew back at the thought of such a bridal, and began to be
jealous for myself. It was not thus that I desired to be loved. And
then I began to fall into a great pity for the girl herself. I thought
how sharp must be her mortification, that she, the student, the
recluse, Felipe’s saintly monitress, should have thus confessed an
overweening weakness for a man with whom she had never exchanged a
word. And at the coming of pity, all other thoughts were swallowed up;
and I longed only to find and console and reassure her; to tell her how
wholly her love was returned on my side, and how her choice, even if
blindly made, was not unworthy.

The next day it was glorious weather; depth upon depth of blue
over-canopied the mountains; the sun shone wide; and the wind in the
trees and the many falling torrents in the mountains filled the air
with delicate and haunting music. Yet I was prostrated with sadness. My
heart wept for the sight of Olalla, as a child weeps for its mother. I
sat down on a boulder on the verge of the low cliffs that bound the
plateau to the north. Thence I looked down into the wooded valley of a
stream, where no foot came. In the mood I was in, it was even touching
to behold the place untenanted; it lacked Olalla; and I thought of the
delight and glory of a life passed wholly with her in that strong air,
and among these rugged and lovely surroundings, at first with a
whimpering sentiment, and then again with such a fiery joy that I
seemed to grow in strength and stature, like a Samson.

And then suddenly I was aware of Olalla drawing near. She appeared out
of a grove of cork-trees, and came straight towards me; and I stood up
and waited. She seemed in her walking a creature of such life and fire
and lightness as amazed me; yet she came quietly and slowly. Her energy
was in the slowness; but for inimitable strength, I felt she would have
run, she would have flown to me. Still, as she approached, she kept her
eyes lowered to the ground; and when she had drawn quite near, it was
without one glance that she addressed me. At the first note of her
voice I started. It was for this I had been waiting; this was the last
test of my love. And lo, her enunciation was precise and clear, not
lisping and incomplete like that of her family; and the voice, though
deeper than usual with women, was still both youthful and womanly. She
spoke in a rich chord; golden contralto strains mingled with
hoarseness, as the red threads were mingled with the brown among her
tresses. It was not only a voice that spoke to my heart directly; but
it spoke to me of her. And yet her words immediately plunged me back
upon despair.

“You will go away,” she said, “to-day.”

Her example broke the bonds of my speech; I felt as lightened of a
weight, or as if a spell had been dissolved. I know not in what words I
answered; but, standing before her on the cliffs, I poured out the
whole ardour of my love, telling her that I lived upon the thought of
her, slept only to dream of her loveliness, and would gladly forswear
my country, my language, and my friends, to live for ever by her side.
And then, strongly commanding myself, I changed the note; I reassured,
I comforted her; I told her I had divined in her a pious and heroic
spirit, with which I was worthy to sympathise, and which I longed to
share and lighten. “Nature,” I told her, “was the voice of God, which
men disobey at peril; and if we were thus humbly drawn together, ay,
even as by a miracle of love, it must imply a divine fitness in our
souls; we must be made,” I said—“made for one another. We should be mad
rebels,” I cried out—“mad rebels against God, not to obey this
instinct.”

She shook her head. “You will go to-day,” she repeated, and then with a
gesture, and in a sudden, sharp note—“no, not to-day,” she cried,
“to-morrow!”

But at this sign of relenting, power came in upon me in a tide. I
stretched out my arms and called upon her name; and she leaped to me
and clung to me. The hills rocked about us, the earth quailed; a shock
as of a blow went through me and left me blind and dizzy. And the next
moment she had thrust me back, broken rudely from my arms, and fled
with the speed of a deer among the cork-trees.

I stood and shouted to the mountains; I turned and went back towards
the residencia, waltzing upon air. She sent me away, and yet I had but
to call upon her name and she came to me. These were but the weaknesses
of girls, from which even she, the strangest of her sex, was not
exempted. Go? Not I, Olalla—O, not I, Olalla, my Olalla! A bird sang
near by; and in that season, birds were rare. It bade me be of good
cheer. And once more the whole countenance of nature, from the
ponderous and stable mountains down to the lightest leaf and the
smallest darting fly in the shadow of the groves, began to stir before
me and to put on the lineaments of life and wear a face of awful joy.
The sunshine struck upon the hills, strong as a hammer on the anvil,
and the hills shook; the earth, under that vigorous insulation, yielded
up heady scents; the woods smouldered in the blaze. I felt the thrill
of travail and delight run through the earth. Something elemental,
something rude, violent, and savage, in the love that sang in my heart,
was like a key to nature’s secrets; and the very stones that rattled
under my feet appeared alive and friendly. Olalla! Her touch had
quickened, and renewed, and strung me up to the old pitch of concert
with the rugged earth, to a swelling of the soul that men learn to
forget in their polite assemblies. Love burned in me like rage;
tenderness waxed fierce; I hated, I adored, I pitied, I revered her
with ecstasy. She seemed the link that bound me in with dead things on
the one hand, and with our pure and pitying God upon the other: a thing
brutal and divine, and akin at once to the innocence and to the
unbridled forces of the earth.

My head thus reeling, I came into the courtyard of the residencia, and
the sight of the mother struck me like a revelation. She sat there, all
sloth and contentment, blinking under the strong sunshine, branded with
a passive enjoyment, a creature set quite apart, before whom my ardour
fell away like a thing ashamed. I stopped a moment, and, commanding
such shaken tones as I was able, said a word or two. She looked at me
with her unfathomable kindness; her voice in reply sounded vaguely out
of the realm of peace in which she slumbered, and there fell on my
mind, for the first time, a sense of respect for one so uniformly
innocent and happy, and I passed on in a kind of wonder at myself, that
I should be so much disquieted.

On my table there lay a piece of the same yellow paper I had seen in
the north room; it was written on with pencil in the same hand,
Olalla’s hand, and I picked it up with a sudden sinking of alarm, and
read, “If you have any kindness for Olalla, if you have any chivalry
for a creature sorely wrought, go from here to-day; in pity, in honour,
for the sake of Him who died, I supplicate that you shall go.” I looked
at this awhile in mere stupidity, then I began to awaken to a weariness
and horror of life; the sunshine darkened outside on the bare hills,
and I began to shake like a man in terror. The vacancy thus suddenly
opened in my life unmanned me like a physical void. It was not my
heart, it was not my happiness, it was life itself that was involved. I
could not lose her. I said so, and stood repeating it. And then, like
one in a dream, I moved to the window, put forth my hand to open the
casement, and thrust it through the pane. The blood spurted from my
wrist; and with an instantaneous quietude and command of myself, I
pressed my thumb on the little leaping fountain, and reflected what to
do. In that empty room there was nothing to my purpose; I felt,
besides, that I required assistance. There shot into my mind a hope
that Olalla herself might be my helper, and I turned and went down
stairs, still keeping my thumb upon the wound.

There was no sign of either Olalla or Felipe, and I addressed myself to
the recess, whither the Senora had now drawn quite back and sat dozing
close before the fire, for no degree of heat appeared too much for her.

“Pardon me,” said I, “if I disturb you, but I must apply to you for
help.”

She looked up sleepily and asked me what it was, and with the very
words I thought she drew in her breath with a widening of the nostrils
and seemed to come suddenly and fully alive.

“I have cut myself,” I said, “and rather badly. See!” And I held out my
two hands from which the blood was oozing and dripping.

Her great eyes opened wide, the pupils shrank into points; a veil
seemed to fall from her face, and leave it sharply expressive and yet
inscrutable. And as I still stood, marvelling a little at her
disturbance, she came swiftly up to me, and stooped and caught me by
the hand; and the next moment my hand was at her mouth, and she had
bitten me to the bone. The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of
blood, and the monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me all in
one, and I beat her back; and she sprang at me again and again, with
bestial cries, cries that I recognised, such cries as had awakened me
on the night of the high wind. Her strength was like that of madness;
mine was rapidly ebbing with the loss of blood; my mind besides was
whirling with the abhorrent strangeness of the onslaught, and I was
already forced against the wall, when Olalla ran betwixt us, and
Felipe, following at a bound, pinned down his mother on the floor.

A trance-like weakness fell upon me; I saw, heard, and felt, but I was
incapable of movement. I heard the struggle roll to and fro upon the
floor, the yells of that catamount ringing up to Heaven as she strove
to reach me. I felt Olalla clasp me in her arms, her hair falling on my
face, and, with the strength of a man, raise and half drag, half carry
me upstairs into my own room, where she cast me down upon the bed. Then
I saw her hasten to the door and lock it, and stand an instant
listening to the savage cries that shook the residencia. And then,
swift and light as a thought, she was again beside me, binding up my
hand, laying it in her bosom, moaning and mourning over it with
dove-like sounds. They were not words that came to her, they were
sounds more beautiful than speech, infinitely touching, infinitely
tender; and yet as I lay there, a thought stung to my heart, a thought
wounded me like a sword, a thought, like a worm in a flower, profaned
the holiness of my love. Yes, they were beautiful sounds, and they were
inspired by human tenderness; but was their beauty human?

All day I lay there. For a long time the cries of that nameless female
thing, as she struggled with her half-witted whelp, resounded through
the house, and pierced me with despairing sorrow and disgust. They were
the death-cry of my love; my love was murdered; was not only dead, but
an offence to me; and yet, think as I pleased, feel as I must, it still
swelled within me like a storm of sweetness, and my heart melted at her
looks and touch. This horror that had sprung out, this doubt upon
Olalla, this savage and bestial strain that ran not only through the
whole behaviour of her family, but found a place in the very
foundations and story of our love—though it appalled, though it shocked
and sickened me, was yet not of power to break the knot of my
infatuation.

When the cries had ceased, there came a scraping at the door, by which
I knew Felipe was without; and Olalla went and spoke to him—I know not
what. With that exception, she stayed close beside me, now kneeling by
my bed and fervently praying, now sitting with her eyes upon mine. So
then, for these six hours I drank in her beauty, and silently perused
the story in her face. I saw the golden coin hover on her breaths; I
saw her eyes darken and brighter, and still speak no language but that
of an unfathomable kindness; I saw the faultless face, and, through the
robe, the lines of the faultless body. Night came at last, and in the
growing darkness of the chamber, the sight of her slowly melted; but
even then the touch of her smooth hand lingered in mine and talked with
me. To lie thus in deadly weakness and drink in the traits of the
beloved, is to reawake to love from whatever shock of disillusion. I
reasoned with myself; and I shut my eyes on horrors, and again I was
very bold to accept the worst. What mattered it, if that imperious
sentiment survived; if her eyes still beckoned and attached me; if now,
even as before, every fibre of my dull body yearned and turned to her?
Late on in the night some strength revived in me, and I spoke:—

“Olalla,” I said, “nothing matters; I ask nothing; I am content; I love
you.”

She knelt down awhile and prayed, and I devoutly respected her
devotions. The moon had begun to shine in upon one side of each of the
three windows, and make a misty clearness in the room, by which I saw
her indistinctly. When she rearose she made the sign of the cross.

“It is for me to speak,” she said, “and for you to listen. I know; you
can but guess. I prayed, how I prayed for you to leave this place. I
begged it of you, and I know you would have granted me even this; or if
not, O let me think so!”

“I love you,” I said.

“And yet you have lived in the world,” she said; after a pause, “you
are a man and wise; and I am but a child. Forgive me, if I seem to
teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who
learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they
conceive the dignity of the design—the horror of the living fact fades
from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember, I
think, and are warned and pity. Go, rather, go now, and keep me in
mind. So I shall have a life in the cherished places of your memory: a
life as much my own, as that which I lead in this body.”

“I love you,” I said once more; and reaching out my weak hand, took
hers, and carried it to my lips, and kissed it. Nor did she resist, but
winced a little; and I could see her look upon me with a frown that was
not unkindly, only sad and baffled. And then it seemed she made a call
upon her resolution; plucked my hand towards her, herself at the same
time leaning somewhat forward, and laid it on the beating of her heart.
“There,” she cried, “you feel the very footfall of my life. It only
moves for you; it is yours. But is it even mine? It is mine indeed to
offer you, as I might take the coin from my neck, as I might break a
live branch from a tree, and give it you. And yet not mine! I dwell, or
I think I dwell (if I exist at all), somewhere apart, an impotent
prisoner, and carried about and deafened by a mob that I disown. This
capsule, such as throbs against the sides of animals, knows you at a
touch for its master; ay, it loves you! But my soul, does my soul? I
think not; I know not, fearing to ask. Yet when you spoke to me your
words were of the soul; it is of the soul that you ask—it is only from
the soul that you would take me.”

“Olalla,” I said, “the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in
love. What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the
soul cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God’s
signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the
footstool and foundation of the highest.”

“Have you,” she said, “seen the portraits in the house of my fathers?
Have you looked at my mother or at Felipe? Have your eyes never rested
on that picture that hangs by your bed? She who sat for it died ages
ago; and she did evil in her life. But, look again: there is my hand to
the least line, there are my eyes and my hair. What is mine, then, and
what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love,
and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me) not a
gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my
eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to
others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men
have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.
The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me,
they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform
features and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the
quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made
me? The girl who does not know and cannot answer for the least portion
of herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory eddy, the tree
of which she is the passing fruit? The race exists; it is old, it is
ever young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like
waves upon the sea, individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a
semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul,
but the soul is in the race.”

“You fret against the common law,” I said. “You rebel against the voice
of God, which he has made so winning to convince, so imperious to
command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we
are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb
and flow, by things older and greater than we ourselves.”

“Alas!” she said, “what can I say to you? My fathers, eight hundred
years ago, ruled all this province: they were wise, great, cunning, and
cruel; they were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war;
the king called them his cousin; the people, when the rope was slung
for them or when they returned and found their hovels smoking,
blasphemed their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen; if he
has sprung from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level. The
breath of weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they
began to go down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in
gusts, heady and senseless like the wind in the gutters of the
mountains; beauty was still handed down, but no longer the guiding wit
nor the human heart; the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the
flesh covered the bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of
brutes, and their mind was as the mind of flies. I speak to you as I
dare; but you have seen for yourself how the wheel has gone backward
with my doomed race. I stand, as it were, upon a little rising ground
in this desperate descent, and see both before and behind, both what we
have lost and to what we are condemned to go farther downward. And
shall I—I that dwell apart in the house of the dead, my body, loathing
its ways—shall I repeat the spell? Shall I bind another spirit,
reluctant as my own, into this bewitched and tempest-broken tenement
that I now suffer in? Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of humanity,
charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison, and dash it, like a
fire, in the faces of posterity? But my vow has been given; the race
shall cease from off the earth. At this hour my brother is making
ready; his foot will soon be on the stair; and you will go with him and
pass out of my sight for ever. Think of me sometimes as one to whom the
lesson of life was very harshly told, but who heard it with courage; as
one who loved you indeed, but who hated herself so deeply that her love
was hateful to her; as one who sent you away and yet would have longed
to keep you for ever; who had no dearer hope than to forget you, and no
greater fear than to be forgotten.”

She had drawn towards the door as she spoke, her rich voice sounding
softer and farther away; and with the last word she was gone, and I lay
alone in the moonlit chamber. What I might have done had not I lain
bound by my extreme weakness, I know not; but as it was there fell upon
me a great and blank despair. It was not long before there shone in at
the door the ruddy glimmer of a lantern, and Felipe coming, charged me
without a word upon his shoulders, and carried me down to the great
gate, where the cart was waiting. In the moonlight the hills stood out
sharply, as if they were of cardboard; on the glimmering surface of the
plateau, and from among the low trees which swung together and sparkled
in the wind, the great black cube of the residencia stood out bulkily,
its mass only broken by three dimly lighted windows in the northern
front above the gate. They were Olalla’s windows, and as the cart
jolted onwards I kept my eyes fixed upon them till, where the road
dipped into a valley, they were lost to my view forever. Felipe walked
in silence beside the shafts, but from time to time he would cheek the
mule and seem to look back upon me; and at length drew quite near and
laid his hand upon my head. There was such kindness in the touch, and
such a simplicity, as of the brutes, that tears broke from me like the
bursting of an artery.

“Felipe,” I said, “take me where they will ask no questions.”

He said never a word, but he turned his mule about, end for end,
retraced some part of the way we had gone, and, striking into another
path, led me to the mountain village, which was, as we say in Scotland,
the kirkton of that thinly peopled district. Some broken memories dwell
in my mind of the day breaking over the plain, of the cart stopping, of
arms that helped me down, of a bare room into which I was carried, and
of a swoon that fell upon me like sleep.

The next day and the days following the old priest was often at my side
with his snuff-box and prayer book, and after a while, when I began to
pick up strength, he told me that I was now on a fair way to recovery,
and must as soon as possible hurry my departure; whereupon, without
naming any reason, he took snuff and looked at me sideways. I did not
affect ignorance; I knew he must have seen Olalla. “Sir,” said I, “you
know that I do not ask in wantonness. What of that family?”

He said they were very unfortunate; that it seemed a declining race,
and that they were very poor and had been much neglected.

“But she has not,” I said. “Thanks, doubtless, to yourself, she is
instructed and wise beyond the use of women.”

“Yes,” he said; “the Senorita is well-informed. But the family has been
neglected.”

“The mother?” I queried.

“Yes, the mother too,” said the Padre, taking snuff. “But Felipe is a
well-intentioned lad.”

“The mother is odd?” I asked.

“Very odd,” replied the priest.

“I think, sir, we beat about the bush,” said I. “You must know more of
my affairs than you allow. You must know my curiosity to be justified
on many grounds. Will you not be frank with me?”

“My son,” said the old gentleman, “I will be very frank with you on
matters within my competence; on those of which I know nothing it does
not require much discretion to be silent. I will not fence with you, I
take your meaning perfectly; and what can I say, but that we are all in
God’s hands, and that His ways are not as our ways? I have even advised
with my superiors in the church, but they, too, were dumb. It is a
great mystery.”

“Is she mad?” I asked.

“I will answer you according to my belief. She is not,” returned the
Padre, “or she was not. When she was young—God help me, I fear I
neglected that wild lamb—she was surely sane; and yet, although it did
not run to such heights, the same strain was already notable; it had
been so before her in her father, ay, and before him, and this inclined
me, perhaps, to think too lightly of it. But these things go on
growing, not only in the individual but in the race.”

“When she was young,” I began, and my voice failed me for a moment, and
it was only with a great effort that I was able to add, “was she like
Olalla?”

“Now God forbid!” exclaimed the Padre. “God forbid that any man should
think so slightingly of my favourite penitent. No, no; the Senorita
(but for her beauty, which I wish most honestly she had less of) has
not a hair’s resemblance to what her mother was at the same age. I
could not bear to have you think so; though, Heaven knows, it were,
perhaps, better that you should.”

At this, I raised myself in bed, and opened my heart to the old man;
telling him of our love and of her decision, owning my own horrors, my
own passing fancies, but telling him that these were at an end; and
with something more than a purely formal submission, appealing to his
judgment.

He heard me very patiently and without surprise; and when I had done,
he sat for some time silent. Then he began: “The church,” and instantly
broke off again to apologise. “I had forgotten, my child, that you were
not a Christian,” said he. “And indeed, upon a point so highly unusual,
even the church can scarce be said to have decided. But would you have
my opinion? The Senorita is, in a matter of this kind, the best judge;
I would accept her judgment.”

On the back of that he went away, nor was he thenceforward so assiduous
in his visits; indeed, even when I began to get about again, he plainly
feared and deprecated my society, not as in distaste but much as a man
might be disposed to flee from the riddling sphynx. The villagers, too,
avoided me; they were unwilling to be my guides upon the mountain. I
thought they looked at me askance, and I made sure that the more
superstitious crossed themselves on my approach. At first I set this
down to my heretical opinions; but it began at length to dawn upon me
that if I was thus redoubted it was because I had stayed at the
residencia. All men despise the savage notions of such peasantry; and
yet I was conscious of a chill shadow that seemed to fall and dwell
upon my love. It did not conquer, but I may not deny that it restrained
my ardour.

Some miles westward of the village there was a gap in the sierra, from
which the eye plunged direct upon the residencia; and thither it became
my daily habit to repair. A wood crowned the summit; and just where the
pathway issued from its fringes, it was overhung by a considerable
shelf of rock, and that, in its turn, was surmounted by a crucifix of
the size of life and more than usually painful in design. This was my
perch; thence, day after day, I looked down upon the plateau, and the
great old house, and could see Felipe, no bigger than a fly, going to
and fro about the garden. Sometimes mists would draw across the view,
and be broken up again by mountain winds; sometimes the plain slumbered
below me in unbroken sunshine; it would sometimes be all blotted out by
rain. This distant post, these interrupted sights of the place where my
life had been so strangely changed, suited the indecision of my humour.
I passed whole days there, debating with myself the various elements of
our position; now leaning to the suggestions of love, now giving an ear
to prudence, and in the end halting irresolute between the two.

One day, as I was sitting on my rock, there came by that way a somewhat
gaunt peasant wrapped in a mantle. He was a stranger, and plainly did
not know me even by repute; for, instead of keeping the other side, he
drew near and sat down beside me, and we had soon fallen in talk. Among
other things he told me he had been a muleteer, and in former years had
much frequented these mountains; later on, he had followed the army
with his mules, had realised a competence, and was now living retired
with his family.

“Do you know that house?” I inquired, at last, pointing to the
residencia, for I readily wearied of any talk that kept me from the
thought of Olalla.

He looked at me darkly and crossed himself.

“Too well,” he said, “it was there that one of my comrades sold himself
to Satan; the Virgin shield us from temptations! He has paid the price;
he is now burning in the reddest place in Hell!”

A fear came upon me; I could answer nothing; and presently the man
resumed, as if to himself: “Yes,” he said, “O yes, I know it. I have
passed its doors. There was snow upon the pass, the wind was driving
it; sure enough there was death that night upon the mountains, but
there was worse beside the hearth. I took him by the arm, Senor, and
dragged him to the gate; I conjured him, by all he loved and respected,
to go forth with me; I went on my knees before him in the snow; and I
could see he was moved by my entreaty. And just then she came out on
the gallery, and called him by his name; and he turned, and there was
she standing with a lamp in her hand and smiling on him to come back. I
cried out aloud to God, and threw my arms about him, but he put me by,
and left me alone. He had made his choice; God help us. I would pray
for him, but to what end? there are sins that not even the Pope can
loose.”

“And your friend,” I asked, “what became of him?”

“Nay, God knows,” said the muleteer. “If all be true that we hear, his
end was like his sin, a thing to raise the hair.”

“Do you mean that he was killed?” I asked.

“Sure enough, he was killed,” returned the man. “But how? Ay, how? But
these are things that it is sin to speak of.”

“The people of that house . . . ” I began.

But he interrupted me with a savage outburst. “The people?” he cried.
“What people? There are neither men nor women in that house of Satan’s!
What? have you lived here so long, and never heard?” And here he put
his mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even the fowls of the mountain
might have over-heard and been stricken with horror.

What he told me was not true, nor was it even original; being, indeed,
but a new edition, vamped up again by village ignorance and
superstition, of stories nearly as ancient as the race of man. It was
rather the application that appalled me. In the old days, he said, the
church would have burned out that nest of basilisks; but the arm of the
church was now shortened; his friend Miguel had been unpunished by the
hands of men, and left to the more awful judgment of an offended God.
This was wrong; but it should be so no more. The Padre was sunk in age;
he was even bewitched himself; but the eyes of his flock were now awake
to their own danger; and some day—ay, and before long—the smoke of that
house should go up to heaven.

He left me filled with horror and fear. Which way to turn I knew not;
whether first to warn the Padre, or to carry my ill-news direct to the
threatened inhabitants of the residencia. Fate was to decide for me;
for, while I was still hesitating, I beheld the veiled figure of a
woman drawing near to me up the pathway. No veil could deceive my
penetration; by every line and every movement I recognised Olalla; and
keeping hidden behind a corner of the rock, I suffered her to gain the
summit. Then I came forward. She knew me and paused, but did not speak;
I, too, remained silent; and we continued for some time to gaze upon
each other with a passionate sadness.

“I thought you had gone,” she said at length. “It is all that you can
do for me—to go. It is all I ever asked of you. And you still stay. But
do you know, that every day heaps up the peril of death, not only on
your head, but on ours? A report has gone about the mountain; it is
thought you love me, and the people will not suffer it.”

I saw she was already informed of her danger, and I rejoiced at it.
“Olalla,” I said, “I am ready to go this day, this very hour, but not
alone.”

She stepped aside and knelt down before the crucifix to pray, and I
stood by and looked now at her and now at the object of her adoration,
now at the living figure of the penitent, and now at the ghastly,
daubed countenance, the painted wounds, and the projected ribs of the
image. The silence was only broken by the wailing of some large birds
that circled sidelong, as if in surprise or alarm, about the summit of
the hills. Presently Olalla rose again, turned towards me, raised her
veil, and, still leaning with one hand on the shaft of the crucifix,
looked upon me with a pale and sorrowful countenance.

“I have laid my hand upon the cross,” she said. “The Padre says you are
no Christian; but look up for a moment with my eyes, and behold the
face of the Man of Sorrows. We are all such as He was—the inheritors of
sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is
in all of us—ay, even in me—a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must
endure for a little while, until morning returns bringing peace. Suffer
me to pass on upon my way alone; it is thus that I shall be least
lonely, counting for my friend Him who is the friend of all the
distressed; it is thus that I shall be the most happy, having taken my
farewell of earthly happiness, and willingly accepted sorrow for my
portion.”

I looked at the face of the crucifix, and, though I was no friend to
images, and despised that imitative and grimacing art of which it was a
rude example, some sense of what the thing implied was carried home to
my intelligence. The face looked down upon me with a painful and deadly
contraction; but the rays of a glory encircled it, and reminded me that
the sacrifice was voluntary. It stood there, crowning the rock, as it
still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by,
an emblem of sad and noble truths; that pleasure is not an end, but an
accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best
to suffer all things and do well. I turned and went down the mountain
in silence; and when I looked back for the last time before the wood
closed about my path, I saw Olalla still leaning on the crucifix.




THE TREASURE OF FRANCHARD.




CHAPTER I.
BY THE DYING MOUNTEBANK.


They had sent for the doctor from Bourron before six. About eight some
villagers came round for the performance, and were told how matters
stood. It seemed a liberty for a mountebank to fall ill like real
people, and they made off again in dudgeon. By ten Madame Tentaillon
was gravely alarmed, and had sent down the street for Doctor Desprez.

The Doctor was at work over his manuscripts in one corner of the little
dining-room, and his wife was asleep over the fire in another, when the
messenger arrived.

“Sapristi!” said the Doctor, “you should have sent for me before. It
was a case for hurry.” And he followed the messenger as he was, in his
slippers and skull-cap.

The inn was not thirty yards away, but the messenger did not stop
there; he went in at one door and out by another into the court, and
then led the way by a flight of steps beside the stable, to the loft
where the mountebank lay sick. If Doctor Desprez were to live a
thousand years, he would never forget his arrival in that room; for not
only was the scene picturesque, but the moment made a date in his
existence. We reckon our lives, I hardly know why, from the date of our
first sorry appearance in society, as if from a first humiliation; for
no actor can come upon the stage with a worse grace. Not to go further
back, which would be judged too curious, there are subsequently many
moving and decisive accidents in the lives of all, which would make as
logical a period as this of birth. And here, for instance, Doctor
Desprez, a man past forty, who had made what is called a failure in
life, and was moreover married, found himself at a new point of
departure when he opened the door of the loft above Tentaillon’s
stable.

It was a large place, lighted only by a single candle set upon the
floor. The mountebank lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man, with
a Quixotic nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon stooped over
him, applying a hot water and mustard embrocation to his feet; and on a
chair close by sat a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet
dangling. These three were the only occupants, except the shadows. But
the shadows were a company in themselves; the extent of the room
exaggerated them to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the
candle the light struck upwards and produced deformed foreshortenings.
The mountebank’s profile was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and
it was strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the flame was
blown about by draughts. As for Madame Tentaillon, her shadow was no
more than a gross hump of shoulders, with now and again a hemisphere of
head. The chair legs were spindled out as long as stilts, and the boy
set perched atop of them, like a cloud, in the corner of the roof.

It was the boy who took the Doctor’s fancy. He had a great arched
skull, the forehead and the hands of a musician, and a pair of haunting
eyes. It was not merely that these eyes were large, or steady, or the
softest ruddy brown. There was a look in them, besides, which thrilled
the Doctor, and made him half uneasy. He was sure he had seen such a
look before, and yet he could not remember how or where. It was as if
this boy, who was quite a stranger to him, had the eyes of an old
friend or an old enemy. And the boy would give him no peace; he seemed
profoundly indifferent to what was going on, or rather abstracted from
it in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his feet against
the bars of the chair, and holding his hands folded on his lap. But,
for all that, his eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with a
thoughtful fixity of gaze. Desprez could not tell whether he was
fascinating the boy, or the boy was fascinating him. He busied himself
over the sick man: he put questions, he felt the pulse, he jested, he
grew a little hot and swore: and still, whenever he looked round, there
were the brown eyes waiting for his with the same inquiring, melancholy
gaze.

At last the Doctor hit on the solution at a leap. He remembered the
look now. The little fellow, although he was as straight as a dart, had
the eyes that go usually with a crooked back; he was not at all
deformed, and yet a deformed person seemed to be looking at you from
below his brows. The Doctor drew a long breath, he was so much relieved
to find a theory (for he loved theories) and to explain away his
interest.

For all that, he despatched the invalid with unusual haste, and, still
kneeling with one knee on the floor, turned a little round and looked
the boy over at his leisure. The boy was not in the least put out, but
looked placidly back at the Doctor.

“Is this your father?” asked Desprez.

“Oh, no,” returned the boy; “my master.”

“Are you fond of him?” continued the Doctor.

“No, sir,” said the boy.

Madame Tentaillon and Desprez exchanged expressive glances.

“That is bad, my man,” resumed the latter, with a shade of sternness.
“Every one should be fond of the dying, or conceal their sentiments;
and your master here is dying. If I have watched a bird a little while
stealing my cherries, I have a thought of disappointment when he flies
away over my garden wall, and I see him steer for the forest and
vanish. How much more a creature such as this, so strong, so astute, so
richly endowed with faculties! When I think that, in a few hours, the
speech will be silenced, the breath extinct, and even the shadow
vanished from the wall, I who never saw him, this lady who knew him
only as a guest, are touched with some affection.”

The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be reflecting.

“You did not know him,” he replied at last, “he was a bad man.”

“He is a little pagan,” said the landlady. “For that matter, they are
all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists, and what not. They
have no interior.”

But the Doctor was still scrutinising the little pagan, his eyebrows
knotted and uplifted.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Jean-Marie,” said the lad.

Desprez leaped upon him with one of his sudden flashes of excitement,
and felt his head all over from an ethnological point of view.

“Celtic, Celtic!” he said.

“Celtic!” cried Madame Tentaillon, who had perhaps confounded the word
with hydrocephalous. “Poor lad! is it dangerous?”

“That depends,” returned the Doctor grimly. And then once more
addressing the boy: “And what do you do for your living, Jean-Marie?”
he inquired.

“I tumble,” was the answer.

“So! Tumble?” repeated Desprez. “Probably healthful. I hazard the
guess, Madame Tentaillon, that tumbling is a healthful way of life. And
have you never done anything else but tumble?”

“Before I learned that, I used to steal,” answered Jean-Marie gravely.

“Upon my word!” cried the doctor. “You are a nice little man for your
age. Madame, when my _confrère_ comes from Bourron, you will
communicate my unfavourable opinion. I leave the case in his hands; but
of course, on any alarming symptom, above all if there should be a sign
of rally, do not hesitate to knock me up. I am a doctor no longer, I
thank God; but I have been one. Good night, madame. Good sleep to you,
Jean-Marie.”




CHAPTER II.
MORNING TALK


Doctor Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, before the
first cart rattled over the bridge to the day’s labour in the fields,
he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch
of grapes; now he would eat a big pear under the trellice; now he would
draw all sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane; now he
would go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber
landing-place at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used
to say, for making theories like the early morning. “I rise earlier
than any one else in the village,” he once boasted. “It is a fair
consequence that I know more and wish to do less with my knowledge.”

The Doctor was a connoisseur of sunrises, and loved a good theatrical
effect to usher in the day. He had a theory of dew, by which he could
predict the weather. Indeed, most things served him to that end: the
sound of the bells from all the neighbouring villages, the smell of the
forest, the visits and the behaviour of both birds and fishes, the look
of the plants in his garden, the disposition of cloud, the colour of
the light, and last, although not least, the arsenal of meteorological
instruments in a louvre-boarded hutch upon the lawn. Ever since he had
settled at Gretz, he had been growing more and more into the local
meteorologist, the unpaid champion of the local climate. He thought at
first there was no place so healthful in the arrondissement. By the end
of the second year, he protested there was none so wholesome in the
whole department. And for some time before he met Jean-Marie he had
been prepared to challenge all France and the better part of Europe for
a rival to his chosen spot.

“Doctor,” he would say—“doctor is a foul word. It should not be used to
ladies. It implies disease. I remark it, as a flaw in our civilisation,
that we have not the proper horror of disease. Now I, for my part, have
washed my hands of it; I have renounced my laureation; I am no doctor;
I am only a worshipper of the true goddess Hygieia. Ah, believe me, it
is she who has the cestus! And here, in this exiguous hamlet, has she
placed her shrine: here she dwells and lavishes her gifts; here I walk
with her in the early morning, and she shows me how strong she has made
the peasants, how fruitful she has made the fields, how the trees grow
up tall and comely under her eyes, and the fishes in the river become
clean and agile at her presence.—Rheumatism!” he would cry, on some
malapert interruption, “O, yes, I believe we do have a little
rheumatism. That could hardly be avoided, you know, on a river. And of
course the place stands a little low; and the meadows are marshy,
there’s no doubt. But, my dear sir, look at Bourron! Bourron stands
high. Bourron is close to the forest; plenty of ozone there, you would
say. Well, compared with Gretz, Bourron is a perfect shambles.”

The morning after he had been summoned to the dying mountebank, the
Doctor visited the wharf at the tail of his garden, and had a long look
at the running water. This he called prayer; but whether his adorations
were addressed to the goddess Hygieia or some more orthodox deity,
never plainly appeared. For he had uttered doubtful oracles, sometimes
declaring that a river was the type of bodily health, sometimes
extolling it as the great moral preacher, continually preaching peace,
continuity, and diligence to man’s tormented spirits. After he had
watched a mile or so of the clear water running by before his eyes,
seen a fish or two come to the surface with a gleam of silver, and
sufficiently admired the long shadows of the trees falling half across
the river from the opposite bank, with patches of moving sunlight in
between, he strolled once more up the garden and through his house into
the street, feeling cool and renovated.

The sound of his feet upon the causeway began the business of the day;
for the village was still sound asleep. The church tower looked very
airy in the sunlight; a few birds that turned about it, seemed to swim
in an atmosphere of more than usual rarity; and the Doctor, walking in
long transparent shadows, filled his lungs amply, and proclaimed
himself well contented with the morning.

On one of the posts before Tentaillon’s carriage entry he espied a
little dark figure perched in a meditative attitude, and immediately
recognised Jean-Marie.

“Aha!” he said, stopping before him humorously, with a hand on either
knee. “So we rise early in the morning, do we? It appears to me that we
have all the vices of a philosopher.”

The boy got to his feet and made a grave salutation.

“And how is our patient?” asked Desprez.

It appeared the patient was about the same.

“And why do you rise early in the morning?” he pursued.

Jean-Marie, after a long silence, professed that he hardly knew.

“You hardly know?” repeated Desprez. “We hardly know anything, my man,
until we try to learn. Interrogate your consciousness. Come, push me
this inquiry home. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” said the boy slowly; “yes, I like it.”

“And why do you like it?” continued the Doctor. “(We are now pursuing
the Socratic method.) Why do you like it?”

“It is quiet,” answered Jean-Marie; “and I have nothing to do; and then
I feel as if I were good.”

Doctor Desprez took a seat on the post at the opposite side. He was
beginning to take an interest in the talk, for the boy plainly thought
before he spoke, and tried to answer truly. “It appears you have a
taste for feeling good,” said the Doctor. “Now, there you puzzle me
extremely; for I thought you said you were a thief; and the two are
incompatible.”

“Is it very bad to steal?” asked Jean-Marie.

“Such is the general opinion, little boy,” replied the Doctor.

“No; but I mean as I stole,” explained the other. “For I had no choice.
I think it is surely right to have bread; it must be right to have
bread, there comes so plain a want of it. And then they beat me cruelly
if I returned with nothing,” he added. “I was not ignorant of right and
wrong; for before that I had been well taught by a priest, who was very
kind to me.” (The Doctor made a horrible grimace at the word “priest.”)
“But it seemed to me, when one had nothing to eat and was beaten, it
was a different affair. I would not have stolen for tartlets, I
believe; but any one would steal for baker’s bread.”

“And so I suppose,” said the Doctor, with a rising sneer, “you prayed
God to forgive you, and explained the case to Him at length.”

“Why, sir?” asked Jean-Marie. “I do not see.”

“Your priest would see, however,” retorted Desprez.

“Would he?” asked the boy, troubled for the first time. “I should have
thought God would have known.”

“Eh?” snarled the Doctor.

“I should have thought God would have understood me,” replied the
other. “You do not, I see; but then it was God that made me think so,
was it not?”

“Little boy, little boy,” said Dr. Desprez, “I told you already you had
the vices of philosophy; if you display the virtues also, I must go. I
am a student of the blessed laws of health, an observer of plain and
temperate nature in her common walks; and I cannot preserve my
equanimity in presence of a monster. Do you understand?”

“No, sir,” said the boy.

“I will make my meaning clear to you,” replied the doctor. “Look there
at the sky—behind the belfry first, where it is so light, and then up
and up, turning your chin back, right to the top of the dome, where it
is already as blue as at noon. Is not that a beautiful colour? Does it
not please the heart? We have seen it all our lives, until it has grown
in with our familiar thoughts. Now,” changing his tone, “suppose that
sky to become suddenly of a live and fiery amber, like the colour of
clear coals, and growing scarlet towards the top—I do not say it would
be any the less beautiful; but would you like it as well?”

“I suppose not,” answered Jean-Marie.

“Neither do I like you,” returned the Doctor, roughly. “I hate all odd
people, and you are the most curious little boy in all the world.”

Jean-Marie seemed to ponder for a while, and then he raised his head
again and looked over at the Doctor with an air of candid inquiry. “But
are not you a very curious gentleman?” he asked.

The Doctor threw away his stick, bounded on the boy, clasped him to his
bosom, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Admirable, admirable imp!” he
cried. “What a morning, what an hour for a theorist of forty-two! No,”
he continued, apostrophising heaven, “I did not know such boys existed;
I was ignorant they made them so; I had doubted of my race; and now! It
is like,” he added, picking up his stick, “like a lovers’ meeting. I
have bruised my favourite staff in that moment of enthusiasm. The
injury, however, is not grave.” He caught the boy looking at him in
obvious wonder, embarrassment, and alarm. “Hullo!” said he, “why do you
look at me like that? Egad, I believe the boy despises me. Do you
despise me, boy?”

“O, no,” replied Jean-Marie, seriously; “only I do not understand.”

“You must excuse me, sir,” returned the Doctor, with gravity; “I am
still so young. O, hang him!” he added to himself. And he took his seat
again and observed the boy sardonically. “He has spoiled the quiet of
my morning,” thought he. “I shall be nervous all day, and have a
febricule when I digest. Let me compose myself.” And so he dismissed
his pre-occupations by an effort of the will which he had long
practised, and let his soul roam abroad in the contemplation of the
morning. He inhaled the air, tasting it critically as a connoisseur
tastes a vintage, and prolonging the expiration with hygienic gusto. He
counted the little flecks of cloud along the sky. He followed the
movements of the birds round the church tower—making long sweeps,
hanging poised, or turning airy somersaults in fancy, and beating the
wind with imaginary pinions. And in this way he regained peace of mind
and animal composure, conscious of his limbs, conscious of the sight of
his eyes, conscious that the air had a cool taste, like a fruit, at the
top of his throat; and at last, in complete abstraction, he began to
sing. The Doctor had but one air—, “Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre;”
even with that he was on terms of mere politeness; and his musical
exploits were always reserved for moments when he was alone and
entirely happy.

He was recalled to earth rudely by a pained expression on the boy’s
face. “What do you think of my singing?” he inquired, stopping in the
middle of a note; and then, after he had waited some little while and
received no answer, “What do you think of my singing?” he repeated,
imperiously.

“I do not like it,” faltered Jean-Marie.

“Oh, come!” cried the Doctor. “Possibly you are a performer yourself?”

“I sing better than that,” replied the boy.

The Doctor eyed him for some seconds in stupefaction. He was aware that
he was angry, and blushed for himself in consequence, which made him
angrier. “If this is how you address your master!” he said at last,
with a shrug and a flourish of his arms.

“I do not speak to him at all,” returned the boy. “I do not like him.”

“Then you like me?” snapped Doctor Desprez, with unusual eagerness.

“I do not know,” answered Jean-Marie.

The Doctor rose. “I shall wish you a good morning,” he said. “You are
too much for me. Perhaps you have blood in your veins, perhaps
celestial ichor, or perhaps you circulate nothing more gross than
respirable air; but of one thing I am inexpugnably assured:—that you
are no human being. No, boy”—shaking his stick at him—“you are not a
human being. Write, write it in your memory—‘I am not a human being—I
have no pretension to be a human being—I am a dive, a dream, an angel,
an acrostic, an illusion—what you please, but not a human being.’ And
so accept my humble salutations and farewell!”

And with that the Doctor made off along the street in some emotion, and
the boy stood, mentally gaping, where he left him.




CHAPTER III.
THE ADOPTION.


Madame Desprez, who answered to the Christian name of Anastasie,
presented an agreeable type of her sex; exceedingly wholesome to look
upon, a stout _brune_, with cool smooth cheeks, steady, dark eyes, and
hands that neither art nor nature could improve. She was the sort of
person over whom adversity passes like a summer cloud; she might, in
the worst of conjunctions, knit her brows into one vertical furrow for
a moment, but the next it would be gone. She had much of the placidity
of a contented nun; with little of her piety, however; for Anastasie
was of a very mundane nature, fond of oysters and old wine, and
somewhat bold pleasantries, and devoted to her husband for her own sake
rather than for his. She was imperturbably good-natured, but had no
idea of self-sacrifice. To live in that pleasant old house, with a
green garden behind and bright flowers about the window, to eat and
drink of the best, to gossip with a neighbour for a quarter of an hour,
never to wear stays or a dress except when she went to Fontainebleau
shopping, to be kept in a continual supply of racy novels, and to be
married to Doctor Desprez and have no ground of jealousy, filled the
cup of her nature to the brim. Those who had known the Doctor in
bachelor days, when he had aired quite as many theories, but of a
different order, attributed his present philosophy to the study of
Anastasie. It was her brute enjoyment that he rationalised and perhaps
vainly imitated.

Madame Desprez was an artist in the kitchen, and made coffee to a
nicety. She had a knack of tidiness, with which she had infected the
Doctor; everything was in its place; everything capable of polish shone
gloriously; and dust was a thing banished from her empire. Aline, their
single servant, had no other business in the world but to scour and
burnish. So Doctor Desprez lived in his house like a fatted calf,
warmed and cosseted to his heart’s content.

The midday meal was excellent. There was a ripe melon, a fish from the
river in a memorable Bearnaise sauce, a fat fowl in a fricassee, and a
dish of asparagus, followed by some fruit. The Doctor drank half a
bottle _plus_ one glass, the wife half a bottle _minus_ the same
quantity, which was a marital privilege, of an excellent Côte-Rôtie,
seven years old. Then the coffee was brought, and a flask of Chartreuse
for madame, for the Doctor despised and distrusted such decoctions; and
then Aline left the wedded pair to the pleasures of memory and
digestion.

“It is a very fortunate circumstance, my cherished one,” observed the
Doctor—“this coffee is adorable—a very fortunate circumstance upon the
whole—Anastasie, I beseech you, go without that poison for to-day; only
one day, and you will feel the benefit, I pledge my reputation.”

“What is this fortunate circumstance, my friend?” inquired Anastasie,
not heeding his protest, which was of daily recurrence.

“That we have no children, my beautiful,” replied the Doctor. “I think
of it more and more as the years go on, and with more and more
gratitude towards the Power that dispenses such afflictions. Your
health, my darling, my studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies,
how they would all have suffered, how they would all have been
sacrificed! And for what? Children are the last word of human
imperfection. Health flees before their face. They cry, my dear; they
put vexatious questions; they demand to be fed, to be washed, to be
educated, to have their noses blown; and then, when the time comes,
they break our hearts, as I break this piece of sugar. A pair of
professed egoists, like you and me, should avoid offspring, like an
infidelity.”

“Indeed!” said she; and she laughed. “Now, that is like you—to take
credit for the thing you could not help.”

“My dear,” returned the Doctor, solemnly, “we might have adopted.”

“Never!” cried madame. “Never, Doctor, with my consent. If the child
were my own flesh and blood, I would not say no. But to take another
person’s indiscretion on my shoulders, my dear friend, I have too much
sense.”

“Precisely,” replied the Doctor. “We both had. And I am all the better
pleased with our wisdom, because—because—” He looked at her sharply.

“Because what?” she asked, with a faint premonition of danger.

“Because I have found the right person,” said the Doctor firmly, “and
shall adopt him this afternoon.”

Anastasie looked at him out of a mist. “You have lost your reason,” she
said; and there was a clang in her voice that seemed to threaten
trouble.

“Not so, my dear,” he replied; “I retain its complete exercise. To the
proof: instead of attempting to cloak my inconsistency, I have, by way
of preparing you, thrown it into strong relief. You will there, I
think, recognise the philosopher who has the ecstasy to call you wife.
The fact is, I have been reckoning all this while without an accident.
I never thought to find a son of my own. Now, last night, I found one.
Do not unnecessarily alarm yourself, my dear; he is not a drop of blood
to me that I know. It is his mind, darling, his mind that calls me
father.”

“His mind!” she repeated with a titter between scorn and hysterics.
“His mind, indeed! Henri, is this an idiotic pleasantry, or are you
mad? His mind! And what of my mind?”

“Truly,” replied the Doctor with a shrug, “you have your finger on the
hitch. He will be strikingly antipathetic to my ever beautiful
Anastasie. She will never understand him; he will never understand her.
You married the animal side of my nature, dear and it is on the
spiritual side that I find my affinity for Jean-Marie. So much so,
that, to be perfectly frank, I stand in some awe of him myself. You
will easily perceive that I am announcing a calamity for you. Do not,”
he broke out in tones of real solicitude—“do not give way to tears
after a meal, Anastasie. You will certainly give yourself a false
digestion.”

Anastasie controlled herself. “You know how willing I am to humour
you,” she said, “in all reasonable matters. But on this point—”

“My dear love,” interrupted the Doctor, eager to prevent a refusal,
“who wished to leave Paris? Who made me give up cards, and the opera,
and the boulevard, and my social relations, and all that was my life
before I knew you? Have I been faithful? Have I been obedient? Have I
not borne my doom with cheerfulness? In all honesty, Anastasie, have I
not a right to a stipulation on my side? I have, and you know it. I
stipulate my son.”

Anastasie was aware of defeat; she struck her colours instantly. “You
will break my heart,” she sighed.

“Not in the least,” said he. “You will feel a trifling inconvenience
for a month, just as I did when I was first brought to this vile
hamlet; then your admirable sense and temper will prevail, and I see
you already as content as ever, and making your husband the happiest of
men.”

“You know I can refuse you nothing,” she said, with a last flicker of
resistance; “nothing that will make you truly happier. But will this?
Are you sure, my husband? Last night, you say, you found him! He may be
the worst of humbugs.”

“I think not,” replied the Doctor. “But do not suppose me so unwary as
to adopt him out of hand. I am, I flatter myself, a finished man of the
world; I have had all possibilities in view; my plan is contrived to
meet them all. I take the lad as stable boy. If he pilfer, if he
grumble, if he desire to change, I shall see I was mistaken; I shall
recognise him for no son of mine, and send him tramping.”

“You will never do so when the time comes,” said his wife; “I know your
good heart.”

She reached out her hand to him, with a sigh; the Doctor smiled as he
took it and carried it to his lips; he had gained his point with
greater ease than he had dared to hope; for perhaps the twentieth time
he had proved the efficacy of his trusty argument, his Excalibur, the
hint of a return to Paris. Six months in the capital, for a man of the
Doctor’s antecedents and relations, implied no less a calamity than
total ruin. Anastasie had saved the remainder of his fortune by keeping
him strictly in the country. The very name of Paris put her in a blue
fear; and she would have allowed her husband to keep a menagerie in the
back garden, let alone adopting a stable-boy, rather than permit the
question of return to be discussed.

About four of the afternoon, the mountebank rendered up his ghost; he
had never been conscious since his seizure. Doctor Desprez was present
at his last passage, and declared the farce over. Then he took
Jean-Marie by the shoulder and led him out into the inn garden where
there was a convenient bench beside the river. Here he sat him down and
made the boy place himself on his left.

“Jean-Marie,” he said very gravely, “this world is exceedingly vast;
and even France, which is only a small corner of it, is a great place
for a little lad like you. Unfortunately it is full of eager,
shouldering people moving on; and there are very few bakers’ shops for
so many eaters. Your master is dead; you are not fit to gain a living
by yourself; you do not wish to steal? No. Your situation then is
undesirable; it is, for the moment, critical. On the other hand, you
behold in me a man not old, though elderly, still enjoying the youth of
the heart and the intelligence; a man of instruction; easily situated
in this world’s affairs; keeping a good table:—a man, neither as friend
nor host, to be despised. I offer you your food and clothes, and to
teach you lessons in the evening, which will be infinitely more to the
purpose for a lad of your stamp than those of all the priests in
Europe. I propose no wages, but if ever you take a thought to leave me,
the door shall be open, and I will give you a hundred francs to start
the world upon. In return, I have an old horse and chaise, which you
would very speedily learn to clean and keep in order. Do not hurry
yourself to answer, and take it or leave it as you judge aright. Only
remember this, that I am no sentimentalist or charitable person, but a
man who lives rigorously to himself; and that if I make the proposal,
it is for my own ends—it is because I perceive clearly an advantage to
myself. And now, reflect.”

“I shall be very glad. I do not see what else I can do. I thank you,
sir, most kindly, and I will try to be useful,” said the boy.

“Thank you,” said the Doctor warmly, rising at the same time and wiping
his brow, for he had suffered agonies while the thing hung in the wind.
A refusal, after the scene at noon, would have placed him in a
ridiculous light before Anastasie. “How hot and heavy is the evening,
to be sure! I have always had a fancy to be a fish in summer,
Jean-Marie, here in the Loing beside Gretz. I should lie under a
water-lily and listen to the bells, which must sound most delicately
down below. That would be a life—do you not think so too?”

“Yes,” said Jean-Marie.

“Thank God you have imagination!” cried the Doctor, embracing the boy
with his usual effusive warmth, though it was a proceeding that seemed
to disconcert the sufferer almost as much as if he had been an English
schoolboy of the same age. “And now,” he added, “I will take you to my
wife.”

Madame Desprez sat in the dining-room in a cool wrapper. All the blinds
were down, and the tile floor had been recently sprinkled with water;
her eyes were half shut, but she affected to be reading a novel as the
they entered. Though she was a bustling woman, she enjoyed repose
between whiles and had a remarkable appetite for sleep.

The Doctor went through a solemn form of introduction, adding, for the
benefit of both parties, “You must try to like each other for my sake.”

“He is very pretty,” said Anastasie. “Will you kiss me, my pretty
little fellow?”

The Doctor was furious, and dragged her into the passage. “Are you a
fool, Anastasie?” he said. “What is all this I hear about the tact of
women? Heaven knows, I have not met with it in my experience. You
address my little philosopher as if he were an infant. He must be
spoken to with more respect, I tell you; he must not be kissed and
Georgy-porgy’d like an ordinary child.”

“I only did it to please you, I am sure,” replied Anastasie; “but I
will try to do better.”

The Doctor apologised for his warmth. “But I do wish him,” he
continued, “to feel at home among us. And really your conduct was so
idiotic, my cherished one, and so utterly and distantly out of place,
that a saint might have been pardoned a little vehemence in
disapproval. Do, do try—if it is possible for a woman to understand
young people—but of course it is not, and I waste my breath. Hold your
tongue as much as possible at least, and observe my conduct narrowly;
it will serve you for a model.”

Anastasie did as she was bidden, and considered the Doctor’s behaviour.
She observed that he embraced the boy three times in the course of the
evening, and managed generally to confound and abash the little fellow
out of speech and appetite. But she had the true womanly heroism in
little affairs. Not only did she refrain from the cheap revenge of
exposing the Doctor’s errors to himself, but she did her best to remove
their ill-effect on Jean-Marie. When Desprez went out for his last
breath of air before retiring for the night, she came over to the boy’s
side and took his hand.

“You must not be surprised nor frightened by my husband’s manners,” she
said. “He is the kindest of men, but so clever that he is sometimes
difficult to understand. You will soon grow used to him, and then you
will love him, for that nobody can help. As for me, you may be sure, I
shall try to make you happy, and will not bother you at all. I think we
should be excellent friends, you and I. I am not clever, but I am very
good-natured. Will you give me a kiss?”

He held up his face, and she took him in her arms and then began to
cry. The woman had spoken in complaisance; but she had warmed to her
own words, and tenderness followed. The Doctor, entering, found them
enlaced: he concluded that his wife was in fault; and he was just
beginning, in an awful voice, “Anastasie—,” when she looked up at him,
smiling, with an upraised finger; and he held his peace, wondering,
while she led the boy to his attic.




CHAPTER IV.
THE EDUCATION OF A PHILOSOPHER.


The installation of the adopted stable-boy was thus happily effected,
and the wheels of life continued to run smoothly in the Doctor’s house.
Jean-Marie did his horse and carriage duty in the morning; sometimes
helped in the housework; sometimes walked abroad with the Doctor, to
drink wisdom from the fountain-head; and was introduced at night to the
sciences and the dead tongues. He retained his singular placidity of
mind and manner; he was rarely in fault; but he made only a very
partial progress in his studies, and remained much of a stranger in the
family.

The Doctor was a pattern of regularity. All forenoon he worked on his
great book, the “Comparative Pharmacopoeia, or Historical Dictionary of
all Medicines,” which as yet consisted principally of slips of paper
and pins. When finished, it was to fill many personable volumes, and to
combine antiquarian interest with professional utility. But the Doctor
was studious of literary graces and the picturesque; an anecdote, a
touch of manners, a moral qualification, or a sounding epithet was sure
to be preferred before a piece of science; a little more, and he would
have written the “Comparative Pharmacopoeia’ in verse! The article
“Mummia,” for instance, was already complete, though the remainder of
the work had not progressed beyond the letter A. It was exceedingly
copious and entertaining, written with quaintness and colour, exact,
erudite, a literary article; but it would hardly have afforded guidance
to a practising physician of to-day. The feminine good sense of his
wife had led her to point this out with uncompromising sincerity; for
the Dictionary was duly read aloud to her, betwixt sleep and waning, as
it proceeded towards an infinitely distant completion; and the Doctor
was a little sore on the subject of mummies, and sometimes resented an
allusion with asperity.

After the midday meal and a proper period of digestion, he walked,
sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by Jean-Marie; for madame would
have preferred any hardship rather than walk.

She was, as I have said, a very busy person, continually occupied about
material comforts, and ready to drop asleep over a novel the instant
she was disengaged. This was the less objectionable, as she never
snored or grew distempered in complexion when she slept. On the
contrary, she looked the very picture of luxurious and appetising ease,
and woke without a start to the perfect possession of her faculties. I
am afraid she was greatly an animal, but she was a very nice animal to
have about. In this way, she had little to do with Jean-Marie; but the
sympathy which had been established between them on the first night
remained unbroken; they held occasional conversations, mostly on
household matters; to the extreme disappointment of the Doctor, they
occasionally sallied off together to that temple of debasing
superstition, the village church; madame and he, both in their Sunday’s
best, drove twice a month to Fontainebleau and returned laden with
purchases; and in short, although the Doctor still continued to regard
them as irreconcilably anti-pathetic, their relation was as intimate,
friendly, and confidential as their natures suffered.

I fear, however, that in her heart of hearts, madame kindly despised
and pitied the boy. She had no admiration for his class of virtues; she
liked a smart, polite, forward, roguish sort of boy, cap in hand, light
of foot, meeting the eye; she liked volubility, charm, a little
vice—the promise of a second Doctor Desprez. And it was her
indefeasible belief that Jean-Marie was dull. “Poor dear boy,” she had
said once, “how sad it is that he should be so stupid!” She had never
repeated that remark, for the Doctor had raged like a wild bull,
denouncing the brutal bluntness of her mind, bemoaning his own fate to
be so unequally mated with an ass, and, what touched Anastasie more
nearly, menacing the table china by the fury of his gesticulations. But
she adhered silently to her opinion; and when Jean-Marie was sitting,
stolid, blank, but not unhappy, over his unfinished tasks, she would
snatch her opportunity in the Doctor’s absence, go over to him, put her
arms about his neck, lay her cheek to his, and communicate her sympathy
with his distress. “Do not mind,” she would say; “I, too, am not at all
clever, and I can assure you that it makes no difference in life.”

The Doctor’s view was naturally different. That gentleman never wearied
of the sound of his own voice, which was, to say the truth, agreeable
enough to hear. He now had a listener, who was not so cynically
indifferent as Anastasie, and who sometimes put him on his mettle by
the most relevant objections. Besides, was he not educating the boy?
And education, philosophers are agreed, is the most philosophical of
duties. What can be more heavenly to poor mankind than to have one’s
hobby grow into a duty to the State? Then, indeed, do the ways of life
become ways of pleasantness. Never had the Doctor seen reason to be
more content with his endowments. Philosophy flowed smoothly from his
lips. He was so agile a dialectician that he could trace his nonsense,
when challenged, back to some root in sense, and prove it to be a sort
of flower upon his system. He slipped out of antinomies like a fish,
and left his disciple marvelling at the rabbi’s depth.

Moreover, deep down in his heart the Doctor was disappointed with the
ill-success of his more formal education. A boy, chosen by so acute an
observer for his aptitude, and guided along the path of learning by so
philosophic an instructor, was bound, by the nature of the universe, to
make a more obvious and lasting advance. Now Jean-Marie was slow in all
things, impenetrable in others; and his power of forgetting was fully
on a level with his power to learn. Therefore the Doctor cherished his
peripatetic lectures, to which the boy attended, which he generally
appeared to enjoy, and by which he often profited.

Many and many were the talks they had together; and health and
moderation proved the subject of the Doctor’s divagations. To these he
lovingly returned.

“I lead you,” he would say, “by the green pastures. My system, my
beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one phrase—to avoid excess.
Blessed nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates
excess. Human law, in this matter, imitates at a great distance her
provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law.
Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for ourselves and for our
neighbours—lex armata—armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a
crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The judge, though
in a way an admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either
the doctor or the priest. Above all the doctor—the doctor and the
purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure air—from the
neighbourhood of a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine—unadulterated
wine, and the reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence
of the works of nature—these, my boy, are the best medical appliances
and the best religious comforts. Devote yourself to these. Hark! there
are the bells of Bourron (the wind is in the north, it will be fair).
How clear and airy is the sound! The nerves are harmonised and quieted;
the mind attuned to silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats
the heart! Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these
sensations; and yet you yourself perceive they are a part of
health.—Did you remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona
also is a work of nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree
which we might gather for ourselves if we lived in the locality.—What a
world is this! Though a professed atheist, I delight to bear my
testimony to the world. Look at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures
that surround our path! The river runs by the garden end, our bath, our
fishpond, our natural system of drainage. There is a well in the court
which sends up sparkling water from the earth’s very heart, clean,
cool, and, with a little wine, most wholesome. The district is
notorious for its salubrity; rheumatism is the only prevalent
complaint, and I myself have never had a touch of it. I tell you—and my
opinion is based upon the coldest, clearest processes of reason—if I,
if you, desired to leave this home of pleasures, it would be the duty,
it would be the privilege, of our best friend to prevent us with a
pistol bullet.”

One beautiful June day they sat upon the hill outside the village. The
river, as blue as heaven, shone here and there among the foliage. The
indefatigable birds turned and flickered about Gretz church tower. A
healthy wind blew from over the forest, and the sound of innumerable
thousands of tree-tops and innumerable millions on millions of green
leaves was abroad in the air, and filled the ear with something between
whispered speech and singing. It seemed as if every blade of grass must
hide a cigale; and the fields rang merrily with their music, jingling
far and near as with the sleigh-bells of the fairy queen. From their
station on the slope the eye embraced a large space of poplar’d plain
upon the one hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the other, and
Gretz itself in the middle, a handful of roofs. Under the bestriding
arch of the blue heavens, the place seemed dwindled to a toy. It seemed
incredible that people dwelt, and could find room to turn or air to
breathe, in such a corner of the world. The thought came home to the
boy, perhaps for the first time, and he gave it words.

“How small it looks!” he sighed.

“Ay,” replied the Doctor, “small enough now. Yet it was once a walled
city; thriving, full of furred burgesses and men in armour, humming
with affairs;—with tall spires, for aught that I know, and portly
towers along the battlements. A thousand chimneys ceased smoking at the
curfew bell. There were gibbets at the gate as thick as scarecrows. In
time of war, the assault swarmed against it with ladders, the arrows
fell like leaves, the defenders sallied hotly over the drawbridge, each
side uttered its cry as they plied their weapons. Do you know that the
walls extended as far as the Commanderie? Tradition so reports. Alas,
what a long way off is all this confusion—nothing left of it but my
quiet words spoken in your ear—and the town itself shrunk to the hamlet
underneath us! By-and-by came the English wars—you shall hear more of
the English, a stupid people, who sometimes blundered into good—and
Gretz was taken, sacked, and burned. It is the history of many towns;
but Gretz never rose again; it was never rebuilt; its ruins were a
quarry to serve the growth of rivals; and the stones of Gretz are now
erect along the streets of Nemours. It gratifies me that our old house
was the first to rise after the calamity; when the town had come to an
end, it inaugurated the hamlet.”

“I, too, am glad of that,” said Jean-Marie.

“It should be the temple of the humbler virtues,” responded the Doctor
with a savoury gusto. “Perhaps one of the reasons why I love my little
hamlet as I do, is that we have a similar history, she and I. Have I
told you that I was once rich?”

“I do not think so,” answered Jean-Marie. “I do not think I should have
forgotten. I am sorry you should have lost your fortune.”

“Sorry?” cried the Doctor. “Why, I find I have scarce begun your
education after all. Listen to me! Would you rather live in the old
Gretz or in the new, free from the alarms of war, with the green
country at the door, without noise, passports, the exactions of the
soldiery, or the jangle of the curfew-bell to send us off to bed by
sundown?”

“I suppose I should prefer the new,” replied the boy.

“Precisely,” returned the Doctor; “so do I. And, in the same way, I
prefer my present moderate fortune to my former wealth. Golden
mediocrity! cried the adorable ancients; and I subscribe to their
enthusiasm. Have I not good wine, good food, good air, the fields and
the forest for my walk, a house, an admirable wife, a boy whom I
protest I cherish like a son? Now, if I were still rich, I should
indubitably make my residence in Paris—you know Paris—Paris and
Paradise are not convertible terms. This pleasant noise of the wind
streaming among leaves changed into the grinding Babel of the street,
the stupid glare of plaster substituted for this quiet pattern of
greens and greys, the nerves shattered, the digestion falsified—picture
the fall! Already you perceive the consequences; the mind is
stimulated, the heart steps to a different measure, and the man is
himself no longer. I have passionately studied myself—the true business
of philosophy. I know my character as the musician knows the ventages
of his flute. Should I return to Paris, I should ruin myself gambling;
nay, I go further—I should break the heart of my Anastasie with
infidelities.”

This was too much for Jean-Marie. That a place should so transform the
most excellent of men transcended his belief. Paris, he protested, was
even an agreeable place of residence. “Nor when I lived in that city
did I feel much difference,” he pleaded.

“What!” cried the Doctor. “Did you not steal when you were there?”

But the boy could never be brought to see that he had done anything
wrong when he stole. Nor, indeed, did the Doctor think he had; but that
gentleman was never very scrupulous when in want of a retort.

“And now,” he concluded, “do you begin to understand? My only friends
were those who ruined me. Gretz has been my academy, my sanatorium, my
heaven of innocent pleasures. If millions are offered me, I wave them
back: _Retro_, _Sathanas_!—Evil one, begone! Fix your mind on my
example; despise riches, avoid the debasing influence of cities.
Hygiene—hygiene and mediocrity of fortune—these be your watchwords
during life!”

The Doctor’s system of hygiene strikingly coincided with his tastes;
and his picture of the perfect life was a faithful description of the
one he was leading at the time. But it is easy to convince a boy, whom
you supply with all the facts for the discussion. And besides, there
was one thing admirable in the philosophy, and that was the enthusiasm
of the philosopher. There was never any one more vigorously determined
to be pleased; and if he was not a great logician, and so had no right
to convince the intellect, he was certainly something of a poet, and
had a fascination to seduce the heart. What he could not achieve in his
customary humour of a radiant admiration of himself and his
circumstances, he sometimes effected in his fits of gloom.

“Boy,” he would say, “avoid me to-day. If I were superstitious, I
should even beg for an interest in your prayers. I am in the black fit;
the evil spirit of King Saul, the hag of the merchant Abudah, the
personal devil of the mediæval monk, is with me—is in me,” tapping on
his breast. “The vices of my nature are now uppermost; innocent
pleasures woo me in vain; I long for Paris, for my wallowing in the
mire. See,” he would continue, producing a handful of silver, “I denude
myself, I am not to be trusted with the price of a fare. Take it, keep
it for me, squander it on deleterious candy, throw it in the deepest of
the river—I will homologate your action. Save me from that part of
myself which I disown. If you see me falter, do not hesitate; if
necessary, wreck the train! I speak, of course, by a parable. Any
extremity were better than for me to reach Paris alive.”

Doubtless the Doctor enjoyed these little scenes, as a variation in his
part; they represented the Byronic element in the somewhat artificial
poetry of his existence; but to the boy, though he was dimly aware of
their theatricality, they represented more. The Doctor made perhaps too
little, the boy possibly too much, of the reality and gravity of these
temptations.

One day a great light shone for Jean-Marie. “Could not riches be used
well?” he asked.

“In theory, yes,” replied the Doctor. “But it is found in experience
that no one does so. All the world imagine they will be exceptional
when they grow wealthy; but possession is debasing, new desires spring
up; and the silly taste for ostentation eats out the heart of
pleasure.”

“Then you might be better if you had less,” said the boy.

“Certainly not,” replied the Doctor; but his voice quavered as he
spoke.

“Why?” demanded pitiless innocence.

Doctor Desprez saw all the colours of the rainbow in a moment; the
stable universe appeared to be about capsizing with him. “Because,”
said he—affecting deliberation after an obvious pause—“because I have
formed my life for my present income. It is not good for men of my
years to be violently dissevered from their habits.”

That was a sharp brush. The Doctor breathed hard, and fell into
taciturnity for the afternoon. As for the boy, he was delighted with
the resolution of his doubts; even wondered that he had not foreseen
the obvious and conclusive answer. His faith in the Doctor was a stout
piece of goods. Desprez was inclined to be a sheet in the wind’s eye
after dinner, especially after Rhone wine, his favourite weakness. He
would then remark on the warmth of his feeling for Anastasie, and with
inflamed cheeks and a loose, flustered smile, debate upon all sorts of
topics, and be feebly and indiscreetly witty. But the adopted
stable-boy would not permit himself to entertain a doubt that savoured
of ingratitude. It is quite true that a man may be a second father to
you, and yet take too much to drink; but the best natures are ever slow
to accept such truths.

The Doctor thoroughly possessed his heart, but perhaps he exaggerated
his influence over his mind. Certainly Jean-Marie adopted some of his
master’s opinions, but I have yet to learn that he ever surrendered one
of his own. Convictions existed in him by divine right; they were
virgin, unwrought, the brute metal of decision. He could add others
indeed, but he could not put away; neither did he care if they were
perfectly agreed among themselves; and his spiritual pleasures had
nothing to do with turning them over or justifying them in words. Words
were with him a mere accomplishment, like dancing. When he was by
himself, his pleasures were almost vegetable. He would slip into the
woods towards Acheres, and sit in the mouth of a cave among grey
birches. His soul stared straight out of his eyes; he did not move or
think; sunlight, thin shadows moving in the wind, the edge of firs
against the sky, occupied and bound his faculties. He was pure unity, a
spirit wholly abstracted. A single mood filled him, to which all the
objects of sense contributed, as the colours of the spectrum merge and
disappear in white light.

So while the Doctor made himself drunk with words, the adopted
stable-boy bemused himself with silence.




CHAPTER V.
TREASURE TROVE.


The Doctor’s carriage was a two-wheeled gig with a hood; a kind of
vehicle in much favour among country doctors. On how many roads has one
not seen it, a great way off between the poplars!—in how many village
streets, tied to a gate-post! This sort of chariot is
affected—particularly at the trot—by a kind of pitching movement to and
fro across the axle, which well entitles it to the style of a Noddy.
The hood describes a considerable arc against the landscape, with a
solemnly absurd effect on the contemplative pedestrian. To ride in such
a carriage cannot be numbered among the things that appertain to glory;
but I have no doubt it may be useful in liver complaint. Thence,
perhaps, its wide popularity among physicians.

One morning early, Jean-Marie led forth the Doctor’s noddy, opened the
gate, and mounted to the driving-seat. The Doctor followed, arrayed
from top to toe in spotless linen, armed with an immense flesh-coloured
umbrella, and girt with a botanical case on a baldric; and the equipage
drove off smartly in a breeze of its own provocation. They were bound
for Franchard, to collect plants, with an eye to the “Comparative
Pharmacopoeia.”

A little rattling on the open roads, and they came to the borders of
the forest and struck into an unfrequented track; the noddy yawed
softly over the sand, with an accompaniment of snapping twigs. There
was a great, green, softly murmuring cloud of congregated foliage
overhead. In the arcades of the forest the air retained the freshness
of the night. The athletic bearing of the trees, each carrying its
leafy mountain, pleased the mind like so many statues; and the lines of
the trunk led the eye admiringly upward to where the extreme leaves
sparkled in a patch of azure. Squirrels leaped in mid air. It was a
proper spot for a devotee of the goddess Hygieia.

“Have you been to Franchard, Jean-Marie?” inquired the Doctor. “I fancy
not.”

“Never,” replied the boy.

“It is ruin in a gorge,” continued Desprez, adopting his expository
voice; “the ruin of a hermitage and chapel. History tells us much of
Franchard; how the recluse was often slain by robbers; how he lived on
a most insufficient diet; how he was expected to pass his days in
prayer. A letter is preserved, addressed to one of these solitaries by
the superior of his order, full of admirable hygienic advice; bidding
him go from his book to praying, and so back again, for variety’s sake,
and when he was weary of both to stroll about his garden and observe
the honey bees. It is to this day my own system. You must often have
remarked me leaving the ‘Pharmacopoeia’—often even in the middle of a
phrase—to come forth into the sun and air. I admire the writer of that
letter from my heart; he was a man of thought on the most important
subjects. But, indeed, had I lived in the Middle Ages (I am heartily
glad that I did not) I should have been an eremite myself—if I had not
been a professed buffoon, that is. These were the only philosophical
lives yet open: laughter or prayer; sneers, we might say, and tears.
Until the sun of the Positive arose, the wise man had to make his
choice between these two.”

“I have been a buffoon, of course,” observed Jean-Marie.

“I cannot imagine you to have excelled in your profession,” said the
Doctor, admiring the boy’s gravity. “Do you ever laugh?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the other. “I laugh often. I am very fond of jokes.”

“Singular being!” said Desprez. “But I divagate (I perceive in a
thousand ways that I grow old). Franchard was at length destroyed in
the English wars, the same that levelled Gretz. But—here is the
point—the hermits (for there were already more than one) had foreseen
the danger and carefully concealed the sacrificial vessels. These
vessels were of monstrous value, Jean-Marie—monstrous value—priceless,
we may say; exquisitely worked, of exquisite material. And now, mark
me, they have never been found. In the reign of Louis Quatorze some
fellows were digging hard by the ruins. Suddenly—tock!—the spade hit
upon an obstacle. Imagine the men fooling one to another; imagine how
their hearts bounded, how their colour came and went. It was a coffer,
and in Franchard the place of buried treasure! They tore it open like
famished beasts. Alas! it was not the treasure; only some priestly
robes, which, at the touch of the eating air, fell upon themselves and
instantly wasted into dust. The perspiration of these good fellows
turned cold upon them, Jean-Marie. I will pledge my reputation, if
there was anything like a cutting wind, one or other had a pneumonia
for his trouble.”

“I should like to have seen them turning into dust,” said Jean-Marie.
“Otherwise, I should not have cared so greatly.”

“You have no imagination,” cried the Doctor. “Picture to yourself the
scene. Dwell on the idea—a great treasure lying in the earth for
centuries: the material for a giddy, copious, opulent existence not
employed; dresses and exquisite pictures unseen; the swiftest galloping
horses not stirring a hoof, arrested by a spell; women with the
beautiful faculty of smiles, not smiling; cards, dice, opera singing,
orchestras, castles, beautiful parks and gardens, big ships with a
tower of sailcloth, all lying unborn in a coffin—and the stupid trees
growing overhead in the sunlight, year after year. The thought drives
one frantic.”

“It is only money,” replied Jean-Marie. “It would do harm.”

“O, come!” cried Desprez, “that is philosophy; it is all very fine, but
not to the point just now. And besides, it is not ‘only money,’ as you
call it; there are works of art in the question; the vessels were
carved. You speak like a child. You weary me exceedingly, quoting my
words out of all logical connection, like a parroquet.”

“And at any rate, we have nothing to do with it,” returned the boy
submissively.

They struck the Route Ronde at that moment; and the sudden change to
the rattling causeway combined, with the Doctor’s irritation, to keep
him silent. The noddy jigged along; the trees went by, looking on
silently, as if they had something on their minds. The Quadrilateral
was passed; then came Franchard. They put up the horse at the little
solitary inn, and went forth strolling. The gorge was dyed deeply with
heather; the rocks and birches standing luminous in the sun. A great
humming of bees about the flowers disposed Jean-Marie to sleep, and he
sat down against a clump of heather, while the Doctor went briskly to
and fro, with quick turns, culling his simples.

The boy’s head had fallen a little forward, his eyes were closed, his
fingers had fallen lax about his knees, when a sudden cry called him to
his feet. It was a strange sound, thin and brief; it fell dead, and
silence returned as though it had never been interrupted. He had not
recognised the Doctor’s voice; but, as there was no one else in all the
valley, it was plainly the Doctor who had given utterance to the sound.
He looked right and left, and there was Desprez, standing in a niche
between two boulders, and looking round on his adopted son with a
countenance as white as paper.

“A viper!” cried Jean-Marie, running towards him. “A viper! You are
bitten!”

The Doctor came down heavily out of the cleft, and, advanced in silence
to meet the boy, whom he took roughly by the shoulder.

“I have found it,” he said, with a gasp.

“A plant?” asked Jean-Marie.

Desprez had a fit of unnatural gaiety, which the rocks took up and
mimicked. “A plant!” he repeated scornfully. “Well—yes—a plant. And
here,” he added suddenly, showing his right hand, which he had hitherto
concealed behind his back—“here is one of the bulbs.”

Jean-Marie saw a dirty platter, coated with earth.

“That?” said he. “It is a plate!”

“It is a coach and horses,” cried the Doctor. “Boy,” he continued,
growing warmer, “I plucked away a great pad of moss from between these
boulders, and disclosed a crevice; and when I looked in, what do you
suppose I saw? I saw a house in Paris with a court and garden, I saw my
wife shining with diamonds, I saw myself a deputy, I saw you—well, I—I
saw your future,” he concluded, rather feebly. “I have just discovered
America,” he added.

“But what is it?” asked the boy.

“The Treasure of Franchard,” cried the Doctor; and, throwing his brown
straw hat upon the ground, he whooped like an Indian and sprang upon
Jean-Marie, whom he suffocated with embraces and bedewed with tears.
Then he flung himself down among the heather and once more laughed
until the valley rang.

But the boy had now an interest of his own, a boy’s interest. No sooner
was he released from the Doctor’s accolade than he ran to the boulders,
sprang into the niche, and, thrusting his hand into the crevice, drew
forth one after another, encrusted with the earth of ages, the flagons,
candlesticks, and patens of the hermitage of Franchard. A casket came
last, tightly shut and very heavy.

“O what fun!” he cried.

But when he looked back at the Doctor, who had followed close behind
and was silently observing, the words died from his lips. Desprez was
once more the colour of ashes; his lip worked and trembled; a sort of
bestial greed possessed him.

“This is childish,” he said. “We lose precious time. Back to the inn,
harness the trap, and bring it to yon bank. Run for your life, and
remember—not one whisper. I stay here to watch.”

Jean-Marie did as he was bid, though not without surprise. The noddy
was brought round to the spot indicated; and the two gradually
transported the treasure from its place of concealment to the boot
below the driving seat. Once it was all stored the Doctor recovered his
gaiety.

“I pay my grateful duties to the genius of this dell,” he said. “O, for
a live coal, a heifer, and a jar of country wine! I am in the vein for
sacrifice, for a superb libation. Well, and why not? We are at
Franchard. English pale ale is to be had—not classical, indeed, but
excellent. Boy, we shall drink ale.”

“But I thought it was so unwholesome,” said Jean-Marie, “and very dear
besides.”

“Fiddle-de-dee!” exclaimed the Doctor gaily. “To the inn!”

And he stepped into the noddy, tossing his head, with an elastic,
youthful air. The horse was turned, and in a few seconds they drew up
beside the palings of the inn garden.

“Here,” said Desprez—“here, near the table, so that we may keep an eye
upon things.”

They tied the horse, and entered the garden, the Doctor singing, now in
fantastic high notes, now producing deep reverberations from his chest.
He took a seat, rapped loudly on the table, assailed the waiter with
witticisms; and when the bottle of Bass was at length produced, far
more charged with gas than the most delirious champagne, he filled out
a long glassful of froth and pushed it over to Jean-Marie. “Drink,” he
said; “drink deep.”

“I would rather not,” faltered the boy, true to his training.

“What?” thundered Desprez.

“I am afraid of it,” said Jean-Marie: “my stomach—”

“Take it or leave it,” interrupted Desprez fiercely; “but understand it
once for all—there is nothing so contemptible as a precisian.”

Here was a new lesson! The boy sat bemused, looking at the glass but
not tasting it, while the Doctor emptied and refilled his own, at first
with clouded brow, but gradually yielding to the sun, the heady,
prickling beverage, and his own predisposition to be happy.

“Once in a way,” he said at last, by way of a concession to the boy’s
more rigorous attitude, “once in a way, and at so critical a moment,
this ale is a nectar for the gods. The habit, indeed, is debasing;
wine, the juice of the grape, is the true drink of the Frenchman, as I
have often had occasion to point out; and I do not know that I can
blame you for refusing this outlandish stimulant. You can have some
wine and cakes. Is the bottle empty? Well, we will not be proud; we
will have pity on your glass.”

The beer being done, the Doctor chafed bitterly while Jean-Marie
finished his cakes. “I burn to be gone,” he said, looking at his watch.
“Good God, how slow you eat!” And yet to eat slowly was his own
particular prescription, the main secret of longevity!

His martyrdom, however, reached an end at last; the pair resumed their
places in the buggy, and Desprez, leaning luxuriously back, announced
his intention of proceeding to Fontainebleau.

“To Fontainebleau?” repeated Jean-Marie.

“My words are always measured,” said the Doctor. “On!”

The Doctor was driven through the glades of paradise; the air, the
light, the shining leaves, the very movements of the vehicle, seemed to
fall in tune with his golden meditations; with his head thrown back, he
dreamed a series of sunny visions, ale and pleasure dancing in his
veins. At last he spoke.

“I shall telegraph for Casimir,” he said. “Good Casimir! a fellow of
the lower order of intelligence, Jean-Marie, distinctly not creative,
not poetic; and yet he will repay your study; his fortune is vast, and
is entirely due to his own exertions. He is the very fellow to help us
to dispose of our trinkets, find us a suitable house in Paris, and
manage the details of our installation. Admirable Casimir, one of my
oldest comrades! It was on his advice, I may add, that I invested my
little fortune in Turkish bonds; when we have added these spoils of the
mediæval church to our stake in the Mahometan empire, little boy, we
shall positively roll among doubloons, positively roll! Beautiful
forest,” he cried, “farewell! Though called to other scenes, I will not
forget thee. Thy name is graven in my heart. Under the influence of
prosperity I become dithyrambic, Jean-Marie. Such is the impulse of the
natural soul; such was the constitution of primæval man. And I—well, I
will not refuse the credit—I have preserved my youth like a virginity;
another, who should have led the same snoozing, countryfied existence
for these years, another had become rusted, become stereotype; but I, I
praise my happy constitution, retain the spring unbroken. Fresh
opulence and a new sphere of duties find me unabated in ardour and only
more mature by knowledge. For this prospective change, Jean-Marie—it
may probably have shocked you. Tell me now, did it not strike you as an
inconsistency? Confess—it is useless to dissemble—it pained you?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“You see,” returned the Doctor, with sublime fatuity, “I read your
thoughts! Nor am I surprised—your education is not yet complete; the
higher duties of men have not been yet presented to you fully. A
hint—till we have leisure—must suffice. Now that I am once more in
possession of a modest competence; now that I have so long prepared
myself in silent meditation, it becomes my superior duty to proceed to
Paris. My scientific training, my undoubted command of language, mark
me out for the service of my country. Modesty in such a case would be a
snare. If sin were a philosophical expression, I should call it sinful.
A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his
obligations. I must be up and doing; I must be no skulker in life’s
battle.”

So he rattled on, copiously greasing the joint of his inconsistency
with words; while the boy listened silently, his eyes fixed on the
horse, his mind seething. It was all lost eloquence; no array of words
could unsettle a belief of Jean-Marie’s; and he drove into
Fontainebleau filled with pity, horror, indignation, and despair.

In the town Jean-Marie was kept a fixture on the driving-seat, to guard
the treasure; while the Doctor, with a singular, slightly tipsy
airiness of manner, fluttered in and out of cafés, where he shook hands
with garrison officers, and mixed an absinthe with the nicety of old
experience; in and out of shops, from which he returned laden with
costly fruits, real turtle, a magnificent piece of silk for his wife, a
preposterous cane for himself, and a kepi of the newest fashion for the
boy; in and out of the telegraph office, whence he despatched his
telegram, and where three hours later he received an answer promising a
visit on the morrow; and generally pervaded Fontainebleau with the
first fine aroma of his divine good humour.

The sun was very low when they set forth again; the shadows of the
forest trees extended across the broad white road that led them home;
the penetrating odour of the evening wood had already arisen, like a
cloud of incense, from that broad field of tree-tops; and even in the
streets of the town, where the air had been baked all day between white
walls, it came in whiffs and pulses, like a distant music. Half-way
home, the last gold flicker vanished from a great oak upon the left;
and when they came forth beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was
already sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging
skyward through the filmy poplars.

The Doctor sang, the Doctor whistled, the Doctor talked. He spoke of
the woods, and the wars, and the deposition of dew; he brightened and
babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast on the glories of the
political arena. All was to be changed; as the day departed, it took
with it the vestiges of an outworn existence, and to-morrow’s sun was
to inaugurate the new. “Enough,” he cried, “of this life of
maceration!” His wife (still beautiful, or he was sadly partial) was to
be no longer buried; she should now shine before society. Jean-Marie
would find the world at his feet; the roads open to success, wealth,
honour, and post-humous renown. “And O, by the way,” said he, “for
God’s sake keep your tongue quiet! You are, of course, a very silent
fellow; it is a quality I gladly recognise in you—silence, golden
silence! But this is a matter of gravity. No word must get abroad; none
but the good Casimir is to be trusted; we shall probably dispose of the
vessels in England.”

“But are they not even ours?” the boy said, almost with a sob—it was
the only time he had spoken.

“Ours in this sense, that they are nobody else’s,” replied the Doctor.
“But the State would have some claim. If they were stolen, for
instance, we should be unable to demand their restitution; we should
have no title; we should be unable even to communicate with the police.
Such is the monstrous condition of the law.[263] It is a mere instance
of what remains to be done, of the injustices that may yet be righted
by an ardent, active, and philosophical deputy.”

Jean-Marie put his faith in Madame Desprez; and as they drove forward
down the road from Bourron, between the rustling poplars, he prayed in
his teeth, and whipped up the horse to an unusual speed. Surely, as
soon as they arrived, madame would assert her character, and bring this
waking nightmare to an end.

Their entrance into Gretz was heralded and accompanied by a most
furious barking; all the dogs in the village seemed to smell the
treasure in the noddy. But there was no one in the street, save three
lounging landscape painters at Tentaillon’s door. Jean-Marie opened the
green gate and led in the horse and carriage; and almost at the same
moment Madame Desprez came to the kitchen threshold with a lighted
lantern; for the moon was not yet high enough to clear the garden
walls.

“Close the gates, Jean-Marie!” cried the Doctor, somewhat unsteadily
alighting. “Anastasie, where is Aline?”

“She has gone to Montereau to see her parents,” said madame.

“All is for the best!” exclaimed the Doctor fervently. “Here, quick,
come near to me; I do not wish to speak too loud,” he continued.
“Darling, we are wealthy!”

“Wealthy!” repeated the wife.

“I have found the treasure of Franchard,” replied her husband. “See,
here are the first fruits; a pineapple, a dress for my
ever-beautiful—it will suit her—trust a husband’s, trust a lover’s,
taste! Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over; the butterfly
unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow Casimir will come; in a week we
may be in Paris—happy at last! You shall have diamonds. Jean-Marie,
take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by
piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling,
hasten and prepare this turtle; it will be a whet—it will be an
addition to our meagre ordinary. I myself will proceed to the cellar.
We shall have a bottle of that little Beaujolais you like, and finish
with the Hermitage; there are still three bottles left. Worthy wine for
a worthy occasion.”

“But, my husband; you put me in a whirl,” she cried. “I do not
comprehend.”

“The turtle, my adored, the turtle!” cried the doctor; and he pushed
her towards the kitchen, lantern and all.

Jean-Marie stood dumfounded. He had pictured to himself a different
scene—a more immediate protest, and his hope began to dwindle on the
spot.

The Doctor was everywhere, a little doubtful on his legs, perhaps, and
now and then taking the wall with his shoulder; for it was long since
he had tasted absinthe, and he was even then reflecting that the
absinthe had been a misconception. Not that he regretted excess on such
a glorious day, but he made a mental memorandum to beware; he must not,
a second time, become the victim of a deleterious habit. He had his
wine out of the cellar in a twinkling; he arranged the sacrificial
vessels, some on the white table-cloth, some on the sideboard, still
crusted with historic earth. He was in and out of the kitchen, plying
Anastasie with vermouth, heating her with glimpses of the future,
estimating their new wealth at ever larger figures; and before they sat
down to supper, the lady’s virtue had melted in the fire of his
enthusiasm, her timidity had disappeared; she, too, had begun to speak
disparagingly of the life at Gretz; and as she took her place and
helped the soup, her eyes shone with the glitter of prospective
diamonds.

All through the meal, she and the Doctor made and unmade fairy plans.
They bobbed and bowed and pledged each other. Their faces ran over with
smiles; their eyes scattered sparkles, as they projected the Doctor’s
political honours and the lady’s drawing-room ovations.

“But you will not be a Red!” cried Anastasie.

“I am Left Centre to the core,” replied the Doctor.

“Madame Gastein will present us—we shall find ourselves forgotten,”
said the lady.

“Never,” protested the Doctor. “Beauty and talent leave a mark.”

“I have positively forgotten how to dress,” she sighed.

“Darling, you make me blush,” cried he. “Yours has been a tragic
marriage!”

“But your success—to see you appreciated, honoured, your name in all
the papers, that will be more than pleasure—it will be heaven!” she
cried.

“And once a week,” said the Doctor, archly scanning the syllables,
“once a week—one good little game of baccarat?”

“Only once a week?” she questioned, threatening him with a finger.

“I swear it by my political honour,” cried he.

“I spoil you,” she said, and gave him her hand.

He covered it with kisses.

Jean-Marie escaped into the night. The moon swung high over Gretz. He
went down to the garden end and sat on the jetty. The river ran by with
eddies of oily silver, and a low, monotonous song. Faint veils of mist
moved among the poplars on the farther side. The reeds were quietly
nodding. A hundred times already had the boy sat, on such a night, and
watched the streaming river with untroubled fancy. And this perhaps was
to be the last. He was to leave this familiar hamlet, this green,
rustling country, this bright and quiet stream; he was to pass into the
great city; his dear lady mistress was to move bedizened in saloons;
his good, garrulous, kind-hearted master to become a brawling deputy;
and both be lost for ever to Jean-Marie and their better selves. He
knew his own defects; he knew he must sink into less and less
consideration in the turmoil of a city life, sink more and more from
the child into the servant. And he began dimly to believe the Doctor’s
prophecies of evil. He could see a change in both. His generous
incredulity failed him for this once; a child must have perceived that
the Hermitage had completed what the absinthe had begun. If this were
the first day, what would be the last? “If necessary, wreck the train,”
thought he, remembering the Doctor’s parable. He looked round on the
delightful scene; he drank deep of the charmed night air, laden with
the scent of hay. “If necessary, wreck the train,” he repeated. And he
rose and returned to the house.




CHAPTER VI.
A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, IN TWO PARTS.


The next morning there was a most unusual outcry, in the Doctor’s
house. The last thing before going to bed, the Doctor had locked up
some valuables in the dining-room cupboard; and behold, when he rose
again, as he did about four o’clock, the cupboard had been broken open,
and the valuables in question had disappeared. Madame and Jean-Marie
were summoned from their rooms, and appeared in hasty toilets; they
found the Doctor raving, calling the heavens to witness and avenge his
injury, pacing the room bare-footed, with the tails of his night-shirt
flirting as he turned.

“Gone!” he said; “the things are gone, the fortune gone! We are paupers
once more. Boy! what do you know of this? Speak up, sir, speak up. Do
you know of it? Where are they?” He had him by the arm, shaking him
like a bag, and the boy’s words, if he had any, were jolted forth in
inarticulate murmurs. The Doctor, with a revulsion from his own
violence, set him down again. He observed Anastasie in tears.
“Anastasie,” he said, in quite an altered voice, “compose yourself,
command your feelings. I would not have you give way to passion like
the vulgar. This—this trifling accident must be lived down. Jean-Marie,
bring me my smaller medicine chest. A gentle laxative is indicated.”

And he dosed the family all round, leading the way himself with a
double quantity. The wretched Anastasie, who had never been ill in the
whole course of her existence, and whose soul recoiled from remedies,
wept floods of tears as she sipped, and shuddered, and protested, and
then was bullied and shouted at until she sipped again. As for
Jean-Marie, he took his portion down with stoicism.

“I have given him a less amount,” observed the Doctor, “his youth
protecting him against emotion. And now that we have thus parried any
morbid consequences, let us reason.”

“I am so cold,” wailed Anastasie.

“Cold!” cried the Doctor. “I give thanks to God that I am made of
fierier material. Why, madam, a blow like this would set a frog into a
transpiration. If you are cold, you can retire; and, by the way, you
might throw me down my trousers. It is chilly for the legs.”

“Oh, no!” protested Anastasie; “I will stay with you.”

“Nay, madam, you shall not suffer for your devotion,” said the Doctor.
“I will myself fetch you a shawl.” And he went upstairs and returned
more fully clad and with an armful of wraps for the shivering
Anastasie. “And now,” he resumed, “to investigate this crime. Let us
proceed by induction. Anastasie, do you know anything that can help
us?” Anastasie knew nothing. “Or you, Jean-Marie?”

“Not I,” replied the boy steadily.

“Good,” returned the Doctor. “We shall now turn our attention to the
material evidences. (I was born to be a detective; I have the eye and
the systematic spirit.) First, violence has been employed. The door was
broken open; and it may be observed, in passing, that the lock was dear
indeed at what I paid for it: a crow to pluck with Master Goguelat.
Second, here is the instrument employed, one of our own table-knives,
one of our best, my dear; which seems to indicate no preparation on the
part of the gang—if gang it was. Thirdly, I observe that nothing has
been removed except the Franchard dishes and the casket; our own silver
has been minutely respected. This is wily; it shows intelligence, a
knowledge of the code, a desire to avoid legal consequences. I argue
from this fact that the gang numbers persons of respectability—outward,
of course, and merely outward, as the robbery proves. But I argue,
second, that we must have been observed at Franchard itself by some
occult observer, and dogged throughout the day with a skill and
patience that I venture to qualify as consummate. No ordinary man, no
occasional criminal, would have shown himself capable of this
combination. We have in our neighbourhood, it is far from improbable, a
retired bandit of the highest order of intelligence.”

“Good heaven!” cried the horrified Anastasie. “Henri, how can you?”

“My cherished one, this is a process of induction,” said the Doctor.
“If any of my steps are unsound, correct me. You are silent? Then do
not, I beseech you, be so vulgarly illogical as to revolt from my
conclusion. We have now arrived,” he resumed, “at some idea of the
composition of the gang—for I incline to the hypothesis of more than
one—and we now leave this room, which can disclose no more, and turn
our attention to the court and garden. (Jean-Marie, I trust you are
observantly following my various steps; this is an excellent piece of
education for you.) Come with me to the door. No steps on the court; it
is unfortunate our court should be paved. On what small matters hang
the destiny of these delicate investigations! Hey! What have we here? I
have led on to the very spot,” he said, standing grandly backward and
indicating the green gate. “An escalade, as you can now see for
yourselves, has taken place.”

Sure enough, the green paint was in several places scratched and
broken; and one of the panels preserved the print of a nailed shoe. The
foot had slipped, however, and it was difficult to estimate the size of
the shoe, and impossible to distinguish the pattern of the nails.

“The whole robbery,” concluded the Doctor, “step by step, has been
reconstituted. Inductive science can no further go.”

“It is wonderful,” said his wife. “You should indeed have been a
detective, Henri. I had no idea of your talents.”

“My dear,” replied Desprez, condescendingly, “a man of scientific
imagination combines the lesser faculties; he is a detective just as he
is a publicist or a general; these are but local applications of his
special talent. But now,” he continued, “would you have me go further?
Would you have me lay my finger on the culprits—or rather, for I cannot
promise quite so much, point out to you the very house where they
consort? It may be a satisfaction, at least it is all we are likely to
get, since we are denied the remedy of law. I reach the further stage
in this way. In order to fill my outline of the robbery, I require a
man likely to be in the forest idling, I require a man of education, I
require a man superior to considerations of morality. The three
requisites all centre in Tentaillon’s boarders. They are painters,
therefore they are continually lounging in the forest. They are
painters, therefore they are not unlikely to have some smattering of
education. Lastly, because they are painters, they are probably
immoral. And this I prove in two ways. First, painting is an art which
merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the
moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts,
implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is
never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under
too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious
distinctions of the law!”

“But you always say—at least, so I understood you”—said madame, “that
these lads display no imagination whatever.”

“My dear, they displayed imagination, and of a very fantastic order,
too,” returned the Doctor, “when they embraced their beggarly
profession. Besides—and this is an argument exactly suited to your
intellectual level—many of them are English and American. Where else
should we expect to find a thief?—And now you had better get your
coffee. Because we have lost a treasure, there is no reason for
starving. For my part, I shall break my fast with white wine. I feel
unaccountably heated and thirsty to-day. I can only attribute it to the
shock of the discovery. And yet, you will bear me out, I supported the
emotion nobly.”

The Doctor had now talked himself back into an admirable humour; and as
he sat in the arbour and slowly imbibed a large allowance of white wine
and picked a little bread and cheese with no very impetuous appetite,
if a third of his meditations ran upon the missing treasure, the other
two-thirds were more pleasingly busied in the retrospect of his
detective skill.

About eleven Casimir arrived; he had caught an early train to
Fontainebleau, and driven over to save time; and now his cab was
stabled at Tentaillon’s, and he remarked, studying his watch, that he
could spare an hour and a half. He was much the man of business,
decisively spoken, given to frowning in an intellectual manner.
Anastasie’s born brother, he did not waste much sentiment on the lady,
gave her an English family kiss, and demanded a meal without delay.

“You can tell me your story while we eat,” he observed. “Anything good
to-day, Stasie?”

He was promised something good. The trio sat down to table in the
arbour, Jean-Marie waiting as well as eating, and the Doctor recounted
what had happened in his richest narrative manner. Casimir heard it
with explosions of laughter.

“What a streak of luck for you, my good brother,” he observed, when the
tale was over. “If you had gone to Paris, you would have played
dick-duck-drake with the whole consignment in three months. Your own
would have followed; and you would have come to me in a procession like
the last time. But I give you warning—Stasie may weep and Henri
ratiocinate—it will not serve you twice. Your next collapse will be
fatal. I thought I had told you so, Stasie? Hey? No sense?”

The Doctor winced and looked furtively at Jean-Marie; but the boy
seemed apathetic.

“And then again,” broke out Casimir, “what children you are—vicious
children, my faith! How could you tell the value of this trash? It
might have been worth nothing, or next door.”

“Pardon me,” said the Doctor. “You have your usual flow of spirits, I
perceive, but even less than your usual deliberation. I am not entirely
ignorant of these matters.”

“Not entirely ignorant of anything ever I heard of,” interrupted
Casimir, bowing, and raising his glass with a sort of pert politeness.

“At least,” resumed the Doctor, “I gave my mind to the subject—that you
may be willing to believe—and I estimated that our capital would be
doubled.” And he described the nature of the find.

“My word of honour!” said Casimir, “I half believe you! But much would
depend on the quality of the gold.”

“The quality, my dear Casimir, was—” And the Doctor, in default of
language, kissed his finger-tips.

“I would not take your word for it, my good friend,” retorted the man
of business. “You are a man of very rosy views. But this robbery,” he
continued—“this robbery is an odd thing. Of course I pass over your
nonsense about gangs and landscape-painters. For me, that is a dream.
Who was in the house last night?”

“None but ourselves,” replied the Doctor.

“And this young gentleman?” asked Casimir, jerking a nod in the
direction of Jean-Marie.

“He too’—the Doctor bowed.

“Well; and if it is a fair question, who is he?” pursued the
brother-in-law.

“Jean-Marie,” answered the Doctor, “combines the functions of a son and
stable-boy. He began as the latter, but he rose rapidly to the more
honourable rank in our affections. He is, I may say, the greatest
comfort in our lives.”

“Ha!” said Casimir. “And previous to becoming one of you?”

“Jean-Marie has lived a remarkable existence; his experience his been
eminently formative,” replied Desprez. “If I had had to choose an
education for my son, I should have chosen such another. Beginning life
with mountebanks and thieves, passing onward to the society and
friendship of philosophers, he may be said to have skimmed the volume
of human life.”

“Thieves?” repeated the brother-in-law, with a meditative air.

The Doctor could have bitten his tongue out. He foresaw what was
coming, and prepared his mind for a vigorous defence.

“Did you ever steal yourself?” asked Casimir, turning suddenly on
Jean-Marie, and for the first time employing a single eyeglass which
hung round his neck.

“Yes, sir,” replied the boy, with a deep blush.

Casimir turned to the others with pursed lips, and nodded to them
meaningly. “Hey?” said he; “how is that?”

“Jean-Marie is a teller of the truth,” returned the Doctor, throwing
out his bust.

“He has never told a lie,” added madame. “He is the best of boys.”

“Never told a lie, has he not?” reflected Casimir. “Strange, very
strange. Give me your attention, my young friend,” he continued. “You
knew about this treasure?”

“He helped to bring it home,” interposed the Doctor.

“Desprez, I ask you nothing but to hold your tongue,” returned Casimir.
“I mean to question this stable-boy of yours; and if you are so certain
of his innocence, you can afford to let him answer for himself. Now,
sir,” he resumed, pointing his eyeglass straight at Jean-Marie. “You
knew it could be stolen with impunity? You knew you could not be
prosecuted? Come! Did you, or did you not?”

“I did,” answered Jean-Marie, in a miserable whisper. He sat there
changing colour like a revolving pharos, twisting his fingers
hysterically, swallowing air, the picture of guilt.

“You knew where it was put?” resumed the inquisitor.

“Yes,” from Jean-Marie.

“You say you have been a thief before,” continued Casimir. “Now how am
I to know that you are not one still? I suppose you could climb the
green gate?”

“Yes,” still lower, from the culprit.

“Well, then, it was you who stole these things. You know it, and you
dare not deny it. Look me in the face! Raise your sneak’s eyes, and
answer!”

But in place of anything of that sort Jean-Marie broke into a dismal
howl and fled from the arbour. Anastasie, as she pursued to capture and
reassure the victim, found time to send one Parthian arrow—“Casimir,
you are a brute!”

“My brother,” said Desprez, with the greatest dignity, “you take upon
yourself a licence—”

“Desprez,” interrupted Casimir, “for Heaven’s sake be a man of the
world. You telegraph me to leave my business and come down here on
yours. I come, I ask the business, you say ‘Find me this thief!’ Well,
I find him; I say ‘There he is!’ You need not like it, but you have no
manner of right to take offence.”

“Well,” returned the Doctor, “I grant that; I will even thank you for
your mistaken zeal. But your hypothesis was so extravagantly
monstrous—”

“Look here,” interrupted Casimir; “was it you or Stasie?”

“Certainly not,” answered the Doctor.

“Very well; then it was the boy. Say no more about it,” said the
brother-in-law, and he produced his cigar-case.

“I will say this much more,” returned Desprez: “if that boy came and
told me so himself, I should not believe him; and if I did believe him,
so implicit is my trust, I should conclude that he had acted for the
best.”

“Well, well,” said Casimir, indulgently. “Have you a light? I must be
going. And by the way, I wish you would let me sell your Turks for you.
I always told you, it meant smash. I tell you so again. Indeed, it was
partly that that brought me down. You never acknowledge my letters—a
most unpardonable habit.”

“My good brother,” replied the Doctor blandly, “I have never denied
your ability in business; but I can perceive your limitations.”

“Egad, my friend, I can return the compliment,” observed the man of
business. “Your limitation is to be downright irrational.”

“Observe the relative position,” returned the Doctor with a smile. “It
is your attitude to believe through thick and thin in one man’s
judgment—your own. I follow the same opinion, but critically and with
open eyes. Which is the more irrational?—I leave it to yourself.”

“O, my dear fellow!” cried Casimir, “stick to your Turks, stick to your
stable-boy, go to the devil in general in your own way and be done with
it. But don’t ratiocinate with me—I cannot bear it. And so, ta-ta. I
might as well have stayed away for any good I’ve done. Say good-bye
from me to Stasie, and to the sullen hang-dog of a stable-boy, if you
insist on it; I’m off.”

And Casimir departed. The Doctor, that night, dissected his character
before Anastasie. “One thing, my beautiful,” he said, “he has learned
one thing from his lifelong acquaintance with your husband: the word
_ratiocinate_. It shines in his vocabulary, like a jewel in a
muck-heap. And, even so, he continually misapplies it. For you must
have observed he uses it as a sort of taunt, in the sense of to
_ergotise_, implying, as it were—the poor, dear fellow!—a vein of
sophistry. As for his cruelty to Jean-Marie, it must be forgiven him—it
is not his nature, it is the nature of his life. A man who deals with
money, my dear, is a man lost.”

With Jean-Marie the process of reconciliation had been somewhat slow.
At first he was inconsolable, insisted on leaving the family, went from
paroxysm to paroxysm of tears; and it was only after Anastasie had been
closeted for an hour with him, alone, that she came forth, sought out
the Doctor, and, with tears in her eyes, acquainted that gentleman with
what had passed.

“At first, my husband, he would hear of nothing,” she said. “Imagine!
if he had left us! what would the treasure be to that? Horrible
treasure, it has brought all this about! At last, after he has sobbed
his very heart out, he agrees to stay on a condition—we are not to
mention this matter, this infamous suspicion, not even to mention the
robbery. On that agreement only, the poor, cruel boy will consent to
remain among his friends.”

“But this inhibition,” said the Doctor, “this embargo—it cannot
possibly apply to me?”

“To all of us,” Anastasie assured him.

“My cherished one,” Desprez protested, “you must have misunderstood. It
cannot apply to me. He would naturally come to me.”

“Henri,” she said, “it does; I swear to you it does.”

“This is a painful, a very painful circumstance,” the Doctor said,
looking a little black. “I cannot affect, Anastasie, to be anything but
justly wounded. I feel this, I feel it, my wife, acutely.”

“I knew you would,” she said. “But if you had seen his distress! We
must make allowances, we must sacrifice our feelings.”

“I trust, my dear, you have never found me averse to sacrifices,”
returned the Doctor very stiffly.

“And you will let me go and tell him that you have agreed? It will be
like your noble nature,” she cried.

So it would, he perceived—it would be like his noble nature! Up jumped
his spirits, triumphant at the thought. “Go, darling,” he said nobly,
“reassure him. The subject is buried; more—I make an effort, I have
accustomed my will to these exertions—and it is forgotten.”

A little after, but still with swollen eyes and looking mortally
sheepish, Jean-Marie reappeared and went ostentatiously about his
business. He was the only unhappy member of the party that sat down
that night to supper. As for the Doctor, he was radiant. He thus sang
the requiem of the treasure:—

“This has been, on the whole, a most amusing episode,” he said. “We are
not a penny the worse—nay, we are immensely gainers. Our philosophy has
been exercised; some of the turtle is still left—the most wholesome of
delicacies; I have my staff, Anastasie has her new dress, Jean-Marie is
the proud possessor of a fashionable kepi. Besides, we had a glass of
Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory. I was growing
positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly. Let me
take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our
visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its
occultation. The third I hereby dedicate to Jean-Marie’s wedding
breakfast.”




CHAPTER VII.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ.


The Doctor’s house has not yet received the compliment of a
description, and it is now high time that the omission were supplied,
for the house is itself an actor in the story, and one whose part is
nearly at an end. Two stories in height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles
of an ancient ruddy brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood
with one wall to the street in the angle of the Doctor’s property. It
was roomy, draughty, and inconvenient. The large rafters were here and
there engraven with rude marks and patterns; the handrail of the stair
was carved in countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did
duty to support the dining-room roof, bore mysterious characters on its
darker side, runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when he
ran over the legendary history of the house and its possessors, to
dwell upon the Scandinavian scholar who had left them. Floors, doors,
and rafters made a great variety of angles; every room had a particular
inclination; the gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner
of a leaning tower, and one of the former proprietors had buttressed
the building from that side with a great strut of wood, like the
derrick of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of ruin; it was a
house for the rats to desert; and nothing but its excellent
brightness—the window-glass polished and shining, the paint well
scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all wreathed about with
climbing flowers—nothing but its air of a well-tended, smiling veteran,
sitting, crutch and all, in the sunny corner of a garden, marked it as
a house for comfortable people to inhabit. In poor or idle management
it would soon have hurried into the blackguard stages of decay. As it
was, the whole family loved it, and the Doctor was never better
inspired than when he narrated its imaginary story and drew the
character of its successive masters, from the Hebrew merchant who had
re-edified its walls after the sack of the town, and past the
mysterious engraver of the runes, down to the long-headed, dirty-handed
boor from whom he had himself acquired it at a ruinous expense. As for
any alarm about its security, the idea had never presented itself. What
had stood four centuries might well endure a little longer.

Indeed, in this particular winter, after the finding and losing of the
treasure, the Desprez’ had an anxiety of a very different order, and
one which lay nearer their hearts. Jean-Marie was plainly not himself.
He had fits of hectic activity, when he made unusual exertions to
please, spoke more and faster, and redoubled in attention to his
lessons. But these were interrupted by spells of melancholia and
brooding silence, when the boy was little better than unbearable.

“Silence,” the Doctor moralised—“you see, Anastasie, what comes of
silence. Had the boy properly unbosomed himself, the little
disappointment about the treasure, the little annoyance about Casimir’s
incivility, would long ago have been forgotten. As it is, they prey
upon him like a disease. He loses flesh, his appetite is variable and,
on the whole, impaired. I keep him on the strictest regimen, I exhibit
the most powerful tonics; both in vain.”

“Don’t you think you drug him too much?” asked madame, with an
irrepressible shudder.

“Drug?” cried the Doctor; “I drug? Anastasie, you are mad!”

Time went on, and the boy’s health still slowly declined. The Doctor
blamed the weather, which was cold and boisterous. He called in his
_confrère_ from Bourron, took a fancy for him, magnified his capacity,
and was pretty soon under treatment himself—it scarcely appeared for
what complaint. He and Jean-Marie had each medicine to take at
different periods of the day. The Doctor used to lie in wait for the
exact moment, watch in hand. “There is nothing like regularity,” he
would say, fill out the doses, and dilate on the virtues of the
draught; and if the boy seemed none the better, the Doctor was not at
all the worse.

Gunpowder Day, the boy was particularly low. It was scowling, squally
weather. Huge broken companies of cloud sailed swiftly overhead; raking
gleams of sunlight swept the village, and were followed by intervals of
darkness and white, flying rain. At times the wind lifted up its voice
and bellowed. The trees were all scourging themselves along the
meadows, the last leaves flying like dust.

The Doctor, between the boy and the weather, was in his element; he had
a theory to prove. He sat with his watch out and a barometer in front
of him, waiting for the squalls and noting their effect upon the human
pulse. “For the true philosopher,” he remarked delightedly, “every fact
in nature is a toy.” A letter came to him; but, as its arrival
coincided with the approach of another gust, he merely crammed it into
his pocket, gave the time to Jean-Marie, and the next moment they were
both counting their pulses as if for a wager.

At nightfall the wind rose into a tempest. It besieged the hamlet,
apparently from every side, as if with batteries of cannon; the houses
shook and groaned; live coals were blown upon the floor. The uproar and
terror of the night kept people long awake, sitting with pallid faces
giving ear.

It was twelve before the Desprez family retired. By half-past one, when
the storm was already somewhat past its height, the Doctor was awakened
from a troubled slumber, and sat up. A noise still rang in his ears,
but whether of this world or the world of dreams he was not certain.
Another clap of wind followed. It was accompanied by a sickening
movement of the whole house, and in the subsequent lull Desprez could
hear the tiles pouring like a cataract into the loft above his head. He
plucked Anastasie bodily out of bed.

“Run!” he cried, thrusting some wearing apparel into her hands; “the
house is falling! To the garden!”

She did not pause to be twice bidden; she was down the stair in an
instant. She had never before suspected herself of such activity. The
Doctor meanwhile, with the speed of a piece of pantomime business, and
undeterred by broken shins, proceeded to rout out Jean-Marie, tore
Aline from her virgin slumbers, seized her by the hand, and tumbled
downstairs and into the garden, with the girl tumbling behind him,
still not half awake.

The fugitives rendezvous’d in the arbour by some common instinct. Then
came a bull’s-eye flash of struggling moonshine, which disclosed their
four figures standing huddled from the wind in a raffle of flying
drapery, and not without a considerable need for more. At the
humiliating spectacle Anastasie clutched her nightdress desperately
about her and burst loudly into tears. The Doctor flew to console her;
but she elbowed him away. She suspected everybody of being the general
public, and thought the darkness was alive with eyes.

Another gleam and another violent gust arrived together; the house was
seen to rock on its foundation, and, just as the light was once more
eclipsed, a crash which triumphed over the shouting of the wind
announced its fall, and for a moment the whole garden was alive with
skipping tiles and brickbats. One such missile grazed the Doctor’s ear;
another descended on the bare foot of Aline, who instantly made night
hideous with her shrieks.

By this time the hamlet was alarmed, lights flashed from the windows,
hails reached the party, and the Doctor answered, nobly contending
against Aline and the tempest. But this prospect of help only awakened
Anastasie to a more active stage of terror.

“Henri, people will be coming,” she screamed in her husband’s ear.

“I trust so,” he replied.

“They cannot. I would rather die,” she wailed.

“My dear,” said the Doctor reprovingly, “you are excited. I gave you
some clothes. What have you done with them?”

“Oh, I don’t know—I must have thrown them away! Where are they?” she
sobbed.

Desprez groped about in the darkness. “Admirable!” he remarked; “my
grey velveteen trousers! This will exactly meet your necessities.”

“Give them to me!” she cried fiercely; but as soon as she had them in
her hands her mood appeared to alter—she stood silent for a moment, and
then pressed the garment back upon the Doctor. “Give it to Aline,” she
said—“poor girl.”

“Nonsense!” said the Doctor. “Aline does not know what she is about.
Aline is beside herself with terror; and at any rate, she is a peasant.
Now I am really concerned at this exposure for a person of your
housekeeping habits; my solicitude and your fantastic modesty both
point to the same remedy—the pantaloons.” He held them ready.

“It is impossible. You do not understand,” she said with dignity.

By this time rescue was at hand. It had been found impracticable to
enter by the street, for the gate was blocked with masonry, and the
nodding ruin still threatened further avalanches. But between the
Doctor’s garden and the one on the right hand there was that very
picturesque contrivance—a common well; the door on the Desprez’ side
had chanced to be unbolted, and now, through the arched aperture a
man’s bearded face and an arm supporting a lantern were introduced into
the world of windy darkness, where Anastasie concealed her woes. The
light struck here and there among the tossing apple boughs, it glinted
on the grass; but the lantern and the glowing face became the centre of
the world. Anastasie crouched back from the intrusion.

“This way!” shouted the man. “Are you all safe?” Aline, still
screaming, ran to the new comer, and was presently hauled head-foremost
through the wall.

“Now, Anastasie, come on; it is your turn,” said the husband.

“I cannot,” she replied.

“Are we all to die of exposure, madame?” thundered Doctor Desprez.

“You can go!” she cried. “Oh, go, go away! I can stay here; I am quite
warm.”

The Doctor took her by the shoulders with an oath.

“Stop!” she screamed. “I will put them on.”

She took the detested lendings in her hand once more; but her repulsion
was stronger than shame. “Never!” she cried, shuddering, and flung them
far away into the night.

Next moment the Doctor had whirled her to the well. The man was there
and the lantern; Anastasie closed her eyes and appeared to herself to
be about to die. How she was transported through the arch she knew not;
but once on the other side she was received by the neighbour’s wife,
and enveloped in a friendly blanket.

Beds were made ready for the two women, clothes of very various sizes
for the Doctor and Jean-Marie; and for the remainder of the night,
while madame dozed in and out on the borderland of hysterics, her
husband sat beside the fire and held forth to the admiring neighbours.
He showed them, at length, the causes of the accident; for years, he
explained, the fall had been impending; one sign had followed another,
the joints had opened, the plaster had cracked, the old walls bowed
inward; last, not three weeks ago, the cellar door had begun to work
with difficulty in its grooves. “The cellar!” he said, gravely shaking
his head over a glass of mulled wine. “That reminds me of my poor
vintages. By a manifest providence the Hermitage was nearly at an end.
One bottle—I lose but one bottle of that incomparable wine. It had been
set apart against Jean-Marie’s wedding. Well, I must lay down some
more; it will be an interest in life. I am, however, a man somewhat
advanced in years. My great work is now buried in the fall of my humble
roof; it will never be completed—my name will have been writ in water.
And yet you find me calm—I would say cheerful. Can your priest do
more?”

By the first glimpse of day the party sallied forth from the fireside
into the street. The wind had fallen, but still charioted a world of
troubled clouds; the air bit like frost; and the party, as they stood
about the ruins in the rainy twilight of the morning, beat upon their
breasts and blew into their hands for warmth. The house had entirely
fallen, the walls outward, the roof in; it was a mere heap of rubbish,
with here and there a forlorn spear of broken rafter. A sentinel was
placed over the ruins to protect the property, and the party adjourned
to Tentaillon’s to break their fast at the Doctor’s expense. The bottle
circulated somewhat freely; and before they left the table it had begun
to snow.

For three days the snow continued to fall, and the ruins, covered with
tarpaulin and watched by sentries, were left undisturbed. The Desprez’
meanwhile had taken up their abode at Tentaillon’s. Madame spent her
time in the kitchen, concocting little delicacies, with the admiring
aid of Madame Tentaillon, or sitting by the fire in thoughtful
abstraction. The fall of the house affected her wonderfully little;
that blow had been parried by another; and in her mind she was
continually fighting over again the battle of the trousers. Had she
done right? Had she done wrong? And now she would applaud her
determination; and anon, with a horrid flush of unavailing penitence,
she would regret the trousers. No juncture in her life had so much
exercised her judgment. In the meantime the Doctor had become vastly
pleased with his situation. Two of the summer boarders still lingered
behind the rest, prisoners for lack of a remittance; they were both
English, but one of them spoke French pretty fluently, and was,
besides, a humorous, agile-minded fellow, with whom the Doctor could
reason by the hour, secure of comprehension. Many were the glasses they
emptied, many the topics they discussed.

“Anastasie,” the Doctor said on the third morning, “take an example
from your husband, from Jean-Marie! The excitement has done more for
the boy than all my tonics, he takes his turn as sentry with positive
gusto. As for me, you behold me. I have made friends with the
Egyptians; and my Pharaoh is, I swear it, a most agreeable companion.
You alone are hipped. About a house—a few dresses? What are they in
comparison to the ‘Pharmacopoeia’—the labour of years lying buried
below stones and sticks in this depressing hamlet? The snow falls; I
shake it from my cloak! Imitate me. Our income will be impaired, I
grant it, since we must rebuild; but moderation, patience, and
philosophy will gather about the hearth. In the meanwhile, the
Tentaillons are obliging; the table, with your additions, will pass;
only the wine is execrable—well, I shall send for some to-day. My
Pharaoh will be gratified to drink a decent glass; aha! and I shall see
if he possesses that acme of organisation—a palate. If he has a palate,
he is perfect.”

“Henri,” she said, shaking her head, “you are a man; you cannot
understand my feelings; no woman could shake off the memory of so
public a humiliation.” The Doctor could not restrain a titter. “Pardon
me, darling,” he said; “but really, to the philosophical intelligence,
the incident appears so small a trifle. You looked extremely well—”

“Henri!” she cried.

“Well, well, I will say no more,” he replied. “Though, to be sure, if
you had consented to indue—_À propos_,” he broke off, “and my trousers!
They are lying in the snow—my favourite trousers!” And he dashed in
quest of Jean-Marie.

Two hours afterwards the boy returned to the inn with a spade under one
arm and a curious sop of clothing under the other.

The Doctor ruefully took it in his hands. “They have been!” he said.
“Their tense is past. Excellent pantaloons, you are no more! Stay,
something in the pocket,” and he produced a piece of paper. “A letter!
ay, now I mind me; it was received on the morning of the gale, when I
was absorbed in delicate investigations. It is still legible. From
poor, dear Casimir! It is as well,” he chuckled, “that I have educated
him to patience. Poor Casimir and his correspondence—his infinitesimal,
timorous, idiotic correspondence!”

He had by this time cautiously unfolded the wet letter; but, as he bent
himself to decipher the writing, a cloud descended on his brow.

“_Bigre_!” he cried, with a galvanic start.

And then the letter was whipped into the fire, and the Doctor’s cap was
on his head in the turn of a hand.

“Ten minutes! I can catch it, if I run,” he cried. “It is always late.
I go to Paris. I shall telegraph.”

“Henri! what is wrong?” cried his wife.

“Ottoman Bonds!” came from the disappearing Doctor; and Anastasie and
Jean-Marie were left face to face with the wet trousers. Desprez had
gone to Paris, for the second time in seven years; he had gone to Paris
with a pair of wooden shoes, a knitted spencer, a black blouse, a
country nightcap, and twenty francs in his pocket. The fall of the
house was but a secondary marvel; the whole world might have fallen and
scarce left his family more petrified.




CHAPTER VIII.
THE WAGES OF PHILOSOPHY.


On the morning of the next day, the Doctor, a mere spectre of himself,
was brought back in the custody of Casimir. They found Anastasie and
the boy sitting together by the fire; and Desprez, who had exchanged
his toilette for a ready-made rig-out of poor materials, waved his hand
as he entered, and sank speechless on the nearest chair. Madame turned
direct to Casimir.

“What is wrong?” she cried.

“Well,” replied Casimir, “what have I told you all along? It has come.
It is a clean shave, this time; so you may as well bear up and make the
best of it. House down, too, eh? Bad luck, upon my soul.”

“Are we—are we—ruined?” she gasped.

The Doctor stretched out his arms to her. “Ruined,” he replied, “you
are ruined by your sinister husband.”

Casimir observed the consequent embrace through his eyeglass; then he
turned to Jean-Marie. “You hear?” he said. “They are ruined; no more
pickings, no more house, no more fat cutlets. It strikes me, my friend,
that you had best be packing; the present speculation is about worked
out.” And he nodded to him meaningly.

“Never!” cried Desprez, springing up. “Jean-Marie, if you prefer to
leave me, now that I am poor, you can go; you shall receive your
hundred francs, if so much remains to me. But if you will consent to
stay”—the Doctor wept a little—“Casimir offers me a place—as clerk,” he
resumed. “The emoluments are slender, but they will be enough for
three. It is too much already to have lost my fortune; must I lose my
son?”

Jean-Marie sobbed bitterly, but without a word.

“I don’t like boys who cry,” observed Casimir. “This one is always
crying. Here! you clear out of this for a little; I have business with
your master and mistress, and these domestic feelings may be settled
after I am gone. March!” and he held the door open.

Jean-Marie slunk out, like a detected thief.

By twelve they were all at table but Jean-Marie.

“Hey?” said Casimir. “Gone, you see. Took the hint at once.”

“I do not, I confess,” said Desprez, “I do not seek to excuse his
absence. It speaks a want of heart that disappoints me sorely.”

“Want of manners,” corrected Casimir. “Heart, he never had. Why,
Desprez, for a clever fellow, you are the most gullible mortal in
creation. Your ignorance of human nature and human business is beyond
belief. You are swindled by heathen Turks, swindled by vagabond
children, swindled right and left, upstairs and downstairs. I think it
must be your imagination. I thank my stars I have none.”

“Pardon me,” replied Desprez, still humbly, but with a return of spirit
at sight of a distinction to be drawn; “pardon me, Casimir. You
possess, even to an eminent degree, the commercial imagination. It was
the lack of that in me—it appears it is my weak point—that has led to
these repeated shocks. By the commercial imagination the financier
forecasts the destiny of his investments, marks the falling house—”

“Egad,” interrupted Casimir: “our friend the stable-boy appears to have
his share of it.”

The Doctor was silenced; and the meal was continued and finished
principally to the tune of the brother-in-law’s not very consolatory
conversation. He entirely ignored the two young English painters,
turning a blind eyeglass to their salutations, and continuing his
remarks as if he were alone in the bosom of his family; and with every
second word he ripped another stitch out of the air balloon of
Desprez’s vanity. By the time coffee was over the poor Doctor was as
limp as a napkin.

“Let us go and see the ruins,” said Casimir.

They strolled forth into the street. The fall of the house, like the
loss of a front tooth, had quite transformed the village. Through the
gap the eye commanded a great stretch of open snowy country, and the
place shrank in comparison. It was like a room with an open door. The
sentinel stood by the green gate, looking very red and cold, but he had
a pleasant word for the Doctor and his wealthy kinsman.

Casimir looked at the mound of ruins, he tried the quality of the
tarpaulin. “H’m,” he said, “I hope the cellar arch has stood. If it
has, my good brother, I will give you a good price for the wines.”

“We shall start digging to-morrow,” said the sentry. “There is no more
fear of snow.”

“My friend,” returned Casimir sententiously, “you had better wait till
you get paid.”

The Doctor winced, and began dragging his offensive brother-in-law
towards Tentaillon’s. In the house there would be fewer auditors, and
these already in the secret of his fall.

“Hullo!” cried Casimir, “there goes the stable-boy with his luggage;
no, egad, he is taking it into the inn.”

And sure enough, Jean-Marie was seen to cross the snowy street and
enter Tentaillon’s, staggering under a large hamper.

The Doctor stopped with a sudden, wild hope.

“What can he have?” he said. “Let us go and see.” And he hurried on.

“His luggage, to be sure,” answered Casimir. “He is on the move—thanks
to the commercial imagination.”

“I have not seen that hamper for—for ever so long,” remarked the
Doctor.

“Nor will you see it much longer,” chuckled Casimir; “unless, indeed,
we interfere. And by the way, I insist on an examination.”

“You will not require,” said Desprez, positively with a sob; and,
casting a moist, triumphant glance at Casimir, he began to run.

“What the devil is up with him, I wonder?” Casimir reflected; and then,
curiosity taking the upper hand, he followed the Doctor’s example and
took to his heels.

The hamper was so heavy and large, and Jean-Marie himself so little and
so weary, that it had taken him a great while to bundle it upstairs to
the Desprez’ private room; and he had just set it down on the floor in
front of Anastasie, when the Doctor arrived, and was closely followed
by the man of business. Boy and hamper were both in a most sorry
plight; for the one had passed four months underground in a certain
cave on the way to Acheres, and the other had run about five miles as
hard as his legs would carry him, half that distance under a staggering
weight.

“Jean-Marie,” cried the Doctor, in a voice that was only too seraphic
to be called hysterical, “is it—? It is!” he cried. “O, my son, my
son!” And he sat down upon the hamper and sobbed like a little child.

“You will not go to Paris now,” said Jean-Marie sheepishly.

“Casimir,” said Desprez, raising his wet face, “do you see that boy,
that angel boy? He is the thief; he took the treasure from a man unfit
to be entrusted with its use; he brings it back to me when I am sobered
and humbled. These, Casimir, are the Fruits of my Teaching, and this
moment is the Reward of my Life.”

“_Tiens_,” said Casimir.

printed by
spottiswoode and co. ltd., new-street square
london




Footnotes


[5] Boggy.

[15] Clock

[16] Enjoy.

[140] To come forrit—to offer oneself as a communicant.

[144] It was a common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a
black man. This appears in several witch trials and I think in Law’s
_Memorials_, that delightful store-house of the quaint and grisly.

[263] Let it be so, for my tale!