WANLOCK of Manor looked with a puckered face at the tiny jewel flaming in
the hollow of his hand, and, for the hour forswearing piety, cursed the
lamented Lady Grace, his sister, _haut en bas_, with all the fury of his
bitter disappointment. The harridan had her revenge! Last night he
dreamt her envoys by their wailings made the forest hideous; already
amongst the Shadows of the monstrous other world she must be chuckling
(if the Shades have laughter) through her toothless gums at the chagrin
of her brother, for the first of the seven shocks of evil fortune had
that moment staggered him, and he was smitten to the vitals in his purse
and pride.
The brooch, so wretchedly inadequate as consolation for the legacy he had
long anticipated, had seemed last night as he peered at it with dubious
eyes a bauble wholly innocent, and he had laughed at its sinister
reputation, which in a last vagary of her spiteful humour she had been at
pains to apprise him of in a posthumous private letter. “Seven shocks of
dire disaster, and the last the worst,” he had read in the crabbed
writing of the woman who, even in prosperity, could never pardon him his
luckless speculation with the money that was meant to be her dowry; he
had sneered at her pagan folly, but now the premonstration bore a
different aspect; he was stunned with the news that his law-plea with
Paul Mellish of The Peel was lost, and that the bare expenses of that
long-protracted fight should cost him all that was left of his beggared
fortunes. But that was not the worst of it, for Mellish, as in pity of a
helpless foe, had waived his admitted claim to the swampy field which was
the object of their litigation. The first blow, surely, with a
vengeance!
For a moment Wanlock, now assured of some uncanny essence in the jewel,
thought to defend himself by its immediate destruction, and then he had a
craftier inspiration. He strode across the room, threw up the
window-sash, and bellowed upon Stephen, his idle son, the spoiled
monopolist of what love he had to spare.
“You see this brooch?” he said when the lad, with a grey dog at his
heels, came in with a rakish swagger from his interrupted dalliance with
the last maid (so to call her) left of Wanlock’s retinue.
They looked at it together as it lay in the father’s hand—a garnet, cut
_en cabochon_, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary,
clasped by thin gold claws; and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near
them, wrapt in cogitations of a different world. Their heads went down
upon the gem: they stared in silence, strangely influenced by its
eye-like shape and sullen glow, that seemed to come less from the
polished surface than from a cynic spirit inward, animate. It had the
look of age: had glowed on the breasts of high-scarfed dandies, pinned
the screens on girlish bosoms flat now in the dust, known the dear
privacies of love and passion, lurked in the dusk of treasuries, kept
itself unspotted, indifferent, unchanged through the flux of human
generations. Lord! that men’s lives should be so short and the objects
of their fashioning so permanent!
“It may be braw, but it’s no’ very bonny,” at the last quo’ Stephen
Wanlock.
“I want ye,” said his father, “to take it now with—with my assurance of
regard and—and gratitude to Mellish of The Peel. He has a craze for such
gewgaws, with no small part of his money, they tell me, sunk in their
collection. You can say it has the reputation of a charm.”
Young Wanlock posted off on this pleasant mission, with a chuck below the
chin for the maid in passing; and his father, walking in the afternoon
between the dishevelled shrubberies of his neglected policies, felt at
times amid the anguish of his situation a soothing sense of other ills
averted and transferred to one whom now he hated worse than ever.
* * * * *
It seemed next day as if the evil genius dwelling in the jewel wrought
its purpose with appalling expedition. Something is in the air of our
haunted North whose beaked sea promontories cleave the wind and foam,
that carries the hint of things impending to all who have boding fears or
hateful speculations, and Wanlock knew some blow had fallen on his enemy
while yet were no human tidings. The pyots chattered garrulous as women
on the walls; the rooks that flew across the grey storm-bitten country
were in clanging bands, possessed of rumours which they shared at first
with the careering clouds alone, for men are the last of all created
things to learn of their own disasters.
He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped
down the glen—“The Peel! The Peel!” he cried, as he thundered past with
his head across his shoulder—“They have broken The Peel!” A running
gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into
the wood as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on
the highway wildly protesting innocence.
“Who blamed ye?” queried Wanlock. “What has happened?”
“I declare to my God I know nothing of it!” cried the man in an excess of
apprehension, “but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the
night.”
“Ha! say ye so!” said Wanlock, kindling. “The wicked flee when no man
pursueth: ye run gey fast, I think, for innocence,” and he fixed a
piercing gaze upon the wretch, who drew his hand across his throat and
held it up to heaven.
“But it is none of my affair—begone!” said Wanlock, and the gipsy
clattered on his way.
Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the
exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were
sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the
summer’s end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet
not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something
unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts
beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth,
and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie
call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice
and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it
be lamenting. But still—but still ’twas not a voice of nature, rather to
the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange
country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the
interspace, remembering joys evanished.
A hand fell on the listener’s shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in
the face of his daughter Mirren.
“Have you heard the news?” she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan
and troubled aspect.
He held up an arresting hand, and “Hush!” he said, “there is something
curious in the wood. . . . Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the
wood. . . . In the wood. . . . Did ye not . . . did ye not hear it?”
and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through
the columns of the trees.
Again the cry rose, farther in the distance, burdened with a sense of
desolation.
“A bittern,” said Mirren; “it can only be a bittern.”
“Do ye think I have not thought of that?” asked Wanlock. “Have ye ever
heard a bittern boom at this time of the year, and in the middle of the
day?”
“I have heard it once or twice at night of late,” said his daughter. “It
can only be a bittern, or some other creature maybe wounded. Do you know
that The Peel has been plundered? Last night the strong-room was broken
into.”
“And robbed of the Mellish jewels?” broke in Wanlock, with exultant
intuition.
“Yes, and a great collection of antique gems entrusted to Mellish for the
purpose of a monograph he was writing,” said the daughter.
“A monograph?” asked Wanlock, still with eyes bent on the wood from which
the dog returned indifferent.
“It is a book on gems he has been busy writing.”
Wanlock sneered. “A book!” said he. “I’m thinking he’d be better at
some other business. I find, myself, but the one Book needful; all the
others are but vanity, and lead but to confusion. And he was pillaged,
was he? Well, there’s this, it might have been a man who could afford it
less, for Mellish was the wealthiest in the shire.”
“But now he is the poorest,” said the girl with pity. “I’m told it means
his utter ruin.”
“There’s the money of the Glasfurd girl to patch his broken fortune with;
they’re long enough engaged if the clash of the countryside be true,”
said Wanlock, and his daughter blenched, while the wailing cry rose up
again beyond the fir-tops on the moorland edge.
Wanlock stood confused a moment, then seized her by the arm. “Would ye
have me vexed for him?” said he. “Now I—with your permission—look upon
it as a dispensation. If Mellish is ruined, Dreghorn is the richest man
in the countryside and the better match for you—”
“Dreghorn!” cried the girl with scorn. “He danced at my mother’s
wedding—a cankered, friendless miser!”
“And now he’ll dance at yours! There have been men more spendthrift,
I’ll admit, but you’re not a Wanlock if in that respect ye could not
teach him better. He was at me again for ye yesterday—”
Mirren put her fingers in her ears; she was used to these importunities;
they had lately made her days and nights unhappy, and sent her fleeing
like a wild thing to the hills, or roving with a rebel heart in all the
solitary places of the valley. At any other hour this spirit would have
made him furious; to-day he was elated at her news, and let her go.
* * * * *
His joy, however, was but transitory. Searching with a candle late that
evening through his wine-cellar among dusty bins whose empty niches
gloomily announced the ebbing tide of that red sea of pleasure, or its
fictitious wave, that had swept so high on ancient jovial nights to the
lips of many generations of the guests of Manor, a yellow glint as from a
reptile’s eye fastened upon him from a cobwebbed corner. He stared at it
in horror and unbelief, closed in upon it with his guttering candle,
warily; and found himself once more the owner of the brooch!
In the chill of the vault he felt, for a moment, the convulsion of a mind
confronted with some vast mysterious power whose breath was loathsome,
deathly, redolent of dust and fraught with retribution, and fearing an
actual presence, almost shrieked when the flame of his candle was
extinguished in the draught of a slowly opening door. He stood all
trembling, with the jewel in his hand: a mocking chuckle rose in the
outer night: all the old eerie tales of childhood then were true! He
heard approaching cautious footsteps; a light was struck; a taper flared,
and he faced the ne’er-do-well, his son!
“At the wine again, Stephen?” he said with unspeakable sadness, for
indeed the lad had been the apple of his eye, and he knew too well his
failing.
“Not this time, father!” said the son, with some effrontery in spite of
his perturbation. “There’s damned little left between us: we’re at the
dregs of the old Bordeaux. I dropped—I dropped something last time I was
here, I fancy, and I’m come to seek for it.”
His father’s cheek in the daytime would have ashened: in the taper light
it merely shook and crinkled colourlessly like a scum. He held the
brooch out in his hand, and asked, “Is that it, Stephen?” in the simple
phrase of a man with his last illusion shattered, and the son confessed.
He had been shown to the strong-room when he carried the brooch to
Mellish: the sight of its contents and all their possibilities of life
and pleasure had fevered him with desire: he had returned in cover of
night and plundered the treasure of The Peel.
“Oh Lord!” cried Wanlock, “must I now pay teind to hell? ‘He that
begetteth a fool doeth it to his own sorrow, and the father of a fool
hath no joy.’ And where, my rogue, have ye put your plunder?”
“That is the worst of it,” said Stephen: “you have it all there in your
hand! It lay apart from the rest, and I put it in my pocket.”
“A liar, too!” wailed Wanlock.
“It is nothing but the truth,” protested Stephen sullenly. “I was
observed, whether by man or woman, beast or bugle, I cannot tell, but I
heard the laugh at my elbow, and I ran. It pattered at my heels, and
would have caught me if I had not dropped my burden in the old Peel
well.”
“And there let it lie and rot!” exclaimed his father: “But you—oh,
Stephen!—you to be the robber! and bring on me the second blow!” and the
wine-vault rang with the blame and lamentation of a shattered man.
The son was packed off on the morrow lest a worse thing should befall in
a suspicion of his part in the fall of Mellish: his father paid the last
penny of his available money for the journey to the south; the search for
the spoiler passed into other parts of the country, and was speedily
abandoned. When the hue and cry had ceased, old Wanlock, professing to
have found the brooch on the roadside, sent it back to Mellish, and
waited with a savage expectation for another demonstration of its power.
He had not long to wait. The very day on which the talisman was sent,
the match of Mellish with the Glasfurd girl—as rich as she was proud,
haughty, and ambitious—was broken off by one who could not bring herself
to marry a beggared man, and the tale, by gossip amplified and rendered
almost laughable, went round the parish like a song.
’Twas Dreghorn brought the news to Manor—the ancient wooer. Wanlock
broke a bottle of wine and made the occasion festival, but Mirren could
not be discovered.
Full of his plans, her father went that evening to her chamber at an hour
when she should be bedded, and found with apprehension that although the
door was barred the chamber held no tenant. He went outside in darkness
lashed by rain, and to her open window: made his way within—and found the
brooch upon her unpressed pillow! It caught a flicker from the fire and
shot a lance of light across the room.
“My God!” cried Wanlock harshly, “oh, my God! is this himself, Mahoun?”
and with the jewel burning in his loof, he turned to see his daughter,
with a face of shame and fear, framed in the open window. She had, in
other hours, a sweetness and a charm like sunny Highland weather, or like
the little lone birds of the sea, or like an air of youth remembered; but
now arising from the outer night of misty exhalations, pallid against the
background of the Manor trees, she seemed a blameful ghost.
He dragged her to his feet: as she knelt and cowered, he stamped with
brutal passion on her fingers.
“Where have ye been?”
Her gallant spirit plucked her back from the edge of swound to which his
cruel act had brought her: she looked without a tremor in his face, and
the third blow fell when she told him she had been to Mellish.
“Mellish!” he cried aghast, “and, madam, what in the name of God have you
to do with Mellish? He gave you this?” And he pressed with a brutal
thumb the fateful gem against her parted lips so sore it seemed to shed
its juices like a berry.
“I love him, and he has long loved me, and—”
“What! and there was the Glasfurd woman!”
“He had never loved her, or only thought so at the first, and the freedom
she has given him has more than made amends for his poverty. Father, I
am going to marry him.”
“Mellish! A ruined man! And you know my pact with Dreghorn?”
“Your pact, father, but never mine: I should die first. It was the
horrid prospect sent me to The Peel to-night. The thing is settled: he
gave me his troth with the brooch you hold there in your hand—oh, the
dear brooch! the sweet brooch of happy omen!—and you will let us marry,
will you not? I would never marry wanting your consent.”
“Then ye will never have it if the man is Mellish!” cried her father. He
thundered threats: he almost wept entreaties: every scrap of his
affection reft from her and centred now on his blackguard son, but the
girl was staunch: that night he drove her from his door.
* * * * *
It was with huge dismay he came upon the gem a fortnight later on the
floor of his girl’s deserted chamber. This new appearance for a moment
filled his soul with panic—it seemed the very pestilence that walks in
darkness—and then he realised she must have left it on the night he sent
her forth. With the assassin’s heart and the family humour, that had not
been confined to Lady Grace, he wrapped the jewel up and sent it as his
wedding-present to The Peel.
To his outcast daughter and the man who loved her he could have done no
kinder act, for their marriage hung upon his giving to it something of
his countenance, and this ironic gift of what to them was ever a talisman
benign, came to relieve a piteous situation. Mirren loved, but she had
made a promise not to wed without her father’s willingness, and she was
such that she should keep her promise though her life was marred.
With a light heart, then, did Mellish ride with the jewel in his pocket
to the house in town where she had taken refuge, and gladly taking the
gem as proof of her father’s softening, she married the man of her
desire.
“And now, goodwife,” said Mellish, “I will go down to Manor and make
peace.”
“You will take our lucky amulet,” she said, as she pinned it in his
scarf, and he galloped with the gaiety of a boy through the fallen autumn
leaves to the house of Wanlock.
It was as if he came from realms of morning freshness to some Terror
Isle. Gloaming was come down upon that sad reclusive lowland country:
the silvery fog which often filled the valley where the mansion lay,
austere and old and lonely, gave to the natural dusk a quality of dream,
an air of vague estrangement, a brooding and expectant sentiment. The
trees stood round like sighing ghosts, and evening birds were mourning in
the clammy thickets. Only one light burned in the impoverished dwelling;
Mellish, through the open window where it beamed uncurtained, saw old
Wanlock sunk in meditation with a Bible on his knees, and with a heart of
pity left the saddle.
Oh God! that men should die within stark walls in ancient long-descended
properties, without a comprehension of the meaning of the misty world!
He passed within the frowning arch and beat upon the knocker. The
clangour rang through the dark interior: the night stood hushed, save for
the inquiry of the howlets in the pines, the plunge of the Manor Burn,
the drip of crisply falling perished leaves, and, far away upon the
coast, the roaring of the sea. Pervaded by the spirit of the scene and
hour, misgivings came to Mellish, in whose heart the night seemed all at
once inimical, fantastic, peopled with incorporeal presences. He heard
their mutter, heard them move with cunning footsteps; of a sudden, near
at hand broke forth the dolorous utterance of a soul beseeching and
forlorn. The dreary note, prolonged and dying slowly, seemed to roll in
waves far out on shoreless seas of space, and Mellish, agitated, beat
again upon the ponderous brass.
He heard the halting shuffle of feet within; the door was opened; Wanlock
stood with a candle in the entrance. One glance only he gave to Mellish,
and slammed the door in his face!
Abruptly from the crowding night round Mellish burst a peal of mad and
mocking laughter!
For a moment fear, resentment, and disbelief warred in his brain for his
possession: fear, being stranger there, was routed by an effort of the
will; disbelief surrendered to his reason; he was left alone on the
battlefield with anger. It swept with purple banners through the rally
of his senses: drunk with passion, he tore from his breast the gem that
had misled him to that hateful door, and flung it in by the open window,
then leaped upon his horse and galloped furiously for home.
* * * * *
Wanlock, with the candle in his hand, stood for a moment listening in the
passage, glad with venom. He heard the thud of hoofs die off in the
distance of the avenue, then, with a shock that left him trembling, the
ululation of his old familiar—that dreadful bittern call! It was
to-night more sad than he had ever heard it, more imbued with hopeless
longing, yet in some way through its desolation went a yapping note of
menace and alarm.
He hurried to his chamber with a sense of something older than mankind:
he set the candle on the table; turned with eagerness to lift the
Book—the comforter, the shield,—and there between the open pages, on the
final verses of the seventh Psalm, lay the accursed brooch!
It seemed to him like a thing that had come from the void outside the rim
of human life where evils muster with black wings and the torments of men
are fashioned. He whimpered as he made to seize it, then, as if it stung
him, felt a numbness in the arm. Through his brain for a moment went the
feeling of something gush: he staggered on the floor: a mist swept
through his eyes. His vision cleared, and he saw the jewel at his feet.
He bent to lift it with some curious failure in his members, groped with
an impercipient hand, and found his fingers would not close upon it!
“My God!” he mumbled, “what is this come on me?” A mocking chuckle
sounded through the room, and the final doubts of Wanlock
vanished—another blow was come, and he was in the grip of the Adversary!
With his other hand he caught the gem, and rising slowly, cast a glance
of wild expectancy about the room. No assurance came from the discovery
that to the eye at least he was alone, yet a subtler sense than vision
told him he had company, and he looked above him into the umber rafters,
then turning to the window, saw enormous hands claw on the sill. They
seemed to drag a weight from the nether world behind them: he watched
them fascinated, even to the sinews’ tension, till there raised and
rested on the backs of them a face more horrible than he had ever dreamt
of—blurred, maculate, amorphous! From the sallow visage peered inquiring
eyes profound with cunning, and the soul of Wanlock grewed.
“We wrestle,” he mumbled, “not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness”: he
seized upon the Book, and held it up before him like a buckler, all his
being drenched in the spirit of defiance, and he cried the Holy Name.
He cried it as they cried it on the moors—his people, when the troopers
rode upon them: he cried with their conviction that the Blood had all
things pacified, redeemed, and the apparition chuckled!
The last redoubt of Wanlock’s faith surrendered: he madly wrenched a page
from the sacred volume, crushed it with the jewel in his hand, and threw
them in the face of his tormentor, then fell, a withered man, upon the
bedstead, while the bittern cry outside arose in demon laughter.
* * * * *
When he drifted back from the bliss of his oblivion, he lay a while like
a child that makes its world afresh each morning from a few familiar
surrounding things—the light, the shade, the feel of textures, and the
sound of the cinder falling on the hearthstone. All his life came ranked
before him in epochs that grew more vivid as his brain grew clear—the
folly of youth, the vanity of manhood, the pride of his strength, the
dour determination of his will; but he saw them all as virtues. Had he
not prayed, and sat at the Communion? Had he not felt the gust of the
Holy Spirit? Had he not repented?—nay, penitence had been denied him
from his very birth, and without repentance well he knew there was no
sin’s remission. Thus are the unelect at last condemned for a natural
inability—terror they have and chagrin at results, but no regret for the
essential wrong. There was a sound of some one moving in the house—the
servant, who had been on a private escapade of her own, was now returned.
Wanlock seized a walking-cane he kept beside the bedstead for the
purpose, and he loudly rapped upon the wall. At first there was no
answer; then he rapped again, and the woman entered, flushed with some
spirit of adventure.
She had the radiant sleekness of the country’s girls,—a strapping, rosy
healthfulness, a jaunty carriage, and a dancing and inviting eye: she
seemed to Wanlock for a moment like a stranger, and she carried with her
scents of the cool night winds.
For a moment she looked at him, astounded—he had so suddenly grown very
old and his mouth so strangely twisted; then she gave a little cry, and
hurried to his bedside, and he saw that the shawl she wore was pinned
upon her shoulder by the luckless brooch!
It glowed portentous and commanding like a meteor; with the squeal of a
netted hare he grasped at his walking-cane, and struck with fury at the
object of his terror. The woman shrank before the blow; the rattan swept
the candle from the table to the floor: a fountain of flame from the hell
that is under life sprang up the bedstead curtains!
With an oath old Wanlock staggered from his bed in time to save himself,
but the Manor-house was doomed—at dawn the bitter smell of woody ashes
blew across the valley.
From the shabby lodge-house midway in the avenue he looked astonished at
the girdling hills, to see them all so steadfast and indifferent: the sun
came up and sailed across the heavens, heedless of the smouldering space
among the pines, where turret and tower more lofty than themselves had
seemed, a day ago, eternal. The rat squeaked as it burrowed for a new
home under fallen lintels; the raven croaked upon the cooling hearth.
And night came down on these charred relics, swiftly—night, the old
conquering rider, ally of despair! It appeared to Wanlock like a
thousand years since he had had a careless heart, yet the ruin of his
home for the moment seemed less dreadful than its cause, and the new
light it had thrown on his situation. Never before was he so desolate,
so desolate!—forsaken of God and man. All night his flaming house had
stained the clouds: the crackle of its timbers and the thunder of its
falling walls appeared to fill the whole world’s ear, yet none had come
to his assistance: as if abhorred by all, he was left to dree his weird
alone among the ashes.
One thing only he had saved besides his life—a bottle of Bordeaux. He
had seized upon it as the only friend from whom he could look for
consolation. Even the maid and the dog had fled from him, but she
returned at nightfall to the cheerless lodge to make it habitable.
“Where in the name of God got ye yon accursed thing?” he asked her, and
she told him, flushing, she had got it from a lover.
“A lover!” quo’ Wanlock, regarding his helpless arm, remembering happier
things. “Are there still folk loving?”
“It’s what he would like to be,” said the woman awkwardly; “but the man’s
a dwarfish waif I daren’t hardly venture through the woods for; ye’ll
have heard him screech for a month past. He haunts me like a bogle,
comes from I kenna where—a crazy, crooked, gangrel body, worse than the
Blednock brownie. He was squatted at the door last night when I got
home, and he gave me the brooch,—I—I wish to the Lord I had never seen
it.”
“Where is it now?” asked Wanlock.
“I—I have given it back,” the girl replied with some confusion.
“Ye were wise in that,” said her master. “Woe upon the owner of the
havock brooch! for I have had it too, and the heart of me is withered in
my bosom. No brooch, no human brooch, I’ll warrant! but a clot of the
blood that dried on the spear of the Roman soldier. Ye have trafficked
with the devil and have worn his seal. It has robbed me of my money and
my home, my son, my daughter, and the power of my members—look at that
blemished arm!”
She watched him for a moment, fascinated, seeing now his palsy; he beheld
the pity in her eye, resenting it, and caught with his able hand at the
bottle of Bordeaux which he poured with a splash into a tarnished goblet.
He was about to drink it when he saw a look of fear and speculation come
upon her face.
“May the Lord forgive me, Manor!” she exclaimed, “but I gave the brooch
this morning to your son!”
“To my son!” he cried, incredulous. “How could you have seen him? He is
far from here.”
“He never left the country,” cried the woman, weeping, “and I have known
his hiding all the time. He saw the brooch upon me, was furious when he
heard how I had got it, and made me give it up.”
“Furious,” said Wanlock curiously. “Had he the right?”
“None better,” said the woman, looking on the floor.
“I might have guessed,” said Wanlock bitterly. “‘Though thou shouldst
bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his
foolishness depart from him.’ He has the brooch! Then are his footsteps
dogged by the Accuser of the Brethren, for the gem is hell’s
bell-wether!”
The night was tranquil, windless, frosty-cold; deep in the valley’s
labyrinth lay the lodge-house, far from other dwellings, alien,
apparently forgot, with the black plumes of the trees above it. In
pauses of the conversation something troubled Wanlock like the fear of
ambush; some absorbing sense of breathing shadows: silence itself took on
a substance and stood listening at the threshold.
Suddenly there came a scratching at the door, and Wanlock blenched.
“God save us!” said the girl, and her face like sleet.
“I dare ye to open the door!” cried Wanlock, shaking.
“It is the dog,” she said—“the dog come back; I left it in the company of
Stephen.”
“There is some compact here with things beyond me,” said her master.
“Open—open the door and see.”
One glance only Wanlock gave at the grey dog trotting in, and fell to
weeping when he saw a neckcloth pinned upon it with the brooch! He
reeled a moment at the sight, then fumbled at the neckcloth and drew out
the gem. With a curse he cast it in the heart of the burning peats,
where it lay a little, blinking rubescent, then rolled among the cooler
ashes. He moved expectant to the open door where the dog was leading:
the girl took up the gem, which stung her like an asp upon the palm; she
dropped it in the goblet where it hissed and cooled among the wine, and
at that moment rose the cry of Stephen in the avenue.
With a snatch at the burning candles she ran out behind her master where
he stood with head uplifted looking at the squadrons of the stars. She
was the first to reach the figure lying on the ground, and putting down
the candlesticks, she raised the lad, whose face was agonised and white
like sapple of the sea. He had no eyes for them, but, trembling,
searched with a fearful glance the cavern of the night made little by the
candles burning in the breathless avenue.
“Stephen! Stephen! what has happened?” cried the girl, her lips upon his
cheek.
“It—it caught me,” gasped the lad. “I ran from The Peel, and it caught
me, clawed upon my thrapple, and left me here. I pinned my neckcloth on
the dog.”
He leaned upon the woman, helpless in his terror. “Bring me the wine!”
she bade her master, and old Wanlock stumbled back to fetch it.
“Oh, Stephen! Stephen! what were ye doing at The Peel?” she asked. “Ye
know ye promised me—”
“I could not help myself,” he answered, “knowing what was in the well.
’Twas that that kept me in the country. I got it out and was making off
with it when I heard the eerie laugh again. I dropped the plunder at the
very door of Mellish when the de’il was on me. He was no bigger than a
bairn, but he kept upon my heels till I got here, and then he leaped.”
“My Stephen! oh, my Stephen!” cried the woman, fondling him upon her
breast, and he hung within her arms. A snarl came from the shadows: a
creature smelling of mould and rotten leafage, clothed as in ragged
lichens, contorted like a pollard willow, leaped at the throat of Stephen
and crushed it like a paste, then fled with the bittern call.
Old Wanlock heard the woman shriek: he tottered with the goblet from the
lodge and came within the circuit of the candles where she knelt beside
her lover.
“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she cried, demented. “The devil has strangled
him,” and at the moment passed the ghost of Stephen Wanlock.
“I knew it,” said the father—“very well I knew it: the sixth blow! There
is no discharge in this war!” His head seemed filled with wool: his
blood went curdling in its channels, and he staggered on his feet.
Raising the goblet till it chattered on his teeth, he drained it at a
draught, and the woman, heedless, straightened out the body of his son.
She heard her master choke: she turned to see his face convulsed, his
eyeballs staring, and the empty flagon falling from his hand.
“The brooch! the brooch!” she screamed: a gleam of comprehension passed
for a moment over Wanlock’s purpling visage: he raised his arms, and
stumbling, fell across the body of his son!