THE GREAT STORM.
“Which it’s well known that ’ope deferred maketh a cat sick,” said
Mrs. Puddephatt, with unintentional irreverence, referring to my
report to my uncle of our late meeting with Mr. Rampick. She was by
this time quite in the family confidence. “Bless you, Master Richard,”
said she, “it’s not the Lord’s secret the man’s so keerful of; it’s
’is hown, living all these years on the ’opes of salvidge from the
’ill, and jealous of hothers steppin’ hin and anticepting of ’im.”
Uncle Jenico laughed.
“You’re still as sceptical as ever about the earthquake, Mrs.
Puddephatt,” said he. “Now, it occurs to me, if the hill was, as you
suppose, a rendezvous for smugglers, who by some folly entombed
themselves therein, why wasn’t the whole village plunged immediately
into mourning for the loss at a blow of so many fathers and brothers?”
Mrs. Puddephatt, standing with folded arms and a bleak, patient smile,
awaited his good pleasure to answer.
“Hev you adone, sir?” she now demanded. “Don’t let me hinterrupt you
before you’ve got it hall hout.”
“Thank you,” said Uncle Jenico, a little abashed. “I think there’s
nothing more.”
“Ho!” said the lady, drawing in a sharp breath. “Then let me hexpress
at once, sir, before more’s said, my hobligation for your supposing as
I’m supposing.”
“I admit it was unpardonable,” answered my uncle, with a beaming but
rather frightened smile. “I should have understood, of course, that
you have warrant for your smugglers.”
“Not _my_ smugglers, sir,” she said, “begging _your_ pardon. Faults
there may be in my pronounciation; but ’awking and spitting in his
langwidge was never yet, so far as I know, laid to the charge of a
Londoner.”
“My dear soul!” began Uncle Jenico. But she interrupted him--
“No, sir; nor to hend the names of his towns with a hoath, which it is
not permitted to a lady’s lips to pollute themselves with huttering.”
“O, really, Mrs. Puddephatt, I don’t understand!” said my uncle in
despair.
“I dare say not, sir,” went on the inexorable female. “But you must
excuse me if I draw the line at Hamster and Rotter.”
“O!” said Uncle Jenico, gathering light through the gloom. “You mean
to imply that these smugglers were Dutchmen?”
She condescended to smile a little, and, pursing her lips, nodded at
him with a very stiff neck.
“Bein’, you see, a Londoner yourself, sir, to which a nod is as good
as a wink. It was Dutchmen what landed and stowed the stuff, and
Dunberry what distributed of it. They howned to no connection with one
another, and worked apart, which was their safety. Dunberry, bless
you, would be dreaming in their beds that hinnercent, while ’Olland
would be stuffing of the ’ill with contraband. Honly that Rampick was
the master sperrit and go-between; and now you knows the truth about
’im.”
We both stared at her breathless.
“Then,” said my uncle at last, “the unfortunate creatures caught up
there, if caught they were----”
“Made no widders in Dunberry, sir,” she put in decisively.
“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, much agitated. “Then Rampick----”
He turned to me.
“Don’t bait the man, Dick,” he said. “Remember, whoever’s to blame for
it, he’s half crazed by his misfortunes; and small wonder, when some
of us find it difficult to keep our heads in prosperity. Why, dear,
dear! It isn’t the part of luck to throw stones, and certainly not at
a dog in a trap. It’s like enough the poor creature’s dangerous. I
dare say _I_ should be if things had gone against me. Don’t bait him,
Dick. Give him a wide berth.”
He had always been a little nervous about this fellow and our attitude
towards him. His appeal was, however, superfluous. The ex-smuggler was
not attractive; and Harry and I were certainly never the first to
invite collision with him. For, what with blight and rum and
sanctimony--which last, from being assumed for a disguise, had become
a half-demoniac possession in him--he was little better at this day
than a smouldering madman. Nevertheless, I tried loyally henceforth to
emulate Uncle Jenico’s better Christianity by making allowances for
the man because of his provocation. After all, calumny could visit him
with no more formidable charge than that of having been a successful
smuggler--a negative indictment even in these days. And perhaps, the
main impeachment admitted, Mrs. Puddephatt’s cockney perspicacity was
not so deadly a detective as she supposed.
I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard
to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to
them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of
the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I
do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become
acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or
she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many
allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had
speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which
the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number
of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of
the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the
local _esprit de corps_ which hid the real truth from him. Now much
was explained--provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to
discover what had been kept from us--much, that is to say, except the
nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should
never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For
Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now
gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.”
In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a
falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long
in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to
enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on
the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which
followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind
came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely,
cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook
with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into
which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered
like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of
agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the
day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the
bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the
Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary
monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.
That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the
rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which
Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire,
and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon
talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees
that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its
pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the
drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound
like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a
legend he had once heard about a werewolf--the German vampire. These
creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to
become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal.
It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any
way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall.
One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods,
was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over
her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back,
there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable
creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified
her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what
or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in
spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her
basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will
know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature
stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and
reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt
with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole
confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess
her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and
summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard
her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that
snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and
met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the
bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped
at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it
issue forth and come pattering round to the side where----
We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in a
pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the
window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved by
a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door. The
wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the
latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall
that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged and
stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be
seen--only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.
“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something
attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”
But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the homeward
march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the storm awed us, I
think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.
As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the
shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and
hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac
laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and shuddering
between the sheets.