JOSHUA SPEAKS.
What a fantastic nightmare in my memory is that amazing voyage! Were
souls as oddly consorted ever launched on an odder? Looking back at
this date on all the circumstances, our isolation, our helplessness,
our exhaustion of mind and body following on the strain--and that, by
long hours yet, not to be withdrawn--it appears to me little less than
miraculous that we ever won to harbour. Had it not been for the
strange distraction of a certain recital which the occasion called
forth, and which, occupying our thoughts both during and after its
telling, rendered us partly oblivious to our condition, a very
creeping paralysis of terror would, I believe, have ended by
destroying us. To swing there unrelated to any visible hold on life
but the sodden, weltering stick beneath us: lost atoms in a vast
immensity of mist and water! My mind, save I gripped it frenziedly to
its own consciousness, would have reeled and forsaken me, I think.
Sometimes for a moment, indeed, it would be almost gone, dropping
through the seeming clouds on which we swam into immeasurable abysses
of space; and it was only on these occasions by grappling aghast with
the figures of reality before it, that it could recover and control
itself. If only we could have seen the shore--could have steadied
nothing more than our vision on that ghost of moral support, it would
have been something. But by now the haze had shut down, and we were
derelicts utterly committed to the waste. It was a bad time--a bad,
forsaken time, and I do not much like to recall it, that is the truth.
We had perched Joshua, having with some distress got him on board,
between us on the twin spar, where he could set his back against the
broken top and hold on mechanically till he was in the way to
convalescence. Fore and aft of him, squatting or straddling on our
slippery bed, we made at first fitful attempts to dig a little way on
our craft with our feet; but the load was too heavy thus lightly to be
influenced, and we soon gave up the effort. We might, perhaps, have
affected our course a trifle by swimming and pushing; we did not dare.
It had been a different matter in the first excitement of escape, with
the sand under our feet. Now, in the reaction to a consciousness of
our drenched, and overwrought, and half benumbed condition, the water
had become a fathomless horror, lapping after us with hiss and hurry
to devour what it had seduced from its shallows. There was a
heaviness, a deadliness in it, level and undisturbed as it seemed,
which it was sickening to contemplate. And so we sat close and
drifted, and essayed--did Harry and I, while Joshua was recovering--to
reassure ourselves and one another with fitful banter--the most
cheerless, hollow stuff, God knew, and soon to expire of its own
pretence.
For a time, undoubtedly, the tide carried us shorewards, leisurely and
with no affectation of charity. The wreck sunk and disappeared behind
us: was a wreck--a bulwark--a stile in mid-desert--a post--a
stump--was gone. We distanced it so slowly that scarce a quarter of a
mile could have separated us from it when its last token was
submerged--and our hearts seemed to founder with it.
“Harry!” I cried, in a sudden shock of terror: “what if, at this rate,
we never reach the shore at all, and are carried out again by the
ebb!”
He wriggled and snarled.
“What’s the use of meeting trouble half-way? We’ve four or five hours
before us, and if we can’t drift close enough by then to finish
swimming, the deuce is in it. Hold tight, Dicky--that’s all you’ve got
to do; and I’ll answer for the rest.”
His self-confidence soothed me supremely. And I was the more comforted
to see Joshua stir himself at that moment and sit upright.
“What’s that?” he said. “Leave me out of the question if you want to
swim.”
“We don’t want to swim, Mr. Pilbrow--not unless the tide won’t serve
us to the end; and then I hope it’ll be only a little way.”
“Well,” he answered, “go when you will; only I want to have a word
with you first, Richard.”
“You are all right again, sir?”
“Right?” he muttered. “I don’t know. The land drops and flees before
me. The cold is in my heart. I must ease it, Richard--I must ease it
of its secret load before that winter gets home.”
“O, don’t talk like that!” I complained. “It’s to flout Providence in
the face after this mercy.”
“Well,” he said, with a melancholy smile, “I shall be lighter anyhow
for the easing. With this weight continuing in me, I should sink like
a plumb.”
“There’s to be no thought of sinking, Mr. Pilbrow,” I said. “But if
there’s something you’ll feel the better for ridding yourself of, why
say it and have done.”
He turned stiffly in his place so that the spar rocked, and looked at
me, where I sat behind him, with a most yearning affection.
“If you were entitled to the truth before,” he said, “how much more
now, when you have saved my life.”
“Saved your life!” I exclaimed.
“Didn’t you!” he answered. “Didn’t you risk your own by letting go to
reach me, when I might have pulled you down?”
“O, nonsense!” I cried, with a real laugh. “We should have both been
in a bad way, I dare say, if Harry hadn’t had the sense to catch my
foot. He towed us in. If there’s any credit it’s to him.”
“He did the resourceful thing, and you the brave,” persisted Joshua.
“I owe to him through you; but to you first. If I live, I will honour
that debt. If I am to die----”
“In good time, Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried reassuringly. “This little
contest had flushed and rallied us all. “In good time! We aren’t going
to give up, I can assure you, having come so far as this.”
“By God’s providence!” answered the ex-bookseller, with unwonted
devoutness. “Only I feel that while I delay to tell you, the devil
struggles to hale me into the deeps.”
“Out with it, then!” I said lightly, “and let’s crow to see him gnash
his ugly teeth at being anticipated.”
I realized that he was about to give us the long-expected story, with
a shadowy abstract of which he had only as yet tantalized me, and,
through me, of course, Harry. Could we have had our curiosity
satisfied under circumstances more tragically wet-blanketing? Yet
there was a providence in that no less. The little sparks of
inquisitiveness which survived in us, expanded in the revelation to
flames of heat, which, in warming us, distracted our thoughts from our
miseries. I will not believe this opportuneness was accidental. Mercy,
in all the Committee of Destiny, is jealous to keep to herself the
casting vote, I think.
His face fell; the evil shadow I knew darkened on it a moment; but
almost in the same thought was gone. He wrung his lips with his hand,
and heaved a profound sigh.
“Succeed, then,” he said, in a sad inspired voice, “succeed to the
truth for which your father died; and God spare you to find your
inheritance a rich one! If He will; if for your most loyal faith in
me, dear child, I could so requite you, I could pass contented under
the waters to the rest the land has denied me. I am weary, Richard; I
am wearied to death; and to lie floating off my legs appears
beatitude.”
He sighed again, and setting his teeth in the very act, forced himself
frowningly and inexorably to his task.
“I have hinted to you already,” he said, “that this long fever of my
quest dates from Abel’s disappearance with a certain book which
contained the clue to an important secret. Hear, then, at last, what
that secret was, and how it came into our hands.
“My brother Abel and I were twins and enemies, partners and apart.
Why? I cannot tell. Look at two dogs of a litter quarrelling over a
bone, and seek for the reason there. We thwarted one another--at every
turn we did, and ruined our common business in a mutual spite. You
know as much; yet in fairness I must urge that his was the more
rancorous and vindictive spirit. I would have cried halt sometimes;
but Abel, never. He had the fiercer resolution; he went armed; I
feared while I hated him. ... The book in question was one of a packet
over which we had perversely disputed in the sale-room; an old
scorched and dog’s-eared commonplace book of the seventeenth century,
in contemporary crimson calf, and bearing inside its cover the name of
‘Carolus Victor, Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’s Prison of
Newgate.’ Yes, you remember the name. I once let it out unguarded.
Well, he was our inspirer, as some Morell or Morant was your uncle’s.
... There was nothing of note about this book. It contained just the
jottings and excerpta of a decent unremarkable man; ‘tips’ for
homilies; memoranda of ‘last testaments;’ mere personal data of a
conscientious and commonplace clergyman, whose lines had fallen in
incongruous places. With all that we have nothing to do. Our business
is with a folded letter, in the handwriting of this same Carolus
Victor, which ages ago had been slipped between the leaves, and had
there adhered through the melting of the wax with which it was
sealed.”
“How had it got there?” I asked, because he here came to a dramatic
pause, which seemed to challenge questioning.
“Ah!” he answered. “How? And why it had remained undelivered? I can
submit only a plausible theory. A second-hand book-shop, gentlemen, is
a mine of reference. Research presently revealed to me that this
Carolus Victor, Chaplain of Newgate, had died--suddenly, by
presumption--in that very year, 1679, which dates not only his letter,
but the last entries in his diary where it was found. Suppose, then,
the letter written by this Victor, and never delivered to him to whom
it was addressed; suppose the book containing it tied up unexamined
with the deceased’s other manuscript effects, and put away on some
remote shelf and forgotten; suppose some jealous no-Popery bookdealer
snatching it years later from the flames of Newgate, and consigning it
to his own store, where, in the excitement, it was again forgotten
till finally brought to light in the sale-room, a scorched and
smoke-stained packet to excite the ridicule of the dealers. Suppose
anything or nothing; conjecture and account as you will. The fact
remains that Carolus Victor’s commonplace book came intact, and
holding fast to its enclosure, into our hands. ... Into our
hands--into _our_ hands, I say. Were we not brothers, twins, partners?
Abel, before bidding for it, had known or guessed nothing of what the
packet contained. He had bought the lot, a business transaction,
merely to spite me. And yet now he would claim the whole fruits for
himself!”
A fury and excitement took the narrator’s voice at this point. The
heat he exhaled was communicated to us in part.
“Go on!” I said, giving a vigorous kick into the water. “There was a
letter in the book, you say. What was it about?”
He struggled with himself a moment, dropped his face into his hands
with a groan, looked up, and resumed in a more ordered voice--
“I am coming to it. It is stereotyped on my brain--all of its accursed
riddle, that is to say, but the key. It was dated Newgate, 1679, and
was superscribed to one Peachumn, a doctor of divinity, (to whom, you
will always bear in mind, it never was delivered), from which honoured
friend and counsellor the writer craved certain instruction and advice
in a very private and particular matter. He had had confessed to him
that night, he said, a passing strange story by one Vining, a
prisoner, and grey in iniquity, who was condemned to suffer on the
morrow for piracy on the high seas. This Vining, according to his own
statement, had been, about the second decade of the century, a student
in the great English College of Douai, in France, whence one winter he
had been sent, in company with an ordained brother collegiate, on an
extraordinary secret mission across the water to a little town on our
east coast. This mission, said Vining, was nothing less than to
recover, if possible, from its secret hiding-place in the crypts of a
certain long abandoned church, a great treasure of gold pieces, which
had lain there ever since the suppression of the religious houses--a
suppression which, in this case, had but hardly anticipated a natural
dissolution more complete. For the church in question was, it
appeared, already doomed when the king’s edict fell. Lingering, a
relic of the greater past, amidst the ruin of those eastern shores,
the sea had since taken its outworks; and now the treasure (the
existence and depository of which had been made known through the
death-bed confidence of a former sacristan) must be secured without
delay, if recovered it were to be at all ... Richard! it _was_ secured
by those two--a loaded box of iron. And then the madness of possession
smote the wretched clerk. In the darkness of the crypts he murdered
his companion, and in the darkness the curse of God fell upon him. His
hands were scarlet with consecrated blood. He loathed to handle the
price of his iniquity; but, like Judas, he cast it from him, and with
it hid the body of his victim in a place whence he hoped neither could
again be brought to light to testify against him.”
He paused. And “Where was that?” I asked faintly. An extraordinary
fancy had taken possession of me--a thought so stunning, so
bewildering in its first weak conception, yet so explanatory, if
admitted, of Rampick’s incomprehensible behaviour, that I fairly
shivered under it. I looked dumfounded at Harry. He also, if I was not
mistaken, had been smitten with a like shock of expectancy.
“Where was that?” I repeated; and so, innocently, applied the match to
this tow. Joshua did not answer, to my surprise, for a moment; and
then suddenly I was conscious of the flame rising and blazing in him.
“Where!” he shrieked. “Give me the key if you pity me! It is that has
kept me hunting these long years, ravenous like the dogs that devoured
Sin, their mother, and yet were unappeased. Give me the key; give me
rest, or here and now the waters of oblivion!”
For an instant I really believed he was going to rise and plunge. Had
he done so, I doubt if, in our weakened condition, we could have saved
him a second time. But in the thought, he had clutched at himself once
more; and his passion grew inarticulate, and ceased.
When at last he resumed his tale, it was with a manner of some
suffering shame.
“Richard,” he said, “touch me there and I am mad. Rebuke me with thine
eyes, sweet boy, and I am sane and sorry. I will not offend again.
Listen, the story breaks off with the night of our quarrel--Abel’s and
mine. He had discovered and was reading this letter spread out before
him on the table, when I came up unnoticed behind him and read over
his shoulder. The confession was all there, to the flight of the
murderer and his subsequent life of crime; to the agony of his haunted
soul and his desire, in the shadow of death, to make restitution. Some
words by the chaplain followed; some prayer of the weak soul to his
stronger confidant to guide him in this pass, whether for action or
unconcern. And at the foot of the sheet he ended with the words. ‘_And
the confessed Place and deposit of this treasure are_----’ and there
passed over the page, and I never learned them, was never to learn
them, Richard. ... Some sound I made roused Abel from his absorption.
He leapt to his feet, cramming the paper into his pocket, and faced
me.
“‘Well, where are they?’ I asked, smiling. Yet in that moment I knew
he would never tell me.
“‘Miles under the sea, probably, by this time,’ he answered. ‘You will
understand that, if you have pryed to any purpose.’
“‘Abel,’ I said quietly, ‘you are lying. The place still exists, or
you would not wish to conceal its name from me.’
“‘Well,’ he said, with an evil grin, ‘the book is mine, and the secret
with it. You disputed its purchase, remember.’
“‘I may have,’ I replied. ‘But bought it is, and with our money--_our_
money, Abel. I will not yield my right to a share in it.’
“I advanced upon him. I was hell inside, though calm outwardly. And as
I came, he pulled a pistol from his breast--he was left-handed, like
the crooked beast he was--and held it at me. I told you he always went
armed. ... Richard, I confess the creature appalled me. He would have
made nothing of shooting me like a dog. I hesitated; and then fell to
entreaty, expostulation, threats. He was grey and hard as steel. In
the end I must desist, though still resolved to get at the paper by
fair means or foul. When he was gone, in a hunger of agitation I threw
myself upon the book. It told me nothing, of course. I flung it down
again, and went to bed, poisoned with black thoughts. In the morning
when I rose, late and racked with fever, I found him gone, him and the
book and the paper--gone, without leaving anywhere a trace of his
direction. I could not believe it for a time; then madness took me. I
went up and down, mouthing like a beast--by day and night, Richard--by
day and night. It was then I must inadvertently have fired the stock.
You know the rest.”
He ended in a deep depression, and burying his face in his hands, set
to rocking to and fro.
“Rest!” he suddenly cried. “No rest for me! All these years I have
pursued him, a wicked, laughing shadow, in the likely places of the
land--always on these eastern coasts or near them, exploring ruins or
the histories of them--recognizing at last my own madness, yet unable
to lay it. And still the shadow flies before; and still I follow,
myself a shadow!”
Again I looked at Harry. He understood, and answered my mute inquiry.
“Yes, tell him,” he said. “Tell him, if he’ll believe, how he’s been
mistaken by a madman for the risen ghost of his brother yonder.”
It was the conviction in both our minds. It grew inevitably out of the
tale just told us. Time, place, circumstance; the combative brother
who went armed; the pistol clutched in the dead _left_ hand--these,
taken together with Rampick’s discovery of our discovery, and his
imagined identification of the dead, invoked by us, as he thought, to
rise and denounce him, left us in no moral doubt whatever. Yet still,
the coincidence was so amazing, I hesitated to commit myself. I must
take breath, fencing a little longer with the truth.
“Mr. Pilbrow,” I faltered, “were you and Abel so much alike?”
He had started at Harry’s words, and was sitting rigid, awaiting my
answer.
“We were twins,” he said quietly, “scarce separable, perhaps, in
feature, unless by the lines which hate had chiselled to distinguish
us. His were deeper scored than mine.”
“And his dress?” I said: “how did he go dressed?”
He bent over the step to stare at me.
“He wore a blue coat, Richard. Why do you ask?”
I gave a little gasp.
“Tell him,” said Harry again.
“Wait a moment!” I fluttered. “Why, who could say, Mr. Pilbrow, that
thieves or the sea hadn’t taken this treasure long ago?”
“Abel,” he answered, in the same voice. “Abel, the direct consignee of
the secret, which was sealed by Carolus Victor, and never opened or
delivered till it came to light in our parlour. Abel, who knew this
coast, had written guide-books, about it--misleading guide-books,
indeed, to me in my killing search--and who was aware that the place,
the actual _caché_ of the treasure, still survived--or why should he
have sought to hide the truth from me, and have fled in the night,
himself like a thief? Abel, the cursed shadow that I follow, and
cannot run to earth!”
“O, Dick, tell him!” cried Harry once more.
“Mr. Pilbrow!” I broke out, trembling with excitement. “I believe you
have hunted counter; I believe we can show you where your shadow lies.
It is in the hill under the abbey ruins, and you must take off your
curse from it.”