ALL this time two persons in the gold mine were upon thorns of
expectation and doubt--brutus and Peter Crawley. George and Robinson
did not return, but no more did Black Will. What had happened? Had
the parties come into collision? and, if so, with what result? If the
friends had escaped, why had they never been heard of since? If, on the
other hand, Will had come off conqueror, why had he never reappeared? At
last brutus arrived at a positive conviction that Black Will had robbed
and probably murdered the men, and was skulking somewhere with their
gold, thereby defrauding him, his pal; however, he kept this to himself,
and told Crawley that he feared Will had come to grief, so he would go
well armed, and see what was the matter, and whether he could help him.
So he started for the bush, well armed. Now his real object, I blush to
say, was to murder Black Will, and rob him of the spoils of George and
Robinson.
Wicked as these men of violence had been six months ago, gold and
Crawley had made them worse, ay, much worse. Crawley, indeed, had never
openly urged any of them to so deep a crime as murder, and it is worthy
of note, as a psychological fact, that this reptile contrived to deceive
itself into thinking that it had stopped short of crime's utmost limits;
to be sure it had tempted and bribed and urged men to robbery under
circumstances that were almost sure to lead to murder, but still murder
might not occur; meantime it had openly discountenanced that crime, and
checked the natural proclivity of brutus and Black Will toward deeds of
blood.
Self-deception will probably cease at the first blast of the archangel's
trumpet. But what human heart will part with it till then? The
circumstances under which a human being could not excuse or delude or
justify himself have never yet occurred in the huge annals of crime.
Prejudice apart, Crawley's moral position behind brutus and Black Will
seems to bear a strong family likeness to that which Holy Writ assigns
to the great enemy of man. That personage knocks out nobody's brains,
cuts nobody's throat, never was guilty of such brutality since the world
was, but he finds some thorough egotist, and whispers how the egotism
of his passions or his interest may be gratified by the death of a
fellow-creature. The egotist listens, and blood flows.
brutus and Black Will had both suffered for their crimes. brutus had
been nailed by Carlo, twice gibbeted, and the bridge of his nose broken
once. Black Will had been mutilated, and Walker nearly drowned, but “the
close contriver of all harms” had kept out of harm's way. Violence had
never recoiled on him who set it moving. For all that, Crawley, I
must inform the reader, was not entirely prosperous. He had his little
troubles, too, whether warnings that he was on the wrong path, or
punishments of his vices, or both, I can't say.
Thus it was. Mr. Crawley had a natural love of spirits, without a
stomach strong enough to deal with them. When he got away from Mr.
Meadows he indulged more and more, and for some months past he had been
subject to an unpleasant phenomenon that arises now and then out of the
fumes of liquor. At the festive board, even as he raised the glass to
his lips, the face of Crawley would often be seen to writhe with a
sort of horror, and his eyes to become fixed on unseen objects, and
perspiration to gather on his brow. Then such as were not in the secret
would jump up and say, “What on earth is the matter?” and look fearfully
round, expecting to see some horrid sight to justify that look of horror
and anguish; but Crawley, his glassy eyes still fixed, would whimper
out, his teeth chattering, and clipping the words: “Oh, ne-ne-never
mind, it's o-o-only a trifling ap-parition!” He had got to try and make
light of it, because at first he used to cry out and point, and then
the miners ran out and left him alone with his phantoms, and this was
terrible. He dreaded solitude; he schemed against it, and provided
against it, and paid fellows to bear him company night and day, and
at the festive board it was one thing to drink his phantoms neat
and another to dilute them with figures of flesh and blood. He much
preferred the latter.
At first, his supernatural visitors were of a unfavorable but not a
ghastly character.
No. 1 was a judge who used to rise through the floor, and sit half
in and half out of the wall, with a tremendous flow of horse-hair,
a furrowed face, a vertical chasm between the temples, and a
strike-me-off-the-rolls eye gleaming with diabolical fire from under a
gray, shaggy eyebrow.
No. 2 was a policeman, who came in through the window, and stood
imperturbable, all in blue, with a pair of handcuffs, and a calm eye,
and a disagreeable absence of effort or emotion--an inevitable-looking
policeman.
But as Crawley went deeper in crime and brandy, blood-boltered figures,
erect corpses, with the sickening signs of violence in every conceivable
form, used to come and blast his sight and arrest the glass on its way
to his lips, and make his songs and the boisterous attempts at mirth of
his withered heart die in a quaver and a shiver of fear and despair.
And at this period of our tale these horrors had made room for a phantom
more horrible still to such a creature as Crawley. The air would seem to
thicken into sulfurous smoke, and then to clear, and then would come out
clearer and clearer, more and more awful, a black figure with hoof and
horns and tail, eyes like red-hot carbuncles, teeth a _chevaux-de-frise_
of white-hot iron, and an appalling grin.*
* The god Pan colored black by the early Christians.