with us not Sandy, but another gillie, and ate our lunch on the slope of
the Picts’ Castle after landing a couple of fish there. Even as Hugh had
said, a great flat slab of stone had been dragged on to the platform
outside the river gate of the castle, where it rested on certain rude
supports, which, now that it was in place, seemed certainly designed to
receive it. It was also exactly opposite that lancet window in the
basaltic rock across the pool, so that if the moon at midnight did shine
through it, the light would fall on the stone. This then was the almost
certain scene of the incantations.
Below the platform, as I have said, the ground fell rapidly away to the
level of the pool, which owing to rain on the hills was running very
high, and, streaked with lines of greyish bubbles, poured down in
amazing and ear-filling volume. But directly underneath the steep
escarpment of rock on the far side of the pool it lay foamless and
black, a still backwater of great depth. Above the altar-like erection
again the ground rose up seven rough-hewn steps to the gate itself, on
each side of which, to the height of about four feet, ran the circular
wall of the castle. Inside again were the remains of partition walls
between the three chambers, and it was in the one nearest to the river
gate that we determined to conceal ourselves that night. From there,
should the witch and Sandy keep tryst at the altar, any sound of
movement would reach us, and through the aperture of the gate itself we
could see, concealed in the shadow of the wall, whatever took place at
the altar or down below at the pool. The lodge, finally, was but a short
ten minutes away, if one went in the direct line, so that by starting at
a quarter to twelve that night, we could enter the Picts’ Castle by the
gate away from the river, thus not betraying our presence to those who
might be waiting for the moment when the moon should shine through the
lancet window in the wall of rock on to the altar in front of the river
gate.
Night fell very still and windless, and when not long before midnight we
let ourselves silently out of the lodge, though to the east the sky was
clear, a black continent of cloud was creeping up from the west, and had
now nearly reached the zenith. Out of the remote fringes of it
occasional lightning winked, and the growl of very distant thunder
sounded drowsily at long intervals after. But it seemed to me as if
another storm hung over our heads, ready every moment to burst, for the
oppression in the air was of a far heavier quality than so distant a
disturbance could have accounted for. To the east, however, the sky was
still luminously clear; the curiously hard edges of the western cloud
were star-embroidered, and by the dove-coloured light in the east it was
evident that the moonrise over the moor was imminent. And though I did
not in my heart believe that our expedition would end in anything but
yawns, I was conscious of an extreme tension and rawness of nerves,
which I set down to the thunder-charged air.
For noiselessness of footstep we had both put on india-rubber soled
shoes, and all the way down to the pool we heard nothing but the distant
thunder and our own padded tread. Very silently and cautiously we
ascended the steps of the gate away from the river, and keeping close to
the wall inside, sidled round to the river gate and peered out. For the
first moment I could see nothing, so black lay the shadow of the
rock-wall opposite across the pool, but by degrees I made out the lumps
and line of the glimmering foam which streaked the water. High as the
river was running this morning it was infinitely more voluminous and
turbulent now, and the sound of it filled and bewildered the ear with
its sonorous roaring. Only under the very base of the rock opposite it
ran quite black and unflecked by foam: there lay the deep still surface
of the backwater. Then suddenly I saw something black move in the
dimness in front of me, and against the grey foam rose up first the
head, then the shoulders, and finally the whole figure of a woman
coming towards us up the bank. Behind her walked another, a man, and the
two came to where the altar of stone had been newly erected and stood
there side by side silhouetted against the churned white of the stream.
Hugh had seen too, and touched me on the arm to call my attention. So
far then he was right: there was no mistaking the stalwart proportions
of Sandy.
Suddenly across the gloom shot a tiny spear of light, and momentarily as
we watched, it grew larger and longer, till a tall beam, as from some
window cut in the rock opposite, was shed on the bank below us. It moved
slowly, imperceptibly to the left till it struck full between the two
black figures standing there, and shone with a curious bluish gleam on
the flat stone in front of them. Then the roar of the river was suddenly
overscored by a dreadful screaming voice, the voice of a woman, and from
her side her arms shot up and out as if in invocation of some power. At
first I could catch none of the words, but soon from repetition they
began to convey an intelligible message to my brain, and I was listening
as in the paralytic horror of nightmare to a bellowing of the most
hideous and un-nameable profanity. What I heard I cannot bring myself to
record; suffice it to say that Satan was invoked by every adoring and
reverent name, that cursing and unspeakable malediction was poured forth
on Him whom we hold most holy. Then the yelling voice ceased as
suddenly as it had begun, and for a moment there was silence again, but
for the reverberating river.
Then once more that horror of sound was uplifted.
“So, Catrine Gordon,” it cried, “I bid ye in the name of my master and
your’s to rise from where ye lie. Up with ye--up!”
Once more there was silence; then I heard Hugh at my elbow draw a quick
sobbing breath, and his finger pointed unsteadily to the dead black
water below the rock. And I too looked and saw.
Right under the rock there appeared a pale subaqueous light, which waved
and quivered in the stream. At first it was very small and dim, but as
we looked it seemed to swim upwards from remote depths and grew larger
till I suppose the space of some square yard was illuminated by it. Then
the surface of the water was broken, and a head, the head of a girl,
dead-white and with long, flowing hair, appeared above the stream. Her
eyes were shut, the corners of her mouth drooped as in sleep, and the
moving water stood in a frill round her neck. Higher and higher rose the
figure out of the tide, till at last it stood, luminous in itself, so it
appeared, up to the middle. The head was bent down over the breast, and
the hands clasped together. As it emerged from the water it seemed to
get nearer, and was by now half-way across the pool, moving quietly and
steadily against the great flood of the hurrying river.
Then I heard a man’s voice crying out in a sort of strangled agony.
“Catrine!” it cried; “Catrine! In God’s name; in God’s name!”
In two strides Sandy had rushed down the steep bank, and hurled himself
out into that mad swirl of waters. For one moment I saw his arms flung
up into the sky, the next he had altogether gone. And on the utterance
of that name the unholy vision had vanished too, while simultaneously
there burst in front of us a light so blinding, followed by a crack of
thunder so appalling to the senses, that I know I just hid my face in my
hands. At once, as if the flood-gates of the sky had been opened, the
deluge was on us, not like rain, but like one sheet of solid water, so
that we cowered under it. Any hope or attempt to rescue Sandy was out of
the question; to dive into that whirlpool of mad water meant instant
death, and even had it been possible for any swimmer to live there, in
the blackness of the night there was absolutely no chance of finding
him. Besides, even if it had been possible to save him, I doubt whether
I was sufficiently master of my flesh and blood as to endure to plunge
where that apparition had risen.
Then, as we lay there, another horror filled and possessed my mind.
Somewhere close to us in the darkness was that woman whose yelling voice
just now had made my blood run ice-cold, while it brought the streaming
sweat to my forehead. At that moment I turned to Hugh.
“I cannot stop here,” I said. “I must run, run right away. Where is
She?”
“Did you not see?” he asked.
“No. What happened?”
“The lightning struck the stone within a few inches of where she was
standing. We--we must go and look for her.”
I followed him down the slope, shaking as if I had the palsy, and
groping with my hands on the ground in front of me, in deadly terror of
encountering something human. The thunder-clouds had in the last few
minutes spread over the moon, so that no ray from the window in the rock
guided our search. But up and down the bank from the stone that lay
shattered there to the edge of the pool we groped and stumbled, but
found nothing. At length we gave it up: it seemed morally certain that
she, too, had rolled down the bank after the lightning stroke, and lay
somewhere deep in the pool from which she had called the dead.
None fished the pool next day, but men with drag-nets came from Brora.
Right under the rock in the backwater lay two bodies, close together,
Sandy and the dead girl. Of the other they found nothing.
* * * * *
It would seem, then, that Catrine Gordon, in answer to Sandy’s letter,
left Inverness in heavy trouble. What happened afterwards can only be
conjectured, but it seems likely she took the short cut to Gavon,
meaning to cross the river on the boulders above the Picts’ pool. But
whether she slipped accidentally in her passage, and so was drawn down
by the hungry water, or whether, unable to face the future, she had
thrown herself into the pool, we can only guess. In any case they sleep
together now in the bleak, wind-swept graveyard at Brora, in obedience
to the inscrutable designs of God.
THE CONFESSION OF CHARLES LINKWORTH
Dr Teesdale had occasion to attend the condemned man once or twice
during the week before his execution, and found him, as is often the
case, when his last hope of life has vanished, quiet and perfectly
resigned to his fate, and not seeming to look forward with any dread to
the morning that each hour that passed brought nearer and nearer. The
bitterness of death appeared to be over for him: it was done with when
he was told that his appeal was refused. But for those days while hope
was not yet quite abandoned, the wretched man had drank of death daily.
In all his experience the doctor had never seen a man so wildly and
passionately tenacious of life, nor one so strongly knit to this
material world by the sheer animal lust of living. Then the news that
hope could no longer be entertained was told him, and his spirit passed
out of the grip of that agony of torture and suspense, and accepted the
inevitable with indifference. Yet the change was so extraordinary that
it seemed to the doctor rather that the news had completely stunned his
powers of feeling, and he was below the numbed surface, still knit into
material things as strongly as ever. He had fainted when the result was
told him, and Dr Teesdale had been called in to attend him. But the fit
was but transient, and he came out of it into full consciousness of what
had happened.
The murder had been a deed of peculiar horror, and there was nothing of
sympathy in the mind of the public towards the perpetrator. Charles
Linkworth, who now lay under capital sentence, was the keeper of a small
stationery store in Sheffield, and there lived with him his wife and
mother. The latter was the victim of his atrocious crime; the motive of
it being to get possession of the sum of five hundred pounds, which was
this woman’s property. Linkworth, as came out at the trial, was in debt
to the extent of a hundred pounds at the time, and during his wife’s
absence from home, on a visit to relations, he strangled his mother, and
during the night buried the body in the small back-garden of his house.
On his wife’s return, he had a sufficiently plausible tale to account
for the elder Mrs Linkworth’s disappearance, for there had been constant
jarrings and bickerings between him and his mother for the last year or
two, and she had more than once threatened to withdraw herself and the
eight shillings a week which she contributed to household expenses, and
purchase an annuity with her money. It was true, also, that during the
younger Mrs Linkworth’s absence from home, mother and son had had a
violent quarrel arising originally from some trivial point in household
management, and that in consequence of this, she had actually drawn her
money out of the bank, intending to leave Sheffield next day and settle
in London where she had friends. That evening she told him this, and
during the night he killed her.
His next step, before his wife’s return, was logical and sound. He
packed up all his mother’s possessions and took them to the station,
from which he saw them despatched to town by passenger train, and in the
evening he asked several friends in to supper, and told them of his
mother’s departure. He did not (logically also, and in accordance with
what they probably already knew) feign regret, but said that he and she
had never got on well together, and that the cause of peace and
quietness was furthered by her going. He told the same story to his wife
on her return, identical in every detail, adding, however, that the
quarrel had been a violent one, and that his mother had not even left
him her address. This again was wisely thought of: it would prevent his
wife from writing to her. She appeared to accept his story completely:
indeed there was nothing strange or suspicious about it.
For a while he behaved with the composure and astuteness which most
criminals possess up to a certain point, the lack of which, after that,
is generally the cause of their detection. He did not, for instance,
immediately pay off his debts, but took into his house a young man as
lodger, who occupied his mother’s room, and he dismissed the assistant
in his shop, and did the entire serving himself. This gave the
impression of economy, and at the same time he openly spoke of the great
improvement in his trade, and not till a month had passed did he cash
any of the bank-notes which he had found in a locked drawer in his
mother’s room. Then he changed two notes of fifty pounds and paid off
his creditors.
At that point his astuteness and composure failed him. He opened a
deposit account at a local bank with four more fifty-pound notes,
instead of being patient, and increasing his balance at the savings bank
pound by pound, and he got uneasy about that which he had buried deep
enough for security in the back garden. Thinking to render himself safer
in this regard, he ordered a cartload of slag and stone fragments and
with the help of his lodger employed the summer evenings when work was
over, in building a sort of rockery over the spot. Then came the chance
circumstance which really set match to this dangerous train. There was a
fire in the lost luggage office at King’s Cross Station (from which he
ought to have claimed his mother’s property) and one of the two boxes
was partially burned. The company was liable for compensation, and his
mother’s name on her linen, and a letter with the Sheffield address on
it, led to the arrival of a purely official and formal notice, stating
that the company were prepared to consider claims. It was directed to
Mrs Linkworth, and Charles Linkworth’s wife received and read it.
It seemed a sufficiently harmless document, but it was endorsed with his
death-warrant. For he could give no explanation at all of the fact of
the boxes still lying at King’s Cross Station, beyond suggesting that
some accident had happened to his mother. Clearly he had to put the
matter in the hands of the police, with a view to tracing her movements,
and if it proved that she was dead, claiming her property, which she had
already drawn out of the bank. Such at least was the course urged on him
by his wife and lodger, in whose presence the communication from the
railway officials was read out, and it was impossible to refuse to take
it. Then the silent, uncreaking machinery of justice, characteristic of
England, began to move forward. Quiet men lounged about Smith Street,
visited banks, observed the supposed increase in trade, and from a house
near by looked into the garden where ferns were already flourishing on
the rockery. Then came the arrest and the trial, which did not last very
long, and on a certain Saturday night the verdict. Smart women in large
hats had made the court bright with colour, and in all the crowd there
was not one who felt any sympathy with the young athletic-looking man
who was condemned. Many of the audience were elderly and respectable
mothers, and the crime had been an outrage on motherhood, and they
listened to the unfolding of the flawless evidence with strong approval.
They thrilled a little when the judge put on the awful and ludicrous
little black cap, and spoke the sentence appointed by God.
Linkworth went to pay the penalty for the atrocious deed, which no one
who had heard the evidence could possibly doubt that he had done, with
the same indifference as had marked his entire demeanour since he knew
his appeal had failed. The prison chaplain who had attended him had done
his utmost to get him to confess, but his efforts had been quite
ineffectual, and to the last he asserted, though without protestation,
his innocence. On a bright September morning, when the sun shone warm on
the terrible little procession that crossed the prison yard to the shed
where was erected the apparatus of death, justice was done, and Dr
Teesdale was satisfied that life was immediately extinct. He had been
present on the scaffold, had watched the bolt drawn, and the hooded and
pinioned figure drop into the pit. He had heard the chunk and creak of
the rope as the sudden weight came on to it, and looking down he had
seen the queer twitchings of the hanged body. They had lasted but a
second or two; the execution had been perfectly satisfactory.
An hour later he made the post-mortem examination, and found that his
view had been correct: the vertebrae of the spine had been broken at the
neck, and death must have been absolutely instantaneous. It was hardly
necessary even to make that little piece of dissection that proved this,
but for the sake of form he did so. And at that moment he had a very
curious and vivid mental impression that the spirit of the dead man was
close beside him, as if it still dwelt in the broken habitation of its
body. But there was no question at all that the body was dead: it had
been dead an hour. Then followed another little circumstance that at the
first seemed insignificant though curious also. One of the warders
entered, and asked if the rope which had been used an hour ago, and was
the hangman’s perquisite, had by mistake been brought into the mortuary
with the body. But there was no trace of it, and it seemed to have
vanished altogether though it was a singular thing to be lost: it was
not here; it was not on the scaffold. And though the disappearance was
of no particular moment, it was quite inexplicable.
Dr Teesdale was a bachelor and a man of independent means, and lived in
a tall-windowed and commodious house in Bedford Square, where a plain
cook of surpassing excellence looked after his food, and her husband his
person. There was no need for him to practise a profession at all, and
he performed his work at the prison for the sake of the study of the
minds of criminals. Most crime--the transgression, that is, of the rule
of conduct which the human race has framed for the sake of its own
preservation--he held to be either the result of some abnormality of the
brain, or of starvation. Crimes of theft, for instance, he would by no
means refer to one head; often it is true they were the result of actual
want, but more often dictated by some obscure disease of the brain. In
marked cases it was labelled as kleptomania, but he was convinced there
were many others which did not fall directly under the dictation of
physical need. More especially was this the case where the crime in
question involved also some deed of violence, and he mentally placed
underneath this heading, as he went home that evening, the criminal at
whose last moments he had been present that morning. The crime had been
abominable, the need of money not so very pressing, and the very
abomination and unnaturalness of the murder inclined him to consider the
murderer as lunatic rather than criminal. He had been, as far as was
known, a man of quiet and kindly disposition, a good husband, a sociable
neighbour. And then he had committed a crime, just one, which put him
outside all pales. So monstrous a deed, whether perpetrated by a sane
man or a mad one, was intolerable; there was no use for the doer of it
on this planet at all. But somehow the doctor felt that he would have
been more at one with the execution of justice, if the dead man had
confessed. It was morally certain that he was guilty, but he wished that
when there was no longer any hope for him, he had endorsed the verdict
himself.
He dined alone that evening, and after dinner sat in his study which
adjoined the dining-room, and feeling disinclined to read, sat in his
great red chair opposite the fireplace, and let his mind graze where it
would. At once almost, it went back to the curious sensation he had
experienced that morning, of feeling that the spirit of Linkworth was
present in the mortuary, though life had been extinct for an hour. It
was not the first time, especially in cases of sudden death, that he had
felt a similar conviction, though perhaps it had never been quite so
unmistakable as it had been to-day. Yet the feeling, to his mind, was
quite probably formed on a natural and psychical truth. The spirit--it
may be remarked that he was a believer in the doctrine of future life,
and the non-extinction of the soul with the death of the body--was very
likely unable or unwilling to quit at once and altogether the earthly
habitation, very likely it lingered there, earth-bound, for a while. In
his leisure hours Dr Teesdale was a considerable student of the occult,
for like most advanced and proficient physicians, he clearly recognised
how narrow was the boundary of separation between soul and body, how
tremendous the influence of the intangible was over material things,
and it presented no difficulty to his mind that a disembodied spirit
should be able to communicate directly with those who still were bounded
by the finite and material.
His meditations, which were beginning to group themselves into definite
sequence, were interrupted at this moment. On his desk near at hand
stood his telephone, and the bell rang, not with its usual metallic
insistence, but very faintly, as if the current was weak, or the
mechanism impaired. However, it certainly was ringing, and he got up and
took the combined ear and mouth-piece off its hook.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “who is it?”
There was a whisper in reply almost inaudible, and quite unintelligible.
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
Again the whisper sounded, but with no greater distinctness. Then it
ceased altogether.
He stood there, for some half minute or so, waiting for it to be
renewed, but beyond the usual chuckling and croaking, which showed,
however, that he was in communication with some other instrument, there
was silence. Then he replaced the receiver, rang up the Exchange, and
gave his number.
“Can you tell me what number rang me up just now?” he asked.
There was a short pause, then it was given him. It was the number of the
prison, where he was doctor.
“Put me on to it, please,” he said.
This was done.
“You rang me up just now,” he said down the tube. “Yes; I am Doctor
Teesdale. What is it? I could not hear what you said.”
The voice came back quite clear and intelligible.
“Some mistake, sir,” it said, “We haven’t rang you up.”
“But the exchange tells me you did, three minutes ago.”
“Mistake at the Exchange, sir,” said the voice.
“Very odd. Well, good-night. Warder Draycott, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir; good-night, sir.”