Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To
stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the
birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him
feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and
forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth
the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever
proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his
estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be
accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.
It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it
fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of
their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been
small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of
a new-minded _débutante_ who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the
verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above
them.
But it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall's mind as, when
the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and
sauntered down to the river. His intimate friend, the companion of his
boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many
lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all
men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have
sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. He had
been a guest on the adjoining estate during the past week, shooting with
the fervor of the true sportsman, making love in the intervals to
Adeline Cavan, and apparently in the best of spirits. As far as was
known there was nothing to lower his mental mercury, for his rent-roll
was a large one, Miss Cavan blushed whenever he looked at her, and,
being one of the best shots in England, he was never happier than in
August. The suicide theory was preposterous, all agreed, and there was
as little reason to believe him murdered. Nevertheless, he had walked
out of March Abbey two nights ago without hat or overcoat, and had not
been seen since.
The country was being patrolled night and day. A hundred keepers and
workmen were beating the woods and poking the bogs on the moors, but as
yet not so much as a handkerchief had been found.
Weigall did not believe for a moment that Wyatt Gifford was dead, and
although it was impossible not to be affected by the general uneasiness,
he was disposed to be more angry than frightened. At Cambridge Gifford
had been an incorrigible practical joker, and by no means had outgrown
the habit; it would be like him to cut across the country in his evening
clothes, board a cattle-train, and amuse himself touching up the picture
of the sensation in West Riding.
However, Weigall's affection for his friend was too deep to companion
with tranquillity in the present state of doubt, and, instead of going
to bed early with the other men, he determined to walk until ready for
sleep. He went down to the river and followed the path through the
woods. There was no moon, but the stars sprinkled their cold light upon
the pretty belt of water flowing placidly past wood and ruin, between
green masses of overhanging rocks or sloping banks tangled with tree and
shrub, leaping occasionally over stones with the harsh notes of an angry
scold, to recover its equanimity the moment the way was clear again.
It was very dark in the depths where Weigall trod. He smiled as he
recalled a remark of Gifford's: "An English wood is like a good many
other things in life--very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery
when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun
freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem
what they ought to be--what they once were, before our ancestors'
descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various
days."
Weigall strolled along, smoking, and thinking of his friend, his
pranks--many of which had done more credit to his imagination than
this--and recalling conversations that had lasted the night through.
Just before the end of the London season they had walked the streets one
hot night after a party, discussing the various theories of the soul's
destiny. That afternoon they had met at the coffin of a college friend
whose mind had been a blank for the past three years. Some months
previously they had called at the asylum to see him. His expression had
been senile, his face imprinted with the record of debauchery. In death
the face was placid, intelligent, without ignoble lineation--the face of
the man they had known at college. Weigall and Gifford had had no time
to comment there, and the afternoon and evening were full; but, coming
forth from the house of festivity together, they had reverted almost at
once to the topic.
"I cherish the theory," Gifford had said, "that the soul sometimes
lingers in the body after death. During madness, of course, it is an
impotent prisoner, albeit a conscious one. Fancy its agony, and its
horror! What more natural than that, when the life-spark goes out, the
tortured soul should take possession of the vacant skull and triumph
once more for a few hours while old friends look their last? It has had
time to repent while compelled to crouch and behold the result of its
work, and it has shrived itself into a state of comparative purity. If I
had my way, I should stay inside my bones until the coffin had gone into
its niche, that I might obviate for my poor old comrade the tragic
impersonality of death. And I should like to see justice done to it, as
it were--to see it lowered among its ancestors with the ceremony and
solemnity that are its due. I am afraid that if I dissevered myself too
quickly, I should yield to curiosity and hasten to investigate the
mysteries of space."
"You believe in the soul as an independent entity, then---that it and
the vital principle are not one and the same?"
"Absolutely. The body and soul are twins, life comrades--sometimes
friends, sometimes enemies, but always loyal in the last instance. Some
day, when I am tired of the world, I shall go to India and become a
mahatma, solely for the pleasure of receiving proof during life of this
independent relationship."
"Suppose you were not sealed up properly, and returned after one of your
astral flights to find your earthly part unfit for habitation? It is an
experiment I don't think I should care to try, unless even juggling with
soul and flesh had palled."
"That would not be an uninteresting predicament. I should rather enjoy
experimenting with broken machinery."
The high wild roar of water smote suddenly upon Weigall's ear and
checked his memories. He left the wood and walked out on the huge
slippery stones which nearly close the River Wharfe at this point, and
watched the waters boil down into the narrow pass with their furious
untiring energy. The black quiet of the woods rose high on either side.
The stars seemed colder and whiter just above. On either hand the
perspective of the river might have run into a rayless cavern. There
was no lonelier spot in England, nor one which had the right to claim so
many ghosts, if ghosts there were.
Weigall was not a coward, but he recalled uncomfortably the tales of
those that had been done to death in the Strid.[1] Wordsworth's Boy of
Egremond had been disposed of by the practical Whitaker; but countless
others, more venturesome than wise, had gone down into that narrow
boiling course, never to appear in the still pool a few yards beyond.
Below the great rocks which form the walls of the Strid was believed to
be a natural vault, on to whose shelves the dead were drawn. The spot
had an ugly fascination. Weigall stood, visioning skeletons, uncoffined
and green, the home of the eyeless things which had devoured all that
had covered and filled that rattling symbol of man's mortality; then
fell to wondering if any one had attempted to leap the Strid of late. It
was covered with slime; he had never seen it look so treacherous.
[Footnote 1:
"This striding place is called the 'Strid,'
A name which it took of yore;
A thousand years hath it borne the name,
And it shall a thousand more."
]
He shuddered and turned away, impelled, despite his manhood, to flee the
spot. As he did so, something tossing in the foam below the
fall--something as white, yet independent of it--caught his eye and
arrested his step. Then he saw that it was describing a contrary motion
to the rushing water--an upward backward motion. Weigall stood rigid,
breathless; he fancied he heard the crackling of his hair. Was that a
hand? It thrust itself still higher above the boiling foam, turned
sidewise, and four frantic fingers were distinctly visible against the
black rock beyond.
Weigall's superstitious terror left him. A man was there, struggling to
free himself from the suction beneath the Strid, swept down, doubtless,
but a moment before his arrival, perhaps as he stood with his back to
the current.
He stepped as close to the edge as he dared. The hand doubled as if in
imprecation, shaking savagely in the face of that force which leaves its
creatures to immutable law; then spread wide again, clutching,
expanding, crying for help as audibly as the human voice.
Weigall dashed to the nearest tree, dragged and twisted off a branch
with his strong arms, and returned as swiftly to the Strid. The hand was
in the same place, still gesticulating as wildly; the body was
undoubtedly caught in the rocks below, perhaps already half-way along
one of those hideous shelves. Weigall let himself down upon a lower
rock, braced his shoulder against the mass beside him, then, leaning out
over the water, thrust the branch into the hand. The fingers clutched it
convulsively. Weigall tugged powerfully, his own feet dragged perilously
near the edge. For a moment he produced no impression, then an arm shot
above the waters.
The blood sprang to Weigall's head; he was choked with the impression
that the Strid had him in her roaring hold, and he saw nothing. Then the
mist cleared. The hand and arm were nearer, although the rest of the
body was still concealed by the foam. Weigall peered out with distended
eyes. The meagre light revealed in the cuffs links of a peculiar device.
The fingers clutching the branch were as familiar.
Weigall forgot the slippery stones, the terrible death if he stepped too
far. He pulled with passionate will and muscle. Memories flung
themselves into the hot light of his brain, trooping rapidly upon each
other's heels, as in the thought of the drowning. Most of the pleasures
of his life, good and bad, were identified in some way with this friend.
Scenes of college days, of travel, where they had deliberately sought
adventure and stood between one another and death upon more occasions
than one, of hours of delightful companionship among the treasures of
art, and others in the pursuit of pleasure, flashed like the changing
particles of a kaleidoscope. Weigall had loved several women; but he
would have flouted in these moments the thought that he had ever loved
any woman as he loved Wyatt Gifford. There were so many charming women
in the world, and in the thirty-two years of his life he had never known
another man to whom he had cared to give his intimate friendship.
He threw himself on his face. His wrists were cracking, the skin was
torn from his hands. The fingers still gripped the stick. There was life
in them yet.
Suddenly something gave way. The hand swung about, tearing the branch
from Weigall's grasp. The body had been liberated and flung outward,
though still submerged by the foam and spray.
Weigall scrambled to his feet and sprang along the rocks, knowing that
the danger from suction was over and that Gifford must be carried
straight to the quiet pool. Gifford was a fish in the water and could
live under it longer than most men. If he survived this, it would not be
the first time that his pluck and science had saved him from drowning.
Weigall reached the pool. A man in his evening clothes floated on it,
his face turned towards a projecting rock over which his arm had fallen,
upholding the body. The hand that had held the branch hung limply over
the rock, its white reflection visible in the black water. Weigall
plunged into the shallow pool, lifted Gifford in his arms and returned
to the bank. He laid the body down and threw off his coat that he might
be the freer to practise the methods of resuscitation. He was glad of
the moment's respite. The valiant life in the man might have been
exhausted in that last struggle. He had not dared to look at his face,
to put his ear to the heart. The hesitation lasted but a moment. There
was no time to lose.
He turned to his prostrate friend. As he did so, something strange and
disagreeable smote his senses. For a half-moment he did not appreciate
its nature. Then his teeth clacked together, his feet, his outstretched
arms pointed towards the woods. But he sprang to the side of the man and
bent down and peered into his face. There was no face.