About mid-day Mr. Tuke sat himself down, like a man thoroughly
wearied, in his great flagged hall--which, with a fancifulness of
conceit, he had dubbed his dining-room--and summarized, with a
completely depressed air, the fruits of his morning’s exploration.
Briefly, these included, in the matter of “furnished apartments,” the
chamber in which he rested--whereof the plainest of necessaries was
comprised in a table and a few chairs; his bedroom, already described;
two little closets in the north wing, appropriated to Dennis and his
sister, and very modestly equipped; and a kitchen embellished with a
basketful of odd pots and pans. For the rest, a score of rooms, large
and small--of direct access, or approached by way of tortuous
passages, whereby unexpected steps to nowhere were the least harmful
of many pitfalls and obstructions--represented the present value of
his inheritance, and so far as they went, a purely negative one,
inasmuch as it seemed that the small fortune that would be required to
put them into a moderate state of repair, would be sufficient to
purchase elsewhere a messuage in sound and habitable condition.
And, without, it had been the same. The stables, substantial as the
house, were in a like condition of neglect. His horse he had found
ensconced in a battered stall and feeding out of a bushel basket. All
the contiguous offices, of less durable material than the main
building--which was of stone, coated with some form of plaster--were
lamentably dilapidated and threatening to a collapse that should be
general.
Clearly, unless the sum standing to his credit should prove to be a
considerable one, he must give up all thought of adequately repairing
the ravages of time.
As he sat in melancholy cogitation, he heard a suppressed chuckle at
the door, and, slewing his head about, caught sight of Darda standing
above in the hall.
“What do you want?” he said sharply.
She nodded at him with a fantastic gesture.
“My curiosities,” she said. “Do you wish to see them?”
He was about to return a peevish refusal; but bethought himself that
with such an one, a promise unfulfilled was like to prove a recurring
annoyance. Therefore he rose resignedly and went to the door.
“Lead on,” said he, “and I will come.”
She flitted before him, looking back from time to time with a
changeling coquetry that was half-repellant, half-fascinating. Her
actions, all lithe and graceful, were yet marked by an exaggeration
that transcended the bounds of reasonable self-control.
She led him to a narrow back stairway mounting from a sort of stone
closet set in an odd corner of the north wing, where meagre light
entered by way of a square aperture cut in the masonry and barred with
a sturdy grate of iron.
The spot was like a prison-cell in the black melancholy of its
surroundings. Arid moss grew in the crevices of the stones, and
everywhere the viscous tracks of snails laced the walls, as if in a
feeble attempt to beautify what was obdurate.
Crossing the floor, the boards, at a certain place, gave up a booming
sound, as if there were a vault underneath.
The girl paused, with a light foot on the stairway.
“You hear it?” she said. “That is where the shadows sleep at mid-day.
But when the sun loses his hold of the white ladder he has climbed by,
they come out and grow and grow in joy to see him fall. Then all night
they can fill the house, for they are brave and big.”
“What is it?” said the baronet. “A vault?”
She moved back a step, and stamped with her slender foot.
“They call it ‘the Priests’ Hole,’” she said. “Perhaps they hid there
and became shadows in time. You may open it if you will. It is too
heavy for me.”
He saw a ring in the boards, and tugged at it. A square of flooring
yielded and came slowly up, screeching like the mandrake. Beneath was
revealed a stone-lined chamber, some seven feet in depth and four in
width, into which a weak gush of light found passage from some distant
grating.
A dismal hiding-place, in all truth, where, it seemed, a man might
perish forgotten in the racket of the times that gave it existence.
“It was hard to find once,” said Darda. “Hidden and tucked away in the
hollow of the wall, ’tis said. Then the shadows must have been short
and the world always day.”
“A weary thing for men, my lass. Lead on.”
He let the flap fall into place with a slam of thunder, and followed
the girl up the stairs. These led to the servants’ quarter, where were
situated the two little sleeping-places of Dennis and his sister.
Into her own room she flitted, and bade her companion watch while she
unlocked and threw open the door of a tall wooden press that stood in
a recess of the chimney.
He lounged, idly looking while she revealed her treasures; and she
stepped back with an expression of covert triumph on her face.
“Do you know what they are?” she said. “Name them to me, all.”
He gave an involuntary exclamation of repulsion; for verily it was a
gruesome collection that met his gaze.
Many old mummified skins of bird and beast, with beak and claw still
adhering to them; yellowing teeth of cattle and skulls of small-deer
picked out of brake and warren; the sloughed skin of an adder; the
desiccated presentment of a cat with a mouse in its jaws, found behind
a stove; amongst them all, carefully arranged, a host of common
pebbles, selected for some distinguishing mark, and even withered
roots and potatoes, that accident had embellished with some grotesque
resemblance to twisted limbs or faces--such were the principal
features of Darda’s museum.
There was yet another treasure that stood prominently forward of the
rest in a place of honour--a human skull--no less--with wisps of
gritty hair yet clinging to the scalp, and the flesh of the face
withered to a corrugated substance like bark.
The baronet gave out a note of extreme disgust. The eye-holes of the
dead horror were wrinkled like a toad’s back, and one of them was
bulged with a chalky lump that, gleaming through the slit, looked as
if the last dying terror of the soul that once inhabited had petrified
it.
Seeing his expression, the girl gave an eldritch laugh, and clipped it
in the bud.
“That is Dennis,” she said, listening.
A step came up the stairway. Mr. Tuke strode into the passage without,
and met the brother approaching.
“She has been showing me those abominations,” he said. “They must be
cleared out, every one of them. I won’t have the ugly rubbish in my
house. You hear me?”
He understood the man to give a little gasping, nervous response, and
walked on fuming. At the stair-head he turned again. Whimple had not
moved, and his face was drawn and white.
“Where did she pick up that filthy relic?” said he sternly.
“The head, sir?”
“The head, of course. There is no need to misapprehend me.”
The other seemed to have some difficulty in replying. More than once
he cleared his husky throat; and when at length he spoke, it was in a
strained, mumbling voice.
“She wanders far afield. It was at the foot of the gallows on the
downs she found it fallen, and brought it home.”
“Lately?”
“Oh, sir, no. It was the first year of our coming.”
“Well, it must be got rid of. I won’t have it here.”
The words had hardly left his lips, when Darda sprang into the
passage, her eyes blazing like a maniac’s.
“It shan’t go!” she shrieked--“it shan’t! it shan’t! Dennis, kill
him!”
Her brother closed frantically with the mad creature, and sought to
still her cries. He looked imploringly, in the midst of his
struggling, at his master.
The latter took no heed of the uproar; but simply saying over his
shoulder, “Remember; it is to be done as I say,”--turned coolly and
descended the flight. But the noise of the girl’s screaming pursued
him far into the house.
It was an hour later when Dennis begged leave to speak with him as he
sat awaiting his dinner. The caretaker was palpably in a state of
semi-prostration. His face was white and his hands shook. It was,
perhaps, not to be expected that a man of Sir Robert’s calibre should
be prepossessed by an exhibition of nervousness so pitiful.
“Well?” he said, the contempt in his heart finding some expression in
his voice.
“I wanted to ask you, sir--to beg you not to hold me responsible for
this--this scene. The girl has ever been a wayward unaccountable
body.”
“I will not be troubled with her. If she is to stop--and God knows why
she should--she must learn to keep her place and to do what service
she can.”
“I know, sir. I never guessed--she must learn to appreciate your
goodness. We are quite homeless but for your bounty.”
“I don’t wish to be harsh; but you must see, my good fellow, that her
way of looking at things is not that of a servant towards her master.
No doubt these twenty-odd years of caretaking have led her to assume a
sort of semi-proprietary attitude towards the estate. I grant her that
excuse; and see, of course, that you are very much bound up in her.”
“Oh! I am, sir.”
“That is commendable,” said the baronet dryly. “Only--you understand?”
“I understand fully, sir. She shall not annoy you again. I have made
away with--with the things, as you ordered.”
“And the skull is gone?”
“It is--yes, it is gone.”
Was there a shifting devil in the fellow’s eyes? His master looked at
him keenly. Everything about the man--his humility, his gentle voice,
his poor physique, and more beggarly resignation to a life of long
inaction--told against him with the robuster individuality. And, after
all, were these qualities in a measure assumed? So much of doubt and
mystery had entered into the baronet’s days of late, as to give birth
in him to a gloom and suspicion that were hitherto foreign to his
nature. He foresaw himself, with dark apprehension, the lord of a
bugbear estate--beset with a thousand trials and difficulties--cut off
from the world of his custom, and ever sinking into deeper sloughs of
melancholy and despondence.
He roused himself with an effort. That very afternoon, he inwardly
determined, he would ride into Winchester--where was to be found his
agent, to whom Creel had entrusted the moneys standing to his
credit--and satisfy himself as to his prospective position as a man of
more or less substance. Then, if all figured out well, he could
arrange for the purchase of furniture and hire of servants
proportionate to his means.
At any rate he would rub shoulders with his fellow-creatures once
more. That, perhaps, was not the least that induced him to the
purpose. He most piously longed to shake off, if only for an hour,
that sense of sombre isolation that had lain on him from his first
coming, like a dark fatality.
“You can go,” he said sharply; and fell to musing again.
His meal was served by Darda. If, in her half-crazed consciousness,
she resented, with a swollen, passionate heart, the cruel order that
had deprived her at a blow of the chief fantastic interest of her
broken life, she had disciplined herself already to give no sign of
it. No doubt her brother, forced to be the instrument of a harsh
despotism, had appealed to her by love of himself to control the
emotion that, expressed, could only read their ruin. No doubt, also,
the sense of bitter wrong driven down, would by and by stimulate
certain nerves of action that had hitherto slumbered unrecognized.
She moved to and fro with set lips and white face and shot no single
glance in the direction of her master. The womanly instinct for grace
and neatness, that not the most debased intellect altogether foregoes,
led her to give what order to the arrangement of the meal its poor
accessories allowed.
When all was finished, she went softly from the room and closed the
door.
Mr. Tuke did not permit a certain pity in his heart for this tender
bud he had so lacerated to interfere with his appetite. But, his
dinner over, he fell, as men will, to a more genial view of
circumstances, and, as he sipped his wine, was inclined to regret his
precipitancy of the morning.
“Yet, after all,” he thought, “the monstrosities were incompatible
with any forms of feminine attractiveness, and she will soon learn to
find her pleasure in more wholesome interests.”
He laughed, reviewing the items of the hideous collection.
“From the gallows!” quoth he. “And a relic of twenty years standing!
And did she let the rest of the good gentleman lie--only plucking the
head, like a withered medlar, from the stalk it dropped with? I am
made a receiver of stolen property, by Gad--Herodias to some bloody
cut-purse! What a dreary-minded wench, and what a pretty!”
The sweet old wine flushed his brain with a glamour of roses. He was
inclined to take a more humorous view of his state and position.
No doubt, withheld for the time being from considerations of
worldliness, he felt that relapse from reclaimed barbarism which,
coming to us all in certain moods and before certain aspects of
nature, restores us momentarily to the primitive joy in life untamed
and unmalignant, that is our proper heritage.
After all, it is not for the trimmed parterres of existence to yield
those glad surprises that are the basis of our yearning to the
immortal. Who ever, wandering in an ordered garden, lost himself in a
luminous mist of paganism?
Here, the infinite possibilities of Nature were before him--the search
for her glimmering and elusive shrine in an endless variety of
thickets. He would slough the skin of conventions, and, plunging naked
into the green glooms of enchantment, pursue the way from which only
is hedged off by leafiness the menacing face of Death. More than this,
work--the work that should be in touch with that of the great Mother,
adapting her harmonies, imitating her lines--appealed to him with
sudden force, so that he was to find a purpose in living that he had
never guessed at hitherto. He was fascinated--absorbed in a dream of
sun and woodlands and the mossy sparkle of innocent springs.
As the spirit of the wine evaporated, however, that hideous token of a
felon’s fate would slip into his thoughts with a recurring
persistency. That this was so, first angered, then depressed him. He
was not a particularly squeamish individual, and certainly his rough
times were not favourable to sensitiveness in so common a respect.
Still, he could not drive the sordid keepsake from his reflections.
“Curse the jade!” he muttered. “Wasn’t the place lonely and dismal
enough without that acute accent on its ghostliness!”
He laboured out a sigh.
“Well, at any rate,” he breathed, “it’s got rid of now.”
As he spoke, his glance wandered to the long latticed window, a
casement of which stood open: and there, upon the sill, a black blotch
in the sunlight, lay the grinning horror itself.