Sir David ladled out into fresh glasses from the dregs of the jorum.
“A toast!” said he, the leaping candle-light making a shifting
grotesque of his wholesome young face. “Here’s to the memory of the
last tenant o’ ‘Delsrop,’ and the health of the new one!”
“With all my heart. How was the beggar called? He hath entailed me a
legacy of weeds. Was _he_ the gallows-bird?”
The visitor spoke in jest, and was surprised to have, “Aye, that he
was,” for answer.
“Great heavens!” he exclaimed.
The baronet flung himself back in his chair with a chuckle.
“You little expected that,” said he. “But there’s a reservation I’ll
own to. They strung him up after he was dead.”
He went into a fit of laughter over the other’s astonished expression.
“I see you are unacquainted with the tale,” he said. “’Tis a tattered
old boggart of the past that the neighbourhood has years-long ceased
to throw stones at. But, you’ll pardon me, Tuke. What the devil
induced you to invest in those ragged acres yonder?”
“I didn’t. I succeeded to them.”
“Direct?”
“Certainly.”
He had hesitated in answering. The little man gazed at him
inquisitively.
“You are--you are not in mourning,” he said.
“For my father? Scarcely. He died in ’80. A widow even may be excused
for doffing black in twenty years.”
“I see. You are an absentee landlord. Fie, sir! We hold you
responsible thereby for many a pretty ghost tale.”
He answered jocosely; but he was looking at the other with a certain
ruminative wonder.
“Twenty years,” he murmured. “Why, then, your father must have stepped
straight into old Turk’s shoes.”
“The former tenant? Was that his name?”
“Turk--yes.”
He was still engulfed in retrospect. His eyes were fixed, unwinking,
like a doll’s.
“Well,” he said at last--sucking at the stem of his “church-warden” as
if he were a baby ravenous for its “comforter”--“it fair upsets me, it
does.”
“What does?”
“How you can ’a let a fruitful estate like that go to wrack and ruin
for twenty years.”
Mr. Tuke was silent. Had he spoken, and the truth, he could only have
echoed the other’s wonder. As it was, his mouth was tied to an
adequate explanation.
Blythewood blew away the problem with a cloud of smoke.
“We’ve got you at last, anyhow,” he said. “And that’s nine points of
the law. I’ll wager you don’t know, sir, whence your house gets its
name.”
“I can’t take you. You’re right.”
“’Tis the short for Devil’s-rope,--that’s what it is; the cursed
bind-weed that will honeycomb a county from an inch of root if you
give it rein. The story goes that, when they dug the foundations, it
lay thick in the soil as macaroni in a dish.”
“That’s odd enough; and an ominous name for the last tenant by your
showing. What was his history that you make a secret of?”
“Tut! ’tis no secret. Did you hear that?--the wind ’ll blow the
casement in. ’Tis no secret; but I was only a lad of five when they
found him hanging on the downs, and so can give you little but the
fruits of hearsay.”
“And what are they?”
“As dry as apple-johns by this date. Fill your glass. The fellow’s
name was Turk, I say; and he looked his name.--Zounds! ’tis like his
ghost ravenin’ with fury to get the grip of us.--He must ’a been an
ugly beggar; for I can remember him plain as plain for all I was only
five years old when he was found swingin’.”
“What was he like?”
“Like? Like a gurgoyle on a church--a face to sweat o’ nights with
thinking on. A murderous-looking caitiff, sir, with red stubble under
his jasey and a bloody long tuck at his side. Yet I can mind me of a
look in his eyes--or in one of ’em; for t’other was fixed in his head
and chalky like a boiled cod’s--that wasn’t all of the rest. ’Twas
fear, or sufferin’--or compound of both; and it lessened the fright I
stood in of meetin’ him.”
“Was he always there--at ‘Delsrop,’ I mean, in your early memory of
it?”
“Save us, no. The place belonged to the Woodruffs up to ’77, when it
came into the market. The new owner wasn’t in possession--no, not a
year. He turned up sudden--was there on a day, with his black-bodin’
face; and nobody knew where he’d come from or what was his business in
life. They didn’t find out then or afterwards. He kept himself to
himself; received no visitors and wanted none; lived his days
solitary, shut up like a miser; and didn’t so much as weed the gravel
of his drive.”
“And so disappeared?”
“Disappeared? Not he. He was a landmark to every traveller for months
to come. I mind the mornin’ well--ah! even through this lapse of
time--that young Peterson, our landreeve, rode over to ‘Chatters,’
with a face like whey, and said as how Mr. Turk had been found
murdered and hangin’ in the chains on Stockbridge downs.”
“Hanging?”
“Aye! There they’d strung him up that did the deed; for he’d been
stabbed first--nigh a dozen angry wounds that had sucked at the steel
like mouths--and then set to dangle for a jest to the daws.”
“And when they ran the rogues to earth?”
“They never did, sir--they never did. To this day the man’s fate is
locked up in the mystery of his life.”
“But at the inquest----”
“None was held. ’Twas an odd thing, you’ll say; and a cursed odd thing
it was. But none was held for all that. Men’s minds were disorganized
at that time, ’tis said. There was the French and Spanish coalition,
and dark trouble about a possible descent on the coast--like as there
is now. Who was to think of one murdered land-loper, that nobody knew
or claimed, when all eyes were turned to the sea? Anyhow, there he
swung and rotted, to the huge scandal of the neighbourhood, till he
and his head parted company and came to the ground.”
“But there must have been legatees--executors--lawyers interested, at
the very least?”
“They never put in a claim, then. The fellow was here, and gone, and
narry a sign. ’Twas a queer business.”
“Well, heaven rest his bones at the last!”
“I’ll give you Amen to that. You are its deputy for one of them by all
account.”
“Eh! What d’ye say?”
“’Tis a tale hereabouts that Whimple’s mad sister has the creature’s
skull in keepin’--that for months she hovered like a crow under the
gallows, and picked it up at last when it fell.”
“Good God! She has--or had. I’ve seen it.”
“Ah! A pretty plaything for a maid. Well, that’s Mr. Turk’s story, as
I know it.”
The listener sat for some moments in a profound and bewildered
silence. Vaguely, through his brain, like faint harmonics, ran the
words of the lawyer Creel and his own question to which they had been
an answer: “When did it come to him?” “That I may answer you. It was
in the year ’79.”
So his father had himself slipped into possession of this mysterious
estate at the very time that ghastly scarecrow was tossing in the
wind. How then was it, that he had not caused inquiry to be made as to
the fate of his predecessor--had not set bloodhounds on the track of
the assassins--had not even allotted the poor remains some decent
burial?
For the first time a little mist of darkness gathered in his heart--a
suspicion born of the unaccountable secrecy that was the main
condition of his inheritance.
Presently he looked up with a troubled face.
“Then Whimple and his sister,” he said, “were early put in charge of
the deserted place?--but they were, of course. The fellow told me so
himself.”
“Aye, aye,” said Sir David. “He was only a lad of eighteen when he
first came--a great weedy gawk with scared eyes.”
“Twenty years haven’t improved upon that. My God! what an existence!”
“Well, sir, it may suit a being or not. We ain’t all built for
coal-porters. The measure of a man’s work is his willingness to it;
and Dennis is no Jackalent for all his diffidence. He knows a spavin
from a thrush; and I’ll tell ye somethin’ more--he can put rhymes
together equal to Milton or Mr. Pye.”
“Umph!” said the other.