ISHMAEL'S HERITAGE
There was something very dreadful about Farish M'Kissock's appearance as
he came shuffling forward from the corner under the gallery. His torn
and travel-stained white robe gave him a ghostly aspect which was
heightened by the cold and clammy pallor of his face, his sunken eyes,
the matted, blood-stained tangle of grey hair that merged into a long,
unkempt beard and moustache. He moved like an automaton, with all his
limbs and joints loose. The stamp of death was on him.
The Duchess of Dawn shrank into the ingle behind her as he approached,
and her noble nephew backed after her, one elbow uplifted, fists
clenched, with the apparent idea of protecting her from that
spectre-like apparition; at whom Herries also was gazing, aghast but
motionless, while Mr. Jobling, with bulging eyes and open mouth, felt
about him as if for some friendly hand to clutch at and, finding none,
laid hold of Slyne by the coat--who struck his fingers away with a
muttered oath. Slyne and Captain Dove and Justin Carthew were all
regarding him with blank dismay. Sallie uttered a little, low, pitiful
cry as she recognised in the worn-out wreck who had halted mutely a few
paces away the man she had seen only a month or two before in the prime
of life and the plenitude of his power, the Emir El Farish.
His burning eyes met and held Captain Dove's cowed, murderous, questing
glance for a moment; and then he laughed, in a most grisly manner.
"I'm dying now, Captain Dove," said he, in a strong, deep voice that
contrasted strangely with his obvious bodily exhaustion, "a day or two
sooner than need have been--but for you. _You're_ hale and strong yet.
You'll fight hard--when the hangman and his mates come quietly into your
cell at daybreak to pinion you. And, when you're standing on the trap,
with your head in a bag and the knot in a new rope rasping under one
ear, you'll think of me that's waiting for you in the pit below the
scaffold.
"But that's for by and by; and there's to-day to be done with first." He
laughed again, in such a fashion that the listeners shuddered. "I told
you there was nothing at all that would avail you against me," said he.
"Maybe you'll believe me now!"
Captain Dove looked furtively round at the others' faces, and spoke,
with obvious difficulty. "I've no idea what you're talking about--"
"I found M'Kissock--where you left him," interrupted Lord Jura, as if to
say that it was needless now to deny anything.
"You'd better send him back there, then," Captain Dove retorted
rancorously. "The man's mad--and dangerous. That's why I had him shut
up. He thinks he has some grudge against you, too. Take care he
doesn't--"
"I'm not mad. I'm not even dangerous enough to save the hangman his job
with you," said Farish M'Kissock quietly, and turned to Lord Jura again.
"But _you'll_ see to it, my lord, that the cruel wrongs this old Judas
has wrought you and me--ay, and even the innocent girl beside you
there--are avenged to the uttermost. I can trust you for that at least."
Lord Jura looked forlornly at Sallie. He could not now recall his
promise to her if Captain Dove still chose to take advantage of that.
"Sal--My sister has begged me to let him go free, M'Kissock," he said at
length, almost apologetically, "and--I've agreed."
Farish M'Kissock's head had begun to shake as if with palsy. He tried to
speak, but could not articulate. The veins about his clammy, yellow
temples were swelling darkly out, like cords. Carthew limped across to
the table and brought him over a glass of water. He swallowed some with
difficulty, and, finding his voice again, "You fool!" he cried, with
inexpressible bitterness. "Oh, you blind fool! Will you let him serve
you as he served me with her to help him!"
Lord Jura's face flushed.
"I want to hear no more from you in that strain," he said haughtily, as
if the old spirit of place and power were stirring within him again. "It
is sufficient that my sister's wishes--"
"If Sallie _were_ your sister, it would make no difference," the dying
man declared with fierce impatience. "This is no time to humour whim of
hers. In any case--she is no kin of yours, Lord Jura, as Captain Dove
well knows. He could have told you--_Keep him off!_ He'll make an end of
me before my time if he can, to silence me. And you must hear, before I
go,--" He staggered backward, coughing, and almost choked for want of
breath. Captain Dove had made a wild lunge at him, but Justin Carthew
had sprung forward in time to save him from the old man's frenzied
attempt: and Herries and Lord Ingoldsby also stepped in between him and
his would-be murderer.
"All right, then," panted Captain Dove. "Leave me alone, and I'll do him
no harm. I quite forgot that he was off his head, his lies provoke me
so."
Lord Jura had put Sallie behind him to shield her in the struggle that
promised. He looked round at her then with dazed, doubtful eyes and read
in hers pain and horror and disbelief equally dreadful. He drew a deep,
sobbing breath and confronted Farish M'Kissock again.
"What in God's name are you driving at!" he demanded, in a tone which
told the stress of mind he was suffering. And Farish M'Kissock regarded
him very evilly for a little before replying. Slyne and Captain Dove and
Carthew were waiting, as if on barbed tenter-hooks. The others, and
Sallie also, seemed to be stricken speechless and still.
"I am here to seek my revenge, my lord, as you know," said Farish
M'Kissock slowly at length, and licked his bloodless lips. "There is
still a small matter betwixt your lordship and me that remains to be
settled--an old wrong done, which your lordship has almost forgotten, it
seems. _I_ neither forget nor forgive.
"I may not have time left to tell all I owe Captain Dove there--for that
goes back through long years to what I owe you. But, before I am done
with, I think I can settle with you as well as with him.
"Sallie is no sister of yours, as Captain Dove knows--though she herself
has been beguiled as easily as your lordship. Your lordship's sister,
the Lady Josceline Justice, died in my arms eight or nine weeks ago: and
she was my wife. Sallie there, knowing nothing, saw her a few hours
before--"
He blinked and hung his head for a moment, as if recalling all that had
come to pass since he had laid the light, wasted body aside on the sand,
and set a guard over it until--until he could spare time to see to a
decent grave.
"She was my wife," he said again, looking up at the last of the haughty
Juras with hate unquenchable in his glance. "And that's the revenge I
have taken on you and yours, my lord, for the ill your lordship lightly
wrought--the other, that should have been."
A woman's voice came wailingly from the musicians' gallery and Mr.
Jobling uttered a low moan of abject fear. His nerves had evidently
failed him altogether. Hasty steps were descending the short stone
stairway which led to the gallery, and then Janet M'Kissock came
tottering forth across the floor from the foot of it.
"Oh, Farish!" the old woman cried to her brother. "Have you no heart at
all! Are there not enough lives ruined already that you would wreck her
ladyship's here as well?" And she turned toward Sallie with a poor,
pitiful gesture as of protection. "It _cannot_ be as you say," she
whimpered. "For how could _I_ be mistaken, that knew her father far
better than you--ay, and the countess her mother too; whose locket she
was wearing at her neck the day she first came to Loquhariot. I'll swear
to it, at any rate! I had it for a time in my own keeping, before the
countess--went away.
"Ask her ladyship where she got the locket, your grace. And then my
poor, distracted brother will maybe admit that he's been deceived about
her."
The duchess's anxious, encouraging look seemed to beg an answer of
Sallie. But the girl was gazing, with dumb dismay in her wide, wounded
eyes, at Farish M'Kissock, recalling as well as she could amid such a
maze the incidents of the hours she had spent in his camp on the African
coast.
Under the spell of his piercing glance the shadowy banquet-hall of
Loquhariot seemed to fade away from her, and in its place she saw again
the spacious rose-pink pavilion behind the carved chair on which he was
seated in state among his staring councillors, under a great green flag
with a golden harp on its heavy folds. Behind her, from about the
picket-lines where she had noticed the negro slaves at their work, she
seemed to hear the whinnying of the horses, the vicious squeals of the
restless camels. In the dim crimson glow of the dying fires she was
gazing again at the horsehair tents in the background, and the multitude
of men and women and children all busy about them in the open air.
She saw, as if in a vision, the Emir spring from his seat and come
hastily forward to where she stood shrinkingly at Captain Dove's
shoulder. He was tall and stalwart on foot, a fine figure of a man even
in his loose, shapeless garments, with a bronzed, hook-nosed, handsome
face of his own, a heavy moustache, the brooding, patient, predatory
eyes of a desert vulture. And, as he confronted Captain Dove, over whom
he seemed to tower threateningly, the hood of his _selham_ slipped back,
disclosing a flaming shock of red hair.
Her own veil had slipped to her chin, but she had been unconscious of
that until his blazing eyes had shifted from Captain Dove's unconcerned
face to hers. She pulled it hurriedly back into place, and he, turning
to the curious onlookers, rid himself of their company before he called,
in a caressing voice, on some one within the big, white tent that was
the heart of his stronghold. And there came forth a woman, veiled as she
herself had been, but clad in silk instead of cotton, who bowed
submissively to what he had to say, and then held out a slender,
bloodless, burning hand to her....
It all came back to her memory, as if in a lightning-flash that left her
stunned and helpless to face the appalling present again. She knew now
who the Emir's wife had been--a girl of her own age, but grown old
before her time and weary of the little life that had been left in her
then. She knew that Farish M'Kissock was speaking the truth now, and
that she must bear witness to it at whatever cost to herself. It made no
difference that Captain Dove's expression was a mute and none the less
dreadful threat of what she might look for at his hands if she dared to
do so. The helpless horror of the position in which his cunning intrigue
had left her broke on her mind like a thunderbolt. She covered her
shamed, white face with both hands, and turned, swaying on her feet, and
would have fallen had not the duchess thrown both arms about her and
held her there in a close, warm clasp, while Justin Carthew and Lord
Ingoldsby, who had both darted forward to help her, glared at each other
vindictively.
"It _can't_ be true!" said the duchess, half to herself, but Sallie
heard, and stood upright again, dizzily, letting her hands fall,
prepared to do public penance for her innocent and unwitting part in the
shameless fraud that had been perpetrated. She did not give a thought to
the fact that all her own fair dreams of the future were finally
shattered and past repair. But she wondered what the poor folk she had
befriended about the village would have to say when they heard that she
was no better than a common impostor, and the duchess, who had
befriended her, and Justin Carthew, whom Mr. Jobling had treated as a
trespasser there!
"It _is_ true," she asserted, desperately, in a tone which might have
touched even Captain Dove, "though I didn't know till now--" She almost
broke down under the dire humiliation she was enduring, but the duchess
would not let her go when she would have drawn away from the arm at her
waist, and she forced herself to go on with her unspeakably hurtful
confession.
"The locket was given me by the girl who died in the desert--who was
that man's wife," she said so that all might hear, her face aflame now
under the others' blankly believing glances. "I didn't want to take it
at all--but she believed she would not live long, and I felt that it
would be unkind to refuse."
Farish M'Kissock looked round, in baleful triumph, at Captain Dove,
whose hopes he had thus thwarted and brought to nought. But Captain
Dove's evil eyes were fixed on Lord Jura.
"Did she tell you nothing at all of herself--or her history?" the
duchess asked very gently.
"Not a word," Sallie answered with transparent honesty.
"But there's another here that knew who she was," said Farish M'Kissock,
and pointed to Justin Carthew, who could only nod most unhappily,
avoiding Sallie's sudden, incredulous glance.
And, at that, Lord Jura seemed to start from the stupor into which he
had gradually lapsed. His haggard face grew dark with insane and
uncontrollable passion as he began to realise the fiendish ingenuity of
the revenge exacted by the man whom he had, in the first place, wronged
so cruelly. No other torture, bodily or mental, could have caused him
such anguish as the thought of all his sister must have suffered ere she
died. He lifted two twitching hands and suddenly leaped, as a tiger
might, at Farish M'Kissock's throat.
So swift and unforeseen was the movement that no one could interfere.
But he overshot his mark and slipped and fell on the polished oaken
floor as Farish M'Kissock stumbled aside, just in time to escape his
clutch. He came down with a crash, and his eye-glass dropped and
splashed about him in fragments as his forehead struck. But, stunned as
he was, he turned on one shoulder and thrust an arm out, and was trying
to rise when something seemed to snap in the coat-pocket underneath him,
and he uttered a scream of agony as his arm collapsed at the elbow, so
that he fell face forward again, struggling like a swimmer with cramp.
"_Keep back!_" shouted Slyne. And Justin Carthew, in the act of stooping
to try to help the ex-engineer, sprang to one side in time and no more
to escape the touch of a wriggling thing, black and slimy, like a live
shoe-string, which had come slithering out from under the hand with
which the fallen man was clawing at the floor. It was almost at
Carthew's ankles. He leaped convulsively again, and came down on it with
both feet. Its little venomous head writhed round and struck more than
once at the patent leather of his low shoes, and then fell limply back
and lay still. He set his heel on it, to make sure that it would work no
more harm, and turned hastily toward Lord Jura again.
Herries was before him, however, and had already lifted the stricken
man's head and shoulders a little. Carthew would have helped to raise
him to a sitting posture, but all his limbs curled in a dreadful
convulsion and straightened rigidly and curled again in a last awful
spasm, and so relaxed, lifeless, while his rolling eyeballs also grew
fixed and still. He had ceased to breathe.
"He's dead," said Captain Dove, and started, as if alarmed by the sound
of his own voice. And for a space no one else spoke, and no one moved at
all. The only undertones that broke the silence were the subdued,
helpless weeping of the three women, the muted moaning of the wind on
the terrace without. Carthew and Herries were still on their knees, one
on either side of the dead man, from one of whose pockets protruded a
broken, empty cigar-box. The others stood staring down at him as if they
could scarcely yet understand what it was that had made such an instant
difference in him.
Carthew got stiffly to his feet. "We must get the women away out of this
at once," he whispered to Herries, and held out a hand to help the old
factor up.
Herries gazed at him, out of lack-lustre eyes into which a slow return
of intelligence crept as he too rose.
"Yes,--my lord," he answered in a low voice, that yet was audible to all
but the unhearing ears of him who had been the ninth Earl of Jura, whose
heritage was now no more than a quiet niche in the lonely graveyard on
the most seaward of the Small Isles, and a young girl's ignorant prayers
that he might there find rest and peace.