“Why, in Ranger Portlock’s cottage,” said he, “buried, out of all
whooping, in the forest. Would you like to be introduced to your
host?”
“Yes, if you please,” I said. “Will you call him in?”
He laughed.
“Mahomet will have to go to the mountain. You will understand why,
when you see it. Well, for this cottage. Did you mark its position in
the dark? Poor little bewildered brain--poor little brain! Harkee!”
(He was fondly touching and smoothing the hair on my temples.) “I
loved this Diana as a little girl. What a phenomenal brother, to be
sure! This cottage you are in, child--did you not observe?--lies
snuggled in the shoulder of the hill, warm as a baby in its mother’s
arm--as warm and as safe too. Its back wall here” (he turned and
tapped the plaster) “is just a windowless buttress, built strong
against any chance falling of the soil beyond. This” (he pointed to
the inner wall) “terminates the kitchen, and not the house itself, as
a body entering the building is meant to suppose. ’Tis a blind, as one
might call it, and not discernible from the outside to any but a
conjurer.”
“And there?” I said, pointing to the closed door at the end.
“That, madam,” said he, with some momentary return to dryness, “is
Bluebeard’s Chamber, if you please, and not at present in the articles
of discussion.”
I was surprised--a little startled, perhaps--but said no more; and he
went on--
“Well, now: this same cottage is a half-timbered structure, very
ancient, and as full of odd little compartments as a bureau. Where we
lie is its secret drawers, Diana, a nest of ’em--two below and two
over. And how to reach here, miss? Ay, there’s the master stroke you’d
never guess. No, ’tis no way by the door yonder.”
“If you please, sir,” says I, “if ’twas left to my innocence to
decide, I should e’en choose the way the tray went.”
“Well, come and look,” says he, and made me go and stoop to the hole.
To my surprise, it was closed, and black.
“’Twas not so I saw it last night,” I said, rising.
“What!” cried he, “you were prowling, were you? Thank you kindly for
the hint”--and he gave a great laugh, but sobered in a moment.
“Did you listen, then?” said he.
“I was going to,” I answered; “but the moment I bent, your chairs
moved, and I was frightened, and ran away.”
“That sounds frank,” said he. He sat musing a little. “You’re a child,
’tis true, mutable and thoughtless; but where could be the harm? If
the secret were mine only-- Well, study for my confidence, and some
day, perhaps”--
He broke off with a smile, which I had a difficulty to return. So
there _was_ a mystery in reality. There and then I vowed a Delilah
oath to myself to get the better of it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said; “I had no thought to surprise
any secrets. Is that the way through, indeed?”
“Yes,” he said; “fairly, it is. ’Tis pierced under the big copper in
the kitchen, which has a detachable grate to be pulled all out in one
piece. God knows the original use of this contrivance--this space in
the wall--unless ’twere always for the purpose that we”--(he checked
himself again). “Anyhow, ’tis utterly inaccessible else, save by way
of the skylight which your ladyship knows; and now you’re acquainted
with your prison, ask me further what you will.”
“_Ranger_ Portlock, did you say?”
“Ay, ranger; once my brother’s keeper (not like Cain, unhappily), and
since promoted.”
“You seem to love your brother.”
“I have reason.”
“And this Portlock is still in his service?”
“Yes.”
“And in _your_ confidence?”
“Ay, is he not! I must tell you I am a proper sportsman, madam, and
always more popular with Hardrough’s people than the noble verderer
himself. Well, I have taught them something here and there, and put
money in their pockets, maybe. Have no fear. Not Portlock nor any
other will betray us. I have my merry men of Down, who sink or swim
with me. And now I have my Maid Marian. What more? You shall see this
Portlock. Bear in mind he was once a thread-paper of a man. I have
known him since I was a boy. What else?”
“Can you ask me?” I said low, hanging my head. “The reason--what you
hinted up there--why you are ruined and in hiding?”
He ventured to put an arm about me. How could I refuse him, who was my
Bayard? Yet, when he told me, it was not all. He never to the end
acquainted me of what social dereliction of his had originally
delivered him into the earl his brother’s power, and placed him and
his remnant fortunes under the hand of that remorseless nobleman to
use and crush at his will. He never even admitted but indirectly that
stain on his birth, in which a high person was whispered to be
implicated, and which was at the root, perhaps, of all the trouble.
“He always hated me,” he said of the Lord Herring; “and never more
than when he foresaw my succession in the death of his promising limb,
my nephew.”
“What, is he dead?” I asked, astonished.
“No,” he said, “but only rotten. He will never come into the title,
believe me.”
“And you,” I said, curiously interested. “How will he keep you out, if
the worst should happen to him?”
“Why,” he said, “he would threaten an inquiry, an exposure; and there
are those who, rather than suffer it, would countenance his quiet
disposal of me--have done so, perhaps, already. And there you come
in.”
“Me!” I cried.
“Child,” he responded, “how can I speak it without offence? You have
long been marked down by this man, my brother, for his prey. I have
known it, trust me, and writhed under the knowledge. But you were in
proper hands, and he must bide his opportunity. Believe me, he was no
privy to Sophia’s schemes of husbandry. Had he guessed, he would have
anticipated the end, so far as you was concerned, by carrying you away
by force. When he learned the truth at last, he was mad. But he
recovered his sanity on reflection. It was no bad thing to let you
ripen in that hell for his purposes--to subdue you by that torture to
his will. Then, when reduced, he would exchange your sweet person with
Dr. Peel for mine, would sell me to your place in the madhouse, so
killing his two birds with one wicked stone. But his plan miscarried.
I had a friend in the household--someone, a poor dancer, whom he had
used for a day and thrown aside. She revealed all to me, and I fled,
leaving him only my bitter curse for legacy. And I came here, into
hiding, to mature my plans for revenge--came back to Nature,
renouncing my kindred and all the vile social policies of a world I
had got to loathe. He had beggared me, and I would fleece the
plunderer. He had thought to debauch my love, and I would disappoint
him of even that moiety of his bargain. Have I done so? Judge, if he
loved me before, how he would spare me now, who have baffled his
schemes and stolen his dear! A knowledge of but half the truth has
already, in these few weeks, set him turning every stone to discover
where I lie; but I am well served by my friends. He would burn the
forest if he guessed the whole. As you regard me, as you value
yourself, child, concede nothing to chance--not so much as a peep over
the roof. Ay, I know your activity. But you must lie close as a hare
if you would be safe--through these first days of peril, at least.
Later, when the chase less presses, you may venture out, perhaps, by
the ladder; but always with infinite caution, as you love me. Little
sister, do you agree?”
I buried my face in my hands. My whole heart cried out on the cruel
tyranny of a code that could let such monsters as this wreak their
passions on the pure and innocent, and yet find absolution. O, that I
could find a way, in the lawful junction of our fortunes, to vindicate
this dear oppressed creature, and establish him in his rights before
the world! I leaned to him, with wet eyes.
“If you love _me_ so, brother,” I murmured, “what made you behave so
cruel to me?”
He gave a happy, low laugh, and tightened his hold.
“Why, dear,” he said, “are not a woman’s extremes of love all for the
man who will beat her, or the man she can cherish and protect? I vow I
chose only my natural part.”
“Well,” said I, “I’m glad you stopped short of the beating. It would
only have stiffened me, like cream.”
“Whipt cream is very good with cherries,” said he, and bent to my
lips.
But I started from him gaily, and leapt to my feet.
“Come,” I said; “I’m waiting to be introduced to Mr. Portlock.”
He laughed, and stretched himself, and, rising, stooped to the hole in
the wall and scratched with his finger, like a rat gnawing, on the
iron stop therein. In a little something was withdrawn, and a weak
wash of light flowed through.
“Now,” said he, “I will go first, and do you follow, little mouse.”
He dropped on his hands and knees, and crawled in, and disappeared. It
was an attitude that lacked romance, and I was glad there was none
behind to witness my passing. But the journey was so short that I was
hardly in before my head was free on the farther side; and in a moment
George had helped me to my feet, and I saw our host.
I saw nothing else, indeed. There were, I believe, the open range, and
herb-hung rafters, and settle and dresser of the ordinary cottager’s
kitchen. The huge creature before me absorbed three-fourths of the
field of my vision. I understood at once why Mahomet must come to the
mountain.
He had an enormous tallowy face, had this person, with an expression
so excessively melting that it might have been said to be no
expression at all. He could have had no more intimacy with his own
skeleton than a hippopotamus. Ages ago he must have left it buried
within himself as useless, and turned his wits to balancing on the
twin globes of fat that were his legs. His eyes were slits, his nose a
wart, his mouth the mere orifice of a blow-pipe. If his neck by any
possibility had been broken, one might have stretched it till his head
touched the ceiling.
I was conscious of George standing by watching me, and instinctively I
dropped a curtsey. Immediately the mountain rumbled, and dusted a
chair for my reception. It swung in his vast hand like a signboard
from an inn. Relatively, I had some fear of sitting on it; it looked
for a moment so like a doll’s.
“Mr. Portlock,” I murmured, casting down my eyes, “I--I am your humble
servant, sir.”
He bowed--bagged, would be the better expression. The whole weight of
his chin was against his recovery; but he managed it, with an effort.
“You--you are very good to give me shelter,” said I. “I’m afraid
we--we shall crowd you dreadfully, sir.”
A low gale vibrated in him somewhere. I seemed to be able to detach
certain indistinct utterances from it, of which “welcome: what can do:
Maid Marian” were the clearest.
I made an effort to respond fitly--struggled, and was dumb. Then, in a
moment--I saw George with his hand to his mouth--the demon exploded in
me.
“Were you--were you always like that?” I shrieked, and fell across my
chair-back, half hysteric.
The poor fellow may have laughed himself--there was no guessing what
emotions that curtain of flesh concealed--but he looked, if anything,
more abashed than offended.
“Hush!” said George, recovering himself, “or I must drag you back,
miss.”
We shook, facing one another with gleaming eyes and teeth.
“Didn’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that he was a thread-paper of a man
once?”
He went and clapped a hand on the mountain’s shoulder.
“Come, Johnny, no offence,” said he. “None knows better than her
ladyship that your heart’s in the right place.”
I subdued myself by a vast effort, and rose, and went to conciliate
the poor creature.
“Haven’t I reason to?” I said. “And--and I put my faith in you, sir;
and--and faith moves mountains”--and I was near off again.
He shifted, and flushed faintly, and delivered himself once more.
“’Tis the wittles--have done it.”
“He means,” said George, “that he’s made up for lost time and
opportunities, since his promotion.”
“Ay, ’twas the nerves,” went on the oracle--“kep’ me down--once.
Shook, I did--hear thunder. Walk a mile round--avoid row. When the
crows holloa’d--see funeral pass--turned blood water. ’Twas lack
ballast--that was it.”
“Of course,” said George, “that was it. What a coward you was, Johnny,
in your thin time. D’you remember the day we shot the home covers,
with a great person for company, and the sky came raining cobwebs, so
that we were near stifled with ’em; and you stuck your head in a bush,
till we gave you with our ramrods something better than cobwebs to
roar about?”
“Ay, I do,” said the mountain, and rumbled again. “Not much
cobweb--’bout me now.”
Well, I told him that one couldn’t have too much of a good thing; and
very soon we were fast friends. But that morning George haled me back
into shelter before much was said; and afterwards our acquaintance
ripened by fits and starts. The very immobility of the creature was
our and his salvation. There was no conscious expression to betray
itself on that vast desert of a countenance. Periodically, he was
visited by the steward; fitfully, by units of the hunt which his
lordship sought to lay on his vanished brother’s trail. He was never,
so far as I knew, suspected; and with the deepening of winter the
chase slackened.
And, in the meantime, what was I doing there, buried alive like a
recreant novice in the wall? Wilt thou believe, Alcide, that I, with
all my free aspirations, could have remained at peace in the little
prison for a day? Well, with rare excursions beyond, and those not
till I had been long immured, I lived there for more than a year, and
was near all the time as happy as a swallow under the eaves. It is
love makes the dimensions of our estate.
XX.
I PUT AN END TO FOLLY NUMBER TWO
It was not till early in the second spring of my idyll that the
clouds began to darken, and my conscience to stir uneasily in those
gloomy last hours before the final waking. Many things had contributed
to this state, some cardinal, but most, no doubt, indifferent--mere
little tributary streams which had come to swell the volume of my
disenchantment. Misunderstanding, alas! does not walk to challenge us
on the highway. It spies from behind hedges, and listens at keyholes;
and when at length its tally of grievances is made, we wonder at the
weight of the evidence it has accumulated.
Late in the previous year I had been very ill. During the worst of my
disorder an unconscionable old hag, some withered afreet of the
forest, who was in the secret of our retreat, had been brought in to
attend me. She disappeared soon, thank God, in a whisk of sulphur; and
thereafter George nursed me devotedly. But, strangely enough, as I
grew convalescent I developed an odd impatience of him, which rose by
degrees to a real intolerance and dislike. That feeling abated as I
grew strong, but never to such degree as to make us again quite the
friends we had been. He made some study to propitiate me, even to the
extent of renouncing those ridiculous principles of “Nature,” which he
had affected to exchange for the whole sum of social accommodations.
It was a relief, though an aggravation, to have him refine himself
again out of a savage, since I no longer could find the entertainment
I once had in the dear _poseur_. Orson, in truth, was never so little
attractive as when, for the sake of tired love’s favour, he confessed
his ruggedness a humbug. His recantation, though welcome enough in one
way, only disillusioned me in another. So long as he had been
consistent, he was absolute; now his weakness had made me so. I
remembered the times when I had pleaded with him, and had found him
only more covetable in his inaccessibility to my arguments.
“We can’t return to Nature, in the sense of rudeness,” I had often
said to him, “any more than we can recover our childhood. We have
grown out of it, and there’s an end. A man playing the child is only
sorry make-believe; or, if it isn’t, the man’s an idiot. Nature
herself, you see, isn’t stationary: she’s always refining on her first
conceptions.”
“What!” he would protest, grumbling; “is all that hypocrisy of
‘breeding,’ that high _goût_, which is so fastidious in its appetite
for crawling meats, and rotten policies, and bruised virtues, Nature?”
“Yes, to be sure,” I would answer: “’tis _human_ nature--the fruits of
her desire to hasten her social apotheosis by a union with the sons of
God.”
“Ay,” would growl my Timon--“the fruits of incontinence.”
“I don’t see it,” I would cry. “I can’t see but that a knife and fork
are in the right succession to a beak. We may use our fingers, you
will say. Would you wish me, sir, to fondle my love with the same
hands I tear my meat withal? No, you wouldn’t--except for the sake of
argument,--and therefore I protest I am the truer child of that little
liaison. _Vive la Nature!_ say I; the Nature who is my mother, and the
God who is my father. They have taught me between them to study, in
studying myself, to make the gift of prettiness to my neighbours.”
“And I swear you are a dutiful child,” he would answer, with the
readiness that made me love him.
“O, believe me, sir!” I would cry; “there is nothing artificial about
the civilisation you have professed to renounce--as if that were
responsible for your downfall. On its main lines it always makes for
beauty”--
“Which is truth, I suppose,” he would interrupt with a sneer.
“Which is truth, as much as anything is,” I would reply. “Truth is
only a cant word for what we don’t understand; and, if we could get
to, there would be an end of all fun in the world.”
“O, upon my word, you are a very learned minx!” he would crow; but I
would continue, not minding him--
“If we had to start again from the beginning, don’t tell me but that
we should develop the very same conventions as now, or at least near
’em. Why, sir, not to lean our elbows on the table, for instance,
while we sup our tea, isn’t a tyrannous edict of society. ’Tis a
natural recognition of the unhandsome; a natural effort to qualify
ourselves for the better company we all look to some day. Don’t we all
feel that we are only rehearsing here for a greater piece? Well, for
my part, I don’t want to be damned in it. But you--you cry, like a
poor actor, ‘Leave me alone to my pipe and beer. I shall be all right
on the night itself!’”
Then he would laugh bravo; and, pulling out his tobacco, silence me
with a kiss.
But now--well, he had abdicated, and I ruled, that was the difference.
There had been a time when I would have consolidated the understanding
between us by taking, on the first dawn of liberty, our friendship to
church. In those days, indeed, I even hinted as much to him, touching
upon the duty he owed me so to establish my innocence with the world.
Then he would fall back upon his cant of Nature; of vows dishonoured
in her sight; of laws that crossed the plainest mandate that ever she
had given to earth. And I must be content at the time, because we were
helpless outcasts together, because he was kind to me, because he
flattered me with a thousand attentions which made me forget the
equivocalness of my position.
But now, at the last, it was he must sue and I be cold. For, under our
altered relations, I had come to recognise, though late, how wrong was
this continued communion, however platonic, between us. It was not
that I loved my brother less, but that I respected myself more. I had
been blinded by all the novelty and glamour. He was pagan at heart, I
saw, and I was at heart religious. My thoughts turned with affection
to the quiet nunnery at Wellcot. I longed to see my kind again, to
recover something of the world I had lost. I had no real faith in his
protestations, no real belief that, should it ever chance to him to
recover his rights--which, in truth, seemed impossible--he would claim
me to my legitimate share in them. And I found no room in my world for
a paradise of sinful loves.
He sighed much, and was very pathetic, poor fellow, over my changed
attitude, and wearied me to death. Then he took to verse, and
depressed me more. He had a strange faculty for a sort of big-sounding
line, which he would invent and declaim in his odd moments while
engaged over mending his snares or sewing buttons on his gaiters. It
was quite impressive in its place, but was not exhilarating when
applied to _les amours_.
“This world” (he declared once) “is but the weed-heap of the spheres,
Whereon we rot and fester, torn from the skies,
And are consumed in fire, to manure
And quicken old fields of heaven with new love.
O, sweet! wind with me on the damnéd pile,
So of our mingled dust shall blossom heaven”--
A romantic use to put your poor little Diana to, eh, my friend? But,
indeed, I would have none of it. I hate that fashion of decrying the
flesh, because your poet has a stomachache. My body is the only
certain God I know in the midst of these shadows. I cling to it,
worshipping it with all the pretty gifts I can think. When it goes,
where shall I be? Seeking and crying for it again through space. I
will not have it abused to such uses, my sweet body that I love so.
Well, it had all vastly interested me once: the fond, comical
incongruity; the unexpected soul of my Nimrod revealing itself through
suffering. He did not, dear simpleton, in the least understand his own
inconsistency: how, loving all birds and beasts, as he professed to
do, and so claiming affinity with Nature, he could use and approve the
latest engines of civilisation for their slaughter. He called the red
deer “the spirit of the antlered tree,” and went to shoot it with a
gun. He made me a pretty waistcoat of squirrel skins (I went sweetly
befurred, indeed, throughout the cold winters), and dwelt lovingly on
the primeval romance of woodlands, meaning, in fact, that rapture of
flight and pursuit of visible things which alone appeals to the
unredeemed barbarian. In the end, to speak truth, his mad rhapsodies
came to remind me, only too uncomfortably, of the dead astrologer; and
I looked askance on what seemed a common derivation from a crazy
stock.
But now, lest it appear that I attach too much importance to these
minor discords, let me relate of the much darker and more formidable
shadow which had arisen between us, and which, as the months but added
to its density, grew at last to be the insuperable barrier to our
reconciliation.
It was the _secret_ dividing us--the secret which I had once half
surprised, and to the existence of which he had virtually confessed,
only, it seemed, to torture me by withholding it. This much alone I
knew: that he went somehow practising, in his banishment, to be
revenged on the society which he held responsible for it. Often, at
first, I tried to coax the truth from him. He was not, for all his
love, to be beguiled. There were others concerned, he said, who by no
means shared his faith in my discretion; with whom, in fact, he had
come to open dispute on the subject of my continued sojourn in the
cottage, and whom, in the end, he had had to propitiate--seeing his
safety lay in their hands--by a vow to reveal nothing to me.
I had no doubt, in my heart, but that these unknown were the “merry
men” of his boasting--woodmen, verderers, perhaps, who--treacherous to
the earl their master--were aiding and abetting the exile in those
very malpractices he concealed from me. I was right as to that, it
appeared; but what I could never understand was the nature of my
reputation with them: how they had so learned to misapprehend my
character for faith and loyalty. However, mistaken as they were, they
had nothing to complain of their leader’s constancy to his oath--a
constancy, alas! which I can only not commend because of its miserable
sequel. If he had only had the strength to trust me, neither would he
have lost his liberty, nor I been condemned to the torments of a quite
unmerited remorse. At this date of time, I can insist, with a clear
but sorrowful conscience, that the poor infatuated fool brought what
happened upon his own head.
When I recognised at last that he was adamant to my pleadings, I
waived the subject, but not by any means my private concern in it. The
secret, I was naturally enough convinced, lay to be revealed behind
the locked door of that Bluebeard Chamber; and one night--after my
friend had gone out--I took a taper and my courage in hand, and
descended softly through the trap to investigate.
After he had gone out, I say; and therein lay the key to my growing
apprehensions. For not many days had I been in hiding before I
discovered that my comrade was a night-walker. He would wait,
soft-shut into his room, until he fancied I was drowned in sleep, then
list-footed creep out and by the screen--which he had put up to
protect me--and either descend by way of the trap, or, less often,
mounting the ladder which communicated with the hidden gully,
disappear, and pull his means of exit after him. Then I would wait,
shivering and wondering through the whole gamut of formless fears,
till stupor overtook me, or perhaps by and by, after long hours, a
terrified half-consciousness of his stealthy return.
Where did he thus nightly go? To what dark business or witches’
frolic? I tormented my brain for the solution, and of my love and
loyalty could find none. But the poison of a yet-unrealised fear was
working in me early.
Now, on this night, waking out of tormented dreams, I was on the
instant desperate to solve the mystery. But hardly had I crossed the
little cellar when a warning rumble from Portlock, seated in the room
beyond, told me that I was discovered. So this vast creature was in
the conspiracy! Quite panic-struck, I fled, and, mounting to my
room--found George there. He had returned, descending by the ladder,
during the minute of my absence.
He made no allusion whatever to my escapade; but just laughed softly,
and took my cold hand in his, as I stood trembling and aghast before
him.
“Poor little maid,” he said; “she has been dreaming”--and he led me to
my bed, and tucked me in warm, and left me with a kiss.
I never thought it necessary to confess; but always after that, as I
came to learn, he descended by the trap and _bolted it behind him_.
That did not assuage my fears, though it was some comfort henceforth
to be spared the pretence of blindness to his flittings--a comfort, I
think, to him as well as to me, though his silence on the main point
was not to be broken. Ah! if he had only had the courage to set my
mind at rest, before its fears grew to a frenzy beyond my control!
Now, as time went on, my hearing grew morbidly acute--during the dark
hours of his nightly absences, when I was fastened lonely and
frightened into my attic, and sleep refused to come to me--to certain
shufflings and whisperings--sounds scarce to be distinguished from the
wind and the rain--which filtered to me from the depths below.
Sometimes it would seem a sough of blown voices; sometimes a
suggestion of _dragging_; sometimes the low rumble of a cart on the
turf, which set my pulses knocking in my ears. Then when, succeeding
an ominous silence, George’s step would come mounting stealthily by
the trap, on tiptoe thence to his room, I would shudder in the thought
of dreadful footprints going by my screen, and would feign the
deep-breathing of slumber, lest he should be moved to stop and call to
me softly in the voice I had not yet learned to resist.
And so at last, out of all this torment of apprehension, out of the
sleepless waitings and breathless listenings, had emerged a spectre,
real and present in the end, to whose whispered hauntings I had long
struggled to close my ears; whose approach I had sought to stay,
beating my hands in air; whose name I had not dared to breathe to
myself. And it was murder.
Yes, murder. So only, and only so, was logically expounded that
perverted creed of Nature. Livid, terrifying, his hands stained with
blood, I saw him in its ghastly glair; saw him savagely wreaking on
the social order the wrongs he had suffered at its hands; saw him
reverted to the beast he worshipped, tearing his kind, a common robber
and assassin.
I will not say that I was convinced and overwhelmed in a breath. For
long the hideous shadow of the phantom was poor proof against the sun
of present love; would thin, attenuate to a mere gross mist in the
light of kind embraces, and honest laughter, and a manly candour--on
all, alas! but the subject that most corroded. Only when that later
spectre of our estrangement crept between, did it assume a dreadful
complexion, glooming through the other. And so, at last, the appalling
confirmation.
It had been for weeks a terror to me to creep by the secret passage
into Portlock’s kitchen, on the rare occasions when my brief visits
there, for the sake of some small change and play of liberty, were
invited. For the hole entered close by the locked door, which had come
to figure to me for the seal on all most nameless horrors; and I could
not pass it by but with averted head, and nostrils held from
breathing, and a sickness like to the death I felt it contained.
Rather would I strain a little the chance of capture without; and
often now, when George was sleeping--for he lay late after his night
excursions--I would put the ladder to the hill, and climb, and wander
in the hidden furrow above, sometimes as far as the gravel-pit, and
there indulge my misery, daring even at the worst a thought of escape.
For at length, so far as we knew, the chase of us had ceased
altogether, and Portlock was no longer interrogated for possible
information.
Wandering thus, greatly unhappy, my thoughts would often recur for
shelter to the peaceful nunnery; to my little loving Patty, the
dearest pleader of a sister’s repentance; most, and with a
self-humbling remorse, to the faithful, unexacting soul whom I had
deserted in the tower. What if I had been misled by specious arguments
to wound incurably where I had wrought to cure? Could I ever in that
case forgive the false advocate? O, surely there was a greater Nature
than she in whose name were perpetrated deeds of violence and
reprisal? There was the human, the humorous, the tolerant large
philosophy of being which Gogo had revealed in his story of himself.
_His_ misfortunes had but made him forswear the false goddess in whom
weaker men sought to justify their passions. I could never think of
him but as the Pan of these later days--the poor limping Pan of our
era, beguiled into a hospital, and persuaded to an operation, and
shorn of his limp and his legs together. One might meet him begging on
a city bridge, and look wondering down for the song of the water in
the rushes that were not; one might read his hairy breast into dreams
of red dead bracken, and see his eyes, under their matted brows, like
little forest pools reflecting glimpses of the sky, and not guess who
he was, for he would never whine of better days. He always took
fortune like a fallen god, did Gogo. He always smelt sweet, did my
monster. And he had not erred in love before he found me.
Could that be said of another? I was never quite able to forget that
discarded favourite who had warned a threatened brother and assisted
him to escape. Though I had never deigned to give the thought place in
my mind, the unacknowledged shadow of it, of what had been her
inducement to the act, slept in me, to rise presently and add its
quota of darkness to the whole. I was very unhappy--very forlorn and
tired and unhappy.
But, on that morning, as it blew bitter cold without, and I longed for
the fire that was never ours in that chill cellar but by proxy of the
chimney-back, I brought myself to go down, and scratch out the signal
to Portlock to let me pass if it were practicable. He responded at
once, drawing away the grate; and I crept in and through, and stood up
on the farther side. Instantly a grumpy exclamation from him, as
instantly clapped back with his great hand on his mouth, took my eyes
to my skirt, whereto for a flash I had seen his directed. And there,
smearing the pale folds of it, was a long, foul streak of blood.
“Where did this come from?” I cried in a dismayed voice, for the
moment too shocked to reflect.
I fancied he shook upon his great gelatinous calves, that the little
eyes set in the vast oyster of his face were blinking shiftily, alert
to my movements while he turned over the dull masses of his brain for
an answer.
“Rabbits--dinner,” at length he rumbled.
But I had realised it all while he stuck fast. Desperate in my
heart-sickness, I made a hurried step to pass him; and instantly he
moved backwards, and filled the doorway into the little front parlour
by way of which I had hoped to escape into the forest.
“Let me pass,” I cried wildly. “I want air.”
He pointed to the copper.
“Not safe. That way.”
“I can’t,” I cried. “It was there I picked this up: you know it was.”
Then I quite lost my reason. “You are a murderer!” I shrieked. “You
are all murderers here! You rob and kill, and drag the poor bodies
through and hide them in the cellar behind the door. Let me pass--I
can’t live here--I can bear it no longer!”
I raved and cried; I beat helplessly on that huge drum of flesh. It
stood stolid, insensible, completely stopping the aperture.
“Go--ask cap’en,” was all it said.
I fell back from him on the word. The sense of an immediate necessity
of self-control was flashed upon my consciousness. Above or
below--either way my passage was guarded. I was between the devil and
the deep sea; and, in an irrepressible burst of frenzy, I had
confessed myself, let slip my tortured demon, and so, perhaps, spoken
my own death-sentence. The terror of the thought drove out the lesser
loathing. I must temporise--finesse.
“Yes,” I said, “I will. I will not rest now till I know.”
The return by that foul sewer, the fearful issue by the closed door,
were experiences as horrible as any in my life. What crawling thread
might not be still drawing from the obscure reservoir beyond? What
hideous witness not fastening silent to me in the darkness, that it
might rise with my rising and shriek to the light for vengeance? But I
forced myself, in my mortal fear, to tread softly, and on very panic
tiptoe climbed from the hateful pit, and crossed the room above. I
paused a moment, on my shuddering way, for assurance of _his_ steady
breathing; and then with cold deft hands set the ladder in place, and
mounted it, and, drawing it after me into the thicket, fled along the
passage. I had no thought of what I should do. I only wanted to
escape: to put as long a distance as possible between myself and that
spectre, confessed in all its blood-guiltiness at last. Half blinded,
torn by flint and briar, I broke at length through the farther
thicket, and sank, trembling and exhausted, upon the bank of the
gravel-pit beyond.
I had sat there I know not how long, my face in my hands, the alarum
in my heart deafening me to all outward sounds--the storming trees
above; the cold sabre of the wind slashing into the bushes of my
refuge, as if it would lay me bare--when suddenly I felt the clinch of
a hand on my shoulder, and screamed, and looked up. Three fellows, in
a common livery, had descended softly upon me from above, and I was
captured without an effort.
I rose, staggering, to my feet, my face like ashes, my poor hands
clasped in entreaty. But not a word could I force from my white lips.
“You must come with us, miss, if you please,” said the man who held
me, civilly enough.
“Where?” I made out to whisper.
He pointed with a riding-whip. I followed the direction of his hand;
and there, on the rim of the pit above, silhouetted against the sky,
sat a single horseman. I had no reason to doubt who it was. Even at
that distance, the lank red jaw of him was sign enough of the fox. I
was trapped at last, and when I had thought myself securest.
Now, I do not know what desperate resignation came to me all in a
moment. As well this way out as another. “Very well,” I said quietly,
“I will go with you.”
They were surprised, I could see, by my submission, and all the more
alert, on its unexpected account, to hover about my going. But their
strong arms were not the less considerate, for that reason, to support
me, overwrought as I was, in my passage to the open daylight above;
and, almost before I realised it, I was standing before the Earl of
Herring.
He sat as stiff and relentless in his saddle as an Attila, his red
eyes staring, a very wickedness of foretasted relish grinning in his
hungry teeth. A fourth servant in livery stood a little apart, holding
his own and the others’ horses.
“So,” said the master, whispering as out of a dream, “you are caught
at last, my lady.”
I felt for the first time a little flush come to my cheeks, and
answered his gaze resolutely.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘caught,’ my lord,” I said. “These are
not the days of King John.”
He rubbed his gloved hand across his chin.
“No, by God!” he said, with a hoarse chuckle. “But they are the days
of King Hardrough, by your leave.”
“I have done no wrong.”
“Tell that to my lady,” said he.
“Jealousy has no ears.”
He gave a hyæna laugh.
“Misfortune has not chastened you, I see,” crowed he.
“It has not tried to,” I said, “till this moment. Now you have seen
me, will you let me go, and ride back to tell Mrs. de Crespigny that
she has nothing more to fear from my rivalry?”
He regarded me with a delighted humour.
“When I go, you come with me.”
“O no!”
“O yes! straight back to Dr. Peel and his whippings.”
“You will not--you will not!” I clasped my hands upon his knee in a
frenzy of terror. I was quite broken in a moment. “Don’t send me back
to that hell!” I implored.
He lusted over my fear. He could not for long bring himself to ease
it.
“What have you got to offer me to stay my hand?” he said at last.