"Good Heavens, boy! What do you take me for?"
"I beg your pardon, then. But when you talk of a row-boat--at night--a
job that wants secrecy--breaking the law--"
"I'll have to tell you the whole tale, I see: and it's only fair."
"Not a bit," said I stoutly. "Tell me what you want done and I'll do
it. Afterwards tell me your reasons, if you care to. Indeed, Sir, I'd
rather have it that way, if you don't mind. I was abominably
disrespectful this afternoon--"
"No more about _that_."
"But I _was_: and with your leave, Sir, that's the form of apology I'll
choose."
And I stood up with my hands in my pockets.
"Nonsense, nonsense," said the Vicar, eyeing me with a twinkle.
But I nodded back in the most determined manner.
"Your instructions, sir--that is, unless you prefer to get another
helper."
"But I cannot," pleaded he. "That's the mischief."
"Very well, then. Your instructions, please." And thus I had my way.
This happened on a Tuesday. The next evening I walked down to the Porth
and launched my boat. A row of idlers watched me from the long bench
under the life-boat house, and a small knot on the beach inspected my
fishing-gear and lent a hand to push off. "Ben't goin' alone, be 'e?"
asked Renatus Warne. "Yes," said I. "The conger'll have 'ee then, sure
enough." One or two offered chaffingly to come out and search for me if
I shouldn't return before midnight; and a volley of facetious warnings
followed me out upon the calm sea.
The beach was deserted, however, when I returned. I had hooked three
fine conger; and having hauled up the boat and cleaned her, I made my
way back to the vicarage, well pleased, getting to bed as the clock
struck two in the morning.
This was Thursday; and in the evening, between seven and eight o'clock,
I launched the boat again under the eyes of the population and started
fishing on the inner grounds, well in sight of the Porth. Dusk fell,
and with it the young moon dropped behind the western headland. Far out
beyond Menawhidden the riding-lights of a few drifters sparkled in the
darkness: but I had little to fear from them.
The moon had no sooner disappeared than I shifted my ground, and pulling
slowly down in the shore's shadow (I had greased the leathers of my oars
for silence), ran the boat in by the point under Gunner's Meadow,
beached her cunningly between two rocks, and pulled a tarpaulin over to
hide her white-painted interior. My only danger now lay in blundering
against the coastguard: but by dodging from one big boulder to another
and listening all the while for footsteps, I gained the withy bed at the
foot of the meadow. The night was almost pitch-black, and no one could
possibly detect the boat unless he searched for it.
I followed the little stream up the valley bottom, through an orchard,
and struck away from it across another meadow and over the rounded
shoulder of the hill to my right. This brought me in rear of a
kitchen-garden and a lonely cob-walled cottage, the front of which faced
down a dozen precipitous steps upon the road leading from Lansulyan to
the Porth. The cottage had but one window in the back, in the upper
floor; and just beneath it jutted out a lean-to shed, on the wooden side
of which I rapped thrice with my knuckles.
"Hist!" The Vicar leaned out from the dark window above. "Right: it's
all ready. We must stow it in the outhouse. Trudgeon is down in the
road below, waiting for me to finish."
No more was said. The Vicar withdrew: after a minute I heard the
planking creak: then something white glimmered in the opening of the
window--something like a long bundle of linen, extruded inch by inch,
then lowered on to the penthouse roof and let slide slowly down towards
me.
"Got it?"
"Right." I steadied it a moment by its feet, then let it slide into my
arms, and lowered it on to the gravelled path. It was the body of John
Emmet, in his winding-sheet.
"Carry it into the shed," whispered the Vicar. "I must show Trudgeon
the coffin and hand him the keys. When I've got rid of him I'll come
round."
Somehow, the second time of handling it was far worse than the first.
The chill of the corpse seemed to strike through its linen wrappers.
But I lifted it inside, shut the door upon it, and stood wiping my
forehead, while the Vicar closed the window cautiously, drew the blind,
and pressed-to the clasp.
A minute later I heard him calling from the front, "Mr. Trudgeon--Mr.
Trudgeon"; and Trudgeon's hob-nailed boots ascending the steps.
Silence followed for many minutes: then a slant of candlelight faded off
the fuchsia-bush round the corner, and the two men stumbled down the
staircase--stood muttering on the doorstep while a key grated in the
lock--stumbled down the steps and stood muttering in the sunken roadway.
At length they said "Good-night" and parted. I listened while the sound
of their footsteps died away: Trudgeon's down the hill towards the
Porth, the Vicar's up towards the church-town.
After this I had some painful minutes. As they dragged by, an
abominable curiosity took hold of me, an itch to open the door of the
shed, strike a match, and have a look at the dead face I had never seen.
Then came into my mind a passage in the _Republic_ which I had read a
fortnight before--how that one Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up
one day from the Piraeus under the north wall of the city, observed some
corpses lying on the ground at the place of execution; and how he fought
between his desire to look and his abhorrence until at length, the
fascination mastering him, he forced his eyes open with his fingers and
ran up exclaiming, "Look, wretches, look! Feed your fill on the fair
sight!" . . . My seat was an inverted flower-pot, and clinging to it I
began to count. If the Vicar did not arrive before I reached five
hundred, why, then . . .
"_Hist!_" He had fetched his compass round by the back of the garden,
treading so softly that the signal sounded almost in my ear and fetched
me off my flower-pot in a nervous quake. He wore a heavy pea-jacket,
and, as a smell of hot varnish announced, carried a dark lantern beneath
it. He had strapped this to his waist-belt to leave both hands free.
We lifted the body out and carried it across the meadow, the Vicar
taking the shoulders and I the heels. And now came the real hazard of
the night. If the coastguard or any belated wanderer should blunder
upon us, we stood convicted of kidnapping a corpse, and (as the Vicar
afterwards allowed) there was simply no explanation to be given.
When we gained the orchard and pushed through the broken fence, every
twig that crackled fetched my heart into my mouth: and I drew my first
breath of something like ease when at length, in the withy bed at the
foot of Gunner's Meadow, we laid our burden down behind the ruin of an
old cob-wall and took a short rest before essaying the beach.
But that breath was hardly drawn before I laid a warning hand on the
Vicar's sleeve. Someone was coming down the cliff-track: the
coastguard, no doubt. He halted on the wooden footbridge, struck a
match and lit his pipe. From our covert not ten yards away I saw the
glow on his face as he shielded the match in the hollow of both his
hands. It was the coastguard--a fellow called Simms. His match lit, I
expected him to resume his walk. But no: he loitered there. For what
reason, on earth? Luckily his back was towards us now: but to me, as I
cowered in the plashy mud and prayed against sneezing, it seemed that
the damnatory smell of the Vicar's lantern must carry for half a mile at
least.
And now I heard another footstep, coming from the westward, and a loose
stone kicked over the cliff. Another coastguard! The pair hailed each
other, and stood on the footbridge talking together for a good three
minutes.
Then to our infinite relief they parted with a "So long!" and each made
slowly off by the way he had come. It was just a meeting of the patrols
after all.
Another ten minutes must have gone by before we dared to lift the body
again: and after a nervous while in crossing the beach we found the boat
left high and dry by the ebb, and had an interminable job to get her
down to the water without noise. I climbed in and took the oars: the
Vicar lifted a sizeable stone on board and followed.
"The Carracks," he whispered. "That's the spot he named to me."
So I pulled out towards the Carracks, which are three points of rock
lying just within the main barrier of Menawhidden, where it breaks up
towards its western end into a maze of islets. While I pulled, the
Vicar knelt on the bottom-boards and made fast the stone to John Emmet's
feet.
Well, I need not tell the rest of our adventure at length. We reached
the Carracks, and there the Vicar pulled out a short surplice from the
immense inner pocket of his pea-jacket, donned it, and read the burial
service in due form by the light of his dark lantern: and by the light
of it, as I arranged John Emmet's shroud, I had my first and last
glimpse of his face--a thin face, old and hollow, with grey
side-whiskers: a face extraordinarily pallid: in other circumstances
perhaps not noticeable unless it were for a look of extreme weariness
which had lasted even into the rest of death.
"We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption,
looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her
dead), and the life of the world to come. . . ."
Together we balanced it on the gunwale, and with the help of the
stern-board tilted it over. It dropped, into fifteen fathoms of water.
There was another funeral next day in Lansulyan churchyard--where so
many have come to be buried who never in life heard the name of
Lansulyan: the harvest of Menawhidden, commemorated on weather-beaten
stones and, within the church, on many tablets which I used to con on
Sundays during the Vicar's discourses. The life-boat men had mustered
in force, and altogether there was a large attendance at the graveside.
At one point a fit of coughing interrupted the Vicar in his recital of
the service. I was the one auditor, however, who understood the meaning
of it.
That evening we took our dessert again under the great elm. Somehow I
felt certain he would choose this hour for his explanation: and in due
course it came.
"I'm a truth-speaking man by habit," he began after a long gaze upwards
at the rooks now settling to roost and making a mighty pother of it.
"But I'm afraid there's no getting round the fact that this afternoon I
acted a lie. And yet, on the whole, my conscience is easy."