Wager of Battel
Gilbert Maryvale!
“Oh, you!” exclaimed Pendleton, and appeared completely contented at
once.
“Isn’t it awful?” asked Maryvale. “Isn’t it awful?”
Pendleton and I stared speechless at him; in me, at least, the old
surprise had given place to new astonishment twice as strong. What was
the matter with this man? The only light in the long windowless
corridor came from a translucent electric globe far at the foot of the
stairs, but even in the vaguely illuminated passage I realized that
something had happened to Maryvale.
“I saw the boy coming by the drive, and I thought he might—there might
be some news of Sir Brooke at last. The doctor is telling some
powerful things. I’ve been in and out of there twice. I always—I
thought I’d better get away . . . came to see if the boy had . . .”
“One question, Mr. Maryvale,” I said quickly. “Were you in the
corridor a while ago tapping the wall with something?”
“Why, yes, with my friend Crofts’ cane.” He turned to our host. “But I
assure you I did not harm the cane.”
“The cane be hanged,” responded Crofts. “But why in thunder did you do
it?”
An expression vanished from Maryvale’s eyes almost before it deepened
there, a softness, a look of meekness, a chastened look; I thought it
a revelation of painful things kept subdued.
“Something suggested to me that there might be a secret passage in one
of the walls of the corridor. I was trying, high up—”
Our host made a disgusted sound. “One thing you may depend upon,
Gilbert, no matter what happens. In this extant portion of the castle
there are no secret passages. There’s not so much as a priest’s hole
or a trap-door or a double wall to a cupboard. There’s one bogie laid,
anyhow. You may as well know that you made fools of us in there. Where
the devil did you go afterward?”
“I’m sorry if I annoyed you. I just went back into the Hall of the
Moth. But Doctor Aire—I didn’t care for the hobby of Doctor Aire. So I
returned again to hear if there was anything about Sir Brooke.”
The servants, of course, had clustered around the door with quite
natural and honourable inquisitiveness. Pendleton turned on them.
“You may go—and mind, don’t talk about this all afternoon. The subject
is closed.” Ah, trustful Crofts!
So out of the dining-hall they filed to their aloof world of
below-stairs: Ruth and Rosa Clay of lustrous person, Ardelia Lacy
(giving the Welsh stableman a look in passing that was obviously a
piece of her mind, though its crushing significance was hardly clear
from the evidence), the maids, Jael, Em, and Harmony. Morgan and his
fellow stablemen, Tenney and Wheeler, got out next, and the tall
keeper gravely followed them behind the screen. Soames and Blenkinson
both had hard work getting rid of old Finlay, who seemed to think that
the occasion demanded more of his japes, and who finally thrust his
head out from behind the screen for one last comprehensive wink at me.
Pendleton turned to the boy, who had set about his somewhat unorthodox
task of clearing the dessert dishes.
“Did you inquire about Sir Brooke, Toby?”
“Yes, sir, I did,” answered the lad, looking white over a load of
china and glass ware on a tray.
“No news, I dare say.”
“Oh, yes, sir, as a fact there was, sir.”
“Eh? Who told you?”
“It was the station-master at New Aidenn, sir. He was very angry, sir,
when I told him that you didn’t believe he had seen Sir Brooke. He
said to tell you, sir, that he was certain-sure. Those were the words
I was to tell you, sir.”
“Did he take a ticket from him?”
“He can’t exactly remember, sir, but he’s sure he saw him somewhere in
the crowd. He must have taken his ticket, sir.”
“Bosh!” exclaimed Pendleton. “Why, I have a letter from Sir—”
Toby continued in his unruffled style. “And he said he remembered Sir
Brooke very well from other times he was here, sir. A thinnish,
middle-sized gentleman, with a bang of mouse-coloured hair over his
eye, and double glasses, and his silk bow tie tilted toward his ear.
He remembered him quite well, you see, sir.”
“It seems,” said I, putting in my oar for the first time, “that _you_
remember remarkably well, Toby.”
The boy gazed at me as if I were a sport of nature, a phenomenon of
dubiety amazing. “Why, he made me repeat what he said until I had it
by heart, sir. He was very angry, Mr. Pendleton.”
Pendleton was in a brown study, until I plucked his sleeve and
whispered. “Thinking won’t help. Let’s get out of here, or the boy
will have something to regale the servants with.”
But Toby now proffered a request. “Please, sir, will it be all right
if I take a picture of the servants to-night? Miss Lebetwood gave me
her old flash-light camera when she came down this time, sir, and I
want to use it.”
(Photography—not topography!)
“Why, hm, yes, I suppose so. Are the servants for it?”
“Some are afraid of the flash, sir, but I’ll show ’em how it works.”
“Go ahead, then, after dinner. Don’t blow up the place.”
“Thank you, sir. I won’t, sir. Miss Lebetwood will help me, sir.”
Maryvale was still standing in the corridor when we came out.
Crofts relieved his pent-up bitterness. “What a man! He sends me a
letter, very explanatory, containing three words: ‘Wait for me.’ He
arrives at New Aidenn station last evening, but doesn’t deign to make
use of the car I sent to meet the train; he even avoids speaking to
the chauffeur, to mention that he intends to walk. He then strolls off
somewhere, apparently to lie low until it pleases him to disclose
himself. He’ll be lucky if he finds the house occupied when he makes
his appearance.”
“But he may have got lost, of course.”
“I had men out searching. Every foot of the Vale was beaten last
night.”
“Still, your men may have missed him.”
“Well, then,” Crofts declared with fine sarcasm, “suppose the
gentleman did get lost and have to sleep in the nasty, damp Vale and
get sniffles. Where’s he been all to-day? Climbing about up there
where you were yesterday?”
“Ah, now you are asking reasonably. I can’t imagine. What is it, Mr.
Maryvale?”
For Maryvale had suddenly grasped my arm. Now he released it, and
ignored my question.
I could not gauge the look on the face of the “man of business”; it
appeared to have volcanic possibilities, yet subterranean still. To
regain the trivial and commonplace, I sounded Crofts on the matter
that had irritated me ever since I had seen the unstartling words in
the letter of dispute last night.
“By the way, Crofts, I may have to be sending out a message or two if
I remain here long—”
“Of course you’ll remain—”
“Where’s the mail for posting?”
“Why, just hand whatever you have to one of the servants. If you need
stationery—”
“But isn’t there a particular place—”
“Oh, yes, if it’s more convenient—there’s a rack for outgoing mail
under the staircase. It hangs above the end of the settle.”
“Thank you.”
Maryvale was busy fingering the lower part of the wide gilt frame of
one of the portraits, a full length representation of a man in cuirass
and metal thigh-plates, holding his helmet in one hand, leaning with
the other arm upon a convenient pedestal; his narrow face looked like
that of a newly-elected thane of Hell.
“_That’s_ Sir Pharamond Kay,” Pendleton remarked, “first builder of
the castle this House is remnant of.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Maryvale murmured to himself, concluding his
investigation of the frame. “The gilding is valuable at any rate.”
Pendleton and I reciprocated glances of bewilderment, but Maryvale
seemed disinclined to explain himself further. He was even unwilling
to precede us back into the Hall of the Moth, which he had deserted a
little while before, and wherein the entire rest of the company were
still listening to Doctor Aire. Alberta Pendleton received us with her
charming smile, and we took places beside her at the foot of the room,
and that other, smaller, bewitched or accursed portrait of Sir
Pharamond glared down on me from the wall.
The rain having ceased long before, and the clouds being a little
broken, the sun was, so to speak, red in the face from trying to dry
the lawn. The french windows were opened, through the northern one we
caught glimpses of the glassman from New Aidenn making whole the
damaged conservatory window. But there was no tendency toward seeking
the out-of-doors. Most of the party were quite sated with the open-air
sports afforded in Aidenn Vale.
Doctor Aire, moreover, would have demanded attention under any
circumstances. Apart from the fascination of his subject, there was
authority in the clipped, methodical manner of his speech. Just now he
was telling of the last case of Appeal of Murder, that relic of early
ages whereby one acquitted of a death-crime could be compelled to
defend himself anew by the might of his body. As late as 1819, it
appeared, one Thornton, when acquitted, and when the dead girl’s
brother had made Appeal of Murder against him, had thrown down in
challenge to “wager of battel”—this we were in time to hear—a gauntlet
as strange as the occasion, without either fingers or thumbs, made of
white tanned skin, ornamented with sewn tracery and silk fringes,
crossed by a narrow band of red leather with leather tags and thongs
for fastening.
Cosgrove was listening. But of a sudden it seemed to me that his
attention was curiously directed beyond Doctor Aire, beyond the
vicissitudes of the accused and acquitted Thornton, who had needed to
go on trial again with only the prowess of his body to defend himself.
“Listening, surely,” I told myself, and asked myself, “_For
what?_” . . .
Doctor Aire’s recital went on, encyclopedically.
“Lord Ellenborough had to admit that the procedure was competent,
although there had not been a whisper of the Appeal throughout the
kingdom for forty years. But the curious crowd was disappointed when
the appellant withdrew; so there was no gladiatorial exhibition for
the chief justice to preside over. It is extremely unlikely that Mary
Ashford’s brother had ever intended to carry his Appeal into force, he
being a slighter man of body than the appellee—and for that reason
Thornton had probably been emboldened to make the brave show he did
with his extraordinary gauntlet of white tanned leather.”
In the half-darkness underneath the musicians’ gallery were a pair of
listeners who had been within neither the range of my vision nor the
scope of my thought. Now one of them, the young American, Bob Cullen,
became in an instant the cynosure of the company.
For the youth, scarcely more than a lad, rose from his seat beside Lib
Dale, and the exclamation that came from his lips twisted every neck
in the Hall.
“So _that_ was it!” The expression of ire on those young, unformed
features was almost comical.
Despite a hurried, “Bob, don’t be sil,” from Lib, the youth advanced a
couple of steps toward Cosgrove, leaving no doubt against whom his
wrath was directed. He raised his shaking arm and pointed at the
Irishman, he opened his mouth and was attempting articulate words, but
only one word issued, a smothered one:
“You—you—”
Cosgrove’s face was a thing to watch, while the parade of emotions
passed across it. Mere surprise vanished with the first turn of his
head along with the rest of the heads. His eyes widened, but for a few
seconds were blank with absolute stupefaction, and when enlightenment
finally appeared to come within him, the resentment expressed in his
lowering brows and glowing eyes seemed to be mingled with a sense of
shame, or else there was no meaning in the sidewise shift of those
eyes and in those irresolute lips. He swallowed, and his head made a
small, sharp jerk in the act. A muscle twitched in his cheek. Bob
Cullen was still saying, “You—you—” and Lib Dale was whispering dire
things to him.
That other, admirable, American tried to deal with the frenzied youth.
Paula Lebetwood said, “Bob, you’re making a child of yourself.
Remember where you are.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Ludlow in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Ask him—ask him, that’s all!” cried Bob Cullen bitterly, and then, as
is the wont of youths who believe themselves wronged, commenced
himself to explain. “He thought—you thought, Mr. Cosgrove”—(“_Mr._”
Cosgrove; much revealed by that “Mr.”)—“you thought that because you
were bigger and stronger than I was, that you could get away with
talking the way you did. Well, you needn’t think that it was because I
was afraid of you—”
I noticed that Lib Dale was actually twisting her young compatriot’s
arm in an endeavour to gain his attention, but he held on through
pain, white and red by turns.
“I’m ready any time you are, Mr. Cosgrove, and don’t you forget it.
I’ll show you, Mr. Cosgrove. I’ll fight you a duel or a wager of
battle or anything—”
“My dear boy,” slipped in Doctor Aire, who took the interruption of
his narrative in very good humour, “the wager of battle is null and
void. That was the whole upshot of my story, if you had only the
patience—”
“I don’t care if it’s null and void or not. Mr. Cosgrove, if you’re a
man—”
Paula Lebetwood had taken hold of the half-hysterical youth’s other
arm; she placed a firm hand across his mouth, effectually stifling
what further wild challenge he might have uttered on the spot. Lib
sank down flushed and pouting, her blue eyes flinging defiance to all
of us. Cosgrove, who had not uttered a word, had a face like a man’s
in an apoplexy, and his head was lower between his shoulders than it
was accustomed to be.
The youngster Bob Cullen was still standing there like a bulldog in
the centre of the ring, anger adding a degree of dignity to his
stature. Ten, twenty, seconds may have gone by, and still he
confronted the Irishman, whose only recognition of his challenge had
been a turn of his head and that slow dark flame in his face.
“Well?” demanded Bob Cullen.
Still the Irishman preserved a silence of stone.
“Oh, Bob, you sorehead,” cried Lib Dale, grinding her heel into the
carpet. “Of all the id—”
“But Bob, dear,” pleaded Miss Lebetwood, “what Sean said to Lib was
long, long ago in the spring, and she’s forgotten all about it, and so
should you, you silly kid.”
The voice of Cosgrove came thundering, overwhelming. “Woman,” he said,
and a quite perceptible thrill passed over us, for he spoke to his
intended wife, and “woman” as he said it then sounded the most brutal
word he could use—“woman, no need for you to defend me. The code of
this young upstart is not my code, by the heavens—nor is yours my
code. Stand aside.”
“Sean!”
“Stand aside—did you hear?”
“But Sean—”
“While the light is in me, I shall offer it to you, woman, and to all
others I find in need of grace—even if it gall your young upstart
there.”
Paula Lebetwood had tottered a step backward, with an expression of
the utmost pain and loss upon her face. Suddenly her face was hidden
in her hands, and her shoulders heaved with swift gusts of feeling.
Then she lifted her face tearless and hot-eyed and defiant beneath
golden hair turning to riot.
“Sean, how unmanly, how cowardly! Oh, if you knew how I despise you
now. Oh, I need air—air!”
She turned from us abruptly, then paused. Her bosom moved in a long,
slow breathing, and she turned her head to look at her lover, whose
gaze did not meet hers. A veil of anger seemed to fall from her
features, and the fire softened in her eyes. But this was no melting
mood. Instead, a serene aloofness reigned in her face, and she seemed
like one who studied Cosgrove from some region above, studied him with
sympathy and compassion. For a space of time—perhaps a minute—there
was this silence. Then, as if she had shown enough that she was not
embittered by passion, she departed swiftly.
Through the passage of the french windows she strode, out to the lawn,
and across, to be lost to sight in shrubs alongside the gate-house.
So, splitting into new faction and fresh enmity at every hour, the
Bidding Feast at last witnessed the discord of the lovers themselves.
Cosgrove’s rebuke of his betrothed had stunned us, and her answering
rebuke had left us wild and speechless. None stirred to follow Miss
Lebetwood. In me, at least, the strife of feeling was comparable to
the mad stress of the night before, when the first message of Parson
Lolly had been found. I knew a delirium of bewilderment, a very
horror, in the instants following those outbursts.
Cosgrove’s face, now so blotted with blood, took fantastic dimensions,
seemed twice its size. The room appeared an enormous room, and the
people pigmy people. Sir Pharamond’s portrait leered and sneered.
Every proportion was indecently distorted, and time, like space, was
bereft of its comfortable conventions. The seconds seemed to stagger
past.
Then Pendleton, no longer held by Alberta, rose so hastily that his
chair banged backward against the stair-post of the little gallery.
“Yes, by gad! Let’s all get some air. This room is stuffy as blazes.
That’s what puts us all at sixes and sevens.”
“I really think,” observed Eve Bartholomew, “that it’s the absence of
Sir Brooke that gets so on our nerves.”
“Let’s declare a truce—no, let’s make peace,” smiled Alberta
Pendleton. “Sean, you and Bob haven’t any ill-will, have you?”
Since his betrothed’s condemnation of him, no petty enmity could very
well find hold in Cosgrove’s soul. His defeat told in his dejected
head and drooped lids. He didn’t answer Alberta.
But Bob Cullen, whose excitement had flagged, was suddenly overwhelmed
by his former audacity. “I—I suppose you folks must think—you must
think—”
“That’s all right, Bob,” soothed Alberta; “you just lost your temper
for a minute, that was all. Anybody is likely to do that.”
“He let Mr. Cosgrove get his goat,” put in Lib Dale in a _sotto voce
obbligato_; she was still much displeased with her compatriot.
“I’m—I’m sorry—I apologize,” said Bob.
“As for me,” said Cosgrove suddenly, “I do more than apologize; I make
anew.”
“Why, Sean, how—what can you mean?” gasped Alberta, for the Irishman
now stood on his feet looking around the Hall without explaining his
remark.
“Yes, it will do,” muttered Cosgrove. “God can come from there”; and
he gestured toward the musicians’ gallery.
“G-g-god?” stammered Pendleton.
“God the Creator,” responded Sean Cosgrove, and he appended a few
words as inconsequential as any Crofts himself could have used: “I’ve
seen the book in your library.”
“But what do you mean, man?” cried Pendleton. “I never heard—”
“To-night,” said Cosgrove, “in this Hall we shall rehearse the play of
‘Noah’s Flood.’”
“‘Noah’s Flood!’” came a gasp from most of us.
“Animal crackers,” mumbled Bob Cullen obscurely.
“What’s ‘Noah’s Flood?’” asked Pendleton. “I’ve never seen any book of
that name—”
“It is inside a book of another name,” answered Cosgrove; “one you
have never opened, I dare say. Here, at five o’clock, we shall have
tea; is it not so? Then I shall unfold—”
“It’s an old mystery-play,” said Alberta. “Crofts, I’m surprised.”
“But won’t there be, er, costumes, and so forth?”
“For me, at least, no costume,” declared Cosgrove. “Man, made in the
image of God, shall need no gaudery. I should scorn to deck and
disguise myself to play my God.”
“You don’t mean that you’re to appear in the, er, in the—”
“In the altogether?” finished Eve Bartholomew in a thin
quasi-hysterical tone. “Oh, Mr. Cosgrove—”
“No doubt,” Doctor Aire put in sardonically, “Sean is thinking of the
mediaeval way of playing Adam and Eve with a screen up to their
necks.”
“Leave it to me,” said Cosgrove.
“But won’t all this furniture have to be shifted?” inquired Pendleton
nervously.
“Leave it to me.”
“Alone—how will you do it?”
“With my God-given arms.”
“But shouldn’t the servants—”
“I will do everything that must be done. But first,” and here I
thought Cosgrove became a little wistful, “let us go outside and
breathe the God-given air. Leave all to me; assemble here at five
o’clock.”
He marched out, his face, with a look of grim regret and
determination, turned toward the place in the shrubbery where Paula
Lebetwood had disappeared. The last we saw of him, he had followed her
out of sight.
The company began to disband.