OLD PEGGY.
The months that immediately followed my home-coming were passed by me
in an aimless, desultory temporizing with the vexed problems that,
unanswered, were consuming my heart.
I roamed the country as of old and renewed my acquaintance with bird,
fish and insect. Starting to gather a collection of butterflies and
moths--many of which were local and rare--with the mere object of
filling in the lapses of a restless ennui and in some dull gratitude
to a pursuit that had helped me to a little degree of late success, I
rapidly rose to an interest in its formation that became, I may say,
the then chief happiness of my life. To my father, also, it brought,
in the arrangement and classification of specimens, a certain innocent
pleasure that helped to restore him to some healthier show of
manliness moral and physical.
Poor, broken old man! I would not now have stultified his pathetic
confidence in me for the biggest bribe the world could hold out.
Yet it must not be supposed I ever really for a moment lost sight of
the main issues of a mystery that was bitten into my heart with an
acid that no time could take the strength from. Sometime, sooner or
later, I knew it would be revealed to me who it was that killed
Modred.
As to that lesser secret of the coins--it troubled me but little. Free
of that dread of possible ruin that appeared to cling hauntingly to my
father, I was not disinclined to the belief that the complete
dissipation of his bugbear estate might prove after all his moral
salvation. Remove its source of irritation, and would not the sore
heal?
Sometimes in the full pressure of this thought I found it almost in my
mind to hunt and hunt until I found his hiding-place and to commit its
remaining treasures to the earth or the waters. Then it would seem a
base thing to do--a mean advantage to take of his confidence--and I
would put the thought from me.
Still, however I might decide ultimately, this determination dwelt
firmly and constantly in me--to oppose by every means in my power any
further levying of blackmail on the part of the doctor.
This unworthy eccentricity had not, to my knowledge, been near the
mill since that night of my return. That he presently found means,
nevertheless, of communicating with his victim, I was to find out by a
simple chance.
June had come upon us leading this placidly monotonous life, when,
returning one afternoon from a ramble after specimens, I found my
father sitting upstairs in a mood so preoccupied that he did not
notice my entrance. His head was bowed, his left arm drooping over one
end of the table. Suddenly hearing my footsteps in the room, he
started and a gold coin fell from his hand and spun and tinkled on the
boards.
“What’s that?” I said.
He stooped and clutched it, and hugging it to his breast looked up in
my face with startled eyes. But he gave no answer.
“Is it necessary to change another, dad?”
“No,” he muttered.
A thought stung me like a wasp.
“Is it for a bribe?” I demanded. Still he kept silence.
“Father,” I said, “give it to me.”
“Renalt--I can’t; I mustn’t.”
“Give it to me. If you refuse--I threaten nothing--but--give it to
me!”
He held it forth in a shaking hand. I took it and slipped it into my
pocket.
“Now,” I said, sternly, “I am going to see Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
He rose from his chair with a cry.
“You are mad, I tell you! You can do nothing--nothing.”
“It is time this ceased for good and all, father. I stand between you
now--remember that. You have to choose between me and that villain.
Which is it to be?”
“Renalt--my son. It is for your sake!”
“I can look after my own interests. Which is it to be?”
He dropped back into his chair with a groan.
“Go, then,” he muttered, “and God help you!”
I turned and left him. My heart was blazing with a fierce resentment.
But I would not leave the house till my veins ran cooler, for no
advantage of temper should be on the side of that frosty bloodsucker.
I wandered downstairs, past the door of the room of silence, but the
rough jeering of the wheel within drove me away to where I could be
out of immediate earshot of it.
From the kitchen at the back came the broken, whining voice of old
Peggy Rottengoose, who yet survived and waited upon the meager
household with a ghoulish faithfulness that no time could impair.
The words of some sardonic song came sterilely from her withered lips.
She was apt at such grewsome ditties:
“I saw three ravens up a tree--
Heigho!
I saw three ravens up a tree;
And they were black as black could be--
All down by the greenwood side, O!
“I stuck my penknife in their hearts--
Heigho!
I stuck my penknife in their hearts;
And the more I stuck it the blood gushed out;
All down by the greenwood side, O!”
I softly pushed open the door, that stood ajar, and looked in. The old
creature was sitting crooning in a chair, a picture or print of some
kind, at which she was gazing in a sort of hungry ecstasy, held out
and down before her at arm’s length. I stole on tiptoe behind her and
sought to get a glimpse at that she devoured with her rheumy eyes.
“Why, what are you doing with that, Peg?” I said, with a start of
surprise.
Cunning even under the spur of sudden discomfiture, she whipped the
thing beneath her apron before she struggled to her feet and faced
round upon me.
“What ails ye, Renalt?” she wheezed, in a voice like that of one
winded by a blow--“to fright a body, sich like?”
“You needn’t be frightened, unless you were doing something you
shouldn’t, you know.”
“Shud and shudn’t,” she said, her yellow under jaw, scratched all over
with fine wrinkles, moving like a barbel’s. “I doesn’t take my morals
fro’ a Trender.”
“You take all you can get, Peggy. Why not a picture with the rest?”
“My own nevvy!” she cried, with an attenuated scream--“blessed son to
Amelia as were George’s first wife and died o’ cramps o’ the cold dew
from a shift hung out on St. Bartlemey’s day.”
“Now, Peggy,” I said sternly, “I saw that picture and it wasn’t of
your nephew or of any other relation of yours. It was a silhouette, as
they call it, of my brother, Modred, made when he was a little fellow,
by some one in a show that came here, and it used to hang in Modred’s
room.”
“Ye lie, Renalt!” she cried, panting at me. “It’s Amelia’s boy--and
mayn’t I enjoy the fruits o’ my own heritage?”
“Let me look at it, then; and if I’m wrong I’ll ask your pardon.”
“Keep arf!” she cried, backing from me. “Keep arf, or I’ll tear your
weasand wi’ my claws!”
I made a little rush and clutched her. She could not keep her promise
without loosening her hold of the picture, but she butted at me, with
her cap bobbing, and dinted my shin with her vicious old toes. Then,
seeing it was all useless, she crumpled the paper up into a ball and,
tossing it from her, fell back in her chair and threw her apron over
her head.
I dived for the picture and smoothed out its creases.
“Peggy!” I said.
“I tuk it--I tuk it!” wailed the old woman. “I tuk it fro’ the wall
when I come up wi’ the blarnkets and nubbody were there to see!”
“Why did you take it and why have you riddled it with holes like
this?”
She slipped down on her trembling knees.
“Don’tee be hard on me, Renalt--don’tee! I swear, I were frighted
myself at what I done. I didn’t hardly guess it would act so. Don’tee
have me burnt or drownded, Renalt. It were a wicked thing to a body
old enough to be your grandam, and I’ve but a little glint o’ time
left.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Peggy. You’d no business to take the
picture, of course, and still less to treat it like this. But your
nature’s a thieving one, and I suppose you can’t help it. Get off your
knees. It’s done, and there’s an end of it.”
She stopped her driveling moan and looked up at me queerly, I thought.
“Ay, I’d no call to do it, of course,” she said. “Just a body’s
absence o’ mind, Renalt, ye see--same as pricking pastry in time to a
toone like. I thought maybe if ye saw it ye’d want to tell the old man
upstairs, and he’s got the strong arm yet, for all the worm in his
brain.”
“I sha’n’t tell him this time, but don’t let me catch you handling any
of our property again”; and I left the room.
A little flustered by my late tussle and hardly yet in a mood for the
interview I clearly foresaw would be no amicable one, I wandered out,
turning my footsteps, not at present in the direction of the doctor’s
house, but toward that part of the river called the “weirs,” which ran
straight away from the mill front. This was a pleasant, picturesque
stretch down which the water, shaded by many stooping trees and
bushes, washed and gurgled brightly. A railed pathway ran by it and,
to the same side, cottages at intervals and little plats of flowering
parterres.
It was a reach which, unpreserved, was much favored of the townsfolk
for fishing.
A man was whipping the stream now in its broadest part, and I stopped
to watch him. He was a rosy, well-knit fellow of 35 or so, with a
good-humored, bibulous eye and a foolish underjaw.
“Any sport?” I asked.
“Plenty o’ sport,” said he, “but no fish.”
“You’re a philosopher, it seems.”
“Mebbe I arm, for what it may mean. A pint of ale ’ud cure it.”
“Why not a pint of water? It’s there and to spare.”
“The beggar’s tap, master. I arns my living.”
“Well, buy your pot of ale out of it.”
“I’d rather you tuk the responsibility off me.”
“Well,” said I, with a grin, “let’s see you catch a fish and I’ll
stand treat.”
He threw for some time in silence.
“I must be off,” said I.
“Fair play, master! I harsn’t got my fish yet.”
“I can’t wait all day for that.”
“Then, pay up. You put no limit to the time.”
I laughed and gave him the money, and he spat upon it for luck.
“You come fro’ yon old mill, don’tee?” said he.
“Yes, I do. You know me, it appears. Who may you be?”
“They carls me saxton ower at St. John’s yonder.”
I received his answer with a little start. Were these the hands that
had dug the grave for my dead brother?
“They call you? What do you call yourself?” I said.
“High priest to the worms, wi’ your honor’s leave.”
He stuck his tongue in his cheek and whipped out his fly again. This
time it disappeared with a fat blob and his hand came smartly up. I
watched him while he wheeled in his floundering prize.
“Ay,” he went on, as he stooped to unhook the trout, “the worms and I
works on the mutual-profit system. I feeds them and they feeds me.
Sometimes”--he looked round and up at me slyly--“they shows a power o’
gratitoode ower an uncommon rich meal and makes me a particlar
acknowledgment o’ my services.”