INTO THE DEPTHS.
Momentarily I saw--a black mote in that flickering violet
transparency--the figure of Duke as he ran before me bobbing up and
down like the shadow of the invisible man. Drawn by a sure instinct,
he was heading for the mill, and every nerve must I strain to overtake
him, now goaded by fear and triumph to maniacal frenzy.
But half the distance was covered when the rain swept down in one
blinding sheet, that lashed the gutters into froth a foot high and
numbed the soul with its terrific uproar.
On I staggered, knowing only for my comfort that the pursued must
needs labor against no less resistance than the pursuer. Inch by inch
I fought my way, taking advantage of every buttress and coign of
shelter that presented itself; leaping aside with thump-heart from the
crash of falling tiles or dropping swing of branches, as the wind
flung them right and left in its passing; now stumbling and regaining
my feet, shoulder to the storm, now driven back a pace by some gust--a
giant among its fellows--inch by inch I drove on till the mill yard
was reached; and all the way I gained never a foot upon him I strove
to run down.
Then, rushing along the yard, where comparative shelter was, I found a
thrill of fear, in the midmost confusion of my thoughts, for the
safety of the building itself. For the voice of the mill-tail smote
the roar of the elements and seemed to silence it, and the foam of its
fury sprung and danced above the high-walled channel and flung itself
against the parapet of the bridge in gusts of frosty whiteness. And in
the little lulls came the whistle of sliding tiles from the roof or
snap of them breaking from the walls; so that it seemed before long
nothing but a skeleton of ancient timbers like the ribs and spars of
the phantom death-ship would stand for the blast to scream through.
Then I came panting to the mill, my soul so whelmed in the roar of all
things that room scarcely was for thought of those two stark sleepers
lying quiet above and deaf forevermore to the hateful tumults of
life--came to the mill, and on the instant abandoned hope. For so it
appeared that in rushing from the door none had thought to shut it,
and the tempest had caught and, near battering it from its hinges, had
dashed it, wrenched and splintered, against the wall of the passage
beyond, and in such way that no immediate human power might close it.
And there lay the way into the building; open to all who listed, and
if Jason had run thither, as I bade him----
These thoughts were in passing. I never stayed my progress for them,
but without pause leaped into the inclosed darkness, and only then I
stood still.
Instantly with my plunge into that pit of blackness the hosts of the
storm without seemed to break and scatter before the wind, shaken with
low spasms of thunder as they fled; but under my feet the racing
waters took up great chords of sound, so that the whole building
trembled and vibrated with their awful music.
Overstrung to a pitch of madness, I felt my way to the foot of the
stairs, and, stumbling, mounted in the darkness, and reached the first
landing.
All was still as death. Perhaps it was death come in a new shape, and
stealthily lying somewhere to trip up my feet in a ghastly game of
clowns. I dared not go further; dared hardly to breathe.
As I stood, a rat began gnawing at the skirting. The jar of his teeth
was like the turning of a rusty lock. The old superstition about
falling houses passed through my mind. What if the close night about
me were to be suddenly rent with the explosive splintering of great
beams--with the raining thunder of roof and chimney-stack pouring
downward in one vast ruin, of which I should be the mangled
palpitating core?
My body burst into a cold sweat. Perhaps above all the fear in me was
that death should find me with my mission unaccomplished; that I
should have striven and waited in vain.
Shrinking, I would not push further to the upper rooms, but felt my
way down the stairs once more. It was, at least, hardly probable that
Jason would have rushed for asylum to the very death chambers above.
More likely was I to find him crouching unnerved, if still alive, in
some dark corner of one of the lower rooms.
As I descended into the passage I fancied I heard a step coming toward
me; and the next moment a dusky shape stood up between me and the dim
oblong of lesser darkness that marked where the front door gaped open.
I ran forward--grasped at it blindly; and long arms were crooked about
me and held me as in a vise.
“Who’s here?” cried Dr. Crackenthorpe, in a mad voice. “Who is it?
Say, Renalt Trender, and let me choke the cursed life out of him!”
His passion would hardly allow him to articulate. He dragged me
unresisting to the door, up the yard, and thrust his ugly face down
till it almost touched mine.
“It is!” he cried, with a scream of fury. “Look--look there! See what
you’ve done!”
I had marked it already--a dull glow rising over the houses and
chimney pots that lay between us and Chis’ll street--a glow writhed
with twisted skeins of smoke, that rolled heavily upward, coiling
sluggishly in the calm that had fallen.
“Look!” he screeched; “the priceless treasures of a life--the glories
I bartered my soul for--doomed, in a moment, and by your act! Oh, dog,
for revenge!”
“You lie!” I cried, outshrieking his rage with a fury that half-shook
him from his hold on me. “I had no part in it! You saw it and you
know! Go! Attend to your own. I’ve deadlier work in hand.”
I tore myself free of him with a violence that brought him on his
knees, and hurried up the yard once more and into the pitchy house. He
came upon me again while I was fumbling in my pockets for a match, but
he put out no hand to me a second time.
“Listen, you,” he said, and the words rose and burst from his throat
like bubbles. “You have been a thorn in my foot ever since I trod this
city. If yours wasn’t the act, you were the cause. I would have killed
you both on the spot--you and your accomplice--if the fire, blazing
out on the curtains, had left me time. Now you shall know what it is
to have made me desperate--desperate, do you understand, you fulsome
cur? Better take a viper to bed with you than the thought of my
revenge.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe,” I said, very coolly, “you are a ruffian and a
blackguard. Which is the more desperate of us two is an open question.
Anyhow, I fancy myself the stronger. There’s the door. If you remain
this side of it after I have counted twelve you try conclusions with
the mill-tail yonder.”
I had struck a match while I spoke and kindled an oil lamp standing on
a bracket. This wrestle with an evil soul had braced my nerves like a
tonic.
He slapped back against the passage wall, staring at me and gasping.
His face, I saw, was grimed with smoke, and his coat scorched in
places.
I began to count, looking into his eyes, with a grim smile--had got as
far as nine, without awakening movement on his part, when a deathly
yell rung through the house and the words died on my lips.
I felt the blood leave my face, sinking like water in snow. There was
no mistaking the direction from which the sound had come. It issued
from the haunted room--there from the black end of the passage--from
the core of hideous night, whose silence no storm could penetrate.
Once I looked at the face before me and saw my own terror reflected in
it; then I sprung for the dreadful place, sick, at whatever cost, to
solve the mystery of the cry.
Groping for the heavy timbered door, I came suddenly upon a wide
luminous square and almost fell into it. Then I saw, indeed, that the
door itself was open and that a dim glow lighted the interior of the
room. Something else I saw in the same instant--Duke, standing at the
open mouth of the cupboard that inclosed the wheel--Duke, with a
fearful smile on his white face, and his head bent as if he listened.
And his black glowing eyes, set in pools of shadow, alone moved,
fixing their gaze steadily on mine as I came into their vision.
“Stop!” he said, in a clear, low voice. He need not have bidden me. My
limbs seemed paralyzed--my heart stiffening with deadly foreboding of
some approaching wickedness.
A lighted lantern stood near him on the floor and threw a gigantic
distorted shadow of him on the wall against the window.
“Did you hear?” he said, in a whisper that thrilled to me where I
stood. “Is it haunted, this room of yours? It seems so. Listen!”
He leaned over and looked down into the pit, so that the upper half of
his body was plunged in black shadow. Simultaneously an appalling
scream rose from the depths and echoed away among the rafters above.
The marrow froze in my bones. I struggled vainly to rush forward, but
my feet would not obey my will.
“My God!” I muttered from a crackled throat--“my God!”
He was looking at me again across the glowing space, a grin twitching
up his mouth like a dog’s.
“If you move to come at me,” he said, “I leap down there and end it.
He won’t thank you, though.”
“Duke,” I forced myself to mutter, at length, in uncontrollable
horror. “Is it Jason? Oh! be satisfied at last and God will forgive
you.”
“Why, so I am!” he cried, with a whispering laugh. “But I never sent
him down there. He went of his own accord--a secret, snug
hiding-place. But he should have waited longer; and who would have
thought of looking so deep! It was his leaning over, as he came up, to
put the lantern where it stands that drew me.”
In the sickness of my terror I saw it all. Jason, flying back to the
mill, mad with fear, mad for the means of escape--Jason, who had
already solved the mystery of the treasure, and had only hitherto
lacked the courage necessary to a descent upon it--Jason, in his
despair, had seized a light, burst into the room of silence; had found
the wheel stopped and the key in the lock, as I had left them; had,
summoning his last of manliness, gone down into the pit and,
returning, had met his fearful enemy face to face.
I read it all and, utterly hopeless and demoralized as I was--knowing
that a movement on my part would precipitate the tragedy--yet found
voice to break the spell, and delivered my agony in a shriek.
“Jason!” I screamed; “Jason! Climb up! You are as strong as he! Climb
up and defy him! We are two to one!”
Even as the volume of my cry seemed to strike a responsive weak echo
from the bowels of the pit, I was conscious that Dr. Crackenthorpe was
breathing behind me over my shoulder. And while the sound of my voice
ran from beam to beam in devilish harmonics, the cripple suddenly
threw up his arms with a quavering screech and leaped upon the
threshold of the cupboard.
“The man!” he yelled; “the dog, and now the man! I know him at last!”
Dr. Crackenthorpe broke past me with an answering cry:
“He fired my house! Stop him! The hound! Stop him!”
As he sprang forward Duke, with a sudden swoop, seized the lantern
from the floor and flung it at him; and at the same instant--as I saw
by the flaming arc of light it made--clutched the rope and swung
himself into the vault. The lantern crashed and was extinguished. The
doctor uttered a fierce oath. Spellbound I stood, and for half a dozen
seconds the weltering blackness eddied with a ghastly silence. Then I
heard the doctor fling past me, running out of the room with a fearful
exclamation on his lips, and, as he went, scream after scream rise
from the depths, so that my soul seemed to faint with the agony of it.
Groping, staggering, my brain reeling, I stumbled toward the sound.
“God forgive me!” I whispered. “Death is better than this.”
Even with the thought a new uproar broke upon my senses--the
thunderous heaving onrush of a mighty torrent of water underfoot.
In a flash I knew what had happened. The hideous creature had lifted
the sluice and turned the swollen flood upon the wheel.
Then the past swept over me in a hurried panorama as my poor brain
paused for rest.
Who killed Modred--How did he die?
What is the mystery of Duke Straw?
What was the sin of my mother?
Whose portrait was it that my father nailed to the axle of the wheel?
These and many other of the problems haunting my life came to me in
swift succession, only to be passed in dullness and left unanswered.