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Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories

by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #13799 · 471,998 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories

Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch


        
Release date: October 19, 2004 [eBook #13799]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13799

Credits: E-text prepared by Lionel G. Sear


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD FIRES AND PROFITABLE GHOSTS: A BOOK OF STORIES ***

OLD FIRES AND PROFITABLE GHOSTS.

A Book of Stories

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH.







PREFACE

The stories in this book are of _revenants_: persons who either in
spirit or in body revisit old scenes, return upon old selves or old
emotions, or relate a message from a world beyond perception.  "Which?"
was suggested by a passage in Hawthorne's Note-books, where he proposes
a story or sketch the scene of which is "to be laid within the light of
a street lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam."
"The Lady of the Ship" is very nearly historical.  "Prisoners of War"
rests on the actual adventures of two St. Ives men, Thomas Williams and
John Short, in the years 1804-1814.  "Frozen Margit" and "The Seventh
Man" have--if not their originals--at least their suggestions in fact.

One of the tales, "Once Aboard the Lugger," is itself a _revenant_.
After writing it in the form here presented, I took advice and gave it
another, under the title of "Ia."  Yet some whose opinion I value prefer
the original, and to satisfy them (though I think them wrong) it is
reprinted; not with intent to pad out the volume.  But my readers are
too generous to need the assurance.

Q.




CONTENTS


I.     OCEANUS.

II.    THE SEVENTH MAN.

III.   THE ROOM OF MIRRORS.

IV.    A PAIR OF HANDS.

V.     THE LADY OF THE SHIP.

VI.    FROZEN MARGIT.

VII.   THE SINGULAR ADVENTURE OF A SMALL FREE-TRADER.

VIII.  THE MYSTERY OF JOSEPH LAQUEDEM.

IX.    PRISONERS OF WAR.

X.     A TOWN'S MEMORY.

XI.    THE LADY OF THE RED ADMIRALS.

XII.   THE PENANCE OF JOHN EMMET.

XIII.  ELISHA.

XIV.   "ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER".

XV.    WHICH?





OCEANUS

I

My Dear Violet,--So you "gather from the tone of two or three recent
letters that my spirit is creeping back to light and warmth again"?
Well, after a fashion you are right.  I shall never laugh again as I
used to laugh before Harry's death.  The taste has gone out of that
carelessness, and I turn even from the remembrance of it.  But I can be
cheerful, with a cheerfulness which has found the centre of gravity.
I am myself again, as people say.  After months of agitation in what
seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the
scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal
business intelligently.  So might a mote in a sunbeam feel itself at one
with God!

But when you assume that my recovery has been a gradual process, you are
wrong.  You will think me more than ever deranged; but I assure you that
it has been brought about, not by long strivings, but suddenly--without
preparation of mine--_and by the immediate hand of our dead brother_.

Yes; you shall have the whole tale.  The first effect of the news of
Harry's death in October last was simply to stun me.  You may remember
how once, years ago when we were children, we rode home together across
the old Racecourse after a long day's skating, our skates swinging at
our saddle-bows; how Harry challenged us to a gallop; and how, midway,
the roan mare slipped down neck over crop on the frozen turf and hurled
me clean against the face of a stone dyke.  I had been thrown from
horseback more than once before, but somehow had always found the earth
fairly elastic.  So I had griefs before Harry died and took some rebound
of hope from each: but that cast repeated in a worse degree the old
shock--the springless brutal jar--of the stone dyke.  With him the sun
went out of my sky.

I understand that this torpor is quite common with men and women
suddenly bereaved.  I believe that a whole week passed before my brain
recovered any really vital motion; and then such feeble thought as I
could exert was wholly occupied with the desperate stupidity of the
whole affair.  If God were indeed shaping the world to any end, if any
design of His underlay the activities of men, what insensate waste to
quench such a heart and brain as Harry's!--to nip, as it seemed out of
mere blundering wantonness, a bud which had begun to open so generously:
to sacrifice that youth and strength, that comeliness, that enthusiasm,
and all for nothing!  Had some campaign claimed him, had he been spent
to gain a citadel or defend a flag, I had understood.  But that he
should be killed on a friendly mission; attacked in ignorance by those
East Coast savages while bearing gifts to their king;  deserted by the
porters whose comfort (on their own confession) he had studied
throughout the march; left to die, to be tortured, mutilated--and all
for no possible good: these things I could not understand.  At the end
he might have escaped; but as he caught hold of his saddle by the band
between the holsters, it parted: it was not leather, but faced paper,
the job of some cheating contractor.  I thought of this, too.  And Harry
had been through Chitral!

But though a man may hate, he cannot easily despise God for long.
"He is great--but wasteful," said the American.  We are the dust on His
great hands, and fly as He claps them carelessly in the pauses of His
work.  Yet this theory would not do at all: for the unlucky particles
are not dust, not refuse, but exquisite and exquisitely fashioned,
designed to _live_, and to every small function of life adapted with the
minutest care.  There were nights indeed when, walking along the shore
where we had walked together on the night before Harry left England and
looking from the dark waters which divided me from his grave up to the
nightly moon and to the stars around her, I could well believe God
wasteful of little things.  Sirius flashing low, Orion's belt with the
great nebula swinging like a pendant of diamonds; the ruby stars,
Betelgueux and Aldebaran--my eyes went up beyond these to Perseus
shepherding the Kids westward along the Milky way.  From the right
Andromeda flashed signals to him: and above sat Cassiopeia, her mother,
resting her jewelled wrists on the arms of her throne.  Low in the east
Jupiter trailed his satellites in the old moon's path.  As they all
moved, silent, looking down on me out of the hollow spaces of the night,
I could believe no splendid waste too costly for their perfection: and
the Artificer who hung them there after millions of years of patient
effort, if more intelligible than a God who produced them suddenly at
will, certainly not less divine.  But walking the same shore by daylight
I recognised that the shells, the mosses, the flowers I trampled on,
were, each in its way, as perfect as those great stars: that on these--
and on Harry--as surely as on the stars--God had spent, if not infinite
pains, then at least so superlative a wisdom that to conceive of them as
wastage was to deny the mind which called them forth.

There they were: and that He who had skill to create them could blunder
in using them was simply incredible.

But this led to worse: for having to admit the infallible design, I now
began to admire it as an exquisite scheme of evil, and to accuse God of
employing supreme knowledge and skill to gratify a royal lust of
cruelty.  For a month and more this horrible theory justified itself in
all innocent daily sights.  Throughout my country walks I "saw blood."
I heard the rabbit run squeaking before the weasel; I watched the
butcher crow working steadily down the hedge.  If I turned seaward I
looked beneath the blue and saw the dog-fish gnawing on the whiting.
If I walked in the garden I surprised the thrush dragging worms from the
turf, the cat slinking on the nest, the spider squatting in ambush.
Behind the rosy face of every well-nourished child I saw a lamb gazing
up at the butcher's knife.  My dear Violet, that was a hideous time!

And just then by chance a book fell into my hands--Lamartine's _Chute
d'un Ange_.   Do you know the Seventh and Tenth Visions of that poem,
which describe the favourite amusements of the Men-gods?  Before the
Deluge, beyond the rude tents of the nomad shepherds, there rose city
upon city of palaces built of jasper and porphyry, splendid and utterly
corrupt; inhabited by men who called themselves gods and explored the
subtleties of all sciences to minister to their vicious pleasures.
At ease on soft couches, in hanging gardens set with fountains, these
beings feasted with every refinement of cruelty.  Kneeling slaves were
their living tables; while for their food--

    Tous les oiseaux de l'air, tous les poissons de l'onde,
    Tout ce qui vole ou nage ou rampe dans le monde,
    Mourant pour leur plaisir des plus cruels trepas
    De sanglantes savours composent leurs repas. . . .

In these lines I believed that I discerned the very God of the universe,
the God whom men worship--

    Dans les infames jeux de leur divin loisir
    Le supplice de l'homme est leur premier plaisir.
    Pour que leur oeil feroce a l'envi s'en repaisse
    Des bourreaux devant eux en immolent sans cesse.
    Tantot ils font lutter, dans des combats affreux,
    L'homme contre la brute et les hommes entre eux,
    Aux longs ruisseaux de sang qui coulent de la veine,
    Aux palpitations des membres sur l'arene,
    Se levant a demi de leurs lits de repos
    Des frissons de plaisir fremissent sur leurs peaux.
    Le cri de la torture est leur douce harmonie,
    Et leur oeil dans son oeil boit sa lente agonie.

I charged the Supreme Power with a cruelty deliberate, ruthless, serene.
Nero the tyrant once commanded a representation in grim earnest of the
Flight of Icarus; and the unhappy boy who took the part, at his first
attempt to fly, fell headlong beside the Emperor's couch and spattered
him with blood and brains.  For the Emperor, says Suetonius, _perraro
praesidere, ceterum accubans, parvis primum foraminibus, deinde toto
podio adaperto, spectare consuerat_.  So I believed that on the stage of
this world men agonised for the delight of one cruel intelligence which
watched from behind the curtain of a private box.


II

In this unhappy condition of mind, then, I was lying in my library chair
here at Sevenhays, at two o'clock on the morning of January 4th.  I had
just finished another reading of the Tenth Vision and had tossed my book
into the lap of an armchair opposite.  Fire and lamp were burning
brightly.  The night outside was still and soundless, with a touch of
frost.

I lay there, retracing in thought the circumstances of Harry's last
parting from me, and repeating to myself a scrap here and there from the
three letters he wrote on his way--the last of them, full of high
spirits, received a full three weeks after the telegram which announced
his death.  There was a passage in this last letter describing a
wonderful ride he had taken alone and by moonlight on the desert; a ride
(he protested) which wanted nothing of perfect happiness but me, his
friend, riding beside him to share his wonder.  There was a sentence
which I could not recall precisely, and I left my chair and was crossing
the room towards the drawer in the writing-table where I kept his
letters, when I heard a trampling of hoofs on the gravel outside, and
then my Christian name called--with distinctness, but not at all loudly.

I went to the window, which was unshuttered; drew up the blind and flung
up the sash.  The moon, in its third quarter and about an hour short of
its meridian, shone over the deodars upon the white gravel.  And there,
before the front door, sat Harry on his sorrel mare Vivandiere, holding
my own Grey Sultan ready bridled and saddled.  He was dressed in his old
khaki riding suit, and his face, as he sat askew in his saddle and
looked up towards my window, wore its habitual and happy smile.

Now, call this and what follows a dream, vision, hallucination, what you
will; but understand, please, that from the first moment, so far as I
considered the matter at all, I had never the least illusion that this
was Harry in flesh and blood.  I knew quite well all the while that
Harry was dead and his body in his grave.  But, soul or phantom--
whatever relation to Harry this might bear--it had come to me, and the
great joy of that was enough for the time.  There let us leave the
question.  I closed the window, went upstairs to my dressing-room, drew
on my riding-boots and overcoat, found cap, gloves, and riding-crop, and
descended to the porch.

Harry, as I shall call him, was still waiting there on the off side of
Grey Sultan, the farther side from the door.  There could be no doubt,
at any rate, that the grey was real horseflesh and blood, though he
seemed unusually quiet after two days in stall.  Harry freed him as I
mounted, and we set off together at a walk, which we kept as far as the
gate.

Outside we took the westward road, and our horses broke into a trot.
As yet we had not exchanged a word; but now he asked a question or two
about his people and his friends; kindly, yet most casually, as one
might who returns after a week's holidaying.  I answered as well as I
could, with trivial news of their health.  His mother had borne the
winter better than usual--to be sure, there had been as yet no cold
weather to speak of; but she and Ethel intended, I believed, to start
for the south of France early in February.  He inquired about you.
His comments were such as a man makes on hearing just what he expects to
hear, or knows beforehand.  And for some time it seemed to be tacitly
taken for granted between us that I should ask him no questions.

"As for me--" I began, after a while.

He checked the mare's pace a little.  "I know," he said, looking
straight ahead between her ears; then, after a pause, "it has been a bad
time for you, You are in a bad way altogether.  That is why I came."

"But it was for _you!_" I blurted out.  "Harry, if only I had known why
_you_ were taken--and what it was to _you!_"

He turned his face to me with the old confident comforting smile.

"Don't you trouble about _that.  That's_ nothing to make a fuss about.
Death?" he went on musing--our horses had fallen to a walk again--
"It looks you in the face a moment: you put out your hands: you touch--
and so it is gone.  My dear boy, it isn't for us that you need worry."

"For whom, then?"

"Come," said he, and he shook Vivandiere into a canter.



III

I cannot remember precisely at what point in our ride the country had
ceased to be familiar.  But by-and-by we were climbing the lower slopes
of a great down which bore no resemblance to the pastoral country around
Sevenhays.  We had left the beaten road for short turf--apparently of a
copper-brown hue, but this may have been the effect of the moonlight.
The ground rose steadily, but with an easy inclination, and we climbed
with the wind at our backs; climbed, as it seemed, for an hour, or maybe
two, at a footpace, keeping silence.  The happiness of having Harry
beside me took away all desire for speech.

This at least was my state of mind as we mounted the long lower slopes
of the down.  But in time the air, hitherto so exhilarating, began to
oppress my lungs, and the tranquil happiness to give way to a vague
discomfort and apprehension.

"What is this noise of water running?"

I reined up Grey Sultan as I put the question.  At the same moment it
occurred to me that this sound of water, distant and continuous, had
been running in my ear for a long while.

Harry, too, came to a halt.  With a sweep of the arm that embraced the
dim landscape around and ahead, he quoted softly--

    en detithei potamoio mega spenos Okeanoio
    antyga par pymaten sakeos pyka poietoio . . . .

and was silent again.

I recalled at once and distinctly the hot summer morning ten years back,
when we had prepared that passage of the Eighteenth Book together in our
study at Clifton; I at the table, Harry lolling in the cane-seated
armchair with the Liddell and Scott open on his knees; outside, the
sunny close and the fresh green of the lime-trees.

Now that I looked more attentively the bare down, on which we climbed
like flies, did indeed resemble a vast round shield, about the rim of
which this unseen water echoed.  And the resemblance grew more startling
when, a mile or so farther on our way, as the grey dawn overtook us,
Harry pointed upwards and ahead to a small boss or excrescence now
lifting itself above the long curve of the horizon.

At first I took it for a hummock or tumulus.  Then, as the day whitened
about us, I saw it to be a building--a tall, circular barrack not unlike
the Colosseum.  A question shaped itself on my lips, but something in
Harry's manner forbade it.  His gaze was bent steadily forward, and I
kept my wonder to myself, and also the oppression of spirit which had
now grown to something like physical torture.

When first the great barrack broke into sight we must have been at least
two miles distant.  I kept my eyes fastened on it as we approached, and
little by little made out the details of its architecture.  From base to
summit--which appeared to be roofless--six courses of many hundred
arches ran around the building, one above the other; and between each
pair a course, as it seemed, of plain worked stone, though I afterwards
found it to be sculptured in low relief.  The arches were cut in deep
relief and backed with undressed stone.  The lowest course of all,
however, was quite plain, having neither arches nor frieze; but at
intervals corresponding to the eight major points of the compass--so far
as I who saw but one side of it could judge--pairs of gigantic stone
figures supported archways pierced in the wall; or sluices, rather,
since from every archway but one a full stream of water issued and
poured down the sides of the hill.  The one dry archway was that which
faced us with open gate, and towards which Harry led the way; for
oppression and terror now weighted my hand as with lead upon Grey
Sultan's rein.

Harry, however, rode forward resolutely, dismounted almost in the very
shadow of the great arch, and waited, smoothing his mare's neck.
But for the invitation in his eyes, which were solemn, yet without a
trace of fear, I had never dared that last hundred yards.  For above the
rush of waters I heard now a confused sound within the building--the
thud and clanking of heavy machinery, and at intervals a human groan;
and looking up I saw that the long friezes in bas-relief represented men
and women tortured and torturing with all conceivable variety of method
and circumstance--flayed, racked, burned, torn asunder, loaded with
weights, pinched with hot irons, and so on without end.  And it added to
the horror of these sculptures that while the limbs and even the dress
of each figure were carved with elaborate care and nicety of detail, the
faces of all--of those who applied the torture and of those who looked
on, as well as of the sufferers themselves--were left absolutely blank.
On the same plan the two Titans beside the great archway had no faces.
The sculptor had traced the muscles of each belly in a constriction of
anguish, and had suggested this anguish again in moulding the neck, even
in disposing the hair of the head; but the neck supported, and the locks
fell around, a space of smooth stone without a feature.

Harry allowed me no time to feed on these horrors.  Signing to me to
dismount and leave Grey Sultan at the entrance, he led me through the
long archway or tunnel.  At the end we paused again, he watching, while
I drew difficult breath. . . .

I saw a vast amphitheatre of granite, curving away on either hand and
reaching up, tier on tier, till the tiers melted in the grey sky
overhead.  The lowest tier stood twenty feet above my head; yet curved
with so lordly a perspective that on the far side of the arena, as I
looked across, it seemed almost level with the ground; while the human
figures about the great archway yonder were diminished to the size of
ants about a hole. . . For there were human figures busy in the arena,
though not a soul sat in any of the granite tiers above.  A million eyes
had been less awful than those empty benches staring down in the cold
dawn; bench after bench repeating the horror of the featureless carvings
by the entrance-gate--repeating it in series without end, and unbroken,
save at one point midway along the semicircle on my right, where the
imperial seat stood out, crowned like a catafalque with plumes of purple
horse-hair, and screened close with heavy purple hangings.  I saw these
curtains shake once or twice in the morning wind.

The floor of this amphitheatre I have spoken of as an arena; but as a
matter of fact it was laid with riveted sheets of copper that recalled
the dead men's shelves in the Paris _morgue_.  The centre had been
raised some few feet higher than the circumference, or possibly the
whole floor took its shape from the rounded hill of which it was the
apex; and from an open sluice immediately beneath the imperial throne a
flood of water gushed with a force that carried it straight to this
raised centre, over which it ran and rippled, and so drained back into
the scuppers at the circumference.  Before reaching the centre it broke
and swirled around a row of what appeared to be tall iron boxes or
cages, set directly in face of the throne.  But for these ugly boxes the
whole floor was empty.  To and from these the little human figures were
hurrying, and from these too proceeded the thuds and panting and the
frequent groans that I had heard outside.

While I stood and gazed, Harry stepped forward into the arena.
"This also?" I whispered.

He nodded, and led the way over the copper floor, where the water ran
high as our ankles and again was drained off, until little dry spaces
grew like maps upon the surface, and in ten seconds were flooded again.
He led me straight to the cages, and I saw that while the roof and three
sides of these were of sheet iron, the fourth side, which faced the
throne, lay open.  And I saw--in the first cage, a man scourged with
rods; in the second, a body twisted on the rack; in the third, a woman
with a starving babe, and a fellow that held food to them and withdrew
it quickly (the torturers wore masks on their faces, and whenever blood
flowed some threw handfuls of sawdust, and blood and sawdust together
were carried off by the running water); in the fourth cage, a man tied,
naked and helpless, whom a masked torturer pelted with discs of gold,
heavy and keen-edged; in the fifth a brasier with irons heating, and a
girl's body crouched in a corner--

"I will see no more!" I cried, and turned towards the great purple
canopy.  High over it the sun broke yellow on the climbing tiers of
seats.  "Harry! someone is watching behind those curtains!  Is it--HE?"

Harry bent his head.

"But this is all that I believed!  This is Nero, and ten times worse
than Nero!  Why did you bring me here?"  I flung out my hand towards the
purple throne, and finding myself close to a fellow who scattered
sawdust with both hands, made a spring to tear his mask away.  But Harry
stretched out an arm.

"That will not help you," he said.  "The man has no face."

"No face!"

"He once had a face, but it has perished.  His was the face of these
sufferers.  Look at them."

I looked from cage to cage, and now saw that indeed all these
sufferers--men and women--had but one face: the same wrung brow, the
same wistful eyes, the same lips bitten in anguish.  I knew the face.
_We all know it_.

"His own Son!  O devil rather than God!"  I fell on my knees in the
gushing water and covered my eyes.

"Stand up, listen and look!" said Harry's voice.

"What can I see?  He hides behind that curtain."

"And the curtain?"

"It shakes continually."

"_That is with His sobs_.  Listen!  What of the water?"

"It runs from the throne and about the floor.  It washes off the blood."

"That water is His tears.  It flows hence down the hill, and washes all
the shores of earth."

Then as I stood silent, conning the eddies at my feet, for the first
time Harry took my hand.

"Learn this," he said.  "There is no suffering in the world but
ultimately comes to be endured by God."

Saying this, he drew me from the spot; gently, very gently led me away;
but spoke again as we were about to pass into the shadow of the arch--

"Look once back: for a moment only."

I looked.  The curtains of the imperial seat were still drawn close, but
in a flash I saw the tiers beside it, and around, and away up to the
sunlit crown of the amphitheatre, thronged with forms in white raiment.
And all these forms leaned forward and bowed their faces on their arms
and wept.

So we passed out beneath the archway.  Grey Sultan stood outside, and as
I mounted him the gate clashed behind. . . .


IV

I turned as it clashed.  And the gate was just the lodge-gate of
Sevenhays.  And Grey Sultan was trampling the gravel of our own drive.
The morning sun slanted over the laurels on my right, and while I
wondered, the stable clock struck eight.

The rest I leave to you; nor shall try to explain.  I only know that,
vision or no vision, my soul from that hour has gained a calm it never
knew before.  The sufferings of my fellows still afflict me; but always,
if I stand still and listen, in my own room, or in a crowded street, or
in a waste spot among the moors, I can hear those waters moving round
the world--moving on their "priest-like task "--those lustral divine
tears which are Oceanus.



THE SEVENTH MAN.


In a one-roomed hut, high within the Arctic Circle, and only a little
south of the eightieth parallel, six men were sitting--much as they had
sat, evening after evening, for months.  They had a clock, and by it
they divided the hours into day and night.  As a matter of fact, it was
always night.  But the clock said half-past eight, and they called the
time evening.

The hut was built of logs, with an inner skin of rough match-boarding,
daubed with pitch.  It measured seventeen feet by fourteen; but opposite
the door four bunks--two above and two below--took a yard off the
length, and this made the interior exactly square.  Each of these bunks
had two doors, with brass latches on the inner side; so that the owner,
if he chose, could shut himself up and go to sleep in a sort of
cupboard.  But as a rule, he closed one of them only--that by his feet.
The other swung back, with its brass latch showing.  The men kept these
latches in a high state of polish.

Across the angle of the wall, to the left of the door, and behind it
when it opened, three hammocks were slung, one above another.  No one
slept in the uppermost.

But the feature of the hut was its fireplace; and this was merely a
square hearth-stone, raised slightly above the floor, in the middle of
the room.  Upon it, and upon a growing mountain of soft grey ash, the
fire burned always.  It had no chimney, and so the men lost none of its
warmth.  The smoke ascended steadily and spread itself under the
blackened beams and roof-boards in dense blue layers.  But about
eighteen inches beneath the spring of the roof there ran a line of small
trap-doors with sliding panels, to admit the cold air, and below these
the room was almost clear of smoke.  A newcomer's eyes might have
smarted, but these men stitched their clothes and read in comfort.
To keep the up-draught steady they had plugged every chink and crevice
in the match-boarding below the trap-doors with moss, and payed the
seams with pitch.  The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck
wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed
the frozen beach outside--whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers'
axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent.  But the
wreck-wood came from their own ship, the _J. R. MacNeill_, which had
brought them from Dundee.

They were Alexander Williamson, of Dundee, better known as The Gaffer;
David Faed, also of Dundee; George Lashman, of Cardiff; Long Ede, of
Hayle, in Cornwall; Charles Silchester, otherwise The Snipe, of Ratcliff
Highway or thereabouts; and Daniel Cooney, shipped at Tromso six weeks
before the wreck, an Irish-American by birth and of no known address.

The Gaffer reclined in his bunk, reading by the light of a smoky and
evil-smelling lamp.  He had been mate of the _J. R. MacNeill_, and was
now captain as well as patriarch of the party.  He possessed three
books--the Bible, Milton's "Paradise Lost," and an odd volume of
"The Turkish Spy."  Just now he was reading "The Turkish Spy."
The lamplight glinted on the rim of his spectacles and on the silvery
hairs in his beard, the slack of which he had tucked under the edge of
his blanket.  His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off
to glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire
with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of
Lashman in the bunk below him.  Lashman had taken to his bed six weeks
before with scurvy, and complained incessantly; and though they hardly
knew it, these complaints were wearing his comrades' nerves to
fiddle-strings--doing the mischief that cold and bitter hard work and
the cruel loneliness had hitherto failed to do.  Long Ede lay stretched
by the fire in a bundle of skins, reading in his only book, the Bible,
open now at the Song of Solomon.  Cooney had finished patching a pair of
trousers, and rolled himself in his hammock, whence he stared at the
roof and the moonlight streaming up there through the little trap-doors
and chivying the layers of smoke.  Whenever Lashman broke out into fresh
quaverings of self-pity, Cooney's hands opened and shut again, till the
nails dug hard into the palm.  He groaned at length, exasperated beyond
endurance.

"Oh, stow it, George!  Hang it all, man! . . ."

He checked himself, sharp and short: repentant, and rebuked by the
silence of the others.  They were good seamen all, and tender dealing
with a sick shipmate was part of their code.

Lashman's voice, more querulous than ever, cut into the silence like a
knife--

"That's it.  You've thought it for weeks, and now you say it.
I've knowed it all along.  I'm just an encumbrance, and the sooner
you're shut of me the better, says you.  You needn't to fret.  I'll be
soon out of it; out of it--out there, alongside of Bill--"

"Easy there, matey."  The Snipe glanced over his shoulder and laid his
cards face downward.  "Here, let me give the bed a shake up.  It'll ease
yer."

"It'll make me quiet, you mean.  Plucky deal you care about easin' me,
any of yer!"

"Get out with yer nonsense! Dan didn' mean it."  The Snipe slipped an
arm under the invalid's head and rearranged the pillow of skins and
gunny-bags.

"He didn't, didn't he?  Let him say it then . . ."

The Gaffer read on, his lips moving silently.  Heaven knows how he had
acquired this strayed and stained and filthy little demi-octavo with the
arms of Saumarez on its book-plate--"The Sixth Volume of Letters writ by
a Turkish Spy, who liv'd Five-and-Forty Years Undiscovered at Paris:
Giving an Impartial Account to the _Divan_ at _Constantinople_ of the
most remarkable Transactions of Europe, And discovering several
_Intrigues_ and _Secrets_ of the _Christian_ Courts (especially of that
of _France_)," etc., etc.  "Written originally in _Arabick_.  Translated
into _Italian_, and from thence into _English_ by the Translator of the
First Volume.  The Eleventh Edition.  London: Printed for G. Strahan,
S. Ballard"--and a score of booksellers--"MDCCXLI." Heavens knows why he
read it; since he understood about one-half, and admired less than
one-tenth.  The Oriental reflections struck him as mainly blasphemous.
But the Gaffer's religious belief marked down nine-tenths of mankind for
perdition: which perhaps made him tolerant.  At any rate, he read on
gravely between  the puffs of his short clay--

    "_On the 19th of this Moon, the King and the whole Court were
    present at a Ballet, representing the grandeur of the_ French
    _monarchy.  About the Middle of the Entertainment, there was an
    Antique Dance perform d by twelve Masqueraders, in the suppos'd
    form of_ Daemons.  _But before they had advanc'd far in their
    Dance, they found an Interloper amongst 'em, who by encreasing
    the Number to thirteen, put them quite out of their Measure:
    For they practise every Step and Motion beforehand, till they are
    perfect.  Being abash'd therefore at the unavoidable Blunders the
    thirteenth Antique made them commit, they stood still like Fools,
    gazing at one     another: None daring to unmask, or speak a Word;
    for that would have put all the Spectators into a Disorder and
    Confusion_.  Cardinal Mazarini _(who was the chief Contriver of these
    Entertainments, to divert the King from more serious Thoughts) stood
    close by the young Monarch, with the Scheme of the Ballet in his
    Hand.  Knowing therefore that this Dance was to consist but of
    twelve Antiques, and taking notice that there were actually
    thirteen, he at first imputed it to some Mistake.  But, afterwards,
    when he perceived the Confusion of the Dancers, he made a more
    narrow Enquiry into the Cause of this Disorder.  To be brief, they
    convinced the_ Cardinal _that it could be no Error of theirs, by a
    kind of Demonstration, in that they had but twelve Antique Dresses
    of that sort, which were made on purpose for this particular Ballet.
    That which made it seem the greater Mystery was, that when they came
    behind the Scenes to uncase, and examine the Matter, they found but
    twelve Antiques, whereas on the Stage there were thirteen . . ._"

"Let him say it.  Let him say he didn't mean it, the rotten Irishman!"

Cooney flung a leg wearily over the side of his hammock, jerked himself
out, and shuffled across to the sick man's berth.

"Av coorse I didn' mane it.  It just took me, ye see, lyin' up yondher
and huggin' me thoughts in this--wilderness.  I swear to ye, George: and
ye'll just wet your throat to show there's no bad blood, and that ye
belave me."  He took up a pannikin from the floor beside the bunk,
pulled a hot iron from the fire, and stirred the frozen drink.
The invalid turned his shoulder pettishly.  "I didn't mane it," Cooney
repeated.  He set down the pannikin, and shuffled wearily back to his
hammock.

The Gaffer blew a long cloud and stared at the fire; at the smoke
mounting and the grey ash dropping; at David Faed dealing the cards and
licking his thumb between each.  Long Ede shifted from one cramped elbow
to another and pushed his Bible nearer the blaze, murmuring, "Take us
the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil our vines."

"Full hand," the Snipe announced.

"Ay." David Faed rolled the quid in his cheek. The cards were so thumbed
and tattered that by the backs of them each player guessed pretty
shrewdly what the other held.  Yet they went on playing night after
night; the Snipe shrilly blessing or cursing his luck, the Scotsman
phlegmatic as a bolster.

"Play away, man.  What ails ye?" he asked.

The Snipe had dropped both hands to his thighs and sat up, stiff and
listening.

"Whist!  Outside the door. . . ."

All listened.  "I hear nothing," said David, after ten seconds.

"Hush, man--listen!  There, again . . ."

They heard now.  Cooney slipped down from his hammock, stole to the door
and listened, crouching, with his ear close to the jamb.  The sound
resembled breathing--or so he thought for a moment.  Then it seemed
rather as if some creature were softly feeling about the door--fumbling
its coating of ice and frozen snow.

Cooney listened.  They all listened.  Usually, as soon as they stirred
from the scorching circle of the fire, their breath came from them in
clouds.  It trickled from them now in thin wisps of vapour.  They could
almost hear the soft grey ash dropping on the hearth.

A log spluttered.  Then the invalid's voice clattered in--

"It's the bears--the bears!  They've come after Bill, and next it'll be
my turn.  I warned you--I told you he wasn't deep enough.  O Lord, have
mercy . . . mercy . . . !"  He pattered off into a prayer, his voice and
teeth chattering.

"Hush!" commanded the Gaffer gently; and Lashman choked on a sob.

"It ain't bears," Cooney reported, still with his ear to the door.
"Leastways . . . we've had bears before.  The foxes, maybe . . . let me
listen."

Long Ede murmured: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes . . ."

"I believe you're right," the Gaffer announced cheerfully.  "A bear
would sniff louder--though there's no telling.  The snow was falling an
hour back, and I dessay 'tis pretty thick outside.  If 'tis a bear, we
don't want him fooling on the roof, and I misdoubt the drift by the
north corner is pretty tall by this time.  Is he there still?"

"I felt something then . . . through the chink, here . . . like a warm
breath.  It's gone now.  Come here, Snipe, and listen."

"'Breath,' eh?  Did it _smell_ like bear?"

"I don't know . . . I didn't smell nothing, to notice.  Here, put your
head down, close."

The Snipe bent his head.  And at that moment the door shook gently.
All stared; and saw the latch move up, up . . . and falteringly descend
on the staple.  They heard the click of it.

The door was secured within by two stout bars.  Against these there had
been no pressure.  The men waited in a silence that ached.  But the
latch was not lifted again.

The Snipe, kneeling, looked up at Cooney.  Cooney shivered and looked at
David Faed.  Long Ede, with his back to the fire, softly shook his feet
free of the rugs.  His eyes searched for the Gaffer's face.  But the old
man had drawn back into the gloom of his bunk, and the lamplight shone
only on a grey fringe of beard.  He saw Long Ede's look, though, and
answered it quietly as ever.

"Take a brace of guns aloft, and fetch us a look round.  Wait, if
there's a chance of a shot.  The trap works.  I tried it this afternoon
with the small chisel."

Long Ede lit his pipe tied down the ear-pieces of his cap, lifted a
light ladder off its staples, and set it against a roof-beam: then, with
the guns under his arm, quietly mounted.  His head and shoulders wavered
and grew vague to sight in the smoke-wreaths.  "Heard anything more?" he
asked.  "Nothing since," answered the Snipe.  With his shoulder Long Ede
pushed up the trap.  They saw his head framed in a panel of moonlight,
with one frosty star above it.  He was wriggling through.  "Pitch him up
a sleeping-bag, somebody," the Gaffer ordered, and Cooney ran with one.
"Thank 'ee, mate," said Long Ede, and closed the trap.

They heard his feet stealthily crunching the frozen stuff across the
roof.  He was working towards the eaves over-lapping the door.
Their breath tightened.  They waited for the explosion of his gun.
None came.  The crunching began again: it was heard down by the very
edge of the eaves.  It mounted to the blunt ridge overhead; then it
ceased.

"He will not have seen aught," David Faed muttered.

"Listen, you.  Listen by the door again."  They talked in whispers.
Nothing; there was nothing to be heard.  They crept back to the fire,
and stood there warming themselves, keeping their eyes on the latch.
It did not move.  After a while Cooney slipped off to his hammock; Faed
to his bunk, alongside Lashman's.  The Gaffer had picked up his book
again.  The Snipe laid a couple of logs on the blaze, and remained
beside it, cowering, with his arms stretched out as if to embrace it.
His shapeless shadow wavered up and down on the bunks behind him; and,
across the fire, he still stared at the latch.

Suddenly the sick man's voice quavered out--

"It's not him they want--it's Bill!  They're after Bill, out there!
That was Bill trying to get in. . . . Why didn't yer open?  It was Bill,
I tell yer!"

At the first word the Snipe had wheeled right-about-face, and stood now,
pointing, and shaking like a man with ague.

"Matey . . . for the love of God . . ."

"I won't hush.  There's something wrong here to-night.  I can't sleep.
It's Bill, I tell yer.  See his poor hammock up there shaking. . . ."

Cooney tumbled out with an oath and a thud.  "Hush it, you white-livered
swine!  Hush it, or by--"  His hand went behind him to his knife-sheath.

"Dan Cooney"--the Gaffer closed his book and leaned out--"go back to
your bed."

"I won't, Sir.  Not unless--"

"Go back."

"Flesh and blood--"

"Go back."  And for the third time that night Cooney went back.

The Gaffer leaned a little farther over the ledge, and addressed the
sick man.

"George, I went to Bill's grave not six hours agone.  The snow on it
wasn't even disturbed.  Neither beast nor man, but only God, can break
up the hard earth he lies under.  I tell you that, and you may lay to
it.  Now go to sleep."


Long Ede crouched on the frozen ridge of the hut, with his feet in the
sleeping-bag, his knees drawn up, and the two guns laid across them.
The creature, whatever its name, that had tried the door, was nowhere to
be seen; but he decided to wait a few minutes on the chance of a shot;
that is, until the cold should drive him below.  For the moment the
clear tingling air was doing him good.  The truth was Long Ede had begun
to be afraid of himself, and the way his mind had been running for the
last forty-eight hours upon green fields and visions of spring.
As he put it to himself, something inside his head was melting.
Biblical texts chattered within him like running brooks, and as they
fleeted he could almost smell the blown meadow-scent.  "Take us the
foxes, the little foxes . . . for our vines have tender grapes . . .
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon
. . . Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south . . . blow upon my
garden, that the spices thereof may flow out . . ."  He was
light-headed, and he knew it.  He must hold out.  They were all going
mad; were, in fact, three parts crazed already, all except the Gaffer.
And the Gaffer relied on him as his right-hand man.  One glimpse of the
returning sun--one glimpse only--might save them yet.

He gazed out over the frozen hills, and northward across the ice-pack.
A few streaks of pale violet--the ghost of the Aurora--fronted the moon.
He could see for miles.  Bear or fox, no living creature was in sight.
But who could tell what might be hiding behind any one of a thousand
hummocks?  He listened.  He heard the slow grinding of the ice-pack off
the beach: only that.  "Take us the foxes, the little foxes. . ."

This would never do.  He must climb down and walk briskly, or return to
the hut.  Maybe there was a bear, after all, behind one of the hummocks,
and a shot, or the chance of one, would scatter his head clear of these
tom-fooling notions.  He would have a search round.

What was that, moving . . . on a hummock, not five hundred yards away?
He leaned forward to gaze.

Nothing now: but he had seen something.  He lowered himself to the eaves
by the north corner, and from the eaves to the drift piled there.
The drift was frozen solid, but for a treacherous crust of fresh snow.
His foot slipped upon this, and down he slid of a heap.

Luckily he had been careful to sling the guns tightly at his back.
He picked himself up, and unstrapping one, took a step into the bright
moon-light to examine the nipples; took two steps: and stood
stock-still.

There, before him, on the frozen coat of snow, was a footprint.
No: two, three, four--many footprints: prints of a naked human foot:
right foot, left foot, both naked, and blood in each print--a little
smear.

It had come, then.  He was mad for certain.  He saw them: he put his
fingers in them; touched the frozen blood.  The snow before the door was
trodden thick with them--some going, some returning.

"The latch . . . lifted . . ."  Suddenly he recalled the figure he had
seen moving upon the hummock, and with a groan he set his face northward
and gave chase.  Oh, he was mad for certain!  He ran like a madman--
floundering, slipping, plunging in his clumsy moccasins.  "Take us the
foxes, the little foxes . . . My beloved put in his hand by the hole of
the door, and my bowels were moved for him . . . I charge you, O
daughters of Jerusalem . . . I charge you . . . I charge you . . ."

He ran thus for three hundred yards maybe, and then stopped as suddenly
as he had started.

His mates--they must not see these footprints, or they would go mad too:
mad as he.  No, he must cover them up, all within sight of the hut.
And to-morrow he would come alone, and cover those farther afield.
Slowly he retraced his steps.  The footprints--those which pointed
towards the hut and those which pointed away from it--lay close
together; and he knelt before each, breaking fresh snow over the hollows
and carefully hiding the blood.  And now a great happiness filled his
heart; interrupted once or twice as he worked by a feeling that someone
was following and watching him.  Once he turned northwards and gazed,
making a telescope of his hands.  He saw nothing, and fell again to his
long task.


Within the hut the sick man cried softly to himself.  Faed, the Snipe,
and Cooney slept uneasily, and muttered in their dreams.  The Gaffer lay
awake, thinking.  After Bill, George Lashman; and after George? . . .
Who next?  And who would be the last--the unburied one?  The men were
weakening fast; their wits and courage coming down at the end with a
rush.  Faed and Long Ede were the only two to be depended on for a day.
The Gaffer liked Long Ede, who was a religious man.  Indeed he had a
growing suspicion that Long Ede, in spite of some amiable laxities of
belief, was numbered among the Elect: or might be, if interceded for.
The Gaffer began to intercede for him silently; but experience had
taught him that such "wrestlings," to be effective, must be noisy, and
he dropped off to sleep with a sense of failure . . .

The Snipe stretched himself, yawned, and awoke.  It was seven in the
morning: time to prepare a cup of tea.  He tossed an armful of logs on
the fire, and the noise awoke the Gaffer, who at once inquired for Long
Ede.  He had not returned.  "Go you up to the roof.  The lad must be
frozen."  The Snipe climbed the ladder, pushed open the trap, and came
back, reporting that Long Ede was nowhere to be seen.  The old man
slipped a jumper over his suits of clothing--already three deep--reached
for a gun, and moved to the door.  "Take a cup of something warm to
fortify," the Snipe advised.  "The kettle won't be five minutes
boiling."  But the Gaffer pushed up the heavy bolts and dragged the door
open.

"What in the! . . .Here, bear a hand, lads!"

Long Ede lay prone before the threshold, his out-stretched hands almost
touching it, his moccasins already covered out of sight by the powdery
snow which ran and trickled incessantly--trickled between his long,
dishevelled locks, and over the back of his gloves, and ran in a thin
stream past the Gaffer's feet.

They carried him in and laid him on a heap of skins by the fire.
They forced rum between his clenched teeth and beat his hands and feet,
and kneaded and rubbed him.  A sigh fluttered on his lips: something
between a sigh and a smile, half seen, half heard.  His eyes opened, and
his comrades saw that it was really a smile.

"Wot cheer, mate?"  It was the Snipe who asked.

"I--I seen . . ."  The voice broke off, but he was smiling still.

What had he seen?  Not the sun, surely!  By the Gaffer's reckoning the
sun would not be due for a week or two yet: how many weeks he could not
say precisely, and sometimes he was glad enough that he did not know.

They forced him to drink a couple of spoonfuls of rum, and wrapped him
up warmly.  Each man contributed some of his own bedding.  Then the
Gaffer called to morning prayers, and the three sound men dropped on
their knees with him.  Now, whether by reason of their joy at Long Ede's
recovery, or because the old man was in splendid voice, they felt their
hearts uplifted that morning with a cheerfulness they had not known for
months.  Long Ede lay and listened dreamily while the passion of the
Gaffer's thanksgiving shook the hut.  His gaze wandered over their bowed
forms--"The Gaffer, David Faed, Dan Cooney, the Snipe, and--and George
Lashman in his bunk, of course--and me."  But, then, _who was the
seventh?_  He began to count.  "There's myself--Lashman, in his bunk--
David Faed, the Gaffer, the Snipe, Dan Cooney . . . One, two, three,
four--well, but that made _seven_.  Then who was the seventh?  Was it
George who had crawled out of bed and was kneeling there?  Decidedly
there were five kneeling.  No: there was George, plain enough, in his
berth, and not able to move.  Then who was the stranger?  Wrong again:
there was no stranger.  He knew all these men--they were his mates.
Was it--Bill?  No, Bill was dead and buried: none of these was Bill, or
like Bill.  Try again--One, two, three, four, five--and us two sick men,
seven.  The Gaffer, David Faed, Dan Cooney--have I counted Dan twice?
No, that's Dan, yonder to the right, and only one of him.  Five men
kneeling, and two on their backs: that makes seven every time.  Dear
God--suppose--"

The Gaffer ceased, and in the act of rising from his knees, caught sight
of Long Ede's face.  While the others fetched their breakfast-cans, he
stepped over, and bent and whispered--

"Tell me.  Ye've seen what?"

"Seen?" Long Ede echoed.

"Ay, seen what? Speak low--was it the sun?"

"The s--"  But this time the echo died on his lips, and his face grew
full of awe uncomprehending.  It frightened the Gaffer.

"Ye'll be the better of a snatch of sleep," said he; and was turning to
go, when Long Ede stirred a hand under the edge of his rugs.

"Seven . . . count . . ." he whispered.

"Lord have mercy upon us!" the Gaffer muttered to his beard as he moved
away.  "Long Ede; gone crazed!"

And yet, though an hour or two ago this had been the worst that could
befall, the Gaffer felt unusually cheerful.  As for the others, they
were like different men, all that day and through the three days that
followed.  Even Lashman ceased to complain, and, unless their eyes
played them a trick, had taken a turn for the better.  "I declare, if I
don't feel like pitching to sing!" the Snipe announced on the second
evening, as much to his own wonder as to theirs.  "Then why in thunder
don't you strike up?" answered Dan Cooney, and fetched his concertina.
The Snipe struck up, then and there--"Villikins and his Dinah"!
What is more, the Gaffer looked up from his "Paradise Lost," and joined
in the chorus.

By the end of the second day, Long Ede was up and active again.  He went
about with a dazed look in his eyes.  He was counting, counting to
himself, always counting.  The Gaffer watched him furtively.

Since his recovery, though his lips moved frequently, Long Ede had
scarcely uttered a word.  But towards noon on the fourth day he said an
extraordinary thing.

"There's that sleeping-bag I took with me the other night.  I wonder if
'tis on the roof still.  It will be froze pretty stiff by this.
You might nip up and see, Snipe, and"--he paused--"if you find it, stow
it up yonder on Bill's hammock."

The Gaffer opened his mouth, but shut it again without speaking.
The Snipe went up the ladder.

A minute passed; and then they heard a cry from the roof--a cry that
fetched them all trembling, choking, weeping, cheering, to the foot of
the ladder.

"Boys! boys!--the Sun!"


Months later--it was June, and even George Lashman had recovered his
strength--the Snipe came running with news of the whaling fleet.  And on
the beach, as they watched the vessels come to anchor, Long Ede told the
Gaffer his story.  "It was a hall--a hallu--what d'ye call it, I reckon.
I was crazed, eh?"  The Gaffer's eyes wandered from a brambling hopping
about the lichen-covered boulders, and away to the sea-fowl wheeling
above the ships: and then came into his mind a tale he had read once in
"The Turkish Spy."  "I wouldn't say just that," he answered slowly.

"Anyway," said Long Ede, "I believe the Lord sent a miracle to us to
save us all."

"I wouldn't say just that, either," the Gaffer objected.  "I doubt it
was meant just for you and me, and the rest were presairved, as you
might say incidentally."



THE ROOM OF MIRRORS


A late hansom came swinging round the corner into Lennox Gardens,
cutting it so fine that the near wheel ground against the kerb and
jolted the driver in his little seat.  The jingle of bells might have
warned me; but the horse's hoofs came noiselessly on the half-frozen
snow, which lay just deep enough to hide where the pavement ended and
the road began; and, moreover, I was listening to the violins behind the
first-floor windows of the house opposite.  They were playing the
"Wiener Blut."

As it was, I had time enough and no more to skip back and get my toes
out of the way.  The cabby cursed me.  I cursed him back so promptly and
effectively that he had to turn in his seat for another shot.
The windows of the house opposite let fall their light across his red
and astonished face.  I laughed, and gave him another volley.  My head
was hot, though my feet and hands were cold; and I felt equal to cursing
down any cabman within the four-mile radius.  That second volley
finished him.  He turned to his reins again and was borne away defeated;
the red eyes of his lamps peering back at me like an angry ferret's.

Up in the lighted room shadows of men and women crossed the blinds, and
still the "Wiener Blut" went forward.

The devil was in that waltz.  He had hold of the violins and was weaving
the air with scents and visions--visions of Ascot and Henley; green
lawns, gay sunshades, midsummer heat, cool rivers flowing, muslins
rippled by light breezes; running horses and silken jackets; white
tables heaped with roses and set with silver and crystal, jewelled
fingers moving in the soft candle-light, bare necks bending, diamonds,
odours, bubbles in the wine; blue water and white foam beneath the
leaning shadow of sails; hot air flickering over stretches of moorland;
blue again--Mediterranean blue--long facades, the din of bands and King
Carnival parading beneath showers of blossom:--and all this noise and
warmth and scent and dazzle flung out into the frozen street for a
beggar's portion.  I had gone under.

The door of the house opposite had been free to me once--and not six
months ago; freer to me perhaps than to any other.  Did I long to pass
behind it again?  I thrust both hands into my pockets for warmth, and my
right hand knocked against something hard.  Yes . . . just once. . . .

Suddenly the door opened.  A man stood on the threshold for a moment
while the butler behind him arranged the collar of his fur overcoat.
The high light in the portico flung the shadows of both down the crimson
carpet laid on the entrance-steps.  Snow had fallen and covered the
edges of the carpet, which divided it like a cascade of blood pouring
from the hall into the street.  And still overhead the "Wiener Blut"
went forward.

The man paused in the bright portico, his patent-leather boots twinkling
under the lamp's rays on that comfortable carpet.  I waited, expecting
him to whistle for a hansom.  But he turned, gave an order to the
butler, and stepping briskly down into the street, made off eastwards.
The door closed behind him.  He was the man I most hated in the world.
If I had longed to cross the threshold a while back it was to seek him,
and for no other reason.

I started to follow him, my hands still in my pockets.  The snow muffled
our footfalls completely, for as yet the slight north-east wind had
frozen but the thinnest crust of it.  He was walking briskly, as men do
in such weather, but with no appearance of hurry.  At the corner of
Sloane Street he halted under a lamp, pulled out his watch, consulted
it, and lit a cigarette; then set off again up the street towards
Knightsbridge.

This halt of his had let me up within twenty paces of him.  He never
turned his head; but went on presenting me his back, a target not to be
missed.  Why not do it now?  Better now and here than in a crowded
thoroughfare.  My right hand gripped the revolver more tightly.
No, there was plenty of time: and I was curious to know what had brought
Gervase out at this hour: why he had left his guests, or his wife's
guests, to take care of themselves: why he chose to be trudging afoot
through this infernally unpleasant snow.

The roadway in Sloane Street was churned into a brown mass like
chocolate, but the last 'bus had rolled home and left it to freeze in
peace.  Half-way up the street I saw Gervase meet and pass a policeman,
and altered my own pace to a lagging walk.  Even so, the fellow eyed me
suspiciously as I went by--or so I thought: and guessing that he kept a
watch on me, I dropped still further behind my man.  But the lamps were
bright at the end of the street, and I saw him turn to the right by the
great drapery shop at the corner.

Once past this corner I was able to put on a spurt.  He crossed the
roadway by the Albert Gate, and by the time he reached the Park railings
the old distance separated us once more.  Half-way up the slope he came
to a halt, by the stone drinking-trough: and flattening myself against
the railings, I saw him try the thin ice in the trough with his
finger-tips, but in a hesitating way, as if his thoughts ran on
something else and he scarcely knew what he did or why he did it.
It must have been half a minute before he recovered himself with a shrug
of his shoulders, and plunging both hands deep in his pockets, resumed
his pace.

As we passed Hyde Park Corner I glanced up at the clock there: the time
was between a quarter and ten minutes to one.  At the entrance of Down
Street he turned aside again, and began to lead me a zigzag dance
through the quiet thoroughfare: and I followed, still to the tune of the
"Wiener Blut."

But now, at the corner of Charles Street, I blundered against another
policeman, who flashed his lantern in my face, stared after Gervase, and
asked me what my game was.  I demanded innocently enough to be shown the
nearest way to Oxford Street, and the fellow, after pausing a moment to
chew his suspicions, walked with me slowly to the south-west corner of
Berkeley Square, and pointed northwards.

"That's your road," he growled, "straight on.  And don't you forget it!"

He stood and watched me on my way.  Nor did I dare to turn aside until
well clear of the square.  At the crossing of Davies and Grosvenor
Streets, however, I supposed myself safe, and halted for a moment.

From the shadow of a porch at my elbow a thin voice accosted me.

"Kind gentleman--"

"Heh?" I spun round on her sharply: for it was a woman, stretching out
one skinny hand and gathering her rags together with the other.

"Kind gentleman, spare a copper.  I've known better days--I have
indeed."

"Well," said I, "as it happens, I'm in the same case.  And they couldn't
be much worse, could they?"

She drew a shuddering breath back through her teeth, but still held out
her hand.  I felt for my last coin, and her fingers closed on it so
sharply that their long nails scraped the back of mine.

"Kind gentleman--"

"Ay, they are kind, are they not?"

She stared at me, and in a nerveless tone let one horrible oath escape
her.

"There'll be one less before morning," said I, "if that's any
consolation to you.  Good night!"  Setting off at a shuffling run, I
doubled back along Grosvenor Street and Bond Street to the point where I
hoped to pick up the trail again.  And just there, at the issue of
Bruton Street, two constables stood ready for me.

"I thought as much," said the one who set me on my way.  "Hi, you!
Wait a moment, please;" then to the other, "Best turn his pockets out,
Jim."

"If you dare to try--" I began, with my hand in my pocket: the next
moment I found myself sprawling face downward on the sharp crust of
snow.

"Hullo, constables!" said a voice.  "What's the row?"  It was Gervase.
He had turned leisurely back from the slope of Conduit Street, and came
strolling down the road with his hands in his pockets.

"This fellow, Sir--we have reason to think he was followin' you."

"Quite right," Gervase answered cheerfully, "of course he was."

"Oh, if you knew it, Sir--"

"Certainly I knew it.  In fact, he was following at my invitation."

"What for did he tell me a lie, then?" grumbled the constable,
chapfallen.

I had picked myself up by this time and was wiping my face.
"Look here," I put in, "I asked you the way to Oxford Street, that and
nothing else."  And I went on to summarise my opinion of him.

"Oh! it's you can swear a bit," he growled.  "I heard you just now."

"Yes," Gervase interposed suavely, drawing the glove from his right hand
and letting flash a diamond finger-ring in the lamp-light.  "He _is_ a
bit of a beast, policeman, and it's not for the pleasure of it that I
want his company."

A sovereign passed from hand to hand.  The other constable had
discreetly drawn off a pace or two.

"All the same, it's a rum go."

"Yes, isn't it?" Gervase assented in his heartiest tone.  "Here is my
card, in case you're not satisfied."

"If _you're_ satisfied, Sir--"

"Quite so.  Good night!" Gervase thrust both hands into his pockets
again and strode off.  I followed him, with a heart hotter than ever--
followed him like a whipped cur, as they say.  Yes, that was just it.
He who had already robbed me of everything else had now kicked even the
pedestal from under me as a figure of tragedy.  Five minutes ago I had
been the implacable avenger tracking my unconscious victim across the
city.  Heaven knows how small an excuse it was for self-respect; but one
who has lost character may yet chance to catch a dignity from
circumstances; and to tell the truth, for all my desperate earnestness I
had allowed my vanity to take some artistic satisfaction in the sinister
chase.  It had struck me--shall I say?--as an effective ending, nor had
I failed to note that the snow lent it a romantic touch.

And behold, the unconscious victim knew all about it, and had politely
interfered when a couple of unromantic "Bobbies" threatened the
performance by tumbling the stalking avenger into the gutter!  They had
knocked my tragedy into harlequinade as easily as you might bash in a
hat; and my enemy had refined the cruelty of it by coming to the rescue
and ironically restarting the poor play on lines of comedy.  I saw too
late that I ought to have refused his help, to have assaulted the
constable and been hauled to the police-station.  Not an impressive
wind-up, to be sure; but less humiliating than this!  Even so, Gervase
might have trumped the poor card by following with a gracious offer to
bail me out!

As it was, I had put the whip into his hand, and must follow him like a
cur.  The distance he kept assured me that the similitude had not
escaped him.  He strode on without deigning a single glance behind,
still in cold derision presenting me his broad back and silently
challenging me to shoot.  And I followed, hating him worse than ever,
swearing that the last five minutes should not be forgotten, but charged
for royally when the reckoning came to be paid.

I followed thus up Conduit Street, up Regent Street, and across the
Circus.  The frost had deepened and the mud in the roadway crackled
under our feet.  At the Circus I began to guess, and when Gervase struck
off into Great Portland Street, and thence by half-a-dozen turnings
northward by east, I knew to what house he was leading me.

At the entrance of the side street in which it stood he halted and
motioned me to come close.

"I forget," he said with a jerk of his thumb, "if you still have the
entry.  These people are not particular, to be sure."

"I have not," I answered, and felt my cheeks burning.  He could not see
this, nor could I see the lift of his eyebrows as he answered--

"Ah? I hadn't heard of it. . . . You'd better step round by the mews,
then.  You know the window, the one which opens into the passage leading
to Pollox Street.  Wait there.  It may be ten minutes before I can
open."

I nodded.  The house was a corner one, between the street and a by-lane
tenanted mostly by cabmen;  and at the back of it ran the mews where
they stabled their horses.  Half-way down this mews a narrow alley cut
across it at right angles: a passage un-frequented by traffic, known
only to the stablemen, and in the daytime used only by their children,
who played hop-scotch on the flagged pavement, where no one interrupted
them.  You wondered at its survival--from end to end it must have
measured a good fifty yards--in a district where every square foot of
ground fetched money; until you learned that the house had belonged, in
the 'twenties, to a nobleman who left a name for eccentric profligacy,
and who, as owner of the land, could afford to indulge his humours.
The estate since his death was in no position to afford money for
alterations, and the present tenants of the house found the passage
convenient enough.

My footsteps disturbed no one in the sleeping mews; and doubling back
noiselessly through the passage, I took up my station beside the one low
window which opened upon it from the blank back premises of the house.
Even with the glimmer of snow to help me, I had to grope for the
window-sill to make sure of my bearings.  The minutes crawled by, and
the only sound came from a stall where one of the horses had kicked
through his thin straw bedding and was shuffling an uneasy hoof upon the
cobbles.  Then just as I too had begun to shuffle my frozen feet, I
heard a scratching sound, the unbolting of a shutter, and Gervase drew
up the sash softly.

"Nip inside!" he whispered.  "No more noise than you can help.  I have
sent off the night porter.  He tells me the bank is still going in the
front of the house--half-a-dozen playing, perhaps."

I hoisted myself over the sill, and dropped inside.  The wall of this
annexe--which had no upper floor, and invited you to mistake it for a
harmless studio--was merely a sheath, so to speak.  Within, a corridor
divided it from the true wall of the room: and this room had no window
or top-light, though a handsome one in the roof--a dummy--beguiled the
eyes of its neighbours.

There was but one room: an apartment of really fine proportions, never
used by the tenants of the house, and known but to a few curious ones
among its frequenters.

The story went that the late owner, Earl C--, had reason to believe
himself persistently cheated at cards by his best friends, and in
particular by a Duke of the Blood Royal, who could hardly be accused to
his face.  The Earl's sense of honour forbade him to accuse any meaner
man while the big culprit went unrebuked.  Therefore he continued to
lose magnificently while he devised a new room for play: the room in
which I now followed Gervase.

I had stood in it once before and admired the courtly and costly
thoroughness of the Earl's rebuke.  I had imagined him conducting his
expectant guests to the door, ushering them in with a wave of the hand,
and taking his seat tranquilly amid the dead, embarrassed silence: had
imagined him facing the Royal Duke and asking, "Shall we cut?" with a
voice of the politest inflection.

For the room was a sheet of mirrors.  Mirrors panelled the walls, the
doors, the very backs of the shutters.  The tables had mirrors for tops:
the whole ceiling was one vast mirror.  From it depended three great
candelabra of cut-glass, set with reflectors here, there, and
everywhere.

I had heard that even the floor was originally of polished brass.
If so, later owners must have ripped up the plates and sold them: for
now a few cheap Oriental rugs carpeted the unpolished boards.  The place
was abominably dusty: the striped yellow curtains had lost half their
rings and drooped askew from their soiled vallances.  Across one of the
wall-panels ran an ugly scar.  A smell of rat pervaded the air.
The present occupiers had no use for a room so obviously unsuitable to
games of chance, as they understood chance: and I doubt if a servant
entered it once a month.  Gervase had ordered candles and a fire:  but
the chimney was out of practice, and the smoke wreathed itself slowly
about us as we stood surrounded by the ghostly company of our reflected
selves.

"We shall not be disturbed," said Gervase.  "I told the man I was
expecting a friend, that our business was private, and that until he
called I wished to be alone.  I did not explain by what entrance I
expected him.  The people in the front cannot hear us.  Have a cigar?"
He pushed the open case towards me.  Then, as I drew back, "You've no
need to be scrupulous," he added, "seeing that they were bought with
your money."

"If that's so, I will," said I; and having chosen one, struck a match.
Glancing round, I saw a hundred small flames spurt up, and a hundred men
hold them to a hundred glowing cigar-tips.

"After you with the match."  Gervase took it from me with a steady hand.
He, too, glanced about him while he puffed.  "Ugh!"  He blew a long
cloud, and shivered within his furred overcoat.  "What a gang!"

"It takes all sorts to make a world," said I fatuously, for lack of
anything better.

"Don't be an infernal idiot!" he answered, flicking the dust off one of
the gilt chairs, and afterwards cleaning a space for his elbow on the
looking-glass table.  "It takes only two sorts to make the world we've
lived in, and that's you and I."  He gazed slowly round the walls.
"You and I, and a few fellows like us--not to mention the women, who
don't count."

"Well," said I, "as far as the world goes--if you must discuss it--
I always found it a good enough place."

"Because you started as an unconsidering fool: and because, afterwards,
when we came to grips, you were the under-dog, and I gave you no time.
My word--how I have hustled you!"

I yawned.  "All right: I can wait.  Only if you suppose I came here to
listen to your moral reflections--"

He pulled the cigar from between his teeth and looked at me along it.

"I know perfectly well why you came here," he said slowly, and paused.
"Hadn't we better have it out--with the cards on the table?"  He drew a
small revolver from his pocket and laid it with a light clink on the
table before him.  I hesitated for a moment, then followed his example,
and the silent men around us did the same.

A smile curled his thin lips as he observed this multiplied gesture.
"Yes," he said, as if to himself, "that is what it all comes to."

"And now," said I, "since you know my purpose here, perhaps you will
tell me yours."

"That is just what I am trying to explain.  Only you are so impatient,
and it--well, it's a trifle complicated."  He puffed for a moment in
silence.  "Roughly, it might be enough to say that I saw you standing
outside my house a while ago; that I needed a talk with you alone, in
some private place; that I guessed, if you saw me, you would follow with
no more invitation; and that, so reasoning, I led you here, where no one
is likely to interrupt us."

"Well," I admitted, "all that seems plain sailing."

"Quite so; but it's at this point the thing grows complicated."
He rose, and walking to the fireplace, turned his back on me and spread
his palms to the blaze.  "Well," he asked, after a moment, gazing into
the mirror before him, "why don't you shoot?"

I thrust my hands into my trouser-pockets and leaned back staring--
I daresay sulkily enough--at the two revolvers within grasp.  "I've got
my code," I muttered.

"The code of--these mirrors.  You won't do the thing because it's not
the thing to do; because these fellows"--he waved a hand and the ghosts
waved back at him--"don't do such things, and you haven't the nerve to
sin off your own bat.  Come"--he strolled back to his seat and leaned
towards me across the table--"it's not much to boast of, but at this
eleventh hour we must snatch what poor credit we can.  You are, I
suppose, a more decent fellow for not having fired: and I--By the way,
you did feel the temptation?"

I nodded.  "You may put your money on that.  I never see you without
wanting to kill you.  What's more, I'm going to do it."

"And I," he said, "knew the temptation and risked it.  No: let's be
honest about it.  There was no risk: because, my good Sir, I know you to
a hair."

"There was," I growled.

"Pardon me, there was none.  I came here having a word to say to you,
and these mirrors have taught me how to say it.  Take a look at them--
the world we are leaving--that's it: and a cursed second-hand,
second-class one at that."

He paced slowly round on it, slewing his body in the chair.

"I say a second-class one," he resumed, "because, my dear Reggie, when
all's said and done, we are second-class, the pair of us, and pretty bad
second-class.  I met you first at Harrow.  Our fathers had money: they
wished us to be gentlemen without well understanding what it meant: and
with unlimited pocket-money and his wits about him any boy can make
himself a power in a big school.  That is what we did: towards the end
we even set the fashion for a certain set; and a rank bad fashion it
was.  But, in truth, we had no business there: on every point of
breeding we were outsiders.  I suspect it was a glimmering consciousness
of this that made us hate each other from the first.  We understood one
another too well.  Oh, there's no mistake about it!  Whatever we've
missed in life, you and I have hated."

He paused, eyeing me queerly.  I kept my hands in my pockets.  "Go on,"
I said.

"From Harrow we went to College--the same business over again.
We drifted, of course, into the same set; for already we had become
necessary to each other.  We set the pace of that set--were its apparent
leaders.  But in truth we were alone--you and I--as utterly alone as two
shipwrecked men on a raft.  The others were shadows to us: we followed
their code because we had to be gentlemen, but we did not understand it
in the least.  For, after all, the roots of that code lay in the
breeding and tradition of honour, with which we had no concern.  To each
other you and I were intelligible and real; but as concerned that code
and the men who followed it by right of birth and nature, we were
looking-glass men imitating--imitating--imitating."

"We set the pace," said I.  "You've allowed that."

"To be sure we did.  We even modified the code a bit--to its hurt;
though as conscious outsiders we could dare very little.  For instance,
the talk of our associates about women--and no doubt their thoughts,
too--grew sensibly baser.  The sanctity of gambling debts, on the other
hand, we did nothing to impair:  because we had money.  I recall your
virtuous indignation at the amount of paper floated by poor W---- towards
the end of the great baccarat term.  Poor devil!  He paid up--or his
father did--and took his name off the books.  He's in Ceylon now, I
believe.  At length you have earned a partial right to sympathise: or.
would have if only you had paid up."

"Take care, Gervase."

"My good Sir, don't miss my point.  Wasn't I just as indignant with W--?
If I'd been warned off Newmarket Heath, if I'd been shown the door of
the hell we're sitting in, shouldn't I feel just as you are feeling?
Try to understand!"

"You forget Elaine, I think."

"No: I do not forget Elaine.   We left College: I to add money to money
in my father's office; you to display your accomplishments in spending
what your father had earned.  That was the extent of the difference.
To both of us, money and the indulgence it buys meant everything in
life.  All I can boast of is the longer sight.  The office-hours were a
nuisance, I admit: but I was clever enough to keep my hold on the old
set; and then, after office-hours, I met you constantly, and studied and
hated you--studied you because I hated you.  Elaine came between us.
You fell in love with her.  That I, too, should fall in love with her
was no coincidence, but the severest of logic.  Given such a woman and
two such men, no other course of fate is conceivable.  She made it
necessary for me to put hate into practice.  If she had not offered
herself, why, then it would have been somebody else: that's all.
Good Lord!" he rapped the table, and his voice rose for the first time
above its level tone of exposition, "you don't suppose all my study--
all my years of education--were to be wasted!"

He checked himself, eyed me again, and resumed in his old voice--

"You wanted money by this time.  I was a solicitor--your old college
friend--and you came to me.  I knew you would come, as surely as I knew
you would not fire that pistol just now.  For years I had trained myself
to look into your mind and anticipate its working.  Don't I tell you
that from the first you were the only real creature this world held for
me?  You were my only book, and I had to learn you: at first without
fixed purpose, then deliberately.  And when the time came I put into
practice what I knew: just that and no more.  My dear Reggie, you never
had a chance."

"Elaine?" I muttered again.

"Elaine was the girl for you--or for me: just that again and no more."

"By George!" said I, letting out a laugh.  "If I thought that!"

"What?"

"Why, that after ruining me, you have missed being happy!"

He sighed impatiently, and his eyes, though he kept them fastened on
mine, seemed to be tiring.  "I thought," he said, "I could time your
intelligence over any fence.  But to-night there's something wrong.
Either I'm out of practice or your brain has been going to the deuce.
What, man!  You're shying at every bank!  Is it drink, hey?  Or hunger?"

"It might be a little of both," I answered.  "But stay a moment and let
me get things straight.  I stood between you and Elaine--no, give me
time--between you and your aims, whatever they were.  Very well.
You trod over me; or, rather, you pulled me up by the roots and pitched
me into outer darkness to rot.  And now it seems that, after all, you
are not content.  In the devil's name, why?"

"Why?  Oh, cannot you see? . . . Take a look at these mirrors again--
our world, I tell you.  See--you and I--you and I--always you and I!
Man, I pitched you into darkness as you say, and then I woke and knew
the truth--that you were necessary to me."

"Hey?"

"_I can't do without you!_"  It broke from him in a cry.  "So help me
God, Reggie, it is the truth!"

I stared in his face for half a minute maybe, and broke out laughing.
"Jeshurun waxed fat and--turned sentimental!  A nice copy-book job you
make of it, too!"

    "_Oh, send my brother back to me--
    I cannot play alone!_"

"Perhaps you'd like me to buy a broom and hire the crossing in Lennox
Gardens?  Then you'd be able to contemplate me all day long, and nourish
your fine fat soul with delicate eating.  Pah! You make me sick."

"It's the truth," said he quietly.

"It may be.  To me it looks a sight more like _foie gras_.  Can't do
without me, can't you?  Well, I can jolly well do without you, and I'm
going to."

"I warn you," he said: "I have done you an injury or two in my time, but
by George if I stand up and let you shoot me--well, I hate you badly
enough, but I won't let you do it without fair warning."

"I'll risk it anyway," said I.

"Very well." He stood up, and folded his arms.  "Shoot, then, and be
hanged!"

I put out my hand to the revolver, hesitated, and withdrew it.

"That's not the way," I said.  "I've got my code, as I told you before."

"Does the code forbid suicide?" he asked.

"That's a different thing."

"Not at all.  The man who commits suicide kills an unarmed man."

"But the unarmed man happens to be himself."

"Suppose that in this instance your distinction won't work?  Look here,"
he went on, as I pushed back my chair impatiently, "I have one truth
more for you.  I swear I believe that what we have hated, we two, is not
each other, but ourselves or our own likeness.  I swear I believe we two
have so shared natures in hate that no power can untwist and separate
them to render each his own.  But I swear also I believe that if you
lift that revolver to kill, you will take aim, not at me, but by
instinct at a worse enemy--yourself, vital in my heart."

"You have some pretty theories to-night," I sneered.  "Perhaps you'll go
on to tell me which of us two has been Elaine's husband, feeding
daintily in Lennox Gardens, clothed in purple and fine linen, while the
other--"

He interrupted me by picking up his revolver and striding to the
fireplace again.

"So be it, since you will have it so.  Kill me," he added, with a queer
look, "and perhaps you may go back to Lennox Gardens and enjoy all these
things in my place."

I took my station.  Both revolvers were levelled now.  I took sight
along mine at his detested face.  It was white but curiously eager--
hopeful even.  I lowered my arm, scanning his face still; and still
scanning it, set my weapon down on the table.

"I believe you are mad," said I slowly.  "But one thing I see--that, mad
or not, you're in earnest.  For some reason you want me to kill you;
therefore that shall wait.  For some reason it is torture to you to live
and do without me: well, I'll try you with that.  It will do me good to
hurt you a bit."  I slipped the revolver into my pocket and tapped it.
"Though I don't understand them, I won't quarrel with your sentiments so
long as you suffer from them.  When that fails, I'll find another
opportunity for this.  Good night."  I stepped to the door.  "Reggie!"

I shut the door on his cry: crossed the corridor, and climbing out
through the window, let myself drop into the lane.

As my feet touched the snow a revolver-shot rang out in the room behind
me.

I caught at the frozen sill to steady myself: and crouching there,
listened.  Surely the report must have alarmed the house!  I waited for
the sound of footsteps: waited for three minutes--perhaps longer.
None came.  To be sure, the room stood well apart from the house: but it
was incredible that the report should have awakened no one!  My own ears
still rang with it.

Still no footsteps came.  The horse in the stable close by was still
shuffling his hoof on the cobbles.  No other sound . . .

Very stealthily I hoisted myself up on the sill again, listened, dropped
inside, and tip-toed my way to the door.  The candles were still burning
in the Room of Mirrors.  And by the light of them, as I entered, Gervase
stepped to meet me.

"Ah, it's you," I stammered.  "I heard--that is, I thought--"

And with that I saw--recognised with a catch of the breath--that the
figure I spoke to was not Gervase, but my own reflected image, stepping
forward with pale face and ghastly from a mirror.  Yet a moment before I
could have sworn it was Gervase.

Gervase lay stretched on the hearthrug with his hand towards the fire.
I caught up a candle, and bent over him.  His features were not to be
recognised.

As I straightened myself up, with the candle in my hand, for an instant
those features, obliterated in the flesh, gazed at me in a ring, a
hundred times repeated behind a hundred candles.  And again, at a second
glance, I saw that the face was not Gervase's but my own.

I set down the candle and made off, closing the door behind me.
The horror of it held me by the hair, but I flung it off and pelted down
the lane and through the mews.  Once in the street I breathed again,
pulled myself together, and set off at a rapid walk, southwards, but not
clearly knowing whither.

As a matter of fact, I took the line by which I had come: with the
single difference that I made straight into Berkeley Square through
Bruton Street.  I had, I say, no clear purpose in following this line
rather than another.  I had none for taking Lennox Gardens on the way to
my squalid lodgings in Chelsea.  I had a purpose, no doubt; but will
swear it only grew definite as I came in sight of the lamp still burning
beneath Gervase's portico.

There was a figure, too, under the lamp--the butler--bending there and
rolling up the strip of red carpet.  As he pulled its edges from the
frozen snow I came on him suddenly.

"Oh, it's you, Sir!"  He stood erect, and with the air of a man
infinitely relieved.

"Gervase!"

The door opened wide and there stood Elaine in her ball-gown, a-glitter
with diamonds.

"Gervase, dear, where have you been?  We have been terribly anxious--"

She said it, looking straight down on me--on me--who stood in my
tattered clothes in the full glare of the lamp.  And then I heard the
butler catch his breath, and suddenly her voice trailed off in wonder
and pitiful disappointment.

"It's not Gervase!  It's Reg--Mr. Travers.  I beg your pardon.
I thought--"

But I passed up the steps and stood before her: and said, as she drew
back--

"There has been an accident.  Gervase has shot himself."  I turned to
the butler.  "You had better run to the police station.  Stay: take this
revolver.  It won't count anything as evidence: but I ask you to examine
it and make sure all the chambers are loaded."

A thud in the hall interrupted me.  I ran in and knelt beside Elaine,
and as I stooped to lift her--as my hand touched her hair--this was the
jealous question on my lips--

"What has _she_ to do with it.  It is _I_ who cannot do without him--who
must miss him always!"



A PAIR OF HANDS


AN OLD MAID'S GHOST-STORY

"Yes," said Miss Le Petyt, gazing into the deep fireplace and letting
her hands and her knitting lie for the moment idle in her lap.
"Oh, yes, I have seen a ghost.  In fact I have lived in a house with one
for quite a long time."

"How you _could_--" began one of my host's daughters; and "_You_, Aunt
Emily?" cried the other at the same moment.

Miss Le Petyt, gentle soul, withdrew her eyes from the fireplace and
protested with a gay little smile.  "Well, my dears, I am not quite the
coward you take me for.  And, as it happens, mine was the most harmless
ghost in the world.  In fact"--and here she looked at the fire again--
"I was quite sorry to lose her."

"It was a woman, then?  Now _I_ think," said Miss Blanche, "that female
ghosts are the horridest of all.  They wear little shoes with high red
heels, and go about _tap, tap_, wringing their hands."

"This one wrung her hands, certainly.  But I don't know about the high
red heels, for I never saw her feet.  Perhaps she was like the Queen of
Spain, and hadn't any.  And as for the hands, it all depends _how_ you
wring them.  There's an elderly shop-walker at Knightsbridge, for
instance--"

"Don't be prosy, dear, when you know that we're just dying to hear the
story."

Miss Le Petyt turned to me with a small deprecating laugh.  "It's such a
little one."

"The story, or the ghost?"

"Both."

And this was Miss Le Petyt's story:--


"It happened when I lived down in Cornwall, at Tresillack on the south
coast.  Tresillack was the name of the house, which stood quite alone at
the head of a coombe, within sound of the sea but without sight of it;
for though the coombe led down to a wide open beach, it wound and
twisted half a dozen times on its way, and its overlapping sides closed
the view from the house, which was advertised as 'secluded.'  I was very
poor in those days.  Your father and all of us were poor then, as I
trust, my dears, you will never be; but I was young enough to be
romantic and wise enough to like independence, and this word 'secluded'
took my fancy.

"The misfortune was that it had taken the fancy, or just suited the
requirements, of several previous tenants.  You know, I dare say, the
kind of person who rents a secluded house in the country?  Well, yes,
there are several kinds; but they seem to agree in being odious.  No one
knows where they come from, though they soon remove all doubt about
where they're 'going to,' as the children say.  'Shady' is the word, is
it not?  Well, the previous tenants of Tresillack (from first to last a
bewildering series) had been shady with a vengeance.

"I knew nothing of this when I first made application to the landlord, a
solid yeoman inhabiting a farm at the foot of the coombe, on a cliff
overlooking the beach.  To him I presented myself fearlessly as a
spinster of decent family and small but assured income, intending a
rural life of combined seemliness and economy.   He met my advances
politely enough, but with an air of suspicion which offended me.
I began by disliking him for it: afterwards I set it down as an
unpleasant feature in the local character.  I was doubly mistaken.
Farmer Hosking was slow-witted, but as honest a man as ever stood up
against hard times; and a more open and hospitable race than the people
on that coast I never wish to meet.  It was the caution of a child who
had burnt his fingers, not once but many times.   Had I known what I
afterwards learned of Farmer Hosking's tribulations as landlord of a
'secluded country residence,' I should have approached him with the
bashfulness proper to my suit and faltered as I undertook to prove the
bright exception in a long line of painful experiences.  He had bought
the Tresillack estate twenty years before--on mortgage, I fancy--because
the land adjoined his own and would pay him for tillage.  But the house
was a nuisance, an incubus; and had been so from the beginning.

"'Well, miss,' he said, 'you're welcome to look over it; a pretty enough
place, inside and out.  There's no trouble about keys, because I've put
in a housekeeper, a widow-woman, and she'll show you round.  With your
leave I'll step up the coombe so far with you, and put you in your way.'
As I thanked him he paused and rubbed his chin.  'There's one thing I
must tell you, though.  Whoever takes the house must take Mrs. Carkeek
along with it.'

"'Mrs. Carkeek?' I echoed dolefully.  'Is that the housekeeper?'

"'Yes: she was wife to my late hind.  I'm sorry, miss,' he added, my
face telling him no doubt what sort of woman I expected Mrs. Carkeek to
be; 'but I had to make it a rule after--after some things that happened.
And I dare say you won't find her so bad.  Mary Carkeek's a sensible
comfortable woman, and knows the place.  She was in service there to
Squire Kendall when he sold up and went: her first place it was.'

"'I may as well see the house, anyhow,' said I dejectedly.  So we
started to walk up the coombe.  The path, which ran beside a little
chattering stream, was narrow for the most part, and Farmer Hosking,
with an apology, strode on ahead to beat aside the brambles.
But whenever its width allowed us to walk side by side I caught him from
time to time stealing a shy inquisitive glance under his rough eyebrows.
Courteously though he bore himself, it was clear that he could not sum
me up to his satisfaction or bring me square with his notion of a tenant
for his 'secluded country residence.'

"I don't know what foolish fancy prompted it, but about halfway up the
coombe I stopped short and asked:

"'There are no ghosts, I suppose?'

"It struck me, a moment after I had uttered it, as a supremely silly
question; but he took it quite seriously.  'No; I never heard tell of
any _ghosts_.'  He laid a queer sort of stress on the word.  'There's
always been trouble with servants, and maids' tongues will be runnin'.
But Mary Carkeek lives up there alone, and she seems comfortable
enough.'

"We walked on.  By-and-by he pointed with his stick.  'It don't look
like a place for ghosts, now, do it?'

"Certainly it did not.  Above an untrimmed orchard rose a terrace of
turf scattered with thorn-bushes, and above this a terrace of stone,
upon which stood the prettiest cottage I had ever seen.  It was long and
low and thatched; a deep verandah ran from end to end.  Clematis,
Banksia roses and honeysuckle climbed the posts of this verandah, and
big blooms of the Marechal Niel were clustered along its roof, beneath
the lattices of the bedroom windows.   The house was small enough to be
called a cottage, and rare enough in features and in situation to confer
distinction on any tenant.  It suggested what in those days we should
have called 'elegant' living.  And I could have clapped my hands for
joy.

"My spirits mounted still higher when Mrs. Carkeek opened the door to
us.  I had looked for a Mrs. Gummidge, and I found a healthy
middle-aged woman with a thoughtful but contented face, and a smile
which, without a trace of obsequiousness, quite bore out the farmer's
description of her.  She was a comfortable woman; and while we walked
through the rooms together (for Mr. Hosking waited outside) I 'took to'
Mrs. Carkeek.  Her speech was direct and practical; the rooms, in spite
of their faded furniture, were bright and exquisitely clean; and somehow
the very atmosphere of the house gave me a sense of well-being, of
feeling at home and cared for; yes, _of being loved_.  Don't laugh, my
dears; for when I've done you may not think this fancy altogether
foolish.

"I stepped out into the verandah, and Farmer Hosking pocketed the
pruning-knife which he had been using on a bush of jasmine.

"'This is better than anything I had dreamed of,' said I.

"'Well, miss, that's not a wise way of beginning a bargain, if you'll
excuse me.'

"He took no advantage, however, of my admission; and we struck the
bargain as we returned down the coombe to his farm, where the hired
chaise waited to convey me back to the market town.  I had meant to
engage a maid of my own, but now it occurred to me that I might do very
well with Mrs. Carkeek.  This, too, was settled in the course of the
next day or two, and within the week I had moved into my new home.

"I can hardly describe to you the happiness of my first month at
Tresillack; because (as I now believe) if I take the reasons which I had
for being happy, one by one, there remains over something which I cannot
account for.  I was moderately young, entirely healthy; I felt myself
independent and adventurous; the season was high summer, the weather
glorious, the garden in all the pomp of June, yet sufficiently unkempt
to keep me busy, give me a sharp appetite for meals, and send me to bed
in that drowsy stupor which comes of the odours of earth.  I spent the
most of my time out of doors, winding up the day's work as a rule with a
walk down the cool valley, along the beach and back.

"I soon found that all housework could be safely left to Mrs. Carkeek.
She did not talk much; indeed her only fault (a rare one in
house-keepers) was that she talked too little, and even when I addressed
her seemed at times unable to give me her attention.  It was as though
her mind strayed off to some small job she had forgotten, and her eyes
wore a listening look, as though she waited for the neglected task to
speak and remind her.  But as a matter of fact she forgot nothing.
Indeed, my dears, I was never so well attended to in my life.

"Well, that is what I'm coming to.  That, so to say, is just _it_.
The woman not only had the rooms swept and dusted, and my meals prepared
to the moment.  In a hundred odd little ways this orderliness, these
preparations, seemed to read my desires.  Did I wish the roses renewed
in a bowl upon the dining-table, sure enough at the next meal they would
be replaced by fresh ones.  Mrs.  Carkeek (I told myself) must have
surprised and interpreted a glance of mine.  And yet I could not
remember having glanced at the bowl in her presence.  And how on earth
had she guessed the very roses, the very shapes and colours I had
lightly wished for?  This is only an instance, you understand.
Every day, and from morning to night, I happened on others, each slight
enough, but all together bearing witness to a ministering intelligence
as subtle as it was untiring.

"I am a light sleeper, as you know, with an uncomfortable knack of
waking with the sun and roaming early.  No matter how early I rose at
Tresillack, Mrs.  Carkeek seemed to have prevented me.  Finally I had to
conclude that she arose and dusted and tidied as soon as she judged me
safely a-bed.  For once, finding the drawing-room (where I had been
sitting late) 'redded up' at four in the morning, and no trace of a
plate of raspberries which I had carried thither after dinner and left
overnight, I determined to test her, and walked through to the kitchen,
calling her by name.  I found the kitchen as clean as a pin, and the
fire laid, but no trace of Mrs. Carkeek.  I walked upstairs and knocked
at her door.  At the second knock a sleepy voice cried out, and
presently the good woman stood before me in her nightgown, looking (I
thought) very badly scared.

"'No,' I said, 'it's not a burglar.  But I've found out what I wanted,
that you do your morning's work over night.  But you mustn't wait for me
when I choose to sit up.  And now go back to your bed like a good soul,
whilst I take a run down to the beach.'

"She stood blinking in the dawn.  Her face was still white.

"'Oh, miss,' she gasped, 'I made sure you must have seen something!'

"'And so I have,' I answered, 'but it was neither burglars nor ghosts.'

"'Thank God!' I heard her say as she turned her back to me in her grey
bedroom--which faced the north.  And I took this for a carelessly pious
expression and ran downstairs, thinking no more of it.

"A few days later I began to understand.

"The plan of Tresillack house (I must explain) was simplicity itself.
To the left of the hall as you entered was the dining-room; to the right
the drawing-room, with a boudoir beyond.  The foot of the stairs faced
the front door, and beside it, passing a glazed inner door, you found
two others right and left, the left opening on the kitchen, the right on
a passage which ran by a store-cupboard under the bend of the stairs to
a neat pantry with the usual shelves and linen-press, and under the
window (which faced north) a porcelain basin and brass tap.  On the
first morning of my tenancy I had visited this pantry and turned the
tap; but no water ran.  I supposed this to be accidental.  Mrs. Carkeek
had to wash up glass ware and crockery, and no doubt Mrs. Carkeek would
complain of any failure in the water supply.

"But the day after my surprise visit (as I called it) I had picked a
basketful of roses, and carried them into the pantry as a handy place to
arrange them in.  I chose a china bowl and went to fill it at the tap.
Again the water would not run.

"I called Mrs. Carkeek.  'What is wrong with this tap?' I asked.
'The rest of the house is well enough supplied.'

"'I don't know, miss.  I never use it.'

"'But there must be a reason; and you must find it a great nuisance
washing up the plate and glasses in the kitchen.  Come around to the
back with me, and we'll have a look at the cisterns.'

"'The cisterns'll be all right, miss.  I assure you I don't find it a
trouble.'

"But I was not to be put off.  The back of the house stood but ten feet
from a wall which was really but a stone face built against the cliff
cut away by the architect.  Above the cliff rose the kitchen garden, and
from its lower path we looked over the wall's parapet upon the cisterns.
There were two--a very large one, supplying the kitchen and the bathroom
above the kitchen; and a small one, obviously fed by the other, and as
obviously leading, by a pipe which I could trace, to the pantry.
Now the big cistern stood almost full, and yet the small one, though on
a lower level, was empty.

"'It's as plain as daylight,' said I.  'The pipe between the two is
choked.'  And I clambered on to the parapet.

"'I wouldn't, miss.  The pantry tap is only cold water, and no use to
me.  From the kitchen boiler I gets it hot, you see.'

"'But I want the pantry water for my flowers.'  I bent over and groped.
'I thought as much!' said I, as I wrenched out a thick plug of cork and
immediately the water began to flow.   I turned triumphantly on Mrs.
Carkeek, who had grown suddenly red in the face.  Her eyes were fixed on
the cork in my hand.  To keep it more firmly wedged in its place
somebody had wrapped it round with a rag of calico print; and,
discoloured though the rag was, I seemed to recall the pattern (a lilac
sprig).  Then, as our eyes met, it occurred to me that only two mornings
before Mrs. Carkeek had worn a print gown of that same sprigged pattern.

"I had the presence of mind to hide this very small discovery, sliding
over it some quite trivial remark; and presently Mrs. Carkeek regained
her composure.  But I own I felt disappointed in her.  It seemed such a
paltry thing to be disingenuous over.  She had deliberately acted a fib
before me; and why?  Merely because she preferred the kitchen to the
pantry tap.  It was childish.  'But servants are all the same,' I told
myself.  'I must take Mrs. Carkeek as she is; and, after all, she is a
treasure.'

"On the second night after this, and between eleven and twelve o'clock,
I was lying in bed and reading myself sleepy over a novel of Lord
Lytton's, when a small sound disturbed me.  I listened.  The sound was
clearly that of water trickling; and I set it down to rain.  A shower
(I told myself) had filled the water-pipes which drained the roof.
Somehow I could not fix the sound.  There was a water pipe against the
wall just outside my window.  I rose and drew up the blind.

"To my astonishment no rain was falling; no rain had fallen.  I felt the
slate window-sill; some dew had gathered there--no more.  There was no
wind, no cloud: only a still moon high over the eastern slope of the
coombe, the distant plash of waves, and the fragrance of many roses.
I went back to bed and listened again.  Yes, the trickling sound
continued, quite distinct in the silence of the house, not to be
confused for a moment with the dull murmur of the beach.  After a while
it began to grate on my nerves.  I caught up my candle, flung my
dressing-gown about me, and stole softly downstairs.

"Then it was simple.  I traced the sound to the pantry.  'Mrs. Carkeek
has left the tap running,' said I: and, sure enough, I found it so--a
thin trickle steadily running to waste in the porcelain basin.  I turned
off the tap, went contentedly back to my bed, and slept.

"--for some hours.  I opened my eyes in darkness, and at once knew what
had awakened me.  The tap was running again.  Now it had shut easily in
my hand, but not so easily that I could believe it had slipped open
again of its own accord.  'This is Mrs. Carkeek's doing,' said I; and am
afraid I added 'Bother Mrs. Carkeek!'

"Well, there was no help for it: so I struck a light, looked at my
watch, saw that the hour was just three o'clock, and descended the
stairs again.  At the pantry door I paused.  I was not afraid--not one
little bit.  In fact the notion that anything might be wrong had never
crossed my mind.  But I remember thinking, with my hand on the door,
that if Mrs. Carkeek were in the pantry I might happen to give her a
severe fright.

"I pushed the door open briskly.  Mrs. Carkeek was not there.
But something _was_ there, by the porcelain basin--something which might
have sent me scurrying upstairs two steps at a time, but which as a
matter of fact held me to the spot.  My heart seemed to stand still--so
still!  And in the stillness I remember setting down the brass
candlestick on a tall nest of drawers beside me.

"Over the porcelain basin and beneath the water trickling from the tap I
saw two hands.

"That was all--two small hands, a child's hands.  I cannot tell you how
they ended.

"No: they were not cut off.  I saw them quite distinctly: just a pair of
small hands and the wrists, and after that--nothing.  They were moving
briskly--washing themselves clean.  I saw the water trickle and splash
over them--not _through_ them--but just as it would on real hands.
They were the hands of a little girl, too.  Oh, yes, I was sure of that
at once.  Boys and girls wash their hands differently.  I can't just
tell you what the difference is, but it's unmistakable.

"I saw all this before my candle slipped and fell with a crash.  I had
set it down without looking--for my eyes were fixed on the basin--and
had balanced it on the edge of the nest of drawers.  After the crash, in
the darkness there, with the water running, I suffered some bad moments.
Oddly enough, the thought uppermost with me was that I _must_ shut off
that tap before escaping.   I _had_ to.  And after a while I picked up
all my courage, so to say, between my teeth, and with a little sob
thrust out my hand and did it.  Then I fled.

"The dawn was close upon me: and as soon as the sky reddened I took my
bath, dressed and went downstairs.  And there at the pantry door I found
Mrs. Carkeek, also dressed, with my candlestick in her hand.

"'Ah!' said I, 'you picked it up.'

"Our eyes met.  Clearly Mrs. Carkeek wished me to begin, and I
determined at once to have it out with her.

"'And you knew all about it.  That's what accounts for your plugging up
the cistern.'

"'You saw? . . .' she began.

"'Yes, yes.  And you must tell me all about it--never mind how bad.
Is--is it--murder?'

"'Law bless you, miss, whatever put such horrors in your head?'

"'She was washing her hands.'

"'Ah, so she does, poor dear!  But--murder!  And dear little Miss
Margaret, that wouldn't go to hurt a fly!'

"'Miss Margaret?'

"'Eh, she died at seven year.  Squire Kendall's only daughter; and
that's over twenty year ago.  I was her nurse, miss, and I know--
diphtheria it was; she took it down in the village.'

"'But how do you know it is Margaret?'

"'Those hands--why, how could I mistake, that used to be her nurse?'

"'But why does she wash them?'

"'Well, miss, being always a dainty child--and the house-work, you
see--'

"I took a long breath.  'Do you mean to tell me that all this tidying
and dusting--'  I broke off.  'Is it _she_ who has been taking this care
of me?'

"Mrs. Carkeek met my look steadily.

"'Who else, miss?'

"'Poor little soul!'

"'Well now'--Mrs. Carkeek rubbed my candlestick with the edge of her
apron--'I'm so glad you take it like this.  For there isn't really
nothing to be afraid of--is there?'  She eyed me wistfully.  'It's my
belief she loves you, miss.  But only to think what a time she must have
had with the others!'

"'The others?' I echoed.

"'The other tenants, miss: the ones afore you.'

"'Were they bad?'

"'They was awful.  Didn't Farmer Hosking tell you?  They carried on
fearful--one after another, and each one worse than the last."

"'What was the matter with them?  Drink?'

"'Drink, miss, with some of 'em.  There was the Major--he used to go mad
with it, and run about the coombe in his nightshirt.  Oh, scandalous!
And his wife drank too--that is, if she ever _was_ his wife.  Just think
of that tender child washing Up after their nasty doings!'

"I shivered.

"'But that wasn't the worst, miss--not by a long way.  There was a pair
here--from the colonies, or so they gave out--with two children, a boy
and gel, the eldest scarce six.  Poor mites!'

"'Why, what happened?'

"'They beat those children, miss--your blood would boil!--_and_ starved,
_and_ tortured 'em, it's my belief.  You could hear their screams, I've
been told, away back in the high-road, and that's the best part of half
a mile.  Sometimes they was locked up without food for days together.
But it's my belief that little Miss Margaret managed to feed them
somehow.  Oh, I can see her, creeping to the door and comforting!'

"'But perhaps she never showed herself when these awful people were
here, but took to flight until they left.'

"'You didn't never know her, miss.  The brave she was!  She'd have stood
up to lions.  She've been here all the while: and only to think what her
innocent eyes and ears must have took in!  There was another couple--'
Mrs. Carkeek sunk her voice.

"'Oh, hush!' said I, 'if I'm to have any peace of mind in this house!'

"'But you won't go, miss?  She loves you, I know she do.  And think what
you might be leaving her to--what sort of tenant might come next.  For
she can't go.  She've been here ever since her father sold the place.
He died soon after.  You musn't go!'

"Now I had resolved to go, but all of a sudden I felt how mean this
resolution was.

"'After all,' said I, 'there's nothing to be afraid of.'

"'That's it, miss; nothing at all.  I don't even believe it's so very
uncommon.  Why, I've heard my mother tell of farmhouses where the rooms
were swept every night as regular as clockwork, and the floors sanded,
and the pots and pans scoured, and all while the maids slept.  They put
it down to the piskies; but we know better, miss, and now we've got the
secret between us we can lie easy in our beds, and if we hear anything,
say "God bless the child!" and go to sleep.'

"'Mrs. Carkeek,' said I, 'there's only one condition I have to make.'

"'What's that?'

"'Why, that you let me kiss you.'

"'Oh, you dear!' said Mrs. Carkeek as we embraced: and this was as close
to familiarity as she allowed herself to go in the whole course of my
acquaintance with her.

"I spent three years at Tresillack, and all that while Mrs. Carkeek
lived with me and shared the secret.  Few women, I dare to say, were
ever so completely wrapped around with love as we were during those
three years.  It ran through my waking life like a song: it smoothed my
pillow, touched and made my table comely, in summer lifted the heads of
the flowers as I passed, and in winter watched the fire with me and kept
it bright.

"'Why did I ever leave Tresillack?'  Because one day, at the end of five
years, Farmer Hosking brought me word that he had sold the house--or was
about to sell it; I forget which.  There was no avoiding it, at any
rate; the purchaser being a Colonel Kendall, a brother of the old
Squire.'

"'A married man?' I asked.

"'Yes, miss; with a family of eight.  As pretty children as ever you
see, and the mother a good lady.  It's the old home to Colonel Kendall.'

"'I see.  And that is why you feel bound to sell.'

"'It's a good price, too, that he offers.  You mustn't think but I'm
sorry enough--'

"'To turn me out?  I thank you, Mr. Hosking; but you are doing the right
thing.'

"Since Mrs. Carkeek was to stay, the arrangement lacked nothing of
absolute perfection--except, perhaps, that it found no room for me.

"'_She_--Margaret-will be happy,' I said; 'with her cousins, you know.'

"'Oh yes, miss, she will be happy, sure enough,' Mrs. Carkeek agreed.

"So when the time came I packed up my boxes, and tried to be cheerful.
But on the last morning, when they stood corded in the hall, I sent Mrs.
Carkeek upstairs upon some poor excuse, and stepped alone into the
pantry.

"'Margaret!' I whispered.

"There was no answer at all.  I had scarcely dared to hope for one.
Yet I tried again, and, shutting my eyes this time, stretched out both
hands and whispered:

"'Margaret!'

"And I will swear to my dying day that two little hands stole and
rested--for a moment only--in mine."



THE LADY OF THE SHIP


[_Or so much as is told of her by Paschal Tonkin, steward and major-domo
to the lamented John Milliton, of Pengersick Castle, in Cornwall: of her
coming in the Portugal Ship, anno 1526; her marriage with the said
Milliton and alleged sorceries; with particulars of the Barbary men
wrecked in Mount's Bay and their entertainment in the town of Market
Jew._]

My purpose is to clear the memory of my late and dear Master; and to
this end I shall tell the truth and the truth only, so far as I know it,
admitting his faults, which, since he has taken them before God, no man
should now aggravate by guess-work.  That he had traffic with secret
arts is certain; but I believe with no purpose but to fight the Devil
with his own armoury.  He never was a robber as Mr. Thomas St. Aubyn and
Mr. William Godolphin accused him; nor, as the vulgar pretended, a
lustful and bloody man.  What he did was done in effort to save a
woman's soul; as Jude tells us, "_Of some have compassion, that are in
doubt; and others save, having mercy with fear, pulling them out of the
fire, hating even the garment spotted by the flesh_"--though this, alas!
my dear Master could not.  And so with Jude I would end, praying for all
of us and ascribing praise _to the only wise God, our Saviour, who is
able to guard us from stumbling and set us faultless before His presence
with exceeding joy_.

It was in January, 1526, after a tempest lasting three days, that the
ship called the _Saint Andrew_, belonging to the King of Portugal, drove
ashore in Gunwallo Cove, a little to the southward of Pengersick.
She was bound from Flanders to Lisbon with a freight extraordinary
rich--as I know after a fashion by my own eyesight, as well as from the
inventory drawn up by Master Francis Porson, an Englishman, travelling
on board of her as the King of Portugal's factor.  I have a copy of it
by me as I write, and here are some of Master Porson's items:--

   8,000 cakes of copper, valued by him at      3,224 pounds.
   18 blocks of silver,    '    '    '          2,250   '.
   Silver vessels, plate, patens, ewers and
   pots, beside pearls, precious stones,
   and jewels of gold.
   Also a chest of coined money, in amount      6,240   '.

There was also cloth of arras, tapestry, rich hangings, satins, velvets,
silks, camlets, says, satins or Bruges, with great number of bales of
Flemish and English cloth; 2,100 barber's basins; 3,200 laten
candlesticks; a great chest of shalmers and other instruments of music;
four sets of armour for the King of Portugal, much harness for his
horses, and much beside--the whole amounting at the least computation to
16,000 pounds in value. [1]  And this I can believe on confirmation of
what I myself saw upon the beach.

But let me have done with Master Porson and his tale, which runs that
the _Saint Andrew_, having struck at the mouth of the cove, there
utterly perished; yet, by the grace and mercy of Almighty God, the
greater part of the crew got safely to land, and by help of many poor
folk dwelling in the neighbourhood saved all that was most valuable of
the cargo.  But shortly after (says he) there came on the scene three
gentlemen, Thomas Saint Aubyn, William Godolphin, and John Milliton,
with about sixty men armed in manner of war with bows and swords, and
made an assault on the shipwrecked sailors and put them in great fear
and jeopardy; and in the end took from them all they had saved from the
wreck, amounting to 10,000 pounds worth of treasure--"which," says he,
"they will not yield up, nor make restitution, though they have been
called upon to do so."

So much then for the factor's account, which I doubt not he believed to
be true enough; albeit on his own confession he had lain hurt and
unconscious upon the beach at the time, and his tale rested therefore on
what he could learn by hearsay after his recovery; when--the matter
being so important--he was at trouble to journey all the way to London
and lay his complaint before the Portuguese ambassador.  Moreover he
made so fair a case of it that the ambassador obtained of the English
Court a Commissioner, Sir Nicholas Fleming, to travel down and push
enquiries on the spot--where Master Porson did not scruple to repeat his
accusation, and to our faces (having indeed followed the Commissioner
down for that purpose).  I must say I thought him a very honest man--not
to say a brave one, seeing what words he dared to use to Mr. Saint Aubyn
in his own house at Clowance, calling him a mere robber.  I was there
when he said it and made me go hot and cold, knowing (if he did not)
that for two pins Mr. Saint Aubyn might have had him drowned like a
puppy.  However, he chose to make nothing of an insult from a factor.
"_Mercator tantum,_" replied he, snapping his fingers, and to my great
joy; for any violence might have spoiled the story agreed on between
us--that is, between Mr. Saint Aubyn, Mr. Godolphin, and me who acted as
deputy for my Master.

This story of ours, albeit less honest, had more colour of the truth
than Master Porson's hearsay.  It ran that Mr. Saint Aubyn, happening
near Gunwallo, heard of the wreck and rode to it, where presently Mr.
Godolphin and my Master joined him and helped to save the men; that, in
attempting to save the cargo also, a man of Mr. Saint Aubyn's--one Will
Carnarthur--was drowned; that, in fact, very little was rescued; and,
seeing the men destitute and without money to buy meat and drink, we
bought the goods in lawful bargain with the master.  As for the assault,
we denied it, or that we took goods to the value of ten thousand pounds
from the sailors.  All that was certainly known to be saved amounted to
about 20 pounds worth; and, in spite of many trials to recover more,
which failed to pay the charges of labour, the bulk of the cargo
remained in the ship and was broken up by the seas.

This was our tale, false in parts, yet a truer one than either of us,
who uttered it, believed.  The only person in the plot (so to say) who
knew it to be true in substance was my Master.  I, his deputy, took this
version from him to Clowance with a mind glad enough to be relieved by
my duty from having any opinion on the matter.  On the one hand, I had
the evidence of my senses that the booty had been saved, and too much
wit to doubt that any other man would conclude it to be in my Master's
possession.  On the other, I had never known him lie or deceive, or
engage me to further any deceit; his word was his bond, and by practice
my word was his bond also.  Further, of this affair I had already begun
to wonder if a man's plain senses could be trusted, as you will hear
reason by-and-by.  As for Mr. Saint Aubyn and Mr. Godolphin, they had no
doubt at all that my Master was lying, and that I had come wittingly to
further his lie.  They would have drawn on him (I make no doubt) had he
brought the tale in person.  From me, his intermediate, they took it as
the best to suit with the known truth and present to the Commissioner.
All Cornishmen are cousins, you may say.  It comes to this, rather:
these gentlemen chose to accept my master's lie, and settle with him
afterwards, rather than make a clean breast and be forced to wring their
small shares out of the Exchequer.  A neighbour can be persuaded,
terrified, forced; but London is always a long way off, and London
lawyers are the devil.  I say freely that (knowing no more than they
did, or I) these two gentlemen followed a reasonable policy.

But, after we had fitted Sir Nicholas with our common story, and as I
was mounting my horse in Clowance courtyard, Mr. Saint Aubyn came close
to my stirrup and said this by way of parting:

"You will understand, Mr. Tonkin, that to-day's tale is for to-day.
But by God I will come and take my share--you may tell your master--and
a trifle over!  And the next time I overtake you I promise to put a
bullet in the back of your scrag neck."

For answer to this--seeing that Master Porson stood at an easy distance
with his eye on us--I saluted him gravely and rode out of the courtyard.


Now the manner of the wreck was this, and our concern with it.
So nearly as I can learn, the _Saint Andrew_ came ashore at two hours
after noon: the date, the 20th of January, 1526, and the weather at the
time coarse and foggy with a gale yet blowing from the south-west or a
good west of south, but sensibly abating, and the tide wanting an hour
before low water.

It happened that Mr. Saint Aubyn was riding, with twenty men at his
back, homeward from Gweek, where he had spent three days on some private
business, when he heard news of the wreck at a farmhouse on the road to
Helleston: and so turning aside, he, whose dwelling lay farthest from
it, came first to the cove.  The news reached us at Pengersick a little
after three o'clock; as I remember because my Master was just then
settled to dinner.  But he rose at once and gave word to saddle in
haste, at the same time bidding me make ready to ride with him, and
fifteen others.

So we set forth and rode--the wind lulling, but the rain coming down
steadily--and reached Gunwallo Cove with a little daylight to spare.
On the beach there we found most of the foreigners landed, but seven of
them laid out starkly, who had been drowned or brought ashore dead
(for the yard had fallen on board, the day before, and no time left in
the ship's extremity to bury them): and three as good as dead--among
whom was Master Porson, with a great wound of the scalp; also everywhere
great piles of freight, chests, bales, and casks--a few staved and
taking damage from salt water and rain, but the most in apparent good
condition.  The crew had worked very busily at the salving, and to the
great credit of men who had come through suffering and peril of death.
Mr. Saint Aubyn's band, too, had lent help, though by this time the
flowing of the tide forced them to give over.  But the master (as one
might say) of their endeavours was neither the Portuguese captain nor
Mr. Saint Aubyn, but a young damsel whom I must describe more
particularly.

She was standing, as we rode down the beach, nigh to the water's edge;
with a group of men about her, and Mr. Saint Aubyn himself listening to
her orders.  I can see her now as she turned at our approaching and she
and my Master looked for the first time into each other's eyes, which
afterwards were to look so often and fondly.  In age she appeared
eighteen or twenty; her shape a mere girl's, but her face somewhat
older, being pinched and peaked by the cold, yet the loveliest I have
ever seen or shall see.  Her hair, which seemed of a copper red,
darkened by rain, was blown about her shoulders, and her drenched blue
gown, hitched at the waist with a snakeskin girdle, flapped about her as
she turned to one or the other, using more play of hands than our
home-bred ladies do.  Her feet were bare and rosy; ruddied doubtless, by
the wind and brine, but I think partly also by the angry light of the
sunsetting which broke the weather to seaward and turned the pools and
the wetted sand to the colour of blood.  A hound kept beside her,
shivering and now and then lowering his muzzle to sniff the oreweed, as
if the brine of it puzzled him: a beast in shape somewhat like our
grey-hounds, but longer and taller, and coated like a wolf.

As I have tried to describe her she stood amid the men and the tangle of
the beach; a shape majestical and yet (as we drew closer) slight and
forlorn.  The present cause of her gestures we made out to be a
dark-skinned fellow whom two of Saint Aubyn's men held prisoner with his
arms trussed behind him.  On her other hand were gathered the rest of
the Portuguese, very sullen and with dark looks whenever she turned from
them to Saint Aubyn and from their language to the English.  He, I could
see, was perplexed, and stood fingering his beard: but his face
brightened as he came a step to meet my Master.

"Ha!" said he, "you can help us, Milliton.  You speak the Portuguese, I
believe?" (For my master was known to speak most of the languages of
Europe, having caught them up in his youth when his father's madness
forced him abroad.  And I myself, who had accompanied him so far as
Venice, could pick my way in the _lingua Franca_.) "This fellow"--
pointing at the prisoner--"has just drawn a knife on the lady here; and
indeed would have killed her, but for this hound of hers.  My fellows
have him tight and safe, as you see: but I was thinking by your leave to
lodge him with you, yours being the nearest house for the safe keeping
of such.  But the plague is," says he, "there seems to be more in the
business than I can fathom: for one half of these drenched villains take
the man's part, while scarce one of them seems too well disposed towards
the lady: although to my knowledge she has worked more than any ten of
them in salving the cargo.  And heaven help me if I can understand a
word of their chatter!"

My Master lifted his cap to her; and she lifted her eyes to him, but
never a word did she utter, though but a moment since she had been using
excellent English.  Only she stood, slight and helpless and (I swear)
most pitiful, as one saying, "Here is my judge.  I am content."

My Master turned to the prisoner and questioned him in the Portuguese.
But the fellow (a man taller than the rest and passably
straight-looking) would confess nothing but that his name was Gil Perez
of Lagos, the boatswain of the wrecked ship.  Questioned of the assault,
he shook his head merely and shrugged his shoulders.  His face was
white: it seemed to me unaccountably, until glancing down I took note of
a torn wound above his right knee on the inside, where the hound's teeth
had fastened.

"But who is the captain of the ship?" my Master demanded in Portuguese;
and they thrust forward a small man who seemed not over-willing.
Indeed his face had nothing to commend him, being sharp and yellow, with
small eyes set too near against the nose.

"Your name?" my Master demanded of him too.

"Affonzo Cabral," he answered, and plunged into a long tale of the loss
of his ship and how it happened.  Cut short in this and asked concerning
the lady, he shrugged his shoulders and replied with an oath he knew
nothing about her beyond this, that she had taken passage with him at
Dunquerque for Lisbon, paying him beforehand and bearing him a letter
from the Bishop of Cambrai, which conveyed to him that she was bound on
some secret mission of politics to the Court of Lisbon.

As I thought, two or three of the men would have murmured something
here, but for a look from her, who, turning to my Master, said quietly
in good English:

"That man is a villain.  My name is Alicia of Bohemia, and my mission
not to be told here in public.  But he best knows why he took me for
passenger, and how he has behaved towards me.  Yourselves may see how I
have saved his freight.  And for the rest, sir"--here she bent her eyes
on my Master very frankly--"I have proved these men, and claim to be
delivered from them."

At this my Master knit his brows: and albeit he was a young man (scarce
past thirty) and a handsome, the deep wedge-mark showed between them as
I had often seen it show over the nose of the old man his father.

"I think," said he to Mr. Saint Aubyn, "this should be inquired into at
greater leisure.  With your leave my men shall take the prisoner to
Pengersick and have him there in safe keeping.  And if"--with a bow--"
the Lady Alicia will accept my poor shelter it will be the handier for
our examining of him.  For the rest, cannot we be of service in rescuing
yet more of the cargo?"

But this for the while was out of question: the _Saint Andrew_ lying
well out upon the strand, with never fewer than four or five ugly
breakers between her and shore; and so balanced that every sea worked
her to and fro.  Moreover, her mizzen mast yet stood, as by a miracle,
and the weight of it so strained at her seams that (thought I) there
could be very little left of her by the next ebb.

By now, too, the night was closing down, and we must determine what to
do with the cargo saved.  Mr. Godolphin, who had arrived with his men
during my Master's colloquy, was ready with an offer of wains and
pack-horses to convey the bulk of it to the outhouses at Godolphin.
But this, when I interpreted it, the Portuguese captain would not hear.
Nor was he more tractable to Mr. Saint Aubyn's offer to set a mixed
guard of our three companies upon the stuff until daybreak.  He plainly
had his doubts of such protection: and I could not avoid some respect
for his wisdom while showing it by argument to be mere perversity.
To my Master's persuasions and mine he shook his head: asking for the
present to be allowed a little fuel and refreshment for his men, who
would camp on the beach among their goods.  And to this, in the end, we
had to consent.  Several times before agreeing--and perhaps more often
than need was--my Master consulted with the Lady Alicia.  But she seemed
indifferent what happened to the ship.  Indeed, she might well have been
overwearied.

At length, the Portugals having it their own way, we parted: Mr. Saint
Aubyn riding off to lodge for the night with Mr. Godolphin, who took
charge of the three wounded men; while we carried the Lady Alicia off to
Pengersick (whither the prisoner Gil Perez had been marched on ahead),
she riding pillion behind my Master, and the rest of us at a seemly
distance.

On reaching home I had first to busy myself with orders for the victuals
to be sent down to the foreigners at the Cove, and afterwards in
snatching my supper in the great hall, where already I saw my Master and
the strange lady making good cheer together at the high table.  He had
bidden the housekeeper fetch out some robes that had been his mother's,
and in these antique fittings the lady looked not awkwardly (as you
might suppose), but rather like some player in a masque.  I know not how
'twas: but whereas (saving my respect) I had always been to my dear
Master as a brother, close to his heart and thoughts, her coming did at
once remove him to a distance from me, so that I looked on the pair as
if the dais were part of some other world than this, and they, pledging
each other up there and murmuring in foreign tongues and playing with
glances, as two creatures moving through a play or pisky tale without
care or burden of living, and yet in the end to be pitied.

My fast broken, I bethought me of our prisoner; and catching up some
meats and a flask of wine, hurried to the strong room where he lay.  But
I found him stretched on his pallet, and turning in a kind of fever: so
returned and fetched a cooling draught in place of the victuals, and
without questioning made him drink it.  He thanked me amid some
rambling, light-headed talk--the most of it too quickly poured out for
me to catch; but by-and-by grew easier and drowsy.  I left him to sleep,
putting off questions for the morning.

But early on the morrow--between five and six o'clock--came Will Hendra,
a cowkeeper, into our courtyard with a strange tale; one that disquieted
if it did not altogether astonish me.  The tale--as told before my
Master, whom I aroused to hear it--ran thus: that between midnight and
one in the morning the Portugals in the Cove had been set upon and
beaten from the spoils by a number of men with pikes (no doubt belonging
to Saint Aubyn or Godolphin, or both), and forced to flee to the cliffs.
But (here came in the wonder) the assailants, having mastered the field,
fell on the casks, chests, and packages, only to find them utterly empty
or filled with weed and gravel! Of freight--so Will Hendra had it from
one of Godolphin's own men, who were now searching the cliffs and
caverns--not twelve-pennyworth remained on the beach.  The Portugals
must have hidden or made away with it all.  He added that their captain
had been found at the foot of the cliffs with his head battered in; but
whether by a fall or a blow taken in the affray, there was no telling.

My Master let saddle at once and rode away for the Cove without breaking
his fast.  And I went about my customary duties until full daybreak,
when I paid a visit to the strong room, to see how the prisoner had
slept.

I found him sitting up in bed and nursing his leg, the wound of which
appeared red and angry at the edges.  I sent, therefore, for a
fomentation, and while applying it thought no harm to tell him the
report from the Cove.  To my astonishment it threw him into a transport,
though whether of rage or horror I could not at first tell.  But he
jerked his leg from my grasp, and beating the straw with both fists he
cried out--

"I knew it!  I knew it would be so!  She is a witch--a daughter of
Satan, or his leman!  It is her doing, I tell you.  It is she who has
killed that fool Affonzo.  She is a witch!"  He fell back on the straw,
his strength spent, but still beat weakly with his fists, gasping
"Witch--witch!"

"Hush!" said I.  "You are light-headed with your hurt.  Lie quiet and
let me tend it."

"As for my hurt," he answered, "your tending it will do no good.
The poison of that hound of hell is in me, and nothing for me but to say
my prayers.  But listen you"--here he sat up again and plucked me by the
shoulder as I bent over his leg.  "The freight is not gone, and good
reason for why: it was never landed!"

"Hey?" said I, incredulous.

"It was never landed.  The men toiled as she ordered--Lord, how they
toiled!  Without witch-craft they had never done the half of it.  I tell
you they handled moonshine--wove sand.  The riches they brought ashore
were emptiness; vain shows that already have turned to chips and straw
and rubbish.  Nay, sir"--for I drew back before these ravings--"listen
for the love of God, before the poison gets hold of me!  Soon it will be
too late. . . .  The evening before we sailed from Dunquerque, we were
anchored out in the tide.  It was my watch.  I was leaning on the rail
of the poop when I caught sight of her first.  She was running for her
life across the dunes--running for the waterside--she and her hound
beside her.  Away behind her, like ants dotted over the rises of the
sand, were little figures running and pursuing.  Down by the waterside
one boat was waiting, with a man in it--or the Devil belike--leaning on
his oars.  She whistled;  he pulled close in shore.  She leapt into the
boat with the dog at her heels, and was half-way across towards our ship
before the first of those after her reached the water's edge.  When she
hailed us I ran and fetched Affonzo the master.  The rest I charge to
his folly.  It was he who handed her up the ship's side.  How the dog
came on board I know not: only that I leaned over the bulwarks to have a
look at him, but heard a pattering noise, and there he was on deck
behind me and close beside his mistress.  The boat and rower had
vanished--under the ship's stern, as I supposed, but now I have my
doubts.  I saw no more of them, anyhow.

"By this time Affonzo was reading her letter.  The crowd by the water's
edge had found a boat at length--how, I know not; but it was a very
little one, holding but six men besides the one rower, and then
over-laden.  They pulled towards us and hailed just as the lady took the
master's promise and went down to seek her cabin: and one of the men
stood up, a tall gentleman with a chain about his neck.  Affonzo went to
the side to parley with him.

"The tall man with the chain cried out that he was mayor or provost--
I forget which--and the woman must be given up as a proved witch who had
laid the wickedest spells upon many citizens of Dunquerque.  All this he
had to shout; for Affonzo, who--either ignorantly or by choice--was
already on Satan's side, would not suffer him to come aboard or even
nigh the ship's ladder.  Moreover, he drove below so many of our crew as
had gathered to the side to listen, commanding me with curses to see to
this.  Yet I heard something of the mayor's accusation; which was that
the woman had come to Dunquerque, travelling as a great lady with a
retinue of servants and letters of commendation to the religious houses,
on which and on many private persons of note she had bestowed relics of
our Lord and the saints, pretending it was for a penance that she
journeyed and gave the bounties: but that, at a certain hour, these
relics had turned into toads, adders, and all manner of abominable
offal, defiling the holy places and private shrines, in some instances
the very church altars: that upon the outcry her retinue had vanished,
and she herself taken to flight as we saw her running.

"At all this Affonzo scoffed, threatening to sink the boat if further
troubled with their importunities.  And, the provost using threats in
return, he gave order to let weigh incontinently and clear with the
tide, which by this was turned to ebb.  And so, amid curses which we
answered by display of our guns, we stood out from that port.  Of the
master's purpose I make no guess.  Either he was bewitched, or the woman
had taken him with her beauty, and he dreamed of finding favour with
her.

"This only I know, that on the second morning, she standing on deck
beside him, he offered some familiar approach; whereupon the dog flew at
him, and I believe would have killed him, but was in time called off by
her.  Within an hour we met with the weather which after three days
drove us ashore.  Now whether Affonzo suspected her true nature or not--
as I know he had taken a great fear of her--I never had time to
discover.  But I know her for a witch, and for a witch I tried to make
away with her.  For the rest, may God pardon me!"

All this the man uttered not as I have written it, but with many gasping
interruptions; and afterwards lay back as one dead.  Before I could make
head or tail of my wonder, I heard cries and a clatter from the
courtyard, and ran out to see what was amiss.

In the courtyard I found my Master with a dozen men closing the bolts of
the great gate against a company who rained blows and hammerings on the
outside of it.  My Master had dismounted, and while he called his orders
the blood ran down his face from a cut above the forehead.  As for the
smoking horses on which they had ridden in, these stood huddling,
rubbing shoulders, and facing all ways like a knot of frightened colts.

All the bolts being shut, my Master steps to the grille and speaking
through it, "Saint Aubyn," says he, "between gentlemen there are fitter
ways to dispute than brawling with servants.  I am no thief or robber;
as you may satisfy yourself by search and question, bringing, if you
will, Mr. Godolphin and three men to help you under protection of my
word.  If you will not, then I am ready for you at any time of your
choosing.  But I warn you that, if any man offers further violence to my
gate, I send Master Tonkin to melt the lead, of which I have good store.
So make your choice."

He said it in English, and few of those who heard him could understand.
And after a moment Saint Aubyn, who was a very courteous gentleman for
all his hot temper, made answer in the same tongue.

"If I cannot take your word, Pengersick," said he, "be sure no searching
will satisfy me.  But that some of your men have made off with the
goods, with or without your knowledge, I am convinced."

"If they have--" my Master was beginning, when Godolphin's sneering
laugh broke in on his words from the other side of the gate.

"'_If!_' '_If!_' There are too many _if's_ in this parley for my
stomach.  Look ye, Pengersick, will you give up the goods or no?"

Upon this my Master changed his tone.  "As for Mr. Godolphin, I have
this only to say: the goods are neither his nor mine; they are not in my
keeping, nor do I believe them stolen by any of my men.  For the words
that have passed between us to-day, he knows me well enough to be sure I
shall hold him to account, and that soon: and to that assurance
commending him, I wish you both a very good day."

So having said, he strolled off towards the stables, leaving me to
listen at the gate, where by-and-by, after some disputing, I had the
pleasure to hear our besiegers draw off and trot away towards Godolphin.
Happening to take a glance upwards at the house-front, I caught sight of
the strange lady at the window of the guest-chamber, which faced towards
the south-east.  She was leaning forth and gazing after them: but,
hearing my Master's footsteps as he came from the stables, she withdrew
her eyes from the road and nodded down at him gaily.

But as he went indoors to join her at breakfast I ran after, and
catching him in the porch, besought him to have his wound seen to.
"And after that," said I, "there is another wounded man who needs your
attention.   Unless you take his deposition quickly, I fear, sir, it may
be too late."

His eyebrows went up at this, but contracted again upon the twinge of
his wound.  "I will attend to him first," said he shortly, and led the
way to the strong room.  "Hullo!" was his next word, as he came to the
door--for in my perturbation and hurry I had forgotten to lock it.

"He is too weak to move," I stammered, as my poor excuse.

"Nevertheless it was not well done," he replied, pushing past me.

The prisoner lay on his pallet, gasping, with his eyes wide open in a
rigor.  "Take her away!" he panted.  "Take her away!  She has been
here!"

"Hey?" I cried: but my Master turned on me sharply.  To this day I know
not how much of evil he suspected.

"I will summon you if I need you.  For the present you will leave us
here alone."

Nor can I tell what passed between them for the next half-an-hour.
Only that when he came forth my Master's face was white and set beneath
its dry smear of blood.  Passing me, who waited at the end of the
corridor, he said, but without meeting my eyes:

"Go to him.  The end is near."

I went to him.  He lay pretty much as I had left him, in a kind of
stupor; out of which, within the hour, he started suddenly and began to
rave.  Soon I had to send for a couple of our stablemen; and not too
soon.  For by this he was foaming at the mouth and gnashing, the man in
him turned to beast and trying to bite, so that we were forced to strap
him to his bed.  I shall say no more of this, the most horrible sight of
my life.  The end came quietly, about six in the evening: and we buried
the poor wretch that night in the orchard under the chapel wall.

All that day, as you may guess, I saw nothing of the strange lady.
And on the morrow until dinner-time I had but a glimpse of her.
This was in the forenoon.  She stood, with her hound beside her, in an
embrasure of the wall, looking over the sea: to the eye a figure so
maidenly and innocent and (in a sense) forlorn that I recalled Gil
Perez' tale as the merest frenzy, and wondered how I had come to listen
to it with any belief.  Her seaward gaze would be passing over the very
spot where we had laid him: only a low wall hiding the freshly turned
earth.  My Master had ridden off early: I could guess upon what errand.

He returned shortly after noon, unhurt and looking like a man satisfied
with his morning's work.  And at dinner, watching his demeanour
narrowly, I was satisfied that either he had not heard the prisoner's
tale or had rejected it utterly.  For he took his seat in the gayest
spirits, and laughed and talked with the stranger throughout the meal.
And afterwards, having fetched an old lute which had been his mother's,
he sat and watched her fit new strings to it, rallying her over her
tangle.  But when she had it tuned and, touching it softly, began the
first of those murmuring heathenish songs to which I have since listened
so often, pausing in my work, but never without a kind of terror at
beauty so far above my comprehending--why, then my Master laughed no
more.

He had met Godolphin that morning and run him through the thigh.
And that bitterest enemy of ours still wore a crutch a month later, when
we faced Master Porson before the Commissioner in Saint Aubyn's house at
Clowance.  At that conference (not to linger over the time between) the
Commissioner showed himself pardonably suspicious of us all.  He was a
dry, foxy-faced man, who spoke little and at times seemed scarce to be
listening; but rather turning over some deeper matters in his brain
behind his grey-coloured eyes.  But at length, Mr. Saint Aubyn having
twice or thrice made mention of the Lady Alicia and her presence on the
beach, this Sir Nicholas looked up at me sharply, and said he--"By all
accounts this lady was a passenger shipped by the master at Dunquerque.
It seems she was a foreign lady of birth, bearing letters commendatory
to the Court of Lisbon."

"That was his story of it," Master Porson assented.  "I was below and
busy with the cargo at the time, and knew nothing of her presence on
board until we had cleared the harbour."

"And at this moment she is a guest of Mr. Milliton's at Pengersick?"
pursued Sir Nicholas, still with his eyes upon mine.  I bowed, feeling
mightily uneasy.  "It is most necessary that I should take her
evidence--and Mr. Milliton's.  In all the statements received by me
Mr. Milliton bears no small part: his house lies at no distance from
Gunwallo Cove: and I have heard much of your Cornish courtesy.
It appears to me singular, therefore, that although I have been these
four days in his neighbourhood no invitation has reached me to visit
his house and have audience with him: and it argues small courtesy that
on coming here to-day in full expectation of seeing him, I should be
fobbed off with a deputy."

"Though but a deputy," I protested, "I have my Master's entire
confidence."

"No doubt," said he drily.  "But it would be more to the point if you
had mine.  It is imperative that I see Mr. Milliton of Pengersick and
hear his evidence, as also this Lady Alicia's: and you may bear him my
respects and say that I intend to call upon him to-morrow."

I bowed.  It was all I could do: since the truth (for different reasons)
could neither be told to him nor to the others.  And the truth was that
for two days my Master and the strange lady had not been seen at
Pengersick!  They had vanished, and two horses with them: but when and
how I neither knew nor dared push inquiries to discover.  Only the
porter could have told me had he chosen; but when I questioned him he
looked cunning, shook his head, and as good as hinted that I would be
wiser to question nobody, but go about my business as if I shared the
secret.

And so I did, imitating the porter's manner even before Dame Tresize,
the housekeeper.  But it rankled that, even while instructing me--as he
did on the eve of his departing--in the part I was to play at Clowance,
my Master had chosen to shut me out of this part of his confidence.
And now on the road home from Clowance I carried an anxious heart as
well as a sore.  To tell the truth--that my Master was away--I had not
been able, knowing how prompt Saint Aubyn and Godolphin might be to take
the advantage and pay us an unwelcome visit.  "And indeed," thought I,
"if my Master hides one thing from me, why not another?  The stuff may
indeed be stored with us: though I will not believe it without proof."
The Commissioner would come, beyond a doubt.  To discover my Master's
absence would quicken his suspicions: to deny him admittance would
confirm them.

I reached home, yet could get no sleep for my quandary.  But a little
before the dawning, while I did on my clothes, there came a knocking at
the gate followed by a clatter of hoofs in the courtyard; and hurrying
down, with but pause to light my lantern, I found my Master there and
helping the strange lady to dismount, with the porter and two sleepy
grooms standing by and holding torches.  Beneath the belly of the lady's
horse stood her hound, his tongue lolling and his coat a cake of mire.
The night had been chilly and the nostrils of the hard-ridden beasts
made a steam among the lights we held, while above us the upper frontage
of the house stood out clear between the growing daylight and the waning
moon poised above the courtlege-wall in the south-west.

"Hey!  Is that Paschal?"  My Master turned as one stiff with riding.
His face was ghastly pale, yet full of a sort of happiness: and I saw
that his clothes were disordered and his boots mired to their tops.
"Good luck!" cried he, handing the lady down.  "We can have supper at
once."

"Supper?" I repeated it after him.

"Or breakfast--which you choose.  Have the lights lit in the hall, and a
table spread.  My lady will eat and drink before going to her room."

"'My lady'?" was my echo again.

"Just so--my lady, and my wife, and henceforward your Mistress.
Lead the way, if you please!  Afterwards I will talk."

I did as I was ordered: lit the lights about the dais, spread the cloth
with my own hands, fetched forth the cold meats and--for he would have
no servants aroused--waited upon them in silence and poured the wine,
all in a whirl of mind.  My Mistress (as I must now call her) showed no
fatigue, though her skirts were soiled as if they had been dragged
through a sea of mud.  Her eyes sparkled and her bosom heaved as she
watched my Master, who ate greedily.  But beyond the gallant words with
which he pledged her welcome home to Pengersick nothing was said until,
his hunger put away, he pushed back his chair and commanded me to tell
what had happened at Clowance: which I did, pointing out the ticklish
posture of affairs, and that for a certainty the Commissioner might be
looked for in within a few hours.

"Well," said my Master, "I see no harm in his coming, nor any profit.
The goods are not with us: never were with us: and there's the end of
it."

But I was looking from him to my Mistress, who with bent brows sat
studying the table before her.

"Master Paschal," said she after a while, as one awaking from thought,
"has done his business zealously and well.  I will go to my room now and
rest: but let me be aroused when this visitor comes, for I believe that
I can deal with him."  And she rose and walked away to the stair, with
the hound at her heels.

A little later I saw my Master to his room: and after that had some
hours of leisure in which to fret my mind as well over what had happened
as what was likely to.  It was hard on noon when the Commissioner
arrived: and with him Master Porson.  I led them at once to the hall
and, setting wine before them, sent to learn when my Master and Mistress
would be pleased to give audience.  The lady came down almost at once,
looking very rosy and fresh.  She held a packet of papers, and having
saluted the Commissioner graciously, motioned me to seat myself at the
table with paper and pen.

Sir Nicholas began with some question touching her business on board the
_Saint Andrew_: and in answer she drew a paper from the top of her
packet.  It was spotted with sea-water, but (as I could see) yet
legible.  The Commissioner studied it, showed it to Master Porson (who
nodded), and handing it back politely, begged her for some particulars
concerning the wreck.

Upon this she told the story clearly and simply.  There had been a three
days' tempest: the ship had gone ashore in such and such a manner: a
great part of the cargo had undoubtedly been landed.  It was on the
beach when she had left it under conduct of Mr. Milliton, who had shown
her great kindness.  On whomsoever its disappearance might be charged,
of her host's innocence she could speak.

My Master appearing just now saluted the Commissioner and gave his
version very readily.

"You may search my cellars," he wound up, "and, if you please,
interrogate my servants.  My livery is known by everyone in this
neighbourhood to be purple and tawny.  The seamen can tell you if any of
their assailants wore these colours."

"They assure me," said Sir Nicholas, "that the night was too dark for
them to observe colours: and for that matter to disguise them would have
been a natural precaution.  There was a wounded man brought to your
house--one Gil Perez, the boatswain."

"He is dead, as you doubtless know, of a bite received from this lady's
hound as he was attacking her with a knife."

"But why, madam"--the factor turned to my Mistress--"should this man
have attacked you?"

She appeared to be expecting this question, and drew from her packet a
second paper, which she unfolded quietly and spread on the table, yet
kept her palm over the writing on it while she answered, "Those who
engage upon missions of State must look to meet with attacks, but not to
be asked to explain them.  The mob at Dunquerque pursued me upon a
ridiculous charge, yet was wisely incited by men who invented it,
knowing the true purpose of my mission."  She glanced from the
Commissioner to Master Porson.  "Sir Nicholas Fleming--surely I have
heard his name spoken, as of a good friend to the Holy Father and not
too anxious for the Emperor's marriage with Mary Tudor?"
The Commissioner started in his chair, while she turned serenely upon
his companion.  "And Master Porson," she continued, "as a faithful
servant of His Majesty of Portugal will needs be glad to see a princess
of Portugal take Mary Tudor's place.  Eh?"--for they were eyeing each
the other like two detected schoolboys--"It would seem, sirs, that
though you came together, you were better friends than you guessed.
Glance your eye, Master Porson, over this paper which I shall presently
entrust to you for furtherance; and you will agree with Sir Nicholas
that the prudent course for both of you is to forget, on leaving this
house, that any such person as I was on board the _Saint Andrew._"

The two peered into the parchment and drew back.  "The Emperor--" I
heard the Commissioner mutter with an intake of breath.

"And, as you perceive, in his own handwriting."  She folded up the paper
and, replacing it, addressed my Master.  "Your visitors, sir, deserve
some refreshment for their pains and courtesy."

And that was the end of the conference.  What that paper contained I
know as little as I know by what infernal sorcery it was prepared.
Master Porson folded it up tight in his hand, glancing dubiously at Sir
Nicholas.  My lady stood smiling upon the both for a moment, then
dismissed me to the kitchens upon a pretended errand.  They were gone
when I returned, nor did I again set eyes upon the Commissioner or the
factor.  It is true that the Emperor did about this time break his
pledge with our King Henry and marry a princess of Portugal; and some of
high office in England were not sorry therefore.  But of this enough.


As the days wore on and we heard no more of the wreck, my Master and
Mistress settled down to that retirement from the world which is by
custom allowed to the newly married, but which with them was to last to
the end.  A life of love it was; but--God help us!--no life of
happiness; rather, in process of days, a life of torment.  Can I tell
you how it was?  At first to see them together was like looking through
a glass upon a picture; a picture gallant and beautiful yet removed
behind a screen and not of this world.  Suppose now that by little and
little the glass began to be flawed, or the picture behind it to crumble
(you could not tell which) until when it smiled it smiled wryly, until
rocks toppled and figures fell askew, yet still kept up their pretence
of play against the distorted woodland.  Nay, it was worse than this:
fifty times worse.  For while the fair show tottered, my Master and
Mistress clung to their love; and yet it was just their love which kept
the foundations rocking.

They lived for each other.  They neither visited nor received visits.
Yet they were often, and by degrees oftener, apart; my Master locked up
with his books, my Mistress roaming the walls with her hound or seated
by her lattice high on the seaward side of the castle.  Sometimes (but
this was usually on moonlit nights or windless evenings when the sun
sank clear to view over our broad bay) she would take up her lute and
touch it to one of those outlandish love-chants with which she had first
wiled my Master's heart to her.  As time went on, stories came to us
that these chants, which fell so softly on the ears of us as we went
about the rooms and gardens, had been heard by fishermen riding by their
nets far in the offing--so far away (I have heard) as the Scillies; and
there were tales of men who, as they listened, had seen the ghosts of
drowned mariners rising and falling on the moon-rays, or floating with
their white faces thrown back while they drank in the music; yea, even
echoing the words of the song in whispers like the flutter of birds'
wings.

When first the word crept about that she was a witch I cannot certainly
say.  But in time it did; and, what is more--though I will swear that no
word of Gil Perez' confession ever passed my lips--the common folk soon
held it for a certainty that the cargo saved from the _Saint Andrew_ had
been saved by her magic only; that the plate and rich stuffs seen by my
own eyes were but cheating _simulacra_, and had turned into rubbish at
midnight, scarce an hour before the assault on the Portuguese.

I have wondered since if 'twas this rumour and some belief in it which
held Messrs. Saint Aubyn and Godolphin from offering any further attack
on us.  You might say that it was open to them, so believing, to have
denounced her publicly.  But in our country Holy Church had little
hold--scarce more than the King's law itself in such matters; and within
my memory it has always come easier to us to fear witch-craft than to
denounce it.  Also (and it concerns my tale) the three years which
followed the stranding of the _Saint Andrew_ were remarkable for a great
number of wrecks upon our coast.  In that short time we of our parish
and the men of St. Hilary upon our north were between us favoured with
no fewer than fourteen; the most of them vessels of good burden.  Of any
hand in bringing them ashore I know our gentry to have been innocent.
Still, there were pickings; and finding that my Master held aloof from
all share in such and (as far as could be) held his servants aloof, our
neighbours, though not accepting this for quittance, forbore to press
the affair of the _Saint Andrew_ further than by spreading injurious
tales and whispers.

The marvel was that we of Pengersick (who reaped nothing of this
harvest) fell none the less under suspicion of decoying the vessels
ashore.  More than once in my dealings with the fishermen and tradesmen
of Market Jew, I happened on hints of this; but nothing which could be
taken hold of until one day a certain Peter Chynoweth of that town,
coming drunk to Pengersick with a basket of fish, blurted out the tale.
Said he, after I had beaten him down to a reasonable price, "Twould be
easy enough, one would think, to spare an honest man a groat of the
fortune Pengersick makes on these dark nights."

"Thou lying thief!" said I.  "What new slander is this?"

"Come, come," says he, looking roguish; "that won't do for me that have
seen the false light on Cuddan Point more times than I can count; and so
has every fisherman in the bay."

Well, I kicked him through the gate for it, and flung his basket after
him; but the tale could not be so dismissed.  "It may be," thought I,
"some one of Pengersick has engaged upon this wickedness on his own
account"; and for my Master's credit I resolved to keep watch.

I took therefore the porter into my secret, who agreed to let me through
the gate towards midnight without telling a soul.  I took a sheepskin
with me and a poignard for protection; and for a week, from midnight to
dawn, I played sentinel on Cuddan Point, walking to and fro, or
stretched under the lee of a rock whence I could not miss any light
shown on the headland, if Peter Chynoweth's tale held any truth.

By the eighth trial I had pretty well made up my mind (and without
astonishment) that Peter Chynoweth was a liar.  But scarcely had I
reached my post that night when, turning, I descried a radiance as of a
lantern, following me at some fifty paces.  On the instant I gripped my
poignard and stepped behind a boulder.  The light drew nearer, came, and
passed me.  To my bewilderment it was no lantern, but an open flame,
running close along the turf and too low for anyone to be carrying it:
nor was the motion that of a light which a man carries.
Moreover, though it passed me within half-a-dozen yards and lit up the
stone I stood behind, I saw nobody and heard no footstep, though the
wind (which was south-westerly) blew from it to me.  In this breeze the
flame quivered, though not violently but as it were a ball of fire
rolling with a flickering crest.

It went by, and I followed it at something above walking pace until upon
the very verge of the head-land, where I had no will to risk my neck, it
halted and began to be heaved up and down much like the poop-light of a
vessel at sea.  In this play it continued for an hour at least; then it
came steadily back towards me by the way it had gone, and as it came I
ran upon it with my dagger.  But it slipped by me, travelling at speed
towards the mainland; whither I pelted after it hot-foot, and so across
the fields towards Pengersick.  Strain as I might, I could not overtake
it; yet contrived to keep it within view, and so well that I was bare a
hundred yards behind when it came under the black shadow of the castle
and without pause glided across the dry moat and so up the face of the
wall to my lady's window, which there overhung.  And into this window it
passed before my very eyes and vanished.

I know not what emboldened me, but from the porter's lodge I went
straight up to my Master's chamber, where (though the hour must have
been two in the morning or thereabouts) a light was yet burning.
Also--but this had become ordinary--a smell of burning gums and herbs
filled the passage leading to his door.  He opened to my knock, and
stood before me in his dressing-gown of sables--a tall figure of a man
and youthful, though already beginning to stoop.  Over his shoulder I
perceived the room swimming with coils of smoke which floated in their
wreaths from a brazier hard by the fireplace.

I think his first motion was to thrust me away; but I caught him by the
hand, and with many protestations broke into my tale, giving him no time
to forbid me.  And presently he drew me inside, and shutting the door,
stood upright by the table, facing me with his fingers on the rim as if
they rested there for support.

"Paschal," said he, when at length I drew back, "this must not come to
my lady's ears.  She has been ailing of late."

"Ay, sir, and long since: of a disease past your curing."

"God help us! I hope not," said he; then broke out violently: "She is
innocent, Paschal; innocent as a child!"

"Innocent!" cried I, in a voice which showed how little I believed.

"Paschal," he went on, "you are my servant, but my friend also, I hope.
Nay, nay, I know.  I swear to you, then, these things do but happen in
her sleep.  In her waking senses she is mine, as one day she shall be
mine wholly.  But at night, when her will is dissolved in sleep, the
evil spirit wakes and goes questing after its master."

"Mahound?" I stammered, quaking.

"Be it Satan himself," said he, very low and resolute, "I will win her
from him, though my own soul be the ransom."

"Dear my Master," I began, and would have implored him on my knees; but
he pointed to the door.  "I will win her," he repeated.  "What you have
seen to-night happens more rarely now.  Moreover, the summer is
beginning--"

He paused: yet I had gathered his meaning.  "There will be less peril
for the ships for a while," said I.

Said he: "To _them_ she intends no harm.  It is for her master the light
waves.  Paschal, I am an unhappy man!"  He flung a hand to his forehead,
but recovering himself peered at me under the shadow of it.  "If you
could watch--often--as you have done to-night--you might protect others
from seeing--"

The wisdom of this at least I saw, and gave him my promise readily.
Upon this understanding (for no more could be had) I withdrew me.

The next day, therefore, I moved my bed to a turret-chamber on the angle
of the south-eastern wall whence I could keep my lady's window in view.
I was never a man to need much sleep: but if, through the year which
followed, the apparition escaped once or twice without my cognisance, I
dare take oath this was the extent of it.  It appeared more rarely, as
my Master had promised: and in the end (I think) scarce above once a
month.  In form it never varied from the cresseted globe of flame I had
first seen, and always it took the path across the fields towards Cuddan
Point.  No sound went with it, or announced its going or return: and
while it was absent, my lady's chamber would be utterly dark and silent.
My custom was not to follow it (which I had proved to be useless), but
to let myself out and patrol the walls, satisfying myself that no
watchers lurked about the castle.  I understood now that Pengersick was
reported throughout the neighbourhood to be haunted: and such a report
is not the worst protection.  These vague tales kept aloof the country
people who, but for them, had almost certainly happened on the secret.
And night after night while I watched, my Master wrestled with the Evil
One in his room.

The last time I saw the apparition was on the night of May 10th, 1529,
more than three years after my lady's first coming to Pengersick.
I was prepared for it: for she had been singing at her window a great
part of the afternoon, and I had learnt to be warned by this mood.
The night was a dark one, with flying clouds and a stiff breeze blowing
up from the south-east.  The flame left my lady's window at the usual
hour--a few minutes after midnight--but returned some while before its
due time.  In ordinary it would be away for an hour and a half, or from
that to two hours, but this night I had scarcely begun my rounds before
I saw it returning across the fields.  Nor was this the only surprise.
For as I watched it up the wall and saw it gain my lady's window, I
heard the hound within lift up its voice in a long, shuddering howl.

I lost no time, but made my way to my Master's room.  He, too, had heard
the dog's howl, and was strangely perturbed.  "It means something.
It means something," he kept repeating.  He had already run to his
wife's chamber, but found her in a deep slumber and the hound (which
always slept on the floor at her bed's foot) composing itself to sleep
again, with jowl dropped on its fore-paws.

The next morning I had fixed to ride into the Market Jew to fetch a
packet of books which was waiting there for my Master.  But at the
entrance of the town I found the people in great commotion, the cause of
which turned out to be a group of Turk men gathered at the hither end of
the causeway leading to the Mount.  One told me they were Moslems (which
indeed was apparent at first sight) and that their ship had run ashore
that night, under the Mount; but with how much damage was doubtful.
She lay within sight, in a pretty safe position, and not so badly fixed
but I guessed the next tide would float her if her bottom were not
broken.  The Moslems (nine in all) had rowed ashore in their boat and
landed on the causeway; but with what purpose they had no chance to
explain: for the inhabitants, catching sight of their knives and
scymeters, could believe in nothing short of an intent to murder and
plunder; and taking courage in numbers, had gathered (men and women) to
the causeway-head to oppose them.  To be sure these fears had some
warrant in the foreigners' appearance: who with their turbans, tunics,
dark faces and black naked legs made up a show which Market Jew had
never known before nor (I dare say) will again.

Nor had the mildness of their address any effect but to raise a fresh
commotion.  For, their leader advancing with outstretched hands and
making signals that he intended no mischief but rather sued for
assistance, at once a cry went up, "The Plague!"  "The Plague!" at which
I believe the crowd would have scattered like sheep had not a few sturdy
volunteers with pikes and boat-hooks forbidden his nearer approach.

Into this knot the conference had locked itself when I rode up and--the
crowd making way for me--addressed the strangers in the _lingua Franca_,
explaining that my Master of Pengersick was a magistrate and would be
forward to help them either with hospitality or in lending aid to get
their ship afloat; further that they need have no apprehension of the
crowd, which had opposed them in fear, not in churlishness; yet it might
be wise for the main body to stay and keep guard over the cargo while
their spokesman went with me to Pengersick.

To this their leader at once consented; and we presently set forth
together, he walking by my horse with an agile step and that graceful
bearing which I had not seen since my days of travel: a bearded swarthy
man, extraordinarily handsome in Moorish fashion and distinguished from
his crew not only by authority as patron of the ship, but by a natural
dignity.  I judged him about forty.  Me he treated with courtesy, yet
with a reticence which seemed to say he reserved his speech for my
Master.  Of the wreck he said nothing except that his ship had been by
many degrees out of her bearings: and knowing that the Moorish disasters
in Spain had thrown many of their chiefs into the trade of piracy I was
contented to smoke such an adventurer in this man, and set him down for
one better at fighting than at navigation.

With no more suspicion than this I reached Pengersick and, bestowing the
stranger in the hall, went off to seek my Master.  For the change that
came over my dear lord's face as he heard my errand I was in no way
prepared.  It was terrible.

"Paschal," he cried, sinking into a chair and spreading both hands
helplessly on the table before him, "it is _he!_  Her time is come, and
mine!"

It was in vain that I reasoned, protesting (as I believed) that the
stranger was but a chance pirate cast ashore by misadventure; and as
vain that, his fears infecting me, I promised to go down and get rid of
the fellow on some pretence.

"No," he insisted, "the hour is come.  I must face it: and what is more,
Paschal, I shall win.  Another time I shall be no better prepared.
Bring him to my room and then go and tell my lady that I wish to speak
with her."

I did so.  On ushering in the stranger I saw no more than the bow with
which the two men faced each other: for at once my Master signalled me
to run on my further errand.  Having delivered my message at my lady's
door, I went down to the hall, and lingering there, saw her pass along
the high gallery above the dais towards my lord's room, with the hound
at her heels.

Thence I climbed the stair to my own room: locked the door and anon
unlocked it, to be ready at sudden need.  And there I paced hour after
hour, without food, listening.  From the courtyard came the noise of the
grooms chattering and splashing: but from the left wing, where lay my
Master's rooms, no sound at all.  Twice I stole out along the
corridors and hung about the stair head: but could hear nothing, and
crept back in fear to be caught eavesdropping.

It was about five in the afternoon (I think), all was still in the
courtyard, when I heard the click of a latch and, running to the window,
saw the porter closing his wicket gate.  A minute later, on a rise
beyond the wall, I spied the Moor.  His back was towards the castle and
he was walking rapidly towards Market Jew: and after him padded my
lady's hound.

I hurried along the passages and knocked at my Master's door.  No one
answered.  I could not wait to knock again, but burst it open.


On the floor at my feet lay my Master, and hard by the window my
Mistress with her hands crossed upon a crucifix.  My Master had no
crucifix: but his face wore a smile--a happier one than it had worn for
years.

[1] About 150,000 pounds in present money.



FROZEN MARGIT


_A Narrative of the sufferings of Mr. Obed Lanyon, of Vellingey-Saint
Agnes, Cornwall; Margit Lanyon, his wife; and seventeen persons (mostly
Americans) shipwrecked among the Quinaiult Tribes of the N.W. Coast of
America, in the winter of 1807-8.  With some remarkable Experiences of
the said Margit Lanyon, formerly Pedersen.  Written by the Survivor,
Edom Lanyon, sometime a Commander in the service of the Honourable East
India Company._

My twin brother Obed and I were born on the 21st of March, 1759
(he being the elder by a few minutes), at Vellingey-St. Agnes, or
St. Ann's, a farm on the north coast of Cornwall, owned and cultivated
by our father Renatus Lanyon.   Our mother was a Falmouth woman,
daughter of a ship's captain of that port: and I suppose it was this
inclined us to a sea-faring life.  At any rate, soon after our fifteenth
birthday we sailed (rather against our father's wish) on a short
coasting voyage with our grandfather--whose name was William Dustow.

A second voyage in the early summer of 1776 took us as far as the
Thames.  It happened that the famous Captain Cook was just then
recruiting for his third and (as it proved) his last voyage of
discovery.  This set us talking and planning, and the end was that we
stole ashore and offered ourselves.  Obed had the luck to be picked.
Though very like in face, I was already the taller by two inches; and no
doubt the Captain judged I had outgrown my strength.  But it surprised
me to be rejected when Obed was taken; and disappointed me more: for,
letting alone the prospect of the voyage, we two (as twins, and our
parents' only children) were fond of each other out of the common
degree, and had never thought to be separated.

To speak first of Obed:--Captain Cook put some questions, and finding
that we were under our grandfather's care, would do nothing without his
consent.  We returned to the ship and confessed to the old man, who
pretended to be much annoyed.  But next day he put on his best clothes
and went in search of the great seaman, to Whitehall; and so the matter
was arranged.  Obed sailed in July on board the _Discovery_; shared the
dangers of that voyage, in which the ships followed up the N.W. Coast of
America and pushed into Behring's Strait beyond the 70th parallel; was a
witness, on February 4th, 1779, of his commander's tragical end; and
returned to England in October, 1780.  Eleven years later he made
another voyage to the same N.W. American Coast; this time as master's
mate under Vancouver, who had kept an interest in him since they sailed
together under Cook, and thought highly of him as a practical navigator
and draughtsman.  It was my brother who, under Vancouver, drew up the
first chart of the Straits of Fuca, which Cook had missed: and I have
been told (by a Mr. G--, a clerk to the Admiralty) that on his return he
stood well for a lieutenant's commission--the rule of the Service being
stretched now and then to favour these circumnavigating seamen, many of
whom worked their way aft from the hawse-hole to the quarter deck.
But my father and mother dying just then, and the former having slipped
a particular request into his will, Obed threw up the sea and settled
down in Vellingey as a quiet yeoman farmer.

Meanwhile, in 1779, I had entered the sea service of the Honourable East
India Company; and with passable good fortune had risen in it pretty
fast.  Enough to say, that by the spring of 1796 I was looking forward
to the command of a ship.  Just then my fortune deserted me.  In a
sudden fear of French invasion, our Government bought the four new ships
which the Company had building (and a bad bargain they proved).
This put a stop for the time to all chance of promotion; and a sharp
attack of jaundice falling on top of my disappointments, I took the
usual decrease of pay and the Board's promise to remember my services on
a proper occasion, and hauled ashore to Vellingey for a holiday and a
thorough refit of health.

I believe that the eight or nine following months which Obed and I spent
together were the happiest in our two lives.  He was glad enough to
shoulder off the small business of the farm and turn--as I have seen so
many men play, in a manner, at the professions they have given over--to
his favourite amusement of sounding the coast of Vellingey and
correcting the printed charts.  He kept a small lugger mainly for this
purpose, and plied her so briskly that he promised to know the
sea-bottom between Kelsey Head and Godrevy Rock better than his own
fields.  As for me, after years of salt water and stumping decks, I
asked nothing better than to steer a plough and smell broken soil, and
drowse after supper in an armchair, with good tobacco and Obed for
company.

In this way we passed the winter of 1796-7; until the lambing season,
which fell midway in February.  The year opened wet, with fresh south
westerly winds, which in the second week chopped suddenly; and for four
days a continuous freezing gale blew on us from the N.W. It was then
that the lambs began to drop; and for three nights I exchanged pipe and
fireside for a lantern and the lower corner of Friar's Parc at the back
of the towans, where the ewes were gathered in the lew.[1]  They kept us
so busy that for forty-eight hours we neither changed our clothes (at
least, I did not) nor sat down to a meal.  The sand about Vellingey is
always driving, more or less; and the gale so mixed it up with fine snow
that we made our journeys to and from the house, so to speak, blindfold,
and took our chance of the drifts.  But the evening of the 11th promised
better.  The wind dropped, and in an hour fell to a flat calm: then,
after another hour, began to draw easily off shore--the draught itself
being less noticeable than the way in which it smoothed down the heavy
sea running.  Though the cold did not lift, the weather grew tolerable
once more: and each time I crossed the townplace[2] with a lamb in my
arms, I heard the surf running lower and lower in the porth below
Vellingey.

By day-break (the 12th) it was fallen to nothing: the sky still holding
snow, but sky and sea the same colour; a heavy blueish grey, like steel.
I was coming over the towans, just then, with a lamb under either arm
(making twelve, that night) when I happened to look seaward, and there
saw a boat tossing, about a gunshot from the shore.

She was a long boat, painted white; very low in the sheer, and curved at
stem and stern like a Norwegian; her stem rounded off without a transom,
and scarcely bluffer than her bows.  She carried a mast, stepped right
forward; but no sail.  She was full of people.  I counted five sitting,
all white with snow--one by the mast, three amidships, and one in the
stern sheets, steering.  At least, he had a hand on the tiller: but the
people had given over pulling, and the boat without steerage-way was
drifting broadside-on towards the shore with the set of the tide.

While I stood conning her, up at the house the back-door opened, and my
brother stepped out and across the yard to milk the cows.  His
milk-pails struck against the door-post, and sounded as clear as bells.
I shouted to him and pointed towards the boat: and after looking a
moment, he set down his pails and started off at a run, down towards the
porth.  I then hurried towards the house, where I found Selina, our old
housekeeper, in the kitchen, tending the lambs with warm milk.
Handing the new-comers over to her, I caught up a line and made off
hot-foot after Obed.

At low-water (and the tide had now scarcely an hour to ebb) the sands in
Vellingey Porth measure a good half-mile from the footbridge at its head
to the sea at its base.  My legs were longer than Obed's; but I dare say
he had arrived five minutes ahead of me.  He was standing and calling to
the boat's crew to get out an oar and pull her head-to-sea: for although
the smoothing wind had taken most of the danger out of the breakers,
they were quite able to capsize and roll over any boat that beached
herself in that lubberly fashion.

I ran up panting, and shouted with him--"Pull her round head-to-sea, and
back her in!"

Not a man moved or lifted a hand.  The next moment, a wave tilted and
ran a dozen yards with her, but mercifully passed before it broke.
A smaller one curved on the back-draught and splashed in over her
gunwale as she took ground.  But what knocked the wind out of our sails
was this--As the first wave canted her up, two men had rolled out of her
like logs; and the others, sitting like logs, had never so much as
stirred to help!

"Good Lord!" I called out, and fumbled with my line.  "What's the
meaning of it?"

"The meaning is," said Obed, "they're dead men, every mother's son.
They're frozen," said he: "I've seen frozen seamen before now."

"I'll have in the boat, anyway," I said.  "Here, catch hold and pay
out!"  Running in, I reached her just as she lifted again; and managed
to slew her nose in-shore, but not in time to prevent half-a-hogshead
pouring over her quarter.  This wave knocked her broadside-on again, and
the water shipped made her heavier to handle.  But by whipping my end of
the line round the thwart in which her mast was stepped, for Obed to
haul upon, and myself heaving at her bows, we fetched her partly round
as she lifted again, and ran her into the second line of breakers, which
were pretty well harmless.

"How many on board?" Obed sang out.

"Five!" called I, having counted them.  Up to this I had had enough to
do with the boat; besides looking after myself.  For twice the heave had
tilled me up to the armpits, and once lifted me clean off my feet; and I
had no wish to try swimming in my sea-boots.  "Five," said I; "and two
overboard--that makes seven.  Come and look here!"

"Tend to the boat first," he said.  "I've seen frozen seamen."

"You never saw the likes of this," I answered.  So he ran in beside me.

The boat had her name (or that of the ship she belonged to) painted in
yellow and black on the gunwale strake by her port quarter--
"MARGIT PEDERSEN, BERGEN": but by their faces we could not miss knowing
to what country the poor creatures belonged.  They were--

    1.  A tall man, under middle age; seated by the mast and leaning
    against it (his right arm frozen to it, in fact, from the elbow up)
    with his back towards the bows.  The snow was heaped on his head and
    shoulders like a double cape.  This one had no hair on his face; and
    his complexion being very fresh and pink, and his eyes wide open, it
    was hard to believe him dead.  Indeed, while getting in the boat,
    I had to speak to him twice, to make sure.

    2.  A much older man, and shorter, with a rough grey beard.  He sat
    in the stern sheets, with his right hand frozen on the tiller.
    Our folk had afterwards to unship the tiller when they came to lift
    him out: and carried him up to the house still holding it.  Later on
    we buried it beside him.  This man wore a good blue coat and black
    breeches; and at first we took him to be the captain.  He turned out
    to be the mate, Knud Lote, who had put on his best clothes when it
    came to leaving the ship.  His eyes were screwed up, and the brine
    had frozen over them, like a glaze, or a big pair of spectacles.

    3.  Against his knee rested the head of a third man--one of the
    three I had first seen sitting amidships.  When the other two
    toppled overboard this one had slid off the thwart and fallen
    against the steersman.  He was an oldish man, yellow and thin and
    marked with the small-pox; the only one in the boat who might have
    come from some other country than Norway.  His eyes were cast down
    in a quiet way, and he seemed to be smiling.  He wore a seaman's
    loose frock, ragged breeches, and sea-boots.

    4 and 5.  Stretched along the bottom-boards lay a tall young man
    with straw-coloured hair and beard: and in his arms, tightly
    clasped, and wrapped in a shawl and seaman's jacket, a young woman.
    Her arms were about the young man and her face pressed close and
    hidden against his side.  He must have taken off his jacket to warm
    her; for the upper part of his body had no covering but a flannel
    shirt and cinglet.

While we stood there the tide drained back, leaving the bows of the boat
high and dry.  As I remember, Obed was the first to speak; and he said
"She has beautiful hair."  This was the bare truth: a great lock of it
lay along the bottom-board like a stream of guineas poured out of a
sack.  He climbed into the boat and lifted the shawl from her face.

Those neighbours of ours, friends and acquaintances, who afterwards saw
Margit Pedersen at Vellingey, and for whom this account is mainly
written, will not need a description of her.  Many disliked her: but
nobody denied that she was a lovely woman; and I am certain that nobody
could see her face and afterwards forget it.  It was, then and always,
very pale: but this had nothing to do with ill health.  In fact I am not
sure it would have been noticeable but for the warm colour of her hair
and her red lips and (especially) her eyebrows and lashes, of a deep
brown that seemed almost black.  Her lips were blue with the cold, just
now: but the contrast between her eyebrows and her pale face and yellow
hair struck me at once and kept me wondering: until Obed startled me by
dropping the shawl and falling on his knees beside her.  "Good God,
Dom!" he sang out: "the girl's alive!"

The next moment, of course, I was as wild as he.  "Get her out, then," I
cried, "and up to the house at once!"

"I can't loosen the man's arms!"  Though less than a yard apart, we both
shouted at the top of our voices.

"Nonsense!" I answered: but it was true all the same--as I found out
when I stepped in to Obed's help.  "We must carry up the pair as they
are," I said.  "There's no time to lose."

We lifted them out, and making a chair of our hands and wrists, carried
them up to Vellingey; leaving the others in the boat, now for an hour
well above reach of the tide.  And here I must tell of something that
happened on the way: the first sign of Obed's madness, as I may call it.
All of a sudden he stopped and panted, from the weight of our load, I
supposed.  "Dom," he said, "I believe that nine men out of ten would
kiss her!"

I told him not to be a fool, and we walked on.  In the town-place we
happened on the shepherd, Reuben Santo, and sent him off for help, and
to look after the frozen people in the boat.  The sight of us at the
door nearly scared Selina into her grave: but we allowed her no time for
hysterics.  We laid the pair on a blanket before the open fire, and very
soon Obed was trying to force some warm milk and brandy between the
girl's lips.  I think she swallowed a little: but the first time she
opened her eyes was when one of the lambs (which everyone had neglected
for twenty minutes or so) tottered across the kitchen on his foolish
legs and began to nuzzle at her face.  Obed at the moment was trying to
disengage the dead man's arms.  A thought struck Selina at once.
"Put the lamb close against her heart," she said.  "That'll warm her
more than any fire."

So we did, making the lamb lie down close beside her; and it had a
wonderful effect.  In less than half-an-hour her pulse grew moderately
firm and she had even contrived to speak a word or two, but in
Norwegian, which none of us understood.  Obed by this time had loosened
the dead man's arms; and we thought it best to get her upstairs to bed
before the full sense of her misfortune should afflict her.
Obed carried her up to the spare-room and there left her to Selina;
while I saddled horse and rode in to Truro, for Doctor Mitchell.

Much of what followed is matter of public knowledge.  Our folks carried
the dead Norwegians up to Church-town, including one of the two that had
fallen overboard (the next tide washed him in; the other never came to
land); and there buried them, two days later, in separate graves, but
all close together.  The boat being worthless, we sawed it in two just
abaft the mast and set the fore-part over the centre grave, which was
that of Captain Pedersen, the young man we had carried up with Margit.
The mast rotted and fell, some years ago, although carefully stayed: but
the boat, with the names painted on it, remains to this day.  Also we
set up a small wooden cross by each man's grave, with his name upon it.
Margit was able, from our description, to plan out the right name for
each.

On the third day an interpreter came over from Penzance.  Margit could
not yet leave her bed: and before he stepped up to question her, I took
him aside and showed a small Norwegian Bible we had found in the pocket
of the seaman's jacket to which she owed her life.  On the first page
was some foreign writing which I could not make out.  The interpreter
translated it: first the names "Margit Hansen to Nils Pedersen": and
after them, this strange verse from the _Song of Solomon_--strange, I
mean, to find written in such a place--"Let him kiss me with the kisses
of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine."

The interpreter, Mr. Scammel, went upstairs, and she told him her story.
"Our vessel," she said (I give it in brief) "was the _Margit Pedersen_,
brig.  She belonged to me and was called after me.  We were bound for
the Tagus with a cargo of salted fish which I had bought at Bergen from
the Lofoden smacks--fish for the Roman Catholics to eat in Lent.
Nils Pedersen, the captain, was my husband:  Knud Lote was mate."
Mr. Scammell having expressed some surprise that so young a man should
have been captain, she explained, "He was twenty-two.  I made him
captain.  My father and mother died: they had not wished me to marry
him.  They were proud.  But they left very little money, considering;
and with it I bought the brig and cargo.  She was an old craft, half
rotten.  We had fair weather, mostly, down the English Channel and
almost to Ushant.  There we met a strong southerly gale, and in the
middle of it a pintle of our rudder gave way and the loose rudder
damaged our stern-post.  We tried to bear up for Falmouth, but she would
not steer; and we drove up towards the Irish Coast, just missing Scilly.
On the 8th the wind changed to N.W. and increased.  That night, as Nils
tried to lay to, she carried away her fore-mast, which had been shaky
for days.  She was now leaking fast.  At noon on the 9th we managed to
launch a boat, and abandoned her.  She sank at four o'clock: we saw her
go down.  The weather grew colder, that night.  I think it snowed all
the time: and the seas were too heavy to let the boat run.  The men
pulled to keep her nose to them and the wind, and so she drifted.
I forget when they gave over pulling.  For a night and a day I baled
steadily.  After that I lay most of the time in the bottom of the boat.
Our food was almost done.  It was very cold.  That is all I can
remember."

And this, I think, was all we ever heard from her.  On his return to
Penzance, Mr. Scammell sent me a Norwegian dictionary; and with the help
of it Obed and I soon managed to talk a little with her, in a mixture of
Norwegian and English.  But she never wanted to speak of the past, and
fell silent whenever we spoke of it.  What astonished me more was that,
though she told us the names of the dead men, she showed no further
interest in them.  At first, knowing how weak she was, and fearing to
distress her, I fought shy of the subject; but one day, towards the end
of the third week--she being strong enough to walk a moderate distance--
I plucked up courage and asked if she cared to come with me to the
churchyard.  She agreed, and that afternoon, after a heavy shower, we
walked thither together.  I feared what effect the first sight of her
husband's grave might work on her feelings; and all the way kept wishing
that we had omitted to set up the boat and mast.  But she looked at them
calmly, and at the graves.  "That is good," she said: "you have done
great kindness to them.  I will not come any more."  And so she prepared
to walk away.

I own that this seemed to me unfeeling.  Outside the churchyard I pulled
from my pocket the small Bible.  "This belongs to you," I said: "I have
kept it to help me with your language"--but I held it open at the
fly-leaf.  She glanced at it, "Oh yes, I gave it to Nils, my husband.
You wish to keep it?"

"You were very fond of him, to judge from this," I said; and halted,
expecting her to be angry.  But she halted too, and said quite coolly--
looking at me straight--"Yes?  Oh yes; very much."

That same evening I spoke to Obed as we sat alone with our pipes.
"I suppose," said I as carelessly as I could, "Margit Pedersen will be
leaving us before long."  He looked up sharply, and began to shift the
logs on the hearth.  "What makes you say so?" he asked.  "Well, she will
have friends in Bergen, and business--"  "Has she written to her
friends?" he interrupted.  "Not to my knowledge: but she won't be
staying here for ever, I suppose."  "When she chooses to go, she can.
Are you proposing to turn her out?  If so, I'd have you to mind that
Vellingey is my house, and I am master here."

This was an unworthy thing to say, and he said it with a fury that
surprised me.  Obed and I had not quarrelled since we were boys.  I put
a stopper on my tongue, and went on smoking: and after a while he began
to talk again in his natural way on ordinary matters.

Margit stayed on; and to all appearance our life at Vellingey fell back
into its old groove.  As a matter of fact there was all the difference
in the world--a difference felt before it was seen, and not to be summed
up by saying that a woman sat at our table.  I believe I may quite
fairly lay the blame on Obed.  For the first time in our lives he kept a
part of his mind hidden from me; he made show enough of frankness in his
talk, but I knew him far too well to miss the suspicion behind it.  And
his suspicion bred suspicion in me.  Yet though I searched, I could find
nothing amiss in his outward bearing.  If he were indeed in love with
the girl--her age, she told us, was twenty-one--he gave no sign upon
which one could lay hold.  And certainly Margit's bearing towards us was
cool and friendly and impartial as the strictest could desire.  Of the
two, I had, perhaps, more of her company, simply because Obed spent most
of his time in the lugger, while I worked in the fields and within easy
reach of an afternoon's stroll.  Margit would be busy with housework
most of the morning, or in the kitchen, helping Selina--"domineering,"
Selina preferred to call it.

For, whatever our feelings, Selina had set her face against the
new-comer from the first.  She started, no doubt, with the old woman's
whiddle that no good ever comes of a person saved from the sea.  But as
time went on she picked up plenty of other reasons for dislike.
Margit took charge from the day she came downstairs, and had a cold way
of seeing that her orders were attended to.  With about twenty words of
English she at once gave battle to Selina, who had bullied us two men
from childhood; and routed her.  The old woman kept up a running fight
for a week before appealing to Obed, and this delay cost her everything.
Obed flew in a rage that more than equalled her own, and had the
advantage to be unusual and quite unexpected by her.  She ran from him
to the kitchen, in tears; and thenceforth was a beaten woman, however
much she might grumble at the "foreigner" and "interloper."

For me, I will confess, and have done with it, that before a month was
out my interest in this pale foreign woman, who moved about the house so
quietly and surely, had grown to a degree that troubled me.  That Obed
had suspected me before he had any cause made it no easier now to play a
concealed game at cross-purposes; and no pleasanter.  In the two months
that followed I hated myself pretty often, and at times came near to
despise myself for the thought that before long I might be hating Obed.
This would never have done: and luckily I saw it in time.  Towards the
end of June I made application to the Board: and left Vellingey in July,
to sail for Bombay on board the _Warren Hastings_, in my old capacity of
first mate.  My abandoning the field to Obed would deserve some credit,
had Margit ever by word or look given me the slightest reason to hope.
But she had not; indeed I hoped that she had never guessed the state of
my feelings.

Eighteen months passed before I returned to Vellingey--this time on a
short leave.  Obed had written constantly and with all the old
familiarity; a good deal concerning Margit--her health, her walks, her
household business--everything, in short, but what I expected and
dreaded to hear.  "Come," I said to myself, "five minutes' start in life
and eighteen months in courtship is no such bad allowance for Obed.
Perhaps he will allow me now to have _my_ turn."

I had this thought in my head as I drew near Vellingey in a light gig
hired from the Truro post-master.  It was a rainy afternoon in January,
and a boisterous north-wester blew the Atlantic weather in our teeth as
we mounted the rise over Vellingey churchtown.  My head being bent down,
I did not observe the figure of a woman coming up the village street,
but looked up on hearing the sound of her clogs close beside the gig.
It was Selina, tearful, carrying a bundle.

"Whatever is the matter?" I asked, on pulling up.

"They've turned me to door!" she moaned.  "My dear, they've turned me to
door!"

She was tramping home to her cousins in St. Day parish.   Not another
night would she sleep at Vellingey--to be trampled on.  Of course she
accused the "foreign woman ": but I, it seemed, had started the quarrel
this time; or, rather, it started over the preparations for my
home-coming--some trifling matter of cookery.  Selina knew my tastes.
Margit professed to know them better.  Such are women.

I own that as I sent the poor soul on her way, with a promise that the
gig should carry back her boxes from Vellingey and a secret resolve that
she should return to us within a week, I could not avoid a foolish
pleasure in the thought that Margit deemed my coming of such importance.
Then it occurred to me that her position now as a single woman alone at
Vellingey lay open to scandal.  The sooner I tested my growing hopes,
the better.

I did so, the second evening, after supper.  Obed had stepped out to
make the round of the farm buildings and lock up.  Margit had removed
the white cloth, and was setting the brass candlesticks and tobacco jar
on the uncovered table.

"What is going to happen about Selina?" I asked, from my chair.

Margit set down a candlestick.  "Selina has gone," she said quietly.

"But people will talk, if you stay here alone with us, or with Obed.
You mustn't mind my saying this."

"Oh, no.  I suppose they will talk."

I stood up.  "I take it," said I, "you cannot be quite blind to my
feelings, Margit.  I came home on purpose to speak to you: but perhaps,
if it had not been for this, I might have put off speaking for some
days.  If you care for me at all, though, I think you can answer.
My dear, if you will marry me it will make me a happy man."

She was fingering the candle-base, just touching the brass with her
finger-tips and withdrawing them gently.  She looked up.  "I rather
thought," she said, "you would have spoken last night.  Obed asked me
this morning--he gave you that chance: and I have promised to marry
him."

"Good Lord! but this is a question of loving a man!"

"I have never said that I like you better.  I shall make Obed a very
good wife."

Less than a minute later, Obed came into the room, after slamming the
back-door loudly.  He did not look at our faces: but I am sure that he
knew exactly what had happened.

They were married in April, a fortnight after my leaving England on
another voyage.  We parted the best of friends; and in the course of the
next seven years I spent most of my holidays with them.  No married life
could well be smoother than was Obed's and Margit's in all this time.
He worshipped her to fondness; and she, without the least parade of
affection, seemed to make his comfort and well-being the business of her
life.  It hardly needs to be said that my unfortunate proposal was
ignored by all of us as a thing that had never happened.

In October, 1802, I reached the height of my ambition, being appointed
to the command of the Company's ship _Macartney_, engaged in the

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