The secret in the hill

by Bernard Capes

PART II.

CHAPTER I.
THE BADGER.

It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression, that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now—an interval of five years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse—the “shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches.

Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”—to put an extreme case—at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late Commission, [Reported in 1864.] are peculiar to this seminary of the gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in the world.

Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.

Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention.

As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth, mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters. There were some bronze coins certainly—none too many—whose value was conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard.

“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the principal yet—not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my boy—then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court itself.”

Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.

He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than passengers in a train.

Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments.

None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to come.

He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were become of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and affection. As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable visitors, of whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were doomed to non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it, at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most operative. Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must be confessed, a sinister notoriety—a name for determined and organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor welcomed, the whole native population, or at least with few exceptions, forming a lawless confederacy for the disposal of contraband. But after the earthquake (or what was generally cited for such, and by many, I am persuaded, who knew better, though it made no difference in the moral), things should have been otherwise, when the new rector, using its opportunity to reclaim his wayward flock to godliness, sought to compensate by legitimate trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is easier to cure the itch than to convince others of your patient’s recovered cleanness. And so Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the penalty of Dunberry unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was in the position of having dropped the carnal substance for the moral shadow. And what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous condition.

The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick might be considered the prominent expression. This man deteriorated thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the practical uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation was a real grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not always proof against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this cherished convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he chose to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst whom he included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and me, and in only less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But bankruptcy knows no reason.

At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a shambling, degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink and his sense of injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings; still, as of old, the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old, policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in form, while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a main factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave him.

* * * * * *

It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the promise of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks, and sudden rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich harvest of driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of frenzied waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like swallows blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds quieted, and one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were moved to stroll out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It was so peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping towards its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle drift or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and there on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness but the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below.

We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and silent congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea still mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners, where the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches, colossal-shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under the weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that were without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and tragic in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation of giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer. An odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on the ground.

“Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler chaps down here ever walk!”

With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice.

“Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed.

Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a grey shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not.

“O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away—Harry! at the back here.”

The sound of my voice, little though it was, appeared to startle the creature. It turned, paused as if regarding us, seemed to be coming our way, and vanished again into the glooms from which it had emerged. I had had a dreadful moment; and so it was with a sense of outrage that I heard Harry laugh out as he sprang to his feet.

“O!” he cried, skipping and sniggering before me; “to see it come so pat, and hear his tone change. Wasn’t it beautiful? And him not to know a bogey from a badger! O, Master Dicky, really!”

“A badger!” I echoed awfully. Then recovered myself and added with a rather agitated laugh; “Well, don’t pretend you weren’t startled yourself at first.”

“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, you old donkey, I brought you up here on purpose, on the chance of seeing it.”

“Bosh!” I snapped.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll show you its tracks in the mud to-morrow, if you don’t believe me. I guessed it was somewhere in the hill, and now I know.”

“Did you?” I said resentfully. “Then I’d rather you played the fool with me by day.”

“Played!” said he; “what have I played? ’Twas you began with your ghosts and things. Besides, any fool knows that badgers only walk at night.”

He sniggered again; then, seeing that I was hurt, took my arm in his, and patted me down.

“It’s really rather a start, though,” said he—“I mean the thing being here at all; because they live in woods, you know. But I’ll tell you what I make of it; that it was driven down by those burnings” (it had been a very hot summer, with two fires, destroying some acres, up in the Court woods) “to get near the water. Anyhow, I spotted its tracks in the soft ground here some days ago, and made up my mind to run it to earth. We’ll come up to-morrow and have a look by daylight.”

We did as he proposed, and found, amongst the bramble and other vegetable and miscellaneous litter which choked the neighbourhood of the great tumbled mass of masonry, indubitable signs of a passage leading to the creature’s earth.

“Don’t say anything about it,” said Harry, desisting, excited, from his examination; “and we’ll just have a try to dig it out some day. Wonder if it could tell us anything about the earthquake?”

He was staring at me, and I at him.

“Harry,” I whispered, thrilling all through; “supposing there’s a way down after all!”

“Don’t you—believe it, sir,” said Rampick’s breathless voice.

The man had, after his customary fashion, come softly upon us from some hidden coign of espial. His hands were slouched in his pockets, and he mumbled a little black clay pipe, shaped like a death’s head, between his teeth.

“I wouldn’t think—if I were you,” he went on, “fur to pry into the Lord’s secrets. Let the grave keep its own—pervided I may be so bold.”

“I wish you wouldn’t pry into our secrets, Mr. Rampick,” said Harry, loftily. “It’s got to be rather a nuisance this, you know.”

The ex-smuggler snatched his pipe from his lips, and seemed for an instant as if he were about to dash it to the ground in a fury. But he recovered himself, and pretended only to be shaking out the ashes before he returned the cutty to his mouth.

“Secrets?” said he. “Why, you makes me laugh to talk of having secrets here!”

He broke off, restless in a shaking way to get his pipe to draw; then turned suddenly upon me.

“You’re a gen’leman, sir,” he said, “and should know better—nor to meddle in things what don’t concarn you. The Lord has putt His seal on this here hill: you let it alone—if I may make free to be His mouthpiece, like Ezekiel what was told to warn the evil doers that they come not to grief—and die.”

I laughed.

“O, you flatter yourself, Mr. Rampick!” I said. “You aren’t a bit like Ezekiel.”

He stood regarding me, half perplexed, half malignant, for a minute; then settled himself down on a stone and smoked away, silent, his eyes staring and full of a vicious resolution.

“Come on, Dick,” said Harry, seeing it obvious that the man meant to outstay us, and took my arm and walked me off.

“But we’ll have the badger, nevertheless,” he said, when we were out of hearing, “and in spite of that sot. Can’t make him out, can you? Should have thought he’d have welcomed the chance of recovering some of his old brandy tubs.”

CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT STORM.

“Which it’s well known that ’ope deferred maketh a cat sick,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, with unintentional irreverence, referring to my report to my uncle of our late meeting with Mr. Rampick. She was by this time quite in the family confidence. “Bless you, Master Richard,” said she, “it’s not the Lord’s secret the man’s so keerful of; it’s ’is hown, living all these years on the ’opes of salvidge from the ’ill, and jealous of hothers steppin’ hin and anticepting of ’im.”

Uncle Jenico laughed.

“You’re still as sceptical as ever about the earthquake, Mrs. Puddephatt,” said he. “Now, it occurs to me, if the hill was, as you suppose, a rendezvous for smugglers, who by some folly entombed themselves therein, why wasn’t the whole village plunged immediately into mourning for the loss at a blow of so many fathers and brothers?”

Mrs. Puddephatt, standing with folded arms and a bleak, patient smile, awaited his good pleasure to answer.

“Hev you adone, sir?” she now demanded. “Don’t let me hinterrupt you before you’ve got it hall hout.”

“Thank you,” said Uncle Jenico, a little abashed. “I think there’s nothing more.”

“Ho!” said the lady, drawing in a sharp breath. “Then let me hexpress at once, sir, before more’s said, my hobligation for your supposing as I’m supposing.”

“I admit it was unpardonable,” answered my uncle, with a beaming but rather frightened smile. “I should have understood, of course, that you have warrant for your smugglers.”

“Not my smugglers, sir,” she said, “begging your pardon. Faults there may be in my pronounciation; but ’awking and spitting in his langwidge was never yet, so far as I know, laid to the charge of a Londoner.”

“My dear soul!” began Uncle Jenico. But she interrupted him—

“No, sir; nor to hend the names of his towns with a hoath, which it is not permitted to a lady’s lips to pollute themselves with huttering.”

“O, really, Mrs. Puddephatt, I don’t understand!” said my uncle in despair.

“I dare say not, sir,” went on the inexorable female. “But you must excuse me if I draw the line at Hamster and Rotter.”

“O!” said Uncle Jenico, gathering light through the gloom. “You mean to imply that these smugglers were Dutchmen?”

She condescended to smile a little, and, pursing her lips, nodded at him with a very stiff neck.

“Bein’, you see, a Londoner yourself, sir, to which a nod is as good as a wink. It was Dutchmen what landed and stowed the stuff, and Dunberry what distributed of it. They howned to no connection with one another, and worked apart, which was their safety. Dunberry, bless you, would be dreaming in their beds that hinnercent, while ’Olland would be stuffing of the ’ill with contraband. Honly that Rampick was the master sperrit and go-between; and now you knows the truth about ’im.”

We both stared at her breathless.

“Then,” said my uncle at last, “the unfortunate creatures caught up there, if caught they were——”

“Made no widders in Dunberry, sir,” she put in decisively.

“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, much agitated. “Then Rampick——”

He turned to me.

“Don’t bait the man, Dick,” he said. “Remember, whoever’s to blame for it, he’s half crazed by his misfortunes; and small wonder, when some of us find it difficult to keep our heads in prosperity. Why, dear, dear! It isn’t the part of luck to throw stones, and certainly not at a dog in a trap. It’s like enough the poor creature’s dangerous. I dare say I should be if things had gone against me. Don’t bait him, Dick. Give him a wide berth.”

He had always been a little nervous about this fellow and our attitude towards him. His appeal was, however, superfluous. The ex-smuggler was not attractive; and Harry and I were certainly never the first to invite collision with him. For, what with blight and rum and sanctimony—which last, from being assumed for a disguise, had become a half-demoniac possession in him—he was little better at this day than a smouldering madman. Nevertheless, I tried loyally henceforth to emulate Uncle Jenico’s better Christianity by making allowances for the man because of his provocation. After all, calumny could visit him with no more formidable charge than that of having been a successful smuggler—a negative indictment even in these days. And perhaps, the main impeachment admitted, Mrs. Puddephatt’s cockney perspicacity was not so deadly a detective as she supposed.

I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the local esprit de corps which hid the real truth from him. Now much was explained—provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to discover what had been kept from us—much, that is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.”

In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.

That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf—the German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall.

One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering round to the side where——

We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in a pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved by a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door. The wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged and stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be seen—only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.

“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”

But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the homeward march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the storm awed us, I think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.

As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and shuddering between the sheets.

CHAPTER III.
OPEN SESAME.

I had a vision sometimes of our tight little island lying on the sea like a round of bread and butter on a plate, and the Angel of the Storm amusing himself by biting patterns out of its edges. The coast in our part of the world was particularly inviting to him, because, I suppose, it was crumb, and not rocky with crust like other parts. Anyhow he never flew near without setting his teeth in it somewhere, and on this occasion to such gluttonous effect that he must have blown himself out before he had fairly settled down to his meal. His attack was as short as it was violent. For miles north and south the cliffs had been torn and gulped—only the birds, mapping them from above, could have said into what new fantastic outline. Landmarks were gone, and little bays formed where had been promontories. Here and there a fisherman’s boat had been licked out of its winter perch, that that same angel might play bounce-ball with it on the cliffs until it was broken to bits. The wreck and flotsam on the shore were indescribable; and sad and ugly was the sight of more than one drowned mariner entangled in them. I turn my memory gladly from such retrospects, to concentrate it upon those features of the havoc which most concern this history.

Waterside folk are a strangely incurious and fatalistic race. Once having satisfied themselves after a storm that their craft, disposed here and there in winter quarters, are untouched, the changes wrought on their sea-front interest them only in so far and so long as those changes mean profitable wreckage. When that is all gathered, they withdraw again to their winter burrows and winter occupations, and leave the foreshore to its natural desolation.

At least, that is what Dunberry did after the gale and within a couple of days following it, than which no longer was needed, it appeared, to secure any salvage worth the landing. For there is this characteristic of great tempests, that from their destructive rage they yield a poorer harvest of “whole grain,” so to speak, than do moderate ones. The latter, maybe, deposit some literal pickings in the shape of crates, barrels, seamen’s chests, etc., yet compact; the former for the most part mere disjecta membra. It followed, therefore, that when Harry and I next visited the beach—which, as it happened, he having been away, and I confined to the house with a beastly cold, we did not do until the afternoon of the third day succeeding that night of uproar—we found we had the whole place virtually to ourselves.

Uncle Jenico, who, from his anxious concern for me, had also kept at home during the interval, came with us, full of suppressed eagerness to glean the torn fields of shingle for relics. I think I only realized the self-restraint which his affection must have imposed upon him in those two days, when I saw the almost childish joy with which he greeted the sight of the weedy litter strewn, as far as the eye could reach, along the shore.

“Why, Richard!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands, while his spectacles seemed to twinkle again, “here’s a chance indeed! It’s an ill wind that blows nobody—— Poor souls, poor souls! I feel like robbing the grave to take such advantage of their misery.”

His countenance fell a moment; but his mood was not proof against the stupendous prospect.

“The sea’s a pretty big grave, sir,” said Harry. “You might as well have scruples about digging gold out of the earth, seeing we’re all buried there.”

“That’s true,” said Uncle Jenico, with serious delight. “That’s quite true, my boy. I only hope I’ve not left it to too late.”

This gave me a little qualm.

“Shall I come with you, uncle?” I said.

“No, Dicky,” he answered; “no, no, no. You and Harry amuse yourselves as you will. I wouldn’t deny myself for anything the gratification of the treat I’m going to bring you by-and-by. It’s selfish, no doubt; but—but I’d rather be alone.”

And he hobbled away, calling out to us not to let our expectations run too high, or he might be defrauded of his opportunity to surprise us.

“He’s a real trump,” said Harry. “I hope you think so, Dick.”

“Of course I do,” I answered, rather testily, and began to whistle.

“That’s all right, then,” said he. “And now let’s explore.”

It was a fine, still afternoon, with the tide at quiet ebb, and a touch of frost in the air. The sun, low down, burned like a winter fire, and gleamed with a light of sadness on the ribs of the gaunt wreck lying far away on the Weary Sands. She was visible only at low water; at high being completely submerged. No one, so far as I knew, had yet had the curiosity or venturesomeness to row out and investigate the poor castaway. It was just plain to see, by the aid of glasses, that she had broken her back on the drift, and that only her stern half remained, wedged into the sand. But what her name or condition Dunberry had not had the energy to inquire.

We were standing at gaze at the foot of the Gap, and when Uncle Jenico went north, we, in obedience to his wish to be left alone, turned our faces down the coast. But we had not taken a score or so of steps when we hooted out simultaneously over the sight that was suddenly revealed to us. The storm had bolted a great hunk, good ten feet through at its thickest, of the Mitre, obliterating the already half-effaced step-way by which Rampick had been wont to ascend, and laying bare, high up in the cliff, a mass of broken masonry. From the character of this last it was evident at a glance what had happened. The seaward limit to the crypts of the old abbey had been shorn through, and the extreme vaulting of that ancient underworld exposed. Nor was this all. The well, now thus further isolated from the hill which had once contained it, was grown, from the washing away of the sand at its base, an apparent five feet or so taller, and was leaning outwards at a distinctly acuter and more ominous angle with the shore.

We stood excited a moment, then, without a word, raced to get a closer view. The wrack and downfall, as we looked up at their traces, must have been stupendous; yet so great had been the pulverising force of the waves, the mighty silt from them, except for a few tumbled blocks of stone, was all dispersed and distributed about the shore below, so that a new cliff face, clear of ruin, went up in a pretty clean sweep from beach to summit sixty feet above. From the lower curve of this, where it ran out and down into the sand, the well projected, not ten feet above us, like a little tower of Pisa; and yet thirty feet higher, at a point in the hill face about on a level with the well top, gaped the jagged ruin of masonry which the storm had laid bare.

“Dick!” whispered Harry—“Dick!” (He was gulping and gripping my arm hard, as he stared up.) “Supposing we could climb to there and look in!”

“Yes!” I choked back. I knew what was in his mind; and the thought fascinated while it frightened me horribly.

“I’ve never seen a Dutchman,” he said. “Mrs. Puddephatt, she—it would be fun to find out the truth. What are they like?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, shivering. “They wear lots of breeches, I believe. But it’s no good. The place is all choked up. You can see for yourself.”

There was no apparent entrance that way, indeed. The contour of the vaulting was roughly discernible, it is true, but so stopped with mud and débris as to offer no visible passage.

“Besides,” I went on, swallowing fast and trying to escape from the fluttering spell the mere suggestion had laid upon me,—“whether it was an earthquake or gunpowder, it’s all the same. It must be just all squash and ruin inside; and—and the things——” I stuck, feeling that I dare not speculate further.

Harry released my arm, and for some time looked down, making thoughtful patterns with his foot in the sand.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, raising his face suddenly. “But I’d mighty like to see.”

We were both rather silent for the rest of the afternoon; and, though we neither of us alluded to the subject for a day or two afterwards, it was evident it stood between us. We avoided the spot, too; until one evening a long ramble brought us back by the shore past it. Then, by a common impulse, we stopped, and stood gaping silent up once more. The light from the sinking sun smote level upon the face of the cliff, so that it stood out as bright as a grate back. Its surface, quite dried from the tempest, reflected no glaze of water. The rivulets of mud, which had flowed over and sealed the scar of ruin above, were hardened like plaster, though shrinkage had opened black fissures in them here and there.

Harry, softly whistling, left me suddenly, and, with his hands in his pockets, toiled indifferently up the slope to the well foot. Here, still whistling, he began kicking round the base; but in a moment desisted and called to me. I went up, and he fell upon his knees, and set to scraping with his fingers.

“See?” he said, stopping.

“No; what?” I answered.

“Why, look, you bat!” said he. “Nothing under; nothing deeper. Here’s the last bottom course of the thing; the foundation stones, or I’m a——”

He checked himself, grinning.

“I was going to say ‘Dutchman,’” said he; “and, for all we know, they may be listening up there.”

“O, don’t be a beast!” I exclaimed, with a wriggle of discomfort.

He chuckled again.

“Well, anyhow,” he said, “here’s the old well just standing on its end, like a drain-pipe with a tilt to it. If we brought spades and dug away underneath on the outside, it would fall—and on the top of us, too; but that’s a detail. Wonder the storm didn’t finish it, don’t you? Must have come pretty near to.”

As he spoke, staring up at me, he suddenly uttered a soft exclamation, and scrambling to his feet, pulled at my arm.

“Look there!” he whispered. “Don’t move!”

I followed the direction of his hand, which was pointing to the scar in the cliff-face above. I could see nothing.

“Hush, you old fool!” he said impatiently. “Keep quiet!”

I did not stir; till, at the end of a long interval, something made me start involuntarily. It was a wink—a flutter—a motion of some sort, I knew not what, on the hill front.

“Did you see?” whispered Harry.

“Yes,” I muttered back. “What was it?”

He ran down the slope to the sand, and I followed at a leap, thinking he meant that the cliff was falling. But when I saw his face I knew that some excitement other than fear was moving him.

“It was the badger,” he said, turning sharp on me. “Now, do you understand what that means?”

Perhaps I had a glimmering; but I shook my head feebly to repudiate it.

“Why!” he cried reproachfully. “Dicky, you gowk! If he goes to earth at the top and comes and puts his nose out here, what does it mean but that the crypts ain’t as blocked as we supposed!”

“There must be a passage through, of course,” I murmured.

Harry nodded, primming his lips. “Well?” said he.

“Why, it don’t follow that where a badger can go, we can.”

“It does with me,” he said shortly.

An odd little silence fell between us. Then Harry turned away, and began to move off, whistling. At a bound I was after him, with a furious red face, and, seizing his arm, had whipped him round.

“I’m going to try to get into the hill up there,” I cried. “If you’re afraid to come too, stop behind like a coward!”

He stared at me amazed; then fell a’ grinning.

“I never said you were a coward,” he retorted.

“But you meant it,” I answered, fuming.

We were bristling, actually, as on that far-off day when we had first come into collision. Our fists were clenched; the backs of our necks tingled; it was really a pregnant moment.

But the good old fellow resolved it, and in the best way possible. The fire suddenly left his eyes.

“O, Dick,” he said; “what asses we are! Look here, I’ll tell you—I should funk it going up there alone, and you wouldn’t, it seems; that’s the truth. I only wanted to dare you, for my own sake.”

“O, all right!” I said, pocketing my fists, and pretty ashamed of myself. I kicked the sand about, not knowing how to escape the situation gracefully. At last I in my turn blurted out: “What rot this is! Let’s forget it all, and just discuss ways and means.”

“You really intend to try?” said Harry, his face relighting.

“If I die for it now,” I answered.

“O, well!” he said, heaving a profound sigh. “It’s simple enough. We’ll just climb up there, and say ‘open sesame,’ and walk in.”

This little inspiration to identify our adventure with Ali Baba’s was quite a happy one. Not forty Dutch smugglers, but forty beautiful Persian thieves with scimitars and waxed moustaches! It tinctured with romance at once the thought of the ugly sights it was possible we might encounter. Our half fearful design became, in a flash of coloured light, a tingling conspiracy.

It was too late, of course, to attempt anything that evening. But the following afternoon was a half-holiday with us, and quite apt to our purpose. In the interval we secured some candles and a box of the friction matches then lately come into use, as also, privately, Uncle Jenico’s geological hammer, a sturdy tool with a heavy butt and a long steel pick to balance its head. And with these, and nothing else whatever but our trust in ourselves, we issued forth after a hasty early dinner, and no word said to anybody, to dare and do.

We had resolved, after consultation, to make the attempt from above rather than below; because, in the first place, we should be less likely to attract attention, and, in the second, because a descent of twenty feet appeared easier of accomplishment than a climb of thirty up that slippery glacis. So we started, unregarded of any one, as we supposed, by way of the valley, and were not long in reaching the brow of the Mitre where it overlooked the well and the recent landfall.

It was all strangely altered here, and, near the edge, risky footing at the best. But we stole up cautiously, and, going upon our stomachs the last yard or two, looked down. Below us, at a rather giddy distance, projected some spars and ledges of the fractured masonry. Fortunately, however, the interval between us and them was not balked by any bulge in the cliff, but showed a smooth descent, and not too sheer for the essay. Still, it did not do to dwell upon it.

“Are you ready?” I whispered. “I’m going down.”

“No, you aren’t,” said Harry. “Me first.”

I only answered by crooking my elbow to keep him back.

“Don’t be a fool!” he protested. “We shall break away, and both go faster than we want, if you aren’t careful.”

I made no reply but to resist him doggedly, till at last, with a grunt, he let me go, and I turned, lying flat-faced, and swung my legs over the precipice.

“O, you old brute!” he said. “Well, go easy, then, and dig your toes in.”

And with that I let go and slid away, clawing and scratching like a cat coming down a tree. It was just to fasten on and commit one’s self to luck, which, fortunately for me, directed my feet to a ledge, on which I brought up, gasping and spitting out dirt. But once secure of my hold, and in a state to look about me, I was relieved to find that the position was much more possible than it had seemed either from above or below, the projecting spits of stonework being more and more pronounced than had showed at a distance.

I took a minute to get my wind, and then called up to Harry to follow; but he was already on his way. I saw him coming at a risky pace, and by a slightly divergent course, which he had taken to avoid me. It would have carried him clear of the ruin altogether had I not, at the psychologic moment, clapped my hand to the seat of his small-clothes and checked his descent.

“O!” he howled, “let go!”

“I won’t!” I cried. “Don’t be an ass! Stick your foot out here!”

With a desperate effort he managed to wriggle oblique, and in a moment we were standing together on the ledge.

“That was give and take,” he panted. “Like being saved from drowning by a shark. Can’t say your bark’s worse than your bite.”

I chuckled so that I was near falling off our perch, till a sudden thought sobered me.

“Supposing, after all, we can’t get in, or up or down neither?” I said dismayed. “A pretty picture we shall make, stuck up here.”

“Well, it’s too late to think of that now,” answered Harry, coolly. “Lend me a hand while I kick.”

He let out on the wall of mud in front, which we had hoped was just a mask or screen hiding a cavity behind; but his foot only sunk to the ankle in it without effect.

“So there!” he said. “We must look for a better place, that’s all.”

We were standing, so far as we could judge, about midway up the groining of the vault, and right under the apex, a little above and to the right of us, gaped a small round fissure.

“See?” said Harry, excitedly; “that’s the place. It don’t go perpendicular like the others, which means that it’s sunk away from some support above it. Hold me, now.”

I clutched him the best I could, gripping a stone with my other hand, and he brought the big hammer from his jacket pocket, and poised himself, standing high on his toes. “Open sesame!” says he, and struck with all the force he could muster on the soil just under the hole. The result made him stagger, for he had expected some resistance, and there was none. The whole top of a mound of silt, which stopped the neck, it seemed, of the decapitated crypts, and into the thick base of which he had first struck his foot, broke away and fell inwards, revealing an aperture, already, under that one blow, large enough for a man to crawl through.

Harry, recovering himself, quietly repocketed the tool, and turned to me. His face was a little white, but his mouth was set as grim as sin.

“It’s my turn,” he said. “Think you can give me a leg up?”

It was no use my disputing, as he was on the right side. Working with infinite caution and difficulty on that perilous eyrie, I managed to stoop, and, getting my hands under one of his feet, levered him slowly up, while he drew on every projection he could reach, until he was able to claw his arms into the hole and hang on.

“Now,” came his voice out, muffled and hollow, “one shove, and——”

I drove with the word; dig went his feet and knees; he sprawled convulsively a moment; got hold; the mound jerked and sunk a little under him, a clatter of débris went down the cliff face, and he was in.

Almost in the same instant his face, hot and staring, re-emerged, and then his arms.

“Here,” he panted. “Can you reach?”

Not by a couple of feet could I.

“Hold tight and catch me,” I said. “I’m going to jump.”

Fixing my eyes on him, and crouching to the lowest I dared, I sprang, and he snatched and gripped my wrists.

“Now!” he gasped; and instantly the both of us were battling and struggling, he to hold me firm, and I to get way on and leverage.

For a minute the issue was doubtful; the mound sunk and crumbled still lower; I clawed frantically with my toes, my legs going like a frog’s on a slippery basin. But at last I got hold, and a little ease to my lungs; and so, hauling on to the hands held out to me, and wriggling up foot by foot, was drawn into the opening, now much enlarged, and crawling through, rolled, tangled up with Harry, down a slope into darkness.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SECRET IN THE HILL.

My first impression, as I sat up to gather my wits, was of awakening from a falling nightmare to the comfortable security of bed and early morning. The frantic fears engendered of that fathomless descent were all resolved in laughter. I giggled as I recalled them, shaking my dusty noddle to get the brains into place in it. Opposite me I could discern a shadowy figure, squatting in a like process of self-recovery.

“Well, old chap,” I said; “here we are!”

The sound of my voice, clanging in a vaulted space, gave me a start.

“O!” I exclaimed; and the monosyllable rolled away into the darkness like a barrel.

We scrambled up, while it was still echoing, and catching involuntarily at one another, looked fearfully about us. At a height of twelve feet or so behind us shone the opening through which we had entered. It made a great splotch of light, with a dim tail running fanlike from it down the slope by which we had fallen. The effect to us, standing possessed by gloom, was as of our being involved in the tail of a comet. So long as we looked that way, it dazzled and perplexed us. We turned our backs on it.

Then, gradually, the obscure details of the place gathered coherence; and we saw that we were standing in a low vaulted chamber, giving at its further end upon a sewer-like mouth of blackness.

“Dicky,” said Harry, in a rather tremulous whisper, “have you got the candles and lucifers all safe? This is p-p-prime, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I gulped, to either question. But I answered without heart, being sick to postpone the advance, by whatever means, for a little.

“Don’t let me go, you old idiot!” I complained in a panic, as he made as if to step forward. “Supposing we lost one another. Ha-Harry, do you know what I saw under my arm as you p-pulled me up outside there?”

“No. What?”

“Rampick—the b-beast—scuttling for the Gap. He must have been watching us again, hidden below somewhere this time; and like enough now he’s making for the cliff overhead.”

Harry began chuckling, but stopped in a fright to hear himself answered, as it were, by a patter of little laughing hiccoughs.

“He won’t find much,” he whispered, “and we needn’t be afraid he’ll follow us down here. Light a candle, Dicky, for goodness’ sake. There seem to be all sorts of things creeping and rustling.”

My hands shook so that I boggled three good matches in coaxing the wick to take; but I would not let Harry hold the candle, for fear that he might run ahead with it, and perhaps in some labyrinth of passages leave me to follow the wrong one.

The flame caught at last, flared with a momentary brilliancy, and shrunk to a mere blink. It is the common way with candles, yet I know nothing more maddening in a nervous emergency. And if philosophy sneers over that statement, let it ponder, and be thankful but take no credit, because it had nothing whatever to do with the making of its own temperament. At length, after a moment of tension indescribable, the wicked little tongue stretched, and glowed steady; and I lifted it high, while we glared right and left.

The cellar in which we found ourselves was, or had been till shorn of its seaward end, a four-square room, with Norman vaulting—crossed flat half-hoops of stone—going down into the corners. It was very small, and very low (the candle flame, as I lifted it, blackened the roof), and very massive; and because of the three, very ancient. Probably it had once been a death-chapel under some older foundation than the abbey, and connected only as a matter of piety with the newer crypts, which, to meet it, had been tunnelled eastwards, in a manner very unusual, from beneath the nave. But, so far as we could see, it was quite empty, and undamaged by the earthquake, or explosion.

I waved the light to and fro.

“Nothing here,” whispered Harry. “Let’s get on!”

The black sewer faced us. There, we knew, was our way. If for a minute or two we hesitated to follow it, by so long was Providence our friend. For, indeed, we had never thought to take account of the stale, confined gases which for years must have been poisoning these glooms, and our delay gave the draught that we had created time to take effect.

For draught there was, though we were unconscious of the significance of it when we saw the flame of our candle draw towards the tunnel. But in truth we had forgotten in our excitement all about the badger.

At last we made a move, holding on to one another’s hands like Hansel and Gretel entering the witch’s forest. We reached the black mouth of the passage, and went in on tiptoe. It was arched, and high enough in its middle to enable one to walk erect; yet not so wide but that Harry must drop behind and follow me. I sniggered a little to feel him treading nervously on my heels, and the sense of laughter was like a tonic. If one touch of nature makes the world kin, it is surely the touch that tickles one under the fifth rib.

The passage seemed to run on endlessly—just a high stone drain with a floor of hammered earth driving straight into the hill. No other diverged from it, nor did any ruin block our path; and we were beginning to move quite merrily, when suddenly the end came in a flight of half a dozen steps going down, and at the bottom a great door torn off its hinges and shivered into splinters.

At the sight we drew back on the very brink, and stood gaping and dumbstruck, afraid for the moment to proceed.

“Dicky,” said Harry, staring over my shoulder, “here comes the tug, don’t it?”

I did not answer. Suddenly he dipped under my arm and ran down, and, terrified at the thought of being left alone, I followed him.

The fragments of the door stood wrenched at any angle; but through the black gaps in the wreck flowed the sense of shattered spaces beyond.

“Now for it!” said Harry. “Hand me the light when I’m in, and follow yourself.”

I would have lingered yet, but he broke from me, and, fearing to precipitate I knew not what nameless ruin, I let him go with only a show of interference.

He was through in a moment, and calling back to me, “Pass the light, and come on. It’s all serene.”

And then in an instant I had followed him.

The draught was still strong enough here to flutter the candle flame, so that for a little we could make out nothing of our surroundings. But stepping cautiously to one side, away from the door, we found the light to stand suddenly steady, and immediately before our eyes there grew into grotesque and shadowy being a vision of enormous destruction.

It was again a vaulted chamber we were in, but of apparent proportions infinitely greater than the other. Apparent, I say, for for two-thirds of its extent it was just one unresolvable ruin. A great part of the roof had collapsed, snapping in its downfall, like sticks of celery, the squat massive piers which had supported it. The walls on either side were bowed to an arch above, or swayed drunkenly with colossal knees bent outwards. To the further side, gaping at us across the havoc, a huge blackened rent seemed to invite to nameless horrors beyond; and scattered and spattered and spurted from under the fringe of the stony avalanche were staves of casks, and fragments of burst chests from which fountains of tea had showered all over the floor.

We stood awestruck, scarce daring to breathe. The sense of yet impending disaster, the terror of calling it down upon us by a stumble, a false step, kept us as still as mice. Before us a path went clear round the ruin to another broken archway, and yet remoter vaults. But by this time my curiosity was become something less than a negative quantity.

“Harry,” I whispered at last, almost querulously, “we’ve seen enough. I’m going back.”

His face looked into mine like a little ghost’s.

“I’m not,” he said. “But I don’t want you to come. Light me another bit of candle from yours, and stay here while I go and explore. We’ve found out nothing yet, you know.”

I am ashamed to say I let him go, only imploring him to return soon—to be satisfied with a look. He did not answer, but stole off resolutely with his bit of a torch, and it was with a feeling of agony that I saw him disappear through the opening.

It is a question with psychologists how much one can dream in a second. I will answer for the eternity of nightmare I suffered during those few moments of Harry’s absence. He could hardly, in point of fact, have set foot in the further chamber when a strange little cry from him made me start violently. And immediately, as if in response, there sprang into voice near me a step, a rustle, the menace of a coming roar, and I screamed out and fled towards my friend. The crash answered behind me as I ran, and a film of dust followed. Half blinded and deafened, I almost fell at Harry’s feet as he met me. We clutched one another convulsively, and for a minute could not speak.

The concussion was succeeded by an appalling silence. Presently he was staring over my shoulder, swaying his light to and fro.

“Dick!” He went muttering in my ear: “Dick! Dick! Dick! the roof has fallen, down by the door, and blocked our way back!”

Horror took me of a heap. I could only bite into Harry’s arm up and down with my fingers, dumbly entreating him to do something to save us from going crazy.

“O, why did we come?” I moaned at last. “Why didn’t you come when I asked you?”

“What good would that have been,” he said miserably, “if we’d been caught and squashed?”

If he could not see the way to save, he could to make a man of me. He was the first to return to his sturdy self. It struck me like sacrilege to hear him suddenly emit a faint little laugh.

“O, don’t!” I said. “It’s too awful!”

“What is?” he answered. “Look here, Dick, we’re just fools, that’s all, There must be a way out somewhere—we’d forgotten what the badger showed us.”

In an instant, at his words, I had leapt to the ultimate pole of hope.

“O, Harry!” I said, “you good old fellow to think of it! Why, of course there must be; if only we could——”

“Wait a bit!” he interrupted me. “You’ll have to make up your mind to go on.”

“I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “to get safe out of this. O, don’t stop! Any moment may bring down some more of it.”

I was wriggling and sweating in a perfect agony over his hesitation.

“All right,” he said; “pull a long breath and prepare yourself.”

“For what?”

The truth came upon me in a flash. I fell back, panting at him.

“Harry! They’re there!”

He nodded.

“Yes, they’re there. If you like to shut your eyes, I’ll lead you past.”

But he had shamed me once.

“No,” I said, with a catch in my voice. “If you stood it, so can I. Go on—quick. Are they—are they—very——”

We were in the further vault before I could shape my question; and I took one glance, and shrieked, and shrunk back under the wall. And so, in the very act, at a leap the horror was gone.

Why? I cannot tell. The problem is again for the psychologists. All I know is that, as I cried out, the sickness left me. A spring of some human sympathy gushed up in my heart and expelled it. These pitiful remnants seemed to greet us as with a wistful hail of comradeship. They were ugly, disjointed, ghastly enough in all conscience; but they appealed as from the lost to the lost, and seeing them, their quiet, sad decay, I no longer feared them as I had feared them unseen. Who might swear, indeed, that our own bones would not mingle with these others presently? They were dust of our dust in the great Commonwealth of death. If I had been a desert castaway, lying down to die beside some parched human skeleton, I could not better have testified to my sense of the sorrow that makes us kin than I did now in my changed emotions.

Yet, indeed, the scene was a very awful one. Near the whole of the further side of the crypt had collapsed, making of the place a huge cave-like mouth stuck with blackened splinters of teeth, and gorged to the throttle with a litter of human remains. They lay scattered all over the vast jaw of it—chewed, dismembered, scarce one to be identified in its entirety. Here it might be a red-capped skull, with a naked brown cutlass tilted across its teeth; here a limbless body, horribly suggestive in its crumbling stumps of a mangled doll dribbling sawdust; here something, whole but for its head, crooking its fingers into the dusty scalp of a comrade from whom the legs had been torn. They may have counted to near a dozen in all, if one had had the stomach to tally the flannel caps and brass-buttoned jackets and disjointed slops. But, ten or twenty, the moral was the same. Here at the crook of a finger was the whole life of the hill blown into fragments; and the legend of the earthquake laid.

I understood that plain enough before Harry’s low excited voice sounded over my shoulder.

“Come away, Dick! Look there; don’t you see how it happened?”

He drew me back and we stood, figures of tragedy, flashing the light from our candle-ends into dark corners. In all the hideous mélange there were two details unmistakable in their significance. To our right, lying front-downwards with its face smashed into the floor, and its legs caught into the closing throat of the vault, was a little flattened blue-coated figure, its hands flung out, and the left yet closed upon the butt of a pistol. To our left, bolt upright against the wall through which the great rent had been blown into the adjoining crypt, sat a thing grotesque almost beyond naming. It wore, with a little air of sagging weariness, a seaman’s common jersey and good white ducks and shoes with shining buckles, and its right elbow was crooked and the hand beneath rested with a sort of exhausted jauntiness on its bent right knee. In all of which there was wonder, but no indecency, had it not been that, above, the thing had no head, nor any left arm but a stump, which stood oddly upraised from its shoulder.

And somehow one knew that these two were correlative in the tragedy, and somehow responsible for the human scatteration between them—for the bright gleams and splotches of colour which budded from the ancient soot of the holocaust—for these gaudy, half-perished weed-heaps scoring the garden of death.

“Do you see?” urged Harry again.

I sighed and shook my head, not meaning ignorance, but simply overwhelmed under the weight of my own conclusions.

“Why,” he whispered, in an awestruck voice; “that—that there was reaching up for the ammunition, the—the armoury in the wall where they kept their powder and things, and, as he opened the cupboard, the other fired his pistol across. The bullet must have missed who it was meant for and gone into a powder barrel.”

As he spoke, one of the lights sputtered and went dim; and he caught suddenly at me.

“Come away!” he cried. “Why don’t you come? We haven’t candles and to spare.”

His words reawoke me instantly to the unresolved horror of our situation.

“I’m coming,” I answered tremulously. “Which way? Harry, don’t go without me!”

We stumbled a few blind paces, dazzled again for the nonce.

“Look here,” he said; “we must economize these. It won’t do to waste our lights.”

Instantly, in a panic, I blew out my candle, and simultaneously he blew out his. Thus was illustrated the weakness of generalities; and, correspondingly, the value, as you shall see, of accidents. We were plunged, on the breath, into subterranean night; lapped in lead and buried beyond hope of release. At least, so it seemed for the moment; and moments make the sum of time.

We stood rigid, paralysed, too dumb-stricken for speech or movement. And, in that pass, if you will believe me, the most unearthly horror of a voice hard by came to complete our demoralization. It rose between a hiss and bark, a swinish indescribable thing that tailed off into a bubbling snarl; and I thought it was the dead man caught by the legs struggling to rise and get at us.

I could not have survived and kept my reason, I think, had not Harry at this instant scattered all shadows with a jubilant shout—

“Daylight! Look up there, Dicky! We’ve found the way.”

I shook with the cry, and raised my despairing eyes. Sure enough, at a good height before and above us, a gleam of blessed dawn filtered down through the superincumbent soil. The accident of darkness had revealed it to us so soon as our pupils had forgotten the false glare of the candles.

“O, Harry!” I cried, half hysterical. “O, Harry! what was that noise?”

And he laughed out—“Light up again, you old funk! It was the best friend in the world to us.”

Amazed, without understanding, I tremblingly rekindled the candle; and there, right before us, was a flight of stone steps going up—the ancient entrance to the crypts; and, risen bristling from his bed of straw and sticks at the foot of it, was our ally, our preserver, our most noble and honoured the badger.

He was a surly auxiliary, resentful for his broken slumber. He stood setting at us, and bubbling, and showing his teeth, as cross a little Cerberus as ever divided his duty between guarding the way down and keeping damned souls from escaping. Harry softly pulled the geological hammer from his pocket.

“Don’t!” I gasped. “You mustn’t! He saved us.”

“I’m not going to attack,” said Harry. “But I must defend, if he makes a rush. Try a bite of him first, if you’re doubtful. I tell you, if he once fastens on, you’ll have to take him up with you.”

Keeping close together, and our eyes on the little grey gentleman, we edged gingerly round towards the foot of the flight. Fortunately, as we advanced, he withdrew, coming behind us in a circle.

“Go up first,” whispered Harry, “while I keep the rear.”

Holding the candle to light him, I went backwards up the steps, until my head touched the canopy of soil and ruin which blocked their exit; and then, backwards, Harry followed me. The badger snuffed and gurgled, pointing his snout at us, but not offering to follow.

“Now,” said Harry, turning round, “for the way!”

It was a narrow one as it first offered—a mere beast-earth driven down between chance interstices in the ruins above to meet the stair-head. But all the time while we wrought at to enlarge it, the sweet light was stretched to us to comfort and inspire, and the smell of liberty came down more and more in draughts like wine, as if Harry with his strenuous hammer were tapping the very reservoir of day. The only fear was that, striking carelessly, he might loosen some poised mass, and bury us under an avalanche of stone. But luckily, both sunk vault and tumbled ruin had so well adjusted between them the balance of collapse that our puny grubbing was all insufficient to disturb it.

For which, thank God! And tenfold for that glorious moment when, struggling and pushing up by way of the last of the littered steps, we shouldered and tore ourselves through into the mid-thicket of brambles by the fallen plinth, and felt the light of day, broken by the branches, burst over us like a salvo of resplendent rockets!

CHAPTER V.
A REAPPEARANCE.

On the day following that of our adventure Harry was due at Yokestone. I had arranged to walk part of the way with him, for we had much and momentous matter to discuss—our discovery, and the responsibility, moral and legal, which it entailed upon us, to wit. But, to my disturbance, the morning found Uncle Jenico knocked up with a chill; and the dear soul’s hope that I would stay to keep him company was so patent, that I had not the heart to disoblige him. I just took an opportunity to run out and tell Harry I could not come, and to re-decide with him upon postponing all action until we could consider the matter in its every bearing; and then returned, very much depressed, I must own, to my duty.

I don’t know if any suspicion of the past, any premonition as to the future was operating in the old man’s mind. Pure spirits, one must think, must be strangely sensitive to any disturbance in their moral atmosphere. He was certainly oddly solicitous about me, wistfully attentive, loth that I should leave him, and for my sake, not his own. But after dinner, as luck would have it, he fell asleep in his chair, and, restless beyond endurance, I took the chance to go for a stroll.

Once outside the door, I hesitated. I had not yet slept soundly or exhaustively enough to shake off all the horror of our late experience. I dreaded to go by the hill; I dreaded to go by the beach; but at last the prospective quiet of the latter drew me, and I turned my face seawards.

I had expected to find the shore deserted, and so, reaching the cliff edge, was put out a little to see a figure, that of a stranger, already down there before me. It went to and fro, this figure, on the fringe of the surf, thoughtfully, its head bent, its hands clasped behind its back—a lean, small old man, it seemed. But I observed it with unspeculative eyes, because of my pondering all the time, abstractedly and rather dismally, on the events of yesterday.

We had not canvassed our adventure much as yet, Harry and I. The shock and the shame of it, the body and brain-weariness, had disinclined us, during our walk home, to comment on a very frightening experience, out of the reach of whose shadow we could not escape, for all our hurrying. Morning, indeed, found it still with us, like a motionless fog, which, however, we should have endeavoured to dissipate by the breath of frank discussion, had not Uncle Jenico’s illness supervened. In consequence of which I had to face the rather depressing prospect of enduring for a whole day and night the burden of unrelieved silence. Still, about one thing we had been agreed: that we must weigh all the pros and cons before deciding to suppress or confess our discovery. At first, I had been for telling Mr. Sant everything the moment he returned; for he was away in London, as it chanced, on a short visit. But Harry had at once vetoed the idea.

“It wouldn’t be fair to foist all the responsibility on him,” he had said, emphatically. “Being a parson, he’d be bound to call in the law, and if he did that, his influence here would be lost, and you might burst your cheeks trying to whistle it back. Who knows who’d be found to be mixed up in the business, if once we talked? Most of the village, likely. And we’re not going to do anything to force him into becoming unpopular, and losing what he’s been years in getting.”

“But, Mrs. Puddephatt,” I had complained feebly, “said the village had nothing to do with it.”

“Nonsense!” Harry had answered. “She didn’t neither. She said that Dunberry and the Dutchmen worked separate, with Rampick for go-between.”

“Well,” I had still protested, “isn’t that much the same?”

“Much the same, you gaby!” he had cried. “O yes, of course! Much the same as if two engine wheels connected by a rod turned up their noses about knowing one another.”

The technical inspiration of his simile had thereupon surprised him into a grin, and me, even, into a dismally funny attempt at a retort:—

“Well, they would move in different circles, you know. But we’ll sleep on it—that’s the best; and thrash it out between us to-morrow.”

That, however, as I have explained, we were debarred from doing; and now there was nothing for me but to possess my troubled soul in patience until Harry’s return. In Uncle Jenico, we had neither of us thought for a moment of confiding. Some instinctive sense of his lack of grasp, of his unpractical weakness prevented us. We would not confound or agitate the dear old fellow; and so here, in the result, I was solitarily and tragically cogitating our problem on the cliff edge.

We had, indeed, already come to one conclusion too obvious for dispute. The secret entrance to the smugglers’ lair had been patently near the spot whence we had emerged, and the significance of the now obliterated cliff-path was thus revealed. Those, however, were points which only concerned indirectly the main sources of our confusion, which sources were necessarily the nature of the tragedy and Rampick’s presumptive connection with it. There lay the deep core of the shadow—the stress of the moral obligations our reckless adventure had imposed upon us. We had opened the forbidden chamber, and our fingers were bloody.

Was it murder, in short? And, if so, was Rampick an accessory? And, if so, were we also become accessories?

I started at the thought, and went hurriedly down the Gap impelled by a sudden vision, It took the form of a tax-cart, and a handcuffed man in it being carried off to Ipswich Gaol. I felt the cold grip of the iron on my own wrists, and had to thrust my hands deep into my breeches’ pockets for some familiar reassurance of warmth. The stranger still paced the sands, a mechanic irritating figure. Now noticing my advent, he stopped to regard me, his hands behind his back, the wind gently undulating his coat-tails. Going northwards, I should come under the rake of his eyes. My nerves were on the jump. I flounced peevishly, and went down the coast, till, come opposite the scene of our yesterday’s escapade, I stopped involuntarily and stared up.

I had not intended to. I could master the inclination no more than I could the morbid concentration of my thoughts. They were drawn like smoke into that black gash high up in the cliff.

It was not very noticeable even now. Another storm, any hurricane of rain, might seal it once more, and close the evidence of our passage thereby. Why let any thought of our responsibility to it vex us? Our enterprise had been a purely private one, and——

Like a blow came the memory of Rampick’s cognisance of it, of my vision of him hurrying agitated for the Gap as I was drawn in. He had seen us enter; possibly, emerge. He must at least suspect us of having made some sort of discovery, and his knowledge of our knowledge was the terror.

I still stared up. If it was really murder, then, and this man an accessory?

He might have been, and yet none know the truth of his guilt but himself. Grant it a fact that the local and foreign gangs had worked apart. Had he not been, according to the same authority, their connecting link? What more likely then that he alone of all alive should be informed of the real nature of the act which at a stroke had shattered his connection? It would account for his eternal haunting of the neighbourhood, for his terror lest some one, exploring too far, should unearth his secret—if guilty secret it were. And what proof of that? Why, none that was direct—no proof of anything; not of murder, certainly. And yet I was as sure as if my soul had witnessed it that murder, in deed or intention, had been committed. It was the position, the settlement of the bodies, flung down with all that atmosphere of deadly suggestion. I felt that I could restore the scene, as sculptors restore a statue from a few significant fragments. That the man under the stone had been attacked, and had fired in a desperate self-defence, accidentally sending all to perdition, I had no doubt. He might have been a spy, a deposed chief—his clothing seemed to pronounce him above the order of the rest—he might have been one of, or other than themselves; he had precipitated a greater tragedy in trying to avert a lesser, of that I was sure. And Rampick?

It all resolved upon him, this doubt, this haunting stress of conscience—all concentrated itself upon the wretched, degraded creature in the tissue of whose story our destiny had entangled us. I stirred, and gave a little groan.

“Ha!” exclaimed a voice at my elbow.

With a shock I jerked round; and there was the stranger of the sands come softly up, and intently scrutinising me.

I felt unreasoningly ashamed, as if caught in some self-soliloquy. My face went like fire. “What do you——” I was beginning loud enough; and on the instant bit my teeth on the cry, and stood gaping. I could feel my jaw slackening idiotically. Minute by minute, it seemed to me, we stood silent there, regarding one another.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I whispered at last.

It all came back to me across that shining gulf of years. I had forded the valley in the mean time, descending into deep glens and unremembering woods, distancing for ever, as I had supposed, the landmarks of childhood. And, lo! climbing the further side, and looking back, here was the past quite close; for the valley had been but a little fairy cleft after all, and all the time the memory of old things had been waiting there for me to resume them. Six years, with their fulness of growth and interest, stood between me and this man; yet I saw and knew him as if the interval were but a span. The story of him, the tragedy of my own connection with it, became in this moment the instant thing with me, bridging the abysmal lapse between.

He was not much changed, it is true. The face was the same haunting unearthly mask which had hung up before me in the court. A gurgoyle, I had called it; and still the stony inhumanity of it was the first thing to impress me. It was older only, and more scarred by wind and weather. The drench of unhealing waters had streaked its forehead and darkened the pits of its eyes; but with no other result than to emphasize the fire in them, and intensify the loneliness of the lost soul they windowed. I gave a little foolish fluttering laugh.

“So you remember me?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “But how do you know me?”

That was the wonder, indeed. Medusa might not change to Perseus as Perseus to Medusa.

“Were you looking for me?” I asked. “Did you know I was living here?”

He shook his head slightly.

“No more, young sir, than I know the ultimate goal of my destiny.”

It suddenly occurred to me that, after all, he had said nothing to associate me with any memory of his own. I blushed like a fool, and stammered out—

“I suppose you aren’t mistaking——”

He put up his hand to interrupt me.

“Your father gave his life for me, sir. Not a shadowed feature, not a transmitted gesture of his, but I should feel myself cursed for failing to identify, if I lived to the age of Methuselah. You are Master Richard Bowen. You will hardly deny it, I think.”

I giggled again, more foolish than ever.

“No, I won’t,” I said. “And have you yet found Abel, Mr. Pilbrow?”

Now, in a wonderful way, my ingenuous question wrought a sudden transformation in the man. As once before, his hand swept the hard evil from his eyes, and when those looked at me again, they were as soft as a weary woman’s. The change was infinitely pathetic, illuminating; and in the light of it, I seemed to see for the first time how worn was this poor creature, how tired and woeful, and how, perhaps, he wore his outlawry for a mask.

“If I doubted before, could I doubt now!” he cried. “Staunch, and unspoiled by the years! And how could it be otherwise with his son!”

He had seized my hands in his; and, embarrassed as I was, his words moved me to a strange understanding.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I cried, as I had cried those long years before, “he said you did not do it.”

He gazed at me rapturously a moment, then fell to urging me to walk with him.

“Come,” he cried. “I must move, or I shall be a woman. Ask me, ask me everything. This accident—this destiny—this heart-filling spring in the desert! No, I have not found Abel, my friend, my dear friend, though I have never ceased to seek him, like the spectral dog I am.”

I thought of the werewolf of Mr. Sant’s story. So damned, so abhorrent, so pitiful appeared this grey shadow moving at my side. He put his arm within mine, and hurried me up and down the desolate beach. The grinding of the sea seemed to hush itself, the drooping pall of sky to rise aloof from us. I was full of excitement and agitation, carried altogether without the oppression of the thoughts which had been vexing me.

“Ask,” he cried, feverishly pressing my arm. “Give me the chance to unburden my heart to my one true friend, I do believe, God help me, in all the world! I have not found Abel, Richard—ah! may I call you Richard?—I have not found Abel, though through these long years I have never ceased to hunt him—his shadow, some sound of his voice, some track of his footsteps.”

“To right yourself with the world?” I asked.

“Let it fall from me—the vampire!” he cried, contemptuously. “You are all the world I care, as your father was before you. It is not Abel I want, Richard; it is the secret he carried away with him—the secret, or the clue to it, which I have maddened after, pursuing it, the wicket friar’s-lantern, down the long mire of these coasts.”

“Secret?” I said, wondering. “What secret?”

“The book,” he answered—snapped, rather.

I turned and stared at him as we walked.

“You mean the book that—that you fought about?”

He nodded.

“Why,” I sniggered, incredulous, “was it worth all this?”

He did not resent my youthful irony—met it with a solemn self-deprecation, in fact.

“God knows, dear boy!” he said. “This, and more, I thought once. Now, Richard, forbear to indulge a lust till it masters you. I have damned myself like the wandering Jew. I have no rest in rest. The quest has become an obsession, a craze, which not even the discovery of the treasure itself could, I believe, appease.”

“Phew!” I whistled, soft and amazed. “A treasure, was it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And somewhere on these coasts, I think you said?”

“Somewhere on these east coasts.”

I stopped in sheer excitement.

“I don’t wonder. They are choke full of—of things. And have you been tramping them ever since I saw you last?”

“On and off; up and down; to and fro.”

“It must have been tiring, and—and a bit expensive.”

He smacked his hand to his breast.

“There is a hundred or two left here yet. ‘Equity’—you remember your friend’s words?—‘equity is justice.’”

“You got your thousand pounds?”

“I got my thousand pounds.”

A longish silence fell between us.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I said at last, “what has brought you here?”

“Destiny,” he answered at once; “yours and mine.”

“It was quite accidental, this meeting?”

“As the world would consider it—quite.”

“Well,” I said, after a pause, “it is very wonderful; and most of all your knowing me again. I—I hope you will be here a day or two. I must be going home.”

He looked at me with his strange wolf’s eyes.

“I only arrived last night,” he said. “You live here?—but, of course.”

“I live here—have lived, ever since that time, with my guardian.”

He started back with a gesture of repulsion.

“Not that man, that crow, that Quayle?”

I laughed. He had no sense of humour. In all my knowledge of him I never knew him even to smile.

“O dear no!” I said. “A very different person; my uncle, Mr. Paxton.”

“He could not be too different to satisfy me as your guardian,” he responded grimly. Then his face softened, and he took my hands in his. “So long as I stay,” he said sorrowfully, “you will let me see you sometimes?”

Now, at that, my heart melted to him. He was so fierce, so vicious to the rest of the world, it was a certain glory to be his chosen.

“Won’t you come and see my uncle?” I said. “He is at home, not very well. He knows all about that trial, Mr. Pilbrow, and—and he loved my father dearly.”

I believe there were tears sprung to his eyes. I turned away abashed.

“Does he love you?” he asked low.

“He lives for me, I think.”

“Then,” he said, “we shall have that sympathy in common, and I will risk it.”

All the way back I chattered to him of my life since we had last met. He had been so associated with my father’s end, I could not shake off the impression that we were old friends. He listened intently, sharing in all my sympathies, grinding his teeth over my little local misfortunes. And when we reached our door, he took my hand again before entering, and said in a full voice, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

CHAPTER VI.
AN ODD COMPACT.

Age, that forgets its yesterday’s company, often puts one to shame in the memories of long ago. I had pondered the problem, even while proposing it, of Joshua’s introduction to my uncle; and, behold! the dear soul recognized his guest at the first mention. His name was associated indirectly, it is true, with a momentous decision in his own life; yet, even so—well, one was not wont to look upon Uncle Jenico’s memory as the active partner in his constitution. It saved me some perplexity.

I had left Joshua by his own request in the porch while I went to prepare my relative, who I found much refreshed by his sleep, and to whom I briefly recapitulated the tale of my rally with this old client, as I might call him.

“Bring him in, by all means,” he said, adjusting his spectacles, and then beaming at me through them. “Poor soul, poor fellow, to have suffered all these years under the stigma of an unfounded slander!”

He spoke with a new-awakened loudness; the door was close at hand; the visitor heard. In a moment he came striding in, hat in hand, his eyes glittering.

“Mr. Paxton,” he said; “Mr. Paxton! You are worthy to be this dear lad’s guardian! I can say no more.”

The two men shook hands, with a full understanding, it seemed; and a pregnant minute ticked itself out between them.

“You come off a long journey?” asked my uncle, at the end.

“Off a long journey, sir—a journey of six years. I had hardly expected to find this haven by the way. I hardly know now what it means; yet Fate grant it has a meaning!”

“You are making a considerable stay?”

“If I have not lost the faculty to rest. I don’t know. I am all confounded at present.”

“He is seeking for a treasure hidden on these coasts,” I put in, and I could have put in nothing apter. My uncle kindled.

“A treasure!” he cried. “Why, so am I, Mr. Pilbrow. Only, I gather, I have the advantage of you in having already collected a part of mine. And did you read of yours, too, in Morant?”

“Morant, sir!” said the bookseller. “No, his name was Victor—Carolus Victor.”

He checked himself instantly—jealously. He had been carried away emotionally, I think, over his reception. But in the same breath his reserve was gone.

“You shall have the whole story from me,” he said; “but not now. Give me time to order my thoughts, to realize what this encounter means to me.”

“Certainly,” said my uncle, kindly. And being all openness and simplicity himself, he proceeded to relate to our visitor the entire history of our sojourn in Dunberry, and of the events and prospects which had brought us there.

“The result has justified my utmost hopes,” he ended with, enthusiastically; and then cast a sudden wistful look at me. “It is something in an otherwise empty life, Mr. Pilbrow, to have this object in accumulating. Heaven has seen fit, sir, to deny me the blessing of a family, lest by my improvidence I turned it into a curse. But it has compensated with the left hand while it withheld the right. What prouder trust to have committed to one than the welfare of the child of him who died to prove the truth!”

The visitor stepped back, shading his eyes with his hand.

“You rebuke me, sir,” he said in a stifled voice; “you teach me. Is this the meaning, the atonement? If I, too, might so earn quittance of this curse of emptiness! The child of him who died to prove the truth! My God, my God! To bequeath to him the fruits of this so wretched quest! To turn the curse into a blessing!”

He advanced, and seized my uncle’s hand with a strenuous entreaty.

“Let me be joint trustee with you. By that sacred life laid down for mine, I have a right. If I could so convert this evil—to enrich his son—so perhaps to earn rest.”

My uncle was distinctly snuffling. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and put them on again tremulously.

“So be it, Mr. Pilbrow,” he said. “We have been two selfish souls, perhaps. We will win our redemption through Richard.”

Thus was I made the inheritor of phantom fortunes. I felt quite inclined to put on airs, as the sole legatee to a vast atmospheric estate. Mr. Pilbrow even came to claim me with some show of kind judicial authority, as if the law had appointed him my part guardian. But that was by-and-by.

Now, he uttered a sound, as if his emotions had been too much for him, and stepped back.

“I must go,” he said. “You will excuse me. This wonder—this kindness—I am unused; it overwhelms me. I must rest the body, even if the brain works. You will let me come and see you again?”

“But why not accept a——” began my uncle.

“No, no,” he interrupted him, gasping. “I understand your generosity, sir. I have stood, I can stand the rack. There are limits to my endurance of benignity—such human consideration. I have a good bed at the Flask. I entreat you to let me go—to——”

He left hurriedly. I would have accompanied him; but Uncle Jenico, with a better delicacy, detained me. The moment the door slammed on him he smacked one hand decisively in the palm of the other.

“That man a murderer!” he cried. “Richard, I wish your Mr. Quayle no worser fate than to die in refuting such another calumny!”

CHAPTER VII.
“FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.”

I had forgotten all our late troubles in this wonderful encounter. Aaron’s snake had swallowed the others. This peaked wintry little ghost out of the past, starved and frost-bitten and shabby as it looked, had yet a strange suggestion of vicious force about it which, inasmuch as it seemed sworn for good or evil to my service, comforted me unconsciously in the sense of fear and helplessness which had got me in grip. Somehow Rampick seemed less formidable, my feeling of bondage to an ugly responsibility less acute, in the knowledge of this new acrid ally.

But, beyond this, there was curiosity—still-breathing, wide-eyed curiosity to know what enduring mystery yet held the footsteps of that ancient tale of The King versus Joshua Pilbrow. I had learned something, had had my adventure tooth tickled with a taste of the truth. It had whetted my hunger for more, had tantalized me with that sharpest spur to youthful appetite—the dream of hidden treasure. When would Joshua serve up the whole dish—or would he ever? It seemed incredible that a man who had pursued such a secret, morose and self-contained, for six years, could yield it at last to a sentiment. Yet he had promised, and, though I sickened of the delay, I must not dare to risk making that eternal by over-precipitation.

In the meantime, as there could be no harm in the attentions natural to hospitality, I walked over to the Flask inn, after breakfast the following morning, to see how our visitor had slept.

It was within three or four days of Christmas, and sharp, beautiful weather. I have always since associated the deadliest scheming of Fate with such tranquillity. The robin, like a tiny phœnix, burned, singing on a spray. There was a glaze of rime on the ground, and the sweetest coldness to take into the lungs. The ringers were already practising their carols; the ruddiness of the holly was reflected in the genial cheeks of the wives; the prospect of holiday and fat fare smiled from every door. One had thought that the village, like its geese, had been gutted of the last foulness, and that Nature beamed approval. Alas! it is not the blackest thought that rides the storm. Nature, like the man, may “smile and smile and be a villain.”

The younger Miss Fleming had made herself a sad misalliance, running away with the ostler, and coming to grief and indigence. But her fate had wrought no impression on her sister, who remained as pert and coquettish as ever, and wore the same gaudy finery and shoes down at heel. She always rather courted me because of Harry, of whom she was gigglingly enamoured, and who detested her.

“Lork, Mr. Dicky!” she said, when I came in. “Is the old gentleman a friend of yours? I’m sure I’d have give him every attention if I’d known.”

She was glancing fitfully, all the time she spoke, at a little lozenge of looking-glass which stood on the bar rack.

“Whatever you could have spared from that, Tilly?” I said. “I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.”

“O, get along!” she protested. “You’re always poking your fun at me!” And I made my way upstairs, as directed, to number seven.

I found Joshua not yet out of bed when I entered to his summons. He sat up to greet me, like Lazarus new-risen—a wasted corpse-like little figure, white and grim and unshorn. But his face lighted rapturously at sight of me.

“It was no dream, then!” he said, and lay back again, with a very gentle expression. I came and stood over him, and he nodded to me.

“Richard, I shall lie abed to-day. This passion of luxury after the toil! Most restful, most wonderful! Yet the sickness is not out of my bones.”

“You will do very well,” I said. “When you are rested, we must show you all there is of the place—the local lions, you know. To-night it is a Feast of Lanterns—rather fun. Do you think you could manage it?” And between question and answer he learned all about Mr. Sant, and Harry, and what remained untold of our simple history. It might have been Hume to him, so profound an attention he gave to it.

“I shall like that Harry,” he said at the end; “and the sensible clergyman. Yes, I will come to the Feast, if you can find me a lantern.”

After arranging to fetch him at a given hour, I left him to his trance of rest. He told me no more of his story. I had hardly expected he would; yet I retreated in an itch of half-injured excitement. Ah! if I could have foreseen under what circumstances the revelation was to come to me, I would have sworn a compact of eternal silence with him, and baffled Fate.

That morning Harry returned from Yokestone, and I walked a mile to meet him. He was near as excited as I over Joshua’s coming. He knew all about him, of course. We had no secrets from one another.

“What does he look like?” he said. “I’ve never seen an acquitted murderer.”

Joshua had shaved the gallows. He was not the rose, but he had lived near it.

“I can’t say he looks like everybody else,” I said, “because he doesn’t. But his nose is in the middle of his face.”

By-and-by we fell to our long-postponed discussion of the great adventure and its moral.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Harry, “that perhaps after all we’ll tell Sant.”

“O, you may snigger!” he said. “But supposing anything were to happen to us.”

“Why, what’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know. One can never tell.” He spoke quite sombrely. “It wouldn’t be right, would it, to carry that secret to the grave, especially——”

“Especially what?”

“Why, I was going to say, especially if we thought we were going to be sent there by some one on purpose to keep it.”

“Look here, Harry,” I exploded; “I wish you’d speak plain, and not hint and nudge and set a fellow jumping. Who do you mean? Say out!”

“Rampick, then.”

I walked on, staring at the road. He had but given actuality to a rather haunting spectre of my own.

“You think he’ll be wanting to shut our mouths?” I said, low.

“I think—yes. He saw us go in; and—well, look here, Dick—why’s he been watching there all these years, unless out of fear that some such thing might happen? Ah, you’ve thought the same yourself, I see! It looks black against him, in my opinion, and——”

“He’s half crazed. We two ought to be a match for him.”

“Suppose he took us separate? He’s strong as the devil still, I tell you. I’m not afraid; but I don’t want to be tipped over a cliff, or have a stone fall on me, and mother be left to think I didn’t take care of my life for her sake.”

“Very well; we’ll tell Sant, then,” I said, graciously conceding the point—with much private relief.

“Then the sooner the better,” said Harry. “I’ve thought it all out since yesterday, and concluded that not to tell him would be to make him out less of a man than we are. Supposing anything were to happen to us, and some chance brought to his knowing after all what we’d died to keep from him. A pretty opinion he’d think we had of him, and a pretty ghost to haunt his conscience, to know that he might have saved us. The sooner the better, I say.”

“All right. Only he won’t be back till this evening.”

“No more he will. Very well; what do you say, then, to filling up the time by going there again?”

I actually stumbled, as if he had tripped me.

“Harry!”

I had clutched hold of him to stop him, and we stood face to face.

“You ain’t afraid?” he asked.

“Afraid! I’m sick at the very thought.”

“O, that’s rot! We’ve seen the worst, and got over it.”

“Have we? We’ve seen enough anyhow to serve me for a lifetime.”

“Don’t you bother, then. I’ll go by myself.”

“You shan’t, I tell you.”

“Shan’t I? We’ll see.”

“What do you want to go for?”

“To find out whether he’s been there since or not.”

“What does it matter if he has? Besides, he’d never get his great carcase through the way we came.”

“I dare say; but I want to see. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Wait till we’ve spoken to Mr. Sant.”

“I’d rather have the latest facts to put before him.”

I clutched my forehead. I knew the dogged side of this friend of mine. Then I fell into a fury, and stamped.

“You’re a beast! If I have a fit, you’ll have to answer for it, that’s all.”

“I don’t want you to come!”

“Don’t you? Who gave you leave to dictate to me, I should like to know?”

“Well, come if you like.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrier, for the permission.”

We resumed our way, and I walked by Harry’s side, ruffling. Presently he said—

“I say! Supposing that old Pilbrow’s treasure had anything to do with the secret in the hill! What a lovely complication!”

“I don’t see why it particularly should,” I snapped. “It had to do with a book; not—not with a hash of smugglers.”

I took no longer interest in Joshua for the moment. Harry had put all that story out of my head. He saw I was worked up, and said no more. We parted where our roads branched, on my side in a very depressed condition. My dinner choked me, and my desperate efforts to simulate appetite only brought me observation. Uncle Jenico was quite concerned, and Mrs. Puddephatt disgustingly critical.

“It’s the hair,” she said. “Soon or late it was bound to find ’im hout. I don’t blame you, sir, for noticing at the eleventh hour what’s long been apperient to the casual. The heyes of love is blind, and incapable of seeing into the stomach. The young gentleman, sir, is sickening for London, and no wonder. We know, sir, what Scripture says is the dog’s fancy; and is a human to be judged more himpervious to what he’s give up? Let Master Richard breathe the hair of his native ’eath once more is my advice.”

“Is there any truth in this, Dick?” said Uncle Jenico, when she had gone. “Have you been, perhaps unconsciously, thinking of London lately, because——”

“O, don’t be a dear old idiot!” I interrupted him impatiently. “I was never less in the mood to leave Dunberry. Can’t I keep up my character for health without stuffing myself when I ain’t hungry!”

I laughed vexedly; but still I could see he was anxious about me, and I was working myself up to the last pitch of irritability, when suddenly I was conscious that Harry had gone past the window outside. I waited for his rap at the door. It did not follow. I jumped up, stung to fury, and disregarding my uncle’s cry, ran out of the house and came up with my friend.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Were you going without me?”

“I thought,” he answered, “you’d see me; and then you could come or not as you liked.”

“Now, look here,” I said, “I won’t be treated in this way. I think it’s just beastly. Because I don’t jump at being made sick, every one’s going to pity me or be my superior.”

“Why, what’s happened?” said Harry, with a twinkle.

“Mrs. Puddephatt,” I answered. “I wish she’d leave my inside alone. And here you are going along with your nose in the air.”

Harry was chuckling out loud; but he reddened as I ended.

“I can’t help my nose,” he said gravely. “I don’t see the point.”

“No more do I,” I answered, looking at it, and beginning to come round with a vexed laugh. It is strange what self-respect we can acquire from other people’s weaknesses. Harry’s “pug” was always a rather delicate subject with him.

He flushed truculent a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and gave a good-natured laugh.

“I must take what comfort I can out of its being a cushion,” he said. “It’s very resting to the eyes—better than yours, that they can’t settle on without slipping.”

“Tit for tat,” I said. “You’ve answered me like a witty little gentleman, my darling. And now you can pull my ear, if you like, for having been cross and rude with you.”

He responded, with the addition of an amiable kick, and Richard was himself again.

The air being thus cleared, we went swiftly for the Mitre, chattering spasmodically all the way in a desperate pretence of swagger. I really think the greater credit was due to me, as I was being engaged to this anticlimax, as I considered it, entirely against my judgment. But my heart sank once more, when at last we came up on the hill among the ruins, and I realized at first hand the sinister futility of our design.

The day had fallen wintry close and breathless. The sun was not blotted out, but dulled, as if a ground-glass window had been shut upon it. A light fog was stretching shorewards from the water, chilling and isolating us. It brought the very spirit of ghostly echoes with it, and wickedness and watchfulness; and it seemed to demoralize the pith in one’s bones.

“O, if it’s got to be done, let’s get it over!” I said, with a shiver. “Why—Harry, look there!”

He nipped my arm, and we both stood staring—at the place of our yesterday’s exit.

There was no doubt about it. We had never effected, had never thought to effect, in the litter of dead stuff and bramble, so complete a concealment of our passage therethrough, for our ecstasy had taken no account at the moment of the rending evidences of our adventure which we were leaving behind us. Now, all trace of such was gone, obliterated, had been cunningly effaced and built in with other litter torn from the thicket elsewhere. The deadly spot was returned, to all appearance, to its wonted condition.

“Won’t that do?” I whispered, gulping. “We needn’t look any further.”

“We need,” returned Harry, short and grim. “Who’s to know, if we don’t, that he found his way down?”

“What does it matter if he did or didn’t? This shows plains enough that he saw us come out.”

“But it doesn’t show that he knows what we know.”

“Harry!”

He was pulling at the dead stuff as I shook out his name. A great pad of it came bodily away in his hands, revealing a savage gap behind—a hole torn and trodden beyond anything that we had made.

“Harry!” I whispered again. “Supposing—supposing he should be down there now!”

Nothing would persuade or deter him. He broke from me, and was in while I spoke; and I had in decency to follow.

Now, if more proof were needed, here it was in the black rent at our feet. It was flagrantly enlarged from our memory of it by the forced passage of a huger body. It offered no difficulty of descent, and Harry let himself down into it cautiously, but without hesitation.

“Wait,” he muttered, as he disappeared, “while I light up.”

He had brought matches and candles with him; but he paused a moment to listen before he fetched them out.

Not a sound reached us. The hill, inside and out, was wrapped in deadliest silence. The next instant a soft glow spread itself below me, and I went down into it, tingling with the horror of what it should reveal.

Not a sound; not even the snarl of the badger, which I believe I should have welcomed. The brute, scared out of his security, I think, had betaken himself to other quarters. We reached the floor, and crept on.

Again the dead came about us; but now, knowing and holding the road to flight, I could recover nothing of the sad appeal to comradeship with which they had before greeted me. They were terrors apart: ghastly chuckling grotesques without name in the kind world I had left. I hated them as they hated me.

Suddenly Harry uttered a little cry, and, stooping, rose again with some object in his hand.

“Look!” he whispered, and held it to the light.

It was the bowl, broken off short, of a blackened death’s-head pipe, such as was familiar to us in the lips of Joel Rampick.

Do you know what the French call a pièce de conviction? Here it was, and we needed nothing further.

He had been here, and he shared our secret. What was he going to do?

CHAPTER VIII.
THE FEAST OF LANTERNS.

I remember I ate a very large supper that night, to the happy reassurance of Uncle Jenico. That suffocating tightness of the midriff, which anxiety brings, seems to expand, in its reaction, to a quite exaggerated emptiness. Have we not all had that experience? What meals we’ve made after a visit to the dentist’s! Who would have thought that this Berserker, dashing his beard with wine and roaring contempt of wounds and death, was the same individual who in the morning cowered sick-cropped in Mr. Forceps’s waiting-room? The thought of having vindicated, and proved, and so honourably acquitted one’s self of further responsibility to a much-dreaded task, is one of the most appetizing reflections in the world. And besides, I had arrears to make up.

For the moment, I was quite congratulatory to Fate on its having found so strong an instrument as myself to help it with its schemes. I even, I think, took credit for that brilliant conception of shifting the whole burden as soon as possible upon Mr. Sant’s shoulders. Through the glaze of repletion I saw, bedimmed, and even perhaps glorified, the figures of two ghostseers scuttling home that afternoon, with their tails between their legs, before the vision of a vengeance they had evoked. Now I laughed and snapped my fingers at the shadow of that vengeance left standing outside the window.

But it came to be just a leetle a different matter when it fell evening, and when shadow enwrapped the shadow, and I must go out into the first, perhaps after all to find the second also claiming and involving me. We were still, Harry and I, bound unrelieved to our secret, and must be so till late night, at least. For Mr. Sant was to return from London but in time to keep his evening engagement at the church, or, rather, the schoolrooms adjoining—to which, since their completion, the lectures had been relegated—and no opportunity could be ours to speak with him till after the entertainment. In the meanwhile, we had arranged to meet at the Flask, when I went to fetch Joshua, that Harry might be introduced; and about half-past seven I set out.

I confess I looked over my shoulder more than once as I sped for the inn. The night was very black, with a sense of creeping inquisitive mists in it. I had brought a lantern for myself and one for Joshua; but for some reason I did not want to light them as yet. Perhaps it was the thought of my moving a marked object through the gloom which prevented me. However, I reached my destination without mishap, and finding Harry already waiting for me there, took him up at once to our visitor’s bedroom.

We found Mr. Pilbrow dressed, and expecting me with some eagerness. He was quite spruce, so far as the contents of the little hand-bag, his sole baggage, it seemed, could make him. But he had been shaved and brushed, and his boots cleaned; and if his heavy green surtout was worn and smeared with a hundred stains, the character of it was redeemed by that of the little, alert, forcible face, which looked out of the frayed collar.

“So,” he said, pleased, but stiffly, “here’s the lantern, and here’s Harry, I presume?”

“How dee do, sir?” said my friend, grinning rather shy, but in his frank, attractive way. “I hope you’ll like Dunberry. We haven’t much in the way of local sights to recommend us; but what there is we’ll show you, if you’ll let us.”

“I’m obliged to ye,” said Joshua. “My young friend here mentioned some ruins.”

“Yes, there’s the ruins,” said Harry; “and—and—what else is there, Dick?”

I had hoped, under the circumstances, we might have let the ruins alone. I did not care much to think of them, for my part.

“O,” I said, airily, “there’s the wreck on the sands. It’s the only other thing I can call to mind.”

“Mighty!” said Harry. “What a genius you are, Dicky! I’d never thought of that. Would you care to pull out and see a wreck, Mr. Pilbrow?”

“Infinitely,” said the old man, handsomely. “And what wreck is it now?”

We told him.

“It’d be rather a lark,” said Harry. “Only we must time our visit to the tide. It’ll be low about to-morrow midday, if that’ll suit. If you’ll believe me, sir, we shall be the first to show any curiosity about the thing. There it’s sat for a week, and Dunberry not taken the trouble to pull five miles out to learn its name, even.”

We must go now, if we wanted to hear the lecture; and so we lighted our lanterns and descended those private stairs which I had used on the morning first after our coming. I led, and as I issued forth, I lifted my lantern to show Joshua, who followed, the way. The light shone full upon his face, where it hung, like the gurgoyle of my memory, I could have thought, in the dark entry. And on the instant a little strained scream broke at my elbow, and something staggered back against the closed door of the tap which stood hard by.

The latch burst; there was a snap and tinkle of glass, and the door flying open, let down a heavy sprawling body into the lighted bar beyond. A volley of oaths from the landlord sprung out with the glow, and some one was cursed for a crazy, drunken lout. Startled beyond measure, I hurried our guest on.

“What was it?” he asked, unruffled.

“Nothing,” I said, “but a boozy ruffian of our acquaintance.”

But by-and-by I took an opportunity to pull Harry back and whisper in his ear—

“Did you see?”

“Yes. Rampick.”

“What was he doing there?”

“What is he always doing there?”

“Yes. But to give out that screech at the sight of us!”

“It shows, anyhow, that he’s more frightened of us than we are of him.”

I was agitated, nevertheless, and more eager than ever to unburden myself to Mr. Sant. This giving of himself away was hardly to be reconciled with the drunkard’s stealthy effacement of his traces up on the hill yonder. I wanted the thing all over and taken out of our hands.

We found the road to the schools, now we came to retrace it, all dotted and lively with wandering sparks of lanterns. There was to be a good attendance, it was evident. The holiday spirit was in the air, and these lectures, after all, were the best of holiday tasks. And, indeed, when we entered the building we perceived it so crowded as, in the brilliancy of its illumination, to preclude any chance of that first fun of obscured revelations; for the drawings on the sheet were plain as truth, or anyhow as plain as good intentions. We were forced to satisfy ourselves with back places near the door. However, the room was not so large but that we could distinguish every one of the freehand objects depicted in charcoal on the screen, which, with a “Seraphine”—a late invented reed instrument blown with the feet, and the joy of Mr. Sant’s heart—was the whole of the lecturer’s paraphernalia.

“What’s that first thing?” whispered Harry, giggling.

“Hush!” I said. “I don’t know. It looks like an oyster.”

The lights, and the company, and the prospect of our tutor’s near restoration to us, were beginning to recover me, and already I was tickled with the thought of some fun ahead. And then, in a moment, there he was, the whimsical strong soul; and I breathed a great sigh of relief, and joined tumultuously in the welcome which greeted him.

His discourse this night (and the illustrations to it, presumably) was all of an appropriate observance of the sacred and festive occasion now upon us. He urged his audience to honour it with sobriety. “In the very teeth,” he said, “of that foreign clergyman who exhorted his English congregation to temperance in these words: ‘Myself I do not say no drink. Myself I would drink a pot of porter with you every minute,’ I must assure you that it is not excess which is the friend of festivity, nor is it sport to choose the devil for bottle holder, and let one’s self be knocked out of time at the first round. Take your share and drink fair is our motto; and put it down that you may keep it up, the ‘father of lies.’ A drunken christening is never a pleasant sight; but when Christ Himself is the baby, it is damning as well as shameful. What would you think, as honest men, of repaying the author of a feast by excluding him from a share in it, and not even, like the Model Constituency, in order to point a moral? You have never heard of the Model Constituency?” (“No, your reverence, no!”) “Well, I suppose not. But the one that came nearest to it was the one to the independent and enlightened electors of which a candidate once appealed with a free lunch and drinks on the day of the poll. And very polite and ingratiatory he came to it himself, too, to take a snack and a glass with his good friends and guests. Only his good friends and guests wouldn’t let him in On the contrary, a burly, red-faced elector barred his way as he was entering.

“‘Vait a minute, sir,’ says the elector. ‘Ve likes this idea of yours,’ he says, ‘only there’s vun thing: ve doesn’t want to be disfranchised for corruption,’ says he. ‘The bony fiddles of our borough is wery dear to us,’ he says.

“‘And to me,’ says the candidate. ‘Rather sacrifice twenty seats than imperil that and my good name,’ he says.

“‘So ve thought, sir,’ says the elector. ‘And therefore ve’re going to eat your wittles, and drink your hale, and arterwards go down in a body and plump for the other gentleman, in order to prove,’ says he, ‘that our incorruptibility was what you stood on. And we’ll be wery much obliged,’ he says, ‘if you’ll give us your countenance by clearing out.’”

The illustration went home—we were not so far from the Reform Act of ’32—and was greeted with laughter and cheers.

“Now, you have not that excuse,” said the lecturer. “The author of this feast comes to save, not to corrupt you; and if you would honour Him, consider His sober innocence in your midst, or His Father will withdraw Him. Christmas without Christ! That is to play the devil’s game.”

He sat down, as he spoke, to his “Seraphine,” and broke into a hymn—his own production, and very characteristic—which ran, literally, as follows—

“’Tis Christ His feast,” said Short to Long.

“Let’s pass the night in drink and song.”

“The liquor must not be too mild

For toasting of that holy Child,”

Said Long. “Them Jews was blind,” said he;

“But not so blind as we will be.”

They drank Him once, and twice, and thrice;

The main brace they began to splice.

A child’s voice wailed outside the door:

“O, let me enter, I implore!

“’Tis freezing cold, and dark, and dire.

O, let me warm me at your fire!”

“No place for children here,” said Long,

And bid him “cut his lucky” strong.

“We’re keeping of Christ Jesus’ feast,

Clear out,” said Short, “you little beast!”

They sang to “David’s royal Son,”

And not till all the drink was done

Abstained; then staggered to the door,

And sobered at the sight they saw.

Stark on the snow Christ baby lay.

’Twas Him those sots had cursed away.

Now tell me, what availed them, then,

To keep Christ out and Christmas in?

He had set his words to the tune of “Immortal Babe who this dear day,” and you may question, if you are purists, a cockney rhyme or two; and you may question, if you are Pharisees, his methods. Well, all I can tell you is that women wiped their eyes over the homely theme, and that our Christmas was the sweeter for the lesson it taught.

At the end Mr. Sant jumped up, and taking his rod, pointed to the first object on the screen.

“Now, then!” sniggered Harry, kneading his hands between his knees.

There followed a pause and a general stir, rippled through with a little undercurrent of laughter.

“Go on!” whispered Harry, nudging me.

“Oyster!” I sung out.

Mr. Sant caught sight of us, and nodded and laughed.

“Thank you, Mr. Bowen,” said he. “No, it’s not an oyster!” and he sat down and began trolling out a new carol.

The little ex-bookseller shifted; blushed faintly, I do believe, and turned to me.

“I fancy I’ve got it,” said he.

“Have you?” I answered delightedly. “Cry up, then!”

“Christmas pie!” he piped, in his thin, cracked voice.

Every head was turned momentarily our way. Mr. Sant left his stool and bowed.

“The artist is vindicated,” said he. “The gentleman has the right penetrative vision. A mince-pie it is.” And he made his illustration forthwith the text for a lovely disquisition on plum-porridge and frumenty and goose-pie, “on beef and plum-pudding and turkey and chine,” and, generally, the history and rationale of Christmas fare, till his audience shifted and sighed under the influence of an illusive surfeit.

A thing guessed for “one o’ them tree worms,” and turning out to be a yule log, came next, and provoked an allusion to a Norfolk custom on certain farms of dealing out the strong cider to the household at meals for so long as the block was in consuming; for which reason the servants would select for Yule the biggest and most cross-grained stump of elm they could find—a shrewd providence which tickled the simple fancy of this fishing community, where wood for burning was economized to the last spark it would yield.

A leathern jack coming third, and passing, by way of a wading boot, the ordeal of identification, led to the liveliest little essay on the drinking vessels of our ancestors; the “cocker-nuts” and hornes of beasts; the “goords” and ostrich eggs; the “mazers, broad-mouthed dishes, noggins, whiskins, piggins, crinzes, ale-bowls, wassell-bowls, court-dishes, tankards, Kannes, from a pottle to a pint and a pint to a gill;” and, last of all, the great jacks and bombards, which indeed were not unlike the cavalry boot of William III.’s time.

Then we came to a fowl of some sort, most unnamable and amazing. Every species of partlet known to Dunberry, from a barn-door to a guinea-hen, was named without success, while Mr. Sant at the “Seraphine” laughed so that he could hardly sing, and from the hall a peal of merriment went up with every guess. But at last, a dear fat boy, Hoogan by name, was inspired, and to an explosion of chuckles gave up the secret.

“I’ve got un, Muster Sarnt, I’ve got un! It’s a tor-key!”

The lecturer brought down his hands to a little scream of laughter, and sprang to his feet.

“Hoogan,” he cried, “you redeem me. Not know him! Look here—his vain, empty, strutting, intolerable self-importance! Isn’t it all there to the life? The very manner of the creature that imposed so abominably upon the Mayor of Bantam.”

Cries and cheers greeted him as the laughter subsided.

“Your reverence, your reverence! Tell us who was the Mayor of Bantam.”

“Why, he was the Mayor of Bantam, to be sure, and so puffed up with pride and good living, that when he sat down, I tell you for a fact, he couldn’t see his own lap. He could only see, resting on it, what he loved best in the world; and you may guess what that was. Anyhow, there are two ways of running to waste, and his wasn’t the consumption of the stomach one.

“Well, one Christmas, when he was at the height of his glory and appetite, he conceived the happy idea of making that part of himself a present of the primest and most promising bird which money could procure. ‘It’s no less than a duty,’ thinks he, ‘to so faithful a servant; and I’ll go to Huggins myself this day about it.’

“Now, this Huggins bred turkeys; and what he didn’t know about ’em wasn’t worth knowing. He knew their pride and their self-sufficiency; he knew that of all the fowls that came strutting out of the ark they were the vainest about their election; he knew how a little flattery, properly administered, would serve them for food and drink till they came near bursting; and he had a grudge against this Mayor of Bantam for having once fined him for being incapable when he had never felt so powerful drunk in his life. So, ‘Ho-ho!’ says he to himself, when the mayor comes upon his quest, ‘I’ve a bone to pick with you, my friend; and fine pickings you shall have!’

“‘You want such a turkey as never was, my lord?’ says he. ‘And you want to take and fatten him, and watch him fattening, and enjoy him in anticipation, do you?’ he says. ‘But turkeys is queer beasts,’ says he; ‘and whited sepulchres to them as doesn’t know their tricks.’

“‘How do you mean “whited sepulchres?”’ asks the Mayor of Bantam.

“‘Bones, when all’s told,’ says Huggins, shaking his head darkly, ‘if you don’t know the trick of inducing of ’em to swell.’

“‘Well, what is the trick?’ says the mayor.

“‘Flattery, my lord,’ says Huggins. And then he pointed to a bird.

“‘Do you see him?’ says he. ‘There’s the proudest, healthiest cock in my yard—one as, if humoured, would fill a whole corporation, down to its hungriest kitchen gal on two and six a week and what she could pick up, with the marrer of deliciousness. A dream, he is.’

“‘A nightmare, by the looks of him,’ says the mayor, ‘There’s more of sepulchre than of meat about him,’ he says.

“‘Ah!’ says Huggins; ‘and that shows your ignorance. It’s just slighting that keeps him in his place till he’s wanted. If I was to flatter that bird, sir, he’d puff himself out that amazing with self-importance, he’d burst in a week and anticipate his own market. You take him home, and feed him judicious on admiration and little else, and you’ll have such a feast of him in the end as you never dreamed.’

“‘How much for him?’ says the mayor.

“‘Not a penny less than two guineas,’ says Huggins.

“‘Preposterous!’ says the mayor.

“‘O, very well!’ says Huggins. ‘I’d as lief you refused. He shall be three to the next customer.’

“Well, the mayor allowed himself to be persuaded; and he had the bird sent home and put in a coop. And every day, and half a dozen times a day, he’d go down and praise the creature to its face till its very wattles turned purple with pleasure. There’s nothing too fulsome for a turkey to swallow. The very ‘gobble-gobble’ of him set the mayor’s jaws going with a foretaste of delight.

“‘Gobble-gobble! I could eat you, my beauty!’ says he, just as a rapturous mother talks to her child.

“You should have seen the turkey ruffle and swell to be called beauty.

“‘Put up your tail,’ says the mayor, ‘and the dear little pope’s nose! There’s no Juno’s peacock can spread such a fan!’ says he.

“The cage would hardly contain the bird at that. He expanded at the very sound of the mayor’s footstep afterwards; and he discarded his food almost entirely, as something too gross for the consideration of a better than Juno’s peacock. The mayor wondered; but he couldn’t discount the evidence of his own eyes.

“‘That Huggins is a cunning one,’ he thought. ‘He knows what he’s about’—which was very true.

“Well, at length the festive day arrived, and the mayor went to take a last look at his beauty before consigning him to his cook. He was almost in tears. He’d been starving himself for a week, in anticipation of the feast, and perhaps that was the reason.

“‘Darling!” he said, ‘my whole being craves for you! There never was such a beautiful turkey in the world!’

“Bang! went the bird. It was like a paper bag exploding. And there before the mayor’s eyes was just a little sack of bones and feathers. The creature’s pride had been nothing but wind; and that was a turkey all over.

“It was Christmas Day, not a market open, and Huggins was avenged.”

The lecturer ended amidst shouts of laughter and applause. In the midst, he sat down to the “Seraphine,” and was fingering out the first bars of a new hymn, when some one coming up on to the platform whispered to him. He rose hurriedly, and, listening a moment or two, as hurriedly left the room. The audience, including ourselves, relaxed, at his going, into a babble of talk and merriment.

“Prime, isn’t it, Mr. Pilbrow?” said Harry, grinning and rubbing his hands.

“If you introduce me to nothing worse,” answered the visitor, “I shall love Dunberry for itself.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I never thought of it before. If we’re going to take him to see the wreck to-morrow, Harry, where shall we get a boat?”

“H’m!” said my friend. “That requires consideration, to be sure. They’re all laid up for the holidays, I suppose.”

“Well, we must see,” said I, and, in the act of speaking, turned my head.

Now there was a row of wooden pillars behind us, supporting a gallery, which threw into comparative darkness the space underneath; and projected round that pillar nearest us, and leaned out of the darkness, hung the face of Rampick. It was ghastly pale, the jaw loose, the livid spectacles about the eyes horribly emphasized; and its expression was one of an unnerved and listening sickness that made me shudder. In the very act of my looking, it was snatched back; and I saw the man himself going, lurching heavily, but on tiptoe, into the gloom and away.

To say that I was startled would be but to express ill my feelings. All the doubts and agitations of the earlier evening trooped upon me again, like a cold cloud. Had he followed us for a purpose? and, if so, for what purpose? He had long slunk out of all attendance at these feasts. For some reason, it seemed—we could only assume what—we had become objects of mixed terror and fascination to him. He must have picked himself up from that fall, and stealthily shadowed us hither, where, it was evident, he had taken up a position cautiously to observe and overhear us.

I bent towards Harry to whisper to him; but before I could secure his attention, a stir and silence ran through the room, and there, on the platform, was our parish clerk holding up his hand. He came to say that Mr. Sant had been summoned hastily to the Court, where an old servant of the squire was reported at death’s door, and to request the audience to take his apologies and disperse.

As we rose, I looked at Harry dumbly and significantly.

So here were we again baulked for the moment of our confession. It was under the spirit of a fall from gaiety to a very real depression that I said good night to my friends.

CHAPTER IX.
THE WEARY SANDS.

But the morning, rising cold and bright, though still misty, found me on the rebound once more. The day, after all, is what we make it, and I would not think evil of so smiling a one. Mr. Sant was back, even if we could not see him yet, and his mere neighbourhood was a splint to a weak-knee’d conscience.

Uncle Jenico, though still oppressed with some odd premonition, some formless concern about me, permitted himself to be reassured so far by my high spirits as to let me go presently, with nothing more than an earnest entreaty that I would take care of myself. I had told him nothing about our proposed trip to the Weary Sands. It would have served no purpose but to trouble him all day with anxiety as to our return. I was glad to think, later, that I had not done so; that I had sat content with him for an hour or two after breakfast; had kept him chatting genially, and made him laugh; had taken a genuine bright interest in the “Colossal Wrench,” an invention (which he was engaged in perfecting at the time) somewhat on the principle of the Spanish garrotte, for applying tremendous haulage to an object—the most gratifyingly practical of all his inspirations, as you shall see. And I was glad to think that when at last I had left him, well on in the morning, in a sudden access of emotion he had kissed me, and then driven me away with his stick, and a laugh, and the tears in his eyes. I had been half shamefaced, it is true, at the moment; but presently was to sentimentalize more over the memory than he had over the fact.

We were engaged, Harry and I, by arrangement for this day to the convoying of Mr. Pilbrow about the place, in order to his making acquaintance with its objects of interest. It was nothing, in fact, but an excuse for a ramble; only, to give it a holiday complexion, we had arranged to bring our lunch with us, and our visitor back to high tea at the end of the jaunt.

I set forth about eleven o’clock for the Flask, where we were to meet. The shadows of the previous night were dispelled. A still, shining mist half hid and half revealed, like a bridal veil, the pretty face of nature. There was a smile and a sparkle of gems through it all, and I whistled, as happy as a blackbird, as I went. It was within three mornings of Christmas, a time of peace and good-will, and I was determined to let the day be sufficient for itself in evil without troubling to force its hand.

On the wall of the inn I found a wonderful notice posted. It was written crooked, in great black letters and without any stops, and ran as follows:—

“Nekt Thrusday 26t Desrember there will be on Plaistoo Jingling matches for Hats grinning thro coler Catching of a pig with the Tail greazed climing of a pole of wemen Running For Snuff old Men for tobakker there will be also a place receved for dancing and seats Will be also receved for the Leadies there will be a band including marrow bons and clever to conclude with a grand Exbitrition of Fire wax and Cullerd bumps by J.F.”

Harry joined me while I was spluttering over this, and read the exciting legend across my shoulder.

“I say,” he said, “Mr. Pilbrow’s in luck. He’ll think we’re a game lot. I only hope the reaction won’t be too severe. But what does ‘bumps’ mean? Is Sant getting up a sparring match?”

“Bombs, you gaby,” I said, sniggering.

“Mighty!” said he. “Old Fleming’s going it. But won’t it be fun!”

Then he fell to a little gravity.

“By the way,” he said, “Sant hasn’t come home yet, and they don’t expect him at the rectory till this afternoon.”

It was the first little damper on my serenity.

“O, well!” I said, with a sigh; “we shall be out for the day anyhow; and it don’t make much difference if we can only get hold of him this evening. You saw Rampick last night?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Bother Rampick for this day at least!”

We ran up in good spirits to Joshua, and in a little while were launched upon our explorations. Our odd dry old companion was quite excited, too, in his way. It was the most novel, most wonderful experience to him, I think, thus to chaperon a couple of lively lads, and be their favoured charge and mentor in one. He kept himself acrid and reserved—it was the habit of his life; but a certain glistening in his pale eyes, a spot of colour that established itself in his lean cheek, spoke of some spark reawakening in those long-chilled ashes of his soul underneath. There was even some glow of self-marvelling enthusiasm in that haunting gaze of his, of which I found myself from time to time the cynosure. It was like the glare of a remorseful ghost coveting recognition in heaven’s nursery by its own child’s happy spirit. “What human sympathy have I foregone and realized too late!” it seemed to express.

We betook ourselves in the first place—by Joshua’s rather insistent wish, but, secretly, against our own—to the ruins, and for an hour poked about among them wearily, loitering after our guest, and supplying, scarcely volunteering, all that of their history with which we were acquainted—impersonally, that is to say. The truth is, the place had become odious to us—as full of sordid significances as is a house in which a murder has been committed, when we know ourselves subpoena’d to give evidence on the crime. But naturally our companion felt none of this, and was only absorbed and interested, so far as appeared, in the archaeological testimony. Once, at the end, he paused, as fatality would have it, close by the plinth and the encumbered thicket. I glanced at Harry. A second time, patiently and scrupulously, had the hole been stopped, and the traces of our visit effaced.

What did the man mean? Did he, in his diseased imagination, think thus to convince us in the face of our actual experience? It was like enough. His unnerving dreams are so real to the drunkard, he cannot but think that others must see what he sees and be blind to what he has successfully hidden from himself. He is like the ostrich in his amazing digestion of both facts and fables, Whether he puts fire in his stomach or his head in the sand, he is equally the confident and incurable dupe of his own imagination.

Suddenly Joshua, after a prolonged reverie, half turned to us.

“Are there any legends of crypts, underground vaults, anything that we have not seen about here?” he demanded.

I was startled; I could not order my thoughts. I mumbled out involuntarily—

“I—there used to be a talk of smugglers.”

He turned upon me like a snapping dog.

“Smugglers! What about them?”

Harry glanced at me warningly.

“O!” I said, recovering myself with a flush, “it was an old tale when we came, Mr. Pilbrow; and, since, the weather and the coastguard have been knocking it to pieces between them.”

He stood thoughtfully rubbing his chin.

“So?” he murmured. “Knocking what to pieces?”

“Why, the tale,” said I; for I did not wish to be more particular.

I don’t know if he understood my reluctance. He did not persist in his questions, anyhow, but lapsed into a brown study. He seemed to have forgotten our presence.

“So it ever vanishes,” he muttered, with a stark and melancholy frown. “From Dungeness to Spurn Head it is always the same. The past breaks away and falls into the sea as I approach. The ghosts lead, the mirage beckons me; and, behold! the precipice and the boom of waters where I had thought a treasure house!”

He gave a sigh that was nothing less than heart-rending. A certain awe and discomfort kept us mute. Here was some tragedy beyond our guessing, but to which we were guiltily conscious that our secretiveness contributed. Then in a moment he turned upon us with a laugh in which there was not even a tinge of mirth.

“If there is any land too much in the world,” said he, “put me to walk upon its shore, and it will vanish before me yard by yard. My breath is blasting powder; my feet are earthquakes. I must drown if I live long enough.”

He walked off towards the cliff, and paused at its edge, looking down gloomily on the leaning shaft of the well.

“He is thinking of Abel and his book,” I whispered to Harry as we followed.

Suddenly he turned to me, and put his arm through mine with an air emotional and apologetic.

“Dear lad,” he said, “you mustn’t consider my moods. I talk to myself, Richard—the bad habit of a lonely man. What is that thing, now? I have wondered before this.”

I told him.

“Ah!” he said, with a bleak jocosity: “let well be. It should have confronted me six years ago; and I see it only now, the moral of all my wanderings. Yet in a good hour is it spoken, Richard, since chance has brought me to your company again. Or is it destiny, which leading me to neglect this scrap of shore hitherto, points its lesson at the end with the broken shaft yonder? Let well be. I am hungry.”

So we sat down then and there and got out our provisions. They put astonishing comfort into us, and we two boys, at least, grew hilarious. Sound-livered and hardened, we took no thought of chill; and indeed the weather for the time of year was balm. A light glistening fog still slept over everything; there was no breath of wind, and the whisper of the surf came up to us drowsily.

“Now, this wreck,” said Joshua presently: “where will it be?”

Harry jumped to his feet.

“Mighty!” he exclaimed. “We must be thinking of moving if we want to pull out to it. Tide’s at ebb, Dicky, and near the turn. Thereabouts it lies, Mr. Pilbrow, on the Weary Sands; but we can’t just make it out in this haze.”

“Well, for the boat,” I said, scrambling up; and we all made for the Gap together. It was then half an hour past midday.

“A bad time,” said I. “What fools we were not to think of it before! There won’t be a soul about.”

There was one soul, however, it appeared—a gaunt solitary figure, which, as we neared the head of the sandy slope, we could see silhouetted against the sky—a figure, too, which, from its restless craning attitude, one might have thought was expecting us.

Harry edged up to me, and was on the point of whispering, when he caught Joshua’s eyes fixed upon him. He giggled, and looked silly.

“I was thinking, sir,” began he, “that that man there——” and then he stopped.

“Well, what about him?” said the other.

“Why,” said Harry, so confused as to forget himself—“if—if you want to know about smugglers, he’s the chap to tell you, that’s all.”

I nudged my friend.

“Well,” he muttered peevishly; “I’ve not said anything, have I? Rampick can look after himself.”

Joshua did not answer, and we went on—and in the same moment Rampick was gone.

But we saw him again when we came into view of the beach. He was down by the water, ostentatious with a boat, which lay stern on to the surf—the only man and the only craft handy in all the waste prospect.

Joshua stopped in admiration.

“A providence, it seems to me!” said he.

“We can’t go with him!” I muttered.

Our visitor looked at me in wonder.

“Why not?” he said.

How could I answer? That this seeming opportuneness was nothing more, as I was convinced, than a deliberate self-appropriation by this man of a scheme which he had overheard us discussing in the hall last night? And what then, save a confession on his part of a good trading instinct? I must find something better than that.

“He’s a drunkard,” I said, flushing. “He isn’t to be trusted, in my opinion.”

“Why?” said Joshua. “Isn’t it his own boat?”

“O yes!” I answered; for it was, indeed—the single sound piece of goods which Rampick had saved and clung to out of the wreck of his past.

“Isn’t it big enough?” insisted the visitor.

“Quite big enough.”

“Why,” said Joshua, “a seaman never loses his legs but ashore. And we are three to one, gentlemen. I’m small; but I’ll back myself for a rat to grip. If it’s me you’re thinking of——”

Harry hung his head. I was ashamed to say more. It did seem ridiculous that three vigorous bodies should be timorous of this one crazy oaf. The half-truth made us out cravens, and the whole was impossible. Nevertheless, the prospect of such a boatman for the trip quite took off the edge of its pleasure. We followed Joshua hangdog, as he strode down the Gap and across the beach.

“You’ve whetted my curiosity,” he said over his shoulder. “A drunken smuggler should be good company.”

I scowled at Harry, dropping behind.

“Well, why didn’t you take upon yourself to answer him?” he muttered viciously. “We’re in for a nice thing, it seems, knowing what we know. It’ll be pleasant to have to hob-nob with the fellow, and a warrant for his hanging like in our pockets!”

“He’s brought it on himself,” I answered. “He heard us last night; and I’ll swear he’s been ready and waiting for us all the morning.”

“Well, look out for squalls, that’s all I can say,” said my friend; and, as he spoke, we reached the boat.

Rampick, busy over it, never even looked up as we came. But I could see his great hands trembling on the thwarts, as he leaned down.

“We want to pull out to the wreck, Mr. Rampick,” I faltered. “Can you let us have your boat?”

I essayed to exclude him, as a last resource. He did not raise his head, but answered in a heavy shaking voice from where he bent.

“Which it’s well known to you, sir, that my boat and me don’t part company.”

“It’s a special occasion, Mr. Rampick.”

He came up, with a sudden heaving together of all his bulk, and subsiding rigidly backwards against the gunwale, stood breathing softly, and staring with intense unblinking eyes, not at us, but at our companion.

So a cat stares at bay, crouching before a watchful snuffing dog. I don’t think he ever once looked at Harry or me. From that moment he seemed to focus all the panic of his haunted soul on the stranger who had come in our train. It was inexplicable, though in its way a relief to us for the time being—the sort of relief one feels when some deriding gutter urchin attracts from one to himself the unwelcome notice of the town drunkard.

“Which, it’s well known,” he whispered breathless.

His demented gaze wandered from Joshua’s face to his knees, where it fixed itself.

“‘And He said,’” he muttered, “‘Lazarus, come forth!’ And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre. It’s come to it—a special occasion. One or the other of us. Boat, sir, yes. But I never done it. You ought to know—one, or the other of us.”

“Then the other, by all means,” said Joshua, caustic but interested. “My good man, we don’t want to separate you from your boat. If your presence is indispensable, why, we’ll put up with it.”

Rampick, I could have thought, went a shade more livid. His dry lips seemed to crackle under his hand as he passed the back of it over them. Yet, strangely enough, I did not believe him drunk. He seemed rather in that arid, aghast condition which, with such a man, bespeaks a temporary abstinence.

Suddenly he heaved himself upright, and began heavily to busy himself with preparations for launching his craft. We all lent a hand, and in another minute, with a slide and a jump, were on board and slipping easily over the shoreward swell.

Not then, when he had settled himself to his sculls, we being all seated in the stern, did he for a moment take his eyes off our visitor. Sympathetically, I shrunk under that concentrated stare; but Joshua bore it unruffled. Still, there was something in the atmosphere to freeze our loquacity. For a long time none of us spoke at all. There had not been air enough to fill a sail; and the monotonous bump and creak of the oars in the rowlocks beat a dreary accompaniment to our depression.

At length Harry essayed a little weak conciliation.

“Tide’ll hold for us to land and see the wreck, won’t it, Mr. Rampick?” he said.

His voice broke the spell, and to strange effect. The ex-smuggler did not answer him; but he suddenly ceased rowing, and, resting on his sculls, felt out with his foot, and kicked Joshua softly on the shins.

“What are you doing?” snapped the victim, jerking his insulted limbs under him. “What do you mean, man?”

Rampick cowered where he sat.

“I see you walk, sir,” he said hoarsely. “I see you with my own eyes. It’s not in nature, is it? You was kep’ from it, I say—held by the legs from rising. Who let you loose? Who patched you up to follow me? My God, I’ll be even with ’em, I will!”

He was working himself up to a mad pitch of excitement. I half rose in agitation, and looked behind me. We were already so far from the shore that its line of cliffs was a mere blurred bank in the haze. But Joshua, in the same instant, had seized the occasion to justify the character he had given of himself.

“Silence!” he said, not loud, but in a tone like a vice. “Who speaks of being out of nature, you crazy patch! Row on, and mind your business, which is to take us to the wreck!”

The maniac creature shrunk, as quickly as he had flamed up, under the bitter voice. Lowering and trembling he applied himself to his sculls once more, and the boat sped on.

“Harry,” I whispered, pale and gulping. “Did you understand?”

“Yes. Him that lies with the pistol in the hill yonder. He thinks it’s Mr. Pilbrow, and that we’ve set him free!”

He ended with an hysterical giggle. Here, in truth, it appeared, was this bedlamite’s attitude towards our guest explained. The infection of Harry’s laugh over the absurdity seized me. I struggled in vain to control myself. In another moment we were both of us doubling and rolling as if the devil were tickling our ribs.

Joshua expressed no surprise, but nodded intelligently as we gasped ourselves sober again. He attributed our merriment, no doubt, to a general sense of the ludicrous in this wretched creature’s wanderings, of the likelihood of any significance or coherence in which he had, of course, no idea. As for the man himself, he regarded Harry and me no further than if we had been squeaking mice behind a wainscot; but sat with his vision attached once more, and more cringingly than ever, to the little wintry, venomous figure in the stern.

We recovered ourselves, half fearful, from our convulsion, feeling rather, I think, like fugitives who had consciously betrayed their own whereabouts. But the explosion, in fact, had relieved the air; and thenceforth we began to talk together, moved by a common rebellion against the moral tyranny of the depression which had held us hitherto. But, for all that, it startled us near out of our skins, when Joshua of a sudden turned upon Rampick, and asked him roundly if he hadn’t any good smuggling yarns to recount to him.

“Of hidden stores, and black nights,” said he; “and the ground giving up a sudden swarm of mushroom creatures, things squat and stealthy, shouldering kegs?”

Rampick’s chest had seemed to fall in at the first word. It was painful to hear his breathing. But he made no attempt to answer.

“Come!” said Joshua. “It’s fast confidences, man. You know what you know. These young gentlemen have given you away—but no further than to me, mind. Come! What happened underground in those days, before the sea took its toll of the vaults?”

“Why, you should know, sir—as well as me!”

Such a funny little voice, so strained and hoarse, like a cry at a great distance. Joshua himself was startled by it, moved, perhaps, by its distress. He persisted no further, but shrugged his shoulders, and turned to address us again.

In the meanwhile we were approaching the wreck, which for some time now had been visible to us. It hung oddly in the mist—suspended, as it seemed, in the mid-haze of sky and water, like a wreck painted on glass. Still, seen through that illusive medium, it appeared a phantom, far-off thing, when to our surprise, grown absorbed as we were in contemplation of it, our boatman gave a final stroke, and finished on it with his sculls poised.

“No further?” said I, rising all excitement now. “Can’t you take us any further, Mr. Rampick?”

I’ll swear that not once during our approach had he turned his head to canvass our distance or direction. Old crafty smuggler as he was, he had hit his mark blindfold as it were. Even as I spoke, I was aware of something stretching its endless length across our course—a great soft, iridescent fish-shaped bulk, as it might be a vast submarine monster floating dead and motionless on the surface. It shone sleek and fawny, and pitted with little blue scales of water; and in the instant of my recognizing it, our boat had floated on, and, with the way given it, had grated its nose softly in its flank.

Following the little shock and recoil, we were all on our feet.

“The sands!” whispered Harry, with glistening eyes. “That was clever of you, Mr. Rampick.”

We did not, he or I, demur to our enemy’s silence. It would have made no difference if we had. His regard, his consideration, were still all for our companion.

Across the glimmering lifts of sand, the wreck, now we were brought stationary, seemed to draw nearer and clearer—a phantom still, yet claiming some foothold on this unreal reality of an amphibious little continent. Only a broken poop it was, tilted up and its mighty entrails spilt into the drift. Another storm, any rough weather, would scatter it for ever; yet no plundered town could have stood a symbol of more awful and pathetic desolation. The haze blurred and magnified it to us where we stood; so that, huge relic as it was in reality, it looked nothing less than gigantic. Gazing on it, its ruin and isolation in that mist of waters, I felt as one might feel in alighting on a fallen colossus in a desert.

“Are we to land here?” said Joshua, breaking through the spell which had overtaken me.

“Aye,” answered the smuggler, in that one terse, low monosyllable, and with his eyes never leaving the other’s face.

“Go, you,” said Joshua, turning briskly to us two. “I will wait here, and take my turn when you’ve finished.”

We hesitated, questioning him with a dumb glance.

“Come!” he said. “The tide, as I reckon, don’t stand on ceremony.”

“Why should we any of us go, Mr. Pilbrow?” I spoke up quickly. “We can see all we want to see from here.”

“Nonsense!” he said sharply. “Who’ll credit our adventure if we don’t bring back her name?”

We still hung reluctant; but he drove us good-humouredly forward, and out over the bow. Looking back, after we had leapt to the reeking sand and were hurrying to cross it, I saw him still standing there, taut and resolute, to wave us on.

“I don’t like it, Harry,” I said; “I don’t like it. And no more did he, or he wouldn’t have stayed by Rampick. Let’s hurry all we can.”

“Well, come on!” panted my friend. “The quicker we’re there, the quicker we shall be back.”

Yard by yard, as we traversed the broad spit of sand, the looming ribs of the wreck seemed to shrink, and materialize, and take on outline. And then, in a moment, with an involuntary gasp, we had pulled up, and were standing staring. For between us and our quarry had come suddenly into view an unguessed-at channel of dim water, a hundred feet it might be across.

Harry wheeled.

“He’s done us!” he exclaimed. “He’s meaning some mischief, I’ll swear. Come back, Dick!”

With the word we were running. For a moment the bulge of the drift hid the boat from our view. The next, we had topped it, and breathed with relief to see the figure of Joshua still standing up at the bow as we had left him. For an instant only; and, in that instant, Rampick, catching sight of our returning forms, rose hurriedly and stealthily, with one of his sculls clubbed to strike. We screeched out together. The warning was quick to save Joshua from the worst, but not from secondary consequences. Instinctively he ducked, as the blade flashed over his head; but the act toppled him from his balance, and he fell from the boat prone upon the sand, from which he rolled down, clutching, into the sea. In the same moment, Rampick, using the scull he had swung for lever, pushed off from the bank, hurriedly seated himself, and in a stroke or two was out at safe distance and in deep water, where he held up, breathing stertorously as he regarded us.

By this time we were down at the edge, and, flinging ourselves flat, had caught at Joshua’s hands, where they clawed and slipped in the slobber of wet sand. The drift took the water at a deepish angle, but it was firm above for knee-hold; and in a minute or two we had drawn him up far enough to enable him to get a bite with his own nails, and then the rest was easy. As he sat to recover himself, crowing and spitting but not otherwise greatly discomposed, Harry jumped to his feet, and hailed the madman furiously—

“Come back!”

Rampick, resting on his oars, chewed his dry lips for moisture, but answered nothing.

“Come back!” screamed Harry; “or I’ll fetch you!”

He dropped, and slipped knee-deep into the water as he cried, as if to verify his threat, insane one as he knew it to be. The sea was near quiet as a mill-pond, and Rampick had only to pull a couple of indifferent strokes to increase the distance between us by some fathoms. I thought he was going to abandon us altogether and at once, and in an agony hailed him on my own account—

“Mr. Rampick! why don’t you come back? You aren’t going to leave us to drown here!”

He leaned forward, always watchful of us, and, groping under the thwarts, fetched up a black bottle, which he uncorked and put to his lips—a rejoicing swill. It gave him nerve and voice. He sagged down, between maudlin and triumphant, and answered, with a hoarse defiant laugh—

“I am, though!”

“Mr. Rampick!” I cried, “what have we done to you?”

He drank again. Every addition of this fuel made the devil roar in him.

“Done!” he yelled. “See how you done—fur yourselves, my hearties! You’d let him out, would you! You’d make the dead walk to testify agen me! I know you. You’ve plotted and schemed agen me from the first, you parson’s whelps—and here’s what it come to. I was on the way to salvation—till you crossed me—once too often. The sands ’ll keep my secret and yourn. Let him out to walk, you will; but not to swim—my God, I had you there—old Jole had you there, my bucks!”

He poured down more fire, and howled and drummed his feet in a gloating frenzy.

“Had you there!” he shrieked. “You may quicken him out of fire—out of rocks and fire; but you furgot as water squenches fire. Thought old Jole crazy, did you—poor old Jole, whose fortunes went out in the spark as him there lighted. And all the time he lay low to get even with you. Has he done it? Did he choose his time crafty? Did any one see us? When your drownded corpses comes in with the tide, who’ll know the truth? Jole—and Jole can keep a secret, once all prying apes is laid from forcing his hand.”

He shook to the roaring of his own voice. The reverberating fire in his brain deafened him to any reason, reassurance, protest. We cried to him in our distraction to listen, only to calm himself and listen. Our appeals could not penetrate the pandemonium in that maniac soul. In the midst Joshua, all amazed and at sea as he was, rose to add his entreaties to ours. The effect was disastrous. At the vision of him, strung as if to fly, his coat-tails spread, the madman gripped his oars convulsively.

“Lie down!” he screamed. “What’s death to you! I ain’t going to stop! I never could abide the sight of it!”

And with the word he was pulling furiously away.

We still shrieked to him vainly. We ran up and down the sand. For the moment I felt quite blind and delirious.

All was of no avail. Yard by yard the boat drew away into the thickening mist; grew dim and dimmer, a phantom of itself; and, while still the thump of its rowlocks drummed thickly into our ears, vanished and was gone.

And then at last we came together, and, halting, looked into one another’s pallid faces like dead souls meeting on the banks of Styx.

CHAPTER X.
THE DARKEST HOUR.

The memory of that awful time is soothed and assuaged to me by virtue of the strong soul who, under Providence, was given to us to command it. If destiny had used him its instrument to precipitate the tragedy, long, I am sure, hanging over our heads, it had done so consciously, by higher command, in order to neutralize the effects of its own inexorable decree. So thought Mr. Sant presently; and gratefully we acquiesced, giving thanks to Providence. Like children, we had played with fire, not realizing, nor, I think, deserving the consequences. All honour, then, after God, to His little self-possessed deputy, who of his confidence and resolution helped us to the nerve to escape them.

For a time Harry and I—I may surely admit it without shame—were beside ourselves. To be thus cast away and abandoned on a sandbank in mid-ocean—for to all appearances, and intents and purposes, our fate seemed nothing less—it was horrible beyond words. An hour—perhaps two hours—and a lingering death must overtake us. Already—we could see by the near lines of foam, could gather from the changed whisper of the tide—the seaward surges were freshening to their return. We hurried to and fro, wringing our hands, crying for impossible help, never once in our distraction holding escape as conceivable save by external agency. The bank on which we stood stretched north and south, a sleek, hateful mockery. It were useless to traverse it up and down; yet we went, as if to hurry this way and that over it were to summon of our agonized need a causeway to the unseen shore five miles distant; we went, until the terror of ranging adrift, beyond recovery, from our one hope of resource, already grown a desolate phantom behind us in the mist, sent us frantically back to the side of the motionless figure, which had not once stirred since we parted from it raving.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried. “What are we to do?”

“Ah!” he answered, sharp as an echo: “to command yourselves!”

It was like a tonic of steel served from a pistol.

“We will—we do,” said Harry, forcing down his terror in one great gulp. “Dick, don’t be a fool!”

Some shame, I think, stiffened me. The debility of despair conceded a hope to the mere prospect of discussion. What a courage was this to succumb without an effort; to have reason, and yield it to the shadow falling before the fact!

“All right,” I muttered. “I’m an ass. Only let him tell us what we’re to do. He brought this on us, you know.”

He showed no resentment of my bitterness.

“Yes,” he said, in a strong quiet voice. “I brought this on you, Richard; for you warned me and I overruled your warning, being sceptical without knowledge, which is the boast of fools. The man was mad, and I thought to control him with reason, having failed in that as in everything else. Now accursed shall I be in the eyes of my co-trustee, your dear uncle.”

His mention of Uncle Jenico quite upset me again.

“O!” I cried violently, “what do you matter! If you drown, you’ve only yourself to thank. He would have stopped my going, but I wouldn’t tell him anything about it, because I thought it was nonsense to be afraid. And now he’ll wait and wait, and we shall never come, and it will break his heart.”

He stood before me, dripping wet, a most wretched, pathetic expression on his face. It was due less, I knew, to despair than to sorrow over my revolt against him. At the vision of it I was moved even against my will to remorse.

“Well,” I said miserably, “I don’t want to put all the blame on you, though you might have given me credit for a reason. You don’t know what we know about the man, or his interest in shutting our mouths. I ought to have told you, perhaps; but the secret was saving for another who has more right to it. It doesn’t matter now. We only want to get out of this—Mr. Pilbrow, do you hear? O, please think of something! There must be a way! To stand here, and——”

“Richard!” he cried, in great emotion. He half advanced, holding out his hand, then suddenly commanded himself, let it fall, and became in a moment a figure of passionless resolution.

“You are right,” he said, dryly defining and articulating each word. “This is no time for recriminations. We must compose ourselves—must think. The way out of a trap is never the way in. That is where men waste themselves. Now, tell me: nobody knows of our coming here?”

“Nobody,” I said, “nor saw us take the boat. There isn’t a hope of our being rescued from the shore. We can’t see it, even; and if we could be made out here, who’s abroad to mark us? Besides, even if any one did, there’s bare time, even now, to put off and cover the distance before——”

“H’mph!” he pondered, frowning and fondling his gritty chin. Then he turned to my friend.

“How long have we?” he asked.

Harry gave a desperate glance seawards.

“Say an hour here—perhaps two, if we climbed the wreck. But there’s deep water between. Ah! you didn’t know that, did you? but there is—and you——”

Joshua made a gesture of dissent.

“No,” he said, “I can’t swim. Leave me out of the question. But you two can, I know. Why shouldn’t you reach the shore?”

Harry shook his head.

“The tide’s running in, it’s true; but five miles, and in December!”

He ended with a despairing shrug.

“Very well,” said Joshua, so prompt and decided that he made us jump. “Then the wreck’s our one asset; and we’ll just go and see the best use we can make of it.”

With the word, he was striding over the sand, and, sprung to some sudden thrill of hope at his confidence, we followed him, our hearts thumping.

When we came down to the little strait, we found it already and undoubtedly widened. The cream of incoming surf showed more boldly over the lip of the further bank where the wreck lay; and between that and ourselves there was a sense of busier movement, as it might be water yawning and stretching after sleep.

“Now,” said Joshua, sharp as a lash, “swim across to her.”

“Swim! At once?” I exclaimed. “And what about you?”

“I’ve told you to leave me out,” he said, dry and composed. “You must swim, as you can’t jump. I’ll wait you here. Maybe you’ll find the means to float back on boards or such.”

Then we saw what was in his mind. It was a chance against all odds, and so poor a one, that we had hardly considered it, I think, in our agitation. The storm, we felt, must have gutted the carcase as clean as a dressed ox’s. Nothing detachable, but must have been wrenched and flung away. From where we stood, indeed, only the framework of the poop, gaunt, and inflexible, and rigid in its suggestion of ribs and spars shattered but unyielding, appeared to have survived its furious sacking by the waves. Moreover, a certain suspicion had come to us that Rampick had not now made his first acquaintance with the wreck; that, even perhaps so early as the serving of the last ebb, when fresh from hearing of our plans, he had rowed over to examine his ground by lantern-light, and to make sure—as so cunning a madman would—that no contingency of crate or cask or loosened plank should be allowed to mar his wicked purpose.

Though we might or might not be right in this (in point of fact, I believe, we were right), our hope, looking upon that lean account of ruin, was a very little hope. Still, for what it was, it lost nothing in inspiration from the self-confidence of our companion. I turned a desperate inquiring glance on Harry.

“Come!” he said, in answer; and, without another word between us, we had slipped down and taken the water.

As for that, it was chill enough, but, to traverse the interval, child’s play for swimmers so young and hardy. In five minutes we had emerged, sleek and dripping, on the further side, and the wreck was close before us.

We shook ourselves like dogs, and ran up the sand. The shivered frame of the thing lay pitched on the sharp back of the drift, where the poor ship must have dumped herself to be broken like a stick across a housemaid’s knee. What remained was a melancholy witness to the impotence of man’s bravest efforts to command Nature in her passions. She must have been a fine craft, of many thousand tons burden, by evidence of this fragment. Ex pede Herculem. Now, the forlorn remnant of her was so shattered as to look, at these close quarters, more like the wreck of a blown-down hoarding than of a gallant vessel. Wryed, and gaping, and burst apart, her ribs had been stripped, inside and out, of everything that could be torn away and swallowed; so that what survived, survived by virtue of a tenacity, which, inasmuch as it had defied the wrench of the storm, was little likely to yield us salvage.

And, indeed, we reached her only to find our apprehensions confirmed. Shorn through her waist, it appeared, close off by the poop, and her fore-part lifted, and rolled, and ravished God knew whither, she had disgorged her vitals into the gulf to the last bolt, so that not one loose board of her remained to reward us, unless buried beyond our recovery in the sand, into which the jagged wound of her emptied trunk was plugged.

We climbed, and pulled, and tested, running hither and thither. We fell upon our knees, and with our hands dug frantically, until they bled, into the wedged drift. It yielded nothing. From time to time we desisted, and gazed, in a panic of fear, at the water, where, but a few yards beyond and below her stern, it rustled and curvetted, advancing and retreating, and advancing yet another step to play cat-like with our anguish.

At last, and for the last time of many, we mounted the slope of stubborn planks, to struggle with some fractured balk of timber, some broken rib end, which might seem to promise yielding to our frenzied blows and kicks. It was all of no avail. Like lost souls we paused, looking down on a litter of splinters, our great need’s only recompense; and, “O, my God!” whispered Harry, and staggered back where he stood, and flung himself, quite ill and overcome, upon the bulwarks.

He was up by the broken stern-post, and, sick to note the rising of the tide, he looked down. On the instant he uttered a wild exclamation, jumped to his feet, went over the side, and vanished.

I was poising myself a little below on the slope of the deck. At his cry I dropped and slipped, landed at the bottom, recovered my feet, and raced round to meet him. Then I, too, uttered a yell; for here, unnoticed by us before, was at least a straw of hope to catch at.

It was a great spar, which lay down the slope of the sand, with some wreck of tackle yet tangled about it, and its butt wedged under the stern of the ship.

“Lord!” shrieked my friend. “Come and pull, Dicky! O, Lord! Come and pull!”

He was skipping and sobbing as if he were cracked. “Get a purchase!” he screeched. “We must have it out if we bust ourselves!”

I had sprung and seized on it even as he spoke. To lift it was far beyond our strength; but straining and hauling our mightiest, we found we could shift it a little, right and left, like a colossal dead tooth in its socket.

“O, if we only had Uncle Jenico’s wrench!” I panted, as we paused a moment in exhaustion. We were quite breathless and white. The sweat, for all the weather, was running down our faces.

“Harry!” I groaned piteously, “if we can’t get it out now, after all this—this——”

The look in his eyes stopped me. The despair was quite gone from them, and the old breezy fearlessness returned.

“But we’re going to get it out,” he cried, “and without Uncle Jenico’s wrench, too.”

His gay new confidence was revivifying, amazing. My heart, for all its terror, was beginning to expand in the radiance of it.

“How?” I gasped. “Don’t keep me waiting, you—you old beast!”

“I’ll show you,” he said; and with the word was down among the tackle, unknotting and pulling.

I watched him breathless—helped him where I could. Between us, in a few minutes, we had disentangled many fathoms of unbroken rope, and still there was more to come. We wrought hurriedly, feverishly, with one eye always on the rising water.

“Let it only wait,” said Harry through his teeth, “till we’ve got this clear, and then it may come as fast as it likes.”

I worked on hard, not asking him why. Perhaps I had a lingering horror that his answer would disillusion me, show this shadow of hope a heart-breaking chimera. And still stealthily the tide crept up, and still we had not done.

But at length the last kink was unravelled, and we rose with a shout. One end of the rope was still fastened tight to a ring-bolt in the spar at its seaward end. The other Harry shouldered, and with it turned to run up the bank.

“Do you understand yet, gaby?” he demanded, grinning triumphant.

“You are going to get a haul on the thing, to one side and further up?”

“Yes, I am.”

My spirits sank a little.

“We shan’t be able to move it that way any more than we did before—anyhow, not to pull it out of its hold.”

“Shan’t we? Wait and see.”

“O, Harry! Don’t be such a fiend.”

“Why, Dicky, you stoopid, look here. I examined the thing, which you didn’t, no more than Rampick himself, if it’s true he’s been here already. He thought it wedged tight, maybe, and safe from us. Well, I tell you it’s only caught by the tip of its nose—far enough in to baffle us lying as it does, but easy enough to pull out floating.”

I stared at him a moment; then gave a wild hoot, and began to dance about as he had done before, and threw up my cap, and ended by hugging him.

“You beauty, you beauty! You dear old positive genius and darling! We shall get away, after all, with nothing but a ducking. And Uncle Jenico——”

A sudden choke stopped me. I turned away so that my friend shouldn’t see my shame.

“Dick, old man,” he said, soberly. “You mustn’t be too wild even now. It’s all right, I hope; only—well, it’s cold, and three of us to drift five miles on a spar——”

But I wouldn’t heed a word of his admonition. The recoil from despair had sent my wits toppling clean head over heels. If nothing but a bowl had offered, I should have been as joyous as a wise man of Gotham to commit our destinies to it. To have some means, any, to escape this hideous nightmare of enchainment to a living death!

“Hi! Gee-whoa! Get on!” I cried, chuckling hysteric, and drove Harry, holding the rope-end, up the sand before me. It paid out behind, and did not pull taut till we were well on the slope. Then, for the first time, we thought of Joshua, and turned to look for him.

He was standing, with some suggestion of agitation, on the edge of the further drift. The water had crept up since we left him, widening ominously the channel between. We waved our hands to him, and he responded.

“Look here,” said Harry. “He mustn’t be left in his ignorance; it’s torture. Besides—— Hold on, Dicky, while I go to him.”

“Why don’t you bawl across?”

“He’d never gather. We must have him ready, and I can’t explain here. Don’t drop the rope for a moment while I’m gone.”

“All right. But why not have a pull first, to see if it’ll come free without?”

“Mighty! Not for the world! It’s been rotting in the water: supposing it snapped? There’ll hardly be a strain when the tide lifts the thing, and gets under the seat of the old girl—you believe me. Did you see her name?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s The Good Hope. Hurrah!”—and he scuttled from me, and the next moment was squattering through the water of the little strait. I watched his chestnut ball of a head lovingly as it drew a line across the channel; and I danced with excitement again to see his streaming shoulders emerge presently, and Joshua, as near wrought-up as I, run out knee-deep to help him ashore, and support him—as if he needed support—and kneel to wring out his clothes, while the faint gabble of their voices came to me. And then I turned to look seawards once more, and, behold! the comb of a little wave struck the spar-end, and seethed up and over it, and the sight made my heart flutter.

“Harry!” I screeched; and gripped the rope as if I feared some unnamable wickedness were seeking to snatch it out of my hands. I did not dare to turn again; but watched the hurrying tide fascinated; and, almost before I knew it, Harry was at my side.

“Lord, Dicky!” he whispered, his eyes glistening; “it comes, don’t it! Don’t let go! We mustn’t give it a chance.”

If it had only answered to our thoughts! How slow it crawled, without haste or flurry, sometimes seeming to drop dormant as if to take us off our guard. Presently, what with the strain and our shivering, we were fain to squat gingerly upon the sand, and grip, and watch, setting our chattering teeth. What if our expectations were to be cruelly baffled after all! What if the spar were anchored by some unexpected unseen grapnel to the bank! I turned sick at the thought. The water by now lipped along it, covering some three feet of its end. And still, to any gentle test of pulling it responded nothing.

Suddenly, eccentric as always in its motions, the tide bowled a succession of heavier wavelets shorewards. The first found us sitting, the rope taut between us and the spar, and left us sprawling backwards in a puddle of water. I thought the mere wash of it had upset us, till, in the midst of my spluttering and clutching to recover purchase, I heard my friend sing out—

“Get up! Hold on! Dick! O, come, come!”

Then, scrambling, gasping, to my feet, I saw what had happened. The spar, answering to our strain in the bobble of water, had swung towards us, the rope had slackened, and over we had tumbled. Chattering with excitement, we got hold once more, and pulled.

Still it did not come free, nor for long minutes yet. We tugged and hauled what we dared, and ceased, and tugged again. Not—to cut short that tale of agony and suspense—until we were ankle deep in water; not until the rush of little incoming waves foamed high on the stern of The Good Hope, kicking her up, and loosening her nip on that grim-held relic of her own; not until the sands were whelmed near and far, so that we seemed to sprout, three fantastic trunks of humanity, from the surface of the ocean itself, did a great surge and vortex, answering to our last despairing wrench, show us that we had been successful.

And even then some dreadful moments passed—moments of terror lest the rope had given—before the mass, rolling sluggishly to the surface, revealed itself.

We were panting and sobbing as we hauled it in. But Harry kept his wits through all.

“Get astride, Dick,” he said, “and help me to fasten this home.”

“This” was the running gear, which he wanted to dispose about the spar in such way as to give us all some hold to cling by. We wrought quick and hard, and in a little had it looped to our satisfaction. The wreckage consisted of a huge segment of a main lower and top-mast, with the step, pretty complete, and the whole of the over-lapping part bolted snug, on either side of which the great sticks had snapped. It was in all some twenty feet long, perhaps, with rings and shroud fastenings and cut ends of rigging yet attached; and it floated massive, on an even keel, so to speak, so that in places we could even walk on it without fear of upsetting in that tranquil sea.

“Now,” said Harry at last, “to get to Mr. Pilbrow!”

I swear till that moment we had realized no difficulty; and then, with the word, we were staring aghast at one another. The spar sat too deep to move; not till the tide had risen another two feet at least would she ride over the bank; we knew no way round. Could he plant himself firm in that hurrying sway of water until we reached him?

We stood up and waved and shouted: “We’re coming in a little! Hold on till we come!” I don’t know if he heard us. He stood there plunged to the knees—the oddest, most tragic sight. He waved back and screeched something—what, we could not understand. Every few minutes we dropped overboard, and heaved our utmost at the great hulk, only to have her ride a few feet and ground again. But at last, when the water was up to his shoulders, she gave a little dip and curtsey, and the following wave washed her on. We yelled, then, and slipped into the water for the last time, and, finding no bottom, kicked out frantic, holding each to a loop of the rope, and propelled her slowly before us, The tide took her now, and do what we would, we could not coax her in a direct course for our friend. We saw we should miss him by a full fathom; he was staggering, desperate to keep his foothold; we drove near.

“Fling yourself forward!” shrieked Harry. “It’s your only chance!” And with the word scrambled on to the spar again. I was on Joshua’s side; and I dwelt in an agony, holding on to the rope with one hand, while I strained to draw her closer.

It was no use, and seeing we must float past, I echoed Harry’s scream. Joshua sprang out and forward on the instant, and, with a mighty flounder of water, disappeared. But the impetus of his leap carried him towards me, and suddenly, like a crooked bough borne on a flood, an arm of him was stuck out within a yard of my reach. I let go my hold to dash and clutch it, and as I swerved, Harry, snapping down, caught at one of my kicking ankles and held on. My head went under; but I had the wrist like a vice; and in another minute I and my quarry were drawn to the spar side, and our noddles, gobbling and clucking and purple with suffocation, helped right way up.

We were saved! So far we had won free. Vogue la galère!

CHAPTER XI.
JOSHUA SPEAKS.

What a fantastic nightmare in my memory is that amazing voyage! Were souls as oddly consorted ever launched on an odder? Looking back at this date on all the circumstances, our isolation, our helplessness, our exhaustion of mind and body following on the strain—and that, by long hours yet, not to be withdrawn—it appears to me little less than miraculous that we ever won to harbour. Had it not been for the strange distraction of a certain recital which the occasion called forth, and which, occupying our thoughts both during and after its telling, rendered us partly oblivious to our condition, a very creeping paralysis of terror would, I believe, have ended by destroying us. To swing there unrelated to any visible hold on life but the sodden, weltering stick beneath us: lost atoms in a vast immensity of mist and water! My mind, save I gripped it frenziedly to its own consciousness, would have reeled and forsaken me, I think. Sometimes for a moment, indeed, it would be almost gone, dropping through the seeming clouds on which we swam into immeasurable abysses of space; and it was only on these occasions by grappling aghast with the figures of reality before it, that it could recover and control itself. If only we could have seen the shore—could have steadied nothing more than our vision on that ghost of moral support, it would have been something. But by now the haze had shut down, and we were derelicts utterly committed to the waste. It was a bad time—a bad, forsaken time, and I do not much like to recall it, that is the truth.

We had perched Joshua, having with some distress got him on board, between us on the twin spar, where he could set his back against the broken top and hold on mechanically till he was in the way to convalescence. Fore and aft of him, squatting or straddling on our slippery bed, we made at first fitful attempts to dig a little way on our craft with our feet; but the load was too heavy thus lightly to be influenced, and we soon gave up the effort. We might, perhaps, have affected our course a trifle by swimming and pushing; we did not dare. It had been a different matter in the first excitement of escape, with the sand under our feet. Now, in the reaction to a consciousness of our drenched, and overwrought, and half benumbed condition, the water had become a fathomless horror, lapping after us with hiss and hurry to devour what it had seduced from its shallows. There was a heaviness, a deadliness in it, level and undisturbed as it seemed, which it was sickening to contemplate. And so we sat close and drifted, and essayed—did Harry and I, while Joshua was recovering—to reassure ourselves and one another with fitful banter—the most cheerless, hollow stuff, God knew, and soon to expire of its own pretence.

For a time, undoubtedly, the tide carried us shorewards, leisurely and with no affectation of charity. The wreck sunk and disappeared behind us: was a wreck—a bulwark—a stile in mid-desert—a post—a stump—was gone. We distanced it so slowly that scarce a quarter of a mile could have separated us from it when its last token was submerged—and our hearts seemed to founder with it.

“Harry!” I cried, in a sudden shock of terror: “what if, at this rate, we never reach the shore at all, and are carried out again by the ebb!”

He wriggled and snarled.

“What’s the use of meeting trouble half-way? We’ve four or five hours before us, and if we can’t drift close enough by then to finish swimming, the deuce is in it. Hold tight, Dicky—that’s all you’ve got to do; and I’ll answer for the rest.”

His self-confidence soothed me supremely. And I was the more comforted to see Joshua stir himself at that moment and sit upright.

“What’s that?” he said. “Leave me out of the question if you want to swim.”

“We don’t want to swim, Mr. Pilbrow—not unless the tide won’t serve us to the end; and then I hope it’ll be only a little way.”

“Well,” he answered, “go when you will; only I want to have a word with you first, Richard.”

“You are all right again, sir?”

“Right?” he muttered. “I don’t know. The land drops and flees before me. The cold is in my heart. I must ease it, Richard—I must ease it of its secret load before that winter gets home.”

“O, don’t talk like that!” I complained. “It’s to flout Providence in the face after this mercy.”

“Well,” he said, with a melancholy smile, “I shall be lighter anyhow for the easing. With this weight continuing in me, I should sink like a plumb.”

“There’s to be no thought of sinking, Mr. Pilbrow,” I said. “But if there’s something you’ll feel the better for ridding yourself of, why say it and have done.”

He turned stiffly in his place so that the spar rocked, and looked at me, where I sat behind him, with a most yearning affection.

“If you were entitled to the truth before,” he said, “how much more now, when you have saved my life.”

“Saved your life!” I exclaimed.

“Didn’t you!” he answered. “Didn’t you risk your own by letting go to reach me, when I might have pulled you down?”

“O, nonsense!” I cried, with a real laugh. “We should have both been in a bad way, I dare say, if Harry hadn’t had the sense to catch my foot. He towed us in. If there’s any credit it’s to him.”

“He did the resourceful thing, and you the brave,” persisted Joshua. “I owe to him through you; but to you first. If I live, I will honour that debt. If I am to die——”

“In good time, Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried reassuringly. “This little contest had flushed and rallied us all. “In good time! We aren’t going to give up, I can assure you, having come so far as this.”

“By God’s providence!” answered the ex-bookseller, with unwonted devoutness. “Only I feel that while I delay to tell you, the devil struggles to hale me into the deeps.”

“Out with it, then!” I said lightly, “and let’s crow to see him gnash his ugly teeth at being anticipated.”

I realized that he was about to give us the long-expected story, with a shadowy abstract of which he had only as yet tantalized me, and, through me, of course, Harry. Could we have had our curiosity satisfied under circumstances more tragically wet-blanketing? Yet there was a providence in that no less. The little sparks of inquisitiveness which survived in us, expanded in the revelation to flames of heat, which, in warming us, distracted our thoughts from our miseries. I will not believe this opportuneness was accidental. Mercy, in all the Committee of Destiny, is jealous to keep to herself the casting vote, I think.

His face fell; the evil shadow I knew darkened on it a moment; but almost in the same thought was gone. He wrung his lips with his hand, and heaved a profound sigh.

“Succeed, then,” he said, in a sad inspired voice, “succeed to the truth for which your father died; and God spare you to find your inheritance a rich one! If He will; if for your most loyal faith in me, dear child, I could so requite you, I could pass contented under the waters to the rest the land has denied me. I am weary, Richard; I am wearied to death; and to lie floating off my legs appears beatitude.”

He sighed again, and setting his teeth in the very act, forced himself frowningly and inexorably to his task.

“I have hinted to you already,” he said, “that this long fever of my quest dates from Abel’s disappearance with a certain book which contained the clue to an important secret. Hear, then, at last, what that secret was, and how it came into our hands.

“My brother Abel and I were twins and enemies, partners and apart. Why? I cannot tell. Look at two dogs of a litter quarrelling over a bone, and seek for the reason there. We thwarted one another—at every turn we did, and ruined our common business in a mutual spite. You know as much; yet in fairness I must urge that his was the more rancorous and vindictive spirit. I would have cried halt sometimes; but Abel, never. He had the fiercer resolution; he went armed; I feared while I hated him. ... The book in question was one of a packet over which we had perversely disputed in the sale-room; an old scorched and dog’s-eared commonplace book of the seventeenth century, in contemporary crimson calf, and bearing inside its cover the name of ‘Carolus Victor, Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’s Prison of Newgate.’ Yes, you remember the name. I once let it out unguarded. Well, he was our inspirer, as some Morell or Morant was your uncle’s. ... There was nothing of note about this book. It contained just the jottings and excerpta of a decent unremarkable man; ‘tips’ for homilies; memoranda of ‘last testaments;’ mere personal data of a conscientious and commonplace clergyman, whose lines had fallen in incongruous places. With all that we have nothing to do. Our business is with a folded letter, in the handwriting of this same Carolus Victor, which ages ago had been slipped between the leaves, and had there adhered through the melting of the wax with which it was sealed.”

“How had it got there?” I asked, because he here came to a dramatic pause, which seemed to challenge questioning.

“Ah!” he answered. “How? And why it had remained undelivered? I can submit only a plausible theory. A second-hand book-shop, gentlemen, is a mine of reference. Research presently revealed to me that this Carolus Victor, Chaplain of Newgate, had died—suddenly, by presumption—in that very year, 1679, which dates not only his letter, but the last entries in his diary where it was found. Suppose, then, the letter written by this Victor, and never delivered to him to whom it was addressed; suppose the book containing it tied up unexamined with the deceased’s other manuscript effects, and put away on some remote shelf and forgotten; suppose some jealous no-Popery bookdealer snatching it years later from the flames of Newgate, and consigning it to his own store, where, in the excitement, it was again forgotten till finally brought to light in the sale-room, a scorched and smoke-stained packet to excite the ridicule of the dealers. Suppose anything or nothing; conjecture and account as you will. The fact remains that Carolus Victor’s commonplace book came intact, and holding fast to its enclosure, into our hands. ... Into our hands—into our hands, I say. Were we not brothers, twins, partners? Abel, before bidding for it, had known or guessed nothing of what the packet contained. He had bought the lot, a business transaction, merely to spite me. And yet now he would claim the whole fruits for himself!”

A fury and excitement took the narrator’s voice at this point. The heat he exhaled was communicated to us in part.

“Go on!” I said, giving a vigorous kick into the water. “There was a letter in the book, you say. What was it about?”

He struggled with himself a moment, dropped his face into his hands with a groan, looked up, and resumed in a more ordered voice—

“I am coming to it. It is stereotyped on my brain—all of its accursed riddle, that is to say, but the key. It was dated Newgate, 1679, and was superscribed to one Peachumn, a doctor of divinity, (to whom, you will always bear in mind, it never was delivered), from which honoured friend and counsellor the writer craved certain instruction and advice in a very private and particular matter. He had had confessed to him that night, he said, a passing strange story by one Vining, a prisoner, and grey in iniquity, who was condemned to suffer on the morrow for piracy on the high seas. This Vining, according to his own statement, had been, about the second decade of the century, a student in the great English College of Douai, in France, whence one winter he had been sent, in company with an ordained brother collegiate, on an extraordinary secret mission across the water to a little town on our east coast. This mission, said Vining, was nothing less than to recover, if possible, from its secret hiding-place in the crypts of a certain long abandoned church, a great treasure of gold pieces, which had lain there ever since the suppression of the religious houses—a suppression which, in this case, had but hardly anticipated a natural dissolution more complete. For the church in question was, it appeared, already doomed when the king’s edict fell. Lingering, a relic of the greater past, amidst the ruin of those eastern shores, the sea had since taken its outworks; and now the treasure (the existence and depository of which had been made known through the death-bed confidence of a former sacristan) must be secured without delay, if recovered it were to be at all ... Richard! it was secured by those two—a loaded box of iron. And then the madness of possession smote the wretched clerk. In the darkness of the crypts he murdered his companion, and in the darkness the curse of God fell upon him. His hands were scarlet with consecrated blood. He loathed to handle the price of his iniquity; but, like Judas, he cast it from him, and with it hid the body of his victim in a place whence he hoped neither could again be brought to light to testify against him.”

He paused. And “Where was that?” I asked faintly. An extraordinary fancy had taken possession of me—a thought so stunning, so bewildering in its first weak conception, yet so explanatory, if admitted, of Rampick’s incomprehensible behaviour, that I fairly shivered under it. I looked dumfounded at Harry. He also, if I was not mistaken, had been smitten with a like shock of expectancy.

“Where was that?” I repeated; and so, innocently, applied the match to this tow. Joshua did not answer, to my surprise, for a moment; and then suddenly I was conscious of the flame rising and blazing in him.

“Where!” he shrieked. “Give me the key if you pity me! It is that has kept me hunting these long years, ravenous like the dogs that devoured Sin, their mother, and yet were unappeased. Give me the key; give me rest, or here and now the waters of oblivion!”

For an instant I really believed he was going to rise and plunge. Had he done so, I doubt if, in our weakened condition, we could have saved him a second time. But in the thought, he had clutched at himself once more; and his passion grew inarticulate, and ceased.

When at last he resumed his tale, it was with a manner of some suffering shame.

“Richard,” he said, “touch me there and I am mad. Rebuke me with thine eyes, sweet boy, and I am sane and sorry. I will not offend again. Listen, the story breaks off with the night of our quarrel—Abel’s and mine. He had discovered and was reading this letter spread out before him on the table, when I came up unnoticed behind him and read over his shoulder. The confession was all there, to the flight of the murderer and his subsequent life of crime; to the agony of his haunted soul and his desire, in the shadow of death, to make restitution. Some words by the chaplain followed; some prayer of the weak soul to his stronger confidant to guide him in this pass, whether for action or unconcern. And at the foot of the sheet he ended with the words. ‘And the confessed Place and deposit of this treasure are——’ and there passed over the page, and I never learned them, was never to learn them, Richard. ... Some sound I made roused Abel from his absorption. He leapt to his feet, cramming the paper into his pocket, and faced me.

“‘Well, where are they?’ I asked, smiling. Yet in that moment I knew he would never tell me.

“‘Miles under the sea, probably, by this time,’ he answered. ‘You will understand that, if you have pryed to any purpose.’

“‘Abel,’ I said quietly, ‘you are lying. The place still exists, or you would not wish to conceal its name from me.’

“‘Well,’ he said, with an evil grin, ‘the book is mine, and the secret with it. You disputed its purchase, remember.’

“‘I may have,’ I replied. ‘But bought it is, and with our money—our money, Abel. I will not yield my right to a share in it.’

“I advanced upon him. I was hell inside, though calm outwardly. And as I came, he pulled a pistol from his breast—he was left-handed, like the crooked beast he was—and held it at me. I told you he always went armed. ... Richard, I confess the creature appalled me. He would have made nothing of shooting me like a dog. I hesitated; and then fell to entreaty, expostulation, threats. He was grey and hard as steel. In the end I must desist, though still resolved to get at the paper by fair means or foul. When he was gone, in a hunger of agitation I threw myself upon the book. It told me nothing, of course. I flung it down again, and went to bed, poisoned with black thoughts. In the morning when I rose, late and racked with fever, I found him gone, him and the book and the paper—gone, without leaving anywhere a trace of his direction. I could not believe it for a time; then madness took me. I went up and down, mouthing like a beast—by day and night, Richard—by day and night. It was then I must inadvertently have fired the stock. You know the rest.”

He ended in a deep depression, and burying his face in his hands, set to rocking to and fro.

“Rest!” he suddenly cried. “No rest for me! All these years I have pursued him, a wicked, laughing shadow, in the likely places of the land—always on these eastern coasts or near them, exploring ruins or the histories of them—recognizing at last my own madness, yet unable to lay it. And still the shadow flies before; and still I follow, myself a shadow!”

Again I looked at Harry. He understood, and answered my mute inquiry.

“Yes, tell him,” he said. “Tell him, if he’ll believe, how he’s been mistaken by a madman for the risen ghost of his brother yonder.”

It was the conviction in both our minds. It grew inevitably out of the tale just told us. Time, place, circumstance; the combative brother who went armed; the pistol clutched in the dead left hand—these, taken together with Rampick’s discovery of our discovery, and his imagined identification of the dead, invoked by us, as he thought, to rise and denounce him, left us in no moral doubt whatever. Yet still, the coincidence was so amazing, I hesitated to commit myself. I must take breath, fencing a little longer with the truth.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I faltered, “were you and Abel so much alike?”

He had started at Harry’s words, and was sitting rigid, awaiting my answer.

“We were twins,” he said quietly, “scarce separable, perhaps, in feature, unless by the lines which hate had chiselled to distinguish us. His were deeper scored than mine.”

“And his dress?” I said: “how did he go dressed?”

He bent over the step to stare at me.

“He wore a blue coat, Richard. Why do you ask?”

I gave a little gasp.

“Tell him,” said Harry again.

“Wait a moment!” I fluttered. “Why, who could say, Mr. Pilbrow, that thieves or the sea hadn’t taken this treasure long ago?”

“Abel,” he answered, in the same voice. “Abel, the direct consignee of the secret, which was sealed by Carolus Victor, and never opened or delivered till it came to light in our parlour. Abel, who knew this coast, had written guide-books, about it—misleading guide-books, indeed, to me in my killing search—and who was aware that the place, the actual caché of the treasure, still survived—or why should he have sought to hide the truth from me, and have fled in the night, himself like a thief? Abel, the cursed shadow that I follow, and cannot run to earth!”

“O, Dick, tell him!” cried Harry once more.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I broke out, trembling with excitement. “I believe you have hunted counter; I believe we can show you where your shadow lies. It is in the hill under the abbey ruins, and you must take off your curse from it.”

CHAPTER XII.
RESCUE.

Confession, discussion, incredulity, conviction, with all their concomitants of amazement, awe, emotion, were long over; long put aside in reservation was the unsolvable problem of Rampick’s part in the dark mystery of the hill; long had our last exhausted consideration of these questions lapsed into something like a silence of despair, as we drifted, with gentle lap and wallow, over those immeasurable heart-breaking wastes.

At least with Harry and me, I think, hope had attenuated almost to the vanishing point. Brain-sodden, benumbed, half lifeless, grown near unconscious of time or place, the instinct to hold on, the power to keep at bay the last fatal drowsiness alone remained to us in ever-diminishing degree. We did not know, in the confusion of our senses, whether we were drawing inshore or to sea; we did not know whether we were rocking, an idle log, virtually unprogressive, or slipped into one of the coast currents, and speeding silent on an interminable journey. We could not tell the sick drawl of the hours, for our watches had, of course, stopped. But we dreaded horribly the time when dusk should fall, if it should find us derelicts still. And so it found us, drooping down and closing in; and then Providence seemed hidden, and we despaired.

I cannot picture, indeed, the terror of that darkening desolation; the running fields of water, spectral with foam, fenced within an ever-contracting cyclone of dusk, devouring their own boundaries, and committing us slowly to entombment in one final sepulchre of night. It is all an impossible dream, in my mind—a sort of horrible pantomime, in which a sense of induration, of fixity, while I watched grotesque figures, born of my imagination, come and go in my brain, was ineffably dissolved by the spirit of the moon, and changed into consciousness of heaven.

Joshua, I knew, felt nothing of what we did, except, in a measure, physically; and, even there, the exultation in his soul was tonic to his body. Since our capping of his secret with our own, he had been a changed creature—a bent bow released and snapped upright. It is difficult to describe his transformation—his translation, rather, inspired as Bottom’s. Where had been sombreness, depression, some self-deprecation, was self-assurance, some rallying blitheness, boisterousness almost. He had been crushed, and was expanded; beaten, and was triumphant. That he should have run, when near broke with the chase, his shadow to earth, and through me, the son of the man whose memory he worshipped! It was stupendous. He could not contain his glee, or discipline his expectancy, now it had once burst those year-long bonds. He was convinced with, more utterly convinced than, us, that the body was Abel’s. He would tolerate no suggestion of error. And where the body was, would be the book, the clue—finally the treasure. I doubted if, in all these generations, it could still lie hidden there undiscovered and unravished. He laughed my scepticism to scorn. That Vining would never have concealed the evidences of his crime in a place easy or inviting to be come at, he declared. Probably, indeed, he had restored them to the original oubliette, which, I might make sure, would have been chosen by the monks with a cunning genius for its inaccessibility, either by smugglers or other casual squatters in their abandoned vaults. Moreover history, or at least gossip, might be trusted to have left us record of such costly treasure-trove thus unearthed, if unearthed it had been. Nevertheless, he questioned us closely as to our underground observations, which, indeed, had not been exhaustive. But they were enough, it appeared, to confirm his assurance. Desire is the most credulous of all enthusiasts.

All this was before the last abandonment to despair had overwhelmed us, Harry and me; and it was useful in helping us to a sort of fictitious endurance. We might have succumbed sooner, otherwise, and actually foregone our living rescue. He was so strong and hopeful; so certain that Destiny would not have led him thus far, by such tortured ways, only to see him founder when within sight of his goal, that some part of his faith could not fail to communicate itself to us with vital results. At the same time, I think, we shrunk from the merciless expression of his triumph. Our concern, in revealing the truth as we supposed it, had been with the tragic end of his brother. Not so his. He had no sentiment for Abel even now; no pity for the fate which had overtaken him. The best he could find to say about him was that he had paid the penalty and called quits, and left the better man to come into his own. Not for himself—that was the moral reservation, after all, which silenced and confounded us. He longed for the treasure; he gloated in the thought of its resurrection; but now for my sake, not his own. With the prospect of its recovery instant in his mind, he never wavered in his intention to bestow it all on the son of the man who had died to vindicate his honesty. I could have laughed again over this tragic, comical, chimerical bequest to me; only tears were too near the source of humour. It was terrible, and indecent, and pathetic in one. We sought life for no end but sweet life’s own. The rest was a mockery.

Well, he kept us alive with it, that I believe. Even after he himself was numbed and silenced from stimulating us, from encouraging us by sympathy and example to prevail through hope, he would keep nodding brightly to us to rally our spirits, until his neck got too stiff to nod at all.

It must have been half-past six and near the time of ebb, when the spectral dark which engulphed us knew a change. The fog, lying low on the water, grew slowly diaphanous, waxing from a weak dawn, like heaven seen through dying lids, to a sweet and solemn lightness. For long we were too exhausted, body and mind, to consider what this portended. The lightness increased; and suddenly high over the bank shone a little red spark like a lantern. We lifted our dazed heads; we stirred stiffly where we sat. O God! O God! what did it mean?

Swiftly it broadened, glowing like a rising fire. It mounted, or the haze shrunk beneath it—who could tell? In a moment it was free, and we knew it, in wonder and thankfulness, for the moon.

She was in her first quarter—a child moon, swelling into maidenhood. Slowly, slowly she rose, while we watched her, gloating, absorbed. Gradually the blush with which she had first observed us, sole spectators of her girlish disrobing, faded into a white glow of pity. Her tresses fell from her neck upon the sea, the mist parting to let them by, and were extended to us, “Climb to me by them,” she seemed to whisper; “here is the way to hope.” And lo! full in the midst of that shining path rode a little boat.

There was a man in it, a solitary fisherman trawling for soles. The agony of the moment gave us life and voice. We screamed to him; we waved; we made every frantic demonstration that was possible to us in our condition. He heard and saw us—and he sat as if stricken. Ghostly, leisurely, we drifted past, and the boat faded and became a phantom behind us.

We could not believe it. We never ceased to cry out. It was too hideous, too cruel for truth. Harry, with a dying effort, half rose. I don’t know what desperate thought was in his mind.

“Hush!” I suddenly implored; and we all became stone.

There was a little knock and paddle coming to us out of the mist. In a moment the boat forged into sight, approached us, and hung off.

“Who be ye?” said a fearful voice.

We answered all together in a babble.

“Nay, let me speak alone,” said Joshua; and he hailed the man clearly.

“We went to visit the wreck on the sands; we were abandoned there by a scoundrel, and we have been floating on this spar ever since.”

Still the man was not convinced. We could hear him distinctly spit into the water. It is so his class exorcises all demons.

“What might be your names, now?” he asked cunningly.

Here was a poser for the devil.

“First of all, Master Richard Bowen,” began Joshua.

“Hey!” interrupted the boatman, with all his voice of wonder; and he sculled rapidly up, and alongside. “Master!” He peered through the mist. “Lord have mercy on ’s, ’tis himself trewthfully!”

“Old Jacob!” I cried, in a faint voice between laughing and sobbing. “Old Jacob, help us off this before we die!”

And after that I remember nothing.

CHAPTER XIII.
RAMPICK SPEAKS.

You remember old Jacob? ’Twas he seconded Harry so unhandsomely in the great fight. He had retired upon his savings now, and did no work, save when a still night persuaded him forth with line and trawling-net, and the loan of a friend’s boat could be procured. Such had been the case when we ran across him. He had taken advantage of the holiday spirit, which kept all “afternoon farmers” of the sea scrupulously away from it, to pull a few miles out in a borrowed craft, and try for a basket of fish to make a welcome garnish to his Christmas pot.

He was lying, when he picked us up, off the banks some four miles from land in a southerly direction, and in a few minutes was to have hauled in and returned home. By so narrow a margin of Providence were we acquitted. In all these hours, it appeared, we had made no nearer the coast than this; had just swung hither and thither gently, drifting south, on the whole, and making two feet shoreward, perhaps, for every one we retired. Probably, in the end, we should have dropped sluggishly on the banks again, unless the outward race of the tide, more vicious than the inward, had swept us over them. In either case, however, the result would have been the same, I believe. Another hour or two must have seen the finish of our endurance.

As it was, I don’t know how they got me on board. Harry, with his stronger fibre, rallied immediately under the excitement: the strain off, I collapsed—that was the difference between us. I was physically and mentally frozen; I could not make an effort on my own account; but lay on the planks, my head on my friend’s knees, listening, in a sort of staring dream, to the murmur of voices above me punctuated by old Jacob’s exclamations. They were telling him, I knew, enough of the facts to explain our situation; and I heard Harry impress upon him the necessity of keeping all to himself, until we had seen Mr. Sant, and learned what course he proposed to take. Old Jacob made no demur. He was honoured in their confidence for one thing, and, for another, his admiration for his former master was still so unspeakable, that he chuckled at the mere idea of temporarily sharing a secret with that great man.

Harry questioned him about Rampick’s doings since our abandonment on the sands. He knew nothing of the fellow; had neither seen nor heard of him. Probably, he thought, if he were convinced no one had witnessed our departure, he would, after deserting us, have pulled oblique up or down the coast, to some outlying station on it, in order to establish an alibi in case of inquiry.

“He were free to go his gait, without risk o’ being observed in these merry times,” said he. “Reckon he’s turned up late, with his story of Jack or Jim visited, and the wur-rds spoke, and mayhap some proof of what Jack give him or Jim lent, to the very tune of innercence.”

I heard them all. Their speech drummed on my brain, as if it were parchment, which was just what it felt like. I lay staring at the light of the moon, for my back was turned to the beautiful thing herself; and I was not unhappy, only utterly cold-blooded. I thought, perhaps, from my long semi-immersion I had become a fish. What a fate, to go gasping through the world, with round lidless eyes and ears palpitating like gills, and never to feel warm again!

Presently we came to shore; and they tilted me up, as if I were a board, and stood me on end, so that I could not help laughing. But even then, in the most extraordinary way, cold air seemed to come from my lungs. Some one, with a whisper and nudge, as if to fire my interest, pointed out to me a boat, Rampick’s, pulled up on the beach, its sides gleaming wet in the moonshine. I crowed and acquiesced, very knowing about nothing, as they seemed to wish me to be; and then, having my legs pointed out to me, tried seriously to remonstrate with and command them, for they were in the most drunken condition. I supposed, indeed, that they were quite detached from me, until, between Harry’s and Jacob’s support, I set them moving; and then I understood that they still acknowledged my control, and I was gigglingly interested in them, looking down on them idiotically as they went splayed, and giving, and pulling themselves respectable over the hard. They found the Gap a tough business; but once up and over it, the descent beyond appeared a matter of moments. While I was still chuckling to Harry, and failing in words to express to him what the joke was, there close before our faces was the door of number three, the Playstow; and I gaped and grinned and delightedly pointed out my discovery to my friends. While I was yet in the act, it opened hurriedly to a great surge of light; and I saw the figures of Uncle Jenico and Mr. Sant, standing blowzed and flurried, in the midst of the furnace. Suddenly they moved and came towards us; and at that I tried to hail them with a shout of laughter; but, instead, staggered and slipped down into their midst. It was very restful, after all; and I thought I would stop where I was. But the jangle of many voices worried me, and I closed my eyes. Then, instantly, as it seemed to me, I was lifted up, and borne aloft, and smothered in down, or snow, which embraced me very cold and peaceful. The light sunk low, and the voices to a whisper. I was quite content, so long as they would leave me packed there frozen. But presently I was conscious that this was not to be. Something, by creeping degrees, tickled, and bit, and stung at my feet. The poison rose, giving me intolerable pain. I moaned and cried; and, at the sound of my voice, they lifted me up and poured fire down my throat. The rising and the falling heat met, it seemed, at my heart, and I believed it was consuming. I struggled to beat out the flames, to reproach these demons with their cruelty—and then in a moment, in a blazing swerve to consciousness, I saw them. They, or their shadows, leapt gigantic on the ceiling; furious, gnashing caricatures of my uncle, Mrs. Puddephatt, Mr. Sant, Fancy-Maria. A furnace glared and reverberated behind them. They sprang and held me down, and rasped my limbs till they crackled and smoked. From prayers and anguish I passed to frenzied defiance. If they would torture me so pitilessly, I would of myself stultify their efforts. I felt the waters of revolt rising within me. An instant, and they gushed to the surface of my body, putting out the fires all over. Surcease from pain, a delicious oblivion overwhelmed me, and I sank back and forgot everything.

Once out of dreams of dewy meadows I awoke, and found my hand in the hand of my uncle, who sat beside the bed. He was himself once more, the real loving normal Uncle Jenico, and I smiled drowzily on him, and dropped away again. A second time I awoke; and there was Fancy-Maria beside my pillow, softly rubbing a smut into her nose with her thumb, and repeating to herself the multiplication table to keep from nodding.

“Three sevens ain’t twenty-four, Fancy-Maria,” I said, and off I went again.

At last, and finally, after unravelling a great endless jest of a rope, I stuck at a prodigious knot, and gasped, and opened my eyes.

“I thought that last snore would finish you,” said a voice.

I sat up. I was in bed in my own room; the noonday sun glowed on the blind, and squatted down before the dead embers of the fire, sniggering like a Bonanza, was Harry. He rose, yawning, and came across to me.

“All right?” he said.

“Right as a trivet.”

“Hungry?”

“Just!”

“You’ll do, then.”

“Think I should—when I’ve had something to eat.”

Sweet is the constitution of youth. It all came back to me now, and without distress.

He sat down on the bed.

“Why, whatever was up with you last night?” he asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” I answered, shame-faced. “Didn’t you feel it?”

“Not much. Not in that way. It was good enough for me to be safe. I say, you gave us a precious fright.”

“I’m very sorry. I couldn’t help it. What happened? Was Uncle Jenico very put out about our not coming home?”

“Near off his head, I should think. He’d sent for Sant. Nobody had heard or knew anything about us. But, of course, they never supposed it was quite so bad as it was.”

“Poor old chap! I was an ass to go off like that. Well, what was decided?”

His face fell a little sombre.

“Sure you’re in a fit state to hear?”

“O, I’m all right, I tell you. It would worry me not to know.”

“Very well. Then, when we’d got rid of you at last, and had something to eat and drink, we held a council of war. Mr. Paxton was in a rare state. I think he’d have liked to shoot that beast at sight. I’d never thought he could be like that, and I tell you it made me crow to see him. But your friend Joshua was for a postponement, until he could visit the crypts. He went through his whole story again, just as he’d said it to us. We told your uncle everything, of course, from first to last; and Sant, naturally. And then he came down. He would hear of no course but the direct one. He’d go straight up to the Court for a warrant against Rampick for attempted murder; and, after that, to wring out and air the whole dirty business. He didn’t mind about risking his own popularity; he didn’t value at a brass piece the insane flummery of the treasure, as he called it. He and Mr. Pilbrow near came to words about it; and then——”

“What then?” I asked him, for he had stopped.

“I hardly like to tell you,” he said. “Sure you’re all right?”

“O yes, of course!” I said impatiently. “Do go on!”

“Well, we’d all gone out on the step, to see Mr. Pilbrow off, and he and Sant were standing wrangling there, when who should come slouching past but Rampick himself.

“I tell you he gave a screech, and dropped in a heap where he stood. We all ran out, thinking him dead. I don’t know now whether he is or not.”

“It would be the best way out of it all, perhaps,” I muttered.

“Maybe it would,” said Harry. “They got help and carried him home, and Sant went with him. He’s been there ever since, I think. At least he’s not come back here. Anyhow it stops the warrant business for the time. And there we are. Nobody knows the real truth but old Jacob; and Sant bound him to silence for the present. We’ve been looking after you ever since, young gentleman; and here I am, having taken my turn by the fire.”

“It’s very good of you, you old idiot,” I said rather tremulously. “Harry, if—if he’s rested, do you think you could send Uncle Jenico to me now?”

He nodded, comprehending perfectly, and went out. I don’t intend to recount the meeting that followed. If I had loved the old man before, you may understand what penitence now made of my feelings. I was painfully suspicious that that secrecy as to my own movements had been dictated rather by private selfishness than consideration for my relative. Certainly I had feared that, had he been told of our purposed trip to the sands, he would, in his uneasiness of mind, have put forward all sorts of objections, even, perhaps, had I proved obstinate, to a personal appeal to me not to desert him in his depressed condition. And now, supposing that eternal seal had been put on our actions, what a heritage of mental torture, of unfounded self-accusations to impose on that blameless soul! I ended by swearing that for the future no simplest scheme of mine should take shape without his sanction. And then he was pacified, though still, while Rampick’s fate was undecided, in a fever of nervousness to keep me within sight and touch.

I came down to dinner, at which Harry was an invited guest, and made up handsomely for my late abstinence. We had a merry meal, though still in some perturbation as to Mr. Sant’s prolonged absence. During the course of it, I suddenly found a huge 21, scrawled on a scrap of paper, lying on the table beside me. A smutty thumb print in one corner informed me at once of the authorship.

“Three times seven, Fancy-Maria?” I said. “That’s a good girl! I knew you’d come round to my point of view in the end.”

She backed, giggling, out of the room; and a heavy sound in the hall which followed, endorsed, so to speak, by a pasty disc on her bustle when she reappeared, showed us that she had sat down in the pudding. But that, fortunately, was when we were at the cheese.

Mrs. Puddephatt was genteel and a little distant in her visitations during the meal; and, finally, with such spectral significance, that Uncle Jenico, though she had not spoken, felt constrained to offer her a sort of apology.

“There’s something behind, you think,” said he. “Well, candidly, there is, but it’s not exactly our secret as yet, my dear woman. When it is, you shall have all the facts.”

She gave a sharp wince, as if suddenly recalled to herself with a pin; and, drawing herself up with her arms folded, gazed at him with stony abstraction.

“Which you was addressing me, Mr. Paxton?” she said. “Would you take the liberty now to repeat yourself?”

Much confused, Uncle Jenico did.

“Ho!” she exclaimed, with decision. “Well, I must believe my ears for the future, I suppose, when they accuses me of curihosity, and pryingness into things which people no doubt has their very good reasons for keeping dark, and not becoming to a decent woman to pollute herself with hearing. I thank you for your consideration, Mr. Paxton, venturing to remark honly as it were uncalled for; me being the last person to worrit herself about her neighbour’s concerns, nor accustomed in London to know so much as the name of the next door, which is a feature of the metropulis neither hunderstood nor hemulated by provincial rustication.”

“I’m very sorry,” began Uncle Jenico. “I really thought——”

“Permit me to say, sir,” she broke in rather shrilly, “that you should not think about a woman at all, save in the way of kindness; and leastways, not to adopt her to your fancies. Suspicion begets the shadows of its own rising, Mr. Paxton.”

And, with these enigmatical words, she left us quite crushed and flabby.

We had hardly recovered, indeed, when steps outside woke us alert, and the next instant Mr. Sant entered.

He looked pale, and worn, and unshaved; but his eyes lightened at sight of me sitting there rested and confident.

“Ha, Dick!” he said. “What a brave constitution, you little dog! Is it fit for another strain yet, do you think?”

He came and put an affectionate arm over my shoulders.

“Is it fit?” he repeated, while Harry and Uncle Jenico stood wondering.

“You’ve nothing else for him at present?” said my uncle suddenly, and almost fiercely. “I’m not going to have him overtired, Sant.”

The rector said “Hush!” and crossing over to see that the door was tight shut, turned to us with his back against it.

“He’s dying,” he said. “It was a stroke, or fit, and the heart is just doing time for a little. The hope of your forgiveness is all, I do believe, that keeps it going.”

He looked intently at us. None of us spoke.

“He knows the truth now, and in his turn confesses everything,” said the clergyman, clearly. “He understands the terrible mistake he made. His brain clears of its delusions in the searching atmosphere of death. If you can forgive him, forgive the great wrong he designed you, he may be saved for God yet. But there is no time to lose.”

I felt that the blood had left my face, making my head swim and my heart beat suffocatingly. This was a hard relapse upon horror. But had we not learned to hit and be hit and nurse no resentment? I pulled myself together.

“Broughton regulations, sir,” I said, with a rather shaky smile. “Come on, Harry. Let’s go and find Mr. Pilbrow, and bring him, too.”

“Stay,” said our tutor, in a very sweet voice. “I’ve fetched him already. He’s waiting outside now. He will abide by your decision, Richard.”

“Then, let him be my dear boy’s deputy to forgive,” spoke up Uncle Jenico, sharply. “There’s no occasion to submit Richard to this fresh ordeal.”

Mr. Sant looked at me.

“He’s got a bad enough road to go, uncle,” I said. “I don’t want to lay up more remorse for myself. We’ll cheer him on his way. Come, Mr. Sant!”

My uncle uttered what sounded like an oath. But he objected no further.

“In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum suum!” I heard him mutter viciously; and I ran up, and shook his hand hard, and hurried out.

In the little garden we found Joshua. He understood without a word. He was very sombre; but quiet, and glad, by his glistening eyes, to see me well.

We hastened up the village street. News of our mission had got abroad; vague and speculative as yet, for Jacob had been loyal. But the people we passed looked at us covertly and curiously, scenting strange revelations in the air.

The ex-smuggler lived, was dying, in a little cottage up a squalid alley near the head of the village. It was a poor, dreary hovel, the mere lair of a beast, self-degraded, God-forsaken. His wretched wife, the real scapegoat of his sins, took us in to him.

“He’s dyin’ hard,” she said, in a thin fretful voice; “hard as a lord, wi’ the whole world to lose. He allers was above his station, was Jole. Lived on dreams, he did. I mind the time he promised me a kerridge; and now we’ll be bad set to find a hearse.”

He sat propped up under a frowzy patchwork quilt. A silhouette under broken glass was clutched in one of his hands. The whole man was sunk in upon his frame; his breath, always difficult to him to draw, laboured heavily; his eyes, in their livid halos, were quite unearthly. The woman went to him, and made some show of easing the coverlet on his chest.

“I was telling the gentlemen,” she said, shrilly, “that time was we was to have our kerridge, and now summut less than a hearse must serve.”

He nodded, and moved his ashy lips, and fingered the picture in his hand.

“He’s daft on it,” she said, turning to address us. “’Tis our little Martha, gentlemen, took at the fair before her going. I tell him he needn’t look to join her where she sings among the angels. He should have thought about it earlier, if he wanted to curry favour. Better to pass on what he can get from you, if so be as you’re agreeable.”

I felt a sudden thickness in my throat.

“We forgive you, Mr. Rampick!” I cried out, and hung my head, and turned in dumb entreaty to Mr. Sant. He hurried to the bed-head, and put a gentle manly arm about the dying sinner.

“Do you hear, Rampick?” he said. “As God witnesses, they forgive you.”

The smuggler moved his exhausted hands. Mr. Sant, understanding, lifted them both for him in an attitude of prayer.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” he said softly, “he wants you to hear the truth, if possible, from his own lips. Will you come?”

Joshua moved up, and knelt by the bed. We all heard the broken, gasping confession—

“Tuk you—fur him, I did. ’Twas in the days—afore the—’arthquake. We had our store—where you know, in the underground vaults of th’ old abbey. Over above, in the hopen, was a knot of arches—running together, like the bow ribs of a ship; and—set in the pavement under—in a dark corner behind ruins, were a stone moving on a pivot—what let down him—as knew the trick—by a flight of steps, to the crypts. The powder—was kep’ handy—just below; and beyond—in th’ old cellars running seaward—till they bruk off—in a choke of ruin, behind the cliff face—lay the tea and brandy.

“At that time we was a good deal chafed—as one might call it. What with a revenue cutter—and a sloop of war to back it—our last run had been a run fur life—and—at the end it were touch and go to get—the stuff housed. And in the thick, of the excitement, who should be sprung—upon us—as we thought, but a spy. He come from nowhere—it seemed. He was just up there one day poking—and prying—among the ruins—and I see him. For hours he went—sniffing round—while I watched secret. He squinted, and he tapped, and he went—in and out—cautious; and sometimes, he’d stamp on the ground, and listen—fur the holler echer—with his ear down like a dog. Then—by-and-by—off he went, on tiptoe, and I follered, tracken en—to the Flask. They could tell me nothing—about en there; save as he’d walked over—by his own statement—from Yokestone. The thing looked as black as hell; and what we done—we done—in justice to ourselves as we thought—because we was druv, to it. I had no hand in what follered. I wouldn’t have: I never—could abide—the sight of death.

“We was stowing—the last of the cargo—by starlight, when I see—the man agen. He was setting, behind a stone, his eyes shining—like a cat’s—upon each of us—tradesmen—as we disappeared, down the hole. We was druv to it—as we thought—and tuk our plans—cautious and seized en. He was a cat—he was. We bled, a few on us. But we got en down, he screeching—all the time—about some treasure, he was come arter,—and then I left en, and went up—to keep watch. I couldn’t stand—what I knew was to foller. I’m a peaceable man—by disposition, I am. It was a providence—arter all. Fur I hadn’t abin—there not a minute—when all hell bruk—underneath me, and went out with a roar. The blessed ground—heaved itself—like so much bed-clothes; the arches—come thumping down, and all—in a noise—as if, the Almighty was a tearing—of His world—to tatters. I were spilt on my face—lucky, fur me, I’d moved away to git—out o’ earshot—of the thing, under—and when I come—to my senses, I didn’t know myself—or the place. I crep’ home—dazed-like—to bed; and kep’ it—fur a week—hearing of the ’arthquake. But I knew, in my heart, what had happened. Some fool had fired—the powder—and closed up, the hill. It were so—I was sure—when I come at last—to look. It seemed all fallen, in upon itself. Where the passage—had been—were just, a shipload, of ruin, the half of it turned over—and sunk, into the herth. I never believed—from that moment—till the day I seen it, proved otherwise—that so much—as a babby—could find its way agen—into them shattered vaults. But the Lord—has His way.”

He ended, amidst a deep silence, and sank back exhausted. Joshua got quietly to his feet.

“You are forgiven, Rampick,” he said, “by me and by us all. Make your peace with God.”

Mr. Sant motioned to us.

Silently we filed out, and left the dying and his minister alone.

CHAPTER XIV.
WHAT THE LETTER SAID.

We were all sitting very sombrely in the gloaming, when Mr. Sant came in to us. There was no need to question anything but his face.

“Yes,” he said, “it is over. God give him mercy!”

By common consent we would speak no more on the subject until nature had been restored. There was a scent of battle, not to speak of eggs and bacon, in the air, which inspired us somehow to brace up our loins before the ordeal. Tea was on the table, and we sat down to it, and presently were doing justice to Uncle Jenico’s plentiful fare. Then, refreshed and reinvigorated, we pulled our chairs to the fire, and the ball began.

“Now, Mr. Pilbrow,” opened the rector, cautiously, “what is your next move?”

“To find and search my brother Abel’s body,” answered Joshua, prompt and perfectly cool. “What is yours?”

“To go straight to the squire, and put the whole matter into the hands of the law,” said Mr. Sant.

“You will give me a day or two first?”

“No!”

“One day?”

“No.”

Joshua scrambled to his feet, and went to and fro.

“This is intolerable, sir. It is my brother who was done to death, and the cause is mine.”

“It is the cleansing of my parish, sir, and the cause is mine.”

“I must secure my treasure first, sir.”

“Your treasure be——!”

I am sorry to say Mr. Sant went the whole length of the expression.

“Your parish,” said Joshua, viciously, “has postponed its cleansing six years. A couple of days longer won’t spoil it.”

“It would spoil my conscience in my own eyes, Mr. Pilbrow. I do not compound a felony, now I know of it, for an hour.”

“Then go at once, sir, to be consistent, and, to satisfy your conscience, defraud this orphan, your pupil, of his just indemnification.”

The clergyman rose to his feet.

“Indemnification? For what, sir?” he said, very sternly.

“For the loss of his fortune, of his father, sir,” said Joshua, as resolutely; “who, to vindicate the truth, died and left him bankrupt of his legitimate expectations.”

Uncle Jenico, shifting nervously in his seat, put in a pacifying word. The truth is, the dear old fellow had been in a suppressed state of excitement ever since our visitor’s first dark allusion to his mission on these coasts had begun to shadow itself out into some form and substance.

“Sant,” he said, “I think you must be reasonable. We don’t stand first in this matter. The treasure——”

“Nonsense!” interrupted the clergyman loudly. “Do you credit a word of the stuff!”

“To be sceptical without knowledge—the boast of fools!” cried Joshua, repeating himself.

“Hush!” said Uncle Jenico. “Sant, hadn’t we better first learn from Mr. Pilbrow how he proposes to act in event of the—the clew really coming to light?”

The rector was silent.

“You are an adept in matters of conscience, sir,” said the bookseller, bitterly and rather violently. “There was no question of hurry when you wanted to use us to help you smuggle a soul into salvation. I won’t say that, if I’d foreseen your intention, I should have postponed my forgiveness till I’d gone to the hill and verified the man’s words; but I do say that in acting on a generous impulse, without a thought of possible consequences to myself, I was playing a better Christian part than you, who had this damning sequel in your mind all the time.”

Harry, very restless, cried out here sensibly enough—

“Aren’t we rather fighting in the dark? It mayn’t be Mr. Pilbrow’s brother that was the supposed spy, after all, in which case there’s no question of treasure. I think he’s the right to go and see first, before any steps are taken. I beg your pardon, sir.”

Mr. Sant sighed, his brow lightened, and he patted the boy’s shoulder approvingly.

“Good fellow!” he said. “No doubt it would be best to clear the air of this fantastic stuff, before we begin to set our house in order.”

Then he turned to Joshua genially.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Pilbrow. I was betrayed into some unwarrantable heat. I confess we look at this matter from different points of view; but that is not to say that mine is necessarily the right one. Indeed, you have given me a lesson in Christianity, to which I seem to make, I admit, a scurvy return.”

The little bookseller bowed, grimly still, but without answer.

“If then,” said the clergyman, biting under the irony that would make itself felt in his words, “you find this clew—find this marvellous deposit of wealth—there are laws of treasure-trove: you cannot think for a moment that I will, that I can, counsel secrecy—allow Richard to share in the profits of a felony——”

“Felony, sir!” cried Joshua.

“Is not that what a hoodwinking of the law would amount too? You agree with me, Mr. Paxton?”

“Yes, yes—O yes, of course!” assented Uncle Jenico, faintly.

“Harkee, Mr. Parson!” cried Joshua, in a heat. “I throw the word in your teeth. I am no suborner, sir, no, nor glorifier of my own ignorance neither. Be sure I don’t know the law better than you, before you tax me in advance with cheating it.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Sant, smiling. “I don’t know the law on the subject, I confess.”

“Then take this, sir, for your rebuke,” said the other, sourly; “and be less apt—for a clergyman—to damn without book. The law of England—I do know it, and have reason to—takes its definition of treasure-trove from the jurist Paulus, who lays down that ‘vetus depositio pecuniae cujus dominus ignoratur,’ that is to say, ancient concealed treasure of which the lord of the soil is ignorant, becomes, being discovered, the property of the Crown, if presumptively deposited by some one who at the time intended to reclaim it.”

“Exactly,” put in Mr. Sant. “And yet, in the face of——”

“Will you permit me?” interrupted the bookseller, with a manner of most frosty sarcasm. “For all your cloth, sir, I would not have you on a jury, lest you stopped the case before hearing the other side.”

The rector muttered an apology. He really did look abashed.

“I say,” repeated Joshua, “that the Crown, to prove its title to treasure-trove, must prove the depositor’s intention to reclaim first. Where that is wanting, or where an intention to abandon can be shown—as when the goods were thrown away in a panic, or for other reason, to be rid of them—the treasure remains wholly and solely in the possession of the finder.”

“Very well,” said Mr. Sant, plucking up heart. “And what benefit is that alternative to you?”

“What benefit! To me!” cried Joshua. “Have you heard my story, sir? Did you listen to it? Did you hear me quote the man Vining’s confession that he had abandoned the price of his iniquity, and cast it from him?”

Mr. Sant reflected. He was getting interested, I was sure, after all.

“’Tis a subtle legal point, I think,” said he. “I foresee, anyhow, fine complications; even if you had evidence—which you have not—of this intention to abandon.”

“Which I have not,” repeated Joshua, “at present. And which I shall never have, to the right effect, if your delicate conscience can forestall me.”

“You are unnecessarily sarcastic, sir,” said the clergyman, gravely. “You must give me the credit of my intentions. This Augean stable in our midst—it must be cleaned out as soon as recognized, or I become an accomplice in its condition. Why should any prompt summoning of the sweeper—of our legal Hercules—affect your position?”

“Because, sir,” said Joshua, vigorously, “he would, a thousand to one, lay bare, in so drastic a process, the golden deposit underneath, and so rob me of any title to its discovery.”

Mr. Sant grunted uneasily.

“The better title is certainly yours,” he conceded.

I believe there was enough of the imaginative boy yet left in him to thrill and respond to this exciting legend of gold. Uncle Jenico felt the change, and fell back, glistening, and softly rubbing his hands together.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” said the clergyman, suddenly and decisively, “will you tell me plainly what you propose?”

“I propose,” said Joshua, as instantly, “to visit, and identify, and search the remains of my unhappy brother to-morrow; I propose to take advantage of the letter which, I am convinced, will be found on them, and which, by every right, is legally mine, to secure the treasure. After that, sir, let in your Hercules with a fire-hose, if you will. I shall be content for my part. Possession is eleven points in the law, and for the twelfth I will go to pitch-and-toss with it.”

“Sant, that is certainly fair!” cried out Uncle Jenico, impulsively, and immediately fell abashed.

A longish silence ensued.

“Very well,” said our dear rector at last. “I will agree to defer my action till after to-morrow; but on condition that, once having secured his wonderful haul, Mr. Pilbrow openly challenges the law to deprive him of it. It is buying a pig in a poke, I believe; but I must guard myself by insisting.”

He uttered a rather enjoying laugh, which he tried to make ironic.

“That’s capital,” said Uncle Jenico. “You don’t object to the condition, Mr. Pilbrow?”

“No,” said Joshua, shortly. “I ask for complete secrecy in the mean time—that is all. That man’s wife——”

“She will say nothing,” said Mr. Sant. “The honour of her poor rogue is safe with her.”

Then we fell excitedly to discussing ways and means. The embargo once off my conscience, I was eager to join in the search. But here Uncle Jenico was quite absolute and imperative in vetoing my taking any part in it. He would not, on any condition whatever, have me descend into the hill again. I was disappointed; but he was unshakable, and in the end I had to submit.

It was finally arranged that Mr. Sant, Joshua, and Harry should meet early on the following morning, and complete their expedition, if possible, before the village was awake. And, on this understanding, at a latish hour we parted.

The next day was Christmas eve. I had never known one to drag so wearily. Uncle Jenico and I were up betimes, and making a show of following with serenity our customary occupations. But it was all a transparent pretence. I took no more interest in my books, nor he in his new invention, than if they had been prison tasks. We just perspired for the return of one or other of the party to put an end to our intolerable suspense; and that was the beginning and end of it.

At last a shadow danced on the window, and the door opened, and Harry hurried in. In the first sight of his face we read momentous news. I could hardly control myself as I said—

“Well?”

He had shut the door behind him, and stood there, breathing quickly, his eyes like white pebbles.

“Harry,” I whispered, “was it Abel?”

“Yes.”

“And the letter was there?”

“Yes—in his pocket. He—I could hardly look—he seemed to fall to pieces.”

“And—and it said where?”

“Yes. You’ll never believe.”

“Where?”

“In the well.”

“In the——”

“In the well. What fools we were never to think of that before! Of course it stood at the end of the crypts once—the most natural place for him to throw them into.”

His “them” seemed to hit me in the throat. I had forgotten about the murdered priest. I stood gaping like an idiot, lost in the plain marvel of the thing. I had forgotten Uncle Jenico, till his voice, speaking in a queer, shaky way, recalled me to the thought of him.

“My wrench!” he said. “They will have sunk to the bottom. We shall have to pull it down!”

“That’s just what we’re going to do,” said Harry “to-night, after every one’s asleep.”

CHAPTER XV.
OUT OF THE DEPTHS.

The village was long asleep when at last we issued forth, as blamelessly agitated a body of brigands as ever trod the corridors of night. We had taken our measures with infinite precaution, so that not a hint of our designs should leak out; yet still we had delayed, sitting, like the party in the parlour, “all silent and all damned,” while Dunberry sunk into deep and deeper unconsciousness of our conspiracy in its midst. We were assembled, in fact, in the rector’s study, Joshua, Mr. Sant himself, my uncle, and we two; and there we stuck, spelling out the blessed quarters, until the chimes of the school clock, coming in a flurry out of silence, called up a single rebukeful stroke from Time, and subsided upon it. So late as this, an hour after midnight, had we resolved to linger, to make assurance double sure; and at the sound, with a great pouf! of relief, we were on our feet and tingling to depart.

There had been no longer any question, of course, since our learning where the treasure was, or should be, concealed, of my foregoing my share in the attempt to recover it. No possible peril, within reason, could attach to this purely open-air sport; though, indeed, Uncle Jenico had made, even now, some presumptive risk to me the excuse for his joining us in the expedition.

It was a question, at this last, if he or Mr. Sant were the more excited. Our dear comical tutor and sceptic still made a show, it is true, of subscribing to a madness in order to humour a party of lunatics under his charge; but this affectation, I do believe, took in none of us. Was it not he, in solemn fact, who had insisted upon the necessity of this postponement of the foray until the small hours? Was it not he who had manœuvred to enwrap our plans in a profound mist of secrecy? Was it not he who had appointed the present rendezvous with a masterly eye to contingencies? As to wit: (1) His house stood remote, and we could reach the sea-front from the back of it, without ever touching the village; (2) A French window gave from his study upon the garden to the rear; (3) There was a little hand-cart for luggage in a shed in this garden, which cart offered itself apt to a dual purpose—(A) to convey down to the shore a pick and a shovel, together with Uncle Jenico’s colossal wrench, which, under pretence of its being submitted to some test, had already been brought to the rectory; (B) to serve as vehicle for the carrying back of the treasure.

On the top of all which, I ask you, was Mr. Sant the incredulous humourist he professed to be?

Whatever he thought, however, Uncle Jenico was patently and irresistibly the enthusiast of the undertaking. He stumped along, dear soul, his face one moon of hilarity. The adventure was to his very heart. To be called upon, in such an enterprise, to advertise the merits of such an invention, his own! It was unspeakable—beyond expectation! He laughed constantly, holding my arm, and rebuking me for being a sluggard when I tried to regulate his pace lest he upset himself.

Harry trundled the cart, making the softest track he could manage, under the hill towards the Gap. It was a brilliant moonlit night, with a singing wind. We had brought lanterns; but had no need of them. It was near as bright as day, indeed, and we sped rapidly on our course, never having need to pause or pick our way till we reached the sands. The great shaft of the well, when we stood over against it, seemed to topple towards us, tragically anticipating its doom. The sight of it, so lonely and so ancient in this moon-drowned solitude, thrilled me with a sort of pity. It had stood so long, baffling the winds and tides, foregathering with such generations of dead and departed ghosts! And now at last man’s cupidity was scheming to compass the final ruin of what Nature had been impotent to wreck. Ah! a more fatal force than any storm! the one against which no monument, however venerable, is proof.

If the others were touched by this spirit of regret, they were sensible enough to subordinate it to the inevitably practical. While I was, literally, mooning, they had already lifted the wrench from the barrow, and were busy, under Uncle Jenico’s directions, getting it into position on the sand.

I can only hastily elucidate the idea of this machine. Pinned to a sort of frame, or trestle, which was anchored all round with stout grapnels, and shored up in front against a bracket, was a ship’s steering-wheel, which the inventor had picked up cheap at a marine auction. A good rope (length indefinite), to be passed round the subject of the proposed haulage, and its two ends then carried to the wheel and clamped, one on each side, to its rim, completed the design. So disposed, nothing remained but to turn the wheel by its spokes, when the rope would garrotte the object, and, mechanically contracting of itself, induce a forward strain.

Now, I know little about scientific values; but certainly in this case the result justified the means, as you shall hear.

We had got all in place but the rope; and then suddenly Mr. Sant drew himself up, scratching his head in an unclerical manner.

“Whereabouts is it to be passed round?” he said.

“O!” answered Uncle Jenico: “as high up on the shaft as one can reach.”

“My good man,” cried the rector sarcastically, “do you really imagine we are going to haul that thing over by tugging at its base, or near it?”

“It is tottering already. It is laid bare to its lowest course. These boys examined and proved it!” answered Uncle Jenico.

Nevertheless, I could see he was taken by surprise and dismayed.

“That may be,” said Mr. Sant, “but——”

He paused, shrugged his shoulders, and laughed out comically.

“O, it will never do!” he said. “We must give this insanity a better chance. By hook or by crook, we must get the thing fixed up near the top.”

I started forward.

“I’ll carry the rope up, sir. I know the way. Harry and I climbed it once before.”

“No,” cried Uncle Jenico, sharply and decisively. “I won’t have you go on any account, Richard!”

“Then it’s to be me!” cried Harry; and, as I muttered discontentedly, trying to block his way, he evaded me and ran for the shaft. Mr. Sant, trailing the rope, followed him, and in a moment they were under its shadow.

I chafed, watching them: but my relative was inexorable. And, indeed, to speak truth, there was considerably more risk in the venture than formerly before the storm. Harry, however, accomplished his part in safety; and, while he still dwelt aloft, holding the loop in place, Mr. Sant captured the two ends of the rope, and came running towards us with them. In a moment we had pulled them taut and clamped them in place to the wheel. And then we hailed Harry to come down, which he did, rather with a run, so afraid was he of missing any detail of the sport.

Uncle Jenico had already given a half-turn to the wheel, in order to clinch the hold of the rope; and now he stood in a tense eagerness, dwelling on the psychologic moment. He held, by right of patent, the larboard spokes; Mr. Sant, the port. The dear old man was so wrought up out of feebleness, that I was apprehensive of the part he insisted upon taking in the manipulation of his own design. He would not be denied, however; and who could have had the heart to disappoint him? Was not this the very first time that his genius for invention promised him a harvest of gold? He took a long breath, and tightened his hold on the spokes.

Joshua stood rigid, awaiting the result. Harry and I shook on wires, staring from the wrench to the shaft, and hardly stifling the exclamations that rose to our lips. It was a solemn moment.

“Go!” cried Uncle Jenico; and the wheel spun a little, stiffened, and began to cry ominously.

Something cracked; thank Heaven it was only Uncle Jenico’s braces! The old man tugged and puffed, wrestling with his task. Suddenly he staggered—the wheel seemed to give and spin away from him—and he was almost on his face. In the same moment I fancied the shadow of a night-bird had crossed my vision—and I looked; and where had been the well was nothing. It was fallen prone upon the sand, so wearily, so softly, that in that humming wind no sound of the concussion had reached us.

Hardly suppressing a cry of triumph, we dropped everything, and raced for the place. The shaft in falling had broken into three pieces, of which the middle one was in a proportion of two-fourths. The fracture nearest the base was only three or so inches in width; but the top fragment was quite detached, and tilted over a little away from the neck.

Where the shaft had stood was surprisingly little scar in the ground—nothing to see, in fact, but a pyramid of sand, which had run from the stuffed base of the well in its parting. Upon this we flung ourselves, scrambling and scraping like children about a burst sugar cask. We clawed, as badgers claw, throwing the draff behind us. A hole opened under our furious assault, and sunk, and deepened—and revealed nothing. We ran for the tools, and picked and dug like madmen. Presently Mr. Sant threw down his shovel.

“We are feet below the well bottom. Are you satisfied at last, Mr. Pilbrow?” he said, really in a quite quarrelsome way. He had been cheated, he felt, of the fruits of his own condescension.

“No,” snarled Joshua, “I’m not. Here was mud, perhaps, once. It was a loaded box of iron—we know that. It may have sunk far.”

Mr. Sant laughed offensively. The best of us bear awakening from engaging dreams badly. As for me, I had desisted from working when he did, and was sitting disconsolately on the lower part of the shaft, fumbling with my fingers in the fracture.

All in a moment the blood seemed to rush to my heart, making me gasp. I jumped to my feet.

“Here it is!” I screeched. “I’ve found it! I felt it!”

My fingers, burrowing through the crack into a choke of sand, had touched upon the iron-bound corner of a box.

They were all up and swarming about me directly. One by one, quite cavalier to each other in their eagerness to dive and feel, they exclaimed and fell back, Some people say that colours are indiscernible by moonlight. I can answer for the flush which suffused our rector’s cheek as he looked at Joshua.

But it was Uncle Jenico who commanded the situation.

“We must rope this lowest piece, and pull it away from the other,” he cried, full of bustle and excitement. “What a providential thought was this wrench of mine! Hey, my boys? Ha-ha!”

It was brilliantly the obvious course, and at the word we were all scurrying to put it into execution, Uncle Jenico directing us in a perfect and quite lovable rapture of self-importance. He and I, when the rope had been readjusted to its new position, hurried to manipulate the machine, while the others remained to watch the result of our efforts on the huge pipe of masonry. We seized the spokes.

“Right!” said my uncle, with a laugh of joyous confidence.

Now, I don’t know if the first test had amounted to no more than a little soft extra persuasion applied to an already tottering article. I know only that that success was not to be repeated.

“Right!” said Uncle Jenico; and the wheel turned under our hands, tightened, and began to scream as before, only infinitely more distressfully. We strained our mightiest, putting our backs into it.

“It gives, I think,” said Uncle Jenico, in a suffocating voice.

And with the word, an explosive lash whistled by my ear, the machine bounded and pitched, and there were we rolling on the sand amidst a mad wreck of everything.

We were neither of us hurt. Uncle Jenico sat up ruefully. Mr. Sant came running to us across the sand.

“Anybody killed?” he panted, as he rushed up.

Nobody, by God’s mercy! It was the nearest shave. If I had had a whisker, it would have been shorn off, I think. The rope had snapped like a piece of string, and we were right in the path of its recoil.

“Anyhow, I suppose we moved the thing a little?” said Uncle Jenico.

“Not an inch,” was the answer.

“Eh!” cried my uncle. “I can’t understand. It must have severed itself on a sharp stone, I suppose.”

“That was the case, without doubt,” said the clergyman, kindly. “Well, there’s nothing for us now but to take pick and shovel, and dig out the pith of the thing. It will take a little longer, that’s all.”

Indeed, we found the other two, once assured of our safety, already hard at the job. It proved a tough one, for the silt inside from long pressure was grown as compact as mortar, and every fragment of it had to be chipped off and pulled away—a difficult matter, when from the depth of our boring it was no longer possible to wield the pick. However, we got through it, taking turns at the tools, and working now by lantern light, for the end of the great trunk was turned from the face of the moon.

Suddenly Harry, when he and I were once more hammering and shovelling together, uttered a stifled sound, and scrambled up, so quickly as half to fracture his skull against the roof of the tube. Then, holding his head, and squatting out backwards, he gingerly raked after him a little white thing—a human bone.

I scuttled to join him, and we all looked at one another.

“We’re coming to it,” muttered Mr. Sant; and almost on the instant, as we plunged in again to resume our burrowing, the end was wrought. A slab of concreted stuff, falling detached to our renewed blows and tilting outwards, let down an avalanche of loosened sand, and, slipping on its torrent—what?

We did not wait to discriminate. The dead, it seemed to us only, had come sliding and chuckling to meet us half way, with his, “Here we are again!” like a clown.

“It’s there!” gasped Harry, as we stood up outside. “Some one else must fetch it—not me: I won’t.”

Joshua dived on the instant: we heard him scuffling and chattering inside. And then he emerged.

“The rope!” he cried like a madman. “Fetch it—a bit of it—anything!”

I ran off, unknotted the shorter length from the wreck of the machine, and returned with it to him. He disappeared again into the tunnel, drawing the slack after him, and in a minute reissued, unkempt and agitated beyond measure, and disposed us all to haul. Without a question we obeyed, and, at his word, set our shoulders to a simultaneous tug. Slowly the capture responded to our efforts, and drew out heavily into the open—a great iron-ribbed box, with the upper half of a human skeleton chained to it by the neck.

Joshua seized the pick, and, before Mr. Sant could stop him, had parted at a blow the skull from its vertebræ. It leapt and settled, grinning up at us from the sand.

“That was basely done,” said our rector. “Take your spoil, sir. These poor remains are my concern.”

Joshua had thrown away the tool, and was standing, as if petrified, looking down on the chest. It might have measured a yard by two feet, and some two feet and a half in depth. The wood, under the corroded clamps of iron, was spongey, half-eaten by water, and, half-eaten, preserved in sand. But of the immense antiquity of the whole there was no question.

“We must secure what of these bones we can,” said Mr. Sant. “Well, Dick? Well, Harry?”

His quiet appeal overcame our repugnance. Once more we grovelled and groped in the bowels of the well. It was a gruesome task; but we fulfilled it. Excitement, no doubt—an eagerness to be done with it, and so earn the sweeter reward of adventure, stimulated us. At the end we had found, and gathered into a heap outside, all evidence that remained to mortality of that ancient deed of murder. It made one’s brain swim to look down on this wonderful tragic salvage of the centuries. It was all true, then—all true! And Destiny had made us her instruments in this unspeakable resurrection!

All this time Joshua, and even my uncle, had remained as if tranced. Now, suddenly, the former raised his voice in a shrill ecstatic cry.

“Poor Abel! poor fool! Come, let us load up! What are we waiting for?”

It was evident he was wrought far beyond any susceptibility to moral warning or rebuke. The rector perceived this, I think, and submitted himself to circumstance.

The truck was hurried up, and the chest placed upon it. It needed our united efforts to raise the thing; and at our every stagger Joshua sawed out a little jubilant laugh. We gathered the tools and the ropes and the ruin of the wrench, and piled all on top. Then we disposed the broken skeleton amidst, and started on our way home.

It was a hard pull now, though we all gave a hand to it. Three o’clock had struck, when at last, exhausted and agitated, we drew the little cart cautiously up to the study window, and unloaded it of its weightest burden, leaving the rest temporarily outside while we examined our haul.

The box had been stoutly fastened and secured; but the wood being shrunk away from its clamps rendered our task an easy one. A little wrenching with forceps, and the whole lid came apart, sinking upon the floor with a dusty clang. And then——

Sleeking and glinting through a dust of perished rags—piled to the throat, and kept burnished by the sand that had filtered in—a glut of gold!

Gold in rouleaux and ingots; gold in sovereigns and ryals; gold in angels and rose-nobles—near all of Henry the Seventh’s and Henry the Eighth’s reigns, and of incalculable antiquarian, apart from their intrinsic, value; gold in patens; gold and more in a jewelled ciborium; chased gold and ivory in an exquisite chalice with handles, and little queer figures of saints in rich enamel; gold in such wealth as we had never dreamt.

The vessels had been wrapped, it appeared, in soft skins of suckling-calf vellum, which had long crumpled into a floury meal, keeping all bright as blossoms preserved in sand, and easy to dust and blow away, We felt fairly drunk with the sight, as we gazed down spell-bound into that brimming reservoir of all wealth.

And then suddenly Mr. Sant had fallen upon his knees.

“O Lord!” he prayed, in a low half-agonized tone; “teach thy servant to deal rightly with this, converting it to fair uses, and justifying himself of Thy generosity.”

A little dead silence followed; and at the end Joshua bowed his head, and raising his hands clasped together, cried twice, in a firm voice—

“Amen!”

And so at last was consummated that wonderful and tragic tale of mystery and fatality, which had begun for me in the old court house of Ipswich. Truly, other things than hanging and wiving go by destiny.