Then Cumac turned with a moan of grief, his madness all gone. “The bond is ended. I have done. I say I have done.” He seemed to wake as from sleep, and, seeing the two captive men, he asked: “Why did they come? What brought them here? Take them away, the bond is ended, I say I have done. There shall be no more bonds given in the world. But take them out of the city gate and unbind them and cast them both loose; then clap fast the gate again. No more death, I would not have them die; let them wander in the live world, and dog each other for ever. Tanil, you rotten core of constancy, Fax brought you here and so Flaune, bitter and beautiful, dies. But Fax still lives—do you not see him?—I give Fax to you: may he die daily for ever. Fax, blundering jackal, you spoke of bonds. The bond is met, and so Yali is dead, but Tanil still lives: I give you Tanil as an offering, but not of peace. May he die daily for ever.”
So the guard took Fax and Tamil out of the city, struck off their shackles, and left them there together.
The bird man finished; there was a silence; the other yawned. “Did you hear this?” asked the bird man. And the man in the stripéd jacket replied: “Ay, with both ears, and so may God bless you.” So saying, he rose and went out singing.
The Devil in the Churchyard
“Henry Turley was one of those awkward old chaps as had more money than he knowed what to do wi'. Shadrach we called him, the silly man. He had worked for it, worked hard for it, but when he was old he stuck to his fortune and wouldn’t spend a sixpence of it on his comforts. What a silly man!”
The thatcher, who was thus talking of Henry Turley (long since dead and gone) in the “Black Cat” of Starncombe, was himself perhaps fifty years old. Already there was a crank of age or of dampness or of mere custom in most of his limbs, but he was bluff and gruff and hale enough, with a bluffness of manner that could only offend a fool—and fools never listened to him.
“Shadrach—that’s what we called him—was a good man wi’ cattle, a masterpiece; he would strip a cow as clean as a tooth and you never knowed a cow have a bad quarter as Henry Turley ever milked. And when he was buried he was buried with all that money in his coffin, holding it in his hand, I reckon. He had plenty of relations—you wouldn’t know ’em, it is thirty years ago I be speaking of—but it was all down in black and white so’s no one could touch it. A lot of people in these parts had a right to some of it, Jim Scarrott for one, and Issy Hawker a bit, Mrs. Keelson, poor woman, ought to have had a bit, and his own brother, Mark Turley; but he left it in the will as all his fortune was to be buried in the coffin along of him. ’Twas cruel, but so it is and so it will be, for whenever such people has a shilling to give away they goes and claps it on some fat pig’s haunches. The foolishness! Sixty pounds it was, in a canister, and he held it in his hand.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said a mild-faced man sitting in the corner. “Henry Turley never did a deed like that.”