Take warning by my dreadful fate,
The truth I can't deny;
This dreadful crime that I are done
I are condemned to die.
The singular grammar of the last two lines I never quite understood, not having noticed its like elsewhere; but I put it down as a distinguishing characteristic of the speech of murderers.
I waited till the woman had taken her ballads away, and I had grown uncommonly cold in the legs, and then crept back to bed. But now I had fully awakened myself, and sleep was impossible. Presently I got up again, and looked out over the river. Very black and mysterious it lay, the blacker, it seemed, for the thousand lights that spotted it, craft and shore. No purlmen's fires were to be seen, for work on the colliers was done long ago, but once a shout and now a hail came over the water, faint or loud, far or near; and up the wooden wall I leaned on came the steady sound of the lapping against the piles below. I wondered where Grandfather Nat's boat—our boat—lay now; if the murderer were still rowing in it, and would row and row right away to sea, where my father was, in his ship; or if he would be caught, and make a dying confession with all the "haves" and "ams" replaced by "ares"; or if, indeed, he had already met providential retribution by drowning. In which case I doubted for the safety of the boat, and Grandfather would buy another. And my legs growing cold again, I retreated once more.
I heard the customers being turned into the street, and the shutters going up; and then I got under the bed-clothes, for I recalled the nightmare, and it was not pleasant. It grew rather worse, indeed, for my waking fancy enlarged and embellished it, and I longed to hear the tread of Grandfather Nat ascending the stair. But he was late to-night. I heard Joe the potman, who slept off the premises, shut the door and go off up the street. For a few minutes Grandfather Nat was moving about the bar and the bar-parlour; and then there was silence, save for the noises—the clicks and the creaks—that the old house made of itself.
I waited and waited, sometimes with my head out of the clothes, sometimes with no more than a contrived hole next my ear, listening. Till at last I could wait no longer, for the house seemed alive with stealthy movement, and I shook with the indefinite terror that comes, some night or another, to the most unimaginative child. I thought, at first, of calling to my grandfather, but that would seem babyish; so I said my prayers over again, held my breath, and faced the terrors of the staircase. The boards sang and creaked under my bare feet, and the black about me was full of dim coloured faces. But I pushed the door and drew breath in the honest lamplight of the bar-parlour at last.
Nobody was there, and nobody was in the bar. Could he have gone out? Was I alone in the house, there, where the blood was still on the carpet? But there was a slight noise from behind the stairs, and I turned to look farther.
Behind the bar-parlour and the staircase were two rooms, that projected immediately over the river, with their frames resting on the piles. One was sometimes used as a parlour for the reception of mates and skippers, though such customers were rare; the other held cases, bottles and barrels. To this latter I turned, and mounting the three steps behind the staircase, pushed open the door; and was mightily astonished at what I saw.
There was my grandfather, kneeling, and there was one half of Bill Stagg the purlman, standing waist-deep in the floor. For a moment it was beyond me to guess what he was standing on, seeing that there was nothing below but water; but presently I reasoned that the tide was high, and he must be standing in his boat. He was handing my grandfather some small packages, and he saw me at once and pointed. Grandfather Nat turned sharply, and stared, and for a moment I feared he was angry. Then he grinned, shook his finger at me, and brought it back to his lips with a tap.
"All right—my pardner," he whispered, and Bill Stagg grinned too. The business was short enough, and in a few seconds Bill Stagg, with another grin at me, and something like a wink, ducked below. My grandfather, with noiseless care, put back in place a trap-door—not a square, noticeable thing, but a clump of boards of divers lengths that fell into place with as innocent an aspect as the rest of the floor. This done, he rolled a barrel over the place, and dropped the contents of the packages into a row of buckets that stood near.
"What's that, Grandfather Nat?" I ventured to ask, when all was safely accomplished.