But now a new ghost shook my very soul in its walking, and it was the specter of the blackmailer’s raising.
Was it possible—was it possible that my father that night—in some fit of drunken savagery——
I put the thought from me, with loathing, but it returned again and again.
One fair morning it occurred to me to go and look upon the grave I had never yet visited. Perhaps, I thought, I should find inspiration there. This vengeful, bewildered pursuit—I did not know how long I should be able to endure it. Sometimes, reviewing the latter, I felt as if it would be best to abandon the chase right then; to yield the chimera to fate to resolve as she might judge fit or never to resolve at all, perhaps. Then the thought that only by running to earth the guilty could I vindicate the innocent, would steel me more rigidly than ever in the old determination.
The ancient church, in the yard of which Modred was buried, stands no great distance away upon a slope of the steep hill that shuts in the east quarter of Winton.
As I passed from the road through the little gate in the yard boundaries a garden of green was about me—an acre of tree and shrub and grass set thickly with flowering barrows and tombstones wrapped in lichen, like velvet for the royal dead. The old church stood in the midst, as quiet and staid and peaceful there in its bower as if no restless life of a loud city hummed and echoed all about it.
I paused in indecision. For the first time it occurred to me that I had made no inquiry as to the position of my brother’s grave; that I did not even know if the site of his resting-place was marked by stone or other humbler monument. While I stood the sound of a voice cheerily singing came to me from the further side of a laurel bush that stood up from the grass a rood away. I walked round it and came plump upon my philosophical friend of the “weirs,” knee-deep in a grave that he was lustily excavating.
“Hullo,” I said, and “Hullo,” he answered.
“You seem to find your task a pleasant one?” said I.
“Ah!” he said. “What makes ’ee think thart, now?”