The mill of silence

by Bernard Capes

And in this year a strange and tragic thing happened in Winton that was indirectly the cause in me of a fresh fungus growth of doubt and dark suspicion; and it fell out in this wise:

Some twenty years before, when I was a mere child (the story came to me later), a great quarrel had taken place between two citizens of the old burg. They were partners, before the dispute, in a flourishing business, and the one of them who was ultimately worsted in the argument had been the benefactor of the man that triumphed. The quarrel rose on some question as to the terms of their mutual agreement, the partner who had been taken into the firm out of kindness claiming the right to oust the other by a certain date. The technicalities of the matter were involved in a mass of obscurity, but anyhow they went to law about it and the beneficiary won the case. The other was forced to retire, to all intents and purposes a ruined man, but he bore with him a possession that no judge could deprive him of—a deep, deadly hatred against the reptile whose fortunes he had made and who had so poisonously bitten him in return. He was heard to declare that alive or dead he would have his enemy by the heel some day, and no one doubted but that he meant it.

Some months later, as the successful partner was returning home from his office one winter night, a pistol shot cracked behind him and he was constrained to measure his portly figure in the slush of the street. There his late partner came and looked upon him and gave a weltering grunt, like a satisfied hog, and kicked the body and went his way. But his victim was scarcely finished with in the manner he fancied. The ball, glancing from a lamp-post, had smashed the bones of his right heel only, and he was merely feigning death. When his enemy was retired he crawled home on his hands and knees, leaving a sluggish trail of crimson behind him, and, once safe in the fortress of his household, sent for the doctor and an inspector of police.

The would-be murderer was of course captured, tried and sentenced to a twenty-year term of penal servitude. He made no protest and took it all in the nature of things. But, before leaving the dock, he repeated—looking with a quiet smile on his becrutched and bandaged oppressor sitting pallidly in the court—his remarkable formula about “alive or dead” having him by the heel some day.

Then he disappeared from Winton’s ken and for sixteen years the town knew him no more, and his victim prospered exceedingly and walked far into the regions of wealth and honor, for all a painful limp that seemed as if it should have impeded his advance.

At the end of this time a little local excitement was stirred by the return of the criminal, out on ticket-of-leave, and presenting all the appearance of a degraded, battered and senile old man. His one-time partner—a town councilor by then—resented his intrusion exceedingly; but finding him to be impervious, apparently, to the sting of memory, and presumably harmless to sting any more on his own account, he bestirred himself to quarter the driveling wreck on an almshouse—a proceeding which gained him much approval on the part of all but those who retained recollection of the origin of the quarrel.

In this happy asylum the poor ruin breathed his last within a month of its admission, and the rubbish of it was buried—not in the pauper corner of some city cemetery, as one might suppose, but in the very yard of the cathedral itself. For, curiously enough, the fading creature before his death had claimed lying-room in a family vault sunk in that august inclosure, and his claim was found to be a legitimate one.

I knew the place where he lay, well; for an end of the old vault they had opened for his accommodation tunneled under a pathway that cut the yard obliquely, and, passing along it one’s feet hit out the spot in a low reverberating thud of two steps that spoke of hollowness beneath the gravel.

The July of the present year I write of being the fourth from that poor thing’s death and burial, was marked by one of the most terrific thunderstorms that have ever in my memory visited Winton.

If there was one man abroad in those bitter hours, there was one only, I should say, and he paid a grewsome price for his temerity. He was returning home from a birthday party, was that fated councilor, and, fired with a Dutch courage, must have taken that very path across the yard under which his once partner lay, and which he generally for some good reason rather avoided. What followed he might never describe himself, for that was the last of him. But a strange and eerie scene met the sight of an early riser abroad in the yard the next morning.