‘Why not have remained there, then?’
‘Is it so unusual for an exile to yearn towards the land of his birth—especially an he envisage a prospect to combine some business with pleasure there? But I see you do not believe me. Well, Sir, bruised and battered though I be, I would sooner be put to lie out in the fields than accept a bounty offered on such terms. Or would you be the treacherous husbandman of the fable, with whom the poor driven fox took shelter, and keep me here, to point out to the hunt my hiding-place? It may ride up anon. Be sure those bloody miscreants will rouse the neighbourhood, and there will be search for me. Well, I am sick and friendless and at your mercy.’
He had spoken from the first in a voice weak and languid, though always oddly preserving its dry particularity, and now sank back as if exhausted, closing his eyes. But still Brion regarded him unmoved, it seemed, by either his explanations or his taunts. Something, he felt, rang false—he could not say what, but it certainly was not the man’s physical hurts, which were very definite and serious. There was reality enough in them to outweigh for the moment any thought of moral deception. One in particular on the side, the result of a terrible blow from a metal bar or stone, bore a sinister look. No rib, so far as he could ascertain, was fractured, but he feared some bad internal injury. He had done, and he did hereafter, all that he could to alleviate the suffering caused by this injury, using what soft compresses and tender balsams he could filch from Mother Harlock’s preserves; but still the pain did not seem to mend, and its persistence troubled him. Supposing the man were to die on his hands, to what unresolvable difficulties would he not have committed himself? However, the thing was done, and might God help him in having acted humanely on impulse instead of discreetly on reflection.
‘I pass by your bitter words,’ he said, standing over the prone figure, ‘which some might think had savoured of ingratitude, but which I take for an ill man’s ravings. Be assured, I shall not betray you. What is to the point is how not to make myself suspect. It can be done, and safely, but only at the expense of my company. You must do without my visiting you, save at daily intervals. I will bring you all you need from time to time, food, and more comforts, and so will continue till you are in a condition to be released and sped upon your way. By that time, let us hope, the hue and cry will have died down and yourself be forgotten. That dark dawn can have little familiarised your persecutors with your features. For the brazier, I will bring to-morrow the wherewithal to screen it; yet methinks, once warmed, you’ll need but little artificial heat in this subterranean chamber. It were wise to kindle no taper but on urgent need. For the rest, you are buried here as inviolate as in a tomb. No one of the household nor the near neighbourhood would so much as come near the place: it hath an evil reputation with the foolish. But that need not concern you. Are you willing that I leave you now?’
The eyes were opened and staring at him again—strange blots in the dying glow; the lips whispered, it seemed, some inarticulate thanksgiving. Brion, with a curt ‘good-night,’ turned and mounted the steps. In the chamber above, having closed and spun the wheel, he paused a moment to see if any tell-tale gleam issued from the edges of the orifice; but detecting no least hint of such, he went, satisfied, into the night.
Henceforth he kept to his word, visiting the fugitive once at least a day, bringing him good sustenance and more comfortable stuff for his bedding, and staying to converse awhile as he bandaged the inflamed and aching flesh. Sometimes he would go by the garden and sometimes by the wood: the little sport of secrecy and evasion tickled him for a while; it was like a game, and he was still boy enough to enjoy a game. Yet now and again it would occur to him that a game indefinitely prolonged might lose its point, and expose, through constant use, its own machinery; and so far no period to the one he was playing seemed suggested. An uncomfortable feeling dawned and developed in him that he had burdened himself, and at a crucial time, with an undetachable incubus. As the days went on, in proportion as the invalid’s main injury seemed to heal superficially, the inner hurt appeared to intensify. The fact threatened to confirm his first most grave suspicions; but it did not help to solve his difficulties. He began to foresee the ultimate necessity of taking somebody into his confidence. What if matters should go from bad to worse? He was doing his best for the man; but his best was after all only the best of ignorance. Good intentions might very well make bad nurses, unless reinforced by knowledge. Instead of curing he might be actually helping to kill.
The patient, in fact, in defiance of all the young man’s ministrations, continued to look ghastly; he seemed to speak with difficulty; he complained of eternal pain and unrest. And no wonder, buried, so injured, in that dank and gloomy crypt. One welcome change there was: soft and open Spring weather had followed on that day of cold and storm, mitigating the frigid atmosphere of the stone chamber. Going down the garden on the morning after the encounter, Brion felt his every pore expanding with delight. Balm was in the air; an incense rose from the earth; the winter aconites had blinked the frost from their golden eyes, and, with their ruffs starched and smart, were smiling in holiday rows under the wall. Even a surviving snowdrop or two—those sweet little acolytes of Candlemas, as Clerivault called them—opened their hearts to the sun, and betrayed to it the tender green thoughts they were used to guard so shyly.
Brion, descending to the patient, found him, a little to his surprise, shifted from the position in which he had left him the night before to one in an angle of the wall where the brazier had been formerly set. They had exchanged places, in fact. Remarking on the transposition, he was informed by the other, in that weak, precisely-measured voice of his, that, growing chill in the small hours, he had bethought himself to take advantage of the warmth reflected to the stones by the then extinguished charcoal, and had so made shift to effect the change, which he had with difficulty accomplished, lying with his body against the hot wall. That, as a stratagem, was resourceful enough: the perplexing thing to Brion was how one in so feeble a state could have put it into practice. Yet, again, that state seemed indisputable. One had only to look at the man to know he could not be malingering.
They talked a little together, desultorily. The stranger was curious about the superstition which kept his hiding-place inviolate; and Brion, seeing no reason for concealment, told him all about the legend of the departed buccaneer, and the fate of the unfortunate young relative who had got to know more about his affairs than was good for his health or hers. The eyes always seemed to listen to him more than the ears: they blinked no facts, and confessed no emotions—none in the least over their owner’s contiguity to the place of that dark reputed tragedy. He was evidently ‘insusceptible,’ in the superstitious sense.
‘And was, Sir,’ he said, ‘this business of the wheel some of that Fulke’s contriving?’