So, in his loneliness and despair, there returned to him, and with a wonderful new sense of restfulness, a thought which had already half troubled, half bewitched his mind. He knew in what soft and gentle bosom he could find, if he would, the welcome and the comradeship his soul so longed for. Why not abandon the struggle, yield for once and for all his scruples, and so turn the tables on the fate which had thought finally to bereave him? The very reflection was balm out of sickness. It steadied the agitation of his nerves and induced in him a feeling of tranquil resignation. Thenceforth the turmoil in his mind subsided, and he set himself to face with sober philosophy the weary days of the voyage which yet lay before him. He was no longer in any hurry to reach home; which testified to the rationality of his resolve, if it did not to any compelling force of passion behind it.
Until the 10th September the Tiger and the Santa Anna ran in company; when, foul weather intervening, they were cast apart, and the lighter ship so gained on the other as quickly to lose sight of her in the murk. Nor was she to see her again during the remainder of the run, which for her part she completed some twelve days ahead of her consort. Of this time there is nothing of interest to record; the finish of the voyage was uneventful, and on the 6th of October the Tiger fell in with the Land’s End, and the same day cast anchor at Falmouth, where Brion parted from her, and went ashore.
It was six months near to a day since he had left his native land; and with what varied emotions he set foot again on her dear soil may be imagined. He made no stay in the town—which indeed was little better than a fishing colony—but took boat that afternoon for Plymouth, where he was to put up for the night before completing the rest of his journey, which he was resolved to do on the morrow. Only he did not. Something intervened.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE VIPER ON THE HEARTH
Whether or not the vulnerary water distilled from the plantain in the year of its becoming a bird possessed the phœnix-like properties attributed to it by its concoctor, certain it is that from the moment of Mrs Harlock’s taking the stranger in hand the man’s hurts began to mend; and within a month of his being received into the house he was pronounced by his attendant in a fit state to take himself out of it. He demurred over the verdict, protesting that only his own resolution and desire to appear grateful were feigning a cure which in his inner self he knew to be far from assured; but his precise plaints, after a private consultation among the conspirators, were ignored, and he was given definite notice that, as from the first day of May, he was to consider them discharged of any further obligations regarding him, and must make his plans accordingly. He submitted perforce, and, it is to be assumed, took them at their word, for his plans, when he came to develop them, showed a full appreciation of the independence of action presented to him, and were very certainly his own. He went—but only to return.
During those weeks of his convalescence no least hint of his presence in the Grange had been allowed to percolate through to its master, who, indeed, more than ever since his nephew’s departure, had shut himself away in complete isolation from his household. Nor had a whisper of the secret the place contained been let penetrate to the outer world. Absolute loyalty to their service was, as Brion had very well known, an assured asset with those faithful souls, and observance to the letter of his instructions could be depended on. So rigidly, indeed, had his directions been followed that from first to last the invalid had been able to inform himself in no solitary particular of the constitution of the household into which he had been admitted. He knew from Brion the name of its head, and that was all. That, it may be said, had conveyed something to him, but something which required substantiation and consideration. The question was, how to bring about, what he most desired, a personal interview. It was already, to his mind, a sheer Providence which had brought him, though by way of travail, to a house actually marked for early visitation on his list. For there is need no longer to skirmish about the truth regarding Master John Melton. He was in very fact one of those agents provocateurs already alluded to as being sent by the Jesuit Allen to England to test popular feeling and sow sedition. Not in Orders himself, he was possessed, nevertheless, of sufficient dogmatism to qualify him for such a mission, his English blood further suiting him for the task. He was, moreover, a dry and crafty creature, born for an Inquisitor. Part of his business was to analyse the sources of disaffection, and to involve such waverers as he could in the conspiracy against the Queen’s life, which even then was germinating in the breasts of certain Catholic extremists. Among such presumptive confederates, it seemed, the name of Quentin Bagott figured as that of one who had secretly recanted his heresy, and might be used as a local agent for the insidious dissemination of treason. How the information had been acquired is of little matter; it was of a piece with much that jumped to certain conclusions from insufficient premises. In any case a visit to the ex-Judge had been assigned a foremost place in the itinerary mapped out for Allen’s emissary.
And here he was, by a very Providence, as has been said—inscrutably severe in its methods though it might be—actually on the premises which he might in vain have sought to enter lacking that Divine castigation. It seemed incredible that his good fortune stood to be stultified through the perversity of a party of fools, too obstinately loyal to their instructions to give him the least tether for his operations. Nor should it be—on that he was determined—whatever close watch they kept over their tongues, or over his movements when once he was in a condition to rise and creep about his room. He was able to learn so much—that he owed this rigid supervision to the man who had rescued him, and could form, perhaps, his own shrewd conclusions as to some of Brion’s reasons for desiring to keep him and his Uncle apart. For this Melton was as sharp as a ferret, and had that sort of microscopic mental eye which can discover whole truths in grains of unconsidered suggestion. So, when the time came, he went, quite quietly and tamely, and his watchers breathed a sigh of relief that their responsibility was at an end.
That same night Quentin Bagott was sitting in his chamber alone. A solitary lamp burned over his head, diluting but not obliterating a patch of moonlight which fell through the open casement upon the floor. The window looked out upon the waste ground to the rear of the Grange, and was flung wide, for the night was still and warm. He sat, his eyes fixed on the carpet, on the patch of moonlight there, drearily hypnotised by it. There was a criss-cross pattern in it which seemed to entangle his brain. Wrenching himself once free from the obsession, he turned to the table to drink, and again came round to stare at the carpet. Something had happened to it. In the thick of the moonlit lattice lay a folded scrap of paper which had not been there before. It looked as if entangled in the meshes—or in his brain. He sat staring at it, trying to think. Suddenly he rose unsteadily, and stooped, and gained the thing, and unfolded it and read. He stood a long time reading; then went softly and quickly to the window and bent out.
‘Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas,’ he said low into the night.
A man came out of the shadows and approached the window.