"He's desperate seemingly," said her husband. "Even so he talked to me, but dared not go quite so far as he did to you. Threats be the weapons of weak men. He was always fond of talking rather large. Even so Joe Tapson spoke when he had to go. The good I did him was not remembered. He cared nothing for that. As for Weekes, I can't help him, and there's an end of it."
Brendon dismissed the subject from his mind and bade Sarah Jane do the like. He went on his way, and life with its thousand calls soon made him forget the tribulations of Jarratt Weekes. His wife, however, did not overlook them, because, when possible, she visited Mary and heard of the increasing difficulties of her husband.
And Jarratt himself allowed embarrassment to breed ferocity, as happens often with small-minded men. When he left Sarah Jane after uttering his threat, he returned to Lydford and went to drink at the Castle Inn. Full well he knew that Daniel Brendon was not to be moved, and he dared not approach him directly for fear of actual injury to himself. But he had reached striking point; out of his own vexed and troubled heart rose a fierce longing to bring vexation and trouble upon others. He scarcely realized the terrific gravity of any attack on Brendon at this juncture, for the years had dulled his memory, and only one main fact respecting Daniel's wife stuck there. Given prosperity and sustained success, he might never have struck; but now a time had come when misfortune played the lodestone and drew from him an active and avid malignity. He smarted to see the other rise from strength to strength. He did not perceive that even rumours of the truth would bring absolute and utter ruination, or he might have hesitated. All he designed as yet was a drop of gall for Brendon's full cup of sweetness. He thought how to embitter; but he did not desire to poison. He failed, as many a coarse-minded soul fails, to perceive that what for him might be no more than affliction and transitory torment, to a greater spirit must mean everlasting wreck and perdition.
With a mind quite empty he entered the inn, ordered his drink and waited to catch the thread of the conversation before taking his part in it. Taverner was there, and old Huggins. The latter talked, and half-a dozen men in the bar listened to him. Noah Pearn served his customer with liquor and explained the subject.
"Valentine here be running on the past to-day, and he's gone back fifty years in his memory as easy as we go back a month. He often will after a third glass. 'Tis a pity there's none to write down the things he calls home; for they'll all perish with him, and some of 'em be very well worth remembering."
He stopped, and they listened to the ancient.
"Them days of barley bread! But which among you folk ever tasted it? Harsh it was and made us far shorter and sharper than we be nowadays. I've seed a chap buried at cross-roads with a stake drove through his carcase. 'Twas thought he'd killed hisself, and cross-roads was the grave of such people then. By night they buried him; and by night they dug him up again."
"Dug him up, Val!" cried Mr. Pearn. "Surely not. What for did they dig him up again?"
"Because a year later 'twas found that he'd died by lawful murder and never took his life at all! A valiant man, as stopped coaches on the Launceston Road, was catched red-handed, and tried to Exeter, and hanged 'pon Gibbet Hill above Mary Tavy. The last hanging there 'twas—somewhere about the year 1790, I reckon, or may have been later. But I went to see the sight, as a small boy, and afore they turned the bold feller off, he confessed that among other wicked things, he'd put a bullet through the chap we buried, because the chap had seed him stop a coach and marked him. And he'd left a old hoss-pistol by the chap a purpose to make it look as if he'd done it hisself. So they dug him up again and gived his fragments a proper box, and laid him in holy ground, and parson made a whole-hearted speech about it, and forgived everybody, as he hoped to be forgiven."
"The things you've seen!" murmured a young man.