“Well, perhaps after all it’s best to tell what I know.” Punch took out a pipe and slowly filled it. “Mind you, it’s all damned uncertain, a lot of little things that don’t mean anything when taken by themselves. I first met the man in ’89, twenty years ago. I was a young chap, twenty-one or so. A kind of travelling blacksmith I used to be then, with Pendragon up the coast as a kind o’ centre. It was at Pendragon I saw him. He used to live there then as he lives in Treliss now; it was a very different kind o’ place then to what it is now—just a sleepy, dreamy little town, with bad lights, bad roads and the rest, and old tumbled down ’ouses. Old Sir Jeremy Trojan ’ad the run of it then, him that’s father of the present Sir Henry, and you wouldn’t have found a quieter place, or a wilder in some ways.”
“Wild?” said Maradick. “It’s anything but wild now.”
“Yes, they’ve changed it with their trams and things, and they’ve pulled down the cove; but the fisher-folk were a fierce lot and they wouldn’t stand anyone from outside. Morelli lived there with his wife and little girl. ’Is wife was only a young thing, but beautiful, with great eyes like the sea on a blue day and with some foreign blood in ’er, dark and pale.
“’E wasn’t liked there any more than ’e is here. They told funny tales about him even then, and said ’e did things to his wife, they used to hear her crying. And they said that ’e’d always been there, years back, just the same, never looking any different, and it’s true enough he looks just the same now as he did then. It isn’t natural for a man never to grow any older.”
“No,” said Maradick, “it isn’t.”
“There were other things that the men down there didn’t like about ’im, and the women hated ’im. But whenever you saw ’im he was charming—nice as ’e could be to me and all of ’em. And he was clever, could do things with his ’ands, and make birds and beasts do anything at all.”
“That’s strange,” said Maradick. “Tony said something of the same sort the other day.”
“Well, that ain’t canny,” said David, “more especially as I’ve seen other animals simply shake with fear when he comes near them. Well, I was telling you, they didn’t like ’im down in the cove, and they’d say nothing to ’im and leave ’im alone. And then one night”—Punch’s mouth grew set and hard—“they found Mrs. Morelli up on the moor lying by the Four Stones, dead.”
“Dead!” said Maradick, startled.
“Yes; it was winter time and the snow blowing in great sheets across the moor and drifting about her dress, with the moon, like a yellow candle, hanging over ’er. But that weren’t all. She’d been killed, murdered. There were marks on her face and hands, as though teeth had torn her. Poor creature!” Punch paused.