'No, as a Hand of Glory. It were washed in mother's milk to a child base-born, and smoked in the reek of gallows-wood, and then laid with tamarisk from the sea, and vervain, and rue, and bog-bean.'
'Well, what then?'
'Why, then, sure it's a Hand of Glory.' She paused, then struck her hand across her forehead, 'and grass off the graves of them as it killed—I forgot to say that was added.'
'What can such a hand do?'
'Everything. If I had it here and set it up on the mantelshelf, and set a light to the fingers, all would flame blue, and then every soul in the house would sleep except us two, and we might ransack the whole place and none would stir or hinder or see. And if we let the hand flame on, they would lie asleep till we were far away beyond their reach.'
'If you had this Hand of Glory, I wouldn't help you to use it,' said Charles, writhing on his seat.
'That is not all,' Mrs. Veale went on, standing by a little tea-table with her hand on it, the other against her side. 'That hand has wonderful powers of itself. It is as a thing alive, though dead and dry as leather. If you say certain words it begins to run about on its fingers like a rat. Maybe you're sitting over the fire of nights, and hear something stirring, and see a brown thing scuttling over the floor and you think it is a rat. It is not. It is the dead man's hand. Perhaps you hear a scratching on the wall, and look round, and see a great black spider—a monstrous spider going about, running over and over the wainscot, and touching and twitching at the bell wires. It is not a spider, it is the murderer's hand. It hasn't eyes, it goes by the feel, till it comes to gold, and then, at the touch the dark skin becomes light and shines as the tail of a glowworm, and it picks and gathers by its own light. I reckon, if that hand o' Wellon's were in the oven behind the parlour-grate, it would make such a light that you'd see what was on every guinea, whether the man and horse or the spade, and you could read every note as well as if you had the daylight. Then the ring-finger and the little finger close over what money the hand has been bidden fetch, and it runs away on the thumb and other two—and then, if you will, it's spiderlike with a bag behind.'
'I don't believe a word of it,' said Charles, but his words were more confident than his tone.
'You see,' Mrs. Veale went on, 'there is this about it, you tell the hand to go and fetch the money, but you don't say whither it is to go, and you do not know. You get the money and can swear you have robbed no one. I reckon, mostly the money is found by the hand in old cairns and ruins. I've been told there's a table of gold in Broadbury Castle that only comes to the top on Midsummer night for an hour, and then sinks again. Folks far away see a great light on Broadbury, and say we be swaling (burning gorse) up here; but it is no such thing; it is the gold table coming up, and shining like fire, and the clouds above reflecting its light.'
'Pity the hand don't break off bits of the gold table,' said Charles sarcastically; but his face was mottled with fear; Mrs. Veale's stories frightened him.