The thrust went home. "So I will, by----!" the Irishman cried passionately. "I'll have her out, and the stuff! But I'll think twice before I pay you, you lily-livers! You chicken hearts. Give me a light!"
"There's light enough upstairs!" the Clipper answered mockingly. But the other man, more amenable, produced a flint and steel and a candle end, and lighting the one from the other handed it to Hawkesworth. "Likely enough you'll find her behind the door, captain," he said civilly. "'Twon't be much risk after all."
"Then go yourself, you cur," Hawkesworth answered brutally. He was torn this way and that; between fear and rage, cupidity and cowardice. The ardour of the chase grew cool in this atmosphere of disease; the courage of the man failed before this house given up to the fell plague, that in those days took pitiless toll of rich and poor, of old and young, of withered cheeks and bright eyes, of kings and joiners' daughters. His gorge rose at the sharp scent of vinegar, at the duller odour of burnt rags with which the air was laden; they were the rough disinfectants of the time, used before the panic-stricken survivors fled the place. In face of the danger he had to confront, women have ever been bolder than men, though they have more to lose. He was no exception.
Yet he would go. To flinch was to be lessened for ever in the eyes of the meaner villains, his hirelings; to dare was to confirm the evil pre-eminence he claimed. Bitter black rage in his heart--rage in especial against the woman who laid this necessity upon him--he thrust the door wide open, and shielding the candle, of which the light but feebly irradiated the black cavern before him, he crossed the threshold.
The place he entered seemed all dark to eyes fresh from the moonbeams; but some light there was beside that which he carried. From the open door of a narrow staircase that led to the upper rooms a faint reflection of the candles that burned above issued; by aid of which he saw that he stood in the great kitchen of the farm. But the black pot that tenanted the vast gloomy recess of the fireplace, hung over dead, white ashes--cold relics of the cheer that had once reigned there. The cradle in the corner was still and shrouded. In the middle of the stone floor a bench, a mere slab on four-straddling legs, lay overturned, upset by the panic-stricken survivors in their hurried flight; and beside it, stiff and grinning, sprawled the body of a black cat, killed in some frenzy of fear or superstition ere the living left the house to the care of the dead. A brooding odour of disease filled the gaunt, wide-raftered room, infected the shadowy hanging flitches, and grew stronger and more sickly towards the staircase at the farther end.
Yet it was there he saw her, as he paused uncertain, his heart like water. She was standing on the lowest step of the stairs as if she had retreated thither on his entrance. Her one hand held her skirt a little from the floor, and close to her; the other hung by her side. Her eyes shone large in her white face; and in her look and in her attitude was something solemn and unearthly, that for a moment awed him.
He stared spell-bound. She was the first to speak. "What do you want?" she whispered--as if the dead in the room above could hear her.
"The jewels!" he muttered, his voice subdued to the pitch of hers. "The jewels! Give me the jewels, and I will go!"
"They are not here," she said. "They are far away. Here is only death. Death is here, death is above," she continued solemnly. "The air is full of death. If you would not die, go! Go before it be too late."
He battled with the dark fear which her words fluttered before him; the fear that was in the air of the room, the fear that made his light burn more dimly than was natural. He battled with it, and hated her for it, and for his cowardice. "You she-devil!" he cried, "where are the jewels?"