"Yes, yes!" said Marmaduke passionately. "My uncle has moved it. When I was ill, upon my coming to Fairburn, I slept here, and I had terrible visions. I see it all now. He wanted to frighten me to death, or to make me mad. He would come and stand by my bedside and stare at me. Cruel--cruel coward!"
Then he begged us to go away. "My uncle will wonder at your long delay. He will suspect something," he said.
"Peter," observed my tutor gravely, as we went homeward, "whatever you may think of what has passed to-day, say nothing. I am not so ignorant of the wrongs of that poor boy as I appear, but there is nothing for it but patience."
II.--A Gypsy's Curse
In a few days I was in possession of an excellent horse, and Marmaduke had the like fortune. My tutor examined the steed Sir Massingberd had bought with great attention, and after commenting on the tightness of the curb, declared that he would accompany us on our first ride. After we had left the village, he expressed a wish to change mounts with Marmaduke, and certainly if he had been a horsebreaker he could not have taken more pains with the animal. In the end he expressed himself highly satisfied. Some days afterwards, however, Panther, for so we called the horse, behaved in a strange and incomprehensible fashion, and at last became positively fiendish. Shying at a gypsy encampment, he rushed at headlong speed down a zigzagged chalk road, and at last pitched head-first over a declivity. When I found Marmaduke blood was at his mouth, blood at his ears, blood everywhere.
"Marmaduke, Marmaduke!" I cried. "Speak! Speak, if it be but a single word! Great heaven, he is dead!"
"Dead! No, not he," answered a hoarse, cracked voice at my ear. "The devil would never suffer a Heath of Fairburn to die at his age!"
"Woman," cried I, for it was an old gypsy, who had somehow transported herself to the spot, "for God's sake go for help! There is a house yonder amongst the trees."
"And why should I stir a foot," replied she fiercely, "for the child of a race that has ever treated me and mine as dogs?"
Then she cursed Sir Massingberd as the oppressor of her kith and kin, concluding with the terrible words, "May he perish, inch by inch, within reach of the aid that shall never come, ere the God of the poor take him into His hand!"