The policeman looked up knowingly. “Is it that there woman that lives——” he paused, with a significant glance towards the closed windows of the Marvels’ house. “A bad lot she is. She behaves best to any fellow she treats badly. Come, come, young man, as the lady speaks for you, I’ll let you go this time. Your young ’ooman ain’t here now, d’ye understand? And if you take my advice, you’ll give her a wide berth, wherever she may be.”
The wretched youth rose, picking up his cap, and dashing it against the iron balustrade to beat off the dust.
“Thank you kindly, mum,” he mumbled thickly. “I begs your pardon. I did not know she’d left here. I on’y knew she gave me the go-by directly my back was turned, a-earnin’ money to make a home for her.”
“Well, well,” rejoined the policeman, pushing the shambling figure before him. “You be thankful she did give you the go-by, though you don’t deserve a better woman, if you ain’t more of a man than to let the likes of her get you into the mess you’re in to-night—or this morning, rather,” he added, looking up at the whitening sky. “Good day, mum, I’m sorry I had to disturb you.”
On their way back to their rooms, they met Clementina, who had been aroused by the movements within the house. Clementina, as she herself expressed it, “was trembling so that one could knock her down with a feather.” She had not descended below the first floor. Her breathless question was—
“Is he dead? Has it been a murder?”
She seemed so alarmed and agitated that Lucy, reminded that any such night disturbance, if occurring on Clementina’s Highland hills, would have meant something of tragic importance, proposed that they should all adjourn to the kitchen together and fortify themselves with cups of coffee. Dawn was already so bright that gas was a ghastly superfluity. Clementina, usually almost obsequious in her methods of attendance, was so shaken that she sat down and allowed the two ladies to make all the little preparations. Yet she suddenly became more communicative than she had ever been before, and also wonderfully interesting. She told of other night alarms of her life—of a wild shriek that went sounding over the moor in one black midnight hour, and was never explained till months afterwards, when a few whitened bones and wasted rags had been found among the heather. She whispered of the heavy knock which fell on her father’s cottage door one bright moonlit evening, though no step was heard on the footpath, and nobody was in sight when they looked forth. “But on the afternoon of that day my brother Niel was killed in India,” she went on in her monotonous mysterious voice, “and when we heard that, we knew what the knock had been. That’s Niel’s memorial,” she added, pointing to the melancholy little framed card. “It tells the date—June 25—and the moon was at the full. It was Rachel’s sweetheart who wrote and told us all about it,” she went on. “It was the year after Rachel had been up seeing her sweetheart’s mother and visiting us. And I mind, wicked sinner as I was, that I grudged that our lad should be taken and hers left. But after all, she was never to see hers again, for as long after as he lived. Eh, but life is short for any of us, whatever!”
“Was your house quite lonely?” Tom asked in an awed whisper.
“Yes,” she said, “that house was. When my father first went there, there was only a one-roomed place, and he had to pick up the stones off the fields before he could plant. He said my mother put her life into that bit of land. That was why she died so young. I’ve heard him say he could never see a hayrick or a sheaf of ours without thinking her very heart was inside it. In time he built two rooms more, putting stone upon stone himself, and Niel helping him. And when, the summer after Niel was dead, the factor’s letter came, saying the rent was to be raised, I thought my father was struck for a dead man. I mind I lay waking through the night. I slept in the old part of the house that had been there from the beginning, and just when the light was peeping in, I heard a strange sound, like a spade howking in hard earth. I lay and listened, and I thought it was like the digging of a grave, and that it was a sign sent that my father’s time had come. I kept still, for it’s ill to pry where a sign is set. Then I heard something like a very heavy sigh and a cough. I thought ‘that’s human,’ and I ventured to peep. There was my old father himself, howking down the stones that he’d built up, one by one! And all that day he did it, and by nightfall no human creature could find a place there to lay its head. And it was the room where my mother had died, and where Niel had sat in the chimney corner. My father never said one word,” she concluded, “but I knew what was in his heart. And next day he took the rubble, and threw it over the fields. ‘And now,’ said he, ‘let the laird come and take his own again.’”
A fierce vindictive exultation thrilled through her wailing Celtic voice.