THE LAKE OF WINE

COPYRIGHT.

Copyright, 1898,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS.

EPIGRAPH.

“So fares the unthrifty lord of Linne

Till all his gold is gone and spent:

And he maun sell his lands so broad,

His house and landes and all his rent.

. . . . . . .

Thus he hath sold his land so broad,

Both hill and holt, and moore and fenne,

All but a poore and lonesome lodge,

That stood far off in a lonely glenne.

For soe he to his father hight:

‘My sonne, when I am gonne,’ sayd hee,

‘Then thou wilt spend thy lande so broad,

And thou wilt spend thy gold so free:

But sweare me nowe upon the roode,

That lonesome lodge thou’lt never spend;

For when all the world doth frown on thee,

Thou there shalt find a faithful friend.’

. . . . . . .

Away then hyed the heire of Linne

O’er hill and holt, and moore and fenne,

Untill he came to the lonesome lodge,

That stood so lowe in a lonely glenne.

. . . . . . .

Then round his necke the corde he drewe,

And sprang aloft with his bodie:

When lo! the ceiling burst in twaine,

And to the ground came tumbling hee.

Astonyed lay the heire of Linne,

Ne knewe if he were live or dead:

At length he looked, and sawe a bille,

And in it a key of gold so redd.

He took the bill, and lookt it on,

Strait good comfort found he there:

Itt told him of a hole in the wall,

In which there stood three chests in-fere.

Two were full of the beaten golde,

The third was full of white monèy;

And over them in broad lettèrs

These words were written so plaine to see:

‘Once more, my sonne, I sette thee clere;

Amend thy life and follies past;

For but thou amend thee of thy life,

That rope must be thy end at last.’”

THE LAKE OF WINE.

CHAPTER I.

Some time in June of the year 1800 (as privately chronicled) there came a famous evening at Whitelaw’s Club in St. James’s Street, off Piccadilly, London. There and then—according to the unattested evidence of an eyewitness—Mr. Ladislaw lost his head, Lord Dunlone his mistress, Sir Robert Linne his fortune, and Major Dalrymple his life. Thus it appears these four were all losers, and each of a material property, save the first, who, alone of the quartette, commuted his self-possession for a very real equivalent in hard cash.

“Whitelaw’s” in those days ran, of a host of gambling clubs, the deepest. It was there all heavy potations and long stakes (at which many a self-martyr burned); but the first of these were put down and the second up with an accepted solemnity of decorum that was traditional to the place and the sign of its moral endowment. Fox, in his heavier moments, had been known to hazard in its glooms occasionally, and to lose, of course; and—equally of course—to find immediate balm for his scorched fingers in the inevitable “Herodotus.” Selwyn, also, and Topham Beauclerc, and many another Georgium sidus, had played and hiccupped within its pregnant walls; but always with gravity and a weight of personal responsibility towards the foundation. “Brookes’s” might have held in its time more showy revelry; “Almack’s” have gambled in broad-brimmed straw hats, bedecked with flowers, and masks to hide the play of emotions. “Whitelaw’s” would have none of these. It had ever stood coldly aloof from flash and notoriety, accepting Todd’s definition of a club as “An association of persons subjected to particular rules,” rather than that of Johnson (the rendering has a warm personal flavour), who calls it “An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.” From first to last it remained ponderous in self-importance and rigid in exacting the observance of its unwritten codes of conduct. If its gaming operations were large, it desired the company of no feather-brain “plungers”; but rather of players of substance, to whom cards were a market, not a raffle.

Therefore, when on this particular night no fewer than four of its members—like those in the fable—suddenly revolted against the central system, and, for a space of minutes, made havoc of its respectable traditions, it is no wonder that “Whitelaw’s” rose at the outrage like one man, and, in the upshot, pronounced sentence of club ostracism upon the delinquents. This, as it affected three, is matter of private history. The fourth escaped the distinction there and then through the interposition of “the man with the scythe.”

Faro was the game, and the stakes were swingeing The four had played from three o’clock of a Thursday afternoon to six of the Friday morning. In the white spread of day their eyes showed up blood-shot, their cheeks grimy with candle soot, their hair slack and unstrung. My lord Dunlone, who was a slipslop youth, colourless and jejune, with stains of wine on his chin and high cravat, brooded in fathomless sulkiness, the only pronounced expression he was ever real master of. His neighbour, Sir Robert Linne, had the look of a fine tormented devil, desperate and at bay.

These were the losers. Of the winners, Mr. Ladislaw was a perspiring cabbage of a man, stunted and over-headed; and he seemed drunk and amazed with his good fortune; and the major presented a lean and hungry appearance, as if his passions were devouring worms—which indeed I believe they were.

About six of the clock there came a pause in the game—the lull before the crash. Mr. Ladislaw, twinkling prosperity, bent obsequiously to the baronet, his cards clumped together in one hand.

“The stakes as before, Sir Robert?” he said in a small, confidential voice.

The other gave a hollow laugh, checking it frowningly in mid-career.

“I think so,” he said. “If there happens a margin, why—we must make it a broad one, on paper.”

“As you please, sir.”

Major Dalrymple, with his thick lips dropped apart, was gazing breathingly at his sulky neighbour. The latter, conscious of the inquiring scrutiny, pulled himself erect—a cub of ill-temper.

“Curse it!” he muttered, with a surly sidelong glance. “What am I being stared at for, curse it?”

“Your pardon, my lord,” said the major, in a high, stiff voice. “I looked only to inquire your stake.”

“I can settle it myself, sir, without your help”—and, with a very meaning action, he held his cards face-downwards upon his breast.

The major went back in his chair, his corded hands thrust out rigidly before him on the table.

“My lord Dunlone,” he said, “impugns not only my judgment, but my honour!”

“Oh, curse it!” cried the Viscount. “What have I said?”

“It was your action spoke, sir.”

Sir Robert laughed recklessly.

“You’re hard on my lord. He clasped his dear love to his bosom—no more. ’Tis an amorous way he has.”

The dyspeptic face of the soldier went dark. He recognized an allusion in the bantering words. The Viscount Dunlone, in fact (it was notorious), had outbidden him in the favour of a certain Mademoiselle Carminelle, a figurante at Vauxhall in the suit of Mr. “Tom Restless”; and, popularly, he was supposed to have aged under the disappointment.

“Come!” cried the baronet. “Give us the privilege of driving to the devil our own way. You mustn’t criticize the actions of dying men. We writhe with wounds, sir, while you are sound.”—He turned to Mr. Ladislaw, who sat staring, apprehensive. “I stake my all,” he said; and named a sum sufficiently desperate.

There were a few late habitués in the room. One of these, a dry, long man, with a face like a puckered medlar and a short-sighted contraction of the eyelids, had been . for some time a stealthily intent observer of the quartette. Now this individual, humouring a habit of his by drawing in his breath with a wincing sound, gave his chair a shift, and seemed to be awaiting results, at a distance, with some secret interest.

“Stake, and have done with it!” cried Sir Robert boisterously to the young lord.

The latter turned an insolent, languid glance on Major Dalrymple. They were a contrast. The soldier set, spare, bilious, with a great hooked nose and cracked heavy lips; the other a ruffled petit-maître of the first folly, pearl-powdered, cherry-mouthed, a model of sartorial elegance from his choking cravat—so amplified as that his face looked like a peach stuck in a napkin—to his full pantaloons of apricot-coloured velvet.

“I stake,” lisped this exquisite—“I stake your reversion, sir.”

There were influences of wine and ill-fortune fermenting in the fool’s empty head. Otherwise he would have hardly dared such perilous banter.

“I fail to gather your lordship,” said the soldier, going red.

“The adorable Carminelle,” began the Viscount drawlingly, when the other jumped up with a furious face, upsetting his chair in the act, and clapped his left hand instinctively upon his thigh.

There was a moment’s commotion. One or two in the room rose; but the dry, short-sighted stranger sat on, quietly rubbing his chin.

Nonplussed for the moment, as it seemed, by the absence of his weapon, Major Dalrymple gasped, hesitated—and sat down again. As he did so, some were aware of a blue streak across his forehead that remained there after his flush of passion had subsided.

“I stake a thousand pounds against that,” he said, with a sudden fall to intense quietness of intonation.

The incident passed, and the deal. There was a stern spirit of expectancy in the room. This was not “Whitelaw’s” way—either as regarded the outburst, or the nature of the declaration that had produced it.

Then, all in a moment, Sir Robert Linne had leaped up and flung his cards in Mr. Ladislaw’s face, and the major was on his feet again, stamping and declaiming.

The baronet’s victim, taken completely by surprise, started and fell over on his back, his chair splintering beneath him. The place was in an uproar at once—red and angry visages on all sides. Only Sir Robert stood placid with folded arms, smiling grimly down on the havoc he had wrought.

“I call all to witness,” screamed the major, panting and struggling in the arms of two who had seized him, “that I accepted my lord’s stake, but not his infernal insult. I have won the right of protection over an outraged lady, and I now call upon him to answer for his brutal abuse of her name in public”—and, despite his captors, he whipped up a glass of wine from the table, and dashed it at the stupid face of the lordling, who still sat, sullenly defiant of the spirit he had evoked. The glass cut his forehead and half-stunned him for the moment.

“Mr. Jephson,” cried the soldier, glaring round, and selecting one from the excited group about him—“you will do me the service to ac——”

The word snapped in his teeth like a pipe-stem. With a groan he sank upon the ground, and his face was purple from ear to ear.

An instant’s silence followed, then babble of voices and the pressing inward of the spectators around the fallen man. Lord Dunlone sat mopping his red forehead in foolish vacancy; and Sir Robert Linne strode over to Mr. Ladislaw, who had been helped to his feet and stood apart and alone.

“I took full licence for a ruined man,” said the baronet; “and am prepared to give the fullest satisfaction.”

The injured one almost whimpered.

“That is the devil of luck,” he said hysterically. “You force a quarrel on me, and deprive me of the fruits of it.”

“Oh, sir! Not necessarily.”

“You know I’m damned bad at shot and thrust.”

The loser smiled wickedly. The only stealthy witness of the little scene was the short-sighted man.

“You desire to compound the insult, then?” said Sir Robert.

“Oh! surely, sir, with your kind permission.”

The other laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and turned away. Mr. Ladislaw took a forward step and ventured timidly:

“You exaggerated, I trust, when you spoke of yourself as ruined?”

“Do you question my statement, sir?”

He flapped round with a mockery of fierceness. The little man fell back, scared.

“Oh, dear me, no!” he cried.

Sir Robert laughed again, shot a contemptuous look at the group by the table, and went quietly from the room.

In the Club-hall he came to a momentary pause.

“The fellow should have fought,” he muttered. “I would have made myself a broad target to him.”

Then he sighed.

“But there’s a shorter cut.”

CHAPTER II.

Sir Robert Linne, as he left the club, had no thought but to sever the tangle of things by cutting his own throat. He intended to do this agreeably and decently, and to step off the world into chaos with as little inconvenience to himself and to others as was compatible with the severity of the deed.

After considerable reflection, the plan that suggested itself to him was to proceed to some riverside station, hire a wherry, work his way down stream an indefinite distance; and then, sitting on the thwarts, neatly and philosophically put a weight in his pocket and a bullet in his head, and so overboard.

Ordinarily, he permitted himself some nausea and ill-temper after a night’s debauch. This morning he would have none of them.

“It would be churlish,” he thought, “to hand in my credentials with an ill-grace. If I have represented his sable majesty faithfully, he has his own good reasons, no doubt, for recalling me.”

Therefore, to prove how the will can overcrow the nerve, he whistled on his way, and was very affable and kindly to all his fellows with whom he came in contact. They were not many at that early hour. An amazed roysterer waking on a step; a kennel-scraper driving his broom before him at a shambling trot; Giles the apprentice, yawning over the shutters, and a pretty mop-squeezer or so who affected a demure propriety as he waved a kiss to them in passing, and blushed and giggled when he had gone by.

He turned into St. James’s Park, where Moll and Meg were tethering their cows at the sweet-stuff stalls; and bought and drank a glassful of white innocence with a sort of pleasant bravado of geniality. It made him feel good for the moment—pastoral and boyish once more.

“What’s your wish in life, Molly?” he said, turning with a smile to the girl who had supplied him.

“Sure your honour’s quizzing!”

“No, I’m not. In truth now?”

“Tea at Bagnigge Wells, then, with china and a gilt spoon.”

He burst out laughing and then looked grave.

“Your ambition hath a goose-flight. What would you give for the treat?”

“Anything but my good name.”

“I stand corrected, sweetling. Here, take your golden egg, and never part with your goose.”

He took her chin in his hand.

“Bite,” he said, and clipped a guinea between her white teeth.

“That shall go to my credit,” he said to himself as he walked off; and made his way slowly to his rooms in Whitehall.

Therein he did not remain long, but came out very shortly, a pocket of his riding-coat bulged in a sinister manner.

He went down the Strand and Fleet Street, at a faster pace now, passed Temple Bar, with its three gaunt spikes yet shooting from the topmost arch, like dry stalks from which the ugly blossom had long withered and fallen, and turning into the cloisteral recesses of the Temple, fell loitering again, moved by the silence and antiquity of the place.

It was a fresh-blown morning, sweet with virginal sunshine, and the old haunted walls and windows of the courts seemed elbowing one another in eagerness to obtain largesse of light.

Glancing upward, he read on a dial set in the stained red brick wall of a house in the Inner Temple—“Begone about your business.”

“A sexton’s motto,” he murmured. “Must leisure be always a stolen happiness, and every clock a treadmill for Time to toil on? But I accept the churlish reminder,” and he made his way, with a melancholy smile, to a rearward gate in the river wall, and came out upon a flight of stone steps, that went down through ooze and slime to the water level.

The muddy stream, as far as the view could reach, was all patched with sunshine, like a beggar’s fustian with cloth of gold. Life was awake on the flood, but in such enchanted guise that for the moment his eyes filled with tears. Wherries shot the ripples, like bobbins traversing a loom of silver tissue; hay barges, soft apple-green along the thwarts and stacked high with yellow trusses, slid placidly past until the blue distance covered them with a haze like glass. From the happy shoreward mists, voices and anvils chimed in intricate harmony, but so subdued by distance as to seem the veritable bells of elf-land.

Sir Robert gazed in that entrancement of the spirit that is impersonal and momentarily divine—that comes of a complete surrender to influences outside the bourne of Nature. A voice hailing him, brought him back to the ugly prose of being.

“Boat, sir, boat!”

“Hi! my lad. Pull in here!”

The wherry came alongside the steps, and the man touched his hat.

“Waterman, what’s the value of your boat?”

“She’s not to sell, sir.”

“Perhaps she’s to buy. I’ll give you ten guineas for her.”

The craft was old and cranky. The man scratched his head, grinned and spat into the water.

“I’m at your service, sir.”

“And damn your company, say I. I don’t want it. If you’re for selling, there’s my offer. If you’re not, I’ll go elsewhere.”

“Short and sweet. What d’ye want of her?”

“That’s my business. Mind you your own, and——”

He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure moving the other side of the gateway in the wall.

“Come!” he cried hurriedly. “Take or reject. I’ve no time for barter.”

He brought a handful of gold out of his pocket as he spoke. There was the sum he had named and a little over.

The man hesitated—not from any doubt as to his own advantage in the bargain, but from a dread that he might be lending himself to some compromising transaction. The glitter of the pieces decided him. He stepped forward, hollowed his two hands together, and looked up greedily.

“Take it a bargain,” he said. “I’m for your honour.”

A moment later he was holding the wherry while the baronet climbed in, sat down and unshipped the sculls.

The stern swung out into the stream. At that instant a figure came softly and hastily through the doorway, with a finger on its lips. It slipped a crown into the waterman’s ready palm. The prow of the wherry, held by the latter, jerked and bobbed and settled steady. He in the boat was at wrestle with the sculls.

“Let her go!” he cried, without looking round.

The waterman gave the craft a vigorous shove, and stepped back.

“What’s in the wind with you, my dandy galloot?” he murmured watching, hand on hip; and—“Your honour makes better time with tongue-pad than with sculls,” he added with a grin. And, indeed, it must be confessed that Sir Robert was no accomplished oarsman.

However, he shuffled his craft out into mid-stream somehow, being indifferent to the manner; and then he poised his sculls, letting the boat drift down with the tide which was running to sea.

Even now he could hardly take himself with that seriousness that the nature of his intention would seem to demand.

“Did ever man,” he said aloud, “meet the devil half-way with such a sense of humour?”

“You have none,” said a creaking voice in the bows.

He twisted his head about—scarcely marvelling at the response.

“So you have taken me at my word?” he said.

“You think I am the devil—eh?”

“You flatter yourself. A monarch to condescend to the practical executive! I take you for one of his imps.”

“Well, sir—I don’t despair of you. I gave the waterman a douceur, and slipped in as you pushed off.”

“So, you are not the devil?”

“No; only one of his imps—an attorney.”

“Then I am lost indeed.”

“H’m!—May I have a little bout at reasoning with you—before you—eh?”

“Before I—eh?—just so, my friend. Now, balance the pros and cons, I pray. Here am I, going to damnation, and thinking myself equipped with all decent loneliness for the journey. I turn my head, and find——”

“Counsel, waiting to argue the case for you. Congratulate yourself. Heaven is——”

“No, no. State your case, without blasphemy.”

“Very well (take care of that barge).—I revert to my original postulate. You said—‘Did ever man meet the devil half-way with such a sense of humour?’—and I answered: ‘You have none.’”

“You did—and I throw the word in your teeth. No man, I make bold to say, has more than I.”

“Yet you propose killing yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“My mission in life was to be foil to the virtuous. ’Tis a costly business, and not to be maintained save with luck. Luck has cold-shouldered me. I have staked and lost my last penny, and so my mission ends; and I jump off the cliff of the world with a light heart.”

“And with a poor sense of humour. I repeat it.”

“Pardon me. You said with no sense of humour.”

“Well—I qualify that.”

“That is a concession from a lawyer. Now, has it occurred to you that you have obtruded yourself upon a reckless and desperate man?—that, to a lost soul standing on the brink of Cocytus, it may seem a small matter, and the humouring of a very trifling aggravation, to push a fellow-traveller over into the gulf before he leaps himself?—At this moment it suggests itself to me that no ghostly letter of credit would serve me half so well down there as an attorney in esse. The devil needs lawyers to argue his case. Generally they evade him at the last by some technicality. Shall I take you, to prove at least that suicides come not, without exception, of the humourless class?”

“I made no such statement. But this I say—that any man who contemplates self-destruction has, for the time being, lost his sense of humour.”

“I am in no hurry. Why?”

“Because he is taking himself with that exaggerated seriousness which is the trade-mark of the bore.”

“Is a suicide a bore?”

“Certainly. He is a man with a grievance, who, professing to accept life as a game of chances, cries out if the cards are against him. His tone may be clamorous or subdued; but it always carries the same refrain. At a certain point he would almost resent good fortune, for he hath persuaded himself that he is born the butt of Providence; and his vanity is such that he would not have even a diseased judgment of his refuted. Vanity, vanity—he is the very maggot of it.”

“Continue, continue, my friend. This is not Coke or Lyttleton.”

“Sir, I will continue. You decry my profession; but what doth it teach a man, if not to look below the surface? The suicide is he who will not take his own destinies in hand; for at heart he is a sensuous fellow, who hath subordinated his instinct for combativeness to a poor sentiment of fatality. In a world of noble struggle he would lie down and ignobly sleep. Thus, like a distempered cur, he turns and gnaws his own flesh; or, weakly despairing, stings himself to death like the fire-ringed scorpion.”

The baronet sat amazed.

“This is no lawyer,” he cried; “but a Wesley come to judgment!”

The dried-stick of a man in the bows drew in his breath, and leaned forward, with moist eyes, the lids whereof were like dead sea-weed.

“Oh, sir!” he cried, in a full voice, “let me entreat you—see the game out. If I lose and am disqualified, there is no whit the less interest in the play that goes on. There are plenty to continue it—plenty to profit by the lesson of my downfall. From being pupil I have become teacher; and shall I by self-destruction diminish the number of that blest company?”

“My good sir,” said the baronet, with some emotion (and, “Pull your right scull,” said the lawyer anxiously), “you have a great advantage of me; but I respect and honour your sentiments. Why I should find you here, or why you should take an interest in my fate, passes my comprehension.”

“No doubt,” said the other.

“I know you, I think, by sight,” said Sir Robert. “You are a member of ‘Whitelaw’s,’ if I am not greatly mistaken.”

“I was elected five years ago. Recently, I have presumed to take a watchful interest in your fortunes, as they were presented to me by report and by actual observation. I have sorely marked you—I crave your indulgence—in your race to the devil.”

“I have a good mount. I shall win.”

“Sir! sir!”

“Why, what a to-do is this! Do you disparage your master? I am no attorney; yet I could prove black the very moral of innocence.”

“As how?”

“As thus. To desire—conscious of unworthiness—one’s own salvation, is to aim at self-aggrandisement. To be careless of one’s own salvation, is to be unselfish. To be opposed to one’s own salvation, is to be actually virtuous. The devil may be considered the Apostle of this creed—ergo, the devil teaches virtue.”

“Well, and well. I take you on clause two of your reasoning. If, in being careless of your own salvation, you are careless of that of others (and surely it so follows, having regard to precept and influence), you are selfish. But, if you think of others, you are not careless of your own; for no man would of his true generosity help his neighbour to that which he himself scorns. Now, the manner of your purposed exit; the unexampled sweetness, sir, with which you have met my most impertinent intrusion, convince me that you are far from feeling a careless indifference to your fellows.”

“I have a measure of good-humour. I would not kick the stool from under my neighbour because I sit upon a stone. But the first test of humour is to know itself bested; to succumb to the finer wit—and that the devil hath shown.”

“Disprove him. He hath stood so long in his own shadow that he fancies himself a giant. He tiptoes against the setting sun, and his dead image seems to embrace the world. Upset him, and he lies but a pigmy.”

“My friend, he is not to be felled but by the stone of godliness. That I never possessed, for it is not purchasable. And if it were, my pouch is empty.”

“Yet you gave, in hard cash, ten guineas for this crank vessel that is worth——”

“It was my all—I swear it. And now I have bought Charon’s ferry-boat, and future souls must swim. Not much consideration for my neighbour in that.”

“So I have said nought to move you from your purpose?”

“I greatly regret—nothing.”

The spare stranger groaned.

“It shall be a lesson to my self-sufficiency. Well, sir, I must play a better card.”

“If you please.”

“Run the boat into the hard there, and accompany me to my office. I will hand you the title-deeds of an estate that shall give you a new lease of life.”

CHAPTER III.

Like one who accepts an indifferent gift, rather to pleasure a friend than for his own gratification, Sir Robert Linne held his reprieve in his pocket, as it were, with a careless hand, and, accompanied by the lawyer, re-entered the humming lists of life.

Silently the two made their way westwards, the man of deeds accommodating his pace, with some secret chafing, to the leisurely progress of his companion. Now and again he would glance stealthily aside into the latter’s face, and give a half-comical shrug of chagrin over its expression of tranquil good-humour that seemed such a genial satire upon the situation.

“If he hobnobs with death so calmly, how will his philosophy accept a living estate?” thought the uneasy scrivener; and, “light come, light go,” he groaned in his heart.

Presently they were in Holborn, without the rag of a sentence to pass between them; and so came opposite the block of houses known as Middle Row.

Here suddenly Sir Robert stopped, and took his companion by the arm.

“You itch to improve on the situation,” said he, with a twinkling gravity. “Harkee! Now’s your opportunity. Here am I;—yonder stands Branscome’s lottery office. Draw your moral, my friend, and ease you of your load.”

The lawyer drew in his breath, his face crinkling.

“Well,” said he—fore-read and embarrassed but conscious of right—“the man was an earl’s fellow once.”

“It proves him the more admirable for being a rich man now!”

“Sir Robert, Sir Robert! ’tis an evil system and a mistaken. How is he rich? On the pitiful savings of shoeblacks and servant wenches. ’Tis such as he bid industry sit hands in lap and starve on illusive hopes. For a single chance in fifty thousand he buys her ruin; and what is all this but bitter gambling?”

“Ha, ha! old gentleman. We reach the point at once. But, believe me, sir, I never starved a servant wench or took anything from her but a kiss—and that I returned.”

The lawyer sighed.

“Go your ways,” he said. “You have your father’s laugh.”

“What—you knew him?”

“I had the fortune to do him a service once—’twas during the riots of ’68, when foul John Wilkes was committed to King’s Bench, on a writ of capias utlagatum, and the red-coats let fly at the mob. Your father commanded. They called it the St. George’s Fields massacre, and all concerned in it gained a mighty unpopularity.”

“Yet he was but a simple soldier and obeyed orders.”

“Well, sir, an unpopular king must needs have unpopular ministers, and so down the scale. Let a tyrant fall (I speak in illustration only—God bless his Majesty!) and his very scullions come down with him. I did Sir Robert a service, I say; and he repaid me with his confidence.”

“His son is beholden to you. You repeat yourself on behalf of a scapegrace, I fear. You were not his adviser?”

“In one matter only that you shall learn. Now, my friend?”

The last words were addressed to an odd-looking individual who had come up to them as they talked, and who now presented certain savoury goods to their inspection with a dumb gesture of invitation.

The creature was a lank, middle-sized man, with a meagre face of decorum and rather delicate features set in an expression of confident apathy. He was scrupulously attired in dress-coat, vest and knee-breeches of stainless black broadcloth; and black silk stockings, ending in shoes decorated with large steel buckles, encased his neat deliberate legs. A great shirt-frill stood out from his breast, like a table napkin from a tumbler, and his neck cherished the spotless embrace of a lawny cravat. On his head he wore no covering save its natural one; but this was so clipt and bepowdered as almost to give the appearance of a close cap of linen. A short apron of the softest texture, which concealed a third of his glories, seemed designed rather to advertise his calling than to protect his broadcloth.

Thus apparelled, he presented to the talkers a little round tray, on which was set for consideration a pudding, neatly sliced and sugared, that gave out a pleasant fragrance. To the obvious merits of this he silently drew attention with a short, bright spatula which he carried in his other hand.

“No, no,” said the lawyer. “Not to-day, my friend; not to-day.”

He smiled good-humouredly; and the oddling dropped a courtly bow—“the loss is mutual,” it expressed—and carried his comestible elsewhere.

“Sir Robert,” said the attorney, with a droll, kindly look, “the lottery office missed fire; but I have another moral for you.”

“It shall have my respectful attention, sir, in honour of my father’s friend.”

The words were spoken with gravity. The other gave a twitch of surprise. Then said he in a pretty gentle voice:

“’Tis from him with the pudding. They call him the Flying Pieman; but his proper business is to paint pictures, at which he has a fine skill, they say. Fortune missed him, however. He married ‘for love’—a course for which there is plenty of precedent, but no authority—and love begets a family, but nothing to put in its empty crops. At the last pinch he kicked over his easel and went out to sell puddings. He did nought by halves. If his pictures are half as good as his victuals he deserves the Presidency. He hath made himself a character in the neighbourhood, but a finer one in God’s eyes, I will venture. ’Tis said that, no whit faithless to his art, he trades all day that he may indulge his real bent after hours. That is to be a man and an example.”

“To me, sir, to me, you would say; and so he is. I have no family; but that is an accident—not an excuse. I take the pieman to my heart, and see no ostentatious vanity in his shirt-frill. I read another moral here too. This is ‘Heavy Hill,’ and goes to Tyburn.”

“Oh, Heaven send you to the House of Correction! Come on, I beg. My office is close by.”

“Then your prayer is answered. You shall do the overseer, and whip me with maxims.”

The lawyer smacked in his lips as if he were sampling some sharp but not disagreeable berry; regarded his incorrigible companion a moment through covert eyelids; then turned and led the way across the road and under the old gate-arch of Gray’s Inn.

Beyond this portal, a short distance, pleasant tranquillity prevailed. It is the humour of the Law to hatch in antique solitudes the plots that vex many lives with turmoil and disquiet. Around its Inn Halls the Devil’s cloisters invite to peripatetic contemplation of quibble and sophistry; and its silent gardens cherish that grimy tree of Death whose trunk is freckled like the serpent’s with discs of yellow.

Up a step or two, through a venerable doorway with fluted pilasters, the long man ushered his visitor, and so to a dusty comfortable room on the first floor, where tiers of japanned boxes, the caskets of dead passions and aspirations, were piled high against the walls like coffins in a family vault.

“Mr. Creel?” said the baronet, sitting up on a high stool and crossing his legs.

The lawyer bowed.

“So I read it on the door, sir. Believe me, I hold the name in honour for my father’s sake.”

“It is a good sign,” said the other; “and so far of happy augury. Here, I hope, is soil that may be renewed and yield yet a plentiful crop of wholesome grain.”

He sat himself down, and, toying with a pencil, fixed his eyes steadily and gravely on the young man.

“I crave your permission,” he said gently, “to speak very plainly, very freely, and—within proper limits—without reserve.”

“Surely, sir; for should I not be dead by now? ’Tis a post-mortem examination. Out with your scalpel, and cut and dissect as you list.”

“It is a family matter and very private to your ear.”

“Mr. Creel, who so taciturn as a ghost? Even a lawyer may give his confidence to a shadow.”

“You please to jest. Will you be serious for once? What I have to say affects you nearly. I represent your dead father—am his agent, not in authority, but in loving-kindness.”

“I listen, I listen. Perhaps I am a little light-headed. I have thrown out all my ballast, remember.”

“You saw but little of the late Sir Robert?”

“I was eleven years old when he died. That was in the war of ’80. He fought under Clinton and lies in Charleston where he fell. He was always a soldier in my vague memory of him—saturnine, pre-occupied, with a rare smile for odd moments.”

“He feared God and loved his king—rest his memory! He had one other love—his only child; but him he was troubled for.”

“Troubled for? But why should I ask?”

“The boy was of high spirit, reckless, generous. He wore, even at that age, his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at.”

“They have left all threadbare. Well, well!”

“Sir Robert’s was not a great fortune; but it was sufficient, with management, for his wants.”

“They were fewer than mine, good man. I feel sure, sir, this retrospect is for a worthy purpose. Otherwise—well, it is obvious I was acquainted with the extent of my own inheritance.”

“I ask no account of your stewardship. That is no part of the solemn commission I accepted from my friend. Maybe you have been more sinned against than sinning. Yet, is it not true that your father’s apprehensions were justified?”

“Why else was I in the wherry?”

“You are ruined?”

“I am ruined.”

The lawyer sighed.

“It was foreseen,” he said, “by him who was dearest to you—foreseen and provided against.”

“Provided against?”

Mr. Creel made no answer; but he quietly arose, went to one of the japanned boxes, unlocked it and took thence a bundle of papers.

“These,” he said, “are the title-deeds of an estate that is yours—on certain conditions.”

The young man had no word to say; but watched the other in amazement as he took from the little heap a certain paper that was folded and sealed with his father’s monogram.

“I follow my direction,” said the lawyer, “and break this seal. The contents of the document are for your ear, but they are addressed to me. I ask your attention while I make them known to you.”

He shifted so as to secure a full light, knitted his brow, and, without pause or comment, read out in a brassy legal voice the lines before him:—

“To my honoured friend, Mr. James Creel, of Gray’s Inn, I have committed, to hold in trust for certain purposes, the estate of ‘Delsrop,’ in the county of Hampshire; whereof are dwelling-house and messuage, ninety-four acres, together with two farms held on long leases, the which it is not my desire to particularize in this the present connection. But rather to state clearly that in event of the bankruptcy at any time after my death of my only son, Robert (which calamity I, considering the bent of his nature, do sorrowfully foresee), and in no other event, the said estate is to be handed over to him, to work to a profit if he will, and so redeem the past; but on the condition that from that time being he shall forego his honourable title and know himself and be known as Robert Tuke, which name of Tuke hath his mother borne before him to her maiden honour and renown. And this I state clearly, that he may take or reject without further question, knowing the estate to be mine to give, and else seeking to know nothing. And I offer it, a last chance of redemption, that he, sloughing all that foulness of the past with his dishonoured name may turn the fruits of evil to the account of good.”

In the minute of amazed silence, during which the listener sought to ponder the import of this astonishing message, Mr. Creel refolded the paper, returned it to the packet, and, sitting down again, tapped and scraped his chin with the latter in a dry manner of expectancy.

“Well?” he said at length.

Sir Robert tilted himself to his feet, and stood rumpling his hair.

“I am at sea!” he cried, in a lost voice. “What does it all mean? I never heard of this estate; nor, I protest, did the executors. How did it come to him, and when?”

“That I may answer you. It was in the year ’79—not many months before his death.”

“And from whom?”

The lawyer shook his head grimly.

“Ah!” said the baronet. “You love a secret, of course. Am I never to know more than this?”

“Sir, you understand the conditions. You are to take or reject.”

“A messuage and the rest of it? And where is the working capital?”

“These many years I have nursed the property against this contingency. It has yielded fairly, and there will be an accumulated sum to your credit.”

“And if I reject?”

“Then the whole reverts to me.”

The young man’s eyes took a sudden softness. He was only thirty-one, and susceptible yet to impressions of unworldliness.

“I fail to see your profit in the matter,” he said.

“My profit,” answered the lawyer sternly, “was in a good man’s confidence.”

Then he went on more gently:

“I sought no profit in the transaction. I would have sacrificed more than the estate to save you and myself the necessity of this explanation. It was my affection for your father bound me to this solemn compact, as it was my regard for the latter drove me unknown to you to set an anxious eye upon your career.”

“And so pluck a fool from the burning and lose an estate.”

Sir Robert advanced impetuously and seized the other’s corded hand.

“You are a noble soul. I will learn to pray, and you shall be my saint to intercede. I take my life from you and this strange trust; doing my duty by it and asking no questions.”

The old lawyer’s eyes moistened; but he answered somewhat caustically:

“I won’t say it is your deserts. But the gift is from Heaven, where your father, his battles over, sits at peace. ’Tis he hath interceded, and the Almighty—to satisfy his importunity, maybe—gives you a new house, as erst he did to Job, but for a better reason.”

Then he added a little inconsequently:

“You’ll find it in a damned bad state of repair.”

CHAPTER IV.

It was six o’clock of a cold September morning when Sir Robert—or Mr. Tuke, as we must now know him—woke in his room off the stable-yard of the old “George” inn at Winchester. Lying lazily snoozed amongst the pillows, he reviewed, with some amused satisfaction, the first courses of that scheme of reformation he had mapped out for himself, whereof two rather sleepless nights at Farnham and his present quarters—the result of an abstention in the matter of numerous “nightcaps,” which habit had made necessary to slumber—were the prologue. Now, the little battle fought and won, he preened his moral feathers smugly, and felt clear-eyed and very good indeed. As to the mysterious estate—the last stage on the journey to which he should cover that day—he had soon learned to accept its acquisition with that sweetness of irresponsibility that was his most engaging and aggravating characteristic. But, after all, he had an excellent digestion—in common with a great many men of the eighteenth century—and was little inclined to dyspeptic brooding over problems.

Now, as he lay, his half-dreaming glance was arrested by a coloured print after George Morland hanging on the wall over against him. The like he remembered dimly to have known in a nursery of long ago—a picture that had often set his young soul wandering by lanes of enchantment. Nothing could have served better to confirm and make abiding his present mood. He was a boy again, an apple-skinned Ulysses, with the limitless possibilities of the unknown before him. Without stain or guile he passed beyond the narrow margins of the print into a land that no mortal foot but his own had yet trodden.

Indeed, for the moment he was a child again, and there is nothing in after-life like the pure imaginings of such. To the child every incident is a picture framed and hung upon a wall. The memory of these pictures abides long, then fades a little and a little more. We are hardly conscious of them in old age, or at least feel hardly the ecstasy of their atmosphere. In acquiring our identities (Keats’s phrase), what don’t we lose? We find a fact for a dream—a wretched exchange. But the first possession doesn’t altogether go. It recurs to us at odd moments in little sweet mental vertigoes—never so much, perhaps, as during that half-waking hour of dawn when we are least conscious of our material selves.

Then to think of a dewy morning down; of a pleached alley of fruit-trees in blossom; of a windy common; of the mystery of snow and brooding distances; of a Christmas-tree, even, and the mingled ravishing smell of lighted tapers and banked fir-branches, is momentarily to recall the amazing romance and illimitableness of life; is to be quit of the dreariness of conviction, and to stand once more at the foot of the green slope, and look up and wonder whither the clouds are sailing over the far summit. A few artists, a few writers, a few musicians, have the power, or the instinct, to inspire us with these ancient imaginings; and such as can, we must dearly love, though they may never stand in the front ranks of their fellows. The child is the only real genius; and perhaps these have remained morally children. In mid-life they can arrest and record the fugitive retrospections that to the most of us are only bubbles broken away from the far-distant spring of life, to be caught at and to vanish on the prick of possession. God bless them! they are our best earnest of the spiritual.

Out of his luminous stupor on that grassy borderland of dawn, the dreamer came with a full heart, and, it must be confessed, a biting consciousness of emptiness in his stomach.

He sprang out of bed, and bathed and dressed to the hissing accompaniment of ostlers in the yard below and to the clank of horse-hoofs on the cobble-stones.

He breakfasted, as men did in those days, as if he were victualling for a siege, and had great thoughts of kissing the chambermaid when he fee’d her—but refrained.

By half-past nine he was on the road, with a heart full of gaiety, and a recurring wonder for his destination, and clattered under the old west gateway of the town with a song on his lips—

She was throated like the stare—

Well-a-day!

She was white as buds of May—

Well-a-day!

And all with their sweet scent

Her bodie was besprent,

That to kiss her was a joy beyond compare,

If her mouth the scarlet hips—

Well-a-day!

Would for redness all dismay—

Well-a-day!

Ah! it took its comely stain

From the truths that she had slain;

For falser than the serpent were her lips.

Once with passion I did rave—

Well-a-day!

Now I will not, though she say

Well-a-day!

For the cry of damnéd Love

All her beauty doth disprove,

And her heart it is a stone above his grave.

Mr. Tuke had not a good voice. The chords of vibration were beyond his control. But his breast was lined with romance, and this led him to give some melodious effect to the sentiment of words that did not seem, it must be admitted, appropriate to his rather riotous character.

He left the old city and took the Stockbridge road; and presently, entering between country hedgerows, looped his reins slackly and let his horse amble fairly as he listed.

The sunshine in his soul was constitutional, inextinguishable, and not reflected from his surroundings; for the day was bitter for the time of year, and the wind stuck as rigidly in the northeast as if the stiff-pointing weathercocks had nailed it there. The greyness, however, emphasized the sparkle of hip and holly and all red berries; for every dull mood of Nature has its compensations to shame us out of peevishness. A squirrel ran from branch to root of a beech-tree like a stain of rust; a cloud of fieldfares went down the sky and wheeled, disintegrated, as if they were so much blown powder; the ruddocks twinkled in the hedges like dead leaves flicked by the wind.

The horseman had an eye and a heart for all. He was of good, lovable material, whatever the hitherto courses of his bad days and worser nights.

By and by he came out upon country very wild and barren. The road heaved and dropped by way of grim and treeless downs, through whose cropped surface-grass the white chalk smote upwards like death in a sick man’s face. For leagues the sterile slopes seemed stretching onwards; and no sign of life was on them all, but here and there a flapping crow—no music of it, but, in some more sheltered hollow, the sweet lark’s broken ground-song.

And the further he rode, the more confirmed in desolation grew the scenery. There was a wild forlorn beauty about it all, nevertheless—a clean-blown freshness that seemed to set the hillsides pulsing with opal tints, like near-extinguished ashes breathed upon.

Something, familiar to those days, was wanting, however; and the solitary rider peered for the something, unwilling to believe that a tract so lonely could be innocent of a certain unchancy landmark. He had already loosened his pistols in the holsters, and was riding with a greater regard for surprises.

He topped a hillock, and “Ah!” quoth he; “I could not be mistaken.”

On a high swell of ground, right in his path, as it seemed, a structure like a massive clothes’-horse, open at an angle, stood up against the sky. From its crowning beams a short slack or two of chain depended; but these were quit for the time of any ugly burden—a void that by no means pleased the traveller.

“When the boggart tumbles, the crows re-gather,” he murmured sententiously; but he set to singing again, though with an eye alert for mishaps.

Nothing occurred, however; nor had he sighted a solitary soul moving in the breadth of the wide landscape, when—without a change being obvious in the character of the latter—he found himself descending a steep slope to a little long township of queer and ancient houses.

Here at a pleasant small tavern—on whose sign-board, as he approached, he read the legend “The First Inn” (the reverse slyly exhibited, to the eternal merriment of chuckleheads, the obvious antiperistasis of “The Last Out”)—he drew rein, and found he had reached the village of Stockbridge, which was in truth that halting-place on his last stage, from which he was, as he had learned, to take a by-road, some five or six miles, to his destination.

Into the tap he strode; and there were a few gaping rustics swilling their muddy quarts, and the landlord, a wizened, bent-stick of a man, behind the bar.

“Oblige me by sending some one to look after my horse,” said Mr. Tuke to this person.

The person shifted a glass or two, covertly eyeing the stranger through rheumy slits of lids; but answer made he none.

Mr. Tuke repeated his request—still without result. He turned sharply on one of the grinning hinds.

“What ails the old faggot?” he said.

“He be stone deaf, master.”

Then the fellow bawled: “Jarge! Jar-rge! the gen’leman warnts ’s oss tended.”

The old man put a wrinkled claw to his ear, and shook his head.

“Eh!” said Mr. Tuke. “You refuse?”

He flushed in surprised anger, when at the moment a girl came into the bar, and addressed him in a bright civil voice.

“Grandfather’s deaf, sir,” she said; “and I was out of the way. I’ll send your horse to the stable. And what shall I draw for your honour?”

She was fresh and desirable as a spring of sweet water to a thirsty traveller. An old yellow handkerchief, of cherished silk, was knotted about her head, yet none so jealously but that a curl or two might escape—like tendrils of Tantalus his vine—for the teasing of fervid souls; and her gown, girdled under her bosom and fastened there with a favour of Michaelmas daisy, smelt of lavender and was the colour of it. She was tall, too, for a Hebe of the downs, and her arms, bare to the elbow, were tanned of a soft ivory—as were her hands, that were fine and capable-looking.

She gazed honestly at our gentleman from eyes as full of brown harmonies as a starling’s back; and he had no thought but to return her gaze with complete admiration.

“Can you give me to eat?” he said. “Anything will do.” And “Surely, sir,” she answered, “if simple fare will serve your honour.”

She showed him into a queer little parlour, with a long latticed window that looked into a vegetable garden ruddy with apple-trees, and fetched cloth and salt from a corner cupboard, while he sat down by an old grumbling grandfather clock and watched her movements.

“Who is the landlord of this good tavern?” said he.

“George Pollack, sir; and I am his granddaughter, at your service.”

“Would you were. And what is your name, my pretty maid?”

“Elizabeth, I was christened,” said she; “and Betty am I called.”

His last words suggesting an old nursery rhyme—“And what is your fortune, my pretty maid?” he could not help murmuring.

“Self-possession,” said she with a smile, and whisked out of the room.

CHAPTER V.

Mr. Tuke had ridden a mile along the last lap of his journey, when he suddenly drew himself together, gave a whistle, and set to communing audibly with his inner man.

“This will not do, Roberto,” he murmured. “Thou hast eaten of the dangerous fruit, and the sweet poison courses in thy veins.”

He shrugged out a laugh.

“Why, what has my drugged headpiece been conscious of since I left the inn?—whereat I dwelt a pernicious while, by the way. The wind whistles ‘Betty Pollack’—the lark twitters ‘Betty Pollack’—she smiles over the hedgerows; she sits on every stile; the rose of the sun looks through the grey welkin like the fire of untouched maidenhood in her delicate cheeks. And I am a squire of acres—a man of substance; and a good man prospective, I believe.”

He laughed again, flicked his horse to a canter, and broke into a fragment of the old-world song that seemed queerly inapt to his character—

Sweet sun, sweet air, and a pilgrim’s scrip;

Shoon to my feet and sword on hip;

Flout or kiss on a ready lip,

And the green by-ways of the world-a!

His voice rang down the lonely swales and made their austerity human. For a profound silence reigned on all the hills and in the valleys by way of his passing, and the wind had ceased to cry of its own desolation.

Still no change marked the aspect of the country he traversed. Downs—endless downs, with, occasionally, a wryed plume of beech-trees on the peak of a slope; occasionally, a row of white stones in the cleft of a hillside, as if Nature, like some disturbed beast, were setting her teeth for a snarl.

At the end of another mile, it came as a breathing relief to him, upon topping a long incline, to see its downward pitch break away into a spread of meadow-land, whereafter began trees, at first singly or in clumps; further, in copses and little shaws, until the distance rolled with their billowing in fair, modulated waves.

The sight brought a cluck of satisfaction from him, for he was not made for loneliness; and he paused to drink in the glad prospect. Indeed, he had come to think that his acres would prove but barren sheep-runs, and his house but a magnified shepherd’s cottage on a swept table of pasturage, till this good view opened out to reassure him.

Down below, at the foot of the hill, lay a little lusty field with a noble girth of hawthorn about it, and through the green of this a shining burn flowed—a mere crooked rindle it looked, pencilled white on the grass. It was like the image of a lightning flash—earth’s engraved memory of a sublime moment—so still seemed its course from the traveller’s coign of regard; and, for some reason unaccountable—unless it typified in its innocence the cleansing spring of repentance—it drew him to dismount that he might stoop and wash his throat with a mouthful of its kindly rippling.

He rode down, tied his horse to a stake in the hedge, and, crossing a broken stile, strolled over the long grass that gave up a spicy smell of peppermint. As he neared a fat bush of wayfaring tree that stood against the margin of the brook, he became aware of a man, whom he had not at first noticed, fishing in the shadow of the green covert. The very creases in the back of this individual, who was to all appearance absorbed in his sport, excerned a suggestion of watchfulness, that somehow convinced the intruder that his every approaching step was being marked and listened for. Careless of the fact, however, he came alongside the stranger, who moved not so much as an eyelid, but continued to observe the slow voyage of his float with inexpressible serenity.

“Any sport, friend?” quoth our hero.

The stranger, without turning his head, answered, “None”—like a dog snapping at a fly. He was not a well-favoured person, it must be said, either as to his clothes or features, any of which seemed to have assimilated a common frowsiness. His long yellow jaws were clean-shaved—if so spruce an epithet could be applied to a hand-breadth of mouldy stubble—and dry tags of neutral-tinted hair fell over his cheeks and little hard eye-places. A greasy cocked hat, whereof one flap had been roughly seized down to give shade from the sun, was battened on his head, and the length of his gaunt body was expressed only by a rusty brown riding-coat that fell almost to his heels.

There was something else—some peculiarity that marked him apart from the ordinary; and in the first moments of their meeting the new-comer vainly cudgelled his brains to find out what this was. But, presently, when at length the stranger turned to read him full-face with a single covert glance, he saw in what the abnormality consisted. The man had no ears, but only little corrugated holes where these features should have been.

Mr. Tuke gave a whistle, then a laugh.

“I disturb you, I see,” said he.

“That be damned!” said the stranger icily. “You disturb the fish, sir.”

He had a great hooked nose, the corners of which were sensitive of his every word. One would have expected them to vibrate like laminæ of talc if he should ventilate his anger.

Mr. Tuke laughed again.

“Why do you swear?” he said cheerfully. “I don’t, though I think I have lost my way.”

“Then let me put you on it again, in the devil’s name.”

“You will pardon me. I can’t undertake to travel with that passport, even if countersigned by you.”

“Sir, sir! Whither are you bound? Do you think the chub are interested in your converse?”

“I don’t know. The wise man baits his hook with inquiry.”

“And the fool his with impertinence. You fish in empty waters, sir.”

“Oh! You are churlish. But I understand an angler sports for the love of solitude.”

“You are perfectly right.”

“Well—convince me that I have not wandered abroad, and I will go.”

“You are out of your path here. That I can assert.”

“For ‘Delsrop’ House?”

The long man’s fist jerked, so that his float bobbed on the water.

“For where?” said he.

The float slid out of sight. Mechanically he reeled up, bungled, and lost his fish. Curiously, he seemed little affected by the calamity.

“What place?” he repeated, busy with his hook.

“‘Delsrop,’ ’tis called—a house somewhere in the neighbourhood.”

“Why, what d’ye seek thither?”

“Surely, sir, you are a fool by your own showing. Rest content. I only seek my own.”

“Your own—‘Delsrop?’”

Mr. Tuke sniggered with amusement.

“Preserve the man!” he cried. “But I understand, sir; and appreciate the kind of welcome like to be extended to an absentee landlord.”

For a moment the stranger seemed at a loss for speech. Then suddenly he turned upon the other, with a strained smile on his lips and his nostrils in a lively state of convulsion.

“You must pardon me,” he said. “I know the house, which hath been so long untenanted, that the fact of a claimant to its wildernesses appearing fills me with a sense of the abnormal.”

He trailed his rod, staring at the intruder.

“So you own ‘Delsrop?’” said he, with a musing hand caressing his stubble. “I suppose you know—now I suppose you know the place is reputed to be haunted?”

Mr. Tuke was growing impatient.

“Can you direct me thither?” he said curtly.

“Surely, sir,”—a lean smile creased the leathery skin of his cheeks. “You have only to follow the road you left. Over the crest of the first slope you will pass a tavern—the ‘Dog and Duck.’ The gates of ‘Delsrop’ break a plantation of firs, three miles beyond.”

The baronet expressed his thanks briefly, and stalked away. His informant looked an unsavoury piece of goods, in all truth, and he was growing conscious of a sense of weariness that inclined him to resent undue eccentricity.

He remounted his horse, and pricked him to the ascent beyond the dip. Looking back as he neared the top, he noticed that the fisherman was disjointing his rod with a snapping, impatient hurry of action that seemed to signify his sport was no longer the uppermost interest with him.

“I am destined to be stalked for some weeks as a black swan,” thought he crossly. “My advent will be better than a raree-show to these local blockheads.”

He breasted the summit, and rode on. Almost immediately, he came in sight of the ale-house alluded to, and read “Dog and Duck” on its flaked and blistered sign-board that hung posted in the roadway opposite the tavern.

The latter was a forlorn and barren-enough-looking little temple of conviviality—a mere whitened sepulchre for the entombment of dead-drunks. It stood in a sterile patch of garden that was so flogged by bitter winds that the very cabbages lost heart, and the stunted potatoes cowered in their trenches like the rawest of Nature’s recruits. There was a vagabond look about the building, too, that was rather accented by a strip of lead over its dinted doorway, that gave to the two round bosses of opaque glass let into the upper panels of the latter, the appearance of weak bibulous eyes protected by a monstrous shade. To one side of the door a wooden bow-window, with its lower panes lined with some stuff of a crimson hue, projected; and on the outer sill of this, a figure, quite in keeping with the character of his surroundings, lounged at cumbrous ease, and drew the while at a long “churchwarden.”

Mr. Tuke caught only a fleeting view of this figure as he rode past; but an impression of it was taken on the retina of his mind’s eye with curious fidelity. Yet there had been nothing so remarkable about the man, who was a thick-set burly fellow, of low statue and unobtrusive physiognomy. Only, his cropt hair and eyebrows had been very white and his face very red, and somehow the combination had had an extremely ugly look. A hundred yards further on, looking backwards, with the common self-consciousness of the wayfarer, he saw that the lounger had slouched out into the road, and was watching his recession with weighty curiosity; and—“Oh!” he groaned, “that I should come to be the eye-salve of such a parcel of oafs!”

On he rode by swale and hillock, and presently the sombreness of his journey wrought a little mood of discomfort in him. He had loitered so much by the way, that dusk was beginning to gather in the hollows, and the melancholy of his surroundings found something of a kindred feeling in his heart. The rising of the mist along water-courses, as if silent trains of powder had been fired to give warning of his passing; the monotonous progression of thorny hedgerows; the flickering of sudden bats and rustle of unseen things in the roadside tangle—all oppressed him as if with a certain alarm of ominous expectancy.

Often now he dived into swoops of lower ground that were mere pits of blackness from the density of the trees that grew about them. Then the wind, that had lain coiled awhile, reared itself anew and went moaning through the branches, and met the traveller full-face on ascents, so that he shivered and greatly desired the comfort of a cloak;—but still, nothing like a house appeared in any corner of the desolate and lonely landscape.

It was in one of these dismal plunges into gloom that, as he began to toilfully breast the incline beyond, the memory of a gate half-hidden in the bush-tangle at the bottom occurred to him as something he had passed but a minute before with an abstracted eye.

At the thought he drew rein, turned his horse, with the sound of a tired trailing of hoofs, and retraced his steps a length of fifty paces.

Sure enough, set in the height of a dense shrubbery, was a tall twofold gate of wrought iron that sloped off into the bushes on either side. But years of neglect had assimilated the paint of the metal to the colour of the leafiness about it—blue and mossy green—so that little wonder was that it should stand unobserved by the belated passer-by.

“Now, the star of my destiny guide me!” said the baronet, peering curiously through the dusk. “Is this the road to my inheritance? It seems weird and neglected enough in all conscience.”

He dismounted, found the lock of the gate to be burst and useless, and decided to at least push his inquiries into the mysterious twilight beyond.

It needed an effort to force open the structure on rusted hinges and against the mat of weediness underfoot; but he did it, led his horse through, and swung-to the gate behind him. It went into place with a scream and a clang that cut piercingly into the sombre stillness. A bird or two fled twittering from the thickets, and then all sank into silence again.

The intruder paused a moment before pushing further. Peering hither and thither through the dank obscurity of trunks, whose interlacing boughs made a high fragrant vault at a lofty distance above him, he was aware of a little ruined lodge, ancient, tenantless, and all overgrown with lichen.

An eerie inheritance, in good sooth! He shivered, and, taking his horse by the bridle, led him on. The brute’s pasterns rustled in dead leaves; his hoofs thudded softly on spongy moss. To all appearance he traversed a drive making for the house; but from its character it might have been a natural alley in some primeval wood.

He had been given to understand that the caretaker had been forwarded certain directions for his reception. Now, as the wild and unordered nature of his property was brought home to him, he thought how inadequate to his present needs any preparation possible to the estate was like to be, and was half-inclined, late as the hour was, to ride back to Stockbridge—so cosily figured in his imagination the lights and good roast of the “First Inn,” with pretty Betty Pollack to serve them.

It was the reaction of a moment, and in a moment dismissed; for, whatever the spirit of the man, the good horse’s was already sufficiently tried.

Dismally cogitating he continued his way, and suddenly a new uneasiness was added to his apprehensions. Something was moving alongside him—keeping pace with him—flitting in and out at a little distance amongst the trees. It was spectral and soft-footed—a suggestion rather than a shape; but when he paused to look more closely, it was always gone. Still, if he moved again, there it was undiscernible in the dark thickset, slipping forward on a level with him, and so noiselessly that sometimes he thought it a mere trick of his fancy.

The tension on his nerves under this shadowy ordeal grew at length so taut, that he was fain to stop and cry out, if only for the relief of hearing his own voice in that ghost-haunted solitude.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Why are you dogging me like this?”

“Like this?” a little laughing echo threw back—and silence closed upon him again.

He felt the thrill of sweat prickle down his neck; but, stubbornly pushing forward, of a sudden he saw the drive swerve into open space—a twinkle of light gleamed upon him—and there, grown out of the dark before his eyes; was a long low house of crinkled white, with either end fashioned into a protruding gable.

Too weary and out of humour with the situation to note anything but that here presumably his quest ended, he drew up at a central porch with a peaked roof, and seeing a dark iron-studded door before him, rained a shower of blows on it with the butt of his riding-whip.

A step hurried along the passage within—there was the click of a latch, and the figure of a tall man, holding a candle over its head, appeared in the opening.

As the two stood thus a moment, a white shape came out of the darkness, passed horse and traveller, and, with a tiny laugh, fled into the house and vanished.

CHAPTER VI.

Any man but a Bayard is apt to lose the accent of courtesy in the rebound from a sudden fright.

Mr. Tuke fell back a pace, breathing quickly. Then he advanced in quick fury, so that the man in the doorway shrunk before him.

“Are you Whimple?” he demanded in a harsh voice, with a slight tremor in it.

“At your good service, sir.”

The caretaker spoke up timidly, and made an involuntary motion of retreat.

“Who was that that went in before me—that has been stalking me all up the drive?”

“Ah, sir! You must hold her excused. I did not know she was out. It is my sister Darda.”

“The fiend take the jade! I’ll have her out bag and baggage if she trifles with me. Here, sir—do you know who I am? Take my horse and see that he has food and water.”

He stalked angrily past the shrinking figure and made his way into the passage.

“Go, now,” he said with an impatient stamp, “and join me when your service is done.”

The man went forth silently, and the new-comer turned to look about him.

It seemed that his most dour apprehensions were realized in that first view of his surroundings.

He saw a long hall, not too wide, that in its panelling of black oak looked a very catacomb of dismality in the light of a single flaring oil-lamp that stood up on a bracket, half-way down, and whose greasy radiance rather emphasized than relieved the enwrapping gloom. Somewhere in the further obscurity, the first steps of a stairway, with old carved-end posts, were evident; and here the windy darkness seemed to rise into vacancy like smoke up a chimney.

The traveller uttered a fretful expression, and pushing open a door to his left—through which a weak shaft of light issuing appeared to give promise of a certain comfort beyond—almost fell down a couple of stone steps that led straight into a large massive-beamed room, with a great hearth in it on which some smouldering faggots glowed with a dull crimson.

Here, at any rate, was a board spread with food and drink, and, amongst them, a couple of candles in brass sconces. The revivifying sight led the baronet to look about him with a wider geniality. Certainly the room was beautiful in its proportions and in its air of antique solemnity. The floor was paved with solid stone flags; the walls were oak up to the ceiling; and a long oriel window, now heavily shuttered, was set deep in the masonry of the side over against the hearth.

The tired man sat him down on a wooden stool before the embers, and fell to a fit of musing over his queer destiny. So this was to be his fate—to plunge from the fever and glare of fashionable dissipation into a lonely and half-dismantled dwelling-place situate in the heart of an isolated thicket. Well, he had accepted his life on the terms, and the powers of destiny should find that he had the will to shake the life out of a resolution into which he had fastened his teeth.

In the depths of his pondering, he heard the front door slammed to and bolted, and was aware the next moment that the caretaker was standing in the room, silently awaiting his notice.

He twisted round on his perch, and regarded the man frowningly.

The latter hung his head under the scrutiny. He was a hectic, bashful-looking fellow, tall and weedy, with pale eyes and a weak, sloping chin. His age might have been thirty-eight or so—was in fact; though there was a curious suggestion of youthfulness in his smooth, shaven cheeks and soft, uncertain voice.

Mr. Tuke waved his hand towards the table.

“These preparations are for me?”

“The best we could compass, sir.”

He spoke with hesitancy, and in a manner of deprecation.

“The notice was very short. I had no instructions to provide but what the house could supply; and no means of learning your wishes.”

“There is little in the house, I suppose?”

“Little, indeed, sir, but some linen and a trifle of silver and a good store of wine in the cellars.”

“Of whose providing?”

The man did not answer. The other repeated his question in a more peremptory tone. Already—he could not have said why—a prejudice was forming in his mind against this patient-spoken servant.

“Of whose providing? I say. Why—don’t you know?”

“It has always been here, sir. It was here before I came.”

“And when was that?”

The answer followed so soft that the baronet could scarcely distinguish it.

“Speak out, sir!” said he angrily. “When was that? I ask.”

The caretaker cleared his throat.

“It was in November of the year ’79.”

“The year before my father’s death? Why, man, do you mean to tell me you have lived here all this age—lived and vegetated in this isolation for twenty-one years?”

“It is true, indeed, sir.”

“You were a boy when you came. Your ambition is a tortoise. And who was the last tenant?”

Again the soft, distressed answer:

“I don’t know, sir. Indeed I don’t know. How can I tell?”

“How, truly—for one who can be content to rust in a solitude for a double decade? Well—you take your service from Mr. Creel, I suppose; and he knows his business. And whither do you wend now?”

The man was emboldened to step forward, his eyes shining with a pitiful anxiety.

“Oh, sir, sir! If you will only continue the service? We have no home or hope or prospect without ‘Delsrop’; and Mr. Creel—Mr. Creel, sir, he bade me throw myself upon your bounty.”

“I am beholden to him.”

He looked a little sourly on the flushed, weak face. Perhaps there had been small charge of powder behind his shot; but anyhow, in the long run, good-nature was sure to incline him to generosity.

“I will consider of it,” he said coolly. “Perhaps you can prove yourself worthy of my interest. For the present, at least, you may stop—you, and your sister, to whom I conclude you desire me to extend the permission.”

“If you will, sir. And I can only thank you from my heart.”

His broken tones found a weak spot in the other’s breast.

“Well,” he said—“well, what are you called?”

“My name is Dennis.”

“And your sister?”

“She is Darda.”

“H’m! A pet expression, I presume.”

“Indeed, no, sir. ’Tis Hebrew, and signifies ‘Pearl of Wisdom.’”

“And is she that?”

“Ah, sir! ’Twas a fanciful notion of her mother’s. God help her, poor stricken loveling! Sure the fiends of pride suggested it in a bitter irony.”

“What ails her?”

“Her mind keeps no growth with her body. In this, her twenty-fifth year, she is nought but a wayward and fantastic child.”

“My household figures out apace. And you two are alone on the premises?”

“Alone, sir, and have always been.”

“Well, Mr. Dennis Whimple—and I would say, ‘as I would be, too.’ Leave me, my good fellow, and light me presently to bed.”

The caretaker withdrew, with a humble obeisance, and Mr. Tuke sat down to his meal. This proved homely enough, but acceptable to a ravenous stomach; and no doubt the wine made rich amends for the poverty of the repast.

His supper finished, and a great wave of sleepiness threatening to overwhelm him, he called for his henchman and demanded guidance to his bedroom.

Up the broad stairway Dennis, bearing a candlestick in either hand, preceded him, and his drowsiness inclined him there and then to little observation of the passages by which he passed. But presently he was aware of standing in a great gusty room, strongly shuttered like the one below, and having for its one conspicuous piece of furniture a mighty four-poster, with curtains and tester of heavy, faded brocade.

Dismissing his guide with a curt “good-night,” he crawled shortly between sheets fragrant of lavender, and fell almost at once into a profound slumber.

He woke in the morning to the sound of a tap on his door panels.

“Come in!” he groaned—for his head was like lead with the close atmosphere of the room.

A broad spurt of light flooded him from the opened door, and Dennis entered with shaving water and a towel.

“Ah!” said Tuke, recollecting himself. “It’s you, is it? Oblige me, my friend, by flinging open those shutters. And for the future, refrain from closing them at night.”

The man did as he was ordered, and then paused.

“Sir,” said he, with the same painful hesitancy of manner—“if I may presume—pray let me entreat you to reconsider the question.”

The other raised his head in staring surprise.

“What question?” said he.

“That of opening the shutters at night.”

Mr. Tuke sprang up into a sitting posture, with an oath.

“What the devil!” he cried. “Are you to begin by disputing my orders?”

“But——”

“Leave the room, sir.”

When he was alone—“Mr. Whimple,” muttered he, “you must have that hang-dog mouth muzzled if you are to stop.”

He looked forth through the broad-latticed casement. It was a fair, still morning, and the sun made idyllic glory of what had overnight appeared so haunted and so sombre. The house lay, so far as he could make out, in a wide basin of ground cut out of the heart of a thronging woodland, and must from its position be very private and remote. Before him was stretched a noble lawn, with a couple of gnarled and buttressed oaks to break its greenness; but the grass was a foot long, and so weighted with dew that a kilderkin of sweet water might have been gathered from it.

To his right he saw the opening of the drive by which he had come to his own. This, so far as he could see down it, was less an avenue than a passage driven through a wood, and all over its mossy floor the light fell in brilliant smears and patches, as if the branches dripped green fire.

Elsewhere, on every side visible, were trees; but with, here and there, scant openings in them. They closed in the further line of the lawn; they packed the hollows and mounted the slopes; in every direction they filled the prospect with an ardent leafiness.

The gazer turned and pursued his inquiries into the room. He found little to reward his curiosity, beyond the general beauty of an ancient interior; for the chamber was panelled in oak, like the other where he had supped, and the window was a fine oriel, with heraldic devices in stained glass in its topmost squares. For furniture there were the great bed, whose posts were richly carved in antique foliage; a wardrobe no less generously designed; a washhand-stand and chairs of plain solid oak, and an oak table in the embrasure of the window, with a cracked mirror of old repoussé brass work standing on it. This, indeed, was the one exception to that tasteful substantiality of accessory with which a mysterious destiny seemed to have supplied his needs. Else there were no pictures, no carpet, no curtains, no adornments of any kind—only a severe simplicity, in which was suggested a certain methodical cleanliness which, it pleased the man of fashion to think, was far remote from the systems of society with its accumulations of glittering rubbish.

He went through his toilet singing, and, opening his door, found himself on a broad landing, wherefrom half-a-dozen other doors gave access to as many rooms. Into each of these In order he peeped. They were empty, one and all—dusty, spider-haunted; and not a room of them, it appeared, but had had, at some remote period, its oak flooring roughly jarred up, and as roughly thrown and stamped into place again. In one or two, moreover, bricks, dislodged from the chimneys, were cast pell-mell upon the hearths; or fissures gaped in the walls or in the plaster of the ceilings.

“One would think,” he murmured, “that the place had withstood a siege.”

That it was designed with an eye to such a contingency, the massive nature of its window-shutters would seem to point. These—all of which had been obviously only recently thrown open—were of a common pattern of studded oak, and their hinges were sunk deep in the masonry of the walls. Closed, their power of resistance would have been as that of the stones themselves.

Throughout the house, when its owner came to explore it, this same feature was apparent. The building, in an emergency, could have been sealed as securely as a castle.

Mr. Tuke found his breakfast laid in the room where he had supped. As he entered the figure of a girl, that had been busy at the table, came forward as if to pass him. He barred her way, and she stopped immediately.

“Are you Darda?” said he.

She gave a shrill laugh, and “Yes,” she answered.

She was an eldritch creature and undersized; but the clean symmetry of her limbs was perfect, and her manners of movement showed all the mingled grace and self-consciousness of a child of ten. In her face was a marvellous contrast of colour, that was even startling on first acquaintance—for the skin was white as bleached kid, but the eyebrows were very dark; and the piled heap of hair that curled down upon her forehead was of a bright coppery tint.

She nodded at the intruder, and showed a line of even teeth.

“You come in good time for the shadows,” she said. “In the autumn the house is dark with them.”

“What shadows, girl?”

“Ah! you will know. They moan and look from corners; or swing from the cobwebs and clutch at you as you go by. You will know. Did I frighten you last night?”

“You startled me, you jade.”

She clapped her hands merrily. Her laugh was the most weird concatenation of rippling discords the baronet had ever heard.

“Poor gentleman!” she said. “Perhaps you shall see my museum for recompense. Will you come?”

“By and by, maybe. Is my breakfast ready?”

She nodded again, with her lips set, and vanished from the room.

CHAPTER VII.

About mid-day Mr. Tuke sat himself down, like a man thoroughly wearied, in his great flagged hall—which, with a fancifulness of conceit, he had dubbed his dining-room—and summarized, with a completely depressed air, the fruits of his morning’s exploration. Briefly, these included, in the matter of “furnished apartments,” the chamber in which he rested—whereof the plainest of necessaries was comprised in a table and a few chairs; his bedroom, already described; two little closets in the north wing, appropriated to Dennis and his sister, and very modestly equipped; and a kitchen embellished with a basketful of odd pots and pans. For the rest, a score of rooms, large and small—of direct access, or approached by way of tortuous passages, whereby unexpected steps to nowhere were the least harmful of many pitfalls and obstructions—represented the present value of his inheritance, and so far as they went, a purely negative one, inasmuch as it seemed that the small fortune that would be required to put them into a moderate state of repair, would be sufficient to purchase elsewhere a messuage in sound and habitable condition.

And, without, it had been the same. The stables, substantial as the house, were in a like condition of neglect. His horse he had found ensconced in a battered stall and feeding out of a bushel basket. All the contiguous offices, of less durable material than the main building—which was of stone, coated with some form of plaster—were lamentably dilapidated and threatening to a collapse that should be general.

Clearly, unless the sum standing to his credit should prove to be a considerable one, he must give up all thought of adequately repairing the ravages of time.

As he sat in melancholy cogitation, he heard a suppressed chuckle at the door, and, slewing his head about, caught sight of Darda standing above in the hall.

“What do you want?” he said sharply.

She nodded at him with a fantastic gesture.

“My curiosities,” she said. “Do you wish to see them?”

He was about to return a peevish refusal; but bethought himself that with such an one, a promise unfulfilled was like to prove a recurring annoyance. Therefore he rose resignedly and went to the door.

“Lead on,” said he, “and I will come.”

She flitted before him, looking back from time to time with a changeling coquetry that was half-repellant, half-fascinating. Her actions, all lithe and graceful, were yet marked by an exaggeration that transcended the bounds of reasonable self-control.

She led him to a narrow back stairway mounting from a sort of stone closet set in an odd corner of the north wing, where meagre light entered by way of a square aperture cut in the masonry and barred with a sturdy grate of iron.

The spot was like a prison-cell in the black melancholy of its surroundings. Arid moss grew in the crevices of the stones, and everywhere the viscous tracks of snails laced the walls, as if in a feeble attempt to beautify what was obdurate.

Crossing the floor, the boards, at a certain place, gave up a booming sound, as if there were a vault underneath.

The girl paused, with a light foot on the stairway.

“You hear it?” she said. “That is where the shadows sleep at mid-day. But when the sun loses his hold of the white ladder he has climbed by, they come out and grow and grow in joy to see him fall. Then all night they can fill the house, for they are brave and big.”

“What is it?” said the baronet. “A vault?”

She moved back a step, and stamped with her slender foot.

“They call it ‘the Priests’ Hole,’” she said. “Perhaps they hid there and became shadows in time. You may open it if you will. It is too heavy for me.”

He saw a ring in the boards, and tugged at it. A square of flooring yielded and came slowly up, screeching like the mandrake. Beneath was revealed a stone-lined chamber, some seven feet in depth and four in width, into which a weak gush of light found passage from some distant grating.

A dismal hiding-place, in all truth, where, it seemed, a man might perish forgotten in the racket of the times that gave it existence.

“It was hard to find once,” said Darda. “Hidden and tucked away in the hollow of the wall, ’tis said. Then the shadows must have been short and the world always day.”

“A weary thing for men, my lass. Lead on.”

He let the flap fall into place with a slam of thunder, and followed the girl up the stairs. These led to the servants’ quarter, where were situated the two little sleeping-places of Dennis and his sister.

Into her own room she flitted, and bade her companion watch while she unlocked and threw open the door of a tall wooden press that stood in a recess of the chimney.

He lounged, idly looking while she revealed her treasures; and she stepped back with an expression of covert triumph on her face.

“Do you know what they are?” she said. “Name them to me, all.”

He gave an involuntary exclamation of repulsion; for verily it was a gruesome collection that met his gaze.

Many old mummified skins of bird and beast, with beak and claw still adhering to them; yellowing teeth of cattle and skulls of small-deer picked out of brake and warren; the sloughed skin of an adder; the desiccated presentment of a cat with a mouse in its jaws, found behind a stove; amongst them all, carefully arranged, a host of common pebbles, selected for some distinguishing mark, and even withered roots and potatoes, that accident had embellished with some grotesque resemblance to twisted limbs or faces—such were the principal features of Darda’s museum.

There was yet another treasure that stood prominently forward of the rest in a place of honour—a human skull—no less—with wisps of gritty hair yet clinging to the scalp, and the flesh of the face withered to a corrugated substance like bark.

The baronet gave out a note of extreme disgust. The eye-holes of the dead horror were wrinkled like a toad’s back, and one of them was bulged with a chalky lump that, gleaming through the slit, looked as if the last dying terror of the soul that once inhabited had petrified it.

Seeing his expression, the girl gave an eldritch laugh, and clipped it in the bud.

“That is Dennis,” she said, listening.

A step came up the stairway. Mr. Tuke strode into the passage without, and met the brother approaching.

“She has been showing me those abominations,” he said. “They must be cleared out, every one of them. I won’t have the ugly rubbish in my house. You hear me?”

He understood the man to give a little gasping, nervous response, and walked on fuming. At the stair-head he turned again. Whimple had not moved, and his face was drawn and white.

“Where did she pick up that filthy relic?” said he sternly.

“The head, sir?”

“The head, of course. There is no need to misapprehend me.”

The other seemed to have some difficulty in replying. More than once he cleared his husky throat; and when at length he spoke, it was in a strained, mumbling voice.

“She wanders far afield. It was at the foot of the gallows on the downs she found it fallen, and brought it home.”

“Lately?”

“Oh, sir, no. It was the first year of our coming.”

“Well, it must be got rid of. I won’t have it here.”

The words had hardly left his lips, when Darda sprang into the passage, her eyes blazing like a maniac’s.

“It shan’t go!” she shrieked—“it shan’t! it shan’t! Dennis, kill him!”

Her brother closed frantically with the mad creature, and sought to still her cries. He looked imploringly, in the midst of his struggling, at his master.

The latter took no heed of the uproar; but simply saying over his shoulder, “Remember; it is to be done as I say,”—turned coolly and descended the flight. But the noise of the girl’s screaming pursued him far into the house.

It was an hour later when Dennis begged leave to speak with him as he sat awaiting his dinner. The caretaker was palpably in a state of semi-prostration. His face was white and his hands shook. It was, perhaps, not to be expected that a man of Sir Robert’s calibre should be prepossessed by an exhibition of nervousness so pitiful.

“Well?” he said, the contempt in his heart finding some expression in his voice.

“I wanted to ask you, sir—to beg you not to hold me responsible for this—this scene. The girl has ever been a wayward unaccountable body.”

“I will not be troubled with her. If she is to stop—and God knows why she should—she must learn to keep her place and to do what service she can.”

“I know, sir. I never guessed—she must learn to appreciate your goodness. We are quite homeless but for your bounty.”

“I don’t wish to be harsh; but you must see, my good fellow, that her way of looking at things is not that of a servant towards her master. No doubt these twenty-odd years of caretaking have led her to assume a sort of semi-proprietary attitude towards the estate. I grant her that excuse; and see, of course, that you are very much bound up in her.”

“Oh! I am, sir.”

“That is commendable,” said the baronet dryly. “Only—you understand?”

“I understand fully, sir. She shall not annoy you again. I have made away with—with the things, as you ordered.”

“And the skull is gone?”

“It is—yes, it is gone.”

Was there a shifting devil in the fellow’s eyes? His master looked at him keenly. Everything about the man—his humility, his gentle voice, his poor physique, and more beggarly resignation to a life of long inaction—told against him with the robuster individuality. And, after all, were these qualities in a measure assumed? So much of doubt and mystery had entered into the baronet’s days of late, as to give birth in him to a gloom and suspicion that were hitherto foreign to his nature. He foresaw himself, with dark apprehension, the lord of a bugbear estate—beset with a thousand trials and difficulties—cut off from the world of his custom, and ever sinking into deeper sloughs of melancholy and despondence.

He roused himself with an effort. That very afternoon, he inwardly determined, he would ride into Winchester—where was to be found his agent, to whom Creel had entrusted the moneys standing to his credit—and satisfy himself as to his prospective position as a man of more or less substance. Then, if all figured out well, he could arrange for the purchase of furniture and hire of servants proportionate to his means.

At any rate he would rub shoulders with his fellow-creatures once more. That, perhaps, was not the least that induced him to the purpose. He most piously longed to shake off, if only for an hour, that sense of sombre isolation that had lain on him from his first coming, like a dark fatality.

“You can go,” he said sharply; and fell to musing again.

His meal was served by Darda. If, in her half-crazed consciousness, she resented, with a swollen, passionate heart, the cruel order that had deprived her at a blow of the chief fantastic interest of her broken life, she had disciplined herself already to give no sign of it. No doubt her brother, forced to be the instrument of a harsh despotism, had appealed to her by love of himself to control the emotion that, expressed, could only read their ruin. No doubt, also, the sense of bitter wrong driven down, would by and by stimulate certain nerves of action that had hitherto slumbered unrecognized.

She moved to and fro with set lips and white face and shot no single glance in the direction of her master. The womanly instinct for grace and neatness, that not the most debased intellect altogether foregoes, led her to give what order to the arrangement of the meal its poor accessories allowed.

When all was finished, she went softly from the room and closed the door.

Mr. Tuke did not permit a certain pity in his heart for this tender bud he had so lacerated to interfere with his appetite. But, his dinner over, he fell, as men will, to a more genial view of circumstances, and, as he sipped his wine, was inclined to regret his precipitancy of the morning.

“Yet, after all,” he thought, “the monstrosities were incompatible with any forms of feminine attractiveness, and she will soon learn to find her pleasure in more wholesome interests.”

He laughed, reviewing the items of the hideous collection.

“From the gallows!” quoth he. “And a relic of twenty years standing! And did she let the rest of the good gentleman lie—only plucking the head, like a withered medlar, from the stalk it dropped with? I am made a receiver of stolen property, by Gad—Herodias to some bloody cut-purse! What a dreary-minded wench, and what a pretty!”

The sweet old wine flushed his brain with a glamour of roses. He was inclined to take a more humorous view of his state and position.

No doubt, withheld for the time being from considerations of worldliness, he felt that relapse from reclaimed barbarism which, coming to us all in certain moods and before certain aspects of nature, restores us momentarily to the primitive joy in life untamed and unmalignant, that is our proper heritage.

After all, it is not for the trimmed parterres of existence to yield those glad surprises that are the basis of our yearning to the immortal. Who ever, wandering in an ordered garden, lost himself in a luminous mist of paganism?

Here, the infinite possibilities of Nature were before him—the search for her glimmering and elusive shrine in an endless variety of thickets. He would slough the skin of conventions, and, plunging naked into the green glooms of enchantment, pursue the way from which only is hedged off by leafiness the menacing face of Death. More than this, work—the work that should be in touch with that of the great Mother, adapting her harmonies, imitating her lines—appealed to him with sudden force, so that he was to find a purpose in living that he had never guessed at hitherto. He was fascinated—absorbed in a dream of sun and woodlands and the mossy sparkle of innocent springs.

As the spirit of the wine evaporated, however, that hideous token of a felon’s fate would slip into his thoughts with a recurring persistency. That this was so, first angered, then depressed him. He was not a particularly squeamish individual, and certainly his rough times were not favourable to sensitiveness in so common a respect. Still, he could not drive the sordid keepsake from his reflections.

“Curse the jade!” he muttered. “Wasn’t the place lonely and dismal enough without that acute accent on its ghostliness!”

He laboured out a sigh.

“Well, at any rate,” he breathed, “it’s got rid of now.”

As he spoke, his glance wandered to the long latticed window, a casement of which stood open: and there, upon the sill, a black blotch in the sunlight, lay the grinning horror itself.

CHAPTER VIII.

For some seconds the diner sat, too astounded for speech or action. That either of his dependents should have dared to thus defy him!

At length he rose, and took a step or two towards the window. It was no trick of his fancy. There lay the abomination, its dry dead hair stirring in the draught, its stuft lid winking a dirty white, as if it cocked an eye at him in a hideous merriment.

He strode to the door and thundered for his henchman. The latter came immediately, apprehensive already, and doubly so when he marked the other’s face.

“You see that?” said his master, in a voice whose quiet was more appalling than any outburst of fury.

Whimple’s very lips went ghastly. He tried to answer, and broke down at the first syllable.

“I don’t accuse you of putting it there. Now, tell me—why didn’t you get rid of it as you undertook to do?”

He made out the man to say that he had—that he had removed it to his own room, intending later to find some means of disposing of it.

In the midst of his stammering explanations, Darda came softly into the hall. Her brother seized her arm with a shaking hand.

“How could you?” he muttered. “How could you do a thing so stupid and wicked?—and you have ruined us.”

She followed the direction of his wild eyes, and her own opened round in wonder.

“I didn’t put it there,” she said. “Does he say I did? It is a lie.”

He whispered “Hush!” in a fearful voice; but his master broke in at once.

“No matter who did it. One of you has thought fit to make a mock of me, and you must both pay the penalty.”

The girl laughed scornfully.

“You only wanted a pretext,” she said, “to get rid of us. I thought you would, sooner or later. Perhaps you put it there yourself.”

Her voice was rising to bitterer significance, when she heard a sound at her side, and, turning, made a frantic clutch at her brother as he slid to the floor. His head came with a little thwack on the boards; and there he lay with clinched teeth and a face like a stone.

Then—“Oh! oh!” she wailed, and threw herself down beside him.

Mr. Tuke was very embarrassed and a little shocked. He took no resentment over the girl’s spirit, though he still firmly believed she lied about the skull. But after all, it was patently unjust to hold the man responsible for the cantrips of so unmanageable a charge.

He seized a jug of water.

“Here—pour some of this over him,” he said. “He’s fainted like a woman.”

She looked up at him with fierce eyes; but she took the jug nevertheless.

“He’s a better man than you!” she cried. “He can suffer and endure; and fight too, when there’s need.”

She was human enough in her fearless championship of her own flesh and blood.

The gentleman laughed uneasily, and, feeling himself under the circumstances a little de trop, left the hall, with a certain consciousness of shame tingling in his heels.

Outside, he thought, “Did she get the better of me? If this sort of thing goes on, I shall lose the sense of how to be master in my house.”

Stung by the thought, he threw open the door once more and looked in.

“He’ll come round in a minute,” he said hardly. “Listen to me. I shall sleep out to-night. You can——”

He broke off suddenly; paused a moment in indecision—then tip-toed gently away.

The girl’s face had been drowned in tears as she bent over her brother.

He passed to the neglected stables, and was fain to saddle his own horse and lead him forth and mount in the weed-choked yard.

He rode down by way of the long slumberous drive. Its whole course was matted with woodland moss, smooth as green felt; and thereon the beeches, staking their aftermath of glory, flung golden counters softly, as if on a card-table. At the half-ruined lodge he paused, and dwelt upon its desolation curiously. Ivy, like a cluster of swarming snakes, held the writhed chimneys in a death-grip, and had fractured the spine of the gabled roof. The ribs of the structure showed through gaping rents, like those in a stranded ship. Not a melancholy window-place but gaped a black mouth, full of broken splints of teeth and dead sticks of sashes. The whole building seemed sunk into the moss and leafiness that engirdled it.

He went out through the iron gate, and spurred along the road that was yet unfamiliar to him. The air was at once soft and keen as the taste of olives, and as such stimulated his new appetite for Nature.

Life seems never so desirable as in typical days of autumn, when the year rallies of its disease and makes a brave effort to renew its thoughtless morning with a few withering leaves. Of all the motley months, none is so pathetic as October in its likeness to an aging lady, striving to salve by gentleness the unhealed wounds inflicted of her earlier pugnacity.

Mr. Tuke’s spirits rose as he advanced. He seemed already in touch with the world again—a butterfly of the second brood emerged from a buried larva. He met a few clowns, and acknowledged their salutations brightly. His voice rose and cracked in snatches of romantic song, and he greeted with pleasure whatever landmarks he remembered.

Of these, the “Dog and Duck” stood as unchanged as any tree or hillock; for on the window-sill of the tap the same figure lounged and smoked. The rider got a better view of the fellow as he stood broadly in the sunlight. He was built sturdily, with something of an air of the sea about him; and his coat was bedecked with trinketry of faded gold, like an old galley-foist. But his face, red as brick and patched with eyebrows like tags of wild clematis-down, was a cut-throat one by every sinister mark.

As before—the traveller past—he swung heavily out into the road to watch his going.

“I’ve an eye for you, my friend,” murmured the baronet. “What do you do in this happy valley, where winds and waters should be the only forces to strive with?”

He was pondering a little all the way to Stockbridge; and there Betty Pollack came upon him with a blush and a smile, like a posy of sweetbriar, and drew his honour a mug of ale. She knew him now by report, of course; and was curious, with the gossips of the neighbourhood, as to the history of his mysterious coming. Near all the years of her short life, “Delsrop,” unclaimed and deserted, had been lonely, enchanted ground for the builders of local tradition to lay their airy bricks on.

“Is your honour for Winchester?” she said. “The evenings draw in, and it’s well to be over the downs by sunset. There have been bad characters about of late.”

“Betty,” said he, “will you give me a curl to put over my heart for a charm?”

She laughed and then looked grave.

“I’m not that sort,” she said. “I keep my favours for my inferiors.”

“And what am I but one?”

“Well,” said she, “I think you are, to talk so.”

It was like a glimpse of an orchard through a wall-wicket to tarry with her a moment; but he must needs be up and onward if he wished to reach the old Burgh before dark fell.

Therefore he mounted and went his way, whereby we need not pursue him; for it was devoid of incident, and of much emotion but weariness.

He slept that night at the “George,” and the next morning sought out his agent and went deep into matters of business with him.

The upshot was so satisfactory, that he felt justified, then and there, in giving considerable commissions for furniture, and in arranging for the hire of such servants as were at least indispensable.

He dined early, and had made his return journey, with a heart considerably lightened and braced to content by three o’clock.

As he came within sight of the iron gate, he noticed to his surprise a horse tethered amongst the bushes off the road; and still more did he marvel upon nearing it, to see that it was a well-groomed animal and a lady’s, by token of the side-saddle.

He dismounted, and leading his own beast over the turf, pushed open the gate, and stood still to reconnoitre. No sign of the owner of the horse was there—no sound of voice or footstep in the green glooms beyond.

Uncertain what to do he remained a moment looking this way and that, when suddenly there broke upon his ear a shrill scream of terror. It seemed to issue not twenty paces away, from the direction of the ruined lodge.

He dropped the reins and sprang forward.

“Here!” he shouted. “What is it? Where are you?”

Crying, frenzied words came back to him—a woman’s voice, but inarticulate. Guided by it, however, he ran round by way of a little tangled garden that brought him to the rear of the low building.

Nothing was to be seen; but here the voice appealed to him in agony from out the very ground. He fell upon his knees by a sunk heap of rubbish—saw in a moment, and snapped vigorously at two gloved hands, that wavered up at him from a ruin of weeds and broken earth.

As he held on, frantically hauling, with his jaw set square, the matted ground shook and crumbled under his feet. He saw what was happening, and, throwing himself back with a mighty effort of resolution, drew slowly from the bowels of the earth, as it were, the collapsed and almost senseless form of a young woman. Then, scarcely might he stagger with her to a place of security, when a rent opened in the spot whence he had struggled, and a great pad of undergrowth went down with a roar and hollow splash of water to ugly depths.

Mr. Tuke laid his dainty salvage on the débris of a bench, and looked down upon it all amazed. It presented the form of a girl, of nineteen or twenty perhaps, with a quantity of pale golden hair dragged and tumbled over her very white face, and her dress and velvet spencer—both rich and fashionable—torn and stained in twenty places. Her eyes were closed, and her gloved hands daubed with mud and roots of grass.

He was quite at a loss as to what to do; and could only stand helplessly above her, wondering who she could be, and what the chance that had brought her into so perilous a position. Vaguely he recalled certain specifics for faintness, that seemed scrawled illegibly in the commonplace-book of his mind. Wringing her ears, or her nose—he could not remember which—suggested itself as a remedy dimly familiar. Burnt feathers, also—but whether for in- or external application, he had no recollection—fluttered faintly in the background of his fancy. Now he thought he would lay her flat, and now seat her upright like a limp Eastern idol, in the hope that the position most favourable to Nature’s purpose would induce recovery.

While he was speculating in great embarrassment, the young lady solved the problem for herself by opening her eyes, and giving out a little tremulous sigh, like the flutter of a scorched moth.

“Oh!” she whimpered—a line of pain coming across her brow—“where is my saltier?”

It was her chain, ending in a little medallion called a bréviaire—at that time fashionable—that she missed. Life devoid of this trinket was a petty possession.

“It must have gone whither you nearly followed, into a disused well,” said Mr. Tuke, becomingly grave.

He added with some humour of impertinence:

“How a foot, too light to bruise a daisy, could tread so heavy a measure, passes my comprehension.”

A little flush, as when a spoonful of red wine is dropped into a glass of milk, came to her cheek and delicate ear.

“I felt it going,” she whispered; “and screamed out. Did you save me? And are you the new squire of ‘Delsrop’? Oh, sir! I am ashamed.”

She broke off abruptly, and, blushing a more vivid pink, rose to a sitting posture, and put back the hair from her face in a bewildered manner.

“I hardly know what I say or do,” she said. “I was so frightened; and I have lost my saltier. My horse is somewhere outside. Will you help me to it?”

“You are not in a state to ride. Wait and rest, and I will escort you whither you wish by and by.”

“No; I must go now. My brother will be home from cock-fight and raging for his supper. It was wrong of me to venture in, and I have lost my saltier, and nearly my life. Will you have search made for it in the well? It is gold, and the bréviaire is shaped prettily like a ridicule.”

“It shall be found, if possible. If you must go, I will ride with you.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, indeed. And whither may I squire you, madam?”

“To ‘Chatters,’ if you must. ’Tis his house—my brother’s.”

“Your brother’s?”

“He is Sir David Blythewood, sir.”

“You must pardon me. I have only made my début in the neighbourhood this day or so.”

“Yes; I know.”

She looked at him with a vague little smile. Her eyes swam as pale a blue as plumbago flowers. Her features were cut to a sharpish pattern; but their complexion was of snow berries, and the softness of youth triumphed over all angles. Suddenly she put her hands to her rumpled hair.

“My hat!” she cried.

“I fear it has followed the saltier. We must make shift without it.”

She rose at once and took the arm he offered. The shock and the fright seemed to have confused her, so that her actions and most of her speech were mechanical.

When he had helped her to mount and was riding beside her, he had full opportunity, in the intermittent silences that fell awkwardly between them, to study her very dainty personality. She managed her “grey” like one finely educated in the science of horsemanship. All graces of mien and action seemed exhibited with the cultivated art that conceals art.

Now and again he would be conscious of an inquisitive glance shot in his direction, and the little confusion that followed upon discovery was skillfully expressed.

A long two miles they rode together, by further way of the “Delsrop” road; and presently, skirting a sweep of park-land—in ordered contrast with Mr. Tukes’ domain—came in view of a lodge and gates of the most admired substantiality.

Here the gentleman would insist upon delivering up his charge, and returning the way he had come. No pretty remonstrances would avail to make him spoil the romance of the situation by so much as a yard of anti-climax.

“I am too happy in having been the means of help,” said he. “If you are beholden to me at all, a word of thanks from your brother would make me a debtor instead of a creditor.”

She smiled back delightfully.

“He shall come in person,” she said, “and bring you a receipt of my safe custody.”

She laughed and waved to him, and was gone up the drive.

He stood hat in hand until she had disappeared. Then he mounted and rode back, with a heart full of sun and merriment.

Indeed, it was like a sail to a castaway, this vision in his waste of days. To know that refined civilization was within a couple of miles or so of his gates, did more to reconcile him to his embowered lot, than any philosophy of nature. He felt friendless and isolated no longer; but rather inspired to a pursuit that should make of his thickets a garden of Hesperus.

In this mood of exaltation he reached his own door, rapped on it with the butt of his riding-whip, and, as it was swung open, encountered the figures of Whimple and his sister arrayed as if for a journey.

CHAPTER IX.

The man’s face looked fallen and hectic; but he was recovered at least of his fit. Darda clung to his arm, a frail, defiant, wisp of a thing, her hair a quivering mist of fire in the light of the low-down sun.

“Whither away?” said the baronet in surprise. “My horse, Whimple.”

Dennis put his sister gently to one side, and took the bridle. Standing thus, he turned to his master and spoke him quietly.

“We stayed to deliver you the keys, sir. I have made all snug against our going.”

“And where do you wend now?” said Mr. Tuke mockingly.

“I don’t know, sir; indeed, I don’t. We must make shift in a barn for to-night.”

“And your belongings—your personal effects?”

The servant made a sad expressive gesture. “Only our poor clothes,” it seemed to imply.

“Now, my good fellow,” said the baronet, a little grimly, “I decline, you know, to take the responsibility of this self-martyrdom. It is a weak attempt to put me in the wrong, which is no improvement of your case. I gave an order which was not carried out.”

“She gives her word, sir, she never put the skull there.”

“Nor you?”

“Nor I, indeed, sir.”

“H’m! It must be one of those remnants of mortality that provide for themselves, it seems. Anyhow, it is gone now, I presume?”

“I will swear I took it away and locked it up.”

“Very well. Then let us say no more about it. Do you wish to stay on?”

“I wish, sir, with all respect, to do my duty by the place that has so long harboured us.”

“Which means I am not included in the contract, and that you would take service elsewhere if you could get a better.”

The man was protesting, but the other stopped him with a laugh.

“Go your ways,” said he. “I see no reason why you should love me. We will make it a question of duty, and abide by that.”

Throughout the little discussion, Darda had stood in the entrance, passive and indifferent. Now, foreseeing the upshot, she turned and walked away into the gathering dusk of the house.

Mr. Tuke followed, jovially whistling. All the evening he was in great spirits, and at supper he had up a bottle of Muscadine, jacketed with a half-century growth of cobwebs and tartar, and drank to the blue of a couple of eyes that were comically, and a little sweetly, in his thoughts.

He went to bed, slept like Innocence, and woke like Justice, and, as he lay on his morning pillow, pondered the oddities of his new life.

One small matter exercised his mind perplexingly—his antipathy to the man Whimple. Whence it was born, and on what cherished, he found it difficult to decide. The fellow was respectful, obedient, and, so far as he knew, honest. Yet, from the first, he had felt an inclination, unusual to his bent, to bully him and depreciate his efforts. Something in the man—he could not tell what—woke suspicion in him—unjustified, he verily believed. He would remedy this, if possible; would look with a broader view of toleration on the conduct of his spiritless dependent.

The resolve was frank and characteristic enough; and he was decided to give it immediate expression. But so it happened, an incident of the coming day was to reawaken and confirm his deepest distrust in the unhappy caretaker.

All the morning he spent riding about his ragged estate, exploring, investigating, calculating possibilities and planning improvements. It was past mid-day when he turned his horse’s head homewards, and then he was by a dense thicket that skirted a little long wood of lofty trees. Here he dismounted; for it struck him that this was the fringe of the very holt he had penetrated on his first coming, and he must put his conjecture to the test. He tied up his horse and plunged amongst the branches, and presently was rewarded by catching a glimpse through the thronging trunks of the mossy lap of the drive and the dank stones of the ruined lodge. Right opposite the latter, but well hidden in the brush, he sat himself down upon a tumbled log; for he was hot and weary, and the high green silence of the place smote upon his senses like a cathedral anthem. Far away the tap of a woodpecker rang like an elfin hammer; things unseen pattered from a height upon the dead leaves—mere accents on solitude; the “caw” of a sailing rook came through the leafy canopy overhead with a weight of drowsy utterance.

He closed his eyes blissfully—and opened them again with a start.

Something soft-footed had entered the drive by way of the iron gate—had paused, and was peering forward with a concentrated gaze.

He made this out—cautiously shifting his body for the better view—to be a tall, dark-featured woman—a gipsy-like creature by every token—keen-faced; very poorly dressed. Presently she moved secretly, a yard at a time, in skirmishing advances, as a mouse does.

Suddenly she gave a little run; stopped; drew her ragged shawl tightly about her bosom, and uttered a low exclamation of greeting. To whom? It was with a curious wonder that the watcher saw coming from the other direction his man Whimple. He, the latter, moved as the woman, with a like air of secrecy; and he had a scared look in his face, too, as if he were on some errand of a disturbing privacy.

The two met, with a hasty familiarity of welcome, and words passed between them. These were earnest, rapid, vehement; but Mr. Tuke could not gather their import. More than once the woman’s voice wavered up for an instant into a tone of scorn and indignation, which was as quickly subdued.

Then, in a moment, something had passed from the man to the stranger—something, wrapped in an old chequered handkerchief, that she received delicately and hid under her shawl,—and they had parted, and the woman had gone to the gate with a sound of sobbing.

“Mr. Whimple, Mr. Whimple,” thought Mr. Whimple’s master—“if there was only a little more brass in your hang-dog face, I could respect, if I didn’t encourage, your tactics.”

He saw the fellow turn and scurry away as he had come, and gave an indrawn whistle deflected at the stop, as men do who vent upon themselves an emotion of surprise.

“Now, what is the riddle?” he muttered. “Our effectless friend can find the means to a little barter on his own account, it seems. But where is in all the house to tempt his honesty? Well, forewarned is forearmed; and there is an end of the reaction in your favour, Mr. Dennis.”

He left the wood by and by, and made for the house, lost in speculation. For the present he was resolved to allude in no way to the interview he had been witness of; and to alter no whit of his manner towards his servant. So should he be clad in double proof who keeps secret his discovery of his enemy’s ambush.

Despite the decision, however, he found it no light matter to give to his consideration for his dependent that air of spontaneity he had made it his task to exhibit. He could hardly tell if it were his own reawakened suspicions they saw themselves reflected in the man’s face; but—so it seemed to him—the latter was full of a covert significance of guilt and trepidation that was expressed in a certain watchfulness most difficult to ignore.

He was sitting, having finished his dinner, deep in thought; when this very fellow entered to say that a man without craved the indulgence of a word with his honour.

“A man?—What man?” said Tuke.

“He is a stranger to me, sir.”

“Did you ask his name—his business?”

“No, sir.”

“Go and do so, blockhead!”—He lost his patience for a moment; then, recollecting himself, “Tell him to walk in here,” he added more mildly.

In response to this amiable permission, an individual, whose wooden face wore the perpetual smile of an “Aunt Sally,” and whose clothes smelt of stables and were mere patched horse-cloths in appearance, advanced to the threshold of the hall, where he stood, after touching his forelock, with an expression on his features of the most engaging vacuity.

“Now, my man!” said the baronet; “what is your business?”

“I come to enkvire, master, if ye has a gawdner?”

“A gardener? No, I have not.”

The oddity’s little eyes looked anywhere but at the speaker. He seemed to be joyously calculating the dimensions of the ceiling.

“Mebbe ye vants a gawdner?” he said roguishly.

“Maybe you want to be engaged? Where do you hail from—any place hereabouts?”

“Not I, squeer. I comes fro’ Suth’ampt’n.”

“And what are your qualifications?”

“I’m Joe Corby.”

“What are your qualifications for the post, I say?”

“All’s one for that. I’m a gawdner, squeer.”

“Do you know a cabbage from a rose?”

“Aye; and a spade from a stallion.”

Mr. Tuke scanned the fellow in silence for a moment.

“And a barrow from a rakehell, I suppose?” said he quietly. “You are too accomplished for me. Whimple, show this person off the premises.”

“Meaning I’m to go?” said the man, in a sort of genial surprise.

“Certainly. Whimple!”

“Look’ee here, master,” said the intruder, hesitating and apparently embarrassed, “I’ll ventur’ to speak Gawd’s truth, with your honour’s kind indulgence. I’m a Jack-o’-trades, I am—a handy man, ye might call me, and tough as a dawg in bout or brawl. You live lonely, says I to myself—the gent lives lonely; and there be reskel characters about in every lonely by-way. He might find me useful, the gent might; and my sarvice is for him, so be he rekvires it. Roses, says you? Well, not partiklerly; but cabbages—yes—bein’ all heart and head. That’s what I am—heart and head, and both at your honour’s sarvice. I know a thing or two. Them shutters, now—how be they fastened?”

Actually, as he spoke, he was stepping into the room, smile and all, with the apparent intention of setting his mind at rest on the subject. However, the gentleman jumped up and barred his way.

“What!” cried the latter. “Take yourself off, fellow—you aren’t wanted here!”

The man stopped; scratched his head with a laughable expression of chagrin, and retreated muttering.

“No offence, master; no offence,” said he, and either a very comical or a very wicked light glinted in his little eyes as he retired.

Dennis escorted him without, and the voices of the two in low converse came to Mr. Tuke where he stood. He rattled on the window angrily, and the man slouched off, going in the direction of the drive.

Now the oddness of this apparition and of the interview it had brought about was filling the baronet with a sense of uneasiness. There had been that in the fellow that had seemed to belie his assumption of stupidity; and, after a moment’s thought, Tuke left the hall, quitted the house by a back door, and started rapidly upon a private détour that should bring him upon the drive at a point near to the ruined lodge. He wished to satisfy himself as to two little matters—whether or no the man had confederates in waiting at the gate, and whether or no he would make his exit in proper course.

He sped so energetically, that, when at last he struck the thickets at the back of the lodge, and, moving cautiously, peered through the trees, he found that he had fairly outrun his quarry and must await its coming. For this purpose no better ambush could offer than the deserted cottage itself.

Stepping warily, he moved round by way of the garden he had entered once before, and passed with a little thrill that torn patch in the tangle that remained an intimate mark in his memory. It was with a tickle of nervousness that, as he went by, he paused an instant and, looking down, caught sight of a glint of slimy wall on which the very canker of death seemed to lie in an oily scab.

At the back of the lodge stood a crazy porch of rustic woodwork, and therefrom a door, lolling on broken hinges, gave access to the interior of the building. There was a gap here sufficient for the entrance of a man, and he went through it swiftly, and along a stone-paved passage beyond, that was dumb with dust and littered with flaked rags of plaster and crackling wall-paper. So he made his way to a front room that looked upon the drive; and here he paused with a certain measure of astonishment. For on some mouldering shelves that spanned a recess by the chimney, lay in orderly arrangement of ugliness Darda’s banished museum of curiosities.

“So-ho!” he breathed. “This is how the law is evaded.”

He nodded to himself with set lips, and moved to the window. In the moment of his doing so, a low crooning voice broke upon his ears, and the fantastic figure of the girl herself came out from amongst the trees opposite and stood in a shaft of sunlight that broke from above into that luminous well of leafiness.

She smiled and sang, making a harmony of weird discords; and throwing her head back, with her hands beneath, it received the touch of the sun upon her mouth, and seemed to return it with a fond little sound of kissing.

She was so near to him, that he could see the pulse in her throat fluttering like a bird’s as she murmured her strange music—could note every movement of the spirit that rose from her heart to her lips.

Suddenly she was silent, and gazing before her, dropped an odd little curtsey and stood still. Mr. Joseph Corby had, it appeared, come down the drive and was slouching into view. He stopped before the girl; yet not, it seemed, as one who was altogether unacquainted with her or ignorant of her reputation; for he stood at gaze with some expression of hilarity, but none of wonder upon his face.

“That’s right, missy,” he said. “Drink the sun, like the new wine it is for a merry maid. It’s yaller, for youth, as is cowslips and buttercupses and pretty gildilocks; but give me the old red of Oporto for a seasoned skin, and a ship’s bucket of it to drink against bed-time.”

Darda laughed shrilly.

“You could swallow a lake of it, I expect,” said she, “like the troll in the fairy tale.”

“That’s it,” he said, “a lake of wine.”

He came quite close to the girl, and advanced his red face so that his injected eyes looked full into hers.

“A lake of wine,” he repeated. “Have you ever heard tell of one?”

She shook her head smiling.

“Come now,” said the man—and the watcher saw his jovial face suddenly assume a very evil and menacing look. “Have you ever heard of one, I say? You’d better answer.”

Again she shook her head.

“You must know, you know,” said the fellow, his eyes staring and his mouth creasing at the corners. “You ain’t a lively sucker o’ the old stem and growed up here all these years not to have heard on it. What is it, I say? What’s become o’ the Lake of Wine?”

He gripped her wrist as he spoke. She uttered a little shriek of pain and anger—not of fear—and sprang back from him. She even made a feint of aiming a blow at him with her soft fist.

“You dare to touch me!” she cried. “My nails are like thorns.”

“Aye, and so’s your mind,” muttered the man. He looked at her in savage gloom a moment; then his broad face cleared, and he grinned in a conciliatory manner.

“Come, missy,” he said, with an upward jerk of his chin. “We’ll be good friends, I can see. I not expeerunce spurit in a gal without knowing how to admire it. Of course if you’re set on havin’ a secret from old Joe, Joe’s not the man to appint to find it out. His wit’s a rumfusticus sort o’ target to put up agen your bright arrers. I only axed out o’ curiosity—has you ever heard tell of a Lake of Wine?—and no, says you.”

The girl was silent.

“You never did, now did you?” said the man, his face all one bunch of geniality.

She nodded and laughed in an elfin manner.

“Perhaps I did,” she said. “What then?”

He breathed out a great grunt of satisfaction.

“I thought so,” said he. “Well, what’s become on it?”

She was laughing again, when Dennis’s voice came from a distance, calling her. At the sound she sprang forward immediately, evaded Mr. Corby, who had made a clutch at her, and was sped out of sight up the drive before he could collect his faculties.

“Missy!” he had called, as she ran from him. “You and me must meet agen and have a long talk. Missy! mum’s the word!” but she had given no sign of hearing him.

Left by himself, the fellow plunged into a ruminative mood; spat thoughtfully upon the ground; and then all of a sudden made rapidly for the gate and vanished up the road.

CHAPTER X.

Mr. Tuke and his man were employed upon a very profitless and monotonous task. The one—the first—was engaged in drawing stagnant water from a well in a bucket; the other received and toiled away with each vessel-full in succession, and flung it broadcast about the garden.

They had cleared from the well-rim the torn earth and rubbish that encumbered it. A flap of wood had originally protected the mouth of the hole; but the slobbering tooth of Time had chewed this to the veriest pulp, upheld only by the clutch of the grass roots that had spread over and beyond it, and it had become the merest question of accident as to whose foot should first break into the pitfall.

Despite the unchancy look of the place, measurement with a plumb revealed the fact that not so much as four feet of dead water lay at the bottom of the inky funnel; and this four feet Mr. Tuke had set himself patiently to withdraw, in fulfilment of a certain promise made to a couple of rather colourless beaux yeux.

Now, for an hour had the two been regularly dipping and spilling, in the remote hope of finding a gold chain and bréviaire curled snugly in the pail after some particular haul. But it seemed a forlorn and fruitless search. If the gewgaw had in truth slipped in, it was for a certainty imbedded in the silt and slime at the bottom.

Fatigue was telling a little upon the loose physique of the servant. His cheeks were hot and his breath laboured. But the master worked on, vigorous and pre-occupied, and gave little thought to the other’s condition.

Indeed, his want of consideration could plead the excuse that he had much present matter to meditate and digest. He had inherited, it seemed, the lonely lordship of many mysteries; and to the devil’s captured attorneys, he could have thought, had been committed the task of drawing up his new lease of life, so teeming was it with uninterpretable perplexities, after the most admired human models.

Once or twice he spoke to his servant, in a stern, even voice that was really little of an invitation to confidence.

“Whimple,” he had said, “had you any previous knowledge of the fellow who called yesterday?”

“I have seen him about, sir.”

“Had he ever spoken to you before?”

“He had—he may have once or twice.”

It was always an aggravation that this man could never, it appeared, give a direct answer.

“What do you mean by ‘may have’? Has he or has he not?”

“He has, sir.”

“On what matters?”

“I don’t know, sir—of no importance—I really couldn’t tell.”

Mr. Tuke glanced up angrily.

“You part with every word as if it were a tooth. Now, mind,” he said sharply—“you’ll give him a wide berth for the future. I’ll not have anything concerning me discussed between you—concerning me, or my house, or whatsoever connected with the estate.”

Once again, as the man took the bucket from him, he had looked into his face and said:

“So your removal of the abominations belonging to your sister was an evasion, after all?”

Whimple gave a gasp and dropped his eyes.

“Sir,” he muttered piteously—“I thought you would never know, or, knowing, never mind. She—she—it would break her heart to part with them altogether. They are abominations to you and me——”

“You can leave yourself out of the question, fellow. I don’t concern myself with the quality of your emotions.”

The other twined his nervous fingers together over the bucket handle. Suddenly he spoke up, with a flushed face.

“If they are to go, sir, I would rather take the girl, with all her cranks and fancies, and do my best to seek a living elsewhere.”

The baronet looked hard at the poor baited creature.

“Am I losing touch of humanity in face of a little botheration?” he thought. Then he added aloud, with a spirit of scorn: “Words, words! But you would force me again into being the agent of your self-martyrdom. It won’t do, my friend. The lodge may serve as museum until it is pulled down. I see at least that the most disgusting item of the collection has vanished.”

“The skull, sir? Yes, it is gone.”

They laboured at their task once more; and once more Mr. Tuke fell into profound musing over the perplexities of his later lot. In this connection were two matters for worrying consideration—two flails that beat up the dust of his mind in the absence of any sound grain of evidence.

Of these, the first was a certain hyperbolic expression used and reiterated by yesterday’s rogue—a preposterous inquiry that had yet seemed instinct with a subtle undermeaning, and, so weighted, had sung and buzzed ever since in the eavesdropper’s brain.

“The Lake of Wine!” The term had been surely employed to cover or suggest a tangible fact. Its persistent repetition by Mr. Joe Corby precluded the idea that it was merely an accidental fancy played upon for the girl’s behoof.

Then, what was its interpretation?—to what did it allude? Beyond the surmise that it must refer to something concealed upon, or connected with, his bugbear property, it was obviously impracticable for him to reach.

So, rebounding from a blank wall of speculation, he would stumble against his second trouble. This, in its essence, was nothing but a fear, or the shadow of one. It amounted to sounds about the house of a night—sounds indistinctly acknowledged by a consciousness on the borderland of slumber and acute to nice impressions of the senses. He could recall them thundering on the drum of his visionary ear, and could remember starting up wildly awake to be aware of nothing in all the atmosphere of his room but a ticking silence. Still, the feeling would remain that something had been moving, creeping, breathing in his neighbourhood only a moment earlier; and more than once he had risen, with a wet forehead, to satisfy himself that he had been merely dreaming.

This recurrent uneasiness he had experienced on every night but the first of his inhabitance of the room; and it was beginning to thread his being with a little strand of nervousness. Oddly he felt himself in some telepathic way to be the centre of a nebulous mystery without having the remotest idea as to what was its nature. But his present lot was so strange, his position so isolated, that, even as a fearless man, he felt he was justified in adopting some nice precautions against the possibility of midnight surprises.

Now it occurred to him that upon that single night only of his arrival had he enjoyed immunity from this shadowy sense of unseen company in his room; and he could not fail to remember that upon that occasion alone had the shutters of the broad window been closed and fastened. Ever since, by his own order, had they remained open. Moreover, as was his custom, he slept with a lattice flung wide to the inpour of fresh cold air.

Certainly to assume that any midnight visitor could have taken advantage of this so far as to enter, by way of ladder or creeper, and prowl about his chamber without immediately awakening him, seemed a ridiculous supposition. Yet, as a wise man, it would perhaps be as well for the future to obviate, by closing the shutters, the necessity of suffering an apprehension so far-fetched.

“Whimple,” said he, as the man brought the bucket wearily back to the well-side—“why, when I first came, did you so protest against my flinging open the shutters of my bedroom?”

The servant hesitated, then stammered:

“I—I thought it wisest, sir. The—the house is lonely, and the neighbourhood harbours some rogues, I fear.”

“Such as him you are on speaking terms with? Well, I have altered my mind. For the future, close them—you understand?”

For the life of him he could not treat the man with even an assumption of confidence. He would have thought the revocation of his order received with unmistakable relief, had he not been so steeped in suspicion of all things.

He was bending to his work again, when a voice hailing him from over the garden hedge made him start and turn round.

“Hi! Are you Squire Tuke?”

“At your service,” said he, and went forward.

A little man seated on a great horse was there in the drive—a pert cocksparrow knowingly-attired and bristling with pride of raiment. He had a comical small face, very pale, and his hat was of the last-approved shade of grey, with a broad ribbon of black and a broader buckle about it.

He looked a mere handy-dandy snip; though he had in fact at that time come of age some five years; but his whimsical self-sufficiency not the fly on the bull’s horn could have outdone.

He raised his hat in a very courtly manner as the other approached.

“I have to apologize,” he said, “for this unceremonious greetin’.”

His voice was high and restive, as if it were not yet quite broken in.

“By no means,” said Mr. Tuke. “You are Sir David Blythewood, I presume?”

The manling had by this time dismounted. He reached a hand over the hedge—a little gloved paw, small as a girl’s—and offered it in grasp to the gentleman.

“I ask the honour of your acquaintance,” said he. “My sister owes her life to you, I hear. ’Twas an admirable rescue, and more than her deserts.”

He grinned all over his little face.

“She was pryin’, Mr. Tuke—she was pryin’. She didn’t let that cat out of the bag, I’ll warrant. Ever since your comin’ she’d been eatin’ her heart out to get a glimpse of the lord of Wastelands, as they call you.”

“Indeed? I am happy to interest Miss Blythewood. She suffers no hurt from her mishap, I hope?”

“Rest you, rest you. The hurt’s to her vanity, by Gad. ’Twas rich for her to make her bow wrong end up. She’s Miss Royston—my half-sister; and a devilish responsible legacy, by the token. She keeps house for me. I say, you’ll let us be acquainted. D’you breed from your own game-eggs? There’s a pit at Stockbridge kept by old Pollack of the inn. I’ve a duckwing cockerel, March sittin’ would torment ye;—hackles as gold as his mettle. Come Yule, I’ll back him, fifty pounds a side, against the bloodiest rooster you can show.”

So he ran on. His naïve self-importance, half-nullified by the frankness of his boyish confidence, was like a gush of sweet air through the enwrapping gloom of the other’s surroundings.

“We’ll see,” said Mr. Tuke, with a smile—“we’ll see. At present, as you may observe, I’ve my work cut out here for months.”

Sir David craned his neck over the hedge.

“It’s a wilderness, good truth,” said he. “Is that Whimple? He’s a spine-broke artichoke, he is, with a worm at his root. What’s he doin’ there? Sure that’s the hole that Angel near sunk into. You ain’t never—why, you ain’t never dippin’ for that chain of hers?”

“We are, though.”

The youngling turned to him with a grin and a titter.

“It’s a shame, by cock,” said he. “I ought to have sent a message, but clean forgot. You may save yourself the trouble. She had left it at home all the time.”

Mr. Tuke, all considered, received this belated information very handsomely.

“Then I have laboured like Jacob,” said he. “But my second term is yet to serve.”

Sir David chuckled.

“Rachel was a prodigious coquette,” he said. “Well, Mr. Tuke, I’m forgettin’ my manners keepin’ you talkin’ here.”

“No, no. Come to the house.”

He was reluctant to part with the bright little dandy; but the latter was already in the saddle.

“Can’t,” he chirped. “I’ve an appointment at four, and Angel ’ll be faintin’ to hear tell of every word you’ve spoke. I say—I’ll draw the bow on that Jacob. You must come over to my place, and let’s be friends.”

The lord of Wastelands walked with him to the gate, and bid him a cheery good-speed as he cantered away.

He was dipping out of sight, when a long man, with a rod over his shoulder, came past up the road, and leered sourly as he went by at the baronet.

“Come,” thought the gentleman, “I’ve seen you once before. What do you fish for in these dry beds, my friend?”

He waited until the man had vanished over the hill. The latter had looked back once on his way, and seeing himself observed, had gone forward with no further token of inquisitiveness.

Mr. Tuke returned to his house, in a pleasantly preoccupied frame of mind. He was both cheered and amused over the meeting with his lively neighbour, and promised himself a substantial dividend of fun out of that investment in the other’s friendship. He called to Whimple, as he passed, that he should need him no longer, and so went by to his front door, and, on the threshold, met Darda.

At once, some impulse of the moment drove him to look full in her face and to say: “What is the Lake of Wine?”

The girl backed from him, and stared a breathless instant with round eyes of wonder. Then she gave a small soft laugh, and, twining her fingers together, set her lips chilly like frosted rosebuds shrunk from opening to a north-easter.

“Darda,” he said, “will you not tell me? I think you don’t know what is the Lake of Wine, or where it is?”

“I know—I know!” she cried suddenly—“but what have you done that I should tell you?”—and, with a changeling screech, she sprang past him and vanished up the drive.

CHAPTER XI.

“A man to see you, sir.”

“His name?”

“’Tis Richard Breeds, sir, of the ‘Dog and Duck.’”

“Breeds?”

“The landlord, sir.”

“What does he want?”

For answer, Dennis wriggled his shoulders, with a scared look.

“You don’t know, of course. Tell him to wait me in the hall.”

A few minutes later Mr. Tuke descended the stairs, and, happening to be in slippered feet, walked without sound in search of his visitor, whom, curiously, he came upon comprehensively examining the fastenings of the oaken shutters, his bullet-head bent low. At a cough the man started erect, and, gasping with embarrassment, ducked an awkward bow to the master of the house.

“They are of good, tough wrought-iron,” said the latter grimly.

“So I see, sir. I was takin’ a hint for my own little place with all respect. I’m lonely situated, too.”

He lied, of course, with scarcely professional ease. He was a short, fleshy man, with an unwholesome damp skin like veal, and rum-buds over his face in patches, as if he were stricken with a plague—which, indeed, he was, of a bibulous order. His manner was very nervous and self-depreciatory, and the only accent of character that marked his tumid physiognomy was in the expression of his ratty and restless little eyes.

Mr. Tuke took his measure during a moment of silence that was obviously disconcerting to him.

“Now, sir,” said the first, at length. “What is your business?”

“I called, your honour, to axe if I could supply your honour with liquor, milk, eggs and garden produce. I keep the ‘Dog and Duck’ on the Stockbridge road, and maybe, I thought, ’twould be handier to your honour and more reasonable-like to deal at a half-way house.”

“That depends. I leave these matters to my servant, who does his catering, I believe, in the village. I know your house of call, and have marked one or two of the visitors you entertain.”

“Maybe, sir, maybe. It’s not my business, now is it, to put every gentleman as demands a measure of ale through his catechism?”

“That seems an odd answer. Did I make any reflections? Scarcely, I think. The law takes means to deal with rogues without consulting the prejudices of landlords.”

The visitor looked very ill at ease. Clearly the conversation had taken a turn entirely unexpected by him.

“Your honour’s perfectly right,” he said, pressing his damp hands together. “Yet the law gives us no licence to refuse a customer for the reason we don’t like his looks.”

Eliciting no response—“I’m a peaceable man,” he went on, with some anguish of protest. “Give me bowl and pipe and a snug ingle-corner, and Fortin may set her cap at me, and die a old maid despite. But ain’t it hard, sir—now ain’t it hard that I’m to be coloured with the reputation of them as takes shelter under my roof and find my character in question for the mere contact?”

“You enlarge greatly upon a hint,” said Mr. Tuke. “I understand, then, that you have unwelcome guests to entertain?”

Mr. Breeds winced almost imperceptibly; but his eyes took a glint of cunning.

“I don’t say that,” said he. “I speak on general premises, as they calls ’em, and on behalf o’ the fraternity. Mr. Brander—him you may a’ seen—is to my knowledge a scholard and an angler; which is not, by your honour’s favour, indictable offences—no, not either of ’em.”

“Assuredly. And that other gentleman, with the beetroot face and venerable white hair?”

The landlord sucked his lips together, in an absurd affectation of perplexity.

“Oh, him!” he cried suddenly and jovially. “That’s Mr. Fern, that is—a traveller, from abroad, come on a tower through the old country.”

Then, in the same breath, he went on deprecatingly, with a ludicrous decline of spirit:

“It’s all force the favour and take the blame with us, sir. I’m a peaceable soul that loves a pot, and circumstances conspire to upset me.”

Mr. Tuke looked at the man keenly. Somehow the latter seemed in travail with that he could not, or would not, give expression to. His hands shook, and beads of leaden perspiration stood on his forehead. By and by he glanced stealthily at the other, and went flaccid to see himself under scrutiny.

“Mr. Tuke—your honour,” said he, in a hoarse, vibrative voice, “I weren’t never fitted to be a landlord—that’s the solemn truth. A man as keeps a inn stands balanced between his custom and his conscience; and then comes an extry pot and bowls him off of his legs. Give me your word to compensate me agen the loss, and I’ll shut up the ‘Dog and Duck’ to-morrow and set the place a-fire.”

He said it in a tentative, apologetic way, and was quite ready to join in the other’s cackle of merriment over the suggestion.

“No, no, my friend,” said Mr. Tuke. “I’ve plenty on my conscience without the guardianship of a scrupulous innkeeper.”

Then he added sternly:

“You’ve said much or little, but enough. Dree your pothouse weird, my friend; and take the consequences if you knowingly harbour law-breakers. We’ve talked round the subject; and now you can hardly expect me, upon my soul, to fall in with your offer of a half-way market.”

“Very well, sir,” said the landlord, chapfallen; and, “Bear in mind, Mr. Breeds,” said the other, “that to be caught examining a householder’s shutters is scarcely a recommendation to his favour.”

He saw the fellow off the premises—marked his going till he was well out of sight; then returned to the hall and pondered the interview.

This seemed to him, as regarded the visitor’s share in it, a confirmation of his suspicions that there was a certain mystery toward which he was the indefinite subject and centre. More—it convinced him that if mischief of any sort was somewhere in process of incubation the tavern of which Mr. Breeds was landlord was the place most likely to contain the egg.

Now, as a man who had once already taken his own life in hand, he was not greatly sensitive to alarms that might have unnerved persons of a more precise conduct. Indeed, in the tasteless monotony of his present days, he would have welcomed, perhaps, the necessity of some vigorous action justly undertaken on his own behalf. But it was this blind search for a clue to the intangible—this turning round and round in a vain effort to grasp a chimera, that at first worried and depressed him.

If he could only have received certain confirmation of his surmises that some rascal intrigue was afoot; if in all his little world there had been a single soul he could trust and depend upon, his course would have been easier. As it was, how did the case stand? A very desert loneliness had begotten in him already a distrust of his neighbours, of whom, undoubtedly, were a few of shady visage and equipment. But, here, surely every ale-house had its personnel of loafers and idle rogues; and it seemed monstrous to assume that in broad day, within call, as it were, of a considerable village, a plot—of which a private gentleman, making out life meagrely in a near empty house, was the object—could be hatching at his very door.

That was so; yet his reckoning must include those two enigmatical visitors, the professed end of each of which was far from being, he felt positive, its real one; and must include Mr. Joseph Corby’s pregnant allusions—to the crazed girl—to some unknown quantity with a fanciful title.

Considering all this from each and every aspect, he did so work himself up to a state of savage irritation over the intolerable strain it entailed upon a mind prone to pre-occupation in less morbid matters, that he must have in the unfortunate Whimple and ease upon him his burden of annoyance.

“Tell me,” said he. “Do you know anything of this man Breeds by reputation?”

“I know—yes, sir; I have heard of him.”

“Oh! for heaven’s sake, man, give a straightforward answer for once. I ask you what is his reputation?”

“Indeed, sir, it is none of the best; though I have heard nought immediately to his discredit.”

“Again and again. Isn’t it a mere slander to impute evil and back from specifying it? What is he charged with?”

“Nothing, but that his house is the resort of topers and padding gentry.”

“And is it on that account you make a sealed coffin of ‘Delsrop’ o’ nights and would have me suffocate in my bedroom?”

The servant showed a distressed hesitation.

“Is it, I say?” persisted his master.

“Yes, sir—indeed—that is—oh, sir! ’tis an old habit with me. The house is isolated—dark; it lies in the shadow—my God! in what a shadow.”

Mr. Tuke stared in positive amazement. Was the fellow crazed like his sister? A pretty thing if he should discover himself the keeper of a private lunatic asylum.

“Control your emotions,” he said coolly. Whimple’s lips were trembling. The man had permitted himself an outburst of which for hours he would feel the effects.

“I would ask you,” said Mr. Tuke, with an irrepressible little sneer—“if the question is unexciting—when did the present owner of the ‘Dog and Duck’ come into possession?”

“’Twas last Martinmas, sir. The tavern then had been long to let. ’Twas last Martinmas.”

“And whence did he come? Do you know?”

“No, sir. I don’t know.”

“Now, Mr. Whimple, I want to ask you another question. Have you any reason to understand what is implied by the Lake of Wine?”

If he had accused the man of murder, the latter could not have gone a more ghastly white, or have more by his expression associated himself with that he disowned. He even staggered a little where he stood; and it was painful to witness his sick effort at self-control.

“None whatever?” echoed Mr. Tuke, closely scrutinizing the servant’s face, and interpreting the tortured answer from the motion of his lips.

“Your reply,” he went on, biting as acid, “is convincing, of course. Why should you know? I don’t myself, and I am as much interested in the matter as you, maybe. I only asked, because I seek the clue to a mystery that vents itself in strange visits, and secret interviews, and unaccountable sounds at night. Then, too, there is a footprint on the flower-bed under the hall-window this morning; but what of that when I have a caretaker so zealous and so scrupulous? Only, I take some amusement out of puzzles; but I am impatient, and very apt, at the last, to cut a knot that bothers me with a bullet. You can go.”

He had to repeat his permission before the servant seemed to understand and to gather the nerve to retreat. But, the moment he was vanished, the baronet clapped his hand on the table, with an oath.

“The fellow is in the league against me, whatever it is!” he cried in inward fierceness; and his soul rejoiced that at last it had some tangible justification for its innate antipathy to the man.

It was patent that this Lake of Wine was the clue to the riddle and the pass-word of the conspirators. But with the last how deeply was the caretaker involved; and to what extent was he to be depended on in the performance of his nightly services? Probably his officiousness in that respect was employed as a blind. Not probably was his habitual nervousness assumed. In greatest likelihood he was in weak process of corruption—one hand held to his duty, the other to his interest; and, if this were so, no doubt was as to which way his constitutional depravity would eventually decide him to incline.

Then would it be wise to here and now give him short shrift of notice, and so rid the house of an incubus and an embarrassment? Scarcely; for so should he—Robert Tuke—not only advertise himself in apprehension of his surroundings, whereby his enemies might be tempted to a bolder policy; but he should drive from his camp an informer, whose uses, so long as he assumed himself undetected, must all be for his intended victim.

No; the fellow must stay for the present, and be treated with a show of consideration, too; else would mistrust awakened in him greatly complicate the situation.

It was a maddening hotch-potch of confusion; the more so as all this fabric of suspicion, being builded on conjecture, might at any moment resolve itself into thin air.

CHAPTER XII.

Mr. Tuke was arrayed resplendent, cap-à-pie. His personal baggage had reached him from London, and he felt human, in the sense of the beast of civilization, once more. If his household was as yet unenlarged and his halls filled with little but echoes, he had at least a retiring chamber worthy of the most exquisite refinements of a Georgian toilet.

It was four o’clock of a sunny afternoon as he descended the stairs, pulling on his gloves; for he was for a little party at “Chatters,” to meet a neighbour or so, and Whimple held his horse at the door.

Taking him altogether, he was a handsome and amiable-looking gentleman, and manly withal; nor did his subscription to the dandyism of the day exhibit exaggeration or tastelessness. It is true his hair, now surmounted by the high-crowned beaver hat of the period, was “craped,” as the fashion-books would say, over his forehead, and liberally anointed with some lustrous oil; but cleanliness in this respect would have then been considered the merest affectation of eccentricity. For the rest, his long riding-coat, of many capes, concealed a toilet of cloth and silk and plaited lawn that, in its mode and finish, bespoke the highest traditions of metropolitan elegance.

So, at any rate, thought Betty Pollack, who was standing in the porch waiting to have a word with his honour.

Betty had driven over with her grandfather in an old taxed-cart, which was now drawn up at the broad end of the drive.

She curtsied like a daffodil to the sun; and Mr. Tuke nodded brightly to her as he buttoned the last ray of his glories into his coat.

“On what errand, my girl?” said he.

“With a humble message from grandfather, your honour,” she answered—“that there’s a battle-royal in his cockpit Saturday forenoon, and will your honour condescend to take a seat?”

“I don’t know. What would you have me do, Betty?”

“Sure, your honour’s the best judge. Cocks will be cocks, I suppose; but ’tis a cruel business to set natural enemies to the scratch, think I; and I’d rather have them in broth, with their necks wrung, when all’s said and done.”

“Then, I won’t come.”

“Oh! but save us! that’s only a woman’s view.”

“It flies with all the force of beauty behind it, my dear.”

The girl shrunk back a little.

“Then I was to ask you,” she said, in a more strained voice, “if you would favor us with your custom in the matter of poultry and butter and garden stuff?”

The gentleman laughed.

“Why, I’ve turned away one with the same offer already,” cried he. Then, seeing her fall back timid, as if at a rebuff: “Could you undertake to supply ’em very fresh?” he said, with mock gravity.

“Oh! rest your honour!” she said eagerly. “We could drive over every day, if needs were.”

“Say, twice a week, Betty. And, if you lack garden stuff, why come none the less, and I’ll take a fruitful pleasure of your visits.”

He caught his stirrup and mounted, and was gone with a smiling nod to the girl. At the entrance to the drive, the old man saluted him respectfully. He pulled up, and was about to exchange a word with the gaffer, when he remembered his deafness, and made as if to proceed on his way. But Grandfather Pollack leaned out of his cart and beckoned him.

“That’s a full-blooded girl,” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “A sweet, neat filly, I calls her.”

Mr. Tuke, feeling the uselessness of speech, nodded after a reserved manner.

“That girl,” said the old man, with a small experimental leer of confidence, “would serve a gentleman well for her beauty and her lovingness.”

He tapped the sleeve of the other’s riding-coat.

“I’m poor, sir, I’m poor and failin’. What a chance if I had a piece o’ goods that costly as to be worth a little annuity to me!”

He received a grunt and scowl of indignation for answer; but it was doubtful if he read their significance.

Mr. Tuke shook off the old clawing touch and rode on. He did not, however, put a short period to the evil by forbidding the ancient rascal then and there his presence. Which of us has the courage to strike at the snake of temptation on the first protrusion of his head from the ground? We want to circumvent him, with that truly human habit of temporizing that so often ends by our getting entangled in the toils.

Now he was righteously incensed; yet as he rode away under the yellowing trees, his thoughts ran warm on the ardent beauty of melancholy that characterized the face of all things about him; and gradually his mood fell from indignation to a tenderness that was almost a passion.

Miss Angela Royston received her preserver very prettily, and thanked him with an exaggerated effusiveness which was the more embarrassing inasmuch as the company, to whom the ultimate revelation of what he had done seemed to present itself as a rather tame anti-climax, had already treated his advent (but this was by way of provincial gaucherie) as if it were an intrusion.

The party was of the nature of a kettle-drum, it appeared, with supper to follow and genteel games. The young baronet was not yet in evidence, being ridden to some kennels across country and late in returning; but there were two or three squireens who obviously desired the moral support of his presence, and, lacking it, had so strenuously beaten about in the waste lands of their brains for ideas, as to have grown as apoplectic and nearly as expressionless as tomatoes. A notable member of the company was the Honourable Mrs. Tatty, whose turban was so immense as to give her the perpetual appearance of tilting up her nose to keep it from falling off; and whose observations invariably drew rein on the brink or pit-edge of profundity, where, when one expected much, they sat down abruptly and refused, as it were, to yield their further confidences to strangers.

This lady was accompanied by a quizzical little person, a cousin from London, who was of the order of those who curry favour with their present, by laughing at their late, company; and a saturnine gentleman, addressed as Captain Luvaine—who said little, and said that as if he grudged it—completed the party.