The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the
public domain.

THE

COTTAGE

ON THE

FELLS

THE COTTAGE ON THE FELLS

By

H. de VERE

STACPOOLE

Author of

“The Crimson Azaleas,”

“The Blue Lagoon,”

etc., etc.

Toronto

HENRY FROWDE

THE COTTAGE ON THE FELLS

CHAPTER I

“WELL,” said Comyns, “I can’t see for the life of me what makes you want to linger on in this benighted hole.”

“There are a great many things in this world we can’t see,” replied Hellier.

They were standing on the pier at Boulogne, the Folkstone boat was just departing, the east wind was blowing, and over the cold, early spring day the clouds drifted, grey as the cygnet’s feather.

Without wishing to paraphrase or parody a famous author, one may say that if one goes over to Boulogne and stands long enough on the pier, one will meet, most possibly, someone one knows—probably one’s tailor.

Hellier had come over to Boulogne a fortnight ago to recruit from an attack of influenza; he was a briefless barrister, with two hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own; his chambers were in Clifford’s Inn, and he had a taste for that side of life which lends itself to romantic literature.

The novels of Gaboriau, absorbed as a boy, had given him his first impetus towards the law.

There is no manner of doubt in the world that housebreaking is the most romantic of the professions; after housebreaking, the profession that helps the housebreaker to escape the law.

A great criminal lawyer, with his armful of briefs, was the pictured objective towards which Richard Hellier had set his face; he had been called to the Bar eighteen months now, and his only client up to this had been a dog thief (item, convicted).

“I suppose there are,” replied Comyns, “but there’s one thing I can, the gangway is going, so long—”

He dashed down the gangway, the hawsers were cast off, and the screw churned the steel grey waters of the harbour.

Hellier stood with his hands in his overcoat pockets, watching the boat as she passed from sight, and wishing that he was Comyns.

Comyns was handsome, Comyns was wealthy. His father made bicycle lamps and motor horns in Wolverhampton, his grandfather had been a platelayer. He belonged to one of those families that go up in the world. Hellier belonged to one of the families that go down. When Comyns’ grandfather had been laying plate, Hellier’s had been eating off it. But the plate of the Helliers’ had vanished as utterly as their past, and of all the story there remained a single punch ladle, a speechless, yet eloquent witness, to tell of the good times gone.

Hellier was a middle-sized man, and plain. Dark, clean-shaved, pre-eminently a gentleman. Just as a rose is a rose, or a pansy a pansy.

Let the handsome and superficial Comyns walk with him down the street, and out of a hundred and one women a hundred would have looked with appreciation on the motor horn merchant’s son, but the hundred and first would have looked with interest at Hellier.

He turned from contemplation of the harbour and came back down the pier slowly, breathing the keen east wind and wishing he was Comyns.

He was in love for the first time in his life, and he was taking it badly. He was only thirty-three years of age, yet he was already summing up his life, looking back at his past, telling himself that had he not fooled away his time in the by-ways of literature and stuck to the hard high road of life, he might now have been well-to-do, like Comyns.

It is only when a man is really in love that he sees the defects in himself and his position, sees them with a preternatural and startling vividness—if he is a man.

So Hellier wished he was Comyns, utterly ignorant of the fact that if some magician had converted him into the object of his admiration, the woman he loved would not have looked at him twice.

He had only known her ten days. Her name was Mademoiselle Cécile Lefarge, he had met her accidently at the Hotel des Bains, and had fallen in love with her on sight.

When a man falls in love with a woman on sight, it is through his desires that love comes to him. Her body takes possession of his mind. This kind of love may fade away or endure for ever; as a rule it is unfortunate, and fades; sometimes it becomes converted into hatred, when the lover, after marriage, has discovered how the flesh has betrayed him, what a base soul beauty has palmed off on him, wrapped in an attractive wrapper.

A bad bargain in love. Those five words contain in them the plot and essence of most of the tragedies in life.

Cécile Lefarge was twenty-eight, and looked, perhaps, twenty-six. Pale, of medium height, voluptuously formed, dark, with blindish-looking violet grey eyes, serious-looking as a priestess of Aphrodite, yet with a nun-like spirituality, she was a woman to drive a sensualist mad with desire, a woman to inspire the dreams of a poet or a saint.

This was the woman who had captured Hellier, heart, soul and body; and the poignant, the terrible thing in his case, was the fact that he knew his passion was partly returned, that he had awakened in this being, that chance had caused to stray across his life, that something, that magnetic response, that deep, vague interest, which in a woman’s mind marks the beginning of love. That he had done this, but yet that something stood in the way.

The girl was staying at the Hotel des Bains with her aunt, Madame de Warens, a pale-faced, mild and most practicable old lady.

They had a suite of rooms, and were evidently very well-to-do people in a worldly way. They had lived at the hotel for three years, they had no relations in the visible universe, and what friendships they made were chance friendships.

Hellier had not done badly, for he had gained the confidence of old Madame de Warens, as well as the attention of her niece, and it was mainly from the old lady’s rambling conversations that he had gained his knowledge of their habits and their past. Also the hint of some mysterious cloud in that past, whose shadow still hung over them, some barrier that fate had slidden between them and society, causing them to lead this aimless hotel life, divorced from friends and relations.

CHAPTER II

HE came through the town and up the Grand Rue.

When he reached the ramparts he took a seat, despite the nipping east wind.

He looked at his watch.

Just about this hour every day it was the custom of Madame de Warens and her niece to take a walk on the ramparts.

It seemed the only fixed thing, except meals, in their desolate lives, this walk every day on the ramparts.

Hellier would meet them there. It was a sort of tacit appointment. No person, unless they were curiously blind, could fail to see that it was a rendezvous. The women came and the young man came and walked with them up and down on this desolate place for half an hour or so, talked about everything and nothing, returning to the hotel where he left them, perhaps not to see them again till the following day.

This afternoon they were late. Hellier looked at his watch again, it was ten minutes past the time of the usual meeting. He was rising to return, with a desolate feeling at the heart, when, far off, coming towards him, he saw the figure of a girl. It was Mademoiselle Lefarge, and she was alone!

“My aunt was afraid of the east wind,” said the girl. “I came because I thought you possibly might be here and waiting for us; we have got so into the habit of meeting you that really it was like an appointment—your society in this desolate place has become quite one of our pleasures,” she said, “and it is bad to keep a friend who has given one pleasure waiting in the cold east wind.”

This was plunging into the middle of things; she spoke with the slightest foreign accent, and Hellier, an Englishman used to the convention-bound female, could not find words, or thoughts, to reply to her with for a moment.

It was not an awkward silence. They paused for a moment and looked over the rampart wall at the peaceful country, just tinged by the early spring, trees and fields, belfries and far-off hamlets, all under a sky sad coloured and beautiful, like that sky which dwells for ever over the “Avenue near Middleharnis.”

As they gazed, without speaking, the man was telling the woman that he loved her, and the woman was telling the man that she cared for him.

It came quite naturally, when he took her hand and held it.

“I have wanted to tell you for a long time,” he said.

She sighed, but she let him hold her hand.

Then she said, as if in answer to some question.

“It can never be.”

“I love you,” he said, speaking in a plain, matter-of-fact tone, that would have told little to a stander-by of the passion that was consuming him. “You have come into my life suddenly, and if I lose you, if you leave me, I will be for ever desolate—dear friend.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“It can never be.”

There was a fatality, a hopelessness in her voice, that told him that these words were no idle woman’s words. It could never be. Never could he hold her in his arms as his own, never possess her. Paradise lay before him, yet he could never enter in.

“Why?”

“Come,” said she, “and I will show you.”

CHAPTER III

THEY left the ramparts and returned to the hotel. She left him in the hall for a moment, and then returned, and asked him to follow her.

He followed her to a door on the first floor landing; she opened it, and led him into a sitting-room, where in an armchair beside a blazing wood fire sat old Madame de Warens muffled up in a light shawl, with a novel open upon her lap, asleep.

It was no ordinary hotel sitting-room, this daintily upholstered room. It had, in fact, been entirely redecorated by a Parisian firm three years before, when the two women had decided to take up their quarters for good at the hotel.

The old lady by the fire awoke with a start when she heard them enter, welcomed Hellier with a little old-fashioned bow, and relapsed into her chair, whilst the girl, laying her gloves, which she had drawn off, upon the table, went to a door leading into another room, opened it, and motioned the young man to follow her.

He followed her into a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. On the dressing-table lay silver hair brushes and all the odds and ends of a woman’s toilet, the little bed stood virginal-looking and white as snow, a row of tiny boots and shoes stood by one wall.

On a table, in a corner near the bed, stood something dismal and dark.

Something veiled with crêpe. The girl went to this object and removed the covering. She disclosed a bust.

The marble bust of a man. A marvellous piece of work.

A man of middle age with a pointed beard. A jolly-looking man, a forceful face and a lovable face, roguish a bit, with that old Gallic spirit that makes fun in public of the things that Englishmen laugh over in private, yet benevolent.

The face of a man who begins life as a delightful companion, and ends it as a delightful grandfather.

Looking at him one would say, “He might act foolishly, but he could do no real wrong, I would trust him with my last shilling—”

“He was my father,” said the girl, as Hellier gazed upon the marble, that, under the chisel of some masterhand, spoke, laughed and diffused jollity around it.

“He was my father and he was a murderer—so the world says.”

Hellier turned slightly aside and placed his hand to the side of his head; he could not speak.

The shocking statement was made in such a calm voice. A calmness that spoke of what suffering endured, what shame, what ruin.

She arranged the dismal crêpe around the joyous thing.

Then she turned to lead him back to the sitting-room, and as she turned, unable to speak, unable even to think what to say, he took her hand and pressed it.

“I know,” she replied.

He followed her into the sitting-room, and quite regardless of the old lady by the fire, she led him to one of the windows.

Merridew’s library lay opposite, and as they stood and she talked to him they watched the people entering the shop and the people walking on the pavement.

“It was eight years ago,” she said. “I have not changed my name—you must have heard of the case. It was the Lefarge case—ah no?” She paused for a moment, “eight years ago. I cannot tell you the details, but it was in the spring. An artist made that bust of my dear father. The artist’s name was Müller; he had the face of a demon. I saw him twice, and his face still haunts my dreams. I see it now before me as I talk to you. It was a pale face, a weary face, the face of a man who has known all evil.

“He was a great artist, his name was Müller, a German, who lived in the Quartier Latin. He was known as the madman. My dear father allowed him to make that bust, gave him sittings, twice invited him to our house.

“When I saw this awful man,” went on the girl, her voice sinking lower, “I felt as though I had seen evil itself. I implored my father to have nothing to do with him. He laughed. He had no fear of evil. He was all good.

“He called at Müller’s studio one day; listen to me, my friend, for this is what the world says, he called at Müller’s studio one day and murdered him.

“Listen to me, he murdered him, disappeared, and was never seen again. He decapitated Müller, and the headless body was found in the studio. That is what the world says. But he did not do it, I know, for I feel it here where I place my hand.”

She placed her little hand, not to her side, but towards the centre of the breast, where the heart really lies.

“It is terrible,” murmured Hellier.

“Terrible—oh, you cannot think!—and now you know why it can never be.”

“If his innocence were proved?” asked he.

“Ah, then—,” she replied.

Hellier took her hand and held it in both of his.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I have seen much of life and men, I do not say it to please you or comfort you, but the face you have shown me is a face incapable of—that. If I could stake my life, and if it were possible for me to stake it upon your father’s innocence, I would do so. I am a member of the English Bar; after what you have told me of the barrier between us, a barrier which is no barrier to me, I will do all that in me lies to remove it. Nothing may come of my efforts, everything may. When a man works from love he goes doubly armed. Tell me, my friend, where I can learn the details of your trouble, not from your lips, for that would be too painful—have you no papers—”

“I have the dossier of the case,” replied Mademoiselle Lefarge. “I will place it in your hands; I have belief in you. When I first saw you, something drew me towards you, perhaps it was the spirit of my father—for I feel that he is no more—perhaps it was his spirit pointing out to me his avenger, perhaps—” She paused.

“Yes,” said Hellier.

“Perhaps,” she said, “it was an instinct that told me that some day—”

“Yes.”

“Some day, I should love you.”

The next afternoon Hellier returned to London.

CHAPTER IV

IT was in the year 1600, or thereabouts, that the family of Gyde first took its place in the history of Cumberland.

A family may be likened to a thistle; plant it here or there, and, if left, it grows and flourishes, it casts its spores, like thistle-down on the wind of chance, and the spores blown here or there fade or flourish, as the case may be.

The wind of chance in the year 1600, blew Sir John Gyde to the wilds of Cumberland, from the original home of the family in Pembrokeshire.

How splendidly they built in those old days may still be seen in the house he made for himself.

Sir John was a gentleman of a very old school; had he lived in the present day, and did the law take cognizance of his pleasantries and way of life, he would have found himself, within twenty-four hours, in the gaol of Carlisle, and he would have been hanged, to a certainty, after the lapse of three clear Sundays following his conviction at the next assizes.

In 1600, however, he was respected with that unalloyed respect which fear of a bloody-minded and powerful scoundrel inspired in the medieval mind.

For Cumberland, in 1600, was medieval to the core, and the core is tinged, though ever so slightly, with medievalism still.

Sir John Gyde’s spirits, wine and tobacco, never paid duty, the smugglers of Ravenglass knew why. He was the friend and protector of all lawless scoundrels who put money in his pocket, and he hanged and imprisoned all backsliders who didn’t. He had seduced other men’s wives, betrayed other men’s daughters, he had killed three men in duel with his red right hand, and he was a justice of the peace. Throstle Hall was the name of the house he had built for himself, and Throstle Hall it remains to this day, a formidable old pile, standing close up to the Fells of Blencarn like an ancient malefactor, miraculously preserved for our inspection; walls twenty-feet thick, a courtyard full of echoes, dungeon-like cellars, interminable passages, intricate, like the convolutions of a thief’s brain; little secret rooms, a picture gallery, where the dead and gone Gydes stand still, despite the rigor of death, confessing their sins by the expressions on their faces; their loves, their hates, and, the fact, despite the beauty peeping here and there from the gloom of a dusty canvas, that the Gydes were a sinister race.

A scarlet thread ran through the history of the family; there was something appalling in the rapidity that marked the history of their succession. Death had had a lot of dealings with the Gydes, and the Gydes had dealt largely with death.

Sir Lionel Gyde had killed Sir Thomas Fiennes in a duel, and had been killed in turn by Sir Thomas’s son. He stands, still, in effigy, does Sir Lionel, dressed in faded violet velvet and Mechlin lace, staring from the canvas straight before him, at the poplar trees waving in the wind before the gallery windows. He has every point that goes to the making of a handsome and debonair cavalier, but he has the pale blue eyes of a murderer.

Near him there is a canvas blackened out. It has a history not to be repeated. Beyond, another canvas exhibits a portly old gentleman. “Fox hunter” is written upon his face across “Port wine,” and that was his history.

They were not all bad, the Gydes; the scarlet thread only appeared in the family texture here and there, but when it did appear it was vivid.

The fortunes of the family had been varied; the estates had been confiscated once and given back, it had cast spores as far as London, where Aldermanic Gydes had bloomed with great splendour.

In the Overend and Gurney business the family had, as nearly as possible, come to ruin; it was saved only by the genius of finance displayed by the present Sir Anthony Gyde’s father.

When Sir Anthony, the man we have to deal with in this extraordinary story, came to his own, he found himself the possessor of half a million of money—a poor enough heritage in these days—Throstle Hall in Cumberland, a house in Piccadilly, and the reputation of being a fool.

He had gained the reputation at Christ Church.

The reputations gained and discarded at Oxford would make a very quaint museum, could they be preserved, labelled and classified, and when plain Anthony Gyde became Sir Anthony, and succeeded to the banking business, founded by his grandfather, he left his reputation behind him at the University in more senses than one.

The thing was as surprising as the bursting of a dragon fly from its sheath.

It was in November that the University lost an undergraduate, noted chiefly for a handsome face, effeminacy and a taste for collecting first editions.

In the following January, Lombard Street became aware of a new hand in the game of finance.

As a matter of fact Oxford had let loose, without knowing it (as she sometimes does), a very great genius.

The young Sir Anthony had the gift of seeing the inwardness of a thing; he had the gift of knowing what was going to appreciate; he had a nose that could scent rotten security through all the rose leaves and figments heaped upon it by the wiliest promoters of companies.

He would have succeeded as a small tradesman in a country town, but he never would have made such a success as he did, with half a million of money at his back, good credit and a hand in the European treacle-pot.

He was twenty-two when he succeeded to the banking business, and he was forty-four at the date of this story. Twenty years, and he had done a great deal in twenty years. He had made himself a name in finance, not so great as the name of Rothschild or Schwab, but equally as great as Hirsch.

He had a house in the Avenue Malakoff, in Paris, as well as his house in London. Paris and London were the two foci of his business orbit.

It is impossible for an ordinary person to estimate the power and influence that lie in the hands of a man like Sir Anthony Gyde; millions do not, of a necessity, confer power upon their possessor, except the power of spending; but a man of genius, with seven million in cash and credit at his elbow, can command events.

Of the private life of this banker-millionaire, the least said the better. He was a patron of Art, he was many things besides. As a man of the world, that is to say, a man capable of fighting the world, he was all but flawless.

He had one weak point, his temper. He rarely lost his temper, but when he did, he quite lost control of himself and a demon, carefully hidden at all other times, arose and spoke and acted.

A terrible and familiar spirit.

When under its influence the man was appalling.

CHAPTER V

STANDING on Gamblesby Fell you can see Throstle Hall away to the right, its gables and the smoke of its chimneys above the tall elm trees, and the great sweep of park surrounding it.

Gazing straight before one the eye travels over pasture-land and corn-field, farm and village, to the far dim valley of the Eden beyond, and far beyond, the hills of Cumberland stand like the ramparts of a world dominated by the Saddle Back.

Carlisle to the right, twenty miles away, shows a tracery of smoke against the sky.

The pasture-land and the corn-fields come right up to the fell foot, where they cease suddenly, as though a line had been drawn between civilization and desolation.

The whole sky-line of the fells is unbroken by a tree; here and there, on the fell sides, you may come across a clump of stunted firs, a spread of bushes, a larch or two, but on the upper land nothing may grow but the short fell grass, and here and there, in the shelter of a hollow, a few whortle bushes. The reason of this desolation is the helm wind.

The helm wind has never been explained. Of nights in Blencarn, or Skirwith, or any of the villages in the plain below, the villagers, waking from their sleep, hear a roar like the roar of an express train. It is the helm wind.

Next morning the trees are in torment; in the plain below a high gale is blowing, and, looking up at the fells, you see above them, ruled upon the sky, a bar of cloud. It is the helm bar, under it the wind comes rushing. When it is high, nothing can withstand its force on the fell top; it will blow a farm cart away like a feather; the horned and black-faced fell sheep lie down before it.

One afternoon towards the end of March a man on a big black horse came riding through the little village of Blencarn.

He was a middle-sized man, dark, with a Vandyke beard; he wore glasses, and he rode as though half the countryside belonged to him, which, in fact, it did.

A farmer, leaning over his gate, touched his hat to the passer-by, watched him turn a corner, and then, turning, called out to a man working in a field beyond.

“Bill!”

“Ay.”

“Gyde’s back.”

“I seed’n.”

That was all, but the tones of the men’s voices spoke volumes.

Twice a year or so, once for the shooting in the autumn, and again in spring, as a rule, Sir Anthony Gyde came down to Throstle Hall, bringing with him his French valet, his cook, and in the autumn half a dozen friends.

He was a good landlord, and open-handed enough, but he had never gained the esteem of the country folks; they touched their hats to him, but they called him a stracklin.[^[1]]

[1]. A bad un.

Certain incidents of his youth lingered in their memory. In the country the past dies slowly; if you leave a reputation there to-day, you will find it there ten years hence, not much the worse for the wear.

Leaving Blencarn, Sir Anthony struck over the lower fells; he did not trouble about roads or gates, when he met with a wall of loose stones he put his horse at it, and the horse, an Irish hunter, tipped it with his fore hoofs and passed over.

On Gamblesby Fell he drew rein. It was a still grey day; there was scarcely a sound on the breeze; one could hear the call of a shepherd, the bark of his dog, and, far away, the drumming sound of driven sheep.

The master of millions sat with the reins hanging loose upon his horse’s neck, gazing at the scene before him. Then, touching his horse with the spur, he resumed his way, making towards the plain and home.

He had only come down from London the day before, and he intended returning on the morrow; he had spent the day in going over the estate, and he intended passing the evening in consultation with his land-agent, Gristlethwaite.

Two miles from home he took a short cut, and struck across the fields into a very strange and desolate place.

Here, in a large meadow, stands Long Meg, and here recline her daughters.

They are a weird group, even by daylight, more so just now, for the dusk was beginning to fall.

Long Meg is just a huge stone, standing erect and lonely, the relic of some forgotten religion; her daughters, sixty or more, lie before her in a circle. They are boulders, seen by daylight; but in the dusk, they are anything your fancy wills. Hooded women, for choice, in all positions; some crouched as if in prayer, some recumbent, some erect. He was passing these things, which he had known from his childhood, when, amidst them, and almost like one of them, he perceived a form seated on a camp stool.

It was the form of a man wearing a broad-brimmed hat.

Now, what presentiment or curiosity stirred the mind of Sir Anthony Gyde will never be known, but on perceiving this figure he reined in, then turned his horse and rode towards it.

The man had been sketching, evidently, for a small easel stood before him, but he seemed to have forgotten his work, forgotten the dusk that had overtaken him, forgotten everything, in some reverie into which he had fallen.

He must have heard the horse’s hoofs approaching, but he did not turn.

“You are sketching the stones?” said Sir Anthony, drawing rein a few feet away.

The man on the camp stool turned and looked from under the brim of his hat at the man on the horse.

There was just enough light to see his face.

It was a face that no man or woman would ever forget, once having seen.

It was not ugly, but it was thin, cadaverous, and under the shadow of the hat brim, in some mysterious way dreadful. Now Sir Anthony Gyde was a man who feared neither ghost nor devil, but when his eyes met the eyes of this man his face fell away, and he sat in his saddle like a man who has suddenly been stricken by age.

He sat for a moment like this, then, wheeling his horse, he put spurs to it and fled, as a man flies for his life.

CHAPTER VI

HE struck into the high road.

A frost had set in with the evening, the road was like metal, and the sound of the horse’s hoofs rang upon the air like the sound of a trip-hammer on anvil.

A detour of several miles brought him to the main avenue gate of the Hall.

A groom was waiting at the steps of the house; he took the horse, which was lathered with foam, and the horseman, without a word, went up the steps.

He entered a large galleried hall, hung with armour and trophies of the chase; a great fire blazed cheerily on the immense hearth, and the soft electric light fell upon the Siberian bear-skins, and lit with the light of another age the quaint figures of the dark oak carvings that were there when Charles was King.

Sir Anthony Gyde passed across the hall, opened a door, and entered the library.

He paced up and down. To-morrow evening at this hour he was due to meet Spain in the person of her Ambassador, and to discuss a loan that had been entrusted to his hands.

But he was not thinking of Spain. For the moment the affairs of the world were nothing to him.

For the moment his mind was driven into communication with his soul.

As he walked up and down, now with his hands in his pockets, now with his arms crossed, his face wore that expression which a face wears when its owner finds himself fronting his fate.

The most terrible experience in life is to meet the past, and to find that it is still living.

What a helpless, vague, futile country seems the past; just a picture, a voice, a dream. Yet what demons live there, active and in being.

Men fear the future, but it is in the past that danger lies. At any moment one of those old vague pictures that lie beyond yesterday, may become animated, and the woman we betrayed in the rose garden, or the brother of the man we killed in the desert, may enter our lives through some unseen door.

Gyde, having paced the room for some ten minutes, rang a bell by the mantel and ordered the servant who answered it to summon Gristlethwaite, the land-agent.

He was a short, thick-set man, Cumbrian by birth, but with little trace of the accent.

Sir Anthony bade him be seated, ordered in cigars and whisky, and plunged into business.

He was once more the level-headed business man, the man who could take in the whole details of the management of a big estate in a few hours, pick holes in it, point out errors, and show as deep a knowledge of detail as though he lived there all the year round.

It was past dinner-time, but he apparently forgot the fact.

After several hours’ conversation and inspection of accounts, Sir Anthony, who was standing with his back to the mantelpiece, suddenly, in the middle of a confabulation about drainage, turned the conversation.

“By the way,” he said, “have you seen an artist fellow about here, man in a broad-brimmed hat—”

“If he’s the man you mean,” replied the agent, “I believe it’s a man with a German name, Klein, an artist. I let him have Skirle Cottage a month ago.”

“Klein,” said the other, in a meditative tone.

“He took it for three months,” went on Gristlethwaite. “Paid in advance. He brought some sticks of furniture from Penrith; he’s an ill-looking chap, but his money is good; half-cracked I should think, coming here this time of year.”

“He didn’t give you any references.”

“No, he paid in advance; I was in two minds about letting him have the place, but since old Lewthwaite’s death it has been lying idle and going to pieces.”

“Did you have any conversation with him?”

“Yes, sir,” said Gristlethwaite, “and his talk struck me as a bit daft. I cannot remember all he said, but I remember he told he me had lived in Paris and had seen you there.”

“What else did he say, try and think. I saw the fellow this evening sketching the stones, and I don’t like the look of him; one never knows in these days what burglars are about.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’s anything of that sort,” replied the other, “and I can’t very well remember the words he said, except that he was reckoned a great artist and that he had come down here to complete his masterpiece.”

Sir Anthony made that movement of the shoulders of a person who, to use a vulgar expression, feels a goose walking upon his grave.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose he has taken the cottage, and we can’t turn him out.”

Then he went on conversing about the drainage, at the exact point where he had left off, as though Klein, the cottage, and the masterpiece were things of no account.

At ten Gristlethwaite departed.

CHAPTER VII

THE next morning’s post brought some fifty or so letters to Throstle Hall, forwarded on from London.

Letters from Russia, letters from Japan, letters from Paris, Constantinople and Madrid; bills, circulars, lottery announcements, touting letters, begging letters, letters from lunatics, financiers, friends, politicians and enemies.

It was a post the receipt of which would have driven an ordinary man to distraction, but it did not distract Sir Anthony Gyde.

He reviewed them sitting up in bed propped up with pillows, a cup of tea by his side and his correspondence spread upon the coverlet.

He sorted them by the simple process of casting them upon the floor, some on the right, some on the left. The ones on the right went to the waste-paper basket, the ones on the left to his secretary. He had nearly finished, when he came upon an envelope thin and narrow, poverty stricken, stamped in the left-hand corner as if in defiance of convention and addressed in a handwriting unique, in that it managed to be both prim and fantastic.

There are letters, men, streets, and numerous other things in this life, that produce upon the mind of the person who sees them for the first time, an impression to be summed up in the one word—Bad.

The letter in Sir Anthony’s hand would have struck you or me, most probably, with an unfavourable impression, but it did not seem to affect him; he was used to all sorts of impressions.

When you possess a fortune to be reckoned in millions, derived from possessions all over the world, you must accommodate your temper to the receipt of more things than rents and felicitations. Gyde, for instance, was accustomed to receive at least one letter in the course of every month, threatening either his life or his reputation; so accustomed, indeed, that he looked forward perhaps with interest to their receipt.

He opened the murderous and mean-looking letter in his hand, and came upon neither skull nor cross-bones, nor coffin, nor threat, but simply,

“Skirle Cottage,

“Blencarn Fell,

“I will be at home this afternoon at three o’clock. I must see you, without fail, at that hour.

“Klein.”

Leloir, the valet, was in the bath-room stropping a razor, when he heard a stifled cry from the bedroom adjoining; running in, he found his master standing on the floor, holding the bedpost with one hand, whilst with the other he held the letter we have just read.

His face was of that peculiar grey we associate with damp walls, mildew, ruin. He was shaking in every member, and the bed shook, as if the terror of the man, or his rage, had diffused itself even into the inanimate.

Leloir withdrew; he had too intimate a knowledge of his master to intrude upon him when he was in one of his takings.

I have said that when Gyde lost himself in one of his attacks of anger, a devil stepped forth and was seen. Speaking less hyperbolically, the man became a ravening beast, and he would as soon have struck Leloir to the ground, or anyone else, indeed, when in one of these attacks, as not.

Now, left to himself, with nothing to vent his anger upon, the attack left him without an explosion, the shaking of the bed ceased, he called his man to him, ordered his bath to be prepared, and whilst this was being done, he examined the envelope in which the letter had arrived.

It bore the postmark “Skirwith,” and in the corner was written the word “Local.”

It had evidently been posted at the village of Skirwith some time on the day before, though the office stamp was half obliterated and quite useless as an indication of the date.

Having examined the envelope carefully, he replaced the letter in it and laid it on the mantelpiece, bathed, dressed, put the letter in his pocket, and then sent for his secretary to the library, where he began dictating letters in answer to the important ones he had received that morning.

But he dictated no reply to the humble-looking epistle post-marked Skirwith.

At half-past one he had luncheon.

Shortly after luncheon he ordered his motor-car to be got ready to take him to the railway station at Carlisle, in time to catch the express to London at five; also a second car to take his secretary, dispatch boxes and odds and ends. The French cook was not given the dignity of a car. The cook, who was a personage in his way, would be driven to Little Salkeld station in the dogcart, and find his way to Carlisle by train. Leloir would go with his master.

It was like the mobilization of a small army every time Sir Anthony Gyde chose to change his residence, even for a few days.

At half-past two a small Arol-Johnston car, used for short distances, was brought to the door.

Sir Anthony got into it, having given Leloir strict injunctions as to the luggage, etc. He told the man that he was about to visit an outlying farm on the estate, and that he would be back in time for the motor to take him to the train. Then he started.

He was his own chauffeur.

CHAPTER VIII

SKIRLE Cottage lies tucked away in a hollow of Blencarn Fell.

The fells, as I have before indicated, are one great sweep of low hills facing the west; they are continuous and almost unbroken yet by the local custom they are divided into sections, each with a name of its own.

Blencarn Fell, so called, perhaps, from the village of Blencarn at its foot, is as wild and, perhaps, in summer, as lovely as any other part of the Pennine Range.

Skirle Cottage, lying in a depression of it, was as far removed from human eye as it is possible for a house to be.

It was a fairly large cottage, a barn was attached to it in the Cumberland fashion, so that the whole building was of one piece.

The hollow in which it lay, was, of a summer afternoon, perfumed with the smell of those wild flowers that grow in Cumberland as they grow nowhere else, and filled with the murmur of bees. At dusk of a summer’s evening it was a veritable cup of twilight and silence.

Even in summer, when the sky was blue above, when the wild strawberries were in their glory and the hills were hazy with heat, there was something strangely melancholy about this tiny valley, with the little cottage nestling in its heart.

There were days in the long winter of Cumberland when the valley and the cottage seen from above, presented a picture dreary to the point of being tragic.

The high road, at the foot of the fells, was scarcely a quarter of a mile away, yet the cottage was quite invisible from it.

The Arol-Johnston car, with its single occupant, drew up on the road level with the unseen cottage. Sir Anthony Gyde descended, and leaving the car to take care of itself, opened the gate, passed through, and struck up the rising ground.

There was not a breath of wind, the air was keen with frost, there was not a living thing in sight, save in the sky, far up, under the cold grey clouds, a hawk poised, now moving with a flutter of the wings, now motionless as a stone.

One might stand here seemingly unseen; it would have appeared that one might commit any act, unseen by eye, save the eye of God. Yet far up the fell, so small a figure as to be unnoticeable, a boy, Robert Lewthwaite, son of a shoe-maker in Blencarn, attracted by the hum of the approaching car on the high road far below, was watching.

From that elevation he could see the car approaching; he saw it stop and the occupant get out. He recognized him at once as Sir Anthony Gyde. He saw him cross the field and enter the little valley.

Here Sir Anthony looked around him, sweeping the fell face as though to see if he were observed. Apparently satisfied, he knocked at the cottage door; the door was opened for him, he entered, and the door was closed.

All this vastly interested the boy. Klein, the German artist, had greatly exercised the local mind. A man whose face and personality would have drawn attention in a city, excited the deepest interest among these primitive folk.

Primitive, perhaps, but full of imagination, and more than ordinarily speculative.

He, too, like Sir Anthony Gyde, had been labelled a stracklin; besides being a stracklin he was “Waugh.”

No boy in the village would have approached Skirle Cottage after dark. There was something about its occupant that fascinated them, but it was a fascination composed three parts of fear.

He cooked his own food, and though the food he cooked was the food he bought from the village shop and the surrounding farms, there were sinister suspicions in the minds of the young people in the neighbourhood that he cooked and ate other things besides eggs and bacon and fell mutton.

An old woman of the village, Mrs Braithwaite, called every day at noon to clean up the place and make the bed (Klein was a late riser, another suspicious point about him), and her tales about the artist and his doings did not detract from the villagers’ pre-conceived impressions.

She declared, at times, that he was enough to “mak’ t’ flesh creep up yan’s back to think on,” but he paid her five shillings a week, and as money was scarce in the Braithwaite household, and the work to be done at Skirle Cottage occupied only half an hour or so a day, she kept on with the job.

There was, besides the money, a sort of eerie fascination about the stranger that was not entirely distasteful to the old lady’s heart.

Once, a small boy named Britten, greatly daring, had peeped through the window at the ogre. The door opened and the ogre came out, and Britten ran, returning home drenched, and with the following lucid description of the incident and the cause of his wetting. “He chased me an’ I rin, ah catcht mi teea ower a cobble and down ah went, end-ower-end inta the beck.” So it was not surprising that Bob Lewthwaite, seeing Sir Anthony Gyde going in to the ogre’s cottage and the door closing upon him, waited, forgetting everything else in the world, to see what was going to happen.

He waited a long time, nearly three-quarters of an hour, then the door opened and Sir Anthony Gyde came out.

He was carrying a black bag in his hand.

He closed the door and looked around him, just as he had done before entering. Satisfied, apparently, that he was unobserved, he came down the valley towards the road, got into the motor-car and drove off.

CHAPTER IX

SIR ANTHONY GYDE was a fearless horseman, but a somewhat timid motorist, as motorists go.

He drove carefully, rarely exceeding fifteen miles an hour.

To-day, however, he cast his timidity aside.

He was lucky to-day, for on these roads of Cumberland it is nothing to meet with a flock of five hundred sheep or so, or a string of farm carts, each drawn by a horse terrified of motor-cars, as most of the farm horses of Cumberland still are.

It was ten minutes to four when he reached Throstle Hall.

The Edinburgh express for London stops at Carlisle at five, so he had plenty of time in which to catch it.

He descended from the car in a leisurely manner, with the black bag in his hand, and entered the house. He crossed the hall and entered the library, remained there for a minute or so, and then came out and went into the dining-room. One could tell, by the man’s footsteps, that he was full of unrest. He went upstairs and entered the rooms on the first floor. Here he met his secretary, Mr Folgam, but he did not speak a word.

In one of the corridors he met Leloir.

“The luggage has all been dispatched, sir,” said Leloir, “and the car is waiting. When would you like to start?”

“Start,” said Sir Anthony, speaking like a person awakened from a dream, “for where?”

“You ordered the car to take you to Carlisle, sir,” said the astonished Leloir, “to catch the London express at five. I telegraphed this morning for a special saloon carriage to be attached.”

“Ah, so I did,” said Sir Anthony, “so I did.” He chuckled, as if at some obscure joke, known to him alone.

It was dusk in the corridor, and Leloir could not see his master’s face distinctly, or the expression on it, but he heard the chuckle. He had been in Gyde’s service for two years, and he thought that he knew every phase of his master’s temperament and character, but this chuckle alarmed him more than the wildest outbreak of rage would have done.

There was something inhuman in it, something horrible. It did not seem the sound produced by a man’s voice, a great ape might have uttered it or a devil.

Leloir was turning to go, in fact, he had made half a dozen steps, when Gyde’s voice said:

“Stop.”

“Sir?” replied the valet.

“You have all my jewels.”

“Yes, sir, they are in this bag.”

“Right. Order the car to the door.”

The valet, glad to be gone, did as he was bid, and the master of Throstle Hall continued his peregrinations about the house, as though to make sure that everything was right before leaving.

A few minutes later he came downstairs, still carrying the bag. The motor, a large brougham affair, was standing at the steps; he got in, Leloir closed the door, mounted beside the chauffeur, and they started.