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.