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.