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.