SIR DAVID ladled out into fresh glasses from the dregs of the jorum.
“A toast!” said he, the leaping candle-light making a shifting grotesque of his wholesome young face. “Here’s to the memory of the last tenant o’ ‘Delsrop,’ and the health of the new one!”
“With all my heart. How was the beggar called? He hath entailed me a legacy of weeds. Was he the gallows-bird?”
The visitor spoke in jest, and was surprised to have, “Aye, that he was,” for answer.
“Great heavens!” he exclaimed.
The baronet flung himself back in his chair with a chuckle.
“You little expected that,” said he. “But there’s a reservation I’ll own to. They strung him up after he was dead.”
He went into a fit of laughter over the other’s astonished expression.
“I see you are unacquainted with the tale,” he said. “’Tis a tattered old boggart of the past that the neighbourhood has years-long ceased to throw stones at. But, you’ll pardon me, Tuke. What the devil induced you to invest in those ragged acres yonder?”
“I didn’t. I succeeded to them.”
“Direct?”
“Certainly.”
He had hesitated in answering. The little man gazed at him inquisitively.
“You are—you are not in mourning,” he said.
“For my father? Scarcely. He died in ’80. A widow even may be excused for doffing black in twenty years.”
“I see. You are an absentee landlord. Fie, sir! We hold you responsible thereby for many a pretty ghost tale.”
He answered jocosely; but he was looking at the other with a certain ruminative wonder.
“Twenty years,” he murmured. “Why, then, your father must have stepped straight into old Turk’s shoes.”
“The former tenant? Was that his name?”
“Turk—yes.”
He was still engulfed in retrospect. His eyes were fixed, unwinking, like a doll’s.
“Well,” he said at last—sucking at the stem of his “church-warden” as if he were a baby ravenous for its “comforter”—“it fair upsets me, it does.”
“What does?”
“How you can ’a let a fruitful estate like that go to wrack and ruin for twenty years.”
Mr. Tuke was silent. Had he spoken, and the truth, he could only have echoed the other’s wonder. As it was, his mouth was tied to an adequate explanation.
Blythewood blew away the problem with a cloud of smoke.
“We’ve got you at last, anyhow,” he said. “And that’s nine points of the law. I’ll wager you don’t know, sir, whence your house gets its name.”
“I can’t take you. You’re right.”
“’Tis the short for Devil’s-rope,—that’s what it is; the cursed bind-weed that will honeycomb a county from an inch of root if you give it rein. The story goes that, when they dug the foundations, it lay thick in the soil as macaroni in a dish.”
“That’s odd enough; and an ominous name for the last tenant by your showing. What was his history that you make a secret of?”
“Tut! ’tis no secret. Did you hear that?—the wind ’ll blow the casement in. ’Tis no secret; but I was only a lad of five when they found him hanging on the downs, and so can give you little but the fruits of hearsay.”
“And what are they?”
“As dry as apple-johns by this date. Fill your glass. The fellow’s name was Turk, I say; and he looked his name.—Zounds! ’tis like his ghost ravenin’ with fury to get the grip of us.—He must ’a been an ugly beggar; for I can remember him plain as plain for all I was only five years old when he was found swingin’.”
“What was he like?”
“Like? Like a gurgoyle on a church—a face to sweat o’ nights with thinking on. A murderous-looking caitiff, sir, with red stubble under his jasey and a bloody long tuck at his side. Yet I can mind me of a look in his eyes—or in one of ’em; for t’other was fixed in his head and chalky like a boiled cod’s—that wasn’t all of the rest. ’Twas fear, or sufferin’—or compound of both; and it lessened the fright I stood in of meetin’ him.”
“Was he always there—at ‘Delsrop,’ I mean, in your early memory of it?”
“Save us, no. The place belonged to the Woodruffs up to ’77, when it came into the market. The new owner wasn’t in possession—no, not a year. He turned up sudden—was there on a day, with his black-bodin’ face; and nobody knew where he’d come from or what was his business in life. They didn’t find out then or afterwards. He kept himself to himself; received no visitors and wanted none; lived his days solitary, shut up like a miser; and didn’t so much as weed the gravel of his drive.”
“And so disappeared?”
“Disappeared? Not he. He was a landmark to every traveller for months to come. I mind the mornin’ well—ah! even through this lapse of time—that young Peterson, our landreeve, rode over to ‘Chatters,’ with a face like whey, and said as how Mr. Turk had been found murdered and hangin’ in the chains on Stockbridge downs.”
“Hanging?”
“Aye! There they’d strung him up that did the deed; for he’d been stabbed first—nigh a dozen angry wounds that had sucked at the steel like mouths—and then set to dangle for a jest to the daws.”
“And when they ran the rogues to earth?”
“They never did, sir—they never did. To this day the man’s fate is locked up in the mystery of his life.”
“But at the inquest——”
“None was held. ’Twas an odd thing, you’ll say; and a cursed odd thing it was. But none was held for all that. Men’s minds were disorganized at that time, ’tis said. There was the French and Spanish coalition, and dark trouble about a possible descent on the coast—like as there is now. Who was to think of one murdered land-loper, that nobody knew or claimed, when all eyes were turned to the sea? Anyhow, there he swung and rotted, to the huge scandal of the neighbourhood, till he and his head parted company and came to the ground.”
“But there must have been legatees—executors—lawyers interested, at the very least?”
“They never put in a claim, then. The fellow was here, and gone, and narry a sign. ’Twas a queer business.”
“Well, heaven rest his bones at the last!”
“I’ll give you Amen to that. You are its deputy for one of them by all account.”
“Eh! What d’ye say?”
“’Tis a tale hereabouts that Whimple’s mad sister has the creature’s skull in keepin’—that for months she hovered like a crow under the gallows, and picked it up at last when it fell.”
“Good God! She has—or had. I’ve seen it.”
“Ah! A pretty plaything for a maid. Well, that’s Mr. Turk’s story, as I know it.”
The listener sat for some moments in a profound and bewildered silence. Vaguely, through his brain, like faint harmonics, ran the words of the lawyer Creel and his own question to which they had been an answer: “When did it come to him?” “That I may answer you. It was in the year ’79.”
So his father had himself slipped into possession of this mysterious estate at the very time that ghastly scarecrow was tossing in the wind. How then was it, that he had not caused inquiry to be made as to the fate of his predecessor—had not set bloodhounds on the track of the assassins—had not even allotted the poor remains some decent burial?
For the first time a little mist of darkness gathered in his heart—a suspicion born of the unaccountable secrecy that was the main condition of his inheritance.
Presently he looked up with a troubled face.
“Then Whimple and his sister,” he said, “were early put in charge of the deserted place?—but they were, of course. The fellow told me so himself.”
“Aye, aye,” said Sir David. “He was only a lad of eighteen when he first came—a great weedy gawk with scared eyes.”
“Twenty years haven’t improved upon that. My God! what an existence!”
“Well, sir, it may suit a being or not. We ain’t all built for coal-porters. The measure of a man’s work is his willingness to it; and Dennis is no Jackalent for all his diffidence. He knows a spavin from a thrush; and I’ll tell ye somethin’ more—he can put rhymes together equal to Milton or Mr. Pye.”
“Umph!” said the other.