THE night fell dead and blank, and with it came the snow, crisp, large-flaked, dropping silently as autumn leaves in a windless garden. These were but the pickets of a gathering army—whose cloudy regiments moved up unwieldily from the north-west, where for weeks they had been forming and manœuvring—and the world looked indifferently on them, little thinking how presently it should be overwhelmed in the rush of forces of which they were the pioneers.
Sometimes a little galloping wind, like one of a distracted staff, would scatter a company of them right and left; and then to folks within-doors would sound a rubbing noise on window-panes, as if stealthy fingers were feeling for the hasp.
“If I had not lived all my life amongst ghosts,” said Luvaine, “I should fear this house of yours, Mr. Tuke.”
He rose as he spoke (the three gentlemen were sitting over their wine in the great dining-hall of “Delsrop”), and, walking to the casement, plucked aside a corner of the wide crimson curtain that hung thereover, and stood looking out into the night.
“The dark is full of white faces,” he muttered. “They writhe with laughter and flash down and are gone. There! did you hear that?”
Blythewood glanced, with a shrug of his shoulders, at his host.
“Oh, Luvaine!” he cried—“damn your shuddering fancies! Come to the table, man, and take your glass like an honest soldier!”
The captain dropped the curtain and walked slowly back to his place.
“That I am,” he said, “and that I have been through all the buffets of Fate. But it’s trouble, David, that teaches a man to look inward; and there, does he concentrate his gaze, he acquires the gift of second sight.”
“And what does it advantage him to ride with a spectre on his pillion? I’ve a shorter and pleasanter way to see double.”
He lifted his glass with a jolly chuckle.
“Here’s to the memory of Mr. Cutwater, the greatest broker of his age, yet who got broke himself in the end!” he cried.
Luvaine declined to drink.
“Oh!” said Tuke, laughing. “Give him the nail-toast, sir. He hath kept the gem in trust for you all these years.”
“You are pleased to be facetious, gentlemen. It is all little of a jesting matter to me. I will not drink a murdering thief.”
“Why,” said Blythewood, “he might retaliate by disputing your title, since he had the stone in his eye from the first moment of his hearing of it.”
He chuckled joyously over his own pleasantry; but the other would condescend to no answer but a wave of the hand to dismiss the subject.
“Do you drink the night out?” he said. “Mr. Tuke” (he turned sombrely to his host), “I would be loth to presume upon your hospitality; but, sir—sir, I must venture to hint I am here for a purpose that is not yet satisfied.”
Something like a muttered oath escaped from Tuke’s lips. He, however, forced his good-humour to the front.
“Why, Captain Luvaine,” he said, “I assumed that a travelled guest would prefer to postpone business to the morning.”
“I cannot look upon this as business, sir, in the ordinary sense—no more than the signing of a reprieve, every moment in the delay of which is torture to him most concerned.”
“Well, well—if you regard it in that light.”
Blythewood protested against this unseemly wet-blanketing of a convivial meeting; but he was graciously overborne by his host, who rose and rang the bell.
“Send Mr. Whimple to me,” he told the servant who answered the summons.
The man came flushed and nervous. Tuke saw that the door was carefully closed; gathered with his friends about the hearth, and bade Dennis to stand by them.
“Now,” he said, in a low voice, “this is Captain Luvaine, Whimple, from whose father was stolen the ‘Lake of Wine.’ Tell us plainly, and in a few words, the story of its discovery by your sister.”
The man bowed and moistened his lips. Once or twice he glanced in a frightened way about him, as if he sought some loophole of escape from the situation.
“Gentlemen, ’twas in the winter of ’81 that the body, his body, fell from the chains, and that the skull was brought hither by my sister—then a child of five, and a poor natural as she has ever been—to add to a strange collection of odds-and-ends it has been her delight to form. And there it had remained to a certain day after the coming of my master, who took an objection to it, and bade me rid the house of the thing.”
He paused, and passed a hand across his wet brow.
“Go on,” said Tuke. “I will take the blame of its disappearance, and I confess I acted harshly to the girl.”
Luvaine, from lowered eyelids, shot a malignant glance at the speaker.
“There was a woman,” continued Dennis faintly, “that used to come upon me from time to time for the little help I could afford her—a strange, wild wanderer, whose hand was against every man as she imagined every man’s was against her. I gave the skull to her. She asked for it. She would keep and cherish it, she said, in—in memory of a great criminal. I gave it to her, and she took it away.”
“Where——?” began Luvaine; but Tuke motioned him to silence.
“Let the man tell his story in his own way,” he said.
“It has been gone long months,” said Whimple, “when suddenly, this day or two ago, my sister (ah! gentlemen,” he interpolated with great emotion—“she hath not the wit to distinguish between right and wrong!) amazes me with the confession that, from early in her possession of the skull, she has known a great crimson stone—which later she learned to identify by its fanciful title—to be fixed and buried in one of its eyesockets, and that this stone had been at one time cemented smoothly over its outer surface and something resembling the picture of an eye enamelled thereon. Gentlemen, all confounded as I was, I rushed to my master, and told him what I had heard.”
Luvaine was jerking in his chair and gnawing his knuckles like a madman.
“Whither has it been taken?” he cried in a strangled voice. “That is the one moral of this accursed concatenation of accident and brutality. What has she done with it—where does she live, this woman? She must be come at—my God! she must be held responsible and whipped into disgorging.”
Whimple had shrunk back; but for all his instinctive action his face had taken a dark flush.
“She must be assured from violence, whatever has happened,” he said in a pretty strong voice, “or I will not move a finger to help you to her.”
Tuke put in a decided word. This first sign of courage in his man-servant surprised and pleased him.
“I guarantee her gentle treatment, Dennis,” he said.
The man turned gratefully to his master.
“I know you would, sir. It’s to you I reveal the truth, and God grant that she won’t curse me for betraying her. Were I to go alone, and endeavour to recover the relic——”
Luvaine sprang to his feet, interrupting him.
“No!” he cried savagely. “I’ll permit no such risk. I want no broker to deal for me. Lead me to the place—that’s all I ask.”
Tuke turned to his servant.
“Where is it?” he said, in a note of contempt, that he could not control, hardening his voice.
Whimple was about to answer, when a sound in the room disturbed them all. Luvaine broke out into a great oath.
“How did she come in? What does she want? Fling her out at the door!”
Sir David cried, “Damme, sir! you forget yourself!”
“Captain Luvaine,” said that gentleman’s entertainer, a very ugly expression tightening his mouth—“making every allowance for your condition of mind, I must ask you to leave the propriety of my servants’ behaviour to be judged by me.”
Even at that, the rabid creature could do little but pretend to control his passion.
“I will apologize,” he said sullenly. “Take any form of words you like from me; only do me the kindness to dismiss this person. Surely, sir, you can see how maddening is this interruption to me at the critical moment?”
“I can see, indeed, and regret it.”
He walked towards the door, and put his hand kindly on Darda’s shoulder; for Darda it was that had come, softly and unbidden, into the room, and who stood silently awaiting the upshot of the explosion her entrance had evoked.
Her slim white figure, her immobile face and glowing hair, made of her against the fire-lit wall such a presentment of the spiritual as one sees in old cathedral frescoes; but, at her master’s touch, a rose grew to her cheek, announcing her all one at heart with pitiful humanity.
“What is it, Darda?”
She looked up in his face with solemn eyes.
“The shadows!” she whispered—“they are abroad again; far off at present—but they are stretching towards the house, and by and by they will reach it.”
He scanned her face earnestly. Suddenly it recurred to him how once before this fancy of hers had been significant of a certain peril.
“Come,” he said hurriedly—“come and show me.”
He cried to his companions that he would be back in a moment, hesitated, and called to Dennis to follow him. Luvaine uttered a wild exclamation; but he took no heed of it.
Out in the hall, the girl sped swiftly to the stairway, the two men following her. A startled housemaid made room for them to pass, and afterwards announced in the kitchen that she had seen “crazy” playing follow-my-leader with master and her brother.
Up to the very top floor of the house; further, by way of a flight of steps, to a trap-door, and so to the leads, where the frost sparkled like emery paper, Darda climbed and the men pursued her. And there, in the high freezing night, she stood erect and pointed with her hand.
Tuke gave out a note of surprise. Far away, where Stockbridge townlet lay under the horizon hills, a broad blot of crimson was soaked into the sagging of the cloud-canopy above. This red stain palpitated like a very heart of fear, so that to gaze on it was to be insensibly influenced by a sympathetic emotion; and, in the beating of its pulse, rays and spars of shadows shot forth and were withdrawn and appeared again in other quarters, as if truly something were there struggling in its death throes.
“Dennis—whereabouts is it?”
“By the position, sir, well east of the village; about Mr. Pollack’s inn, I should reckon.”
His master started violently.
“Pollack’s inn?” he muttered, and cried, “Good God! it must be blazing to the roof!”
A momentary amazed expression was on his face—something, some sense of omen or catastrophe, knocked at his heart;—then he addressed his man with immediate decisiveness.
“Order my horse to be saddled, Dennis—quickly and silently. Say nothing of it to those within there; but, when I am gone, make Sir David my apologies and ask him, if he will, to await my return.”
The servant responded and disappeared. For some minutes Tuke stood, his gaze concentrated on the wavering splotch of light, his brain banded, it seemed, with a filament of steel. If any figure was imaged tenderly and pitifully in his soul, it was not that that breathed close by him in the icy shadow of the roof, that watched his every look and motion like a dog. Indeed, so little was she that had brought him there in his mind, that when in another minute he turned to descend, he almost brushed her in his passage without being recalled thereby to thought of her presence.
Going softly down, he found Dennis already mounted in the yard, with the bridle of his master’s horse held in his hand.
“Whimple!” he exclaimed.
“I go with you, sir,” said the man boldly. “Who knows what you may be riding to?”
“But, my good fellow—Sir David and the captain?”
“Sir, you come first. I have passed on your message.”
How could he gainsay him? It gave him a thrill of exquisite pleasure thus to experience a devotion that could so over-crow a constitutional timidity.
Silently together they padded it down the snowy drive, and in another minute were galloping along the road to Stockbridge.
High on the roof a figure watched their departure. The girl had scarcely moved since her master left her alone. But now her slender feet went crisp on the frost as she paced to and fro in the angle of the gables.
Once, suddenly, she paused at the limit of her path where the gutter-ledge, knee-high, formed the topmost courses of the house-front. And here she leapt upon the parapet, and stretched out her arms in a perilous manner into the dizzy whiteness of space.
“I know,” she said, nodding downwards fantastically. “But would you catch me if I jumped? It would hurt him to the heart to find me, when he comes back, lying there all crushed and broken.”
She seemed to listen, her face falling into shadow.
“To the heart,” she repeated, with a catch in her voice. “It would—it would, for all your secret laughing.”