THE wind was so bitter, the roads so glassy with peril and so scourged with swept drifts of snow, that when at last on the following morning the little party of three gentlemen, with Dennis for guide, assembled in the hall of “Delsrop” preparatory to issuing on their quest, it was resolved to make no attempt to cover any part of the distance on horseback, but to trust to their legs and their endurance for the entire course. What this was, each of the three had but an indefinite idea, for the servant showed a strange reluctance to discuss the subject, even with his master; and would only place their goal approximately at some seven or eight miles. Seeing the pain it gave him to be pressed for closer particulars, Tuke good-humouredly insisted that there should be no further flogging of their willing horse; and presently there was not a man of them all but was so engrossed in his own discomfort as to be oblivious of any consideration but that his numbed extremities called for.
Blythewood, who had relieved his mind of responsibility by early dispatching his note to his sister, was then free to give the most of his concern to his little aching tipple-befumed top-knot; Tuke, whose soul was hot with vexing self-problems, worried to get this distracting and depressing business of the stone done with; Luvaine stalked a very nightmare embodiment of grievance. Altogether it was something a dismal party that followed in the wake of the dismal serving-man—its members mere moving pillars of duffel and muffler, hands in pockets, rigid as pantomime chimney-pots, with their heads bent to the blast like cowls.
The wind was dreadful. It came screaming down the road like flights of arrows; it swept the long wastes as if the very scythe of Death were threshing there for some least little blade of life; it seemed of a sharpness to blaze the tree-trunks and cut the copses into shreds. Not a living thing but themselves appeared to be on foot or wing in all the dreary landscape. Only a grey sky frothed with snowflakes, and the inexorable endless downs received and encompassed them and wrought upon their souls with horror of the soulless.
Early in the tramp Dennis had led from the Stockbridge highway eastwards over the slopes.
“What!” whined Sir David. “You give it us full in the face, Mr. Whimple? We shall be torn like bunting.”
“There is no other way, sir,” said the man.
“Can’t we get between hedges, at least?”
“No, sir. No road leads to where she inhabits.”
Luvaine turned with a stare, and Blythewood shrugged his shoulders.
“This is Captain Phipps and the North Pole,” he said. “I protest, Luvaine, ’twill be nothing to my mind to exchange your cursed stone for half-a-dozen of my toes.”
The soldier, the wind whizzing in his set teeth, muttered a word or two about the selfishness of uninterested parties; and that at last started the little baronet laughing—the first note of gaiety the expedition had produced.
“Oh!” he chirped, “what a noble sacrifice you would make of your friends”—and he kicked up his little hoofs and scampered like a colt.
Tuke, who was tailing in the rear, called to Dennis and fell somewhat behind with him.
“Is this necessary?” he said.
“Indeed, yes, sir.”
“She lives remote on these wild downs?”
“For nigh a year, sir, now.”
“With none to neighbour or assist her?”
“None. Deep in these wastes she bides, secret and alone, and not a soul within miles, did she need succour. It is her whim—her craze, sir, if you will. She hath led a strange, solitary life—for years apart from her fellows—for years hating the world so, that she would deign to draw but the meagrest sustenance from it.”
“Meagre indeed in these solitudes. She must browse like the sheep.”
“She traps the birds and little game of the open. Those are for feast days. In general she can make much of a few dried berries.”
“Together with what you give her?”
The man hung his head in silence.
“Are you the only one that knows of her eyrie?”
“The only one, master.”
“She hath suffered some great wrong?”
“A great, great wrong.”
Tuke looked keenly at his servant.
“I am neither curious nor insolent,” he said; “but if it would ever relieve your mind to acquaint me of the truth, I am your friend to counsel and help, Dennis.”
Whimple flushed round, the tears sprung to his eyes.
“Oh!” he cried, “do you think I don’t know it? Do you think I haven’t suffered to tell you all? You would have learnt long ago, but that the confidence is not mine to give while she lives.”
“Well, well,” said his master; “go to the front again, my good fellow, and lead.”
The wind whipped the slopes, planing the fallen snow from them in ringlets like wood-shavings. Now and again a lashed clump of trees would seem to swerve at them through the blinding flakes, or the thud of tumbling chalk, sprung by the frost in some neighbouring quarry, would sound startlingly in their ears. These were the only scattered phrases on an else blank page, and the desolation made them expressive as words of comfort.
By and by Tuke moved forward to his companions.
“The snow thickens,” he cried. “I shall be easier when our faces are turned westwards.”
He shouted to Dennis: “You are not wandering afield? You are sure of your way?” And: “Quite,” the man answered. “We are nigh upon the place now, sir.”
It seemed full time, if any prospect remained to them of getting back to lunch and to the invited guests. Blythewood groaned at the very thought of being late.
“I have sinned enough already,” said he. “Angel will be ready to bite me.”
They had fought and struggled by long miles of swale and hillock, and were become mere remote atoms in the midst of a blinding wilderness, when they broke upon a little gaunt oasis—a dismal copse of good intent—stretching withered arms of welcome to them from out the whirl. This forlorn touch of nature was set at the foot of a shallow mound or tumulus that now, caked with white, looked like a huge inverted pudding-basin; and amongst the spare trunks Dennis stopped and turned a grey face to his gentlemen.
“This is the place,” he said.
“The place!” echoed Blythewood, looking about him bewildered.
“Hurry, Whimple!” cried his master.
There was a great tang of blackthorn and bramble—a little lonely thicket of it—heaped against the lower slope of the mound. From this thicket, all tossed with snow, two or three crippled beech-saplings escaped, throwing wild arms aloft as if their lower limbs were pinned in the jaws of some hidden monster in the brushwood. Thither the man made his way, and the others followed.
“They are but suckers,” he said, “of an old giant trunk, the decayed butt of which lies there in the bush. It may have fallen and been removed a hundred years ago. But while it was alive its great roots were busy undermining this hillock and boring a passage into the heart of it.”
He turned to his master.
“For all I know, sir, she was the first to discover the way and the first to penetrate to the chamber within.”
“The chamber?”
“Aye, gentlemen. This is an ancient barrow of the dead, and the goal of our hopes.”
Luvaine pushed rudely past him. The inner character of the man seemed to reveal itself in the neighbourhood of success.
“Our hopes!” he drawled insolently. “Here of course is the tentative place-seeker on the very threshold of my inheritance.”
“Now,” muttered Tuke to himself, “this cur snarls over his bone before the sheep is killed.”
“The way in, man—the way in!” cried Luvaine, beating his hands together. “Why do you keep me outside? You can play cicerone to your damned barrow when the stone is in my pocket.”
Tuke caught his servant’s eye entreating, and came peremptorily to the front.
“Of course,” he said to him—“you must enter first and prepare the woman for our coming. Whatever her status, she has the right of priority here.”
“A rat in a drain!” cried the soldier jeeringly. “I don’t stand on ceremony with such.”
“Pardon me, sir. You owe this consideration to my servant, without whose self-sacrificing assistance you were like to go jewelless for all time.”
He made a sign to Dennis. The man turned and went round about to where close by a scarce noticeable passage had been forced through the bramble. The thicket received and swallowed him to the shoulders. A dozen yards in, he faced about, waved to his master, stooped, and vanished. Luvaine, stamping in a fury of restlessness, would not yet venture upon pursuit; but as he padded it to and fro he cast quick, hateful glances at the man who had baulked him.
Perhaps for a minute they awaited the desired summons, hammering their feet on the frozen turf, hugging themselves with their pocketed hands for a little warmth. It seemed impossible that that smooth white desolation could contain any sunken chamber of refuge.
Quite suddenly a cry came to their ears—an attenuated scream forced from the bowels of the earth. To men in their impatient and overstrung condition it wavered up weird and deathly. With one impulse they dashed for the path into the thicket, stumbling and pushing and striving for the lead. It fell to Tuke. Reaching the spot where he calculated his man had disappeared, he flung about like a nosing hound, saw where a loose path of undergrowth was swung before a jagged fissure in the tangle, elbowed it aside, and slipped into a narrow broken tunnel that seemed to undermine the hill.
A moment he paused. The smell of lifeless earth was about him—a dull sense of pressure seemed to set his eardrums tattooing. Then his pupils, relieved of the sheeted glare without, dilated, and he saw the profound gloom of the passage to be broken into by a little glimmer of light at its far end. Hearing his companions behind him, he crept on. So low was the boring that in some places he had to stoop almost double to pass. But he went forward steadily, and all at once regained a thought of space and stopped in amazement and concern.
He was in a little circular chamber, whose walls and floor were built of blocks of unhewn and uncemented stone. Other blocks, roughly squared and shaped, stood on the level here and there; and against one of these was piled a heterogeneous heap of human bones, mixed with fragments of stone implements and arrow-heads and some beads of dull amber. Over all a flaring dip—wedged into a cleft-stick stuck in a crevice of the wall—cast a wavering glow. It made manifest the simple austerity of this antique chamber of the dead; and it did more—it revealed Dennis on his knees beside a pallet of dried turves, whereon something long and gaunt and quiet was extended.
“Whimple!” exclaimed his master softly. He felt Luvaine’s breath at his ear, and extended his arms that the other might not pass. The servant turned his head. A lost, wild expression was in his eyes.
“Dead!” he muttered, in a dreadful voice.
Tuke went forward and looked down. She had noble sepulture, this tameless wanderer. What a fiercely handsome face it was—stone in the midst of stone. But all the age of sixty years of loneliness was gathered in it, now the informing will was withdrawn. In her long discipline of hatred she had yielded so little to her fellows, that not even the right of her burial should be theirs. In her own earth, after all the long vain baying of the human pack, she had lain herself down to die of the frost-stroke; and here she was, as much a part of the ancient cairn as the elf-arrows that were strewn about her.
“Dennis!” said his master again—and the man looked up in his face and said simply: “She was my mother.”
Tuke put his hand gently on his shoulder.
“I have thought as much. You would not have her removed?”
“No, no! Let her lie at peace.”
“I think you are right. Such a tomb as this is for the hunted.”
A discordant cry echoed through the chamber: “The skull! My God, let me pass!”—and Luvaine, dashing aside the restraining arm, bounded to the furthermost of the stone blocks and snatched something into his hands. He had no respect, no sympathy, no decency even, in the covetous lust of his soul. Perhaps if he had had, the Fates had vouchsafed a kindlier turn to his fortunes.
Tuke and Blythewood would not echo his jubilance—would hardly give him their notice, indeed. To them a solemner tragedy appealed—a mystery far profounder than that of humanity’s morbid attraction to coloured pebbles. It was only when a second horrible cry broke from him that they looked round, startled.
He was standing with the skull held out before him in one hand. His face was ghastly and contorted; his eyes, in the marionette play of light and shadow, were dancing devils of fury.
“It is gone!” he shrieked—“the stone is gone!”
Tuke’s very gorge rose. The nerves of his jaw seemed to click rigid.
“Dennis,” he said, with a sternness that was only for that other—“forbear your grief a little, my good fellow. For the sake of common decency let us resolve this matter now and at once.”
He crossed to Luvaine.
“Well, sir,” he said—“you say the stone is gone?”
For answer the other held him out the skull. He was so lost in the terror of loss that he would have scarcely resented a blow.
Tuke took the ugly relic in his hand, and offered it to his man’s inspection.
“Is this,” he said, “the same you gave to your mother? Can you identify it?”
“It is the same. There is the bulged eyelid and the chalk-marks yet about it.”
“The stone may have dropped out. We can show you no better consideration, Dennis, than to begin and end the search here and now.”
Luvaine was on his knees already, diving into and scattering the little heap of bones and implements. He found nothing there; nor could any of them, after the most exhaustive search, discover a trace of the missing gem. The candle on the wall guttered and flared down while they were at work, and Dennis replaced it with another from a little bundle he had brought with him. He had made it one of his duties, it seemed, to supply these to the lonely woman.
Suddenly Luvaine rose to his feet with an evil expression of face.
“This is trouble thrown away,” he said. “There is one and one only likely place to overhaul.”
Dennis cried “No, no!” with an agonized look.
“Whimple,” said his master gently—“these are great stakes at issue, and to curtail the search would be to place me at least in a very false position. Let it be done with all reverence, by your hands.”
The servant knelt beside the body with a stifled groan. As he did so, a common impulse led Tuke and his friend to hastily block the soldier’s path. The maniac did not interfere; but he glanced over their shoulders, gnawing his knuckles and jerking his every limb in a fury of impatience.
“There is nothing on this poor body,” said Dennis, after a pause, looking up. “Almost as little without as within, poor soul.”
“Nothing in or about the pallet?”
“I have made a complete search, sir. There is not a trace of the stone.”
Luvaine broke out with a shriek.
“He has but looked like a sluggard wench. There are fifty places yet. Let me at her!—let me at her, I say!”
“You shall not, by God!” said Tuke.
The wretched creature wrung his hands.
“You would dash the cup from my very lips!” he yelled. “You would drive me mad among ye! I will not be denied!”
He struggled to pass them. They drove him back, and took their stand by the prostrate body.
“The search here has been thorough,” said Tuke. “I watched and I marked. Anywhere else in the chamber you like, sir; but these poor remains rest sacred from further abuse.” (He felt Whimple’s lips upon his hand as he spoke.) “Hunt, sir, hunt while we wait a little longer; yet I fear the stone may have dropped anywhere on her passage hither, and may lie now sunk for ever in the grass of the downs. Hurry, man, if you would look further, and would not have us snowed up to perish beside her that lies here.”
The rabid creature, chattering and foaming, went off on twenty different scents while they waited. Every stone and crevice of the little room he examined—the broken tunnel explored, candle in hand—even re-issued into the thicket and beat wildly about with hand and foot. At length it became evident, even to him, that his search must prove vain. He desisted, with a dead-white face set to his companions, and: “Come,” he said, in a hollow voice, “and conduct me back to the hell I had a little escaped from.”
Could it be possible that a passion so uncleanly could rise to the least nobility of despair? For a moment Tuke’s heart swerved in a rush of pity for anything so forlorn.
“We may find it yet,” he said. “When it is safe to return we will look here again.”
“No,” said the other; “it is lost to me for ever. I know now and feel it.”
He went out first, with a dull and dogged step. Dennis lingered to whisper a last word of love to the stark thing on the pallet. Suddenly he stooped, lifted the skull from the stone whereon his master had replaced it, and laid it softly down at the feet of the dead woman.
“Perhaps he kneels there now, and is forgiven,” he murmured. Then he blew out the candle and followed the others into the open air.
As he came forth of the thicket, a charge of laden wind near took him off his feet. Staggering and half-blinded, it was some moments before he could collect his sight and his senses. Then he saw his companions huddled about the trunk of a little beech tree, and ran to them, foretasting the peril.
One and all they were now menaced by a loss more final than that of any stone, however costly. While they were within, the wind had called up its reserves and the undulating plain was all one sheeted spectre of driving white.
“We must make the attempt,” said Tuke. “To stay here is to perish.”
He took Blythewood’s arm, and drove into the whirl as he spoke. The other two followed apart.
The snow was up to their ankles; it hurtled into their faces and stung their blinking eyelids. Every minute they felt the labour of progress more acute.
“My God!” cried Sir David—“seven miles of this!”
“Oh, courage, man! There is no hope but to keep going!”
For long they marked their bearings pretty well. Then, looking over his shoulder, Tuke uttered an exclamation and stopped.
“Dennis!” he yelled, for the man had disappeared.
He ran back in their fast-vanishing tracks—stumbled over the fallen body.
“Up!” he shrieked—“don’t give in like this!”
The poor fellow begged to be allowed to sleep—just forty winks, he said.
“Forty winking devils!” shouted his master.
He had him up and on in a moment—placed him between himself and Sir David. Thenceforward the three held together, swaying and struggling. The wiry soldier could take and keep his own measure of endurance.
But now, confused by the temporary delay, they fell doubtful in their landmarks, wavered, and woke to the knowledge that they were lost. Dennis, who alone of them knew something of the road, was fallen into a state of semi-stupefaction and could scarce speak coherently. Indeed, it was all one for that, for the prospect was quite blotted out in the mist of twinkling flakes; and to keep the wind at their backs was become their only guide.
It was a long, agonized advance against the forces of Death. They dared not stop for an instant to breathe or think. They must plod their frantic way whose every step was a lifted labour, and hardly could they cheer on any fainting spirit amongst them who threatened to lag to his destruction. The snow deepened; and often now they floundered into drifts, and must struggle forth and on with their hearts sobbing in their breasts.
At length, when dusk was a little threatening to foreclose, they came down upon trees and a mass of choked underwood. This, like desperate men, blind and unreasoning, they fought through—crossed a downward slope of white—plunged into a second great tangle of growth, tore their way through it, and brought up sharp before a little low door that seemed to pierce the base of an inverted bowl of snow set in a small clearing. It was no time to wonder or inquire. Tuke kicked at the woodwork, and it reeled open on screaming hinges. They saw an aperture leading to some darkness of refuge—stooped, and one by one scrambled in and sank exhausted upon the rubbish that lay beneath.