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THE WATCHERS

THE

WATCHERS

A Novel

BY

A. E. W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE BUCKLER," ETC.

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1899.
By Frederick A. Stokes Company.

CONTENTS

THE WATCHERS

CHAPTER I

[TELLS OF A DOOR AJAR AND OF A LAD WHO STOOD BEHIND IT]

I had never need to keep any record either of the date or place. It was the fifteenth night of July, in the year 1758, and the place was Lieutenant Clutterbuck's lodging at the south corner of Burleigh Street, Strand. The night was tropical in its heat, and though every window stood open to the Thames, there was not a man, I think, who did not long for the cool relief of morning, or step out from time to time on to the balcony and search the dark profundity of sky for the first flecks of grey. I cannot be positive about the entire disposition of the room: but certainly Lieutenant Clutterbuck was playing at ninepins down the middle with half a dozen decanters and a couple of silver salvers; and Mr. Macfarlane, a young gentleman of a Scottish regiment, was practising a game of his own.

He carried the fire-irons and Lieutenant Clutterbuck's sword under his arm, and walked solidly about the floor after a little paper ball rolled up out of a news sheet, which he hit with one of these instruments, selecting now the poker, now the tongs or the sword with great deliberation, and explaining his selection with even greater earnestness; there was besides a great deal of noise, which seemed to be a quality of the room rather than the utterance of any particular person; and I have a clear recollection that everything, from the candles to the glasses on the tables and the broken tobacco pipes on the floor, was of a dazzling and intolerable brightness. This brightness distressed me particularly, because just opposite to where I sat a large mirror hung upon the wall between two windows. On each side was a velvet hollow of gloom, in the middle this glittering oval. Every ray of light within the room seemed to converge upon its surface. I could not but look at it--for it did not occur to me to move away to another chair--and it annoyed me exceedingly. Besides, the mirror was inclined forward from the wall, and so threw straight down at me a reflection of Lieutenant Clutterbuck's guests, as they flung about the room beneath it.

Thus I saw a throng of flushed young exuberant faces, and in the background, continually peeping between them, my own, very white and drawn and thin and a million years old. That, too, annoyed me very much, and then by a sheer miracle, as it seemed to me, the mirror splintered and cracked and dropped in fragments on to the floor, until there was only hanging on the wall the upper rim, a thin curve of glass like a bright sickle. I remember that the noise and hurley-burley suddenly ceased, as though morning had come unawares upon a witches' carnival and that all the men present stood like statues and appeared to stare at me. Lieutenant Clutterbuck broke the silence, or rather tore it, with a great loud laugh which crumpled up his face. He said something about "Old Steve Berkeley," and smacked his hand upon my shoulder, and shouted for another glass, which he filled and placed at my elbow, for my own had disappeared.

I had no time to drink from it, however, for just as I was raising it to my lips Mr. Macfarlane's paper ball dropped from the ceiling into the liquor.

"Bunkered, by God!" cried Mr. Macfarlane, amidst a shout of laughter.

I looked at Macfarlane with some reserve.

"I don't understand," I began.

"Don't move, man!" cried he, as he forced me back into my chair, and dropping the fire-irons with a clatter on to the floor, he tried to scoop the ball out of the glass with the point of Clutterbuck's sword-sheath. He missed the glass; the sheath caught me full on the knuckles; I opened my hand and----

"Sir, you have ruined my game," said Mr. Macfarlane, with considerable heat.

"And a good thing too," said I, "for a sillier game I never saw in all my life."

"Gentlemen," cried Lieutenant Clutterbuck, though he did not articulate the word with his customary precision; but his intentions were undoubtedly pacific. He happened to be holding the last of his decanters in his hand, and he swung it to and fro. "Gentlemen," he repeated, and as if to keep me company, he let the decanter slip out of his hand. It fell on the floor and split with a loud noise. "Well," said he, solemnly, "I have dropped a brooch," and he fumbled at his cravat.

Another peal of laughter went up; and while it was still ringing, a man--what his name was I cannot remember, even if I ever knew it; I saw him for the first time that evening, and I have only once seen him since, but he was certainly--more sober than the rest--stooped over my chair and caught me by the arm.

"Steve," said he, with a chuckle,--and from this familiarity to a new acquaintance I judge he was not so sober after all,--"do you notice the door?"

The door was in the corner of the room to my right. I looked towards it: the brass handle shone like a gold ball in the sun. I looked back at my companion, and, shaking my arm free, I replied coldly:

"I see it. It is a door, a mere door. But I do not notice it. It is not indeed noteworthy."

"It is unlatched," said my acquaintance, with another chuckle.

"I suppose it is not the only door in the world in that predicament."

"But it was latched a moment ago," and with his forefinger he gently poked me in the ribs.

"Then someone has turned the handle," said I, drawing myself away.

"A most ingenious theory," said he, quite unabashed by my reserve, "and the truth. Someone has turned the handle. Now who?" He winked with an extreme significance. "My dear sir, who?"

I looked round the room. Mr. Macfarlane had resumed his game. Two gentlemen in a corner through all the din were earnestly playing putt with the cards. They had, however, removed their wigs, and their shaven heads gleamed unpleasantly. Others by the window were vociferating the chorus of a drinking song. Lieutenant Clutterbuck alone was near to the door. I was on the point of pronouncing his name when he lurched towards it, and instantly the door was closed.

"It was someone outside," said I.

"Precisely. Steve, you are not so devoid of sense as your friends would have me believe," continued my companion. "Now, who will be Lieutenant Clutterbuck's timorous visitor?" He drew his watch from his fob: "We may hazard a guess at the sex, I think, but for the rest---- Is it some fine lady from St. James's who has come in her chair at half-past one of the morning to keep an appointment which her careless courtier has forgotten?"

"Hardly," I returned. "For your fine lady would hurry back to her chair with all the speed her petticoats allowed. She would not stay behind the door, which, I see, has again been opened."

The familiar stranger laid his hand upon my shoulder and held me back in my chair at arm's length from him.

"They do you wrong, my dear Steve," said he, gravely, "who say your brains are addled with drink. Your"--his tongue stumbled over a long word which I judged to be "ratiocination"--"is admirable. Never was logician more precise. It is not a fine lady from St. James's. It will be a flower-girl from Drury Lane, and may I be eternally as drunk as I am to-night, if we do not have her into the room."

With that he crossed the room, and seizing the handle suddenly swung the door open. The next instant he stepped back. The door was in a line with the wall against which my chair was placed, and besides it opened towards me so that I could not see what it was that so amazed him.

"Here's the strangest flower-girl from Drury Lane that ever I saw," said he, and Lieutenant Clutterbuck turning about cried:

"By all that's wonderful, it's Dick Parmiter," and a lad of fifteen years, with a red fisherman's bonnet upon his head and a blue jersey on his back, stepped hesitatingly into the room.

"Well, Dick, what's the news from Scilly?" continued Clutterbuck. "And what's brought you to London? Have you come to see the king in his golden crown? Has Captain Hathaway lost his Diodorus Siculus and sent you to town to buy him another? Come, out with it!"

Dick shifted from one foot to another; he took his cap from his head and twisted it in his hands; and he looked from one to another of Lieutenant Clutterbuck's guests who had now crowded about the lad and were plying him with questions. But he did not answer the questions. No doubt the noise and the lights, and the presence of these glittering gentlemen confused the lad, who was more used to the lonely beaches of the islands and the companionable murmurs of the sea. At last he plucked up the courage to say, with a glance of appeal to Lieutenant Clutterbuck:

"I have news to tell, but I would sooner tell it to you alone."

His appeal was received with a chorus of protestations, and "Where are your manners, Dick," cried Clutterbuck, "that you tell my friends flat to their faces they cannot keep a secret?"

"Are we women?" asked Mr. Macfarlane.

"Out with your story," cried another.

Dick Parmiter shrank back and turned his eyes towards the door, but one man shut it to and leaned his shoulders against the panels, while the others caught at the lad's hesitation as at a new game, and crowded about him as though he was some rare curiosity brought by a traveller from outlandish parts.

"He shall tell his story," cried Clutterbuck. "It is two years since I was stationed at the Scilly Islands, two years since I dined in the mess-room of Star Castle with Captain Hathaway of his Majesty's Invalids, and was bored to death with his dissertations on Diodorus Siculus. Two years! The boy must have news of consequence. There is no doubt trouble with the cray fish, or Adam Mayle has broken the head of the collector of the Customs House----"

"Adam Mayle is dead. He was struck down by paralysis and never moved till he died," interrupted Dick Parmiter.

The news sobered Clutterbuck for an instant. "Dead!" said he, gaping at the boy. "Dead!" he repeated, and so flung back to his noise and laughter, though there was a ring of savagery in it very strange to his friends. "Well, more brandy will pay revenue, and fewer ships will come ashore, and very like there'll be quiet upon Tresco----"

"No," interrupted Parmiter again, and Clutterbuck turned upon him with a flush of rage.

"Well, tell your story and have done with it!"

"To you," said the boy, looking from one to other of the faces about him.

"No, to all," cried Clutterbuck. The drink, and a certain anger of which we did not know the source, made him obstinate. "You shall tell it to us all, or not at all. Bring that table, forward, Macfarlane! You shall stand on the table Dick, like a preacher in his pulpit," he sneered, "and put all the fine gentlemen to shame, with a story of the rustic virtues."

The table was dragged from the corner into the middle of the room. The boy protested, and made for the door. But he was thrust back, seized and lifted struggling on to the table, where he was set upon his feet.

"Harmony, gentlemen, harmony!" cried Clutterbuck, flapping his hand upon the mantelshelf. "Take your seats, and no whispering in the side boxes, if you please. For I can promise you a play which needs no prologue to excuse it."

It was a company in which a small jest passed easily for a high stroke of wit. They applauded Lieutenant Clutterbuck's sally, and drew up their chairs round the table and sat looking upwards towards the boy, with a great expectation of amusement, just as people watch a bear-baiting at a fair. For my part I had not moved, and it was no doubt for that reason that Parmiter looked for help towards me.

"When all's said, Clutterbuck," I began, "you and your friends are a pack of bullies. The boy's a good boy, devil take me if he isn't."

The boy upon the table looked his gratitude for the small mercy of my ineffectual plea, and I should have proceeded to enlarge upon it had I not noticed a very astonishing thing. For Parmiter lifted his arm high up above his head as though to impress upon me his gratitude, and his arm lengthened out and grew until it touched the ceiling. Then it dwindled and shrank until again it was no more than a boy's arm on a boy's shoulder. I was so struck with this curious phenomenon that I broke off my protest on his behalf, and mentioned to those about me what I had seen, asking whether they had remarked it too, and inquiring to what cause, whither of health or malady, they were disposed to attribute so sudden a growth and contraction.

However, Lieutenant Clutterbuck's guests were only disposed that night to make light of any subject however important or scientific. For some laughed in my face, others more polite, shrugged their shoulders with a smile, and the stranger who had spoken to me before clapped his hand in the small of my back as I leaned forward, and shouted some ill-bred word that, though might he die of small-pox if he had ever met me before, he would have known me from a thousand by the tales he had heard. However, before I could answer him fitly, and indeed, while I was still pondering the meaning of his words. Lieutenant Clutterbuck clapped his hands for silence, and Dick Parmiter, seeing no longer any hope of succour, perforce began to tell his story.

It was a story of a youth that sat in the stocks of a Sunday morning and disappeared thereafter from the islands; of a girl named Helen; of a negro who slept and slept, and of men watching a house with a great tangled garden that stood at the edge of the sea. Cullen Mayle, Parmiter called the youth who had sat in the stocks, son to that Adam whose death had so taken Lieutenant Clutterbuck with surprise. But I could not make head or tail of the business. For one thing I have always been very fond of flowers, and quite unaccountably the polished floor of the room blossomed into a parterre of roses, so that my attention was distracted by this curious and pleasing event.

For another, Parmiter's story was continually interrupted by intricate questions intended to confuse him, his evident anxiety was made the occasion of much amusement by those seated about the table, and he was induced on one excuse and another to go back to the beginning again and again and relate once more what he had already told. But I remember that he spoke with a high intonation, and rather quickly and with a broad accent, and that even then I was extremely sensible of the unfamiliar parts from which he came. His words seemed to have preserved a smell of the sea, and through them I seemed to hear very clearly the sound of waves breaking upon a remote beach--near in a word to that granite house with the tangled garden where the men watched and watched.

Then the boy's story ceased, and the next thing I heard was a sound of sobbing. I looked up, and there was Dick Parmiter upon the table, crying like a child. Over against him sat Lieutenant Clutterbuck, with a face sour and dark.

"I'll not stir a foot or lift a finger," said he, swearing an oath, "no, not if God comes down and bids me."

And upon that the boy weakened of a sudden, swayed for an instant upon his feet, and dropped in a huddle upon the table. His swoon put every one to shame except Clutterbuck; everyone busied himself about the boy, dabbing his forehead with wet handkerchiefs, and spilling brandy over his face in attempts to pour it into his mouth--every one except Clutterbuck, who never moved nor changed in a single line of his face, from his fixed expression of anger. Dick Parmiter recovered from his swoon and sat up: and his first look was towards the lieutenant, whose face softened for an instant with I know not what memories of days under the sun in a fishing boat amongst the islands.

"Dick, you are over-tired. It's a long road from the Scillies to London. Very like, too, you are hungry," and Dick nodded "yes" to each sentence. "Well, Dick, you shall eat here, if there's any food in my larder, and you shall sleep here when you have eaten."

"Is that all?" asked Parmiter, simply, and Clutterbuck's face turned hard again as a stone.

"Every word," said he.

The boy slipped off the table and began to search on the ground. His cap had fallen from his hand when he fell down in his swoon. He picked it up from beneath a chair. He did not look any more at Clutterbuck; he made no appeal to anyone in the room; but though his legs still faltered from weakness, he walked silently out of the door, and in a little we heard his footsteps upon the stone stairs and the banisters creaking, as though he clung to them, while he descended, for support.

"Good God, Clutterbuck!" cried Macfarlane "he's but a boy."

"With no roof to his head," said another.

"And fainting for lack of a meal," said a third.

"He shall have both," I cried, "if he will take them from me," and I ran out of the door.

"Dick," I cried down the hollow of the staircase, "Dick Parmiter," but no answer was returned, save my own cry coming back to me up the well of the stairs. Clutterbuck's rooms were on the highest floor of the house; the stone stairs stretched downwards flight after flight beneath me. There was no sound anywhere upon them; the boy had gone. I came back to the room. Lieutenant Clutterbuck sat quite still in his chair. The morning was breaking; a cold livid light crept through the open windows, touched his hands, reached his face and turned it white.

"Good-night," he said, without so much as a look.

His eyes were bent upon memories to which we had no clue. We left him sitting thus and went down into the street, when we parted. I saw no roses blossoming in the streets as I walked home, but as I looked in my mirror at my lodging I noticed again that my face was drawn and haggard and a million years old.

CHAPTER II

[DICK PARMITER'S STORY]

I woke up at mid-day, and lay for awhile in my bed anticipating wearily the eight limping hours to come before the evening fell, and wondering how I might best escape them. From that debate my thoughts drifted to the events of the night before, and I recollected with a sudden thrill of interest, rare enough to surprise me, the coming of Dick Parmiter, and his treatment at Clutterbuck's hands and his departure. I thought of his long journey to London along strange roads. I could see him tramping the dusty miles, each step leading him farther from that small corner of the world with which alone he was familiar. I imagined him now sleeping beneath a hedge, now perhaps, by some rare fortune, in one of Russell's waggons with the Falmouth mails, which at nightfall he had overtaken, and from which at daybreak he would descend with a hurried word of thanks to get the quicker on his way; I pictured him pressing through the towns with a growing fear at his heart, because of their turmoil and their crowds; and I thought of him as hungering daily more and more for the sea which he had left behind, like a sheep-dog which one has taken from the sheep and shut up within the walls of a city. The boy's spirit appealed to me. It was new, it was admirable; and I dressed that day with an uncommon alertness and got me out to Clutterbuck's lodgings.

I found the lieutenant in bed with a tankard of small ale at his bedside. He looked me over with astonishment.

"I wish I could carry my liquor as well as you do," said he, taking a pull at the tankard.

"Has the boy come back?" I asked.

"What, Dick?" said he. "No, nor will not." And changing the subject, "If you will wait, Steve, I will make a shift to get up."

I went into his parlour. The room had been put into some sort of order; but the shattered remnant of the mirror still hung between the windows, and it too spoke to me of Dick's journey. I imagined him coming to the great city at the fall of night, and seeking out his way through its alleys and streets to Lieutenant Clutterbuck's lodgings. I could see him on the stairs pausing to listen to the confusion within the rooms, and in the passage opening and closing the door as he hesitated whether to go in or no. I became all at once very curious to know what the errand was which had pushed him so far from his home, and I cudgelled my brains to recollect his story. But I could remember only the youth Cullen Mayle, who had sat in the stocks on a Sunday morning, and the girl Helen, and a negro who slept and slept, and a house with a desolate tangled garden by the sea, and men watching the house. But what bound these people and the house in a common history, as to that I was entirely in the dark.

"Steve," said Clutterbuck--I had not remarked his entrance--"you look glum as a November morning. Is it a sore head? or is it the sight of your mischievous handiwork?" and he pointed to the mirror.

"It's neither one nor the other," said I. "It's just the recollection of that boy fumbling under the table for his cap, and dragging himself silently out of the room, with all England to tramp and despair to sustain him."

"That boy!" cried Clutterbuck, with great exasperation. "Curse you, Berkeley. That boy's a maggot, and has crept into your brains. We'll talk no more of him, if you please." He took a pack of cards from a corner cupboard, and, tossing them on the table, "Here, choose your game I'll play what you will, and for what stakes you will, so long as you hold your tongue."

It was plain that I should learn nothing by pressing my curiosity upon him. I must go another way to work. But chance and Lieutenant Clutterbuck served my turn without any provocation from myself.

I chose the game of picquet, and Clutterbuck shuffled and cut the cards; whereupon I dealt them. Clutterbuck looked at his hand fretfully, and then cried out:

"I have no hand for picquet, but I have very good putt cards."

I glanced through the cards I held.

"Make it putt, then," said I. "I will wager what you will my hand is the better;" and Clutterbuck broke into a laugh and tossed his cards upon the table.

"You have two kings and an ace," said he, "I know very well; but I have two kings and a deuce, and mine are the better."

"It is a bite," said I.

"And an ingenious one," he returned. "It was Cullen Mayle who taught it to us in the mess at Star Castle. For packing the cards or knapping the dice I never came across his equal. Yet we could never detect him, and in the end not a soul in the garrison would play with him for crooked pins."

"Cullen Mayle," said I; "that was Adam's son."

Clutterbuck had sunk into something of a reverie, and spoke rather to himself than to me.

"They were the strangest pair," he continued; "you would never take them for father and son, and I myself was always amazed to think there was any relationship between them. I have seen them sitting side by side on the settle in the kitchen of the 'Palace Inn' at Tresco. Adam, an old bulky fellow, with a mulberry face and yellow angry eyes, and his great hands and feet twisted out of all belief. His stories were all of wild doings on the Guinea coast. Cullen, on the other hand, was a stripling with a soft face like a girl's, exquisite in his dress, urbane in his manners. He had a gentle word and an attentive ear for each newcomer to the fire, and a white protesting hand for the oaths with which Adam salted his speech. Yet they were both of the same vindictive, turbulent spirit, only Cullen was the more dangerous.

"I have watched the gannets often through an afternoon in Hell Bay over at Brehar. They would circle high up in the air where no fish could see them, and then slant their wings and drop giddily with the splash of a stone upon their prey. They always put me in mind of Cullen Mayle. He struck mighty quick and out of the sky. I cannot remember, during all the ten years I lived at the Scillies, that any man crossed Cullen Mayle, though unwittingly, but some odd accident crippled him. He was the more dangerous of the pair. With Adam it was a word and a blow. With Cullen a word and another and another, and all of them soft, and the blow held over for a secret occasion. But it fell. If ever you come across Cullen Mayle, Berkeley, take care of your words and your deeds, for he strikes out of the sky and mighty quick."

This Clutterbuck said with an extreme earnestness, leaning forward to me as he spoke. And even now I can but put it down to his earnestness that a shiver took me at the words; for nothing was more unlikely than that I should ever come to grips with Cullen Mayle, and the next moment I answered Clutterbuck lightly.

"Yet he sat in the stocks in the end," said I, with as much indifference as I could counterfeit; for I was afraid lest any display of eagerness might close his lips. Lieutenant Clutterbuck, however, was hardly aware that he was being questioned. He laughed with a certain pleasure.

"Yes. A schooner, with a cargo of brandy, came ashore on Tresco. Cullen and the Tresco men saved the cargo and hid it away, and when the collector came over with his men from the Customs House upon St. Mary's, Cullen drove him back to his boats with a broken head. Cullen broke old Captain Hathaway's patience at the same time. Hathaway took off his silver spectacles at last and shut up his Diodorus Siculus with a bang; and so Cullen Mayle sat in the stocks before the Customs House on the Sunday morning. He left the islands that night. That was two years and a month ago."

"And what had Dick Parmiter to do with Cullen Mayle?" said I.

"Dick?" said he. "Oh, Dick was Cullen Mayle's henchman. But it seems that Dick has transferred his allegiance to----" And he stopped abruptly. His face soured as he stopped.

"To the girl Helen?" said I, quite forgetting my indifference.

"Yes!" cried Clutterbuck, savagely, "to the girl Helen. He is fifteen years old is Dick. But at fifteen years a lad is ripe to be one of Cupid's April fools." And after that he would say no more.

His last words, however, and, more than his words, the tone in which he spoke, had given me the first definite clue of the many for which my curiosity searched. It was certainly on behalf of the girl, whom I only knew as Helen, that Dick had undertaken his arduous errand, and it was no less certain that just for that reason Lieutenant Clutterbuck had refused to meddle in the matter. I recognised that I should get no advantage from persisting, but I kept close to his side that day waiting upon opportunity.

We dined together at Locket's, by Charing Cross; we walked together to the "Cocoa Tree" in St. James's Street, and passed an hour or so with a dice-box. Clutterbuck was very silent for the most part. He handled the dice-box with indifference; and, since he was never the man to keep his thoughts for any long time to himself, I had no doubt that some time that day I should learn more. Indeed, very soon after we left the "Cocoa Tree" I thought the whole truth was coming out; for he stopped in St. James's Park, close to the Mall, which at that moment was quiet and deserted. We could hear a light wind rippling through the leaves of the poplars, and a faint rumble of carriages lurching over the stones of Pall Mall.

"It is very like the sound of the sea on a still morning of summer," said he, looking at me with a vacant eye, and I wondered whether he was thinking of a tangled garden raised above a beach of sand, wherein, maybe, he had walked, and not alone on some such day as this two years ago.

We crossed the water to the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall, where we supped. I was now fallen into as complete a silence and abstraction as Clutterbuck himself, for I was clean lost in conjectures, I knew something now of Adam Mayle and his son Cullen, but as to Helen I was in the dark. Was her name Mayle too? Was she wife to Cullen? The sight of Clutterbuck's ill-humour inclined me to that conjecture; but I was wrong, for as the attendants were putting out the lights in the garden I ventured upon the question. To my surprise, Clutterbuck answered me with a smile.

"Sure," said he, "you are the most pertinacious fellow. What's come to you, who were content to drink your liquor and sit on one side while the world went by? No, she was not wife to Cullen Mayle, nor sister. She was a waif of the sea. Adam Mayle picked her up from the rocks a long while since. It was the only action that could be counted to his credit since he came out of nowhere and leased the granite house of Tresco. A barque--a Venetian vessel, it was thought, from Marseilles, in France, for a great deal of Castile soap, and almonds and oil was washed ashore afterwards--drove in a northwesterly gale on to the Golden Bar reef. The reef runs out from St. Helen's Island, opposite Adam Mayle's window. Adam put out his lugger and crossed the sound, but before he could reach St. Helen's the ship went down into fourteen fathoms of water. He landed on St. Helen's, however, and amongst the rocks where the reef joins the land he came across a sailor, who lay in the posture of death, and yet wailed like a hungry child. The sailor was dead, but within his jacket, buttoned up on his breast, was a child of four years or so. Adam took her home. No one ever claimed her, so he kept her, and called her Helen from the island on which she was wrecked. That was a long time since, for the girl must be twenty."

"Is she French?" I asked.

"French, or Venetian, or Spanish, or what you will," he cried. "It matters very little what country a woman springs from. I have no doubt that a Hottentot squaw will play you the same tricks as a woman of fashion, and with as demure a countenance. Well, it seems we are to go to bed sober;" and we went each to his lodging.

For my part, I lay awake for a long time, seeking to weave into some sort of continuous story what I had heard that day from Lieutenant Clutterbuck and the scraps which I remembered of Parmiter's talk. But old Adam Mayle, who was dead; Cullen, the gannet who struck from the skies; and even Helen, the waif of the sea--these were at this time no more to me than a showman's puppets; marionettes of sawdust and wood, that faced this way and that way according as I pulled the strings. The one being who had life was the boy Parmiter, with his jersey and his red fisherman's bonnet; and I very soon turned to conjecturing how he fared upon his journey.

Had he money to help him forward? Had he fallen in with a kindly carrier? How far had he travelled? I had no doubt that, whether he had money or no, he would reach his journey's end. His spirit was evident in the resolve to travel to London, in his success, and in the concealment of any weakness until the favour he asked for had been refused.

I bought next morning one of the new maps of the Great West Road and began to pick off the stages of his journey. This was the second day since he had started. He would not travel very fast, having no good news to lighten his feet. I reckoned that he would have reached the "Golden Farmer," and I made a mark at that name on the map. Every day for a week I kept in this way an imagined tally of his progress, following him from county to county; and at the end of the week, coming out in the evening from my lodging at the corner of St. James's Street, I ran plump into the arms of the gentleman I had met at Clutterbuck's, and whose name I did not know. But his familiarity was all gone from him. He bowed to me stiffly, and would have passed on, but I caught him by the arm.

"Sir," said I, "you will remember a certain night when I had the honour of your acquaintance."

"Mr. Berkeley," he returned with a smile, "I remember very much better the dreadful morning which followed it."

"You will not, at all events, have forgotten the boy whom you discovered outside the door, and if you can repeat the story which he told, or some portion of it, I shall be obliged to you."

He looked at his watch.

"I have still half an hour to spare," said he; and he led the way to the "Groom Porters." The night was young, but not so young but what the Bassett-table was already full. We sat down together in a dark corner of the room, and my companion told me what he remembered of Parmiter's story.

It appeared that Cullen Mayle had quarrelled with his father on that Sunday night after he had sat in the stocks and had left the house. He had never returned. A year ago Adam Mayle had died, bequeathing his fortune, which was considerable, and most of it placed in the African Company, to his adopted daughter Helen. She, however, declared that she had no right to it, that it was not hers, and that she would hold it in trust until such time as Cullen should come back to claim it.

He did not come back, as has been said; but eight months later Dick Parmiter, on an occasion when he had crossed in his father's fishing boat to Cornwall, had discovered upon Penzance Quay a small crowd of loiterers, and on the ground amongst them, with his back propped against a wall, a negro asleep. A paper was being passed from hand to hand among the group, and in the end it came to Dick Parmiter. Upon the paper was written Adam Mayle's name and the place of his residence, Tresco, in the Scilly Islands; and Dick at once recognised that the writing was in Cullen Mayle's hand. He pushed to the front of the group, and stooping down, shook the negro by the shoulder. The negro drowsily opened his eyes.

"You come from Mr. Cullen Mayle?" said Dick.

"Yes," said the negro, speaking in English and quite clearly.

"You have a message from him?"

"Yes."

"What is it?" asked Dick; and he put a number of questions eagerly. But in the midst of them, and while still looking at Dick, the negro closed his eyes deliberately and fell asleep.

"See," cried a sailor, an oldish white-haired man, with a French accent; "that is the way with him. He came aboard with us at the port of London as wide awake as you or I. Bound for Penzance he was, and the drowsiness took him the second day out. At first he would talk a little; but each day he slept more and more, until now he will say no more than a 'Yes' or a 'No.' Why, he will fall asleep over his dinner."

Dick shook the negro again.

"Do you wish to cross to Tresco?"

"Yes," said the negro.

Dick carried him back to Scilly and brought him to the house on Tresco, where Helen Mayle now lived alone. But no news could be got from him. He would answer "Yes" or "No" and eat his meals; but when it came to a question of his message or Cullen Mayle's whereabouts he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Helen judged that somewhere Cullen was in great need and distress, and because she held his money, and could do nothing to succour him, she was thrown into an extreme trouble. There was some reason why he could not come to Scilly in person, and here at her hand was the man sent to tell the reason; but he could not because of his mysterious malady. More than once he tried with a look of deep sadness in his eyes, as though he was conscious of his helplessness, but he never got beyond the first word. His eyelids closed while his mouth was still open to speak, and at once he was asleep. His presence made a great noise amongst the islands; from Brehar, from St. Mary's, and from St. Martin's the people sailed over to look at him. But Helen, knowing Cullen Mayle and fearing the nature of his misadventure, had bidden Parmiter to let slip no hint that he had come on Cullen's account.

So the negro stayed at Tresco and spread a great gloom throughout the house. They watched him day by day as he slept. Cullen's need might be immediate; it might be a matter of crime; it might be a matter of life and death. The gloom deepened into horror, and Helen and her few servants, and Dick, who was much in the house, fell into so lively an apprehension that the mere creaking of a door would make them start, a foot crunching on the sand outside sent them flying to the window. So for a month, until Dick Parmiter, coming over the hill from New Grimsby harbour at night, had a lantern flashed in his face, and when close to the house saw a man spring up from the gorse and watch him as he passed. From that night the house was continually spied upon, and Helen walked continually from room to room wringing her hands in sheer distraction at her helplessness. She feared that they were watching for Cullen; she feared, too, that Cullen, receiving no answer to his message, would come himself and fall into their hands. She dared hardly conjecture for what reason they were watching, since she knew Cullen. For a week these men watched, five of them, who kept their watches as at sea; and then Dick, taking his courage in his hands, and bethinking him of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, who had been an assiduous visitor at the house on Tresco, had crossed over to St. Mary's and learned from old Captain Hathaway where he now lived. He had said nothing of his purpose to Helen, partly from a certain shyness at speaking to her upon a topic of some delicacy, and partly lest he should awaken her hopes and perhaps only disappoint them. But he had begged a passage in a ship that was sailing to Cornwall, and, crossing thither secretly, had made his way in six weeks to London.

This is the story which my acquaintance repeated to me as we sat in the "Groom Porters."

"And Clutterbuck refused to meddle in the matter," said I. "Poor lad!"

I was thinking of Dick, but my companion mistook my meaning, for he glanced thoughtfully at me for a second.

"I think you are very right to pity him," he said; "although, Mr. Berkeley, if you will pardon me, I am a trifle surprised to hear that sentiment from you. It is indeed a sodden, pitiful, miserable dog's life that Clutterbuck leads. To pass the morning over his toilette, to loiter through the afternoon in a boudoir, and to dispose of the evening so that he may be drunk before midnight! He would be much better taking the good air into his lungs and setting his wits to unknot that tangle amongst those islands in the sea. But I have overstayed my time. If you can persuade him to that, you will be doing him no small service;" and politely taking his leave, he went out of the room.

I sat for some while longer in the corner. I could not pretend that he had spoken anything but truth, but I found his words none the less bitter on that account. A pitiful dog's life for Lieutenant Clutterbuck, who was at the most twenty-four years of age! What, then, was it for me, who had seven years the better of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, or rather, I should say, seven years the worse? I was thirty-one that very month, and Clutterbuck's sodden, pitiful life had been mine for the last seven years. An utter disgust took hold of me as I repeated over and over to myself my strange friend's words. I looked at the green cloth and the yellow candles, and the wolfish faces about the cloth. The candles had grown soft with the heat of the night, and were bent out of their shape, so that the grease dropped in great blots upon the cloth, and the air was close with an odour of stale punch. I got up from my corner and went out into the street, and stood by the water in St. James's Park, If only some such summons had come to me when I was twenty-four as had now come to Clutterbuck!--well, very likely I should have turned a deaf ear to it, even as he had done! And--and, at all events, I was thirty-one and the summons had not come to me, and there was an end of the matter. To-morrow I should go back to the green cloth and not trouble my head about the grease blots; but to-night, since Clutterbuck was twenty-four, I would try to do him that small service of which the stranger spoke, and so setting out at a round pace I made my way to Clutterbuck's lodging.

CHAPTER III

[OF THE MAGICAL INFLUENCE OF A MAP]

I did not, however, find Lieutenant Clutterbuck that night. He was out of reach, and likely to remain so for some while to come. He had left his lodgings at mid-day and taken his body-servant with him, and his landlady had no knowledge of his whereabouts. I thought it probable, however, that some of his friends might have that knowledge, and I thereupon hurried to those haunts where of an evening he was an habitual visitor. The "Hercules Pillars" in Piccadilly, the "Cocoa Tree" in St. James's Street, the "Spring Gardens" at Vauxhall, "Barton's" in King Street, the "Spread Eagle" in Covent Garden,--I hurried from one to the other of these places, and though I came upon many of Clutterbuck's intimates, not one of them was a whit better informed than myself. I returned to my lodging late and more disheartened than I could have believed possible in a matter wherein I had no particular concern. And, indeed, it was not so much any conjecture as to what strange tragical events might be happening about that watched and solitary house in Tresco which troubled me, or even pity for the girl maddened by her fears, or regret that I had not been able to do Clutterbuck that slight service which I purposed. But I took out the map of the Great West Road, and thought of the lad Parmiter trudging along it, doing a day's work here among the fields, begging a lift there upon a waggon and slowly working his way down into the West. I had a very clear picture of him before my eyes. The day was breaking, I remember, and I blew out the candles and looked out of the window down the street. The pavement was more silent at that hour than those country roads on which he might now be walking, or that hedge under which he might be shaking the dew from off his clothes. For there the thrush would be calling to the blackbird with an infinite bustle and noise, and the fields of corn would be whispering to the fields of wheat.

I came back again to my map, and while the light broadened, followed Parmiter from the outset of his journey, through Knightsbridge, along the Thames, between the pine-trees of Hampshire, past Whitchurch, and into the county of Devon. The road was unwound before my eyes like a tape. I saw it slant upwards to the brow of a hill, and dip into the cup of a valley; here through a boskage of green I saw a flash of silver where the river ran; there between flat green fields it lay, a broad white line geometrically straight to the gate of a city; it curved amongst the churches and houses, but never lost itself in that labyrinth, aiming with every wind and turn at that other gate, from which it leaped free at last to the hills. And always on the road I saw Dick Parmiter, drunk with fatigue, tottering and stumbling down to the West.

For awhile he occupied that road alone; but in the end I saw another traveller a long way behind--a man on horseback, who spurred out from London and rode with the speed of the wind. For a little I watched that rider, curious only to discern how far he travelled, and whether he would pass Dick Parmiter; then, as I saw him drawing nearer and nearer, devouring the miles which lay between, it came upon me slowly that he was riding not to pass but to overtake; and at once the fancy flashed across me that this was Clutterbuck. I gazed at my map upon the table as one might gaze into a magician's globe. It was no longer a map; it was the road itself imprisoned in hedges, sunlit, and chequered with the shadows of trees. I could see the horseman, I could see the dust spirting up from beneath his horse's hoofs like smoke from a gun-barrel. Only his hat was pushed down upon his brows because of the wind made by the speed of his galloping, so that I could not see his face. But it was Clutterbuck I had no doubt. Whither had he gone from his lodging? Now I was convinced that I knew. There had been no need of my night's wanderings from tavern to tavern, had I but looked at my map before. It was Clutterbuck without a doubt. At some bend of the road he would turn in his saddle to look backwards, and I should recognise his face. It was Lieutenant Clutterbuck, taking the good air into his lungs with a vengeance. He vanished into a forest, but beyond the forest the road dipped down a bank of grass and lay open to the eye. I should see him in a second race out, his body bent over his horse's neck to save him from the swinging boughs. I could have clapped my hands with sheer pleasure. I wished that my voice could have reached out to Parmiter, tramping wearily so far beyond; in my excitement, I believed that it would, and before I knew what I did, I cried out aloud:

"Parmiter! Parmiter!" and a voice behind me answered:

"You must be mad, Berkeley! What in the world has come to you?"

I sat upright in my chair. The excitement died out of me and left me chilly. I looked about me; I was in my own lodging at the corner of St James's Street, outside in the streets the world was beginning to wake, and the voice which had spoken to me and the hand which was now laid upon my shoulder were the voice and the hand of Lieutenant Clutterbuck.

"What's this?" said he, leaning over my shoulder. "It is a map."

"Yes," I answered, "it is a mere map, the map of the Great West Road;" and in my eyes it was no longer any more than a map.

Clutterbuck, who was holding it in his hand, dropped it with a movement and an exclamation of anger. Then he looked curiously at me, stepped over to the sideboard and took up a glass or two which stood there. The glasses were clean and dry. He looked at me again, his curiosity had grown into uneasiness; he walked to the opposite side of the table, and drawing up a chair seated himself face to face with me.

"I hoped you were drunk," said he. "But it seems you are as sober as a bishop. Are you daft, then? Has it come to a strait-waistcoat? I come back late from Twickenham. I stopped at the 'Hercules Pillars.' There I heard that you had rushed in two hours before in a great flurry and disorder, crying out that you must speak to me on the instant. The same story was told to me at the 'Cocoa Trees.' My landlady repeated it. I conjectured that it must needs be some little affair to be settled with sharps at six in the morning; and so that you might not say your friends neglect you, I turn from my bed, and hurry to you at three o'clock of the morning. I find that you have left your front-door unlatched for any thief that wills to make his profit of the house. I come into your room and find you bending over a map in a great excitement and crying out aloud that damned boy's name. Is he to trouble my peace until the Judgment Day? Are you daft, eh, Steve?" and he reached his hand across the table not unkindly, and laid it on my sleeve. "Are you daft?"

I was staring again at the map, and did not answer him. He shifted his hand from my sleeve and took it up and away from my eyes. He looked at it himself, and then spoke slowly, and in quite a different voice:

"It is a curious, suggestive thing, the map of a road, when all's said," he observed slowly. "I'll not deny but what it seizes one's fancies. Its simple lines and curves call up I know not what pictures of flowering hedgerows; a little black blot means a village of stone cottages, very likely overhung with ivy and climbed upon with roses." He suddenly thrust the map again under my nose, "What do you see upon the road?" said he.

"Parmiter," I answered.

"Of course," he interrupted sharply. "Well, where is Parmiter?" and I laid a finger on the map.

"Between Fenny Bridges and Exeter," said he, leaning forward. "He has made great haste."

He spoke quite seriously, not questioning my conjecture, but accepting it as a mere statement of fact.

"That is a heath?" he asked, pointing to an inch or so where the map was shaded on each side of the high-road. "Yes, a heath t'other side of Hartley Row; I know it. There should be a mail-coach there, and the horses out of the shafts, and one or two men in crape masks and a lady in a swoon, and the driver stretched in the middle of the road with a bullet through his crop."

"I do not see that," I returned. "But here, beyond Axminster----"

"Well?"

He leaned yet further forward.

"There is a forest here."

"Yes."

"I saw a man on horseback ride into it between the trees. He has not as yet emerged from it."

"Who was he? Did you know him?"

"I thought I did. But I could not see his face."

Clutterbuck watched that forest eagerly, and with a queer suspense in his attitude and even in his breathing. Every now and then he raised his eyes to mine with a question in them. Each time I shook my head, and answered:

"Not yet," and we both again stared at the map.

Then Clutterbuck whispered quickly:

"What if his horse had stumbled? What if he is lying there at the roadside beneath the tree?" He tore himself away from the contemplation of the map. "The thing's magical!" he cried. "It has bewitched you, Steve, and by the Lord it has come near to bewitching me!"

"I thought the horseman was yourself. Why don't you go?" said I, pointing to the map.

Lieutenant Clutterbuck rose impatiently from his chair.

"There must be an end of this. Once for all I will not go. There is no reason I should. There is reason why I should not. You do not know in what you are meddling. You are taken like a schoolboy by an old wife's tale of a lonely girl trapped in a net. You are too old for such follies."

"I was too old a fortnight ago," I returned, "but, by the Lord, these last days I have grown young again--so young that----"

I stopped suddenly. Not until this instant had the notion occurred to me, but it came now, it thrilled through me with a veritable shock. I leaned back in my chair and stared at Clutterbuck. He understood, for he in his turn stared at me.

"The rider!" said he breathlessly, tapping the map with his forefinger, "the man whose face you did not see!"

I nodded at him.

"What if the face were mine?" said I.

"You could never believe it."

"I believe that I have even enough youth for that," I cried, and I bent over the map, trying again to fashion from its plain black and white my picture of the great high-road, climbing and winding through a country-side rich with all the colours of the summer. But it was only a map of lines and curves, nor could I any longer discover the horseman who spurred along it--though I had now a particular reason to wish for a view of his face,--or the wood into which he disappeared.

"Well, has your cavalier galloped into the open yet?" asked Clutterbuck.

He spoke with sarcasm, but the sarcasm was forced. It was but a cloak to cover and excuse the question.

I shook my head.

"No, and he will not," said Clutterbuck.

"Is that so sure?" I asked. "What if the face were mine?"

"You are serious!" he cried. "You would go a stranger and offer your unsought aid? It would be an impertinence."

"Suppose life and death are in the balance, would they weigh impertinence?"

"It might be your life and your death!"

And as he spoke, it seemed to me that all my last seven years rose up in their shrouds and laughed at him.

"And what then?" I cried. "Would the world shiver if I died? Would even a tavern-keeper draw down his blinds? Perhaps some drunkard in his cups would wish I lived, that he might take my measure in a drinking-bout. There's my epitaph for you! Good Lord, Clutterbuck, but I would dearly love to die a clean death! There's that boy Parmiter tramping down his road. He does a far better thing than I have ever done. You know! Why talk of it? You know the life I have lived, and since that boy flung his example in my eyes, upon my word I sicken to think of it. Twelve years ago, Clutterbuck, I came to London, a cadet with a cadet's poor portion, but what a wealth of dreams! A fortune first, if I slaved till I was forty, and then I would set free my soul and live! The fortune came, and I slaved but six years for it. The treaty of Aix and a rise of stocks, and there was my fortune. You know how I have lived since."

Clutterbuck looked at me curiously. I had never said so much to him or to any man in this strain. Nor should I have said so much now, but I was fairly shaken out of my discretion. For a little Clutterbuck sat silent and motionless. Then he said gently:

"Shall I tell you why I will not go? Yes, I will tell you," and he told me the history of that Sunday, two years ago, when Cullen Mayle sat in the stocks, or at least as much of it as had come within his knowledge. The events of that day were the beginning of all the trouble, indeed, but Lieutenant Clutterbuck never knew more of it than what concerned himself, and as I sat over against him on that July morning and listened to his story while the world awoke, I had no suspicion of what the passage of that Sunday hid, or of the extraordinary consequences which it brought about.

CHAPTER IV

[DESCRIBES THE REMARKABLE MANNER IN WHICH CULLEN MAYLE LEFT TRESCO]

"It was my business," he began, "to fetch Cullen Mayle from Tresco over to St. Mary's where the stocks were set. It was an unpleasant business, and to me doubly and damnably unpleasant."

"I understand!" said I, thinking of how he had before spoken to me of Adam Mayle's adopted daughter.

"I took a file of Musquets, found the three of them at breakfast, and, with as much delicacy as I could, explained my errand. Helen alone showed any distress or consciousness of disgrace. Cullen strolled to the window, and seeing that I had placed my men securely about the house and that my boat was ready on the sand not a dozen yards away, professed himself, with an inimitable indifference, willing to gratify my wishes; while Adam, so far from manifesting any anger, broke out into a great roar of laughter.

"'Cullen, my boy,' he shouted, like a man highly pleased, 'here's a nasty stumble for your pride. To sit in the stocks of a Sunday morning, when all the girls can see you as they come from church! To sit in the stocks like a common drunkard; and you that sets up for a gentleman! Oh, Cullen, Cullen!' He wagged his head from side to side, and so brought his fist upon the table with a bang which set all the plates dancing. 'Devil damn me,' said he, 'if I don't sail to church at St. Mary's myself and see how you look in your wooden garters.' Cullen glanced carelessly towards me. 'An unseemly old man,' said he; and we left Adam still shaking like a monstrous jellyfish, and crossed back to St. Mary's from Tresco.

"Sure enough Adam kept his word. They were singing the Nunc Dimittis in the church when Adam stumped up the aisle. He had brought Helen with him, and she looked as though she wished the brick floor to open and let her out of sight. But Adam kept his head erect and showed a face of an extraordinary good humour. You may be certain that the parson got the scantiest attention imaginable to his discourse. For one thing, Adam Mayle had never set foot in St. Mary's Church before, and for another, every one was agog to see how he would bear himself afterwards, when he passed on his way to the quay across the little space before the Customs House.

"There was a rush to the church door as soon as the benediction was pronounced, and it happened that I was one of the last to come out of the porch. The first thing that I saw was Adam walking a little way apart amongst the gravestones with a stranger, and the next thing, Helen talking to Dick Parmiter."

Here I interrupted Clutterbuck, for I was anxious to let no detail escape me.

"Had Dick crossed with Adam Mayle from Tresco?"

"I think not," returned Clutterbuck. "He was not in the church. I do not know, but I fancy he brought the stranger over to St. Mary's afterwards."

"And who was this stranger?"

"George Glen he called himself, and said he had been quartermaster with Adam Mayle at Whydah. He was a squat, tarry man, of Adam's age or thereabouts, and the pair of them walked through the gates and crossed the fields over to the street of Hugh Town. I made haste to join Helen," Clutterbuck continued, and explained his words with an unnecessary confusion. "I mean, I would not have it appear that she shared in the disgrace which had befallen Cullen Mayle. So I walked with her, and we followed Adam down the street to the Customs House, where it seemed every inhabitant was loitering, and where Cullen sat, with his hat cocked forward over his forehead to shield him from the sun, entirely at his ease.

"It was curious to observe the behaviour of the loiterers. Some affected not to see Cullen at all; some, but those chiefly maidens, protested that it was a great shame so fine a gentleman should be so barbarously used. The elders on the other hand answered that he had come over late to his deserts, while a few, with a ludicrous pretence of unconsciousness, bowed and smiled at him as though it was the most natural thing in the world for a man in a laced coat to take the air in the stocks of a Sunday morning.

"Into the midst of this group marched Adam Mayle, and came to a halt before his son. He had composed his face to an unexceptionable gravity, and as he prodded thoughtfully with his stick at the sole of Cullen's shoe,

"'This is the first time,' he said, 'that ever I saw a pair of silk stockings in the stocks.'

"'One lives and learns,' replied Cullen, indifferently; and the old man lifted his nose into the air and said dreamily:

"'There is a ducking-chair, is there not, at the pier head?' and so walked on to the steps where his boat was moored. He went down into it with Mr. Glen, and the two men set about hoisting the sail. I was still standing on the pier with Helen.

"'You will come too?' she said with a sort of appeal. 'I do not know what may happen when Cullen is set free and comes back, I should be very glad if you would come.'"

Lieutenant Clutterbuck broke off his story and walked uneasily once or twice across the room as though he was troubled even now with the recollection of her appeal and of how she looked when she made it.

"So I went," he continued suddenly, and with a burst of frankness. "You see, Steve, she and I were very good friends; I never saw anything but welcome in her eyes when I crossed over to Tresco, and the kindliness of her voice had a warmth, and at times a tenderness, which I hoped meant more than friendship. Indeed, I would have staked my life she was ignorant of duplicity; and with Cullen she seemed always at some pains to conceal a repugnance. Well, I was young, I suppose; I saw with the eyes of youth, which see everything out of its due proportion. I crossed to Tresco, and while we were seated at dinner, about two hours later, Cullen Mayle strolled in and took his chair. Dick Parmiter had waited for him at St. Mary's until such time as he was set free, and had brought him across the Road.

"I cannot deny but what Cullen Mayle bore himself very suitably for the greater part of the time we were at table. Adam's blatant jests were enough to set any man's teeth on edge, yet Cullen made as though he did not hear a word of them, and talked politely upon indifferent topics to us and Mr. Glen. Adam, however, was not to be silenced that way. His banter became coarse and vindictive; for one thing he had drunk a deal of liquor, and for another he was exasperated that he could not provoke his son. I forget what particular joke he roared out from the head of the table, but I saw Cullen stretch his arm out over the cloth.

"'I see what is amiss,' he said, wearily, and took away the brandy bottle from his father's elbow. He went to the window, and opening it, emptied the bottle on to the grass beneath the sill. Then he came back to his seat and said suavely to Mr. Glen: 'My father cannot get the better of his old habits; he is drunk very early on Sundays--an unregenerate old put of a fellow as ever I came across.'

"The quarrel followed close upon the heels of that sentence, and occupied the afternoon and was renewed at supper. Adam very violent and blustering; Cullen very cool and composed, and only betraying his passion by the whiteness of his face. He used no oaths; he sat staring at his father with his dark sleepy eyes, and languidly accused him of every crime in the Newgate Calendar, with a great deal of detail as to time and place, and adding any horrible detail which came into his mind. The old man was routed at the last. About the middle of supper he got up from his chair, and going up the stairs shut himself into a room which he had fitted up as a cabin, and where he was used to sit of an evening.

"We were all, as you may guess, inexpressibly relieved when Adam left the parlour, for here it seemed was the quarrel ended. We counted, however, without Cullen. He looked for a moment or two at his father's empty chair, and stood up in his turn.

"'Here's an old rogue for you,' he said in a gentle voice. 'He has no more manners than a nasty pig. I'll teach him some,' and he followed his father up the stairs and into the cabin above. What was said between them we never heard, but we gathered at the foot of the stairs in the hall and listened to their voices. The old man bellowed as though he was in pain, and shook the windows with his noise; Cullen's voice came to us only as a smooth, continuous murmur. For half an hour perhaps we stood thus in the hall--interference would have only made matters worse--and I own that this half hour was not wholly unpleasant to me. Helen, in a word, was afraid, and more than once her hand was laid upon my coat-sleeve, and, touching it, ceased to tremble. She turned to me, it seemed, in that half hour of fear; I was fool enough to think it.

"At length we heard a door opening. Cullen negligently came down the stairs; Adam rushed out after him as far as the head of the stairs, where he stopped.

"'Open the door, one of you!' he bawled. 'Kick him out, Clutterbuck, and we'll see what damned muck-heap his fine manners will lead him to.'

"The outcry brought the servants scurrying into the hall. Adam repeated his order and one of the servants threw open the door.

"'Will you fetch me my boots?' said Cullen, and sitting down in a chair he kicked off his shoes. Then he pulled on his boots deliberately, stood up and felt in his pockets. From one pocket he drew out five guineas, from a second two, from a third four. These eleven guineas he held in his open hand.

"'They belong to you, I think,' he said, softly, poising them in his palm; and before any one could move a step or indeed guess at his intention, he raised his arm and flung them with all his force to where his father stood at the head of the stairs. Two of the guineas cut the old man in the forehead, and the blood ran down his face; the rest sparkled and clattered against the panels behind his head, whence they fell on to the stairs and rolled one by one down into the hall. No one spoke; no one moved. The brutal violence of the action for the moment paralysed every one; even Adam stood shaking at the stair head with his wits wandering. One by one the guineas rolled down the staircase, leaping from step to step, rattling as they leaped; and for a long time it seemed, one whirred and sang in a corner as it span round and settled down upon the boards; and when the coin had ceased to spin, still no one moved, no one spoke. A murmur of waves breaking lazily upon the sand, a breath of air stirring a shrub in the garden, the infinitesimal trumpeting of a gnat, came through the window, bringing as it were tales of things which lived into a room of statues.

"Cullen himself was the first to break the enchantment. He took his watch from his fob and holding it by the ribbon twirled it backwards and forwards. It was a big silver watch, and as he twirled it this way and that, it caught the light, seemed to throw out little sparks of fire, and flashed with a dazzling brightness. The eyes of the company were caught by it; they watched it with a keen attention, not knowing why they watched it; they watched it as it shone and glittered in its revolutions, almost with a sense of expectation, as though something of great consequence was to happen from the twirling of that watch.

"'This, too, is yours,' said Cullen, 'but it was no doubt some dead sailorman's before you stole it;' and ceasing to twirl the watch he held it steady by the ribbon. Then he looked round the hall and saw Helen staring at the watch with a queer intentness. I remember that her hand was at that moment resting upon my sleeve, and I felt it grow more rigid. I looked at her; her face was set, her eyes fixed upon Cullen and his glittering watch. I spoke to her; she did not answer, she did not hear."

Clutterbuck interrupted his story and sat moodily lost in his recollections, and when he resumed it was with great bitterness.

"I think," he continued, "that when Cullen spoke, he spoke with no other end than to provoke his father yet more. You must know that the old man had just one tender spot in his heart. Cullen could have no other aim but to set his heel on that.

"'I will come back for you, Helen,' he said, bending his eyes upon her and making as if there was much love between them; and to everybody's surprise Helen lifted her eyes slowly from the watch until they met Cullen's, and kept them there. She did not answer him in words, there was no need she should, every line of her body expressed obedience.

"Even Cullen was puzzled by her demeanour. Boy and girl, maid and youth, they had lived side by side in the house with indifference upon his part and all the appearance of aversion upon hers. Yet here was she subdued in an instant at the prospect of his departure! It seemed that the mere thought that Cullen was henceforth an outcast tore her secret live and warm from her heart.

"Cullen was plainly puzzled, as I say, but he was not the man to miss an advantage in the gratification of his malice. He shot one triumphant look at his father and spoke again to Helen.

"'You will wait for me?'

"Her eyes never wavered from his.

"'Yes!' she answered.

"It was a humiliating moment for me as you may imagine. It must have been more humiliating for Adam. With a hand upon the rail he lumbered heavily down a couple of the stairs.

"'No!' he cried, with a dreadful oath and in a voice which was strangely moved.

"'But I say yes,' said Cullen, very quietly. The smile had gone from his face; a new excitement kindled it. He was pitting his will against his father's. I saw him suddenly draw himself erect. 'Or, better still, you shall come with me now,' he cried. He reached out his arm straight from the shoulder towards her.

"'Come! Come with me now.'

"His voice rang out dominant like the clang of a trumpet, and to the consternation of us all, Helen crossed the floor towards him. I tried to detain her. 'Helen,' I cried, 'you do not know what you are doing. He will drag you into the gutter.'

"'Lieutenant Clutterbuck,' said Cullen, 'you are very red in the face. You cannot expect she will listen to you, for you do not look well when you are red in the face.'

"I paid no heed to his gibes.

"'Helen,' I cried, again. She paid no more heed to my prayers. 'What will you do? Where will you go?' I asked.

"'We shall go to London,' answered Cullen, 'where we shall do very well, and further to the best of our means Lieutenant Clutterbuck's advancement.'

"Humiliation and grief had overset my judgment or I should not have argued at this moment with Cullen Mayle. I flung out at him hotly, and like a boy.

"'When you are doing very well in London, Cullen Mayle, Lieutenant Clutterbuck will not be so far behind you.'

"'He will indeed be close upon my heels,' returned Cullen as pleasantly as possible, 'for most likely he will be carrying my valise.'

"With that he turned again to Helen, beckoned her to follow him, and strode towards the open door. She did follow him. Cullen was already in the doorway; in another second she would have crossed the threshold. But with a surprising agility Adam Mayle jumped down the stairs, ran across the hall, and caught the girl in his arms. She did not struggle to free herself, but she strained steadily towards Cullen. The old man's arms were strong, however.

"'Shut the door,' he cried, and I sprang forward and slammed it to.

"'Lock it! Bolt it!'

"Adam stood with his arms about the girl until the heavy bar swung down across the door and dropped into its socket with a clang. Now do you understand why I will not go down to Tresco? I can give you another reason if you are not content. When I spoke to Helen two days later, and taxed her with her passion for Cullen,--would you believe it?--she was deeply pained and hurt. She would not have it said that she had so much as thought of following Cullen's fortunes. She outfaced me as though I had been telling her fairy tales, and not what my own eyes saw. No, indeed, I will not go down to Tresco! I am not the traveller who has ridden into your wood upon the Great West Road."

Lieutenant Clutterbuck took up his hat when he had finished his story,

"The girl, besides, is not worth a thought," said he.

"I am not thinking of her," said I. Of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, of myself, above all of Dick Parmiter, I was thinking, but not at all of Helen Mayle. I drew the map towards me. Clutterbuck stopped at the door, came back and again leaned over my shoulder.

"Has your traveller come out from that wood?" he asked.

"No," I answered.

"It is an allegory," said he. "The man who rides down on this business to the West will, in very truth, enter into a wood from which he will not get free."

CHAPTER V

[THE ADVENTURE IN THE WOOD]

A loud roll of drums beneath my windows, the inspiriting music of trumpets, the lively measured stamp of feet. The troops with General Amherst at their head were marching down St. James's Street on their way to embark for Canada, and the tune to which they marched sang in my head that day as I rode out of London. The beat of my horse's hoofs kept time to it, and at Brentford a girl singing in a garden of apple-trees threw me a snatch of a song to fit to it.

She sang, and I caught the words up as I rode past. The sparkle of summer was in the air, and an Indian summer, if you will, at my heart. I slept that night at Hartley Row, and the next at Down House, and the third at a little inn some miles beyond Dorchester. A brook danced at the foot of the house, and sang me to sleep with the song I had heard at Brentford, and, as I lay in bed, I could see out of my window the starlight and the quiet fields white with a frost of dew and thickets of trees very black and still; and towards sunset upon the fourth day, I suddenly reined in my horse to one side and sat stone-still. To my left, the road ran straight and level for a long way, and nowhere upon it was there a living thing; on each side stretched fields and no one moved in them, and no house was visible. That way I had come, and I had remarked upon the loneliness. To my right, the road ran forward into a thick wood, and vanished beneath a roof of overhanging boughs. It was the aspect of that wood which took my breath away, and it surprised me because it was familiar. There was a milestone which I recognised just where the first tree overhung the road; there was a white gate in the hedge some twenty paces this side of the milestone. I knew that too. Just behind where I sat there should be three tall poplars ranged in a line like sentinels, the wood's outposts; I turned, and in the field behind me, the poplars reached up against the sky. I had no doubt they would be there, yet the sight of them fairly startled me. I had seen them--yes, but never in my life had I ridden along this road before. I had seen them only on the map in my lodging at St. James's Street.

The sun dropped down behind the trees, and the earth turned grey. I sat there in the saddle with I know not what superstitious fancies upon me. I could not but remember that the traveller had ridden into the wood, and had not ridden out and down the open bank of grass upon the other side. "What if his horse has stumbled?" Clutterbuck had asked. "What if he is lying at the roadside under the trees?" I could see that picture very clearly, and at last, very clearly too, the rider's face. I looked backwards down the road with an instinctive hope that some other traveller might be riding my way in whose company I might go along. But the long level slip of white was empty. All the warmth seemed to have gone from the world with the dropping of the sun. A sad chill twilight crept over the lonely fields. A shiver caught and shook me; I gathered up the reins and rode slowly among the trees, where already it was night.

I rode at first in the centre of the highway, and found the clatter of my horse's hoofs a very companionable sound. But in a little the clatter seemed too loud, it was too clear a warning of my approach, it seemed to me in some way a provocation of danger. I drew to one side of the road where the leaves had drifted and made a carpet whereon I rode without noise. But now the silence seemed too eerie--I heard, and started at, the snapping of every twig. I strained my ears to catch the noise of creeping footfalls, and I was about to guide my horse back to the middle of the road, when I turned a corner suddenly, and saw in front of me in a space where the forest receded and let the sky through, lights gleaming in a window.

I set spurs to the horse and galloped up to the door. The house was an inn; the landlord was already at the threshold, and in a very short while I was laughing at my fears over my supper in the parlour.

"Am I your only guest to-night?" I asked.

"There is one other, sir," returned the landlord as he served me, and as he spoke I heard a footstep in the passage. The door was pushed open, and a young man politely bowed to me in the entrance.

"You have a very pretty piece of horseflesh, sir," said he, as he came into the room. "I took the liberty of looking it over a minute ago in the stables."

"It is not bad," said I. There was never a man in the world who did not relish praise of his horse, and I warmed to my new acquaintance. "We are both, it seems, sleeping here to-night, and likely enough we are travelling the same road to-morrow."

The young man shook his head.

"I could wish indeed," said he, "that we might be fellow-travellers, but though it may well be we follow the same road, we do not, alas, travel in the same way," and he showed me his boots which were thickly covered with dust. "My horse fell some half-a-dozen miles from here and snapped a leg. I must needs walk to-morrow so far as where I trust to procure another--that is to say," he continued, "if I do not have to keep my bed, for I have taken a devilish chill this evening," and drawing up his chair to the empty fireplace, he crouched over an imaginary fire and shivered.

Now since he sat in this attitude, I could not but notice his boots, and I fell to wondering what in the world he had done with his spurs. For he wore none, and since he had plainly not troubled to repair the disorder of his dress, it seemed strange that he should have gone to the pains of removing his spurs. However, I was soon diverted from this speculation by the distress into which Mr. Featherstone's cold threw him. Featherstone was his name, as he was polite enough to tell me in the intervals of coughing, and I told him mine in return. At last his malady so increased that he called for the landlord, and bidding him light a great fire in his bedroom said he must needs go to bed.

"I trust, however," he continued politely to me, "that you, Mr. Berkeley, will prove a Samaritan, and keep me company for a while. For I shall not sleep, upon my word I shall not sleep a wink," and he was so positive in his assurances that, though I was myself sufficiently tired, I thought it no more than kindness to fall in with his wishes.

Accordingly I followed him into his bedroom, where he lay in a great canopied bed, with a big fire blazing upon the hearth, and a bottle of rum with a couple of glasses upon a table at the bedside.

"It is an ague," said he, "which I caught upon the Gambia River, and from which I have ever since suffered many inconveniences;" he poured out the rum into the glasses, and wished me with great politeness all prosperity.

It was no doubt, also, because he had voyaged on the Gambia River that he suffered no inconvenience from the heat of the room. But what with the hot August night, and the blazing fire, and the closed window, I became at once so drowsy that I could hardly keep my eyes open, and I wished him good-night.

"But you will not go," said he. "We are but this moment acquainted, and to-morrow we shall wave a farewell each to the other. Let us, Mr. Berkeley, make something of the meanwhile, I beg you."

I answered him that I did not wish to appear churlish, but that I should most certainly appear so if I fell asleep while we talked, which, in spite of myself, I was very likely to do.

"But I have a bottle of salts here," said he, with a laugh, as he reached out of bed and fumbled with his coat. "I have a bottle of salts here which will infallibly persuade you from any thought of sleep," and he drew out from the pocket of his coat a pack of cards. "Well, what do you say?" he continued, as I did not move.

"It is some while since I handled a card," said I slowly.

"A game of picquet," he suggested.

"It is a good game," said I.

He flipped the edges of the cards with his thumb. I drew nearer to the bed.

"Well, one game then," said I.

"To be sure," said he, shuffling the cards.

"And the stakes must be low."

"I hate a gambler myself."

He cut the cards. I sat down on the bedside and dealt them.

"It is your elder," said I.

He looked disconsolately at his hand.

"Upon my word," said he. "Deuce take me if I know what to discard. I have no hand for picquet at all, though as luck will have it I have very good putt cards."

I glanced through my hand.

"I have better putt cards than you," said I.

"It is not likely," he returned.

"I'll make a wager of it," I cried.

"Your horse," said he, leaning up on his elbow. He spoke a trifle too eagerly, he sprang up on his elbow a trifle too quickly. I looked again through my hand, and I laid the cards down on the counterpane.

"No," said I quietly. "It is very likely you are right: I have two treys and an ace, but you may have two treys and a deuce."