Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  The ostler brought the horse round to the inn door — a, stout brown hack, sixteen hands high, muscular and spirited-looking, with only one speck of white about him, a long slender streak down the side of his head.

  The young man put his arm caressingly round the horse’s neck, and drawing his head down, looked at him as he would have looked at a friend, of whose love and truth in a false and cruel world he at least was certain.

  “Brave Balmerino, good Balmerino,” he said, “you’ve to carry me four-and-twenty miles across a rough country to-night. You’ve to carry me on an errand, the end of which perhaps will be a bad one; you’ve to carry me away from a great many bitter memories and a great many cruel thoughts; but you’ll do it, Balmerino, you’ll do it, won’t you, old boy?”

  The horse nestled his head against the young man’s shoulder, and snuffed at his coat-sleeve.

  “Brave boy; that means yes,” said Markham, as he sprang into the saddle. “Good night, old friends; good-bye, old home! as Mr. Garrick says in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Richard’s himself again!’ Goodbye.”

  He waved his hand and rode slowly off towards the moorland bridle-path, but before he had crossed the wide high road, the usually phlegmatic Samuel Pecker intercepted him, by suddenly rising up, pale of countenance and dismal of mien, under his horse’s head.

  “Mr. Darrell Markham,” said the moody innkeeper very slowly, “don’t you go to Marley Water this night! Don’t go! Don’t ask me why, sir, and don’t, sir, ask me wherefore; for I don’t know wherefore, and I can’t tell why; but don’t go! I’ve got one of those what-you-may-call’ems — I mean one of those feelings that says, as plain as words can speak, ‘Don’t do it!’”

  “What, a presentiment, eh, Pecker?”

  “That’s the dictionary-word for it, I believe, sir. Don’t go!”

  “Samuel Pecker, I must,” answered Darrell. “If I go to my death through going to Marley Water, so be it; I go!” He shook the bridle on the horse’s neck, and the animal sped off at such a rate that by the time Mr. Samuel Pecker had recovered himself sufficiently to look up, all he could see of Darrell Markham was a cloud of white dust hurrying over the darkening moorland before the autumn wind.

  Mrs. Pecker stood under the wide thatched porch of the Black Bear watching the receding horseman “Poor Master Darrell!” she exclaimed with a sigh and an ominous shake of the head; “brave generous noble Master Darrell! I only wish, for pretty Miss Millicent’s sake, that Captain George Duke was a little like him.”

  “But suppose Captain George Duke wishes nothing of the kind? how then, Mistress Pecker?”

  The person who thus answered Mrs. Pecker’s soliloquy was a man of average height, dressed in a naval coat and three-cornered hat, who had come up to the inn doorway as quietly as the horseman had done half an hour before.

  For once in the course of the landlady’s existence the gigantic bosom of the unflinching Sarah Pecker quailed before one of the sterner sex. She almost stammered, that great woman, as she said, “I beg your pardon, Captain Duke, I was only a-thinking!”

  “You were only a-thinking aloud, Mistress Pecker. So you’d like to see George Duke, of His Majesty’s ship the Vulture, a good-for-nothing idling reckless ne’er-do-weel like Darrell Markham, would you?”

  “I tell you what it is, Captain; you’re Miss Millicent’s husband, and if — if you was a puppy dog, and she was fond of you, there isn’t a word I could bring myself to say against you, for the sake of that sweet young lady. But don’t you speak one bad word of Master Darrell Markham, for that’s one of the things that Sarah Pecker will never put up with while she’s got a tongue in her head and sharp nails of her own at her fingers’ ends.”

  The Captain burst into a long ringing laugh — a laugh that had a silver music peculiar to itself. There were people in the town of Compton-on-the-Moor, in the seaport of Marley Water, and on board His Majesty’s frigate the Vulture, who said that there were times when the Captain’s laughter had a cruel sound in its music, and was by no means good to hear. But what man in authority ever escaped the poisonous breath of slander; and why should Captain Duke be more exempt than his fellows?

  “I forgive you, Mrs. Pecker,” he said, “I forgive you. I can afford to hear people speak well of Darrell Markham. Poor devil, I pity him!” With which friendly remark the Captain of the Vulture turned his back upon the portly Sarah, and strolled towards the open door of the inn, through which the rosy glow of fire-light shone out upon the autumn dusk.

  On the doorstep of the Black Bear George Duke encountered Mr. Samuel Pecker, who had, after his solemn adjuration to Darrell Markham, re-entered the hostelry by a side door that led through the stab] yard.

  If Captain George Duke, of His Majesty’s navy, had borne the most terrible shape that ever was assumed by fiend or goblin, his appearance on the step of the inn-door could scarcely have been more appalling to the mild Samuel Pecker. Poor Samuel’s face whitened and his knees bent under him as he started back, and stared at the naval officer with his weak blue eyes opened to their very widest extent.

  “Then you didn’t go, Captain?”

  “Then I didn’t go? Didn’t go where?”

  “You didn’t go to Marley Water.”

  “Go to Marley Water! No! Who said I was going there?”

  The small remnant of manly courage left in Mr. Samuel Pecker after his surprise was quite knocked out of him by the energetic tone of the Captain, and he murmured mildly, —

  “Who said so? O, no one particular; only — only yourself!”

  The Captain laughed his own ringing laugh once more.

  “I said so? I said so, Samuel? When?”

  “Half an hour ago. When you asked me the way there.”

  “When I asked you the way to Marley Water! Why I know the road as well as I know my own quarter-deck.”

  “That’s what struck me at the time, Captain, when you stopped your horse at this door and asked me the way. I must say I thought it was odd.”

  “I stopped my horse! When?”

  “Half an hour ago.”

  “Samuel Pecker, I haven’t been across a horse today. I’m not over attached to the brutes at the best of times, but to-night I’m tired out with my journey from London, and I’ve just come straight from my wife’s tea-table, where I’ve been drinking a dish of sloppy bohea and going to sleep over woman’s talk.”

  “And yet Parson Bendham says there’s no such things as ghosts!”

  “Samuel Pecker, you’re drunk.”

  “I haven’t tasted a mug of beer this day, Captain. Ask Sarah.”

  “That he hasn’t, Captain,” responded Samuel’s spouse to this appeal. “I keep my eye upon him too sharp for that.”

  “Then what’s the fool woolgathering about, Mistress Sally?” asked the Captain, rather angrily.

  “Lord have mercy upon us! I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Pecker, scornfully; “he’s as full of fancies as the oldest woman in all Cumberland; he’s always a-seein’ of ghosts and hobgoblins and windin’ sheets, and all sorts of dismals,” added the landlady contemptuously, “and unsettlin’ his mind for business and bookkeepin’. I haven’t common patience with him, that I han’t. He can’t pass through the churchyard after dark but honest folks that have had Christian burial must needs come out of their graves to look at him, according to his account — as if any decent corpse would leave a comfortable grave for such as him.”

  Mrs. Pecker was very fond of informing people of this fact of her small stock of common patience in the matter of Samuel her husband; and as all her actions went to confirm her words, she was pretty generally believed.

  “O, never mind, Sarah; never mind, Captain Duke; it’s no consequence, and it’s no business of mine,” said the landlord, with abject meekness; “there was three of us as see him, that’s all!”

  “Three of you as see whom?” asked the Captain.

  “As see him — as see—” the landlord gave a peculiarly dry gulp just here, as if the
ghost of something had been choking him, and he were trying to exorcise it by swallowing hard—” there was three of us as see — it!”

  “It? What?”

  “The man who stopped on horseback at this door half an hour ago, and asked me the way to Marley Water.”

  “Humph! And what was this man like?” asked the Captain.

  “As like you as your own reflection in a looking-glass,” answered the landlord. “It’s no use looking contemptuously at me, Sarah,” he added, in reply to a scornful smile and a disdainful gesture from his better half; “the face that’s looking at me now is the face that looked at me half an hour ago. I might have guessed there was something strange in him though from hip coming up so quietly,” murmured Samuel thoughtfully. “Mesh and blood doesn’t creep up to a man unawares like that!”

  Captain Duke looked very hard into the face of the speaker; looked thoughtfully, gravely, earnestly at him, with bright searching brown eyes; and then again burst out laughing louder than before. So much was he amused by the landlord’s astonished and awe-stricken face, that he laughed all the way across the low old hall — laughed as he opened the door of the oak-panelled parlour in which the genteeler visitors at the Bear were accustomed to sit — laughed as he threw himself back into the great polished oaken chair by the fire, and stretched his legs out upon the stone hearth till the heels of his boots rested against the iron dogs — laughed as he called Samuel Pecker, and could hardly order his favourite beverage, rum punch, for laughing.

  The room was empty, and it was to be observed that when the door closed upon the landlord, Captain Duke, though he still laughed, something contracted the muscles of his face, while the pleasant light died slowly out of his handsome brown eyes, and gave place to a settled gloom.

  When the punch was brought him, he drank three glasses one after another. But neither the great wood fire blazing on the wide hearth nor the steaming liquid seemed to warm him, for he shivered as he drank.

  He shivered as he drank, and presently he drew his chair still closer to the fire, planted his feet upon the two iron dogs, and sat looking darkly into the red spitting hissing blaze.

  “My incubus, my shadow, my curse!” he said. Only six words, but they expressed the hatred of a lifetime.

  By-and-by a thought seemed suddenly to strike him; he sprang to his feet so rapidly that he overset the heavy high-backed oaken chair, and strode out of the room.

  On the other side of the hall was situated the common parlour of the inn; the room in which the tradesmen of the town met every evening, the oak room, being sacred to a superior class of travellers, and to such men as the doctor, the lawyer, and Captain Duke. The common parlour was full this evening, and a loud noise of talking and laughter proceeded from the open door.

  To this door the Captain went, and removing his hat from his clustering auburn curls, which were tied behind with a ribbon, he bowed to the merry little assembly.

  They were on their feet in a moment. Captain George Duke, of his Majesty’s ship the Vulture, was a great man at Compton-on-the-Moor. His marriage with the only child of the late squire had identified him with the place, to which he was otherwise a stranger.

  “I am sorry to disturb you, gentlemen,” he said graciously; “is Pecker here?”

  Pecker was there, but so entirely crestfallen and subdued that, on hearing himself asked for, he emerged from his ponderous chair at the head of the table like some melancholy male Aphrodite rising from the sea, and uttered not a word.

  “Pecker, I want to know the exact time,” said the Captain. “My watch has gone down, and Mistress Duke has been so much occupied with reading Mr. Richardson’s romances and nursing her lapdog, that all the clocks at the cottage are out of order. What is the hour by your infallible oaken clock on the stairs, Samuel?”

  The landlord rubbed his two little podgy hands through his limp sandy hair, by which process he seemed to communicate a faint stir to his intellectual faculties, and then retired silently to execute the Captain’s order. A dozen stout silver turnip-shaped chronometers and great leather-encased Tompion watches were out in a moment.

  “Half-past seven by me;”

  “A quarter to eight;’ “Twenty minutes, Captain!” George Duke might have had the choice of half-a-dozen different times had he liked, but he only said quietly, —

  “Thank you, gentlemen, very much; but I’ll regulate my watch by Pecker’s old clock, for I think it keeps truer time than the church, the market, or the gaol.”

  “The gaol’s pretty true to time at eight o’clock on a Monday morning sometimes, though, Captain, isn’t it?” said a little shoemaker, who considered himself the wit of the village.

  “Not half true enough, sometimes, Mr. Tomkins,” answered the Captain, winding up his watch, with a grave smile playing round his well-shaped mouth. “If everybody was hung that deserves to be hung, Mr. Tomkins, there’d be more room in the world for the honest people. Well, Samuel, what’s the exact time?”

  “Ten minutes to eight, Captain Duke, and such a night! I stopped to look out of the staircase window just now, and the sky’s as black as ink, and seems so near the earth that one might fancy it would fall down upon our heads and crush us, if it wasn’t for the wind a-stopping of it.”

  “Ten minutes to eight; that’s all right,” said the Captain, putting his watch into his pocket. He turned to leave the room, but stopped at the door and said, “Oh, by the bye, worthy Samuel, at what time did you see my ghost?” He laughed as he asked the question, and looked round at the company with a smile and a malicious wink in the direction of the subdued landlord.

  “Compton church clock was striking seven as the man on horseback rode away across the moor, Captain. But don’t ask me anything; don’t, please, talk to me,” he said forlornly; “it’s no consequence, it’s not any business of mine, it doesn’t matter to anybody, but — —” he paused and repeated the swallowing process,—”I saw it!”

  The customers at the Black Bear were not generally apt to pay very serious attention to any remark emanating from the worthy landlord, hut these last three words did seem to impress them, and they stared with scared faces from Samuel Pecker to the Captain, and from the Captain back to Samuel Pecker.

  “Our jolly landlord has been a little too free with his own old ale, gentlemen, and he must needs take it into his wise head that he has seen my ghost, for no better reason than because some traveller a little like me stopped at his door to ask the way to Marley Water. I hope good ale and good company will set him right again,” said George Duke. “Good night, gentlemen all.”

  He left the room and returned to the oak parlour, where he flung himself once more into his old moody attitude over the blazing logs, and sat staring gloomily into the red chasms in the burning wood — craggy cliffs and deep abysses, down which ever and anon some dying ember fell like a suicide plunging from the summit of a cliff into the fathomless gulf below.

  The great brown eyes of the Captain looked straight and steadily into the changing pictures to be seen in the fire. He was so entirely different a creature from that man whose gay voice and light laugh had just resounded in the common parlour of the inn, that it would have been difficult for any one having seen him in one phase to recognize him in the other.

  He was not long alone, for presently Nathaniel Halloway the miller dropped in, and joined the Captain over his punch; and by-and-by attorney Selgood and Mr. Jordan the surgeon — Dr. Jordan par excellence throughout Compton — came in arm-in-arm. The four men were very friendly, and they sat drinking, smoking, Mid talking politics till midnight, when Captain George Duke started from his seat and was for breaking up the party.

  “Twelve o’clock from the tower of Compton church,” he said, as he rose from the table. “Gentlemen, I’ve a pretty young wife waiting for me at home, and I’ve half a mile to walk before I get home; so I shall leave you to finish your punch and your conversation without me.”

  Nathaniel Halloway sprang to his feet. “Captai
n Duke, you’re not going to leave us in this shabby fashion. You’re not on your own quarter-deck, remember; and you’re not going to have it all your own way. As for the pretty little admiral in petticoats at home, you can soon make your peace with her. Stop and finish the punch, man!” and the worthy miller, on whom the evening’s potations had produced some little effect, caught hold of the Captain’s gold-laced cuff in a hearty boisterous fashion, and tried to prevent his leaving the room.

  George Duke shook him lightly off, and opening the door that led into the hall, went out, followed by the miller and his boon companions, Dr. Jordan and lawyer Selgood.

  The house, which had been so quiet five minutes before, was now all bustle and confusion. First and foremost there was worthy Mistress Sarah Pecker alternately bewailing, lamenting, and scolding at the very extremest altitude of her voice. Then there was Samuel her husband, pale, aghast, and useless, getting feebly into everybody’s way, and rapidly sinking beneath the combined effects of mental imbecility and universal contumely. Then there were the ostler and two rosy-faced but frightened-looking chambermaids clinging to each other and to the cook-maid and the waiter; and in the centre of the hall the one cause of all this alarm and emotion lay stretched in the arms of two men, a letter-carrier and a farm labourer. Yes — with Mrs. Sarah Pecker kneeling by his side, adjuring him to speak, to move, to open his heavy eyelids — silent, motionless, and unconscious, lay that Darrell Markham who five hours before had started in full health and strength for the little seaport of Marley Water.

  “We kicked over him in the path,” said one of the men; “me and Jim Bowlder here, of Squire Morris’s at the Grange. We was coming home from Marley market, and we come slap upon him in the dark, so dark that we couldn’t see whether he was a man or a dead sheep; but we got him up in our arms and felt that he was stiff with cold and damp — he might be murdered or he might be frozen; there was some wet about his chest and his left arm, and I knew by the feel of it, thick and slimy, that it was blood; and me and Jim Bowlder we raised him between us, heels and head, and carried him straight here.”