This principal street of Marley Water was lighted here and there by feeble oil-lamps, which shed a wan light upon the figures of the foot-passengers.
Glancing behind her once, bewildered by the strange bustle of the busy little sea-port town, Millicent was surprised to see the outside passenger whom she had observed at Compton following close upon their heels.
Captain Duke felt the little hand tighten upon his arm with a nervous shiver.
“What made you start?” he asked.
“The — the man!”
“What man?”
“A man who travelled outside the coach, and whose face was quite hidden by his hat and cloak. I heard the other passengers talking of the man. He was so rude and silent that people took a dislike to him. He is just behind us.”
George Duke looked back,’ but the outside passenger was no longer to be seen.
“What a silly child you are, Millicent!” he said. “What is there so wonderful in your seeing one of your fellow-passengers in the High Street ten minutes after the coach has stopped?”
“But he seemed to be following us.”
“Why, my country wench, people walk close behind one another in busy towns without any such thought as following their neighbours. Millicent, Millicent, when will you learn to be wise?”
The Captain of the Vulture seemed in unusually good spirits upon this bitter January night.
“I shall be far away upon the blue water in twenty-four hours, Milly,” he said. “No one but a sailor can tell a sailor’s weariness of the land. I heard of your brother Ringwood last night.”
“Bad news?” asked Millicent anxiously.
“No good news for you, who will come in for his money if he dies unmarried. He’s leading a wild life, and wasting his substance in taverns, and worse places than taverns. Luckily for you, the Compton property is safely secured, so that he can neither sell nor mortgage it.”
The little inn at which George Duke was stopping faced the water, and Millicent could see the lights on board the Vulture gleaming far away through the winter night, from the window of the little parlour where supper was laid out ready for the traveller.
“At what o’clock do you sail, George?” she asked.
“A little before midnight. You can go down to the pier with me, and see the last of me, and you can get back to Compton by the return coach to-morrow morning.”
“I will do exactly as you please. Will this voyage be a long one, George?”
“Not long. I shall be back in three months at the latest.”
Her heart sank at his ready answer. She was always so much happier in her husband’s absence than when he honoured her with his company — happy in her trim little cottage, her stout good-tempered servant, the friends who had known her from childhood, her favourite romances, her old companion the faithful brown and white spaniel — happy in all these — happy too in her undisturbed memories of Darrell Markham.
While George and his wife were seated at the little supper-table, one of the servants of the inn came to say that Captain Duke was wanted.
“Who wants me?” he asked impatiently.
“A man wrapped in a horseman’s coat, and with his hat over his eyes, Captain.”
“Did you tell him that I was busy; that I was just going to sail?”
“I did, Captain; but he says that he must see you. He has travelled above two hundred miles on purpose.” An angry darkness spread itself over the Captain’s handsome face.
“Curse all such unseasonable visitors!” he exclaimed savagely. “Let him come up-stairs. Here, Millicent,” he added, when the waiter had left the room, “take one of those candles, and go into the opposite chamber, it is my sleeping-room. It will be best for me to see this man alone. Quick, girl, quick.”
Captain Duke thrust the candlestick into his wife’s hand with an impatient gesture, and almost pushed her out of the room in his flurry and agitation.
She hurried across the landing-place into the opposite chamber, but not before she had recognized in the man ascending the stairs the outside passenger who had followed the Captain and herself in the High Street; not before she had heard her husband say, as he shut the parlour door upon himself and his visitor, —
“You here! By heaven, I guessed as much.”
Some logs burned upon the open hearth in the Captain’s bed-chamber, and Millicent seated herself on a low stool before the warm blaze. She sat for upwards of an hour wondering; at this stranger’s lengthened interview with her husband. Once she went on to the landing to ascertain if the visitor had left. He was still with the Captain. She heard the voices of the two men raised as if in anger, but she could not hear their words.
The clock was striking eleven as the parlour door opened and the stranger descended the stairs. Captain Duke crossed the landing-place and looked into the bedroom where Millicent sat brooding over the fire.
“Come,” he said; “I have little better than half an hour to get off; put on your cloak and come with me.”
It was a bitter cold night. The moon was nearly at the full, and shone upon the long stone pier and the white quays with a steely light that gave a ghostly brightness to every object upon which it fell. The outlines of the old-fashioned houses along the quay were 3ut black and sharp against this blue light; every coil of rope and idle anchor, every bag of ballast lying upon the edge of the parapet, every chain and post, and iron ring attached to the solid masonry, was distinctly visible in this winter moonlight. The last brawlers had left the tavern on the quay, the last stragglers had deserted the narrow streets, the last dim lights had been extinguished in the upper windows, and Marley Water, at a little after eleven o’clock, was as tranquil as the quiet churchyard at Compton-on-the-Moor.
Millicent shivered as she walked by her husband’s side along the quay. He had not spoken to her since he had bade her accompany him to the pier. Once or twice she glanced at him furtively. She could see the sharp lines of his profile clearly defined against the luminous atmosphere, and she could see by his face that he had some trouble on his mind. They turned off the quay on to the pier, which stretched far out into the water.
“The boat is to wait for me at the other end,” said Captain Duke. The tide has turned and the wind is in our favour.”
He walked for some time in silence, Millicent watching him timidly all the while; presently he turned to her and said, abruptly, —— .
“Mistress George Duke, have you a ring or any such foolish trinket about you?”
“A ring, George?” she said, bewildered by the suddenness of the question.
“A ring, a brooch, a locket, a ribbon, anything which you could swear to twenty years hence if need were?”
She had a locket hanging about her throat which had been given to her by Darrell on her sixteenth birthday; a locket containing one soft ring of her cousin’s auburn hair, than which she would have sooner parted with her life.
“A locket!” she said, hesitating.
“Anything! Haven’t I said before, anything?”
“I have the little diamond earrings in my ears, George, the earrings you brought me from Spain.”
“Give me one of them, then; I have a fancy to take some token of you with me on my voyage. The earring will do.”
She took the jewel from her ear and handed it to him. She was too indifferent to him and to all things in her weary life even to wonder at his motive in asking for the trinket.
“This is better than anything,” he said, slipping the jewel into his waistcoat pocket; “the earrings are of Indian workmanship and of a rare pattern. Remember, Millicent, the man who comes to you and calls himself your husband, yet cannot give you this diamond earring, will not be George Duke.”
“What do you mean, George?”
“When I return to Compton, ask me for the fellow jewel to that in your ear. If I cannot show it to you—”
“What then, George?”
“Drive rue from your door as an impostor.”
“But
I should know you, George; what need should I have of any token to tell me who you were?”
“You might have need of it. Strange things happen to men who lead such a life as mine. I might be taken prisoner abroad, and kept away from you for years. But whether I come back three months hence, or ten years hence, ask me for the earring, and if I cannot produce it, do not believe in me.”
“But you may lose it.”
“I shall not lose it.”
“But I can’t understand, George—”
“I don’t ask you to understand,” replied the Captain impatiently; “I only ask you to remember what I say, and to obey me.”
He relapsed into silence. They walked on towards the farther end of the long pier, the moon sailing high in the cloudless sky before them, their shadows stretching out behind them black upon the moonlit stones.
They were half a mile from the quay, and they were alone upon the pier, with no sound to wake the silence but the echoes of their own footsteps and the noise of the -waves dashing against the stone bulwarks.
The Vulture’s boat was waiting at the end of the pier. Captain George Duke took his wife in his arms and pressed his lips to her cold forehead.
“You will have a lonely walk back to the inn, Millicent,” he said; “but I have told them to make you comfortable, and to see you safely off by the return coach to-morrow morning. Good-bye and God bless you. Remember what I have told you to-night.”
Something in his manner — a tenderness that was strange to him — touched her gentle heart.
She stopped him as he was about to descend the steps.
“It has been my unhappiness that I have never been a good wife to you, George Duke. I will pray for your safety while you are far away upon the cruel sea.”
The Captain pressed her trembling little hand.
“Good-bye, Millicent,” he said, “and remember.”
Before she could answer him he was gone. She saw the men push the boat off from the steps; she heard the regular strokes of the oars splashing through the water, the little craft skimming lightly over the surface of the waves.
He was gone; she could return to her quiet cottage at Compton, her novel reading, her old friends, her undisturbed recollections of Darrell Markham.
She stood watching the boat till it grew into a black speck upon the moonlit waters; then she slowly turned and walked towards the quay.
A long lonely walk at that dead hour of the night for such a delicately nurtured woman as Millicent Duke! She was not a courageous woman either; rather over-sensitive and nervous, as the reader knows; fond of reading silly romances such as people wrote a century ago, full of mysteries and horrors, of haunted chambers, secret passages, midnight encounters, and masked assassins.
The clocks of Marley Water began to strike twelve as she approached the centre of the desolate pier. One by one the different iron voices slowly rang out the hour; smaller voices in the distance taking up the sound, until all Marley and all the sea, seemed to Millicent’s fancy, tremulous with the sonorous vibration. As the last stroke from the last clock died away and the sleeping town relapsed into silence, she heard the steady tramp of a man’s footsteps slowly approaching her.
She must meet him and pass by him in order to reach the quay.
She had a strange vague fear of this encounter. He might be a highwayman; he might attack and attempt to rob her.
The poor girl was prepared to throw her purse and all her little trinkets at his feet — all but Darrell’s locket.
Still the footsteps slowly approached. The stranger came nearer and nearer in the ghastly moonlight — nearer, until he came face to face with Millicent Duke, and stood looking at her with the moonlight shining foil upon him.
Then she stopped. She meant to have hurried by the man, to have avoided even being seen by him, if possible. But she stood face to face with him, rooted to the ground, a heavy languor paralyzing her limbs. an unearthly chill creeping to the very roots of her hair.
Her hands fell powerless at her sides. She could only stand white and immovable, with dilated eyes staring blankly into the man’s face. He wore a blue coat, and a three-cornered hat, thrown jauntily upon his head, so as in nowise to overshadow his face.
She was alone, half a mile from a human habitation or human help — alone at the stroke of midnight with her husband’s ghost.
It was no illusion of the brain; no self-deception born of a fevered imagination. There, line for line, shade for shade, stood a shadow that wore the outward seeming of George Duke.
She reeled away from the phantom figure, tottered feebly forward for a few paces, and then summoning a desperate courage, rushed blindly on towards the quay, her garments fluttering in the sharp winter air. She was breathless and well-nigh exhausted when she reached the inn. A servant had waited up to receive her; the fire burned brightly in the wainscoted little sitting-room; all within was cheerful and pleasant.
Millicent fell into the girl’s arms and sobbed aloud. “Don’t leave me,” she said; “don’t leave me alone this terrible night. I have often heard that such things were, but never knew before how truly people spoke who told of them. This will be a bad voyage for the ship that sails to-night. I have seen my husband’s ghost.”
CHAPTER VI. SALLY PECKER LIFTS THE CURTAIN OF THE PAST.
The best part of a year had dragged out its slow monotonous course since that moonlit January night on which Millicent Duke had stood face to face with the shadow of her husband upon the long stone pier at Marley Water. The story of Captain George Duke’s ghost was pretty well known in the quiet village of Compton-on-the-Moor, though Millicent had only told it under the seal of secrecy to honest Sally Pecker.
The wisest of womankind is not without some touch of human frailty. Mrs. Sally had tried to keep this solemn secret, but her very reticence was overstrained. There was something more suggestive than words in her pursed-up lips, and the solemn shake of her head, to say nothing of many a hint and insinuation dropped in the hearing of her intimates. So in three days all Compton knew that the hostess at the Black Bear had something wonderful on her mind which she “could, an’ if she would,” reveal to her especial friends and customers.
Again, though Millicent might be sole proprietress, of that midnight encounter at Marley, had not Samuel Pecker himself a prior claim upon the Captain’s ghost? Had he not seen and conversed with the apparition? “I see him as plain, Sarah, as I see the oven and the spit as I’m sitting before at this present time,” Samuel protested. It was scarcely strange, then, if little by little, dark hints of the mystery oozed out until the story became common talk in every village household.
The simple country people were very willing to believe in Captain Duke’s double, and had no idea of attempting to find some commonplace rational explanation of the apparition which had startled Mr. Pecker and Mrs. Duke. Everybody agreed in the conviction that the appearance of the shadow boded evil to the substance; and when the three months appointed for the voyage of the Vulture expired, and Captain Duke did not return to Compton, the honest Cumbrians began to look solemnly at one another, and to mutter ominously that they had never looked to see George Duke touch British ground alive.
But Millicent heard none of these whispers. Shut up in her cottage, she read her well-thumbed romances, sitting in the high-backed arm-chair, with the white and brown spaniel at her feet and Darrell Markham’s locket in her bosom. The stout servant-girl went out in the evenings now and then, and heard the Compton gossip; but if ever she thought of repeating it to her mistress, she felt the words die away upon her lips as she looked at Millicent’s pale face and mournful blue eyes.
“Madam has trouble enough,” she thought, “without hearing their talk.” So she held her peace; and Mrs. Duke waited patiently for her husband’s return, tormented by none of those anxieties which besiege the heart of a loving wife, and content to wait his coming patiently to the end of her life if need were.
She waited a long time. Month after month pas
sed away; the long grass grew deep in the meadows round Compton, and fell in rich waves of dewy green under the mower’s scythe; the stackers spread their smooth straw thatch over groups of noble hayricks clustering about the farm-houses; the corn began to change colour, and undulating seas of wheat and rye faded from green to sickly yellow, which deepened slowly into gold; the ponderous waggons staggered homeward through the perfumed evening air, groaning under their rich burdens of golden grain; the flat stubble-fields were laid bare to the autumn breezes, and the ripening berries grew black in the hedges; the bright foliage in the woods slowly faded out, and the withered leaves fell rustling to the ground; the early frost began to sparkle upon the whitened moors in the chilly sunrise; the pale November fog came stealing over the wide open country, and creeping into Compton High Street in the early twilight; as Time, the inexorable, with every changing sign by which he marks his course upon the face of nature, pursued that one journey which knows no halting-place; and still no tidings of Captain George Duke and the good ship Vulture were heard in Compton. It seemed as if the honest villagers had indeed been strangely near the truth when they said that the Captain would never touch British ground again. In all Compton, Millicent Duke was perhaps the only person who thought differently.
“It is but ten months that he has been away,” she said, when Mrs. Sally Pecker hinted to her that the chances seemed to be against the Captain’s return, and that it might be only correct where she to think of putting on mourning; “it is not ten months, and George Duke was never an over-anxious husband. If it seemed pleasant or profitable to him to stay away, no thought of me would bring him back any the sooner. If it was three years, Sally, I should think little of it, and expect any day to see him walk into the cottage.”
“Him as you saw upon the pier at Marley, perhaps Miss Milly,” answered Sally solemnly, “but not Captain Duke! Such things as you and Samuel see last winter aren’t shown to folks for nothing; and it seems a’most like doubting Providence to doubt that the Captain’s been drowned. I dreamt three times that I see my first husband, Thomas Masterson, lying dead upon a bit of rock in the middle of a stormy sea; and I put on widow’s weeds after the third time.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 51
