He took her in his arms, and pressed his lips with a despairing fondness to her forehead. And then he led her back to George Duke, and said, —
“Be merciful to her, as you hope for God’s mercy.”
In the hall without Darrell Markham found Mr. Samuel Pecker, who had been crouching against the half-open door, listening patiently to the foregoing scene.
“It was according to the directions of Sarah,” he said, apologetically, as Darrell emerged from the parlour and surprised the delinquent. “I was to be sure and take her word of all that happened. Poor young thing, poor young thing! It seems such a pity that when Providence casts folks on desert islands, it don’t leave ’em there snug and comfortable, and no inconvenience to themselves or anybody else.”
Upon this particular night Mr. Pecker was doomed to meet with inattentive listeners. Darrell Markham strode past him on to the terrace, and from the terrace to the pathway leading to the high road, without being conscious of his existence.
The young man walked so fast that Samuel had some difficulty in trotting after him.
“Excuse the liberty, Mr. Markham, but where might you be going?” he said, when at last he overtook Darrell, just as the latter dashed out on to the high road, and halted for a moment, as if uncertain which way to turn; “humbly begging your pardon, sir, where might you be going?”
“Ay, where indeed?” said Darrell, looking back at the lighted window. “I don’t like to leave the neighbourhood of this house to-night. I want to be near her. My poor, poor girl!”
“But, you see, Mr. Darrell,” urged Samuel, interrupting himself every now and then to shift the lantern from his right hand to his left, and to blow upon his disengaged fingers, “as it don’t happen to be particular mild weather, I don’t see how you can spend the night hereabout very well: so I hope, sir, you’ll kindly make the Black Bear your home for such time as you may please to stay in Compton; only adding that, the longer the better for me and Sarah.”
There was an affectionate earnestness in Samuel’s address which could not fail to touch Darrell, even in the midst of his utter misery and distraction of mind.
“You’re a good fellow, Pecker,” he said, “and I’ll follow your advice. I’ll stay at the Bear to-night, and I’ll stay there till I see how that man means to treat my unfortunate cousin.”
Samuel led the way, lantern in hand. It was close upon eleven o’clock, and scarcely a lighted window glimmered upon the deserted village street; but halfway between the Hall and the Black Bear, the two pedestrians met a man wearing a horseman’s cloak, and muffled to the chin, with the snow-flakes lying white upon his hat and shoulders.
Samuel Pecker gave this man a friendly though feeble good-night, but the man seemed a surly fellow, and made no answer. The snow lay so deep upon the ground that the three men passed one another as noiselessly as shadows.
“Have you ever taken notice, Mr. Darrell,” said Samuel, some time afterwards, “that folks in snowy weather looks very much like ghosts; quiet, and white, and solemn?”
* * * * *
Left alone in the solitude of the bar, Mrs. Pecker, lost in dreamy reflection, suffered the fire to burn low and the candles to remain unsnuffed, until the long wicks grew red and topheavy, smouldering rather than burning, and giving scarcely any light.
The half-hour after ten struck from the eight-day clock on the stairs. It was half an hour before Darrell Markham and Samuel Pecker left the Hall, and the Black Bear gave signs of shutting up for the night.
The few customers, who had been drinking and talking together since six or seven o’clock, strolled out into the snow, leaving the house together for the sake of one another’s company, and the business of the inn was done. The one waiter, or Jack-of-all-trades of the establishment, prepared to shut up the house; and, as the first step towards doing so, opened the front door and peered out into the darkness to see what sort of night it was.
As he did so, the biting winter breeze blew in upon him, extinguishing the candle in his hand, and also putting out the two lights in the bar.
“What are you doing there, Joseph?” Mrs. Pecker exclaimed sharply. “Come in, and shut up the place.” Joseph was about to obey, when a horseman galloped up to the door, and springing from his horse, looked into the dimly lighted hall.
“Why, you’re all in the dark here, good people,” he said, stamping his feet and shaking the snow from his shoulders. “What’s the matter?”
Mrs. Sarah Pecker was stooping over the red embers, trying to relight one of the candles.
“Can you tell me the way to Compton Hall, my good friend?” said the traveller to Joseph the waiter.
“Squire Markham’s that was?”
“Ay, Squire Markham’s that was.”
“The waiter gave the necessary directions, which were simple enough.
“Good,” said the stranger; “I shall go on foot; so do you fetch the ostler and give him charge of my horse. The animal’s dead beat, and wants rest and a good feed of corn.”
The waiter hurried off to find the ostler, who was asleep in a loft over the stables. The stranger strode up to the bar, in the interior of which Mrs. Pecker was still struggling with the refractory wick of the tallow candle.
“You seem to have a difficult job with that light, ma’am,” he said; “but perhaps you’ll make as short work of it as you can, and give me a glass of brandy, for my very vitals are frozen with a twenty-mile ride through the snow.”
There was something in the stranger’s voice which reminded Sarah Pecker of some other voice that she knew; only that it was deeper and gruffer than that other voice.
She succeeded at last in lighting the candle, and, placing it in front of the bar between herself and the traveller, took up a wine glass for the brandy.
“A tumbler, a tumbler, ma’am,” remonstrated the stranger; “this is no weather for drinking spirits out of a thimble.”
The man’s face was so shaded by his slouched hat, and further concealed by the thick neckerchief muffled about his throat, that it was utterly irrecognizable in the dim light of Sarah Pecker’s one tallow candle; but as he took the glass of brandy from Sally’s hand, he pushed his hat off his forehead, and lowered his neckerchief in order to drink.
He threw back his head as he swallowed the last drop of the fiery liquor, then throwing Mrs. Pecker the price of the brandy, he bade her a hasty good-night, and strode out of the house.
The empty glass dropped from Sarah’s hand, and shivered into fragments on the floor. Her white and terror-stricken face frightened the waiter when he returned from his errand to the stables.
The man she had served with brandy could not surely be George Duke, for the Captain had an hour before set out for the Hall; but if not George Duke himself, this man was most certainly some unearthly shadow or double of the Captain of the Vulture.
Sarah Pecker was a woman of strong sense; but she was human, and when questioned about her pale face and evident agitation, she told Joseph the waiter, Betty the cook, and Phoebe Price the pretty chambermaid, the whole story of Millicent’s fatal marriage, Captain Duke’s return, and the ghost that had followed him back to Compton-on-the-Moor. —
“When Miss Millicent parted from her husband seven years ago, she met the same shadow upon Marley pier, and now that he’s come back the shadow has come back too. There’s more than flesh and blood in all that, you may take my word for it.”
The household of the Black Bear had enough to talk of that night. What was the excitement of a West-country baronet, generous and handsome as he might be, to that caused by the visit of a ghost, which called for a tumbler of brandy, drank it, and paid for it like a Christian?
Samuel and Sarah sat up late in the little bar talking of the apparition, but they wisely kept the secret from Darrell Markham, thinking that he had trouble enough without the knowledge.
CHAPTER XVII. CAPTAIN DUKE AT HOME.
GEORGE DUKE sat by the fire, staring moodily at the burning coals, and nev
er so much as casting a look in the direction of his wretched wife, who stood upon the spot where Darrell had left her, with her hands clasped about her heart, and her blue eyes dilated in a fixed and vacant gaze, almost terrible to look upon.
The sole domestic at the Hall was the same old woman who had succeeded Sally Masterson as the squire’s housekeeper, and had since kept house for Ringwood and his sister. She was half blind and hopelessly deaf, and seemed to have only a vague consciousness of external things. She took the return of Captain Duke as quietly as if the sailor had not been away seven weeks.
How long she stood in the same attitude, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing, in a kind of stupor which was almost too dull for despair, how long Captain George Duke sat brooding over the hearth, with the red blaze upon his cruel face, Millicent never knew. She only knew that by-and-by he addressed her, still without looking at her:
“Is there anything to drink — any wine or spirits in his dull old hole?” he asked.
She told him that she did not know, but that she would go and find Mrs. Meggis (the deaf woman), and ascertain.
In the overwrought state of her brain, it was a relief to her to have to do her husband’s bidding; a relief to her to go outside into the chilly hall and breathe another atmosphere than that which George Duke respired.
It was a long time before she could make Mrs. Meggis understand what was wanted; but when at last the state of the case dawned upon the old woman, she nodded several times triumphantly, took a key from a great bunch that hung over the dresser, opened a narrow door in one corner of the large stone-flagged kitchen, and, candle in hand, descended a flight of steps leading into the cellar.
After a considerable period she emerged with a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle under each arm. She held each of these bottles before the light for Millicent to see the liquid they contained. That in one was of a bright amethyst colour, the other a golden brown. The first was claret, the second brandy.
Millicent was preparing to leave the kitchen, followed by the old housekeeper carrying the bottles and a couple of glasses, when she was startled by a knocking at the hall-door. When Mrs. Meggis became aware of this summons, she put down her tray of bottles and glasses, and went once more to the bunch of keys; for on the departure of Darrell and Samuel Pecker the door had been locked for the night. It was now past eleven. An unusual hour for visitors anywhere; an unearthly hour at this lonely Cumbrian mansion. Millicent had but one thought. It must be Darrell Markham.
She took the tray in her own hands, and followed Mrs. Meggis, who carried the light and the keys. When they reached the hall, Millicent left the old woman to open the door, and went straight info the parlour to carry George Duke the liquor he had asked for.
“That’s right,” he said, “my throat’s as hot as fire. So, so! no corkscrew? Heaven bless these pretty novel-reading wives, they’re so good at looking after a man’s comfort!”
He took a pistol from his breast, and knocked off the necks of the two bottles with the butt-end of it, spilling the wine and spirit upon the polished parlour table.
He filled a glass from each and drained them one after the other.
“Good,” he said; “the claret first, and the brandy afterwards. We don’t get such liquor as this in — in the Pacific. I shall leave no heel-taps to-night, Mrs. Duke. What’s that?”
He looked up to ask the question, after draining his glass for the third time.
That which had attracted his attention was the sound of voices in the hall without — the shrill treble pipe of Mrs. Meggis, and the deep voice of a man.
“What is it?” repeated George Duke. “Go and see, can’t you?”
Millicent opened the parlour door and looked out into the hall. Mrs. Meggis was standing with the heavy door in her hand, parleying with some strange man who stood in the snow upon the threshold.
The same bitter winter wind which had extinguished the lights at the Black Bear had blown out the guttering tallow candle carried by Mrs. Meggis, and the hall was quite dark.
“What is it?” Millicent asked.
“Why, it is merely this, ma’am,” answered the man upon the threshold: “this good woman here is rather hard of hearing, and not over easy to understand; but from what she tells me, it seems that Captain Duke has come home. Is that true?”
The man spoke from behind the thick folds of a woollen handkerchief, which muffled and disguised his voice as much as it concealed his face. Even in the obscurity he seemed jealous of being seen, for he drew himself further back into the shadow of the doorway as he spoke to Mrs. Duke.
“It is quite true,” answered Millicent; “Captain Duke has returned.”
The man muttered an angry oath.
“Returned,” he said; “returned. Surely he must have come back very lately?”
“He came back to-night.”
“To-night! to-night! Not half-a-dozen hours ago, I suppose?”
“Not three hours ago.”
“That’s good,” muttered the man with another imprecation; “that’s like my luck. Down once, down always: that’s the way of the world. Good-night, ma’am!”
He left the threshold without another word, and went away; his footsteps noiseless in the depth of snow.
“Who was it?” asked George Duke when Millicent had returned to the parlour.
“Some man who wanted to know if you had returned.”
“Where is he?” cried the Captain, starting from his seat, and going towards the hall.
“Gone.”
“Gone without my seeing him?” —
“He did not ask to sec you.”
The Captain of the Vulture clenched his fist with a savage frown, looking at Millicent as if in some sudden burst of purposeless fury he could fain have struck her.
“Gone! gone!” he said; “d — him, whoever he is.
On the very night of my return, too!”
He began to pace up and down the room, his arms folded upon his breast, and his head bent gloomily downwards.
“The garden room has been prepared for you, Captain Duke,” said Millicent, walking towards the door, and pausing upon the threshold to speak to him; “it is the best room in the house, and has been kept well aired, for it was poor Ringwood’s favourite chamber. Mrs. Meggis has lighted a good fire there.”
“Ay,” said the Captain, looking up with a malicious laugh, “it would be clever to give me damp sheets to sleep upon, and give me my death of cold on the night of my return. Folks could scarcely call that murder, and it might be so easily done.”
She did not condescend to notice this speech. “Good-night, Captain Duke,” she said.
“Good-night, my kind dutiful wife, good-night. I am to have the garden room, am I? well and good! May I ask in what part of the house it may please your ladyship to rest?”
“In the room my poor mother slept in,” she said. “Good-night.”
Left to himself, the Captain of the Vulture drew the table close to the hearth, seating himself in old Squire Markham’s high-backed arm-chair, stretched out his legs before the blaze, filled his glass, and made himself thoroughly comfortable.
The broad light of the fire shining full upon his face brought out the changes worked in his seven years’ absence. “Wrinkles and hard lines, invisible before, seemed to grow and gather round his eyes and mouth as he sat gloating over the blaze, and the strong drink, and the comfort about him. With his distorted shadow cast upon the panelling behind his chair, darkening all the wall with its exaggerated shape, he looked like some evil genius brooding over that solitary hearth, and plotting mischief against the roof that sheltered him.
Every now and then he looked up from the blaze to the bottles upon the table, the fire-lit walls, the antique bureau, the oaken sideboard, adorned with massive tankards of tarnished silver and Indian china punch-bowls, the quaint silver candlesticks, and all other evidences of solid countrified prosperity around him, and rubbed his hands softly, breaking out into a low triumphant chuckle as
be did so.
“Better than over yonder,” he said with a backward gesture of his head—” better than over yonder, anyhow. Thunder and fury! better than that, George Duke. You’ve not changed your quarters for the worse, since you bade good-bye to old comrades over there.”
He filled his glass again, and burst into some fragment of a French song, with a jingling chorus of meaningless syllables.
“To think,” he said, “only to fancy that this Ringwood Markham, a younger man than myself, should have died within a few months of my coming home! Egad, they’ve said that George Duke was one of those fellows who always fall on their feet. I’ve had a hard time of it for the last seven years, but I’ve dropped into good luck after all — dropped into my old luck — a fortune, and a poor frightened wife that can’t say be to a goose — a poor trembling novel-reading pale-faced baby, that —— —”
He broke off to fill himself another glass of claret. He had nearly finished the bottle by this time, and his voice was growing thick and unsteady. Presently he fell into a half-doze, with his elbows on his knees, and his head bent over the fire. Sitting thus, nodding forward every now and then, as if he would have fallen upon the burning coals, he woke presently with a sudden jerk.
“The chain,” he cried, “the chain! D — you, you French thief! bear your own share of the weight.”
He looked down at his feet. One of the heavy fire-irons had fallen across his ankles. Captain Duke laughed aloud, and looked round the room, this time with a drunken half-bewildered stare.
“A change,” he said, “a change for the better.”
The bottles were both nearly empty, and the fire had burned low. Midnight had sounded some time before from the distant church-clock — the strokes dull and muffled in a snowy weather. The Captain of the Vulture rubbed his eyes drowsily.
“My head is as light as a feather,” he muttered indistinctly; “I’ve not been over-used to a bottle of good wine lately. I’m tired and worn out, too, with three days’ coach-travelling and a week’s tossing about in stormy weather. So now for the garden room; and to-morrow, Mrs. George Duke and Mr. Darrell Markham, for you.”
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