The Double Eye

by William Fryer Harvey

  ‘You’ve passed through a most upsetting experience, that came on the top of a hard term’s work when you were completely tired out. That first meeting with Miss Cornelius, and all that you went through then, threw you temporarily off your balance. Your natural anxiety for your wife’s safety made matters worse.’

  ‘You mean—you mean,’ said Saxon slowly, ‘that I’m mad.’

  ‘The word means so many things. But you were not your normal self when you threw the bread-knife, or when Luttrell saw you throw the vitriol. You were not your normal self when you thought you saw the figure of Miss Cornelius from the landing window. And remember this, Saxon, your friends may have deceived you for your own good, but I speak now in absolute sincerity. I see no reason why you should not recover. You may only be here for a comparatively short time. But until you have recovered—you see I am speaking to you as if you were your old self, and that surely should give you hope—we must think of the safety of your wife. She has done what many a woman could never do; she has faced danger and misunderstanding with courage and devotion. It was I who persuaded her that it was best for her and for you not to say goodbye. She will be seeing you again in a few weeks’ time, I expect.’

  ‘But Miss Cornelius,’ Saxon gasped. ‘Miss Cornelius! What about her?’

  ‘Miss Cornelius,’ said the other, ‘is a vicious and cruel woman. I think that your original judgment of her was correct. She has probably dabbled in Spiritualism, and together with abnormal powers she has very likely developed a habit of unconscious trickery and legerdemain. Many genuine mediums are wholly untrustworthy. But Miss Cornelius is the occasion, not the cause, of your trouble.’

  ‘Then what is she doing there?’ cried Saxon suddenly. He had sprung to his feet, and was pointing wildly out of the window. ‘That closed car that is passing down the road now! Quick! She has lowered the window and is waving her hand to me.’

  Bestwick caught a glimpse of a car and a hand waving.

  ‘It may or may not be Miss Cornelius,’ he said, ‘but come with me and I will show you your room.’

  THE HEART OF THE FIRE

  THE ‘MOORCOCK’ Inn stands on the loneliest of moorland roads, ten miles away from Daneswick station, five hundred feet above Brockleton church spire. From the top of the sugar-loaf hill that protects it from the south-west you can see the steely glimmer of the North Sea; on a foggy night when the wind blows in gently from the east you can hear the distant boom of sirens, for the colliers from Newcastle and the tramps from Steelborough, heavy laden with rails, hug the coast charily until they can make a straight line for Flamborough Light.

  One long, low building is the ‘Moorcock’ Inn, two-thirds built of gritstone, the rest of brick, with a window jutting out on the southern side on to the moor. It carries a coat of whitewash, and white it stands in springtime against the heather, white and ghostly in the summer nights, when it rises up of a sudden through the mist.

  Three sycamores and a larch-tree, gnarled and bent like the old seafaring men who pass that way, overhang the back of the house, witnesses, if need were, to the strength of the winter gales.

  To the July motorists, the inn seems no better than a dreary house of call in fit keeping with the surrounding wastes. But they are no true judges who pass the door at thirty miles an hour, for the glory of the ‘Moorcock’ is its kitchen. In autumn, winter, or spring, little else matters to the tired foot-traveller sitting on the settle with his beer beside him. Stone-flagged, oak-beamed, with sides of bacon getting ripeness and flavour in the sweet peat smoke, the room would be little different from a score of others in the parish, if it were not for the huge fireplace, as old as the road itself: on the stone mantel is carved a doggerel couplet:

  While on this hearthe of stone a fire you see,

  Kinde Fortune smiles upone ye house of Aislabie.

  Mrs Bradley, who keeps the ‘Moorcock’, will not have time to tell you the story of the fire if you have but called for tea and turf cakes. If you were staying at the inn it might be different; but few people care to stay there now.

  The great days of the ‘Moorcock’ were long ago, before the railway between Dunsley and Maltwick was opened, when four times a week the coaches stopped to change horses, and wagoners drew up daily with smoking teams. In the short summer months many a post-chaise from the ‘Crown’ at Maltwick went by with venturesome gentlefolk from the south.

  In the year 1841 the landlord of the ‘Moorcock’ was one Thomas Aislaby, a big silent man twelve months married to a slip of a girl, who came with a spirit no greater than her wedding portion out of the East Riding.

  He was seated one wild February evening by the fire listening to the chatter of the doctor—only a week before he had presented Aislaby with a fine healthy boy—when both men were roused by the unexpected sound of a horse’s hoofs on the road outside. Taking the horn lantern from its hook by the door, Aislaby, followed by his dog, went out to meet the traveller. The doctor, left to himself, threw another peat sod on to the fire and stretched himself before the blaze. He was nearly dry after the soaking he had received on his way back from Black Fox Farm. In another half-hour he would have to be on his way again.

  ‘An exceedingly stormy night, sir,’ he said to the stranger who had entered the room; ‘have you come far?’

  ‘From Dunsley,’ the man replied. He was slight of build, with a nervous manner and shifty eyes. He carried a small valise which never left his hand, even after he had sat down in the chair Aislaby had just vacated.

  ‘We’re both of us lucky in finding a fire like this on such a night,’ the doctor went on, trying his best to put the little man at his ease.

  The stranger did not seem to hear the remark. He began to ask a string of questions about the road. How far was it to Maltwick? Would he be likely to lose the track in the dark? He had passed one or two doubtful-looking characters on the way; was there any chance of the doctor’s company on the road? The doctor regretted that he was going in the opposite direction. He advised the traveller, if a stranger to the district, to stop the night at the ‘Moorcock’. ‘This fire alone,’ he said, ‘would make it worth your while.’

  But the man was gazing into the embers with an absent expression of face, as if what he saw there only confirmed his fears.

  ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘I must get on; I have no time to waste. You, sir, will perhaps join me with a bottle of wine. It is wonderful what heart it puts into a man on nights like these.’

  Aislaby, coming in from giving the horse a feed of oats, fetched wine and glasses. (There was good wine in those days in the cellars of the ‘Moorcock’.) ‘You had better stay here the night,’ he said; ‘you can start at dawn. The road’s lonely enough for a towns-man, and your horse seems ridden hard.’

  But he would have none of it. He drank the wine, gulping it down as if it had been water, his eyes fixed all the while on the fire. Then, with a hurried ‘Goodnight’ to the doctor, he paid his reckoning and was gone.

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ said Aislaby, ‘they’re not all as surly as him’; and he drank what remained in the bottle. ‘It’s little company we see here, as it is; a curse on his coffin-face.’

  ‘Will you join me with a second bottle, Aislaby?’ the doctor asked. ‘This is rare wine of yours. Yes; these moors are no place for lily-livered citizens like our friend. Between you and me that valise of his looked uncommonly heavy. If he feared robbery he would have been wiser to have slept here and gone on with the coach tomorrow afternoon. Well, well, I envy you your fire, Aislaby. If I were you, I should never leave it; but old men will die, and babies must be born, and time and tide wait for no man, not even for us doctors. Goodnight, Aislaby; your wife’s doing famously. In ten years’ time you won’t be sitting here alone by the hearth, I’ll wager.’

  The doctor was gone. Outside the wind howled through the sycamores; the rain beat viciously against the uncurtained pane. Aislaby drew his chair up into the chimney corner and, like the stranger, gazed thoughtfully i
nto the embers. He was an ambitious man, and in the fire he saw the things he wanted to do. There were patches of moorland he wished to reclaim; good land, water-sodden, that needed but draining to bear heavy crops; there was ironstone to quarry, easily workable, if once you had the capital, and easily got to the rail-head when the Maltwick line was finished. He knew that the days of the ‘Moorcock’ were passing with the coaches, and wished to have more than one iron in the fire as well as to raise again the name of Aislaby. What he saw in the heart of the flame were golden, glittering sovereigns; the clock in the corner ticked money, money, money.

  He was aroused from his dreaming by a sharp double knock at the door. There was no sound of hoofs this time, but the traveller was the same. As he came into the fare-light, clutching tightly his valise, Aislaby saw that the man’s head was bound with a blood-stained handkerchief. His tired horse had stumbled where the Cowgill beck crossed the road, and the rider—who was no rider—had been thrown. He had trudged back the five long miles on foot, leaving his beast to fare as best it might.

  Aislaby offered to show him his room. ‘It’s not what it should be,’ he said, ‘my wife being but poorly.’ The stranger, however, declared that he would prefer to spend the night on the couch by the fire.

  ‘I’ll get you blankets then,’ said the landlord, and stole upstairs on tiptoe, for he was a fond husband then. He found his wife sleeping soundly in the great four-poster bed, the baby by her side. Returning as quietly as he had come, he paused on the little landing half-way down the stairs. The door of the kitchen had been left ajar. The stranger, seated with his back towards him, had opened the valise. Aislaby caught the glint of golden sovereigns and heard them clink as the man counted them over in his hand. By the time the landlord entered the room, the valise had been closed. The stranger was standing before the fire, his sodden clothes smoking in the heat.

  ‘This is a curious inscription,’ he said, as his fingers traced the letters carved in the stone:

  While on this hearthe of stone a fire you see,

  Kinde Fortune smiles upone ye house of Aislabie.

  ‘It’s been there since my great-grandfather’s time,’ said Aislaby. ‘For a hundred years and more the fire’s never been out. I put on a few sods of peat last thing of a night, and it’s always burning in the morning. Gentlefolk have come from Dunsley on purpose to see that fire. There’s not another like it in the whole countryside.’

  ‘I can well believe that,’ said the stranger. ‘There’s a strange fascination about a fire. I remember as boys we used to read our future in the embers.’

  They sat before the fire in silence. Presently the stranger closed his eyes, but Aislaby did not see him; he was slipping down a glowing cavern that seemed to lead to the warm heart of the world. The stranger fell asleep, his bloody head resting on his arm. And then the fire as it died began to speak to Aislaby. At the first whisper of what it said he threw on another peat, and the flame sprang up again, and the fire’s voice was still. Again it sank and, as the shadow crept across the floor, the whisper came again louder and more insistent. Aislaby cast a frightened glance over his shoulder and saw the stranger huddled in his chair, his hand still clasping the valise. Then he knew what the fire was saying. He rose on tiptoe, took one of the empty glasses from the table, filled it with brandy, and drank. Quietly he closed the door. With one long-drawn-out creak, that caused the stranger to turn restlessly in his chair, he drew to the shutters.

  Then, throwing a cloth across the man’s face, he held his throat in a grip of iron, until a sudden limpness told him that the deed was done.

  The work of the night lay ahead of him.

  Very carefully he removed the fire on to the stone flags that formed the kitchen floor. Then with a crowbar he began to raise the hearthstone. The task was one to tax the strength of two ordinary men, but Aislaby worked with a devil’s fury. Next with a pickaxe and shovel he began his assault upon the hard baked earth beneath, stopping from time to time to feed the embers on the floor, lest the fire should go out. Again and again he filled the milking-pail with light yellow soil, creeping out with it into the garden. At last, as the first streaks of dawn came through the chinks between the shutters, he placed the stranger’s body, covered with sacking, in the hole he had dug, threw back the rest of the soil, and stamped it down hard and even. When the business of the night was finished, the hearthstone stood again in its accustomed place, the hearth was swept, and the fire, piled high with peat and gorse-root, burned more brightly than it had done for twelve months past.

  Out in the garden, walled with stone, Aislaby was busy digging. His wife, as she looked out of her window an hour before sunrise, noticed that he had come upon a patch of light yellow earth in the peaty soil.

  Years passed by and Aislaby prospered. Nothing was discovered about the stranger’s death; he was identified as a west country shipowner, a man with few friends, of eccentric habits, who carried on a considerable trade in buying up rotten vessels and sailing them undermanned. He was supposed by many to have been murdered; others believed that his horse had wandered from the road and that, some day, when the bogs were all drained, the body would be found.

  ‘If he had taken our advice,’ the doctor would say, when called on for his opinion, ‘and slept the night at the “Moorcock”, the man would have been going about his business now. The underwriters are content at all events, if half of what I hear is true.’

  Aislaby took land from the moor, built walls, and cut dikes. He got hold of his ironstone quarry and sold the mining rights to a Steelborough syndicate. He bought a cottage in this parish, an odd acre in that, and was known at Feversham market, and even as far away as Yokesly, where the great autumn horse fair was held, as a man with a comfortable balance at the bank, with enough of the true Yorkshireman’s knowledge of men and money to do well in the world.

  If there were fewer travellers now in the kitchen of the ‘Moorcock’, there were more children. Their first alphabet was the letters carved on the stone mantel. One and all were brought up with a fear in later years they regarded as superstitious lest the fire on the hearth should die.

  And what of the man himself? Slow of speech, taciturn, hard as his own ironstone, he was esteemed by all who knew him. Men pointed him out as one whom prosperity had not spoiled; in spite of his money, he seemed fonder than ever of his own fireside. That, indeed, was his favourite spot. In the niche in the corner, where the shadow was deepest, he would sit for hours, watching the flickering flames, the peats stacked ready at his elbow. Last thing at night he raked out the white ash and added fresh fuel. In the early hours of the morning, when all the rest of the house was abed, he would be kneeling on the cold flags, blowing on the embers, or fetching kindling from the stables to tempt the dying flame.

  Time passed. The eldest boy, tiring of the gloom that hung about the house and moors the long year round, ran off to sea. They had one letter from him, written in America. He spoke of joining the Federal army. A second, many months later, brought the news of his death in hospital from wounds. The daughters married: one, a farmer in the East Riding village Mrs Aislaby came from, the other, a trooper in the dragoon regiment stationed at Yorborough. Steven, the youngest, an idle ne’er-do-well, brought his wife to live at the ‘Moorcock’.

  Little by little a change came over Aislaby that soured his nature. Where before he was taciturn, he was now morose. He accepted the narrow tenets of a sect whose zeal was fired by the fear of hell. He even stood up in the market-place at Feversham and proclaimed himself the chief of sinners.

  ‘He makes himself gloomy,’ his wife would say, ‘by brooding in that dark corner by the fire,’ and she tried to get him to like the parlour, with its bay window that looked down southward across the moor. Steven and his wife did not care for the kitchen; the stone floor, they said, was too cold for the children in the evening, and the room only got the afternoon sun. They talked of building out another window, but the old man would not hear of it.


  ‘You waste the peat so,’ said Steven’s wife one day, ‘with the big fires you keep up in the kitchen.’

  ‘And who pays for the peat?’ the old man snarled. ‘The only thing you have ever brought to the house was your reputation, and we could have spared that.’

  Another generation came into being. His wife was dead, buried, according to her wish, in her East Riding churchyard on the wolds. Steven was dead, after living to see his grandchild born, and the house seemed full of women-folk and children. Aislaby was over ninety. For the last five years he had been unable to get upstairs, and his bed had been moved into the kitchen. They did the cooking now in a smaller room at the back. Visitors from Dunsley, who drove over in the summer to take tea and turf cakes at the ‘Moorcock’, would try to get the old man talking.

  ‘He doesn’t talk much,’ his stout-armed granddaughter would say. ‘The only thing he takes an interest in is the fire. He always looks after that, and brings in the peat from the stack outside. And the fires he makes, too! Sometimes of an evening the room gets too hot to live in.’

  He was no longer wealthy; his children and grandchildren between them had squandered his earnings; he alone knew with what difficulty they had been won. The hard theology which had held him up ten years before had slipped away, leaving nothing in its place. The only person who seemed able to rouse the old dotard out of his lethargy was his great-grandchild, a girl of nineteen. Mary Aislaby seemed built of a different clay from the rest. Light-hearted and vivacious—too highly strung a close observer might have thought—the last of the old man’s savings had been spent in giving the girl an education little suited for her station in life. For the past year she had been living at Stourton Hall as governess to Lady Louthwaite’s children.

  Little by little it had become the custom to leave Aislaby alone in the kitchen in the evening. He seemed to like gazing in silence into the heart of the fire, and would often drop off to sleep in his chair if left undisturbed. For the young folk the parlour was more cheerful; there was a piano there now and, as Mary said, the larger room rather gave one the creeps at night.