Part 5

"It was Madgy Figgy who told about my ladder," Sophie said, "she has many charms, I know. She carries the water from St. Annan's spring to the church whenever there's to be a christening. No one baptized in water from St. Annan's spring can die by hanging, every one knows that. Was your mother as learned in charms as old Madgy?"

"She was a wise woman in more than mere charms, yet we will not slight her knowledge of them, since through that we will win your father's affection for me."

"If it could be!" cried Sophie.

"It can be. Listen, my sweet. My dear mother, in dying, left me, among books of the craft of healing and suchlike things, an old love-charm she had had from a Wise Woman in the Highlands. It is nothing but a little white powder, yet it affects the very heart-strings of him who takes it."

"Could it turn my father's heart towards you? Lucius, how happy we should all be. . . . But surely it might make him love some one else instead--Mr. Le Petyt, perhaps?"

"You should know better than that, my foolish Sophie. These things all depend on the intention of he who gives them. You have but to concentrate on me while you give it him, and all will be well."

"He would be furious if he guessed," objected Sophie.

"Neither he nor anyone else must guess, or the charm will fail. I will send it to you in packets with the serpentine beads, and mark it 'Powder to clean the pebbles.'"

"Why not give it to me?" asked Sophie.

"Because I have to go away for a time, my sweet. Not for very long--" as Sophie made a movement of distress, "but I have business I must see to in town. I will send you the beads to remember me by in my absence. Will you wear them for my sake, Sophie."

"I will wear them night and day, but I need no reminders of you, Lucius. But you--will you forget me in London? It is so big and far away and full of great ladies who will put your poor Sophie out of remembrance. Lucius, Lucius. . . ."

"My sweet, silly little Sophie," he whispered, soothing her as she clung to him, "how can you misjudge me so? Is not one black hair from your head, one glance from your blue eyes, dearer to me than all the women in the world? What have I done that you should think so ill of me?"

"Forgive me, dear. I know men are not like women, and I cannot see what there is in me to hold you--except my love for you. No other women could love you half so well, Lucius. It is my only gift, but it at least could not be bettered by anyone."

"I know it, my sweet," he told her, "and when your father is of a better mind towards me you shall give me your love before all the world, and then I need no longer travel alone. Would you like to see London, heart of mine?"

"Ah, with you!" breathed Sophie. "Once, before I met you, I thought of nothing but London, and how I meant some day to be a great lady there, but now I think of nothing but to be with you. Perhaps, after all, this is what the Wise Woman meant and my golden ladder is my love for you, and I've climbed on it from loneliness to joy."

"A Jacob's ladder, for the feet of an angel, then, my Sophie."

"If it could only reach from here to London! Oh, Lucius, need you go?"

"I must, my sweet. Don't make it harder for me."

That checked her plaint at once, as he knew it would.

"When do you go?" she asked quietly.

"In a day or two, sweetheart. Ah, Sophie, how shall I live without you?"

While she comforted him, forgetting self, he made a mental calculation as to how soon he could get away. He kissed Sophie's hair somewhat absently.

"I will write to you, heart of mine," he murmured, "and I will contrive so that he finds I have gone completely away, and that will lull any suspicion he may have against us. And while I am gone you will be working for us, my Sophie. Do not be alarmed if at first the powder seems to cause an indisposition. It has to expel the evil humours from a man before it can turn his nature to good. Give it to him in a small quantity once or twice, and he will vomit and be rid of this disaffection towards me, and the rest will work beneficially. Your father will arise and call you blessed, my Sophie, for having sworn him the evil of his own heart. Do not write me word when anything definite happens--I am leaving my servant at Penzance, and he will post up to me at once when you give him news."

"And then--then you will come down again, and we shall all be able to be happy. Perhaps my father will even dismiss Lylie Ruffiniac when his heart is turned towards you. That woman frightens me, Lucius. She is always looking at me as though she wished me away. No one loves me except yourself--and poor Charles. Hester avoids me, and James never did speak a word to me that he could avoid. Lucius, sometimes it seems to me that he and Lylie and Hester have all grown to hate me, that they would harm me if they could. It frightens me--Lucius, Lucius, what shall I do when you have left me?"

Crandon fought down his boredom and gave himself over to consoling her, with now and again a surreptitious glance at the watch dangling from his fob. He had another interview to go through--with Lylie Ruffiniac. She had to be fostered in the belief that he was going to take Sophie away as soon as possible, leaving the housekeeper free to influence the Squire--for Lylie's ambition rose to being legitimate mistress of the Manor, and Sophie once gone, she saw no reason why she should not attain her end. She knew that the ten thousand pounds was a mere myth, but that she kept hidden from Crandon, even bringing forward, as women can, apparently casual little pieces of information that would all tend to fix him in his belief. Crandon had been wise to impress on Sophie the necessity for keeping the love-potion hidden from every one--Lylie, who had a fine nose for a rogue, would have been in possession of his scheme--a scheme so devastating to her own--at once. As soon as safety and decency permitted he would carry Sophie off, go through the ceremony of marriage with her in a place where he was not known, gain possession of the money--and clear out of England for good. This was his last throw of the dice in his own country--let him but win the stake and he would disappear and enjoy his fortune elsewhere.

He took a last glance at his watch, a last kiss of Sophie's mouth, and scrambled to his feet. He walked back with Sophie as near Troon as was safe, then took an affectionate good-night of her, and started off for the cove to meet Lylie Ruffiniac.

"Thank the gods, that hard-headed vixen of a Lylie won't want me to kiss her!" he reflected as he went. "Ah, there's a woman might have been some help to me if I'd met her in the shoes of Isabel or of this Sophie. Lucius, my son, you are playing a very risky game, but the stakes are worth it. Ten thousand pounds, a fresh country--and entirely new women!"

V

THE LOVE-POTION

Two weeks after Crandon's departure the first instalment of serpentine beads arrived for Sophie. There was no concealing the fact, and Sophie replied to her father's suave inquiries that the beads were a keepsake from a friend. Enclosed with them was a tiny packet of white powder, on which was written "Powder to clean the pebbles," and this Sophie secreted at once.

A few days later the Squire was unwell with a violent headache and bilious attack resulting from too much port and smuggled brandy the night before--Sophie suggested that she should make him a dish of tea. In the night he was taken with violent sickness, but by the next day he had not only recovered from that but apparently actually benefited by it, as it had cured him of the result of his orgy. Next day, to continue the cure, Sophie again sent him up some tea, but this time the Squire thought it tasted odd, and Hester, on bearing away the dish, finding that the rare beverage was left untouched, hid it in the scullery and drank it that evening. She was soon taken with violent pains and sickness and a raging thirst, and it was in this condition that Lylie found her.

"My life, Hester, what have 'ee got?" asked Lylie.

"The pains of death, I do think," gasped Hester. "Oh, oh!"

Lylie looked at her unsympathetically.

"Simme you'm whist wi' en," she observed, "scrawlen' like that. Some bad you do look, though, there's no denyen'."

"I'm dyen'!" wailed Hester.

Sophie, who had come into the kitchen, heard the commotion, and went into the scullery.

"Why, Hester, what ails you?" she exclaimed. "Lylie, what has happened?"

"'Tes the pains o' death, she do say," replied Lylie, "but 'tes nawthen but to be in the bed and somethen' hot that she needs."

"She must get to bed at once. Here, Lylie, you take her arm that side and I'll take this. She's getting quieter."

Indeed, the worst spasms were over: Hester, weak and exhausted, was put to bed, and Sophie, her dislike of the girl forgotten in compassion, sent up weak broth and white wine whey. Late that evening as Lylie sat with the Squire, he asked her what all the noise had been about.

"'Tes that maid Hester," said Lylie indifferently, "she'd taken somethen' that went agen her and was vomiten' all evenin'. Some bad she did vomit, and Miss and I had to get her overstairs to the bed."

The Squire stirred in his chair and very slowly brought his eyes round to Lylie.

"What time did the sickness take her?" he asked.

"Soon after she'd put your tray to the kitchen, measter. Look 'ee, now, at this lutestring piece I got to Penzance church-town. It do sore need a ribbon to go wi' en. What do 'ee say to given' I a crown to buy et with, eh, measter?"

"Shalt have thy crown, woman," said the Squire shortly, "but leave me be now. I want no more for the night. And tell Miss I wish to speak with her to-morrow forenoon."

Lylie, somewhat offended, but mollified by the unexpectedly easy capture of the crown, withdrew, and next morning, as Sophie was busier than usual in household tasks--Hester still being confined to her bed--she delivered the Squire's message. It was with a heart fluttering with hope that Sophie went to his room. He was not yet out of bed, and, wrapped in a dingy dressing-gown, much stained with snuff and wine, his big jowl unshaven and his bald head innocent of wig (that ornament hung rakishly askew on a chair-back) he looked anything but a pleasant object. Sophie stopped short on the threshold.

"You sent for me, sir?" she asked.

"'Tis nothing of any importance, my dear," said the Squire smoothly, "merely to tell you how recovered I am. How blooming you look, my Sophie--more like my own daughter than you have since this shadow fell between us."

Indeed, Sophie, in her flutter of hope and excitement, showed a glowing face. Her heart softened at the kindliness of her father's tone.

"Oh, sir"--she began, "if only this shadow--if you would only let it lift--if you would only believe in me--in him!"

"Who knows," said the Squire benignly, "but that I may see cause to change my opinions. You will understand, my dear daughter, that a father is in so responsible a position, he must not accept an affair of the kind lightly, without due inquiry. Perhaps the fellow who sent me that report was prejudiced, who knows? I might, in justice, inquire further. But you are not wearing your beads, my child."

"They--they have not all come yet," she faltered, "but I received some more yesterday."

"The roses on thy cheeks are the best adornment in a father's eye," said the Squire, "and now tell Lylie to bring me some broth with brandy in it, and bless thee, my child. And," he added to himself as she left the room, "I do not think I shall be taken with sickness again yet awhile."

Sophie's easily persuaded reason and her affectionate nature were swayed to gratitude, and she reproached herself because something in her was repulsed by the old man's blandness. She ran downstairs and out into the yard singing under her breath, and saw the postboy coming up the drive. He had a packet for her which she took up to her room to open. There were a dozen or so more of the polished pebbles, cut into beads, and a short note in which Crandon assured her of his undying affection, and ended by saying, "Do not spare the powder in order to keep the rust off the pebbles."

That afternoon Charles Le Petyt came over to Troon and walked with Sophie in the garden. He was full of joy to see the increased brightness of her look, and soon detected a softening in her tone when she spoke of her father--Crandon's name they avoided by silent consent.

"You may yet be happy with your father, Sophie," said Mr. Le Petyt with the hopefulness of the born idealist, and Sophie, confident in her supernatural knowledge, agreed.

"And I reproach myself that sometimes I have been wicked enough to wish I might never see him again," she said as they walked slowly towards the house door, past the open dairy windows, "and indeed, Charles, I think it must have been the Devil himself who sometimes suggested to me how much happier I should be if he were dead. I have seemed to hear a whisper: 'Who would not wish an old father dead for ten thousand pounds?'--because that meant freedom and--peace."

"My poor Sophie," replied Charles pressing her hand.

He stayed and took tea with her and the Squire, and the latter went to bed soon after he had left. The weather had turned rainy, autumn seemed invaded by a tang of winter that evening, and the Squire, who was subject to fits of shivering, had a huge fire lit, and demanded hot gruel of Lylie.

"There's no occasion for you to leave your ironing, Lylie," remarked Sophie when they were in the kitchen, and the woman acquiescing, Sophie went into the pantry. She was gone some time, and when she reappeared Lylie glanced up from the ironing of her turned satin slip. Sophie caught the glance, and fore-stalling a question, remarked carelessly:

"I have been stirring the gruel and eating some of the oatmeal out of it, for I've taken a great fancy to it. I believe I shall often eat from my father's gruel."

She stirred it round over the fire as she spoke.

"I'll take it overstairs," said Lylie, who viewed the friendlier relations between father and daughter with dislike. Sophie turned the gruel out into a basin and set the saucepan down on the hob.

"I will see to it," she retorted hurriedly, but Lylie seized the basin and bore it out of the kitchen.

Not a quarter of an hour later the Squire's screams echoed through the house. He was very sick, hiccuped like a person bitten by a mad dog, and cried out that he was burnt up with fire. Sophie, terrified, insisted on James riding at once to St. Annan's for the apothecary, and herself banished from the Squire's room by the commands he managed to articulate, she stayed against his door outside, every now and then pressing her fingers to her ears when a more awful sound than common came from within.

He was a trifle easier when the apothecary arrived and applied remedies, and Lylie took advantage of the lull to creep swiftly to the kitchen and pick up the saucepan Sophie had left on the hob. Hester, whom all the outcry had brought from her bed, watched her movements curiously. Lylie lit two candles and bore the pan to the light.

"Come and look here, Hester," said Lylie slowly, feeling some of the sediment from the pan between her finger and thumb, as she spoke, "Did you ever see oatmeal so white?"

"Oatmeal!" said Hester, "why, 'tes as white as flour."

"'Tes more gritty'n flour. I see et all, Hester. Have 'ee never heard that poison's white and gritty? Measter's poisoned, and tes Miss that's done et."

A slight sound came from the kitchen door and both women looked round, but Sophie, whose foot had been on the threshold, had turned and fled upstairs to the door of her father's room again, where she flung herself on the floor and pressed her forehead against the wooden panel. In that long drawn moment of listening the truth had rushed in over her consciousness--and overwhelmed reason and self-control.

The door opened and the apothecary stumbled over her.

"Miss Bendigo--" he began in compassion, then some words to which the Squire had just given vent flashed back at him and he hesitated.

"Bring her in," ordered the patient hoarsely.

Sophie scrambled to her feet and went towards the bed. She fell on her knees beside it.

"Oh, sir, forgive me, I didn't know, I didn't know," she babbled, "send me where you will, only forgive me and get well . . . I'll never see or hear from or write to him more, if you'll but forgive me, I shall be happy. Papa, papa!"

Over Sophie's head the Squire beckoned the apothecary into the room. Then:

"I do forgive thee," he murmured, speaking with difficulty and veiling his eyes with his thin wrinkled lids, "but thou should'st have remembered I am your father. As for the villain Crandon, hadst thou loved me thou wouldst curse him and the ground he walks on."

"Oh, sir," said Sophie, to whom the words of pardon alone had penetrated, "your kindness strikes at my soul. Sir, on my knees I pray you will not curse me."

"_I_ curse thee!" gasped the Squire, forcing his distorted mouth into a semblance of the old bland smile, "no, child, I bless thee and hope God will bless thee, and I pray thou mayest live to repent and amend. . . . Leave me, lest thou should'st say something to thy prejudice--" apparently, thought the apothecary, who was himself trembling with horror, this martyred father had forgotten the presence of a listener. "Go to the clergyman, Mr. Le Petyt, he will take care of thee. Alas, poor man, I am sorry for him. . . ."

"Papa, I am innocent, I swear to you I am. I never knew. I am innocent of this. . . ."

"I fear thou art not quite innocent and that there is some powder in such hands as will appear against thee. Harvey take away my poor misguided child."

Sophie stumbled blindly from the room and went upstairs. Mr. Harvey hesitated a moment, saw the patient almost comatose, and went down to the kitchen. There Lylie still pored over the saucepan, which she thrust out at him.

"See, Mr. Harvey," she demanded, "what's this stuff in wi' the gruel? Can 'ee tell me that?"

Mr. Harvey examined the contents of the pan carefully, tried some on his finger, and shook his cautious head.

"I cannot be very positive," he replied at length, "but at least it can have no business in the gruel. Give me white paper and I will take some home and test it when it is dry."

Lylie helped him scrape the sediment into a sheet of paper, and he folded it up and pocketed it. He then gave instructions to the two women to heat more water for fomentations while he returned to the sick room. Finding the Squire still comatose, he sat with his fingers on the intermittent pulse. Meanwhile Sophie, in whom fear, the most sickening of all emotions had awakened, crept downstairs, holding her breath past her father's room, down to the kitchen. Lylie happened to be in the scullery at the moment, Hester, still weak from morbid excitement as well as illness, was seated in a shadowy corner of the kitchen. Sophie crept in, looked fearfully round her, listened, and then began to stuff some papers into the grate. She thrust them into the heart of the flames and then breathed a deep sigh of relief. "Now I am more easy, thank God," she murmured, and slipped out of the kitchen as cautiously as she had come. Lylie, from behind the crack of the scullery door, went towards the grate, where she was joined by Hester. . . .

A little later all was noise again, the Squire had been seized with violent spasms, raving and hiccuping like a madman, unable to swallow as much as a sip of water. Towards the small hours he grew delirious, then sank gradually; with the dawn he died.

Sophie sat rigid in her room, paler than the paling day. She looked back over the past, recalling little speeches of Crandon's which, had she been less simple, less adoring, must have warned her of his plan. She saw the skill with which he had trapped her, she saw what he hoped to gain, she saw how he would lose nothing. It was she who had to pay. At the thought fear, natural, human fear, caught at her again and she sprang to her feet, a thing distraught. Escape--she must escape, get away from this dread that was closing in on her. She tied on cloak and hood and feverishly crammed all the money that for months she had been saving against her marriage into a little bag. On the stairs she ran into James Ruffiniac, and with her hands on his coat, pressing, begging, silent suppliants, she made him come into the dining-room.

"James," she said, "do you want to make your fortune? You do, do you not? If you will come with me, it is made."

"What do you want me to do?" asked James.

"Only to hire a postchaise to go to London, and I'll give you fifteen guineas now, and more when we come there. Only to do that. And in London you would make your fortune."

"Not on my life," he told her. "What you'm done you must see the end of. 'Tes your guilty soul makes you flee. I'll have to tell of this."

"I--I was merely jesting," faltered Sophie, "to see if you would. James--" but he had swung on his heel and left her.

No one molested Sophie, but towards midday Hester put her head in at the bedroom door to inform her, with a hardly restrained gusto, that Dr. Polwhele had come over from Penzance and was going to open the body. Sick to the soul, Sophie put on her outdoor things once more and struck out over the moors, walking blindly to try and get away from the horror that was in her. As she went all the strength of her nature, inherited from the father who could keep up a pose and plan a revenge on an agonized death-bed; the strength, which had concentrated itself during her girlhood on her ambitions, that had then made her love for Crandon, now turned to a deep hatred and rage that seemed to settle, cold and hard, on the very muscles of her body. She knew the hatred, the fierce resentment, that the trapped thing feels against the trapper, and added to it was the shame of a woman whose love has been made a mockery. And if, unacknowledged even to herself, was the pricking feeling that, could she have been spared discovery, she would not deeply have minded being the innocent cause of her own release, who is there with heart so uncomplex as to be in a position to condemn her. . . .

She tramped on and on, and presently found herself out on the St. Annan high-road. The thought of Charles came to her as a point where she could turn for help, for he had been absent all night at a distant part of the parish, ministering to a dying man, but he would surely be back by now; if she were not quick he would already have set off for Troon on hearing the news. Battling against the rain-laden wind, she bent her head and made her way into the village. There little groups of people were standing about, intent, arguing. At sight of her a common feeling animated them, the various little centres of discussion broke, joined together, swept towards her. She had an impression of shaking fists, angry sounds, rude contacts, and the smell of many rain-wet bodies pressing in around her. The panic of crowds seized her, she screamed, and screamed again, not recognizing the voice of Charles Le Petyt answering her as he made his way through the press. He struck the faces away from him right and left, and his blazing passage made men fall back. Putting an arm round Sophie he drew her up the steps of the inn and through the door, which he shut and barred.

"Take me away, Charles, take me away," she moaned, and he, his arms round her dear trembling body, answered:

"I will take you home. You are quite safe with me, Sophie. When we get back you must tell me everything and I will think of a way to help you. Stay here a moment, dear."