Chapter 3

The moon's rays shone fitfully upon the white face of the kiln, and lit up my work. The little stream rushed noisily below. And so, with this hateful man watching, I laid bare the lime-burnt remains of the comrade whom, almost five months before, I had murdered and buried there. How I had then cursed my luck because forced to hide his corpse away before I could return and search for the diamond I had failed to find upon his body! But as I tossed the earth and lime aside, and discovered my handiwork, the moon's rays were suddenly caught and reflected from within the pit, and I fell forward with a short gasp of delight.

For there, kindled into quick shafts and points of colour--violet, green, yellow, and fieriest red--lay the missing diamond among Roger's bones. As I clutched the gem a black shadow fell between the moon and me. I looked up. My companion was standing over me, with the twinkle still in his eye and the flute in his hand.

"You were a fool not to guess that he had swallowed it. I hope you are satisfied with the bargain. As we are not, I trust, likely to meet again in this world, I will here bid you _Adieu_, though possibly that is scarcely the word to use. But there is one thing I wish to tell you. I owe you a debt to-night for having prevented me from committing a crime. You saw that I had the spade and pickaxe ready in the cottage. Well, I confess I lusted for that gem. I was arguing out the case with my flute when you came in."

"If," said I, "you wish a share--"

"Another word," he interrupted very gravely, "and I shall be forced to think that you insult me. As it is, I am grateful to you for supporting my flute's advice at an opportune moment. I will now leave you. Two hours ago I was in a fair way of becoming a criminal. I owe it to you, and to my flute, that I am still merely a lawyer. Farewell!"

With that he turned on his heel and was gone with a swinging stride up the path and across the moor. His figure stood out upon the sky-line for a moment, and then vanished. But I could hear for some time the tootle-tootle of his flute in the distance, and it struck me that its note was unusually sprightly and clear.

THE RETURN OF JOANNA.

High and low, rich and poor, in Troy Town there are seventy-three maiden ladies. Under this term, of course, I include only those who may reasonably be supposed to have forsworn matrimony. And of the seventy-three, the two Misses Lefanu stand first, as well from their age and extraction (their father was an Admiral of the Blue) as because of their house, which stands in Fore Street and is faced with polished Luxulyan granite--the same that was used for the famous Duke of Wellington's coffin in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Miss Susan Lefanu is eighty-five; Miss Charlotte has just passed seventy-six. They are extremely small, and Miss Bunce looks after them. That is to say, she dresses them of a morning, arranges their chestnut "fronts," sets their caps straight, and takes them down to breakfast. After dinner (which happens in the middle of the day) she dresses them again and conducts them for a short walk along the Rope-walk, which they call "the Esplanade." In the evening she brings out the Bible and sets it the right way up for Miss Susan, who begins to meditate on her decease; then sits down to a game of ecarte with Miss Charlotte, who as yet has not turned her thoughts upon mortality. At ten she puts them to bed. Afterwards, "the good Bunce "--who is fifty, looks like a grenadier, and wears a large mole on her chin--takes up a French novel, fastened by a piece of elastic between the covers of Baxter's "Saint's Rest," and reads for an hour before retiring. Her pay is fifty-two pounds a year, and her attachment to the Misses Lefanu a matter of inference rather than perception.

One morning in last May, at nine o'clock, when Miss Bunce had just arranged the pair in front of their breakfast-plates, and was sitting down to pour out the tea, two singers came down the street, and their voices--a man's and a woman's--though not young, accorded very prettily:--

"Citizens, toss your pens away! For all the world is mad to-day-- Cuckoo--cuckoo! The world is mad to-day."

"What unusual words for a pair of street singers!" Miss Bunce murmured, setting down the tea-pot. But as Miss Charlotte was busy cracking an egg, and Miss Susan in a sort of coma, dwelling perhaps on death and its terrors, the remark went unheeded.

"Citizens, doff your coats of black, And dress to suit the almanack-- Cuckoo--"

The voices broke off, and a rat-tat sounded on the front door.

"Say that we never give to beggars, under any circumstances," murmured Miss Susan, waking out of her lethargy.

The servant entered with a scrap of crumpled paper in her hand. "There was a woman at the door who wished to see Miss Lefanu."

"Say that we never give--" Miss Susan began again, fumbling with the note. "Bunce, I have on my gold-rimmed spectacles, and cannot read with them, as you know. The black-rimmed pair must be up-stairs, on the--"

"How d'ye do, my dears?" interrupted a brisk voice. In the doorway stood a plump middle-aged woman, nodding her head rapidly. She wore a faded alpaca gown, patched here and there, a shawl of shepherd's plaid stained with the weather, and a nondescript bonnet. Her face was red and roughened, as if she lived much out of doors.

"How d'ye do?" she repeated "I'm Joanna."

Miss Bunce rose, and going discreetly to the window, pretended to gaze into the street. Joanna, as she knew, was the name of the old ladies' only step-sister, who had eloped from home twenty years before, and (it was whispered) had disgraced the family. As for the Misses Lefanu, being unused to rise without help, they spread out their hands as if stretching octaves on the edge of the table, and feebly stared.

"Joanna," began the elder, tremulously, "if you have come to ask charity--"

"Bless your heart, no! What put that into your head?" She advanced and took the chair which Miss Bunce had left, and resting her elbows on the table, regarded her sisters steadily. "What a preposterous age you both must be, to be sure! My husband's waiting for me outside."

"Your husband?" Miss Charlotte quavered.

"Why, of course. Did you suppose, because I ran away to act, that I wasn't an honest woman?" She stretched out her left hand; and there was a thin gold ring on her third finger. "He isn't much of an actor, poor dear. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he has been hissed off two-and-thirty stages in Great Britain alone. Indeed, he's the very worst actor I ever saw, although I don't tell him. But as a husband he's sublime."

"Are there--" Miss Charlotte began, and broke down. "Are there," she tried again, "are there--any--children?"

"Ah, my dear, if there were, I might be tempted to repent."

"Don't you?" jerked out Miss Bunce, turning abruptly from the window. There was a certain sharp emotion in the question, but her face was in the shadow. Joanna regarded her for a moment or two and broke into a laugh.

"My dears, I have been an actress and a mother. I retain the pride of both,--though my little one died at three months, and no manager will engage me now, because I refuse to act unless my husband has a part. Theoretically, he is the first of artists; in practice-- You were asking, however, if I repent. Well, having touched the two chief prizes within a woman's grasp, I hardly see how it is likely. I perceive that the object of my visit has been misinterpreted. To be frank, I came to gloat over you."

"Your step-sisters are at least respectable," Miss Bunce answered.

"Let us grant that to be a merit," retorted Joanna: "Do I understand you to claim the credit of it?"

"They are very clean, though," she went on, looking from one to the other, "and well preserved. Susan, I notice, shows signs of failing; she has dropped her spectacles into the teacup. But to what end, Miss--"

"Bunce."

"To what end, Miss Bunce, are you preserving them?"

"Madam, when you entered the room I was of your way of thinking. Book after book that I read"--Miss Bunce blushed at this point-- "has displayed before me the delights of that quick artistic life that you glory in following. I have eaten out my heart in longing. But now that I see how it coarsens a women--for it _is_ coarse to sneer at age, in spite of all you may say about uselessness being no better for being protracted over much time--"

"You are partly right," Joanna interrupted, "although you mistake the accident for the essence. I am only coarse when confronted by respectability. Nevertheless, I am glad if I reconcile you to your lot."

"But the point is," insisted Miss Bunce, "that a lady _never_ forgets herself."

"And you would argue that the being liable to forget myself is only another development of that very character by virtue of which I follow Art. Ah, well"--she nodded towards her stepsisters--"I ask you why they and I should be daughters of one father?"

She rose and stepped to the piano in the corner. It was a tall Collard, shaped, above the key-board, like a cupboard. After touching the notes softly, to be sure they were in tune, she drew over a chair, and fell to playing Schumann's "_Warum?_" very tenderly. It was a tinkling instrument, but perhaps her playing gained pathos thereby, before such an audience. At the end she turned round: there were tears in her eyes.

"You used to play the 'Osborne Quadrilles' very nicely," observed Miss Susan, suddenly. "Your playing has become very--very--"

"Disreputable," suggested Joanna.

"Well, not exactly. I was going to say 'unintelligible.'"

"It's the same thing." She rose, kissed her step-sisters, and walked out of the room without a look at Miss Bunce.

"Poor Joanna!" observed Miss Susan, after a minute's silence. "She has aged very much. I really must begin to think of my end."

Outside, in the street, Joanna's husband was waiting for her--a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face.

"Don't talk to me for a while," she begged. "I have been among ghosts."

"Ghosts?"

"They were much too dull to be real: and yet--Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken! I might have left him there."

"What shall we sing?" asked the man, turning his face away.

"Something pious," Joanna answered with an ugly little laugh, "since we want our dinner. The public has still enough honesty left to pity piety." She stepped out into the middle of the street, facing her sisters' windows, and began, the man's voice chiming in at the third bar--

"In the sweet by-and-bye We shall meet on that be-yeautiful shore." . . .

PSYCHE.

"_Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her way back to earth?_"

The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually screwed up, because his life had run for the most part in the teeth of the wind. The lashes, too, had been scorched off. If you penetrated the mask of oil and coal-dust that was part of his working suit, you found a reddish-brown phlegmatic face, and guessed its age at fifty. He brought the last down train into Lewminster station every night at 9.45, took her on five minutes later, and passed through Lewminster again at noon, on his way back with the Galloper, as the porters called it.

He had reached that point of skill at which a man knows every pound of metal in a locomotive; seemed to feel just what was in his engine the moment he took hold of the levers and started up; and was expecting promotion. While waiting for it, he hit on the idea of studying a more delicate machine, and married a wife. She was the daughter of a woman at whose house he lodged, and her age was less than half of his own. It is to be supposed he loved her.

A year after their marriage she fell into low health, and her husband took her off to Lewminster for fresher air. She was lodging alone at Lewminster, and the man was passing Lewminster station on his engine, twice a day, at the time when this tale begins.

People--especially those who live in the West of England--remember the great fire at the Lewminster Theatre; how, in the second Act of the _Colleen Bawn_, a tongue of light shot from the wings over the actors' heads; how, even while the actors turned and ran, a sheet of fire swept out on the auditorium with a roaring wind, and the house was full of shrieks and blind death; how men and women were turned to a white ash as they rose from their seats, so fiercely the flames outstripped the smoke. These things were reported in the papers, with narratives and ghastly details, and for a week all England talked of Lewminster.

This engine-driver, as the 9.45 train neared Lewminster, saw the red in the sky. And when he rushed into the station and drew up, he saw that the country porters who stood about were white as corpses.

"What fire is that?" he asked one.

"'Tis the theayter! There's a hundred burnt a'ready, and the rest treadin' each other's lives out while we stand talkin', to get 'pon the roof and pitch theirselves over!"

Now the engine-driver's wife was going to the play that night, and he knew it. She had met him at the station, and told him so, at midday.

But there was nobody to take the train on, if he stepped off the engine; for his fireman was a young hand, and had been learning his trade for less than three weeks.

So when the five minutes were up--or rather, ten, for the porters were bewildered that night--this man went on out of the station into the night. Just beyond the station the theatre was plain to see, above the hill on his left, and the flames were leaping from the roof; and he knew that his wife was there. But the train was never taken down more steadily, nor did a single passenger guess what manner of man was driving it.

At Drakeport, where his run ended, he stepped off the engine, walked from the railway-sheds to his mother-in-law's, where he still lodged, and went up-stairs to his bed without alarming a soul.

In the morning, at the usual hour, he was down at the station again, washed and cleanly dressed. His fireman had the Galloper's engine polished, fired up, and ready to start.

"Mornin'," he nodded, and looking into his driver's eyes, dropped the handful of dirty lint with which he had been polishing. After shuffling from foot to foot for a minute, he ended by climbing down on the far side of the engine.

"Oldster," he said, "'tis mutiny p'raps; but s'help me, if I ride a mile longside that new face o' your'n!"

"Maybe you're right," his superior answered wearily. "You'd best go up to the office, and get somebody sent down i' my place. And while you're there, you might get me a third-class for Lewminster."

So this man travelled up to Lewminster as passenger, and found his young wife's body among the two score stretched in a stable-yard behind the smoking theatre, waiting to be claimed. And the day after the funeral he left the railway company's service. He had saved a bit, enough to rent a small cottage two miles from the cemetery where his wife lay. Here he settled and tilled a small garden beside the high-road.

Nothing seemed to be wrong with the man until the late summer, when he stood before the Lewminster magistrates charged with a violent and curiously wanton assault.

It appeared that one dim evening, late in August, a mild gentleman, with Leghorn hat, spectacles, and a green gauze net, came sauntering by the garden where the ex-engine-driver was pulling a basketful of scarlet runners: that the prisoner had suddenly dropped his beans, dashed out into the road, and catching the mild gentleman by the throat had wrenched the butterfly net from his hand and belaboured him with the handle till it broke.

There was no defence, nor any attempt at explanation. The mild gentleman was a stranger to the neighbourhood. The magistrates marvelled, and gave his assailant two months.

At the end of that time the man came out of gaol and went quietly back to his cottage.

Early in the following April he conceived a wish to build a small greenhouse at the foot of his garden, by the road, and spoke to the local mason about it. One Saturday afternoon the mason came over to look at the ground and discuss plans. It was bright weather, and while the two men talked a white butterfly floated past them--the first of the year.

Immediately the mason broke off his sentence and began to chase the butterfly round the garden: for in the West country there is a superstition that if a body neglect to kill the first butterfly he may see for the season, he will have ill luck throughout the year. So he dashed across the beds, hat in hand.

"I'll hat 'en--I'll hat 'en! No, fay! I'll miss 'en, I b'lieve. Shan't be able to kill 'n if hor's wunce beyond th' gaate--stiddy, my son! Wo-op!"

Thus he yelled, waving his soft hat: and the next minute was lying stunned across a carrot-bed, with eight fingers gripping the back of his neck and two thumbs squeezing on his windpipe.

There was another assault case heard by the Lewminster bench; and this time the ex-engine-driver received four months. As before, he offered no defence: and again the magistrates were possessed with wonder.

Now the explanation is quite simple. This man's wits were sound, save on one point. He believed--why, God alone knows, who enabled him to drive that horrible journey without a tremor of the hand--that his wife's soul haunted him in the form of a white butterfly or moth. The superstition that spirits take this shape is not unknown in the West; and I suppose that as he steered his train out of the station, this fancy, by some odd freak of memory, leaped into his brain, and held it, hour after hour, while he and his engine flew forward and the burning theatre fell further and further behind. The truth was known a fortnight after his return from prison, which happened about the time of barley harvest.

A harvest-thanksgiving was held in the parish where he lived; and he went to it, being always a religious man. There were sheaves and baskets of vegetables in the chancel; fruit and flowers on the communion-table, with twenty-one tall candles burning above them; a processional hymn; and a long sermon. During the sermon, as the weather was hot and close, someone opened the door at the west end.

And when the preacher was just making up his mind to close the discourse, a large white moth fluttered in at the west door.

There was much light throughout the church; but the great blaze came, of course, from the twenty-one candles upon the altar. And towards this the moth slowly drifted, as if the candles sucked her nearer and nearer, up between the pillars of the nave, on a level with their capitals. Few of the congregation noticed her, for the sermon was a stirring one; only one or two children, perhaps, were interested--and the man I write of. He saw her pass over his head and float up into the chancel. He half-rose from his chair.

"My brothers," said the preacher, "if two sparrows, that are sold for a farthing, are not too little for the care of this infinite Providence--"

A scream rang out and drowned the sentence. It was followed by a torrent of vile words, shouted by a man who had seen, now for the second time, the form that clothed his wife's soul shrivelled in unthinking flames. All that was left of the white moth lay on the altar-cloth, among the fruit at the base of the tallest candlestick.

And because the man saw nothing but cruelty in the Providence of which the preacher spoke, he screamed and cursed, till they overpowered him and took him forth by the door. He was wholly mad from that hour.

THE COUNTESS OF BELLARMINE.

Few rivers in England are without their "Lovers' Leap"; but the tradition of this one is singular, I believe. It overhangs a dark pool, midway down a west country valley--a sheer escarpment of granite, its lip lying but a stone's throw from the high-road, that here finds its descent broken by a stiff knoll, over which it rises and topples again like a wave.

I had drawn two shining peel out of the pool, and sat eating my lunch on the edge of the Leap, with my back to the road. Forty feet beneath me the water lay black and glossy, behind the dotted foliage of a birch-tree. My rod stuck upright from the turf at my elbow, and, whenever I turned my head, neatly bisected the countenance and upper half of Seth Truscott, an indigenous gentleman of miscellaneous habits and a predatory past, who had followed me that morning to carry the landing-net.

It was he who, after lunch, imparted the story of the rock on which we sat; and as it seemed at the time to gain somewhat by the telling, I will not risk defacing it by meddling with his dialect.

"I reckon, sir," he began, with an upward nod at a belt of larches, the fringe of a great estate, that closed the view at the head of the vale, "you'm too young to mind th' ould Earl o' Bellarmine, that owned Castle Cannick, up yonder, in my growin' days. 'Ould Wounds' he was nick-named--a cribbage-faced, what-the-blazes kind o' varmint, wi' a gossan wig an' a tongue like oil o' vitriol. He'd a-led the fore-half o' his life, I b'lieve, in London church-town, by reason that he an' his father couldn' be left in a room together wi'out comin' to fisticuffs: an' by all accounts was fashion's favourite in the naughty city, doin' his duty in that state o' life an' playing Hamlet's ghost among the Ten Commandments.

"The upshot was that he killed a young gentleman over a game o' whist, an' that was too much even for the Londoners. So he packed up and sailed for furrin' parts, an' didn' show his face in England till th' ould man, his father, was took wi' a seizure an' went dead, bein' palsied down half his face, but workin' away to the end at the most lift-your-hair wickedness wi' the sound side of his mouth.

"Then the new Earl turned up an' settled at Castle Cannick. He was a wifeless man, an', by the look o't, had given up all wish to coax the female eye: for he dressed no better'n a jockey, an' all his diversion was to ride in to Tregarrick Market o' Saturdays, an' hang round the doorway o' the Pack-Horse Inn, by A. Walters, and glower at the men an' women passin' up and down the Fore Street, an' stand drinkin' brandy an' water while the horse-jockeys there my-lord'ed 'en. Two an' twenty glasses, they say, was his quantum' between noon an' nine o'clock; an' then he'd climb into saddle an' ride home to his jewelled four-poster, cursin' an' mutterin', but sittin' his mare like a man of iron.

"But one o' these fine market-days he did a thing that filled the mouths o' the country-side.

"He was loafin' by the Pack-Horse door, just as usual, at two o'clock, rappin' the head o' his crop on the side o' his ridin' boots, drawin' his brows down an' lookin' out curses from under 'em across the street to the saddler's opposite, when two drover-chaps came up the pavement wi' a woman atween 'em.

"The woman--or maid, to call her by her proper title--was a dark-browed slut, wi' eyes like sloes, an' hair dragged over her face till she looked like an owl in an ivy-bush. As for the gown o' her, 'twas no better'n a sack tied round the middle, wi' a brave piece torn away by the shoulder, where one o' the men had clawed her.

"There was a pretty dido goin' on atween the dree, an' all talkin' together--the two men mobbin' each other, an' the girl i' the middle callin' em every name but what they was chris'ened, wi'out distinction o' persons, as the word goes.

"'What's the uproar?' asks Ould Wounds, stoppin' the tap-tap o' his crop, as they comes up.

"'The woman b'longs to me,' says the first. 'I've engaged to make her my lawful wife; an' I won't go from my word under two gallon o' fourpenny.'