Chapter 16

I took the letter; and there, to be sure, read the words the old Admiral had quoted. But it struck me that Fritz Van der Knoope used a very ladylike handwriting, and of a sort not usually taught on H.M.S. _Britannia_.

"In two years' time the lad will be home, all being well. And then, of course, we shall see."

"Of what rank is he?"

"At present a second lieutenant. His age is but twenty-one. The Van der Knoopes have all followed the sea, as the portraits in this house will tell you. Ay, and we have fought against England in our time. As late as 1672, Adrian Van der Knoope commanded a ship under De Ruyter when he outgeneralled the English in Southwold Bay. But since 1688 our swords have been at the service of our adopted country; and she has used them, sir."

I am afraid I was not listening. My chair faced the window, and as I glanced at the letter in my hands enough light filtered through the transparent "foreign" paper to throw up the watermark, and it bore the name of an English firm.

This small discovery, quite unwillingly made, gave me a sudden sense of shame, as though I had been playing some dishonourable trick. I was hastily folding up the paper, to return it, when the door opened and Wilhelmina came in, with her uncle Melchior.

She seemed to divine in an instant what had happened; threw a swift glance at the blind Admiral, and almost as swiftly took the letter from my hand and restored it to the packet. The next moment, with perfect coolness she was introducing me to her uncle Melchior.

Melchior Van der Knoope was perhaps ten years younger than his brother, and carried his tall figure buttoned up tightly in an old-fashioned frockcoat: a mummy of a man, with a fixed air of mild bewilderment and a trick of running his left hand through his white hair--due, no doubt, to everlasting difficulty with the family accounts. He shook hands as ceremoniously as his brother.

"We have been talking of Fritz," said old Peter.

"Oh yes--of Fritz. To be sure." Melchior answered him vaguely, and looked at me with a puzzled smile. There was silence in the room till his brother spoke again. "I have been showing Mr.--Fritz's last letter."

"Fritz writes entertainingly," murmured Melchior, and seemed to cast about for another word, but repeated, "--entertainingly. If the state of your ankle permits, sir, you will perhaps take an interest in our pictures. I shall be happy to show them to you."

And so, with the occasional support of Melchior's arm, I began a tour of the house. The pictures indeed were a sufficient reward--seascapes by Willem Van der Velde, flower-portraits by Willem Van Aslet, tavern-scenes by Adrian Van Ostade; a notable Cuyp; a small Gerard Dow of peculiar richness; portraits--the Burgomaster Albert Van der Knoope, by Thomas de Keyser--the Admiral Nicholas, by Kneller--the Admiral Peter (grand-uncle of the blind Admiral), by Romney. . . . My guide seemed as honestly proud of them as insensible of their condition, which was in almost every case deplorable. By-and-by, in the library we came upon a modern portrait of a rosy-faced boy in a blue suit, who held (strange combination!) a large ribstone pippin in one hand and a cricket bat in the other--a picture altogether of such glaring demerit that I wondered for a moment why it hung so conspicuously over the fireplace, while worthier paintings were elbowed into obscure corners. Then with a sudden inkling I glanced at Uncle Melchior. He nodded gravely.

"That is Fritz."

I pulled out my watch. "I believe," I said, "it must be time for me to bid your brother good-bye."

"You need be in no hurry," said Miss Wilhelmina's voice behind me. "The last train to Aber has gone at least ten minutes since. You must dine and sleep with us to-night."

I awoke next morning between sheets of sweet-smelling linen in a carved four-post bed, across the head-board of which ran the motto "STEMMATA QVID FACIVNT" in faded letters of gilt. If the appearance of the room, with its tattered hangings and rickety furniture, had counted for anything, my dreams should certainly have been haunted. But, as a matter of fact, I never slept better. Possibly the lightness of the dinner (cooked by the small handmaid Lobelia) had something to do with it; possibly, too, the infectious somnolence of the two Admirals, who spoke but little during the meal, and nodded, without attempt at dissimulation, over the dessert. At any rate, shortly after nine o'clock--when Miss Wilhelmina brought out a heavy Church Service, and Uncle Melchior read the lesson and collect for the day and a few prayers, including the one "For those at Sea"--I had felt quite ready for bed. And now, thanks to a cold compress, my ankle had mended considerably. I descended to breakfast in very cheerful mind, and found Miss Wilhelmina alone at the table.

"Uncle Peter," she explained, "rarely comes down before mid-day; and Uncle Melchior breakfasts in his room. He is busy with the accounts."

"So early?"

She smiled rather sadly. "They take a deal of disentangling."

She asked how my ankle did. When I told her, and added that I must catch an early train back to Aber, she merely said, "I will walk to the station with you, if I may."

And so at ten o'clock--after I had bidden farewell to Uncle Melchior, who wore the air of one interrupted in a long sum of compound addition-- we set forth. I knew the child had something on her mind, and waited. Once, by a ruinous fountain where a stone Triton blew patiently at a conch-shell plugged with turf, she paused and dug at the mortared joints of the basin with the point of her sunshade; and I thought the confidence was coming. But it was by the tumble-down gate at the end of the chestnut avenue that she turned and faced me.

"I knew you yesterday at once," she said. "You write novels."

"I wish," said I feebly, "the public were as quick at discovering me."

"Somebody printed an 'interview' with you in '--'s Magazine a month or two ago."

"There was not the slightest resemblance."

"Please don't be silly. There was a photograph."

"Ah, to be sure."

"You can help me--help us all--if you will."

"Is it about Fritz?"

She bent her head and signed to me to open the gate. Across the high-road a stile faced us, and a little church, with an acre framed in elms and set about with trimmed yews. She led the way to the low and whitewashed porch, and pushed open the iron-studded door. As I followed, the name of Van der Knoope repeated itself on many mural tablets. Almost at the end of the south aisle she paused and lifted a finger and pointed.

I read--

SACRED To the Memory of FRITZ OPDAM DE KEYSER VAN DER KNOOPE A Midshipman of the Royal Navy Who was born Oct. 21st MDCCCLXVII. And Drowned By the Capsizing of H.M.S. Viper off the North Coast of Ireland On the 17th of January MDCCCLXXXV. A youth of peculiar promise who lacked but the greater indulgence of an all-wise Providence to earn the distinction of his forefathers (of whom he was the last male representative) in his Country's service in which he laid down his young life

Heu miserande puer! Si qua fata aspera rumpas Tu Marcellus eris.

"Uncle Melchior had it set up. I wonder what Fritz was really like."

"And your Uncle Peter still believes--?"

"Oh yes. I am to marry Fritz in time. That is where you must help us. It would kill Uncle Peter if he knew. But Uncle Melchior gets puzzled whenever it comes to writing; and I am afraid of making mistakes. We've put him down in the South Pacific station at present--that will last for two years more. But we have to invent the gossip, you know. And I thought that you--who wrote stories--"

"My dear young lady," I said, "let me be Fritz, and you shall have a letter duly once a month."

And my promise was kept--until, two years ago, she wrote that there was no further need for letters, for Uncle Peter was dead. For aught I know, by this time Uncle Melchior may be dead also. But regularly, as the monthly date comes round, I am Fritz Opdam de Keyser van der Knoope, a young midshipman of Her Majesty's Navy; and wonder what my affianced bride is doing; and see her on the terrace steps with those butterflies floating about her. In my part of the world it is believed that the souls of the departed pass into these winged creatures. So might the souls of those many pictured Admirals: but some day, before long, I hope to cross Skirrid again and see.

THE PENANCE OF JOHN EMMET.

I have thought fit in this story to alter all the names involved and disguise the actual scene of it: and have done this so carefully that, although the story has a key, the reader who should search for it would not only waste his time but miss even the poor satisfaction of having guessed an idle riddle. He whom I call Parson West is now dead. He was an entirely conscientious man; which means that he would rather do wrong himself than persuade or advise another man--above all, a young man--to do it. I am sure therefore that in burying the body of John Emmet as he did, and enlisting my help, he did what he thought right, though the action was undoubtedly an illegal one. Still, the question is one for casuists; and remembering how modest a value my old friend set on his own wisdom, I dare say that by keeping his real name out of the narrative I am obeying what would have been his wish. His small breach of the law he was (I know) prepared to answer for cheerfully, should the facts come to light. He has now gone where their discovery affects him not at all.

Parson West, then, when I made his acquaintance in 188-, had for thirty years been vicar of the coast-parish of Lansulyan. He had come to it almost fresh from Oxford, a young scholar with a head full of Greek, having accepted the living from his old college as a step towards preferment. He was never to be offered another. Lansulyan parish is a wide one in acreage, and the stipend exiguous even for a bachelor. From the first the Parson eked out his income by preparing small annotated editions of the Classics for the use of Schools and by taking occasional pupils, of whom in 188- I was the latest. He could not teach me scholarship, which is a habit of mind; but he could, and in the end did, teach me how to win a scholarship, which is a sum of money paid annually. I have therefore a practical reason for thinking of him with gratitude: and I believe he liked me, while despising my Latinity and discommending my precociousness with tobacco.

His pupils could never complain of distraction. The church-town--a single street of cottages winding round a knoll of elms which hide the Vicarage and all but the spire of St. Julian's Church--stands high and a mile back from the coast, and looks straight upon the Menawhidden reef, a fringe of toothed rocks lying parallel with the shore and half a mile distant from it. This reef forms a breakwater for a small inlet where the coombe which runs below Lansulyan meets the sea. Follow the road downhill from the church-town and along the coombe, and you come to a white-washed fishing haven, with a life-boat house and short sea-wall. The Porth is its only name. On the whole, if one has to live in Lansulyan parish the Porth is gayer than the church-town, where from the Vicarage windows you look through the trees southward upon ships moving up or down Channel in the blue distance and the white water girdling Menawhidden; northward upon downs where herds of ponies wander at will between the treeless farms, and a dun-coloured British earthwork tops the high sky-line. Dwellers among these uplands, wringing their livelihood from the obstinate soil by labour which never slackens, year in and year out, from Monday morning to Saturday night, are properly despised by the inhabitants of the Porth, who sit half their time mending nets, cultivating the social graces, and waiting for the harvest which they have not sown to come floating past their doors. By consequence, if a farmer wishes to learn the spiciest gossip about his nearest neighbour, he must travel down to the Porth for it.

And this makes it the more marvellous that what I am about to tell, happening as it did at the very gates of the Porth, should have escaped the sharpest eyes in the place.

The Vicar's custom was to read with me for a couple of hours in the morning and again for an hour and a half before dinner. We had followed this routine rigidly and punctually for three months or so when, one evening in June, he returned from the Porth a good ten minutes late, very hot and dusty, and even so took a turn or two up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his coat-tails before settling down to correct my iambics.

"John Emmet is dead," he announced, pausing before the window with his back towards me and gazing out upon the ill-kept lawn.

"Wasn't he the coxswain of the life-boat?" I asked.

"Ah, to be sure, you never saw him, did you? He took to his bed before you came . . . a long illness. Well, well, it's all over!" Parson West sighed. "He saved, or helped to save, a hundred and fifteen lives, first and last. A hundred and fifteen lives!"

"I've heard something of the sort down at the Porth. A hundred and fifty, I think they said. They seemed very proud of him down there."

"Why?" The Vicar faced round on me, and added after a moment abruptly-- "He didn't belong to them: he was not even born in this parish."

"Where then?"

He disregarded the question. "Besides, the number was a hundred and fifteen: that's just the pity."

I did not understand: but he had seated himself at table and was running through my iambics. In the third verse he underlined a false quantity with blue pencil and looked up for an explanation. While I confessed the fault, his gaze wandered away from me and fell upon his fingers drumming upon the table's edge. A slant of red sunshine touched the signet-ring on his little finger, which he moved up and down watching the play of light on the rim of the collet. He was not listening. By-and-by he glanced up, "I beg your pardon--" stammered he, and leaving the rest of my verses uncorrected, pointed with his pencil to the concluding one. "That's not Greek," he said.

"It's in Sophocles," I contended: and turning up the word in "Liddell and Scott," I pushed the big lexicon under his nose.

For a moment he paid no heed to the action; did not seem to grasp the meaning of it. Then for the first and last time in my acquaintance with him he broke into a passion of temper.

"What do you mean, Sir? It's offensive, I tell you: a downright offensive, ungentlemanly thing to do! Yes, Sir, ungentlemanly!" He crumpled up my verses and tossed them into the waste-paper basket. "We had better get on with our Tacitus." And "Offensive!" I heard him muttering once more, as he picked up the book and found his place. I began to construe. His outburst had disconcerted me, and no doubt I performed discreditably: but glancing up in some apprehension after a piece of guess-work which even to me carried no conviction, I saw that again he was not attending. After this, by boldly skipping each difficulty as it arose I managed to cover a good deal of ground with admirable fluency.

We dined together in silence that evening, and after dinner strolled out to the big filbert-tree under which, for a few weeks in the year, Parson West had his dessert laid and sipped his thin port--an old common-room fashion to which he clung. To the end of his days he had the white cloth removed before dessert, and the fruits and the one decanter set out upon polished mahogany.

I glanced at him while helping myself to strawberries and cream. He sat nervously folding and refolding the napkin on his knee. By-and-by he spoke, but without looking at me.

"I lost my temper this afternoon, and I beg your pardon, my boy."

I began to stammer my contrition for having offended him: but he cut me short with a wave of the hand. "The fact is," he explained, "I was worried by something quite different."

"By John Emmet's death," I suggested. He nodded, and looked at me queerly while he poured out a glass of Tarragona.

"He was my gardener years ago, before he set up market-gardening on his own account."

"That's queer too," said I.

"What's queer?" He asked it sharply.

"Why, to find a gardener cox'n of a life-boat."

"He followed the sea in early life. But I'll tell you what _is_ queer, and that's his last wish. His particular desire was that I, and I alone, should screw down the coffin. He had Trudgeon the carpenter up to measure him, and begged this of me in Trudgeon's presence and the doctor's. What's more, I consented."

"That's jolly unpleasant," was my comment, for lack of a better.

The Vicar sat silent for a while, staring across the lawn, while I watched a spider which had let itself down from a branch overhead and was casting anchor on the decanter's rim. With his next question he seemed to have changed the subject.

"Where do you keep your boat now?"

"Renatus Warne has been putting in a new strake and painting her. I shall have her down on the beach to-morrow."

"Ah, so that's it? I cast my eye over the beach this afternoon and couldn't see her. You haven't been trying for the conger lately."

"We'll have a try to-morrow evening if you'll come, Sir. I wish you would."

The Vicar, though he seldom found time for the sport, was a famous fisherman. He shook his head; and then, leaning an arm on the table, gazed at me with sudden seriousness.

"Look here: could you make it convenient to go fishing for conger this next night or two--_and to go alone?_"

I saw that he had something more to say, and waited.

"The fact is," he went on after a glance towards the house, "I have a ticklish job to carry through--the queerest in all my experience; and unfortunately I want help as well as secrecy. After some perplexity I've resolved to ask you: because, upon my word, you're the only person I can ask. That doesn't sound flattering--eh? But it isn't your fitness I doubt, or your nerve. I've hesitated because it isn't fair to drag you into an affair which, I must warn you, runs counter to the law in a small way."

I let out a low whistle. "A smuggling job?" I suggested.

"Good Heavens, boy! What do you take me for?"

"I beg your pardon, then. But when you talk of a row-boat--at night--a job that wants secrecy--breaking the law--"

"I'll have to tell you the whole tale, I see: and it's only fair."

"Not a bit," said I stoutly. "Tell me what you want done and I'll do it. Afterwards tell me your reasons, if you care to. Indeed, Sir, I'd rather have it that way, if you don't mind. I was abominably disrespectful this afternoon--"

"No more about _that_."

"But I _was_: and with your leave, Sir, that's the form of apology I'll choose."

And I stood up with my hands in my pockets.

"Nonsense, nonsense," said the Vicar, eyeing me with a twinkle. But I nodded back in the most determined manner.

"Your instructions, sir--that is, unless you prefer to get another helper."

"But I cannot," pleaded he. "That's the mischief."

"Very well, then. Your instructions, please." And thus I had my way.

This happened on a Tuesday. The next evening I walked down to the Porth and launched my boat. A row of idlers watched me from the long bench under the life-boat house, and a small knot on the beach inspected my fishing-gear and lent a hand to push off. "Ben't goin' alone, be 'e?" asked Renatus Warne. "Yes," said I. "The conger'll have 'ee then, sure enough." One or two offered chaffingly to come out and search for me if I shouldn't return before midnight; and a volley of facetious warnings followed me out upon the calm sea.

The beach was deserted, however, when I returned. I had hooked three fine conger; and having hauled up the boat and cleaned her, I made my way back to the vicarage, well pleased, getting to bed as the clock struck two in the morning.

This was Thursday; and in the evening, between seven and eight o'clock, I launched the boat again under the eyes of the population and started fishing on the inner grounds, well in sight of the Porth. Dusk fell, and with it the young moon dropped behind the western headland. Far out beyond Menawhidden the riding-lights of a few drifters sparkled in the darkness: but I had little to fear from them.

The moon had no sooner disappeared than I shifted my ground, and pulling slowly down in the shore's shadow (I had greased the leathers of my oars for silence), ran the boat in by the point under Gunner's Meadow, beached her cunningly between two rocks, and pulled a tarpaulin over to hide her white-painted interior. My only danger now lay in blundering against the coastguard: but by dodging from one big boulder to another and listening all the while for footsteps, I gained the withy bed at the foot of the meadow. The night was almost pitch-black, and no one could possibly detect the boat unless he searched for it.

I followed the little stream up the valley bottom, through an orchard, and struck away from it across another meadow and over the rounded shoulder of the hill to my right. This brought me in rear of a kitchen-garden and a lonely cob-walled cottage, the front of which faced down a dozen precipitous steps upon the road leading from Lansulyan to the Porth. The cottage had but one window in the back, in the upper floor; and just beneath it jutted out a lean-to shed, on the wooden side of which I rapped thrice with my knuckles.

"Hist!" The Vicar leaned out from the dark window above. "Right: it's all ready. We must stow it in the outhouse. Trudgeon is down in the road below, waiting for me to finish."

No more was said. The Vicar withdrew: after a minute I heard the planking creak: then something white glimmered in the opening of the window--something like a long bundle of linen, extruded inch by inch, then lowered on to the penthouse roof and let slide slowly down towards me.

"Got it?"

"Right." I steadied it a moment by its feet, then let it slide into my arms, and lowered it on to the gravelled path. It was the body of John Emmet, in his winding-sheet.

"Carry it into the shed," whispered the Vicar. "I must show Trudgeon the coffin and hand him the keys. When I've got rid of him I'll come round."

Somehow, the second time of handling it was far worse than the first. The chill of the corpse seemed to strike through its linen wrappers. But I lifted it inside, shut the door upon it, and stood wiping my forehead, while the Vicar closed the window cautiously, drew the blind, and pressed-to the clasp.

A minute later I heard him calling from the front, "Mr. Trudgeon--Mr. Trudgeon"; and Trudgeon's hob-nailed boots ascending the steps. Silence followed for many minutes: then a slant of candlelight faded off the fuchsia-bush round the corner, and the two men stumbled down the staircase--stood muttering on the doorstep while a key grated in the lock--stumbled down the steps and stood muttering in the sunken roadway. At length they said "Good-night" and parted. I listened while the sound of their footsteps died away: Trudgeon's down the hill towards the Porth, the Vicar's up towards the church-town.