Chapter 8

“Make it a crown”, said Hogarth, “and get me to clean up down there; in a shocking state with mast and leaves”.

Frankl considered. “All right, I don't mind”.

“I shall want a spade, and--a barrow”.

“Go down the path yonder, till you come to the stables, and tell them”.

Frankl resumed his musing stroll, and Hogarth ran for the barrow.

In twenty minutes he was again at the elm tree, and, with a scheme in him for seeing Rebekah, heaped the barrow with refuse, pushed it between a beck and the wood, till, wearying of this, he was about to get the meteorite into the barrow, when he had the mad thought that Frankl must be made to see and touch it, so set off to seek him: and a few yards brought him face to face with Frankl.

“Well, how goes it?” asked the Jew.

“There is a weight there which I can't lift”, said Hogarth. “Then you must do the other thing. Don't lift it, and you don't get the pay. What weight is it?”

“It is here”.

Hogarth led him, led him, pointing. Frankl kicked the meteorite.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It can't be a branch”, said Hogarth; “too heavy--more like a piece of old iron”.

“Well, slip into it. A strapping fellow like you ought to be able to do that bit”.

“But suppose it's valuable?”

“I make you a present of it, as you are so hard up”.

Now Hogarth, by tilting the barrow, with strong effort of four limbs, got the meteorite lodged, while Frankl, his smile lifting the wrinkles above his thick moustache, watched the strain: then, with arms behind, went his contemplative way.

Hogarth rolled the barrow toward Thring.

XXV

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE

It was already eleven o'clock, the sun shining in a bright sky, under which the country round the Waveney lay broad to the hills of mist which seemed to encompass the valley; yet, when one came to them no hills were there, but were still beyond. When Hogarth came out from the wood upon a footbridge, to his right a hand-sower was sowing broadcast, with a two-handed rhythm, taking seed, as he strode, from his scrip; and to the left ran a path between fields to an eminence with a little church on it; straight northward some Thring houses visible, and north-east, near the river, Lagden Dip orchard. Only two stooping women in fields near Thring could Hogarth see; also, still further, a gig-and-horse whose remote motion was imperceptible; also the trudging two-handed process of the sower nourishing the furrows. But for these, England, supposed to be “overcrowded”, seemed a land once inhabited, but abandoned.

To Hogarth the whole, so familiar, looked uplifted now, the sunlight of a more celestial essence. Westring he would buy--though one memorable night in Colmoor he had arrived at the knowledge that it was not just that Westring should be anyone's; but then what one bought with his own diamonds was surely his own--his name being Richard.

He had passed the bridge, when, glancing to the left, he saw a fifth person in the landscape--a man under a sycamore near the church, gazing up, with hung jaw, at the apse window--dressed in a grey jacket, but a clerical hat, and he had a note-book, in which he wrote, or drew. Hogarth, whose mind was in weathercock state, rolled the barrow to the hill, left it, went stealing fleetly up, and gripped the man's collar, to whisper: “In the King's name I arrest you”.

The man's hand clapped his heart, as he turned a face of terror.

“There is--some mistake--My God! Are you--?”

“Yes”.

“Hogarth?”

“Who else?”

“But you have killed me! My heart--”

“Serves you right. Why didn't you give your right name to Loveday? And what are you doing here?”

“I was just examining this lovely old church, with its two south aisles, and one north, like St. John's at Cirencester. When the church fell in England, architecture was abolished--But as to why I am in Norfolk at all, I am skulking: and here is as another place. Your friend packed me off to America; but for some reasons I should prefer Golmoor--old Colmoor, eh? I fear I am a voluptuary, my son, fond of comfort, and old things, and pretty things. And all that I shall have yet! Tut, O'Hara is not done with the world, nor it with him. As to Norfolk, I once knew--a person--in this neighbourhood--”

The priest paused, regarding Hogarth with a smile, the “person” meant being Hogarth's mother; and he said: “But you are quite the Jew in dress: do you know now, then, that you are of the Chosen Race?”

“Singular notion! This is a mere disguise”.

“Ah. But you look quite radiant. You must have come into a fortune. When I heard of your escape, I said to myself--”

“How did you hear?”

“Why, from Harris”.

“Harris is drowned”.

“Harris is now under that little roof down there--there”--the prelate stabbed with his forefinger: “Harris is my shadow; Harris is my master. He was picked up naked by the ship which ran down your vessel, recognized me one day in Broadway, and threatened to give me in charge if I did not adopt him 'as my well-beloved son'. Well, from him I heard all, how you called fire from Heaven--it was gallant. But aren't you afraid of capture down here in your own country?”

“I cannot be captured”.

Those stony eyeballs of O'Hara, bulging from out circular trenches round their sockets, surveyed Hogarth, weighing, divining him, while his bottom lip, massive as the mouth of Polynesian stone gods, trembled.

“How do you mean?”

“I can buy King on throne, Judge on bench, Governor and Warder, the whole machinery. Even O'Hara I could buy”.

“I am for sale! Hogarth! I _smelled_ it about you, the myrrh of your garments! And didn't I prophesy it to you years ago? What a development! That beast, Harris, will dance for joy! Oh, there is something very artistic to my fancy, Hogarth, in the metal gold--brittle, bright, orpimented--”

“And diamonds?”

“Hogarth, have you diamonds?”

“Yes”, said Hogarth, smiling at the effect of ecstasy upon O'Hara.

“Prismic diamond!” cried the prelate: “but how--?”

“Do you want to enter my service?”

“Do I _want_?”

“Well, I want a tutor, O'Hara; and you shall be the man. Undertake, then, to teach me all you know in two years, and I'll give you--how much?--twenty thousand pounds a year”.

“My son”, whispered O'Hara, “what a development--!”

“Good-bye. In Thring Street there is a little paper-shop. Come there to-night at seven”.

He ran down the hill: and as he went northward, pushing his barrow, O'Hara had a lens at his eyes, saw the meteorite, and wondered.

XXVI

FRANKL AND O'HARA

Mrs. Sturgess, of the paper-shop, a clean, washed-out old lady, held up both averting hands at her back door, as Hogarth threw back his kefie, finger on lips; but soon, her alarm warming into welcome, she took him to a room above, to listen to his story of escape.

“And to think”, said she, “there is the very box your sister, poor thing, left with me to keep the day she went away, which never once have I seen her dear good face from that day to this. Anyway, _there's_ the box--” pointing to a trunk covered with grey goat's-hair, the trunk to which the old Hogarth had referred in telling Richard the secret of his birth, saying to deaf ears that it contained Richard's “papers”--a box double-bottomed, on its top the letters “P. O.”, with a cross-of-Christ under them.

“But, sir”, said Mrs. Sturgess, “you must be in great danger here. I hope”--with a titter--“I shan't be implicated--”

“Don't be afraid, Mrs. Sturgess, it will be all right, and, for yourself, don't trouble about the paper-shop any more, but buy a little villa near Florence, where it is warm for the cough--don't think me crazy if I tell you that I am a very rich man. Now give me a steak”.

Mrs. Sturgess served him well that day with a pang of expectancy at her heart! Always, she remembered, Richard Hogarth had been strange--uplifted and apart--a man incalculable, winged, unknown, though walking the common ways. He _might_ be a “very rich man”...

His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.

Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the porous ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up, glutting his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane, and was enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the glass like rag: the whim, meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the moor into a paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell stood in Gallery No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.

To see _her_ that very night was a necessity! and when it was dark he set out.

But that plot failed: on presenting himself at the front of the mansion, he was sent round to the back, where he received payment, and was dismissed; and when he again started for the front, intending to force his way in, he decided upon something else, and walked back to Thring.

He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent upon it at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that “the gentleman had come”. He said: “Show him up to my room”.

The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.

After some minutes he furtively turned the key, dived into a mass of things, paused to remember the whereabouts of a spring, found it, and, lifting the upper bottom, peered beneath; saw a bundle of papers; and, without removing the band, ferreted among them, and was satisfied---Hogarth's “birth-papers”.

He presently went to a back window, and saw ruddy streaks between the boarding of the shanty, while sounds of the hammer reached him.

He would go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard, grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through a cranny.

Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the cottage.

Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”

When these came, he sat and wrote:

“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech you, I entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I am dying.

“R. H.”

He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara.

“O'Hara”, said he, “I want you to take that for me. Come--I will show you the place. You ask in the hall to see 'the young lady': her name does not concern you; but you can't mistake her: she is so-pretty. Give the note to no one else, of course: it mentions my escape, for one thing. I know you will do it well”.

He conducted O'Hara, till the two towers of Westring were visible; pointed them out; then went back, and in an hour had finished his work on the diamonds.

O'Hara, meantime, going on his way alone, muttered: “You go fast, Hogarth: prelates of the Church your errand boys? But there is a little fellow called Alf Harris...if he had seen what I have seen to-night, you would be a corpse now”.

In twenty minutes he was at Westring, which he knew well, for twenty-five years before he had lived in the Vale: but he supposed that Lord Westring de Broom was still the inmate.

He asked to see “the young lady”, persisted, and after a time Rebekah came with eyebrows of inquiry.

The moment O'Hara saw her well, his visage acquired a ghastly ribbed fixity. Even before this, _she_, by one flashed glance, had known him.

But she took the envelope with easy coolness. And, instead of then returning upon her steps, went still beyond, and whispered to two men in the hall: “Do not let that man pass out!”

As she again returned inward past O'Hara, she remarked: “You might wait here a little”.

She travelled then, not hurrying, down the breadth of a great apartment to a side room where her father sat, capped and writing; and she said: “Papa, the man who assaulted me in the train is now in the hall. As his sentence was three years, he must have escaped--” She was gone at once, the unaddressed envelope, still unopened, shivering a little in her hand.

Frankl leapt up, rather pale, thinking that if the man had come _here_, he must mean mischief; but remembering that the man was a gentleman, a priest, he took heart, and went out.

O'Hara, meantime, stood at bay, guessing his exit blocked, while the terrors of death gat hold upon him, the flesh of his yellow jaw shivering. But he was a man of stern mind--stern as the rocky aspect of his face, and the moment he saw Frankl coming (he had seen him in the Court), he started to meet him--stooped to the Jew's ear, who shrank delicately from contact.

“There isn't any good in running me down, sir”, he whispered in sycophant haste. “I pledge you my word I came here without knowing to whom. O do, now! I have already suffered for my crime; and if you attempt to capture me, I do assure you, I strangle you where you stand! Do, now! I only brought a letter--”

Frankl, half inclined to tyrannize over misery, and half afraid, swept his hand down the beard.

“Letter?” said he: “from whom?”

“From a friend”.

“Which friend?”

“A man named Hogarth”.

O'Hara said it in an awful whisper, though not aware of any relation between Hogarth and Frankl.

Whereupon an agitation waved down Frankl's beard. The news that “a man named Hogarth” had written to his daughter would hardly have suggested _Richard_--safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he had seen Richard Hogarth inexplicably kiss his daughter's hand.

“Hogarth?” said he: “what Christian name?”

“Richard”.

The agonized thought in Frankl's brain was this: “Well, what's the good of prisons, then?”--he, too earnest a financier to read newspaper gossip, having heard not a word of the three escapes from Colmoor.

He said: “Well, sir, generally speaking, I'm the last to encourage this sort of thing; but, as yours is a special case, I tell you plain out that, personally, I don't mean a bit of harm to you. Just step into a room here, and let us talk the matter quietly over”.

He led O'Hara to his study; and there they two remained locked half an hour, conferring head to head.

XXVII

THE BAG OF LIGHT

Rebekah, having excused herself from three ladies, her guests, alone in her room opened her letter.

Glanced first at the “R. H.”, and was not surprised. He had “escaped”, had “come into great power”: that seemed natural; but he “summoned” her to meet him, and she saw no connection between his “great power” and his right to summon her.

She held the paper to a fire, and, as it began to burn, in a panic of flurry extinguished the edge, and hustled it into her bosom; then perambulated; then fell to a chair-edge with staring gaze; then, rocking her head which she had dropped upon a little table, moaned: “He is mad....”

“My flames of fire! Rebekah! I am dying....”

He suffered; and a pussy's wail mewed from her; but with a gasp of anger which said “Ho!” she sprang straight, and went ranging, with a stamping gait, through the chamber, filling it with passion. “I _won't go_!” she went with fixed lips, as something within her whispered: “You must”.

To escape herself, she went again to see what had happened with regard to the convict, whose face would carry to the grave the scars of her nails.

There were no signs of any disturbance; and she asked a footman: “Where is the man who was here?”

“With your father in the study”.

That seemed a strange proceeding: she felt a touch of alarm for her father, and, passing again by the study, peeped; could see nothing for the key, but heard voices.

This messenger of Hogarth, she next thought, was a criminal: he might betray...so she stole into an adjacent room, to peep by a side door of the study, and though a key projecting toward her barred her vision, the talkers were near this point, and she could hear.

“The diamond block”, O'Hara said, “is the same which he rolled across the bridge this morning; to that I'll swear”.

“Then it must be the very same block he showed me”, Frankl said in a whisper; “that thing was worth millions....!”

“Undoubtedly it was the same”.

“Oh, but Lord”, groaned the Jew in an anguish of self-deprecation, “where were my _eyes_? where were my _wits_? I must have been _dreaming_! No, that's hard!”

“Well--_nil desperandum_! Let us be acting, sir!”

“My own land--!”

“They are still safe enough: come--”

“He may have lost one or two--in his excitement. Thousands gone! He may have hidden some!”

“Tut, he has hidden none”, said O'Hara; “we may have all. Let us make a move”.

“But he is a strong man, this Hogarth. Why do you object to the assistance of the police?”

“What have the police to do with such a matter? Hogarth would simply bribe. And there are three of us--”

“Who is this Harris?”

“He is a Cockney--assassin”.

Frankl took snuff, with busy pats at alternate nostrils.

“What will you tell him is in the bag?”

“Anything--rings--something prized by you for sentimental reasons. We offer him a thousand--two thousand pounds. And he will not fail. He strikes like lightning”.

“And we share--how?”

“Come--let us not talk of that again, sir. What could be more generous than my offer? You divide the diamonds into two heaps, and I choose one; or I divide, you choose; and, before I leave you, you give me a declaration that it was by your contrivance that I escaped prison, and that the gems which I have, once yours, are duly made over to me”.

“And you collar half!” gibed the Jew with an ogle of guile; “that's about as cool a stroke of business as I've come across. You don't take into account that the whole is mine, if the concern fell, as you confess, on my own land! And just ask yourself the question: what is to prevent me handing you over this minute to the police, and grabbing the lot? Only I'm not that sort of man--”

O'Hara drew a revolver.

“You talk to me as though I was a schoolboy, sir”, said he sternly. “Be good enough to learn to respect me. I am not less a man of the world than you are, and quite competent to safeguard my own interests. Supposing I was weak enough to permit you to send for the police, the moment they had me I should tell of Hogarth in hiding; they would go for him, and he, after bribing, may be trusted to take wing with the stones, leaving you whistling. Or perhaps you would care to tackle him in person? He would wheel you by the beard round his arm like a Catherine-wheel, I do assure you. All this you see well, and pretend not to. Do let us be honest with each other!”

“Well, I don't want to be hard”, said Frankl, looking sideward and downward, plotting behind an unwrinkled brow, intending to have every one of the diamonds; so did O'Hara, who already had his plot.

“No, don't be hard”, said O'Hara: “_I_ am not. I give you an incalculable fortune; I take the same. Live and let live! Why should two shrewd old fellows like you and me be like the dog which, wanting two bones, lost the one he had? Come, now--give me your hand on it”.

“Well, I'm hanged if you are not right!” cried Frankl, looking up with discovery: “Share and share alike, and shame the devil! That's the kind of little man I am, frank, bluff, and stalwart--Ha! ha! Give me your hand on it, sir!”

“Ha! ha! you are very kind. That is the only way--absolute sincerity--” and they shook hands, hob-nobbing and fraternizing, with laughs and little nods, like cronies.

“Stop--I'll just ring for a drop of brandy--” said Frankl.

“No! no ringing!--thanks, thanks, no brandy--”

“Well, you are as cautious as they make them. Oh, perfectly right, you know--perfectly right”--he touched O'Hara's chest--“not a word to say against that. I am the same kind of man myself--”

“Come; are you for making a move?”

“Agreed. Where is my hat? I suppose a man may get his hat!--ha! ha!--I can't very well go in this cap---”

“You use mine--with the greatest pleasure. I do not need--Ah? quite the fit, quite the fit”.

“Why, so it is. Ha! ha! why, it's a curate's hat, and--_I'm a Jew_!”

“Excellent, excellent, ha! ha!”

So they made merry, and, with the bitter lip-corners of forced merriment, went out, while Rebekah, who had caught a great deal of that dialogue, crouched a long time there, agitated, uncertain what to do.

That her father should coolly look on at an assassination for a fortune was no revelation to her: she had long despised, yet, with an inconsistency due to the tenderness of Jewish family ties, still loved him; the notion of appealing to the police, therefore, who might ruin Hogarth, too, did not enter her head.

She ran and wrote: “Your life and bag of gems are _at this moment_ in danger”; and sent it by a mounted messenger addressed to “The Guest at the Paper Shop”.

But in twenty minutes the messenger returned to her with it, Hogarth having gone to the _rendezvous_ at the elm--long before the appointed time.

When, accordingly, Frankl, O'Hara, and Harris arrived at the paper-shop back yard, and Harris had stolen up the back stairs, he presently, to the alarm and delight of the others, sent a whisper from the window: “No one 'ere as I can see!”

And the search for the diamonds was short: for Hogarth had actually left the bag containing them on the trunk, and Frankl and O'Hara returned with it to Westring, holding it out at arm's length, one with the right, one with the left hand, like standard-bearers.

Hogarth, meantime, was striding about the elm, and once fell to his knees, adoring a vision, and once, at a fancied step, his teeth-edges chattered.

Rebekah! He called, groaned, hissed that name, while his to-and-fro ranging quickened to a trot.

And now, fancying that he heard a call “_Come !_” he stood startled, struck into a twisting enquiry to the four winds; but could not locate the call, ran hither and thither, saw no one.

“Come to me, little sister”, he wailed tenderly, while to swallow was a doubtful spasm for him, her name a mountain in his bosom.

When he was certain that it must be nearer ten than “nine”, he set out in the sway of a turbulent impulse to spurt for the Hall: but as he reached the point of proximity between path and park, just there where her father had stood that morning he saw her patiently waiting--ever since that “_Come!_”

He flew, and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm, she cried: “Don't you approach me!”--and he stood checked and abject, one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from her ears depending circles of gold large enough to hoop with, a saffron headdress, stuck backward, showing her hair in front, falling upon a shawl which sheltered her frank recumbent shoulders. She did not see Hogarth at all, but stood averted, implacable, unapproachable, looking across the park, while Hogarth occupied a long silence in gazing up to where, like a show, she stood, illumined by the moon.

At last he sent to her the whisper, “Did you call just now? Did you say '_Come_'?”

“What is it you want with me, Hogarth? You have '_summoned_' me: but be very quick”.

“I told you: I am wealthier than all the princes--”

“Well, let me inform you that your life is in danger here; if you are a wise man, you will not fail to leave this neighbourhood this night”.

“But no one knows--”

“It is known, Hogarth: your friends are false, and your enemies crafty. You will have to walk with your eyes open, my friend. What will you do with all the money?”

“I will buy the world, because _you_ are in it”.