CHAPTER X.

HAUNTED.

For full three hours Captain Ducie wandered by the lonely shore. A train of wild and incoherent thoughts, like torn fragments of cloud in a windy sky, chased each other brokenly across his mind. One thought alone--to which all the rest were subsidiary--found a permanent resting-place in his mind, shutting in the horizon of his life on every side as with a sombre pall. It was the thought--or rather, the knowledge,--that he was irretrievably ruined.

In the common parlance of the world he had been "ruined" twice before. But on both those occasions he had had something to fall back upon: rich relations, powerful friends; a windfall, on one occasion, from a wealthy aunt who happened to die just at the time when her cash was most needed; and under all, at the bottom of the casket, had lain youth and hope. But now! Well: his relations were hopelessly alienated; one by one his powerful friends had all turned their backs on him; his character, like an old piece of electro-plate, would have looked all the brighter for a little polishing: he was without money, without youth, without hope. Work he could not, and to beg he was ashamed. Such being the case, what was there left for him but to throw up the sponge, cry quits, and go under as soon as possible?

The clear bright morning had settled down into a raw drizzling day. Captain Ducie paced the sands for full three hours, heedless of the wet and cold. Then he went into the town and pawned his watch for ten sovereigns. Thence he wandered back to the hotel. He could not eat, but the power of drinking was still left him. He had a fire lighted in his bedroom, and ordered up a bottle of cognac. He was ill, not only mentally but bodily. He was suffering from the reaction consequent on the excitement of the last few days. But it was more than any common reaction, it was the dull dead apathy of one who sees himself hopelessly cut off from all that makes life worth the having. In addition to this, as the day went on, he began to suffer from the first symptoms of a sort of low fever brought on by the severe cold he had caught during his many hours' exposure on the cliffs while hunting down the mulatto. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, all his pulses seemed to be on fire. But to deaden the still more weary ache at his heart he kept on resorting every now and again to the bottle of cognac by his bedside. For he had gone to bed as soon as his fire was lighted, and there he lay all through the dreary afternoon and the still drearier evening, and till far into the night, tossing and turning from side to side, courting the sleep that would not come.

But it came to him at last. He had counted the weary chimes one after another till now midnight was here. In the act of counting the twelve strokes as they were doled out slowly one by one from some near-at-hand church, he sank off quietly to sleep, and for a little while both head and heart were at rest.

He had slept for some two hours or more when suddenly he started up in bed with precisely the same sensation that had awakened him the night before--the sensation of a cold wet hand pressed heavily across his mouth and nostrils so as utterly to stop his breathing. As before, he woke up in the most extreme terror, and with great drops of agony on his brow. Instinctively he put out his tongue and passed it across his lip. Again he fancied that he could detect upon them the taste of seawater. For him, that night, there was no more sleep.

The fever still held him like a burning vice. He lay tossing and groaning in its hot embrace, looking ever with impatient eyes for the dawn that was so long in coming. It came at last, as all things come in their turn. Then Captain Ducie rose, washed and dressed. Despite his illness, he was thoroughly bent on quitting the island by that morning's boat. He hungered to be back in England, in London, among the busy haunts of men. The terrible Hand which had broken his sleep for two nights in succession would hardly follow him into the heart of London. There he would lie by till he was better mentally and bodily, and could afford to face the gloomy future with some degree of manly fortitude. He had known fellows as utterly bankrupt and ruined as he was, who had yet managed to survive their difficulties, seeming, indeed, to float none the less gaily along the stream of life, although they might not have a sovereign to call their own. He had relations rich and many, who had one and all declared that if he were begging his bread they would turn him empty from their doors; but now that the grim reality was so near, when begging his bread would soon be his only portion unless help were granted him by some one, they would surely concert together, and, were it only for the sake of the family credit, would arrange amongst themselves a life pittance for him, on which, in some quiet Continental nook where there was good scenery and good society, he might vegetate not unpleasantly for the remainder of his days.

He went down to breakfast, but could not touch a morsel, although he had not tasted food since the day before yesterday. A close carriage took himself and his luggage to the steamer. The morning was cold, wet, and stormy, with a nasty cross sea. He was not displeased to find that very few passengers were going over. He wanted to be as much alone as possible. The fever that had parched him up all night had now been succeeded by a chill that made his teeth chatter, and caused him to tremble in every limb. He went below deck and lay down in a berth and got the steward to heap a lot of wraps about him, and to bring him some hot brandy, but for a long time he felt as if he should never be warm again. All his life he had been a good sailor, he never remembered having been seasick. But to-day the boat had hardly got clear of the harbour before he was attacked. By the time the steamer reached Guernsey he had little or no power of volition left in him. He beckoned to his friend the steward. "Let me be put ashore here," he whispered. "I will wait for fairer weather before going on."

So he was carried ashore by three or four stalwart sailors, and deposited in a fly, and driven off to the hotel "Pomme d'Or." He was exceedingly ill, and he went off to bed at once. The people at the hotel wanted to have a doctor called in, but he would not hear of such a thing. It was only that confounded _mal-de-mer_, he said, and he should be better in the morning.

But he was not better in the morning. If anything, rather worse.

Again he was woke up in the middle of the night by feeling a wet hand laid across his mouth. This persistent disturbance of his sleep, together with the very want of sleep itself, was beginning to tell upon his nerves. When was the terrible persecution to end?

The sensation was so horrible as utterly to banish sleep for the time being, and again he lay tossing to and fro, waiting with impatient eyes for the dawn. About eight he rose and made a show of eating some breakfast. After breakfast he sat in his easy-chair before the fire, and while thus sitting he felt a sweet drowsiness steal through all his limbs. It was broad daylight now, and with the darkness some portion of the fear inspired by the Hand had vanished. He could almost afford to smile at his fright of the last three nights. In any case, he let the drowsiness have its way, and so in three minutes more he was fast asleep before the fire.

But he had not been more than ten minutes asleep when he was disturbed in precisely the same way that he had been disturbed before. And, if his senses did not deceive him, he heard the echo of a low malignant laugh close at the back of his chair. He stared round half expecting to see he knew not what. But every nook and corner of the room was plainly visible. There was no one there but himself. He shuddered from head to foot, and sank back in his chair, and burst into tears.

To-day the weather was even stormier than yesterday: a higher wind, more rain. He was not hurried for time, and to cross either to Southampton or Weymouth in the condition in which he then was, would be sheer madness. He would have medical advice while thus laid up in ordinary at the "Pomme d'Or," and would get cured of his cold, and have an opium mixture to make him sleep, and would wait for fairer weather and a gentler sea before attempting to continue his voyage. If he could only recover the lost tone of his nerves, he felt thoroughly convinced that he should never more be haunted by that nightmare Hand.

Captain Ducie had always held the whole tribe of doctors in abhorrence. He had not been under the hands of one of the brotherhood for more than twenty years, and nothing could have been more strongly indicative of the state to which he was now reduced, than the fact of his determining of his own free will to call in medical advice. He was, in very truth, wretchedly ill, thoroughly woe-begone.

The doctor came, saw him, listened to what he had to say, and prescribed. Ducie entered into no details as to the mode in which his sleep was broken. He merely said that he was unable to get his proper rest in consequence of being so frequently troubled with nightmare, and he begged of the doctor to provide him with a powerful opiate. Medicine came: two bottles: one for the improvement of his cold, the second to be taken just before getting into bed.

Ducie spent a doleful day enough. He had no heart left to read either a newspaper or a magazine, and the very thought of a cigar turned him sick. This latter he regarded as a very bad sign. "When a fellow gets past his smoke, he's not of much account in this world," he said to himself with a sigh. Still, he did not fail to derive some grains of comfort from the hope that with the assistance of his friend the doctor he should succeed in cheating that terrible nightmare which seemed bent on slowly pressing his life out an inch at a time.

He waited with desperate patience without any further attempt at sleep till he heard the people below stairs shutting up the hotel for the night. Then he got into bed, and marking off, with his forefinger on the bottle, a dose and a half of the draught, he swallowed it more gratefully than he had ever swallowed the choicest wine, and then lay down.

Hardly, as it seemed to him, had his head touched the pillow before a delicious languor stole through all his limbs, and with a half turn over to the other side, he was gone.

He was gone, and in a deeper sleep, probably, than he had ever been in before. But it was a sleep that did not last above an hour. At the end of that time it was broken precisely as it had been broken before. Only, this time, as if on account of his being so soundly asleep and therefore more difficult to arouse, he seemed closer to the point of actual suffocation than he had been before. He gasped for breath, and gurgled in his throat, and the veins of his forehead stood out thick and blue as though the circulation were on the point of being violently stopped for ever. Again his returning senses seemed to catch the sound of a low mocking laugh, and again there was the taste of saltwater on his lips.

His terror this time on awaking was, if such a thing were possible, more extreme than it had ever been before, inasmuch as he felt that he had been closer to the verge of death. "Another half-minute, and I should have been gone past recovery," he said to himself as he wiped the great drops of agony off his brow. "Devil!" he muttered aloud--"yellow-skinned son of the bottomless pit, so this is your revenge, is it?" There was a sort of stony despair in his set colourless face, but a wild, almost insane defiance lashed from the hollow caverns of his eyes. "You may win the day, perhaps: I cannot help that," he cried. "But the victory shall be in my fashion--not in yours!"

From that moment he seemed to accept the fate which he saw looming before him as a foregone conclusion from which it was impossible to escape.

Unconsciously to himself, perhaps, he was somewhat of a fatalist in his ideas: the maxim, that "What is to be, must be," was one that was often in his mind if seldom on his lips. He felt like one of those doomed beings whose tragic woes the Greek dramatists loved to sing; he was pursued by a shadowy Nemesis, from whose relentless grasp there was no escape. He could only bow his head in silence and submit.

He got out of bed and made himself some chocolate, and sat brooding over the fire for the remainder of the night.

Two or three times he fell off into a broken doze, which lasted for only a few minutes each time, and each time his brief slumber was broken by the menace rather than the reality of the terrible Hand.

The access of terror through which he had passed early in the night had the effect of rendering him comparatively callous to these minor visitations. Still they all had their effect in helping to wear him out, both in body and mind.

After breakfast--which with him was a mere pretence of a meal--he ordered up pens, ink, and paper, and sat down to write.

With a few intervals of rest he kept on writing through the day, and did not finish till an hour after candles had been brought up. He put what he had written into two different envelopes, which he sealed up and addressed. Then he burned several old letters which lay at the bottom of his despatch box, and, lastly, he took a long, brown, silky ringlet, which he had not looked at for years, from its resting-place in a tiny satin-lined case, and after pressing it passionately two or three times to his lips, he dropped that too into the fire. After that he sat for a full hour gazing with sorrowful eyes into the smouldering embers without stirring a limb.

The doctor had called about noon, whereupon Ducie had assured him that he had passed an excellent night, and felt himself very much better than on the previous day.

The medico looked rather dubious, but could not get over his patient's assurances that he was rapidly improving. Indeed, to-night, after he rose from his seat by the fire and began to pace his room, there was a brightness in his eyes, and an amount of energy in his manner, that might have deceived an inexperienced person into thinking that the morrow would find him perfectly recovered.

A little later on he took a bath and perfumed himself, and ordered up a choice supper, of which he partook with more appetite than he had shown for several days past. Then he began to prepare for bed.

But before retiring for the night, he dived deep into his portmanteau and fished up from its depths a long, thin Damascus dagger of blue steel, with an inlaid haft. He wiped it carefully and felt its point, smiling cynically the while, and then he laid it on the little table by his bedside.

He was soon asleep, but only to be awakened a couple of hours later, as he had been awakened before, by the pressure of a cold wet Hand across his mouth and nostrils, and by feeling that he was on the verge of suffocation. It took him two or three minutes to recover his equanimity. Then he got out of bed, put on his dressing-gown, lighted the candles, and wheeled an easy-chair up to the fire.

The wind was roaring down the chimneys of the hotel and shaking the windows, and he could hear the heavy dashing of the sea against the granite walls of the pier.

A wild, eerie night--a night on which the spirits of the dead might easily be supposed to come forth and wander round the places they had loved best on earth.

Captain Ducie drew the little table close up to his easy-chair, and then sat down before the fire and rested his feet on the fender. On the table were a bottle of cognac, a wineglass, and the "bare bodkin." with the inlaid haft.

* * * * * *

It may be recollected that after George Strickland obtained Captain Ducie's address from the porter at the Piebalds Club, he telegraphed to Major Strickland at Tydsbury. The reply to his message was a request that he would proceed to Jersey without delay, and there, if possible, bring his search to a definite conclusion.

On reaching St. Helier, he went at once to the "Royal George," and inquired for Captain Ducie. In reply he was told that Captain Ducie had left by the Southampton boat four days previously. George was excessively chagrined, for he had quite made up his mind that he should find Ducie at St. Helier. All that he could now do was to go back to London and there wait till a fresh address should be sent by Ducie to the Piebalds, and then follow him up from that point. So he stayed that night at the "Royal George," and started for England by next morning's steamer.

He was standing on the bridge of the steamer, gazing on what looked like a bank of cloud in the distance, but which someone had told him was Guernsey, when the captain and one of the passengers came up and halted close by him. They were talking earnestly together, and George heard the name of Captain Ducie twice mentioned by the captain. He moved away out of earshot till the two men separated. Then he went up to the captain. "I accidentally heard you mention the name of Captain Ducie," he said. "May I ask whether you are acquainted with that gentleman, and whether you can tell me his present address?"

"I am not acquainted with the gentleman in question," said the captain, "but I can tell you his present address. If you choose to inquire at the Pomme d'Or,' in St. Peter's, you will find him lying there, stark dead, stabbed to the heart by his own hand."

George was inexpressibly shocked. In answer to his question, the captain supplied him with these further particulars: Ducie had been stopping at the "Pomme d'Or" for the last two or three days, very much out of health. He had been seen by a doctor, who had pronounced him to be suffering from a species of low fever, brought on through having contracted a severe cold; his nerves, too, seemed to be very much shaken and out of order. There seemed nothing, however, but what a few days' rest, with due attention to the doctor's prescriptions, would have set right. Yesterday morning, on being called, there was no answer, and on the door being forced, Ducie was found dead, having evidently stabbed himself some time in the night with a small dagger that was found on the ground not far away.

George landed at Guernsey, and hurried up to the "Pomme d'Or," where every particular which the captain had given him was confirmed. It was clearly proved that the act must have been premeditated, seeing that the uppermost thing in the dead man's writing-desk was a slip of paper, on which was written a request that in case of anything happening to himself his cousin, the Honourable Egerton Dacre, should at once be communicated with. This request had been complied with before George reached the hotel, so he made up his mind to await the arrival of Mr. Dacre, and detail to him the circumstances which had led to his taking such an interest in the fate of Captain Ducie.

The Hon. Mr. Dacre arrived in due course, and after the funeral was over George introduced himself, and told his story. "It is just the sort of thing Ned would be likely to do," said Mr. Dacre; "to contract a secret marriage, and afterwards to separate from his wife. I am, however, pleased to find that the lady to whom he gave his name came of so excellent a family. As regards his daughter, I know of no reason why she should not be received as such by all of us. I am sure my mother will be delighted to find that Ned has left a child whom she may acknowledge without a blush. Of course you are aware that Ducie has died as poor as a rat, so that in the way of worldly goods the young lady must not expect anything from our side of the house, unless she be in want of a home, in which case we will gladly welcome her. I must, however, lay the whole case before Ned's elder brother, with whom, as being the head of that branch of the family, the settlement of all future details must rest."

Such were the tidings that Captain George Strickland took back with him to Tydsbury.