all that night i tossed and tossed, in vain effort to court the sleep that should quench the fever in my racked and bewildered brain. my errand had been a failure. in every sense but the purely personal, it had been a failure. and now, indeed, that personal side was the one that least concerned me. as to every other soul in whom i was interested, it seemed that a single false step on my part might lead to the destruction of any one of them. where could i look for the least comfort or assistance?
my father had glanced anxiously at me when i returned the evening before.
“it has been as you prophesied,” i said. “the man is a devil.”
he gave a heavy sigh and drooped his head.
“what did he tell you?” he muttered.
“he told me lies, father, i feel sure. but he is too cunning a villain to play without a second card up his sleeve.”
the old man raised imploring eyes to my face.
“dad!” i cried, “is it true you have bought his silence all these years for my sake?”
at that he rose to his feet suddenly.
“no word of that!” he shrieked; “not a word! i can’t bear it!”
i looked at him with my throat swelling.
“i’ll not refer to it, if you wish it,” i said, gently.
“i do wish it. what does it amount to? how could i do less?”
“very well, dad. i’ll keep my gratitude in my heart.”
“gratitude!” he seemed greatly excited. his voice was broken with emotion. “gratitude to me? for what? for driving you from home? for dealing out your inheritance piecemeal to that hungry vulture yonder? you kill me with your cruelty.”
“father!” i cried, amazed.
“no, no, renalt! you don’t mean to be! but you mustn’t talk of it—you mustn’t! it’s a long knife in my soul—every word! the one thing i might have done for you—i failed in. the wild girl, renalt; that you loved—oh! a little more watchfulness on my part, a little less selfishness, might have saved her for you!”
he broke down a moment; then went on with a rough sob: “you think i love you, and i want you to think it; but—if you only knew all.”
“i know enough. i hold you nothing to blame in all you have referred to.”
he waved me from him, entreating me to leave him alone awhile, and he was so unstrung that i thought it best to comply.
but now a new ghost shook my very soul in its walking, and it was the specter of the blackmailer’s raising.
was it possible—was it possible that my father that night—in some fit of drunken savagery——
i put the thought from me, with loathing, but it returned again and again.
one fair morning it occurred to me to go and look upon the grave i had never yet visited. perhaps, i thought, i should find inspiration there. this vengeful, bewildered pursuit—i did not know how long i should be able to endure it. sometimes, reviewing the latter, i felt as if it would be best to abandon the chase right then; to yield the chimera to fate to resolve as she might judge fit or never to resolve at all, perhaps. then the thought that only by running to earth the guilty could i vindicate the innocent, would steel me more rigidly than ever in the old determination.
the ancient church, in the yard of which modred was buried, stands no great distance away upon a slope of the steep hill that shuts in the east quarter of winton.
as i passed from the road through the little gate in the yard boundaries a garden of green was about me—an acre of tree and shrub and grass set thickly with flowering barrows and tombstones wrapped in lichen, like velvet for the royal dead. the old church stood in the midst, as quiet and staid and peaceful there in its bower as if no restless life of a loud city hummed and echoed all about it.
i paused in indecision. for the first time it occurred to me that i had made no inquiry as to the position of my brother’s grave; that i did not even know if the site of his resting-place was marked by stone or other humbler monument. while i stood the sound of a voice cheerily singing came to me from the further side of a laurel bush that stood up from the grass a rood away. i walked round it and came plump upon my philosophical friend of the “weirs,” knee-deep in a grave that he was lustily excavating.
“hullo,” i said, and “hullo,” he answered.
“you seem to find your task a pleasant one?” said i.
“ah!” he said. “what makes ’ee think thart, now?”
he leaned upon his spade and criticised me.
“you sing at it, don’t you?”
“mebbe i do. men sing sometimes, i’ve heard, when they’ve got the horrors on ’em.”
“have you got the horrors, then?”
“not in the sense o’ drink, though mayhap i’ve had them, too, in my time.”
he lifted his cap to scratch his forehead and resumed his former position.
“look’ee here,” he said. “i stand in a grave, i do. i’ve dug two fut down. he could wake to a whisper so be as you laid him there. did he lift his arm, his fingers ’ud claw in the air like a forked rardish. i go a fut deeper—and he’d struggle to bust himself out, and, not succeeding, there’d be a little swelling in the soil above there cracked like the top of a loaf. i go another fut, and he’s safe to lie, but he’d hear arnything louder than a bart’s whistle yet. at two yard he’ll rot as straight and dumb as a dead arder.”
“what then?” i said.
“what then? why, this: digging here, week in, week out, i thinks to myself, what if they buried me six feet deep some day before the life was out o’ me.”
“why should they?”
“why shouldn’t they? men have been buried quick before now, and why not me?”
i laughed, but looking at him, i noticed that his forehead was wet with beads of perspiration not called forth by his labor.
“how long have you been digging graves?” i asked in a matter of way to help him recover his self-possession.
“six year come martlemas.”
he resumed his work for awhile and i stood watching him and pondering. presently i said: “you buried my brother, then?”
“ay,” he answered, heaving out a big clod of earth with an effort, so strained that it seemed to twist his face into a sort of leering grin.
“i was ill when my brother died,” i said, “and have lived since in london. i don’t know where he lies. show me and i’ll give you the price of a drink.”
he jumped out of the pit with alacrity and flung his coat over his shoulders, tying the dangling arms across his breast.
“thart’s easy arned,” he cried, hilariously. “come along,” and he clumped off across the grass.
“see there!” he said, suddenly, stopping me and pointed to a mangy and neglected mound that lay under a corner of the yard wall.
“is that it?”
he looked at me a moment before he answered. through all his heartiness there was a queer suggestion of craft in the fellow’s face that puzzled me.
“it might be for its state,” he said, “but it isn’t. you may as soon grow beans in snow as grass on a murdered marn’s grave.”
“does a murdered man lie there?”
“ay. a matter of ten year ago, it may be. he wur found one summer morn in a ditch by the battery yon, and his skull split wi’ a billhook. nubbody to this day knows his name or him as did it.”
a grim tragedy to end in this quiet garden of death. we moved on again, not so far, and my guide pointed down.
“there he lies,” he said.
a poor shallow little heap of rough soil grown compact with years. a few blades of rank grass standing up from it, starved and stiff like the bristles on a hog’s back. all around the barrows stretched green and kindly. only here and on that other were sordid desolation. no stone, no boards, no long-lifeless flower even to emphasize the irony of an epitaph. nothing but entire indifference and the withering footmark of time.
“i mind the day,” said the sexton. “looking ower the hedge yon i see vokes’ pig running, wi’ a straw in’s mouth. ‘we shall have rain,’ says i, and rain it did wi’ a will. three o’ them came wi’ the coffin—the old marn and a young ’un—him ’ud be your brother now—and the long doctor fro’ chis’ll. in the arternoon, as i was garthering up my tools, the old marn come back by hisself and chucked a sprig o’ verv’n on the mound. ‘oho,’ thinks i. ‘that’ll be to keep the devil fro’ walking.’ the storm druv up while he wur starnding there and sent him scuttling. i tuk shelter i’ the church, and when i come out by and by, there wur the witch-weed gone—washed fro’ the grave, you’ll say, and i’ll not contradict ye; but the devil knows his own.”
“what do you mean?”
he turned and spat behind him before answering.
“he died o’ cold i’ the inside, eh?”
“something of that sort. the doctor’s certificate said so.”
“ah!” he took off his cap again and rubbed his hot head all over with a whisp of handkerchief. “supposing he’d been laid two fut and no more—it wur a smarl matter arter the rain to bust the lid and stick his fingers through.”
“a small matter, perhaps, for a living man.”
he glanced sidelong at me, then gingerly pecked at the mound with his foot.
“no grass’ll ever grow there,” said he.
“that remains to be seen.”
i took a sixpence from my pocket and held it out to him.
“look here,” i said. “take this, and i’ll give you one every week if you’ll do your best to make and keep it like—like the other graves.”
he put out his hand instinctively, but withdrew it empty.
“no, no,” he said; “it’s no marner o’ good.”
“try.”
“i’d rather not. good-marning to ye,” and he turned his back on me and walked straight off, with his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
i watched his going moodily, but with no great surprise. it was small matter for wonder that modred’s death should have roused uncanny suspicions among the ignorant and superstitious who knew of us. the mystery that overhung our whole manner of life was sufficient to account for that.
for long after the sexton had resumed his work—so long, indeed, that when i rose to go, only his head and shoulders bobbed up and down above the rim of the pit he was digging—i sat on the grass beside that poor sterile mound and sought inspiration of it.
but no voice spoke to me from its depths.
