nine months had passed since my parting with duke on the hillside, and my life in the interval had flowed on with an easy uneventful monotony that was at least restorative to my turbulent soul. we had not once heard during this stretch of time from jason or zyp, and could only conclude that, finding asylum in some remote corner of the world, they would not risk discovery in it by word or sign. letters, like homing pigeons, sometimes go astray.
duke had put in no second appearance. dr. crackenthorpe kept entirely aloof. all the tragedy of that dark period, crushed within a single year of existence, seemed swept by and scattered like so much road dust. only my father and i remained of the strutting and fretting actors to brood over the parts we had played; and one of us was gray at heart forevermore, and the other waxing halt and old and feeble.
now, often i tried to put the vexing problem of my brother’s death behind me; and yet, if i thought for a moment i had succeeded, it was only to be conscious of a grinning skeleton at my back.
and in this year a strange and tragic thing happened in winton that was indirectly the cause in me of a fresh fungus growth of doubt and dark suspicion; and it fell out in this wise:
some twenty years before, when i was a mere child (the story came to me later), a great quarrel had taken place between two citizens of the old burg. they were partners, before the dispute, in a flourishing business, and the one of them who was ultimately worsted in the argument had been the benefactor of the man that triumphed. the quarrel rose on some question as to the terms of their mutual agreement, the partner who had been taken into the firm out of kindness claiming the right to oust the other by a certain date. the technicalities of the matter were involved in a mass of obscurity, but anyhow they went to law about it and the beneficiary won the case. the other was forced to retire, to all intents and purposes a ruined man, but he bore with him a possession that no judge could deprive him of—a deep, deadly hatred against the reptile whose fortunes he had made and who had so poisonously bitten him in return. he was heard to declare that alive or dead he would have his enemy by the heel some day, and no one doubted but that he meant it.
some months later, as the successful partner was returning home from his office one winter night, a pistol shot cracked behind him and he was constrained to measure his portly figure in the slush of the street. there his late partner came and looked upon him and gave a weltering grunt, like a satisfied hog, and kicked the body and went his way. but his victim was scarcely finished with in the manner he fancied. the ball, glancing from a lamp-post, had smashed the bones of his right heel only, and he was merely feigning death. when his enemy was retired he crawled home on his hands and knees, leaving a sluggish trail of crimson behind him, and, once safe in the fortress of his household, sent for the doctor and an inspector of police.
the would-be murderer was of course captured, tried and sentenced to a twenty-year term of penal servitude. he made no protest and took it all in the nature of things. but, before leaving the dock, he repeated—looking with a quiet smile on his becrutched and bandaged oppressor sitting pallidly in the court—his remarkable formula about “alive or dead” having him by the heel some day.
then he disappeared from winton’s ken and for sixteen years the town knew him no more, and his victim prospered exceedingly and walked far into the regions of wealth and honor, for all a painful limp that seemed as if it should have impeded his advance.
at the end of this time a little local excitement was stirred by the return of the criminal, out on ticket-of-leave, and presenting all the appearance of a degraded, battered and senile old man. his one-time partner—a town councilor by then—resented his intrusion exceedingly; but finding him to be impervious, apparently, to the sting of memory, and presumably harmless to sting any more on his own account, he bestirred himself to quarter the driveling wreck on an almshouse—a proceeding which gained him much approval on the part of all but those who retained recollection of the origin of the quarrel.
in this happy asylum the poor ruin breathed his last within a month of its admission, and the rubbish of it was buried—not in the pauper corner of some city cemetery, as one might suppose, but in the very yard of the cathedral itself. for, curiously enough, the fading creature before his death had claimed lying-room in a family vault sunk in that august inclosure, and his claim was found to be a legitimate one.
i knew the place where he lay, well; for an end of the old vault they had opened for his accommodation tunneled under a pathway that cut the yard obliquely, and, passing along it one’s feet hit out the spot in a low reverberating thud of two steps that spoke of hollowness beneath the gravel.
the july of the present year i write of being the fourth from that poor thing’s death and burial, was marked by one of the most terrific thunderstorms that have ever in my memory visited winton.
if there was one man abroad in those bitter hours, there was one only, i should say, and he paid a grewsome price for his temerity. he was returning home from a birthday party, was that fated councilor, and, fired with a dutch courage, must have taken that very path across the yard under which his once partner lay, and which he generally for some good reason rather avoided. what followed he might never describe himself, for that was the last of him. but a strange and eerie scene met the sight of an early riser abroad in the yard the next morning.
it appeared that a bolt had struck and wrenched a huge limb from one of the great lime trees skirting the path; that the heavy butt of this, clapping down upon that spot of the gravel under which the end of the vault lay, had splintered the massive lid stone into half a dozen pieces, so that they collapsed and fell inward, crashing upon and breaking open in their fall the pauper’s coffin underneath.
“whom god seeks to destroy, he first maddens.” into this awful trap, in the rain and storm and darkness, mr. councilor walked plump, and there he was found in the morning, dead and ghastly, his already once-wounded leg caught in a crevice made by the broken stone and wood—his heel actually resting in the bony hand of his enemy who had waited for him so long.
all that by the way. it was a grim enough story by itself, no doubt, but i mention it only here as bearing indirectly upon a little matter of my own.
old peggy had retailed it to me, with much grisly decoration, on the afternoon following the night of the tempest. the thorns of her mind were stored with a wriggling half-hundred of such tales.
by and by i walked out to visit the scene of the tragedy. it was dark and gloomy and still threatening storm. there was little left of the ruin of the night. the fallen branch had been sawed to lengths and carted away, and only its litter remained; the vault had been covered in again with a great slab lifted and brought from one of the precinct pathways that were paved with ancient gravestones; a solitary man was raking and trimming the gravel over the restored surface. the crowds who no doubt had visited the spot during the day were dwindled to a half-dozen morbid idlers, and a sweeping flaw of tempest breaking suddenly from the clouds even as i approached drove the last of these to shelter.
i myself scuttled for a long low tunnel that pierced a south wing of the cathedral and promised the best cover available. this was to be reached by way of a double-arched portal which enjoyed the distinction of conveying ill-luck to any who should have the temerity to walk through a certain one of its two openings.
turning when i reached the archway, i saw that the solitary grave-trimmer was running for the same shelter as myself. with head bent to the storm, he bolted through the gate of ill-omen; stopped, recognized his error, hurriedly retraced his steps; spat out the evil and came through the customary opening at slower pace. as he approached me i saw, what i had not noticed before, that he was my friend the sexton of st. john’s.
“good-afternoon,” said i, as he walked under the tunnel, seized off his cap and jerked the rain drops from it.
i fancied there was a queer wild look on his face, and at first he hardly seemed to be able to make me out.
“ah!” he said, suddenly. “good-arternoon to you.”
even then he didn’t look at but beyond me, following with his bloodshot eyes, as it were, the movements of something on the stone wall at my back.
“so you’re translated, it appears?”
“eh?” he said, vaguely.
“you’re promoted to the yard here, aren’t you?”
“i come to oblige jem sweet, ars be down wi’ the arsmer,” he said.
“that was friendly, anyhow. it was an unchancy task you took upon yourself.”
“what isn’t?” he shouted, quite fiercely, all in a moment. “give me another marn as’ll walk all day wi’ the devil arm in arm, as i does.”
“you found him down there, eh?”
he took off his cap and flung it with quick violence at the wall behind me, then pounced upon it lying on the ground, as if something were caught underneath it.
“my!” he muttered, rising with the air of a schoolboy who has captured a butterfly, and, seeking to investigate his prize, made a frantic clutch in the air, as if it had escaped him.
“what’s that?” said i, “a wasp?”
“a warsp!” he cried in a sort of furious fright. “who ever see a pink warsp wi’ a mouth like a purse and blue inside?”
he stood by me, shaking and perspiring, and suddenly seized me with a tremulous hand.
“they shudn’t a’ sent me down there,” he whispered; “it give me the horrors, it did, to see that they’d burried him quick, and that for fower year he’d been struggling and wrenching to get out.”
“i’m afraid that the devil’s got you indeed, my friend.”
“it’s all along o’ thart. he come and he looked down upon me there in the pit.”
“who did? the devil?”
“him or thart chis’ll doctor. it’s all one. i swat cold, i tell ye. i see his face make a ugly fiddle-pattern on the sky. my mate, he’d gone to dinner and the yard was nigh empty. ‘look’ee here,’ i whispered up to him. ‘he were burried quick, as they burried that boy over in st. john’s, yonder, that you murdered.’”
