Chapter I: The Badger

It is with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression, that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now--an interval of five years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse--the “shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches.

Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”--to put an extreme case--at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late Commission, [_Reported in 1864._] are peculiar to this seminary of the gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in the world.

Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.

Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention.

As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth, mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters. There were some bronze coins certainly--none too many--whose value was conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard.

“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the principal yet--not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my boy--then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court itself.”

Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.

He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than passengers in a train.

Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments.

None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to come.

He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were become of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and affection. As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable visitors, of whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were doomed to non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it, at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most operative. Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must be confessed, a sinister notoriety--a name for determined and organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor welcomed, the whole native population, or at least with few exceptions, forming a lawless confederacy for the disposal of contraband. But after the earthquake (or what was generally cited for such, and by many, I am persuaded, who knew better, though it made no difference in the moral), things should have been otherwise, when the new rector, using its opportunity to reclaim his wayward flock to godliness, sought to compensate by legitimate trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is easier to cure the itch than to convince others of your patient’s recovered cleanness. And so Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the penalty of Dunberry unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was in the position of having dropped the carnal substance for the moral shadow. And what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous condition.

The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick might be considered the prominent expression. This man deteriorated thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the practical uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation was a real grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not always proof against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this cherished convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he chose to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst whom he included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and me, and in only less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But bankruptcy knows no reason.

At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a shambling, degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink and his sense of injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings; still, as of old, the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old, policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in form, while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a main factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave him.

* * * * * *

It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the promise of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks, and sudden rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich harvest of driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of frenzied waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like swallows blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds quieted, and one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were moved to stroll out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It was so peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping towards its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle drift or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and there on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness but the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below.

We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and silent congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea still mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners, where the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches, colossal-shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under the weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that were without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and tragic in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation of giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer. An odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on the ground.

“Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler chaps down here ever _walk_!”

With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice.

“Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed.

Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a grey shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not.

“O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away--Harry! at the back here.”

The sound of my voice, little though it was, appeared to startle the creature. It turned, paused as if regarding us, seemed to be coming our way, and vanished again into the glooms from which it had emerged. I had had a dreadful moment; and so it was with a sense of outrage that I heard Harry laugh out as he sprang to his feet.

“O!” he cried, skipping and sniggering before me; “to see it come so pat, and hear his tone change. Wasn’t it beautiful? And him not to know a bogey from a badger! O, Master Dicky, really!”

“A badger!” I echoed awfully. Then recovered myself and added with a rather agitated laugh; “Well, don’t pretend you weren’t startled yourself at first.”

“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, you old donkey, I brought you up here on purpose, on the chance of seeing it.”

“Bosh!” I snapped.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll show you its tracks in the mud to-morrow, if you don’t believe me. I guessed it was somewhere in the hill, and now I know.”

“Did you?” I said resentfully. “Then I’d rather you played the fool with me by day.”

“Played!” said he; “what have I played? ’Twas you began with your ghosts and things. Besides, any fool knows that badgers only _walk_ at night.”

He sniggered again; then, seeing that I was hurt, took my arm in his, and patted me down.

“It’s really rather a start, though,” said he--“I mean the thing being here at all; because they live in woods, you know. But I’ll tell you what I make of it; that it was driven down by those burnings” (it had been a very hot summer, with two fires, destroying some acres, up in the Court woods) “to get near the water. Anyhow, I spotted its tracks in the soft ground here some days ago, and made up my mind to run it to earth. We’ll come up to-morrow and have a look by daylight.”

We did as he proposed, and found, amongst the bramble and other vegetable and miscellaneous litter which choked the neighbourhood of the great tumbled mass of masonry, indubitable signs of a passage leading to the creature’s earth.

“Don’t say anything about it,” said Harry, desisting, excited, from his examination; “and we’ll just have a try to dig it out some day. Wonder if it could tell us anything about the earthquake?”

He was staring at me, and I at him.

“Harry,” I whispered, thrilling all through; “supposing there’s a way down after all!”

“Don’t _you_--believe it, sir,” said Rampick’s breathless voice.

The man had, after his customary fashion, come softly upon us from some hidden coign of espial. His hands were slouched in his pockets, and he mumbled a little black clay pipe, shaped like a death’s head, between his teeth.

“I wouldn’t think--_if_ I were you,” he went on, “_fur_ to pry into the Lord’s secrets. Let the grave keep its own--_per_vided I may be so bold.”

“I wish _you_ wouldn’t pry into our secrets, Mr. Rampick,” said Harry, loftily. “It’s got to be rather a nuisance this, you know.”

The ex-smuggler snatched his pipe from his lips, and seemed for an instant as if he were about to dash it to the ground in a fury. But he recovered himself, and pretended only to be shaking out the ashes before he returned the cutty to his mouth.

“Secrets?” said he. “Why, you makes me laugh to talk of having secrets here!”

He broke off, restless in a shaking way to get his pipe to draw; then turned suddenly upon me.

“_You’re_ a gen’leman, sir,” he said, “and should know better--nor to meddle _in_ things what don’t concarn you. The Lord has putt His seal on this here hill: _you_ let it alone--_if_ I may make free to be His mouthpiece, like Ezekiel what was told to warn the evil doers that they come not to grief--_and_ die.”

I laughed.

“O, you flatter yourself, Mr. Rampick!” I said. “You aren’t a bit like Ezekiel.”

He stood regarding me, half perplexed, half malignant, for a minute; then settled himself down on a stone and smoked away, silent, his eyes staring and full of a vicious resolution.

“Come on, Dick,” said Harry, seeing it obvious that the man meant to outstay us, and took my arm and walked me off.

“But we’ll have the badger, nevertheless,” he said, when we were out of hearing, “and in spite of that sot. Can’t make him out, can you? Should have thought he’d have welcomed the chance of recovering some of his old brandy tubs.”