Chapter II: The Great Storm

“Which it’s well known that ’ope deferred maketh a cat sick,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, with unintentional irreverence, referring to my report to my uncle of our late meeting with Mr. Rampick. She was by this time quite in the family confidence. “Bless you, Master Richard,” said she, “it’s not the Lord’s secret the man’s so keerful of; it’s ’is hown, living all these years on the ’opes of salvidge from the ’ill, and jealous of hothers steppin’ hin and anticepting of ’im.”

Uncle Jenico laughed.

“You’re still as sceptical as ever about the earthquake, Mrs. Puddephatt,” said he. “Now, it occurs to me, if the hill was, as you suppose, a rendezvous for smugglers, who by some folly entombed themselves therein, why wasn’t the whole village plunged immediately into mourning for the loss at a blow of so many fathers and brothers?”

Mrs. Puddephatt, standing with folded arms and a bleak, patient smile, awaited his good pleasure to answer.

“Hev you adone, sir?” she now demanded. “Don’t let me hinterrupt you before you’ve got it hall hout.”

“Thank you,” said Uncle Jenico, a little abashed. “I think there’s nothing more.”

“Ho!” said the lady, drawing in a sharp breath. “Then let me hexpress at once, sir, before more’s said, my hobligation for your supposing as I’m supposing.”

“I admit it was unpardonable,” answered my uncle, with a beaming but rather frightened smile. “I should have understood, of course, that you have warrant for your smugglers.”

“Not _my_ smugglers, sir,” she said, “begging _your_ pardon. Faults there may be in my pronounciation; but ’awking and spitting in his langwidge was never yet, so far as I know, laid to the charge of a Londoner.”

“My dear soul!” began Uncle Jenico. But she interrupted him--

“No, sir; nor to hend the names of his towns with a hoath, which it is not permitted to a lady’s lips to pollute themselves with huttering.”

“O, really, Mrs. Puddephatt, I don’t understand!” said my uncle in despair.

“I dare say not, sir,” went on the inexorable female. “But you must excuse me if I draw the line at Hamster and Rotter.”

“O!” said Uncle Jenico, gathering light through the gloom. “You mean to imply that these smugglers were Dutchmen?”

She condescended to smile a little, and, pursing her lips, nodded at him with a very stiff neck.

“Bein’, you see, a Londoner yourself, sir, to which a nod is as good as a wink. It was Dutchmen what landed and stowed the stuff, and Dunberry what distributed of it. They howned to no connection with one another, and worked apart, which was their safety. Dunberry, bless you, would be dreaming in their beds that hinnercent, while ’Olland would be stuffing of the ’ill with contraband. Honly that Rampick was the master sperrit and go-between; and now you knows the truth about ’im.”

We both stared at her breathless.

“Then,” said my uncle at last, “the unfortunate creatures caught up there, if caught they were----”

“Made no widders in Dunberry, sir,” she put in decisively.

“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, much agitated. “Then Rampick----”

He turned to me.

“Don’t bait the man, Dick,” he said. “Remember, whoever’s to blame for it, he’s half crazed by his misfortunes; and small wonder, when some of us find it difficult to keep our heads in prosperity. Why, dear, dear! It isn’t the part of luck to throw stones, and certainly not at a dog in a trap. It’s like enough the poor creature’s dangerous. I dare say _I_ should be if things had gone against me. Don’t bait him, Dick. Give him a wide berth.”

He had always been a little nervous about this fellow and our attitude towards him. His appeal was, however, superfluous. The ex-smuggler was not attractive; and Harry and I were certainly never the first to invite collision with him. For, what with blight and rum and sanctimony--which last, from being assumed for a disguise, had become a half-demoniac possession in him--he was little better at this day than a smouldering madman. Nevertheless, I tried loyally henceforth to emulate Uncle Jenico’s better Christianity by making allowances for the man because of his provocation. After all, calumny could visit him with no more formidable charge than that of having been a successful smuggler--a negative indictment even in these days. And perhaps, the main impeachment admitted, Mrs. Puddephatt’s cockney perspicacity was not so deadly a detective as she supposed.

I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the local _esprit de corps_ which hid the real truth from him. Now much was explained--provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to discover what had been kept from us--much, that is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.”

In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.

That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf--the German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall.

One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering round to the side where----

We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in a pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved by a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door. The wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged and stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be seen--only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.

“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”

But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the homeward march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the storm awed us, I think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.

As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and shuddering between the sheets.