Chapter V: A Reappearance

On the day following that of our adventure Harry was due at Yokestone. I had arranged to walk part of the way with him, for we had much and momentous matter to discuss--our discovery, and the responsibility, moral and legal, which it entailed upon us, to wit. But, to my disturbance, the morning found Uncle Jenico knocked up with a chill; and the dear soul’s hope that I would stay to keep him company was so patent, that I had not the heart to disoblige him. I just took an opportunity to run out and tell Harry I could not come, and to re-decide with him upon postponing all action until we could consider the matter in its every bearing; and then returned, very much depressed, I must own, to my duty.

I don’t know if any suspicion of the past, any premonition as to the future was operating in the old man’s mind. Pure spirits, one must think, must be strangely sensitive to any disturbance in their moral atmosphere. He was certainly oddly solicitous about me, wistfully attentive, loth that I should leave him, and for my sake, not his own. But after dinner, as luck would have it, he fell asleep in his chair, and, restless beyond endurance, I took the chance to go for a stroll.

Once outside the door, I hesitated. I had not yet slept soundly or exhaustively enough to shake off all the horror of our late experience. I dreaded to go by the hill; I dreaded to go by the beach; but at last the prospective quiet of the latter drew me, and I turned my face seawards.

I had expected to find the shore deserted, and so, reaching the cliff edge, was put out a little to see a figure, that of a stranger, already down there before me. It went to and fro, this figure, on the fringe of the surf, thoughtfully, its head bent, its hands clasped behind its back--a lean, small old man, it seemed. But I observed it with unspeculative eyes, because of my pondering all the time, abstractedly and rather dismally, on the events of yesterday.

We had not canvassed our adventure much as yet, Harry and I. The shock and the shame of it, the body and brain-weariness, had disinclined us, during our walk home, to comment on a very frightening experience, out of the reach of whose shadow we could not escape, for all our hurrying. Morning, indeed, found it still with us, like a motionless fog, which, however, we should have endeavoured to dissipate by the breath of frank discussion, had not Uncle Jenico’s illness supervened. In consequence of which I had to face the rather depressing prospect of enduring for a whole day and night the burden of unrelieved silence. Still, about one thing we had been agreed: that we must weigh all the pros and cons before deciding to suppress or confess our discovery. At first, I had been for telling Mr. Sant everything the moment he returned; for he was away in London, as it chanced, on a short visit. But Harry had at once vetoed the idea.

“It wouldn’t be fair to foist all the responsibility on him,” he had said, emphatically. “Being a parson, he’d be bound to call in the law, and if he did that, his influence here would be lost, and you might burst your cheeks trying to whistle it back. Who knows who’d be found to be mixed up in the business, if once we talked? Most of the village, likely. And we’re not going to do anything to force him into becoming unpopular, and losing what he’s been years in getting.”

“But, Mrs. Puddephatt,” I had complained feebly, “said the village had nothing to do with it.”

“Nonsense!” Harry had answered. “She didn’t neither. She said that Dunberry and the Dutchmen worked separate, with Rampick for go-between.”

“Well,” I had still protested, “isn’t that much the same?”

“Much the same, you gaby!” he had cried. “O yes, of course! Much the same as if two engine wheels connected by a rod turned up their noses about knowing one another.”

The technical inspiration of his simile had thereupon surprised him into a grin, and me, even, into a dismally funny attempt at a retort:--

“Well, they _would_ move in different circles, you know. But we’ll sleep on it--that’s the best; and thrash it out between us to-morrow.”

That, however, as I have explained, we were debarred from doing; and now there was nothing for me but to possess my troubled soul in patience until Harry’s return. In Uncle Jenico, we had neither of us thought for a moment of confiding. Some instinctive sense of his lack of grasp, of his unpractical weakness prevented us. We would not confound or agitate the dear old fellow; and so here, in the result, I was solitarily and tragically cogitating our problem on the cliff edge.

We had, indeed, already come to one conclusion too obvious for dispute. The secret entrance to the smugglers’ lair had been patently near the spot whence we had emerged, and the significance of the now obliterated cliff-path was thus revealed. Those, however, were points which only concerned indirectly the main sources of our confusion, which sources were necessarily the nature of the tragedy and Rampick’s presumptive connection with it. There lay the deep core of the shadow--the stress of the moral obligations our reckless adventure had imposed upon us. We had opened the forbidden chamber, and our fingers were bloody.

Was it murder, in short? And, if so, was Rampick an accessory? And, if so, were we also become accessories?

I started at the thought, and went hurriedly down the Gap impelled by a sudden vision, It took the form of a tax-cart, and a handcuffed man in it being carried off to Ipswich Gaol. I felt the cold grip of the iron on my own wrists, and had to thrust my hands deep into my breeches’ pockets for some familiar reassurance of warmth. The stranger still paced the sands, a mechanic irritating figure. Now noticing my advent, he stopped to regard me, his hands behind his back, the wind gently undulating his coat-tails. Going northwards, I should come under the rake of his eyes. My nerves were on the jump. I flounced peevishly, and went down the coast, till, come opposite the scene of our yesterday’s escapade, I stopped involuntarily and stared up.

I had not intended to. I could master the inclination no more than I could the morbid concentration of my thoughts. They were drawn like smoke into that black gash high up in the cliff.

It was not very noticeable even now. Another storm, any hurricane of rain, might seal it once more, and close the evidence of our passage thereby. Why let any thought of our responsibility to it vex us? Our enterprise had been a purely private one, and----

Like a blow came the memory of Rampick’s cognisance of it, of my vision of him hurrying agitated for the Gap as I was drawn in. He had seen us enter; possibly, emerge. He must at least suspect us of having made some sort of discovery, and his knowledge of our knowledge was the terror.

I still stared up. If it was really murder, then, and this man an accessory?

He might have been, and yet none know the truth of his guilt but himself. Grant it a fact that the local and foreign gangs had worked apart. Had he not been, according to the same authority, their connecting link? What more likely then that he alone of all alive should be informed of the real nature of the act which at a stroke had shattered his connection? It would account for his eternal haunting of the neighbourhood, for his terror lest some one, exploring too far, should unearth his secret--if guilty secret it were. And what proof of that? Why, none that was direct--no proof of anything; not of murder, certainly. And yet I was as sure as if my soul had witnessed it that murder, in deed or intention, had been committed. It was the position, the _settlement_ of the bodies, flung down with all that atmosphere of deadly suggestion. I felt that I could restore the scene, as sculptors restore a statue from a few significant fragments. That the man under the stone had been attacked, and had fired in a desperate self-defence, accidentally sending all to perdition, I had no doubt. He might have been a spy, a deposed chief--his clothing seemed to pronounce him above the order of the rest--he might have been one of, or other than themselves; he had precipitated a greater tragedy in trying to avert a lesser, of that I was sure. And Rampick?

It all resolved upon him, this doubt, this haunting stress of conscience--all concentrated itself upon the wretched, degraded creature in the tissue of whose story our destiny had entangled us. I stirred, and gave a little groan.

“Ha!” exclaimed a voice at my elbow.

With a shock I jerked round; and there was the stranger of the sands come softly up, and intently scrutinising me.

I felt unreasoningly ashamed, as if caught in some self-soliloquy. My face went like fire. “What do you----” I was beginning loud enough; and on the instant bit my teeth on the cry, and stood gaping. I could feel my jaw slackening idiotically. Minute by minute, it seemed to me, we stood silent there, regarding one another.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I whispered at last.

It all came back to me across that shining gulf of years. I had forded the valley in the mean time, descending into deep glens and unremembering woods, distancing for ever, as I had supposed, the landmarks of childhood. And, lo! climbing the further side, and looking back, here was the past quite close; for the valley had been but a little fairy cleft after all, and all the time the memory of old things had been waiting there for me to resume them. Six years, with their fulness of growth and interest, stood between me and this man; yet I saw and knew him as if the interval were but a span. The story of him, the tragedy of my own connection with it, became in this moment the instant thing with me, bridging the abysmal lapse between.

He was not much changed, it is true. The face was the same haunting unearthly mask which had hung up before me in the court. A gurgoyle, I had called it; and still the stony inhumanity of it was the first thing to impress me. It was older only, and more scarred by wind and weather. The drench of unhealing waters had streaked its forehead and darkened the pits of its eyes; but with no other result than to emphasize the fire in them, and intensify the loneliness of the lost soul they windowed. I gave a little foolish fluttering laugh.

“So you remember me?” he said.

“Yes,” I answered. “But how do you know me?”

That was the wonder, indeed. Medusa might not change to Perseus as Perseus to Medusa.

“Were you looking for me?” I asked. “Did you know I was living here?”

He shook his head slightly.

“No more, young sir, than I know the ultimate goal of my destiny.”

It suddenly occurred to me that, after all, he had said nothing to associate me with any memory of his own. I blushed like a fool, and stammered out--

“I suppose you aren’t mistaking----”

He put up his hand to interrupt me.

“Your father gave his life for me, sir. Not a shadowed feature, not a transmitted gesture of his, but I should feel myself cursed for failing to identify, if I lived to the age of Methuselah. You are Master Richard Bowen. You will hardly deny it, I think.”

I giggled again, more foolish than ever.

“No, I won’t,” I said. “And have you yet found Abel, Mr. Pilbrow?”

Now, in a wonderful way, my ingenuous question wrought a sudden transformation in the man. As once before, his hand swept the hard evil from his eyes, and when those looked at me again, they were as soft as a weary woman’s. The change was infinitely pathetic, illuminating; and in the light of it, I seemed to see for the first time how worn was this poor creature, how tired and woeful, and how, perhaps, he wore his outlawry for a mask.

“If I doubted before, could I doubt now!” he cried. “Staunch, and unspoiled by the years! And how could it be otherwise with _his_ son!”

He had seized my hands in his; and, embarrassed as I was, his words moved me to a strange understanding.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I cried, as I had cried those long years before, “he said you did not do it.”

He gazed at me rapturously a moment, then fell to urging me to walk with him.

“Come,” he cried. “I must move, or I shall be a woman. Ask me, ask me everything. This accident--this destiny--this heart-filling spring in the desert! No, I have not found Abel, my friend, my dear friend, though I have never ceased to seek him, like the spectral dog I am.”

I thought of the werewolf of Mr. Sant’s story. So damned, so abhorrent, so pitiful appeared this grey shadow moving at my side. He put his arm within mine, and hurried me up and down the desolate beach. The grinding of the sea seemed to hush itself, the drooping pall of sky to rise aloof from us. I was full of excitement and agitation, carried altogether without the oppression of the thoughts which had been vexing me.

“Ask,” he cried, feverishly pressing my arm. “Give me the chance to unburden my heart to my one true friend, I do believe, God help me, in all the world! I have not found Abel, Richard--ah! may I call you Richard?--I have not found Abel, though through these long years I have never ceased to hunt him--his shadow, some sound of his voice, some track of his footsteps.”

“To right yourself with the world?” I asked.

“Let it fall from me--the vampire!” he cried, contemptuously. “You are all the world I care, as your father was before you. It is not Abel I want, Richard; it is the secret he carried away with him--the secret, or the clue to it, which I have maddened after, pursuing it, the wicket friar’s-lantern, down the long mire of these coasts.”

“Secret?” I said, wondering. “What secret?”

“The book,” he answered--snapped, rather.

I turned and stared at him as we walked.

“You mean the book that--that you fought about?”

He nodded.

“Why,” I sniggered, incredulous, “was it worth all this?”

He did not resent my youthful irony--met it with a solemn self-deprecation, in fact.

“God knows, dear boy!” he said. “This, and more, I thought once. Now, Richard, forbear to indulge a lust till it masters you. I have damned myself like the wandering Jew. I have no rest in rest. The quest has become an obsession, a craze, which not even the discovery of the treasure itself could, I believe, appease.”

“Phew!” I whistled, soft and amazed. “A treasure, was it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And somewhere on these coasts, I think you said?”

“Somewhere on these east coasts.”

I stopped in sheer excitement.

“I don’t wonder. They are choke full of--of things. And have you been tramping them ever since I saw you last?”

“On and off; up and down; to and fro.”

“It must have been tiring, and--and a bit expensive.”

He smacked his hand to his breast.

“There is a hundred or two left here yet. ‘Equity’--you remember your friend’s words?--‘equity is justice.’”

“You got your thousand pounds?”

“I got my thousand pounds.”

A longish silence fell between us.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I said at last, “what has brought you here?”

“Destiny,” he answered at once; “yours and mine.”

“It was quite accidental, this meeting?”

“As the world would consider it--quite.”

“Well,” I said, after a pause, “it is very wonderful; and most of all your knowing me again. I--I hope you will be here a day or two. I must be going home.”

He looked at me with his strange wolf’s eyes.

“I only arrived last night,” he said. “You live here?--but, of course.”

“I live here--have lived, ever since that time, with my guardian.”

He started back with a gesture of repulsion.

“Not that man, that crow, that Quayle?”

I laughed. He had no sense of humour. In all my knowledge of him I never knew him even to smile.

“O dear no!” I said. “A very different person; my uncle, Mr. Paxton.”

“He could not be too different to satisfy me as your guardian,” he responded grimly. Then his face softened, and he took my hands in his. “So long as I stay,” he said sorrowfully, “you will let me see you sometimes?”

Now, at that, my heart melted to him. He was so fierce, so vicious to the rest of the world, it was a certain glory to be his chosen.

“Won’t you come and see my uncle?” I said. “He is at home, not very well. He knows all about that trial, Mr. Pilbrow, and--and he loved my father dearly.”

I believe there were tears sprung to his eyes. I turned away abashed.

“Does he love _you_?” he asked low.

“He lives for me, I think.”

“Then,” he said, “we shall have that sympathy in common, and I will risk it.”

All the way back I chattered to him of my life since we had last met. He had been so associated with my father’s end, I could not shake off the impression that we were old friends. He listened intently, sharing in all my sympathies, grinding his teeth over my little local misfortunes. And when we reached our door, he took my hand again before entering, and said in a full voice, “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”