Chapter VII: “facilis Descensus Averni.”

I had forgotten all our late troubles in this wonderful encounter. Aaron’s snake had swallowed the others. This peaked wintry little ghost out of the past, starved and frost-bitten and shabby as it looked, had yet a strange suggestion of vicious force about it which, inasmuch as it seemed sworn for good or evil to my service, comforted me unconsciously in the sense of fear and helplessness which had got me in grip. Somehow Rampick seemed less formidable, my feeling of bondage to an ugly responsibility less acute, in the knowledge of this new acrid ally.

But, beyond this, there was curiosity--still-breathing, wide-eyed curiosity to know what enduring mystery yet held the footsteps of that ancient tale of The King _versus_ Joshua Pilbrow. I had learned something, had had my adventure tooth tickled with a taste of the truth. It had whetted my hunger for more, had tantalized me with that sharpest spur to youthful appetite--the dream of hidden treasure. When would Joshua serve up the whole dish--or would he ever? It seemed incredible that a man who had pursued such a secret, morose and self-contained, for six years, could yield it at last to a sentiment. Yet he had promised, and, though I sickened of the delay, I must not dare to risk making that eternal by over-precipitation.

In the meantime, as there could be no harm in the attentions natural to hospitality, I walked over to the Flask inn, after breakfast the following morning, to see how our visitor had slept.

It was within three or four days of Christmas, and sharp, beautiful weather. I have always since associated the deadliest scheming of Fate with such tranquillity. The robin, like a tiny phœnix, burned, singing on a spray. There was a glaze of rime on the ground, and the sweetest coldness to take into the lungs. The ringers were already practising their carols; the ruddiness of the holly was reflected in the genial cheeks of the wives; the prospect of holiday and fat fare smiled from every door. One had thought that the village, like its geese, had been gutted of the last foulness, and that Nature beamed approval. Alas! it is not the blackest thought that rides the storm. Nature, like the man, may “smile and smile and be a villain.”

The younger Miss Fleming had made herself a sad misalliance, running away with the ostler, and coming to grief and indigence. But her fate had wrought no impression on her sister, who remained as pert and coquettish as ever, and wore the same gaudy finery and shoes down at heel. She always rather courted me because of Harry, of whom she was gigglingly enamoured, and who detested her.

“Lork, Mr. Dicky!” she said, when I came in. “Is the old gentleman a friend of yours? I’m sure I’d have give him every attention if I’d known.”

She was glancing fitfully, all the time she spoke, at a little lozenge of looking-glass which stood on the bar rack.

“Whatever you could have spared from that, Tilly?” I said. “I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.”

“O, get along!” she protested. “You’re always poking your fun at me!” And I made my way upstairs, as directed, to number seven.

I found Joshua not yet out of bed when I entered to his summons. He sat up to greet me, like Lazarus new-risen--a wasted corpse-like little figure, white and grim and unshorn. But his face lighted rapturously at sight of me.

“It was no dream, then!” he said, and lay back again, with a very gentle expression. I came and stood over him, and he nodded to me.

“Richard, I shall lie abed to-day. This passion of luxury after the toil! Most restful, most wonderful! Yet the sickness is not out of my bones.”

“You will do very well,” I said. “When you are rested, we must show you all there is of the place--the local lions, you know. To-night it is a Feast of Lanterns--rather fun. Do you think you could manage it?” And between question and answer he learned all about Mr. Sant, and Harry, and what remained untold of our simple history. It might have been Hume to him, so profound an attention he gave to it.

“I shall like that Harry,” he said at the end; “and the sensible clergyman. Yes, I will come to the Feast, if you can find me a lantern.”

After arranging to fetch him at a given hour, I left him to his trance of rest. He told me no more of his story. I had hardly expected he would; yet I retreated in an itch of half-injured excitement. Ah! if I could have foreseen under what circumstances the revelation was to come to me, I would have sworn a compact of eternal silence with him, and baffled Fate.

That morning Harry returned from Yokestone, and I walked a mile to meet him. He was near as excited as I over Joshua’s coming. He knew all about him, of course. We had no secrets from one another.

“What does he look like?” he said. “I’ve never seen an acquitted murderer.”

Joshua had shaved the gallows. He was not the rose, but he had lived near it.

“I can’t say he looks like everybody else,” I said, “because he doesn’t. But his nose is in the middle of his face.”

By-and-by we fell to our long-postponed discussion of the great adventure and its moral.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Harry, “that perhaps after all we’ll tell Sant.”

“O, you may snigger!” he said. “But supposing anything were to happen to us.”

“Why, what’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know. One can never tell.” He spoke quite sombrely. “It wouldn’t be right, would it, to carry that secret to the grave, especially----”

“Especially what?”

“Why, I was going to say, especially if we thought we were going to be sent there by some one on purpose to keep it.”

“Look here, Harry,” I exploded; “I wish you’d speak plain, and not hint and nudge and set a fellow jumping. Who do you mean? Say out!”

“Rampick, then.”

I walked on, staring at the road. He had but given actuality to a rather haunting spectre of my own.

“You think he’ll be wanting to shut our mouths?” I said, low.

“I think--yes. He saw us go in; and--well, look here, Dick--why’s he been watching there all these years, unless out of fear that some such thing might happen? Ah, you’ve thought the same yourself, I see! It looks black against him, in my opinion, and----”

“He’s half crazed. We two ought to be a match for him.”

“Suppose he took us separate? He’s strong as the devil still, I tell you. I’m not afraid; but I don’t want to be tipped over a cliff, or have a stone fall on me, and mother be left to think I didn’t take care of my life for her sake.”

“Very well; we’ll tell Sant, then,” I said, graciously conceding the point--with much private relief.

“Then the sooner the better,” said Harry. “I’ve thought it all out since yesterday, and concluded that not to tell him would be to make him out less of a man than we are. Supposing anything were to happen to us, and some chance brought to his knowing after all what we’d died to keep from him. A pretty opinion he’d think we had of him, and a pretty ghost to haunt his conscience, to know that he might have saved us. The sooner the better, I say.”

“All right. Only he won’t be back till this evening.”

“No more he will. Very well; what do you say, then, to filling up the time by going _there_ again?”

I actually stumbled, as if he had tripped me.

“Harry!”

I had clutched hold of him to stop him, and we stood face to face.

“You ain’t afraid?” he asked.

“Afraid! I’m sick at the very thought.”

“O, that’s rot! We’ve seen the worst, and got over it.”

“_Have_ we? We’ve seen enough anyhow to serve me for a lifetime.”

“Don’t you bother, then. I’ll go by myself.”

“You shan’t, I tell you.”

“Shan’t I? We’ll see.”

“What do you want to go for?”

“To find out whether _he’s_ been there since or not.”

“What does it matter if he has? Besides, he’d never get his great carcase through the way we came.”

“I dare say; but I want to see. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Wait till we’ve spoken to Mr. Sant.”

“I’d rather have the latest facts to put before him.”

I clutched my forehead. I knew the dogged side of this friend of mine. Then I fell into a fury, and stamped.

“You’re a beast! If I have a fit, you’ll have to answer for it, that’s all.”

“I don’t want you to come!”

“Don’t you? Who gave you leave to dictate to me, I should like to know?”

“Well, come if you like.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrier, for the permission.”

We resumed our way, and I walked by Harry’s side, ruffling. Presently he said--

“I say! Supposing that old Pilbrow’s treasure had anything to do with the secret in the hill! What a lovely complication!”

“I don’t see why it particularly should,” I snapped. “It had to do with a book; not--not with a hash of smugglers.”

I took no longer interest in Joshua for the moment. Harry had put all that story out of my head. He saw I was worked up, and said no more. We parted where our roads branched, on my side in a very depressed condition. My dinner choked me, and my desperate efforts to simulate appetite only brought me observation. Uncle Jenico was quite concerned, and Mrs. Puddephatt disgustingly critical.

“It’s the hair,” she said. “Soon or late it was bound to find ’im hout. I don’t blame you, sir, for noticing at the eleventh hour what’s long been apperient to the casual. The heyes of love is blind, and incapable of seeing into the stomach. The young gentleman, sir, is sickening for London, and no wonder. We know, sir, what Scripture says is the dog’s fancy; and is a human to be judged more himpervious to what he’s give up? Let Master Richard breathe the hair of his native ’eath once more is _my_ advice.”

“Is there any truth in this, Dick?” said Uncle Jenico, when she had gone. “Have you been, perhaps unconsciously, thinking of London lately, because----”

“O, don’t be a dear old idiot!” I interrupted him impatiently. “I was never less in the mood to leave Dunberry. Can’t I keep up my character for health without stuffing myself when I ain’t hungry!”

I laughed vexedly; but still I could see he was anxious about me, and I was working myself up to the last pitch of irritability, when suddenly I was conscious that Harry had gone past the window outside. I waited for his rap at the door. It did not follow. I jumped up, stung to fury, and disregarding my uncle’s cry, ran out of the house and came up with my friend.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Were you going without me?”

“I thought,” he answered, “you’d see me; and then you could come or not as you liked.”

“Now, look here,” I said, “I won’t be treated in this way. I think it’s just beastly. Because I don’t jump at being made sick, every one’s going to pity me or be my superior.”

“Why, what’s happened?” said Harry, with a twinkle.

“Mrs. Puddephatt,” I answered. “I wish she’d leave my inside alone. And here you are going along with your nose in the air.”

Harry was chuckling out loud; but he reddened as I ended.

“I can’t help my nose,” he said gravely. “I don’t see the point.”

“No more do I,” I answered, looking at it, and beginning to come round with a vexed laugh. It is strange what self-respect we can acquire from other people’s weaknesses. Harry’s “pug” was always a rather delicate subject with him.

He flushed truculent a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and gave a good-natured laugh.

“I must take what comfort I can out of its being a cushion,” he said. “It’s very resting to the eyes--better than yours, that they can’t settle on without slipping.”

“Tit for tat,” I said. “You’ve answered me like a witty little gentleman, my darling. And now you can pull my ear, if you like, for having been cross and rude with you.”

He responded, with the addition of an amiable kick, and Richard was himself again.

The air being thus cleared, we went swiftly for the Mitre, chattering spasmodically all the way in a desperate pretence of swagger. I really think the greater credit was due to me, as I was being engaged to this anticlimax, as I considered it, entirely against my judgment. But my heart sank once more, when at last we came up on the hill among the ruins, and I realized at first hand the sinister futility of our design.

The day had fallen wintry close and breathless. The sun was not blotted out, but dulled, as if a ground-glass window had been shut upon it. A light fog was stretching shorewards from the water, chilling and isolating us. It brought the very spirit of ghostly echoes with it, and wickedness and watchfulness; and it seemed to demoralize the pith in one’s bones.

“O, if it’s got to be done, let’s get it over!” I said, with a shiver. “Why--Harry, look there!”

He nipped my arm, and we both stood staring--at the place of our yesterday’s exit.

There was no doubt about it. We had never effected, had never thought to effect, in the litter of dead stuff and bramble, so complete a concealment of our passage therethrough, for our ecstasy had taken no account at the moment of the rending evidences of our adventure which we were leaving behind us. Now, all trace of such was gone, obliterated, had been cunningly effaced and built in with other litter torn from the thicket elsewhere. The deadly spot was returned, to all appearance, to its wonted condition.

“Won’t that do?” I whispered, gulping. “We needn’t look any further.”

“We need,” returned Harry, short and grim. “Who’s to know, if we don’t, that he found his way down?”

“What does it matter if he did or didn’t? This shows plains enough that he saw us come out.”

“But it doesn’t show that he knows what we know.”

“Harry!”

He was pulling at the dead stuff as I shook out his name. A great pad of it came bodily away in his hands, revealing a savage gap behind--a hole torn and trodden beyond anything that we had made.

“Harry!” I whispered again. “Supposing--supposing he should be down there now!”

Nothing would persuade or deter him. He broke from me, and was in while I spoke; and I had in decency to follow.

Now, if more proof were needed, here it was in the black rent at our feet. It was flagrantly enlarged from our memory of it by the forced passage of a huger body. It offered no difficulty of descent, and Harry let himself down into it cautiously, but without hesitation.

“Wait,” he muttered, as he disappeared, “while I light up.”

He had brought matches and candles with him; but he paused a moment to listen before he fetched them out.

Not a sound reached us. The hill, inside and out, was wrapped in deadliest silence. The next instant a soft glow spread itself below me, and I went down into it, tingling with the horror of what it should reveal.

Not a sound; not even the snarl of the badger, which I believe I should have welcomed. The brute, scared out of his security, I think, had betaken himself to other quarters. We reached the floor, and crept on.

Again the dead came about us; but now, knowing and holding the road to flight, I could recover nothing of the sad appeal to comradeship with which they had before greeted me. They were terrors apart: ghastly chuckling grotesques without name in the kind world I had left. I hated them as they hated me.

Suddenly Harry uttered a little cry, and, stooping, rose again with some object in his hand.

“Look!” he whispered, and held it to the light.

It was the bowl, broken off short, of a blackened death’s-head pipe, such as was familiar to us in the lips of Joel Rampick.

Do you know what the French call a _pièce de conviction_? Here it was, and we needed nothing further.

He had been here, and he shared our secret. What was he going to do?