Chapter XI: Joshua Speaks

What a fantastic nightmare in my memory is that amazing voyage! Were souls as oddly consorted ever launched on an odder? Looking back at this date on all the circumstances, our isolation, our helplessness, our exhaustion of mind and body following on the strain--and that, by long hours yet, not to be withdrawn--it appears to me little less than miraculous that we ever won to harbour. Had it not been for the strange distraction of a certain recital which the occasion called forth, and which, occupying our thoughts both during and after its telling, rendered us partly oblivious to our condition, a very creeping paralysis of terror would, I believe, have ended by destroying us. To swing there unrelated to any visible hold on life but the sodden, weltering stick beneath us: lost atoms in a vast immensity of mist and water! My mind, save I gripped it frenziedly to its own consciousness, would have reeled and forsaken me, I think. Sometimes for a moment, indeed, it would be almost gone, dropping through the seeming clouds on which we swam into immeasurable abysses of space; and it was only on these occasions by grappling aghast with the figures of reality before it, that it could recover and control itself. If only we could have seen the shore--could have steadied nothing more than our vision on that ghost of moral support, it would have been something. But by now the haze had shut down, and we were derelicts utterly committed to the waste. It was a bad time--a bad, forsaken time, and I do not much like to recall it, that is the truth.

We had perched Joshua, having with some distress got him on board, between us on the twin spar, where he could set his back against the broken top and hold on mechanically till he was in the way to convalescence. Fore and aft of him, squatting or straddling on our slippery bed, we made at first fitful attempts to dig a little way on our craft with our feet; but the load was too heavy thus lightly to be influenced, and we soon gave up the effort. We might, perhaps, have affected our course a trifle by swimming and pushing; we did not dare. It had been a different matter in the first excitement of escape, with the sand under our feet. Now, in the reaction to a consciousness of our drenched, and overwrought, and half benumbed condition, the water had become a fathomless horror, lapping after us with hiss and hurry to devour what it had seduced from its shallows. There was a heaviness, a deadliness in it, level and undisturbed as it seemed, which it was sickening to contemplate. And so we sat close and drifted, and essayed--did Harry and I, while Joshua was recovering--to reassure ourselves and one another with fitful banter--the most cheerless, hollow stuff, God knew, and soon to expire of its own pretence.

For a time, undoubtedly, the tide carried us shorewards, leisurely and with no affectation of charity. The wreck sunk and disappeared behind us: was a wreck--a bulwark--a stile in mid-desert--a post--a stump--was gone. We distanced it so slowly that scarce a quarter of a mile could have separated us from it when its last token was submerged--and our hearts seemed to founder with it.

“Harry!” I cried, in a sudden shock of terror: “what if, at this rate, we never reach the shore at all, and are carried out again by the ebb!”

He wriggled and snarled.

“What’s the use of meeting trouble half-way? We’ve four or five hours before us, and if we can’t drift close enough by then to finish swimming, the deuce is in it. Hold tight, Dicky--that’s all you’ve got to do; and I’ll answer for the rest.”

His self-confidence soothed me supremely. And I was the more comforted to see Joshua stir himself at that moment and sit upright.

“What’s that?” he said. “Leave me out of the question if you want to swim.”

“We don’t want to swim, Mr. Pilbrow--not unless the tide won’t serve us to the end; and then I hope it’ll be only a little way.”

“Well,” he answered, “go when you will; only I want to have a word with you first, Richard.”

“You are all right again, sir?”

“Right?” he muttered. “I don’t know. The land drops and flees before me. The cold is in my heart. I must ease it, Richard--I must ease it of its secret load before that winter gets home.”

“O, don’t talk like that!” I complained. “It’s to flout Providence in the face after this mercy.”

“Well,” he said, with a melancholy smile, “I shall be lighter anyhow for the easing. With this weight continuing in me, I should sink like a plumb.”

“There’s to be no thought of sinking, Mr. Pilbrow,” I said. “But if there’s something you’ll feel the better for ridding yourself of, why say it and have done.”

He turned stiffly in his place so that the spar rocked, and looked at me, where I sat behind him, with a most yearning affection.

“If you were entitled to the truth before,” he said, “how much more now, when you have saved my life.”

“Saved your life!” I exclaimed.

“Didn’t you!” he answered. “Didn’t you risk your own by letting go to reach me, when I might have pulled you down?”

“O, nonsense!” I cried, with a real laugh. “We should have both been in a bad way, I dare say, if Harry hadn’t had the sense to catch my foot. He towed us in. If there’s any credit it’s to him.”

“He did the resourceful thing, and you the brave,” persisted Joshua. “I owe to him through you; but to you first. If I live, I will honour that debt. If I am to die----”

“In good time, Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried reassuringly. “This little contest had flushed and rallied us all. “In good time! We aren’t going to give up, I can assure you, having come so far as this.”

“By God’s providence!” answered the ex-bookseller, with unwonted devoutness. “Only I feel that while I delay to tell you, the devil struggles to hale me into the deeps.”

“Out with it, then!” I said lightly, “and let’s crow to see him gnash his ugly teeth at being anticipated.”

I realized that he was about to give us the long-expected story, with a shadowy abstract of which he had only as yet tantalized me, and, through me, of course, Harry. Could we have had our curiosity satisfied under circumstances more tragically wet-blanketing? Yet there was a providence in that no less. The little sparks of inquisitiveness which survived in us, expanded in the revelation to flames of heat, which, in warming us, distracted our thoughts from our miseries. I will not believe this opportuneness was accidental. Mercy, in all the Committee of Destiny, is jealous to keep to herself the casting vote, I think.

His face fell; the evil shadow I knew darkened on it a moment; but almost in the same thought was gone. He wrung his lips with his hand, and heaved a profound sigh.

“Succeed, then,” he said, in a sad inspired voice, “succeed to the truth for which your father died; and God spare you to find your inheritance a rich one! If He will; if for your most loyal faith in me, dear child, I could so requite you, I could pass contented under the waters to the rest the land has denied me. I am weary, Richard; I am wearied to death; and to lie floating off my legs appears beatitude.”

He sighed again, and setting his teeth in the very act, forced himself frowningly and inexorably to his task.

“I have hinted to you already,” he said, “that this long fever of my quest dates from Abel’s disappearance with a certain book which contained the clue to an important secret. Hear, then, at last, what that secret was, and how it came into our hands.

“My brother Abel and I were twins and enemies, partners and apart. Why? I cannot tell. Look at two dogs of a litter quarrelling over a bone, and seek for the reason there. We thwarted one another--at every turn we did, and ruined our common business in a mutual spite. You know as much; yet in fairness I must urge that his was the more rancorous and vindictive spirit. I would have cried halt sometimes; but Abel, never. He had the fiercer resolution; he went armed; I feared while I hated him. ... The book in question was one of a packet over which we had perversely disputed in the sale-room; an old scorched and dog’s-eared commonplace book of the seventeenth century, in contemporary crimson calf, and bearing inside its cover the name of ‘Carolus Victor, Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’s Prison of Newgate.’ Yes, you remember the name. I once let it out unguarded. Well, he was our inspirer, as some Morell or Morant was your uncle’s. ... There was nothing of note about this book. It contained just the jottings and excerpta of a decent unremarkable man; ‘tips’ for homilies; memoranda of ‘last testaments;’ mere personal data of a conscientious and commonplace clergyman, whose lines had fallen in incongruous places. With all that we have nothing to do. Our business is with a folded letter, in the handwriting of this same Carolus Victor, which ages ago had been slipped between the leaves, and had there adhered through the melting of the wax with which it was sealed.”

“How had it got there?” I asked, because he here came to a dramatic pause, which seemed to challenge questioning.

“Ah!” he answered. “How? And why it had remained undelivered? I can submit only a plausible theory. A second-hand book-shop, gentlemen, is a mine of reference. Research presently revealed to me that this Carolus Victor, Chaplain of Newgate, had died--suddenly, by presumption--in that very year, 1679, which dates not only his letter, but the last entries in his diary where it was found. Suppose, then, the letter written by this Victor, and never delivered to him to whom it was addressed; suppose the book containing it tied up unexamined with the deceased’s other manuscript effects, and put away on some remote shelf and forgotten; suppose some jealous no-Popery bookdealer snatching it years later from the flames of Newgate, and consigning it to his own store, where, in the excitement, it was again forgotten till finally brought to light in the sale-room, a scorched and smoke-stained packet to excite the ridicule of the dealers. Suppose anything or nothing; conjecture and account as you will. The fact remains that Carolus Victor’s commonplace book came intact, and holding fast to its enclosure, into our hands. ... Into our hands--into _our_ hands, I say. Were we not brothers, twins, partners? Abel, before bidding for it, had known or guessed nothing of what the packet contained. He had bought the lot, a business transaction, merely to spite me. And yet now he would claim the whole fruits for himself!”

A fury and excitement took the narrator’s voice at this point. The heat he exhaled was communicated to us in part.

“Go on!” I said, giving a vigorous kick into the water. “There was a letter in the book, you say. What was it about?”

He struggled with himself a moment, dropped his face into his hands with a groan, looked up, and resumed in a more ordered voice--

“I am coming to it. It is stereotyped on my brain--all of its accursed riddle, that is to say, but the key. It was dated Newgate, 1679, and was superscribed to one Peachumn, a doctor of divinity, (to whom, you will always bear in mind, it never was delivered), from which honoured friend and counsellor the writer craved certain instruction and advice in a very private and particular matter. He had had confessed to him that night, he said, a passing strange story by one Vining, a prisoner, and grey in iniquity, who was condemned to suffer on the morrow for piracy on the high seas. This Vining, according to his own statement, had been, about the second decade of the century, a student in the great English College of Douai, in France, whence one winter he had been sent, in company with an ordained brother collegiate, on an extraordinary secret mission across the water to a little town on our east coast. This mission, said Vining, was nothing less than to recover, if possible, from its secret hiding-place in the crypts of a certain long abandoned church, a great treasure of gold pieces, which had lain there ever since the suppression of the religious houses--a suppression which, in this case, had but hardly anticipated a natural dissolution more complete. For the church in question was, it appeared, already doomed when the king’s edict fell. Lingering, a relic of the greater past, amidst the ruin of those eastern shores, the sea had since taken its outworks; and now the treasure (the existence and depository of which had been made known through the death-bed confidence of a former sacristan) must be secured without delay, if recovered it were to be at all ... Richard! it _was_ secured by those two--a loaded box of iron. And then the madness of possession smote the wretched clerk. In the darkness of the crypts he murdered his companion, and in the darkness the curse of God fell upon him. His hands were scarlet with consecrated blood. He loathed to handle the price of his iniquity; but, like Judas, he cast it from him, and with it hid the body of his victim in a place whence he hoped neither could again be brought to light to testify against him.”

He paused. And “Where was that?” I asked faintly. An extraordinary fancy had taken possession of me--a thought so stunning, so bewildering in its first weak conception, yet so explanatory, if admitted, of Rampick’s incomprehensible behaviour, that I fairly shivered under it. I looked dumfounded at Harry. He also, if I was not mistaken, had been smitten with a like shock of expectancy.

“Where was that?” I repeated; and so, innocently, applied the match to this tow. Joshua did not answer, to my surprise, for a moment; and then suddenly I was conscious of the flame rising and blazing in him.

“Where!” he shrieked. “Give me the key if you pity me! It is that has kept me hunting these long years, ravenous like the dogs that devoured Sin, their mother, and yet were unappeased. Give me the key; give me rest, or here and now the waters of oblivion!”

For an instant I really believed he was going to rise and plunge. Had he done so, I doubt if, in our weakened condition, we could have saved him a second time. But in the thought, he had clutched at himself once more; and his passion grew inarticulate, and ceased.

When at last he resumed his tale, it was with a manner of some suffering shame.

“Richard,” he said, “touch me there and I am mad. Rebuke me with thine eyes, sweet boy, and I am sane and sorry. I will not offend again. Listen, the story breaks off with the night of our quarrel--Abel’s and mine. He had discovered and was reading this letter spread out before him on the table, when I came up unnoticed behind him and read over his shoulder. The confession was all there, to the flight of the murderer and his subsequent life of crime; to the agony of his haunted soul and his desire, in the shadow of death, to make restitution. Some words by the chaplain followed; some prayer of the weak soul to his stronger confidant to guide him in this pass, whether for action or unconcern. And at the foot of the sheet he ended with the words. ‘_And the confessed Place and deposit of this treasure are_----’ and there passed over the page, and I never learned them, was never to learn them, Richard. ... Some sound I made roused Abel from his absorption. He leapt to his feet, cramming the paper into his pocket, and faced me.

“‘Well, where are they?’ I asked, smiling. Yet in that moment I knew he would never tell me.

“‘Miles under the sea, probably, by this time,’ he answered. ‘You will understand that, if you have pryed to any purpose.’

“‘Abel,’ I said quietly, ‘you are lying. The place still exists, or you would not wish to conceal its name from me.’

“‘Well,’ he said, with an evil grin, ‘the book is mine, and the secret with it. You disputed its purchase, remember.’

“‘I may have,’ I replied. ‘But bought it is, and with our money--_our_ money, Abel. I will not yield my right to a share in it.’

“I advanced upon him. I was hell inside, though calm outwardly. And as I came, he pulled a pistol from his breast--he was left-handed, like the crooked beast he was--and held it at me. I told you he always went armed. ... Richard, I confess the creature appalled me. He would have made nothing of shooting me like a dog. I hesitated; and then fell to entreaty, expostulation, threats. He was grey and hard as steel. In the end I must desist, though still resolved to get at the paper by fair means or foul. When he was gone, in a hunger of agitation I threw myself upon the book. It told me nothing, of course. I flung it down again, and went to bed, poisoned with black thoughts. In the morning when I rose, late and racked with fever, I found him gone, him and the book and the paper--gone, without leaving anywhere a trace of his direction. I could not believe it for a time; then madness took me. I went up and down, mouthing like a beast--by day and night, Richard--by day and night. It was then I must inadvertently have fired the stock. You know the rest.”

He ended in a deep depression, and burying his face in his hands, set to rocking to and fro.

“Rest!” he suddenly cried. “No rest for me! All these years I have pursued him, a wicked, laughing shadow, in the likely places of the land--always on these eastern coasts or near them, exploring ruins or the histories of them--recognizing at last my own madness, yet unable to lay it. And still the shadow flies before; and still I follow, myself a shadow!”

Again I looked at Harry. He understood, and answered my mute inquiry.

“Yes, tell him,” he said. “Tell him, if he’ll believe, how he’s been mistaken by a madman for the risen ghost of his brother yonder.”

It was the conviction in both our minds. It grew inevitably out of the tale just told us. Time, place, circumstance; the combative brother who went armed; the pistol clutched in the dead _left_ hand--these, taken together with Rampick’s discovery of our discovery, and his imagined identification of the dead, invoked by us, as he thought, to rise and denounce him, left us in no moral doubt whatever. Yet still, the coincidence was so amazing, I hesitated to commit myself. I must take breath, fencing a little longer with the truth.

“Mr. Pilbrow,” I faltered, “were you and Abel so much alike?”

He had started at Harry’s words, and was sitting rigid, awaiting my answer.

“We were twins,” he said quietly, “scarce separable, perhaps, in feature, unless by the lines which hate had chiselled to distinguish us. His were deeper scored than mine.”

“And his dress?” I said: “how did he go dressed?”

He bent over the step to stare at me.

“He wore a blue coat, Richard. Why do you ask?”

I gave a little gasp.

“Tell him,” said Harry again.

“Wait a moment!” I fluttered. “Why, who could say, Mr. Pilbrow, that thieves or the sea hadn’t taken this treasure long ago?”

“Abel,” he answered, in the same voice. “Abel, the direct consignee of the secret, which was sealed by Carolus Victor, and never opened or delivered till it came to light in our parlour. Abel, who knew this coast, had written guide-books, about it--misleading guide-books, indeed, to me in my killing search--and who was aware that the place, the actual _caché_ of the treasure, still survived--or why should he have sought to hide the truth from me, and have fled in the night, himself like a thief? Abel, the cursed shadow that I follow, and cannot run to earth!”

“O, Dick, tell him!” cried Harry once more.

“Mr. Pilbrow!” I broke out, trembling with excitement. “I believe you have hunted counter; I believe we can show you where your shadow lies. It is in the hill under the abbey ruins, and you must take off your curse from it.”