Chapter XXVI: An Incubus

‘Thou hast bound up my wounds, and set me on thine own beast, and brought me to an inn,’ said the stranger. ‘Blessed be thy living witness to Christ’s parable.’

He had the inscrutable eyes of a hare. Say what he might, there was always something at odds between them and the picked precision of his speech. He sat propped against a pillow formed of Brion’s cloak; the great horse-cloth was wrapped about his naked limbs; his clothes were spread to dry near the glowing brazier; he had eaten little of the food and drunk feverishly of the wine, and his tongue was loosened.

Brion nodded. ‘Let us have done with compliments. Am I to know your name and business?’

‘I am a simple trader, an Englishman, by name John Melton.’

‘Well, we will return to that. And now, Master Melton, an it please you, what brought a simple trader to such plight?’

‘Sir, I owe you the plain story; and here it is. In the darkness before dawn this morning a hoy, standing off from the coast, was driven ashore at Teignmouth by the fury of the wind and waves. Something, I know not what, aroused in the rough folk who helped to beach her a belief that there were Catholic emissaries from Picardy on board, and in a moment the devil was ablaze in them. For some most unjustifiable reason their suspicions fell on me, of whom their fanatic hatred would have made an instant victim, casting me into a fire of driftwood they prepared to build upon the shore, had I not through God’s grace and the darkness succeeded in escaping from their cruel hands. Battered and wounded, I fled at random, their shouts and imprecations following me as I ran. By dawn I had gained the heights, whence, hiding and observing, I could see the chase, now gathered in volume, still furious on my tracks. Had they once scattered, I had been lost, but they kept together, while I scurried on before, taking advantage of every scrap of cover. Still they pressed on, like hounds intent and inexorable, and to me, hurt and exhausted as I was, there could have come but one end, had I not, through merciful Providence, chanced, when near my last gasp, on a charitable stranger. That is all my tale.’

Brion, regarding the speaker enigmatically, did not respond for a moment.

‘So,’ said he at last, ‘you came in the boat?’

‘That is perfectly true.’

‘And from Picardy--where there are Jesuits?’

‘And traders.’

‘True; and pardoners among them, mayhap--vendors of spurious relics to the credulous, pigs’ bones for saints,’ a feather of the cock that crew St Peter into shame, and of other things no less false and profitable--Papal indulgences, to wit, for any that would be traitors to their country.’

‘It is not true.’

‘Why, I know you for a Papist, else would you ne’er have spoke of “Catholic” emissaries.’

‘I deny it not. Denounce me for it, an you will. Wounded and in your power, I shall not abjure my faith.’

‘Your necessity, as you should know, is your surest appeal to mine.’

‘Yet you can show so little Christian tolerance as to assume, without proof, a certain vileness in me, and for no reason but just that I am a Catholic. Tell me this, Sir: is Papistry, as you call it, countenanced in your England?’

‘With reason, no.’

‘We’ll spare the reason. It is not countenanced, at least. Then, for the convinced English Catholic there is no alternative to apostacy but--Picardy, shall we say?’

‘God forbid I should quarrel with any man for his religion. Only for yours, Picardy is a wholesomer climate than Devon.’

‘My hurts cry Amen to that.’

‘Why not have remained there, then?’

‘Is it so unusual for an exile to yearn towards the land of his birth--especially an he envisage a prospect to combine some business with pleasure there? But I see you do not believe me. Well, Sir, bruised and battered though I be, I would sooner be put to lie out in the fields than accept a bounty offered on such terms. Or would you be the treacherous husbandman of the fable, with whom the poor driven fox took shelter, and keep me here, to point out to the hunt my hiding-place? It may ride up anon. Be sure those bloody miscreants will rouse the neighbourhood, and there will be search for me. Well, I am sick and friendless and at your mercy.’

He had spoken from the first in a voice weak and languid, though always oddly preserving its dry particularity, and now sank back as if exhausted, closing his eyes. But still Brion regarded him unmoved, it seemed, by either his explanations or his taunts. Something, he felt, rang false--he could not say what, but it certainly was not the man’s physical hurts, which were very definite and serious. There was reality enough in them to outweigh for the moment any thought of moral deception. One in particular on the side, the result of a terrible blow from a metal bar or stone, bore a sinister look. No rib, so far as he could ascertain, was fractured, but he feared some bad internal injury. He had done, and he did hereafter, all that he could to alleviate the suffering caused by this injury, using what soft compresses and tender balsams he could filch from Mother Harlock’s preserves; but still the pain did not seem to mend, and its persistence troubled him. Supposing the man were to die on his hands, to what unresolvable difficulties would he not have committed himself? However, the thing was done, and might God help him in having acted humanely on impulse instead of discreetly on reflection.

‘I pass by your bitter words,’ he said, standing over the prone figure, ‘which some might think had savoured of ingratitude, but which I take for an ill man’s ravings. Be assured, I shall not betray you. What is to the point is how not to make myself suspect. It can be done, and safely, but only at the expense of my company. You must do without my visiting you, save at daily intervals. I will bring you all you need from time to time, food, and more comforts, and so will continue till you are in a condition to be released and sped upon your way. By that time, let us hope, the hue and cry will have died down and yourself be forgotten. That dark dawn can have little familiarised your persecutors with your features. For the brazier, I will bring to-morrow the wherewithal to screen it; yet methinks, once warmed, you’ll need but little artificial heat in this subterranean chamber. It were wise to kindle no taper but on urgent need. For the rest, you are buried here as inviolate as in a tomb. No one of the household nor the near neighbourhood would so much as come near the place: it hath an evil reputation with the foolish. But that need not concern you. Are you willing that I leave you now?’

The eyes were opened and staring at him again--strange blots in the dying glow; the lips whispered, it seemed, some inarticulate thanksgiving. Brion, with a curt ‘good-night,’ turned and mounted the steps. In the chamber above, having closed and spun the wheel, he paused a moment to see if any tell-tale gleam issued from the edges of the orifice; but detecting no least hint of such, he went, satisfied, into the night.

Henceforth he kept to his word, visiting the fugitive once at least a day, bringing him good sustenance and more comfortable stuff for his bedding, and staying to converse awhile as he bandaged the inflamed and aching flesh. Sometimes he would go by the garden and sometimes by the wood: the little sport of secrecy and evasion tickled him for a while; it was like a game, and he was still boy enough to enjoy a game. Yet now and again it _would_ occur to him that a game indefinitely prolonged might lose its point, and expose, through constant use, its own machinery; and so far no period to the one he was playing seemed suggested. An uncomfortable feeling dawned and developed in him that he had burdened himself, and at a crucial time, with an undetachable incubus. As the days went on, in proportion as the invalid’s main injury seemed to heal superficially, the inner hurt appeared to intensify. The fact threatened to confirm his first most grave suspicions; but it did not help to solve his difficulties. He began to foresee the ultimate necessity of taking somebody into his confidence. What if matters should go from bad to worse? He was doing his best for the man; but his best was after all only the best of ignorance. Good intentions might very well make bad nurses, unless reinforced by knowledge. Instead of curing he might be actually helping to kill.

The patient, in fact, in defiance of all the young man’s ministrations, continued to look ghastly; he seemed to speak with difficulty; he complained of eternal pain and unrest. And no wonder, buried, so injured, in that dank and gloomy crypt. One welcome change there was: soft and open Spring weather had followed on that day of cold and storm, mitigating the frigid atmosphere of the stone chamber. Going down the garden on the morning after the encounter, Brion felt his every pore expanding with delight. Balm was in the air; an incense rose from the earth; the winter aconites had blinked the frost from their golden eyes, and, with their ruffs starched and smart, were smiling in holiday rows under the wall. Even a surviving snowdrop or two--those sweet little acolytes of Candlemas, as Clerivault called them--opened their hearts to the sun, and betrayed to it the tender green thoughts they were used to guard so shyly.

Brion, descending to the patient, found him, a little to his surprise, shifted from the position in which he had left him the night before to one in an angle of the wall where the brazier had been formerly set. They had exchanged places, in fact. Remarking on the transposition, he was informed by the other, in that weak, precisely-measured voice of his, that, growing chill in the small hours, he had bethought himself to take advantage of the warmth reflected to the stones by the then extinguished charcoal, and had so made shift to effect the change, which he had with difficulty accomplished, lying with his body against the hot wall. That, as a stratagem, was resourceful enough: the perplexing thing to Brion was how one in so feeble a state could have put it into practice. Yet, again, that state seemed indisputable. One had only to look at the man to know he could not be malingering.

They talked a little together, desultorily. The stranger was curious about the superstition which kept his hiding-place inviolate; and Brion, seeing no reason for concealment, told him all about the legend of the departed buccaneer, and the fate of the unfortunate young relative who had got to know more about his affairs than was good for his health or hers. The eyes always seemed to listen to him more than the ears: they blinked no facts, and confessed no emotions--none in the least over their owner’s contiguity to the place of that dark reputed tragedy. He was evidently ‘insusceptible,’ in the superstitious sense.

‘And was, Sir,’ he said, ‘this business of the wheel some of that Fulke’s contriving?’

‘No,’ said Brion. ‘I understand it was here long before his time.’

‘It is a clever contrivance, whoever designed it. I have seen some in my day, and none, I think, so well thought out. _Prudens simplicitas._’

* * * * * *

Day succeeded day, and week week, and still the patient showed no signs of mending, but sat propped against the wall, with that eternal aspect of weakness and suffering which had never changed since Brion first brought him into the pit. The young fellow was at his wits’ end to know what to do. Time was flying, and at any moment he might receive his summons from Plymouth. At length he made up his mind, and laid bare the whole truth to Clerivault--enormously, as may be supposed, to that paragon’s astonishment.

‘I believe,’ said Brion, ‘the poor wretch is dying: and I cannot leave him to die there. What am I to do?’

‘A secret chamber--in the old well-house!’ gasped Clerivault; ‘and to discover it--God’s ’slid! thou must have dared alone the haunted terrors of that place!’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Brion impatiently--‘and a fig for such bugbears. But that is not the point. He must be brought out--brought here--put to bed--old Harlock must see him--God o’ mercy! I shall go demented!’

He started striding forth and back, his fingers wound desperately in his hair. Clerivault quieted him down:--

‘Ah, peace, my sweetheart! We will arrange it.’

‘But you do not know--my fears, my suspicions, my distractions. I will not, for all the world, that mine Uncle and he be brought together--nor so much as learn, each one, that the other is in the house.’

‘No need to, if he is dying.’

‘He may not die, if at all, until after we are gone.’

‘H’mph!’

It was a problem, in truth, of which, on profound consideration, there appeared only one solution. Nol and Phineas and William and Mrs Harlock must be taken into one confidence on the subject, and form a conspiracy to keep the fact of the stranger’s presence in the house a secret equally from their lord and from the whole world. If the man survived, he was to be packed quietly away on his recovery; if he died, then the authorities must be informed, the plain explanation being that the body was that of a poor stranger whom the young master had found injured by the way, and had of his pity brought home to tend. Nobody knew who he was or whence come, so nobody could say.

So Clerivault took it upon himself to inform and instruct the household, and so it was settled. As to any risk of search at this date, it was considered negligible. If the neighbourhood _had_ been aroused, it had shown no disposition to suspect the Grange of harbouring the fugitive. Some vague rumours of the Teignmouth affair had come Clerivault’s way, but it did not appear from them how far the pursuit had been pressed, or whether, even, it had been of that determined character which perhaps the fears of the victim had magnified. In all probability the whole affair was by now completely forgotten.

Brion, to be sure, had no liking for the arrangement; but he was in a desperate quandary, and, short of an inhumanity impossible to him, could see no other way out of it. And then the summons to the voyage came; and that clinched the matter.

On the evening of the day when he received it, he went to visit his patient, and to impress upon him the necessity for his instant removal to the house. Somewhat to his astonishment and displeasure, he encountered an opposition where he had the least expected one.

‘You would rather remain where you are, Master Melton?’ said he, haughtily surprised. ‘Then give me leave to tell you that you will remain to perish, since, I being gone, none other could be found to approach within a score yards of this thicket under which you lie buried.’

‘Sir, my beneficent saviour,’ answered the other, with a low-voiced, measured humility: ‘may it never be yours to suffer the hounding of malignant foes, or, having escaped, broken and demoralised, from their violence, be urged to tempt the Providence which has found you a secure retreat by leaving it untimely for another.’

‘Untimely!’ cried Brion with impatience. ‘I tell you, man, I quit here to-morrow: I shall be absent for many months. What would you do?’

‘With utmost deference, Sir, would it not be possible for you, ere you go, to convey hither to me a moderate store of food and drink, and, having so satisfied your hospitable conscience, dismiss from your mind all question of further responsibility regarding my welfare? Then, if at last forced by my condition to reveal myself, I could make shift to emerge from this confinement, if only to beg of your people a corner in which to die?’

The young man stood fairly astounded before this cool proposition.

‘_No_, Master Melton,’ said he, with emphasis: ‘it would not be possible. If the worst were to come upon you--you force me to speak plain--you would be in no state to make the effort you imply: in which case--but I leave to your imagination the pleasant sequel. Come, prepare yourself to shift. You shall be conveyed to a comfortable bed, and your hurts tended by one of a better skill and knowledge than ever I could pretend to. The household is pledged to secrecy: in the matter of risk, I believe on my soul there is no shadow of any--you are long forgotten by the very men who chased you. And the moment you are fit to travel you shall be free to go. Come.’

The fugitive uttered a little sigh.

‘I yield all,’ said he, ‘to him to whom I owe all.’

He crawled painfully from under the cloth which covered him, and which he fumbled back into the wall-corner where he had lain; and, supported by Brion, laboriously climbed the steps into the chamber above.

‘Are you not going to close the wheel?’ said he, panting and pallid, as they paused a moment, after emerging from the aperture.

‘Presently will serve,’ answered Brion: ‘when I have seen you into safety.’

‘Now, Sir, now, let me entreat you! If any accident should happen--if it should be overlooked--a clue----’

‘Peace, then!’ exclaimed the young man; and he hurriedly and rather pettishly did as he was asked. Truly this most unconscionable invalid was a trial to one’s patience.

Outside the ilex clump, Clerivault, white and grim, stood waiting in the thunderous dusk. He had volunteered to dare the terrors of the awful place; but Brion, seeing what the offer cost him, had laughingly declined his company, saying he could manage much better by himself. They took the stranger between them, and, without more ado, carried rather than supported him to the house, and, smuggling him by a back way to the upper chamber, remotest from Quentin Bagott’s quarters, which had been prepared for him, put him to bed, and left him in the hands of that old wintry bird of prey, Mother Harlock, who forthwith proceeded to examine his hurts with the dark relish peculiar to her kind. Coming to seek Brion presently, she gave him, in a muttered whisper, the result of her diagnosis:--

‘The man’s sore smitten.’

‘Will he die?’

‘A hath a dog’s chance--given my vuln’ry water. ’Twere distilled from the plantain in the year of its becoming a bird.’

‘Of what becoming a bird? The plantain? Does the plantain become a bird?’

‘Every seventh year, and cries “cuckoo!” Did you not know it, child?’

‘On my faith, no.’

‘Ay. ’Tis the reason it lacks a nest of its own.’

‘But----’ he gave it up, bubbling with expressionless laughter. ‘You had better go and get it,’ said he.

He had hoped for something more informative. As it was, her verdict left him exactly where he had been. However, there was no help for it; the man was there, and there he must now remain, until Destiny decided one way or the other on the question of his disposal. In the meantime the faithful souls who were to represent his authority during his absence would see to it that his instructions were implicitly carried out.

He parted from his Uncle that evening, as he and Clerivault had to be on their way at an early hour the following morning. Going in to the recluse, with a certain emotion at his heart, he found him characteristically occupied between a Vulgate and a great tankard of burnt sack plentifully laced with Nantes brandy. A thread of incense, rising from a tiny chafing dish on the table, seemed designed, like a pious kissing-comfit, to neutralise the pungent breath of that ungodly mixture; while the mentality which could appropriate such material to such a use appeared further illustrated in the faldstool, or prie-Dieu, set before a bureau on which stood a laughing head in bronze of a leaf-crowned Dionysus.

The ex-Judge looked up vacantly, as Brion entered, and motioned him mechanically to a seat.

‘Not now,’ said the young man. ‘The time that remains to me here is short. I have come to ask your blessing on my venture, Uncle Quentin.’

Staring a moment, the other shook his head.

‘What venture, nephew?’

‘Have you forgotten? To the New World.’

He seemed to listen and weigh; and then a sudden light went up in his brain:--

‘To the New World? My blessing? A devil’s viaticum that! A curse from my lips might speed thee better.’

‘Come, Uncle. You will not start me on such handicap, like the poor scratch in the game. I of all should know what your blessing is worth to one you love.’

Bagott passed his hand across his eyes.

‘Do you say so, boy? Yet you will leave me.’

‘Would you not have me go?’

‘To the New World? Ay.’ He seemed to muse, pondering some vision. ‘For whither she hath gone should not her son follow?’ He stared and stared before him, till his eyes ran with weak tears. ‘I loved your mother, Brion,’ he sobbed: ‘I loved your mother.’

It was useless to prolong the scene. The young man knelt, and took the shaking hands in his, and, kissing them, laid them on his own head. They slipped down to imprison his face, to draw it towards the dishonoured lips whose utterance had yet never meant to him aught but truth and love.

By six o’clock the next day he and Clerivault and Nol porter were on the Plymouth road, the latter riding with them to convey the baggage, and to bring back the horses. Their way took them by Holne Chase and the head of the Horse-shoe Glen. It was a fair April morning, blue and white and gold. The birds were singing as they never sang but about that lovely haunted spot. It seemed suddenly to Brion that the fetters of long years were broken, and that he was riding forth to challenge the vision not of what was to be, but of what had been and fled. Love was on the heights, and it was the morning of an older day.