At a Winter's Fire Part 12

"I turned to the broad cas.e.m.e.nt in astonishment. My G.o.d! what did I see?

Oh, my friend, my friend! will you believe me? By the melancholy glow that spread therethrough I saw that the whole room was rising and sinking in rhythmical motion; that the lights of King's Cobb had disappeared, and that in their place was revealed a world of pale and tossing water, the pursuing waves of which leapt and clutched at the gla.s.s with innocuous fingers.

"I started to my feet, mad in an instant.

"'Look, look!' I shrieked. 'They follow us--they struggle to get at you, you b.l.o.o.d.y murderer!'

"They came rising on the crests of the billows; they hurried fast in our wake, tumbling and swaying, their stretched, drowned faces now lifted to the moonlight, now over-washed in the long trenches of water. They were rolled against the galleries of gla.s.s, on which their hair slapped like ribbons of seaweed--a score of ghastly white corpses, with strained black eyes and pointed stiff elbows crookt up in vain for air.

"I was mad, but I knew it all now. This was no house, but the good, ill-fated vessel _Rayo,_ once bound for Jamaica, but on the voyage fallen into the hands of the b.l.o.o.d.y buccaneer, Paul Hardman, and her crew made to walk the plank, and most of her pa.s.sengers. I knew that the dark scoundrel had boarded and mastered her, and--having first fired and sunk his own sloop--had steered her straight for the Cuban coast, making disposition of what remained of the pa.s.sengers on the way, and I knew that my great-grandfather had been one of these doomed survivors, and that he had been shot and murdered under orders of the ruffian that now sat before me. All this, as retailed by one who sailed for a season under Hardman to save his skin, is matter of old private history; and of common report was it that the monster buccaneer, after years of successful trading in the ship he had stolen, went into secret and prosperous retirement under an a.s.sumed name, and was never heard of more on the high seas. But, it seemed, it was for the great-grandson of one of his victims to play yet a sympathetic part in the grey old tragedy.

"How did this come to me in a moment--or, rather, what was that dream buzzing in my brain of 'proof' and 'copy' and all the tame stagnation of a long delirium of order? I had nothing in common with the latter. In some telepathic way--influenced by these past-dated surroundings--dropped into the very den of this Procrustes of the seas, I was there to re-enact the fearful scene that had found its climax in the brain of my ancestor.

"I rushed to the window, thence back to within a yard of the glowering buccaneer, before whom I stood, with tost arms, wild and menacing.

"'They follow you!' I screamed. 'Pa.s.sive, relentless, and deadly, they follow in your wake and will not be denied. The strong, the helpless, the coa.r.s.e and the beautiful--all you have killed and mutilated in your wanton devilry--they are on your heels like a pack of spectre-hounds, and sooner or later they will have you in their cold arms and hale you down to the secret places of terror. Look at Beston, who leads, with a fearful smile on his mouth! Look at that pale girl you tortured, whose hair writhes and lengthens--a swarm of snakes nosing the hull for some open port-hole to enter by! Dog and devil, you are betrayed by your own hideous cruelty!'

"He rose and struck at me blindly; staggered, and found his filthy voice in a shriek of rage.

"'Jorinder! make h.e.l.l of the galley-fire! Heat some irons red and fetch out a bucket of pitch. We'll learn this dandy galloot his manners!'

"Wrought to the snapping-point of desperation, I sprang at and closed with him; and we went down on the floor together with a heavy crash.

I was weaponless, but I would choke and strangle him with my hands. I had him under, my fingers crookt in his throat. His eyeb.a.l.l.s slipped forward, like banana ends squeezed from their skins; he could not speak or cry, but he put up one feeble hand and flapped it aimlessly. At that, in the midst of my fury, I glanced above me, and saw a press of dim faces crowding a dusk hatch; and from them a shadowy arm came through, pointing a weapon; and all my soul reeled sick, and I only longed to be left time to destroy the venomous horror beneath me before I pa.s.sed.

"It was not to be. Something, a physical sensation like the jerk of a hiccup, shook my frame; and immediately the waters of being seemed to burst their dam and flow out peaceably into a valley of rest."

William Tyrwhitt paused, and "Well?" said I.

"You see me here," he said. "I woke this morning, and found myself lying on the floor of that shattered and battered closet, and a starved demon of a cat licking up something from the boards. When I drove her away, there was a patch there like ancient dried blood."

"And how about your head?"

"My head? Why, the bullet seemed stuck in it between the temples; and there I am afraid it is still."

"Just so. Now, William Tyrwhitt, you must take a Turkish, bath and some cooling salts, and then come and tell me all about it again."

"Ah! you don't believe me, I see. I never supposed you would.

Good-night!"

But, when he was gone, I sat ruminating.

"That Captain Iron," I thought, "walked over the great rent in the floor without falling through. Well, well!"

A LAZY ROMANCE

I had slept but two nights at King's Cobb, when I saw distinctly that the novel with which I was to revolutionize society and my own fortunes, and with the purpose of writing which in an unvexed seclusion I had buried myself in this expedient hamlet on the South Coast, was withered in the bud beyond redemption. To this lamentable canker of a seedling hope the eternal harmony of the sea was a princ.i.p.al contributor; but Miss Whiffle confirmed the blight. I had fled from the jangle of a city, and the worries incidental to a life of threepenny sociabilities; and the result was--

I had rooms on the Parade--a suggestive mouthful. But then the Parade is such a modest little affair. The town itself is flung down a steep hill, at the mouth of a verdurous gorge; and lies pitched so far as the very waterside, a picturesque jumble of wall and roof. Its banked edges bristle and stand up in the bight of a vaster bay, with a crooked breakwater, like a bent finger, beckoning pa.s.sing sails to its harbourage--an invitation which most are coy of accepting. For the attractions of King's Cobb are--comparatively--limited, and its nearest station is a full six miles distant along a switchback road.

Possibly this last fact may have militated against the popularity of King's Cobb as a holiday resort. If so, all the better; and may enterprise for ever languish in the matter. For vulgarity can claim no commoner purpose with fashion than is shown in that destruction of ancient landmarks and double gilding of new which follows the "opening out" of some unsophisticated colony of simple souls.

King's Cobb, if "remote and unfriended," is neither "melancholy" nor "slow"; but it is small, and all its fine little history--for it has had a stirring one--has ruffled itself out on a liliputian platform.

Than this, its insignificance, I desired nothing better. I wished to feel the comparative importance of the individual, which one cannot do in crowded colonies. I coveted surroundings that should be primitive--an atmosphere in which my thoughts could speak to me coherent. I would be as one in a cave, looking forth on sea, and sky, and the buoyant glory of Nature; unvexed of conventions; untrammelled by social observances; building up my enchanted palace of the imagination against such a background as only the unsullied majesty of sky and ocean could present.

For the result was to crown with my name an epoch in literature; and hither in future ages should the pilgrim stand at gaze, murmuring to himself, 'And here he wrote it!'

I laid my head on my pillow, that first night of my stay, with a br.i.m.m.i.n.g brain and a heart of high resolve. The two little windows, under a thatched roof, of my sleeping place (_that_ lay over my sitting-room, and both looked oceanwards) were open to the inpour of sweet hot air; and only the regular wash of the sea below broke the close stillness of the night. I say this was all; and, with the memory upon me, I could easily, at any time, break the second commandment.

I had thought myself fortunate in my lodgings. They were in a most charming old-world cottage--as I have said on the Parade--and at high tide I could have thrown a biscuit into the sea with merely a lazy jerk.

My sitting-room put forth a semi-circular window--like a lighthouse lantern--upon the very pathway, and it had been soothing during the afternoon to look from out this upon the little world of sea and sky and striding cliff that was temporarily mine. From the Parade four feet of stone wall dipped to a second narrow terrace, and this, in its turn, was but a step above a slope of shingle that ran down to the water.

Veritably had I pitched my tent on the wide littoral of rest. So I thought with a smile, as I composed myself for slumber.

I slept, and I woke, and I lay awake for hours. Every vext problem of my life and of the hereafter presented itself to me, and had to be argued out and puzzled over with maddening reiteration. The reason for this was evident and flagrant. It had woven itself into the tissue of my brief unconsciousness, and was now recognised as, ineradicably, part of myself.

The tide was incoming, that was all, and the waves currycombed the beach with a swishing monotony that would have dehumanized an ostler.

This rings like the undue inflation of a little theme. I ask no pity for it, nor do I make apology for my weakness. Men there may be, no doubt, to whom the unceasing recurrent thump and scream of a coasting tide on shingle speaks, even in sleep, of the bountiful rhythm of Nature. I am not one of them--at least, since I visited King's Cobb. The noise of the waters got into my brain and stayed there. It turned everything else out--sleep, thought, faith, hope, and charity. From that first awakening my skull was a mere globe of stagnant fluid, for any disease germs that listed to propagate in.

Perhaps I was too near the coast-line. The highest appreciations of Nature's thunderous forces are conceived, I believe, in the m.u.f.fled seclusion of the study. I had heard of still-rooms. I did not quite know what they were; but they seemed to me an indispensable part of seaside lodgings, and for the rest of that night I ardently and almost tearfully longed to be in one.

I came down in the morning jaded and utterly unrefreshed. It was patent that I was in no state to so much as outline the preliminaries of my great undertaking. "Use shall accustom me," I groaned. "I shall scarcely notice it to-night."

And it was at this point that Miss Whiffle walked like a banshee into the disturbed chambers of my life, and completed my demoralization.

I must premise that I am an exquisitively nervous man--one who would accept almost ridiculous impositions if the alternative were a "scene."

Strangers, I fancy, are quick to detect the signs of this weakness in me; but none before had ever ventured to take such outrageous advantage of it as did Miss Whiffle, with the completest success.

This lady had secured me for a month. My rights extended over the lantern-windowed sitting-room and the bedroom above it. They were to include, moreover, board of a select quality.

"Select" represented Miss Whiffle's brazen mean of morality; and, indeed, it is an elastic and accommodating word. One, for instance, may select an aged gander for its wisdom, knowing that the youthful gosling is proverbially "green." Miss Whiffle selected the aged gander for me, and I gnawed its sinewy limbs without a protest. On a similar principle she appeared to ransack the town shops for prehistoric joints (the locality was rich in fossils), and vegetables that, like eggs, only grew harder the more they were boiled.

I submitted, of course; and should have done no less by a landlady not so obstreperously const.i.tuted. But this terrible person gauged and took me in hand from the very morning following my arrival.

She came to receive my _orders_ after breakfast (tepid chicory and an omelette like a fragment of scorched blanket) with her head wrapped up in a towel. Thus habited she had the effrontery to trust the meal had been to my liking. I gave myself away at once by weakly answering, "Oh, certainly!"

"As to dinner, sir," she said faintly, "it is agreed, no kitching fire in the hevening. That is understood."

I said, "Oh, certainly!" again.

"What I should recommend," she said--and she winced obtrusively at every sixth word--"is an 'arty meal at one, and a light supper at height."

"That will suit me admirably," I said.

She tapped her fingers together indulgently.