Текст книги "A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh"

Автор книги: Russell Thorndike

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Chapter 16

The Schoolmaster’s Suit

It was now dark. Jerk passed through the cluster of quaint little houses that make up the one street of Dymchurch-under-the-wall, and so on to the vicarage. Just at the corner where the Court House stands amid the great trees he heard singing, and recognized the voice and figure of Imogene. She was carrying a basket from the direction of the Ship and was probably bound, like himself, for the vicarage. Bus as she passed the Court House she paused, and to Jerk’s astonishment felt among the ivy that grew around the old front door. There in a certain branch was a piece of paper, which she took from its hiding

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place as if she had expected to find it. The message it contained she read by the light of the lantern that hung above the door, and then, thrusting it into the bosom of her rough dress, she went on toward the vicarage gate. But out from the shadows of the trees stepped a man, whom Jerk perceived to be the schoolmaster. Imogene hesitated when she saw him, for he was standing directly in her path, but when she tried to hurry past, Rash stopped her and spoke.

“So, Mistress, now that you have got your lover’s written promise from the ivy there, you think you can afford to pass by such a humble one as the schoolmaster, but you’re mistaken, and I’ll trouble you to show me that letter.”

The girl’s hand went involuntarily to her bosom, where the note in question was securely tucked away, and she answered back clear and straight: “No, Mister Rash, you’ve no right.”

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“Right is might, Mistress, as you’ll find, and I think we shall be able to come to terms now. I want you to come along with me to the vicarage; Doctor Syn is there, and I’ve something to say before you both.”

“Let us go, then,” said Imogene, trying to pass.

“All in good time,” returned the schoolmaster, stopping her. “There’s no immediate hurry, I think, for the Doctor won’t come out of that shuttered room of his till morning, so we can afford to keep him waiting, and I’ve something to say to you first—alone.”

The girl tossed her head impatiently as if she knew what was coming, but Rash continued:

“A few weeks back I asked you to marry me—I, the esteemed schoolmaster, asked you, the daughter of a criminal; you, whose father was a proved murderer, a dirty pirate hanged publicly at Rye for a filthy tavern crime; you who were born in a Raratonga drinking hell, some half-caste native girl’s brat!

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Ecod! it’s laughable! I offered to make you respectable and put your banns up in the church, and you refused. Now I know why. You think because that young fool Cobtree is pleased to admire you, that you will catch him in your toils, do you? You’re a clever one, ain’t you? I dare swear that sooner or later you’d succeed in getting hold of him—let the young idiot ruin you, eh? Then make a virtuous song about it to the squire, and a settlement to keep your mouth shut, perhaps.” the church, and you refused. Now I know why. You think because that young fool Cobtree is pleased to admire you, that you will catch him in your toils, do you? You’re a clever one, ain’t you? I dare swear that sooner or later you’d succeed in getting hold of him—let the young idiot ruin you, eh? Then make a virtuous song about it to the squire, and a settlement to keep your mouth shut, perhaps.”

“Beast!” cried the girl, and she struck him sideways across the mouth with her clenched hand.

“Hello!” thought Jerk, crouching in the bushes, “here’s another one having a ‘go’ at him; well, the more the merrier, so long as I’m the last.”

The schoolmaster recoiled, trying to look as if the stinging blow had not hurt, but the blood was flowing from his lip and from the hand of the girl as well.

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“So that’s it, is it?” he sniggered, “a real love match, p’haps? The squire’s consent, the wedding bells, and live happily ever after, eh? Ecod! my lady, I think not. Rash is your man, see? and lucky you are to get him; you whose father’s gibbet chains are still swinging in Rye.”

“And yours are swinging a bit nearer than that!” said Jerry Jerk to himself.

“You leave my father out of it,” went on the girl, “for from all I’ve heard of him he was a better man than you, and he was fond of me, too; so it’s lucky for you he’s not here to hear you speaking bad of his child.”

“You know nothing about him—he was a drunken rascal!”

“Doctor Syn knew him well, and he’s told me things. A rough man he was, certain, and none rougher, reckless, too, and brave, a lawbreaker on land as well as sea, pitiless to his enemies, staunch to his friends, but contemptible he never was; and so, Mister Rash, you can afford to respect him, and I say again that I wish he were here to make you.”

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“Shouldn’t care if he was,” replied the schoolmaster, “for there’s always the law to look after a man.”

“So there is,” chuckled Jerk, “and that you’ll find.”

“Bah! what’s the good of haggling and squabbling?” said Mr. Rash. “You’re mine, or you’ll have to bear the consequences.”

“And that is?” asked the girl defiantly.

“The rope for your friends when I turn King’s evidence.”

“You wouldn’t dare, you coward, for you’d be hanged yourself as well.”

“King’s evidence will cover me all square.”

“So you’re determined to turn it, are you?”

“I am, unless you change your mind.”

The girl didn’t reply to that, so Mr. Rash, thinking that he was making an advance, continued:

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“Think, Imogene—this Cobtree fellow will be packed off to London in a month or so, and from there on to Oxford; and after a university career of drinking, gambling, and loose living, with precious little learning, he’ll settle down to the gentleman’s life, marry some person of quality, and you—eh? what of you, then?”

“I earn my living now, don’t I?” replied the girl. “Well, what’s to prevent me going on the same?”

“Don’t you want to marry?” went on the schoolmaster. “Don’t you want a house of your own? Don’t you want to be the envy of all the girls in the village?”

“Not at the price of my happiness; and, besides, I’m not so sure that I do want all those things so desperate. I’m afraid the wife of Mister Rash would be too genteel a job for me.”

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“Oh, I’d soon educate you up to that,” returned the schoolmaster, looking pleased.

“It ’ud be a nuisance to both of us, wouldn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t mind—it would be a pleasant business making a respectable woman of you, Imogene. You see, you’re not common like these village girls, and that’s what attracts me; otherwise, it might have been better for me to have fixed my choice on one of them: one that hasn’t a bad mark against her, so to speak. But I don’t mind what folk say. I suppose they’ll talk a bit and laugh behind my back. Well, let ’em, say I. I don’t care, because I want you.”

“Then it’s a pity that I’m not the same way of thinking, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That I wouldn’t marry you—no, not though you got the whole village the rope!”

“You ungrateful wretch, not after all they’ve done for you?”

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“You’re not the sort of party to talk to others about being ungrateful, are you now?”

“I wasn’t born of jail folk.”

“No; and you can hope your children, if you’re ever cursed with any, will be able to say the same, for I doubt it very greatly, Mister Schoolmaster. And as to your threats, I set no store on them, for from my heart I despise you; I despise you because you would be willing to betray your fellows, but I despise you more because I know you are too great a coward to do it.”

“We shall see,” said the schoolmaster, “for who’s to stop me?”

“Parson Syn,” answered the girl. “Parsons can bear all manner of secrets and not betray them. That’s their business, and Doctor Syn’s a good man, so I’ll tell him everything, and in his wisdom he’ll find a means of checking your contemptible scheme.”

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“That shows how little you know about things, Mistress Ignoramous; for it’s that very same good man, Doctor Syn, who is going to read out your banns on this next Sabbath as ever is, and it’s Rash who is going to make him, and if you won’t come along with me to church, well, I’ll threaten other parties in this little place who’ll help me make you. Folk are none too anxious to be exposed these days with King’s men in the village, and so you’ll see—” The schoolmaster stopped talking suddenly.

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Chapter 17

The Doctor Sings a Song

Now, although Jerry had employed all his auditory faculties for the overhearing of this conversation, he had unconsciously listened to something else: a slight noise that now and again came from the direction of the vicarage, a small, whirring noise, the kind of noise that he had heard in Mipps’s coffin shop when a tool was working its way through a piece of wood —yes, a whirring noise with an occasional squeak to it. He hadn’t bothered to ask himself what it was; he had just gone on hearing it, that’s all. But now another noise arose in the night that not only claimed his

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immediate attention but made him feel cold all over. It had the same effect upon Mr. Rash, for he stopped talking suddenly and gripped the post of the gate with one hand and with the other pulled Imogene roughly into the denser black of the bushes; and then the noise grew louder and louder. What at first could only be described And as a gibbering moan rose into shriek after shriek of mortal terror: a man’s voice, a man scared out of all knowledge; and then over the gate leaped a dark form, agile and quick, that went bounding away through the ghostly churchyard. There was something familiar in that figure to Jerk. He had seen it almost from the same spot the night before. It was the man with the yellow face. The schoolmaster came out from the bushes, followed by Imogene. Quickly they went through the gate and toward the vicarage, and silently Jerk followed, with his heart thumping loud against his ribs; for although the echoes of those drum-cracking shrieks still vibrated in his ears, the gibbering moans still continued.

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To the back of the house went the girl and the schoolmaster, and to the front went Jerk. It was all dark—indeed no lights were showing from any of the rooms but one, and that was the Doctor’s sitting-room with the shutters still close fastened; but a jagged little hole in the corner of one of the shutters sent a shaft of yellow candlelight straight out into the blackness. Yes, the gibbering moaning was coming from the Doctor’s room. Jerk crossed a bed of flowers and a gravel path and applied his eye to the jagged hole in the shutter. This little hole accounted for the whirring and squeaking that he had just heard, for it was newly cut, and Jerk put his hand upon several little pieces of split wood that had fallen upon the outer sill. It was plain that the awful apparition he had just seen had been looking into the room. He had evidently made the hole for the purpose, and made it with that awful weapon he carried, that same harpoon over which so much talk had been expended at the Court House inquiry. Now the shutter, being an outside shutter, backed right against the lead-rimmed

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glass casement, and thus it was that Jerk had to wait for a few considerable seconds before seeing plainly anything in the room, for the candlelight flickered and danced upon the glass. But the very second he had put his eye to the hole the moans within the room steadily rose, and Jerk’s thumping heart increased its already unnatural pace, for he expected the loud shrieks to follow, though he could not understand their motive. But soon his eye got accustomed to the light, and one thing in the room became visible, the form of Doctor Syn. He was sitting in a high-backed chair in the centre of the room, gripping the oaken arms with his long, white fingers, and upon his face was a look of indescribable horror: his neck being stretched up alert and straight, his eyes dilated to a most disproportionate stare, glazed and terrible; his hair unkempt, and his thin legs pressing hard against the floor.

But his mouth was neither set nor rigid, like the rest of his members—his mouth was loose and hanging open—such a mouth And as the madman carries;

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and from it was coming that inarticulate gibber, that gibbering moan that had arrested the hearing of Jerry Jerk. Straight at the shutter stared the demented Doctor; straight into Jerk’s eye at the jagged hole, and suddenly his hand shot out over the table; he picked up the great plated candelabra, and hurled it, lighted candles and all, full at the window. Jerk started back to the rattle of glass, and at the same time a heavy hand fell upon his shoulder, and another was passed over his mouth, while a familiar voice whispered in his ear: “For God’s sake be quiet!” It was the captain, and he stood holding the boy tightly, keeping his eye on the jagged hole, and with something approaching terror upon his strong face. It was dark now, of course, for there was no light in the house, but presently Jerk and the captain heard low, frightened voices, and a light showed suddenly through the hole. The captain stooped and put his eye to it. Yes, the door of the Doctor’s sitting-room was opening, and Imogene and the

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schoolmaster came into the room. Imogene came first, with a lighted candle held high above her head.

The Doctor was now kneeling on the floor straight up. He had a black bottle in his hand; the same rum bottle from which he had treated Jerk that very day. He seemed to recognize Imogene, for he smiled And as she entered, smiled And as he slowly raised the bottle and tilted the contents, neat and raw, down his vibrating throat. And then he saw the schoolmaster. His upper lip twitched, curled, and rose, disclosing his white upper teeth; his underlip stretched down and slowed his lower teeth, shining white, that glistened underneath the bottle’s neck. There was a snap and a quick crunching sound. The captain gasped for breath, for Doctor Syn had bitten through the glass neck, and seized the bottle by the broken end. Slowly he dragged one leg from the kneeling position and pushed it out before him; slowly he fixed his other foot like a firm spring behind him. Terrified, Mr. Rash sprang back against the wall, with the

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blood still trickling from his cut lip, and motionless stood the girl Imogene, with the candle held above her head. Syn was in position to spring, Rash was waiting to be seized, and nothing moved in the room save the slowly oozing blood on the schoolmaster’s lip, vivid against the pale lantern jaw, and the blood and ground glass that glistened in a saliva stream that hung from the cleric’s mouth. Nothing else moved at all, except perhaps the light shed by the flickering candle, which danced shadows of the two weird men upon the whitewashed wall. And then with a hissing sound Syn made a leap, swinging the bottle And as he did so, and bringing it down with a sickening crash on the white face before him. Down went Rash, senseless, blinded with blood and the shivered glass. Then Syn laughed, and sang at the top of his voice:

“Here’s to the feet wot have walked the plank, Yo ho! for the dead man’s throttle.

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And here’s to the corpses floating round in the tank, And the dead man’s teeth in the bottle.”

And as he sang he danced, and stamped the senseless face beneath his feet; and then he sang again, roaring new words to the eternal old tune:

“A pound of gunshot tied to his feet, And a ragged bit of sail for the winding sheet; Then out to the sharks with a horrible splash, And that’s the end of Mr. Rash.”

And with diabolical glee he leaped again, and landed with both feet upon the victim’s face.

All this time the girl stood still. Like a statue she stood, with the candle high above her head; and the terrible cleric went on with the song: new words,

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but still a corruption of the same old tune, which he roared and screamed in the very whirlwind of his uncontrolled madness:

“And all that isn’t ripped by the sharks outside Stands up again upon its feet upon the running tide.”

Taking the prostate body, he lifted it on to its feet and leered into its face; then letting go of it, he watched it fall and collapse in a heap.

“And it kept a-bowing gently and alooking with surprise At the little crabs a-scrambling from the sockets of its eyes.”

The captain then shouted, shouted at the top of his voice, and tore at the fast, firm shutter. The song ceased in the room. The light once more went out of

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the jagged hole, and there was the noise of a falling body. Probably the girl had fainted. The shutters were strong and wouldn’t give.

“The back door!” shrieked the terrified Jerry. “The back door is open!” And around the back rushed the captain, followed by the boy. And as he ran he blew three shrill calls upon a silver whistle that he carried on a chain. The whistle was answered with another, and before the captain had found and opened the back door, the captain’s bo’sun had appeared from the bushes, followed by a strong party of the King’s men. The bo’sun made a light from his tinder box, and as they were finding a candle in the back kitchen they could hear some one moving about in the sitting-room.

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Chapter 18

Behind the Shutters

Thank God somebody’s brought a light, for I don’t know what hasn’t happened here. Ah, Captain, it’s you, is it?” The speaker was Doctor Syn —he was calmly kneeling over the form of Mr. Rash. He had, in fact, propped his head upon his knee and was dabbing the bleeding face with his clean handkerchief. “Just get the brandy bottle out of that corner cupboard, will you, my man?” he said to the bo’sun. “The girl there has fainted. Nothing serious, just sheer fright.”

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The bo’sun did And as he was ordered, and Imogene was quickly restored to consciousness.

The captain for the most part just stared at Syn and said nothing. Suddenly he passed his hand over his brow and wiped away the great beads of perspiration that had gathered there; then taking the brandy bottle from the bo’sun’s hand he took a long pull, and with a sigh sat down in the armchair, still staring at Doctor Syn with unconcealed amazement.

“Feeling a bit squeamish, Captain?” said the latter, smiling. “You’re right, it’s an ugly sight. More blood than necessary, though. Merely flesh cuts. Bruised a bit, too! Help yourself to brandy. Good evening, Jerry; pleased to see you. Here’s your poor schoolmaster got hurt. Feeling better, Captain? That’s good. The sight of blood does turn one up. Was it Hannibal or Hamilcar who never could reconcile himself to the sight of blood? I forget. Some great general

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it was, though. The girl here is the same. Better, Imogene? Surely it was Hannibal, wasn’t it?”

“I am sure I don’t know, or care,” thundered the captain, standing up and turning desperately on the bo’sun. “Job Mallet, what in hell’s name is all this business? I’m dazed.”

But Doctor Syn went on speaking in his usual collected tones: “It’s all very horrible, I grant, but there’s no mystery, I assure you. We were all three chatting here quite pleasantly, when in leaps that mulatto of yours, attacks my friend the schoolmaster and all but kills him. I picked up a bottle and landed the brute a crack over the head. The bottle broke, and the madman turned on me, clapped a bit of broken glass in my mouth, which I expect is cut about a bit, and got away. I asked the girl to hold the light, and when she saw the schoolmaster’s face, why, over she went, candle and all, into a dead faint. Never saw such a thing in my life, but I tell you this, Captain: it’s your bounden

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duty to get hold of that maniac and string him up to the nearest tree, for there’s not a man, woman, or child safe while he’s free.”

Then Doctor Syn helped them to move the still unconscious Rash into his own bedroom, leaving the bo’sun and two seamen in charge, the rest of the sailors returning to the vicarage barn; and finally muffling himself in his great cloak he proceeded to the inn to procure a room for the night. Supporting Imogene, he walked ahead, followed by the captain and Jerry Jerk holding a lantern.

“Potboy?” said the captain on the way.

“Sir?” said Jerry Jerk.

“Are we dreaming, or what?”

“Blowed if I know; wish I did.”

On reaching the inn they all agreed that it was none too safe to walk abroad that night again, for fear of that sinister mulatto out upon the Marsh, so they

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ordered the supper and rooms to be got ready, and for an hour or so the Doctor chatted of indifferent things, just And as if nothing had happened.

But the captain kept silent that night; he had many things in his head that he couldn’t understand, and the greatest of these was Doctor Syn, that pious old cleric, who was making himself so pleasant over a steaming bowl of punch; and as the parlour clock ticked on, and the room was filled with tobacco smoke which the parson kept sending in thin rings across the fireplace, the captain rubbed his eyes hard, fidgeted and shuffled in his chair, wondering when the dream would stop and he would find himself awake.

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