Complete works of a e w.., p.319
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 319
“Sure,” said he, “you are the most pertinacious fellow. What’s come to you, who were content to drink your liquor and sit on one side while the world went by? No, she was not wife to Cullen Mayle, nor sister. She was a waif of the sea. Adam Mayle picked her up from the rocks a long while since. It was the only action that could be counted to his credit since he came out of nowhere and leased the granite house of Tresco. A barque — a Venetian vessel, it was thought, from Marseilles, in France, for a great deal of Castile soap, and almonds and oil was washed ashore afterwards — drove in a northwesterly gale on to the Golden Bar reef. The reef runs out from St. Helen’s Island, opposite Adam Mayle’s window. Adam put out his lugger and crossed the sound, but before he could reach St. Helen’s the ship went down into fourteen fathoms of water. He landed on St. Helen’s, however, and amongst the rocks where the reef joins the land he came across a sailor, who lay in the posture of death, and yet wailed like a hungry child. The sailor was dead, but within his jacket, buttoned up on his breast, was a child of four years or so. Adam took her home. No one ever claimed her, so he kept her, and called her Helen from the island on which she was wrecked. That was a long time since, for the girl must be twenty.”
“Is she French?” I asked.
“French, or Venetian, or Spanish, or what you will,” he cried. “It matters very little what country a woman springs from. I have no doubt that a Hottentot squaw will play you the same tricks as a woman of fashion, and with as demure a countenance. Well, it seems we are to go to bed sober;” and we went each to his lodging.
For my part, I lay awake for a long time, seeking to weave into some sort of continuous story what I had heard that day from Lieutenant Clutterbuck and the scraps which I remembered of Parmiter’s talk. But old Adam Mayle, who was dead; Cullen, the gannet who struck from the skies; and even Helen, the waif of the sea — these were at this time no more to me than a showman’s puppets; marionettes of sawdust and wood, that faced this way and that way according as I pulled the strings. The one being who had life was the boy Parmiter, with his jersey and his red fisherman’s bonnet; and I very soon turned to conjecturing how he fared upon his journey.
Had he money to help him forward? Had he fallen in with a kindly carrier? How far had he travelled? I had no doubt that, whether he had money or no, he would reach his journey’s end. His spirit was evident in the resolve to travel to London, in his success, and in the concealment of any weakness until the favour he asked for had been refused.
I bought next morning one of the new maps of the Great West Road and began to pick off the stages of his journey. This was the second day since he had started. He would not travel very fast, having no good news to lighten his feet. I reckoned that he would have reached the “Golden Farmer,” and I made a mark at that name on the map. Every day for a week I kept in this way an imagined tally of his progress, following him from county to county; and at the end of the week, coming out in the evening from my lodging at the corner of St. James’s Street, I ran plump into the arms of the gentleman I had met at Clutterbuck’s, and whose name I did not know. But his familiarity was all gone from him. He bowed to me stiffly, and would have passed on, but I caught him by the arm.
“Sir,” said I, “you will remember a certain night when I had the honour of your acquaintance.”
“Mr. Berkeley,” he returned with a smile, “I remember very much better the dreadful morning which followed it.”
“You will not, at all events, have forgotten the boy whom you discovered outside the door, and if you can repeat the story which he told, or some portion of it, I shall be obliged to you.”
He looked at his watch.
“I have still half an hour to spare,” said he; and he led the way to the “Groom Porters.” The night was young, but not so young but what the Bassett-table was already full. We sat down together in a dark corner of the room, and my companion told me what he remembered of Parmiter’s story.
It appeared that Cullen Mayle had quarrelled with his father on that Sunday night after he had sat in the stocks and had left the house. He had never returned. A year ago Adam Mayle had died, bequeathing his fortune, which was considerable, and most of it placed in the African Company, to his adopted daughter Helen. She, however, declared that she had no right to it, that it was not hers, and that she would hold it in trust until such time as Cullen should come back to claim it.
He did not come back, as has been said; but eight months later Dick Parmiter, on an occasion when he had crossed in his father’s fishing boat to Cornwall, had discovered upon Penzance Quay a small crowd of loiterers, and on the ground amongst them, with his back propped against a wall, a negro asleep. A paper was being passed from hand to hand among the group, and in the end it came to Dick Parmiter. Upon the paper was written Adam Mayle’s name and the place of his residence, Tresco, in the Scilly Islands; and Dick at once recognised that the writing was in Cullen Mayle’s hand. He pushed to the front of the group, and stooping down, shook the negro by the shoulder. The negro drowsily opened his eyes.
“You come from Mr. Cullen Mayle?” said Dick.
“Yes,” said the negro, speaking in English and quite clearly.
“You have a message from him?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?” asked Dick; and he put a number of questions eagerly. But in the midst of them, and while still looking at Dick, the negro closed his eyes deliberately and fell asleep.
“See,” cried a sailor, an oldish white-haired man, with a French accent; “that is the way with him. He came aboard with us at the port of London as wide awake as you or I. Bound for Penzance he was, and the drowsiness took him the second day out. At first he would talk a little; but each day he slept more and more, until now he will say no more than a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No.’ Why, he will fall asleep over his dinner.”
Dick shook the negro again.
“Do you wish to cross to Tresco?”
“Yes,” said the negro.
Dick carried him back to Scilly and brought him to the house on Tresco, where Helen Mayle now lived alone. But no news could be got from him. He would answer “Yes” or “No” and eat his meals; but when it came to a question of his message or Cullen Mayle’s whereabouts he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Helen judged that somewhere Cullen was in great need and distress, and because she held his money, and could do nothing to succour him, she was thrown into an extreme trouble. There was some reason why he could not come to Scilly in person, and here at her hand was the man sent to tell the reason; but he could not because of his mysterious malady. More than once he tried with a look of deep sadness in his eyes, as though he was conscious of his helplessness, but he never got beyond the first word. His eyelids closed while his mouth was still open to speak, and at once he was asleep. His presence made a great noise amongst the islands; from Brehar, from St. Mary’s, and from St. Martin’s the people sailed over to look at him. But Helen, knowing Cullen Mayle and fearing the nature of his misadventure, had bidden Parmiter to let slip no hint that he had come on Cullen’s account.
So the negro stayed at Tresco and spread a great gloom throughout the house. They watched him day by day as he slept. Cullen’s need might be immediate; it might be a matter of crime; it might be a matter of life and death. The gloom deepened into horror, and Helen and her few servants, and Dick, who was much in the house, fell into so lively an apprehension that the mere creaking of a door would make them start, a foot crunching on the sand outside sent them flying to the window. So for a month, until Dick Parmiter, coming over the hill from New Grimsby harbour at night, had a lantern flashed in his face, and when close to the house saw a man spring up from the gorse and watch him as he passed. From that night the house was continually spied upon, and Helen walked continually from room to room wringing her hands in sheer distraction at her helplessness. She feared that they were watching for Cullen; she feared, too, that Cullen, receiving no answer to his message, would come himself and fall into their hands. She dared hardly conjecture for what reason they were watching, since she knew Cullen. For a week these men watched, five of them, who kept their watches as at sea; and then Dick, taking his courage in his hands, and bethinking him of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, who had been an assiduous visitor at the house on Tresco, had crossed over to St. Mary’s and learned from old Captain Hathaway where he now lived. He had said nothing of his purpose to Helen, partly from a certain shyness at speaking to her upon a topic of some delicacy, and partly lest he should awaken her hopes and perhaps only disappoint them. But he had begged a passage in a ship that was sailing to Cornwall, and, crossing thither secretly, had made his way in six weeks to London.
This is the story which my acquaintance repeated to me as we sat in the “Groom Porters.”
“And Clutterbuck refused to meddle in the matter,” said I. “Poor lad!”
I was thinking of Dick, but my companion mistook my meaning, for he glanced thoughtfully at me for a second.
“I think you are very right to pity him,” he said; “although, Mr. Berkeley, if you will pardon me, I am a trifle surprised to hear that sentiment from you. It is indeed a sodden, pitiful, miserable dog’s life that Clutterbuck leads. To pass the morning over his toilette, to loiter through the afternoon in a boudoir, and to dispose of the evening so that he may be drunk before midnight! He would be much better taking the good air into his lungs and setting his wits to unknot that tangle amongst those islands in the sea. But I have overstayed my time. If you can persuade him to that, you will be doing him no small service;” and politely taking his leave, he went out of the room.
I sat for some while longer in the corner. I could not pretend that he had spoken anything but truth, but I found his words none the less bitter on that account. A pitiful dog’s life for Lieutenant Clutterbuck, who was at the most twenty-four years of age! What, then, was it for me, who had seven years the better of Lieutenant Clutterbuck, or rather, I should say, seven years the worse? I was thirty-one that very month, and Clutterbuck’s sodden, pitiful life had been mine for the last seven years. An utter disgust took hold of me as I repeated over and over to myself my strange friend’s words. I looked at the green cloth and the yellow candles, and the wolfish faces about the cloth. The candles had grown soft with the heat of the night, and were bent out of their shape, so that the grease dropped in great blots upon the cloth, and the air was close with an odour of stale punch. I got up from my corner and went out into the street, and stood by the water in St. James’s Park, If only some such summons had come to me when I was twenty-four as had now come to Clutterbuck! — well, very likely I should have turned a deaf ear to it, even as he had done! And — and, at all events, I was thirty-one and the summons had not come to me, and there was an end of the matter. To-morrow I should go back to the green cloth and not trouble my head about the grease blots; but to-night, since Clutterbuck was twenty-four, I would try to do him that small service of which the stranger spoke, and so setting out at a round pace I made my way to Clutterbuck’s lodging.
CHAPTER III
OF THE MAGICAL INFLUENCE OF A MAP
I DID NOT, however, find Lieutenant Clutterbuck that night. He was out of reach, and likely to remain so for some while to come. He had left his lodgings at mid-day and taken his body-servant with him, and his landlady had no knowledge of his whereabouts. I thought it probable, however, that some of his friends might have that knowledge, and I thereupon hurried to those haunts where of an evening he was an habitual visitor. The “Hercules Pillars” in Piccadilly, the “Cocoa Tree” in St. James’s Street, the “Spring Gardens” at Vauxhall, “Barton’s” in King Street, the “Spread Eagle” in Covent Garden, — I hurried from one to the other of these places, and though I came upon many of Clutterbuck’s intimates, not one of them was a whit better informed than myself. I returned to my lodging late and more disheartened than I could have believed possible in a matter wherein I had no particular concern. And, indeed, it was not so much any conjecture as to what strange tragical events might be happening about that watched and solitary house in Tresco which troubled me, or even pity for the girl maddened by her fears, or regret that I had not been able to do Clutterbuck that slight service which I purposed. But I took out the map of the Great West Road, and thought of the lad Parmiter trudging along it, doing a day’s work here among the fields, begging a lift there upon a waggon and slowly working his way down into the West. I had a very clear picture of him before my eyes. The day was breaking, I remember, and I blew out the candles and looked out of the window down the street. The pavement was more silent at that hour than those country roads on which he might now be walking, or that hedge under which he might be shaking the dew from off his clothes. For there the thrush would be calling to the blackbird with an infinite bustle and noise, and the fields of corn would be whispering to the fields of wheat.
I came back again to my map, and while the light broadened, followed Parmiter from the outset of his journey, through Knightsbridge, along the Thames, between the pine-trees of Hampshire, past Whitchurch, and into the county of Devon. The road was unwound before my eyes like a tape. I saw it slant upwards to the brow of a hill, and dip into the cup of a valley; here through a boskage of green I saw a flash of silver where the river ran; there between flat green fields it lay, a broad white line geometrically straight to the gate of a city; it curved amongst the churches and houses, but never lost itself in that labyrinth, aiming with every wind and turn at that other gate, from which it leaped free at last to the hills. And always on the road I saw Dick Parmiter, drunk with fatigue, tottering and stumbling down to the West.
For awhile he occupied that road alone; but in the end I saw another traveller a long way behind — a man on horseback, who spurred out from London and rode with the speed of the wind. For a little I watched that rider, curious only to discern how far he travelled, and whether he would pass Dick Parmiter; then, as I saw him drawing nearer and nearer, devouring the miles which lay between, it came upon me slowly that he was riding not to pass but to overtake; and at once the fancy flashed across me that this was Clutterbuck. I gazed at my map upon the table as one might gaze into a magician’s globe. It was no longer a map; it was the road itself imprisoned in hedges, sunlit, and chequered with the shadows of trees. I could see the horseman, I could see the dust spirting up from beneath his horse’s hoofs like smoke from a gun-barrel. Only his hat was pushed down upon his brows because of the wind made by the speed of his galloping, so that I could not see his face. But it was Clutterbuck I had no doubt. Whither had he gone from his lodging? Now I was convinced that I knew. There had been no need of my night’s wanderings from tavern to tavern, had I but looked at my map before. It was Clutterbuck without a doubt. At some bend of the road he would turn in his saddle to look backwards, and I should recognise his face. It was Lieutenant Clutterbuck, taking the good air into his lungs with a vengeance. He vanished into a forest, but beyond the forest the road dipped down a bank of grass and lay open to the eye. I should see him in a second race out, his body bent over his horse’s neck to save him from the swinging boughs. I could have clapped my hands with sheer pleasure. I wished that my voice could have reached out to Parmiter, tramping wearily so far beyond; in my excitement, I believed that it would, and before I knew what I did, I cried out aloud:
“Parmiter! Parmiter!” and a voice behind me answered:
“You must be mad, Berkeley! What in the world has come to you?”
I sat upright in my chair. The excitement died out of me and left me chilly. I looked about me; I was in my own lodging at the corner of St James’s Street, outside in the streets the world was beginning to wake, and the voice which had spoken to me and the hand which was now laid upon my shoulder were the voice and the hand of Lieutenant Clutterbuck.
“What’s this?” said he, leaning over my shoulder. “It is a map.”
“Yes,” I answered, “it is a mere map, the map of the Great West Road;” and in my eyes it was no longer any more than a map.
Clutterbuck, who was holding it in his hand, dropped it with a movement and an exclamation of anger. Then he looked curiously at me, stepped over to the sideboard and took up a glass or two which stood there. The glasses were clean and dry. He looked at me again, his curiosity had grown into uneasiness; he walked to the opposite side of the table, and drawing up a chair seated himself face to face with me.
“I hoped you were drunk,” said he. “But it seems you are as sober as a bishop. Are you daft, then? Has it come to a strait-waistcoat? I come back late from Twickenham. I stopped at the ‘Hercules Pillars.’ There I heard that you had rushed in two hours before in a great flurry and disorder, crying out that you must speak to me on the instant. The same story was told to me at the ‘Cocoa Trees.’ My landlady repeated it. I conjectured that it must needs be some little affair to be settled with sharps at six in the morning; and so that you might not say your friends neglect you, I turn from my bed, and hurry to you at three o’clock of the morning. I find that you have left your front-door unlatched for any thief that wills to make his profit of the house. I come into your room and find you bending over a map in a great excitement and crying out aloud that damned boy’s name. Is he to trouble my peace until the Judgment Day? Are you daft, eh, Steve?” and he reached his hand across the table not unkindly, and laid it on my sleeve. “Are you daft?”
I was staring again at the map, and did not answer him. He shifted his hand from my sleeve and took it up and away from my eyes. He looked at it himself, and then spoke slowly, and in quite a different voice:
