Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  He saw no more of Adams for a day or two, and concluded that he had gone home; and his equanimity endured till Murrell arrived to negotiate on Adams’s behalf. At this it received a great shock. For here was Murrell in possession of the secret — a man as clever as himself, in another way — and the fact suggested unpleasant possibilities. What should prevent Murrell, failing to make an arrangement, from giving information to the revenue officers, and pocketing a share of the prize-money for himself? He was in no way implicated in the run, and stood to make most by revealing it; and in old Sim Cloyse’s simple system of ethics what a man made most by was what a man would do. More, such a catastrophe would mean worse than the mere loss of the “stuff,” bad as that would be; it would mean gaol, and a fine whose magnitude sent one hot and cold to think of — that is, if Murrell’s evidence could connect one with the matter. Old Sim Cloyse fell into a great disquietude.

  On the other hand, he had no idea of how far Murrell’s information went. Golden Adams, in consulting him, had possibly used very general terms, without distinctly specifying what the goods were, or where they lay. Murrell’s use of the words “hidden property” — he had never once particularized further — gave encouragement to this hope, though Cloyse was not persuaded; for he could not conceive a conversation between Golden Adams and Cunning Murrell which should not leave the wizard in possession of all that Adams had to let out. So that on the whole, Sim Cloyse’s disquietude increased rather than diminished with reflection.

  Plainly something must be done, and that quickly. If Murrell should turn informer it would probably be soon, lest the tubs were shifted. Obviously the proper move was to shift them instantly — that night, if possible. But no arrangements had been made, no men were ready, and nobody was prepared to receive them. Cloyse decided to house the tubs quietly himself, and with no help but that of his son — his son and his horses, to be exact. He knew he was able to lay his hands on three, two that he had bought, with the design of selling them again, from Hayes, who ran the shrimp-cart to London, and an old white vanner. He considered that it would be no difficult thing to lead the three silently out of Leigh at nightfall, over the marsh, and up the slope to the castle. The tubs were ready slung for carrying, and he expected that the broad backs of the horses could, with a little contrivance, be made to carry so many that no more than three journeys, or at most four, would be necessary. In his old house in Leigh Strand and the outbuildings attached to it there was room and to spare for the tubs twice over; and though no doubt there was danger in having the “stuff” on one’s premises, it certainly seemed to be the less, by far, of the two risks that faced him.

  Accordingly the horses were made ready, and at the proper time of dark, when the Leigh houses, standing all ways, seemed to hump their high shoulders and confer together, black and frowning, plotting to fall murderously on the next passenger along the narrow way beneath, old Sim Cloyse and young Sim his son went out silently over the little foothills and the marsh, leading their horses. The night was not so dark as Cloyse would have preferred had the circumstances admitted of choice; indeed, at times the moonlight flung down brightly on everything. But for the most of the time the scurrying clouds spread a mottle of moving shadow that was near as effectual a screen as solid darkness itself, and the wind lay so as to carry away from Leigh and any possible watchers the faint sound made by horses’ feet in the soft ground and thick herbage.

  For near three-quarters of an hour they went in silence, picking their way carefully, because of holes and ditches. For most of the latter part of the journey the towers of the castle were fitfully visible, at times springing suddenly as it were into being, pale and ghostly on the hilltop, and vanishing as quickly under the shade of the next cloud.

  There was a gate in a hedge a hundred and fifty yards from the nearest corner of the castle, and having opened it with noiseless care, young Cloyse stayed there with the horses, while his father went forward to observe.

  There was no sound but the hum of the wind, and nothing moved that the wind did not stir, save the unresting tide of shadows. Cloyse crept forward silently, hidden by shade, bush, and fallen masonry, till he stood in a narrow passage lying along the face of the foundations, between them and a row of bushes.

  The hole was closed still, and it was plain that the stones piled to block it had not been disturbed. Cloyse crept back as silently as he had come, and beckoned to young Sim, They led the horses up, and the older man, taking a candle-end from his pocket, was indicating by gestures where the animals could best be tethered, when young Sim, with a start, pointed up to the wall-foot just above them. Cloyse had scarce time to turn when a blinding flash met him; and with a crash in his ears and a stinging pang in an arm, he realised that he had been fired at, and hit.

  The horses started and tugged at their halters, and it was more by instinct than because of reflection that young Sim crouched and began to hurry downhill with two of them; and his father, his wound notwithstanding, seized the other horse and followed, crouching also, taking shelter of the animal and making for the bushes.

  He had gone twenty yards, perhaps, when there came another shot, and broke a thorn bush. There was no pursuit, however; and father and son presently found themselves beyond the gate and in comparative safety, with a little relief to qualify a great deal of terror and surprise. The wound bled a good deal, and was painful, but it was little more than a deep graze, ploughing the outer surface of the upper arm scarce a quarter of an inch at the deepest. A tied handkerchief restrained the bleeding for a time, and with many tremors and much floundering the two reached home at last.

  Old Sim Cloyse was disquieted before his journey, but he quaked after it. For he made no doubt that he had been fired at by a revenue man, and he lay the night in hourly expectation of a party to arrest him. But the morning came and found him safe, and it went, and left him undisturbed. With the passing hours reflection got the better of his fears, and he began to doubt if his plan had been frustrated by the coastguard after all. Otherwise why was there no pursuit? And why was he still left unmolested? Young Sim had perceived but a single dark figure, and had scarce pointed at it when the shot was fired. True there were two shots, but they might easily have been fired by one man with a pair of pistols. And if no Queen’s men were concerned that one man could scarce be other than Golden Adams. Adams was a dangerous sort of fellow, and quite likely to have mounted guard over the tubs with a pair of pistols, resolved to prevent any attempt at removing them till his demands were satisfied.

  Now that the notion had occurred to him, Cloyse wondered that he had not thought of it before, nor laid his plans in view of the possibility. But at present he was by no means sure, after all, that his assailant was not a coastguardsman, as he had at first supposed. So he sent young Sim out to spy about Leigh for an hour.

  Young Sim’s observations were reassuring. The coastguard were about their customary duties in the ordinary sleepy course; the women hung out their linen and clinked about the muddy Strand in pattens, and quarrelled at the pump; the men waited the tide, mended their nets, smoked their pipes, and lounged about the Smack Inn; and in all Leigh there was not a new thing to hear or to talk about save only the chances of a change of wind. Plainly there had been no disturbance of the coastguard. If there had been anything like a seizure during the night — were it merely of one square bottle of Dutch gin — nobody could have walked the length of Leigh Strand without hearing of it a dozen times. The linen would still lie within, and the quarrel at the pump would be held over till to-morrow, or even postponed for a week, while the business was discussed at length, at large, and again; and the substitute coastguard would have been in a riot of distraction.

  Old Sim Cloyse was relieved; but with his spirits his natural spite rose also, and he was more than ever obstinately resolved to seize the tubs at any cost, were it only to damnify Golden Adams. But meantime young Sim extended his reconnaissance to Hadleigh, by the road, and undertook, though with no great readiness,
to take a peep at the castle by daylight, and if possible to ascertain if anything were yet removed.

  He had a drink at the Castle Inn, and another at the Crown. At the Crown Abel Pennyfather was talking of crops to the landlord, nobody else being there to hear; but at the Castle Dan Fisk was reciting, with facetious embellishment, the story of Abel Pennyfather’s cow, and the terrific adventures of Jarge Crick. And in the tap-room Jarge Crick himself, out of a job for the time, but in no lack of eleemosynary threepenny from a constant succession of gaping inquirers, was repeating his last night’s experiences again and again, having already arrived, by natural accretion and the concatenation of pints, at a tale of hundreds of phantom winged horses, of all known and unknown colours, bestridden by goblins and skeletons, belching lightnings and thunderbolts about the hill, whereon Black Men, White Ladies, and the Devil himself disported at large under the shadows of a flying cohort of witches on broomsticks, directed by Mrs Martin and her niece Dorrily Thorn.

  But there was no word anywhere of slung tubs, no talk of the coastguard, no hint of any but supernatural disturbance of last night’s quiet on the marshes. In that respect young Sim took comfort; but there was matter for more misgiving in Jarge Crick’s tale. Through all its multiplication of maze and muddle it was plain to infer that Castle Hill and the marshes had not been so wholly void of by-chance observers as they had seemed.

  Young Sim Cloyse took to the fields east of the lane, so as to approach the castle without passing within hail of Banham’s. He was a careful youth, as became his ancestry, and as his sly-heavy face, a smoother copy of his father’s, gave hint; but he was a youth notwithstanding, and his divagations with Mag Banham had led him farther than he meant. For indeed they had begun less from idle fancy — though that had its part — than from pique at his repulse by Dorrily Thorn, and from the vanity of an obstinate nature. And now he found himself so far entangled that he took refuge in caution and avoidance.

  The black cottage came in view at one point of his walk, and he was in some degree tempted to go aside on chance of meeting Dorrily; for the girl was not a fool, and plainly she must see the superior attractions of his circumstances and his expectations from his father, over the poverty of a common seaman; to say nothing of personal comparison, wherein his dense complacency would admit of no disadvantage. But for the moment there was more pressing business, and he went on by a circuitous path, which led him to the eastern side of the castle.

  He had seen nobody since he had left Hadleigh, and he could neither see anybody now nor hear a sound of human origin. He took his way softly among bushes up such a part of the hill as should lead him unseen to a view of the place of storage.

  It seemed to be still undisturbed. He crept a little closer. It was undisturbed, without a doubt; the stones still blocked the opening, and there was no sign that one had been shifted. He listened again, and peered about him. The stillness was such that here, bending low near the ground, he could distinctly hear the mumble of the grazing of a score of sheep on the marsh by the hill-foot. He grew so confident that he rose boldly and approached the broken masonry: and then on a sudden was near stricken to his knees by a loud voice just above him.

  “Ho-ho!” sang the voice. “Yow nigh made me drop my glass, I jumped so!”

  And the face of Roboshobery Dove, wide and brown, and crowned as with a halo by the shiny hat, looked down from his loop-hole.

  Young Sim gathered his wits together as well as he might, and made an indistinct answer, turning from the piled stones and affecting intense interest in the view toward Leigh.

  “I den’t hear yow comin’ — not a sound,” Dove went on; “been watchin’ so close for prizes goin’ to Chatham. But I han’t seen one now for near a week.”

  “No?” answered young Sim, with an uneasy effort at airiness — a thing beyond his nature at any time— “Well — I — I mus’ be gettin’ on.”

  And he went lumbering down toward the copse and the gate in the way he had led the horses the night before; the plain consternation and perplexity on his face making an odd contrast with the laboured burlesque of careless frolic in his swinging arms and legs, whereby he strove to impart to his back view an aspect of buoyant thoughtlessness and jaunty ease.

  Roboshobery Dove gazed from his perch on this exhibition with a mind innocent of suspicion, as ever; but the hard-faced man who crouched and peered from the copse below, with remains of broken food lying near him, and pistols in his pockets, saw it from the front, and was grimly amused.

  XIV. — AN INVITATION OVER A FENCE

  IT was natural that Dorrily Thorn should do what was possible to withdraw her aunt from the notice of the neighbours, in the circumstances wherein she stood — and, indeed, in a smaller measure, to withdraw herself Jarge Crick’s fantasies had not only grown by his own embellishments and expansions, but by the repetition and imagination employed in carrying them through the district; and soon there was not a household in all Rochford Hundred that had not the news of the horrid bedevilment of Castle Hill on the night when Abel Pennyfather’s cow went astray, and scarce half a dozen that had the same tale, except in so far as all agreed that Mrs Martin made a leading figure in it. More, Em Banham was “took comical” again, and was growing worse. The shock of the explosion and the excitement of fair day had expended their influence, and now, in the dull round of daily muddle that was all her life, she was relapsing into the state of “all-overs” that Cunning Murrell’s art had proved to have been the demoniac work of Mrs Martin. The consequent demeanour of the villagers was unpleasant. There was something peculiarly insufferable in the laboured civility of the most of them, something more hopeless and repellent altogether than the mere persecution of daring hobbledehoys who cried “Witch!” and flung clods. When a woman changed her course, so as to pass to the right, offered her “Good morning” with a visible anxiety to get it out before the other could speak (a needful precaution with all witches), and went off out of sight as quickly as might be, there was that in the civility that made it worse than insult. It could not be resented, and it was sign of a cutting off from human accord.

  So that the two women kept to themselves more than ever, and did none of the occasional field work wherewith they had aided their small resources in other years. Instead they busied themselves more in their own little garden, whose produce went a good way toward keeping them in food. Dorrily found that this work was good for her aunt, who was quiet and seemingly happy so long as she was undisturbed; though the clouding of her mind persisted, and made the girl’s loneliness harder to support than ever.

  The night succeeding that on which Dorrily had been awakened by the sound of shots, was another of little rest for Mrs Martin, albeit there was no disturbance from without; and when she showed some signs of fatigue in the garden the next morning, Dorrily was quick to persuade her to rest, and soon had the satisfaction to see her dozing in her armchair in the keeping-room. So she left her there, partly closed the door, and returned to her work.

  She had piled aside the early bean-stalks which she had rooted up, keeping one or two of the largest for earwig-capture, and now she set to loosening the ground they had occupied. She dug and turned steadily, and it was plain to see that the symmetry of her figure owed its debt to bodily exercise; for on that condition alone is it permitted a woman to use a spade with grace.

  She was watching her work, and was conscious of no witness till a shadow fell along the ground before her, and young Sim Cloyse’s voice said:

  “Yow den’t ote to be diggin’ a garden with hands like they. Not when yow might be in a silk gownd, takin’ your ease.”

  He leaned on the fence with his elbows, smiling as amiably as an unsuitable countenance would permit. Dorrily said nothing, though she reflected that Jack Martin would have made no compliments, but would have taken the spade to do the work himself; as, for that matter, would Steve Lingood or Roboshobery Dove, wooden leg notwithstanding.

  “Not but what it doan’t suit yow,” young
Sim went on gallantly. “Most things do.”

  “Thank ‘ee, Master Cloyse,” Dorrily answered calmly, without looking at him; and went on digging.

  Young Sim shifted his feet and rubbed his palm over an ear. He was considering what to say next.

  “’Tis a fine day agin,” he remarked at last.

  Dorrily assented.

  “An’ ’tis lookin’ like a good harvest.”

  Dorrily thought so, too.

  Young Sim shifted his feet again, and rubbed the other ear.

  “Yow doan’t fare over glad to see me,” he complained.

  That was the truth; so Dorrily said nothing.

  “But ’tis a monsus treat for me when I see you.” He said it with an earnest leer that brought a flush to Dorrily’s cheek, and set her digging faster.

  Having got out this sentiment, young Sim took breath again. It is not easy for one person to keep going a conversation of this sort. The pause endured for a few seconds, and then he tried another tack.

  “I be pardners with my father now,” he said, complacently.

  Dorrily was glad to hear it.

  “An’ we’re takin’ arl Paigles’s crops this year for money owin’,” he went on, with pride.

  This commercial victory only stirred Dorrily so far as to say: “I’m very sorry for Master Paigles.” A perversity shocking to young Sim’s ideas.

  He stared blankly for some little while, more at a loss than ever. At last he said plaintively: “Yow be deadly hard on a chap.”

  Dorrily began to feel a little impatient. “Hard on what chap.” she asked, disingenuously.

  “Ho! yow dunno! Not you!” young Sim replied, with a grin. “But yow han’t no need,” he went on. “I count I be as good as one or two round these parts; so now!”

  Dorrily did not dispute the proposition.

  “An’ could spend fower pound a week if need was.”