Thereupon, Cullen, from relating his adventures, turned to questions asking for word of this man and that whom he had known before he went away. These questions of course he put to Helen, and not once did he let slip a single allusion to the meeting he had had with her in the shed on Castle Down. For that silence on his part I was well prepared; the man was versed in secrecy. But Helen showed a readiness no whit inferior; she never hesitated, never caught a word back. They spoke together as though the last occasion when they had met was the night, now four years and a half ago, when Adam Mayle stood at the head of the stairs and drove his son from the house. One thing in particular I learned from her, the negro had died a month ago.
It was my turn when the gossip of the islands had been exhausted, and I had to tell over again of my capture by Glen and the manner of my escape. I omitted, however, all mention of an earlier visitant to the Abbey burial grounds, and it was to this omission that I owed a confirmation of my conviction that Cullen Mayle was the visitant. For when I came to relate how George Glen and his band sailed away towards France without the cross, he said:
“If I could find that cross, I might perhaps think I had some right to it. It is yours, Helen, to be sure, by law, and — —”
She interrupted him, as she was sure to do, with a statement that the cross and everything else was for him to dispose of as he thought fit. But he was magnanimous to a degree.
“The cross, Helen, nothing but the cross, if I can find it. I have a thought which may help me to it. ‘Three chains east of the east window in south aisle of St. Helen’s Church.’ Those were the words, I think.”
“Yes,” said I.
“And Glen measured the distance correctly?”
“To an inch.”
“Well, what if — it is a mere guess, but a likely one, I presume to think, — what if the chains were Cornish chains? There would be a difference of a good many feet, a difference of which George Glen would be unaware. You see I trust you, Mr. Berkeley. I fancy that I can find that cross upon St. Helen’s Island.”
“I have no doubt you will,” said I.
Cullen rose from his chair.
“It grows late, Helen,” said he, “and I have kept you from your sleep with my gossiping.” He turned to me. “But, Mr. Berkeley, you perhaps will join me in a pipe and a glass of rum? My father had a good store of rum, which in those days I despised, but I have learnt the taste for it.”
His proposal suited very well with my determination to keep a watch that night over Helen’s safety, and I readily agreed.
“You will sleep in your old room, Cullen,” she said, “and you, Mr. Berkeley, in the room next to it;” and that arrangement suited me very well. Helen wished us both good-night, and left us together.
We went up into Mayle’s cabin and Cullen mixed the rum, which I only sipped. So it was not the rum. I cannot, in fact, remember at all feeling any drowsiness or desire to sleep. I think if I had felt that desire coming over me I should have shaken it off; it would have warned me to keep wide awake. But I was not sensible of it at all; and I remember very vividly the last thing of which I was conscious. That was Cullen Mayle’s great silver watch which he held by a ribbon and twirled this way and that as he chatted to me. He spun it with great quickness, so that it flashed in the light of the candle like a mirror, and at once held and tired the eyes. I was conscious of this, I say, and of nothing more until gradually I understood that some one was shaking me by the shoulders and rousing me from sleep. I opened my eyes and saw that it was Helen Mayle who had disturbed me.
It took me a little time to collect my wits. I should have fallen asleep again had she not hindered me; but at last I was sufficiently roused to realise that I was still in the cabin, but that Cullen Mayle had gone. A throb of anger at my weakness in so letting him steal a march quickened me and left me wide awake. Helen Mayle was however in the room, plainly then she had suffered no harm by my negligence. She was at this moment listening with her ear close to the door, so that I could not see her face.
“What has happened?” I asked, and she flung up her hand with an imperative gesture to be silent.
After listening for a minute or so longer she turned towards me, and the aspect of her face filled me with terror.
“In God’s name what has happened, Helen?” I whispered. For never have I seen such a face, so horror-stricken — no, and I pray that I never may again, though the face be a stranger’s and not one of which I carried an impression in my heart.
Yet she spoke with a natural voice.
“You took so long to wake!” said she.
“What o’clock is it?” I asked.
“Three. Three of the morning; but speak low, or rather listen! Listen, and while you listen look at me, so that I may know.” She seated herself on a chair close to mine, and leant forward, speaking in a whisper. “On the night of the sixth of October I went to the shed on Castle Down and had word with Cullen Mayle. Returning I passed you, brushed against you. So much you have maintained before. But listen, listen! That night you climbed into Cullen’s bedroom and fell asleep, and you woke up in the dark middle of the night.”
“Stop! stop!” I whispered, and seized her hands in mine. Horror was upon me now, and a hand of ice crushing down my heart. I did not reason or argue at that moment. I knew — her face told me — she had been after all ignorant of what she had done that night. “Stop; not a word more — there is no truth in it.”
“Then there is truth in it,” she answered, “for you know what I have not yet told you. It is true, then — your waking up — the silk noose! My God! my God!” and all the while she spoke in a hushed whisper, which made her words ten times more horrible, and sat motionless as stone. There was not even a tremor in the hands I held; they lay like ice in mine.
“How do you know?” I said. “But I would have spared you this! You did not know, and I doubted you. Of course — of course you did not know. Good God! Why could not this secret have lain hid in me? I would have spared you the knowledge of it. I would have carried it down safe with me into my grave.”
Her face hardened as I spoke. She looked down and saw that I held her hands; she plucked them free.
“You would have kept the secret safe,” she said, steadily. “You liar! You told it this night to Cullen Mayle.”
Her words struck me like a blow in the face. I leaned back in my chair. She kept her eyes upon my face.
“I — told it — to Cullen Mayle?” I repeated.
She nodded her head.
“To-night?”
“Here in this room. My door was open. I overheard.”
“I did not know I told him,” I exclaimed; and she laughed horribly and leaned back in the chair.
All at once I understood, and the comprehension wrapped me in horror. The horror passed from me to her, though as yet she did not understand. She looked as though the world yawned wide beneath her feet. “Oh!” she moaned, and, “Hush!” said I, and I leaned forward towards her. “I did not know, just as you did not know that you went to the shed on Castle Down, that you brushed against me as you returned, — just as you did not know of what happened thereafter.”
She put her hands to her head and shivered.
“Just as you did not know that four years ago when Cullen Mayle was turned from the door, he bade you follow him, and you obeyed,” I continued. “This is Cullen Mayle’s work — devil’s work. He spun his watch to dazzle you four years ago; he did the same to-night, and made me tell him why his plan miscarried. Plan!” and at last I understood. I rose to my feet; she did the same. “Yes, plan! You told him you had bequeathed everything to him. He knew that tonight when I met him at St. Mary’s. How did he know it unless you told him on Castle Down? He bade you go home, enter his room, where no one would hear you, and — don’t you see? Helen! Helen!”
I took her in my arms, and she put her hands upon my shoulders and clung to them.
“I have heard of such things in London,” said I. “Some men have
this power to send you to sleep and make you speak or forget at their pleasure; and some have more power than this, for they can make you do when you have waked up what they have bidden you to do while you slept, and afterwards forget the act;” and suddenly Helen started away from me, and raised her finger.
We both stood and listened.
“I can hear nothing,” I whispered.
She looked over her shoulder to the door. I motioned her not to move. I walked noiselessly to the door, and noiselessly turned the handle. I opened the door for the space of an inch; all was quiet in the house.
“Yet I heard a voice,” she said, and the next moment I heard it too.
The candles were alight. I crossed the room and squashed them with the palm of my hand. I was not a moment too soon, for even as I did so I heard the click of a door handle, and then a creak of the hinges, and a little afterwards — footsteps.
A hand crept into mine; we waited in the darkness, holding our breath. The footsteps came down the passage to the door behind which we stood and passed on. I expected that they would be going towards the room in which Helen slept. I waited for them to cease that I might follow and catch Cullen Mayle, damned by some bright proof in his hand of a murderous intention. But they did not cease; they kept on and on. Surely he must have reached the room. At last the footsteps ceased. I opened the door cautiously and heard beneath me in the hall a key turn in a lock.
A great hope sprang up in me. Suppose that since his plan had failed, and since Tortue waited for him on Tresco, he had given up! Suppose that he was leaving secretly, and for good and all! If that supposition could be true! I prayed that it might be true, and as if in answer to my prayer I saw below me where the hall door should be a thin slip of twilight. This slip broadened and broadened. The murmur of the waves became a roar. The door was opening — no, now it was shutting again; the twilight narrowed to a slip and disappeared altogether.
“Listen,” said I, and we heard footsteps on the stone tiles of the porch.
“Oh, he is gone!” said Helen, in an indescribable accent of relief.
“Yes, gone,” said I. “See, the door of his room is open.”
I ran down the passage and entered the room. Helen followed close behind me.
“He is gone,” I repeated. The words sounded too pleasant to be true. I approached the bed and flung aside the curtains. I stooped forward over the bed.
“Helen,” I cried, and aloud, “out of the room! Quick! Quick!”
For the words were too pleasant to be true. I flung up my arm to keep her back. But I was too late. She had already seen. She had approached the bed, and in the dim twilight she had seen. She uttered a piercing scream, and fell against me in a dead swoon.
For the man who had descended the stairs and unlocked the door was not Cullen Mayle.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LAST
MESMER AT THIS date was a youth of twenty-four, but the writings of Van Helmont and Wirdig and G. Maxwell had already thrown more than a glimmering of light upon the reciprocal action of bodies upon each other, and had already demonstrated the existence of a universal magnetic force by which the human will was rendered capable of influencing the minds of others. It was not, however, till seventeen years later — in the year 1775, to be precise — that Mesmer published his famous letter to the Academies of Europe. And by a strange chance it was in the same year that I secured a further confirmation of his doctrines and at the same time an explanation of the one matter concerned with this history of which I was still in ignorance. In a word, I learned at last how young Peter Tortue came by his death.
I did not learn it from his father. That implacable man I never saw after the night when we listened to his footsteps descending the stairs in the darkness. He was gone the next morning from the islands, nor was any trace of him, for all the hue and cry, discovered for a long while — not, indeed, for ten years, when my son, who was then a lad of eight, while playing one day among the rocks of Peninnis Head on St. Mary’s, dropped clean out of my sight, or rather out of Helen’s sight, for I was deep in a book, and did not raise my head until a cry from my wife startled me.
We ran to the loose pile of boulders where the boy had vanished, and searched and called for a few minutes without any answer. But in the end a voice answered us, and from beneath our feet. It was the boy’s voice sure enough, but it sounded hollow, as though it came from the bowels of the earth. By following the sound we discovered at last between the great boulders an interstice, which would just allow a man to slip below ground. This slit went down perpendicularly for perhaps fifteen or twenty feet, but there were sure footholds and one could disappear in a second. At the bottom of this hole was a little cave, very close and dark, in which one could sit or crouch.
On the floor of this cave I picked up a knife, and, bringing it to the light, I recognised the carved blade, which I had seen Tortue once polish upon his thigh in the red light of a candle. The cave, upon inquiry, was discovered to be well known amongst the smugglers, though it was kept a secret by them, and they called it by the curious name of Issachum — Pucchar.
This discovery was made in the year of 1768, and seven years later I chanced to be standing upon the quay at Leghorn when a vessel from Oporto, laden with wine and oil, dropped anchor in the harbour, and her master came ashore. I recognised him at once, although the years had changed him. It was Nathaniel Roper. I followed him up into the town, where he did his business with the shipping agent and thence repaired to a tavern. I entered the tavern, and sitting down over against him at the same table, begged him to oblige me by drinking a glass at my expense, which he declared himself ready to do. “But I cannot tell why you should want to drink with me rather than another,” said he.
“Oh! as to that,” said I, “we are old acquaintances.”
He answered, with an oath or two, that he could not lay his tongue to the occasion of our meeting.
“You swear very fluently and well,” said I. “But you swore yet more fluently, I have no doubt, that morning you sailed away from St. Helen’s Island without the Portuguese King’s cross.”
His face turned the colour of paper, he half rose from his chair and sat down again.
“I was never on Tresco,” he stammered.
“Who spoke of Tresco, my friend?” said I, with a laugh. “I made mention of St. Helen’s. Yet you were upon Tresco. Have you forgotten? The shed on Castle Down? The Abbey burial ground?” and then he knew me, though for awhile he protested that he did not.
But I persuaded him in the end that I meant no harm to him.
“You were at Sierra Leone with Cullen, maybe,” said I. “Tell me how young Peter Tortue came by his death?” and he told me the story which he had before told to old Peter in an alehouse at Wapping.
Peter, it appeared, had not been able to hold his tongue at Sierra Leone. It became known through his chattering that Glen’s company and Cullen Mayle were going up the river in search of treasure, and it was decided for the common good to silence him lest he should grow more particular, and relate what the treasure was and how it came to be buried on the bank of that river. George Glen was for settling the matter with the stab of a knife, but Cullen Mayle would have none of such rough measures.
“I know a better and more delicate way,” said he, “a way very amusing too. You shall all laugh to-morrow;” and calling Peter Tortue to him, he betook himself with the whole party to the house of an old buccaneering fellow, John Leadstone, who kept the best house in the settlement, and lived a jovial life in safety, being on very good terms with any pirate who put in. He had, indeed, two or three brass guns before his door, which he was wont to salute the appearance of a black flag with. To his house then the whole gang repaired, and while they were making merry, Cullen Mayle addressed himself with an arduous friendliness to Peter Tortue, taking his watch from his fob and bidding the Frenchman admire it. For a quarter of an hour he busied himself in this way, and then of a sudden in a stern commanding voice he said:
“Stand up in the centre of the room,” which Peter Tortue obediently did.
“Now,” continued Cullen, with a chuckle to his companions, “I’ll show you a trick that will tickle you. Peter,” and he turned toward him. “Peter,” and he spoke in the softest, friendliest voice, “you talk too much. I’ll clap a gag on your mouth, you stinking offal! To-morrow night, my friend, at ten o’clock by my watch, when we are lying in our boat upon the river, you will fall asleep. Do you hear that?”
“Yes,” said Peter Tortue, gazing at Mayle.
“At half-past ten, as you sleep, you will feel cramped for room, and you will dangle a leg over the side of the boat in the river. Do you hear that?”
“Yes!”
“Very well,” said Cullen. “That will learn you to hold your tongue. Now come back to your chair.”
Peter obeyed him again.
“When you wake up,” added Cullen, “you will continue to talk of my watch which you so much admire. You will not be aware that any time has passed since you spoke of it before. You can wake up now.”
He made some sort of motion with his hands and Peter, whose eyes had all this time been open, said:
“I’ll buy a watch as like that as a pea to a pea. First thing I will, as soon as I handle my share.”
Cullen Mayle laughed, but he was the only one of that company that did. The rest rather shrank from him as from something devilish, at which, however, he only laughed the louder, being as it seemed flattered by their fear.
The next day the six men started up the river in a long-boat which they borrowed of Leadstone, and sailed all that day until evening when the tide began to fall.
Thereupon Cullen, who held the tiller, steered the boat out of the channel of the river and over the mudbanks, which at high tide were covered to the depth of some feet.
Here all was forest: the great tree-trunks, entwined with all manner of creeping plants, stood up from the smooth oily water, and the roof of branches over head made it already night.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 333