Dorrien of Cranston

Chapter Thirty Nine.

The Web Weaves

The bright, frosty weather lasted nearly a month, and was followed by a whole month of rain and squalls, culminating in a truly furious March. The trees in the park bent and groaned beneath the lashing wind; and night and day driving showers hurled themselves against the window panes with a crash as of volleys of gravel. At such times, even from Cranston, the thunder of the surf upon the cliff-girt coast could be plainly heard, and safe in her comfortable, luxurious home Olive would shudder at the dull booming of the billows and at the recollections conjured up by the sound. But it was with feelings of deepest thankfulness that she dwelt on that dark and terrible time, while realising her present lot of joyfulness and peace.

And, during this period of conflicting elements, a great and singular change had come over Roland Dorrien. He seemed like a man from whom a great weight of care had been suddenly lifted, an impending danger miraculously averted. His brooding despondency had completely left him, and though he was grave at times, it was with a seriousness far removed from that moodiness and settled gloom which had caused the charitable to whisper hints about hereditary insanity. His cheerfulness, too, became free and unaffected, displacing those wild, excitable fits of hilarity, followed by their corresponding periods of reaction and gloom. The neighbourhood marvelled, but it could do no more, for the cause of this metamorphosis in the Squire of Cranston was known only to one living person and guessed at by another – Dr Ingelow and Olive.

And the latter rejoiced with an exceeding great joy, and her cup of happiness was now, indeed, full. Never by word, or hint, or look had she sought to arrive at that which had caused her husband to return home in the small hours of a certain dark winter morning with such an expression of relief, yes, and of peace upon his face as she had never dared hope to behold there again. Never, even to herself, had she ventured to conjecture, except with the most reverential awe and thankfulness, as to the instrument of this miraculously restored peace; the power which had exorcised the evil spirit and restored to her this man in whom her life was wrapped up – restful, free from care, happy. If she dimly guessed at the nature of that power, she was content to stop there.

This afternoon the rain crashed and volleyed on the panes in such wise as to render the snug morning-room doubly snug. Suddenly Olive broke into a peal of laughter.

“Roland, dear, that seems a desperately engrossing book you have got hold of.”

“Hullo! And why?”

“Because you haven’t turned a page for eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes! I timed you by the clock.”

“By Jove! no more I have! No. Fact is, I’ve been thinking out an idea.”

“Let’s have it then.”

“Well, then – how should you like to go away for a time? To travel, in fact?”

“Oh, immensely,” she cried gleefully. “Where shall we go. Italy? It would be delightful to get out of this hideous weather for a couple of months. No, I should like to go to a new country this time. What about Spain? Or better still, Algiers? There – I’ve set my heart on Algiers.”

“All right. We can’t go too far, I think, nor yet too soon. So see if we can’t manage to get away at once. I feel as if my life depended on it.”

Hardly had he spoken the words than they struck him with a prophetic import. The fact was, he had been revolving this plan for some time past. It would be good for them both, in every way, besides which he felt an irresistible longing to leave the neighbourhood for a considerable period. It seemed to him in some instinctive way that such a course would do away with the last lingering possibility of danger. His apprehensions on the score of certain hints which Devine had from time to time let fall, were lulling. The fellow could have had nothing tangible to go upon. He was a shrewd rogue, merely talking at random in the hope of hitting the right nail on the head, but he, Roland, was too old a bird to hop upon any such palpably limed twig. Yet, on the whole, it might be safe to take a long change. Time blunts the edge of every weapon, even that dangerous one Suspicion.

They discussed the new scheme eagerly for half an hour, and then Olive got up, declaring she should go into the conservatory to get a little air. He laughed.

“Glad to get rid of you, dear. Only you won’t get much air there, I should think, unless it’s hot air. Wait – I’ve just got to dash off a couple of notes to a couple of tiresome fellows, and then I’ll come after you.”

Ten minutes later he had finished his writing.

“What an infernal day,” he muttered, as he took his way down the covered passage leading to the conservatory. Suddenly he stopped short, arrested by the sound of a voice. In the harsh, northern tones he recognised that of Johnston, the Scotch gardener.

Strange as it may seem, this worthy was still in the Cranston service. That it was so may be due to various reasons. The canny Scot, on the sudden and unlooked-for accession of the General’s exiled son, had hastened, with many plausible yet abject apologies, to make his peace with the reigning lord, for the berth was an uncommonly good one, and one to be kept at all costs. Roland, who knew the fellow to be a great rascal and felt towards him a hearty contempt, had kept him on, and his reasons for doing so were various. In the first place, it would save trouble, for the man was good at his work; then he had an idea that he might ascertain whether Johnston really had recognised him that day at Battisford, but as time went on and the man made no sign, his suspicions were lulled. However, the arrogance of so presuming a knave must be kept within bounds, and Johnston no longer dared tyrannise over his betters, by virtue of his office, as he had been wont to do in the old times. On one or two occasions, Roland had come up in time to overhear him rebuking in his old bumptious strain a guest who had ventured to pick a flower, and the trouncing he had got had made the worthy Scot squirm.

He hated his master with a bitter, rancorous hatred, but still he stayed on, for he foresaw the day when he might be revenged on him upon whom he now fawned, saw it dimly still, but opening wide possibilities. So patiently and warily the crafty Gael had watched and waited until the weapon should be ready to his hand, and then how he would strike! But to resume.

A frown of terrible import came over Roland’s face as he paused for a moment. The rain was volleying against the glass sides of the conservatory, but above its rattle, he could hear his wife’s voice, speaking in what seemed to him a tone of scared expostulation, and then the Scot replied:

” – A don’t want to hurrt yere guidman, but after these yeers of surrvice a’ think ye might promise me that place for my bairn, Davy. Ye wouldn’t be wanting to leave this bonny hoose yeerself, awm thinking.”

“Johnston! How dare you talk to me like that!” came the startled and indignant rejoinder.

Roland waited to hear no more. The blaring insolence of the fellow’s tone set his blood surging. There was a half-scream from Olive as he entered suddenly, confronting the astonished speaker.

“Go,” he said. “You are discharged this instant. Go out of my sight, before I forget myself.”

But Johnston had been drinking; yet, even though backed by a certain amount of “Dutch courage,” he deemed it advisable to withdraw a few paces.

“Would ye murrder me – too?” he yelled.

Roland still controlled himself with an effort little short of superhuman, but his face was white and icy.

“Go,” he said. “You are discharged.”

“Dischairged!” echoed Johnston sneeringly, for he had backed away to a safe distance. “Dischairged, am I? I’ll have the law on ye if ye assault me, but it’s a noose ye’ll come to for this day’s wurrk.”

And with this parting shot, he took himself off.

Olive was terribly alarmed and disturbed. The violence of the incident, and the dark and mysterious threats had upset her not a little. Tenderly, Roland set to work to soothe her.

“My darling, tell me all about it.”

She told him – how Johnston had accosted her directly she entered the place, asking her to use her influence to get his wages raised and also to procure a place for his son, who, by the way, was an out-and-out young rascal. She could see that the man had been drinking, and so had answered him quietly at first. Then his manner had become insolent and threatening, and he had hinted at terrible mischief which it was in his power to work his employer in the event of refusal.

“It was only talk, Roland, wasn’t it?” she urged, clinging to him. “Darling, tell me that he has no power to harm you. He has not – has he?”

As a matter of fact the threat had momentarily struck him with a pang of the old alarm. Momentarily, because, invoking reason to his aid, he decided that the rascally Scot had got his suspicions at second-hand from Gipsy Steve when the precious pair were in their cups. The suspicions of these two scoundrels were harmless. Only if he flinched might they become dangerous. So he had acted with decision, as we have seen.

“Not the slightest?” he answered reassuringly. “If he has I’ll give him every opportunity of putting it to the test. Off he goes this very evening, bag and baggage.”

Chapter Forty.

The Ban Again

The Cranston party had organised a picnic to Durnley Castle.

It was May – bright, flowery, laughing May – neither spring nor summer, but something of both. The sun’s rays were not too powerful this glorious afternoon, as with a delicious warmth they poured down upon the fields studded with golden buttercups and delicate bluebells, and distilled the sweet scent from blossoming hawthorn hedges, where the linnet and grey-backed shrike sat patiently upon their eggs, secure in the recesses of their thorny covert. Fair to the eye were the velvety coppices, with their newly-donned mantles of bright green, whence issued the soft coo of the turtle-dove, and the flap of the cushat’s wing among the branches. Then, too, how light-hearted the joyous, oft-repeated note of the cuckoo, sounding over the pleasant landscape!

Durnley Castle was a fine ruin, with massive ivy-grown walls still rising to a considerable height; and standing as it did on a lofty headland, the views of the coast obtained from it were superb. Otherwise it was much like other ruins of the kind, its scarp being literally strewn with bits of sandwich paper, ancient and modern, broken bottles, and similar relics of generations of picnic parties. It was under the care of a clan of cottagers, whose thatch might be detected among the trees hard by, which care mainly consisted in taking precious good care to collect sixpences, but stopped short at clearing away the abominable rubbish aforesaid.

“Eva,” cried Ned Medlicott, the curate’s twelve-year-old, running up to his sister, a pretty girl of eighteen, to exhibit some kestrel’s eggs. “Look at these. Did you ever see such stunners!”

“‘Stunners,’ indeed,” was the laughing reply. “Why, how did you get them, Ned?”

“I didn’t take them,” explained the boy; “Mr Dorrien climbed the tree – but – ”

“But the great thing is, here they are, eh, Ned?” cried Roland. “And it’s my private opinion you’ll break them before you get home.”

He was thinking how thoroughly happy the boy looked, and how easily he had been made so, and the thought seemed to please him.

“Hullo, Eustace! Late as usual,” he went on, as some new arrivals hove in sight, toiling up the steep escarpment. “Thought you had wrecked your party.”

For Eustace had brought round the rest of the party by sea, in a sailing craft, chartered at Minchkil.

“Oh, did you? Now look here. Do you know what Thought did? No? Well, I’ll tell you – Thought we had had a precious dry walk up from the boat, and lost no time in beheading one of those jolly long-necked bottles over there. Aren’t I right, Mr Medlicott?” turning to his companion.

“Oh, of course, you always are,” answered the latter with a laugh. He was the senior curate of Wandsborough, a middle-aged, scholarly man – owning a vast family, two representatives of which were with the party, as we have seen.

“Worse and worse!” said Roland, with a shake of the head, and mischievously barring the way. “Eustace, I wash my hands of you – ‘fizz’ before tiffin isn’t good for little boys like you.”

“Hallo – Sophonisba!” sang out Eustace. “Cut out one of those long-necked bottles, and sail round here with it, sharp! Your dear brother-in-law’s getting mean in his old age. Marsland, tell her to. She’ll do it if you tell her,” added the mischievous dog, grinning all over his face, while his youngest sister looked viciously at him without complying.

“There, there. Go and do for yourself, Eustace,” said Roland, letting him pass. “And now that we are all here, we can gather round the festive – table-cloth. Assort yourselves, good people, and do it well; if you don’t it’s your own faults. Stewart, keep an eye on that subaltern of yours, and don’t let him have too much champagne, or my wife says you will be held responsible as his superior officer.”

Captain Stewart – in whose troop Eustace was – and who had run down with him for the occasion – vehemently declined responsibility, and set to work devoting himself to Eva Medlicott, to the no small satisfaction of that young lady.

“‘Shop!’ Bear witness all!” cried Eustace, tossing off his glass with the air of a man who had walked a mile up a steep hill at mid-day. “He’s talking arrant ‘shop.’ Roland, old chap, consider yourself fined a case of this same ‘gooseberry.’ Stewart and I will take it up to Town with us to-night.”

“Nonsense, you’re not going to-night,” said Olive.

“Am. With deep grief I say it – but – ‘painful necessities,’ as the schoolmaster says upon certain occasions! If we miss that train I’m broke. Chief desperately glum – vows I’ve had four times too much leave already. Isn’t that so, Stewart?”

“For once, Ingelow, truth and the exigencies of the Service compel me to support your statement,” gravely replied the captain, whose attention was divided between his fair companion and the dispensing of a pigeon-pie to many hungry applicants.

There was a laugh at this, and then, the contagion spreading, the fun grew apace, and never a merrier party made the grey old ruins ring. It wae a model picnic party, not too large, all fairly well known to each other, or, in the case of an exception or two, acquisitions to any circle, and all young, except perhaps the curate, who was such a thoroughly good-natured man that his quietness – “slowness” we are afraid they called it – was quite forgiven him. Then there were no elderly chaperons to spoil sport with their whisperings and confounded sharp-sightedness, and not even a botanically-minded old maid to drag off some wretched youth to grub up fern-roots for her, when he would fain be wandering perdu in another direction with a very different sample of charmer.

The Dorriens had been obliged to defer their foreign trip. Business of all sorts, connected more or less with the property, which could not well be left to others, had kept cropping up in the most vexatious manner since we heard them making their plans nearly two months ago. To Roland these delays had been irritating in the extreme, but now he thought he saw the end of them, and had made up his mind to start early next month. There was one bright side to it all. He had heard no more mysterious hints. These seemed to have ceased since the departure of Johnston, who had left the neighbourhood altogether when summarily dismissed from Cranston.

Luncheon over, the party dispersed themselves abroad according to taste – in pairs or in squads. Others preferred taking things easy where they were. Besides those named, there were half a dozen other people who are not specially concerned with this history.

“Hallo! Who are these chaps, I wonder?” suddenly exclaimed Eustace, who was having a quiet weed with his brother-in-law, in a snug, sunny corner of the ruin. Two men were strolling leisurely towards them, stopping every now and then, as if admiring the view to seaward. The foremost had a telescope slung round him, while the other carried a butterfly-net and specimen box. They might have been a brace of well-to-do tradesmen.

“Where? Oh! The advance-guard of a cheap trip, most likely. Two waggonettes of hooraying yahoos to follow,” was the somewhat dissatisfied reply.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said the foremost of the new arrivals. “Excuse my asking, but is there any objection to me and my friend going over the castle.”

“None whatever, as far as I know,” answered Roland good-naturedly. “By the way, is there a trip behind you?”

The men looked mystified for a moment, then the naturalist replied.

“Oh, no, gentlemen, only we two. We walked over from Wandsbro’, we two did, just to look at the view from here, and catch a few butterflies.”

“Caught any?”

“Not to speak of, sir. Just these two or three,” opening his green box. A tortoiseshell of dissipated aspect, and a couple of orange tips stood displayed.

“H’m! Well, as far as I know you’ll find nothing to prevent you going where you like. Only I should advise you to be careful in walking about the walls, because they’re unsafe in parte.”

The men thanked him and walked away. Eustace and Roland, grateful that the invasion took so mild a form, puffed their cigars lazily, and straightway forgot all about it. Had they been aware of it, what matter to them that the strangers, exploring round the ruins, should light upon the Cranston footman, lunching on the relics of the spread, and that the said strangers, being of an engaging manner after their kind, should, in a trice, find themselves on the best of terms with James, resulting in much friendly consumption of Cranston ale, all round.

“That your governor, up there?” said he of the telescope presently, jerking a thumb in the direction he had just left.

“Which?” asked James laconically.

“Tall gent – light clothes – talks like God Almighty.”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Good governor?” said the butterfly-catcher.

“So, so. Too much shirt, though – rather.”

“Hey?”

“Too shirty, for them as doesn’t like it,” explained James.

Then, with tongue loosened by a liberal allowance of ale, indiscriminately poured upon the absorption of the residue of unfinished champagne bottles, the faithful James proceeded to give his new friends a full, true, and above all, humorous account of his master’s idiosyncrasies, whereat the strangers laughed till they could no longer sit upright. But even the graphic James missed the real humour of the thing, as conveyed from one to the other of his listeners in a swift and irresistibly comic glance.

The afternoon had reached the debatable ground lying between itself and evening, and the diverse and errant members of the party had found their way back to the rendezvous. And last of all arrived Marsland and Sophie, trying to look as if they had been there all the time; and the latter, catching her brother’s eye, read therein a mute and satirical assurance that she had not heard the last of her tardy arrival and eke of its circumstances.

“Don’t wait for me, anybody who wants to stroll on,” said Olive, who was superintending the putting away of the things. “I’ll come on afterwards.”

“And, by the way, Stewart, do you mind taking the ribbons going back?” said Roland. “I’m going home by way of the angry deep.”

The Captain declared himself delighted, as in fact he was. A smart whip, he flattered himself he would show those four slashing bays of Dorrien’s at their best.

“Ta-ta, Stewart. Good people, I hope all your lives are insured! I know what Stewart on the box means,” sung out the irrepressible Eustace, with a fiendish chuckle over the misgiving which he had flung in among the driving party. “And now for the rolling deep?”

We will follow the party in the boat. Besides Eustace and Roland there were two young ladies from Wandsborough and Mr Medlicott and Ned. Item, an amphibious youth from Minchkil, who represented the “crew.”

It was a lovely evening. There was just enough breeze to propel them gently and without rocking, and a fragrant whiff of sweet hawthorn reached them even there. As they stood out to sea, the moon shone out brighter and brighter in the clear sky, glancing upon the tiny ripples as though its light were touching the moving spear points of a host. Then, as they presently rounded the headland, a hollow and tuneful echo seemed wafted back to them as the waves plashed against the semi-circle of cliff with the inflowing tide.

Eustace and the two Wandsborough girls were deep in a wordy war of banter and laughter, the former steering villainously in consequence. Roland and the curate were puffing at their cigars and lazily conversing in the fore part of the boat, and young Ned was playfully pulling Roy’s ears. Suddenly through the stillness of the night, above the musical ripple as the bow of the boat cleft the water, above the bell-like plash of the waves upon the shore, a strange, mysterious sound came wafting over the moonlit sea, a sound as of the deep-toned howling of a dog.

The sky, studded with stars, is without a cloud. Yonder, shadowed by the lofty headland, the grey rock-turrets of The Skegs stand forth spectral under the clear moon. Again that most dismal sound floats out upon the night air, but no one seems to hear or notice it. No one? One – that is. One who has heard it before. The curate, glancing at his host, is surprised and alarmed at the latter’s face, for it is ashy white; and following the set and rigid gaze, behold! a dark shadow is resting blackly upon the summit of the haunted rock. And Roy, with his hackles erect and gums drawn back, is snarling aggressively in response.

The terrible and grisly Ban once more. What does it portend?

Chapter Forty One.

The Sword Falls

Olive was rather unwell on the morning after the picnic. It was nothing to worry about, she declared. She supposed she had overdone it, and was a little tired. Any way, she would stay in bed till the afternoon. So Roland and Sophie sat down to a late breakfast alone, Marsland having left earlier to spend a few days at Ardleigh.

“What a jolly day we had yesterday!” the girl was saying. “Olive didn’t catch cold, did she, Roland?”

“No. She’ll be all right after a good sleep. Roy, you vagabond, shut up. That melodious voice of yours is matter in the wrong place just now.”

But Roy, who had been lying curled up on the rug, refused to be silenced. His threatening growl became a deep-toned bay, and his ruff began to rise, as with fangs bared he sprang towards the door, which was yet shut. There were voices in the hall. Then the door opened.