Читать книгу The Riddle of the Mysterious Light - Thomas W. Hanshew - Страница 10

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"To begin with, Mr. Cleek, the origin of the affair dates back eleven months, when the engagement of my daughter, Lady Adela Fulgarney, to the young Marquis of Uppingham was first made public. I do not know if you have any knowledge of the Valehampton district or of the immediate surroundings of Essex Castle, so I must tell you that the former consists of some thirty or forty cottages with outlying farm lands, and that the latter is within easy access of St. Saviour's Church, which, with its detached belfry and surrounding graveyard, is separated from the western boundary of the castle grounds only by a narrow road upon which front two buildings, known as the Castle Cottages on account of their having been erected unintentionally within the precincts of the castle grounds years before a proper survey was carried into effect. I call attention to these two buildings because it is out of one of them that the whole perplexing mystery arises. They stand fronting upon the road which passes the churchyard, and their gardens encroach upon the castle demesne at a point about ninety-six yards distant from the west wing of the castle itself. Do I make that clear?"

"Perfectly."

"I am glad of that, because it is important. In the days when the late Duchess lived she frequently begged of me to have the cottages razed, as she considered them not only an intrusion upon our privacy, but a detriment to the place in every way. I could not, however, bring myself to comply with the request, because both had been taken under lease for a term of years, and although I could, doubtless, have purchased that lease from the tenants holding it, I did not like to do so, since one of the two cottages was occupied by the aged parents of James Overton, my land steward, and they were both very loath to leave it. The other had been occupied by the wife and family of the curate of our vicar. About thirteen months ago, however, the Rev. Mr. Giles was appointed to a living of his own in Yorkshire, and took his departure after a long and pleasant sojourn with us. I could not, however, tear down the one house and leave the other standing with any benefit to the appearance of the estate, so I concluded to allow both to remain until the end of the Overton lease, at which time I proposed to demolish both. A hundred times since, Mr. Cleek, I have regretted that decision. If the cottages had to stand, I said to myself, it was as well that they should both be bringing in a revenue as for one of them to remain vacant. So as the Overton lease had still six years to run I consented to my land steward finding a tenant for the one vacated by the curate for that period only.

"James Overton found a tenant almost immediately, and at that one who improved rather than detracted from the natural beauty of the castle grounds. He inhabits the place still. He is an elderly man with some small private means of his own and an absolute mania for horticulture. The result is that he makes his little garden a veritable Eden of beauty; and as there are only himself and wife, neither children nor grandchildren, and as they not only have no visitors, but hold themselves aloof from even the village folk, this Mr. Joshua Hurdon is a very desirable tenant indeed."

"So I should imagine, Duke. And your land-steward?"

"He is one of the best. Been with me for nine years. I look upon him as my right-hand man, Mr. Cleek. But that is not to the point. Efficient as he was in speedily finding a model tenant for the cottage vacated by the curate, he was not by any means successful in the case of that vacated by his parents."

"They, too, have left then, after all?"

"Yes. Old Mrs. Overton caught a chill and died about a fortnight after the Hurdons moved in, poor creature. She had gone on a visit to a married daughter in Scotland, and her death occurred there. Of course, the old man could not be left altogether to the tender mercies of the village charwoman, who used to come in two or three times a week to do the rough household work, so his son, after returning from the funeral, procured him a housekeeper in the person of one Mrs. Mallory, a widow, who, with her sister, undertook the entire charge of the place and dispensed with the services of the charwoman altogether. This Mrs. Mallory appears to have been a most excellent person for the post and to have performed her duties satisfactorily, although she was of a highly romantic and even emotional disposition. She seems to have devoured love stories and cheap romances with appalling avidity. It is to her propensity for viewing life in the utterly unnatural and luridly coloured manner set forth by such literature that Valehampton owes its unhappy state to-day.

"I cannot vouch for the facts, Mr. Cleek, for I never saw the person, and never even heard of him until after his death; but, as the report goes, this romantic creature, wandering about the country lanes and dreaming her silly dreams, one day heard the sound of someone sobbing and crying out in pain. On going to ascertain the cause, she found a young man of about nineteen, evidently in the last stages of consumption, lying on his face in the woods, and a big, burly gypsy standing over him and beating him with a whip, at the same time mumbling some outlandish gibberish which the woman declared she recognized at once as the spell to avert the Evil Eye.

"Well, to make a long story short, this buxom Diana of the Turnip Fields flew at the gypsy, plucked the whip from his hand, and laid it about his shoulders to such good purpose that he made off and left her with the consumptive youth. She declares, however, that before the man vanished for good he turned and shouted back to her: 'There is a curse on the creature—he is a Vampire. Evil goes with him where he lives, and evil will linger where he dies. Rivers will be choked and devils ride on the air in the place that holds his body. Children shall be stolen and the blood of them sucked by spirits, and they shall be stricken blind who cross any threshold which his accursed foot has pressed!'"

"What utter drivel!" commented Cleek, with a derisive laugh. "It is the baldest rubbish I ever heard in all my life. What happened next?"

"Well, it appears, from what I have heard, that the woman not only took pity on the unfortunate youth she had rescued, but smuggled him into the Overton cottage and tucked him away in a spare room, intending to give him a few nights' shelter and food and to build him up a bit in strength before she sent him on his way. Unfortunately, however, that night the fellow grew worse, and by the morning he was in such a bad way that she had to call in the village doctor. By that time he was dying, Doctor Forsyth declares—in the very last stages of galloping consumption and beyond all possibility of saving."

"H'm! Yes, I see. Couldn't speak, I suppose? Couldn't give any account of who he was?"

"Not a syllable. Forsyth said, however, that in his eyes he looked pretty much like a gypsy himself—had all the characteristics of the Romany race. He further declared that, had he been asked, he should have said that it was well nigh a physical impossibility for the young man in his condition to have walked a step or even lifted a hand to help himself for days and days before he first saw him. But, of course, even the best of doctors are sometimes at fault in their diagnoses, and if the fellow hadn't walked—well, the woman must have got him into the house somehow."

"Yes; you are right there, Duke. The woman must have got him into the house somehow. By the way, was there any tribe of gypsies known to be in the vicinity of Valehampton at the time?"

"No, not then. There had been, a few weeks previously. But they had moved on. Why?"

"It is of no consequence. Go on, please. What happened after Doctor Forsyth's visit?"

"That night the unfortunate wretch died. Fortunately in one sense, there was no necessity for the coroner to be called in and the cottage thrown open for a general inquiry. I can tell you that James Overton was highly incensed when he heard of what the woman had done; incensed at the liberty she had taken without consulting him; for, had Forsyth not been able to issue a death certificate and to declare positively the nature and cause of the disease, the result might have been serious indeed. However, the stranger died and the burial permit was issued in due form, so that put an end to any distressing business with the law. Though it didn't put an end to James Overton's worry over the matter, by any means."

"Why not?"

"Well, you see, there was the question of interring the body. In the usual course of events it would have been buried in the local potter's field with the remains of other paupers; but James Overton is a soft-hearted sort of man and—well, he didn't like to think of it ending that way, so he went to the vicar and offered to pay half the price of a grave to have the body properly buried. The other half was soon raised by subscription, and there was enough to pay for a modest headstone as well. So the poor wretch was buried in the churchyard of St. Saviour's and a cross put over the grave bearing, at Overton's suggestion, the inscription, 'Lord, I come as a stranger, but am I not known unto Thee?'"

"Very pretty, very touching. He is a man of sentiment as well as of charity, this James Overton, it would seem. So the poor wretch who 'came as a stranger' went on to where all are known. And then—what?"

"Oh, you'll scarcely credit it, Mr. Cleek. That night the church bells began to ring as though a madman had laid hands on the ropes, and the whole village was roused from sleep by their dreadful din. The vicar, thinking that someone was playing a foolish prank, dressed and went out to the belfry to reprimand the vandal, but—there was no one there! The bells were clanging and the dangling ropes moving up and down with each swing of them, but no hand was on those ropes and no living thing in sight. He climbed the belfry stairs until he came right underneath the bells themselves. There was no one there, either—they were swinging and clanging above his head apparently of their own accord! That was the beginning of the mischief, Mr. Cleek. Every night following those bells would peal out through the darkness like that. I myself have stood in the belfry and both seen and heard them do it, so the matter is not one of hearsay, but of actual experience.

"The result of this state of affairs I think you can imagine. The whole village suddenly awoke to a remembrance of Mrs. Mallory's adventure, and recalled what she had declared the vagrant gypsy had said in regard to the dead youth. The 'curse' prophesied had fallen; the 'devils' spoken of had begun to ride on the air, and in the end all the other things would happen. People with children were the first to act. They vacated their cottages and left the village by dozens. Almost the first to go was the woman who was indirectly the cause of the panic—Mrs. Mallory. She and her sister fled. A fortune could not have tempted them to stay—they were simply panic-stricken. Then, hard on the heels of that, Overton's old father went so nearly daft with fright that, in common humanity, his son had to take him out of the house and send him to Scotland to the married daughter. The old man would have gone out of his mind with terror if he had not done so. The place was stripped of its equipment, the furniture sent to be sold at auction, and the cottage was left as bare and as empty as an eggshell. And so, but for a period of one brief week, it has remained ever since. But other parts of the diabolical prophecy have come to pass as threatened. The river—a branch of the lovely Colne, which flows within gunshot of the castle boundaries—has begun to choke up and there is no longer a free passage, as formerly, for the skiffs and dinghys."

"What's that? What's that?" ejaculated Cleek. "The river stopped up? Whatever by?"

"By sudden shoals which seem to have risen from the bed of it, and will permit no craft to pass. But the abominable likeness to the things predicted by the gypsy do not cease with that. He spoke of children being spirited away, and at least one child has been.

"With such a reputation hanging over it Overton could get no tenant for the cottage from which his father fled in a panic. No man would live in the place rent free, indeed, no soul in all the district could be persuaded to pass by it, either by night or by day—on account of the threat of sudden blindness, and for the whole eleven months which have passed since that wretched youth was buried the place has known no tenant until eight days ago. Then there suddenly appeared—from God knows where—a man named Smale, who wandered into the district peddling rush baskets in company with his daughter, a girl of thirteen. He heard of the place, laughed at its reputation. He was homeless and well-nigh penniless; he wanted a shelter, and was willing to risk anything to find one. He went to Overton, but Overton had not the heart to yield to his entreaties, so he finally came to me in person. If I would let him have the house rent free for six months, he'd live in it and brave all the spirits that ever existed. I listened and—yielded. Eight days ago the man and the child took possession. A week ago this very night the child vanished—in the dead of the night, with all the doors and all the windows fast bolted on the inside. After two horrible days of rushing about and wildly trying to find a trace of her, the father went insane, flung himself into the river, and was drowned.

"Nor have the tragedies ceased with these two terrible things, Mr. Cleek. The bridesmaids and the guests for my daughter's forthcoming wedding have arrived at the castle. Among them is Captain Weatherley, and with him came his soldier servant—a loyal and intrepid fellow named Davis, who had been through countless perils with his master, and was afraid of nothing living or dead. Early this morning he was found by the Vicar at the foot of the belfry. His head had been smashed in, and he was beyond all earthly aid."

"Any attempt been made to decide the matter? Upon the part of the local authorities, I mean; for, of course, they would be notified of the affair."

"Naturally. The vicar attended to that. But beyond the fact that the body was removed by them to the morgue attached to the local almshouses, I know nothing whatsoever of their movements; nor do I quite see how they could have come to any definite conclusion about the affair."

"No doubt, however, their first step would have been to investigate the condition of the earth in the immediate vicinity of the cottage," suggested Cleek.

"Ah! I see what you mean. They might have found traces of footprints, you think?"

"Something of that sort—yes. If it had rained recently, to put the ground in a condition to receive and retain an impression——"

"The dead man's boot might have been fitted to it, and the point established that way," put in Mr. Narkom, somewhat hastily, his mind travelling along well-worn grooves.

"Oh! no," said Cleek. "Not necessarily a footprint at all, Mr. Narkom, and certainly not a booted one. A boot is never conclusive proof of the identity of the wearer. It may be removed for the purpose of creating certain impressions and afterward returned to the body of the owner. Contrary to the methods of the fictionists, the imprint of a boot or shoe is of no possible value as a clue whatsoever. The only footprints that can be relied upon to furnish positive evidence of the personality of their author are those made either by an animal or the human foot when it is absolutely bare."

"But bare or booted, Mr. Cleek," interposed the duke, "neither could be relied upon to establish—were it important to do so—any proof relative to the movements of Captain Weatherley's servant in the neighbourhood of that abandoned cottage. Two circumstances render such a proceeding impossible. You suggested a moment ago that—well—er—something might be discovered in the immediate vicinity of the cottage provided it had rained recently. Well, it has not. As a matter of fact, the county has been suffering from an absolute drought for the past five weeks, and the earth is baked as hard as flint. That is the one circumstance; the other is even less promising. Both cottages—that of the Hurdons and that left vacant—have courtyards entirely paved with red tiles. A broad, red-tiled footpath surrounds each building, and runs down the middle of its accompanying garden. Nor is that all. Even the belfry of St. Saviour's itself could not have furnished any evidence of the man ever having been there had not his body been found on the spot. It is a curious old Norman structure which originally stood in the midst of a sort of 'square,' paved with cobbles, and extending outward from the walls of the tower for a distance which, roughly, is about four yards in every direction. The uneven surface presented by these cobbles after ages of wear having proved dangerous walking for the thick-soled boots of the bellringers, had caused more than one of them to have a nasty fall, so the vicar sought to rectify the matter by having them entirely covered by a thick layer of cement. The result is that the square in the middle of which the belfry stands presents a smooth, firm, level surface as hard as iron and as bare as one's hand. An elephant could not leave a footprint upon it, much less a man."

The duke paused a moment, as if to give due weight to these unpromising circumstances, then leaned back in his chair.

"There," he said, "that is the case as it stands, Mr. Cleek."