Chapter VII

Events by no means conspired to shake the keeper’s evil determination. Lulled to fancied security and a belief that his indifference indicated a change of mind toward her, Jane continued her attention to Dick; and he abstained from upbraiding her, for he took this display to be love, and felt more than ever assured that, Maybridge once out of the way, the girl would waken as from a dream to the reality of his regard and worship. Her conduct, indeed, obscured his own affection, but he came of a class that takes life and its tender relations callously. The only ardent and worthy emotion that had ever made his heart throb quicker was this girl. His love was still alive, nor could anger kill it while he continued blind to the truth that she no longer cared for him.

A fortnight after his visit to the Case House, Dick descended by night from his den upon the high moor, and the dim flicker of a flame he had long desired to see strung his nerves to steel. For fulfilment of his plan it was necessary that he should come pat on the interval between the arrival of Anthony Maybridge at this tryst and Jane’s subsequent approach. Twice he had been too late; to-night he arrived in time, and his opportunity waited for him. Maybridge was alone. The light burnt in silence. Then came a solitary footfall on the hollow floor above the gunpowder.

Daccombe had calculated every action that would combine to complete and perfect the deed now before him. Nor had he disdained to consider the result. No witness could rise up against him; his enemy would be blown out of physical existence, and his own subsequent declaration that some tons of blasting powder remained forgotten in the old magazine must serve to explain the rest. A spark from Anthony’s pipe would be a satisfactory solution.

The man set about his murder swiftly and stealthily. He had already driven a heavy staple into the door of the Case House, and now, without a sound, he fastened his victim firmly in, using some lengths of brass rabbit wire for the purpose. Then he crept down below the level of the building, scratched away the turf and fern and moved the loosened bricks. He felt the powder dry under his hand, brought a large lump of rotten wood from his breast pocket, where he had long carried it, and struck a match. Soon the touchwood glowed, and he set it down, leapt from his work and hastened away along the path by which Jane must presently approach. Thus he designed to intercept her progress, and, upon some pretence or excuse, draw her from the zone of danger. As to that last point, however, he was doubtful. The amount of the powder he could not accurately tell, and the extent of the explosion remained to be seen. Richard calculated that three minutes, if not a longer period, must elapse before fire would gnaw up the dead wood and reach the powder; and now, as he moved hastily away, the seconds lengthened into minutes, and the minutes most horribly dragged. An infinite abyss of time widened out between the deed and its effect. He lived his life again; and still he peered through the darkness with his eyes, and strained upon the silence with his ears, that he might not let Jane Stanberry pass him and go ignorantly to destruction.

He was a quarter of a mile from the Case House, when it seemed as though the heavens were opened and Doomsday suddenly loosed upon the world. An awful and withering explosion swept the glen like a storm. First there leapt aloft a pillar of pale fire, that rose and spread as the eruption of a volcano spreads. The terrific glare painted long miles of the Moor, and like the hand of lightning, revealed the shaggy crowns of the tors on many a distant hill; while, long before its livid sheaf of flame had sunk, came such a crash and bellow of sound as might burst from the upheaval of a world in earthquake. Upon this appalling detonation a wave of air swept in sudden tempest. Richard was blown off his feet and dashed to the ground; and as he fell, the hills echoed back the explosion in crashing reverberations that rolled out of the darkness, rose and fell, and rose again, until, after a hundred repetitions flung hither and thither over the peaks of the land, they sank through a growling diminuendo into silence. And the silence was terrific by contrast with the awful clamour it succeeded, even as the darkness was intense that followed upon such an unwonted and far-flung glare of light.

Richard Daccombe got upon his feet, and the tinkle of broken glass was in his ears, with the murmur of affrighted voices; for the concussion had shattered nearly every pane at Cross Ways, and mightily alarmed the dwellers there.

When he reached home the young keeper found his parents already out-of-doors, with the whole household assembled about them.

Mary Daccombe praised God at sight of her son uninjured.

“’Tis the end of the world, by the sound of it,” she said. “Where be Davey to?”

His father questioned Richard, and the man declared his ignorance of all particulars.

“An explosion at the old powder-mills, or else a bolt from heaven,” he answered. “I must have passed by the very place, I reckon, not five minutes before the upstore.”

“A thunder-planet, for sartain,” declared an ancient soul, whose few teeth chattered between his words. “I can call home when a com-com-comet was reigning fifty years an’ more agone, an’ ’twas just such open weather as us have had o’ late.”

Mr. Daccombe felt anxious for his stock in certain byres and cow-houses that lay to the west of the powder-mills. But first he held up a lantern and counted the company.

“Be us all here?” he asked.

“Davey’s out somewheers,” answered his wife; “ess, an’ Jane Stanberry be—” She broke off, and looked at the farmer.

“Down-long, I s’pose,” he said carelessly; then he turned to Richard. “Us can’t blink these meetings between ’em, Dick. Best man wins where a maid’s the prize; or which she thinks be the best. Awnly God send her ban’t in the powder-mills to-night.”

“’Tis most certain she be,” answered Mary Daccombe. “Her didn’t know as the young man—Mr. Maybridge—was called off sudden to Moreton to serve ’pon a committee for the Hunt Dinner next month. A chap rode out, and he saddled his mare hisself and galloped off we him directly after he’d ate his meat.”

“Jane didn’t know?” asked Richard.

“No, she went out counting to find him, I’m afraid.”

“An’ he’m at Moreton?”

The man asked in a voice so strange that none failed to note it, even in this dark moment of fear and turmoil.

“Her went to wait for him usual place, no doubt,” said Jonathan Daccombe. “Us had better come an’ look around for her, an’ Davey too—not to name the things in the long byre by the wood.”

A hideous cry suddenly cut Jonathan short, for a storm had swept the sinner’s brain upon these words. He saw what he had done, and the shock overset the balance of his mind.

“Come!” he cried; “I’ve killed her, I’ve ended her days in a scatter of blood and flesh! Nought to show for the butivul round body of her now. But her shall have Christian burial, if ’tis awnly a hair of her head left to put in the churchyard; an’ I’ll mourn for her on my knees, afore they string me up!”

“God’s goodness! what gabble be this?” asked his father.

“And Maybridge still alive, wi’ no smell of fire about him. I’ll—I’ll—”

He broke off and gazed round him wildly.

“Upon the Moreton road as he comes home-along!” he said. Then the wretch turned to hurry away. At the first step, however, he stopped and stood as still as a statue, for he had heard what was hidden from the ears of the rest. Then they too caught the sound of footsteps and a murmuring in the night. Richard remained without moving, and his eyes glared into the dark, and his jaw had fallen. Then, taking shape and coming slowly into the radius of lantern light, there moved a woman and a boy.

Jane Stanberry approached, holding Davey by the hand; and at sight of her Richard Daccombe screamed out his shattered senses, and fled as one possessed of an evil spirit. In vain they made search for him by night and day, and it was not until more than eight-and-forty hours had passed that they found him wandering in the great central loneliness insane. There they ministered to him, and brought him home; and time so dealt with him that he sank into a harmless and haunted idiocy—a horror for his father, a knife in his mother’s heart.

Now it happened that Richard’s brother, upon the keeper’s departure from the Case House on a day already noted, had descended from his pine tree, made close investigation of the elder’s deed, and guessed that such preparations were directed against one man. From that day until the time of the catastrophe, David kept silent watch upon all occasions when Jane and Anthony Maybridge met there. Hidden within a dry drain some ten yards distant, he had played sentinel until the night of Richard’s revenge. Then he had crept from his cover the moment the other’s back was turned, reached the smouldering touchwood, and with amazing courage extinguished it. Afterward, releasing the girl as quickly as possible, and bidding her run for her life to the shelter of a grinding mill two hundred yards distant, he had once more set the rotten wood on fire and hastened after Jane.

She, mystified and indignant, was also conscious that the boy must be obeyed, and so fled as he ordered her. Yet both would have perished but for their protection behind the stout ruin of the grinding mill. And now, the fear of death upon their faces, they hurried trembling home, and Nemesis came with them.

* * *

To-day a black-bearded man, with brown eyes and a mouth always open, shambles about the blasted heart of the old powder-mill. He babbles to himself with many a frown and pregnant nod and look askance; sometimes he watches the trout in the river; sometimes he plucks feverishly at the blossoms of the broom and spearwort and other yellow flowers. These he stamps underfoot as one stamps fire. Davey is his brother’s keeper, and shall be seen always at hand. At his word Richard Daccombe obeys like a dog—shrinks with fear if the boy is angry, fawns and laughs when the boy is kind.