INTRODUCTORY (continued 3)

It may have been meant as a little sly spiritual reflection, but she smacked her ripe lips over it as if she already tasted in me, as madam’s direct protégée, a very plethora of venison and larded fowls. For many years, I believe, these good little women had been secretly looking forward to the term of my novitiate as their gastronomic millennium. I could laugh, I declare, with remorse to think how the dear pink little pigs were defrauded.

I had been delivered without directions, but with a surly intimation that madam would call on the morrow. It was not my business to enlighten anyone; and so I enjoyed the best of my present favour.

She trotted me out by and by to see her asparagus and strawberry beds, fat in promise, though tucked now and slumbering under their autumn blankets of manure; her hives; her mushroom pits; her stewpond thick with fat carps stuffed up to the neck and something her own shape; her pigeon cotes and rabbit hutches. There was an odd family likeness, a general assimilation to the neckless, apoplectic type amongst them all—Sisters, animals, and vegetables. Perpetual invocation, it was evident, had an obliterating effect on the individual. I shifted my own dimpled shoulders. How long would they be rounding to the contour of these squat little vessels? I thought with a certain terror of my admirable digestion, and determined as long as I remained here to live sparely. What if, like the wolf in the fable, I were to eat so many fat pancakes that I could not escape through the hole in the wall again!

That evening we had a refection of sweet bread and fruit and prayers, and a delightful supper (alas for my resolution!) and comfortable droning prayers again. Then we went each to her cosy cell, which was like a crib for a fat baby, and slept the round of the clock to prayers and breakfast. My fellow-sisters delighted me. I never saw such a community of bow-windows, the most comfortable little parlours one could imagine for the spirit to be entertained in. They had their scapulars made very large, and of flannel, so as to serve the double purpose of tokens and liver pads. At meals we were forbidden to talk—a most fattening proscription, or prescription. Prayer, at all seasons or out of them, was the single ordinance of the society—perpetual invocation on behalf of our unenlightened land. We were safe, perhaps, in not considering the logical result of its efficacy, or, indeed, the prospect of a second reformation might have frightened us into heresy. For, our point once gained, our occupation would be gone, and our creed of self-content be called upon to vindicate itself very likely in self-denial. However, England as yet was far from recanting its heresy of prosperity-worship. Our very fatness was the best argument in the world to it of our right to survive; so it showed no tendency to do other than keep us eternally praying for it.

Madam drove over on the day following my arrival, and was closeted for a considerable time with the Mother. I was not summoned to her presence, but I think she did not dare to vent her full heart of spleen upon me in her report. She could not very well, without compromising herself. She must have revealed, or intimated, however, so much as give the poor woman a hopelessly bewildered impression of my personal contribution to art. For the rest, I think she was satisfied with having scotched her terrible little snake, and did not doubt that, having done so, my own sense of final commitment to my calling would keep me immured out of harm’s way, and hers, to the end of time. It must have been with a feeling of guilty relief that she drove back to conclusions with her inamorato.

The Mother, having sent for me on her withdrawal, looked at me with the most cherubic doubt and dread, and pressed my hand quite speechless.

“Dear,” she whispered, all of a sudden, “so very décolletée! and think of the draughts!”

“Why more than the angels?” I said, pouting. “They don’t wear underclothes.”

“They are symbols,” she answered doubtfully. “Besides, we don’t know.”

“O, ma mère!” I cried. “What’s the good of being an angel, if one has to?”

“Hush!” she said. “Anyhow, they may take liberties denied to us. Besides, this young person was not an angel.”

“There you are wrong,” I cried. “She was an angel of purity.”

“Is that so?” she asked a little curiously. “Well, it makes a difference, of course. But it would have been more becoming of her to be painted by a woman. There is the respectable Madame Kauffmann, for instance, who, I am told, depicts religion and the virtues. But there, dear, we will say no more about it; only pray to the good Father, now the naughty little episode’s over, that we may be accepted meekly into His fold.”

I heard no more from Wellcot after this for a couple of days, and was beginning already to torment myself with qualms of jealousy of my sweet little vicegerent there, being at the last almost driven to break out and precipitate matters, when I was saved by a call from the darling herself. Our meeting, to which the Mother’s presence gave a conventual sanction, though fond and cordial, would have been barren of result had not my friend, with a finesse which delighted me, and the more because I had thought her incapable of it, rid us of our incumbrance.

“Good lud!” said she, after the first embrace, twinkling through her tears, “if I haven’t left my little basket of cream cheeses for the Sisters melting outside in the sun!”

The bait took instant. The Mother, with a little gentle reproof for her carelessness, waddled out with such a benevolent glare as though she had heard the last trump.

“Wait, dears, and I’ll be with you again!” said she.

The moment she was gone, Patty threw herself upon me.

“I hid it under some bushes,” she said, “just to keep her hunting, and where it wouldn’t melt really.”

Her second reason was characteristic enough. She could never offer the tiniest hurt from one hand without its remedy from the other. I foresaw she’d whip her children by and by with a strap of healing-plaister, the poor little weak creature.

“O, you naughty little thing!” I giggled; but was serious the next moment, questioning and urging her.

“Quick!” I said. “What’s he going to do? Have you a letter?”

She shook her head.

“He’ll have a postchaise outside in a night or two, and will let you know; but for the moment he’s watched, and daren’t move, or commit himself to paper.”

“The hero! He’s still there, then, at Wellcot? If it had been me, I’d have had my servants flog him out of the house.”

“O, Diana! How can you say such a thing, and you in love with him!”

“Whom I love I chasten. I’m in love, like Mrs. Sophia, with myself through him. He’s going to make me great. Now, tell me what’s the state of things there.”

She shook her head rather piteously.

“I don’t know. It’s all very sad and lonely without you. I think she wants to forgive him; but he’s proud and angry, and holds aloof.”

I turned up my nose with a sniff.

“It’s nicer to be a healthy sinner. Her fulsomeness makes me sick. And how did you get leave to come and see me?”

“I didn’t get leave at all,” she said. “I daren’t even ask it, feeling sure she’d refuse. I slipped out without telling, hearing cook had something to send. I expect she’ll be very angry when she hears.”

“If she hears,” I corrected her.

She looked at me with sad, puzzled eyes, the comical dear.

“How shall I ever bear with it all after you are gone, Diana?” she said. “You’ll let me come and stay with you sometimes, when you’re married?”

“Now, Patty,” I said, “tell me the truth. Is the creature still making eyes at you?”

“No,” she answered stoutly; then added, conscience-stricken, “At least, I don’t know. I never look at him. But—but—O, Diana! I wish he’d go altogether, and leave us, you and me, as we were.”

“That’s perhaps not a very kind wish, child,” said I. “But you shall come and stay with us when once I’ve got him under control, never fear.” Then, as I heard the step of the Mother returning, “Hush!” I whispered; “tell him I’ve no idea of being buried alive here: that he must arrange it very quickly, or I shall return and give everything away.”

She answered silently, with a hug and a gush of tears. She looked haggard and distraught, poor little wretch; yet I had no alternative but to use her.

I waited two days longer, in an anxiety that rose to distraction. Still no message came from him; and at last I made up my mind, and sent him an upbraiding letter by a misbegotten old beldame, with a leery eye, who helped in the convent laundry. She brought me back an answer—that he would be waiting for me, with a postchaise, in the lane without, at nine o’clock that very night. O, my friend! how dreadful is the first realisation of perfidy in those whom our inexperience trusts! This cursed Hecate was all the time in the pay of the authorities whom my innocence thought to hoodwink. When the time came, I wondered, indeed, to find Fortune so blind in my interest. So far seemed there from being the least suggestion of suspicion, of uneasiness abroad, chance appeared to invite me with open portals. What Sisters I encountered, even the Mother herself, manœuvred, I could have thought, to leave me my way unobstructed. Miserable parasites of power, subordinating their consciences to the lusts of their abominable little stomachs! To pamper those, they were lending themselves without scruple to a deed of unutterable darkness—the consigning of their innocent sister to a living death.

I found the chaise waiting in a dusk corner beneath trees. A cloaked and sombre figure, engaging me in the shadow, hurried me within, leapt after, slammed the door, and gave the word to proceed. In a moment we were tearing through the night.

So great was the flurry of my nerves, I had not, until the lamp at the convent gate flashed upon us and was gone, noticed that we were four in company. Then, all at once, I started. The man who sat beside me had removed his hat and was wiping his brow. Two thick-set, motionless figures sat facing me.

“Easy done, sir,” said one of these.

“Ha!” said my companion, “yes.”

In a sudden terror, I struggled to rise. He restrained me.

“Mr. de Crespigny!” I exclaimed.

“Ha!” said my companion again. “You hear that, Willing?”

“I hear,” responded the second of the others gruffly.

My companion turned to me suavely.

“Mr. de Crespigny?” he said. “Yes, and what about him, madam?”

“You are not he!” I cried wildly. “Let me out! He was to have met me!”

With a sort of tacit understanding, they all hemmed me in with their knees, imprisoning and controlling me at once.

“You make a mistake, madam,” said my captor. “He was not to have met you. But, be reconciled; time and judicious treatment, I have not the least doubt, will cure you of this delusion.”

In an instant the whole horror of this snare, of this most wicked scheme, opened like a black gulf before my eyes. The convent—to anticipate an analogy—had been my Elba; now my St. Helena was to be an asylum. She had discovered; or he, the dastard, had betrayed me; and, in the result, she had not hesitated, with the connivance of some sycophant doctor, to stoop to this.

It was night; the chaise drove on by back ways; I sunk back, sick and almost senseless, and abandoned myself to despair.

XIII. I AM WOOED TO SELF-DESTRUCTION

Dr. Peel’s Asylum was known generically as “The House,” perhaps in cynical allusion to its licensed irresponsibility to any laws but its own. It was conceived on the principle of an eel-pot—the easiest thing to slip, or be driven, into; the hardest to escape from. It was not so much an asylum as an oubliette; never so much a house of correction as of annihilation. There, in addition to the constitutionally weak-minded, troublesome heirs, irreclaimable prodigals, jealous wives, importunate creditors, distinguished blackmailers, chance recipients of deadly secrets—all such, in fact, as threatened the peace of that grand seigniory which has a prescriptive monopoly in it—could be immured by lettre de cachet (it amounted to nothing less) from any accommodating physician, and afterwards “treated,” or disposed of, by private contract. Its methods were delicate, tasteful, and exceedingly sure. With rib-breaking, starvation, strait-waistcoats, all the vulgar apparatus of the ordinary médecin de fous, it had no commerce. Where the removal of undesirables was in question, it rather killed with kindness; suffocated, like Heliogabalus, with roses; persuaded to the happy despatch with a silken cord. It drove its poor Judases to suicide by putting by, as useless, their moral reparations, and took care to have at hand the seductive means. If one escaped—a rare occurrence—it possessed a kennel of highly trained bloodhounds, whose belling warned the dark nights with menace. It asked no questions, and expected to be asked none. Its formula was a hint and a cheque.

The asylum ménage was perfectly refined, and its cuisine lavish. It entertained none but the nominees of the wealthy. The extensive grounds of the house were a literal maze of beauty, the shrubberies being so disposed as to preclude all thought of restraint. It was only upon piercing them, at any point, that one found oneself opposed by a high boundary wall, which contained between itself and the estate it enclosed a waste interval incessantly patrolled, day and night, by the asylum watch. Then, indeed, one realised the iron hand in the velvet glove, and started back dismayed from the grin of the nearest sentry whom one’s movements had called light-footed to the spot.

“A fine view, mum,” he might say, stepping up between ingratiatory and insolent. “Was you looking for anything?”

Whereupon one would do best to retire, and precipitately; because there was no appeal from any brutality offered, in his own domain, by any servant of, or partner in, this lawless oligarchy.

Rising from my little bed, and mattresses full of fragrance and down, on the morning first after my arrival—rising, fevered and exhausted, to the full realisation of my awful position, my eyes encountered the vision of a wholesome, even luxurious, little chamber, and through an unbarred window a most heavenly prospect. I could hardly believe in the reality of my fate. This was no prison, but an inn, to escape from which it seemed only necessary to pay the score, and have the landlord cry “Bon voyage!” I remembered him the night before—a little tough, square man, drily courteous in manner, with the head and depressed forehead of a burglar. He had been already on the steps to receive me, when we drove up, standing in a patch of light with an expression on his face as if we had caught him in the act of breaking into his own premises. Those we had reached, within two hours of my first kidnapping, by dark and devious roads. They stood, remote from all other homesteads, a little colony self-contained, some six miles south of Shole.

On the way thither I had soon abandoned all thought of resistance, or of appeal to my captors. They may have heard my sobs and prayers with a certain emotion: virtuous distress had no chance to prevail with cupidity. I sunk into a sullen apathy, my heart smouldering with rage, principally against the craven who had either betrayed me to this living death, or, at least, had weakly acquiesced in my doom. The prospect of revenge, though alternating with despair, alone preserved me from a condition of the last prostration. And in this state I was driven up to the House, and to it consigned, the sold slave of madness.

In the first terror, with staring eyes, a storm in my breast that would not rise and break, dishevelled hair, and, it may be, a look of the part I was called upon to play, I shrunk into a corner of the room into which I was introduced, and stood there panting. Dr. Peel went into a thin chuckle of laughter, curiously small and inward from so thick-set a frame.

“Brava!” said he. “Very well observed, madam! But, if you will look round, you will see there are no bolts, no bars, no locks here, save as the ordinary appurtenances of a domestic household.”

There were not, indeed, to the common view. To most doors, as I came to discover, the locks were inside; and, where it was otherwise, it was—mark this!—to insure from any chance insane attack, especially at night, the lives of those which it was particularly desired should be preserved. To be given the full freedom of the House was always a significant privilege, implying, as it did, one of two things: either that the proprietor had accepted at the outset a round sum down for one’s perpetual incarceration, or a hint that one’s accidental removal would be handsomely acknowledged by those interested.

Now, as I said, waking on that first morning to free prospects, my spirit experienced a rebound to the most delightful reassurance. Surely, I thought, no worse harm could be designed me than the punishment implied in my enforced temporary detention in this charming home, where, it seemed likely, a nominal deprivation of one’s liberty was used to convey a gentle moral or adorn a kindly tale of reproval. I waxed jubilant. If a meek acquiescence in my fate delayed to move my jailers to liberate me, I was confident that my wits would soon find me a way to free myself from so indulgent a thraldom. And in the meantime I would resign myself to the enjoyment of a very novel experience.

A loud bell summoned us all to breakfast, à la table d’hôte, in a pleasant refectory. Dr. Peel took the head of the table, and a plenty of attentive lackeys waited. There was no restriction, nor interference with one’s individual tastes. I accepted silently the place assigned me between a gaunt, supernaturally solemn gentleman, with mended clothes, a wigless head, and prominent fixed eyes, and the tiniest, most conceited-looking creature with humped shoulders I have ever seen. An uproarious gabble of conversation, interspersed with occasional hoots and groans, accompanied the meal throughout. Occasionally my solemn neighbour would turn to me and remark, fiercely, as though daring a contradiction, “Enough is as good as a feast; but more than enough is less than nothing.”

On the third repetition of this formula, the little man on my other side addressed me with an ill-tempered chuckle—

“Bring him down, ma’am, bring him down, or the creature will scorch his head in the moon.”

While I was shrinking back in confusion, Dr. Peel bent to the solemnity.

“Captain,” says he, with an ingratiatory grin, “you’re drinking nothing.”

“I don’t want anything,” said the other, in a loud, bullying voice.

“Nonsense,” answered the doctor. “You must keep up your character. Here, John.”

He spoke to a lackey, who was ready on the moment with a decanter. To my amazement, the man filled up the gentleman’s breakfast cup with raw brandy.

He shifted, glared, hesitated, and caught up the pungent stuff.

“Enough is as good as a feast, but more than enough is less than nothing,” howled he, and swallowed the fire at a draught.

He had hardly consumed it, when he cast the cup into splinters on the board, staggered to his feet, and, moaning to himself, left the room. The conversation died down for a moment, and was instantly resumed more recklessly than ever. I felt suddenly sick.

“He-he!” sniggered my little companion. “He’s been long taking his hint, the fool, and outstaying his welcome. But Peel’s done it at last, I do believe.”

I did not ask him what. My spirit felt engulfed in deep waters of terror. I sat dumb and shivering, till the meal ended, and the company broke up and dispersed itself about the grounds. Many, rude, curious, fantastic, came about me to inquire, mockingly or fulsomely, into my malady. To all their solicitations my little companion, who had appropriated me, turned a rough shoulder and rougher tongue.

“The lady has confided her case to me, you pestilent cranks!” he screamed, and succeeded in extricating and convoying me to a remoter part of the grounds. On the way we encountered two men, like gamekeepers, carrying a ghastly sheet-covered burden on a litter.

“Ho-ho!” said my friend, stopping. “It was arranged for the tower, was it?”

“Now, lookee here, Jimmy,” said one of the carriers, while the two paused for a moment, “you’re too precious fond of poking your nose where you ain’t wanted, you are. You go along to your games, and leave your elders to theirs till you’re growed up.”

“Grown up!” screeched my companion, whose chin, indeed, was thick with a grey bristle, “grown up, you puppy, you calf, you insolent lout!”

Crazy in a moment, he danced in the path, screaming and shaking his fists. The men resumed their way, laughing. Suddenly he caught himself to a sort of reason, white and shaking.

“They want to drive me to it,” he said. “They want me to break a blood-vessel; but I see through them, and I won’t be drawn.”

He wiped his forehead, and looked anxiously up in my face.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “The fools are envious of my inches. But you ain’t, are you, being a woman?”

“No, no,” I said, smiling, in a sort of ghastly spasm, in full understanding of his mania. “No, no; or should I select you for my champion in this? Let us go on, please. Was that—?”

“Yes,” he answered, the question that my fainting spirit shrunk from formulating, “yes, it was the Captain—good riddance to a conceited ass.”

He strutted along, pluming himself on my praise. All that I have stated—the truth about this smiling, damned Gehenna—I drew from him then or thereafter. I cannot recall it now without a shudder like death’s.

Once that morning we came, in a retired corner, upon the prettiest, greenest graveyard—the sweetest God’s-acre, God pity it! in all the sad world. It was studded with quiet flowers, screened with fragrant shrubs, thick with graves, each a nameless grassy barrow. What depth of tragedy in it all! I cannot, I vow, dwell any longer on the picture, but must cover the details of it at a gallop.

I was nine weeks, before I found release, in this appalling hell—a time the most stupendous of my life. I will acquit the Lady Sophia of intending the worst; I cannot acquit her of implying it. Whether from jealousy, or a true conviction as to the unpardonable nature of my recreancy, she failed, at least, to assure the instruments of her cruelty that my death-sentence was not intimated in the bond. It is possible she may have been totally ignorant of the real character of the place to which she condemned me. She is none the less responsible for the conclusions the Rhadamanthus of that inferno elected to draw from her dubiety. Anyhow, I am convinced that my destruction was designed, before I had been there many days.

In the meantime—O, my Alcide, pity thy Diane! What had she done to merit this fate, the most awful that could befall a brilliant sanity? Very, very soon that early buoyancy was like nothing but the memory of a bright star, that had exploded and scattered as soon as realised. A sickness, a deadly apprehension, took its place; a sense of some creeping, circumventing terror, which hemmed me in, stealthy and pitiless, concentrating my thoughts on a single point in this cursed paradise. I was inoculated with the disease of the morbid intellects about me. My reason suffered deliberate contamination by the remorseless ghoul my keeper. No fewer than three times during my short sojourn in his inferno did the corpse of a self-destroyer witness to the success of his methods. They went to swell the bloody tally of shrouds under the grass in the little graveyard; and, thinking of them there, their awful waiting testimony, I would look up to find the evil eye of their murderer fixed upon me in covert, lustful speculation.

For long I remained incredulous that my wit could be utterly impotent to devise a means to escape. Gradually, only, the sinister watchfulness which guarded every outlet of this green prison, and the fiendish incorruptibility of its warders, was bitten into my brain. Pleas and graces were accepted for nothing but an encouragement to unwelcome attentions, indeed. It was not supposed that one could be insane and modest. Many sold their virtue for a little surcease from tyranny, bartered their dearer than life for a poor extension of living. At the same time, and for the same reason, a most rigid embargo was placed on all communications with the outside world. Worse than a Russian censorship doomed these utter exiles from hope.

In the worst of my despair I had written to Patty, to de Crespigny, begging them to intercede for me with the cruel woman, who yet could not be aware of the inhuman character of her revenge. Finally, I wrote to madam herself—an appeal that would have melted a heart of stone. My cries were uttered into space. They were never allowed, in spite of all specious pretence, to penetrate the boundaries of my doom. They recoiled only upon my own fated head, precipitating its calamity, and the swifter because I was persistent in justifying my birth-name to my hateful would-be destroyer.

The little craze they called Jimmy was my sole stay and buckler. He attached himself to me vigorously, and by his quickness and waspishness more than made up for his lack of inches. I never knew who he was, or immured at whose instigation. There was warrant, anyhow, for his detention; yet not sufficient, it appeared, for his “removal.” His philosophy of madness was just a counterbuff to that of the deceased Captain. If, in short, more than enough was less than nothing, then less than nothing was more than enough; wherefore Jimmy, twitted with being less than nothing, knew himself really to be greatly better than most, though he could never get over the envy of smaller souls in refusing him the credit of his stature. What is apparently little is relatively great, he often assured me, while bemoaning his inability to knock the truism into the thin asparagus heads that shot above his own sturdy one. He spent the most of his time, and I with him, in what was known as the workshop—a detached ivy-grown shed, buried amongst trees, very private, and with a deep well in it, and furnished with all sorts of dangerous tools for cranks of a mechanical turn. There he wrought incessantly, for he was a capable carpenter; and there, watching and helping him, I strove to forget something of my misery. One morning, entering this shed, we found a little group of employés gathered about the well, talking and laughing, and fishing with a long grapnel. A partition separated us from the obscene crew, whose movements, unobserved by them, we crouched to watch.

“A thousand to one it’s old Star-jelly,” whispered my companion. “’Twas plain from the first the creature was booked.”

They hauled it to the surface while he muttered—a sodden body caught by its waistband and doubled backwards—and slopped their hideous burden on the floor. The white sightless face settled backwards, as if with a sigh of rest, and I could hardly refrain from a scream of terror. I had known this poor thing for the few days since he had been admitted—a wreck so torn, so noisome, so straining the remnant of life through fretted lungs, it should have seemed a mockery to precipitate its end. I had known, and never, till now seeing it clothed in the white uniform of death, had recognised it. It was the mad incubus of “Rupert’s Folly,” caught somehow tripping at last and consigned to his doom. The red earl had succeeded by long waiting in curing himself of this itch. He was one of a deadly persistent family.

That night I could not even cry myself to sleep.

I don’t know how it was that I was at last driven to visit the Suicide Tower. I had caught glimpses, remote in the grounds, of a picturesque, creeper-hung pagoda set in flowering thickets; but had always, since that first morning of deadly association with it, turned with loathing from the sight. Now, somehow, by degrees, the thing began to impress itself with a certain fascination on me. I felt drawn to it by a horrible curiosity, none the less morbidly self-indulgent because I knew that my jailer, a proselyte of the subtle Mesmer, had long been practising to master my will and get me entirely under his influence. Snuffing here, nibbling there, as it were, like a heifer approaching in pretended unconsciousness the stranger in the field, I gradually lost my power of resistance, the circumference of my orbit slowly lessened, until, behold! one day the attraction found me helpless to oppose it, and, with a little cry to myself, I yielded and went rapidly towards the tower. As I approached the spot, I could hardly feel my limbs; my soul, penetrated with a sort of exquisite nausea, seemed already straining to leave the earth; a mist, luminous, vaguely peopled, eddied before my eyes. Perhaps a confidence derived from the possession of my duck-stone—which all this time I had been jealous to preserve, using it even occasionally, in moments of prostration, for a drug to my nerves—conduced to my undervaluing the force of temptations to which I owned such a counter-charm. In any case, I made so little resistance in the end, that the evil thing concealed amongst the thick bushes by the tower, whence and whither he had drawn me by his spells, must have chuckled to see me so easily netted.

The place was perfectly silent and beautiful. A tinkle of water, a twitter of birds reached my ears from some remote height. The tower sprang from a circular platform of stone, went up loftily, and broke at near its top into two or three little tiled flounces. Under the lowest I could see an opening pierced through a rose trellis; and right before me the unlatched door of the building was reached by a shallow flight of steps.

My heart was fluttering like a netted butterfly as I mounted them. What sinister design could possibly obtain in this still and fragrant enclosure? A flight of spiral stairs, going up the interior, was set in a very bower of plumy palms, and ferns, and clambering rich mosses, made greener by the light which entered through green jalousies. Here and there tiny rills of water, lowering themselves down miniature precipices, were fretted into spray that hung in the twinkling emerald atmosphere and was showered on the leaves. Caged cunningly amidst the foliage, birds of brilliant plumage chirped and flirted; or red squirrels sprang and clung, staring at me with glossy eyes; or lizards, liquid green as the sun through lime leaves, raised their pulsing throats, and whisked and were gone. Once a snake, raising a gorgeous enamelled head, lashed its thread of tongue on the glaze of its little prison, seeming to taste my passing beauty in a wicked lust. I felt quite secure and happy. Up and up I climbed, and presently started singing softly, irresistibly, in response to the growing rapture of my flight. New beauties were revealed with every step, until in a moment, passing, at an angle, through a very thicket of blossoms into white daylight, I saw the meaning, and tottered on the brink of it all.

I had emerged upon a little ledge, a foot in width, which ringed the outside of the tower just below the first roof. I was standing there, suddenly, instantly, with not so much as an inch of parapet between my feet and the edge. Behind was the wall of the tower; below, a reeling abyss and the bare, merciless pavement. Dazzled, irresistibly drawn forward, I longed only to reach the stones and be at rest. But in that terrible moment my talisman occurred to me. Swaying, half fainting, fighting for every movement, I succeeded in drawing it from my pocket and lifting it to my nostrils—and instantly my resistance was relaxed, and I floated down on the wings of enchantment.

When I opened my eyes, drugged and smiling, it was to the vision of Dr. Peel standing before me like an awed and baffled demon. He dressed his twitching features, and came and cringed.

“Are—are you much hurt?” he stammered.

“No, sir,” I murmured. “Not at all, I thank you.”

“It was your skirts ballooned,” he said. “I could not have thought it possible.”

I sat up, reordering my hair.

“Do you now?” I said quietly. “Such an escape could hardly come within your calculations, I think.”

“What do you mean?” he began loudly, and as instantly collapsed again. “You had no right to be there at all,” he said.

“Nor should I,” I replied, “but to show you that virtue may have a familiar as well as vice, and one, too, capable of answering to a wicked challenge.”

I got to my feet as I spoke. He stared at me utterly disconcerted, and, as I withdrew, followed me like a scourged dog.

From that time he sought rather to preserve than to destroy me, and I found myself, as one of the elect, locked into my room at night. He had realised, I suppose, that wickedness could over-reach itself in the chance entertainment of spirits potent beyond the worst it could of itself evoke; and, though he still clung to me as a sort of hostage for his own miserable salvation, made many abject efforts towards my conciliation, amongst which I had great reason to reckon a relaxation in the watchfulness which had hitherto dogged my every movement.

XIV. I AM RESCUED BY MY MONSTER

Have you not noticed, my little friend, how the wicked are always the superstitious? It is because life is to them full of dark corners, in which the unsuspected hides. The atheist will still be for baiting a deity whose existence he denies; he will wring a response from a vacuum, which failing, he fears to canvass emptiness for the reason.

Dr. Peel knew well the impotence of virtue to conquer. He saw it of such poor force in the world as to figure of no moment at all in a contest with vice. He did not fear God, but he feared that the devil was God, and vindictive where the harming of his protégées—of whom he had no thought but that I must be one—was concerned. He had been eye-witness of the, to him unaccountable, foiling of his project; and it struck him as if he had fallen upon an ambush in one of those dark corners. He shrunk back terrified, and thenceforth exchanged his noisome attentions to me for an attitude of propitiation which was as unwelcome, and even more stultifying, in seeming, to my hopes, inasmuch as it included an increased jealous concern for my safeguarding. But there, in the end, his service of his dark master was made to recoil upon his own head, through his very scepticism of the more divinely cunning power which works for good. He would lock me, as I said, into my room at night, thereby securing me not only from prowling evils, but an asylum in which I might ponder undisturbed what plans I could of escape. And it was that security from interruption which enabled me presently to realise on an opportunity of which I was quite unexpectedly made the mistress.

It fell early very cold and wintry that November, but the chill in my heart was colder than any hailstones. Presently such an apathy of despair found me that I would hardly leave my room all day, but would sit in a sullen misery gazing, gazing from my unbarred open window upon the fraction of stiffening world it commanded. It was at a front angle of the house, pretty high above the ground; and under it the stony drive went round an elbow of lofty trees to the fatal unseen gates of the entrance beyond.

One morning, after breakfast, I was seated there, when a chaise rolled up to the steps of the door below, and a moment later Dr. Peel entered and was driven rapidly away, on some fresh marauding devilry, I conjectured. The vehicle, sped by a heart-whole curse from my lips, had disappeared scarce a minute, when round the bend of the shrubs it had taken came striding the oddest figure—an interloper by way of the open portals, it seemed. Such an event had never, in my knowledge, happened before. I stared, and roused myself, elate even over this momentary grotesque vision from the world beyond. It was just a stilt-walker, a monstrous pierrot, with floured absurd face and conical cap, his legs, cased in linen trousers, rising an immense height from the ground. As he came on, ridiculously gyrating, he blew a pipe, and rattled at a little tabor that hung from his neck. In the same moment he saw me where I stood, and danced up, rolling and wallowing—for he was an incomprehensibly great creature for such a trade—and broke into a mad, jerky little chaunt, half French, half English, as he approached—

“O-ha, mamselle! Je vous trouve, je vous salue! A la fin çà, çà, çà!

“‘Be’old the mountaineer,

He sik for edelweiss,

I have found my dear

Very high and very nice—çà, çà, çà!’”

He flicked off his cap—with a grin that showed, though against the flour, a set of perfect teeth—and in three strides was at the window, his eyes and huge white face above the level of the sill. Even in the instant, as if the former were a cypher momentarily isolated for my reading, I understood, and was stricken to stone.

“The graveyard!” whispered the pierrot in that instant: “be at the wall over against it at ten o’clock to-night”—and reeled away, to a pantomime of grins and pirouettes, as the lodge-keeper came raging round the corner in pursuit.

“O que nenni dà!” cried the intruder, twisting and turning and affecting to bend with laughter. “O, madame! O, fie! I am very honourable z’jentlemans. Wat, I say! I make you good proposals to marry. I display my parts, v’là!”

He contorted himself, with absurd coquetry. “Wat!” he protested, pausing; “madame declines of the ravishment? She does not move herself to fly with me? Vair well”— He pretended of a sudden to espy his pursuer, and pressing his cap to his breast, waltzed up to him.

“Hey, my little fellow,” he cried (the lodge-keeper was at least as big as Daniel Lambert), “it is for you, then. You know the best wat is good. I will not abduct madame: I will not marry at all. It is vair much satisfaction. You see me dance, hein? Come on, jolly garçon!—

“‘Love miscarries—heh?

When a man marries—heh?’

When a man’s single he live at his is—you spik French, but yes?”

The lodge-keeper hawked up a glair of oaths, and discharged them. He swore by all his gods that he would cut off the intruder by the legs, unless he went out, and double quick, the way he had come. Then ensued a comical scene. The pierrot, affecting to retreat after a brief altercation, swerved suddenly and seated himself on the branch of a tree—

“O-ho!” he said, as the other came lumbering up, “it is vair well, but I make up my mind. I refuse madame, it is true. You know to marry, what it is? Listen, then—

“‘At the end of one year one baby:

That is jolly-fun!’”

The lodge-keeper, cursing, made a snatch at the man’s stilts; but, incredibly strong, he whipped them up out of reach, and held them so horizontal.

“‘At the end of two year two baby—

How it is a little serious!’”

he sang.

The lodge-keeper swore and jumped, till he was running wet for all the cold; but he was too fat a fox for these grapes.

“‘At the end of three year three baby—

But that is the very devil,’”

bawled the pierrot ferociously, and clashed the stilts like great castanets.

Then he settled himself firmly.

“‘One asks for bread,’” bellowed he; and suddenly flourishing his right stilt, caught the lodge-keeper a stinging smack across the head with it—

“‘Another for soup,’” he yelled, and gave such a counter blow with his left, that the lodge-keeper fairly reeled and went rolling over—

“‘L’aut’ qui demande à téter,

Et les seins sont tarie,’”

shouted the pierrot, and was up and out of sight in a moment, striding like Talus. The infuriate lodge-keeper rose, when he had recovered himself, to pursue; but he was too late. The pierrot had got clean away.

Not till all had been vanished many minutes did I awake from the stunned trance into which I had been thrown by those few whispered words. Then, still by the window, I sank upon the floor, and, simultaneously, into a very reel and passion of ecstasy.

How had he traced me? Whence devised this strange method of procuring speech? Ah! as to that, there were no doubt experiences in his past life still unrelated; and, after all, did he not always in a measure—strictly in a measure—walk on stilts? This was only to extend his wooden legs indefinitely. But after what secret practices, and suspicions averted? For I held him still the creature of his despicable master. My Gogo—for it was he! My Gogo, the great resourceful, affectionate, crippled giant! It was inexpressibly touching to me to know myself, the poor persecuted, wistful dupe of Fate, still the cynosure of this burning soul—not forgotten, schemed for, held the sacred object of its desire. All the time I had thought myself abandoned, he had been weaving a ladder for my despair. Good Gogo! Dear, kind, honest Caliban! He would save me yet—he would save me; and the tears flowed from my eyes. How was he such an actor? It was true I had known hitherto only one side of him—the saturnine—the shadow of the great fallen rock. Ah, he could show a lighter for my sake—little roguish sparklets twinkling in the sun of his hot yearning. I loved him at that moment, and my tears fell for him and myself.

But, stay! What had he whispered? I must remember. At ten o’clock—the wall over against the graveyard? Why had he so chosen—so nicely specified? Did he know nothing of the patrol? Yes, likely; but it was a desperate expedient, calculated upon a possible superstition, upon a presumptive avoidance of so haunted a spot. I pressed my hands to my wet forehead and tangled hair. He had dared and done all he could: the rest was for me, whom he knew and could trust. I would not be unworthy. I would answer to him wit for wit.

Half an hour later, serene and wicked as he could have wished, I took my way, singing, into the grounds, and, unaccosted, sought that remote quarter where the graveyard was situated. Still softly singing, I pushed between the trees, and came out into the waste interval against the boundary wall which was devoted to the watch. Stooping here to pick some chance berries, I had not to wait a minute before the local sentinel, as I had calculated, was upon me. I dropped my spray, with an aspect of alarm that struggled into piteousness.

“O, I am so sorry!” I said.

The man—he was personable enough to make my task the less nauseous—eyed me, insolent and masterful.

“All right,” he said. “Blow me if you ain’t done it now. Why, don’t you know as this here’s Prisoner’s Base, and you’re out of bounds?”

I went up to him fearlessly, and taking his hands, muffled in great hairy gloves, looked up into his face. I saw a spot of deeper colour come into his cheeks, and he breathed fast.

“Shall I confess,” I said, low and urgent, and glancing quickly about me, “that I wanted to be caught?”

“Ah!” he said, and showed his teeth in a twitching grin.

“Hush!” I whispered. “I am in great despair. You know perfectly well I am sane; I shall die if I am detained here longer.”

“O! will you?” he responded.

“Listen,” I said, flushing and hanging my head. “I offer you no money, which I have not got. But there are things—other things—sold here, which”—

I tore my hands away, and, putting them to my face, fell back from him.

“Hey!” he said, in a thick whisper, and pursued me. “Why do you pick me out for your favours, you little beauty?”

I did not answer.

“Why?” he insisted.

“If it has to be,” I muttered from my refuge, “you—O, don’t ask me!”

“Why?” he said.

“Well, of twenty evils, choose the best-looking.”

He gave a low chuckle.

“Come along, where we can be private,” said he, and put a hand on me; but I started back, affecting an agony of shame.

“O! what have I said—what promised? Let me go. Don’t think any more of it.”

“Won’t I?” he said; and added threateningly: “You’ve given your promise, remember.”

I looked about me, and again upon my twined fingers.

“To-night, then, at—at ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“In the workshop.”

“You can get out?”

“Yes; I have a way.”

“That you have,” he said, coveting me with his eyes; “and a pretty one, my darling.”

I entreated him once more, in a passion of emotion—

“If—if I consent, you’ll hold to your part of the bargain?”

“Eh?” he questioned.

“Help me to escape?”

“No fear o’ my forgetting,” he answered. “You may lay to that.”

I knew he meant to betray me in the double sense, and would have given more than I feigned to barter at that moment for the leave to beguile him to me, and slip a knife into his lying throat. But I tasted part of my revenge in the thought of his freezing alone there by and by, in the rendezvous to which my wits had decoyed him, while I went to my other undisturbed.

He was jealous of me, and suspicious still of so light a surrender. But the prize was worth the risking; and in the end he let me go, gloating over my stealthy retreat, as a cruel schoolmaster might watch the slinking away of a delinquent whom he had ordered up for punishment later.

That night fell a harder frost, with glittering stars but no moon. Early secured in my sanctum, I awaited the great moment in such an indescribable agony of mind as I have never felt before or since. Every step near my door was a tread upon a nerve. The stable clock, when it rang out, clear and sonorous, the last quarter after nine, seemed to brain me with its every stroke. I stole to the open window, took intent stock of the quiet, seated myself, poised to spring, on the sill, and passed my duck-stone at a little distance under my nostrils. The next instant I had alighted safely on my feet, and reeling against the wall beneath, stood a minute to recover. The next, I was round the angle of the house, and sped into the dark shrubberies, where were safety and concealment.

Going very softly in my stockinged feet, and careful of my knowledge not to penetrate the thicket until close upon the appointed place, I reached my goal upon the stroke of the hour.

“Well!” whispered a voice from the starlight. “I could trust you.”

He had been stretched recumbent on the wall top, and now rose cautiously to my view, no longer the whitened fool, but the true Gogo of my affections. I looked up at him as from a well; and he swung his long stilts over, as he sat, so that they rested on the ground beneath.

“Quick!” he muttered; “without a moment lost—swarm! I can’t bend.”

Heaven knows how I did it—with no better show of grace than Lady Sophia, I fear. But somehow I scrambled up, until he could reach my hands, and haul me with a mighty power beside him. Then, once more, swing went his legs, and there was the ladder for my descent on the other side.

I clung to him convulsively; I kissed his hands; I could not refrain from sobbing.

“O, Gogo!” I said; “what you have saved me from—O, Gogo, what!”

His breath caught like a wounded lion’s.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “There is far to go first!”

“Put me down, then,” I answered, alert in the stress of things.

“No,” he said. “On my back—quick!”

“You are going to carry me?”

“There are bloodhounds,” he replied. “There must be no tracks but the stilts’—no scent for them to follow.”

Then I understood the fulness of his plan; but still I lingered, amazed.

“I am not a child. What strength, though yours, could bear me so?”

He showed me a long staff that leaned to him against the outer wall.

“There is my third prop,” he said. “When I am driven, I can still seat you upon a branch, and save the scent. The ground is iron, and”—he struck his chest—“these ribs. Come, and let me wear my heart upon my sleeve.”

The next moment we were off. The great creature swayed beneath me like a tree; but he never staggered or faltered, save periodically to rest himself and me. The sweet night wind blew upon my face, cold and colder. I snuggled from it into the vast nape of his neck, which was like a mat for warmth. I had no idea or care whither he was taking me, and the knowledge only that it was by roads deserted at this silent hour. Still he held on, and, when frost and weariness threatened to numb my brain, could spare a strong hand to imprison both mine lest I fell. And still the flight endured, and I asked, could ask, no question, not even when I grew penetrated by a dull consciousness of ascent—of my comrade straining and toiling beneath me like a stricken Sisyphus—of the groaning of the giant spirit in him who would not be subdued. Then, at last, came a pause, and darkness and release; and I felt myself swung gently down to rest upon a mat of scented leaves, whose warmth and fragrance wooed me to such a sleep as I had never known before.

XV. I BECOME AN INMATE OF “RUPERT’S FOLLY”

I awoke, flushed and happy as a dormouse from its winter bed of leaves. The world was good again, with all its potentialities of love and freedom; the sun was somewhere seeking me; there was no ache, but the sweet ache of memory, in my whole heart and body. Locality, I have said before, has never influenced my temper. I make the only reservation now of liberty to change it at my will.

I remained some time, with my hands beneath my head, taking stock motionlessly of my new surroundings. They were odd enough. I lay near the wall, it seemed, of a sort of circular ground chamber or cellar, roofed in at an inexplicable height above me. Twice, at intervals between, projecting corbels appeared to show the one-time existence of upper floors, which, having either rotted away or been removed, had left the chamber of a height quite disproportionate with its ground dimensions. In lieu of stairs, a make-shift ladder went up into the roof at a crazy angle, and disappeared through a trap; but it started from the ground so close to a rude fireplace in the wall, that its butt was scorched, and more than one of the lower rungs snapped in its socket.

Over the floor itself were scattered tokens of some late or present occupation—a common table, a rush chair or two, battered saucepans, a greasy gridiron, and, hanging on the walls, a frowzy account of clothes. A line, stretched across a segment of the room, had once held suspended a litter of foul-washed clouts; but the string had broken, and its filthy load been kicked aside or trodden into the floor, half brick half muck, which paved the apartment.

There were no windows, but, at irregular intervals, narrow loops such as one sees in old castles; and the single ground opening was a doorway, which let in just such a smear of daylight as served to emphasise the uncleanness.

Recognising in all this the reverse of familiar, I let my wondering eyes travel round to the parts more contiguous to my bed, and so gave a little pleased start and smile. There, like guardian posts to my slumber, were the long stilts leaned against the wall, their straps hanging loose; and pendent from a nail close by was the very clown’s dress of my memory. I could have drawn it to me and kissed it; but, contenting myself with conceding to it a sigh of affection, I sank back and closed my eyes. Lying thus deliciously, half-submerged in a very nest of dry fern, and with a heavy cloak for blanket over me, I would delay luxuriously the moment of revelation; but it was very evident, I thought, that Gogo had brought me to some wrecked and deserted mill.

Suddenly, unable to rest longer, I peeped. He was going softly about the hearth, preparing something at a little fire, whose every thicker waft of smoke he would jealously dissipate with his hands. He still feared observation, then! Watching him silently, my heart welled up with a gush of love for the dear, patient, faithful monster. “Gogo!” I said softly.

He started, looked across, and came to me at once, stumping over the floor in a rapture of response. He took a stool, and, sitting on it by me, gazed eagerly into my face, his own—animal, sinful, and divine—looking from a very burning bush of stubble.

Smiling, in a drowsy warmth, I put out a hand, and let him imprison it in his own. Ah, foolish little bird, so to commit thyself to the snare of the fowler! I thought he would have killed it, and tore it back fluttering and wounded.

“O, how could you?” I cried. “I was so happy; and you have hurt me!”

He leaned in a hoarse agony to me; his breath groaned in his chest.

“O, come to me!” he implored, “while I make one mouthful of you!”

Then, all in an instant, he was sobbing, and tearing at his short hair, and crying incoherently—

“What have I done?—to wound my dear! Ride me, flog me, use me, but trust me no more. Bitter, bitter are the gods, who make a man stiff-kneed for their sport! Not love or penance for me, never, never. Never to kneel—to lie prone only for a show! O, child! it seems a little thing not to kneel, but—ah, to see others pray and love, yourself forbidden—what pity, what pity! I am the Olympian fool; I am the ass and clown. Behold my livery!”

He pointed to the dress on the wall, and hung his head and arms in a very grief of despondency. But by now my hurt and little fright were gone, and my heart touched again to softness.

“Gogo,” I said, “give it me down, please.” And he looked up wondering, and stirred and obeyed.

“This, and this, and this,” I said, “in pledge of our one-day contract before Jove, or Jehovah, when the maimed shall be made whole.”

My tears dropped on it, as I kissed it three times and gave it back to him. He received it wonderingly first, then sadly, and held it drooping over his knees.

“Whole!” he muttered. “Ay, I don’t question I shall find my legs in Avalon; but can even Jove restore the rifled flower its honey?”

Suddenly he cast himself down beside me, groaning like a bull.

“O, little maid, little maid! I am a beggar, I am a beggar; but I want no reversion of a used estate. Though my own goes lame, I am proud. Give me new-minted money, that no man has worn in his pocket, or none at all.”

For a moment the great human urgency of the creature made me falter. I owed him so much! could the devotion of my life more than repay him? But, alas! it needed but a little reflection to see the fond ridiculous picture the caricature it was. Had I the right even to risk a new generation of Gogos? I saw myself in imagination walking abroad, the proud convoyer of an uncountable number of little shock-headed Dutch tumblers. Perhaps if our Sovereign King had received that Carpenters’ Petition, and brought wooden legs into fashion, I might have been tempted; but it was still the vogue to walk on one’s own feet.

I sat up, my lips twitching perilously near laughter.

“Dear Gogo,” I said, “I am so thankful to you, and so sorry; and I would not have said or done what I did, if I had known it would disturb you so. Won’t you let me get up?”

He scrambled to his feet—ah, fie upon the unmeant cruelty of the word!—and stood knotting his great hands, while his breast heaved stormily.

“Well, I think I was mad,” he roared suddenly. “Strike me! Stamp on me! Bind me to a pillar, and let the eternal remorse batten on my vitals! Whatever the spark at my tail, it started me up like a rocket: and behold me at the end, a blackened and empty case!”

He entreated me with his hands—

“Ah, the pagan sight of you! Ah, your wild hair, growing from the fern or melting into it! Ah, your face, the very flowering of a hamadryad! It wrought a frenzy in my brain. Forgive me, forgive me! And I will serve you seven times seven years, for the promise only to be godfather to your last—your Benjamin!”

He sank down on the stool, and, burying his face in his hands, was silent.

I thought a practical rescue of the situation best, and rising from my bed, went to bestir myself over the fire, which was burning redly. Moreover, a delectable odour had already reached my nostrils from the little caldron he had hung there, and whose contents were beginning to inspire me with a very lively curiosity.

I turned to the poor sufferer.

“Gogo, please, it is very sad; but if I am to go on being a hamadryad I must be fed. Gogo, what is in the pot?”

He lifted his head, with a sigh.

“Snipe,” he said, most tragically.

“Ah! What else?”

“A hare, a partridge, teal.”

“O!”

“Onions, potatoes, carrots.”

“O—o!”

“Larks, chestnuts”—

“Be quiet, lest I cry. You are the best of creatures, and I am the hungriest.”

“Eat what you will. It is my pot au feu—nothing finished before the next is added.”

“I can wait no longer. You are the hermit of hermits. Who is your commissariat-general?”

“Who but the child your little friend.”

“My”—

“Miss Grant.”

“Patty!”

He had arisen, and come across to me.

“She lays it in a hollow tree, twice a week, and twice a week I go down by night and fetch it.”

I stood gaping, staring at him.

“Gogo! Where are we?”

“In ‘Rupert’s Folly.’”

“In—!”

I gave a little cry. He seized me by the wrist, and dragged me towards the opened door.

“O, Gogo!” I choked, struggling and resisting, “we shall be seen.”

“What does it matter if we are,” he said fiercely, “since you loathe me?”

I wept and fondled him, in an agony of fear.

“I don’t loathe you. You are my one stay and comfort. Gogo! Will you give me back to that terror?”

He fell squatting at my feet—it was his substitute for kneeling—and clasped his arms about my skirt.

“Beast!” he groaned; “I neither meant nor could help it. To play upon your fears!—To taste love by deputy!—O, forgive me, forgive me!”

“Yes,” I said quietly, “for the second time and always, because of what you have done. But I fear for myself now, and shall go on fearing. Let me go—O, Gogo, let me escape into the woods, and break my heart on frost and hunger rather than wrong.”

Still clutching at me, with a look of horror, as if he felt the shadow of his last hope eluding him, he scrambled erect again.

“Hunger!” he said. “Think of the snipe and teal! Listen to me, Diana. Before God, I will not offend again. Base, black coward that I am! Before God, Diana!”

I gazed at him intently.

“Why have you brought me here, Gogo?”

“Because,” he answered, “there was no nearer and surer refuge.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ah, child! But you have not heard the story.”

“Well,” I murmured, reassured, though still shy of him, “if you will keep your promise and be good, you shall tell it me by and by.”

He gave a great sigh, and, gently disengaging myself, I stole to the door, while he followed me with his agitated eyes, and peered out. It was Shole, indeed, and the familiar village green that I saw beneath me, looking down the long wintry slope. Quiet and deserted in the chill mists of dawn, no view apparently less tragic, less harmful, could have greeted me. I returned to my companion, who received me with a pathetic relief. He was quite pale and trembling.

“If my arms had the reach of my heart!” he said. “Well, you have come back; and so—for breakfast.”

“Patty’s pot,” said I merrily. “The dear shall put new heart into me, as her wont was.”

He had bread, and some bottles of wine, a little of which I drank mixed with water. It was the loveliest, most intoxicating meal; and, when it was over, full of a new grace I bid Gogo to my side.

“Now,” said I, “tell me your story.”

“Well, first,” he said with a grunt, “for your safety here. It was the astrologer’s, and now is ours. He was carried away in a thunderstorm, on a red cloud.”

“What do you mean, Gogo, please?”

“I repeat the common superstition. Anyhow, he is gone, and the place is haunted and avoided since. Not a clown but myself will come within a mile of it; and as for me, I have lived here for a month undisturbed already.”

“You? But I know where the poor wretch was taken, and where he died.”

“In the asylum, eh? It is what I supposed; and the red earl comes to his own. Tell me about it.”

“By and by. I want to know first what brought you here.”

“The wish to lose myself and be lost, where I could devise a plan for your rescue.”

“You knew where I had been taken, then?”

“No perspicacity of mine. It was the common report. You had lost your head over love unrequited, and it had become necessary to confine you for a while.”

“O, indeed! Go on.”

“I hear your little white teeth clicking. Rest content. You are avenged: he has married her.”

I jumped to my feet.

“He! de Crespigny?”

“Yes.”

I burst into a shriek of laughter.

“They were reconciled, then? O, the dear particular lady! Does he wipe his boots on her? Did he take his love-potion very strong on the wedding night?”

“Very strong, no doubt,” said Gogo. And then suddenly he clasped my skirt, and buried his face in it.

“He would; it was his way,” he muttered. “O, girl, spare me and my unhappiness—my broken dreams! Did you not know? I had always a struggle to keep him from it. And now he will go down, down.”

“Yes,” I said, “while she clings to his legs, as fools drown together.”

“Would you not have had her try to save him?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Ah! You are vindictive.”

“Don’t you hear me laughing?”

“Yes; like the devil.”

“Is it? I should be mad indeed if I could applaud her. Do you bear in mind what she has done to me? She is of the sort who make cruelty their pander—a frowsy, garterless Jezebel. O, how I hate prudery! For five years I longed to open the windows on it, and let the air in, and whatever wholesome little devils beside. I declare I loathe myself to be of her sex. Touch me, Gogo. Am I the same, or different? O, to be sure! I wish her joy of her bargain—and him.”

“She will pay. But for Noel, weak child of genius—leave me the sorrow of my broken hopes, Diana.”

“And nothing else? Why did he not meet me?”

“He had not the courage at the last moment.”

“And so, having cut the ground from under me, he stepped back, and instigated madam to her little coup de theâtre, I suppose, and helped her to push me over the precipice. And you—you sympathised with and abetted him?”

“Ay,” he said sorrowfully: “witness my long exile here, gnawing my fingers in the hungry moonlight.”

I sank upon the ground in a passion of tears, and he mingled his grief with mine.

“Child, I had loved him; and I had but to learn how he had abandoned you, to leave him. I cursed him—cursed de Crespigny. Will Jove forgive me? What matter, if I have saved you?”

I lifted my drowned eyes and agonised arms.

“Take me to Patty,” I cried, “and let me weep my soul out on her kind little heart.”

He shook his head.

“What!” I said; “you will not?”

“She must not even know,” he said. “I could not trust her anxious love. She must rest as she is, aware of my endless scheming, but not of its fruits. Some day, perhaps. And in the meanwhile my lady is gone honeymooning; there is no hope of appeal to her. A breath would redeliver you to your fate, and perhaps a worse. Come, and tell me all you have suffered, poor mistress.”

I crept to his feet, and in broken tones gave him the history of my misery, to the day, to the hour when he had appeared before me.

“And you have not told me,” I said, “how that was.”

“Once,” he answered, “after I had hidden and settled here, I was spying through the telescope above—(Ay,” he interrupted himself, to my exclamation, “they could be bold to capture the dying sorcerer, but to meddle with his tools was beyond their courage)—when I was witness of a characteristic little affaire on the green below. There were a stilt-walker and his wench—a couple of the wandering tribe—a long-legged bird of passage and his little cocotte of bright plumage. I could see her glitter where I stood—could see her spangles, and the ribbons float from her tambour as she danced. And then suddenly my lord viscount was on the scene. He had been sporting, and carried his gun. He had keepers with him (they were his own; not, as might have seemed apter to his wits, Dr. Peel’s); and his dogs ‘pointed’ at the gipsy, I suppose. Anyhow, there was an altercation; and the next I saw was the clown tipped up by his wooden heels, and lying prone. They carried off the girl—willing or unwilling, it would have needed a stronger telescope than the astrologer’s to discern—and presently the poor stunned fool came to his senses and sat up. I could see him try to gather his wits with his hand, plucking at his brow. He was alone, who had been in company. Where were the rest—his ravished mate, and the mob for whom she had tripped and sung? By and by I saw him, with many starts and delays, unbuckle his stilts, and, having shouldered them, hobble with slow, painful steps towards the village. He disappeared, and till night I sat thinking of him, and of the ‘Contrat Social,’ which M. Rousseau wrote for the angels, and which, therefore, you would not understand, Diana, though, for all my better sense, I adore you. About dark I descended into the woods at the back yonder; and there I came upon my stilt-walker seated dying against a tree. Yes, he was dying. His fall had shattered some ribs, and driven one into his lung, and death was already thawing the white snow on his face into patches of blue. I carried him up to the tower, and eased what I could of his agony, and received his last message to the world. It is a callous world, this world of ’87; a world of serf and Satan and Christianity crushed between. But I tell you I would rather give that message than receive it: would rather be Gogo, the clown and pariah, than the Viscount Salted with all his prospective acres. Well, he died, and I took a spade, and buried him at the foot of the tree where he had rested. Pray God it bears wholesome acorns, for why should he wish to poison the swine his brothers? Then I inherited his property; and a thought, an inspiration, occurred to me how I might use it. Was I not wont to stump the country, like a halting orator? I could stump it to higher purpose now—the purpose of your redemption. Sure the spirit of the dead clown would uphold me, for was it not privilege I fought? So, with no great practice necessary, I became a stilt-walker; and presently ventured afield, starting by night, reaping my little harvest of pence in the far villages by day, and under cover of dark returning. Gradually I contracted my circuit, hovering about your prison; and so, once upon a time, peering over the wall in a wintry evening, spied your figure come and go in the light of a high room. It might be yours! I must dare all, and cast the die. Well, Fortune favours—the fortunate.”

He ended, to a little silence.

“Poor Gogo,” I said softly. “It is true, I do believe, that I am her spoilt doll.”

“And I,” he said, “her Dutch tumbler.”

XVI. I PUT AN END TO ONE FOLLY

Hanging and wiving go by Destiny, which must be my excuse for accepting the silken cord which was weaving for my neck all this time. I knew no more than patient Griselda about my impending fate; yet Destiny was not to be gainsaid because I seemed content to resolve upon Gogo for my present welfare and protection.

He, good monster, never alluded again, during all the days I was with him, to his unhappy passion. He was slavish in his loyalty to his word, and in his attentions to the poor creature so utterly in his power. And if I could not but understand the significance of his sighs and oglings and contortions, my feigned ignorance of those hieroglyphics was undoubtedly the most merciful of all the tortures I might have inflicted on him. Thinking of this, I find salve for certain bruises on my conscience, which, nevertheless, were, I am sure, quite unnecessarily self-inflicted. I acted for the best, and with great pain to myself. He has admitted this since, though confessing he was long in forgiving me.

I was in the tower, in all, but four days, which, nevertheless, might have been as many weeks for their tediousness. Gogo was an incomparable slave and henchman, only his devotion necessarily lacked the relish of publicity. If I could have had but one other to whom to boast it, I could have endured it longer. But to be Single-heart’s exclusive fetish, immured in his wigwam and appropriated to his sole company, was what never appealed to me. Nor do I believe that it does truthfully to any other. We are omnivorous; we can’t live on spoon-meat alone; and there is an end of it.

“Gogo,” I said once, “why are you so attached to me?”

“Why?” said he, throwing up his hands, after his fashion, with a sort of protesting groan to the powers that be. “Because I am a creature of surfaces and impressions; because, drawing my life from the great external of all, it is my doom to worship externals. We talk of our inheriting the world. Pooh! we are just an itch on the skin of this monster, whose dark internals are as remote from us as our own hated organs. Have we ever a thought of possessing our kingdom? Think with what terror we contemplate a living burial. We are the dust of contact between earth and sky; are bandied between space and matter, the dross of one or the scum of the other. Love itself is but the measure of our penetration. It is the propagation of superficies: it probes no farther: and all the time is breathing in the air like a swimmer. Are my eyes in my feet? Ask me why I hate the dark, and am attached to the light—to the brightest gnat of an hour flying within it.”

“Thank you, sir,” said I. “And that is me, I suppose?”

“That is you,” he said—“dancing on a window-pane, and wondering what fate keeps you from the garden beyond.”

“And you,” I said, “are the spider lurking in the window-corner, n’est ce pas, and wondering what fate keeps you from devouring me. Well, you are very complimentary; but, for my part, I would rather have an hour’s dancing on the surface than possess all the world that’s under.”

“Ay,” he answered, “and that’s why I covet you.”

Now, was he not an inexplicable creature, and, it must be said, a depressing? Moreover, for all his advocacy of my cause, I could never quite reconcile him to my view of madam.

“Remember the day of the picture,” he would say; “and how she rebuked us all by her attitude. If I testify to your martyrdom, Diana, I must testify to hers that preceded it.”

“She is welcome to the palm,” I cried. “And may she live long to flaunt her conquest.”

He did not answer; and so letting his dissent pass by default, put a bar between us that was never quite surmounted.

In the meanwhile, day followed day, and the frost held, and I was cold and ennuyée; and still he delayed our flight on the score of peril. I had come but poorly clad for the test, and I cried and shivered much in our dismal refuge, where what fire we could afford must be kept low from dread of the smoke betraying us. Present food we had, and some wine that helped a little to comfort our dejection; and on the Friday he was due, tramping fourteen miles thither and back over the hills, to claim his fresh dole of the tree above Wellcot, where faithful Patty—who was in his confidence as to his retreat, and the means towards my salvation he hoped to make of it—was wont to conceal it. Dear darling! How I longed to convey her a message; but he would not hear of it.

“Of all ephemera,” he said, “she is the very transparent-bodied fly, the secrets of whose own heart she cannot help but reveal.”

So I had to submit, and hold her sweet image in my arms o’ nights, when the wind came in at the door and the stars crackled with cold. But Gogo was right, I had to confess, when once from the deep woods beyond Shole we heard the clanging of bloodhounds, and knew that my enemies were vainly seeking the trail which had no existence. Then I cowered low, and felt a new gush of affection for the resourceful giant who was so wise in the singleness of his passion.

Often by day I would climb up the ladder to the loft where the astrologer’s telescope yet remained, commanding, like a disused cannon, the house and village he had fancied under its dominion, and there spend hours spying hungrily for what tokens of life the bitter season afforded. They were not many or inspiriting; but they served at least to keep me in touch with that world of my fellows that seemed eternally lost to me.

On the Friday I fell at Gogo’s feet.

“Safe or unsafe,” I cried, “take me away! I can stand this loneliness no longer.”

His face was full of a sorrowful ecstasy.

“And it was a garden to me,” he murmured; “blind that I am!”

“I shall die,” I cried terribly, “and you will lay me with the dead clown under the tree.”

“So would you be for ever mine,” he continued, in a sort of dream.

I shrunk from him, and seeing my look, he cast himself down on his face before me.

“Command me as you will,” he cried; “only never, never bid me from serving you.”

“You will go?” I sat back, eagerly canvassing him. “Why should I dream of parting with you? Are not our fortunes pledged together, even if I did not owe you the best of all gratitude? You are so wise and brave; you will find a plan and a direction. Only I can stop here no longer.—O, I can’t!—Gogo, take me away—to London—anywhere.”

He raised himself.

“Spare me this evening to forage,” he said, “so that to-morrow we can at least start provided.”

In deep night he left me, to go to the tree. It was the first time I had been abandoned to my sole self. So long as I could discern his figure, striding over the fields, like some unearthly goblin, on its high stilts, I stood by the door gazing into the starlight. Then, when I could see him no more, I sat down just within, my back to the vast emptiness, and hugged and cried to myself against the long panic of waiting.

Not many minutes had I sat thus, when something—a footstep, a shadow—seemed to fall upon my heart with a shock that stopped its beating. Too terrified for look or utterance, I crouched low, hoping the thing would pass, and leave me unobserved.

“I have come, madam, to invite you to a safer asylum,” said a low and musical voice.

I gave an irresistible cry, suppressing it instinctively, even in its emission, lest it should call back my faithful squire, from his long toil across the fields, to a need which these gentle tones were far from justifying. I struggled to my feet, and made myself as small as possible against the wall.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“An outcast like yourself,” answered the shadow; “a fellow-sufferer at the hands of the very family to which you owe your misfortunes.”

“Who are you?” I could only whisper again.

“I am George Rowe,” it said. “Do you remember me? We have met once—an ineffaceable impression to me. I have followed your career since; unknown to you, have traced you by the flowers in your footsteps—yes, even to that wicked place, and your flight from it. I have watched you since from the woods below; have stood at this door at night and listened to your breathing till I maddened; have sorely bided my time, seeking to speak to you. I have tracked the honest tracker, your good servant and saviour; and, while I applaud his devotion, must warn you against the equivocal position in which your further acceptance of that devotion may place you.”

I could not see his face, but only the dusk of a comely form, as it stood now before me. Well could I recall, indeed, “the good-humoured gentleman in the grey coat,” who had once so espoused my childish cause, and earned thereby the hatred of his kinsmen. My confidence was returning to me with my wits.

“You are very considerate for us,” I said deridingly. “Do you come as madam your sister’s emissary, since you are so particular for my character?”

“Alas!” he said, “you do well to doubt me, being so related. But I am an outlaw from all that house’s influence and consideration.”

“An outlaw—you!” I murmured.

“Ay,” he answered; “ruined, menaced, and driven forth to nurse my wrongs in hiding.”

“Why, where?” I asked.

“To the woods,” he answered, “like Robin Hood.”

“O, an attractive asylum, sir, for distressed ladies,” I said.

He replied, “Maid Marian thought so.”

“Perhaps she had an attachment there,” said I. “I miss the application to myself.”

He laughed softly.

“Whether we fly from fear, or fly to love, we fly,” he said. “You may hold your enemies too cheap, not knowing that my lord makes interest with his sister, and for his own purposes, to subsidise your Dr. Peel. For the sake of the secrets of the prison-house, he will not leave her solus to the hue and cry. You have planted two dragon-heads in place of the one you severed.”

I shrunk before him.

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“By the token,” he said, “that he destined me to your fate, and I answered with the better part of valour, which you will be wise to imitate.”

“To-morrow,” I muttered; “we had already decided.”

“That is not all, nor enough,” he urged. “You may be Una, with a rhinoceros, and that is not enough. My lord rides a thunder-bolt. It is not enough to flee him; you must vanish—be no more.”

Now all of a sudden—I know not how—his words seemed to wake me to the fond illusion of my state. How, indeed, was I situated, with a legless Caliban to show me how to run? I had been blinded, by Gogo’s devotion, to the real nature of the presumption it had thought to justify. What honest right had he to have undertaken so responsible a deed, save he had provided for it to the last details? I felt suddenly very naked and forlorn—shiftless and crying, like some poor exposed child in the night. I clasped my fingers to the shadow, entreating it in a broken voice—

“What am I to do? Advise me, help me!”

It moved upon me, soft, and swift, and irresistible. I felt my hands imprisoned—seized as out of the grave into an assurance of human warmth and sympathy.

“For what else am I here?” demanded the fervent voice. “Have I not the prior claim? Have you never thought of me in all these years—of what you might be now, save for my interference?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Indeed, indeed I am not one to forget.”

“Well,” he said, “I am just a vagabond at last, and desperate in romance; and you—your reason is forfeit, if not your life. Be under no delusion about it; nor about the real impotence of this good fellow to save you. Come with me, then, while there is time, and be my little sister. I am lonely in the deep woods.”

I did not move or speak, but I gazed up intently into the white bloom of his face. The strangest thought was struggling for expression in me—of some conscious gravitation, through all these years, towards an affinity which had been shadowed out to me at that first and only meeting. I felt no shyness, but only a restful confidence in his company. Was not that strange? To be brother and sister, one and indivisible in the candid sympathies of Nature. I recognised in a moment that it was that ideal relationship which had always appealed to me for the best and purest—that I could never be happy again divorced from it.

Suddenly the tears were in my eyes.

“If I could truly be your little sister,” I said, “and keep house for you, as Gretel did for the gentle shepherd who had plucked her when a flower.”

He heaved a long sigh, full of rapture.

“Quick, then! let me pluck my flower,” says he, “and run.”

But now, at that, for some reason, a revulsion of feeling took me. I sank down upon the ground away from him, and hid my face in my hands.

“No, no,” I cried—“not yet, not now. O, leave me, please!”

Perhaps he was wise to understand and temporise. Anyhow, he went, though no farther than the door.

For a moment I hated myself; for a moment I felt the basest thing on earth. What use to reflect that reason and kindness were on my side: that, since I could not cure a poor fond fool, it were no mercy, but the contrary, to submit him to the continued infection of my presence? I said so to myself, and saying it, saw his face returning—full of light and eagerness—to learn the damning truth! To be held accursed in that great heart! I could not, I could not! Poor Gogo! Had he not given up everything for me? I would not desert him. Why should he not come too? But no: I saw in the same instant that that was impossible, since he himself had no thought, no wish, to be my brother. And perhaps, if I went, I should never see him again. Well, would not that be the best for him? Let me nurse my grief eternal, so long as he found his cure in separation. It were better I should go. Freed of this incubus, he would have no longer need to crouch and starve. The world had no reason, so far as I knew, to identify him with my flight. And now every hour he remained with me was an added peril to his safety, his very existence!

Quite wild, I rose to my feet and went panting to the shadow.

“Take me away,” I said, “before he breaks my heart, returning.”

He took my hand tight in his, drew me under the starlight, and together we fled down the hill and into the woods.

XVII. I AM CONSIGNED TO A GREEN GRAVE

To you, my dear Alcide, conscience is, I know, a disease, and virtue its relapse. I do not, then, ask your sympathy, but only your commiseration in that long struggle with my better self in which I was now to engage—a struggle which found me child, and left me woman—a struggle through whose intermittent deliriums moved ever the sorrowful figure of my poor lost Gogo.

Yet I must own that the oasis in which this destiny was to be fulfilled figured for a period the greenest in all my desert career. It was a dear time, in truth; a dear, abandoned, wonderful time, until the inevitable disenchantment came. Alas! to take profit of your own unselfishnesses is, with a stern Providence, to convert them into the plainest of worldly transactions!

No word passed between me and my companion as we hurried, deeper and deeper, into the fathomless woods. Sure of foot and, it seemed, of destination, he drew me unresisting by cloudy deeps of foliage, by starlit alleys, by ways so thronged and massed with trunks as to seem impenetrable. Often I shrunk before some imaginary charge of shadows; often cried out in the silent rush of woodland things across our path. There was no wind that could reach and buffet those packed desolations; no frost, save where in the clearings it could find space to bloom. And these, for precaution’s sake, we avoided, lest our footsteps should betray us. On and on we sped, till my heart was sick in my breast, and I cried out to rest and die. But he would not let me stop.

“Courage, little sister!” he cried; “we are within a cast of home.”

We mounted, after that, a long and gentle hill, from whose sides the trees fell away, till, on the summit, there was none. But here, sunk deep in the crest, was, as I could discern, an ancient gravel pit, whose slopes were rough with brake and brush to a giddy distance down.

“Come,” he whispered, and clasped my hand secure.

We descended by a path, that was no path to me, and, at the bottom, stooped under a very thicket of bush, and gained once more a sense of space and movement, but so deadly close-shut that for a little I dared not stir.

“Come,” whispered my companion again. “It is nothing but a cleft in the hill, but so overgrown above that no mortal would guess it there.”

Still I dared not move. When suddenly I felt his arm about me, and his lips on mine. Then I started to myself with a shock of anger.

“Is this to be a brother?” I cried.

“What else,” he murmured, “to give his little sister confidence.”

The low laugh with which he said it made my blood fire. I could have struck him in my fury.

“Go on!” I said, in a repressed voice. “I have come so far; I must follow, I suppose.”

“Will you not let me lead you?”

“No.”

“You may stumble in the dark.”

“Not to the fall you think.”

“I am sorry.”

“Very well. Go on.”

He went before, submissively. The gully cut straight, like a giant furrow, through the hill. It was narrow and pitch-dark, sodden here and there with dripping water, and always smelling like a vault. Not once in its entire length, so far as I could see, did the dense mat of overgrowth thin to that texture that a star of all the hosts above was visible.

At last he stopped so suddenly that I near fell against him.

“Hush!” he whispered, “we are at the end. Can you see enough to follow me?”

“Yes,” I said; “my eyes are opened now.”

He had hard work, I knew, to suppress a chuckle over my tragic tone.

“Well, keep them so,” said he; and, elbowing up a great pad of foliage, beckoned to me to pass. I obeyed, holding my skirts from him, and in a moment discovered myself in the open once more.

We had emerged, it seemed, high on the near perpendicular side of another pit, or cutting. Right beneath us, shouldering the very steep on which we were perched, was the thatched roof of a cottage, an open skylight in the midst gaping at us scarce ten feet below. So close did it invite us, in the bewildering starlight, that I was near springing, on the thought, to gain its shelter. But my companion restrained me.

“Wait,” he whispered drily. “A little of your discretion, please.”

Doubtful of me, he let go his hold reluctantly, and stooping once more under the curtain of foliage, dragged out a ladder, which was concealed behind, and which he now, with infinite precaution, lowered through the skylight till it rested.

“Now,” he said, “climb down, while I hold it firm.”

It was the rudest thing; just slats nailed across a pole—a ladder for bears, not men. But I was young and lithe, and quickly was down and through, and standing, trembling over this finish to my adventure, on the floor of a little dark, invisible room. And so, before I had time to collect myself, the other was descended in my footsteps, and the ladder hauled in and laid along the wall, and a little silence ensued.

“Well,” said his voice at length, “you are safe at last, little sister.”

Then, I don’t know how it was, the tears would come.

“Why, don’t you believe it?” he whispered, groping a step nearer.

“Have you given me reason to?” I answered, shrinking from his touch, and gulping down my sobs.

He drew away at once.

“The best reason in the world,” he said coldly, “since I have placed my life in your hands—since I leave you here the means to escape, if you will, and curry favour by betraying me.”

I could have cried out on his cruelty, but dared not.

“Understand, this is your sanctuary,” he went on, “prepared against your coming, and which none, in their turn, will betray. The path to it is sacred to me. No one will disturb you; you are secure as a bird in its nest. There is a bed in a corner; rushlight and holder and tinder-box on a table by. Light, and take possession. I must go and reassure Portlock.”

I heard him move softly over the floor; a trap opened somewhere, letting in a momentary weak film of light, and he was gone.

For a time I stood motionless, hearing the murmur of voices somewhere below; then, suddenly panic-struck, groped for the table and tinder, and shakily struck fire. The wick caught, flamed up and settled, and I saw my possession.

It was the tiniest, kindest little room, under a sloping roof, clean and friendly, with a white bed. I was dazed and weary beyond speculation. Leaving the light burning, I crept under the coverlet as I was, and fell into a profound sleep.

XVIII. I BEGIN ANOTHER FOLLY

I opened my eyes to a sense of utter restfulness and peace. A feeling of green isolation, of a quiet and guarded security, such as not all Gogo’s watchfulness could accomplish for me in the tower, came instantly to comfort the first startled shock of my waking. Little demure clouds drifted over the skylight; I heard a faint twitter of birds on the hillside; there were woodland berries and flaming leaves in my room; pictures, too; and a dozen pretty attentions to reassure me. Sure he must have made very certain of his capture before he decorated the cage so handsomely. And for how long, pray, had he held his hand and aloof, biding his opportunity? He must have kept his secret well, at least, for I had never known a hint of his presence.

I smiled, and closed my eyes again. It was a most endearing thought, the thought of that brotherly haunting, while I had been bemoaning my abandonment by all the world. There was still that in me, then, to attract admiration, to ensure my affinity with the strong and shapely. I was sick to death of malformations, mental and bodily. What had become of him? I had not reached the end of my resentment, but I did not wish him to think it insurmountable; and I was certainly curious to learn how far my romantic memory of him was justified.

And, in the meantime, where was I? in what remote eyrie of the green forest? For all I could see, I might be imprisoned in a well.

I rose, and, after making my toilette, had paused undecided, wondering what was to come next, when I heard his voice, very mock-humble, at the trap—

“Little sister, will you come down to breakfast?”

The blood thrilled in my temples, but I hardened my heart, and answered “Yes,” as frigid as a nun.

He flung up the hatch at once, and for the first time I saw the ladder going down into candlelight, whence a smell of warm dust and tallow rose to my nostrils. He descended before me, and I followed, into the leanest of little cellars, with a rough board on trestles in it and a stool or two. The rafters were hung with cobwebs; there were a couple of dismal dips in horn sconces on the walls; a closed door showed dimly at the farther end, and that was all.