Jaunty Jock and Other Stories

“I would like to ask you one thing,” said the Captain. “How did it feel?”

The lawyer flushed over his clean-shaven face and stared straight in front of him out of the window at the sea-shore with the wild gulls flying free.

“I hope it is the last time so shameful an affair will call for reference,” he said; “but I’ll tell you this, it was – it was an ecstasy! I would not have lost the experience for ten thousand pounds.”

“Ho! ho!” said the Captain.

“Nor have it again for twice ten thousand,” concluded the lawyer.

“And do you know this?” said the Captain, taking a grip of his arm and speaking softly into his ear. “Do you know this? By heavens, I envy you! What broke the spell?”

“I know, but I’m not going to tell you,” said the lawyer shamefacedly.

“Come, come! It is hardly worth while swallowing the rump and retching at the tail.”

“Between ourselves, then,” replied Macaulay, “it was my slippers. That and an indifferent dish of tea. If my wife had not got me into my slippers, neither you nor I would be sitting so jocular here. The freedom of the mountains is not to be compared with a pair of dry hose and content beside the fire.”

At that the Captain grimaced. “Tut!” said he. “I wish I had not asked you. I expected a miracle, and you give me only an epitome of civilisation.”

THE BROOCH

WANLOCK of Manor looked with a puckered face at the tiny jewel flaming in the hollow of his hand, and, for the hour forswearing piety, cursed the lamented Lady Grace, his sister, haut en bas, with all the fury of his bitter disappointment. The harridan had her revenge! Last night he dreamt her envoys by their wailings made the forest hideous; already amongst the Shadows of the monstrous other world she must be chuckling (if the Shades have laughter) through her toothless gums at the chagrin of her brother, for the first of the seven shocks of evil fortune had that moment staggered him, and he was smitten to the vitals in his purse and pride.

The brooch, so wretchedly inadequate as consolation for the legacy he had long anticipated, had seemed last night as he peered at it with dubious eyes a bauble wholly innocent, and he had laughed at its sinister reputation, which in a last vagary of her spiteful humour she had been at pains to apprise him of in a posthumous private letter. “Seven shocks of dire disaster, and the last the worst,” he had read in the crabbed writing of the woman who, even in prosperity, could never pardon him his luckless speculation with the money that was meant to be her dowry; he had sneered at her pagan folly, but now the premonstration bore a different aspect; he was stunned with the news that his law-plea with Paul Mellish of The Peel was lost, and that the bare expenses of that long-protracted fight should cost him all that was left of his beggared fortunes. But that was not the worst of it, for Mellish, as in pity of a helpless foe, had waived his admitted claim to the swampy field which was the object of their litigation. The first blow, surely, with a vengeance!

For a moment Wanlock, now assured of some uncanny essence in the jewel, thought to defend himself by its immediate destruction, and then he had a craftier inspiration. He strode across the room, threw up the window-sash, and bellowed upon Stephen, his idle son, the spoiled monopolist of what love he had to spare.

“You see this brooch?” he said when the lad, with a grey dog at his heels, came in with a rakish swagger from his interrupted dalliance with the last maid (so to call her) left of Wanlock’s retinue.

They looked at it together as it lay in the father’s hand – a garnet, cut en cabochon, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary, clasped by thin gold claws; and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near them, wrapt in cogitations of a different world. Their heads went down upon the gem: they stared in silence, strangely influenced by its eye-like shape and sullen glow, that seemed to come less from the polished surface than from a cynic spirit inward, animate. It had the look of age: had glowed on the breasts of high-scarfed dandies, pinned the screens on girlish bosoms flat now in the dust, known the dear privacies of love and passion, lurked in the dusk of treasuries, kept itself unspotted, indifferent, unchanged through the flux of human generations. Lord! that men’s lives should be so short and the objects of their fashioning so permanent!

“It may be braw, but it’s no’ very bonny,” at the last quo’ Stephen Wanlock.

“I want ye,” said his father, “to take it now with – with my assurance of regard and – and gratitude to Mellish of The Peel. He has a craze for such gewgaws, with no small part of his money, they tell me, sunk in their collection. You can say it has the reputation of a charm.”

Young Wanlock posted off on this pleasant mission, with a chuck below the chin for the maid in passing; and his father, walking in the afternoon between the dishevelled shrubberies of his neglected policies, felt at times amid the anguish of his situation a soothing sense of other ills averted and transferred to one whom now he hated worse than ever.

It seemed next day as if the evil genius dwelling in the jewel wrought its purpose with appalling expedition. Something is in the air of our haunted North whose beaked sea promontories cleave the wind and foam, that carries the hint of things impending to all who have boding fears or hateful speculations, and Wanlock knew some blow had fallen on his enemy while yet were no human tidings. The pyots chattered garrulous as women on the walls; the rooks that flew across the grey storm-bitten country were in clanging bands, possessed of rumours which they shared at first with the careering clouds alone, for men are the last of all created things to learn of their own disasters.

He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped down the glen – “The Peel! The Peel!” he cried, as he thundered past with his head across his shoulder – “They have broken The Peel!” A running gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into the wood as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on the highway wildly protesting innocence.

“Who blamed ye?” queried Wanlock. “What has happened?”

“I declare to my God I know nothing of it!” cried the man in an excess of apprehension, “but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the night.”

“Ha! say ye so!” said Wanlock, kindling. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: ye run gey fast, I think, for innocence,” and he fixed a piercing gaze upon the wretch, who drew his hand across his throat and held it up to heaven.

“But it is none of my affair – begone!” said Wanlock, and the gipsy clattered on his way.

Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer’s end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood an eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still – but still ’twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished.

A hand fell on the listener’s shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren.

“Have you heard the news?” she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan and troubled aspect.

He held up an arresting hand, and “Hush!” he said, “there is something curious in the wood… Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the wood… In the wood… Did ye not.. did ye not hear it?” and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through the columns of the trees.

Again the cry rose, farther in the distance, burdened with a sense of desolation.

“A bittern,” said Mirren; “it can only be a bittern.”

“Do ye think I have not thought of that?” asked Wanlock. “Have ye ever heard a bittern boom at this time of the year, and in the middle of the day?”

“I have heard it once or twice at night of late,” said his daughter. “It can only be a bittern, or some other creature maybe wounded. Do you know that The Peel has been plundered? Last night the strong-room was broken into.”

“And robbed of the Mellish jewels?” broke in Wanlock, with exultant intuition.

“Yes, and a great collection of antique gems entrusted to Mellish for the purpose of a monograph he was writing,” said the daughter.

“A monograph?” asked Wanlock, still with eyes bent on the wood from which the dog returned indifferent.

“It is a book on gems he has been busy writing.”

Wanlock sneered. “A book!” said he. “I’m thinking he’d be better at some other business. I find, myself, but the one Book needful; all the others are but vanity, and lead but to confusion. And he was pillaged, was he? Well, there’s this, it might have been a man who could afford it less, for Mellish was the wealthiest in the shire.”

“But now he is the poorest,” said the girl with pity. “I’m told it means his utter ruin.”

“There’s the money of the Glasfurd girl to patch his broken fortune with; they’re long enough engaged if the clash of the countryside be true,” said Wanlock, and his daughter blenched, while the wailing cry rose up again beyond the fir-tops on the moorland edge.

Wanlock stood confused a moment, then seized her by the arm. “Would ye have me vexed for him?” said he. “Now I – with your permission – look upon it as a dispensation. If Mellish is ruined, Dreghorn is the richest man in the countryside and the better match for you – ”

“Dreghorn!” cried the girl with scorn. “He danced at my mother’s wedding – a cankered, friendless miser!”

“And now he’ll dance at yours! There have been men more spendthrift, I’ll admit, but you’re not a Wanlock if in that respect ye could not teach him better. He was at me again for ye yesterday – ”

Mirren put her fingers in her ears; she was used to these importunities; they had lately made her days and nights unhappy, and sent her fleeing like a wild thing to the hills, or roving with a rebel heart in all the solitary places of the valley. At any other hour this spirit would have made him furious; to-day he was elated at her news, and let her go.

His joy, however, was but transitory. Searching with a candle late that evening through his wine-cellar among dusty bins whose empty niches gloomily announced the ebbing tide of that red sea of pleasure, or its fictitious wave, that had swept so high on ancient jovial nights to the lips of many generations of the guests of Manor, a yellow glint as from a reptile’s eye fastened upon him from a cobwebbed corner. He stared at it in horror and unbelief, closed in upon it with his guttering candle, warily; and found himself once more the owner of the brooch!

In the chill of the vault he felt, for a moment, the convulsion of a mind confronted with some vast mysterious power whose breath was loathsome, deathly, redolent of dust and fraught with retribution, and fearing an actual presence, almost shrieked when the flame of his candle was extinguished in the draught of a slowly opening door. He stood all trembling, with the jewel in his hand: a mocking chuckle rose in the outer night: all the old eerie tales of childhood then were true! He heard approaching cautious footsteps; a light was struck; a taper flared, and he faced the ne’er-do-well, his son!

“At the wine again, Stephen?” he said with unspeakable sadness, for indeed the lad had been the apple of his eye, and he knew too well his failing.

“Not this time, father!” said the son, with some effrontery in spite of his perturbation. “There’s damned little left between us: we’re at the dregs of the old Bordeaux. I dropped – I dropped something last time I was here, I fancy, and I’m come to seek for it.”

His father’s cheek in the daytime would have ashened: in the taper light it merely shook and crinkled colourlessly like a scum. He held the brooch out in his hand, and asked, “Is that it, Stephen?” in the simple phrase of a man with his last illusion shattered, and the son confessed.

He had been shown to the strong-room when he carried the brooch to Mellish: the sight of its contents and all their possibilities of life and pleasure had fevered him with desire: he had returned in cover of night and plundered the treasure of The Peel.

“Oh Lord!” cried Wanlock, “must I now pay teind to hell? ‘He that begetteth a fool doeth it to his own sorrow, and the father of a fool hath no joy.’ And where, my rogue, have ye put your plunder?”

“That is the worst of it,” said Stephen: “you have it all there in your hand! It lay apart from the rest, and I put it in my pocket.”

“A liar, too!” wailed Wanlock.

“It is nothing but the truth,” protested Stephen sullenly. “I was observed, whether by man or woman, beast or bugle, I cannot tell, but I heard the laugh at my elbow, and I ran. It pattered at my heels, and would have caught me if I had not dropped my burden in the old Peel well.”

“And there let it lie and rot!” exclaimed his father: “But you – oh, Stephen! – you to be the robber! and bring on me the second blow!” and the wine-vault rang with the blame and lamentation of a shattered man.

The son was packed off on the morrow lest a worse thing should befall in a suspicion of his part in the fall of Mellish: his father paid the last penny of his available money for the journey to the south; the search for the spoiler passed into other parts of the country, and was speedily abandoned. When the hue and cry had ceased, old Wanlock, professing to have found the brooch on the roadside, sent it back to Mellish, and waited with a savage expectation for another demonstration of its power.

He had not long to wait. The very day on which the talisman was sent, the match of Mellish with the Glasfurd girl – as rich as she was proud, haughty, and ambitious – was broken off by one who could not bring herself to marry a beggared man, and the tale, by gossip amplified and rendered almost laughable, went round the parish like a song.

’Twas Dreghorn brought the news to Manor – the ancient wooer. Wanlock broke a bottle of wine and made the occasion festival, but Mirren could not be discovered.

Full of his plans, her father went that evening to her chamber at an hour when she should be bedded, and found with apprehension that although the door was barred the chamber held no tenant. He went outside in darkness lashed by rain, and to her open window: made his way within – and found the brooch upon her unpressed pillow! It caught a flicker from the fire and shot a lance of light across the room.

“My God!” cried Wanlock harshly, “oh, my God! is this himself, Mahoun?” and with the jewel burning in his loof, he turned to see his daughter, with a face of shame and fear, framed in the open window. She had, in other hours, a sweetness and a charm like sunny Highland weather, or like the little lone birds of the sea, or like an air of youth remembered; but now arising from the outer night of misty exhalations, pallid against the background of the Manor trees, she seemed a blameful ghost.

He dragged her to his feet: as she knelt and cowered, he stamped with brutal passion on her fingers.

“Where have ye been?”

Her gallant spirit plucked her back from the edge of swound to which his cruel act had brought her: she looked without a tremor in his face, and the third blow fell when she told him she had been to Mellish.

“Mellish!” he cried aghast, “and, madam, what in the name of God have you to do with Mellish? He gave you this?” And he pressed with a brutal thumb the fateful gem against her parted lips so sore it seemed to shed its juices like a berry.

“I love him, and he has long loved me, and – ”

“What! and there was the Glasfurd woman!”

“He had never loved her, or only thought so at the first, and the freedom she has given him has more than made amends for his poverty. Father, I am going to marry him.”

“Mellish! A ruined man! And you know my pact with Dreghorn?”

“Your pact, father, but never mine: I should die first. It was the horrid prospect sent me to The Peel to-night. The thing is settled: he gave me his troth with the brooch you hold there in your hand – oh, the dear brooch! the sweet brooch of happy omen! – and you will let us marry, will you not? I would never marry wanting your consent.”

“Then ye will never have it if the man is Mellish!” cried her father. He thundered threats: he almost wept entreaties: every scrap of his affection reft from her and centred now on his blackguard son, but the girl was staunch: that night he drove her from his door.

It was with huge dismay he came upon the gem a fortnight later on the floor of his girl’s deserted chamber. This new appearance for a moment filled his soul with panic – it seemed the very pestilence that walks in darkness – and then he realised she must have left it on the night he sent her forth. With the assassin’s heart and the family humour, that had not been confined to Lady Grace, he wrapped the jewel up and sent it as his wedding-present to The Peel.

To his outcast daughter and the man who loved her he could have done no kinder act, for their marriage hung upon his giving to it something of his countenance, and this ironic gift of what to them was ever a talisman benign, came to relieve a piteous situation. Mirren loved, but she had made a promise not to wed without her father’s willingness, and she was such that she should keep her promise though her life was marred.

With a light heart, then, did Mellish ride with the jewel in his pocket to the house in town where she had taken refuge, and gladly taking the gem as proof of her father’s softening, she married the man of her desire.

“And now, goodwife,” said Mellish, “I will go down to Manor and make peace.”

“You will take our lucky amulet,” she said, as she pinned it in his scarf, and he galloped with the gaiety of a boy through the fallen autumn leaves to the house of Wanlock.

It was as if he came from realms of morning freshness to some Terror Isle. Gloaming was come down upon that sad reclusive lowland country: the silvery fog which often filled the valley where the mansion lay, austere and old and lonely, gave to the natural dusk a quality of dream, an air of vague estrangement, a brooding and expectant sentiment. The trees stood round like sighing ghosts, and evening birds were mourning in the clammy thickets. Only one light burned in the impoverished dwelling; Mellish, through the open window where it beamed uncurtained, saw old Wanlock sunk in meditation with a Bible on his knees, and with a heart of pity left the saddle.

Oh God! that men should die within stark walls in ancient long-descended properties, without a comprehension of the meaning of the misty world!

He passed within the frowning arch and beat upon the knocker. The clangour rang through the dark interior: the night stood hushed, save for the inquiry of the howlets in the pines, the plunge of the Manor Burn, the drip of crisply falling perished leaves, and, far away upon the coast, the roaring of the sea. Pervaded by the spirit of the scene and hour, misgivings came to Mellish, in whose heart the night seemed all at once inimical, fantastic, peopled with incorporeal presences. He heard their mutter, heard them move with cunning footsteps; of a sudden, near at hand broke forth the dolorous utterance of a soul beseeching and forlorn. The dreary note, prolonged and dying slowly, seemed to roll in waves far out on shoreless seas of space, and Mellish, agitated, beat again upon the ponderous brass.

He heard the halting shuffle of feet within; the door was opened; Wanlock stood with a candle in the entrance. One glance only he gave to Mellish, and slammed the door in his face!

Abruptly from the crowding night round Mellish burst a peal of mad and mocking laughter!

For a moment fear, resentment, and disbelief warred in his brain for his possession: fear, being stranger there, was routed by an effort of the will; disbelief surrendered to his reason; he was left alone on the battlefield with anger. It swept with purple banners through the rally of his senses: drunk with passion, he tore from his breast the gem that had misled him to that hateful door, and flung it in by the open window, then leaped upon his horse and galloped furiously for home.

Wanlock, with the candle in his hand, stood for a moment listening in the passage, glad with venom. He heard the thud of hoofs die off in the distance of the avenue, then, with a shock that left him trembling, the ululation of his old familiar – that dreadful bittern call! It was to-night more sad than he had ever heard it, more imbued with hopeless longing, yet in some way through its desolation went a yapping note of menace and alarm.

He hurried to his chamber with a sense of something older than mankind: he set the candle on the table; turned with eagerness to lift the Book – the comforter, the shield, – and there between the open pages, on the final verses of the seventh Psalm, lay the accursed brooch!

It seemed to him like a thing that had come from the void outside the rim of human life where evils muster with black wings and the torments of men are fashioned. He whimpered as he made to seize it, then, as if it stung him, felt a numbness in the arm. Through his brain for a moment went the feeling of something gush: he staggered on the floor: a mist swept through his eyes. His vision cleared, and he saw the jewel at his feet. He bent to lift it with some curious failure in his members, groped with an impercipient hand, and found his fingers would not close upon it!

“My God!” he mumbled, “what is this come on me?” A mocking chuckle sounded through the room, and the final doubts of Wanlock vanished – another blow was come, and he was in the grip of the Adversary!

With his other hand he caught the gem, and rising slowly, cast a glance of wild expectancy about the room. No assurance came from the discovery that to the eye at least he was alone, yet a subtler sense than vision told him he had company, and he looked above him into the umber rafters, then turning to the window, saw enormous hands claw on the sill. They seemed to drag a weight from the nether world behind them: he watched them fascinated, even to the sinews’ tension, till there raised and rested on the backs of them a face more horrible than he had ever dreamt of – blurred, maculate, amorphous! From the sallow visage peered inquiring eyes profound with cunning, and the soul of Wanlock grewed.

“We wrestle,” he mumbled, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness”: he seized upon the Book, and held it up before him like a buckler, all his being drenched in the spirit of defiance, and he cried the Holy Name.

He cried it as they cried it on the moors – his people, when the troopers rode upon them: he cried with their conviction that the Blood had all things pacified, redeemed, and the apparition chuckled!

The last redoubt of Wanlock’s faith surrendered: he madly wrenched a page from the sacred volume, crushed it with the jewel in his hand, and threw them in the face of his tormentor, then fell, a withered man, upon the bedstead, while the bittern cry outside arose in demon laughter.

When he drifted back from the bliss of his oblivion, he lay a while like a child that makes its world afresh each morning from a few familiar surrounding things – the light, the shade, the feel of textures, and the sound of the cinder falling on the hearthstone. All his life came ranked before him in epochs that grew more vivid as his brain grew clear – the folly of youth, the vanity of manhood, the pride of his strength, the dour determination of his will; but he saw them all as virtues. Had he not prayed, and sat at the Communion? Had he not felt the gust of the Holy Spirit? Had he not repented? – nay, penitence had been denied him from his very birth, and without repentance well he knew there was no sin’s remission. Thus are the unelect at last condemned for a natural inability – terror they have and chagrin at results, but no regret for the essential wrong. There was a sound of some one moving in the house – the servant, who had been on a private escapade of her own, was now returned. Wanlock seized a walking-cane he kept beside the bedstead for the purpose, and he loudly rapped upon the wall. At first there was no answer; then he rapped again, and the woman entered, flushed with some spirit of adventure.