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Another random document with
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 “And you tore it up?”
“Yes. I didn’t want you to know Zyp and I were married.”
“Now, I’ve done with you. For Zyp’s sake I give you the chance of
escaping from the dreadful fate that awaits you if you get in that
other’s way. I warn you—nothing further. For the rest, never come
near me again, or look to me to hold out a finger of help to you.
Beyond that, if you breathe one more note of the hideous slander
with which you have pursued me for years, I go heart and soul with
Duke in destroying you. You may be guilty of Modred’s death, as you
are in God’s sight the murderer of that unhappy child who has gone
to His judgment.”
“I didn’t kill him,” he muttered again; and with that, without another
word or look, I left him.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
A SUDDEN DETERMINATION.

The inquest was over; the jury had returned a merciful verdict; the
mortal perishing part of poor, weak and lovable Dolly was put gently
out of sight for the daisies to grow over by and by.
Jason had been called, but, not responding, and his presumed
evidence being judged not necessarily material to the inquiry, had
escaped the responsibility of an examination and, as I knew, for the
time being at least, a deadlier risk. Mention of his name left an ugly
stain on the proceedings, and that was all.
Now, night after night, alone with myself and my despair, I sat
brooding over the wreck and ruin of my life. Zyp, so far as this life
was concerned, could never now be mine; and full realization of this
had burst upon me only at the moment when the moral barrier that
had divided me from her was broken down. That wound must
forevermore eat like a cancer within me.
Then, in the worst writhing moments of my anguish, a new savage
lust of sleuth began to prickle and crawl over me like a leprosy. If all
else were taken from me I still had that interest to cheer me through
life—the hounding of my brother’s murderer. This feeling was
curiously intermingled with a revival in my heart of loyalty to Modred.
He had been my friend—at least inextricably kin to me in a common
cause against the world. When I turned to the vile figure of the
brother who survived, the dead boy’s near-forgotten personality
showed up in a light almost lovably humorous and pathetic. My
fevered soul bathed itself in the memory of his whimsicalities, till very
tenderness begot an oath that I would never rest till I had tracked
down his destroyer.
And was Jason that? If it were so, I could afford to stand aside for
the present and leave him to the mercy of a deadlier Nemesis he
had summoned to his own undoing.
Set coldly, at the same time, on a justice that should be
passionless, I bore in mind my brother’s hint of a suspicion that
involved some other person whom he left nameless. This might be—
probably was—a mere ruse to throw me off the scent. In any case I
should refuse to hold him acquitted in the absence of directer
evidence.
Still I could not stay a certain speculative wandering of my
thoughts. If not Jason—who then? There were in the house that
night but the usual family circle and Dr. Crackenthorpe. What
possible temptation could induce any one of them to a deed so
horrible? Jason alone of them had the temptation and the interest,
and, above all, the nature to act upon a hideous impulse. On Jason
must lie the suspicion till he could prove himself innocent.
It was not until about the third night of my gloomy pondering that
the sudden resolution was formed in me to leave everything and
return to my father. The fact of Zyp’s reference to the letter he had
sent me had been so completely absorbed in the tense excitement of
the last few days that when in a moment it recurred to me I leaped to
my feet and began pacing the room like a caged animal that scents
freedom.
So the old man in his loneliness desired me back again. Why not
go? The accustomed life here seemed impossible to me any longer.
The notoriety attaching to these pitiful proceedings was already
making my regular attendance at the office a sore trial. Duke had
sent in his resignation the very morning of his attack on me before
Jason’s house. All old ties were rent and done with. I was, in a
modest way, financially independent, for Ripley’s generous
acknowledgment of my services, coupled with my own frugal manner
of life, had enabled me to put into certain investments sufficient to
produce an interest that would keep me, at least, from starvation.
And, in addition, how could I prosecute my secret inquiries better
than on the very scene of the deed? I would go. My decision was
sudden and final. I would go.
Then and there I sat down and wrote a brief letter to my father.
“I have only within the last few days,” I said, “learned of the letter
you wrote me three months ago. Jason destroyed it lest I should find
out he was married to Zyp. I now tell you that I am ready to do as
you wish—to return and live with you, if you still desire it. In any
case, I can endure my present life here no longer. Upon receipt of a
word from you I will come.”
As I wrote, the wind, bringing clouds of rain with it, was booming
and thundering against the window. Soft weather had succeeded to
the ice-breathing blasts of a few days back, and I thought of a lonely
grave out there in the night of London, and of how just now the water
must be gushing in veins and runnels over its clayey barrow.
Dolly—Dolly! May it wash clean your poor wounded heart. “After
life’s fitful fever” you sleep well; while we—oh, shamed and fallen
child! Which of us who walks straightly before our fellows would not
forego passion and revenge, and all the hot raptures of this blood-
red world, to lie down with you deep in the cool, sweet earth and rest
and forget?
I went out and posted my letter. The streets were swept clean of
their human refuse. Only a few belated vehicles trundled it out
against the downpour, setting their polished roofs as shields against
the myriad-pointed darts of the storm.
Feeling nervous and upset, I was approaching my own door, when
a figure started from a dark angle of the wall close by and stood
before me.
“Duke!” I cried.
He was drenched with rain and mud—his dark clothes splashed
and saturated from boot to collar. His face in the drowned lamplight
was white as wax, but his eyes burned in rings of shadow. I was
shocked beyond expression at his dreadful appearance.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” I cried. “Duke! Come
in, for pity’s sake, and rest, and let us talk.”
“With you?” he muttered, in a mad, grating voice. “With any
Trender? I came to ask you where he’s in hiding—that’s all.”
“I know no more than you do.”
“You lie! You’re keeping his secret for him. What were her claims
compared to family ties—devil’s ties—such as yours? You know, but
you won’t give him up to me.”
“I don’t know.”
He raised and ground his hands together in exquisite passion.
“They drive me to madness,” he cried, “but in the end—in the end I
shall have him! To hold him down and torture the life out of him inch
by inch, with the terror in his eyes all the time! Why, I could kill him
by that alone—by only looking at him.”
He gloated over the picture called up in his soul. If ever demon’s
eyes looked from a human face, they looked from his that night.
“Duke,” I whispered in horror, “you have terrible cause for hate, I
know; but oh, think of how one grain of forgiveness on your part
would stand you with—with God, Duke.”
He gave a wretched, sickening laugh.
“By and by,” he cried. “But tell me first where he’s hiding!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Duke——” and I held out a yearning hand to
him.
At that he struck at me savagely and, running crookedly into the
night, was lost in the rainy darkness.
 CHAPTER XXX.
I GO HOME.

So much of strange incident had crowded with action the long

years of my life in London, that, as I walked from the station down
into the old cathedral town, a feeling of wonder was on me that the
hand of time had dealt so gently with the landmarks of my youth.
Here were the same old gates and churches and houses I had
known, unaltered unless for an additional film of the fragrant lichen of
age. The very ruins of the ancient castle and palace were stone by
stone such as I remembered them.
There was frost in the air, too; so that sometimes, as I moved
dreamily onward, a sense as if all that gap of vivid life were a
vanished vision and unreality moved strongly in me. Then it seemed
that presently I should saunter into the old mill to find my father and
Zyp and Jason sitting down as usual to the midday meal.
My appearance was so changed that none of all who would
formerly have somewhat sourly acknowledged my passing with a
nod now recognized me.
Suddenly I caught sight of Dr. Crackenthorpe, moving on in front of
me in company with another man. The doctor was no more altered
than his surroundings, judged at least by his back view. This
presented the same long rusty coat of a chocolate color—relic of a
bygone generation, I always thought—cut after a slightly sporting
fashion, which he wore in all my memory of him throughout the
winter; half-Wellington boots, into which the ends of his trousers
were tucked, and a flat-topped, hard felt hat, under the brim of which
his lank tails of brick-colored hair fell in dry, thin tassels.
The man he walked with seemed old and bent, and he moved with
a spiritless, hesitating step that appeared to cause the other some
impatience.
I was so far from claiming knowledge of this second person that,
when he turned his head aside a moment to gaze upon something
as I came near, it was with a most painful shock that I discovered it
to be my father.
I hurried up, calling to him. He gave a great start—they both did—
and turned round to meet me.
Then I was terribly taken aback to see the change that had come
over him. He, whom four years ago I had left hale, self-reliant,
powerful in body and intellect, was to all appearance a halting and
decrepit old man, in whom the worst sign was the senile indecision
of his eyes.
He came at me, holding out both his hands in welcome with
trembling eagerness, and I was much moved to see some glint of
tears furrowing his cheeks.
“Renalt, my boy—Renalt, my boy!” he cried in a gladsome, thin
voice, and that was all; for he could find words for no more, but stood
looking up in my face—I topped him now—with a half-searching,
half-deprecating earnestness of perusal.
“Well, dad,” I answered, cheerfully—for I would give no hint of
surprise before the other—“you said ‘come,’ and here I am.”
“A brave fellow—a brown, strong man!” He was feeling me over as
he spoke—running his thumb down the sinews of my hands—
pinching the firm arm in my sleeve.
“A strong man, my boy,” he said. “I bred him—he’s my son—I was
the same myself once.”
“You find your father altered—eh, Mr. Bookbinder?”
“If he is at all, doctor, it’s nothing that won’t improve on a little
management and wholesome company.”
“Well, he’s had plenty of mine.”
“Then his state’s accounted for,” I said.
The long man looked at me with an expression not pleasant.
“Ay,” he said. “There’s the old spirit forward again. We’ve done
very well without it since the last of the fry took themselves off.”
“It’s not company you batten on, doctor,” I said. “But loneliness
breeds other evils than coin-collecting.”
He stared at me a moment, then took off his hat with an ironical
sweep.
“I mustn’t forget my manners to a London rattle,” he said. “No
doubt you pride yourself on a very pretty wit, sir. But while you talk
my lunch grows cold; so I’ll even take the liberty of wishing you
good-morning.”
He walked off, snapping his fingers on either side of him.
When he was gone, I took my father’s arm and passed it through
mine.
“Strong boy,” he said, affectionately—then whispered in my ear:
“That’s a terrible man, Renalt! Be careful before you offend him.”
I looked at him in startled wonder. This was not how he was used
to speak.
“I hold him as cheap as any other dog,” said I.
He patted my hand with a little sigh of comfortable admiration.
“I want you at home,” he said, “all to myself. I’m glad that you’ve
come, Renalt. It’s lonely in the old mill nowadays.”
As we walked, my heart was filled with remorseful pondering over
the wrecked figure at my side. Why had I never known of this change
in it? What had caused it, indeed? Gloomy, sinister remembrances of
my one-time suspicion of some nameless hold that the doctor had
over my father stirred in me and woke a deep anger against fate.
Were we all of us, for no fault of our own, to be forever stunted in our
lives and oppressed by the malign influence of the place that had
given us birth? It was hateful and monstrous. What fight could a
human being show against foes who shot their poison from places
beyond the limits of his understanding?
A trifle more aged looking—a trifle more crazy and dark and
weather-stained—the old mill looked to my returning vision, and that
was all. The atmosphere of the place was cold and eerie and
haunted as ever.
But a great feast awaited the returned prodigal. The sitting-room
table fairly sparkled with unwonted dainties of the season, and a red
fire crackled on the hearth.
My father pressed me into a chair; he heaped good things upon
my plate; he could not do enough to prove the warmth of his
welcome and the pathos of loneliness that underlay it.
“Here’s to my strong son!” he cried, pledging me gayly in a glass
of weak wine and water; “my son that I’m feasting for all the doctor—
for all the doctor, I say!”
“The doctor, dad?”
 “He wouldn’t have had it, Renalt. He said it was throwing pearls
before swine and most wicked waste. I wouldn’t listen to him this
time—not I.”
“Why, what has he got to do with it?”
“Hush!” he paused in his sipping and looked all about him, with a
fearful air of listening.
“He’s a secret man,” he whispered, “and the mill’s as full of ears as
a king’s palace.”
I made no answer, but went on with my meal, though I had much
ado to swallow it; but to please my father I made a great show of
enjoying what was put before me.
One thing I noticed with satisfaction, and that was that my father
drank sparingly and that only of wine watered to insipidity. Indeed, I
was to find that a complete change in him in this respect was not the
least marvelous sign of the strange alteration in his temperament.
The meal over, we drew our chairs to the fire, and talked the
afternoon away on desultory subjects. By and by some shadowy
spirit of his old intellectual self seemed to flash and flicker fitfully
through his conversation.
The afternoon deepened into dusk; strange phantoms, wrought of
the leaping flame, came out of corners or danced from wall to ceiling
and were gone. He was in the midst of a fine flow of words
descriptive of some metaphysical passages he had lately
encountered in a book, when his voice trailed off and died away. He
crept to me and whispered in my ear: “He’s there, behind the door!”
I jumped to my feet, rushed across the room and—met Dr.
Crackenthorpe on the threshold.
“Can’t you come in like a decent visitor?” I cried, stamping my foot
on the floor.
He looked pale and, I thought, embarrassed, and he backed a little
before my onset.
“Why, what’s all this?” he said. “I walked straight up the stairs, as a
body should.”
“You made no noise,” I said, black and wrathful. “What right have
you to prowl into a private house in that fashion?”
For a moment his face fell menacing. But it cleared—if such may
express the lightening of those muddy features—almost immediately.
 “Here’s a fine reception!” he cried, “for one who comes to greet the
returned prodigal in all good comradeship; and to an old friend, too!”
“You were never ours,” I muttered.
He plucked a bottle of gin from under his arm, where he had been
carrying it.
“Your father has given up the pernicious habit,” he said, with a
grin, “but I thought, perhaps, he’d break his rule for once on such a
stupendous occasion as this. Let us pledge you in a full bumper, Mr.
Renalt.”
“Pledge whom you like,” I answered, surlily, “but don’t ask a return
from me. I don’t drink spirit.”
“Then you miss a very exquisite and esthetic pleasure, I may say.
Try it this only time. Glasses, Mr. Trender.”
I saw my father waver, and guessed this unwonted liberality on the
part of the doctor was calculated to some end of his own. In an
access of rage I seized the full bottle and spun it with all my might
against the wooden wall of the room. It crashed into a thousand
flying splinters, and the pungent liquor flooded the floor beneath.
For an instant the doctor stood quite dumfounded, and went all the
colors of the prism. Then he walked very gently to the door and
turned on the threshold.
“You were always an unlicked cub,” he said, softly, “but this
transcends all your past pleasantries.”
“I mean it too,” I said, still in a towering passion. “I intend it as a
hint that you had best keep away from here. I’ve no cause to
remember you with love, and from this time, understand, you’ve no
claim of friendship upon this household.”
“I will remember,” he said. “I always do. Perhaps I’ve another sort
of claim, though. Who knows?”
He nodded at me grimly once or twice, like an evil mandarin, and
walked off, down the stairs.
I looked at my father. He was sitting, his hands clasping the
elbows of his chair, with a wild, lost look upon his face.
“What have you done?” he whispered. “Renalt, what have you
done? We are in that man’s power to ruin us at a word!”
 CHAPTER XXXI.
ONE MYSTERY EXPLAINED.

The explanation I had desired for the morrow I determined to bring

about there and then. I went and stood above the old man and
looked down upon him.
“Dad,” I said, softly, “once before, if you remember, I came to you
heart-full of the question that I am now going to put to you again. I
was a boy then, and likely you did right in refusing me your
confidence. Now I am a man, and, dad, a man whose soul has been
badly wounded in its sore struggle with life.”
He had drooped forward as I began, but at this he raised his head
and looked me earnestly in the eyes.
“I know, Renalt. It was I broke the bottle then, as you have now.
You have taken the lead into your own hands. What is it you’d ask?”
“Don’t you know, dad?”
“Yes, I know. Give me a little time and perhaps some day I’ll tell
you.”
“Why not now, dad?”
He seemed to muse a little space, with his brows gone into
furrows of calculation.
“Why not?” he muttered. “Why not?”
Suddenly he leaned forward and said softly:
“Has it ever concerned you to think what might be the source of
your father’s income?”
“I have thought of it, dad, many and many a time. It wasn’t for me
to ask. I have tried to force myself to believe that it came from our
grandfather.”
“He was a just man, Renalt, and a hard. I married against his will
and he never spoke to me afterward.”
“But the mill——”
“The mill he left to me, as it had been left to him. He would not, in
his justice, deprive me of the means of living. ‘What my hands have
wrought of this, his may do,’ he wrote. But all his little personal
estate he willed elsewhere.”
“And you never worked the mill?”
“For a time I worked it, to some profit. We began not all empty-
handed. She brought a little with her.”
“My mother?”
At the word he half-started from his chair and sunk back into it
again. His eyes blazed as I had not seen them do since my return.
“For twenty years and more,” he shrieked, “that name has never
been on your lips—on the lips of any one of you. I would have struck
him down without pity that spoke it!”
I stood looking at him amazed. For a moment he seemed
transformed—translated out of his fallen self—for a moment and no
more. His passion left him quakingly.
“Ah!” he cried, with a gasp, and looked up at me beseeching
—“you’re not offended—you are not offended, Renalt?”
“No, no,” I said, impatiently. “You must tell me why, dad. You will,
won’t you?”
He answered with a sobbing moan.
“You, her son, must not know. Haven’t I been faithful to her? Have
I ever by word or sign dishonored her memory in her children’s ears
—my boy, have I?”
“I have never heard you mention her till now. I have never
dreamed of her but as a nameless shadow, father.”
“Let her be so always. She wrecked my life—in a day she made
me the dark brute you remember well. I was not so always, Renalt.
This long, degraded life of despair and the bestial drowning of it were
her doing—hers, I tell you. Remorse! It has struggled to master me,
and I have laughed it away—all these years I have laughed it away.
Yet it was pitiful when she died. A heart of stone would have wept to
see her. But mine was lead—lead—lead.”
He dropped his head on his breast. I stood darkly pondering in the
quiet room. There seemed a stir and rustling all round within the
house, as if ghostly footfalls were restlessly pacing out their haunting
penance.
“Renalt,” said my father, presently; “never speak of her; never
mention her by that name. She passed and left me what I am. I
closed the mill and shut its door and that of my heart to every genial
influence that might help it to forget. I had no wish to forget. In
silence and solitariness I fed upon myself till I became like to a
madman. Then I roused and went abroad more, for I had a mission
of search to attend to.”
“You never found him?”
The words came to my lips instinctively. How could I fail to
interpret that part, at least, of the miserable secret?
“To this day—never.”
He answered preoccupied—suddenly heedless of my assurance
in so speaking. A new light had come to his face—an unfamiliar one.
I could have called it almost the reflection of cunning—vanity—a self-
complacent smugness of retrospect.
“But I found something else,” he cried, with a twitching smirk.
“What was that?”
He leaned forward in a listening attitude.
“Hush!” he murmured. “Was that a noise in the house?”
“I heard nothing, dad.”
He beckoned me to stand closer—to stoop to him.
“A jar of old Greek and Roman coins.”
He fell back in his chair and stared up at me with frightened eyes.
The mystery was out, and an awful dismay seized him that at length
in one moment of sentiment he had parted with the secret that had
been life to him.
“What have I said?” he whispered, stilly. “Renalt, you won’t give
any heed to the maundering of an old man?”
I looked down on him pityingly.
“Don’t fear me, father,” I said, almost with a groan. “I will never
breathe a word of it to anybody.”
“Good, dear boy,” he answered, smiling. “I can trust you, I know.
You were always my favorite, Renalt, and——”
He broke off with a sudden, sharp cry.
“My favorite,” and he stared up at me. “My favorite? So kings treat
their favorites!”
He passed a nervous hand across his forehead, his wild eyes
never leaving my face. I could make nothing of his changing moods.
“What about the jar of coins?” I said.
 “Ah!” he muttered, the odd expression degrading his features once
more. “They were such a treasure it was never one man’s lot to
acquire before or since—heaven’s compensation for the cruelty of
the world.”
“Where did you find them?”
“In an ancient barrow of the dead,” he whispered, looking fearfully
around him—“there, on the downs. It had rained heavily, and there
had been a subsidence. I was idly brooding, and idly flung a stone
through a rent in the soil. It tinkled upon something. I put in my hand
and touched and brought away a disk of metal. It was a golden coin.
I covered all up and returned at night, unearthed the jar and brought
it secretly home. It was no great size, but full to the throat of gold.
Then I knew that life had found me a new lease of pleasure. I hid the
jar where no one could discover it and set about to enjoy the gift. It
came in good time. The mill had ceased to yield. My store of money
was near spent. I selected three or four of the likeliest coins and
carried them to a man in London that bought such things—a
numismatist he called himself. If he had any scruples he smothered
them then and afterward, in face of such treasures as it made his
eyes shoot green to look upon. He asked me at first where I had got
them. Hunting about the downs, I said. That was the formula. He
never asked for more. He gave me a good price for them, one by
one, and made his heavier profit, no doubt, on each. They yielded
richly and went slowly. They made an idle, debauched man of me,
who forgot even his revenge in the glut of possession.”
He seemed even then to accuse himself, through an affectation
rather than a conviction of avarice.
“They went slowly,” he repeated; “till—till—Renalt, I would have
loved you as boy was never loved, if you had killed that doctor, as
you killed——” he stopped and gave a thin cry of anguish.
“I didn’t kill Modred, father. I know it now.”
“No, no—you didn’t,” he half-whined in a cowering voice. “Don’t
say I said it. I caught myself up.”
“We’ll talk about that presently. The doctor——”
“That night, you remember,” he cried, passionately, “when I
dropped a coin and he saw it—that was the beginning. Oh, he has a
hateful greed for such things. A wicked, suspicious nature. He soon
began cajoling, threatening, worming my secret out of me. I had to
silence him now and again or he would have exposed me to the
world and wrenched my one devouring happiness from me.”
“You gave him some of the coins?”
“He has had enough to melt into a grill as big as St. Lawrence’s,
and he shall fry on it some day. More than that—more than that!”
He clenched his hands in impotent fury.
“There was one thing in the jar worth a soul’s ransom—a cameo,
Renalt, that I swear was priceless—I, who speak from intuition—not
knowledge. The beauty of the old world was crystallized in it. An
emperor would have pawned his crown to buy it.”
His words brought before me with a shock the night of Modred’s
death, when I had stood listening on the stairs.
“One evening—a terrible evening, Renalt—when I went to fetch a
new bribe for him from the hiding-place (he demanded it before he
would move a finger to help that poor boy upstairs), I found this
cameo gone. He swore he hadn’t set eyes on it, and to this day I
believe he lied. How can I tell—how can I tell? Twenty times a week,
perhaps, my vice brought the secret almost within touch of discovery.
Sometimes for days together I would carry this gem in my pocket,
and take it out when alone and gaze on it with exquisite rapture.
Then for months it would lie safely hidden again. If I had dropped
and lost it in one of my fits—as he suggested—should I have never
heard of it again? Renalt”—he held out two trembling hands to me
—“it was the darling of my heart! Find it for me and I will bless you
forever.”
He ended almost with a sob. I could have wept myself over the
pitiful degeneration of a noble intellect.
“Father, you said he cajoled—threatened. Didn’t you ever reveal to
him——”
“Where the jar was hid? No; a million times, no! He would have
sucked me dry of the last coin. He knew that I had made a rich find—
no more.”
“And on the strength of that vague surmise you have allowed him
to blackmail you all these years?”
He hung his head, as if cruelly abashed.
 “You don’t know the man as I do,” he cried, in a low voice. “He is a
devil—not a man.”
I was utterly shocked and astounded.
“Well,” I said at length. “I won’t ask you for your secret. To share it
with any one would kill the zest, no doubt.”
He lifted his head with a thin wail.
I put my hand gently on his shoulder.
“Dad,” I said, “I must never leave you again.”
He seized my hand and kissed it.
“Harkee, Renalt,” he whispered. “Many are gone, but there are
some left. Could I find out where the cameo is, we would take it, and
what remains, and leave this hateful place—you and I—and bury
ourselves in some beautiful city under the world, where none could
find us, and live in peace and comfort to the end.”
“Peace can never be mine again, father. Would you like to know
why? Would you like to know what has made a sorrowful, haunted
man of me, while you were living on at the old mill here these five
years past?”
“Tell me,” he said. “Confide in this old, broken, selfish man, who
has that love in his heart to seek comfort for you where he can find
none himself.”
Then, standing up in the red dusk of the room, I gave him my
history. “Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” And he
sat with face darkened from me, and quivered only when he heard of
Jason’s villainy.
And at the end he lifted up his voice and cried:
“Oh, Absolom, my son—my son, Absolom!”
 CHAPTER XXXII.
OLD PEGGY.

The months that immediately followed my home-coming were

passed by me in an aimless, desultory temporizing with the vexed
problems that, unanswered, were consuming my heart.
I roamed the country as of old and renewed my acquaintance with
bird, fish and insect. Starting to gather a collection of butterflies and
moths—many of which were local and rare—with the mere object of
filling in the lapses of a restless ennui and in some dull gratitude to a
pursuit that had helped me to a little degree of late success, I rapidly
rose to an interest in its formation that became, I may say, the then
chief happiness of my life. To my father, also, it brought, in the
arrangement and classification of specimens, a certain innocent
pleasure that helped to restore him to some healthier show of
manliness moral and physical.
Poor, broken old man! I would not now have stultified his pathetic
confidence in me for the biggest bribe the world could hold out.
Yet it must not be supposed I ever really for a moment lost sight of
the main issues of a mystery that was bitten into my heart with an
acid that no time could take the strength from. Sometime, sooner or
later, I knew it would be revealed to me who it was that killed
Modred.
As to that lesser secret of the coins—it troubled me but little. Free
of that dread of possible ruin that appeared to cling hauntingly to my
father, I was not disinclined to the belief that the complete dissipation
of his bugbear estate might prove after all his moral salvation.
Remove its source of irritation, and would not the sore heal?
Sometimes in the full pressure of this thought I found it almost in
my mind to hunt and hunt until I found his hiding-place and to commit
its remaining treasures to the earth or the waters. Then it would
seem a base thing to do—a mean advantage to take of his
confidence—and I would put the thought from me.
 Still, however I might decide ultimately, this determination dwelt
firmly and constantly in me—to oppose by every means in my power
any further levying of blackmail on the part of the doctor.
This unworthy eccentricity had not, to my knowledge, been near
the mill since that night of my return. That he presently found means,
nevertheless, of communicating with his victim, I was to find out by a
simple chance.
June had come upon us leading this placidly monotonous life,
when, returning one afternoon from a ramble after specimens, I
found my father sitting upstairs in a mood so preoccupied that he did
not notice my entrance. His head was bowed, his left arm drooping
over one end of the table. Suddenly hearing my footsteps in the
room, he started and a gold coin fell from his hand and spun and
tinkled on the boards.
“What’s that?” I said.
He stooped and clutched it, and hugging it to his breast looked up
in my face with startled eyes. But he gave no answer.
“Is it necessary to change another, dad?”
“No,” he muttered.
A thought stung me like a wasp.
“Is it for a bribe?” I demanded. Still he kept silence.
“Father,” I said, “give it to me.”
“Renalt—I can’t; I mustn’t.”
“Give it to me. If you refuse—I threaten nothing—but—give it to
me!”
He held it forth in a shaking hand. I took it and slipped it into my
pocket.
“Now,” I said, sternly, “I am going to see Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
He rose from his chair with a cry.
“You are mad, I tell you! You can do nothing—nothing.”
“It is time this ceased for good and all, father. I stand between you
now—remember that. You have to choose between me and that
villain. Which is it to be?”
“Renalt—my son. It is for your sake!”
“I can look after my own interests. Which is it to be?”
He dropped back into his chair with a groan.
“Go, then,” he muttered, “and God help you!”
 I turned and left him. My heart was blazing with a fierce
resentment. But I would not leave the house till my veins ran cooler,
for no advantage of temper should be on the side of that frosty
bloodsucker.
I wandered downstairs, past the door of the room of silence, but
the rough jeering of the wheel within drove me away to where I could
be out of immediate earshot of it.
From the kitchen at the back came the broken, whining voice of
old Peggy Rottengoose, who yet survived and waited upon the
meager household with a ghoulish faithfulness that no time could
impair.
The words of some sardonic song came sterilely from her withered
lips. She was apt at such grewsome ditties:
“I saw three ravens up a tree—
Heigho!
I saw three ravens up a tree;
And they were black as black could be—
All down by the greenwood side, O!

“I stuck my penknife in their hearts—

Heigho!
I stuck my penknife in their hearts;
And the more I stuck it the blood gushed out;
All down by the greenwood side, O!”
I softly pushed open the door, that stood ajar, and looked in. The
old creature was sitting crooning in a chair, a picture or print of some
kind, at which she was gazing in a sort of hungry ecstasy, held out
and down before her at arm’s length. I stole on tiptoe behind her and
sought to get a glimpse at that she devoured with her rheumy eyes.
“Why, what are you doing with that, Peg?” I said, with a start of
surprise.
Cunning even under the spur of sudden discomfiture, she whipped
the thing beneath her apron before she struggled to her feet and
faced round upon me.
“What ails ye, Renalt?” she wheezed, in a voice like that of one
winded by a blow—“to fright a body, sich like?”
 “You needn’t be frightened, unless you were doing something you
shouldn’t, you know.”
“Shud and shudn’t,” she said, her yellow under jaw, scratched all
over with fine wrinkles, moving like a barbel’s. “I doesn’t take my
morals fro’ a Trender.”
“You take all you can get, Peggy. Why not a picture with the rest?”
“My own nevvy!” she cried, with an attenuated scream—“blessed
son to Amelia as were George’s first wife and died o’ cramps o’ the
cold dew from a shift hung out on St. Bartlemey’s day.”
“Now, Peggy,” I said sternly, “I saw that picture and it wasn’t of
your nephew or of any other relation of yours. It was a silhouette, as
they call it, of my brother, Modred, made when he was a little fellow,
by some one in a show that came here, and it used to hang in
Modred’s room.”
“Ye lie, Renalt!” she cried, panting at me. “It’s Amelia’s boy—and
mayn’t I enjoy the fruits o’ my own heritage?”
“Let me look at it, then; and if I’m wrong I’ll ask your pardon.”
“Keep arf!” she cried, backing from me. “Keep arf, or I’ll tear your
weasand wi’ my claws!”
I made a little rush and clutched her. She could not keep her
promise without loosening her hold of the picture, but she butted at
me, with her cap bobbing, and dinted my shin with her vicious old
toes. Then, seeing it was all useless, she crumpled the paper up into
a ball and, tossing it from her, fell back in her chair and threw her
apron over her head.
I dived for the picture and smoothed out its creases.
“Peggy!” I said.
“I tuk it—I tuk it!” wailed the old woman. “I tuk it fro’ the wall when I
come up wi’ the blarnkets and nubbody were there to see!”
“Why did you take it and why have you riddled it with holes like
this?”
She slipped down on her trembling knees.
“Don’tee be hard on me, Renalt—don’tee! I swear, I were frighted
myself at what I done. I didn’t hardly guess it would act so. Don’tee
have me burnt or drownded, Renalt. It were a wicked thing to a body
old enough to be your grandam, and I’ve but a little glint o’ time left.”