The wind sang like flying arrows, the dark road was hard beneath their feet.
They came to Tumpany's cottage and little shop, which were on the outskirts of the village.
Then Lothian stopped.
"Look here," he said, "you can give me the bag now. There really isn't any need for you to come to the marsh head with me, Tumpany. – Much better get to bed and be fresh for to-morrow."
The man was nothing loth. The lit window of his house invited him.
"Thank you, sir," he said, sobered now by the keen night wind, "then I'll say good-night."
– "Night Tumpany."
"G'night, sir."
Lothian tramped away into the dark.
The sailor stood for a moment with his hand upon the latch of his house door, listening to the receding footsteps.
"What's wrong with him?" he asked himself. "He speaks different like. Yesterday morning old Trust seemed positive afraid of him! Never saw such a thing before! And to-night he seems like a stranger somehow. I felt queer, in a manner of speaking, as I walked alongside of him. But what a bloody fool I am!" Tumpany concluded, using the richest adjective he knew, as his master's footsteps died away and were lost.
In less than ten minutes Lothian stood upon the edge of the vast marshes.
It was a ghostly place and hour. The wind wailed over the desolate miles like a soul sick for the love it had failed to win in life. The wide creeks with their cliff-like sides of black mud were brimming with sullen tidal water, touched here and there by faint moonbeams – lemon colour on lead.
Night birds passed high over head with a whistle of wings, heard, but not seen in the gloom. From distant Wordingham to far Blackney beyond which were the cliffs of Sherringham and Cromer, for twelve miles or more, perhaps not a dozen human beings were out upon the marshes.
A few bold wildfowlers in their frail punts with the long tapering guns in the bows, might be "setting to birds"; enduring the bitter cold, risking grave danger, and pursuing the wildest and most wary of living things with supreme endurance throughout the night.
Once the wind brought two deep booms to Lothian. His trained ear knew and located the sound at once. One of the Wordingham fowlers was out upon the flats three miles away, and had fired his double eight-bore, the largest shoulder gun that even a strong man can use.
But the saltings were given over to the night and the things of the night.
The plovers called, "'Tis dark and late." "'Tis late and dark."
The wind sobbed coldly; wan clouds sped to hood the moon with darkness. Brown hares crouched among the coarse marrum grasses, the dun owls were afloat upon the air, sounding their oboe notes, and always the high unseen flight of whistling ducks went on all over the desolate majesty of the marshes.
And beyond it all, through it all, could be heard the hollow organs of the sea.
Lothian was walking rapidly. His breathing was heavy and muffled. He skirted the marsh and did not go upon it, passing along the grass slope of foreshore which even a full marsh tide never conquered; going back upon his own trail, parallel to the village.
There were sharp pricking pains in his knees and ankles. Hot sweat clotted his clothes to his body and rained down his face. But he was unaware of this. His alarming physical condition was as nothing.
He went on through the dark, hurriedly, like a man in ambush.
Now and then he stumbled at inequalities of the ground or caught his foot in furze roots. Obscene words escaped him when this happened. They burst from between the hot cracked lips, mechanical and thin. The weak complaints of some poor filthy-minded ghost!
He knew nothing of what he said.
But with knife-winds upon his face, thin needles in his joints; sodden flesh quivering with nervous tremors and wet with warm brine, he went onwards with purpose.
He was in the Amnesic Dream-phase.
Every foul and bestial impulse which is hidden in the nature of man was riotous and awake.
The troglodytes showed themselves at last.
All the unnameable, unthinkable things that lie deep below the soul, far below the conscience, in the lowest and sealed cellars of personality, had burst from their hidden prisons.
The Temple of the Holy Ghost was full of the squeaking, gibbering Powers of utmost, nethermost Hell.
– These are similes which endeavour to hint at the frightful Truth.
Science sums it up in a simple statement. Lothian was now in "The Amnesic dream-phase."
He came to where a grass road bounded by high hedges led down to the foreshore.
Crouching under the sentinel hedge of the road's end, he lit a match and looked at his watch.
It was fifteen minutes past ten o'clock.
Old Phœbe Hannett and her daughter, the servants of Morton Sims at the "Haven," would now be fast in slumber. Christopher, the doctor's personal servant, was in Paris with his master.
The Person who walked in a Dream turned up the unused grass-grown road.
He was now at the East end of the village.
The path brought him out upon the highroad a hundred yards above the rectory, Church, and the schools. From there it was a gentle descent to the very centre of the village, where the "Haven" was.
There were no lights nor lamp-posts in the village. By now every one would be gone to bed..
There came a sudden sharp chuckle into the night. Something was congratulating itself with glee that it had put water-boots with india-rubber soles upon its feet; noiseless soles that would make no sound upon the gravelled ways about the familiar house that had belonged to Admiral Custance.
.. Lothian lifted the latch of the gate which led to the short gravel-drive of the "Haven" with delicate fingers. An expert handles a blown bird's-egg so.
It rose. It fell. Not a crack came from the slowly-pushed gate which fell back into its place with no noise, leaving the night-comer inside.
The gables of the house rose black and stark against the sky. The attic-windows where old dame Hannett and her daughter slept were black. They were fast in sleep now.
The night-intruder set his gun carefully against the stone pillar of the gate. Then he tripped over the pneumatic lawns before the house with almost a dance in his step.
He frisked over the lawns, avoiding the chocolate patches that meant flower-beds, with complacent skill.
Just then no clouds obscured the moon, which rode high before the advancing figure.
A fantastic shadow followed Lothian, coquetting with the flower beds, popping this way and that, but ever at his heels.
It threw itself about in swimming areas of grey vagueness and then concentrated itself into a black patch with moving outlines.
There was an ecstasy about this dancing shadow.
And now, the big building which had been a barn and which Admiral Custance had re-built and put to various uses, cut wedge-like into the lit sky.
The Shadow crept close to the Dream Figure and crouched at its heels.
It seemed to be spurring that figure on, to be whispering in its ear..
We know all about the Dream Figure. Through the long pages of this chronicle we have learned how, and of what, It has been born.
And were it not that experts of the Middle Age – when Demonology was a properly recognised science – have stated that a devil has never a shadow, we should doubtless have been sure that it was our old friend, the Fiend Alcohol, that contracted and expanded with such fantastic measures over the moon-lit grass.
Lothian knew his way well about this domain.
Admiral Custance had been his good friend. Often in the old sailor's house, or in Lothian's, the two had tippled together and drank toasts to the supremacy which Queen Britannia has over the salt seas.
The lower floor of the barn had been used as a box-room for trunks and a general store-house, though the central floor-space was made into a court for Badminton; when nephews and nieces, small spars of Main and Mizzen and the co-lateral Yardarms, came to play upon a retired quarter-deck.
The upper floor had ever been sacred to the Admiral and his hobbies.
From below, the upper region was reached by a private stairway of wood outside the building. Of this entrance the sailor had always kept the key. A little wooden balcony ran round the angle of the building to where, at one end, a large window had been built in the wall.
Lothian went up the outside stairs noiselessly as a cat, and round the little gallery to the long window. Here he was in deep shadow.
The two leaves of the window did not quite meet. The wood had shrunk, the whole affair was rickety and old.
As he had anticipated, the night-comer had no difficulty in pushing the blade of his shooting knife through the crevice and raising the simple catch.
He stepped into the room, long empty and ghostly.
First, he closed the window again, and then let down the blue blind over it. A skylight in the sloped roof provided all the other light. Through this, now, faint and fleeting moonlights fell.
By the gallery door there was a mat. Lothian stepped gingerly to it and wiped the india-rubber boots he wore.
Then he took half a wax candle from a side-pocket and lit it. It was quite impossible that the light could be seen from outside, even if spectators there were, in the remote slumbering village.
In the corners of the long room, black-velvet shadows lurked as the yellow candle flame moved.
A huge spider with a body as big as sixpence ran up one canvas-covered wall. Despite the cold, the air was lifeless and there was a very faint aroma of chemical things in it.
On all sides were long deal tables covered with a multiplicity of unusual objects.
Under a big bell of glass, popped over it to keep the dust away, was a large microscope of intricate mechanism. Close by was a section-cutter that could almost make a paring of a soul for scrutiny. Leather cases stood here and there full of minute hypodermic syringes, and there was a box of thin glass tubes containing agents for staining the low protoplasmic forms of life which must be observed by those who wish to arm the world against the Fiend Alcohol.
At the far end of the room, on each side of the fireplace were two glass-fronted cupboards, lined with red baize. In one of them Admiral Custance had kept his guns.
These cupboards had been constructed by the village carpenter – who had also made the gun cupboard in Lothian's library. They were excellent cupboards and with ordinary locks and keys – the Mortland Royal carpenter, indeed, buying these accessories of his business of one pattern, and by the gross, from Messrs. Pashwhip and Moger's iron-mongery establishment in Wordingham.
Lothian took the key of his own gun cupboard from his waistcoat pocket. It fitted the hole of the cupboard here – on the right side of the fireplace, exactly as he had expected.
The glass doors swung open with a loud crack, and the contents on the shelves were clearly exposed to view.
Lothian set his candle down upon the edge of an adjacent table and thought for a moment.
During their intimate conversations – before Lothian's three weeks in London with Rita Wallace, while his wife was at Nice, Dr. Morton Sims had explained many things to him. The great man had been pleased to find in a patient, in an artist also, the capability of appreciating scientific truth and being interested in the methods by which it was sought.
Lothian knew therefore, that Morton Sims was patiently following and extending the experiments of Professor Fraenkel at his laboratory in Halle, varying the investigation of Deléarde and carrying it much farther.
Morton Sims was introducing alcohol into rabbits and guinea pigs, sub-cutaneously or into the stomach direct, exhibiting the alcohol in well-diluted forms and over long periods. He was then inoculating these alcoholised subjects, and subjects which had not been alcoholised, with the bacilli of consumption – tubercle bacilli – and diphtheria toxin – the poison produced by the diphtheria bacillus.
He was endeavouring to obtain indisputable evidence of increased susceptibility to infection in the animal body under alcoholic influences.
Of all this, Lothian was thoroughly aware. He stood now – if indeed it was Gilbert Lothian the poet who stood there – in front of an open cupboard; the cupboard he had opened by secrecy and fraud.
Upon those shelves, as he well knew, organic poisons of immeasurable potency were resting.
In those half-dozen squat phials of glass, surrounded with felt and with curious stoppers, an immense Death was lurking.
All the quick-firing guns of the navies of the world were not so powerful as one of these little glass receptacles.
The breath came thick and fast from the intruder. It went up in clouds from his heated body; vapourised into steam which looked yellow in the candlelight.
After a minute he drew near to the cupboard.
A trembling, exploring finger pushed among the phials. It isolated one.
Upon a label pasted on the glass, were two words in Greek characters, "διφθ. ποξιν."
Here, in this vessel of gelatinous liquid, lurked the destroying army of diphtheria bacilli, millions strong.
The man held up the candle and its light fell full upon the neat cursive Greek, so plain for him to read.
He stared at it with focussed eyes. His head was pushed forward a little and oscillated slowly from side to side. The sweat ran down it and fell with little splashes upon the floor.
Then his hand began to tremble and the light flickered and danced in the recesses of the cupboard.
He turned away, shaking, and set the candle end upon the table. It swayed, toppled over, flared for a moment and went out.
But he could not wait to light it again. His attendant devil was straying, he must be called back .. to help.
Lothian plunged his hand into his breast pocket and withdrew a flat flask of silver. It was full of undiluted whiskey.
He took a long steady pull, and the fire went through him instantly.
With firm fingers now, he screwed on the top of the flask and re-lit the candle stump. Then he took the marked phial from the cupboard shelf and set it on the table.
From a side pocket he took the little oil-bottle belonging to a travelling gun-case and unscrewed the top of that.
And now, with cunning knowledge, he takes the thick, grey woollen scarf from his neck and drenches a certain portion of its folds with raw whiskey from his flask. He binds the muffler round the throat and nose in such fashion that the saturated portion confines all the outlets of his breathing.
One must risk nothing one's self when one plays and conjures with the spawn and corruptions of death!
.. It is done, done with infinite nicety and care – no trembling fingers now.
The vial is unstopped, the tube within has poured a drop or two of its contents into the oil-bottle, the projecting needle of which is damp with death.
The cupboard is closed and locked again. Ah! there is candle grease upon the table! It is scraped up, to the minutest portion, with the blade of the shooting knife.
Then he is out upon the balcony again. One last task remains. It is to close the long windows so that the catch will fall into its rusty holder and no trace be left of its ever having been opened.
This is not easy. It requires preparation, dexterity and thought. Cunning fingers must use the thin end of the knife to bend the little brass bracket which is to receive the falling catch. It must be bent outwards, and in the bending a warning creak suggests that the screws are parting from the rotten wood.
But it is done at last, surely dexterously. No gentlemanly burglar of the magazines could have done it better.
.. There is no moon now. It is necessary to feel one's way in silence over the lawn and reach the outer gate.
This is done successfully, the Fiend is a good quick valet-fiend to-night and aids at every point.
The gate is closed with a gentle "click," there is only the "pad, pad" of the night-comer's footsteps passing along the dark village street towards the Old House with poison in his pocket and murder in his heart.
Outside his own gate, Lothian's feet assume a brisk and confidential measure. He rattles the latch of the drive gate and tries to whistle in a blithe undertone.
Bedroom windows may be open, it will be as well that his low, contented whistle – as of one returning from healthy night-sport – may be heard.
His lips are too cracked and salt to whistle, however. He tries to hum the burden of a song, but only a faint "croak, croak," sounds in the cold, quiet night – for the wind has fallen now.
Not far away, behind the palings of his little yard, The Dog Trust whines mournfully.
Once he whines, and then with a full-throat and opened muzzle Dog Trust bays the moon behind its cloud-pall.
When he hears the footfall of one he knows and loves, Dog Trust greets it with low, anxious whines.
He is no watch-dog. His simple duties are unvaried from the marsh and field. Growl of hostility to night-comers he knows not. His faithful mind has been attuned to no reveillé note.
But he howls mournfully now.
The step he hears is like no step he knows. Perhaps, who can say? the dim, untutored mind discerns dimly something wicked, inimical and hostile approaching the house.
So The Dog Trust howls, stands for a moment upon his cold concrete sniffing the night air, and then with a sort of shudder plunges into the warm straw of his kennel.
Deep sleep broods over the Poet's house.
The morning was one of those cold bright autumn days without a breath of wind, which have an extraordinary exhilaration for every one.
The soul, which to the majority of folk is like an invisible cloud anchored to the body by a thin thread, is pulled down by such mornings. It reenters flesh and blood, reanimates the body, and sounds like a bugle in the mind.
Tumpany, his head had been under the pump for a few minutes, arrived fresh and happy at the Old House.
He was going away with The Master upon a Wild-fowling expedition. In Essex the geese were moving this way and that. There was an edge upon anticipation and the morning.
In the kitchen Phœbe and Blanche partook of the snappy message of the hour.
The guns were all in their cases. A pile of pigskin luggage was ready for the four-wheel dogcart.
"Perhaps when the men are out of the way for a day or two, Mistress will have a chance to get right… Master said good-bye to Mistress last night, didn't he?" the cook said to Blanche.
"Yes, but he may want to go in again and disturb her."
"I don't believe he will. She's asleep now. Those things Dr. Heywood give her keep her quiet. But still you'd better go quietly into her room with her morning milk, Blanche. If she's asleep, just leave it there, so she'll find it when she wakes up."
"Very well, cook, I will," the housemaid said – "Oh, there's that Tumpany!"
Tumpany came into the kitchen. He wore his best suit. He was quite dictatorial and sober. He spoke in brisk tones.
"What are you going to do, my girl?" he said to Blanche in an authoritative voice.
"Hush, you silly. Keep quiet, can't you?" Phœbe said angrily. "Blanche is taking up Mistress' milk in case she wakes."
"Where's master, then?"
"Master is in the library. He'll be down in a minute."
"Can I go up to him, cook? .. There's something about the guns – "
"No. You can not, Tumpany. But Blanche will take any message. – Blanche, knock at the library door and say Tumpany wants to see Master. But do it quietly. Remember Missis is sleeping at the other end of the passage."
As Blanche went up the stairs with her tray, the library door was open, and she saw her master strapping a suit case. She stopped at the open door.
– "Please, sir, Tumpany wants to speak to you."
Lothian looked up. It was almost as if he had expected the housemaid.
"All right," he said. "He can come up in a moment. What have you got there – oh? The milk for your Mistress. Well, put it down on the table, and tell Tumpany to come up. Bring him up yourself, Blanche, and make him be quiet. We mustn't risk waking Mistress."
The housemaid put the tray down upon the writing table and left the room, closing the door after her.
It had hardly swung into place when Lothian had whipped open a drawer in the table.
Standing upon a pile of note-paper with its vermilion heading of "The Old House, Mortland Royal" was a square oil bottle with its silver plated top.
In a few twists of firm and resolute fingers, the top was loosened. The man took the bottle from the drawer and set it upon the tray, close to the glass of milk.
Then, with infinite care, he slowly withdrew the top.
The flattened needle which depended from it was damp with the dews of death. A tiny bead of crystalline liquid, no bigger than a pin's head, hung from the slanting point.
Lothian plunged the needle into the glass of milk, moving it this way and that.
He heard footsteps on the stairs, and with the same stealthy dexterity he replaced the cap of the bottle and closed the drawer.
He was lighting a cigarette when Blanche knocked and entered, followed by Tumpany.
"What is it, Tumpany?" he said, as the maid once more took up her tray and left the room with it.
"I was thinking, sir, that we haven't got a cleaning rod packed for the ten-bores. I quite forgot it. The twelve-bore rods won't reach through thirty-two-and-a-half barrels. And all the cases are strapped and locked now, sir. You've got the keys."
"By Jove, no, we never thought of it. But those two special rods I had made at Tolley's – where are they?"
"Here, sir," the man answered going to the gun-cupboard.
"Oh, very well. Unscrew one and stick it in your pocket. We can put it in the case when we're in the train. It's a corridor train, and when we've started you can come along to my carriage and I'll give you the key of the ten-bore case."
"Very good, sir. The trap's come. I'll just take this suit case down and then I'll get Trust. He can sit behind with me."
"Yes. I'll be down in a minute."
Tumpany plunged downstairs with the suit case. Lothian screwed up the bottle in the drawer and, holding it in his hand, went to his bedroom.
He met Blanche in the corridor.
"Mistress is fast asleep, sir," the pleasant-faced girl said, "so I just put her milk on the table and came out quietly."
"Thank you, Blanche. I shall be down in a minute."
In his bedroom, Lothian poured water into the bowl upon the washstand and shook a few dark red crystals of permanganate of potash into the water, which immediately became a purplish pink.
He plunged his hands into this water, with the little bottle, now tightly stoppered again, in one of them.
For two minutes he remained thus. Then he withdrew his hands and the bottle, drying them on a towel.
.. There was no possible danger of infection now. As for the bottle, he would throw it out of the window of the train when he was a hundred miles from Mortland Royal.
He came out into the corridor once more. His face was florid and too red. Close inspection would have disclosed the curiously bruised look of the habitual inebriate. But, in his smart travelling suit of Harris tweed, with well-brushed hair, white collar and the "bird's eye" tie that many country gentlemen affect, he was passable enough.
A dreamy smile played over his lips. His eyes – not quite so bloodshot this morning – were drowsed with quiet thought.
As he was about to descend the stairs he turned and glanced towards a closed door at the end of the passage.
It was the door of Mary's room and this was his farewell to the wife whose only thought was of him, with whom, in "The blessed bond of board and bed" he had spent the happy years of his first manhood and success.
A glance at the closed door; an almost complacent smile; after all those years of holy intimacy this was his farewell.
As he descended the stairs, the Murderer was humming a little tune.
The two maid servants were in the hall to see him go. They were fond of him. He was a kind and generous master.
"You're looking much better this morning, sir," said Phœbe. She was pretty and privileged..
"I'm feeling very well, Phœbe. This little trip will do me a lot of good, and I shall bring home lots of birds for you to cook. Now mind both you girls look after your Mistress well. I shall expect to see her greatly improved when I return. Give her my love when she wakes up. Don't forward any letters because I am not certain where I shall be. It will be in the Blackwater neighbourhood, Brightlingsea, or I may make my headquarters at Colchester for the three days. But I can't be quite sure. I shall be back in three days."
