Chapter XII (2)

“A sea strikes the stern, the ship trembles and groans all round them, there’s the noise of the seas about and overhead, confusing Cloete, and he hears the other screaming as if crazy. . . Ah, you don’t believe me! Go and look at the port chain. Parted? Eh? Go and see if it’s parted. Go and find the broken link. You can’t. There’s no broken link. That means a thousand pounds for me. No less. A thousand the day after we get ashore—prompt. I won’t wait till she breaks up, Mr. Cloete. To the underwriters I go if I’ve to walk to London on my bare feet. Port cable! Look at her port cable, I will say to them. I doctored it—for the owners—tempted by a low rascal called Cloete.

“Cloete does not understand what it means exactly. All he sees is that the fellow means to make mischief. He sees trouble ahead. . . Do you think you can scare me? he asks,—you poor miserable skunk. . . And Stafford faces him out—both holding on to the cabin table: No, damn you, you are only a dirty vagabond; but I can scare the other, the chap in the black coat. . .

“Meaning George Dunbar. Cloete’s brain reels at the thought. He doesn’t imagine the fellow can do any real harm, but he knows what George is; give the show away; upset the whole business he had set his heart on. He says nothing; he hears the other, what with the funk and strain and excitement, panting like a dog—and then a snarl. . . A thousand down, twenty-four hours after we get ashore; day after to-morrow. That’s my last word, Mr. Cloete. . . A thousand pounds, day after to-morrow, says Cloete. Oh yes. And to-day take this, you dirty cur. . . He hits straight from the shoulder in sheer rage, nothing else. Stafford goes away spinning along the bulk-head. Seeing this, Cloete steps out and lands him another one somewhere about the jaw. The fellow staggers backward right into the captain’s cabin through the open door. Cloete, following him up, hears him fall down heavily and roll to leeward, then slams the door to and turns the key. . . There! says he to himself, that will stop you from making trouble.”

“By Jove!” I murmured.

The old fellow departed from his impressive immobility to turn his rakishly hatted head and look at me with his old, black, lack-lustre eyes.

“He did leave him there,” he uttered, weightily, returning to the contemplation of the wall. “Cloete didn’t mean to allow anybody, let alone a thing like Stafford, to stand in the way of his great notion of making George and himself, and Captain Harry, too, for that matter, rich men. And he didn’t think much of consequences. These patent-medicine chaps don’t care what they say or what they do. They think the world’s bound to swallow any story they like to tell. . . He stands listening for a bit. And it gives him quite a turn to hear a thump at the door and a sort of muffled raving screech inside the captain’s room. He thinks he hears his own name, too, through the awful crash as the old _Sagamore_ rises and falls to a sea. That noise and that awful shock make him clear out of the cabin. He collects his senses on the poop. But his heart sinks a little at the black wildness of the night. Chances that he will get drowned himself before long. Puts his head down the companion. Through the wind and breaking seas he can hear the noise of Stafford’s beating against the door and cursing. He listens and says to himself: No. Can’t trust him now. . .

“When he gets back to the top of the deck-house he says to Captain Harry, who asks him if he got the things, that he is very sorry. There was something wrong with the door. Couldn’t open it. And to tell you the truth, says he, I didn’t like to stop any longer in that cabin. There are noises there as if the ship were going to pieces. . . Captain Harry thinks: Nervous; can’t be anything wrong with the door. But he says: Thanks—never mind, never mind. . . All hands looking out now for the life-boat. Everybody thinking of himself rather. Cloete asks himself, will they miss him? But the fact is that Mr. Stafford had made such poor show at sea that after the ship struck nobody ever paid any attention to him. Nobody cared what he did or where he was. Pitch dark, too—no counting of heads. The light of the tug with the lifeboat in tow is seen making for the ship, and Captain Harry asks: Are we all there? . . . Somebody answers: All here, sir. . . Stand by to leave the ship, then, says Captain Harry; and two of you help the gentleman over first. . . Aye, aye, sir. . . Cloete was moved to ask Captain Harry to let him stay till last, but the life-boat drops on a grapnel abreast the fore-rigging, two chaps lay hold of him, watch their chance, and drop him into her, all safe.

“He’s nearly exhausted; not used to that sort of thing, you see. He sits in the stern-sheets with his eyes shut. Don’t want to look at the white water boiling all around. The men drop into the boat one after another. Then he hears Captain Harry’s voice shouting in the wind to the coxswain, to hold on a moment, and some other words he can’t catch, and the coxswain yelling back: Don’t be long, sir. . . What is it? Cloete asks feeling faint. . . Something about the ship’s papers, says the coxswain, very anxious. It’s no time to be fooling about alongside, you understand. They haul the boat off a little and wait. The water flies over her in sheets. Cloete’s senses almost leave him. He thinks of nothing. He’s numb all over, till there’s a shout: Here he is! . . . They see a figure in the fore-rigging waiting—they slack away on the grapnel-line and get him in the boat quite easy. There is a little shouting—it’s all mixed up with the noise of the sea. Cloete fancies that Stafford’s voice is talking away quite close to his ear. There’s a lull in the wind, and Stafford’s voice seems to be speaking very fast to the coxswain; he tells him that of course he was near his skipper, was all the time near him, till the old man said at the last moment that he must go and get the ship’s papers from aft; would insist on going himself; told him, Stafford, to get into the life-boat. . . He had meant to wait for his skipper, only there came this smooth of the seas, and he thought he would take his chance at once.

“Cloete opens his eyes. Yes. There’s Stafford sitting close by him in that crowded life-boat. The coxswain stoops over Cloete and cries: Did you hear what the mate said, sir? . . . Cloete’s face feels as if it were set in plaster, lips and all. Yes, I did, he forces himself to answer. The coxswain waits a moment, then says: I don’t like it. . . And he turns to the mate, telling him it was a pity he did not try to run along the deck and hurry up the captain when the lull came. Stafford answers at once that he did think of it, only he was afraid of missing him on the deck in the dark. For, says he, the captain might have got over at once, thinking I was already in the life-boat, and you would have hauled off perhaps, leaving me behind. . . True enough, says the coxswain. A minute or so passes. This won’t do, mutters the coxswain. Suddenly Stafford speaks up in a sort of hollow voice: I was by when he told Mr. Cloete here that he didn’t know how he would ever have the courage to leave the old ship; didn’t he, now? . . . And Cloete feels his arm being gripped quietly in the dark. . . Didn’t he now? We were standing together just before you went over, Mr. Cloete? . . .

“Just then the coxswain cries out: I’m going on board to see. . . Cloete tears his arm away: I am going with you. . .

“When they get aboard, the coxswain tells Cloete to go aft along one side of the ship and he would go along the other so as not to miss the captain. . . And feel about with your hands, too, says he; he might have fallen and be lying insensible somewhere on the deck. . . When Cloete gets at last to the cabin companion on the poop the coxswain is already there, peering down and sniffing. I detect a smell of smoke down there, says he. And he yells: Are you there, sir? . . . This is not a case for shouting, says Cloete, feeling his heart go stony, as it were. . . Down they go. Pitch dark; the inclination so sharp that the coxswain, groping his way into the captain’s room, slips and goes tumbling down. Cloete hears him cry out as though he had hurt himself, and asks what’s the matter. And the coxswain answers quietly that he had fallen on the captain, lying there insensible. Cloete without a word begins to grope all over the shelves for a box of matches, finds one, and strikes a light. He sees the coxswain in his cork jacket kneeling over Captain Harry. . . Blood, says the coxswain, looking up, and the match goes out. . .

“Wait a bit, says Cloete; I’ll make paper spills. . . He had felt the back of books on the shelves. And so he stands lighting one spill from another while the coxswain turns poor Captain Harry over. Dead, he says. Shot through the heart. Here’s the revolver. . . He hands it up to Cloete, who looks at it before putting it in his pocket, and sees a plate on the butt with _H. Dunbar_ on it. . . His own, he mutters. . . Whose else revolver did you expect to find? snaps the coxswain. And look, he took off his long oilskin in the cabin before he went in. But what’s this lot of burnt paper? What could he want to burn the ship’s papers for? . . .

Cloete sees all, the little drawers drawn out, and asks the coxswain to look well into them. . . There’s nothing, says the man. Cleaned out. Seems to have pulled out all he could lay his hands on and set fire to the lot. Mad—that’s what it is—went mad. And now he’s dead. You’ll have to break it to his wife. . .

“I feel as if I were going mad myself, says Cloete, suddenly, and the coxswain begs him for God’s sake to pull himself together, and drags him away from the cabin. They had to leave the body, and as it was they were just in time before a furious squall came on. Cloete is dragged into the life-boat and the coxswain tumbles in. Haul away on the grapnel, he shouts; the captain has shot himself. . .

“Cloete was like a dead man—didn’t care for anything. He let that Stafford pinch his arm twice without making a sign. Most of Westport was on the old pier to see the men out of the life-boat, and at first there was a sort of confused cheery uproar when she came alongside; but after the coxswain has shouted something the voices die out, and everybody is very quiet. As soon as Cloete has set foot on something firm he becomes himself again. The coxswain shakes hands with him: Poor woman, poor woman, I’d rather you had the job than I. . .

“Where’s the mate?” asks Cloete. He’s the last man who spoke to the master. . . Somebody ran along—the crew were being taken to the Mission Hall, where there was a fire and shake-downs ready for them—somebody ran along the pier and caught up with Stafford. . . Here! The owner’s agent wants you. . . Cloete tucks the fellow’s arm under his own and walks away with him to the left, where the fishing-harbour is. . . I suppose I haven’t misunderstood you. You wish me to look after you a bit, says he. The other hangs on him rather limp, but gives a nasty little laugh: You had better, he mumbles; but mind, no tricks; no tricks, Mr. Cloete; we are on land now.

“There’s a police office within fifty yards from here, says Cloete. He turns into a little public house, pushes Stafford along the passage. The landlord runs out of the bar. . . This is the mate of the ship on the rocks, Cloete explains; I wish you would take care of him a bit to-night. . . What’s the matter with him? asks the man. Stafford leans against the wall in the passage, looking ghastly. And Cloete says it’s nothing—done up, of course. . . I will be responsible for the expense; I am the owner’s agent. I’ll be round in an hour or two to see him.

And Cloete gets back to the hotel. The news had travelled there already, and the first thing he sees is George outside the door as white as a sheet waiting for him. Cloete just gives him a nod and they go in. Mrs. Harry stands at the head of the stairs, and, when she sees only these two coming up, flings her arms above her head and runs into her room. Nobody had dared tell her, but not seeing her husband was enough. Cloete hears an awful shriek. . . Go to her, he says to George.

“While he’s alone in the private parlour Cloete drinks a glass of brandy and thinks it all out. Then George comes in. . . The landlady’s with her, he says. And he begins to walk up and down the room, flinging his arms about and talking, disconnected like, his face set hard as Cloete has never seen it before. . . What must be, must be. Dead—only brother. Well, dead—his troubles over. But we are living, he says to Cloete; and I suppose, says he, glaring at him with hot, dry eyes, that you won’t forget to wire in the morning to your friend that we are coming in for certain. . .

“Meaning the patent-medicine fellow. . . Death is death and business is business, George goes on; and look—my hands are clean, he says, showing them to Cloete. Cloete thinks: He’s going crazy. He catches hold of him by the shoulders and begins to shake him: Damn you—if you had had the sense to know what to say to your brother, if you had had the spunk to speak to him at all, you moral creature you, he would be alive now, he shouts.

“At this George stares, then bursts out weeping with a great bellow. He throws himself on the couch, buries his face in a cushion, and howls like a kid. . . That’s better, thinks Cloete, and he leaves him, telling the landlord that he must go out, as he has some little business to attend to that night. The landlord’s wife, weeping herself, catches him on the stairs: Oh, sir, that poor lady will go out of her mind. . .

“Cloete shakes her off, thinking to himself: Oh no! She won’t. She will get over it. Nobody will go mad about this affair unless I do. It isn’t sorrow that makes people go mad, but worry.

“There Cloete was wrong. What affected Mrs. Harry was that her husband should take his own life, with her, as it were, looking on. She brooded over it so that in less than a year they had to put her into a Home. She was very, very quiet; just gentle melancholy. She lived for quite a long time.

“Well, Cloete splashes along in the wind and rain. Nobody in the streets—all the excitement over. The publican runs out to meet him in the passage and says to him: Not this way. He isn’t in his room. We couldn’t get him to go to bed nohow. He’s in the little parlour there. We’ve lighted him a fire. . . You have been giving him drinks too, says Cloete; I never said I would be responsible for drinks. How many? . . . Two, says the other. It’s all right. I don’t mind doing that much for a shipwrecked sailor. . . Cloete smiles his funny smile: Eh? Come. He paid for them. . . The publican just blinks. . . Gave you gold, didn’t he? Speak up! . . . What of that! cries the man. What are you after, anyway? He had the right change for his sovereign.

“Just so, says Cloete. He walks into the parlour, and there he sees our Stafford; hair all up on end, landlord’s shirt and pants on, bare feet in slippers, sitting by the fire. When he sees Cloete he casts his eyes down.

“You didn’t mean us ever to meet again, Mr. Cloete, Stafford says, demurely. . . That fellow, when he had the drink he wanted—he wasn’t a drunkard—would put on this sort of sly, modest air. . . But since the captain committed suicide, he says, I have been sitting here thinking it out. All sorts of things happen. Conspiracy to lose the ship—attempted murder—and this suicide. For if it was not suicide, Mr. Cloete, then I know of a victim of the most cruel, cold-blooded attempt at murder; somebody who has suffered a thousand deaths. And that makes the thousand pounds of which we spoke once a quite insignificant sum. Look how very convenient this suicide is. . .

“He looks up at Cloete then, who smiles at him and comes quite close to the table.

“You killed Harry Dunbar, he whispers. . . The fellow glares at him and shows his teeth: Of course I did! I had been in that cabin for an hour and a half like a rat in a trap. . . Shut up and left to drown in that wreck. Let flesh and blood judge. Of course I shot him! I thought it was you, you murdering scoundrel, come back to settle me. He opens the door flying and tumbles right down upon me; I had a revolver in my hand, and I shot him. I was crazy. Men have gone crazy for less.

“Cloete looks at him without flinching. Aha! That’s your story, is it? . . . And he shakes the table a little in his passion as he speaks. . . Now listen to mine. What’s this conspiracy? Who’s going to prove it? You were there to rob. You were rifling his cabin; he came upon you unawares with your hands in the drawer; and you shot him with his own revolver. You killed to steal—to steal! His brother and the clerks in the office know that he took sixty pounds with him to sea. Sixty pounds in gold in a canvas bag. He told me where they were. The coxswain of the life-boat can swear to it that the drawers were all empty. And you are such a fool that before you’re half an hour ashore you change a sovereign to pay for a drink. Listen to me. If you don’t turn up day after to-morrow at George Dunbar’s solicitors, to make the proper deposition as to the loss of the ship, I shall set the police on your track. Day after to-morrow. . .

“And then what do you think? That Stafford begins to tear his hair. Just so. Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything. Cloete gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair, tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to save himself. . .

“You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely. I’ve got to a point that I don’t care what happens to me. I would shoot you now for tuppence.

“At this the cur dodges under the table. Then Cloete goes out, and as he turns in the street—you know, little fishermen’s cottages, all dark; raining in torrents, too—the other opens the window of the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice—

“You low Yankee fiend—I’ll pay you off some day.

“Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”

* * * * *

My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.

“I don’t quite understand this,” I said. “In what way?”

He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it. Enough to keep her comfortable. George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.

“I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was—I mean the patent medicine. Do you know?”

He named it, and I whistled respectfully. Nothing less than Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills. Enormous property! You know it; all the world knows it. Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.

“Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”

“Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”

He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock. The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink. “Funny chap, Cloete. We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board.”

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger to all moral standards. Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had “had enough of the old country.” George Dunbar had turned on him, too, in the end. Cloete was clearly somewhat disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured “for a parson,” because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man. “Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right,” growled my old ruffian, contemptuously. “He told the parson that I knew this Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it. That skunk of a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . . Promised to be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can guess all that—eh? . . . till he was exhausted. Gave up. Threw himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray. So he says. Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death—he was that terrified. Thought that if he had a knife or something he would cut his throat, and be done with it. Then he thinks: No! Would try to cut away the wood about the lock. . . He had no knife in his pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on God to send him a tool of some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe! In most ships there is a spare emergency axe kept in the master’s room in some locker or other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark. Pulls at the drawers to find matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon—Captain Harry’s revolver. Loaded too. He goes perfectly quiet all over. Can shoot the lock to pieces. See? Saved! God’s providence! There are boxes of matches too. Thinks he: I may just as well see what I am about.

“Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the back of the drawer. Knew at once what that was. Rams it into his pocket quick. Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light. So he pitches a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and starts in a hurry rummaging for more valuables. Did you ever? He told that East-End parson that the devil tempted him. First God’s mercy—then devil’s work. Turn and turn about. . .

“Any squirming skunk can talk like that. He was so busy with the drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens. He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce in the light of the burning papers. His eyes were starting out of his head. Thieving, he thunders at him. A sailor! An officer! No! A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to drown.

“This Stafford—on his death-bed—told the parson that when he heard these words he went crazy again. He snatched his hand with the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming. Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the burning papers, putting the blaze out. All dark. Not a sound. He listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on deck like mad.”

The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

“What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people the captain committed suicide. Pah! Captain Harry was a man that could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too. He wasn’t the sort to slink out of life. Not he! He was a good man down to the ground. He gave me my first job as stevedore only three days after I got married.”

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively for his material. And then it was not worth many thanks in any case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo. This story to be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas. But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak—just as it was told to me—but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of London.

* * * * *

_Oct._ 1910.

THE INN OF THE TWO WITCHES A FIND

This tale, episode, experience—call it how you will—was related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not a bad age—unless in perspective, when no doubt it is contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and standing aside one begins to remember with a certain vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but—so to speak—naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are luckily the property of the immovable past which, without them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or for the wonder of his posterity. It could not have been for his glory, because the experience was simply that of an abominable fright—terror he calls it. You would have guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines was in writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title. The title itself is my own contrivance, (can’t call it invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that’s merely a conventional expression, and we must take our man’s word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand bookseller in the last stage of decay. As to the books themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of money I disbursed. It might have been some premonition of that fact which made me say: “But I must have the box too.” The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting was not attractive at first sight. But in one place the statement that in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting age in which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the faculty of reflection being weak and the power of imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: “At night we stood in again,” arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase. “Let’s see what it is all about,” I thought, without excitement.

Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every other line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the drone of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance. “In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two years old,” he begins earnestly and goes on with every appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don’t imagine, however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn’t progress! . . . Why immense! We have moved on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the remote epoch. And of course no motoring tourist can hope to find such an inn anywhere, now. This one, the one of the title, was situated in Spain. That much I discovered only from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that relation were missing—perhaps not a great misfortune after all. The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that coast—presumably the north coast of Spain. His experience has nothing to do with the sea, though. As far as I can make it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war. There’s nothing strange in that. At all stages of the long Peninsular campaign many of our men-of-war of the smaller kind were cruising off the north coast of Spain—as risky and disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special service to perform. A careful explanation of all the circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as I’ve said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be seen clearly that communication with the shore and even the sending of messengers inland was part of her service, either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of the province. Something of the sort. All this can be only inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious writing.

Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a member of the ship’s company, having the rating of the captain’s coxswain. He was known on board as Cuba Tom; not because he was Cuban however; he was indeed the best type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a man-of-war’s man for years. He came by the name on account of some wonderful adventures he had in that island in his young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of the yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of an evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of some.

Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba Tom with something like affection. This sort of relation between officer and man was not then very rare. A youngster on joining the service was put under the charge of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his first hammock for him and often later on became a sort of humble friend to the junior officer. The narrator on joining the sloop had found this man on board after some years of separation. There is something touching in the warm pleasure he remembers and records at this meeting with the professional mentor of his boyhood.

We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for the service, this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and a very high character for courage and steadiness had been selected as messenger for one of these missions inland which have been mentioned. His preparations were not elaborate. One gloomy autumn morning the sloop ran close to a shallow cove where a landing could be made on that iron-bound shore. A boat was lowered, and pulled in with Tom Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and our young man (Mr. Edgar Byrne was his name on this earth which knows him no more) sitting in the stern sheets.

A few inhabitants of a hamlet, whose grey stone houses could be seen a hundred yards or so up a deep ravine, had come down to the shore and watched the approach of the boat. The two Englishmen leaped ashore. Either from dullness or astonishment the peasants gave no greeting, and only fell back in silence.

Mr. Byrne had made up his mind to see Tom Corbin started fairly on his way. He looked round at the heavy surprised faces.

“There isn’t much to get out of them,” he said. “Let us walk up to the village. There will be a wine shop for sure where we may find somebody more promising to talk to and get some information from.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Tom falling into step behind his officer. “A bit of palaver as to courses and distances can do no harm; I crossed the broadest part of Cuba by the help of my tongue tho’ knowing far less Spanish than I do now. As they say themselves it was ‘four words and no more’ with me, that time when I got left behind on shore by the _Blanche_, frigate.”

He made light of what was before him, which was but a day’s journey into the mountains. It is true that there was a full day’s journey before striking the mountain path, but that was nothing for a man who had crossed the island of Cuba on his two legs, and with no more than four words of the language to begin with.

The officer and the man were walking now on a thick sodden bed of dead leaves, which the peasants thereabouts accumulate in the streets of their villages to rot during the winter for field manure. Turning his head Mr. Byrne perceived that the whole male population of the hamlet was following them on the noiseless springy carpet. Women stared from the doors of the houses and the children had apparently gone into hiding. The village knew the ship by sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed on that spot perhaps for a hundred years or more. The cocked hat of Mr. Byrne, the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the sailor, filled them with mute wonder. They pressed behind the two Englishmen staring like those islanders discovered by Captain Cook in the South Seas.

It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little cloaked man in a yellow hat. Faded and dingy as it was, this covering for his head made him noticeable.

The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a wall of flints. The owner was the only person who was not in the street, for he came out from the darkness at the back where the inflated forms of wine skins hung on nails could be vaguely distinguished. He was a tall, one-eyed Asturian with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a grave expression of countenance contrasted enigmatically with the roaming restlessness of his solitary eye. On learning that the matter in hand was the sending on his way of that English mariner toward a certain Gonzales in the mountains, he closed his good eye for a moment as if in meditation. Then opened it, very lively again.

“Possibly, possibly. It could be done.”

A friendly murmur arose in the group in the doorway at the name of Gonzales, the local leader against the French. Inquiring as to the safety of the road Byrne was glad to learn that no troops of that nation had been seen in the neighbourhood for months. Not the smallest little detachment of these impious _polizones_. While giving these answers the owner of the wine-shop busied himself in drawing into an earthenware jug some wine which he set before the heretic English, pocketing with grave abstraction the small piece of money the officer threw upon the table in recognition of the unwritten law that none may enter a wine-shop without buying drink. His eye was in constant motion as if it were trying to do the work of the two; but when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility of hiring a mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the door which was closely besieged by the curious. In front of them, just within the threshold, the little man in the large cloak and yellow hat had taken his stand. He was a diminutive person, a mere homunculus, Byrne describes him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet assertive attitude, a corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over his left shoulder, muffling his chin and mouth; while the broad-brimmed yellow hat hung on a corner of his square little head. He stood there taking snuff, repeatedly.

“A mule,” repeated the wine-seller, his eyes fixed on that quaint and snuffy figure. . . “No, señor officer! Decidedly no mule is to be got in this poor place.”

The coxswain, who stood by with the true sailor’s air of unconcern in strange surroundings, struck in quietly—

“If your honour will believe me Shank’s pony’s the best for this job. I would have to leave the beast somewhere, anyhow, since the captain has told me that half my way will be along paths fit only for goats.”

The diminutive man made a step forward, and speaking through the folds of the cloak which seemed to muffle a sarcastic intention—

“Si, señor. They are too honest in this village to have a single mule amongst them for your worship’s service. To that I can bear testimony. In these times it’s only rogues or very clever men who can manage to have mules or any other four-footed beasts and the wherewithal to keep them. But what this valiant mariner wants is a guide; and here, señor, behold my brother-in-law, Bernardino, wine-seller, and alcade of this most Christian and hospitable village, who will find you one.”

This, Mr. Byrne says in his relation, was the only thing to do. A youth in a ragged coat and goat-skin breeches was produced after some more talk. The English officer stood treat to the whole village, and while the peasants drank he and Cuba Tom took their departure accompanied by the guide. The diminutive man in the cloak had disappeared.

Byrne went along with the coxswain out of the village. He wanted to see him fairly on his way; and he would have gone a greater distance, if the seaman had not suggested respectfully the advisability of return so as not to keep the ship a moment longer than necessary so close in with the shore on such an unpromising looking morning. A wild gloomy sky hung over their heads when they took leave of each other, and their surroundings of rank bushes and stony fields were dreary.

“In four days’ time,” were Byrne’s last words, “the ship will stand in and send a boat on shore if the weather permits. If not you’ll have to make it out on shore the best you can till we come along to take you off.”

“Right you are, sir,” answered Tom, and strode on. Byrne watched him step out on a narrow path. In a thick pea-jacket with a pair of pistols in his belt, a cutlass by his side, and a stout cudgel in his hand, he looked a sturdy figure and well able to take care of himself. He turned round for a moment to wave his hand, giving to Byrne one more view of his honest bronzed face with bushy whiskers. The lad in goatskin breeches looking, Byrne says, like a faun or a young satyr leaping ahead, stopped to wait for him, and then went off at a bound. Both disappeared.

Byrne turned back. The hamlet was hidden in a fold of the ground, and the spot seemed the most lonely corner of the earth and as if accursed in its uninhabited desolate barrenness. Before he had walked many yards, there appeared very suddenly from behind a bush the muffled up diminutive Spaniard. Naturally Byrne stopped short.

The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand peeping from under his cloak. His hat hung very much at the side of his head. “Señor,” he said without any preliminaries. “Caution! It is a positive fact that one-eyed Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at this moment a mule in his stable. And why he who is not clever has a mule there? Because he is a rogue; a man without conscience. Because I had to give up the _macho_ to him to secure for myself a roof to sleep under and a mouthful of _olla_ to keep my soul in this insignificant body of mine. Yet, señor, it contains a heart many times bigger than the mean thing which beats in the breast of that brute connection of mine of which I am ashamed, though I opposed that marriage with all my power. Well, the misguided woman suffered enough. She had her purgatory on this earth—God rest her soul.”

Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance of that sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of the speech, that he was unable to disentangle the significant fact from what seemed but a piece of family history fired out at him without rhyme or reason. Not at first. He was confounded and at the same time he was impressed by the rapid forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy excited loquacity of an Italian. So he stared while the homunculus letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an immense quantity of snuff out of the hollow of his palm.

“A mule,” exclaimed Byrne seizing at last the real aspect of the discourse. “You say he has got a mule? That’s queer! Why did he refuse to let me have it?”

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with great dignity.

“_Quien sabe_,” he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped shoulders. “He is a great _politico_ in everything he does. But one thing your worship may be certain of—that his intentions are always rascally. This husband of my _defunta_ sister ought to have been married a long time ago to the widow with the wooden legs.” {188}

“I see. But remember that, whatever your motives, your worship countenanced him in this lie.”

The bright unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose confronted Byrne without wincing, while with that testiness which lurks so often at the bottom of Spanish dignity—

“No doubt the señor officer would not lose an ounce of blood if I were stuck under the fifth rib,” he retorted. “But what of this poor sinner here?” Then changing his tone. “Señor, by the necessities of the times I live here in exile, a Castilian and an old Christian, existing miserably in the midst of these brute Asturians, and dependent on the worst of them all, who has less conscience and scruples than a wolf. And being a man of intelligence I govern myself accordingly. Yet I can hardly contain my scorn. You have heard the way I spoke. A caballero of parts like your worship might have guessed that there was a cat in there.”

“What cat?” said Byrne uneasily. “Oh, I see. Something suspicious. No, señor. I guessed nothing. My nation are not good guessers at that sort of thing; and, therefore, I ask you plainly whether that wine-seller has spoken the truth in other particulars?”

“There are certainly no Frenchmen anywhere about,” said the little man with a return to his indifferent manner.

“Or robbers—_ladrones_?”

“_Ladrones en grande_—no! Assuredly not,” was the answer in a cold philosophical tone. “What is there left for them to do after the French? And nobody travels in these times. But who can say! Opportunity makes the robber. Still that mariner of yours has a fierce aspect, and with the son of a cat rats will have no play. But there is a saying, too, that where honey is there will soon be flies.”

This oracular discourse exasperated Byrne. “In the name of God,” he cried, “tell me plainly if you think my man is reasonably safe on his journey.”

The homunculus, undergoing one of his rapid changes, seized the officer’s arm. The grip of his little hand was astonishing.

“Señor! Bernardino had taken notice of him. What more do you want? And listen—men have disappeared on this road—on a certain portion of this road, when Bernardino kept a _meson_, an inn, and I, his brother-in-law, had coaches and mules for hire. Now there are no travellers, no coaches. The French have ruined me. Bernardino has retired here for reasons of his own after my sister died. They were three to torment the life out of her, he and Erminia and Lucilla, two aunts of his—all affiliated to the devil. And now he has robbed me of my last mule. You are an armed man. Demand the _macho_ from him, with a pistol to his head, señor—it is not his, I tell you—and ride after your man who is so precious to you. And then you shall both be safe, for no two travellers have been ever known to disappear together in these days. As to the beast, I, its owner, I confide it to your honour.”

They were staring hard at each other, and Byrne nearly burst into a laugh at the ingenuity and transparency of the little man’s plot to regain possession of his mule. But he had no difficulty to keep a straight face because he felt deep within himself a strange inclination to do that very extraordinary thing. He did not laugh, but his lip quivered; at which the diminutive Spaniard, detaching his black glittering eyes from Byrne’s face, turned his back on him brusquely with a gesture and a fling of the cloak which somehow expressed contempt, bitterness, and discouragement all at once. He turned away and stood still, his hat aslant, muffled up to the ears. But he was not offended to the point of refusing the silver _duro_ which Byrne offered him with a non-committal speech as if nothing extraordinary had passed between them.

“I must make haste on board now,” said Byrne, then.

“_Vaya usted con Dios_,” muttered the gnome. And this interview ended with a sarcastic low sweep of the hat which was replaced at the same perilous angle as before.

Directly the boat had been hoisted the ship’s sails were filled on the off-shore tack, and Byrne imparted the whole story to his captain, who was but a very few years older than himself. There was some amused indignation at it—but while they laughed they looked gravely at each other. A Spanish dwarf trying to beguile an officer of his majesty’s navy into stealing a mule for him—that was too funny, too ridiculous, too incredible. Those were the exclamations of the captain. He couldn’t get over the grotesqueness of it.

“Incredible. That’s just it,” murmured Byrne at last in a significant tone.

They exchanged a long stare. “It’s as clear as daylight,” affirmed the captain impatiently, because in his heart he was not certain. And Tom the best seaman in the ship for one, the good-humouredly deferential friend of his boyhood for the other, was becoming endowed with a compelling fascination, like a symbolic figure of loyalty appealing to their feelings and their conscience, so that they could not detach their thoughts from his safety. Several times they went up on deck, only to look at the coast, as if it could tell them something of his fate. It stretched away, lengthening in the distance, mute, naked, and savage, veiled now and then by the slanting cold shafts of rain. The westerly swell rolled its interminable angry lines of foam and big dark clouds flew over the ship in a sinister procession.

“I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in the yellow hat wanted you to do,” said the commander of the sloop late in the afternoon with visible exasperation.

“Do you, sir?” answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish. “I wonder what you would have said afterwards? Why! I might have been kicked out of the service for looting a mule from a nation in alliance with His Majesty. Or I might have been battered to a pulp with flails and pitch-forks—a pretty tale to get abroad about one of your officers—while trying to steal a mule. Or chased ignominiously to the boat—for you would not have expected me to shoot down unoffending people for the sake of a mangy mule. . . And yet,” he added in a low voice, “I almost wish myself I had done it.”

Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a highly complex psychological state of scornful scepticism and alarmed credulity. It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last for six days at least, and possibly be prolonged further for an indefinite time, was not to be borne. The ship was therefore put on the inshore tack at dark. All through the gusty dark night she went towards the land to look for her man, at times lying over in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.

Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on tossed by the seas towards the shallow cove where, with considerable difficulty, an officer in a thick coat and a round hat managed to land on a strip of shingle.

“It was my wish,” writes Mr. Byrne, “a wish of which my captain approved, to land secretly if possible. I did not want to be seen either by my aggrieved friend in the yellow hat, whose motives were not clear, or by the one-eyed wine-seller, who may or may not have been affiliated to the devil, or indeed by any other dweller in that primitive village. But unfortunately the cove was the only possible landing place for miles; and from the steepness of the ravine I couldn’t make a circuit to avoid the houses.”