A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh

167

“So that’s it, is it?” he sniggered, “a real love match, p’haps? The squire’s consent, the wedding bells, and live happily ever after, eh? Ecod! my lady, I think not. Rash is your man, see? and lucky you are to get him; you whose father’s gibbet chains are still swinging in Rye.”

“And yours are swinging a bit nearer than that!” said Jerry Jerk to himself.

“You leave my father out of it,” went on the girl, “for from all I’ve heard of him he was a better man than you, and he was fond of me, too; so it’s lucky for you he’s not here to hear you speaking bad of his child.”

“You know nothing about him—he was a drunken rascal!”

“Doctor Syn knew him well, and he’s told me things. A rough man he was, certain, and none rougher, reckless, too, and brave, a lawbreaker on land as well as sea, pitiless to his enemies, staunch to his friends, but contemptible he never was; and so, Mister Rash, you can afford to respect him, and I say again that I wish he were here to make you.”

168

“Shouldn’t care if he was,” replied the schoolmaster, “for there’s always the law to look after a man.”

“So there is,” chuckled Jerk, “and that you’ll find.”

“Bah! what’s the good of haggling and squabbling?” said Mr. Rash. “You’re mine, or you’ll have to bear the consequences.”

“And that is?” asked the girl defiantly.

“The rope for your friends when I turn King’s evidence.”

“You wouldn’t dare, you coward, for you’d be hanged yourself as well.”

“King’s evidence will cover me all square.”

“So you’re determined to turn it, are you?”

“I am, unless you change your mind.”

The girl didn’t reply to that, so Mr. Rash, thinking that he was making an advance, continued:

169

“Think, Imogene—this Cobtree fellow will be packed off to London in a month or so, and from there on to Oxford; and after a university career of drinking, gambling, and loose living, with precious little learning, he’ll settle down to the gentleman’s life, marry some person of quality, and you—eh? what of you, then?”

“I earn my living now, don’t I?” replied the girl. “Well, what’s to prevent me going on the same?”

“Don’t you want to marry?” went on the schoolmaster. “Don’t you want a house of your own? Don’t you want to be the envy of all the girls in the village?”

“Not at the price of my happiness; and, besides, I’m not so sure that I do want all those things so desperate. I’m afraid the wife of Mister Rash would be too genteel a job for me.”

170

“Oh, I’d soon educate you up to that,” returned the schoolmaster, looking pleased.

“It ’ud be a nuisance to both of us, wouldn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t mind—it would be a pleasant business making a respectable woman of you, Imogene. You see, you’re not common like these village girls, and that’s what attracts me; otherwise, it might have been better for me to have fixed my choice on one of them: one that hasn’t a bad mark against her, so to speak. But I don’t mind what folk say. I suppose they’ll talk a bit and laugh behind my back. Well, let ’em, say I. I don’t care, because I want you.”

“Then it’s a pity that I’m not the same way of thinking, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That I wouldn’t marry you—no, not though you got the whole village the rope!”

“You ungrateful wretch, not after all they’ve done for you?”

171

“You’re not the sort of party to talk to others about being ungrateful, are you now?”

“I wasn’t born of jail folk.”

“No; and you can hope your children, if you’re ever cursed with any, will be able to say the same, for I doubt it very greatly, Mister Schoolmaster. And as to your threats, I set no store on them, for from my heart I despise you; I despise you because you would be willing to betray your fellows, but I despise you more because I know you are too great a coward to do it.”

“We shall see,” said the schoolmaster, “for who’s to stop me?”

“Parson Syn,” answered the girl. “Parsons can bear all ma

172

“That shows how little you know about things, Mistress Ignoramous; for it’s that very same good man, Doctor Syn, who is going to read out your ba

173

Chapter 17

The Doctor Sings a Song

Now, although Jerry had employed all his auditory faculties for the overhearing of this conversation, he had unconsciously listened to something else: a slight noise that now and again came from the direction of the vicarage, a small, whirring noise, the kind of noise that he had heard in Mipps’s coffin shop when a tool was working its way through a piece of wood —yes, a whirring noise with an occasional squeak to it. He hadn’t bothered to ask himself what it was; he had just gone on hearing it, that’s all. But now another noise arose in the night that not only claimed his

174

immediate attention but made him feel cold all over. It had the same effect upon Mr. Rash, for he stopped talking suddenly and gripped the post of the gate with one hand and with the other pulled Imogene roughly into the denser black of the bushes; and then the noise grew louder and louder. What at first could only be described And as a gibbering moan rose into shriek after shriek of mortal terror: a man’s voice, a man scared out of all knowledge; and then over the gate leaped a dark form, agile and quick, that went bounding away through the ghostly churchyard. There was something familiar in that figure to Jerk. He had seen it almost from the same spot the night before. It was the man with the yellow face. The schoolmaster came out from the bushes, followed by Imogene. Quickly they went through the gate and toward the vicarage, and silently Jerk followed, with his heart thumping loud against his ribs; for although the echoes of those drum-cracking shrieks still vibrated in his ears, the gibbering moans still continued.

175

To the back of the house went the girl and the schoolmaster, and to the front went Jerk. It was all dark—indeed no lights were showing from any of the rooms but one, and that was the Doctor’s sitting-room with the shutters still close fastened; but a jagged little hole in the corner of one of the shutters sent a shaft of yellow candlelight straight out into the blackness. Yes, the gibbering moaning was coming from the Doctor’s room. Jerk crossed a bed of flowers and a gravel path and applied his eye to the jagged hole in the shutter. This little hole accounted for the whirring and squeaking that he had just heard, for it was newly cut, and Jerk put his hand upon several little pieces of split wood that had fallen upon the outer sill. It was plain that the awful apparition he had just seen had been looking into the room. He had evidently made the hole for the purpose, and made it with that awful weapon he carried, that same harpoon over which so much talk had been expended at the Court House inquiry. Now the shutter, being an outside shutter, backed right against the lead-rimmed