The Curse of Carne's Hold Part 42

Then a sudden puff of wind whirled the flames round him. He staggered, made a half step backwards, and fell, while a cry went up from the crowd.

"It's all over, dear," Mr. Armstrong said, releasing his hold of his daughter; and then with Jacob Carey and three or four other men, he ran forward to the house, lifted the body of Reginald Carne and carried it beyond danger of a falling wall.

Dr. Arrowsmith, the clergyman, and several of the neighbours at once hurried to the spot.

"He is not dead," Jacob Carey said, as they came up, "he groaned when we lifted him; he fell on to one of the little flower beds between the windows."

"No, his heart is beating," the doctor said, as he knelt beside him and felt his pulse, "but I fear he must have sustained fatal injuries." He took out a flask that he had, thinking that a cordial might be required, slipped into his pocket just before starting for the scene of the fire, and poured a few drops of spirit between Reginald Carne's lips.

There was a faint groan, and a minute later he opened his eyes. He looked round in a bewildered way, but when his eyes fell on the burning house, a look of satisfaction pa.s.sed over his face.

"I have done it," he said. "I have broken the curse of Carne's Hold."

The doctor stood up for a moment and said to one of the grooms standing close by: "Get a stable door off its hinges and bring it here; we will carry him into the gardener's cottage."

As soon as Reginald Carne was taken away, Mr. Armstrong and his daughter returned to the village. A few of the villagers followed their example; but for most of them the fascination of watching the flames that were leaping far above the sh.e.l.l of the house was too great to be resisted, and it was not until the day dawned and the flames smouldered to a deep, quiet glow, that the crowd began to disperse.

"It has been a terrible scene," Mary said, as she walked with her father down the hill.

"A terrible scene, child, and it would have been just as well if you had stayed at home and slept comfortably. If I had thought that you were going to be so foolish, I would not have gone myself."

"You know very well, father, you could not have helped yourself. You could not have sat quietly in our cottage with the flames dancing up above the tree tops there, if you had tried ever so much. Well, somehow I am glad that The Hold is destroyed; but of course I am sorry for Mr.

Carne's death, for I suppose he will die."

"I don't think you need be sorry, Mary. Far better to die even like that than to live till old age within the walls of a madhouse."

"Yes; but it was not the death, it was the horror of it."

"There was no horror in his case, my dear. He felt nothing but a wild joy in the mischief he had done. I do not suppose that he had a shadow of fear of death. He exulted both in the destruction of his house and in our inability to get at him. I really do not think he is to be pitied, although it was a terrible sight to see him. No doubt he was carrying out a long-cherished idea. A thing of this sort does not develop all at once. He may for years have been brooding over this unhappy taint of insanity in his blood, and have persuaded himself that with the destruction of the house, what the people here foolishly call the curse of the Carnes would be at an end."

"But surely you don't believe anything about the curse, father?"

"Not much, Mary; the curse was not upon the house, but in the insanity that the Spanish ancestors of the Carnes introduced into the family.

Still I don't know, although you may think me weak-minded, that I can a.s.sert conscientiously that I do not believe there is anything in the curse itself. One has heard of such things, and certainly the history of the Carnes would almost seem to justify the belief. Ronald and his two sisters are, it seems, the last of those who have the Carnes' blood in their veins, and his misfortunes and their unhappiness do not seem to have anything whatever to do with the question of insanity. At any rate, dear, I, like you, am glad that The Hold is destroyed. I must own I should not have liked the thought of your ever becoming its mistress, and indeed I have more than once thought that before I handed you over to Ronald, whenever that event might take place, I should insist on his making me a promise that should he survive his cousin and come into the Carnes' estates, he would never take you to live there. Well, this will be a new incident for you to write to him about. You ought to feel thankful for that; for you would otherwise have found it very difficult to fill your letters till you hear from him what course he is going to adopt regarding this business of Ruth Powlett and Forester."

Mary smiled quietly to herself under cover of the darkness, for indeed she found by no means the difficulty her father supposed in filling her letters. "It is nearly four o'clock," she said, as she entered the house and struck a light. "It is hardly worth while going to bed, father."

"All right, my dear, you can please yourself. Now it is all over I acknowledge I feel both cold and sleepy, and you will see nothing more of me until between ten and eleven o'clock in the morning."

"Oh, if you go to bed of course I shall not stop up by myself," Mary said; "but I am convinced that I shall not close an eye."

"And I am equally convinced, Mary, that in a little over half an hour you will be sound asleep;" and in the morning Mary acknowledged that his antic.i.p.ation had been verified.

CHAPTER XX.

CLEARED AT LAST.

Reginald Carne was laid down on the table in the gardener's cottage. The doctor could now examine him, and whispered to the clergyman that both his legs were broken, and that he had no doubt whatever he had received terrible internal injuries. "I don't think he will live till morning."

Presently there was a knock at the door. "Can I come in?" Mr. Volkes asked, when the doctor opened it. "I have known the poor fellow from the time he was a child. Is he sensible?"

"He is sensible in a way," the doctor said. "That is, I believe he knows perfectly well what we are saying, but he has several times laughed that strange, cunning laugh that is almost peculiar to the insane."

"Well, at any rate, I will speak to him," said Mr. Volkes.

"Do you know me, Reginald?" he went on in a clear voice as he came up to the side of the table.

Reginald Carne nodded, and again a low mocking laugh came from his lips.

"You thought you were very clever, Volkes, mighty clever; but I tricked you."

"You tricked me, did you?" the magistrate said, cheerfully. "How did you trick me?"

"You thought, and they all thought, the dull-headed fools, that Ronald Mervyn killed Margaret. Ho! ho! I cheated you all nicely."

A glance of surprise pa.s.sed between his listeners. Mr. Volkes signed to the others not to speak, and then went on:

"So he did, Reginald, so he did--though we couldn't prove it; you did not trick us there."

"I did," Reginald Carne said, angrily. "I killed her myself."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'_I did,' Reginald Carne said, angrily--'I killed her myself._'"]

An exclamation of horror broke from the three listeners. Mr. Volkes was the first to recover himself.

"Nonsense, Reginald, you are dreaming."

"I am not," he said, vehemently. "I had thought it all out over and over again. I was always thinking of it. I wanted to put an end to this curse. It's been going on too long, and it troubled me. I had made up my mind to kill her long before; but I might not have done it when I did if I had not heard Ronald threatening her, and another man heard it too.

This was a grand opportunity, you see. It was as much as I could do to sit quietly at dinner with that naval fellow, and to know that it was all right. It was glorious, for it would be killing two birds with one stone. I wanted to get rid of Ronald as much as I did of her, so that the curse might come to an end, and now it was all so easy. I had only to drop the glove he had left behind him on the gra.s.s close below her window, and after that quarrel he would be suspected and hung. Nothing could have worked better for me; and then, too, I thought it would puzzle them to give them another scent to work on. There was another man had a grudge against Margaret; that was Forester, the poacher. I had picked up his knife in the wood just where he had killed my keeper, and afterwards I heard him telling his sweetheart, who was Margaret's maid, that he would kill Margaret for persuading her to give him up; so I dropped the knife by the side of the bed, and I thought that one or other of them would be sure to be hung; but somehow that didn't come right. I believe the girl hid the knife, only I didn't dare question her about it. But that didn't matter; the fellow would be hung one way or the other for killing my keeper. But the other was a glorious thing, and I chuckled over it. It was hard to look calm and grave when I was giving evidence against Ronald, and when all the fools were thinking that he did it, when it was me all the time. Didn't I do it cleverly, Volkes? I hid her things where the gardener was sure to find them the first time he dug up the bed. They let Ronald off, but he will not come back again, and I don't suppose he will ever marry; so there is an end of the curse as far as he's concerned. Then I waited a bit, but the devil was always at my elbow, telling me to finish the good work, and last night I did it. I put the candle to the curtains in all the rooms downstairs, and stood and watched them blaze up until it got too hot to stay any longer.

It was a grand sight, and I could hear the Spanish woman laughing and shouting. She has had her way with us for a long time, but now it's all over; the curse of the Carnes is played out. There, didn't I cheat you nicely, Volkes, you and all the others? You never suspected me, not one of you. I used to keep grave all day, but at night when I was in my room alone I laughed for hours to think of all the dogs on the wrong scent."

His three listeners looked at each other silently.

"It was a grand thing to put an end to the curse," Reginald Carne rambled on. "It was no pain to her; and if she had lived, the trouble would have come upon her children."

"You know that you are hurt beyond chance of recovery, Carne," the magistrate said, gravely. "It is a terrible story that you have told us.

I think that you ought to put it down on paper, so that other people may know how it was done; because, you see, at present, an innocent man is suspected."

"What do I care? That is nothing to me one way or the other. I am glad I have succeeded in frightening Ronald Mervyn away, and I hope he will never come back again. You don't suppose I am going to help to bring him home!"

Mr. Volkes saw that he had made a mistake. "Yes, I quite understand you don't want him back," he said, soothingly. "I thought, perhaps, that you would like people to know how you had sacrificed yourself to put an end to the curse, and how cleverly you had managed to deceive every one.

People would never believe us if we were to tell them. They would say either that you did not know what you were talking about, or that it was empty boasting on your part."

"They may think what they like," he said, sullenly; "it is nothing to me what they think."

There was a change in the tone of his voice that caused the doctor to put his hand on his wrist again.