The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales Part 24

"Lord help us!" then said Mr. Job, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "She's the _Queen of Sheba_. I'd swear to her run anywhere--ay, or to that queer angle of her hawse-holes."

A close examination confirmed Mr. Job that my yacht was no other than the lost _Queen of Sheba_, lengthened and altered in rig. It persuaded me, too. I turned back to Plymouth, and, leaving the boat in Cattewater, drove to the Millbay Station and took a ticket for Bristol.

Arriving there just twenty-four hours after my interview with Mr. Job, I made my way to Mrs. Carlingford's lodgings.

She had left them two years before; nothing was known of her whereabouts. The landlady could not even tell me whether she had moved from Bedminster: And so I had to let the matter rest.

But just fourteen days ago I received the following letter, dated from a workhouse in one of the Midland counties:--

"DEAR SIR,--I am a dying woman, and shall probably be dead before this reaches you. The doctor says he cannot give me forty-eight hours. It is _angina pectoris_, and I suffer horribly at times.

The yacht you purchased of me is not the _Wasp_, but the _Queen of Sheba_. My husband designed her. He was a man of some property near Limerick; and he and my son were involved in some of the Irish troubles between 1881 and 1884. It was said they had joined one of the brotherhoods, and betrayed their oaths. This I am sure was not true. But it is certain we had to run for fear of a.s.sa.s.sination. After a year in Liverpool we were forced to fly south to Port William, where we brought the yacht and lived for some time in quiet, under our own names. But we knew this could not last, and had taken measures to escape when need arose.

My husband had chanced, while at Liverpool, upon an old yacht, dismantled and rotting in the Mersey--but of about the same size as his own and still, of course, upon the register. He bought her of her owner--a Mr. Carlingford, and a stranger--for a very few pounds, and with her--what he valued far more--her papers; but he never completed the transfer at the Custom House. His plan was, if pressed, to escape abroad, and pa.s.s his yacht off as the _Wasp_, and himself as Mr. Carlingford. All the while we lived at Port William the _Queen of Sheba_ was kept amply provisioned for a voyage of at least three weeks, when the necessity overtook us, quite suddenly-- the name of a man, MacGuire, in the Visitors' Book of a small inn at Penleven. We left Penleven at dusk that evening, and held steadily up the coast until darkness. Then we turned the yacht's head, and ran straight across for Morlaix; but the weather continuing fine for a good fortnight (our first night at sea was the roughest in all this time), we changed our minds, cleared Ushant, and held right across for Vigo; thence, after re-victualling, we cruised slowly down the coast and through the Straits, finally reaching Malaga.

There we stayed and had the yacht lengthened. My husband had sold his small property before ever we came to Port William, and had managed to invest the whole under the name of Carlingford.

There was no difficulty about letters of credit. At each port on the way we had shown the Wasp's papers, and used the name of Carlingford; and at Lisbon we read in an English newspaper about the supposed capsizing of the _Queen of Sheba_. Still, we had not only to persuade the officials at the various ports that our boat was the _Wasp_. We knew that our enemies were harder to delude, and our next step was to make her as unlike the _Wasp_ or the _Queen of Sheba_ as possible. This we did by lengthening her and altering her rig. But it proved useless, as I had always feared it would.

The day after we sailed from Malaga, a Spanish-speaking seaman, whom we had hired there as extra hand, came aft as if to speak to my husband (who stood at the wheel), and, halting a pace or two from him, lifted a revolver, called him by name, and shot him dead.

Before he could turn, my son had knocked him senseless, and in another minute had tumbled him overboard. We buried my husband in the sea, next day. We held on, we two alone, past Gibraltar-- I steering and my son handling all the sails--and ran up for Cadiz.

There we made deposition of our losses, inventing a story to account for them, and my son took the train for Paris, for we knew that our enemies had tracked the yacht, and there would be no escape for him if he clung to her. I waited for six days, and then engaged a crew and worked the yacht back to F--. I have never since set eyes on my son; but he is alive, and his hiding is known to myself and to one man only--a member of the brotherhood, who surprised the secret.

To keep that man silent I spent all my remaining money; to quiet him I had to sell the yacht; and now that money, too, is gone, and I am dying in a workhouse. G.o.d help my son now! I deceived you, and yet I think I did you no great wrong. The yacht I sold you was my own, and she was worth the money. The figures on the beam were cut there by my husband before we reached Vigo, to make the yacht correspond with the _Wasp's_ certificate. If I have wronged you, I implore your pardon.--Yours truly,

"CATHERINE BLAKE."

Well, that is the end of the story. It does not, I am aware, quite account for the figure I saw standing by the _Siren's_ wheel. As for the _Wasp_, she has long since rotted to pieces on the waters of the Mersey. But the question is, Have I a right to sell the _Siren?_ I certainly have a right to keep her, for she is mine, sold to me in due form by her rightful owner, and honestly paid for. But then I don't want to keep her!

PARSON JACK'S FORTUNE.

I.

From Langona church tower you see nothing of the Atlantic but a wedge between two cliffs of a sandy creek. The cottages--thirty in all, perhaps--huddle in a semicircle of the hills about a spring of clear water, which overflows and leaps as from a platform into the hollow coombe, its conduit down to the sands. But Langona Church stands out more boldly, on a high gra.s.sy meadow thrust forward like a bastion over the stream's right flank. It has no tree, no habitation between it and the ocean: it breaks the northerly gales for the cottages behind and under its lee, and these gales have given its tamarisk hedge and even its gravestones so noticeable a slant inland that, by a trick of eyesight, the church itself seems tilted perilously forward.

Forward, in fact--that is to say, seaward--the tower does lean; though but by a foot or so, and now not perilously; the salt winds, impotent against its masonry, having bitten with more effect into the earth around its base. But the church has been restored, the mischief arrested, and the danger no longer haunts its vicar as it haunted the Rev. John Flood on a bright September morning in 1885.

He sat on a thyme-covered hummock by the valley stream, with knees drawn up and palms pressed against his aching head: sat as he had been sitting for half an hour past, a shovel beside him and an empty sack, which he had brought down to fill with clean river-sand. A chaffinch, fresh from his bath, flitted incessantly between the rail of the footbridge, a dozen yards below, and the boughs of a tamarisk beside it. He paid no attention to Parson Jack. Few living creatures ever did.

Even his paris.h.i.+oners--those who knew of it--felt no great concern that Parson Jack had been drunk again last night. There was no harm in the man. "He had this failing, to be sure: with a little liquor he talked silly, though not so silly as you might suppose. Let him alone, and he'll find his way home somehow. Scandalous? Oh, no doubt! But you might easily go farther and find a worse parson than Flood."

It never occurred to them that he felt any special remorse. His agonies were private, and his chance of redemption lay in this, that they neither ceased nor eased with time; perhaps in this, too, that he wasted no breath in apologetics or self-pity, but blamed himself squarely like a man.

Yet a sentimentalist in his place might have run up a long and tearful account against Providence, fate, circ.u.mstances--whatever sentimentalists choose to arraign rather than themselves.

Five-and-twenty years before, Jack Flood had been a rowdy undergraduate of Brasenose College, Oxford; in his third year of residence, with more than a fair prospect of being ploughed--or, in the language of that generation, "plucked"--at the end of it; a member of the Phoenix Wine Club, owner of a brute which he not only called a "hunter" but made to do duty for one at least twice a week; and debtor among various Oxford tradesmen to the tune of something like 500 pounds.

At this point his father--a Berks.h.i.+re rector--died suddenly of a paralytic stroke, leaving Jack and his elder brother Lionel (then abroad in the new Indian Civil Service) to realise and divide an estate of 1200 pounds.

Six hundred pounds is a fair equipment for starting a young man in life; but not when he already owes five hundred, and has few brains, no decided bent, and only a little of the most useless learning.

Jack surrendered two-thirds of his patrimony to his pressing creditors, sold his hunter, read hard for a term, scrambled into his degree, and was received, a month or two later, into Holy Orders. His father had sent him to Brasenose College as a step to this, and Jack had looked forward to being a parson some day--a sporting parson, be it understood.

For the moment, however, he was almost penniless; and he had answered in vain some dozen advertis.e.m.e.nts of curacies, when a college friend came to the rescue and prevailed on a distant kinsman to offer him the living of Langona, with a net annual stipend of 51 pounds eighteen s.h.i.+llings and sixpence. There are such "livings."

It was offered, of course, and accepted, merely as a stopgap.

But twenty-five years had pa.s.sed, and at Langona Parson Flood remained.

It had cost him twenty of these to wipe off his Oxford debts, with interest; but he had managed to retain the small remnant of his capital, and this with his benefice yielded an income better than a day labourer's. That he was still a bachelor goes without saying.

In the summer he fished; in the winter he followed, afoot, a pack of harriers kept by his patron, Sir Harry Vyell of Carwithiel. These were his recreations. He could not afford to travel, and cared little for reading. His library consisted of his Bible, two or three small Divinity Handbooks, a _Pickwick, Stonehenge on the Dog_, and a couple of "Handley Cross" novels, with coloured ill.u.s.trations by John Leech.

Twice a year or thereabouts a letter reached him from his brother in Calcutta, who was apparently prospering, and had a wife and three children--though for some years the letters had brought no news of them.

"Something was wrong," Parson Jack decided after a while, finding that his messages to them met with no answer; and he felt a delicacy in asking questions. He believed that the children had been sent home to England--he did not know where--and would have liked to pay them a visit. But for him a journey was out of the question. So he lived on, alone and forgotten.

On Sundays he wore a black suit, which had lasted him for ten years, and would have to last for another five at least. On week-days he dressed in blue guernsey and corduroys, and smoked a clay pipe. His broad-brimmed clerical hat alone distinguished him from the farm-labourers in his parish; but when at work upon the church--patching its s.h.i.+ngle roof, or pouring mortar into its gaping wounds--he discarded this for a maroon-coloured cap, not unlike a biretta, which offered less surface to the high winds.

He knew nothing of architecture: could not, in fact, distinguish Norman work from Perpendicular; and at first had taken to these odd jobs of masonry as a handy way of killing time. He had wit enough, however, to learn pretty soon that the whole fabric was eaten with rot and in danger from every gale; and by degrees (he could not explain how) the ruin had set up a claim on him. In his worst dreams he saw it toppling, falling; during the winter gales he lay awake listening, imagining the throes and shudders of its old beams, and would be abroad before daybreak, waiting for the light to a.s.sure him that it yet stood. A casual tourist, happening on him at work, some summers before, had mistaken him for a hired mason, and discoursed learnedly on the beauties of the edifice and the pity of its decay. "That's a vile job you have in hand, my friend-- a bit of sheer vandalism," said the tourist; "but I suppose the Parson who employs you knows no better." Parson Jack had been within an ace of revealing himself, but now changed his mind and asked humbly enough what was amiss. Whereupon the tourist pulled out a pencil and an old envelope, and explained. "But there," he broke off, "it would take me a week to go into these matters, and you a deal longer to understand.

I'd enjoy twenty minutes' talk with your Parson. The church wants restoration from beginning to end, and by a first-cla.s.s man.

It deserves no less, for it's interesting throughout; in some points unique." "That would cost money now?" suggested Parson Jack, pitching his voice to the true Langona sing-song. "Two thousand pounds would go a long way."--The tourist scanned the waggon-roof critically, and lowering his eyes, at length observed the Parson's smile. "Ah, I see! a sum that would take some collecting hereabouts. Parson's none too well off, eh?" "Fifty pounds a year or so." "Scandalous! Who's the lay impropriator?" He was told. "Well, but wouldn't he help?" Parson Jack shook his head; he had never asked a penny from Sir Harry Vyell, who was a notorious Gallio in all that concerned religion. He had a further reason, too. He suspected that Sir Harry chafed a little in a careless way at his continuing to hold the living, and would be glad to see him replaced by an inc.u.mbent with private means and no failings to be apologised for with a shrug of the shoulders. Sir Harry, he knew, was aware of these hateful lapses, though too delicate to allude to them, and far too charitable to use them (unless under compulsion) as a lever for getting rid of him. And this knowledge was perhaps the worst of his shame. Yet what could he do? since to surrender Langona was to starve.

"Your Parson might at least make a beginning," pursued the tourist.

"A box, now, inviting donations--that would cost nothing, and might relieve a visitor here and there of a spare sovereign. He could put up a second box for himself: it's quite a usual thing in churches when the parish priest is poor. You might make the suggestion, if he's not too proud."

"I will," said Parson Jack, and after the tourist had gone he thought much of these two boxes. Indeed, he made and fixed up the first that same week, though he labelled it "For Church Repairs," fighting shy of "Restoration" as too magniloquent. The second cost him long searchings of heart, and he walked over and laid the case before Parson Kendall, Rector of the near parish of St. Cadox, a good Christian and a good fellow, with whom he sometimes smoked a pipe. "Why not?" answered Parson Kendall; "it's the most ordinary thing in the world." "But Sir Harry may not like it." The Rector chuckled. "If he doesn't, he'll consult me; and I shall ask him why he hunts a pack by subscription."

So the second box was nailed beside the first, and excited little discussion. Indeed, the pair hung in so obscure a corner--behind the font--that at the first service only Parson Jack and the Widow Copping were aware of them. The Parson stumbled and hesitated so badly over the prayers that one or two wors.h.i.+ppers felt sure he had been drinking; which was not the fact. The Widow Copping took no interest in collecting-boxes; and, besides, she could not read. So the innovation missed fire. Moreover, it suggested neither popery nor priestcraft, and only a fool would suspect Parson Flood of either.

The "Parson's Box" remained, provoking no criticism. He himself had a little plan for its contents. He would spend the money on a journey to his nephew and nieces, if they were anywhere in England. He would find out. There was no hurry, he told himself, with a queer smile.

There was not. The box provoked neither ill-criticism nor effusive charity. On Trinity Sunday, when he opened it and counted out one s.h.i.+lling in silver and sevenpence in coppers, Parson Jack pulled a wry face and then laughed aloud.

II.

_Toot--toot--toot!_

The postman's horn in the village street above him shook the Parson out of his idleness, if not out of his dark thoughts. He sprang up, gripped his shovel, and began spading the white river-sand into his sack.

"It is useless, after all," said he to himself. "The crack on the south of the tower stands still, but the smaller and more dangerous one--the one on the weather side--is widening fast. This winter, even, may finish matters."

He took up a few more shovelfuls. "Anyhow, it will not last my time; and since it will not--" He paused, as a thought rose before him like a blank wall. If the church fell--nay, _when_ it fell--this comrade which had taken possession of his purposes, his fears, his fate--this enigmatic building of which he knew neither the history nor the founder's name, but only its wounds--why, then his occupation was gone!

He might outlive it for years, perhaps a third of a lifetime; but he had no hopes beyond. In imagination he saw it fall, and after that-- nothing. And he laughed--not the laugh with which he had counted out the money in his collecting-box, but one of sheer self-contempt, and pa.s.sing bitter.

The impression had been so sharp that he flung a glance up at the grey tower topping the grey-green rise; and with that was aware of the postman swinging, with long strides, down the slope towards him.

He turned in confusion and resumed his shovelling. Why was the man coming this way, by a path out of his daily beat? Parson Jack stooped over his work. He wished to avoid greeting him. There was talk, no doubt, up at the village. . . .

But the postman was not to be denied. He stopped and hailed across the stream.

"Hulloa, Parson! I've just left a letter for you up at the Parsonage: a long blue letter, and important, by the look of it, with a seal--a man's hand coming out of a castle. Do you know it?"