Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts Part 28

"He followed the sea in early life. But I'll tell you what _is_ queer, and that's his last wish. His particular desire was that I, and I alone, should screw down the coffin. He had Trudgeon the carpenter up to measure him, and begged this of me in Trudgeon's presence and the doctor's. What's more, I consented."

"That's jolly unpleasant," was my comment, for lack of a better.

The Vicar sat silent for a while, staring across the lawn, while I watched a spider which had let itself down from a branch overhead and was casting anchor on the decanter's rim. With his next question he seemed to have changed the subject.

"Where do you keep your boat now?"

"Renatus Warne has been putting in a new strake and painting her.

I shall have her down on the beach to-morrow."

"Ah, so that's it? I cast my eye over the beach this afternoon and couldn't see her. You haven't been trying for the conger lately."

"We'll have a try to-morrow evening if you'll come, Sir. I wish you would."

The Vicar, though he seldom found time for the sport, was a famous fisherman. He shook his head; and then, leaning an arm on the table, gazed at me with sudden seriousness.

"Look here: could you make it convenient to go fis.h.i.+ng for conger this next night or two--_and to go alone?_"

I saw that he had something more to say, and waited.

"The fact is," he went on after a glance towards the house, "I have a ticklish job to carry through--the queerest in all my experience; and unfortunately I want help as well as secrecy. After some perplexity I've resolved to ask you: because, upon my word, you're the only person I can ask. That doesn't sound flattering--eh? But it isn't your fitness I doubt, or your nerve. I've hesitated because it isn't fair to drag you into an affair which, I must warn you, runs counter to the law in a small way."

I let out a low whistle. "A smuggling job?" I suggested.

"Good Heavens, boy! What do you take me for?"

"I beg your pardon, then. But when you talk of a row-boat--at night--a job that wants secrecy--breaking the law--"

"I'll have to tell you the whole tale, I see: and it's only fair."

"Not a bit," said I stoutly. "Tell me what you want done and I'll do it. Afterwards tell me your reasons, if you care to. Indeed, Sir, I'd rather have it that way, if you don't mind. I was abominably disrespectful this afternoon--"

"No more about _that_."

"But I _was_: and with your leave, Sir, that's the form of apology I'll choose."

And I stood up with my hands in my pockets.

"Nonsense, nonsense," said the Vicar, eyeing me with a twinkle.

But I nodded back in the most determined manner.

"Your instructions, sir--that is, unless you prefer to get another helper."

"But I cannot," pleaded he. "That's the mischief."

"Very well, then. Your instructions, please." And thus I had my way.

This happened on a Tuesday. The next evening I walked down to the Porth and launched my boat. A row of idlers watched me from the long bench under the life-boat house, and a small knot on the beach inspected my fis.h.i.+ng-gear and lent a hand to push off. "Ben't goin' alone, be 'e?"

asked Renatus Warne. "Yes," said I. "The conger'll have 'ee then, sure enough." One or two offered chaffingly to come out and search for me if I shouldn't return before midnight; and a volley of facetious warnings followed me out upon the calm sea.

The beach was deserted, however, when I returned. I had hooked three fine conger; and having hauled up the boat and cleaned her, I made my way back to the vicarage, well pleased, getting to bed as the clock struck two in the morning.

This was Thursday; and in the evening, between seven and eight o'clock, I launched the boat again under the eyes of the population and started fis.h.i.+ng on the inner grounds, well in sight of the Porth. Dusk fell, and with it the young moon dropped behind the western headland. Far out beyond Menawhidden the riding-lights of a few drifters sparkled in the darkness: but I had little to fear from them.

The moon had no sooner disappeared than I s.h.i.+fted my ground, and pulling slowly down in the sh.o.r.e's shadow (I had greased the leathers of my oars for silence), ran the boat in by the point under Gunner's Meadow, beached her cunningly between two rocks, and pulled a tarpaulin over to hide her white-painted interior. My only danger now lay in blundering against the coastguard: but by dodging from one big boulder to another and listening all the while for footsteps, I gained the withy bed at the foot of the meadow. The night was almost pitch-black, and no one could possibly detect the boat unless he searched for it.

I followed the little stream up the valley bottom, through an orchard, and struck away from it across another meadow and over the rounded shoulder of the hill to my right. This brought me in rear of a kitchen-garden and a lonely cob-walled cottage, the front of which faced down a dozen precipitous steps upon the road leading from Lansulyan to the Porth. The cottage had but one window in the back, in the upper floor; and just beneath it jutted out a lean-to shed, on the wooden side of which I rapped thrice with my knuckles.

"Hist!" The Vicar leaned out from the dark window above. "Right: it's all ready. We must stow it in the outhouse. Trudgeon is down in the road below, waiting for me to finish."

No more was said. The Vicar withdrew: after a minute I heard the planking creak: then something white glimmered in the opening of the window--something like a long bundle of linen, extruded inch by inch, then lowered on to the penthouse roof and let slide slowly down towards me.

"Got it?"

"Right." I steadied it a moment by its feet, then let it slide into my arms, and lowered it on to the gravelled path. It was the body of John Emmet, in his winding-sheet.

"Carry it into the shed," whispered the Vicar. "I must show Trudgeon the coffin and hand him the keys. When I've got rid of him I'll come round."

Somehow, the second time of handling it was far worse than the first.

The chill of the corpse seemed to strike through its linen wrappers.

But I lifted it inside, shut the door upon it, and stood wiping my forehead, while the Vicar closed the window cautiously, drew the blind, and pressed-to the clasp.

A minute later I heard him calling from the front, "Mr. Trudgeon--Mr.

Trudgeon"; and Trudgeon's hob-nailed boots ascending the steps.

Silence followed for many minutes: then a slant of candlelight faded off the fuchsia-bush round the corner, and the two men stumbled down the staircase--stood muttering on the doorstep while a key grated in the lock--stumbled down the steps and stood muttering in the sunken roadway.

At length they said "Good-night" and parted. I listened while the sound of their footsteps died away: Trudgeon's down the hill towards the Porth, the Vicar's up towards the church-town.

After this I had some painful minutes. As they dragged by, an abominable curiosity took hold of me, an itch to open the door of the shed, strike a match, and have a look at the dead face I had never seen.

Then came into my mind a pa.s.sage in the _Republic_ which I had read a fortnight before--how that one Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus under the north wall of the city, observed some corpses lying on the ground at the place of execution; and how he fought between his desire to look and his abhorrence until at length, the fascination mastering him, he forced his eyes open with his fingers and ran up exclaiming, "Look, wretches, look! Feed your fill on the fair sight!" . . . My seat was an inverted flower-pot, and clinging to it I began to count. If the Vicar did not arrive before I reached five hundred, why, then . . .

"_Hist!_" He had fetched his compa.s.s round by the back of the garden, treading so softly that the signal sounded almost in my ear and fetched me off my flower-pot in a nervous quake. He wore a heavy pea-jacket, and, as a smell of hot varnish announced, carried a dark lantern beneath it. He had strapped this to his waist-belt to leave both hands free.

We lifted the body out and carried it across the meadow, the Vicar taking the shoulders and I the heels. And now came the real hazard of the night. If the coastguard or any belated wanderer should blunder upon us, we stood convicted of kidnapping a corpse, and (as the Vicar afterwards allowed) there was simply no explanation to be given.

When we gained the orchard and pushed through the broken fence, every twig that crackled fetched my heart into my mouth: and I drew my first breath of something like ease when at length, in the withy bed at the foot of Gunner's Meadow, we laid our burden down behind the ruin of an old cob-wall and took a short rest before essaying the beach.

But that breath was hardly drawn before I laid a warning hand on the Vicar's sleeve. Someone was coming down the cliff-track: the coastguard, no doubt. He halted on the wooden footbridge, struck a match and lit his pipe. From our covert not ten yards away I saw the glow on his face as he s.h.i.+elded the match in the hollow of both his hands. It was the coastguard--a fellow called Simms. His match lit, I expected him to resume his walk. But no: he loitered there. For what reason, on earth? Luckily his back was towards us now: but to me, as I cowered in the plashy mud and prayed against sneezing, it seemed that the d.a.m.natory smell of the Vicar's lantern must carry for half a mile at least.

And now I heard another footstep, coming from the westward, and a loose stone kicked over the cliff. Another coastguard! The pair hailed each other, and stood on the footbridge talking together for a good three minutes.

Then to our infinite relief they parted with a "So long!" and each made slowly off by the way he had come. It was just a meeting of the patrols after all.

Another ten minutes must have gone by before we dared to lift the body again: and after a nervous while in crossing the beach we found the boat left high and dry by the ebb, and had an interminable job to get her down to the water without noise. I climbed in and took the oars: the Vicar lifted a sizeable stone on board and followed.

"The Carracks," he whispered. "That's the spot he named to me."

So I pulled out towards the Carracks, which are three points of rock lying just within the main barrier of Menawhidden, where it breaks up towards its western end into a maze of islets. While I pulled, the Vicar knelt on the bottom-boards and made fast the stone to John Emmet's feet.

Well, I need not tell the rest of our adventure at length. We reached the Carracks, and there the Vicar pulled out a short surplice from the immense inner pocket of his pea-jacket, donned it, and read the burial service in due form by the light of his dark lantern: and by the light of it, as I arranged John Emmet's shroud, I had my first and last glimpse of his face--a thin face, old and hollow, with grey side-whiskers: a face extraordinarily pallid: in other circ.u.mstances perhaps not noticeable unless it were for a look of extreme weariness which had lasted even into the rest of death.