Doctor Syn A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (11 page)

“Let us go, then,” said Imogene, trying to pass.

“All in good time,” returned the schoolmaster, stopping her. “There’s no immediate hurry, I think, for the Doctor won’t come out of that shuttered room of his till morning, so we can afford to keep him waiting, and I’ve something to say to you first—alone.”

The girl tossed her head impatiently as if she knew what was coming, but Rash continued:

“A few weeks back I asked you to marry me—I, the esteemed schoolmaster, asked you, the daughter of a criminal; you, whose father was a proved murderer, a dirty pirate hanged publicly at Rye for a filthy tavern crime; you who were born in a Raratonga drinking hell, some half-caste native girl’s brat!

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Ecod! it’s laughable! I offered to make you respectable and put your banns up in the church, and you refused. Now I know why. You think because that young fool Cobtree is pleased to admire you, that you will catch him in your toils, do you? You’re a clever one, ain’t you? I dare swear that sooner or later you’d succeed in getting hold of him—let the young idiot ruin you, eh? Then make a virtuous song about it to the squire, and a settlement to keep your mouth shut, perhaps.” the church, and you refused. Now I know why. You think because that young fool Cobtree is pleased to admire you, that you will catch him in your toils, do you? You’re a clever one, ain’t you? I dare swear that sooner or later you’d succeed in getting hold of him—let the young idiot ruin you, eh? Then make a virtuous song about it to the squire, and a settlement to keep your mouth shut, perhaps.”

“Beast!” cried the girl, and she struck him sideways across the mouth with her clenched hand.

“Hello!” thought Jerk, crouching in the bushes, “here’s another one having a ‘go’ at him; well, the more the merrier, so long as I’m the last.”

The schoolmaster recoiled, trying to look as if the stinging blow had not hurt, but the blood was flowing from his lip and from the hand of the girl as well.

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“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.”

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“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:

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“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.”

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“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?”

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“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 manner of secrets and not betray them. That’s their business, and Doctor Syn’s a good man, so I’ll tell him everything, and in his wisdom he’ll find a means of checking your contemptible scheme.”

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“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 banns on this next Sabbath as ever is, and it’s Rash who is going to make him, and if you won’t come along with me to church, well, I’ll threaten other parties in this little place who’ll help me make you. Folk are none too anxious to be exposed these days with King’s men in the village, and so you’ll see—” The schoolmaster stopped talking suddenly.

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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

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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.

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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

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glass casement, and thus it was that Jerk had to wait for a few considerable seconds before seeing plainly anything in the room, for the candlelight flickered and danced upon the glass. But the very second he had put his eye to the hole the moans within the room steadily rose, and Jerk’s thumping heart increased its already unnatural pace, for he expected the loud shrieks to follow, though he could not understand their motive. But soon his eye got accustomed to the light, and one thing in the room became visible, the form of Doctor Syn. He was sitting in a high-backed chair in the centre of the room, gripping the oaken arms with his long, white fingers, and upon his face was a look of indescribable horror: his neck being stretched up alert and straight, his eyes dilated to a most disproportionate stare, glazed and terrible; his hair unkempt, and his thin legs pressing hard against the floor.

But his mouth was neither set nor rigid, like the rest of his members—his mouth was loose and hanging open—such a mouth And as the madman carries;

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and from it was coming that inarticulate gibber, that gibbering moan that had arrested the hearing of Jerry Jerk. Straight at the shutter stared the demented Doctor; straight into Jerk’s eye at the jagged hole, and suddenly his hand shot out over the table; he picked up the great plated candelabra, and hurled it, lighted candles and all, full at the window. Jerk started back to the rattle of glass, and at the same time a heavy hand fell upon his shoulder, and another was passed over his mouth, while a familiar voice whispered in his ear: “For God’s sake be quiet!” It was the captain, and he stood holding the boy tightly, keeping his eye on the jagged hole, and with something approaching terror upon his strong face. It was dark now, of course, for there was no light in the house, but presently Jerk and the captain heard low, frightened voices, and a light showed suddenly through the hole. The captain stooped and put his eye to it. Yes, the door of the Doctor’s sitting-room was opening, and Imogene and the

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schoolmaster came into the room. Imogene came first, with a lighted candle held high above her head.

The Doctor was now kneeling on the floor straight up. He had a black bottle in his hand; the same rum bottle from which he had treated Jerk that very day. He seemed to recognize Imogene, for he smiled And as she entered, smiled And as he slowly raised the bottle and tilted the contents, neat and raw, down his vibrating throat. And then he saw the schoolmaster. His upper lip twitched, curled, and rose, disclosing his white upper teeth; his underlip stretched down and slowed his lower teeth, shining white, that glistened underneath the bottle’s neck. There was a snap and a quick crunching sound. The captain gasped for breath, for Doctor Syn had bitten through the glass neck, and seized the bottle by the broken end. Slowly he dragged one leg from the kneeling position and pushed it out before him; slowly he fixed his other foot like a firm spring behind him. Terrified, Mr. Rash sprang back against the wall, with the

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blood still trickling from his cut lip, and motionless stood the girl Imogene, with the candle held above her head. Syn was in position to spring, Rash was waiting to be seized, and nothing moved in the room save the slowly oozing blood on the schoolmaster’s lip, vivid against the pale lantern jaw, and the blood and ground glass that glistened in a saliva stream that hung from the cleric’s mouth. Nothing else moved at all, except perhaps the light shed by the flickering candle, which danced shadows of the two weird men upon the whitewashed wall. And then with a hissing sound Syn made a leap, swinging the bottle And as he did so, and bringing it down with a sickening crash on the white face before him. Down went Rash, senseless, blinded with blood and the shivered glass. Then Syn laughed, and sang at the top of his voice:

“Here’s to the feet wot have walked the plank, Yo ho! for the dead man’s throttle.

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And here’s to the corpses floating round in the tank, And the dead man’s teeth in the bottle.”

And as he sang he danced, and stamped the senseless face beneath his feet; and then he sang again, roaring new words to the eternal old tune:

“A pound of gunshot tied to his feet, And a ragged bit of sail for the winding sheet; Then out to the sharks with a horrible splash, And that’s the end of Mr. Rash.”

And with diabolical glee he leaped again, and landed with both feet upon the victim’s face.

All this time the girl stood still. Like a statue she stood, with the candle high above her head; and the terrible cleric went on with the song: new words,