Doctor Syn A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh (22 page)

“That’s all very well, Squire, but how?”

“How, sir?” echoed that irascible gentleman. “How? Do you ask me how? Well, I don’t know! How? Yes, how?”

“That’s the question,” ruefully remarked Doctor Syn.

“Of course it is,” returned the other. “Well, how would you set about it yourself?”

“I’d beat the Marsh from border to border.”

“So I will, sir, so I will!”

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“And I should get that mulatto and hang him, for he’s a sorcerer, a witchman; and I believe that as long as we have such a Jonah’s curse among us that nothing will come right.”

“I’ll do that at once. But we’ve only twenty-four hours.”

Imogene stood up and looked at the squire, and in a steady voice, as if she were pronouncing a definite judgment, she said: “It is enough for me. I will undertake to find your son for you, and the schoolmaster, too.” And without waiting for a reply she swiftly passed out of the room.

“But what can we do?” stammered the squire.

“I should find that mulatto and hang him.”

“But I don’t care a fig about finding him.”

“You must,” persisted the cleric, “for he is the cause of the trouble. Find the mulatto, and leave the rest to Imogene. She has spoken, and you may be sure she’ll keep her word. But find that mulatto!”

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Jerk was kept busy all day at the Ship Inn, for Imogene had left her post and Mrs. Waggetts, who appeared to have grave matters of her own to fuss about, kept the young potboy in command. He was sorry about this, for he was unable to visit his estate upon the Marsh, and he was eager to view his latest purchase, the gallows. But to his great satisfaction he heard it discussed by a farmer and a fisherman who sat drinking at the bar.

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“I tell you that there’s a gallows erected on the Marsh nigh Littlestone Point,” the fisherman was saying. “I could see it quite plain at sunrise when we were running up on to the beach.”

“And you say that there was a man a-hangin’ from it?” said the farmer.

“Aye, that’s what I said, and I thought as how you could tell me what man it was.”

“I don’t know nothing,” replied the farmer, “except that the demon riders was out again last night, and if what you says is right, why, they’re at their tricks again, I suppose.” And the farmer gave the fisherman a knowing wink. However, this didn’t trouble Jerry, for the laugh was all on his side. Not content with an empty scaffold, he had gone out the night before, while Doctor Syn and the captain had been chatting in the sanded parlour, and collected two great sack full of dried sticks and sand, which, with the help of a few tightly knotted lengths of twine, he had converted into the semblance of a man, and

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this same dummy he had hanged from the rusty chain. It had looked splendid swinging there with the mist wrapped round its feet. This indeed was playing hangman’s games with a vengeance. Impatient as he was to see the fruits of his labour, impatient he had to remain, for he was not released till nightfall, when Mrs. Waggetts entered the bar with Sexton Mipps. Freed at last from duty, Jerry stopped outside, pulling his hat over his eyes and tucking up his collar, for the wind was blowing up for a cold night. He was leaving the yard with a brisk step when he noticed a cloaked figure coming to meet him. It was Imogene. Jerry stopped outside, pulling his hat over his eyes and tucking up his collar, for the wind was blowing up for a cold night. He was leaving the yard with a brisk step when he noticed a cloaked figure coming to meet him. It was Imogene.

“Jerry,” she whispered, “who put up that gallows on your plot of land?”

“It’s my gallows,” answered Jerry proudly. “I paid for it, and Mister Mipps it was wot helped me to set it up.”

“It’s a real one, Jerry,” the girl replied.

“Yes, that it is—and ain’t it fine?”

“But there’s a man, a real man hanging there.”

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At this Jerk slapped his knee with enthusiasm and cried aloud: “Now by all the barrels of rum! if I ain’t fit to take in the devil hisself, wot I believes is a sexton dressed up. For that same corpse wot you’ve seed a-danglin’ from my gallows ain’t a corpse at all, but sticks, sand, and sacks wot I invented to look like one.”

“Are you sure, Jerry?” said the girl.

“I’m a-goin’ out there myself now; so come along and see for yourself.”

“I’ve been there once this evening, Jerry.”

“Well, come along o’ me and you shall give the old scarecrow wot’s a-swing on my gallows a good sharp tweak in the ribs.” So off they set through the churchyard and out over the Marsh.

“Jerry,” whispered the girl presently, “there’s something queer going to happen soon. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps to-morrow night. And it’s something uncommon queer, too.”

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“Now what makes you think that?” said Jerry, looking up at her.

“I believe, Jerry, that there are certain tides that run from the Channel round Dungeness that wash up the dead seamen from the deep waters, and all the time that they lie near shore waiting for the ebb to take ’em back to their old wrecked ships in the deep their spirits come ashore and roam about us. I feel that way to-night. I can almost smell death in the air.”

“Well, that’s a funny notion,” remarked the boy, turning it over in his mind, “but I dare say you are right. After all, the sea, what does look so tidy on the top, must have lots of ugly secrets underneath, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t want to wash ’em ashore once in a way. I’ve often wondered myself about the dead what moves about inside the sea, and I thinks sometimes when the high tide runs into the great sluice and near fills the dykes that perhaps it buries things it’s sick of in the mud. P’raps it’s a-doin’ it now, and that’s wot’s given you them notions.”

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“Perhaps it is, Jerry.”

Now the mist was so thick that they did not get a far view of Jerk’s gallows; indeed they had crossed the one-planked bridge over the dyke and half climbed Gallows Tree Hill before they viewed it at all. But as soon as they did Jerry sprang forward crying: “Who’s been messing with my bag o’ sticks?”

The sacking had been torn, and from the slit appeared a hand. Jerry seized the hand and pulled. The rusty chain squeaked, and one of the rotten links “gave,” and the ghastly fruit of the gallows tree fell upon the young hangman, who was borne to the ground beneath the falling weight. Imogene, with a cry, pulled it from him, and Jerk scrambled to his feet. Then they both looked.

The mildewed sacking, wet with the dense mist, had severed in the fall; the threads had rent at a hundred points, and from the fragments of scattered debris the dead face of Rash looked up with protruding eyes that stared from the blood-streaked flesh.

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Jerk’s gallows had borne fruit.

For minutes they stood looking. The cloak had fallen from the girl’s shoulders, and the shrieking wind flapped in her rough dress and tore at her streaming hair. Jerk, with his ambitions fulfilled, found himself most uncomfortably scared. For minutes neither of them spoke. They could only stare. Stare at the huddled horror and listen to the jangle of the broken gibbet chain. Suddenly Imogene remembered something which brought her back to consciousness, for she spoke:

“Jerry, after seeing that, are you afraid to return to the village alone?”

Jerry had not yet found his voice, so he shook his head.

“Then go to the Court House and report what we’ve found to the squire, and tell him that Imogene has gone out to keep the rest of her promise.”

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Jerry got her to repeat the sentence again, and he watched her leap from the dyke and disappear into the mist, and then from behind the scaffold stepped the captain.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, potboy,” he said, seizing Jerk’s arm and leading him away from the scaffold. “I’ve other work for you to do. We’re going back to the village to make our experiment.”

As they stumbled across the Marsh, scrambling the dykes that skirted the fields, the wind got up off shore, scattering he mists and driving them across the sea toward the beacons of France. Half an hour later, as the captain and Hangman Jerk approached the vicarage, a small fishing boat, carrying no light but much sail, raced before the screaming wind toward Dungeness, and with a firm hand grasping the tiller and a great heart beating high, stood Imogene, blinded with lashing spray and her drenched streaming hair, fighting the cruel sea to keep her word to the squire.

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They entered the vicarage by the back door and found the bo’sun roasting chestnuts on the bars of the kitchen fire. There was another man there, with his back to the door, and by his black clothes and scholarly stoop Jerry recognized the vicar. So quietly had the captain opened the door that neither of the men roasting chestnuts was aware of their presence. They went on roasting the nuts, when an astonishing thing happened: The vicar, in trying to take out a hot chestnut from the fire, knocked three of the bo’sun’s into the red-hot coals, which so enraged the bo’sun that he administered with his forearm a

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resounding clump on the back of the cleric’s head. Jerry thought this a distinct liberty, but the vicar only laughed, and when he turned round Jerry saw that it was Morgan Walters dressed in an entire clerical suit, and not Doctor Syn at all.

Morgan Walters looked sheepish and uncomfortable when he beheld the captain, but the latter remarked that his “get-up” was magnificent, and that his black hair, which had been carefully sprinkled by the bo’sun with flour to make it gray, so nearly resembled that of the cleric, that Morgan Walters was evidently intended by Providence to be a parson, for such a capital one did he make. Thus encouraged, Morgan Walters strutted about the kitchen, and the likeness to Doctor Syn (for he was of the same build and Doctor Syn had always the sailor’s rolling gait) was so perfect that Jerk began to laugh, but was speedily hushed by the captain.

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“Now remember, Walters,” the captain said, “there’s no danger in this if you do exactly as I told you, but you will have to be spry, of course.”

“If he sticks me, then I deserves to be stuck,” replied Morgan Walters. “I’ve been Aunt Sally at the county fairs afore now, and never got whacked, not once. I always could bob down in time in those days, and I didn’t have no bo’sun’s whistle to help me.”

And then began the captain’s experiment, a most curious game, and, in spite of its tragic purpose, a humorous game it was.

The bo’sun, whistle in mouth, was hidden in the little front garden; the captain and Jerk crouched in the corner of the room of which the window had no view; while Morgan Walters, in all points resembling Doctor Syn, sat reading in the ingle seat by the fire—sat reading a book with his back to the window, from which the shutters had been thrown open and the broken casement set ajar. It was a weird occasion: the captain crouching down in the

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corner holding on to young Jerk with a warning hand, the bo’sun with his whistle hidden in the garden, and the firelight aided by one candle upon the table throwing the two wavering shadows of the pseudo parson upon the whitewashed wall. Jerk could hardly persuade himself that it was not the Doctor, so clever was the rig-out of Morgan Walters, and he could hardly forbear letting out a laugh as the crafty seaman kept turning the pages of the book. But he had ample time to control himself before anything happened; indeed, a whole hour he had to wait—an hour which seemed a lifetime; and then the occurrence was swift and terrible.

A shrill whistle sounded from the garden; down went Morgan Walters’s head; and with a thud which broke the surrounding wall plaster into a thousand powdery cracks, a great harpoon trembled in the wall, exactly one foot above the settle.

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“Gone!” shouted the bo’sun from the garden, and he immediately tumbled up through the window, closing the shutters behind him.

“Well, sir,” said Morgan Walters, “it wasn’t the ducking I minded when it came to it, but the waiting wasn’t pleasant.”

“You did well, my man,” said the captain. “And now, potboy, after that little experiment I’ll know how to proceed, how to prescribe like an analyzing apothecary, so, as it’s Sunday to-morrow, which ain’t so far off now, we’ll get back to the Ship Inn, bo’sun, and you can light us there, whilst Morgan Walters can change his clothes and get back and to sleep.”

So they left him there, the bo’sun with a lantern stepping before the captain and Jerk to the door of the Ship. Just as they reached the door a horseman galloped up from the Hythe Road and, saluting, asked if any could direct him to Captain Collyer. As soon as the captain had made himself known, Jerk saw the rider hand the captain a blue paper, which the latter put carefully into his

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pocket. Then he led the rider and the bo’sun into the sanded parlour and gave them drinks, after which he went home to bed and slept sound.

But back in the vicarage, just as Morgan Walters was about to divest himself of his ecclesiastical robes, Mr. Mipps entered with a loaded blunderbuss and requested him to turn round, hold his hands above his head, and precede him to the coffin shop at the farther end of the village.

Doctor Syn slept at the Court House, for he did not intend to go to the vicarage any more at night. He had a dread of that sitting-room of his. The horrible whirring of a certain weapon boring a whole through the shutter was still in his ears, and he could see a terrible eye, magnified by the bottle glass of the casement, looking in at him from the darkness. No, he had had enough of that room, he told himself, and so he welcomed the squire’s invitation to pass the night in the Court House. Complaining of fatigue, he went to his room, but the squire sat up late wondering how Imogene was faring, and whether or no