Back o' the Moon, and Other Stories/Skelf-Mary
SKELF-MARY.
A wise man loves the ocean,
A good man loves the hills.
I.
With the wearing on of the afternoon, the flat, treeless country to which for half a day I had steadily dropped had but increased in monotony, and long before nightfall I had begun to weary for other company than that of my own meditations. The road, of a reddish gravel, had begun to cross, by wooden bridges, innumerable drains and channels and narrow waterways; and that there was clay beneath it was evident no less from the wreaths and wisps of vapour that crept fantastically over carr and mere than from the sudden chills of the air, that seemed to stand in banks or to move in thick, idle currents. The clatter of the mare's hoofs on the bridges flushed multitudes of waterfowl, that rose with harsh cries and beatings of wings; and from the number of gulls I had noticed among these while yet a little light remained, I had judged I could not be far from the sea.
How it came to pass that I, having had lands of my own, should find myself so circumstanced as to be fain to look after those of somebody else as factor or steward, is of no present moment; it is more to the point that, if this was the domain of the Master of Skelf, I liked it exceedingly little. The continual flurry and commotion of the waterfowl seemed to rouse in me a restlessness; and, remembering what Cardan had said of lands with a dark and fennish air, that they had the property of folding our thoughts back on themselves, I could only hope that I should not prove the worse bailiff for being acquainted with Cardan.
At first I mistook the man's lantern for an ignis fatuus; but I heard a whistle and the panting of a dog, and he gave me good-evening. He was a tall fellow, with a sheepskin about him; he carried his lantern at the end of a long pole; and he told me, as he trotted by my side, that I was within the confines of Skelf Decoy. I eased the mare that he might keep pace with me.
“Ay, this is Skelf Decoy, and I tend it; they call me Ducky Watt, but they mean Decoy. It isn't what it were, not for fish, sin' they drained it, but there's Friday-meat yet, and birds.... Ower th' Wolds, are ye? Well, it's a good air o' th' Wolds. They ha' farmed part about here too, but it's a black ear and thin crops; that's th' fogs.... Ay, we fish—hark! yon's a pike—trout and eels and roach and pike—and tak' birds for th' markets. Ye'll be a arable man; all's carrs hereabouts; but I don't doubt ye know all about Skelf-Mary.”
I told him that I had never been there before.
“Ay? H'm!... Ye'll know nowt o' th' sea i' these parts, then?”
I said that I did not.
“H'm!—well, this is how it is. Th' sea's taking it, as it's ta'en Auburn and Hartburn and Ravenspur; and a two-three stops, but th' most's flitted months back; ye'll see to-morrow.—Ye won't ha' heard o' Buttevant-Mary neither: no. Well, they talk o' bells chiming under th' sea o' still nights, and folks seen walking up and down th' wharves and marts, and all that; I think them's tales; but Kempery and Flaxton isn't tales. Th' Sheriff o' Kingston, he'll show ye th' Court Rolls o' Flaxton; and Kempery—I'll show ye where Kempery is to-morrow, for ye'd best bide wi' me to-night.—Ay, they took Flaxton Church to Windlesea i' carts; and then there's sea-marks....”
“In a word, the sea's advancing?”
“Ay; sometimes just licking-like, and sometimes a dozen yards of a sudden; ye'll see to-morrow.—And th' sea doesn't keep all it taks, neither. Ye'll be a arable man, say; well, there's a thousand acres o' warp come up out o' Humber, and wheat on it now; a foot-bridge joins it; but there's men has seen deep keels, half a dozen on 'em, passing up yon same channel. That's that side; and o' this, as I tell ye, a farmer can go to bed i' reaping-time and wake up wi' a swath or two less to reap....”
He continued to tell me tales of lost villages, of broken houses with their chambers open to the winds, of wooden groynes that had been put up and abandoned, and a deal more well fitted to the hour and place. Suddenly I asked him about the Master of Skelf-Mary; and the light of the lantern shone on his knuckles as he thumbed his chin.
“Ay, ye're th' new steward.... What wad ye know o' him?” he asked, slowly.
“Seeing I know nothing, you can't get wrong.”
“And that's providential—if it was true,” he retorted. “Well, sir, if ye can't bide while morning, ye can put your questions now.”
But, though I interrogated him, he so fubbed me off with bland and wary answers that I was little the wiser by the time I desisted. The Master of Skelf-Mary, I gathered, was all but bed-ridden, and in very ill fame with such as read their Bibles (but that might have been because he had turned the chapel of the mansion into a library); but my friend was sensible, and careful to assign to others certain tales of devils and familiars and voices that servants, with their ears at the rosewood door of the library, had heard o' nights. Nevertheless, his reluctance was evident, and by and by he pointed out a beam of light smothered in the fen-mists; that was his cottage.
I supped and lay that night in his hut; and by eight o'clock next morning he had conducted me to the village of Skelf-Mary. It was much as he had described it. One or two houses on the north side of the market-place, opposite an ancient butter-cross, appeared to be tenanted, as did also a row of very poor cottages that ran towards the sea; the rest was desolate, and already grass pushed between the cobbles. Two or three folk appeared at upper windows, hearing the sound of hoofs (having no business to take them abroad, I judged they were still abed); and as we left the cottages a couple of rabbits scampered across the street. Half a mile before us lay the church and hall, and beyond it the smooth sea, with a brig motionless far out.
“This road,” said the keeper, indicating a bridle-path to the right; but that was so plainly not the road that I answered shortly, “No, it isn't,” and pushed forward towards the church. Five minutes brought me level with it; and then I stopped with an exclamation.
A few yards beyond a rail of hedge-stakes the road ended as suddenly as if it had been cut off with a knife. The fencing, that was continued on either hand, straggled to the north across the middle of the graveyard, and the marks of wheels in the red clay and the unsightly mounds in which they ended showed what had recently been done. Over the rails, hulks and shoulders of earth fouled the beach; and from the point to which, with a dreadful curiosity, I advanced I saw three square ends, ochrous with the clay, sticking out to the tide like “throughs” in a stone wall.
The keeper pointed to a three-inch fissure at my feet.
“That's th' next,” he said, gloomily; “th' first heavy rain—a touch o' frost—th' sea eats it down there, and a touch o' frost and rain.... Yonder's Kempery.” ... He pointed to the motionless brig.
“Let's get to the hall,” I said; and we did not speak further till we reached the mansion that had so gruesome a prospect to the north of it. It was of grey pebbles, set in a sort of mud-mortar, and was very ancient and handsome. The south lawn was overlooked by an octagonal bay-window, from the flat leads of which (so the keeper said) dead and gone lords of the manor and their chaplains had addressed the assembled tenantry; and this bay formed one end of a long western wing that I judged to be the chapel turned library. To the north lay the courtyard and outbuildings; and to the east, not twenty yards away, was the placid sea and the brig motionless over Kempery.
II.
Knowing what I now know, I think I might almost have guessed, from my first glance at him as the bandy-legged servant closed the rosewood door of the library behind me, what manner of man he was; nevertheless, this knowledge was not long delayed. The bed he seldom left was wheeled into the octagonal window-bay; he was propped up in wraps and blankets, with a book set against his sharp knees; and as he turned, his profile, for flat brow and beak, was for all the world like some grotesque bird carved on a pillar or spout. His large dull eyes, too, protruded remarkably; and the tying of the clout wherewith his head was bound as if for study resembled ears laid back.
“Ye are a day late, sir,” he said at once in a sick, querulous voice; and when I answered that I had been stayed on the road, “Ay,” he complained, “it was a dark night last night; enough.—And now that ye have seen the place in the daylight, ye'll be of the same mind as the rest of them, eh?”
For all his sickness, this nettled me a little, and I replied that if the opinion of others was that the coast in the immediate vicinity was not a pleasing sight, I was disposed to agree with them; “but,” I added, “for that matter, I have some acquaintance with the sciences, and am free from superstition.”
“Eh?” he said sharply. “And what may that amount to?”
Certainly he had in some measure the right to catechise me, albeit not to be both petulant and domineering, as he was; and as I answered his questions as to the extent of my reading, I noticed with what ease I could have taken up his shrivelled figure. By and by he changed abruptly to matters of business; and as in this I wish to imitate his own brevity, I will only say that to a factor's ordinary duties was to be added all the care of a considerable déménagement. He ceased; and I had bowed and was for leaving him when he beckoned me to come nearer. I stooped over the couch.
“Tell me,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “tell me, has it been your chance in the course of your reading to come across—this?”
His face was within a foot of mine, and I barely checked a sound that, for all the early morning, was one of fright. Few men but in an idle moment now and then have tried that trick of gazing into metals, and phials, and flames of candles; and of the stupor or lethargy a man can work in himself by these means I had read in Olaus Magnus, in Suavius, and elsewhere. Neither was I entirely ignorant of that disordered function of the mind whereby a man can people the world with images of his own raising; but he was an ugly devil at best, and the abominable expression into which for a moment his eyeballs were deliberately set—the Squint Upwards and Inwards—added a sensible horror to the already horrible.... As I turned away his gaze righted again; but I knew him now. “I see ye know it,” he said.
“I do, sir,” I answered curtly over my shoulder. “What good the Platonists had of it I could never see, and, by your leave, I will confine myself to my stewardship, which I take to be the godlier business.”
“He, he!” he chuckled weakly. “Free from superstition, too!—So we both know it; good, we will talk of it later.”
“You shall pardon me,” thought I; and left him.
Here, then, was Cardan out-Cardaned; and there rose in my mind an image, not of this terrestrial sea that overwhelms the pleasant habitations of men, but of a dreader ocean, that of the terror of the Spirit, which, when men with anguish and labour have raised creeds and customs and laws against the void the thought of which they could not else endure, licks and laps till darkness cover all again. In this more heinous destruction and treason against all mankind this man trafficked. But if I am to tell my tale—or, rather, to set down this inconclusive record—I must trust you to take my meaning without further words.
The conversation of the bandy-legged servant was, as I should have expected, of the commonplace of desolate neighbourhoods, and I omit it that I may come the sooner to the man under whose influence, within a week, I found myself. For it was easier to say that I would have no commerce with him other than that of my office than it was to perform it; and, being inveigled willy-nilly into it, I salved my conscience by persuading myself that my study was of him and not of his theories. Unless you had read somewhat of the books I have mentioned, you would have found the fabric of folly that composed even the ordinary of his conjectures hard to credit; and since I cannot omit it altogether, it was of such stuff as this: Whether spirits do not commonly assume the globular shape, as being the most perfect of shapes; whether, could we but see them, the air might not be (as Leo Suavius held) thick with them as with snowflakes; whether that be true of the witches of Lapland, ecstasi omnia prædicere; and, above all, of the substance of spirits and of the texture of those light essences that, being divided, come with such celerity together again. That he should need a doctor to come over from Kingston twice in the week was little wonder to me; and when, shortly, this doctor persuaded me that my companionship would be good for my employer's unsettled mind, I only stipulated that I should be spared that distortion of his face that had first shocked me.
The night whereon the invalid first broke his word in this respect was one evening in the middle of October, when I had been, maybe, a month at Skelf-Mary. For several days we had had thick, misty weather (I remember I had been that afternoon to the Decoy, and I leave it to you which was the more dismal, carr or coast), and the fog, penetrating the library, made haloes about the two tapers. The master's face was very white and peaked that evening, and the little nodule of his hooked nose where bone joined cartilage showed sharply. The chamber was full of vague mists and shadows; now and then a ship's horn hooted far out; we had ceased to talk; and while I had settled down to a bundle of lawyer's tangle, he had apparently dozed over the book that was propped against his knees.
I know not what it was that caused me to look up, but I did so as if I had been bidden; and from the way his glassy corneas were set they might have been so for hours. He would no more have felt it had a fly crossed his eyeballs than do cattle. He had managed again to put himself into his trance, and instinctively I glanced over my shoulder to the upper end of the library.
“This is beyond the bargain, sir!” I cried, bringing my hand down on the table. He did not hear. I passed a taper before his eyes, but he did not see. It lasted for some minutes; then the balls traversed the farther end of the library, and the lids flickered and fell. He was asleep. Again I thumped the table, and he woke sluggishly.
“I had your promise,” I said sternly.
“Eh, eh? What's that ye say? ... I have been asleep.”
“Man, do you call that sleep?”
“Eh? ... Ah, yes! ... It is my weakness, sir, and ye shall pardon it,” he replied; and I truly believe that for the moment the creature felt a sort of contrition. Suddenly there came over me a feeling nearer to compassion than to disgust; God knows I am backward to judge those He has seen fit to set in the world with me; and I turned to him earnestly.
“'Tis for your own good,” I said in a moved voice; “good Heaven! ... Tell me what you were looking at yonder.”
The weakness following that vile ecstasy seemed to have made him tractable. “'Tis not in the classics,” he muttered; “ye may walk through them without resistance ... how then should there be a mutilation? ... I cannot see.” ...
This I set down in pity to his lunacy, and he continued to mutter fragments. “A mischance to the mortal remains ... but the hinds in yonder vault were too terrified ... and then, what correspondence.... I tell ye, sir, ye know nothing ... why does it not reunite?” ...
And as he chattered thus, I wondered that I, who dreaded no spectre, should dread exceedingly the mind that could so conjure one up.
On the morrow I again sought Watt the keeper; I had now a purpose, and as he packed hampers in a flat-bottomed boat he again sought to ward off my questions.
“What did he mean by mutilation? You said nothing to me,” I demanded; and “Ye didn't ask me,” Watt replied; “come, Bess!”
“And what's this about a vault?”—“Ay, that'll be th' vault i' th' churchyard,” he answered; “ye'll find th' door there yet, all red wi' rust and green wi' verdigris.”
“Don't fool me,” I cried; and with that the keeper turned fairly on me.
“So ye willn't let it bide? Very well.—There's little gossip i' Skelf-Mary now, by reason o' there being few folk, but I'll be rid o' what I know. They say it'll be Eustace he sees, that was a priest; but ye needn't tak' that fro' me. When he had th' vault oppened he asked this and that and t'other, and if he says th' men was flayed, he's right.—They couldn't sort out which were which—ye understand—and th' breed's as ugly living as dead to my way o' thinking. He talked about nowt but 'knees' ... faugh! Whose knees he wanted ye know as much as me; but th' sexton lives ower at Windlesea. Mysel', I'm a decent wed man, and tak' no count o' ghosts and such, ye understand?” ...
And Watt's way of thinking being a good deal my own, I troubled him no further. But, busy as I was, I had found time within three days to see the sexton (who, professionally, had little reluctance), and had pieced roughly together this delusion of the afflicted Master's. I know not whether it was Eustace who walked the library. That to all intents and purposes his mind conjured up some figure I was as convinced as I was that I myself should never see it. It has been enough for me that, looking where he looked, I have seen but air, while he has seen, stumping across a floor of boards, a shape on thighs that were broken midway.
And with this I come to my own confounding.
III.
My own apartment was one that had been made in the vaulting of the chapel by the insertion of a ceiling; and this ceiling or floor, having no underdrawing, but consisting simply of planks laid athwart the baulks, was little hindrance to the passage of sound. I now did most of my work here, and it was now my turn to hear him babbling half the night beneath me. Many times I could have raged to hear him; but, my wages being good, my own folly, had I quitted his service, would scarce have been less than his, and I began to welcome as a diversion each journey to Kingston or Beverley, where I had to consult with agents and lawyers.
For a good part of the estate was like to be well disposed of, and I had negotiations in hand for the fishing and shooting of the Decoy. Also, with the estate charged with the cost of proper draining, there was no bad prospect of farming, water-carriage being excellent and cheap. Now and then, for form, I went to see the Master in his bed; but the doctor and the servant knew more of his condition than I, and it was only afterwards that I learned how suddenly and alarmingly he had altered for the worse.
The Christmas Eve of that year I remember better than I wish. There was frost enough in the air to set the fires burning brightly, and to give to the stars a wonderful keenness; and so exhilarating was the night that I had taken a walk, returning by way of the forsaken village. But, home again, I noticed as I crossed the courtyard that an unusual number of lights were burning, and with a vague apprehension I made haste to enter.
The Master lay rigid on the bed, and the servant bathed his temples from a kitchen-vessel of vinegar; but it was less of vinegar than of a surgeon that he stood in need. It was useless to address him, seeing how his eyes again were; but when, coherently, though in a very weak voice, he spoke to me, it flashed upon me what had happened. He had, as I take it, strained the muscles of them, and was now cramped so; and even as I stood in awe of the stroke, gazing on the harpy-face, he made as if to point with his finger, and fell back in a fit with a horrid noise of gargling in his throat.
The doctor was due on the morrow, and I arranged with the servant watch and watch for the night. He took the first, and I retired to bed without undressing, and fell into a broken sleep.
I think the noise as of blows with a hammer must have mingled with some dream I had, for although I was conscious of it I did not readily awake. Then I heard a cry. It was midnight by my watch, and I sprang from my bed and hurried to the library. As I set my hand to the rosewood door it was flung open, and the servant, blubbering like a child, all but embraced me. I pushed past him, and stopped.
Six feet within, in a huddle of blankets on the floor, lay the form of the Master of Skelf; I had to glance at the empty bed to realise it. One taper was overturned by his side, but the other showed the heavy poker that had been the cause of the knocking. The servant moaned that he had not dozed—had not dozed; but I know not how else the Master could have found opportunity, as he had found strength in his extremity (acting on who knows what revelation of his mad brain) to rise from his bed, reach the other end of the library, and to prise up a plank from the floor. Into the opening he had made his arm was plunged to the shoulder. I saw at once that he was dead; then I took the taper and peered down into the hole.
I withdrew his arm and composed his body; then deliberately I set to work to pull up the adjoining plank. It came half way up with a harsh noise, and the rusty nails bent and held it so; and all at once the poker fell from my hand, a violent shiver passed through me, and I found myself gazing stupidly at the older floor that lay a couple of feet beneath.