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 “In bed as he was left,” said Jason. “I went in this morning, while
you were asleep, and found him—ah, he looks horrible,” he cried,
and broke off with a shudder.
I did not shrink; I felt braced up to any ordeal.
They were all in the room when we entered it. My father, Dr.
Crackenthorpe, Zyp—even old Peggy, who was busying herself, with
the vulture relish of her kind, over the little artificial decencies of
dress and posture that seem such an outrage on the solemn
unresistance of the dead.
Directly we came in Zyp ran to Jason and clung to him sobbing. I
noticed it with a sort of dull resignation, and that was all; for Peggy,
who had drawn a sheet over the lifeless face, pulled it down that I
might look.
Then, for all my stoicism, I gave a cry.
I had left my brother the night before tired, needing rest, but, save
for the extra pallor of his complexion that never boasted a great deal
of color, much like his usual self. Now the dead face lying back on
the pillows was awful to look upon. Spots and bars of livid purple
disfigured its waxen whiteness—on the cheeks, the ears, the throat,
where a deep patch was. It was greatly swollen, too, and the mouth
so rigidly open that it had defied all effort to bind it close. A couple of
pennies, like a hideous pair of glasses, lay, one over each eye,
where they could only be kept in position by means of a filament
drawn tightly round the head. The hands, stiffly crossed, with the
fingers crooked like talons, lay over the breast, fastened into position
with a ligature.
I turned away, feeling sick and faint. I think I reeled, for presently I
found that Dr. Crackenthorpe was supporting me against his arm.
“Oh, why is he like that?” I whispered.
“’Tis a common afterclap in deaths by drowning,” said he,
speaking in a loud, insistent voice, as if not for the first time. “A
stoppage—a relapse. During the weak small hours, when the
patient’s strength is at its lowest, the overwrought lungs refuse to
work—collapse, and he dies of suffocation.”
He looked at my father as he spoke, but elicited no response. It
was palpable that the heavy potations of the night had so deadened
the latter’s faculties as to make him incapable for the moment of
realizing the full enormity of the sight before him.
“Mark me,” said the doctor; “it’s a plain case, I say, nothing out of
the way; no complications. The wretched boy to all intents and
purposes has been drowned.”
“Who drowned him?” said my father. He spoke thickly, stupidly; but
I started, with a dreadful feeling that the locked jaws must relax and
denounce me before them all.
Seeing his hopeless state, the doctor took my father’s arm and led
him from the room. Zyp still clung to my brother.
“Cover it up,” whispered Jason. “He isn’t a pretty sight!”
“He wasn’t a pretty boy,” muttered Peggy, reluctantly hiding the
dreadful face; “To a old woman’s view it speaks of more than his
deserts. Nobody’ll come to look at me, I expect.”
“You heard what the doctor said?” asked Jason, looking across at
me.
“Yes.”
“Drowned—you understand? Drowned, Renny?”
“Drowned,” I repeated, mechanically.
“Come, Zyp,” he said; “this isn’t the place for you any longer.”
They passed out of the room, she still clinging to him, so that her
face was hidden.
I did not measure his words at that time. I had no thought for nice
discriminations of tone; what did I care for anything any longer?
Presently I heard old Peg muttering again. She thought the room
was emptied of us and she softly removed the face cloth once more.
“Ay, there ye lies, Modred—safe never to spy on poor old
Rottengoose again! Ye were a bad lot, ye were; but Peg’s been
more’n enough for you, she has, my lad.”
Suddenly she saw me out of the tail of her eye, and turned upon
me, livid with fury.
“What are ye listening to, Renalt? A black curse on spies, Renalt, I
say!”
Then her manner changed and she came fawning at me
fulsomely.
“What a good lad to stay wi’ his brother! But Peg’ll do the tending,
Renalt. She be a crass old body and apt to reviling in her speech,
but she don’t mean it, bless you; it’s the tic doldrums in her head.”
I repelled the horrible old creature and fled from the room. What
she meant I neither knew nor cared, for we had always looked upon
her as a feckless body, with a big worm in her brain.
All the long morning I wandered about the house, scarcely
knowing what I did or whither I went. Once I found myself in the
room of silence, not remembering when I had come there or for what
reason. The fact, merely, was impressed upon me by a gradual
change in the nature of my sensations. Something seemed to be
asking a question of me which I was striving and striving to answer. It
didn’t distress me at first, for a nearer misery overwhelmed
everything, but by and by its insistence pierced a passage through
all dull obstacles, and the something took up its abode in me and
reigned and grew. I felt myself yielding, yielding; and strove now to
beat off the inevitable horror of the answer that was rising in me. I
did not know what it was, or the question to which it was a response
—only I saw that if I yielded to it and spoke it, I should die then and
there of the black terror of its revelation.
I sprung to my feet with a cry, and saw, or thought I saw, Modred
standing by the water wheel and beckoning to me. If I had strength
to escape, it was enough for that and no more, for everything
seemed to go from me till I found myself sitting at the foot of the
stairs, with Jason looking oddly down upon me.
“I needn’t get up,” I said. “Modred isn’t dead, after all.”
I think I heard him shout out. Anyhow, I felt myself lifted up and
carried somewhere and put down. If they had thought to restrain me,
however, they should have managed things better; for I was up in a
moment and out at the window. I had often thought one wanted only
the will to forget gravity and float through the air, and here I was
doing it. What a glorious sensation it was! I laughed to think how
long I had remained like a reptile, bound to the plodding miserable
earth, when all the time I had power to escape from myself and float
on and on far away from all those heart-breaking troubles. If I only
went very swiftly at first I should soon be too distant for them to track
me, and then I should be free. I felt a little anxious, for there was a
faint noise behind me. I strove to put on pace; if my limbs had
responded to my efforts no bird could have outstripped me. But I saw
with agony that the harder I fought the less way I made. I struggled
and sobbed and clutched myself blindly onward, and all the time the
noise behind grew deeper. If I pushed myself off with a foot to the
ground I only floated a very little way now. Then I saw a railing and
pulled myself along with it toilsomely, but some great pressure was
in front of me and my feet slipped into holes at every step. Panting,
straining, slipping, as if on blood—why! It was blood! I had to yield at
last.
My passion of hope was done with. I lay in a white set horror, not
daring to move or look. How deadly quiet the room was, but not for
long, for a little stealthy rustle of the sheet beside me prickled
through my whole being with its ghastly stirring. Then I knew it had
secretly risen on its elbow and was leaning over and looking down
upon me. If I could only perspire, I thought, my bonds would loosen
and I could escape from it. But it was cunning and knew that, too,
and it sealed all the surface of my skin with its acrid exhalations.
Suddenly it clutched me in its crooked arms and bore me down,
down to the room of silence. There was a sickening odor there and
the covering of the wheel was open. Then, with a shudder, as of
death, I thought I found the answer; for now it was plain that the
great wheel was driven by blood, not water. As I looked aghast,
straining over, it gave me a stealthy push and, with a shriek, I
splashed among the paddles and was whirled down. For ages I was
spun and beaten round and round, mashed, mangled, gasping for
breath and choked with the horrible crimson broth that fed the insane
and furious grinding of the wheel. At the end, glutted with torture, it
flung me forth into a parching desert of sand, and, spinning from me,
became far away a revolving disk of red that made the low-down sun
of that waste corner of the world.
I was alone, now—always alone. No footsteps had ever trod that
trackless level, nor would, I knew, till time was ended. I had no hope;
no green memory for oasis; no power of speech even. Then I knew I
was dead; had been dead so long that my body had crackled and
fallen to decay, leaving my soul only, like the stone of a fruit, quick
with wretched impulse to shoot upward but dreadfully imprisoned
from doing so.
 Sometimes in the world the massive columns of the cathedral had
suggested to me a like sensation; a moral impress of weight and
stoniness that had driven me to bow my head and creep, sweating
away from their inexorable stolidity. Now I was built into such a body
—more, was an integral part of it. Yet could my pinioned nerves
never assimilate its passionless obduracy, but jerked and struggled
in agony to be free. Oh, how divine is the instinct that paints heaven
all light and airiness, and innocent forevermore of the sense of
weight!
Suddenly I heard Zyp’s voice, singing outside in the world, and in
a moment tears, most blessed, blessed tears, sprung from my eyes
and I was free. The stone cracked and fell asunder, and I leaped out
madly shrieking at my release.
She was sitting under a tree in a beautiful meadow and her young
voice rose sweetly as she prinked her hat with daisies and yellow
king-cups. She called me to her and gave me tender names and
smoothed away the pain from my forehead with kisses and the
cunning of her elfish brown hand.
“Come, drink,” she said, “and you will be better.”
I woke to life and looked up. She was standing by my bed, holding
a cup toward my lips, and at the foot Jason leaned, looking on.
“Have I been ill?” I said, in a voice so odd to me that I almost
laughed.
“Yes, yes—a little; but you have come out of the black pit now into
the forest.”
 CHAPTER X.
JASON SPEAKS.

For some three weeks I had lain racked and shriveled in a

nervous, delirious fever. It left me at last, the ghost of my old self, to
face once more the problems of a ruined life. For many days these
gave me no concern, or only in a fitful, indifferent manner. I was
content to sip the dew of convalescence, to slumber and to cherish
my exhaustion, and the others disturbed me but little. My recovery
once assured, they left me generally to myself, scarce visiting me
more often than was necessary for the administering of food or
medicine. Sometimes one or other of them would come and sit by
my bedside awhile and exchange with me a few desultory remarks;
but this was seldom, and grew, with my strength more so, for the
earth was brilliant with summer outside and naturally fuller of
attractions than a sick-room.
Their neglect troubled me little at first; but by and by, when the first
idle ecstasy of convalescence was beginning to deepen into a sense
of responsibilities that I should soon have to gather up and adjust, it
woke day by day an increasing uneasiness in my soul. As yet, it is
true, the immediate past I could only call up before my mental vision
as a blurred picture of certain events the significance of which was
suggestive only. Gradually, however, detail by detail, the whole
composition of it concentrated, on the blank sheet of my mind, and
stood straight before me terribly uncompromising in its sternness of
outline. Had I any reason to suppose, in short, that my share in
Modred’s death was known to or guessed at by my father, Jason or
Zyp? On that pivot turned the whole prospect of my future; for as to
myself, were the secret to remain mine alone, I yet felt that I could
make out life with a tolerable degree of resignation in the certain
knowledge that Modred had forgiven me before he died, for a
momentary mad impulse, the provocation to which had been so
bitter—the reaction from which had been so immediate and so
equally impulsive.
 Of my father, I may say at once, I had little fear. His manner
toward me when, as he did occasionally, he came and sat by me for
a half-hour or so, was marked by a gentleness and affection I had
never known him to exhibit before. Pathetic as it was, I could
sometimes almost have wished it replaced by a sterner mood, a
more dubious attitude; for my remorse at having so bereaved him
became a barbed sting in presence of his new condescension to me
that dated from the afternoon of my appeal to him, and was
intensified by our common loss.
Of Zyp I hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than
tremulously hover round the thought that Modred’s death had
absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. Still the thought
was there and perhaps I only played with self-deception when I
affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. I
could not live with and not long for her with all the passion I was
capable of.
Therefore it was that I dreaded any possible disclosure of a
suspicion on her part—dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce
that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a
counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a
thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one
who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of
evil.
But it was Jason I feared most. Something—I can hardly give it a
name—had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be
the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. In the
unfolding of this new faculty I was startled and distressed to observe
deformities in my brother where I had before seen nothing but manly
beauty and a breezy recklessness that I delighted in. Beautiful
bodily, I and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to
often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to
my new sense. This I can but describe, with despair of the
melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. The pupils were as full and
purple as berries of the deadly nightshade.
It was not, however, his eyes only that baffled me. I saw that he
coveted any novelty of sensation greedily, and that sooner than
forego enjoyment of it he would ruthlessly stamp down whatever
obstacle to its attainment crossed his path.
Now I knew in my heart that his hitherto indifference to Zyp was an
affectation born only of wounded vanity, and that such as he could
never voluntarily yield so piquant a prize to homelier rivals. I recalled,
with a brooding apprehension, certain words of his on that fatal
morning, that seemed intended to convey, at least, a dark suspicion
as to the manner of Modred’s death. Probably they were bolts shot
at random with a sinister object—for I could conceive no shadow of
direct evidence against me. In that connection they might mean
much or little; in one other I had small doubt that they meant a good
deal—this in fact, that, if I got in his way with Zyp, down I should go.
Daily probing and analyzing such darkly dismal problems as these,
I slowly crawled through convalescence to recovery.
It was a sweltering morning in early July that I first crept out of
doors, with Zyp for my companion. It was happiness to me to have
her by my side, though as yet my weak and watery veins could
prickle to no ghost of passion. I had thought that life could hold
nothing for me ever again but present pain and agonized
retrospects. It was not so. The very smell of the freshly watered
roads woke a shadowy delight in me as we stepped over the
threshold. The buoyant thunder of the river, as it leaped under the
old street bridge seemed to gush over my heart with a cleansing
joyousness that left it white and innocent again.
We crossed the road and wandered by a zig-zag path to the
ancient close, where soft stretches and paddocks of green lawn,
“immemorial elms” and scattered buildings antique and embowered
wrought such an harmonious picture as filled my tired soul with
peace.
Here we sat down on an empty bench. I had much to question Zyp
about—much to reflect on and put into words—but my neglected
speech moved as yet on rusty hinges.
“Zyp,” I said presently, in a low voice; “tell me—where is he
buried?”
“In the churchyard—St. John’s, under the hill, Renny.”
Not once until now had I touched upon this subject or mentioned
Modred’s name to any one of them, and a great longing was upon
me to get it over and done with.
“Who went?”
“Dad and Jason and Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Zyp, nobody has asked me anything about it. Don’t you all want to
know how—how it happened?”
“He was caught in the weeds—you said so yourself, Renny.”
Vainly I strove to get under her words; intuition was, for the time
being, a sluggish quantity in me.
“Yes; but——” I began, when she took me up softly.
“Dad said it was all clear and that we were never to bother you
about it at all.”
A sigh of gratitude to heaven escaped me.
“And I for one,” said Zyp, “don’t intend to.”
Something in her words jarred unaccountably on my sick nerves.
“At first,” she said, just glancing at me, “dad thought there ought to
be an inquest, but Dr. Crackenthorpe was so set against it that he
gave in.”
“Dr. Crackenthorpe? Why was——”
“He said that juries took such an idiotic view of a father’s
responsibilities; that dad might be censured for letting the boy run
wild; that in any case the family’s habits of life would be raked over
and cause a scandal that might make things very uncomfortable; that
it was a perfectly plain case of drowning, and that he was quite
willing to give a certificate that death was due to a rupture of some
blood vessel in the brain following exhaustion from exposure—or
something of that sort.”
“And he did?”
“Yes, at last, after a deal of talk, and he was buried quietly and
there was an end of it.”
Not quite an end, Zyp—not quite an end!
She was very gentle and patient with me all the morning, and my
poor soul brimmed over with gratitude. My pulses began even to
flicker a little with hope that things might be as they were before the
catastrophe. After all she was a very independent changeling and, if
there existed in her heart any bias in my favor, Jason might find
himself quite baffled in his efforts to control her inclinations.
Presently I turned to the same overclouding subject.
 “What happened the day I was taken bad, Zyp?”
“Jason found you on the stairs, talking rubbish. They carried you to
bed and you hardly left off talking rubbish for weeks. Don’t you
remember anything of it?”
“Nothing, after—after I saw him lying there so dreadful.”
“Ah, it was ugly, wasn’t it? Well, you must have wandered off
somewhere—anywhere; and the rest of us to the parlor. There dad
and the doctor fell to words. They had spent all the night over that
stupid drink, sleeping and quarreling by fits and couldn’t remember
much about it. They had not heard any noise upstairs, either of them;
but suddenly the doctor pointed to something hanging out of dad’s
pocket. ‘Why, you must have gone to the boy’s room some time,’ he
said. ‘Look there!’ Dad took it out and it was Modred’s braces, all
twisted up and stuffed into his pocket.”
“Modred’s braces?”
“Yes; they all knew them, for they were blue, you know—the color
he liked. Dad afterward thought he must have put them there to be
out of the way while he was carrying Modred upstairs, but at the time
he was furious. ‘D’ye dare to imply I had a hand in my son’s death?’
he shrieked. ‘I imply nothing; I mean no offense; they are plain for
every one to see,’ said the doctor, going back a little. I thought he
was frightened and that dad would jump at his throat like a weasel,
and I clapped my hands, waiting for the battle. But it never came, for
dad turned pale and called for brandy, and there was an end of it.”
This story of the doctor’s horrible suggestion wrought only one
comfort in me—it warmed my heart with a great heat of loyalty to one
who, I knew, for all his faults, could never be guilty of so inhuman a
wickedness.
“I should like to kill that doctor,” I said, fiercely and proudly.
“So should I,” said Zyp. “I believe he would bleed soot like a
chimney.”
Zyp was my companion during the greater part of that day and the
next. Her manner toward me was uniformly gentle and attentive.
Sometimes during meals I would become conscious of Jason’s eyes
fixed upon one or other of us in a curious stare that was watchful and
introspective at once, as if he were summing up the voiceless
arguments of counsels invisible, while never losing sight of the fact
that we he sat in judgment on were already convicted in his mind.
This, for the time being, did not much disturb me. I was lulled to a
sense of false security by the gracious championship I thought I now
could rely upon.
It was the evening of the second day and we three were in the
living-room together; Jason reading at the window. Zyp had been so
kind to me that my heart was very full indeed, and now she sat by
me, one hand slipped into mine, the other supporting her little
pointed chin, while her sweet, flower-stained eyes communed with
other, it seemed, than affairs of earth. A strange wistful tenderness
had marked her late treatment of me; a pathetic solicitude that was
inexpressibly touching to one so forlorn. Suddenly she rose and I
heard Jason’s book rustle in his hand.
“Now, little boy,” she said, “’tis time you were in bed.”
Then she leaned toward me and whispered:
“Is he so unhappy? What has he done for Zyp’s sake?”
In a moment she bent and kissed me, with a soft kiss, on the
forehead, and shooting a Parthian glance of defiance at Jason, who
never spoke or moved, ran from the room.
All my soul thrilled with a delicious joy. Zyp, who had refused to
kiss him, had kissed me. The ecstasy of her lips’ touch blotted out all
significance her words might carry.
Half-stunned with triumphant happiness, I climbed the stairs and,
getting into bed, fell into a luminous dream of thought in which for the
moment was no place for apprehension.
I did not even hear Jason enter or shut the door, and it was only
when he shook me roughly by the shoulder that I became conscious
of his presence in the room.
He was standing over me, and the windows of his soul were down,
and through them wickedness grinned like a skull.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said in a terrible low voice. “D’you
want to drive me to telling that I know it was you who killed Modred?”
 CHAPTER XI.
CONVICT, BUT NOT SENTENCED.

So the blow had fallen!

Yet a single despairing effort I made to beat off or at least
postpone the inevitable.
I sat up in bed and answered my brother back with, I could feel,
ashen and quivering lips.
“What do you mean?” I said. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“I dare anything,” he said, “where I have a particular object in
view.” He never took his eyes off me, and the cold devil in them froze
my blood that had only now run so hotly.
“For yourself,” he went on, “I don’t care much whether you hang or
live. You can come to terms with your own conscience I dare say,
and a fat brother more or less may be a pure question of fit survival.
That’s as it may be—but the girl here is another matter.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I could only say, dully.
Still keeping his eyes on me he sought for and drew from his
jacket pocket a twist of dry and shrunken water weed. A horrible
shudder seized me as I looked upon it.
“You didn’t think to see that again?” he said. “Do you recognize it?
Of course you do. It was the rope you twisted round his foot, and that
I found round his foot still, after dad had carried him upstairs,
bundled round with those sacks, and I was left alone in the room with
him a minute.”
My heart died within me. I dropped my sick, strained eyes and
could only listen in agonized silence. And he went on quite pitilessly.
“You shouldn’t have left such evidence, you know—least of all for
me to see. I had not forgotten the murder in your eyes when I spoke
to you that morning and the evening before.”
He struck the weed lightly with his right hand.
“This stuff,” he said, “I know it, of course—grows up straight
enough of itself. It wanted something human—or inhuman—to twist it
round a leg in that fashion.”
 I broke out with a choking cry.
“I did it,” I said; “but it wasn’t murder—oh, Jason, it wasn’t murder,
as you mean it.”
He gave a little cold laugh.
“No doubt we have different standards of morality,” he said. “We
won’t split hairs. Say it was murder as a judge and jury would view
it.”
“It wasn’t! Will you believe me if I tell you the truth?”
“That depends upon the form it takes.”
“I’ll tell you. It is the truth—before God, it is the truth! I won’t favor
myself. I had been mad with him, I own, but had nearly got over it. I
was out all day on the hills and thought I should like a bathe on my
way home. I went through the ‘run’ and saw he was there. At first I
thought I would leave him to himself, but just as I was going he saw
me and a grin came over his face and—Jason, you know that if I had
gone away then, he would have thought me afraid to meet him.”
“You can leave me, Renalt, out of the question, if you please.”
“I meant no harm—indeed I didn’t—but when I got there he
taunted and mocked at me. I didn’t know what I was doing; and
when he jumped for the water I followed him and twisted that round.
Then in a single moment I saw what I had done—and was mad to
unfasten it. It would not come away at first, and when at last I got
him free and to the shore he was insensible. If you could only know
what I suffered then, you would pity me, Jason—you would; you
could not help it.”
I stole a despairing look at his face and there was no atom of
softness in it.
“He came to on the way home and I was wild with joy, and at night,
Jason, when you were in bed and asleep, I crept into his room and
begged for his forgiveness and he forgave me.”
“Without any condition? That wasn’t like Modred. What did he ask
for in return?”
I was silent.
“Come,” he persisted, “what did he want? You may as well tell me
all. You don’t fancy that I believe he forgave you without getting
something substantial in exchange?”
“I was to give up all claim to Zyp,” I said in a low, suffering voice.
 Jason laughed aloud.
“Oh, Modred,” he cried, “you were a pretty bantling, upon my word!
Who would have thought the dear fatty had such cunning in him?”
His callous merriment struck me with a dumb horror as of
sacrilege. But he subdued it directly and returned to me and my
misery in the same repressed tone as before.
“Well,” he said, “I have heard it all, I suppose. It makes little
difference. You know, of course, you are morally responsible for his
death, just the same as if you had stuck a knife into his heart.”
I could only hide my face in the bedclothes, writhed all through
with agony. There was a little spell of silence; then my brother
bespoke my attention with a gentle push.
“Renny, do you want all this known to the others?”
I raised my head in a sudden gust of passion.
“Do what you like!” I cried. “I know you now, and you can’t make it
much worse!”
“Oh, yes,” he said, coolly; “I can make it a good deal worse.
Nobody but I knows at present, don’t you see?”
I looked at him with a sudden gleam of hope.
“Don’t you intend to tell, Jason?”
He laughed again, lightly.
“That depends. I must borrow my cue from Modred and make
conditions.”
I had no need to ask what they were. In whatever direction I
looked now, I saw nothing but a blank and deadly waste.
“I want the girl—you understand? I need not go into particulars.
She interests me and that’s enough.”
“Yes,” I said, quietly.
“There must be no more of that sentimental foolery between you
and her. I bore it as long as you were ill; but, now you’re strong
again, it must stop. If it doesn’t, you know what’ll happen.”
With that he turned abruptly on his heel and began to undress. I
listened for the deep breathing that announced him to be asleep with
a strained fever of impatience. I felt that I could not think cleanly or
collectedly with that monstrous consciousness of his awake in the
room.
 Perhaps, in all my wretchedness, the full discovery of his
baseness of soul was as bitter a wound as any I had received. I had
so looked up to him as a superior being, so sunned myself in the
pride of relationship to him; so lovingly submitted to his boyish
patronage and condescension. The grief of my discovery was very
real and terrible and would in itself, I think, have gone far to blight my
existence had no fearfuller blast descended to wither it.
Well, it was all one now. Whatever immunity from disaster I was to
enjoy henceforth must be on sufferance only.
Had I been older and sinfuller I might have grasped in my despair
at the coward’s resource of self-destruction; as it was, I thought of
flight. By and by, perhaps, when vigor should return to me, and with
it resolution, I should be able to face firmly the problem of my future
and take my own destinies in hand.
Little sleep came to me that night, and that only of a haunted kind.
I felt haggard and old as I struggled into my clothes the next
morning, and all unfit to cope with the gigantic possibilities of the
day. Jason had gone early to the fatal pool for a bathe.
At breakfast, in the beginning, Zyp’s manner to me was prettily
sympathetic and a little shy. It was the first of my great misery that I
must repel her on the threshold of our better understanding, and see
her fall away from me for lack of the least expression of that
passionate devotion and gratitude that filled my heart to bursting. I
could see at once that she was startled—hurt, perhaps, and that she
shrunk from me immediately. Jason talked airily to my father all
through the meal, but I knew his senses to be as keenly on the alert
as if he had sat in silence, with his eyes fixed upon my face.
I choked over my bread and bacon; I could not swallow more than
a mouthful of the coffee in my cup, and Zyp sat back in her chair,
never addressing me after that first rebuff, but pondering on me
angrily with her eyes full of a sort of wonder.
She stopped me peremptorily as, breakfast over, I was hastening
out with all the speed I could muster, and asked me if I didn’t want
her company that morning.
“No,” I answered; “I am well enough to get about by myself now.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then you must do without me altogether for
the future.”
 She turned on her heel and I could only look after her in dumb
agony. Then I crept down into the yard and confided my grief to the
old cart wheels.
Presently, raising my head, I saw her standing before me, her
hands under her apron, her face grave with an expression, half of
concern, half of defiance.
“Now, if you please,” she said, “I want to know the meaning of
this?”
“Of what?” I asked, with wretched evasiveness.
“You know—your manner toward me this morning.”
“I have done nothing,” I muttered.
“You have insulted me, sir. Is it because I kissed you last night?”
“Oh, Zyp!” I cried aloud in great pain. “You know it isn’t—you know
it isn’t!”
I couldn’t help this one cry. It was forced from me.
“Then what’s the reason?”
“I can’t give it—I have none. I want to be alone, that’s all.”
She stood looking at me a moment in silence, and the line of her
mouth hardened.
“Very well,” she said, at last. “Then, understand, I’ve done with
you. I thought at first it was a mistake or that you were ill again. I’ve
been kind to you; you can’t say I haven’t given you a chance. And I
pitied you because you were alone and unhappy. Jason, I will tell
you, hinted an evil thing of you to me, but even if it was true, which I
didn’t believe, I forgave you, thinking, perhaps, it was done for my
sake. Well, if it was, I tell you now it was useless, for you will be
nothing to me ever again.”
And, with these cruel words, she left me. The proud child of the
woods could brook no insult to her condescension, and from my
comrade she had become my enemy.
I suppose I should have been relieved that the inevitable rupture
had occurred so swiftly and effectually. Judge you, you poor outcasts
who, sanctifying a love in your tumultuous breasts, have had to step
aside and yield to another the fruit you so coveted.
Once pledged to antagonism, Zyp, it will be no matter for wonder,
adopted anything but half-measures. Had it only been her vanity that
was hurt she would have made me pay dearly for the blow. As it
was, her ingenuity in devising plans for my torture and discomfiture
verged upon the very bounds of reason.
At first she contented herself with mere verbal pleasantries and
disdainful snubbings. As, however, the days went on and my old
strength and health obstinately returned to me, despite the irony of
the shattered soul within, her animosity grew to be an active agent
so persistent in its methods that I verily thought my brain would give
way under the load.
I cannot, indeed, recall a tithe of the Pucklike devices she resorted
to for my moral undoing, and which, after all, I might have endured to
the end had it not been for one threading torment that accompanied
all her whimsies like a strain of diabolical music. This was an
ostentatious show of affection for Jason, which, I truly believe, from
being more or less put on in exaggerated style for my edification,
became at length such a habit with her as may be considered, in
certain dispositions, one form of love.
The two now were seldom apart. Once, conscious of my presence,
she kissed Jason on the lips, because he had brought her a little
flowering root of some plant she desired. I saw his face fire up darkly
and he looked across at me with a triumph that made me almost
hate him.
And the worst of it was that I knew that my punishment was not
more than commensurate with the offense; that my sin had been
grievous and its retribution not out of proportion. How could full
atonement and Zyp have been mine together?
Still, capable of acknowledging the fitness of things in my sadder
hours of loneliness, my nature, once restored to strength, could not
but strive occasionally to throw off the incubus that it felt it could not
bear much longer without breaking down for good and all. I had done
wrong on the spur of a single wicked impulse, but I was no fiend to
have earned such bitter reprisal. By slow degrees rebellion woke in
my heart against the persistent cruelty of my two torturers. Had I fled
at this juncture, the wild scene that took place might have been
averted, and the exile, which became mine nevertheless, have
borne, perhaps, less evil fruit than in the result it did.
 CHAPTER XII.
THE DENUNCIATION.

One November morning—my suffering had endured all these

months—my father and Dr. Crackenthorpe stood before the sitting-
room fire, talking, while I sat with a book at the table, vainly trying to
concentrate my attention on the printed lines.
Since my recovery I had seen the doctor frequently, but he had
taken little apparent notice of me. Now, I had racked my puzzled
mind many a time for recollection of the conversation I had been
witness of on the night preceding my seizure, but still the details of it
had eluded me, though its gist remained in a certain impression of
uneasiness that troubled me when I thought of it. Suddenly, on this
morning, a few words of the doctor’s brought the whole matter vividly
before me again.
“By the bye, Trender,” he said, drawlingly, and sat down and
began to poke the fire—“by the bye, have you ever found that thing
you accused me of losing for you on a certain night—you know
when?”
“No,” said my father, curtly.
“Was it of any value, now?”
“Maybe—maybe not,” said my father.
“That don’t seem much of answer. Perhaps, now, it came from the
same place those others did.”
“That’s nothing to you, Dr. Crackenthorpe.”
“Well, you say it’s lost, anyhow. Supposing I found it, would you
agree to my keeping it? Treasure-trove, you know”—and he looked
up with a grin, balancing the poker perpendicularly in his hand.
“Treasure-trove, my friend,” he repeated, with emphasis, and gave
the other a keen look.
Something in the tone of his speech woke light in my brain, and I
remembered at a flash. I stole an anxious glance at my father. His
face was pale and set with anger, but there was an expression in his
eyes that looked like fear.
 “You don’t mean to tell me you have found it?” he said in a forced
voice.
“Oh, by no means,” answered the doctor. “We haven’t all your
good luck. Only you are so full of the unexpected in producing
valuables from secret places, like a conjurer, that I thought perhaps
you wouldn’t mind my keeping this particular one if I should chance
to pick it up.”
“Keep it, certainly, if you can find it,” said my father, I could have
thought almost with a faint groan.
“Thanks for the permission, my friend; I’ll make a point of keeping
my eyes open.”
When did he not? They were pretty observant now on Zyp and
Jason, who, as he spoke, walked into the room.
“Hullo!” said my brother. “Good-morning to you, doctor, and a
sixpence to toss for your next threppenny fee.”
“Hold your tongue,” cried my father, angrily.
“I would give a guinea to get half for attending on your inquest,”
said the doctor, sourly. “Keep your wit for your wench, my good lad,
and see then that she don’t go begging.”
“I could give you better,” muttered Jason, cowed by my father’s
presence, “but it shall keep and mature.” Then he turned
boisterously on me.
“Why don’t you go out, Renny, instead of moping at home all day?”
His manner was aggressive, his tone calculated to exasperate.
Moved by discretion I rose from my chair and made for the door;
but he barred my way.
“Can’t you answer me?” he said, with an ugly scowl.
“No—I don’t want to. Let me pass.”
My father had turned his back upon us and was staring gloomily
down at the fire.
I heard Zyp give a little scornful laugh and she breathed the word
“coward” at me.
I stopped as if I had struck against a wall. All my blood surged
back on my heart and seemed to leave my veins filled with a tingling
ichor in its place.
“Perhaps I have been,” I said, in a low voice, “but here’s an end of
it.”
 Jason tittered.
“We’re mighty stiltish this morning,” he said, with a sneer. “What a
pity it’s November, so that we can’t have a plunge for the sake of
coolness—except that they say the pool’s haunted now.”
I looked at him with blazing eyes, then made another effort to get
past him, but he repelled me violently.
“You don’t know your place,” he said, and gave an insolent laugh.
“Stand back till I choose to let you go.”
I heard the doctor snigger and Zyp gave a second little cluck. My
father was still absorbed—lost in his own dark reflections.
The loaded reel of endurance was spinning to its end.
“You might have given all your morning to one of your Susans
yonder,” said my brother, mockingly. “Now she’s gone, I expect, with
her apron to her eyes. She’ll enjoy her pease pudding none the less,
I dare say, and perhaps look out for a more accommodating clown. It
won’t be the first time you’ve had to take second place.”
I struck him full between the eyes and he went down like a polled
ox. All the pent-up agony of months was in my blow. As I stepped
back in the recoil, madly straining even then to beat under the more
furious devil that yelled in me for release, I was conscious of a
hurried breath at my ear—a swift whisper: “Kill him! Stamp on his
mouth! Don’t let him get up again!” and knew that it was Zyp who
spoke.
I put her back fiercely. Jason had sprung to his feet—half-blinded,
half-stunned. His face was inhuman with passion and was working
like a madman’s. But before he could gather himself for a rush, my
father had him in his powerful arms. It all happened in a moment.
“What’s all this?” roared my father. “Knock under, you whelp, or I’ll
strangle you in your collar!”
“Let me go!” cried my brother. “Look at him—look what he did!”
He was choking and struggling to that degree that he could hardly
articulate. I think foam was on his lips, and in his eyes the ravenous
thirst for blood.
“He struck me!” he panted—“do you hear? Let me go—let me kill
him as he killed Modred!”
There was a moment’s silence. Dr. Crackenthorpe, who had sat
passively back in his chair during the fray, with his lips set in an acrid