As it was now approaching dinnertime, further matters were left over until such time as the mulatto should be caught.
This, Doctor Syn vehemently urged, was of grave import to the Marsh folk, for so long as that maniac starved upon the Marsh, with a good weapon in his hand, they were open to the same fate as that which had befallen the inoffensive Pepper.
The captain rose first, left the courthouse, and set off for the Ship Inn without a word to the squire, the latter, accompanied by the attorneys and medical men, repairing to the dining-hall below. Doctor Syn, however, went from group to group, impressing the necessity for posses of men to scour the Marsh for the missing seaman.
This gave Rash an opportunity of approaching Jerk, who, being due to dine at the vicarage, was awaiting the parson’s pleasure.
“Well! And what do you think of courthouse inquiries, Mr. Jerk?” he said affably. “Impressive, ain’t they?”
“Not to me,” replied Jerry. “I don’t think nothing at all of ’em. After all the messing of them lawyers, I shouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick, should you?”
“What do you mean—the wrong end?”
“What I say: the wrong end ain’t the right ’un, I believes.”
“Then you don’t think the mulatto committed the murder?”
“From what that there sea captain said, I should say you ain’t got no right to put thoughts into my head any more than words into my mouth.”
“Come, Jerk,” said the schoolmaster suavely, “no offence.”
“Never said there was,” replied Jerry.
“Then come and have a bite with me at my house, as there’s no school today; I should be honoured, indeed I should,” and the schoolmaster beamed upon him.
“Would you, though? I wonders?” mused the boy.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he added airily, “but I’m a-dinin’ at the vicarage.”
“Oh, with the vicar?”
“No, with the Shah of Persia.” Then in a tone of supreme condescension he added: “I believes vicars lives in vicarages!”
“Ah—so—so! quite right!” returned the schoolmaster. “Doctor Syn, then, has asked you to dine?”
“Well, I don’t see anything so very remarkable in that, do you?”
“Oh, not at all—all very right, proper, and pleasant.”
“Well, it’s right enough, you can lay to that, ’cos I tells you it is, and as to its being proper, well, I don’t see as how it’s improper, so I suppose it is; and as to its being pleasant, well, I’ll tell you when I knows what’s to eat there; and if you’ll excuse me I’ll be off now, ’cos I believe Doctor Syn is waiting for me.”
Indeed at that moment Doctor Syn approached and, putting his hand affectionately on Jerk’s shoulder, with a friendly nod to the schoolmaster, he led the boy from the room of inquiry out of the courthouse and so to the vicarage, where a cold dinner was already prepared.
XIV
At the Vicarage
Now, although it was comparatively early in the afternoon, Doctor Syn did rather a curious thing, or so it seemed to Jerry, for he had the wooden shutters of the dining-room fastened, and they dined by the light of candles. This had quite an uncanny effect—to dine by candles in broad daylight—but Jerk thought perhaps this was always done when gentry entertained company.
Doctor Syn was gloomy through the meal, and although he kept pressing Jerry to “take more” and to “help himself,” he made no effort at keeping up conversation; in fact, had not the food been good and plenteous, Jerry very much doubted whether he would have enjoyed himself at all, for Doctor Syn’s manner was so different. He seemed strained and excited, and not once or twice, but many times during the repast, he would get up and stride about the room, and once he broke out into singing that old sea song that Jerry had so often heard at the Ship Inn:
“Here’s to the feet wot have walked the plank.
Yo ho! for the dead man’s throttle.
And here’s to the corpses floating round in the tank,
And the dead man’s teeth in the bottle.”
Now to make conversation Jerry was bold enough to interrupt this song by inquiring what exactly was meant by the “dead man’s throttle.” Doctor Syn stopped in his walk and looked at him, filling two tots of rum, one of which he handed to Jerk, tossing off the other himself and saying:
“Ah, you may well ask that, sonny. I don’t know exactly myself, but I suppose if poor Pepper was to come in here now and throttle us, man and boy—him being stone dead, as we both well know—well, we should be having the ‘dead man’s throttle’ served on us!”
“Oh, I see!” replied Jerk with interest. “Then I take it that the rest of the song has some shreds of meaning, too? What’s the ‘tank’ that the corpses float round in, sir?”
“The sea,” replied the Doctor, “the sea; that’s the great tank, my lad, and that there are corpses enough floating round in it, I don’t think you and I could doubt.”
“That’s plain and true enough,” said Jerk, “but I don’t see no sense about the ‘dead man’s teeth in the bottle.’ ”
“That’s plain enough,” said the Doctor, taking a stiff swig from the black bottle itself; “it was in England’s day that I wrote that. He cut a nigger’s head off with a cutlass because the rascal was drinking his best rum on the sly, and the shock, as he died, made the black brute bite through the glass neck of the bottle.”
“Did you see it, sir?” asked Jerk, carried away by the tale.
“Who said I saw it?” demanded the cleric sharply.
“Well, you said you wrote the song, sir, and at the time it happened.”
“Nothing of the kind—I said nothing of the kind. The song’s an old one,
