“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?”
“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.”
“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 to 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.
XVII
The Doctor Sings a Song
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 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 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.
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 courthouse inquiry. Now the shutter, being an outside shutter, backed right against the lead-rimmed 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 as the madman carries; 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
