He was sitting in a melancholy grove of old trees, that slants gently westward. Exactly the same odd effect of light I have before described—a faint red glow reflected downward from the upper sky, after the sun had set, now gave to the growing darkness a lurid uncertainty. This grove, which lies in a gentle hollow, owing to its circumscribed horizon on all but one side, has a peculiar character of loneliness.
He got up and peeped over a sort of barrier, accidentally formed of the trunks of felled trees laid one over the other, and saw the dog straining up the other side of it, and hideously stretched out, his ugly head looking in consequence twice the natural size. His dream was coming over him again. And now between the trunks the brute’s ungainly head was thrust, and the long neck came straining through, and the body, twining after it like a huge white lizard; and as it came striving and twisting through, it growled and glared as if it would devour him.
As swiftly as his lameness would allow, the Squire hurried from this solitary spot towards the house. What thoughts exactly passed through his mind as he did so, I am sure he could not have told. But when the dog came up with him it seemed appeased, and even in high good-humour, and no longer resembled the brute that haunted his dreams.
That night, near ten o’clock, the Squire, a good deal agitated, sent for the keeper, and told him that he believed the dog was mad, and that he must shoot him. He might shoot the dog in the gun-room, where he was—a grain of shot or two in the wainscot did not matter, and the dog must not have a chance of getting out.
The Squire gave the gamekeeper his double-barrelled gun, loaded with heavy shot. He did not go with him beyond the hall. He placed his hand on the keeper’s arm; the keeper said his hand trembled, and that he looked “as white as curds.”
“Listen a bit!” said the Squire under his breath.
They heard the dog in a state of high excitement in the room—growling ominously, jumping on the window-stool and down again, and running round the room.
“You’ll need to be sharp, mind—don’t give him a chance—slip in edgeways, d’ye see? and give him both barrels!”
“Not the first mad dog I’ve knocked over, sir,” said the man, looking very serious as he cocked the gun.
As the keeper opened the door, the dog had sprung into the empty grate. He said he “never see sich a stark, staring devil.” The beast made a twist round, as if, he thought, to jump up the chimney—“but that wasn’t to be done at no price,”—and he made a yell—not like a dog—like a man caught in a mill-crank, and before he could spring at the keeper, he fired one barrel into him. The dog leaped towards him, and rolled over, receiving the second barrel in his head, as he lay snorting at the keeper’s feet!
“I never seed the like; I never heard a screech like that!” said the keeper, recoiling. “It makes a fellow feel queer.”
“Quite dead?” asked the Squire.
“Not a stir in him, sir,” said the man, pulling him along the floor by the neck.
“Throw him outside the hall-door now,” said the Squire; “and mind you pitch him outside the gate tonight—old Cooper says he’s a witch,” and the pale Squire smiled, “so he shan’t lie in Gylingden.”
Never was man more relieved than the Squire, and he slept better for a week after this than he had done for many weeks before.
It behoves us all to act promptly on our good resolutions. There is a determined gravitation towards evil, which, if left to itself, will bear down first intentions. If at one moment of superstitious fear, the Squire had made up his mind to a great sacrifice, and resolved in the matter of that deed so strangely recovered, to act honestly by his brother, that resolution very soon gave place to the compromise with fraud, which so conveniently postponed the restitution to the period when further enjoyment on his part was impossible. Then came more tidings of Scroope’s violent and minatory language, with always the same burden—that he would leave no stone unturned to show that there had existed a deed which Charles had either secreted or destroyed, and that he would never rest till he had hanged him.
This of course was wild talk. At first it had only enraged him; but, with his recent guilty knowledge and suppression, had come fear. His danger was the existence of the deed, and little by little he brought himself to a resolution to destroy it. There were many falterings and recoils before he could bring himself to commit this crime. At length, however, he did it, and got rid of the custody of that which at any time might become the instrument of disgrace and ruin. There was relief in this, but also the new and terrible sense of actual guilt.
He had got pretty well rid of his supernatural qualms. It was a different kind of trouble that agitated him now.
But this night, he imagined, he was awakened by a violent shaking of his bed. He could see, in the very imperfect light, two figures at the foot of it, holding each a bedpost. One of these he half-fancied was his brother Scroope, but the other was the old Squire—of that he was sure—and he fancied that they had shaken him up from his sleep. Squire Toby was talking as Charlie wakened, and he heard him say:
“Put out of our own house by you!
