The Flight of the Shadow

He reached the moor, and had fallen exhausted, when a solitary gypsy, rare phenomenon, I presume, with a divine spot awake in his heart, found him, gave him some gin, and took him to a hut he had in the wildest part of the heath. He lay helpless for a week, and then began to recover. When he was sufficiently restored, he helped his host to weave the baskets which, as soon as he had enough to make a load, he took about the country in a cart. He soon became so clever at the work as quite to earn his food and shelter, making more baskets while the gypsy was away selling the others. At home, the old horse managed to live, or rather not to die, on the moor, and, all things considered, had not a very hard life of it. On his back, uncle Edmund, ill able to walk so far—for he was anything but strong now, would sometimes go wandering in the twilight, or when the moon shone, to some spot whence he could see his old home. Occasionally he would even go round and round the house while we slept, like a ghost dreaming of ancient days.

“But,” I said, interrupting his narrative, “the horseman I saw that night in the storm could not have been you, uncle; for the horse was a grand creature, rearing like the horse with Peter the Great on his back, in the corner of the map of Russia!”

“Were you out that terrible night?” he returned. “The lightning was enough to frighten even an older horse than the gypsy’s.—I wonder how my friend is getting on! He must think me very ungrateful! But I daresay he imagines me lying fathom-deep in the bog.—You will do something for him, won’t you, Ed?”

“You shall do for him yourself what you please, Ed,” answered my own uncle, “and I will help you.”

“But, uncle Edmund,” I said, “if it was you we saw, the place you were in was a very boggy one always, and nearly a lake then!”

“I thought I should never get out!” he replied. “But for the poor horse and his owner, I should not have minded.”

“How did you get out of it, uncle?” I persisted. “Lady Cairnedge smothered a splendid black horse not far from there. Through the darkness I heard him going down. It makes me shudder every time I think of it.”

“I cannot tell you, child. I suppose my gray was such a skeleton that the bog couldn’t hold him. I left it all to him, and he got himself and me too out of it somehow. It was too dark, as you know, to see anything between the flashes. I remember we were pretty deep sometimes.”

He went back to London after that, and had come and gone once or twice, he said. When he came he always lodged with his gypsy friend. He had learned that his father was dead, but took the Mr. Whichcote he heard mentioned, for his elder brother, David, my father.

I asked him how it was he appeared to such purpose, and in the very nick of time, that afternoon when lady Cairnedge had come with her servants to carry John away; for of course I knew now that our champion must have been uncle Edmund. He answered he had that very morning made up his mind to present himself at the house, and had walked there for the purpose, resolved to tell his brother all. He got in by the end of the garden, as John was in the way of doing, and had reached the little grove of firs by the house, when he saw a carriage at the door, and drew back. Hearing then the noises of attack and defence, he came to the window and looked in, heard lady Cairnedge’s shriek, saw her on the floor, and the men attempting to force an entrance at the other side of the window. Hardly knowing what he did, he rushed at them and beat them off. Then suddenly turning faint, for his heart was troublesome, he retired into the grove, and lay there helpless for a time. He recovered only to hear the carriage drive away, leaving quiet behind it.

To see that woman in the house of his fathers, was a terrible shock to him. Could it be that David had married her? He stole from his covert, and crawled across the moor to the gypsy’s hut. There he was consoled by learning that the mistress of the house was a young girl, whom he rightly concluded to be the daughter of his brother David.

In making a second visit with the same intent, he had another attack of the heart, and now knew that he would have died in the snow had not John found him.

CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME

We returned to England the next day. All the journey through, my uncles were continually reverting to the matter of John’s parentage: the more they saw of him, the less could they believe lady Cairnedge his mother. Through questions put to him, and inquiries afterward made, they discovered that, when he went to London, he had gone to lady Cairnedge’s lawyer, not his father’s, of whom he had never heard—which accounted for his having on that occasion learned nothing of consequence to him. When we reached London, my uncle Edmund, who, having been bred a lawyer, knew how to act, went at once to examine the will left by John’s father. That done, he set out for the place where John was born. The rest of us went home.

The second day after our arrival there, uncle Edmund came. He had found perfect proof, not only that lady Cairnedge was John’s step-mother, but that she had no authority over him or his property whatever.

A long discussion took place in my uncles’ study—I have to shift the apostrophe of possession—as to whether John ought to compel restitution of what she might have wrongfully spent or otherwise appropriated. She had been left an income by each of her husbands, upon either of which incomes she might have lived at ease; but they had a strong suspicion, soon entirely justified, that while spending John’s money, she had been saving up far more than her own. But in the discussion, John held to it that, as she had once been the wife of his father, he would spare her so far—provided she had nowise impoverished either of the estates. He would insist only upon her immediate departure.

“Yes, little one,” said my uncle, one summer evening, as he and I talked together, seated alone in the wilderness, “what we call misfortune is always the only good fortune. Few will say yes in response, but Truth is independent of supporters, being justified by her children.

“Until misfortune found us,” he went on, “my brother and I had indeed loved one another, but with a love so poor that a wicked woman was able to send it to sleep. To what she might have brought us, had she had full scope, God only knows: now all the women in hell could not separate us!”

“And all the women in paradise would but bring you closer!” I ventured to add.

The day after our marriage, which took place within a month of our return from Paris, John went to Rising, on a visit to lady Cairnedge of anything but ceremony, and took his uncles and myself with him.

“Will you tell her ladyship,” he said to the footman, “that Mr. Day desires to see her.”

The man would have shut the door in our faces, with the words, “I will see if my lady is at home;” but John was prepared for him. He put his foot between the door and the jamb, and his two hands against the door, driving it to the wall with the man behind it. There he held him till we were all in, then closed the door, and said to him, in a tone I had never heard him use till that moment,

“Let lady Cairnedge know at once that Mr. Day desires to see her.”

The man went. We walked into the white drawing-room, the same where I sat alone among the mirrors the morning after I was lost on the moor. How well I remembered it! There we waited. The gentlemen stood, but, John insisting, I sat—my eyes fixed on the door by which we had entered. In a few minutes, however, a slight sound in another part of the room, caused me to turn them thitherward. There stood lady Cairnedge, in a riding-habit, with a whip in her hand, staring, pale as death, at my uncles. Then, with a scornful laugh, she turned and went through a door immediately behind her, which closed instantly, and became part of the wainscot, hardly distinguishable. John darted to it. It was bolted on the outside. He sought another door, and ran hither and thither through the house to find the woman. My uncles ran after him, afraid something might befall him. I remained where I was, far from comfortable. Two or three minutes passed, and then I heard the thunder of hoofs. I ran to the window. There she was, tearing across the park at full gallop, on just such a huge black horse as she had smothered in the bog! I was the only one of us that saw her, and not one of us ever set eyes upon her again.

When we went over the house, it soon became plain to us that she had been in readiness for a sudden retreat, having prepared for it after a fashion of her own: not a single small article of value was to be discovered in it. John’s great-aunt, who left him the property, died in the house, possessed of a large number of jewels, many of them of great price both in themselves and because of their antiquity: not one of them was ever found.

A report reached us long after, that lady Cairnedge was found dead in her bed in a hotel in the Tyrol.

My uncles lived for many years on the old farm. Uncle Edmund bought a gray horse, as like uncle Edward’s as he could find one, only younger. I often wondered what Death must think—to know he had his master on his back, and yet see him mounted by his side. Every day one or the other, most days both, would ride across the moor to see us. For many years Martha walked in at the door at least once every week.

My uncles took no pains, for they had no desire, to be distinguished the one from the other. Each was always ready to meet any obligation of the other. If one made an appointment, few could tell which it was, and nobody which would keep it. No one could tell, except, perhaps, one who had been present, which of them had signed any document: their two hands were absolutely indistinguishable, I do not believe either of them, after a time, always himself knew whether the name was his or his brother’s. He could only be always certain it must have been written by one of them. But each indifferently was ready to honour the signature, Ed. Whichcote.

They died within a month of each other. Their bodies lie side by side. On their one tombstone is the inscription:

HERE LIE THE DISUSED GARMENTS OF EDWARD AND EDMUND WHICHCOTE,

BORN FEB. 29, 1804;

DIED JUNE 30, AND

JULY 28, 1864

THEY ARE NOT HERE; THEY ARE RISEN

John and I are waiting.

Belorba Day.