XVIII
The night was cool and dark. There was a full moon, visible at intervals through the drift of clouds. Leslie slipped her arm into his as they walked down the dark avenue toward the road.
“Did you quarrel?” she asked.
“N-no, we didn’t quarrel,” said Dick. “There was a little plain speaking, but I think it cleared the air, and, after all, that was what I came for. He is dismissing Gilder to-morrow.”
She was silent at this, and did not speak again until they were on the road.
“Is that wise?” she asked. “I’m a little afraid of the man. I feel he would be a very bad enemy.”
She heard his soft laugh and felt reassured.
“He’s that all right,” said Dick; “the worst enemy any man could have, I should imagine. But an enemy is only dangerous in ratio to his hurting power. I don’t think Mr. Gilder will hurt anybody.”
“Not Arthur?” she asked.
“Not Arthur, and certainly not you.”
She squeezed his arm in hers.
“You’d be a wonderful brother,” she said.
“I am,” he said curtly, and she smiled in the darkness. “Your handsome relative asked me to persuade you to marry next month, and I told him point-blank that I would do nothing of the kind. Leslie, do you know that you never see Harry from one week-end to another?”
She had realized that for a long time, and it was a constant subject for self-reproach that she had less and less desire for her fiancé’s society.
“He is really not interested in me, Dick,” she said. “Harry is so absorbed in his treasure hunt and his queer chase after the elixir of life——”
“He’s told you that, has he?” asked Dick quickly.
“Why, of course!” she scoffed. “Do you know, Dick, he has almost convinced me that there is something in his idea?”
She waited for him to reply.
“Don’t you think so?”
“In the Life Water… perhaps there is.”
“And in the treasure?” she asked.
“Maybe. Generations of Chelfords have hunted for that wretched gold, and I suppose in the past four hundred years almost as much money has been spent in the search as the treasure is worth! I’m perfectly sure in my own mind that Good Queen Bess of pious memory bagged every bar of it!”
“And I’m perfectly sure she didn’t,” was the surprising reply. “I’ve been reading Elizabethan history very carefully, and the year that your ancestor hid his gold was the year that the Queen was so hard-pressed for money that she had to borrow from the Lombards.”
He stopped.
“Is that so?” incredulously.
“Absolutely. And if you weren’t such a sceptic and would read a little more, you would know what any schoolchild could tell you, that in 1582 the Queen was broke. Do you object to that vulgar word?”
“It is a familiar one at any rate,” he laughed.
They had reached the deep cutting, and he turned to the left, opened a gate, and they walked up a little path toward the ruins of Chelford Abbey.
The moon was showing through a rift in the clouds.
“You ought to see the Abbey by moonlight, if you’ve never seen it. It’s rather beautiful,” he said, as he gave her a hand to assist her up the steep path.
As they came in sight of the broken walls and towers of this ancient place of peace, something of the solemnity of the scene entered her heart, and she stood still, looking spellbound upon the wreckage of a once great abbey. The Abbey ruins stood on the broadest surface of what was locally known as the Mound—the high embankment which ran almost from Fossaway Abbey to the road, following the course of the little Ravensrill. Here, if tradition spoke the truth, a place of sacrifice had stood, before the English church had risen in flint, before the Norman monks laid chisel to stone on their great abbey.
The moon softened and idealized the broken stonework, and in her mind she went back through the years to those ancient times when the black-robed figures of the monks moved where she now stood. Below, to the left, she could see the fret of sparkling silver where the moon reflected in the Ravensrill. Here they had sat, these ancient men, with their fishing-rods, discussing the little events of their narrow world. They had passed into dust, and this great abbey, the pride of their eyes and the work of their hands, was crumbling rapidly into like nothingness.
“It is wonderful!” she breathed.
Were her eyes deceiving her? She could have sworn she saw something moving in the shadow of the old tower. He heard the quick intake of her breath.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know—my imagination, I think. I thought I saw somebody moving there.”
He followed the direction of her eyes.
“There would be nobody here at this time of the night, unless it is the Black Abbot,” he said jocularly, “and we’re not scared of him, are we?”
“I’m not, for one,” she said, with a firmness that she was far from feeling.
At that moment she heard something—something that turned her blood to water. It was a low moan of anguish, a sobbing diminuendo of sound that began on a high note and wailed down the scale until it was inaudible.
“What was that?” she asked, grasping his arm.
He did not speak; he was straining his eyes toward the shadows.
Again the sound, this time a wail that ended in a scream. He caught the girl by the shoulder. At that moment he had seen a figure moving away from the Abbey toward the river. A tall, black figure that showed clearly in the moonlight. She saw it, too.
“Don’t leave me, Dick!” she begged, as she felt him strain away from her.
Then of a sudden she felt his tension relax.
“Let him go,” he said, half to himself.
She clung to him desperately, frantically, as the figure stumbled and staggered toward the trees that would presently engulf him. The dreadful Thing ran on, stopping now and again to turn and gibber and mouth at the man and the woman who stood motionless on the edge of the cutting. Waving wild arms, now howling in dreadful glee, now screaming in senseless fear, it vanished in the dark of the wood—an obscene, uncleanly thing, that belonged to bad dreams and the horrid imaginings of madness. Far away in the distance came the howl of him, and then the night swallowed him up.
“How dreadful!”
And then her knees gave under her and she remembered no more.