Book III
Chapter I Mystery
The company at ‘The Corner House’ had divided into two groups, and each was concerned with a separate subject. Mr. Shillabeer himself, with Bartley Crocker, Mr. Moses, Simon Snell, and Bart Stanbury, discussed a strange phenomenon that had of late startled the dwellers at Sheepstor; while, with their backs to this throng, Ernest Maunder, his friend Timothy Mattacott, and Billy Screech whispered together upon a private problem.
“The thing can be explained in a word,” said Moses; “there be amongst us some high-minded, religious creature that have got hold of this way of advertising the Truth. He have said to himself, ‘There’s nought like a gate to catch the eye of the passer-by.’ And so, where a gate happens to stand by the wayside, he have gone by night and painted up a Bible truth. Farmer Chave found ‘Prepare to meet thy God’ on his bullock byre yesterday morning, and there’s ‘Eternity’—just that one solemn word—on every second gate betwixt here and Meavy.”
“He’s come out our way, too, since last week,” said Bart Stanbury. “There be a text up over on the moor-gate above our house: ‘Now is the accepted time.’”
Young Stanbury was courting a girl at Nosworthy Farm, near his home, and this text, staring out of the dawn-lit desert, had come to him with the force of a direct command. But he made no mention of its private significance in his affairs.
“The party means well enough,” declared Hartley. “There’s no doubt about that. And it can’t be denied that coming upon these solemn things all of a sudden makes men and women think. The puzzle is to know who’s doing it.”
“Some of the people that own the gates don’t like it, however,” said Simon Snell. “Farmer Bassett, out to Yellowmead, says ’tis a form of trespass and battery to write on a man’s gatepost; and it don’t bring you any more within the law because you write up Scripture. The man stuck up ‘Let there be light’ on Mr. Bassett’s big gate—the one going into his four-acre field—and Bassett was cruel vexed and said as how he’d let light into the chap himself if ever he caught him.”
“And he’s cleaned his gate with sand-paper,” added young Stanbury.
“’Tis written on again since then,” said Mr. Shillabeer. “I was that way not long since, and there’s words written there again—namely, ‘God is Love.’”
“Strange thing is that Ernest Maunder on his nightly rounds should have never catched the man,” mused Crocker.
“Not at all,” explained Mr. Moses. “The man no doubt knows the way of Ernest’s beat as well as Ernest himself do, and avoids him. They were saying yesterday that it might even be parson’s self; but of course that’s a rash and silly idea. His reverence is as much interested in it as anybody—especially since he found ‘The Lord loveth a cheerful giver’ on his own back-garden door—the one that leadeth out into the lane. He holds that the man means well; all the same, he wants him catched and stopped.”
“What could be done to him if they did lay hold on him?” asked Reuben Shillabeer.
“Why, there you beat me,” answered Moses. “I’m sure I don’t know. The lord of the manor might talk to him; but I don’t think any law has been broken, whereas ’tis certain many people have been made to think about religion in consequence.”
“My mother for one,” asserted Mr. Snell. “She came across ‘After death the Judgment’ ’pon a broken paling out Yennadon Down way, and it turned her faint on the instant and made her very unwell. But ’twas all to the good, as she herself declared two days afterwards. The man’s doing a very proper work, whoever the man is.”
“With a pot of blacking and letters cut out of tin he does it,” said Bartley Crocker. “It ought to be pretty easy to find him out. He must have been round here only a day or two ago. I see he’s been busy at the bottom of your paddock, ‘Dumpling.’”
“Yes,” admitted Mr. Shillabeer. “He knows a bit about everybody. ‘Swear not at all’ he put up on my fence, down the bottom end of my cabbage plot. That ought to be a lesson to us in this bar, for, try as I will, the crooked words slip out among you.”
“I quite agree,” said Mr. Snell. “I catched myself saying ’damn’ to a young dog only yesternight. And no fault of the dog.”
“If we was all as careful as you, no great harm would come to the parish,” answered Charles Moses. “For my part, swearing never drew me. I found I could be righteously angry without it, and also forcible of speech.”
“Some fall back upon it as natural as drink,” asserted Bartley, “though ’tis certainly no sign of strength to put in swear words.”
“Yet Sir Guy Flamank, his honourable self, be a great hand with them,” argued Snell. “I’ve heard him in the hunting field use the most terrible parts of speech you can imagine—though not when ladies was out, I admit that.”
“Take my good friend, David Bowden,” said Bartley. “No man ever yet heard him use an oath. And yet, by all accounts, nobody gets his way quicker with smooth words.”
Mr. Shillabeer nodded.
“Without a shade of unkindly feeling against the man, I could wish he wasn’t quite so own-self, all the same,” he said. “That wrapped up heart and soul in work and money-making, that he haven’t eyes for anything else in the earth.”
Mr. Crocker looked round about him.
“What you say is gospel truth, ‘Dumpling.’ We’re all friends here, I believe—friends to ’em both. Therefore none will think it anything but kindness in us to be sorry about ’em.”
“I met Margaret a while back,” said Mr. Shillabeer. “My wife was terrible fond of her when she was a mere strip of a girl. We had some talk together, and—there ’twas. I’d give my whiskers to make ’em go along a thought happier; and yet when you say the word, she’ll have nought of it and tell you there never was a happier, luckier creature.”
“In a way that’s true,” declared Bartley, “but in another way ’tis false. What did you say to her, Reuben?”
“To be plain,” answered Mr. Shillabeer, guiltily, “I was full of rather gloomy thoughts along of it being the death-day of the wife. And I said, in my darkness, that self-slaughter might not be all bad, if a man had outlived his value. And she reproved me—yes, she said the word in season.”
“You oughtn’t to think of such things, Shillabeer,” declared Mr. Moses.
“I know it, Charles; yet thoughts will come over the mind unbidden. But leave that.”
“As to David, he’s easier to talk sense to than you might think,” added Crocker. “I risked it once, and he took it in a very manly spirit that made me respect him more than ever. But I doubt he’s forgotten it all long ago. Why for don’t you try, Moses? You’re a light among us and carry the weight of the church on your shoulders. Catch the man coming out one Sunday and go a bit of the way back-along with him, and some of us will take Madge and Rhoda out of earshot.”
“No,” answered the shoemaker. “Don’t ask me to attempt any such a thing. You can’t alter it, and they can’t alter it. ’Tis in them: they’re built so. Just a pinch of salt makes or mars a stew, and just a pinch of character makes or mars a home. If we even knew exactly what ’twas, we couldn’t alter it. You can’t pull out a bit of human nature, like a hollow tooth. Just an over-seasoning of pepper in a man, or a pinch of softness in a woman, may spoil all. It takes terrible little to wreck a home, and I’ve known large tragedies rise up out of nought but a taste.”
“That’s true,” declared Bartley. “A man with a failing, or a fancy, as wouldn’t count against him in one woman’s eyes, may come to eternal smash on it if he happens to wed with another woman. ’Tis the little twists of character that lead to the biggest troubles, as the acorn breeds the oak.”
Mr. Shillabeer obliged with an instance.
“I knowed a very good Christian girl who was a moderate drinker and never dreamed of taking a thimble too much afore she married. And she never would have done so afterwards, but for the bad luck of her husband being a furious teetotaller. I’ve seed that man talk about drink till you’d think he was blind drunk himself! And so he was—drunk with rage at the thought of there being such a thing as drink in the universe. And what come of it? She took to drink, that woman did, driven to it, you might say, out of sheer spite; and the man catched his only son market merry at ten years old; and he dashed him to the earth in his righteous indignation and broke the poor child’s arm in two places.”
“’Tis just the sort of thing that happens every day,” declared Charles Moses, mournfully. “But, please God, with the Bowden pair, they are both too sensible to drift apart. ’Tis a terrible sad thing to see husband and wife lost, as it were—each feeling along alone, trying to find the man or the woman they loved and married, and not finding ’em. For why? Because each have gone back to themselves, and put off all that hoodwinking toggery they was hidden in during the courting time. We talk about being disguised in drink, Reuben Shillabeer, but we ought to talk about being disguised in love also. There’s nought makes a man act further from his true self than wanting to win a woman.”
“’Tis supposed to bring out the best of us; but I’m with you there; I don’t know that it does,” said Bartley.
Mr. Snell stared.
“For my part, though you might say such a man as me hasn’t the right to lift his voice afore such a learned person like you, Mr. Moses, yet I do believe in love. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’ve felt it more than here and there—back and forward, like rheumatism, according to the state of the blood and the season of the year; but when it comes, it makes me more valiant without a doubt; and that’s to the good.”
Mr. Crocker looked at his rival. Then he opened his mouth to speak; and then he shut it again and kept silence.
Elsewhere Mattacott, Maunder, and William Screech debated a great matter. They argued now as to whether Mr. Shillabeer should hear the secret, and the policeman advised against it.
“An honest and an upright man, outside prize-fighting,” he said; “but in this you can’t expect him to take sides. We are all his customers—Bart Stanbury just as much as Mattacott here; therefore I say, ‘keep the thing from him.’”
“And from everybody,” added Mattacott. “If it get’s out, all’s marred. The fewer hear of it, the better; and I hope you won’t tell your wife, Billy.”
Mr. Screech laughed.
“That shows how little you know of the world, Timothy. Why, ’twas my wife had the brilliant thought! She knowed Mattacott wanted for to marry Jane West, and I told her how another man was after Jane also, and that she couldn’t decide between ’em. Then says Dorcas—quick as a needle, that woman—‘Jane believes in all that rummage about Crazywell. So what Mattacott have got to do is to plan to get her that way come next Christmas Eve; and he’ve got to lie hid; and when he sees her, he’ve got to shout out the name of t’other chap; and Jane will think ’tis the spirits; and she’ll fancy t’other chap is bound to die afore the year’s out; so he’ll be no good to her whether she likes him or not. Then, of course, she’ll take Mattacott.’ Those were her very words, as near as I can call ’em home. And when did you hear a cleverer thing?”
“’Tis terrible clever,” confessed Mattacott. “But Jane West wouldn’t never go up past the pool alone on Christmas Eve for a hundred pounds; so us must plan somehow for somebody to go along with her. ’Tis a very tricky business to be drawn into a plot.”
“All be fair in love,” said Mr. Maunder; “else, of course, I couldn’t countenance any such a plan. But the matter is outside the law and therefore I’m not called to take any steps—especially as I very much want to see Mattacott get the woman. He’s the wrong side of forty now, and ’tis more than time he was suited, if it is to be.”
Mr. Mattacott looked across jealously at the innocent Bart Stanbury.
“He’s too young for her even if she’d have him,” he said. “’Tis his sandy hair and his blue, silly eyes have made her think twice about him.”
“Keep to business,” interrupted Billy Screech. “Now it’s agreed we get the girl to Crazywell come Christmas Eve next; and that’s nearly two months off, so we’ve got plenty of time to cabal against Bart. The first question is, who shall take her to Crazywell on the day?”
They all frowned over this problem; then Screech solved it brilliantly.
“Why, Bart hisself, to be sure! What better could happen? He hears his doom come up out of the water; and of course, even if they was tokened, he’d have to release her after that. Any man would have to do it.”
They applauded and Mattacott was especially enthusiastic. But the policeman acknowledged a doubt.
“It don’t strike you as too terrible a thing?” he asked. “For my part, as a tender man, though guardian of law and order, I can’t think we should let the fellow hear his own fate. He might believe it and go mad. Stranger things have happened.”
“Have no fear: he won’t believe it,” said Mr. Screech. “’Tis her that will believe it, and ’tis her that we want to believe it.”
“A fine stroke certainly—to make Bart hear it himself,” admitted Maunder; “that is, if I’ve got your word for it the man won’t be hurt in his mind by such an adventure.”
“That’s settled then; and now there’s the great question of who does the spirit,” continued Screech. “Of course, ’tis Mattacott’s job—not mine; yet I must point out that his voice is not well suited to the deed.”
“I wouldn’t do it for anything,” said Mattacott. “I’m nought at a pinch; and if ’twas thrust upon me to do it, fifty to one but I should go and lose my head and very like shout out the wrong name, or some such foolishness.”
“’Tis true,” said Maunder. “With all your good gifts, Timothy, you’re the very man to make a mess of this. Besides, your voice will surely betray you.”
“I ax this here chap to do it,” said Mattacott, turning to Screech himself. “Maunder, no doubt, would do it for me, as my lifelong friend; but he’s a government servant and his time is not his own. Therefore I ax Billy; and, if it goes right, I’ll pay him down a crown; and if it don’t go right, I’ll pay half-a-crown; and who can say fairer?”
“So far so good then,” summed up Billy; “and I’m bound to say I think you’re right. I can put a hollow sound into my voice and bring it up from my boots, in a way that would make any girl go goose-flesh if she heard me after dark on a common week-day, not to name Christmas Eve at Crazywell. Leave that to me when the time cometh. Now the next thing is, what shall I say?”
“Nought but the man’s name,” advised Ernest Maunder; “the less you say the awfuller ’twill be.”
“Just ‘Bart Stanbury! Bart Stanbury!’ twice,” whispered Mattacott. “You’ll be snug hid in a fuzz bush, of course; and once you mark that she’s heard you, you can slip off home as quick as need be to prove ’twasn’t you, if anything comes to be said about it after.”
Billy nodded.
“Just so; but I mustn’t say ‘Bart’ Stanbury,” he explained. “You see the man’s christening name is ‘Bartholomew,’ and the spirit wouldn’t know as we called him ‘Bart’ for shortness. The full name must be spoken, and that I shall do. So there ’twill be, and Jane West will believe that the man’s booked for death afore another year be out.”
Mr. Mattacott showed a little emotion on Stanbury’s account, but Billy overruled his qualms. The matter was allowed to drop and a diversion threw the two groups together and turned conversation into a former topic.
Ellas Bowden came in, cold and rosy, out of the night.
“Evening, souls!” he said. “On my way up-along and thought I’d give the pony five minutes and myself a drop out of the special bottle. What’s the best news?”
“’Tis for you to tell us what’s the latest, master,” said Bartley.
“The latest,” answered Mr. Bowden, “is this: that pious blade with his blacking brush and his Bible have been up over! Ess fay; Nap and Wellington runned in with the news after daylight. There’s no gates up my way except my own; but he’d fastened ’pon that, and there it was. I heard a dog bark last night, but ’twas dark as pitch and no good looking out the window.”
“And what might he have chosen for you?” asked Ernest Maunder.
“The solemn words, ‘Jesus wept,’” answered Elias. “A drop more water to this, Shillabeer, if you please. Yes, he’d writ those deep words there. Can’t say exactly why he put them in particular; but they drive the love of the Lord into the mind and make a man religious, no doubt. Not that I’m ever anything else, when you come to the bottom of me, I hope.”
“The thought that the Redeemer of mankind shed tears is a very sad thought, however,” declared Mr. Moses. “And yet not all sad, if I make my meaning clear, because it brings Him nearer to us on the human side; and the nearer, the better.”
“Very well put, Charles,” said Reuben Shillabeer. “The nearer the better, I’m sure.”
“Upon the rocks in the warrens too—so the boys tell me,” continued the master of Ditsworthy. “The busy man have set up a good text or two here and there. I doubt he’ll take to writing ’em life-size upon the tors next.”
“That’s a great idea, now!” declared Shillabeer. “Then everybody passing by could catch the Word. In fact, none could miss it if the letters was big enough.”
“For that matter, if I may say so,” argued Mr. Moses, “the tors be the word of God a’ready, and nought out of the Bible could make ’em grander than they be. Not that this curious man thinks so. Without a doubt he’d write great Bible news across the moon’s self, if he could only find a ladder long enough to reach her; and a brush big enough for the work.”