The Nest of the Sparrowhawk

Apparently there was no desire for secrecy or rebellion on the part of the dwellers of the cottage, for hardly had Sir Marmaduke's imperious knock echoed against the timbered walls, than the door was opened from within by Richard Lambert who, seeing the two gentlemen standing on the threshold, stepped back immediately, allowing them to pass.

The old Quakeress and Richard were seemingly not alone. Two ladies sat in those same straight-backed chairs, wherein, some fifty hours ago Adam Lambert and the French prince had agreed upon that fateful meeting on the brow of the cliff.

Sir Marmaduke's restless eyes took in at a glance every detail of that little parlor, which he had known so intimately. The low lintel of the door, which had always forced him to stoop as he entered, the central table with the pewter candlesticks upon it, the elm chairs shining like mirrors in response to the Quakeress' maddening passion for cleanliness.

Everything was just as it had been those few hours ago, when last he had picked up his broad-brimmed hat from the table and walked out of the cottage into the night. Everything was the same as it had been when his young girl-wife pushed a leather wallet across the table to him: the wallet which contained the fortune that he had not yet dared to turn fully to his own account.

Aye! it was all just the same: for even at this moment as he stood there in the room, Sue, pale and still, faced him from across the table. For a moment he was silent, nor did anybody speak. Squire Boatfield felt unaccountably embarrassed, certain that he was intruding, vaguely wondering why the atmosphere in the cottage was so heavy and oppressive.

Behind him, Richard Lambert had quietly closed the front door; the old woman stood in the background; the dusting-cloth which she had been plying so vigorously had dropped out of her hand when the two gentlemen had appeared in her little parlor so unexpectedly.

Sir Marmaduke was the first to break the silence.

"My dear Sue," he said curtly, "this is a strange place indeed wherein to find your ladyship."

He cast a sharp, inquiring glance at her, then at his sister-in-law, who was still sitting by the hearth.

"She insisted on coming," said Mistress de Chavasse with a shrug of the shoulders, "and I had not the power to stop her; I thought it best, therefore, to accompany her."

She was wearing the cloak and hood which Sir Marmaduke had seen round her shoulders when awhile ago he had met her in the hall of the Court. Apparently she had started out with Sue in his immediate wake, and now he had a distinct recollection that while the mare was slowly ambling along, he had looked back once or twice and seen two dark figures walking some fifty yards behind him on the road which he himself had just traversed.

At the moment he had imagined that they were some village folk, wending their way towards Acol: now he was conscious of nerve-racking irritation at the thought that if he had only turned the mare's head back toward the Court—as he had at one time intended to do—he could have averted this present meeting—it almost seemed like a confrontation—here, in this cottage on the self-same spot, where thought of murder had first struck upon his brain.

There was something inexplicable, strangely puzzling now in Sue's attitude.

When de Chavasse had entered, she had risen from her chair and, as if deliberately, had walked over to the spot where she had stood during that momentous interview, when she relinquished her fortune entirely and without protest, into the hands of the man whom she had married, and whom she believed to be her lord.

Her gaze now—calm and fixed, and withal vaguely searching—rested on her guardian's face. The fixity of her look increased his nerve-tension. The others, too, were regarding him with varying feelings which were freely expressed in their eyes. Boatfield seemed upset and somewhat resentful, the old woman sullen, despite the deference in her attitude, Lambert defiant, wrathful, nay! full of an incipient desire to avenge past wrongs.

And dominating all, there was Editha's look of bewilderment, of puzzledom in her face at a mystery whereat her senses were beginning to reel, that mute questioning of the eyes, which speaks of turbulent thoughts within.

Sir Marmaduke uttered an exclamation of impatience.

"You must return to the Court and at once," he said, avoiding Sue's gaze and speaking directly to Editha, "the men are outside, with lanterns. You'll have to walk quickly an you wish to reach home before twilight."

But even while he spoke, Sue—not heeding him—had turned to Squire Boatfield. She went up to him, holding out her hands as if in instinctive childlike appeal for protection, to a kindly man.

"This mystery is horrible!" she murmured.

Boatfield took her small hands in his, patting them gently the while, desiring to soothe and comfort her, for she seemed deeply agitated and there was a wild look of fear from time to time in her pale face.

"Sir Marmaduke is right," said the squire gently, "this is indeed no place for your ladyship. I did not see you arrive or I had at once persuaded you to go."

De Chavasse would again have interposed. He stooped and picked up Sue's cloak which had fallen to the ground, and as he went up to her with the obvious intention of replacing it around her shoulders, she checked him, with a slight motion of her hand.

"I only heard of this terrible crime an hour ago," she said, speaking once more to Boatfield, "and as I methinks, am the only person in the world who can throw light upon this awesome mystery, I thought it my duty to come."

"Of a truth 'twas brave of your ladyship," quoth the squire, feeling a little bewildered at this strange announcement, "but surely . . . you did not know this man?"

"If the rumor which hath reached me be correct," she replied quietly, "then indeed did I know the murdered man intimately. Prince Amédé d'Orléans was my husband."

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE OLD WOMAN

There was silence in the tiny cottage parlor as the young girl made this extraordinary announcement in a firm if toneless voice, without flinching and meeting with a sort of stubborn pride the five pairs of eyes which were now riveted upon her.

From outside came the hum of many voices, dull and subdued, like the buzzing of a swarm of bees, and against the small window panes the incessant patter of icy rain driven and lashed by the gale. Anon the wind moaned in the wide chimney, . . . it seemed like the loud sigh of the Fates, satisfied at the tangle wrought by their relentless fingers in the threads of all these lives.

Sir Marmaduke, after a slight pause, had contrived to utter an oath—indicative of the wrath he, as Lady Sue's guardian, should have felt at her statement. Squire Boatfield frowned at the oath. He had never liked de Chavasse and disapproved more than ever of the man's attitude towards his womenkind now.

The girl was in obvious, terrible distress: what she was feeling at this moment when she was taking those around her into her confidence could be as nothing compared to what she must have endured when she first heard the news that her strange bridegroom had been murdered.

The kindly squire, though admitting the guardian's wrath, thought that its violent expression was certainly ill-timed. He allowed Sue to recover herself, for the more calm was her attitude outwardly, the more terrible must be the effort which she was making at self-control.

Sue's eyes were fixed steadily upon her guardian, and Richard Lambert's upon her. Both these young people who had carved their own Fate in the very rock which now had shattered their lives, seemed to be searching for something vague, unavowed and mysterious which instinct told them was there, but which was so elusive, so intangible that the soul of each recoiled, even whilst it tried to probe.

Entirely against her will Sue—whilst she looked on her guardian—could think of nothing save of that day in Dover, the lonely church, the gloomy vestry, and that weird patter of the rain against the window panes.

She was not ashamed of what she had done, only of what she had felt for him, whom she now believed to be dead; that she gave him her fortune was nothing, she neither regretted nor cared about that. What, in the mind of a young and romantic girl, was the value of a fortune squandered, when that priceless treasure—her first love—had already been thrown away? But now she would no longer judge the dead. The money which he had filched from her, Fate and a murderous hand had quickly taken back from him, crushing beneath those chalk boulders his many desires, his vast ambitions, a worthless life and incomparable greed.

Her love, which he had stolen . . . that he could not give back: not that ardent, whole-souled, enthusiastic love; not the romantic idealism, the hero-worship, that veil of fantasy behind which first love is wont to hide its ephemerality. But she would not now judge the dead. Her romantic love lay buried in the lonely church at Dover, and she was striving not to think even of its grave.

Squire Boatfield's kindly voice recalled her to her immediate surroundings and to the duty—self-imposed—which had brought her thither.

"My dear child," he said, speaking with unwonted solemnity, "if what you have just stated be, alas! the truth, then indeed, you and you only can throw some light on the terrible mystery which has been puzzling us all . . . you may be the means which God hath chosen for bringing an evildoer to justice. . . . Will you, therefore, try . . . though it may be very painful to you . . . will you try and tell us everything that is in your mind . . . everything which may draw the finger of God and our poor eyes to the miscreant who hath committed such an awful crime."

"I fear me I have not much to tell," replied Sue simply, "but I feel that it is my duty to suggest to the two magistrates here present what I think was the motive which prompted this horrible crime."

"You can suggest a motive for the crime?" interposed Sir Marmaduke, striving to sneer, although his voice sounded quite toneless, for his throat was parched and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, "by Gad! 'twere vastly interesting to hear your ladyship's views."

He tried to speak flippantly, at which Squire Boatfield frowned deprecation. Lambert, without a word, had brought a chair near to Lady Sue, and with a certain gentle authority, he forced her to sit down.

"It was a crime, of that I feel sure," said Sue, "nathless, that can be easily proven . . . when . . . when it has been discovered whether money and securities contained in a wallet of leather have been found among Prince Amédé's effects."

"Money and securities?" ejaculated Sir Marmaduke with a loud oath, which he contrived to bring forth with the violence of genuine wrath, "Money and securities? . . . Forsooth, I trust . . ."

"My money and my securities, sir," she interposed with obvious hauteur, "which I had last night and in this self-same room placed in the hands of Prince Amédé d'Orléans, my husband."

She said this with conscious pride. Whatever change her feelings may have undergone towards the man who had at one time been the embodiment of her most cherished dreams, she would not let her sneering guardian see that she had repented of her choice.

Death had endowed her exiled prince with a dignity which had never been his in life, and the veil of tragedy which now lay over the mysterious stranger and his still more mysterious life, had called forth to its uttermost the young wife's sense of loyalty to him.

"Not your entire fortune, my dear, dear child, I hope . . ." ejaculated Squire Boatfield, more horror-struck this time than he had been when first he had heard of the terrible murder.

"The wallet contained my entire fortune," rejoined Sue calmly, "all that Master Skyffington had placed in my hands on the day that my father willed that it should be given me."

"Such folly is nothing short of criminal," said Sir Marmaduke roughly, "nathless, had not the gentleman been murdered that night he would have shown Thanet and you a clean pair of heels, taking your money with him, of course."

"Aye! aye! but he was murdered," said Squire Boatfield firmly, "the question only is by whom?"

"Some footpad who haunts the cliffs," rejoined de Chavasse lightly, "'tis simple enough."

"Simple, mayhap . . ." mused the squire, "yet . . ."

He paused a moment and once more silence fell on all those assembled in the small cottage parlor. Sir Marmaduke felt as if every vein in his body was gradually being turned to stone.

The sense of expectancy was so overwhelming that it completely paralyzed every other faculty within him, and Editha's searching eyes seemed like a corroding acid touching an aching wound. Yet for the moment there was no danger. He had so surrounded himself and his crimes with mystery that it would take more than a country squire's slowly moving brain to draw aside that weird and ghostlike curtain which hid his evil deeds.

No! there was no danger—as yet!

But he cursed himself for a fool and a coward, not to have gone away—abroad—long ere such a possible confrontation threatened him. He cursed himself for being here at all—and above all for having left the smith's clothes and the leather wallet in that lonely pavilion in the park.

Squire Boatfield's kind eyes now rested on the old woman, who, awed and silent—shut out by her infirmities from this strange drama which was being enacted in her cottage—had stood calm and impassive by, trying to read with that wonderful quickness of intuition which the poverty of one sense gives to the others—what was going on round her, since she could not hear.

Her eyes—pale and dim, heavy-lidded and deeply-lined—rested often on the face of Richard Lambert, who, leaning against the corner of the hearth, had watched the proceedings silently and intently. When the Quakeress's faded gaze met that of the young man, there was a quick and anxious look which passed from her to him: a look of entreaty for comfort, one of fear and of growing horror.

"And so the exiled prince lodged in your cottage, mistress?" said Squire Boatfield, after a while, turning to Mistress Lambert.

The old woman's eyes wandered from Richard to the squire. The look of fear in them vanished, giving place to good-natured placidity. She shuffled forward, in the manner which had so oft irritated her lodger.

"Eh? . . . what?" she queried, approaching the squire, "I am somewhat hard of hearing these times."

"We were speaking of your lodger, mistress," rejoined Boatfield, raising his voice, "harm hath come to him, you know."

"Aye! aye!" she replied blandly, "harm hath come to our lodger. . . . Nay! the Lord hath willed it so. . . . The stranger was queer in his ways. . . . I don't wonder that harm hath come to him. . . ."

"You remember him well, mistress?—him and the clothes he used to wear?" asked Squire Boatfield.

"Oh, yes! I remember the clothes," she rejoined. "I saw them again on the dead who now lieth in Adam's forge . . . the same curious clothes of a truth . . . clothes the Lord would condemn as wantonness and vanity. . . . I saw them again on the dead man," she reiterated garrulously, "the frills and furbelows . . . things the Lord hateth . . . and which no Christian should place upon his person . . . yet the foreigner wore them . . . he had none other . . . and went out with them on him that night that the Lord sent him down into perdition. . . ."

"Did you see him go out that night, mistress?" asked the squire.

"Eh? . . . what? . . ."

"Did he go out alone?"

The dimmed eyes of the old woman roamed restlessly from face to face. It seemed as if that look of horror and of fear once more struggled to appear within the pale orbs. Yet the squire looked on her with kindness, and Lady Sue's tear-veiled eyes expressed boundless sympathy. Richard, on the other hand, did not look at her, his gaze was riveted on Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse with an intensity which caused the latter to meet that look, trying to defy it, and then to flinch before its expression of passionate wrath.

"We wish to know where your nephew Adam is, mistress," now broke in de Chavasse roughly, "the squire and I would wish to ask him a few questions."

Then as the Quakeress did not reply, he added almost savagely:

"Why don't you answer, woman? Are ye still hard of hearing?"

"Your pardon, Sir Marmaduke," interposed Lambert firmly, "my aunt is old and feeble. She hath been much upset and over anxious . . . seeing that my brother Adam is still from home."

Sir Marmaduke broke into a loud and prolonged laugh.

"Ha! ha! ha! good master . . . so I understand . . . your brother is from home . . . whilst the wallet containing her ladyship's fortune has disappeared along with him, eh?"

"What are they saying, lad?" queried the old woman in her trembling voice, "what are they saying? I am fearful lest there's something wrong with Adam. . . ."

"Nay, nay, dear . . . there's naught amiss," said Lambert soothingly, "there's naught amiss. . . ."

Instinctively now Sue had risen. Sir Marmaduke's cruel laugh had grated horribly on her ear, rousing an echo in her memory which she could not understand but which caused her to encircle the trembling figure of the old Quakeress with young, protecting arms.

"Are Squire Boatfield and I to understand, Lambert," continued Sir Marmaduke, speaking to the young man, "that your brother Adam has unaccountably disappeared since the night on which the foreigner met with his tragic fate? Nay, Boatfield," he added, turning to the squire, as Lambert had remained silent, "methinks you, as chief magistrate, should see your duty clearly. 'Tis a warrant you should sign and quickly, too, ere a scoundrel slip through the noose of justice. I can on the morrow to Dover, there to see the chief constable, but Pyot and his men should not be idle the while."

"What is he saying, my dear?" murmured Mistress Lambert, timorously, as she clung with pathetic fervor to the young girl beside her, "what is the trouble?"

"Where is your nephew Adam?" said de Chavasse roughly.

"I do not know," she retorted with amazing strength of voice, as she gently but firmly disengaged herself from the restraining arms that would have kept her back. "I do not know," she repeated, "what is it to thee, where he is? Art accusing him perchance of doing away with that foreign devil?"

Her voice rose shrill and resonant, echoing in the low-ceilinged room; her pale eyes, dimmed with many tears, with hard work, and harder piety were fixed upon the man who had dared to accuse her lad.

He tried not to flinch before that gaze, to keep up the air of mockery, the sound of a sneer. Outside the murmur of voices had become somewhat louder, the shuffling of bare feet on the flag-stones could now be distinctly heard.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE VOICE OF THE DEAD

The next moment a timid knock against the front door caused everyone to start. A strange eerie feeling descended on the hearts of all, of innocent and of guilty, of accuser and of defender. The knock seemed to have come from spectral hands, for 'twas followed by no further sound.

Then again the knock.

Lambert went to the door and opened it.

"Be the quality here?" queried a timid voice.

"Squire Boatfield is here and Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse," replied Lambert, "what is it, Mat? Come in."

The squire had risen at sound of his name, and now went to the door, glad enough to shake himself free from that awful oppression which hung on the cottage like a weight of evil.

"What is it, Mat?" he asked.

A man in rough shirt and coarse breeches and with high boots reaching up to the thigh was standing humbly in the doorway. He was bareheaded and his lanky hair, wet with rain and glittering with icy moisture, was blown about by the gale. At sight of the squire he touched his forelock.

"The hour is getting late, squire," he said hesitatingly, "we carriers be ready. . . . 'Tis an hour or more down to Minster . . . walking with a heavy burden I mean. . . . If your Honor would give the order, mayhap we might nail down the coffin lid now and make a start."

Marmaduke de Chavasse, too, had turned towards the doorway. Both men looked out on the little crowd which had congregated beyond the little gate. It was long past three o'clock now, and the heavy snow clouds overhead obscured the scanty winter light, and precipitated the approach of evening. In the gray twilight, a group of men could be seen standing somewhat apart from the others. All were bareheaded, and all wore rough shirts and breeches of coarse worsted, drab or brown in color, toning in with the dull monochrome of the background.

Between them in the muddy road stood the long deal coffin. The sheet which covered it, rendered heavy with persistent wet, flapped dismally against the wooden sides of the box. Overhead a group of rooks were circling whilst uttering their monotonous call.

A few women had joined their men-folk, attracted by the novelty of the proceedings, yielding their momentary comfort to their feeling of curiosity. They had drawn their kirtles over their heads and looked like gigantic oval balls, gray or black, with small mud-stained feet peeping out below.

Sue had thrown an appealing look at Squire Boatfield, when she saw that dismal cortège. Her husband, her prince! the descendant of the Bourbons, the regenerator of France lying there—unrecognizable, horrible and loathsome—in a rough wooden coffin hastily nailed together by a village carpenter.

She did not wish to look on him: and with mute eyes begged the squire to spare her and to spare the old woman, who, through the doorway had caught sight of the drabby little crowd, and of the deal box on the ground.

Lambert, too, at sight of the cortège had gone to the Quakeress, the kind soul who had cared for him and his brother, two nameless lads, without home save the one she had provided for them. He trusted in Squire Boatfield's sense of humanity not to force this septuagenarian to an effort of nerve and will altogether beyond her powers.

Together the two young people were using gentle persuasion to get the old woman to the back room, whence she could not see the dreary scene now or presently, the slow winding of the dismal little procession down the road which leads to Minster, and whence she could not hear that weird flapping of the wet sheet against the side of the coffin, an echo to the slow and muffled tolling of the church bell some little distance away.

But the old woman was obstinate. She struggled against the persuasion of young arms. Things had been said in her cottage just now, which she must hear more distinctly: vague accusations had been framed, a cruel and sneering laugh had echoed through the house from whence one of her lads—Adam—was absent.

"No! no!" she said with quiet firmness, as Lambert urged her to withdraw, "let be, lad . . . let be . . . ye cannot deceive the old woman all of ye. . . . The Lord hath put wool in my ears, so I cannot hear . . . but my eyes are good. . . . I can see your faces. . . . I can read them. . . . Speak man!" she said, as she suddenly disengaged herself from Richard's restraining arms and walked deliberately up to Marmaduke de Chavasse, "speak man. . . . Didst thou accuse Adam?"

An involuntary "No!" escaped from the squire's kindly heart and lips. But Sir Marmaduke shrugged his shoulders.

The crisis which by his own acts, by his own cowardice, he himself had precipitated, was here now. Fatality had overtaken him. Whether the whole truth would come to light he did not know. Truly at this moment he hardly cared. He did not feel as if he were himself, but another being before whom stood another Sir Marmaduke de Chavasse, on whom he—a specter, a ghoul, a dream figure—was about to pass judgment.

He knew that he need do nothing now, for without his help or any effort on his part, that morbid curiosity which had racked his brain for two days would be fully satisfied. He would know absolutely now, exactly what everyone thought of the mysterious French prince and of his terrible fate on Epple sands.

Thank Satan and all his hordes of devils that heavy chalk boulders had done so complete a work of obliteration.

But whilst he looked down with complete indifference on the old woman, she looked about from one face to the other, trying to read what cruel thoughts of Adam lurked behind those obvious expressions of sympathy.