He spoke again, but with obvious reluctance.
“Another was killed early this morning,” he said in a low voice, “on the Home Farm. In the same way.”
For lack of any better comment, I suggested heating the nearby coverts. There might be some—
“We’ve scoured the woods,” interrupted my uncle brusquely.
“And found nothing?”
“Nothing... Except some tracks.”
“What sort of tracks?”
My uncle’s eyes were suddenly evasive. He turned his head away.
“They were a man’s tracks,” he said slowly. A log fell over in the fireplace.
Again a silence. The interview appeared to be causing him pain rather than relief. I decided that the situation could lose nothing through the frank expression of my curiosity. Plucking up courage, I asked him roundly what cause he had to be upset? Three sheep, the property of his tenants, had died deaths which, though certainly unusual, were unlikely to remain for long mysterious. Their destroyer, whatever it was, would inevitably be caught, killed, or driven away in the course of the next few days. The loss of another sheep or two was the worst he had to fear.
When I had finished, my uncle gave me an anxious, almost a guilty look. I was suddenly aware that he had a confession to make.
“Sit down,” he said. “I wish to tell you something.”
This is what he told me:
A quarter of a century ago, my uncle had had occasion to engage a new housekeeper. With the blend of fatalism and sloth which is the foundation of the bachelor’s attitude to the servant problem, he took on the first applicant. She was a tall, black, slant-eyed woman from the Welsh border, aged about 30. My uncle said nothing about her character, but described her as having “powers.” When she had been at Fleer some months, my uncle began to notice her, instead of taking her for granted. She was not averse to being noticed.
One day she came and told my uncle that she was with child by him. He took it calmly enough till he found that she expected him to marry her; or pretended to expect it. Then he flew into a rage, called her a whore, and told her she must leave the house as soon as the child was born. Instead of breaking down, or continuing the scene, she began to croon to herself in Welsh, looking at him sideways with a certain amusement. This frightened him. He forbade her to come near him again, had her things moved into an unused wing of the castle, and engaged another housekeeper.
A child was born, and they came and told my uncle that the woman was going to die; she asked for him continually, they said. As much frightened as distressed, he went through passages long unfamiliar to her room. When the woman saw him, she began to gabble in a preoccupied kind of way, looking at him all the time, as if she were repeating a lesson. Then she stopped, and asked that he should be shown the child.
It was a boy. The midwife, my uncle noticed, handled it with a reluctance almost amounting to disgust.
“That is your heir,” said the dying woman, in a harsh, unstable voice. “I have told him what he is to do. He will be a good son to me, and jealous of his birthright.” And she went off, my uncle said, into a wild yet cogent rigmarole about a curse, embodied in the child, which would fall on any whom he made his heir over the bastard’s head. At last her voice trailed away and she fell back, exhausted and staring.
As my uncle turned to go, the midwife whispered to him to look at the child’s hands. Gently unclasping the podgy, futile little fists, she showed him that on each hand the third finger was longer than the second...
Here I interrupted. The story had a certain queer force behind it, perhaps from its obvious effect on the teller. My uncle feared and hated the things he was saying.
“What did that mean?” I asked; “—the third finger longer than the second?”
“It took me a long time to discover,” replied my uncle. “My own servants, when they saw I did not know, would not tell me. But at last I found out through the doctor, who had it from an old woman in the village. People born with their third finger longer than their second become werewolves. At least” (he made a perfunctory effort at amused indulgence) “that is what the common people here think.”
“And what does that — what is that supposed to mean?” I, too, found myself throwing rather hasty sops to skepticism. I was growing strangely credulous.
“A werewolf,” said my uncle, dabbling in improbability without self-consciousness, “is a human being who becomes, at intervals, to all intents and purposes a wolf. The transformation — or the supposed transformation — takes place at night. The werewolf kills men and animals and is supposed to drink their blood. Its preference is for men. All through the Middle Ages, down to the seventeenth century, there were innumerable cases (especially in France) of men and women being legally tried for offenses which they had committed as animals. Like the witches, they were rarely acquitted, but, unlike the witches, they seem seldom to have been unjustly condemned.” My uncle paused. “I have been reading the old books,” he explained. “I wrote to a man in London who is interested in these things when I heard what was believed about the child.”
“What became of the child?” I asked.
“The wife of one of my keepers took it in,” said my uncle. “She was a stolid woman from the North who, I think, welcomed the opportunity to show what little store she set by the local superstitions. The boy lived with them till he was ten. Then he ran away. I had not heard of him since then till—” my uncle glanced at me almost apologetically — “till yesterday.”
We sat for a moment in silence, looking at the fire. My imagination had betrayed my reason in its full surrender to the story. I had not got it in me to dispel his fears with a parade of sanity. I was a little frightened myself.
“You think it is your son, the werewolf, who is killing the sheep?” I said at length.
“Yes. For a boast: or for a warning: or perhaps out of spite, at a night’s hunting wasted.”
“Wasted?”
My uncle looked at me with troubled eyes.
“His business is not with sheep,” he said uneasily.
For the first time I realized the implications of the Welshwoman’s curse. The hunt was up. The quarry was the heir to Fleer. I was glad to have been disinherited.
“I have told Germaine not to go out after dusk,” said my uncle, coming in pat on my train of thought.
The Belgian was called Germaine; her other name was Vom.
I confess I spent no very tranquil night. My uncle’s story had not wholly worked in me that “suspension of disbelief” which some one speaks of as being the prime requisite of good drama. But I have a powerful imagination. Neither fatigue nor common sense could quite banish the vision of that metamorphosed malignancy ranging, with design, the black and silver silences outside my window. I found myself listening for the sound of loping footfalls on a frost-baked crust of beech-leaves...
Whether it was in my dream that I heard, once, the sound of howling I do not know. But the next morning I saw, as I dressed, a man walking quickly up the drive. He looked like a shepherd. There was a dog at his heels, trotting with a noticeable lack of assurance. At breakfast my uncle told me that another sheep had been killed, almost under the noses of the watchers. His voice shook a little. Solicitude sat oddly on his features as he looked at Germaine. She was eating porridge, as if for a wager.
After breakfast we decided on a campaign. I will not weary you with the details of its launching and its failure. All day we quartered the woods with thirty men, mounted and on foot. Near the scene of the kill our dogs picked up a scent which they followed for two miles and more, only to lose it on the railway line. But the ground was too hard for tracks, and the men said it could only have been a fox or a polecat, so surely and readily did the dogs follow it.