Doctor Syn sat in one of the Spanish seats staring vacantly before him.
He sat rigidly, high tightly griped fits pressed hard upon his knees.
All youth had gone from his face, and his cheeks were a ghastly pallor.
His lips were drawn apart in a hideous grin, showing clenched teeth
biting hard. But what horrified his friends most was to perceive a vivid
white lock that had appeared miraculously in his long raven hair, and,
adding to their terror, they both heard a continual deep moaning that
steadily arose from his throat.
“In heaven’s name wha t ails you, man?” cried Tony when he could find
his voice.
The Doctor’s unseeing eyes did not flicker, but the moaning increased
until it shaped these words, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken
away.” Without warning the stricken man’s finer twitche d convulsively,
and a crumpled piece of paper fell upon the Spanish paving-stones.
Slowly he got to his feet with all the action of an old paralyzed man,
and raising his arms to the sky, he shook his clawing fingers at what he
seemed to see there. He the n completed his text with the most damnable
alteration, as he cried in a loud voice, full of venom, “Cursed be the
name of the Lord,”
“Is Imogene dead?” whispered Tony.
“Had it been only that,” he moaned, “you would not have found me here
so stricken. I have received a letter straight from Hell. If you have
courage, read it.”
Standing erect, and as tense as a soldier about to be shot, he
pointed to the letter, without looking at it. Terrified, Tony’s wife
bent down, picked it up and gave it all crumbled to her husband, who
mechanically smoothed it out, and without knowing what he did, read it
aloud in a low, scared voice.
“I cannot ask forgiveness for myself, but just for my mistake. Why
did I not guess that I loved Nicholas? He lives in the s un I worship,
while you, with all your goodness, float in mists—cold mists. With an
aching heart for you and for myself, I must obey the orders of what is
stronger than myself. From you I have gone to follow my destiny. You
will never find us. I implore you not to seek. When you read this we
shall be far way. We are already fleeing from cold England, and from now
the seas will ever roll between us.
- 59 -
All blame is mine, not yours. I do not matter. I have damned myself.
But I cannot be true to the blackness of your cloth. I could not face a
life in Dymchurch mists. The sun has drawn me to him. But that you will
serve the solemn God whom you are sworn to serve is the dearest wish of
one that was your wife, called Imogene.”
Tony crumpled the letter once more as Syn had done, and in a voice
choking with tears of rage hissed out, “That spawn of Satan! We’ll spit
him with good steel like his uncle. This is my quarrel, Christopher.
God’s curses on them both.”
“No, Tony man, I love her! cried Syn. “I have blasphemed God, but you
are my friend.” Clasping his hands though in prayer, he hid his face in
the folds of Tony’s cravat and prayed aloud not to his God, but to his
friend. “O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I
go hence, and be no more seen.”
Following this despairing cry with sobs that shook him to the soul,
Nature, or the God whom he had cursed, knowing he could stand no more,
touched him with gentle fingers, and snapped all further reason from his
brain, so that he collapsed in dead weight against the body of his
friend. To Tony, too, Nature or God was kind, and lent him such
strength as he had never yet possessed. He lifted the unconscious body
of the parson, as easily, as tenderly as he would no doubt carry his own
children in the time to come.
Fate, like a dramatist, panders to Effect, but has advantage of the
Stage in that many scenes of varying emotions can be played in different
places all at once. As Tony laid his friend upon his bed, the
treacherous Nicholas was lovingly lifting Imogene over the bulwarks of
his ship in London River. And long before the stricken husband woke to
face his dismal future, the sails were filled with the winds that were
to carry the guilty pair to Spain. As though to hide her shame from the
faces of the crew, Imogene took refuge in the cabin. Sure of her now,
and knowing that she could not change her mind, Nicholas left her there.
Up in the Round-house with the sailing-master he drank deep. Towards
evening he had to be carried down to the cabin in a drunken stupor.
Disgusted at his condition, and disappointed in herself, Imogene went up
on deck.
As the ship swept on through the Strait of Dover, a brisk wind filled
the towering canvas, and the full moon showed every detail of the coast.
Seeing the girl standing there so long alone, the sailing-master pitied
her, and thinking she might take cold, procured a sea-cloak and gently
wrapped it round her.
“We shall be altering our tack shortly,” he said, “and swinging out
into the fairway, so you must take your last glimpse of England, lady.
We stand out into deep water to avoid the dangers of Dungeness. We have
at least a friendly moon. I never saw the coast so clear. Do you see
that stretch of beach inside the Bay?”
She nodded.
“And behind it,” he went on, “that long, straight line of bank? Can
you see two separate figures? No, there are three. A man, and a woman
together, and, a little removed, another man? Look through my spyglass, and you would think that you could speak to them.”
He adjusted the lens for her, till she said it was clear. “What part
of England are we looking at?” she asked.
“They call that long bank Dymchurch Wall,” he said.
- 60 -
He heard her gasp, for she had recognized the lonely figure there.
Indeed, some half an hour before, Tony and his wife had seen Doctor Syn
pass through the Hall door out into the night, and fearing his dangerous
mood might counsel him to desperate ends, they followed at a distance,
respecting his solitude, yet fearing its results. He reached the seawall first, and stood there watching the white canvas of the full-rigged
ship. They did not speak as they approached, but he somehow knew that
they were there, for slowly he raised his right arm and with his
forefinger pointed to the vessel. Then did the same unspoken sentence
echo in their brains, “It is the ship.”
Ringed in the powerful glass, which brought the spectral figure of
her husband close to her, Imogene saw the accusing finger-point. With a
strangled cry of anguish, she fell swooning to the deck. The helm swung
round upon the altered course. The ship’s bell changed, and the singsong voice of the heaving leadsman on the bowsprit’s tackle echoed out,
“All’s Well.” And at the sound the black-robed figure of the parson
seemed to grow to an unnatural height, as with his head jerked of a
sudden back against the sky, he shrieked out hellish peals of wild,
demoniacal laughter. It gave the life to the “All’s Well”, and reached
the Gates of Heaven with the news that devils still inhabited with the
earth.
Chapter 9
The Dead Man
That night Doctor Syn sat in with the Court-House dining-room and
drank.
Fearful for his reason, Tony sat with him, faithfully watching, and
sensibly arguing. With the trend of his argument was this.
“You are young. Forget all this. You will in time. Stick to your