The Watchers Part 27

"Why?"

"He said, 'I am looking, not for the cross, but for a man to nail upon the cross,' and he meant his words, every syllable."

Again we fell to silence, and so crossed the Old Grimsby Harbour and rounded its northern point. The lights of the house were in view at last. They shot out across the darkness in thin lines of light and wavered upon the black water lengthening and shortening with the slight heave of the waves. When they shortened, I wondered whether they beckoned me to the house; when they lengthened out, were they fingers which pointed to us to be gone?

"Since you know so much, Mr. Berkeley," whispered Cullen Mayle, "perhaps you can tell me whether Glen secured the cross."

"No, he failed in that."

"I felt sure he would," said Cullen with a chuckle, and he ran the boat aground, not on the sand before the house but on the bank beneath the garden hedge. We climbed through the hedge; two windows blazed upon the night, and in the room sat Helen Mayle close by the fire, her violin on a table at her side and the bow swinging in her hand. I stepped forward and rapped at the window. She walked across the room and set her face to the pane, shutting out the light from her eyes with her hands. She saw us standing side by side. Instantly she drew down the blinds and came to the door, and over the gra.s.s towards us.

She came first to me with her hand outstretched.

"It is you," she said gently, and the sound of her voice was wonderful in my ears. I had taken her hand before I was well aware what I did.

"Yes," said I.

"You have come back. I never thought you would. But you have come."

"I have brought back Cullen Mayle," said I, as indifferently as I could, and so dropped her hand. She turned to Cullen then.

"Quick," she said. "You must come in."

We went inside the door.

"It is some years since I trod these flags," said Cullen. "Well, I am glad to come home, though it is only as an outcast; and indeed, Helen, I have not the right even to call it home."

It was as cruel a remark as he could well have made, seeing at what pains the girl had been, and still was, to restore that home to him.

That it hurt her I knew very well, for I heard her, in the darkness of the pa.s.sage, draw in her breath through her clenched teeth. Cullen walked along the pa.s.sage and through the hall.

"Lock the door," Helen said to me, and I did lock it. "Now drop the bar."

When that was done we walked together into the hall, where she stopped.

"Look at me," she said, "please!" and I obeyed her.

"You have come back," she repeated. "You do not, then, any longer believe that I deceived you?"

"There is a reason why I have come back," I answered. It was a reason which I could not give to her. I was resolved not to suffer her to lie at the mercy of Cullen Mayle. Fortunately, she did not think to ask me to be particular about the reason. But she beat her hands once or twice together, and--

"You still believe it, then!" she cried. "With these two months to search and catch and hold the truth, you still hold me in the same contempt as when you turned your back on me and walked out through that door?"

"No, no!" I exclaimed. "Contempt! That never entered into any thought I ever had of you. Make sure of that!"

"Yet you believe I tricked you. How can you believe that, and yet spare me your contempt!"

"I am no philosopher. It is the truth I tell you," I answered, simply; and the face of Cullen Mayle appeared at the doorway of the parlour, so that no more was said.

CHAPTER XVIII

MY PERPLEXITIES ARE EXPLAINED

There is no need for me to tell at any length the conversation that pa.s.sed between the three of us that night. Cullen Mayle spoke frankly of his journey to the Sierra Leone River.

"Mr. Berkeley," he said, "already knows so much, that I doubt it would not be of any avail to practise mysteries with him. And besides there is no need, for, if I mistake not, Mr. Berkeley can keep a secret as well as any man."

He spoke very politely, but with a keen eye on me to notice whether I should show any confusion or change colour. But I made as though I attached no significance to his words beyond mere urbanity. He told us how he made his pa.s.sage to the Guinea Coast as a sailor before the mast, and then fell in with George Glen. It seemed prudent to counterfeit a friendly opinion that the cross would be enough for all.

But when they discovered the cross was gone from its hiding place, he took the first occasion to give them the slip.

"For I had no doubt that my father had been beforehand," said he. "Had I possessed more wisdom, I might have known as much when I heard him from my bed refuse his a.s.sistance to George Glen, and so saved myself an arduous and a perilous adventure. For my father, was he never so rich, was not the man to turn his back on the King of Portugal's cross."

Of his father, Cullen spoke with good nature and a certain hint of contempt; and he told us much which he had learned from George Glen.

"He went by the name of Kennedy," said Cullen, "but they called him 'Crackers' for the most part. He was not on the _Royal Fortune_ at the time when Roberts was killed, so that he was never taken prisoner with the rest, nor did he creep out of Cape Corse Castle like George Glen."

"Then he was never tried or condemned," said Helen, who plainly found some relief in that thought.

"No!" answered Cullen, with a chuckle. "But why? He played rob-thief--a good game, but it requires a skilled player. I would never have believed Adam had the skill. Roberts put him in command of a sloop called the _Ranger_, which he had taken in the harbour of Bahia, and when he put out to sea on that course which brought him into conjunction with the _Swallow_, he left the _Ranger_ behind in Whydah Bay. And what does Adam do but haul up his anchor as soon as Roberts was out of sight, and, being well content with his earnings, make sail for Maryland, where the company was disbanded. I would I had known that on the day we quarrelled. Body o' me, but I would have made the old man quiver. Well, Adam came home to England, settled at Bristol, where he married, and would no doubt have remained there till his death, had he not fallen in with one of his old comrades on the quay. That frightened him, so he come across to Tresco, thinking to be safe. And safe he was for twenty years, until George Glen nosed him out."

Thereupon, Cullen, from relating his adventures, turned to questions asking for word of this man and that whom he had known before he went away. These questions of course he put to Helen, and not once did he let slip a single allusion to the meeting he had had with her in the shed on Castle Down. For that silence on his part I was well prepared; the man was versed in secrecy. But Helen showed a readiness no whit inferior; she never hesitated, never caught a word back. They spoke together as though the last occasion when they had met was the night, now four years and a half ago, when Adam Mayle stood at the head of the stairs and drove his son from the house. One thing in particular I learned from her, the negro had died a month ago.

It was my turn when the gossip of the islands had been exhausted, and I had to tell over again of my capture by Glen and the manner of my escape. I omitted, however, all mention of an earlier visitant to the Abbey burial grounds, and it was to this omission that I owed a confirmation of my conviction that Cullen Mayle was the visitant. For when I came to relate how George Glen and his band sailed away towards France without the cross, he said:

"If I could find that cross, I might perhaps think I had some right to it. It is yours, Helen, to be sure, by law, and----"

She interrupted him, as she was sure to do, with a statement that the cross and everything else was for him to dispose of as he thought fit.

But he was magnanimous to a degree.

"The cross, Helen, nothing but the cross, if I can find it. I have a thought which may help me to it. 'Three chains east of the east window in south aisle of St. Helen's Church.' Those were the words, I think."

"Yes," said I.

"And Glen measured the distance correctly?"

"To an inch."

"Well, what if--it is a mere guess, but a likely one, I presume to think,--what if the chains were Cornish chains? There would be a difference of a good many feet, a difference of which George Glen would be unaware. You see I trust you, Mr. Berkeley. I fancy that I can find that cross upon St. Helen's Island."

"I have no doubt you will," said I.

Cullen rose from his chair.

"It grows late, Helen," said he, "and I have kept you from your sleep with my gossiping." He turned to me. "But, Mr. Berkeley, you perhaps will join me in a pipe and a gla.s.s of rum? My father had a good store of rum, which in those days I despised, but I have learnt the taste for it."

His proposal suited very well with my determination to keep a watch that night over Helen's safety, and I readily agreed.

"You will sleep in your old room, Cullen," she said, "and you, Mr.