The strange story of Hester Wynne, told by herself

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER page

Prologue .... . . . i

I. — The beginning of the dread .... 8

Prologue

After a showery day the summer evening was both fair and still. Only a little languid breeze crept gently across the few bare fields and the moorland plain that lay around Granbigh Hold. Wide the plain was, but high, high up above the sea on the one hand, and the inland country on the other ; ending abruptly, where it met the beat of the waves, in rocky, storm-beaten cliffs; shelving gradually towards the valley, whefe trees clustered about the homesteads and the heather gave way to corn. The sky was of the pale sweet blue that follows rain, and the clouds held the rare, rich colours that are the evening prophecy of rain to come : the sun came in a long slant right across the moor, holding in its warm embrace the budding heather, the cold gray walls that shut in Granbigh Hold, the green of the shorn grass fields; and fell upon the upper windows of the house, wide, small-paned and low, making them to gleam and glisten in their setting of hard stone. It was said the Hold had been a fort once, and the thick walls that hedged it in gave credit to the saying. Strong and high they rose, straight up out of the heather, broken only by a

I

THE STRANGE STORY OF HESTER WYNNE.

postern gate of thick, long-seasoned wood ; and the rare passers-by, seeing them from the distant road, said that the house must be a desolate place. But the desolation was all outside the walls, not within them. The gate opened on to a square of grass, green, smooth and trim, and all around it, hemmed in by a narrow flagged path, was a blaze of colour. Flowers grew in the wide border, with all the generous luxuriance that they give in payment for toil and care ; the beauty of them, coming from the wildness without, made the straight-lined garden seem like a magic space stolen from Paradise ; the fragrance of them filled the air. Close up to the gray walls they grew, finding no enemy, but a shelter, in the hard stone ; and close under the ’ windows of the house, making a gaiety that was silent indeed, but real and sweet.

This evening the silence was broken ; not by any outside sound, for the garden was empty, and the dash of the waves against the rocks, that in stormy weather came with a boom right across the moor, was hushed to a murmur, powerless to travel so far ; but by sounds that came from within the house, and out through an open window into the still beauty of the evening. The sounds, whether by contrast or essentially, had something of horror in them : human they were, yet with the animal note which breaks through human utterance when the thing uttered is the spontaneous, uncontrolled expression of intense emotion or acute physical pain.

Inside, in the room whence they came, the dusk was gathering, though a shaft of light, entering through the window, fell slantwise across the floor. There were five people in the room ; a woman, three men, and, in the far corner where the sunlight

PROLOGUE.

reached, a little child. One of the men was lying on a narrow wooden bed that faced the window, and it was from him the sounds came ; moans of fear and suffering, cries that were half articulate, words blasphemous and obscene, unimaginable, unutterable, save through the medium of a diseased brain. James Brabrook was dying of drink, and the drink madness was upon him, making the bed on which he lay, the room which prisoned him, the whole world, into a horror of crawling, loathsome life. The two men who tended him, his coachman and his gardener, stood, one on either side of the bed, watchful and ready, waiting for the paroxysms which impelled him to escape, somehow, anyhow, from the terror that pursued him. And all the time his wife stood by his pillow and ministered to him as best she might, and witnessed his degradation, and listened to the words he said ; and all the time, his little son stood silent and shrinking in the sunlit corner, afraid of that struggling figure on the bed, afraid of the strange, unusual atmosphere about him, afraid to move from the spot where his mother had placed him half-an-hour ago. After a while she turned and looked at him, and as his eyes met hers, the whip dropped from the little sun-browned hand that clasped it, and the child made a step forward.

Fm frightened,” he said.

The woman gave him a strange look, half compassionate, half stern.

“ I meant you to be frightened,” she answered.

She turned to the bed again, but presently she looked round once more and held out her hand.

'' Come here ! ” she commanded.

The child hesitated: fear and protection lay in the same direction, and the sense of one was as strong as the desire after the other : but the habit of obedience was stronger than either, and he advanced slowly. His mother drew him close up to the bedside.

“ Look ! ” she said.

The child tried to shrink away, but her hand was firm upon his shoulder.

“ Do you remember,” she went on, “ how your father played with you on your birthday ? how gentle and merry he was ? how kind his face looked ? That is the same face ; that man lying there is the same father who carried you in his arms ; but all changed ” — her even voice took on an inflection of struggling, suppressed emotion — “ all changed.” She turned her eyes from the bed to the boy’s face. “ It’s drink does that,” she said slowly. “ Remember always, it’s drink does that. Now go back into your corner.”

As the words left her lips, the man gave a violent leap that carried him half out of the bed, and his voice rang out in terror.

His struggles broke the bonds that held him down, and with a bound he was across the room and half out of the window, overlooking the cool green peace of the garden and the wild beauty of the moorland beyond. But the world as it was did not exist for James Brabrook ; he was in a hell of his own making, and he struggled after an impossible salvation — escape from himself. His wife’s lips tightened, as, for a moment, it seemed as though his strength would outweigh the strength of his guardians : she showed no other sign of emotion. Her small, strong hands helped the men to drag him back to the bed and fasten him down to it; and she did not flinch from her post at his side when his impotent agony found vent in a torrent of impurities. Only her face

PROLOGUE.

grew a shade paler as his voice rang out through the room ; for, though she did not know the actual significance of the words he uttered, the intuitive recognition of evil which seems to be common to all mankind, creating an antagonism of pain in a pure nature, a sense of dim, attractive fellowship in a corrupt one, revealed to her their essential quality. And to Elizabeth Brabrook evil, in its grosser forms, was especially abhorrent; the sins of the flesh came not within the sphere of her sympathy; vice was to her a weakness as well as a degradation, and she despised it as much on the first account as on the second. Her face showed her to be a woman to whom virtue, in the commonly accepted sense of the term, was easy : not that it lacked beauty, for the face, with its straight, delicately cut features, was a beautiful face ; but in that it denoted a nature, balanced, passionless, strong with the strength of innate purity ; a purity, not that of gold which has passed through fire, but of a precious stone shining beyond the reach of flames. Temptation, that is to say, the combination of outward opportunity with inward desire, did not exist for her in its commoner forms, for the tendencies of her nature were all towards a rigid puritanism both of thought and conduct, and the subjection of will to sense roused in her only contempt. Yet towards her husband, outwardly at least, she had never failed. Her creed taught her that she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, that a woman should stand by the man she married, that a wife should be in subjection to her husband ; and through all the misery of her married life it had never occurred to her that she should leave him, should cease to bear with him, should relax her efforts to wean him from his evil ways. Now, as she stood by his bedside, the love of the woman for the man she had married quite dead within her, the sense of the duty of a wife towards her husband’never faltered ; and stronger than any feeling of duty, horror, disgust, was the desire to save a perishing soul.

The paroxysm of frenzy was over now, and the man lay quiet, breathing heavily. Elizabeth Brabrook went down on her knees by the bedside and prayed in a low steady voice. “ O Lord,” she prayed, ” Who gavest the blood of Thy Son to cleanse the wickedness of men, pour that holy tide into the heart of the sinner — ” She paused and turned her head towards the boy, who stood with frightened eyes and drooping mouth still in his corner.

“ Come here ! ” she said, “ come and pray with me for your father’s soul.” The child came, shrinking but obedient. “ Say the words after me,” she said, and began again the prayer she had paused in.

“ blood of Thy Son,” the child faltered after

her, “ holy tide into the heart of the sinner whom

destruction awaiteth if Thy grace ”

The two men in attendance had drawn back from the bed, and when the prayer began a second time they too knelt down. The sunshine had died out of the room now, and the stillness of the twilight had come : there was no sound save the low even voice and the heavy laboured breathing. Then the breathing stopped. Elizabeth Brabrook finished her prayer and rose to her feet. She looked at her husband’s face and turned to the man nearest to her.

“ He’s quite quiet now,” she said, with a little catch in her breath.

The man returned her gaze in silence, and in a sheepish way raised his hand to his forelock ; but his eyes answered her.

PROLOGUE.

“ No, no,’’ she said quickly, “ he isn’t dead.” Then her lips, that had trembled, grew firm and straight again. “ Leave me,” she said. “ and take the child.”

When she was left alone she stood quite still. The time for prayer had gone by ; “ as the tree falls, so shall it lie,” was her belief ; and no question of the justice of God stirred in her any thought or sense of rebellion. She stood by the bed and wondered how it was that, when the man’s soul had gone to hell, his dead face should look so calm.

Chapter I. The Beginning Of The Dread

I REMEMBER SO Well the evening it all began, all the strange happenings which shadowed the earlier part of my life and made the days sometimes terrible, often unreal, almost always difficult and strange. We were driving home from paying a distant call, Mrs. Sullivan and I. It was late as regarded the length of the day, for the twilight was nearly gone, and the chief light came from the moon ; but the evening was young by the clock, since the hour was not yet seven, and one felt, somehow, though the road was lonely and we met few passengers on our way, that the world of men was still astir. The sea was still, and the great hills rose about the bay, calm and majestic as though they had a right to aspire to the sky ; and one felt, though of course one could not see, the vast stretches of moorland bog lying beyond them ; and the pathetic solitude of Ireland’s waste spaces crept forth from the Connemara wilds and held the highway with its silence. For it was in Ireland that I was driving that night; in Ireland, the fairyland of my girlhood’s days, my world’s Eden, of which this country lying about Sunset Bay seemed to me the very garden. Desolate I have many a time heard it called ; but I loved the loneliness of it, which to me was never 8

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAD.

lonely ; I loved the blending colours on the bogland, I loved the peaty smell of the air, I loved the wild, rough winds that came straight from the Atlantic waves ; and I loved the kind and merry hearts that made it home to me.

It was not really my home ; my real — no, real is not the right word ; ostensible is the fitting term to use — my ostensible home was with Mrs. Pimpernel in London. But Mrs. Sullivan had been a friend of my father’s, and all through my childhood’s and girlhood’s days she had opened to me the circle of her happiness whenever Mrs. Pimpernel would let me come and enter it. It was not very often ; my periods of freedom were as rare as they were happy; for Mrs. Pimpernel did not approve of my Irish visits, and it took all Mrs. Sullivan’s powers of persuasion to open my London cage. Mrs. Pimpernel was my guardian, the friend of my mother’s youth, and left by her with absolute control — as I thought thenover my fate. I often used to wonder when I looked at my mother’s picture what the bond between them had been; for my mother’s face, judging from the portrait of it — I have no recollection of the reality — must have been infinitely sweet. Plaintive somewhat, it looked, and with such gentle eyes, and hair that was very fair and soft; while Mrs. Pimpernel was sallow and stern and stout, a type of woman intensely antipathetic to me; though whether my antipathy to the type was born of my dislike of Mrs. Pimpernel, or my dislike of Mrs. Pimpernel sprang from innate intuitive antipathy, I cannot honestly say. Anyhow I liked her no more than she liked me. And she never liked me; I knew it and felt it with a child’s sure instinct the day I went into her house ; and though with her religion and her self-suppreslO THE STRANGE STORY OF HESTER WYNNE.

sion and her strong will she forced herself to do what she felt to be her duty by me, the dislike was always there, and the day was to come when it would blaze out into hatred.

But this is not the place in which to speak of Mrs. Pimpernel, and indeed I was not thinking of her at all as we drove through the chill mistiness of the October evening. The moon was up, as I have said, a little blurred by the thickening atmosphere, but the moon was the only light ; thin clouds lay over the heavens, and the stars were not strong enough to pierce their folds. As we drove, the silence and the gathering mist, which had held at first nothing but pleasant mystery, began to seem to me a little weird. Mrs. Sullivan was on the other side of the car, and I broke the stillness by a remark to the coachman, seated between us on the well.

“ A fine night, Pat,” I said ; “ but there are no stars.”

“ No, miss,” he answered me. “ Shure the curtains are drawn over the windows of heaven to-night.”

The remark, characteristic of the Irish fancy which gives colour to the speech of her peasants, pleased me, for I was full of fancies myself in those days, and I sat silent again, musing upon it as we drove along. We sped down what I used to call the first hill, and then down the second, and now we touched the bay again, driving, for a quarter of a mile or so, close beside it. A low wall held the sea from the road ; the tide was in, and I could hear the gentle lapping of it through the rumble of the wheels and the clop of the horse’s hoofs. Suddenly the calm of the scene and the hush of the atmosphere became tense ; some strange thrill passed either through me

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAD.

II or my surroundings, or perhaps through both ; and all at once I was excited instead of dreamy, and my musing passed into watchfulness. For what? I could not in the very least tell, but all my life I have been subject to presentiments, and in that moment a wave of apprehension washed over me, and dying down again, yet left upon me a faint spray of fear. I remember noticing just then, with the sort of double consciousness which gives one at the same time cognisance of the outer and inner worlds, how the moonlight caught the water, making a path of troubled light, and noticing too that between me and the path, for one moment, a barrier arose, hiding the brightness. A man it was, walking in the same direction as that in which we were moving. I don’t know how, but somehow, without looking at him, without consciously observing or considering him, I seemed in some strange way to know he was not a native of the place. Soon after, the road wound to the left, away from the water, and turning for a last look of the sea, I caught again, plodding steadily on, a dark blot in the gray, the figure of the wayfarer.

We were alongside the walls of the Sullivan land now, and soon came the sharp swing round the corner where, as a child, when I first learned to sit on an outside car, I had to cling to the seat to prevent myself being jerked off ; and then we were through the gates and up the climbing drive, and the lights of Shivdallagh were twinkling us a welcome.

Inside the hall all was brightness, and the boys (there were three of them at home, the fourth — or the first, rather, for he was the eldest — being far away in America at the time of which I write) came trooping out of the billiard-room to give us a welcome. They had been out spearing eels, and were lounging now, as their habit was, examining guns and fingering revolvers, till the moment when it was no longer possible to put off dressing for dinner. From seventeen to twenty their ages ran, and I, who was twenty-two at that time, and had known them for ten years back, had a sense of comradeship with them which made not a small part of the delights of Shivdallagh. Shivdallagh — or Shibthallagh, as the people about the place called it — is the Irish for beetle, and the house took its name from an island near at hand in the bay, which was supposed to be like a beetle in form.

“ Are ye tired, ma’am ? ” asked Horace, taking , my cloak. They often called me ma’am, the boys ; why I don’t know. It was one of their forms of speech, which were various, and peculiar to themselves, and were given forth with the strongest Irish accent, though they could speak — and did, when on their good behaviour — as pure English as the veriest Sassenach.

“ I am not,” I answered, with the Irish avoidance of the direct no and yes which always became natural to me after I had been two days in Ireland. Did you have good spearing ? ”

“ Ay, we did, we slew them — the robbers ! ”

“ It was grand ! ” said Dick, the youngest.

Only my shins are in splinters with the rocks.”

“ And it’s myself that’s in the same state, begorra,” said Ned, the sailor, home from his ship, and still girt about with the glamour of recent absence.

All for the good of health,” said Horace. It was one of his favourite phrases, and was used frequently and indiscriminately in the course of his conversation.

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAD.

“ You’ll go up in good time to get ready for dinner, won’t you, boys? ” said Mrs. Sullivan, beginning to mount the stairs.

“We will. Old One, we will,” came the answer in a chorus. Old One was their name for their mother, chosen, I suppose, because she was not old at all, nor in any sense ; and then they strolled back to the billiard-room, Horace’s turned up trousers showing spaces of bare legs above his socks. I went up to my room, and by-and-by, within a quarter of an hour of dinner-time, I heard a rush upon the staircase, and a scuffling along passages, and fragments of conversation : “ Let go now, I say ! ” “ Bedad, but

I’ll ” “Would ye now?” and then I knew that

it was all right and that the boys were dressing for dinner.

After dinner we all went into the billiard-room. Ned and the madman, as Horace was generally called, began a game of billiards, and the rest of us sat round the peat fire and talked or were silent as the mood took us ; not that silence ever lasted for more than half a minute when the boys were all together, but, just because their voices were never still, there was no need to talk unless one felt inclined to. There was a fire in the evening nearly all the year round at Shivdallagh, and it was always of peat, and it always blazed with a brilliantly persistent glow which seemed to me then, and seems to me now as I look back to it across the years, more intense and more cheerful than any sent forth by coal. A peat fire is often sulky at the start; you need to understand it — as indeed you need to understand all things Irish, let alone the people, before you can begin to deal with them — but if you do, and if you will coax it a bit, I know no fuel that throws out to you, in such ungrudging and generous wise, the very best, the very essence of itself. The pictures one sees in fires are clearer, I think, in fires of peat; perhaps the romance of the mighty forests of past days still quivers in its fibres and leaps forth again, as the fire touches it, to a momentary life. Anyhow those Irish fires were apt to set me dreaming, and I dreamed that evening, I know, while the voices of the boys and their merriment fell upon and filled my outer ears. “ All the way, all the way,” I heard the madman say coaxingly to a ball of slackening speed. ‘‘ Ah, ye robber ! ” as the ball stopped. “ Boys a boys, what a stroke that would have been ! ” “ He’s got the

spikey hump,” observed Ned, who, fresh from cruising, employed sometimes a more cosmopolitan slang than that which was peculiar to Shivdallagh. “ Isn’t that watty now ? ” Horace said presently, as the ball fell gently into the left-hand centre pocket. ‘‘ Ye’re a schamer ” (schemer), observed Dick from his arm-chair. “ It was the cannon ye were after.” “ Cannon be blowed ! ” rejoined Horace with a show of indignation, and then, having made a horrible grimace, he reverted to his ordinary happy-go-lucky tone. “ All for the good of trade,” he said. And even as I listened and laughed, still I dreamed, my fancy growing vivid in the fire. I dreamed of course of what my life was to bring to me, for the woman’s curiosity as to the future was strong in me, and I longed for the pages of my destiny to unfold. Lovers of course were in my dreams, and scenes of heroism and endurance ; and there was to be one lover before and beyond the rest, and for him I was to do great deeds, to save him — I did not know from what. Somehow I could think of nothing more reckless or heroic just then than the defying of Mrs. Pimpernel, and

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAD.

that hardly seemed grand enough, though to be sure

“Well, his legs are thick enough,"’ Dick’s voice broke in upon my musing.

Sure he s taken out his brains and strapped them on to his calves,” said Ned.

“ For the good of health,” put in Horace.

“ Boys, boys, what rubbish you talk ! ” cried Mrs. Sullivan.

“ And would ye have us wise before our time. Old One ? Sure it’s good sinse to be foolish.”

“ I’m going round to see the little mare,” Ned announced. “ Will ye come. Madman ? ”

“ I will.”

“ I’ll stay with the Old One,” said Dick.

“ May I come ? ” I asked.

“ Good, my rattler. Come along ! ” was the form in which my request was granted.

“ Put on a cloak, Hester,” Mrs. Sullivan called after me.

“ I will,” I returned ; and then presently we had crossed the large hall, and the small one leading to the side entry, and were out in the moonlight. The little mare was a young thing which Ned had bought at a ridiculously low price at a fair. He had a good eye for a horse, and she was well bred and gentle, and he had recently begun to break her in. We paid our visit to the stable, and saw that she was all right after the gallop he had given her; and then we strolled round to the west side of the house, the side which looked towards Croagh Patrick and the sea, and close to which was the fairy fort. The moonlight turned the mist to silver, and there was a strange still charm about the night that worked upon us all, I think, and made us linger ere we went indoors again.

l6 the STRAI^GE story of HESTER WYNNE.

Let us go into the fort/’ I said, “ and see if the fairies are about.”

The fort, a raised mound, surrounded by a thick hedge and shaded by trees, was almost in shadow ; only, through one of the openings cut here and there in the hedge, the moonlight found its way, making a path across the darkness. Somehow the lighted space brought back to me the moonlit pathway on the water I had seen on the drive home : and, curiously, with the recalling of that picture, came again the sense of apprehension which had arisen with the actual vision. Again came the feeling of alertness, of watchfulness, and again I asked myself, for what. There could hardly have been a more peaceful night, so still it was and soundless; soundless at least till

“ Boys,” I said, breaking the charm which had held us in a rare silence, “ why do the dogs bark ? ”

“ For pure divilry,” answered Horace.

No,” said Ned, “ they’re watty. There must be somebody about.”

We waited, listening. There was no sound or movement in the autumn night ; only — in me, at least — a growing sense of some unseen presence, and the persistent barking of the dogs. Then — was it just the crackling of a twig? and did the shadows move? or — I grasped Ned’s hand with a quick catching of the breath, and pointed. Outside the fort a shadow fell upon the moonlight on the lawn, and it seemed to me that for a moment, in the mass of bushes bordering the grass, there was a movement.

“ What is it? ” Ned asked.

“There’s somebody,” I answered in a whisper, “ there,” and again I pointed.

“ Bedad, if there is I’ll have a crack at him,” said

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAD.

the madman, and in an instant he was knocking at the billiard-room windows, and in hardly more than a minute’s space, as it seemed to me, he was back again, a revolver in his hand, while Dick followed close behind, carrying the carbine. Ned went forward to meet him, and I, standing for a moment alone, became conscious of a rustling and of a stealthy footfall which crunched the gravel near at hand.

“ Boys, boys ! ” I cried ; and “ Boys, what is it? ” called Mrs. Sullivan from the window.

The answer was a yell from three strong throats, as, breaking from the shadow of the shrubs, out into the misty moonlight, dodging in and out amongst the bushes, followed by the five bullets of Horace’s revolver and the report of Dick’s carbine, leaping, stooping, racing for dear life, sped the figure of a man.

Chapter II. Things Which I Did Not Tell

Nothing more of moment happened on that evening. The wicket gate in the wall at the bottom of the garden was open, and beyond lay the fields drenched in dew and curtained by the mist. Hither and thither went the boys, the hunter’s and the fighter’s instincts in them aroused and keen ; and close by the house I stood and watched and waited ; trembling, excited, afraid, and yet with some strange feeling that was partly curiosity and partly defiance of my own fear, giving me a sort of courage. Mrs. Sullivan had gone indoors to comfort and soothe the child upstairs, the only daughter of the house, who had been waked by the noise of the shooting; and so I was alone. I had got my own little revolver from the gun cupboard and loaded the five barrels of it. I was used to shooting at a target with the boys, and I remember, as I stood there, wondering if I could hit the man should the chance come to me. The man I called him, for in my mind he had a distinct personality: he was the cause of the curious feeling which had come upon me during the drive that evening; he was one with the figure we had passed on the road ; he was in some way concerned with my affairs ; his purpose in coming to the west, in venturing to approach the house, had to do with me. That it was an evil purpose I never doubted;