Part 15

Constans returned to Croye and to Messer Hugolin's attic neither overmuch surprised nor discouraged by the results of his mission. After all, his ultimate object was a personal one--his revenge--and only his own hand could discharge that debt in full. Did the time seem over-long, the way unendurably lonely and toilsome? He had only to close his eyes to remember--to remember. And so the years had passed.

* * * * *

It was the noon spell on a day in late October, and Constans sat on the river end of the long wooden pier at the tanyard eating his luncheon of bread and bacon scraps. The tide was running up slowly, as could be noted from the bubbles and drift-wood that circled past the piling of the wharf, and Constans, happening to glance down into the swirl, saw something that brought him to his feet. Nothing more remarkable than a bottle of thick, greenish glass, but bottles of any kind had become valuable now that the art of glass blowing was so little practised, and such flotsam was not to be despised.

Having strung a length of noosed cord to a light pole, Constans threw himself flat along the string-piece of the pier and began angling for the prize. A failure or two and then he had it snared securely; now it was in his hand.

The bottle was foul with slime and fungous growth, showing that it had been in the water for a long period. Possibly it had been out to sea and back many times before this particular flood-tide had brought it to Messer Hugolin's tannery and under the eyes of one who would have the wit to distinguish it from a rotten stick. At all events it had found a port at last.

The bottle had been corked and then sealed with pitch, and Constans had to use some care in getting at its contents, a slender cylinder of tightly rolled paper. Finally he succeeded in drawing it out uninjured, and saw that it was superscribed to his uncle Hugolin.

The old man looked up with a frown as Constans presented himself at the door of the counting-room. The rest hour was over and Constans's place was at the tan-pit. How was the work to get done if everybody shirked their part of the common task? A message in a bottle. What foolery was this? Nevertheless, Messer Hugolin extended his hand to receive the roll, and, removing the waxed string that bound it, knit his brows over the enclosure--half a dozen sheets of writing. Constans was about to retire discreetly, but Messer Hugolin raised his hand.

"The writing is too fine for my eyes," he grumbled. "Read it for me, nephew; but, harkee! you will keep your mouth shut whatever its import." Then, in a sudden gust of passion: "A thousand plagues on that fool of an up-river factor who broke for me my reading-glass! Not another one to be had in Croye for good-will or gold, and I compelled to borrow another's eyes, to live at the mercy of my meanest clerk. Come, boy, you must have the sense of it by this time!"

"Shall I read it aloud?" asked Constans, and then, in compliance with his uncle's nod, he began:

"'Dated at Doom, in the year 90 after the Great Change.

"'It is a score of years my brother, since that moonless August night when the Doomsmen came to Croye and I went back with them, tied to Mad Scarlett's saddle-bow. Twenty years of silence in the City of Silence, and I but a slim, brown-faced maid who might be found one day playing at polo and lamenting her lack of mustachios, and on the very next, mooning over a love charm. It was only through the look in my cousin Philip's eyes, as he died under the weight of the Doomsmen battle-axes, that I knew myself a woman, that I finally entered upon my sex's heritage of sorrow.

"'Does this seem an old and hardly remembered tale to you, Anthony Hugolin, Councillor Primus of Croye, and a rich man, if one may judge from the yearly tax rate that stands opposite your name in Dom Gillian's head list? Withal, you are still my brother, and you must listen to what I have now to say, the first and the last word from me to you.

"'I must be just and acknowledge that he truly loved me, the man who plucked me like an apple from the bough; later on he made what amends he could by proclaiming me his wife under the Doomsman law. Yet it was a tiger-cat rather than a woman whom he had taken to his bosom, and I wonder now that I did not a thousand times overpass the limits of his forbearance. Assuredly, in that first agony, I tried my hardest to stretch his patience to the breaking-point, in the hope that a knife-thrust might open for me the doors of the prison-house. You see, I was very young, and I could not forget my cousin Philip's eyes.

"'A woman's heart is like a cup; it holds but one fixed quantity of life's essential liquor, be the latter sweet or bitter. An infinity of little sips or one deep draught, what does it matter? The vessel is empty in either case. Yet, as time went on, I grew to endure existence; afterwards, when my Esmay was born, I valued it again for her sake. Moreover, she was his daughter as well as mine, and so I came finally to endure and even to welcome the touch of my master's hand. In all these years it had never been aught but gentle, for all that they called him Mad Scarlett, and the children were taught to believe that he always wore gloves, because he had a bloody palm whose stain no water would wash away. Yes, and I wept, as any wife and mother might do, on that gray November day when I knelt beside his bier.

"'But this concerns only myself, and it is of Esmay, my daughter, that I would speak. In a year she will be seventeen, and before that time, if at all, the way must be opened for her to go to her mother's people. I am helpless, except for this one opportunity of committing a message to the hands of Chance, one slender line dropped into the ocean of uncertainty. Yet nothing remains to me but to make the cast, for in six months' time I shall be dead; I can count the downward steps of my disease as clearly as though they formed part of the actual stairway under my feet.

"'And this also I know--that the message will reach you, my brother; so far, at least, my eyes are permitted to explore the advancing darkness. You will assuredly receive this letter, but with what disposition of heart? That, alas! I may not know. Nor can I give aught of service in either counsel or means; I must trust to your love and good-will for everything. I can only say that the girl is known to all in Doom as Mad Scarlett's daughter. She has her father's tawny hair and red-brown eyes, and her name, as I have already told you, is Esmay.

"'To-morrow night I shall make my opportunity to reach the river edge unobserved. I shall then commit to the current the bottle containing this message, a precious freight, for it is my darling's life and happiness.

"'To you, my brother, the gift and the grace of God, according as you deal with me and mine. ELENA.

* * * * *

"'Watch him whom they call Quinton Edge.'"

"The date is a year ago, lacking a month," added Constans, as he handed the roll to his uncle.

Messer Hugolin tied up the document with a piece of tape, labelled it with the date of receipt, and laid it away in a pigeon-hole.

"Well?" said Constans, interrogatively.

"Do you want me to put myself within reach of the Gray Wolf's paws?" retorted Messer Hugolin, shrewdly. "I was flayed badly enough the last time the Black Swan cast anchor before Croye, and I am not paying between rent-days."

"The year is almost up," urged Constans, insistently.

"I have lived my life," returned the old man, with sombre fixity of resolve, "and these things do not interest me. I have other use for my hands than to keep them stretched out idly in the dark."

"But that letter--a mother pleading for her child. You have but to give the word--there are men who will go, and gladly."

"I doubt it not, for there are always drones a-plenty around a beehive. But why should I spend my good, red gold to make a beggar's holiday?"