King of the Castle

Never wake up again."

He started up and looked sharply round, trembling violently; and then wiped his forehead with his hand.

"This will not do!" he muttered. "I mustn't show the white feather.

I've got nothing to fear. Nothing at all. Why should I have? It was an accident; I didn't mean it. No: wouldn't hurt a hair of the old man's head--no, not a hair. Yes: it was an accident."

He drew up his head and picked up the cigar he had thrown down, re-lit it, and after a puff or two, threw it down once more.

"Wretched tras.h.!.+" he muttered, taking out his case and fiercely biting the end off another. One of Gellow's best. "Ah," he cried, as he brought down his fist upon the table heavily. "Only let me once get clear of that man! And I might have done it so easily," he continued, as he lit the cigar, "so very easily, and been free of that cursed incubus for a time."

He let his cigar go out again, and his head sank upon his hands as he stared in a maundering way at the cabin door.

"But it's always my luck--always my luck; and I'm the most miserable wretch that ever crawled."

There was no one present to endorse his words, as the maudlin tears rose to his eyes and dripped slowly down between his feet, nature seeming to distil the wine and spirits he had been imbibing all the morning ever since he had left the cot in which he had lain tossing in a fever of fear all through the night.

But after a time champagne and brandy had their effect, and the abject s.h.i.+vering man of half-an-hour before seemed to have grown defiant as to the future.

He was in the act of snapping his fingers with a half-tipsy laugh, when a boat b.u.mped up against the side, and he heard a trampling on the deck, and the buzz of voices.

"What's that?" he panted, completely sobered now, and trembling violently, as he suddenly turned to one of the most abject-looking and white-faced creatures it is possible to imagine. "What's that?" he panted, with his voice trembling; and he took up the brandy to help himself again. "Bah! some boat has struck us. That's all."

"Beg pardon, sir," said a voice; and the steward stood in the doorway.

"Yes; what is it?"

"Boat from the sh.o.r.e, sir, with a policeman in the stern and another man."

"Policeman? Other man?" faltered Glyddyr in a low, faint voice; "what do they want?"

"You, sir," said the man; and then, "Oh, here they are."

Glyddyr sat back, staring at the men wildly.

"Well," said the steward to himself; "I have seen the guv'nor a bit on, but this beats all. I say, you might have waited till you were asked to come down."

This to a policeman who was stooping down to enter the cabin, while Glyddyr clutched the table, and held on, for the sickening sensation in his head threatened a complete collapse.

Volume Two, Chapter XIV.

WIMBLE FINDS A CURIOSITY.

Any one who could have watched Michael Wimble shaving himself at early morn would have wondered whether the man were really sane, for, as he performed the operation upon himself, he worked as if it was for practice--to keep his hand in, just as acrobats and instrumentalists go through their tasks constantly, so as to keep a tight hold upon that which has taken them so much time and labour to acquire.

Being a barber, he considered that those who shaved should shave well, and that the wearing of moustache, or the very smallest morsel of whisker was but a wreak pandering to the savages who had introduced or followed the moustache movement in the time of the Crimean war.

"It's filthy, that's what it is, filthy," Wimble used to say; "and how a man can go about with his face like the back of a wild beast, beats me."

Consequently, soon after springing from his solitary bed, the owner of the Museum used to set light to a spirit lamp to boil a small shaving pot of water, and then, as

There were no half-measures. Wimble pa.s.sed the brush deftly all over his quaintly wrinkled face, till ma.s.ses of lather hung on to his ears, and covered his cheeks, so that only his eyes were seen. Then, as he glared at himself in a shaving gla.s.s, he set to and sc.r.a.ped and sc.r.a.ped his countenance all over, applied the brush again and again in obstinate places, and finished off by grinning hideously in the little mirror, as he stood, with the razor pa.s.sing over the skin in a way that would have suggested horrors about to be perpetrated by a maniac, weary of his life, to any one who could have seen the process.

Clever as he was, too, in the manipulation, there were at times, however, suggestions that a looker-on might have been right in his ideas. As, for instance, upon the morning in question, when a slip or a pimple--it is needless to say which--necessitated the use of sponge and sticking-plaster.

Then the task was done, and Michael Wimble finished dressing, talking to himself rapidly the while, sundry words which were spoken more loudly than others, giving the key to the subject of the man's thoughts--the old, old theme, love. Other words told too of disappointment and jealousy, and all this tended to make Mr Wimble go the wrong way when he started for his regular morning walk along the sh.o.r.e.

His way was always west, but he went east, so as to pa.s.s Chris Lisle's lodgings; and as he did so, staring hard at the drawn-down blinds, and the chimney pot innocent as yet of smoke, he gnashed his teeth softly, for there were two new flowers in Chris's bedroom window--a fuchsia and a geranium, in pots of dazzling red, and the mignonette box, full of nasturtiums, which flowed over and hung down, had been newly painted a delicate green.

Fresh attentions to the lodger. The previous week clean muslin curtains had been put up, and the week before there was a new cover over the little table in the window upon which lay the big History of England which Mrs Sarson had taken in, or been taken in with, in s.h.i.+lling numbers, by a book canva.s.ser, and had bound afterwards for one pound fifteen and sixpence, gilt lettered, and blind tooled, the canva.s.ser had said.

That table cover, when Wimble saw it through the half-open window, was composed of crochet work and green satin, and must have been the widow's handiwork, and a delicate compliment to her lodger.

That was bad enough, but the two new flower pots in the bedroom window were beyond all bearing.

"But wait a bit," said Wimble to himself. "I can wait;" and he went on, turned up the glen path, struck off to the left, where he reached the bridge, and, by pa.s.sing along by the backs of the cottages, he made his way to the alley by the public-house at the harbour head, and from there round by the boats and down to the sea sh.o.r.e.

Mr Wimble thought of the widow, and walked fast, gathering sh.e.l.ls and sc.r.a.ps of weeds washed up by the tide, and paused from time to time to examine fragments of driftwood and pieces of rotten rope.

Everything was thrown away though, for he had plenty of duplicates at home, and only exceptional finds were now worthy of a place in the museum.

So limpets, and turritellas, and pectens were pa.s.sed as unworthy of notice. A pelican's foot sh.e.l.l was transferred to his pocket, but nothing more; and growing quite low-spirited at last, for three reasons--his ill-luck, love, and the want of his breakfast--he turned at last, made for the cliffs, and came along close under the land, in and out among the rocks where the soft sand lay thick and smooth, past the hollows where the old boots and shoes were washed up in company with the other _disjecta membra_ with which sh.o.r.e-dwellers insult the ocean, in the belief that the tide will play the part of scavenger and sweep everything away, a task that the sea mostly scorns.

And so it was that in sundry corners beneath the mighty granite rocks, piled high like t.i.tanic walls, Michael Wimble thought of the widow, and made his way among old baskets, fish-heads, sc.r.a.ps of worn-out netting and tangles of rusty steel, half-covered with rotten fabric suggesting female attire.

No objects these for his museum, for, though old, they were not old enough. Had a few centuries pa.s.sed since they were cast into the waves, that would have made all the difference, and a thousand years would have made them treasures great as gold.

But it was a barren hunt that morning. There had been no storm to tear away the sand and sweep bare the rock, to leave exposed tarnished old coins once cast ash.o.r.e from an Armada galley; no serpula encrusted gem; nothing worthy of notice; and Wimble, with his thoughts turning eagerly now from the widow and her lodger to the toast and the rasher of bacon, he pa.s.sed over his bachelor rival and stepped out till he came beneath the rocky point upon which Gartram had built his home, and was half-way by when a ray of suns.h.i.+ne flashed from something lying among the rocks in a little patch of soft, dry sand.

It might be a diamond, or at least a crystal ground out of the rocks!

But it was only a clear phial bottle--short, unlabelled, tightly corked, and holding about a teaspoonful of some clear fluid at the bottom.

A disappointment; but a clean bottle was always useful, and, after a brief examination, the barber transferred it to his pocket, but not until he had removed the cork, sniffed, replaced it, and looked round, asking himself whether it had floated there in the last spring tide.

No; it seemed too fresh. The cork was too new and dry. It could only have come from about--been thrown from Gartram's windows, and--

Wimble got no further in his chain of reasoning. The vacuum which his nature abhorred was giving him strong hints which he was glad to obey; and the breakfast he had that morning was excellent for a jealous man in love.

Afterwards he rose, took off his coat to put on his ap.r.o.n, found the bottle in his pocket, put it carelessly in a drawer to wait till it could be washed, and declared himself ready for business. He had not long to wait, for one of his regular customers came for a shave. "Heard the news, of course?"

"News? no," said Wimble, stopping short in the stropping of a razor.

"What news? What is it?"

"The King of the Castle--dead."

Volume Two, Chapter XV.

THE DEAD TELL NO TALES.