Tongues of Conscience Part 13

The clergyman was deeply and sincerely religious, but he was in nowise a superst.i.tious man. a.s.sociation with Sir Graham, however, and the circ.u.mstances attendant upon that a.s.sociation, had gradually unnerved him. He was now a prey to fear, almost to horror. Was it possible, he thought, as he sat listening to that eternal footfall overhead, that Providence permitted a spirit to rise from the very grave to proclaim his lie, and to show the truth in a most hideous form? He could almost believe so. It seemed that the dead boy resented the defacement of his tomb, resented the deliberate untruth which concealed from the painter his dreary destiny, and came up out of the other world to proclaim the clergyman's deception. It seemed as if G.o.d himself fought with a miraculous means the battle of truth and tore aside the veil in which Uniacke had sought to shroud the actuality of death. Uniacke could not bring himself to speak to the painter, to acknowledge the trickery resorted to for a sick man's sake. But this vision of the night paralysed his power to make any further effort in deception. He felt benumbed and impotent. A Power invisible to him fought against him. He could only lay down his weapons,--despicable, unworthy, as they were,--and let things take their course, while he looked on as one in a sad dream, apprehensive of the ending of that dream.

Sir Graham began his picture on the morrow. His first excitement in the conception of it, which had been almost joyous, was now become feverish and terrible. He was seized by the dreary pa.s.sion of the gifted man who means to use his gifts to add new and vital horrors to the horrors of life. He no longer felt the pathos, the almost exquisite romance, of his subject. He felt only its tragic, its disgusting terror. While he painted feverishly the mad Skipper hovered about him, with eyes still vacant but a manner of increasing unrest. It seemed as if something whispered to him that this work of a stranger had some connection with his life, some deep, though as yet undiscovered, meaning for him. The first figure in the picture was the Skipper himself. When it was painted the likeness was striking. But the poor mad seaman stared upon it with an ignorant vagueness. It was evident that he looked without seeing, that he observed without comprehending.

"Surely he will not know Jack," Uniacke thought, "since he does not know his own face."

And he felt a faint sense of relief. But this pa.s.sed away, for the unrest of the Skipper seemed continually to grow more marked and seething. Uniacke noticed it with gathering anxiety. Sir Graham did not observe it. He thought of nothing but his work.

"I shall paint Jack last of all," he said grimly, to Uniacke. "I mean to make a crescendo of horror, and in Jack's figure the loathsomeness of death shall reach a climax. Yes, I will paint him last of all. Perhaps he will come again and pose for me upon that grave." And he laughed as he sat before his easel.

"What painter ever before had such a model?" he said to Uniacke.

And that night after supper, he got up from the table saying:

"I must go and see if Jack will give me a sitting to-night."

Uniacke rose also.

"Let me come with you," he said.

Sir Graham stopped with his hand on the door. There was a smile on his lips, but his eyes were full of foreboding.

"Do you want to see Jack, then?" he asked, with a dreadful feigning of jocularity. "But you are not a painter. You require no model, living or dead." He burst again into a laugh.

"Let me come with you," the clergyman repeated doggedly.

Sir Graham made no objection, and they went out together.

The moon was now growing towards the full, but it was yet low in the sky, and the night was but faintly lit, as a room is lit by a heavily shaded lamp. Sir Graham's manner lost its almost piteous bl.u.s.ter as he stood on the doorstep and felt the cold wind that blew from the wintry sea. He set his lips, and his face twitched with nervous agitation as he stole a furtive glance at the clergyman, whose soft hat was pulled down low over his eyes as if to conceal their expression.

The two men walked forward slowly into the churchyard. Uniacke's heart was beating with violence and his mind was full of acute antic.i.p.ation.

Yet he would scarcely acknowledge even to himself the possibility of such an appearance as that affirmed by Sir Graham. They drew near to the grave of little Jack, round which the chill winds of night blew gently and the dull voices of the waves sang hushed and murmurous nocturnes.

Uniacke was taken by an almost insurmountable inclination to pause, even to turn back. Their progress to this grave seemed attended by some hidden and ghastly danger. He laid his hand upon the painter's arm, as if to withhold him from further advance.

"What is it?" Sir Graham asked, speaking almost in a whisper.

"Nothing," said Uniacke, dropping his hand.

Sir Graham's eyes were full of sombre questioning as they met his.

Moving slowly on, the two men stood at length by Jack's grave. The moon rose languidly, and shed a curious and ethereal twilight upon the stone at its head. The blurred place from which Uniacke had struck the name was plainly visible. Instinctively the clergyman's eyes sought the spot and stared upon it.

"Does it not bear all the appearance of having been defaced?" said Sir Graham in his ear.

Uniacke shook his head.

"The Skipper would have it so," he murmured, full of a heavy sense of useless contest against the determination of something hidden that all should be known to his companion, perhaps even that very night.

They waited, as mourners wait beside a tomb. As the moon rose, the churchyard grew more distinct. The surrounding graves came into view, the crude bulk of the rectory, the outline of the church tower, and the long wall of the churchyard. On the white faces of the two men the light fell pitilessly, revealing the strained and anxious expression of Uniacke, the staring watchfulness of the painter. The minutes ran by.

Uniacke s.h.i.+vered slightly in the wind. By degrees he began to lose the expectation of seeing any apparition. Presently he even sneered silently at himself for his folly in having ever entertained it. Nevertheless he was strongly affected by the nearness of the wonder-child's grave, from which seemed to emanate an influence definite and searching, and--so he felt--increasingly hostile, either to himself or to the artist. It came up like a thing that threatened. It crept near like a thing that would destroy. Uniacke wondered whether Sir Graham was conscious of it. But the painter said nothing, and the clergyman dared not ask him. At length, however, his fanciful sense of this dead power, speaking as it were from the ground under his feet, became so intolerable to him that he was resolved to go; and he was about to tell Sir Graham of his intention when the painter suddenly caught his arm in a tight grip.

"There it is," he whispered.

He was staring before him over the grave. Uniacke followed his eyes. He saw the short gra.s.s stirring faintly in the night wind. He thought it looked like hair bristling, and his hair moved on his head. He saw the churchyard in a maze of moon-rays. And with the moonlight had come many shadows. But not one of them was deceptive. Not one took the form of any spectre. Nevertheless Uniacke recoiled from this little grave at his feet, for it seemed to him as if the power that had been sleeping there stirred, forsook its rec.u.mbent position, rose up warily, intent on coming forth to confront him.

"You see it?" whispered Sir Graham, still keeping hold of his arm.

"No, no I see nothing; there is nothing. It's your fancy, your imagination that plays tricks on you."

"No, it's Jack. Oh, Uniacke, see--see how he poses! He knows that I shall paint him to-morrow. How horrible he is! Do the drowned always look like that?"

"Come away, Sir Graham. This is a hideous hallucination. Come away."

"How he is altered. All his features are coa.r.s.ened, bloated. My wonder-child! He is tragic now, and he is disgusting. How loathsomely he twists his fingers! Must I paint him like that--with that grinning, ghastly mouth--little Jack? Ah! ah! He poses--he poses always. He would have me paint him now,--here in the moonlight--here--here--standing on this grave!"

"Sir Graham, come with me!" exclaimed Uniacke.

And this time he forcibly drew his companion with him from the grave.

The painter seemed inclined to resist for a moment. He turned his head and looked long and eagerly behind him. Then suddenly he acquiesced.

"It has gone," he said. "You have driven it away."

Uniacke hurried forward to the Rectory. That night he implored the painter for the last time to leave the island.

"Can't you feel," he said, almost pa.s.sionately, "the danger you are running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes in this abominable way."

"You swear you saw nothing?"

"I do. There was nothing. You have thought of that boy until you actually see him before you."

"As he is?"

"As he is not, as he will never be."

The painter got up from his chair, came over to Uniacke, and looked piercingly into his eyes.

"Then you declare--on your honour as a priest," he said slowly, "that you do not know that my wonder-child is the boy who is buried beneath that stone?"

"I buried that boy, and I declare on my honour as a priest that I do not know it," Uniacke answered, desperately but unflinchingly.

It was his last throw for this man's salvation.

"I believe you," the painter said.

He returned to the fireplace, and leaned his face on his arm against the mantelpiece.

"I believe you," he repeated presently. "I have been mistaken."

"Mistaken--how?"

"Sometimes I have thought that you have lied to me."