Part 18 (1/2)

There was a wicket-gate in the paling, and a rough path from the gate to the house door, and a few steps to the right of this path a well was sunk and rigged with a winch and bucket. I was both tired and thirsty, so I turned into the garden and drew up some water in the bucket. A narrow track was beaten in the gra.s.s between the well and the house, and I saw with surprise that the stones about the mouth of the well were splashed and still wet. The house, then, had an inmate.

I looked at it again, but the shutters kept their secret: there was no glimmer of light visible through any c.h.i.n.k. I approached the house, and from that nearer vantage discovered that the shutters were common planks fitted into the windows and nailed fast to the woodwork from without. Growing yet more curious, I marched to the door and knocked, with an inquiry upon my tongue as to where Mr. Lovyes lived. But the excuse was not needed; the sound of my blows echoed through the house in a desolate, solitary fas.h.i.+on, and no step answered them. I knocked again, and louder. Then I leaned my ear to the panel, and I distinctly heard the rustling of a woman's dress. I held my breath to hear the more surely. The sound was repeated, but more faintly, and it was followed by a noise like the closing of a door. I drew back from the house, keeping an eye upon the upper storey, for I thought it possible the woman might reconnoitre me thence. But the windows stared at me blind, unresponsive. To the right and left lights twinkled in the scattered dwellings, and I found something very ghostly in the thought of this woman entombed as it were in the midst of them and moving alone in the shuttered gloom. The twilight deepened, and suddenly the gate behind me whined on its hinges. At once I dropped to my full length on the gra.s.s--the gloom was now so thick there was little fear I should be discovered--and a man went past me to the house.

He walked, so far as I could judge, with a heavy stoop, but was yet uncommon tall, and he carried a basket upon his arm. He laid the basket upon the doorstep, and, to my utter disappointment, turned at once, and so down the path and out at the gate. I heard the gate rattle once, twice, and then a click as its latch caught. I was sufficiently curious to desire a nearer view of the basket, and discovered that it contained food. Then, remembering me that all this while my own business waited, I continued on my way to Mr. Lovyes'

house. It was a long building of a brownish granite, under Merchant's Point, at the northern extremity of Old Grimsey Harbour. Mr. Lovyes was sitting over his walnuts in the cheerless solitude of his dining-room--a frail old gentleman, older than his years, which I took to be sixty or thereabouts, and with the air of a man in a decline.

I unfolded my business forthwith, but I had not got far before he interrupted me.

”There is a mistake,” he said. ”It is doubtless my brother Robert you are in search of. I am John Lovyes, and was, it is true, captured with my brother in Africa, but I escaped six years before he did, and traded no more in those parts. We fled together from the negroes, but we were pursued. My brother was pierced by an arrow, and I left him, believing him to be dead.”

I had, indeed, heard something of a brother, though I little expected to find him in Tresco too. He pressed upon me the hospitality of his house, but my business was with Mr. Robert, and I asked him to direct me on my path, which he did with some hesitation and reluctance. I had once more to pa.s.s through Dolphin Town, and an impulse prompted me to take another look at the shuttered house. I found that the basket of food had been removed, and an empty bucket stood in its place. But there was still no light visible, and I went on to the dwelling of Mr. Robert Lovyes. When I came to it, I comprehended his brother's hesitation. It was a rough, mean little cottage standing on the edge of the bracken close to the sea--a dwelling fit for the poorest fisherman, but for no one above that station, and a large open boat was drawn up on the hard beside it as though the tenant fished for his bread. I knocked at the door, and a man with a candle in his hand opened it.

”Mr. Robert Lovyes?” I asked.

”Yes, I am he.” And he led the way into a kitchen, poor and mean as the outside warranted, but scrupulously clean and bright with a fire.

He led the way, as I say, and I was still more mystified to observe from his gait, his height, and the stoop of his shoulders that he was the man whom I had seen carrying the basket through the garden. I had now an opportunity of noticing his face, wherein I could detect no resemblance to his brother's. For it was broader and more vigorous, with a great, white beard valancing it; and whereas Mr. John's hair was neatly powdered and tied with a ribbon, as a gentleman's should be, Mr. Robert's, which was of a black colour with a little sprinkling of grey, hung about his head in a tangled mane. There was but a two-years difference between the ages of the brothers, but there might have been a decade. I explained my business, and we sat down to a supper of fish, freshly caught, which he served himself. And during supper he gave me the information I was come after. But I lent only an inattentive ear to his talk. For my knowledge of his wealth, the picture of him as he sat in his great sea-boots and coa.r.s.e seaman's vest, as though it was the most natural garb in the world, and his easy discourse about those far African rivers, made a veritable jumble of my mind. To add to it all, there was the mystery of the shuttered house. More than once I was inclined to question him upon this last account, but his manner did not promise confidences, and I said nothing. At last he perceived my inattention.

”I will repeat all this to-morrow,” he said grimly. ”You are, no doubt, tired. I cannot, I am afraid, house you, for, as you see, I have no room; but I have a young friend who happens by good luck to stay this night on Tresco, and no doubt he will oblige me.” Thereupon he led me to a cottage on the outskirts of Dolphin Town, and of all in that village nearest to the sea.

”My friend,” said he, ”is named Ginver Wyeth, and, though he comes from these parts, he does not live here, being a school-master on the mainland. His mother has died lately, and he is come on that account.”

Mr. Wyeth received me hospitably, but with a certain pedantry of speech which somewhat surprised me, seeing that his parents were common fisherfolk. He readily explained the matter, however, over a pipe, when Mr. Lovyes had left us. ”I owe everything to Mrs. Lovyes,”

he said. ”She took me when a boy, taught me something herself, and sent me thereafter, at her own charges, to a school in Falmouth.”

”Mrs. Lovyes!” I exclaimed.

”Yes,” he continued, and, bending forward, lowered his voice. ”You went up to Merchant's Point, you say? Then you pa.s.sed Crudge's Folly--a house of two storeys with a well in the garden.”

”Yes, yes!” I said.

”She lives there,” said he.

”Behind those shutters!” I cried.

”For twenty years she has lived in the midst of us, and no one has seen her during all that time. Not even Robert Lovyes. Aye, she has lived behind the shutters.”

There he stopped. I waited, thinking that in a little he would take up his tale, but he did not, and I had to break the silence.

”I had not heard that Mr. Robert was ever married,” I said as carelessly as I might.

”Nor was he,” replied Mr. Wyeth. ”Mrs. Lovyes is the wife of John.

The house at Merchant's Point is hers, and there twenty years ago she lived.”

His words caught my breath away, so little did I expect them.

”The wife of John Lovyes!” I stammered, ”but--” And I told him how I had seen Robert Lovyes carry his basket up the path.

”Yes,” said Wyeth. ”Twice a day Robert draws water for her at the well, and once a day he brings her food. It is in his house, too, that she lives--Crudge's Folly, that was his name for it, and the name clings. But, none the less, she is the wife of John;” and with little more persuasion Mr. Wyeth told me the story.