The Lord of the Sea by M. P. Shiel

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His meal over, Hogarth threw himself upon a bed, to dream another
trouble of bubbles and burden of purples; woke at four; and, with a
procured cold-chisel, hammer, and a calico bag, went to the fowl-
house where he had left the meteorite, shut himself in.

Sitting in the dust there, he set to chisel out the gems from the
porous ore, and as the chisel won the luscious plums, held them up,
glutting his gaze, scratched his name on a fragment of window-pane,
and was enchanted that the adamant rim ripped the glass like rag:
the whim, meanwhile, working in him to purchase Colmoor, to turn the
moor into a paradise, the prison into a palace; where his old cell
stood in Gallery No. III to be the bedroom of Rebekah.

To see _her_ that very night was a necessity! and when it was dark
he set out.

But that plot failed: on presenting himself at the front of the
mansion, he was sent round to the back, where he received payment,
and was dismissed; and when he again started for the front,
intending to force his way in, he decided upon something else, and
walked back to Thring.

He reached the Sturgess cottage soon after six, ate, with a candle
returned to the lean-to to resume his work, and was still intent
upon it at seven, when Mrs. Sturgess ran out to tell him that "the
gentleman had come". He said: "Show him up to my room".

The first thing which O'Hara noticed in that room was the goat-hair
trunk, with the initials and cross, the initials his own.

After some minutes he furtively turned the key, dived into a mass of
things, paused to remember the whereabouts of a spring, found it,
and, lifting the upper bottom, peered beneath; saw a bundle of
papers; and, without removing the band, ferreted among them, and was
satisfied---Hogarth's "birth-papers".

He presently went to a back window, and saw ruddy streaks between
the boarding of the shanty, while sounds of the hammer reached him.

He would go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily
that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard,
grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through a
cranny.

Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in
which was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag,
and a lot of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed
mouth, and with a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he
trotted back to the cottage.

Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: "Ah, O'Hara..."; and he
called down: "Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!"

When these came, he sat and wrote:

"I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you
to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. I beseech
you, I entreat you. I burn to ashes. Rebekah! My flames of fire! I
am dying.

"R. H."

He enclosed, and handed it, without any address, to O'Hara.

"O'Hara", said he, "I want you to take that for me. Come--I will
show you the place. You ask in the hall to see 'the young lady': her
name does not concern you; but you can't mistake her: she is so-
pretty. Give the note to no one else, of course: it mentions my
escape, for one thing. I know you will do it well".

He conducted O'Hara, till the two towers of Westring were visible;
pointed them out; then went back, and in an hour had finished his
work on the diamonds.

O'Hara, meantime, going on his way alone, muttered: "You go fast,
Hogarth: prelates of the Church your errand boys? But there is a
little fellow called Alf Harris...if he had seen what I have seen
to-night, you would be a corpse now".

In twenty minutes he was at Westring, which he knew well, for
twenty-five years before he had lived in the Vale: but he supposed
that Lord Westring de Broom was still the inmate.

He asked to see "the young lady", persisted, and after a time
Rebekah came with eyebrows of inquiry.

The moment O'Hara saw her well, his visage acquired a ghastly ribbed
fixity. Even before this, _she_, by one flashed glance, had known
him.

But she took the envelope with easy coolness. And, instead of then
returning upon her steps, went still beyond, and whispered to two
men in the hall: "Do not let that man pass out!"

As she again returned inward past O'Hara, she remarked: "You might
wait here a little".

She travelled then, not hurrying, down the breadth of a great
apartment to a side room where her father sat, capped and writing;
and she said: "Papa, the man who assaulted me in the train is now in
the hall. As his sentence was three years, he must have escaped--"
She was gone at once, the unaddressed envelope, still unopened,
shivering a little in her hand.

Frankl leapt up, rather pale, thinking that if the man had come
_here_, he must mean mischief; but remembering that the man was a
gentleman, a priest, he took heart, and went out.

O'Hara, meantime, stood at bay, guessing his exit blocked, while the
terrors of death gat hold upon him, the flesh of his yellow jaw
shivering. But he was a man of stern mind--stern as the rocky aspect
of his face, and the moment he saw Frankl coming (he had seen him in
the Court), he started to meet him--stooped to the Jew's ear, who
shrank delicately from contact.

"There isn't any good in running me down, sir", he whispered in
sycophant haste. "I pledge you my word I came here without knowing
to whom. O do, now! I have already suffered for my crime; and if you
attempt to capture me, I do assure you, I strangle you where you
stand! Do, now! I only brought a letter--"

Frankl, half inclined to tyrannize over misery, and half afraid,
swept his hand down the beard.

"Letter?" said he: "from whom?"

"From a friend".

"Which friend?"

"A man named Hogarth".

O'Hara said it in an awful whisper, though not aware of any relation
between Hogarth and Frankl.

Whereupon an agitation waved down Frankl's beard. The news that "a
man named Hogarth" had written to his daughter would hardly have
suggested _Richard_--safe elsewhere; but, one night at Yarmouth, he
had seen Richard Hogarth inexplicably kiss his daughter's hand.

"Hogarth?" said he: "what Christian name?"

"Richard".

The agonized thought in Frankl's brain was this: "Well, what's the
good of prisons, then?"--he, too earnest a financier to read
newspaper gossip, having heard not a word of the three escapes from
Colmoor.

He said: "Well, sir, generally speaking, I'm the last to encourage
this sort of thing; but, as yours is a special case, I tell you
plain out that, personally, I don't mean a bit of harm to you. Just
step into a room here, and let us talk the matter quietly over".

He led O'Hara to his study; and there they two remained locked half
an hour, conferring head to head.

XXVII

THE BAG OF LIGHT

Rebekah, having excused herself from three ladies, her guests, alone
in her room opened her letter.

Glanced first at the "R. H.", and was not surprised. He had
"escaped", had "come into great power": that seemed natural; but he
"summoned" her to meet him, and she saw no connection between his
"great power" and his right to summon her.

She held the paper to a fire, and, as it began to burn, in a panic
of flurry extinguished the edge, and hustled it into her bosom; then
perambulated; then fell to a chair-edge with staring gaze; then,
rocking her head which she had dropped upon a little table, moaned:
"He is mad...."

"My flames of fire! Rebekah! I am dying...."

He suffered; and a pussy's wail mewed from her; but with a gasp of
anger which said "Ho!" she sprang straight, and went ranging, with a
stamping gait, through the chamber, filling it with passion. "I
_won't go_!" she went with fixed lips, as something within her
whispered: "You must".

To escape herself, she went again to see what had happened with
regard to the convict, whose face would carry to the grave the scars
of her nails.

There were no signs of any disturbance; and she asked a footman:
"Where is the man who was here?"

"With your father in the study".

That seemed a strange proceeding: she felt a touch of alarm for her
father, and, passing again by the study, peeped; could see nothing
for the key, but heard voices.

This messenger of Hogarth, she next thought, was a criminal: he
might betray...so she stole into an adjacent room, to peep by a
side door of the study, and though a key projecting toward her
barred her vision, the talkers were near this point, and she could
hear.

"The diamond block", O'Hara said, "is the same which he rolled
across the bridge this morning; to that I'll swear".

"Then it must be the very same block he showed me", Frankl said in a
whisper; "that thing was worth millions....!"

"Undoubtedly it was the same".

"Oh, but Lord", groaned the Jew in an anguish of self-deprecation,
"where were my _eyes_? where were my _wits_? I must have been
_dreaming_! No, that's hard!"

"Well--_nil desperandum_! Let us be acting, sir!"

"My own land--!"

"They are still safe enough: come--"

"He may have lost one or two--in his excitement. Thousands gone! He
may have hidden some!"

"Tut, he has hidden none", said O'Hara; "we may have all. Let us
make a move".

"But he is a strong man, this Hogarth. Why do you object to the
assistance of the police?"

"What have the police to do with such a matter? Hogarth would simply
bribe. And there are three of us--"

"Who is this Harris?"

"He is a Cockney--assassin".

Frankl took snuff, with busy pats at alternate nostrils.

"What will you tell him is in the bag?"

"Anything--rings--something prized by you for sentimental reasons.
We offer him a thousand--two thousand pounds. And he will not fail.
He strikes like lightning".

"And we share--how?"

"Come--let us not talk of that again, sir. What could be more
generous than my offer? You divide the diamonds into two heaps, and
I choose one; or I divide, you choose; and, before I leave you, you
give me a declaration that it was by your contrivance that I escaped
prison, and that the gems which I have, once yours, are duly made
over to me".

"And you collar half!" gibed the Jew with an ogle of guile; "that's
about as cool a stroke of business as I've come across. You don't
take into account that the whole is mine, if the concern fell, as
you confess, on my own land! And just ask yourself the question:
what is to prevent me handing you over this minute to the police,
and grabbing the lot? Only I'm not that sort of man--"

O'Hara drew a revolver.

"You talk to me as though I was a schoolboy, sir", said he sternly.
"Be good enough to learn to respect me. I am not less a man of the
world than you are, and quite competent to safeguard my own
interests. Supposing I was weak enough to permit you to send for the
police, the moment they had me I should tell of Hogarth in hiding;
they would go for him, and he, after bribing, may be trusted to take
wing with the stones, leaving you whistling. Or perhaps you would
care to tackle him in person? He would wheel you by the beard round
his arm like a Catherine-wheel, I do assure you. All this you see
well, and pretend not to. Do let us be honest with each other!"

"Well, I don't want to be hard", said Frankl, looking sideward and
downward, plotting behind an unwrinkled brow, intending to have
every one of the diamonds; so did O'Hara, who already had his plot.

"No, don't be hard", said O'Hara: "_I_ am not. I give you an
incalculable fortune; I take the same. Live and let live! Why should
two shrewd old fellows like you and me be like the dog which,
wanting two bones, lost the one he had? Come, now--give me your hand
on it".

"Well, I'm hanged if you are not right!" cried Frankl, looking up
with discovery: "Share and share alike, and shame the devil! That's
the kind of little man I am, frank, bluff, and stalwart--Ha! ha!
Give me your hand on it, sir!"

"Ha! ha! you are very kind. That is the only way--absolute
sincerity--" and they shook hands, hob-nobbing and fraternizing,
with laughs and little nods, like cronies.

"Stop--I'll just ring for a drop of brandy--" said Frankl.

"No! no ringing!--thanks, thanks, no brandy--"

"Well, you are as cautious as they make them. Oh, perfectly right,
you know--perfectly right"--he touched O'Hara's chest--"not a word
to say against that. I am the same kind of man myself--"

"Come; are you for making a move?"

"Agreed. Where is my hat? I suppose a man may get his hat!--ha! ha!--
I can't very well go in this cap---"

"You use mine--with the greatest pleasure. I do not need--Ah? quite
the fit, quite the fit".

"Why, so it is. Ha! ha! why, it's a curate's hat, and--
_I'm a Jew_!"

"Excellent, excellent, ha! ha!"

So they made merry, and, with the bitter lip-corners of forced
merriment, went out, while Rebekah, who had caught a great deal of
that dialogue, crouched a long time there, agitated, uncertain what
to do.

That her father should coolly look on at an assassination for a
fortune was no revelation to her: she had long despised, yet, with
an inconsistency due to the tenderness of Jewish family ties, still
loved him; the notion of appealing to the police, therefore, who
might ruin Hogarth, too, did not enter her head.

She ran and wrote: "Your life and bag of gems are _at this moment_
in danger"; and sent it by a mounted messenger addressed to "The
Guest at the Paper Shop".

But in twenty minutes the messenger returned to her with it, Hogarth
having gone to the _rendezvous_ at the elm--long before the
appointed time.

When, accordingly, Frankl, O'Hara, and Harris arrived at the paper-
shop back yard, and Harris had stolen up the back stairs, he
presently, to the alarm and delight of the others, sent a whisper
from the window: "No one 'ere as I can see!"

And the search for the diamonds was short: for Hogarth had actually
left the bag containing them on the trunk, and Frankl and O'Hara
returned with it to Westring, holding it out at arm's length, one
with the right, one with the left hand, like standard-bearers.

Hogarth, meantime, was striding about the elm, and once fell to his
knees, adoring a vision, and once, at a fancied step, his teeth-
edges chattered.

Rebekah! He called, groaned, hissed that name, while his to-and-fro
ranging quickened to a trot.

And now, fancying that he heard a call "_Come !_" he stood startled,
struck into a twisting enquiry to the four winds; but could not
locate the call, ran hither and thither, saw no one.

"Come to me, little sister", he wailed tenderly, while to swallow
was a doubtful spasm for him, her name a mountain in his bosom.

When he was certain that it must be nearer ten than "nine", he set
out in the sway of a turbulent impulse to spurt for the Hall: but as
he reached the point of proximity between path and park, just there
where her father had stood that morning he saw her patiently
waiting--ever since that "_Come!_"

He flew, and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding
arm, she cried: "Don't you approach me!"--and he stood checked and
abject, one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for
her in her Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms
bare, her fingers clasped before her, making convex the two tassels
of the girdle, from her ears depending circles of gold large enough
to hoop with, a saffron headdress, stuck backward, showing her hair
in front, falling upon a shawl which sheltered her frank recumbent
shoulders. She did not see Hogarth at all, but stood averted,
implacable, unapproachable, looking across the park, while Hogarth
occupied a long silence in gazing up to where, like a show, she
stood, illumined by the moon.

At last he sent to her the whisper, "Did you call just now? Did you
say '_Come_'?"

"What is it you want with me, Hogarth? You have '_summoned_' me: but
be very quick".

"I told you: I am wealthier than all the princes--"

"Well, let me inform you that your life is in danger here; if you
are a wise man, you will not fail to leave this neighbourhood this
night".

"But no one knows--"

"It is known, Hogarth: your friends are false, and your enemies
crafty. You will have to walk with your eyes open, my friend. What
will you do with all the money?"

"I will buy the world, because _you_ are in it".

Now she flashed upon him one glance, in which there was
astonishment, and judgment.

"You said that so like my father! Hogarth among the dealers? I
thought you would be more squeamish, and arduous, and complex".

"But if a man is famished, he is not complex, he runs to the
baker's. You can have no conception how I perish! And I cannot be
contradicted-I claim you-I have the right-I am the lord of this
lower world--"

"But you do not see the effect of your words: you disappoint me
Richard. How of what the poet sings:

...this is my favoured lot,
My exaltation to afflictions high?

That is more in your line, you know, but you are dazzled, Hogarth-
fie. To _buy me_! And how would you like me afterwards, having
renounced my obligations? And how would I like _you_-I whose name is
Rebekah, who will mate with none but a wrestler, a fellow of heroic
muscle? I feel certain that you are dazzled. It is natural, I
suppose--But are all the people in the world so happy, that _you_
too, can find nothing to occupy you but the market-place, with its
buying and selling? And to buy _me_? I am _not_ for sale! How dare
you, Hogarth?"

With this she walked off; but, having a creepy instinct in her back
that he was on the point to follow, catch, and snatch her away, she
span round again, crying: "Do not follow me! Mind you! If you like,
be at the elm-tree again at half-past ten-and I will communicate
with you. Goodbye--"

Now she did not once look back; and he had not heard that fainting
"Good-bye", it had fainted so.

He found himself presently in his room at the paper-shop, and lay
biting the bed-clothes, spasm after spasm traversing his body.

Then, turning on his back, he lay with his face now toward the
trunk, and a little clock ticked ten more minutes before the fact
stole into his consciousness that the bag was not on the trunk.

For some time the disappearance was too stupendous to find room in
his brain. He got up and paced, stunned, just conscious of a feeling
of unease.

Now he was searching the room mechanically. It was not there....

And again he paced, tapping his top teeth with a finger-nail; and
now he called down the stair: "Have you seen, Mrs. Sturgess, the
calico bag you gave me to-day?"

"Why, no".

"Has anyone been in my room?"

"Why, _no_, sir! Only myself".

Again he began to pace, and suddenly the grand reality stabbed his
brain like a dagger: he was poor....

O'Hara! Where was he....?

His forehead dropped upon the mantel-board, and he leant staring
downward there, a miserable man.

But suddenly the man said quietly aloud, raising himself: "All
right: better so. O, I have not been myself--virtue has gone out of
me--!"

Presently he noticed that it was near the hour of her unexpected
_rendezvous_ under the elm....

And nearly all the way he ran--wild to see her again--until he
neared the tree, when, descrying a female form, he came stooping
with humility, but soon saw that it was a girl, her head in a shawl,
whom he did not know.

And she, coming to meet him, said: "What is your name, sir?"

"Why?"

"I am Miss Frankl's messenger".

"My name is Hogarth".

"Will you turn this way that I may see your eyes?...All right:
Miss Frankl directs me to give you these".

The girl, who had been weighted down toward the left, handed him an
envelope, and a steel box.

Never was he so bewildered! On the way home, he observed that the
box had three knobs of gold, surrounded by rays, and, inlaid in the
top, the letters "R. F."; when he tore open the envelope in his room
he found in pencil on one half-sheet:

"Turn the 10 of the right knob to the ray 5; the 5 of the middle
knob to the ray 0; the 15 of the left knob to the ray 10: and the
box will open".

No more. When he had set wildly to work, and the lid turned back,
his eyes beheld the calico bag.

Rebekah had, in fact, before setting out to the _rendezvous_ at
nine, seen her father and O'Hara return to the Hall, bearing the bag
between them; and, she, crouching at the side door, as before, had
heard them talk, arranging details. Her father had then said that
before he could write any document, he must either ring or go search
for paper: and suddenly she had heard an oath, a thud, a scuffle,
had turned the key, softly entered, seen the men struggling against
the other door, a revolver, held by the muzzle, in O'Hara's hand;
and before she had been sighted by the two desperate men, had had
the bag, lying near on an escritoire, and was gone. She had then
sent some servants to the scene, and hurried to her chamber.

Later she had heard that O'Hara had escaped through a window, and
that her father was raving below in a sort of fit: for Frankl
supposed that O'Hara had the jewels, as O'Hara that Frankl had them;
and after tending her father, she had dashed out to the
_rendezvous_, the jewels then in her room.

As for Hogarth, he did not neglect her warning: and, having left a
note for O'Hara, telling him where to find him, at Loveday's, took a
late train southwards.

By what marvel Rebekah had become possessed of the jewels he did not
even seek to fathom; but one of his uppermost feelings was shame for
having suspected O'Hara of stealing them: and for years could never
be got to believe in the bad faith of the prelate, his tutor.

Near midnight, on reaching the obscure townlet of Hadston, he there
took a bed--not to sleep.

At the tiny inn-window he made periodic arrivals, looked out
unseeing at a cart, a wall of flint and Flemish brick, and a moonlit
country, then weighed anchor, and swerved away on another voyage;
then arrived anew, looked out, saw nothing, and weighed.

He walked now in the dark of the valley of humiliation, with those
words written in flame in his brain: "This is my favoured lot--my
exaltation to afflictions high": he had allowed a woman to say them
to him, and he went "_I!_"

He, the richest of men, was, therefore, that night poorer than any
wretch, brought right down, naked, exposed to death, and he filled
that chamber with his moans: "God have mercy upon me! a vulgar rich
man...a dreadful contented clown...."

But toward morning he lay calmer, weeping like Peter, and at peace.

Being without money, he sent the next day a small stone to Loveday,
asking him to sell it; also to meet old Tom Bates on the night
appointed, and keep him till he, Hogarth, came to London.

Four days later he received the money in the name of "Mr. Beech",
but the old Bates had not kept the _rendezvous_; and a month later a
detective agency discovered that the fisher was dead.

At Hadston Hogarth remained two months, the most occupied man
anywhere, yet passing for a lounger in the townlet.

Here and now he was descended deep into himself, aspiring to
greatness, set on high designs; and, as the days passed, his
thoughts more and more took form, though sometimes, with a sudden
heart-pang, he would flinch and shrink, pierced by a consciousness
of the unwieldy thing which he was at; and he would mutter: "I
_must_ be mad". Anon he would start and cower at a distinct sound of
cannon in his ears.

Usually, during the day, he had with him an atlas, a pair of
compasses.

One day he took train, to see the sea.

Another day, happening to look into the goat-hair trunk, he saw that
account-book, containing the addresses of the signatories to his old
"association", and was overjoyed. "Quite a little army", he tenderly
said: "I won't forget them".

After two months he left Hadston for London, having in his head a
new age hatched.

XXVIII

THE LETTER

It was night when Hogarth broke into the presence of Loveday at
Cheyne Gardens with a glad face, crying: "Forgive me, my friend, for
being a boor!"

"You are forgiven", Loveday answered with his smile, hastening to
meet him: "the broken picture, you see, is in a better frame, and so
are we. What could have made us invent a quarrel about--land, of all
things!"

"Come, let us talk", said Hogarth: "not long--all about land, and
sea, too. I suppose you have nothing to tell about my sister? Never
mind--we shall find her. Come, sit and give me _all_ your
intelligence. You are not interested in land, then? You _will_ be in
ten minutes--it is interesting. Listen: all the land of the earth is
_mine_, and all the sea especially--a good thing, for, for a hundred
years Europe, especially England, has wanted a master: the anarchy
of our modern life is too terrible! it cannot arrange itself; and
now the hour has struck, though none has heard the bell".

"Hogarth! but you gabble like a mad god", cried Loveday. "I am all
in the dark--"

"I will tell you".

And he spoke, first going into his discovery at Colmoor, frowning
upon Loveday, ploughing the truth into his brow; proving how modern
misery, in its complexity, had its cause in one simple old fault,
sure as the fact that smoke ascends, or apples fall. And when he saw
conviction beam in Loveday's face, he next told what had happened at
the elm-tree, and what would happen-soon; whereat Loveday, like a
frightened child, clung to his arm, and once gasped: "Oh no--my
God!" and once felt a gory ghost raise horror in his hairs.

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