The dread pursued him to his cot. He went in and shut the door, leaving the two corpses, the dog and the man, untouched where they had fallen. He was not a religious man, but he knew a bad omen when he saw one, and the way that protruding tongue had pointed at him could bode no good. And what had he done—was it murder? Well, they could prove nothing against him. A man falls from his horse and breaks his neck. Whose fault is that? Not Harry Noke’s, gipsy or no gipsy. He was less afraid of the law than of the unseen power whose business it was to visit a man’s sins upon him, and by many degrees less afraid of the law than of the corpse. For to the law, murder was no worse than theft: the same punishment served for either. Moreover the law could be outwitted, but there was no outwitting the Almighty, and no deceiving that corpse. A powerful sly carpse he made, did that one, an uncommon nasty figure of a carpse, with a sorta sneer or snarl in’s face, and a look of Now I’ve got you. Noke lay on his bed, sweating and cold, fearing nothing tangible, wishing almost for something tangible to fear. He had never in his life lacked animal courage, but now he was at a loss and wanted comfort. His thoughts turned gratefully to woman. He remembered how dearly Tisha Bailey loved him, and what a smooth soft complaisant bedfellow Jenny Mykelborne made; and he wished he were not alone in this cold quiet night. Mere habit, and the prompting of loneliness, brought the name of Roger to his lips—‘Hey Roger! Good old son!’—before he remembered the impossible truth about that familiar friend and housemate. He was alone, with only his thoughts for company—his thoughts and the ghost they conjured into being. Yet not quite alone, for his involuntary murmur evoked a response from the darkness.
‘Pretty fellow! Pretty fellow!’
The parrot was never at a loss: he always knew the right thing to say.
CHAPTER 6
A VISITOR FOR MR BAILEY AND OF THE CARGO HE CARRIED
Three o’clock. For a moment Mr Bailey stared at the face of his monitor as though its announcement of the hour had been addressed to him personally. But if the thought of bed had been repugnant before the lady’s visit, it was now doubly so. To sneak timidly upstairs and contrive to slip between the sheets without waking the wife who shared them would provide this romantic night with just the anticlimax he most dreaded; whereas by remaining where he was, in a room enchanted by memory, he could luxuriate in the sense of a continuing rapture. The lady had left the scent and savour of her femininity behind her; the benches, the shuttered windows, the worn brick floor, all were in some fashion transfigured by the light she had shed upon them; and the air still held for him echoes of her voice. Moreover there was here a fire burning, and capable of being coaxed into a blaze: a consideration not to be neglected on so cold a night by no matter how elated a man. Mr Bailey, with a sigh that was more than half satisfaction, went to the hearth and tended the fire lovingly. He set to work with the bellows and was soon rewarded. Here was a vital symbol of the high dream that consumed him: his few faggots burned bravely on the hearth, aspiring to the stars. And the distance between the one and the other was scarcely vaster than that which separated his present status from the beatitude he fancied he desired. Therein, it may be, lay his salvation; but Mr Bailey himself did not take that view, and would have rejected it with indignation had it been presented to him. For all that, and despite his sighing, he was as nearly contented as your true Romantic can ever be; and after a little while of musing and wishing, lamenting and exulting, he took up his tablets again and began adding verse to verse: