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Heath Hover Mystery

<h3 class="chapter">Chapter Twenty Seven.</h3> <h4 class="event">The Vault of Doom.</h4> The red fires shot up against shining rock reflection, throwing out exaggerations or silhouettes of the shaggy figures moving about. Wild, fantastic, as the surrounding crags were, thus thrown out into fitful light, yet the place was an ideal one for a snug and sheltered camp, where the keen mountain air struck chill at night, for it was sheltered on three sides by rock and cliff, while the fourth gave out on a steep drop into the valley beneath. To one, at any rate, the topographical situation did not fail in significance. Not by sheer accident, not for mere purposes of shelter had the situation been chosen. In hanging clusters the stars shone brightly in the clear sky, but there was no moon. The two Europeans, seated in their own camp a little apart, had finished their evening meal—Mervyn incidentally, had been allowed to go out, under escort, and shoot a few chikor (the large red-legged hill partridge), early that morning, so they had fared better than heretofore. Now he had lighted a pipe, and was striving to conjure up all the stoicism of the dim mysterious East to his aid, the while keeping up the conversation with Melian, and doing so in such wise as to convey no apprehension to her mind. And the keeping up of ordinary conversation within an hour or so of one’s own death is not an easy undertaking; but then, John Seward Mervyn was not quite an ordinary man. A few months ago, he would not greatly have concerned himself over this situation. But within that time, life had changed and brightened for him. It was more valuable up to date than it had been then. He turned the talk on to Heath Hover and their time together there, and for a little, the girl forgot their precarious and now depressing situation and surroundings, and was responsive, brightening up with this and that homely touch. “Why, the heather must be flaming out in perfectly gorgeous crimson up above the Plane woods,” she said, “and we are not getting the benefit of it this time. And that bit, down below Chiltingford, where we took Violet the day before she left—that must be too ripping for anything. And the jolly old battered mill, standing out on the open—I wish we were there again, don’t you, dear? Say you do.” The eager, retrospective tone had lapsed into seriousness. There was no difficulty in replying as she wanted, and that with perfect truth and candour. Mervyn, looking back on those fair scenes, spent with this child; marking and treasuring all her golden joyousness and appreciation of every sound and sight around her; thought that for a repetition of just that time alone he would have faced the fate in front of him a hundred times over. It was little enough of such sweet wholesome happiness he had known in the course of a hard, rugged, bizarre life, and that time about comprised it all. Two wolves howled at responsive intervals away down in the valley beneath, and the red glow of the camp fires played upon the bronzed, hook-nosed faces, and fierce eyes, of the wild marauders of the desert, squatted around, smoking their hookahs, and conversing in a deep rumbling undertone. The owls would be softly hooting in the woods which dipped their edges into Plane Pond at this moment, and the bell-like plash of rising fish ring out on its starlit surface. Contrast indeed! Here in this savage wilderness death was to be his at any hour, at any moment. And now and thus, for the first time in his life, death seemed hard to face. “You have—what I gave you—safe, child?” he broke in, as though moved by a sudden impulse. “Recollect, it is only to be produced in the very last extremity, if the appeal to Shere Dil Khan should fail.” “Don’t,” she answered, startled by the solemnly spoken irrelevance of the remark, and thrusting a hand into his. “You must really shake off these dismal forebodings, dear—and yet, how can I undertake to lecture you—you—on things that this weird country may hold out?” And then, as if to give point to her words, a tall figure seemed to grow out of the earth beside them. A murmured sentence or two, and as in response to it he rose. “Sit still, darling, and wait for me,” he said. “I have to go and talk with some of them, and it will be wearisome—especially as it interrupts our talk about good old times.” He rested one hand lovingly upon the gold-crowned head, and then passed out with the man who had come to summon him. He would not even take a real, long farewell of her, if only that it might prove the reverse of advantageous to her, for he must still keep up the pretence of ignorance, and yet it was the last time he should behold her in this world, and he had but a shadowy belief in any other. For John Seward Mervyn knew as well as did the man he was accompanying that he was going to his doom. <hr /> It was a strange place, that in which he found himself but two or three minutes later—a cavernous hall, yet walled around by solid rock, and of some vastness. And yet, it seemed somehow as though it were not entirely the work of Nature, even here, where Nature ran riot in the production of wild freaks of her own masonry. It bore a look as though ages and ages of gradual working had wrought it to such a pitch of symmetry. In the centre a fire burned, the smoke escaping upwards somehow and somewhere, for the atmosphere of the place was quite clear of it. Seated about this were some half dozen figures. Only one did Mervyn recognise as that of Allah-din Khan. The others all looked strangers to him. Stay. Only one? No, there was another; for in the one seated on the right of the chief Mervyn recognised the tall, somewhat remarkable looking man who had joined the rest at prayer. This one sat eyeing him, an embodiment of Eastern stateliness, in snowy flowing garments, the folds of his turban arranged round the conical kulla which just peeped above it, with an almost mathematical nicety. Mervyn took note of something else. Behind him, two tall, ferocious looking Gularzai had drawn up, standing so as to bar effectually the way by which he had been ushered in. So this was to be his death chamber, he thought? Well, the sooner it was over the better. “Salaam, brothers,” he began, but only by way of saying something. “It is not ‘salaam,’” (“salaam”—Peace) answered the distinguished looking stranger, speaking in a very deep chested tone. “You joined the Brethren of the Night whose sign is the Five Pointed Star—were made blood-brother with them, and—were false to them.” “Therein is not truth,” answered Mervyn, who had expected this as an opening of the proceedings. “Not truth?” went on the speaker. “In thine English home the Sign was delivered to thee; in thine English home—the long house with the cornering wings which shelter the centre, and which stands beneath the broad end of the water.” But that Mervyn had learned to be astonished at nothing, he might well have felt surprised. Here was an exact description of Heath Hover, and yet the only man who had seen it, and who bore the terrible and mysterious Sign, had died within its walls, and the method of his death he alone in all England knew. And now here in this far Eastern wilderness was another—were others—who knew. “The Sign was not delivered to me,” he answered. “Not delivered?” repeated the other slowly, and fixing upon his face a glance that seemed to burn, so glowing was it with fell, vengeful intent. “Not delivered? It was delivered not once only, but twice.” Now, indeed, the listener’s self possession all but betrayed the shock this announcement could not but cause him. How well he recalled that lovely summer morning when he had looked out to behold the two girls coming down the sluice path and Melian carrying the deadly shining thing in her white, unsuspecting fingers—and his own frost of horror at the sight. So all that time he had been shadowed, his every movement keenly watched from the recesses of those hanging woods—not as he had thought by honest English Nashby and his random, all-at-sea suspicions, but by this deadly Brotherhood, whose ranks, in an ill-starred moment, and moved chiefly by curiosity, he had joined. Yet how on earth could their emissary or emissaries have hung about the Plane woods all that time undetected by keepers, or unseen and uncommented on by the surrounding rustic population? Of a truth the problem was a record one for stiffness of solution. But he answered: “It was not delivered once, nor yet twice. It was not delivered at all.” The fierce, copper-hued, shaggy faces, the gleaming eyes reflected in the firelight, were bent still more threateningly upon the speaker. The latter, in sheer hopeless desperation, was probing behind his very brain to try and make out a case for himself, and at the same time realising its utter hopelessness; His remorseless indicter went on. “The first who delivered thee the sign thou didst kill.” “That did I not. On the very contrary, I saved him—saved him from the icy death. Listen brothers.” And then Mervyn went on to give the narrative of the events of that wild, sleet-tossed winter night, when we first saw him. He told it graphically and well, speaking in the Pushtu with, as had happened throughout all the dialogue, an odd word here and there of a coined language peculiar to the Brotherhood, thrown in. “Now? Did I not save him from certain death?” he concluded, looking with an anxiety which he hoped did not appear, into the fierce faces that ringed him round. But his heart sank within him, as he realised that any hopes he might have entertained on that score were doomed; for no sign of softening could he trace. On the contrary, the set grimness on every countenance seemed to deepen. “Not knowing him—then,” supplied the stranger, who seemed to have constituted himself—or been constituted—judge in chief, or president of the proceedings. “Afterwards—that was made good.” And his eyes again seemed fixed with a deeper, more compelling glow, upon those of the Englishman. Mervyn stood as though petrified. The words, the mesmeric glance seemed to take him out of himself—to take him back; back to—something. Mechanically he raised a nerveless hand, and passed it over his eyes. He saw—yes, assuredly he saw himself in dreamland, as it were. The next words aroused him—brought him to himself—thoroughly, completely. And they were spoken by Allah-din Khan. “Thou double traitor,” said the chief, in deep, growling tones. “For the act of disobedience thine end should have been sure—sure but swift—the Point of the Star. For this it shall be long, and lingering. Look.” Following the out-darted finger, Mervyn did look, and— For the first time he became aware of a curious object which stood within the grisly vault, and that not far behind him. It was a long, coffin-shaped thing, and now, as two of those who had been seated there arose, and, kindling torches from the fire, approached it, he saw that it took on another shape, that of a long, lounge bath in fact. It was raised from the floor on metal feet, and the thing itself was made of metal, but of such ancient and strange manufacture that the British Museum, say, would probably have given a very large sum to possess. As the flare of the torches gleamed upon this he could see something else. The fronting side of the structure was engraved with subjects of a hideous and revolting nature—that of human beings in process of being done to death under every circumstance of prolonged torment, and one of them, and the most prominent, by means of just such an implement as this. For there reproduced, was an exact facsimile of it. A fire was represented as burning underneath, and out of it the head and shoulders of a man appeared—the open mouthed, staring expression on the face conveying the indescribable and ghastly agony which the sufferer was undergoing. Mervyn stared at the thing, and his blood froze. Here was his own fate represented. To lie for hours in that dreadful bath undergoing a process of slow boiling, this was what it meant. He had heard of this being done, knew that it actually was done. The cold sweat poured from his forehead, and he looked wildly in front for a means of putting a quick end to his existence. He had expected the quick, painless death, which his guest had died under his own roof at Heath Hover—but this! Allah-din Khan’s deep voice broke through the terror of the spell that was on him. “Use no art to avoid this, double traitor, for it is thee or another. If not thee, then the sun-crowned woman who is with thee shall lie yonder. By the tomb of the Prophet it shall be so.” A mist rose before his eyes and he swayed. The very fiend from Hell was speaking, of a surety. He wondered whether he could overcome his momentary faintness, lest they should think he had eluded them, and proceed to put their hellish threat into immediate execution. Great Heaven! was this some awful, shocking nightmare from which he should presently wake? Was ever any one confronted with such an alternative? Death he had expected, but these hours perhaps of fiendish torture? But it was himself or Melian. These devils were not to be balked. Now he saw that there were piles of kindling wood standing beside the horrid implement. The ring of diabolical faces confronting him looked terrific in the fell, ruthless purpose, which he read therein. But for the alternative he would have made a frenzied dash at the nearest weapon and died fighting. Now, the alternative utterly disarmed him. He would make one appeal. “Give me the Star, that I may die by it,” he said. “I have a right to.” “Thou art no longer of its Brotherhood, double traitor,” answered Allah-din Khan. “For thee, the boiling fat.” At a sign from him one of the two who had been mounting guard over the entrance advanced, and tearing out handfuls from the stacks of kindling wood, began to arrange them beneath the grim receptacle. The victim watched the process with a sort of dazed, numbed attention. And then, as he looked again at the ring of his tormentors, something he saw made him wonder whether his head was going round with him, or whether his reeling brain had actually and indeed given way beneath the shock. <hr /> <div class="page-break"></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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