TWO FOR HIS HEELSby
A. A. McBraid
As soon as I'd read the letter from Dumars asking-- no, *begging* me to come down to Lynford, I tore it up and threw it into the fire.
Nor did I give it a second thought thereafter. I couldn't care less if he were offended to receive no response, and in fact hoped he would be. Perhaps then he would leave me alone.
Dumars was a bastard, and had no real friends, except for his money, the only thing that could serve as friend to a person of that description. In doing so, it warms the self-respect of those who have none. I wondered how many other like letters he had sent, and smiled at the confetti thereby created.
It was a beautiful April morning, and a pleasure to forget him. I went to Shefton's and bought a couple of their excellent salt herring sandwiches, a bottle of brown ale, and some cigarettes, and went for a walk. The air was bright and clean from the previous night's shower, the sunshine warm and honeylike on flagstones and window-boxes, from which bowed primroses were already straightening up again, like supplicants at the end of services, with faces of limp, beatific relief.
The road out of town turned at Raeburn Hill and shot across a moist green field of new wheat, then slipped like a stream through clumps of bush and stony knolls spotted with occasional elms and blackthorns. Birdsong piped louder than piccolo trumpets, a breeze rattled the treetops, and clouds raced across an endless expanse of an almost painful blue.
At the wooden bridge I met a party coming back from a funeral. Solemn faces and somber attire within the frame of such a splendid day struck me as being unusually picturesque, a tableaux of prismed dignity. I did not know them, and went on further until I reached the church from which they had just come.
There I saw Bramwell the newsagent, with whom I often had occasion to speak. He was leaning against the gate, shielding his eyes from the sun.
"I hope I'm not intruding," I began. "Are they family?"
He greeted me and shook his head. "No, not of mine. It's the Reynolds' boy, Ethan. They've just buried him." He took out his pipe and filled it.
"His house burned a week ago at--" he went on, and named an area I recognized with an uncomfortable start. "The lad was inside alone, locked in a closet, no one knows how or why. They've brought him home to his parents, or all that was left of him."
We came back together and he told me what little else he knew of the tragedy. At the bridge I took leave of him and went and had my lunch beside the swift current, made some notes in my book, and took a nap in the sun.
I used to wonder to what lengths a man would go in order to escape an opinion of himself which had already settled upon his soul, how soon before he rends himself to spite its teeth when the trap of it comes to resemble a means of some graceless salvation. If it is given us to see these impostures with such clarity, why is it not then ordained for us to know of what they are made? Dumars was not a stupid man, he was not blind. He was part of an accepted herd by society's standards, and never perceived why he suffered rejection at the hand of the individual. But it was only these standards with which he was concerned in any case; he felt equal to the task of winning in this as in most affairs, and did not hesitate to put on charm, manners, wit, politics, even morality with faultless care, and wear them like evening clothes as arguably he saw the best around him do, and with as much aplomb. Yet the facade did not convince beyond the hollow company of those similarly short-sighted; in the deeper confluence of humankind no one could countenance his pride, and no one would trade on his humility. Knowing he was wrong, and without the inclination to instruct him, all quite naturally set themselves against his petitions, and bristled when they were compelled to endure his presence on general principles. But the instinct of their dislike was never effectively betrayed; Dumars always showed himself in the end an odious, self-serving creature, and left all secure in unanimous contempt of him.
He was there to greet me when I returned to my apartments, and there was nothing to do but let him in.
"Did you get my letter?" he asked. I poured myself a drink and asked him what he wanted. He sat down in my best chair and passed a hand over his face.
He was wrought up about something, I realized with pleased surprise. This was probably my mistake; I shouldn't have allowed myself to enjoy his discomfiture so much-- it made me too curious. But I was moved that such justice was still possible.
He told me that he was marked, and proceeded to tell me why.
Would you cavil at a seamy melodrama such as the one Dumars related to me? I have told you something of the man; you might well imagine how such a philosophy would extend to matters of love. The year before he had hired a servant at Lynford, a young girl named Judith, a local girl of more than average beauty. He had, predictably, made advances; she had repulsed them, and he had learned that there was another suitor for her affections, a boy she had cherished since childhood. Dumars' recounting of the events of the subsequent months was unpleasant to hear; it was in fact a maudlin and repulsive story, and I told him so. He took no notice of my displeasure. He probably didn't understand it.
Thwarted in his initial designs, he changed his tactics, became unctious and sly. He set obstacles in the way of this girl and her beloved, then presented himself as benefactor to rescue her from hardships of his own manufacture. Through subterfuge and vandalism he caused her father to lose the profit of his harvest, but intervened to prevent a foreclosure on his property. When her mother sickened from taking on extra work, he paid for her medical care. With one hand he engineered disaster, with the other he forestalled it. Not so, however, with respect to the boy, who suffered from all the unabated persecution that was in Dumars' power to inflict. No venture of his that was reachable by Dumars enjoyed success, yet the undermining of his fortunes was done in such adroit fashion that he was never quite able to affirm the influence of Dumars in the proceedings, though he must have suspected it. Dumars' final triumph was to obtain Judith's hand in marriage, when circumstances made it seem the only prudent course for her to pursue, even at the cost of her rightful sweetheart. Unhappy pair! I was waiting for him to finish so that I could ask him to leave when the tale took an unexpectedly sordid turn, even for him.
It came to Dumars' attention that his new wife and his vanquished rival had not terminated their relationship completely; though it was now necessarily only of the most chaste and transient nature, still even this was too much to his mind. He resolved to put an end to all further contact between them. He brought this up to his wife, who tearfully protested the injustice of it, and came dangerously close to telling the truth about her feelings. In his selfish, singleminded lust Dumars had finally struck her, whipped her in fact, and after he had done what he pleased. The poor girl went to her beau and told him what Dumars had done. The boy showed up early that next morning with a gun and had very nearly succeeded in giving Dumars the swift dispatch to Hell he so richly deserved, but his aim was off. He had been forced to leave, with loud angry promises that he would return and finish the job.
Dumars took the opportunity to go away for a few days, but he left instructions with certain men he knew; by the time he returned the deed was done. When the news reached her, Judith, knowing who was responsible, went out and hanged herself at the foot of the road just beyond the gate leading to Lynford, a wasted gesture; no one else knew enough of what had happened to draw any conclusions, and nothing further was pursued in Dumars' direction by anyone left alive.
I wanted to thrash him myself at this point, and he must have seen the look on my face, for his next words were hurried and aspirant:
"Murderer and worse, that's what you're thinking, is it? Well, as to murder, one of us was sure to commit it, you'll grant that whether you will or no," he said, then in a lower tone went on, "As to the other, that's no new idea, you'll grant that too. I've had servant-girls who were more agreeable."
He stared ahead for a moment, not with dimly-remembered salacity but with genuine puzzlement. I did not despise him less, but I meant for him to leave without a fight if he would. I threw open the door for him. He looked at me then. The blood left his face and his mouth fell open; he made a sign for me to wait, gathered his wits, then continued his story.
The first night back he went through the house locking all the windows and doors, a thing he never bothered with before. The servants had quarters in the east wing; old Cebron slept out back, and he had a rifle; the dogs prowled the grounds and railed at chance intruders and intentional ones alike.
But on this evening he was not assured by these. He said he felt the shadows leaning toward him and the ceilings angle out of true, or some such nonsense, and he had found a huge fly drowned in his mug by the chair, and the tobacco was bitter in his pipe, and smelled like mould.
I laughed, of course. It was not like him to give himself terrors. He gave me an angry glance and almost made a move to go, but something prevented him. "I knew you would doubt me," he snarled. "Perhaps you will not doubt the evidence of your own eyes." He reached into his vest and pulled out a small folded parcel.
"I had a handsome pocket-watch," he said, "a present from a very influential business acquaintance on the Continent. You know me at least not to contemn things of value." I nodded in weary agreement. In regard to what he considered valuable, this was so. He smiled grimly, as if he'd scored a point, and resumed. "Everyone else had gone to bed for the night. I was about to do so myself, and I set this watch upon my dresser. When I came back a minute or two later, this is what I found." He shook the contents of the parcel out onto the newspaper lying on my table.
They were a few sad pieces of twisted metal, gears, springs, and glass, all that remained of Dumars' pocket-watch. Some agency had crushed it to bits with a vicious deliberation. I looked at him for explanation.
"I was no further away than the next room," he said, "and I heard nothing, not a single sound."
He lapsed into apathy again as he went on: "I searched the entire house and found no one. I slept with my revolver that night, but nothing else happened. I dreamed, but... that was to be expected." He didn't elaborate. I suggested that someone must have known something about his affairs and was trying to rattle him, but he acted as if I had not spoken.
The next night (he said) his feelings of oppression had increased. He nearly had Cebron come into the house to sleep downstairs, but decided not to submit to his misgivings to this extent as yet, lest old Cebron think him addled. On his way to the washroom something shifted in the hall behind him, a shuffling step, but the sound was too close for the bearer to have moved from sight in the instant he turned to look. That was the first thing. The next was the indefinite shape he seemed to see behind him when he looked into the washroom mirror, worse when he closed the door, in that small space with him, but again absent when he spun around to confront its source. When he picked up his razor he saw that it was horribly stained, with the appearance of having been left out for a long time in the elements, the handle cracked, the hingepins rusted, the blade pitted and useless. Going to his bed he found the sheets and pillows moist with damp and fearfully cold; he had finally spent the night downstairs on the divan by the fire, shivering in a rug.
As it happened, I had been the only one he had written. He'd scribbled his entreaty and sent it by a messenger that morning, then lay down to doze for an hour or two before deciding to come in person. He suspected the letter would be unanswered. He could not, he said, spend another night there alone. More than that, he wanted someone else outside his household to see, so that he would know he was not either being tricked or merely going mad.
Merely? As if it were as small an inconvenience as all the other warning signs of a neglected conscience he had dismissed, I thought. His guilt was on the point of destroying him at last, and he refused to acknowledge it, so great was his ignorance and conceit. I made him pay for the privilege of my company; a hundred pounds in advance, and I took my own pistol, in case he should change his mind.
Traveling to Lynford in Dumars' coach we did not speak further of the matter. Dumars bantered on about inconsequentialities, and kept trying to draw me out about what I was doing lately, but I was unresponsive. Brooding on what he had already told me I ignored most of what he was saying now, and did not arouse from my thoughts until we were almost at the house.
The turn at the drive made me remember the fate of the unfortunate Judith; I pointed at a likely oak that stood there with thick, overhanging branches. "Is that the one?" I asked him coldly.
He turned to look, with a flash of annoyance, and nodded, then he blanched suddenly. His eyes went dark, and he stared so intently at the tree that I made to look back at it myself, but we were just then approaching the gates, and a wizened old fellow with coarse features and a shock of unkempt white hair I later learned was Cebron himself was unlocking them to admit us. Dumars got out and exchanged a few words with him I did not catch, then got back in, and the coach proceeded up the drive to the doors of his well-appointed residence.
Lynford stood, a long horizontal structure of tall, mullioned windows, pilasters, and balustrades, a lovely old manor in the Renaissance style, without any ominous undercurrent to its mien. We entered, and Dumars had his butler direct me to my room at once. He told me to make myself comfortable and entertain myself however I liked until dinner, when he would rejoin me. He left, rather abruptly I thought, but not, I'll admit, to any displeasure of mine. I poured myself a cognac from the sideboard and went to his library to look through his books.
I was certain to find some choice items in his collection, of course; Dumars' money and his opinion of himself would hardly provide for less than the best, and I was not disappointed. I was admiring some Italian folios from the 17th century when I happened to glance out the library window and see Cebron and Dumars walking back up the drive from the gate. The latter appeared to be very agitated; he was waving his arms and shouting-- separated by the glass and too far away to hear, I could nonetheless see his mouth opening and closing in the manner one expects from a verbal tumult-- while Cebron appeared to be trying vainly to interject a defense every now and then. They passed from sight and I resumed my examination of the volume I was holding, until a similar movement seen out of the corner of my eye made me look up again to see a third figure pass the way the others had come.
This one seemed to grope his way along, though there were no obstructions to his progress; still, he went much slower than Cebron and Dumars had done, as if he were moving in total darkness instead of the glow of late afternoon. He held his head low in his collar; his clothes looked ill-fitting, too large for him; despite the warmth, he wore gloves. Though I was curious enough to strain to see his face, he kept it oddly averted from me, so that I could not gain even a glimpse of it.
A gardener, I decided, perhaps one who had had too much to drink, and was looking for something he had dropped. Soon he too was beyond my range of vision, and after a brief period of wonderment I thought no more of him.
Later, feeling restless, I wandered downstairs and expressed a desire to go outside for some air, wondering aloud if this was practical at that hour. The butler assured me that the dogs were not let loose on the grounds before sundown. I took a walk out by the stables, where I found Cebron and the coachman in conversation.
They dropped whatever subject in which they had been engaged upon seeing me, but after returning their formalities I asked Cebron straight out whether he thought his master had been himself lately.
That took doing; I had to divulge a good deal of information of my own first before he would speak freely. I provided enough necessary details, and merely made vague references to the rest. I felt no allegiance to Dumars, and did not think him enough of a gentleman for me to abide by any caveats of privacy among his own servants. After all, wasn't I a servant too, paid to be there against my better inclinations? That point in fact was what finally made Cebron unburden himself:
" 'e sent me down the drive to 'ave a look at that tree, the one poor Miss Judith did 'erself in upon," he said, after a surreptitious look around. " 'e were of the notion someone 'ad been muckin' about with it with paint or the like."
He explained that when our coach had passed by earlier Dumars had seen a black smudge on the bole of the oak; a large one, the size of a human body (Dumars had not made this precise comparison to Cebron, but had indicated with his hands the unmistakeable dimensions of one). He had sent Cebron to clean it off, whatever it was, but Cebron had found no such mark there. When Dumars went to inspect the result and heard Cebron's report he had accused Cebron of making the stain himself somehow, then removing it. Cebron had denied this to Dumars, and he denied it once again to me. I did not allow it to become an issue, but merely nodded. It was of no value for me to vouchsafe an opinion.
We parted, I think, with something of a mutual understanding. The situation was still an unfamiliar and unwelcome one to me, and I was obliged to enlist any allies which might be available, but I would put my trust in none that did not give fair account of themselves. If Cebron were more likely to help me now should I need it, his help would not be unwelcome; and if he or anyone else in Dumars' employ was responsible for anything unusual I might see later, I would be more likely to recognize the fact. Whether or not I thought this would act as a deterrent of any kind I cannot say. I suppose I privately hoped that it would.
Dinner was excellent, and afterward Dumars suggested we retire to the parlour for cribbage; while we played, he discoursed upon the origins of the various court cards in the deck, a subject he had been studying.
"Observe how the Kings have changed from their original French designs," he said, turning up the King of Hearts. "Here is Charlemagne; where he once brandished a battle-axe in his left hand, he now holds a sword behind his head-- or through it, if your fancy runs to that, earning him the macabre epithet of the Suicide King-- he has left the battle-axing to his sterner brother, the King of Diamonds, who is a personification of Julius Caesar, and is the only King who frowns."
I regarded the Diamond King thoughtfully. He seemed to be holding his other hand out for something that was not rightfully his, and I recalled that his suit originally symbolised wealth.
"The Knaves are the most intriguing," Dumars went on, "Their patchy reputations have doubtless caused their designs to suffer. Drawn and re-drawn through the centuries by menial craftsmen who didn't know what their fellows were doing, they underwent mutations. The arrow which the Knave of Clubs bears has become grotesque, the Knave of Hearts clutches a meaningless feather which was once a baton, and no one seems to know what it is that the Knave of Spades is holding-- ah, he comes to show us."
There was that Knave, with the indefinite object in his hand, the perimeters of his body distorted beyond recognition and his face turned away. Dumars was dealing, and had just turned it up as the starter. "Two for His Heels," he announced, and reached out to peg his points.
The lights dimmed suddenly, and the room went dark.
"Now what foolishness is--" said Dumars, but was cut off by a spate of barking followed by a yelp of agony outside. "The dogs!" he hissed, and jumped up, moving to the bay doors that led out to the garden. I followed, and we went out onto the terrace. Dumars bellowed for Cebron, and both of us ventured in the direction we had heard the hound's cry.
The moon had not fully risen, and the lawns were grey in the twilight. Cebron joined us with a lantern, and we soon found the dog's body, twisted and lifeless, lying on the ground near a stand of trees. Beside it was a torn glove. Dumars picked it up and quickly threw it down again. "Faugh! It stinks. Tend to the poor beast, Cebron." Then to me: "We'd better go back."
We began a tense evening. The servants were ordered to stay locked up in their rooms for the duration of the night. Cebron, plainly distraught over the loss of one of his beloved dogs, found the others and kenneled them. They were cowed and slinking, terrified themselves, and would be no good to us anyway. Cebron would patrol outside alone with his rifle, and aim for any trespasser. Dumars and I kept inside by the fire with our own weapons handy.
The lamps which had so mysteriously gone out were relit, but their illumination was tentative; Dumars' face was grim. Periodically he would rise and go to the window, only to return and settle in his chair again. We did not speak. Dumars muttered to himself now and then, some monologue that only made sense to him, in which I did not care to get involved. I played Solitaire and waited for whatever held sway over Dumars to show itself.
I was not aware how much time had passed before the room abruptly went cold as winter. The flames in the hearth lost all their efficacy, though they burned on, hard and bright as gems, but without heat of any kind. Dumars felt it, and woke from his stupor, his breath like smoke from his nostrils and mouth.
"They fret me," he croaked, and a moment later: "Judith!"
I looked at him hard. "She is not here," I said. "She will not come."
"She was my wife!" he retorted. "Judith!"
But I was correct, for she did not come. She had been his wife, it was true. That pitiful servant-girl who knew no better than to cast her lot with a man like Dumars in order to improve her state, not realizing that it could never prevail against the affection she had kept for another. Now she had left this unhappy world of her own volition; she would not return to a husband that shamed the testament of her heart.
She did not come. It was another whose slouching advent sounded in the hall beyond, and brought with it a smell of burning and of the grave.
This was something I did not want to see. Dumars had done an evil, cowardly thing, and that visitor in the hall would have satisfaction of him, but I had no desire to bear the witness of it. I kept thinking of what Bramwell had told me at the funeral back at the little church, of the Reynolds family's sad attempt to present Ethan's corpse to lie in state; how they had had it dressed to disguise the ravaged body, gloved its hands and draped its face with a cloth, to try and give it enough form to which they could bid farewell for the last time. They could not have known of farewells it would take of its own before it suffered to be quit of all tears.
Dumars got up, and for an instant I thought he was actually going to meet the challenge on his feet; then I saw the revolver in the trembling hand that hung limp by his side drop to the carpet, as if the enormity of what he faced had suddenly made him realize the futility of it. He turned and sprang for the doors leading outside. Before I could stop him he was gone, running across the lawn toward the bottom of the drive.
I shouted for Cebron not to fire, lest he mistake Dumars for a fleeing intruder; he came round the corner, and I indicated the dark form of his master, who had reached the locked gate and was now trying to scale it.
And both of us saw the strange, flopping shape that overtook him at last, and that clawed at his legs; we heard Dumars scream, but we were frozen where we stood, too far away to help even if we had been able to move. In the gloom, and at that distance, it might have been only a bundle of rags blown by the wind that somehow, by being filled with air, gained the illusion of a body-- until the charred fingers of the ungloved hand fluttered across the horror-stricken face of Dumars like a tattered bat, and the blackened head eclipsed that of the man those fingers held, turned away forever, no matter what direction it faced, for it was uniformly burnt on all sides, and had no face to show.
Certain entries found among Dumars' papers later served to identify those men Dumars had hired to murder Ethan Reynolds, and they were tried and executed for the crime. It was some solace to his family, who needed it; those same men were blamed for the disturbance of Ethan's burial place, where they must have sought to destroy any evidence of their villainy before it could be turned against them. They were apparently interrupted in this, for, while the earth was thrown up out of the grave and the coffin found riven apart, the poor remains of Ethan were still there, though the garments in which he had been clothed were missing.
I inherited Lynford, not because Dumars bequeathed it to me, but because I was his only surviving relative, his only sister, a bond I could never renounce in his lifetime, however much I wished, but which now has ceased to matter. Wealth makes you look at things differently, and others take you for more than you really are; in time, this can change your aspect if you let it, and you might one day find someone unfamiliar in the mirror, someone that represents you in name only, if you fail to keep a tight hold on what you know to be the truth.
I kept the servants on, and Cebron too. We never speak of that night, or of what we saw, and no one has ever enjoined us to do so-- unless it is the Knave of Spades' accidental appearance to me on occasion (I have an aversion to cards now, regardless of the game), and the obscure thing he holds in his one hand, which might after all be a coil of rope tied in a noose, that recalls the struggle Cebron and I beheld that evening between Dumars and his Accuser.
We found nothing but a pile of old clothes when we finally reached the place where they had been. At the end of the drive beyond the gate, in the first rays of morning, we discovered Dumars hung on the oak, his own face black and turning slowly, the shadow of his body dark against the tree.
The End