The wide circle of open lawn before the ruined house was less dark than the pathway, but the shadows beneath the trees were inky black and the pines themselves were bowing and thundering in the heavy storm. There was no rain, only the boisterous wind whipping the branches and driving great masses of clouds across the sky with now and then a gleam of stars between. Stars glinted now and again in the pool also, long beams of light in the ruffled water, although, as she came near, there chanced to be quiet for a moment so that she saw reflected the irregular circle of light that Miss Miranda had told her was the Northern Crown.
She stood still by the pool for a long minute, her heart beating very loud, the pulses throbbing in her ears as it does after running. Very keenly she was peering into the dark at the long lines of ruined walls, seeing nothing at first, but by and by catching glimpses of a tiny, moving light. It stopped, vanished, reappeared, and moved on before she could be certain that she really saw it. At last it came nearer, moving along past the door that David had used, slipped over the tumbled wall, even showed double for a second in the shattered old mirror. She was trying to speak, to cry out, but she could not find her voice, could only stare, fascinated, quaking inwardly with the thought that the light, after all, might be something unearthly. But as it progressed farther toward the end of the house where the fire had raged fiercest, the sense of danger brought her to her senses at last.
“Stop,” she cried frantically. “It is not safe there. Stop, come back.”
She had called a second too late. There was a sound of rending walls and tumbling bricks, a crash, a startled cry and then a groan. She rushed across the grass, could find no place to climb over and ran up and down wildly, seeking a point of vantage where she might scramble across. A new sound caught her attention, for flying feet were coming up the path.
“Oh, David, David is it you?” she cried, in an overwhelming rush of relief. “I can’t climb up, I can’t reach him.”
“You are not to try it, it is not safe,” David ordered sternly, setting his foot on the first big block of stone even as he spoke.
“I am going where you go,” she replied and evidently he realized it was no time for argument.
“Then this is the best way over. Here, give me your hand, and be careful of that loose beam.”
They scrambled over the summit and, amid a shower of sliding bricks, slipped down on the other side. A dark figure lay stretched upon the stones, moving a little and still holding a flickering, lighted candle. It was Michael.
“Yes, Miss Betsey dear,” he affirmed cheerfully, when they had at last brought him to recognize who they were, “and I’ve a broken leg I’m thinking from the way it feels by not having any feeling at all. And will you hold up the candle and see what is running down my face?”
“Oh, Michael, Michael, what were you doing, how could you be so foolish?” Betsey reproached him; “your head is cut and what is running over your face is blood.” She began, forthwith, to try to tie it up with her handkerchief.
“Then glory be to all the Saints,” was Michael’s unexpectedly joyful reply; “there is nothing that will break the charm of ill luck like the letting of blood. It will all go well now.”
Betsey looked helplessly at David. Was the poor old man gone out of his wits entirely?
“Don’t you know better than to risk your life over such nonsense? Won’t you ever learn better, Michael?” David said severely, although the pathetic broken figure on the stones was one to call forth only pity.
“Yes,” assented the old Irishman meekly, “I know better and the priest is always telling me so. But yet—when there’s trouble to them you love and seemingly no way out of it, why, you look back at the old fancies and wonder if they were not true after all, and you feel the need to try this thing or to try that thing, just in case there might be help in it.”
“And what were you doing here?” David asked.
“It is on this house that the ill luck lies, for it was in its burning that the evil fortune began and it is only through its building up again that happiness can come back to Miss Miranda. And so—and so—just to make the luck change, it is the old way to take a candle in your hand and to walk through every part of the house saying spells as you go. And the last of the spells must be said in the hour before midnight in the dark of the moon. But Miss Betsey stopped me,” he concluded regretfully. “This was to be the last night, yet I did not get the whole of the way.”
“She came just in time,” David corrected him. “The walls beyond here are weaker even than these, and high enough to bury you completely if they should fall. I was awake and heard the gate swinging, and I was trying to think how it came to be open, but it was Betsey that was quick enough to understand in time. When she ran down the stairs I got up to follow her, yet I really did not guess what was happening until I heard you fall. You must thank her that you are still alive.”
“But if the bad luck still holds,” protested Michael pitifully, “then it will be all to do over again!”
He was silent as though gathering strength for further speech and then began once more.
“And I must tell you that what has been going amiss is, the whole of it, through fault of mine. There was a day, it was before you ever came to the cottage, when Mr. Donald was last here that—that—” His voice faltered, perhaps through weakness, perhaps through reluctance to go on, but he drew a breath and continued bravely. “That very morning, when I was getting my breakfast I spilled the salt dish and I thought to myself, ‘Michael Martin, you will be losing your temper with some one this day.’ But who was there for me to quarrel with except Miss Miranda and her father and the good Saints know I could never be vexed with them. So I went about my work and thought no more about it.
“But that afternoon I went over to the old house, it was late winter still and I was wishing to gather some pine cones for Miss Miranda’s hearth, and, for all the cold, I sat down on a stone to smoke a pipe and think about the old times and how happy we all were before the fire came. And there was Mr. Donald, walking about the broken walls, peering here and peering there, but not stepping within for he is of the sort that are always careful of the safety of their precious skins.”
He stopped again to rest his trembling voice.
“Don’t try to tell us, Michael, if it is so hard,” Elizabeth said.
“I must tell you, Miss Betsey,” he replied, “I have hid it in my heart too long. He says to me, ‘I am just looking to see where the fire really started, it seems that it must have been at this end where the workshop stood.’ I says ‘Yes, sir,’ not being wishful to have any talk with him. And after a little he says again, ‘It was a beautiful old place. I can see plainly why Miranda longs for it and cannot be happy where she is.’ And this time I says nothing but puffs away at my pipe. It roused my anger, some way, to see him peering about, though I am a slow-witted fellow and had no guess at what he was looking for. At last he speaks once more. ‘Why don’t they build it up again, Michael?’ he says. ‘They could if they weren’t such a careless impractical pair. They should be living here again, I have no patience with them.’ Then my wrath boils up in me and I tells him what I thinks. ‘You have no patience, have you,’ says I, ‘with them that took you in and cared for you and bore with those ways you have that no one likes. You’re prosperous yourself through their help, if you want them to rebuild their house why don’t you give them aid in doing it? Miss Miranda toils and saves and has her garden and her ducks and anything she can think of to make things go forward, so that her father will have what he needs for his work.’ All of that I says to him and I wish the Saints had struck me dumb before I spoke.
“‘She works so that her father may have what he needs?’ he repeats. ‘So that is how things stand, just as I had been suspecting. Thank you, Michael, that is all I wanted to know,’ he says and goes, leaving me gaping after him as he walks away over the snow. I did not know even then what use he was to make of what I had told him, but I saw well enough that I had done harm. And so I have been doing all I could to make amends,” he ended sadly; “I have watched over the house that he should never come near with Miss Miranda not there, though I guessed but little what it was he would do. And when it seemed of no use and I felt helpless and afraid, thinking of the mischief I had done, I have turned to trying to drive away the ill luck in the old fashion, with spells and charms, just—just because there might be something in them after all.”
He ceased speaking and closed his eyes, worn out by the effort of confession.
“He used to watch by the garden gate long before Miss Miranda’s cousin ever showed himself,” was Betsey’s whispered comment to David. “He was sitting there on the bench in the dark, that night we sat by the pool and Miss Miranda told us the story of the green jade tree. He was probably watching on the very evening that Donald Reynolds finally came.”
“Yes,” David reminded her bitterly, “and slipped away on a chase after a will-o’-the-wisp, lit his candle and came up here to this place when he might have been of some real use at home. He even brought us there after him, though he did not know it, just at the time when the man he dreaded had really come. If he had only been sensible—”
“Don’t let him think of that,” said Betsey. “Yes, he went at just the wrong minute but he must be kept from remembering it.”
Michael must have suspected that their whispered discussion concerned the truth of his strange notions.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said miserably, “but did not my own eyes see Something stand there by the pool, did not my ears hear a splash in the water that boded no good. If it had only been running water—”
Betsey felt David start suddenly in the dark.
“Say that again, Michael,” he ordered breathlessly.
The old Irishman repeated the words faithfully, even to the groan at the end of them. David’s excitement was rapidly communicating itself to Betsey.
“That was on the night Miss Miranda’s father was taken ill,” she said, although of this explanation there was no need.
“I know, I know,” the boy returned quickly, “but wasn’t Mr. Reynolds in his shop all the rest of the evening? That is what has puzzled me.”
“I looked in once and he was gone,” she answered, “but it was for such a little while that I never thought of it again. Oh, if we should find what is lost, at last!”
David was already on his feet, peering over the stone wall toward th............