The Silent Dead

Chapter I.—The Child of the Slum.-2

By now everyone was noticing my so altered appearance and the girls who had been at school with me had taken to calling after me in the street as 'the duchess.' s*x was raw in Rocker Street and my mother said that some of them were even suggesting I was being kept by a man. Boys now tried to catch my eye, but thank Heaven I had no interest in them and my nature was to remain cold and unresponsive for many years after.

When I had been with the widow about eighteen months no one would have recognised in me the scraggy girl who had first come to her. With the so-much better food and the happy surroundings my face and figure had filled out and I was no longer thin and pale. Attending upon the customers, too, had given me confidence and altogether I was feeling a very important young woman.

Again, the books I read, and my employer made me read every new one she bought so as to be able to advise the borrowers which one to choose, opened up a new world to me and I started day-dreaming and building castles in the air, situated very far away, however, from Camden Town.

Still, all this happiness was not to last, as my poor mother died suddenly from heart failure and my father said I must come back home and keep house for him. My mother's death came as a terrible shock to me, for though I had never loved her very much and there never had been any real confidences between us, of late years I had been feeling intensely sorry for her in the dull and dreary life she lived.

I should have fought hard against returning to Rocker Street except for two things. The first, my father insisted that as I was under sixteen I could not leave him without his permission, and threatened me with the police if I did not do as he ordered. I was very frightened of the police, always associating them in my mind with the struggling and shouting that ensued when they descended upon Rocker Street to arrest a fighting drunk.

The second thing, my grief at leaving the library was mitigated a lot by learning that in any case my benefactor and I would have had to part. She was selling the business to go to live with a brother of hers in Aberdeen who had just lost his wife. For a parting present she gave me five beautiful golden sovereigns, with the stern injunction that I was not on any account to let my father get hold of them.

A fortnight back in Rocker Street proved as much as I could put up with, and I made up my mind to run away. I told myself that, at any rate to begin with, I would take the first situation offered me and go anywhere where the police would not be able to find me.

So, one morning, leaving a note for my father to read when he came home at night, saying I had heard of a good place in Scotland, I took a train going almost in the very opposite direction and arrived at Torquay, in the West of England, the same afternoon. With my heart beating a little faster at the thought that for the first time in my life I was now alone, I walked boldly into a cheap temperance hotel and enquired the price of a room. I was told it would be half a crown including breakfast.

Out early the next morning to buy a newspaper, I saw an advertisement in the Western Morning News that a girl was wanted for general housework in the country and, to my great joy, application for the situation was to be made at an address in Torre, a suburb of Torquay. Within an hour I was being interviewed by the advertiser whom I found was a Colonel Jasper, an amiable and pleasant-looking old gentleman of a much better class than any I had up to then been brought in contact with.

He asked me a lot of questions and, it struck me he seemed pleased I had come from London only the previous day and knew no one in Torquay. I fibbed that both my parents were dead and I had no relations at all. Also, I put my age on two years and told him I was nearly eighteen. Asked what references I could give, I said none at all, as my previous employer who had kept a small lending library had died just recently.

After staring at me for quite a long minute, he seemed satisfied and said he would give me a trial. “But I must tell you,” he added, “that on Dartmoor where you will live it is very lonely. You will find no Town amusements there, no pictures or anything like that, and you won't see many people either. Still it is very healthy and the scenery is very wonderful. Your wages will be £18 a year.” I was delighted. This was exactly what I wanted. However long the arm of the police, I thought it could hardly reach me there.

It was arranged I should meet him the next morning at nine o'clock upon the platform of Torre Railway Station and we were to take the train to Bovey Tracey, a small town about fourteen miles up the line close to where the road starts to climb up on to the moor. I found him waiting for me and took good stock of him again. He was wearing breeches and leggings which were anything but new, and a leather motoring overcoat which from the oil-stains upon it had evidently seen good service.

When the train drew in it was nearly full, with us having to occupy the last vacant seats in a carriage. Accordingly, no conversation took place between us on the journey and I was not sorry for it, as I was interested in a book he had bought for me at the station bookstall. It was all about Dartmoor and I was thrilled at learning to what a mysterious place I was going.

The book said the moor was all that remained now of a once mighty volcano which millions of years ago had heaved up great masses of molten rock to remain as the tors of today. With a circumference of under fifty miles, it rose abruptly from the surrounding country to heights varying between two and three thousand feet above sea-level. It was studded nearly all over its wide expanse with these big tors whose clefts and crannies were the last home of the deadly viper, the one remaining poisonous snake of the British Isles. Less than two hundred years ago, too, wolves were to be seen roaming on its uplands.

The book went on to state that for many centuries the moor had had something of an evil reputation, as history recorded that human sacrifices had once been offered up upon the tors. Even today it was believed by many of the superstitious dwellers round the countryside that the ghosts of the violent dead still haunted the moor, and upon nights when the moon was full would creep out from their hiding-places under the tors and attack human beings who had been unwary enough to come their way.

In summer, it said the moor was well-favoured by picnic parties and tourists, but, even then straying far from the only two roads crossing it its many stretches of dangerous bog-land always constituted something of a menace to the unwary as they were deep and treacherous, with their surfaces easily mistaken for solid ground. From time to time wandering cattle and moorland ponies had been actually seen to disappear in them within the course of a very few minutes. The danger of walking into those bogs was all the greater because of sudden mists and fogs which, even upon a bright summer day, might sweep down, apparently from nowhere and quickly blot out all visibility beyond a few yards.

Such was what I had been reading and in a way, I was quite sorry when the train reached Bovey Tracey and I had to put the book down. Colonel Jasper said he wanted to go into the town to make a few purchases as well as pick up his car, but I was to wait for him in the small hotel near the railway station. He took me in there by the private door and I sat down in the hall to wait until he was ready. He went out again by the same door through which we had entered.

I was expecting to be very bored by the waiting, but, as it happened, the chair I had chosen was close to a door which was slightly ajar and hearing voices very near to me, I peered cautiously round to find I was looking straight into the hotel bar. Besides the barman, there were two customers, young fellows in the late twenties with all the appearance of returned soldiers about them, and I guessed that the motor-cycling outfit I had noticed standing outside the hotel belonged to them. They looked very different from the barman who was a round-faced simple-looking man of middle age.

All at once I heard Colonel Jasper's name mentioned. It was the barman speaking in his soft Devonshire drawl. “Yes, as you say, he looks,” he remarked, “an eccentric character. For one thing he lives in a lonely old place in the very heart of the moor miles away from anywhere.”

“You mean he's got a shack there,” asked one of the young fellows, “a sort of holiday home?”

The barman guffawed. “Shack be damned! Why, it's a big stone house of two stories with a fenced-in yard and plenty of out-buildings. It was built by the Government some fifty to sixty years ago. They had some cracked idea of sinking shafts all round to discover—well Heaven only knows exactly what. However, they soon dropped the idea and the house was shut up and left to go to wrack and ruin.”

“Does he live there alone?” asked the other.

“No, he's got two Indian servants with him, an old man and his wife.” The barman laughed. “All old codgers up there, and we call it the old folks home.”

“But how on earth does he pass the time?” asked the motor-cyclist curiously.

“Writes books about old gold coins,” replied the barman, “and we've heard tell he got one of the finest collections of them in the kingdom. Then he goes fishing a lot, and watches the stars. Oh, yes, he's got plenty of money. Last year he had a big telescope built into the roof of the house and three men came all the way from London to fix it.”

“But isn't he afraid of being robbed?”

“Not he,” laughed the barman. “He's been a big-game hunter all over the world and is afraid of nothing. He's a tough old guy. Besides, he's got a couple of big savage dogs up there with him, Alsatians, and they keep everybody away.”

All the time I was seeing and hearing everything exactly as if I were in the bar itself. One of the motor-cyclists had changed his seat, so that while he was talking, he could keep his eye on his motor-cycle through the window. This had brought him so near to me that by stretching out my hand I could almost have touched him. However, the dim light in the little narrow hall made me feel quite safe and I was thrilled at learning anything about my employer. Of the conversation which followed, too, even after all these years I can recall almost everything which was said, as it seemed so much like a fairy tale to me that it left its lasting impression upon my mind.

Suddenly I saw the other young fellow move up to the bar counter. “Here, Gov'nor,” he said, “have a pint with me, and tell us more about those dogs and the old gentleman. I'm quite interested as I'm a newspaper man and might make a good story out of it.”