“My Stephen! oh, my Stephen!” cried the woman, fondling him upon her breast, and he hung within her arms. A snarl came from the shadows: a creature smelling of mould and rotten leafage, clothed as in ragged lichens, contorted like a pollard willow, leaped at the throat of Stephen and crushed it like a paste, then fled with the bittern call.
Old Wanlock heard the woman shriek: he tottered with the goblet from the lodge and came within the circuit of the candles where she knelt beside her lover.
“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she cried, demented. “The devil has strangled him,” and at the moment passed the ghost of Stephen Wanlock.
“I knew it,” said the father—“very well I knew it: the sixth blow! There is no discharge in this war!” His head seemed filled with wool: his blood went curdling in its channels, and he staggered on his feet. Raising the goblet till it chattered on his teeth, he drained it at a draught, and the woman, heedless, straightened out the body of his son.
She heard her master choke: she turned to see his face convulsed, his eyeballs staring, and the empty flagon falling from his hand.
“The brooch! the brooch!” she screamed: a gleam of comprehension passed for a moment over Wanlock’s purpling visage: he raised his arms, and stumbling, fell across the body of his son!
THE husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour, plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her floor.
“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”
“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there? And—and the hen; or—or yon ham?”
But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.