Hounds Pasture

Otago Witness, Issue 3765, 11 May 1926, Page 5

Hounds Pasture

By

Vincent Cornier.

{ [{ Copyright.—For the Witness.) SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS. Thorroldan Priory, a grim old house at the edge of the North Yorkshire moors is the centre of a grim and baffling mystery. A hound howls; a stranger arrives. This man, Magerison, takes up his quarters in the jfiace. He has some hold over Thorrold, the master of the Priory. He presumes on this to tell Dorothy Thorrold, the old man s grand-daughter, that he intends to make her his wife.

Margerison proves, and forces Thorrold to admit, that. John Barnaby, who has worked as a servant in the Priory, is in reality the next heir, and Dorothy’s brother. Looking 1 for the hound Barnaby i 9 shot in the shoulder by someone hiding in Hound's Feature. a field in which a treasure, hidden by monks, is said to be buried. The wound turns out to have been caused by a diamond, not a bullet I A duck shot in Hound's Pasture has its crop filled with gems worth two thousand pounds. While examining them Magerison is attacked—by a ghostly monk, says Dorothy, who saw the thing "materialise’ behind him He is knocked unconscious, and the jewels are stolen. Dorothy now betrays her iove for him. Together they resolve to solve the mystery.

No one is found in the locked room in •which the attack was made, but while searching a spectral figure of a monk is seen. Magerison fires at it, but it is not harmed I Dorothy accidentally grips a carved boss of oak, and she and Magerison fall together through a secret aperture in the wali. Old Thorrold bursts open the study door, and Igod, his confidential servant, and he quarrel. Igod accuses his master of being—a murderer I

Meanwhile Magerison and Dorothy Thorrold explore the place into which they fell ou the opening of the secret panel. They find themselves in a deserted lead mine gallery beneath the Priory. Igod and Thor rold, baffled by the pair's disappearance, decide to join forces. While they are talking Richard Leathley, Thorrold’s enemy, suddenly appears—seemly from nowhere! Old Igod, the master of Thorroldan, and Leathley confer; Leathley traps himself —informing the two autocrats of the priory that he is at their mercy. Meanwhile Margerison and Dorothy are busily exploring under the priory,-in the old lead mines They find in a subterranean chamber the body—long dead—of Thorjold, the Master of Thorroldan I CHAPTER XX.—IMPASSE. Confronted by the wreckage of all his long-laid plans, and confounded so greatly at now to be in the position of one suing for temporary peace, instead of persisting in perpetual warfare, Leathley rocked himself to and fro and moaned. “You murdered him, Leathley!” The remorseless accusation of old Thorrold again was made. “And now you’re going to tell us why!” “An’ if «o be ye doesn’t oppen three gob i’ truth an nothin’ but truth,” Igod Wnarled the threat, “Aa’ll limb thee, Leathley. . . . Aa’ll limb thee wi’ these ’ands o’ mine, and t’ Lord o’ all just dealing ’ll help me t’ find strength enow t’ do it!”

Leathley looked up at last. “It It was an accident, Thorrold,” he stated, unsteadily. “I swear it was an accident. ... his death!” “Rather late in the day, don’t you think, to plead that cause, Leathley?” Thorrold’s grin was cruel. “Just thirty years too late I should imagine.” The sneer goaded Leathley a little. For an instant he became his old-time implacable self. “Well, as his remains can never be found, my dear Thorrold,” he, in turn, grinned, “I really cannot see how such a point has any debatable valup. . . . He's under some five hundred tons of 6tone, and has been for a generation!” All of which would have proved a conversation as vastly intriguing as it would have been grimly amusing to the redoubtable Magerison, who, at that moment, away under the earth of Hound’s Pasture, was confronted by the mummified body of the long-dead figure of mystery the three men in the study of Thorroldan Priory were talking about so guardedly. Thorrold thought about that statement for upwards of two minutes before he ventured a reply taking the form of ft leading question. “Under five hundred tons of stone, you nay? -Um-m-m, and. the treasure of Hound’s Pasture lies there. , . . Buried with him . . . eh:” “Probably!”

“Still guarding yourself, Leathley? What a loss you are to the race that came out of Judah I No. Jew since the redoubtable Shylock has shown one half the avarice arid tenacity for gain that you have done, this thirty years gone by!” There was no animosity now on Thorrold’s part nor was there any emotion betrayed by his level and dispassionate tones. He seemed to be lost in the rarer atmosphere of abstractions; mundanity had ceased, for him, to be a factor sufficiently powerful to intrude. He was cogitating on the amazing perplexity of a nature that was so soured and warped and weaned from all humanity by the acquisitive urge to possess a tiny hoard of glittering stones —and, of course, their equivalent wealth—that it . could be easily inclined toward death; invulnerable before scorn but reticent and truculent at once before the slightest touch on that •one and all-absorbing passion that influenced it. Leathley had not spent a sleepless night in thirty years, for all that Bomething very akin to murder had lain on his soul. . . . now, it was all changed And it was Leathley who would know Jute restless insomnia of anxiety in the 'fpturo. For tbcoa fh| bad been once

afraid of him were now, to a certain extent, his masters, and were beginning to think of the treasure of Hound's Pasture more than, previously, they had thought on the preservation of their own freedom (and their lives) when it was that his very name was a menace to them. . . . “Probably,” once mol% he uttered the non-committal word.

“Well,” Thorrold sighed. “Since, as we have determined, a state of impasse has been reached . . . since neither Igod nor I fear you in the slightest; since you stand, Leathley, self-confessed as the instrument, in part or in whole, of that man’s death . . . we’ll find a panacea, I think, for the ills of the hour in . . .

an alliance, my good Leathley. You understand?” » *‘l—l’m damned if I do!” “You think I talk in riddles, eh,”

“Talk —you can talk as you damn’ well like Thorrold, but you can’t act —no more than—than I can 1 You’re right: we are in a state of impasse . . . you’ll stick to your muttons and I’ll stick to mine, thank you!” “Meaning?” “That you ought to be thanking all the gods of chance that be that you've got across thirty years without the hangman’s noose getting - about vour neck—justly of unjustly, Thorrold,” he snarled and grinned again, coarsely, “or a charge of shot from'the back of a wall, from my gun, knocking the daylight through you—without bothering about the treasure of Hound’s Pasture. That’s mine, by all rights—and mine it shall be. You keep off the grass, Thorrold; you’ve told me once to-night you’ve no need of money ; . I have!” “Oh, I don’t want the treasure.” Leathlev's sullen face lighted up. “Y’ you mean it?” Thorrold nodded—-but. old Igod smiled sardonically to a shadow. “YouTl let me have—have a clear field then?”

“So far as Hound's Pasture itself is concerned^-yes! What lies beneath it is, of course, quite another matter.” Leathley’s smirk of satisfaction faded. “Wh—what in hell are getting at?” he- roughly mouthed. “Well, for over a quarter of a century you’ve made a pretty fat income by wildfowling in the Pasture . . . carry on: I’ve no objections. But, you see, the lad who stopped the missile you fired at John Barnaby, who lies upstairs now with his shoulder smashed to a pulp by your murderous designs—gets the treasure from beneath Hound’s Pasture—aye, if I have to spend mv all to have it dug over inch bv inch, and down as deep as a coalmine!” Leathley staggered and looked, incredulous, from Thorrold’s calm eyes to the mocking and wary orbs of old Igod. “Barnaby—John Barnaby " . . . a—a damned cowman . . . - general servant to—to the whole of the Priory .. . lie’s to have, the treasure ?” —As he is entitled to it: Yes!” “Entitled to it?” “Certainly, my luckless Mr Leathley—entitled to it. Ah—l forgot to tell you, you see, that John Barnaby has thrown up his recent—er—pursuit of cow-keeping for another, and a much more lucrative one ...” Leathley gasped and looked wild. . .* I—er —forgot to tell you that mv recently acknowledged grandson — John Barnaby Thorrold—being the heir to this estate, is entitled to all ” But Leathley, with a roar like a wild beast, sprang forward at that, and.Thorrold’s mocking words gurgled away as a white light flashed before his eyes and a stunning blow crashed at his temple. CHAPTER XXI.—DEATH AND TREASURE. When, in that grim stone chamber far below the surface of Hound's Pasture, Basil Magerison and Dorothy Tlibrrold found the mummified thing that sat at a crumbling table with its dead feet in the fire bosomed duet of a treasure worth a king’s ransom—no other emotion was greater in tlieir minds than the sudden and awfully overwhelming desire for light. Panic—fear—dread — horror, all these, in their degree, were submerged beneath the elemental terror of darkness which possessed them. The glitter from the rift in the spar which inlet moonlight and the cool air of the moorlands above them was not sufficient

. . . light, broad, glaring, wild light they craved, and prayed for. Magerison, calmer, then thought of something. In his pocket was an oil flask belonging to his gun. In that flask was tow for cleaning purposes. In another pocket he had a few cartridges —then, he had his marches. He steadily assessed his wealth in such simple things, and how best to apply it to immediate needs. Thinking of the tinder-like shoring baulks set up all along the long deserted mine gallery lie arrived at a decision. • • .

So it came about that, after the opening up of three cartridges and thfi. tearing down of sundry pieces of crumbling timber—by use of oil, tow, and matches—he furnished himself with a most admirable supply of torches, and Dorothy Thorrold, like some fair denizen of olden caves, fanned a steadily glowing fire set in a hole in

the thick peat-tan that made the floor of the monkish tunnels so resilient to the feet and so sweet to the nostrils. She crouched there—fifty yards from the mouth of that horrid den of death—and kept her soothing flames at a cheerful height what time her mate, flaming brand stuck in a rock crevice, explored the chamber.

This dead thing was the counterpart of Thorrold, as has been said. But it was as though the master of Thorroldan Priory had been frozen with the ice touch of youth in some earlier day

. • . the same massive head was here; the same wave of iron grey hair, going back to whiteness; same hands; the same fierce jaw; the same close-set Saxon ears, and the same highridged Saxon cheek bones. But each attribute, despite long death, betrayed its subtle difference from the living Thorrold. Here a tiny contrast, there a small halt between identical likeness and merely likeness . . . youth had been on this dead thing’s brow when it was that he had died. That was the difference—that, accentuated by the oldfasliioned clothing still adhering dustily and greenly to the skeleton body. Before the body was the rude table on which the living man had been working at the moment precedent to his death. . .

it was plain to be seen in what he had been engaged. For he had been counting, miser-like, his strange hoard: that load of wealth in plate and pearls and gems and manuscripts that the monks of Thorroldan Priory had hidden at the time of the Reformation. Thick with dust a diary was open on the table before the dead right hand, and on it lay a shrivelled and split-up piece of cedar wood, which had been a pencil. The graphite had long gone to impalpatle dust: as graphite in the presence of lead wili do. . . Basil Magerison secured the diary, dusted it, and read:

'* ’Plate probably seven hundred ounces, most of it silver gilt, but of rare workmanship. Memo: make guarded enquiries about worth of silver gilt cf fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Communion cups and plate all in fine gold. Memo: this should be kept separately and offered to the Archbishop; it would be a shameful thincr if Moresby got his evil fingers on it. Pearls—most of them scarred: acid action. Small loose ones gone to dust: of remainder 74 large ones ranging from size of pea to that of a marble, perfect in their orient and shape. Worth at least £20,000. Diamonds : 67; from splinters used to pierce the heads of the two silver croziers in chest A to the big ones found in chest B. Evidently tribute of some kind, for they had been placed in a sealed leather bag. Seals suspiciously like that of the Thorrold family—what rogues those old monks were! Emeralds: 15. Memo : this is strange, having regard to the vogue which the “Aaronic stone” had among the old pre-Reformation clerics. Must be some more somewhere. Search in east gallery later; beneath tombs of men killed and buried in the lead workings. Topaz—innumerable pieces. Not so very valuable: to be counted carefully later. A relic containing incinerated bone with a Latin inscription later to be interpreted. This is alabaster: probably the remains are those of an early Roman martyr. Memo: Offer to Minister authorities or to Archbishop personally. Again a treasure that Moresby must not be allowed to handle. This list completes work for the day: October 23rd, 1897. Still two chests unopened. Memo: ‘George Shackleton tells me that Leathley was seen in Thewle lagt night and I am tO I And there the last chronicle of the man who had died under the earth broke off. Magerison looked long and earnestly at the dead thing, then reverently laid the diary by its quiet hand. He went back to Dorothy Thorrold and her fire. “The mystery of Hound’s Pasture,” he stated gravely, “is solved in its entirety!” “Who—who was he?” She nodded toward the stone death chamber. “Your grandfather’s twin brother,” Magerison’s voice was passionless and weary. “Killed by Leathley or—or ty your grandfather to gain, on the one hand, the inheritance of the treasure. . . on the other the inheritance of the Priory !’ (To be continued.)