The Inn of the Two Witches

Joseph Conrad

Exported from Wikisource on July 22, 2023

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This tale, episode, experience--call it how you will--was
related in the fifties of the last century by a man who, by his
own confession, was sixty years old at the time. Sixty is not
a bad age--unless in perspective, when no doubt it is
contemplated by the majority of us with mixed feelings. It
is a calm age; the game is practically over by then; and
standing aside one begins to remember with a certain
vividness what a fine fellow one used to be. I have observed
that, by an amiable attention of Providence, most people at
sixty begin to take a romantic view of themselves. Their
very failures exhale a charm of peculiar potency. And
indeed the hopes of the future are a fine company to live
with, exquisite forms, fascinating if you like, but--so to
speak--naked, stripped for a run. The robes of glamour are
luckily the property of the immovable past which, without
them, would sit, a shivery sort of thing, under the gathering
shadows.

I suppose it was the romanticism of growing age which set

our man to relate his experience for his own satisfaction or
for the wonder of his posterity. It could not have been for
his glory, because the experience was simply that of an
abominable fright--terror he calls it. You would have
guessed that the relation alluded to in the very first lines
was in writing.

This writing constitutes the Find declared in the sub-title.

The title itself is my own contrivance, (can't call it

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invention), and has the merit of veracity. We will be
concerned with an inn here. As to the witches that's merely
a conventional expression, and we must take our man's
word for it that it fits the case.

The Find was made in a box of books bought in London, in

a street which no longer exists, from a second-hand
bookseller in the last stage of decay. As to the books
themselves they were at least twentieth-hand, and on
inspection turned out not worth the very small sum of
money I disbursed. It might have been some premonition of
that fact which made me say: "But I must have the box too."
The decayed bookseller assented by the careless, tragic
gesture of a man already doomed to extinction.

A litter of loose pages at the bottom of the box excited my

curiosity but faintly. The close, neat, regular handwriting
was not attractive at first sight. But in one place the
statement that in A.D. 1813 the writer was twenty-two years
old caught my eye. Two and twenty is an interesting age in
which one is easily reckless and easily frightened; the
faculty of reflection being weak and the power of
imagination strong.

In another place the phrase: "At night we stood in again,"

arrested my languid attention, because it was a sea phrase.
"Let's see what it is all about," I thought, without
excitement.

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Oh! but it was a dull-faced MS., each line resembling every
other line in their close-set and regular order. It was like the
drone of a monotonous voice. A treatise on sugar-refining
(the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given
a more lively appearance. "In A.D. 1813, I was twenty-two
years old," he begins earnestly and goes on with every
appearance of calm, horrible industry. Don't imagine,
however, that there is anything archaic in my find. Diabolic
ingenuity in invention though as old as the world is by no
means a lost art. Look at the telephones for shattering the
little peace of mind given to us in this world, or at the
machine guns for letting with dispatch life out of our
bodies. Now-a-days any blear-eyed old witch if only strong
enough to turn an insignificant little handle could lay low a
hundred young men of twenty in the twinkling of an eye.

If this isn't progress! . . . Why immense! We have moved

on, and so you must expect to meet here a certain naiveness
of contrivance and simplicity of aim appertaining to the
remote epoch. And of course no motoring tourist can hope
to find such an inn anywhere, now. This one, the one of the
title, was situated in Spain. That much I discovered only
from internal evidence, because a good many pages of that
relation were missing--perhaps not a great misfortune after
all. The writer seemed to have entered into a most elaborate
detail of the why and wherefore of his presence on that
coast-- presumably the north coast of Spain. His experience
has nothing to do with the sea, though. As far as I can make
it out, he was an officer on board a sloop-of-war. There's
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nothing strange in that. At all stages of the long Peninsular
campaign many of our men-of- war of the smaller kind
were cruising off the north coast of Spain- -as risky and
disagreeable a station as can be well imagined.

It looks as though that ship of his had had some special

service to perform. A careful explanation of all the
circumstances was to be expected from our man, only, as
I've said, some of his pages (good tough paper too) were
missing: gone in covers for jampots or in wadding for the
fowling-pieces of his irreverent posterity. But it is to be
seen clearly that communication with the shore and even
the sending of messengers inland was part of her service,
either to obtain intelligence from or to transmit orders or
advice to patriotic Spaniards, guerilleros or secret juntas of
the province. Something of the sort. All this can be only
inferred from the preserved scraps of his conscientious
writing.

Next we come upon the panegyric of a very fine sailor, a

member of the ship's company, having the rating of the
captain's coxswain. He was known on board as Cuba Tom;
not because he was Cuban however; he was indeed the best
type of a genuine British tar of that time, and a man-of-
war's man for years. He came by the name on account of
some wonderful adventures he had in that island in his
young days, adventures which were the favourite subject of
the yarns he was in the habit of spinning to his shipmates of
an evening on the forecastle head. He was intelligent, very

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strong, and of proved courage. Incidentally we are told, so
exact is our narrator, that Tom had the finest pigtail for
thickness and length of any man in the Navy. This
appendage, much cared for and sheathed tightly in a
porpoise skin, hung half way down his broad back to the
great admiration of all beholders and to the great envy of
some.

Our young officer dwells on the manly qualities of Cuba

Tom with something like affection. This sort of relation
between officer and man was not then very rare. A
youngster on joining the service was put under the charge
of a trustworthy seaman, who slung his first hammock for
him and often later on became a sort of humble friend to the
junior officer. The narrator on joining the sloop had found
this man on board after some years of separation. There is
something touching in the warm pleasure he remembers and
records at this meeting with the professional mentor of his
boyhood.

We discover then that, no Spaniard being forthcoming for

the service, this worthy seaman with the unique pigtail and
a very high character for courage and steadiness had been
selected as messenger for one of these missions inland
which have been mentioned. His preparations were not
elaborate. One gloomy autumn morning the sloop ran close
to a shallow cove where a landing could be made on that
iron-bound shore. A boat was lowered, and pulled in with
Tom Corbin (Cuba Tom) perched in the bow, and our young

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man (Mr. Edgar Byrne was his name on this earth which
knows him no more) sitting in the stern sheets.

A few inhabitants of a hamlet, whose grey stone houses

could be seen a hundred yards or so up a deep ravine, had
come down to the shore and watched the approach of the
boat. The two Englishmen leaped ashore. Either from
dullness or astonishment the peasants gave no greeting, and
only fell back in silence.

Mr. Byrne had made up his mind to see Tom Corbin started
fairly on his way. He looked round at the heavy surprised
faces.

"There isn't much to get out of them," he said. "Let us walk

up to the village. There will be a wine shop for sure where
we may find somebody more promising to talk to and get
some information from."

"Aye, aye, sir," said Tom falling into step behind his officer.
"A bit of palaver as to courses and distances can do no
harm; I crossed the broadest part of Cuba by the help of my
tongue tho' knowing far less Spanish than I do now. As they
say themselves it was 'four words and no more' with me,
that time when I got left behind on shore by the Blanche,
frigate."

He made light of what was before him, which was but a

day's journey into the mountains. It is true that there was a

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full day's journey before striking the mountain path, but that
was nothing for a man who had crossed the island of Cuba
on his two legs, and with no more than four words of the
language to begin with.

The officer and the man were walking now on a thick

sodden bed of dead leaves, which the peasants thereabouts
accumulate in the streets of their villages to rot during the
winter for field manure. Turning his head Mr. Byrne
perceived that the whole male population of the hamlet was
following them on the noiseless springy carpet. Women
stared from the doors of the houses and the children had
apparently gone into hiding. The village knew the ship by
sight, afar off, but no stranger had landed on that spot
perhaps for a hundred years or more. The cocked hat of Mr.
Byrne, the bushy whiskers and the enormous pigtail of the
sailor, filled them with mute wonder. They pressed behind
the two Englishmen staring like those islanders discovered
by Captain Cook in the South Seas.

It was then that Byrne had his first glimpse of the little
cloaked man in a yellow hat. Faded and dingy as it was, this
covering for his head made him noticeable.

The entrance to the wine shop was like a rough hole in a

wall of flints. The owner was the only person who was not
in the street, for he came out from the darkness at the back
where the inflated forms of wine skins hung on nails could
be vaguely distinguished. He was a tall, one-eyed Asturian

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with scrubby, hollow cheeks; a grave expression of
countenance contrasted enigmatically with the roaming
restlessness of his solitary eye. On learning that the matter
in hand was the sending on his way of that English mariner
toward a certain Gonzales in the mountains, he closed his
good eye for a moment as if in meditation. Then opened it,
very lively again.

"Possibly, possibly. It could be done."

A friendly murmur arose in the group in the doorway at the

name of Gonzales, the local leader against the French.
Inquiring as to the safety of the road Byrne was glad to
learn that no troops of that nation had been seen in the
neighbourhood for months. Not the smallest little
detachment of these impious polizones. While giving these
answers the owner of the wine-shop busied himself in
drawing into an earthenware jug some wine which he set
before the heretic English, pocketing with grave abstraction
the small piece of money the officer threw upon the table in
recognition of the unwritten law that none may enter a
wine-shop without buying drink. His eye was in constant
motion as if it were trying to do the work of the two; but
when Byrne made inquiries as to the possibility of hiring a
mule, it became immovably fixed in the direction of the
door which was closely besieged by the curious. In front of
them, just within the threshold, the little man in the large
cloak and yellow hat had taken his stand. He was a
diminutive person, a mere homunculus, Byrne describes

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him, in a ridiculously mysterious, yet assertive attitude, a
corner of his cloak thrown cavalierly over his left shoulder,
muffling his chin and mouth; while the broad- brimmed
yellow hat hung on a corner of his square little head. He
stood there taking snuff, repeatedly.

"A mule," repeated the wine-seller, his eyes fixed on that

quaint and snuffy figure. . . "No, senor officer! Decidedly
no mule is to be got in this poor place."

The coxswain, who stood by with the true sailor's air of

unconcern in strange surroundings, struck in quietly -

"If your honour will believe me Shank's pony's the best for
this job. I would have to leave the beast somewhere,
anyhow, since the captain has told me that half my way will
be along paths fit only for goats."

The diminutive man made a step forward, and speaking

through the folds of the cloak which seemed to muffle a
sarcastic intention -

"Si, senor. They are too honest in this village to have a

single mule amongst them for your worship's service. To
that I can bear testimony. In these times it's only rogues or
very clever men who can manage to have mules or any
other four-footed beasts and the wherewithal to keep them.
But what this valiant mariner wants is a guide; and here,
senor, behold my brother-in-law, Bernardino, wine- seller,

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and alcade of this most Christian and hospitable village,
who will find you one."

This, Mr. Byrne says in his relation, was the only thing to
do. A youth in a ragged coat and goat-skin breeches was
produced after some more talk. The English officer stood
treat to the whole village, and while the peasants drank he
and Cuba Tom took their departure accompanied by the
guide. The diminutive man in the cloak had disappeared.

Byrne went along with the coxswain out of the village. He

wanted to see him fairly on his way; and he would have
gone a greater distance, if the seaman had not suggested
respectfully the advisability of return so as not to keep the
ship a moment longer than necessary so close in with the
shore on such an unpromising looking morning. A wild
gloomy sky hung over their heads when they took leave of
each other, and their surroundings of rank bushes and stony
fields were dreary.

"In four days' time," were Byrne's last words, "the ship will
stand in and send a boat on shore if the weather permits. If
not you'll have to make it out on shore the best you can till
we come along to take you off."

"Right you are, sir," answered Tom, and strode on. Byrne
watched him step out on a narrow path. In a thick pea-
jacket with a pair of pistols in his belt, a cutlass by his side,
and a stout cudgel in his hand, he looked a sturdy figure and

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well able to take care of himself. He turned round for a
moment to wave his hand, giving to Byrne one more view
of his honest bronzed face with bushy whiskers. The lad in
goatskin breeches looking, Byrne says, like a faun or a
young satyr leaping ahead, stopped to wait for him, and
then went off at a bound. Both disappeared.

Byrne turned back. The hamlet was hidden in a fold of the

ground, and the spot seemed the most lonely corner of the
earth and as if accursed in its uninhabited desolate
barrenness. Before he had walked many yards, there
appeared very suddenly from behind a bush the muffled up
diminutive Spaniard. Naturally Byrne stopped short.

The other made a mysterious gesture with a tiny hand

peeping from under his cloak. His hat hung very much at
the side of his head. "Senor," he said without any
preliminaries. "Caution! It is a positive fact that one-eyed
Bernardino, my brother-in-law, has at this moment a mule
in his stable. And why he who is not clever has a mule
there? Because he is a rogue; a man without conscience.
Because I had to give up the macho to him to secure for
myself a roof to sleep under and a mouthful of olla to keep
my soul in this insignificant body of mine. Yet, senor, it
contains a heart many times bigger than the mean thing
which beats in the breast of that brute connection of mine of
which I am ashamed, though I opposed that marriage with
all my power. Well, the misguided woman suffered enough.
She had her purgatory on this earth--God rest her soul."

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Byrne says he was so astonished by the sudden appearance
of that sprite-like being, and by the sardonic bitterness of
the speech, that he was unable to disentangle the significant
fact from what seemed but a piece of family history fired
out at him without rhyme or reason. Not at first. He was
confounded and at the same time he was impressed by the
rapid forcible delivery, quite different from the frothy
excited loquacity of an Italian. So he stared while the
homunculus letting his cloak fall about him, aspired an
immense quantity of snuff out of the hollow of his palm.

"A mule," exclaimed Byrne seizing at last the real aspect of

the discourse. "You say he has got a mule? That's queer!
Why did he refuse to let me have it?"

The diminutive Spaniard muffled himself up again with

great dignity.

"Quien sabe," he said coldly, with a shrug of his draped

shoulders. "He is a great politico in everything he does. But
one thing your worship may be certain of--that his
intentions are always rascally. This husband of my defunta
sister ought to have been married a long time ago to the
widow with the wooden legs." {1}

"I see. But remember that; whatever your motives, your

worship countenanced him in this lie."

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The bright unhappy eyes on each side of a predatory nose
confronted Byrne without wincing, while with that testiness
which lurks so often at the bottom of Spanish dignity -

"No doubt the senor officer would not lose an ounce of

blood if I were stuck under the fifth rib," he retorted. "But
what of this poor sinner here?" Then changing his tone.
"Senor, by the necessities of the times I live here in exile, a
Castilian and an old Christian, existing miserably in the
midst of these brute Asturians, and dependent on the worst
of them all, who has less conscience and scruples than a
wolf. And being a man of intelligence I govern myself
accordingly. Yet I can hardly contain my scorn. You have
heard the way I spoke. A caballero of parts like your
worship might have guessed that there was a cat in there."

"What cat?" said Byrne uneasily. "Oh, I see. Something

suspicious. No, senor. I guessed nothing. My nation are not
good guessers at that sort of thing; and, therefore, I ask you
plainly whether that wine-seller has spoken the truth in
other particulars?"

"There are certainly no Frenchmen anywhere about," said

the little man with a return to his indifferent manner.

"Or robbers--ladrones?"

"Ladrones en grande--no! Assuredly not," was the answer

in a cold philosophical tone. "What is there left for them to

14
do after the French? And nobody travels in these times. But
who can say! Opportunity makes the robber. Still that
mariner of yours has a fierce aspect, and with the son of a
cat rats will have no play. But there is a saying, too, that
where honey is there will soon be flies."

This oracular discourse exasperated Byrne. "In the name of

God," he cried, "tell me plainly if you think my man is
reasonably safe on his journey."

The homunculus, undergoing one of his rapid changes,

seized the officer's arm. The grip of his little hand was
astonishing.

"Senor! Bernardino had taken notice of him. What more do

you want? And listen--men have disappeared on this road--
on a certain portion of this road, when Bernardino kept a
meson, an inn, and I, his brother-in-law, had coaches and
mules for hire. Now there are no travellers, no coaches. The
French have ruined me. Bernardino has retired here for
reasons of his own after my sister died. They were three to
torment the life out of her, he and Erminia and Lucilla, two
aunts of his--all affiliated to the devil. And now he has
robbed me of my last mule. You are an armed man.
Demand the macho from him, with a pistol to his head,
senor--it is not his, I tell you--and ride after your man who
is so precious to you. And then you shall both be safe, for
no two travellers have been ever known to disappear

15
together in those days. As to the beast, I, its owner, I
confide it to your honour."

They were staring hard at each other, and Byrne nearly

burst into a laugh at the ingenuity and transparency of the
little man's plot to regain possession of his mule. But he had
no difficulty to keep a straight face because he felt deep
within himself a strange inclination to do that very
extraordinary thing. He did not laugh, but his lip quivered;
at which the diminutive Spaniard, detaching his black
glittering eyes from Byrne's face, turned his back on him
brusquely with a gesture and a fling of the cloak which
somehow expressed contempt, bitterness, and
discouragement all at once. He turned away and stood still,
his hat aslant, muffled up to the ears. But he was not
offended to the point of refusing the silver duro which
Byrne offered him with a non-committal speech as if
nothing extraordinary had passed between them.

"I must make haste on board now," said Byrne, then.

"Vaya usted con Dios," muttered the gnome. And this

interview ended with a sarcastic low sweep of the hat which
was replaced at the same perilous angle as before.

Directly the boat had been hoisted the ship's sails were
filled on the off-shore tack, and Byrne imparted the whole
story to his captain, who was but a very few years older
than himself. There was some amused indignation at it--but

16
while they laughed they looked gravely at each other. A
Spanish dwarf trying to beguile an officer of his majesty's
navy into stealing a mule for him--that was too funny, too
ridiculous, too incredible. Those were the exclamations of
the captain. He couldn't get over the grotesqueness of it.

"Incredible. That's just it," murmured Byrne at last in a

significant tone.

They exchanged a long stare. "It's as clear as daylight,"

affirmed the captain impatiently, because in his heart he was
not certain. And Tom the best seaman in the ship for one,
the good-humouredly deferential friend of his boyhood for
the other, was becoming endowed with a compelling
fascination, like a symbolic figure of loyalty appealing to
their feelings and their conscience, so that they could not
detach their thoughts from his safety. Several times they
went up on deck, only to look at the coast, as if it could tell
them something of his fate. It stretched away, lengthening
in the distance, mute, naked, and savage, veiled now and
then by the slanting cold shafts of rain. The westerly swell
rolled its interminable angry lines of foam and big dark
clouds flew over the ship in a sinister procession.

"I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in
the yellow hat wanted you to do," said the commander of
the sloop late in the afternoon with visible exasperation.

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"Do you, sir?" answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish.
"I wonder what you would have said afterwards? Why! I
might have been kicked out of the service for looting a mule
from a nation in alliance with His Majesty. Or I might have
been battered to a pulp with flails and pitch-forks--a pretty
tale to get abroad about one of your officers--while trying to
steal a mule. Or chased ignominiously to the boat--for you
would not have expected me to shoot down unoffending
people for the sake of a mangy mule. . . And yet," he added
in a low voice, "I almost wish myself I had done it."

Before dark those two young men had worked themselves

up into a highly complex psychological state of scornful
scepticism and alarmed credulity. It tormented them
exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last for
six days at least, and possibly be prolonged further for an
indefinite time, was not to be borne. The ship was therefore
put on the inshore tack at dark. All through the gusty dark
night she went towards the land to look for her man, at
times lying over in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in
the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her
own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm
impulse.

Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on
tossed by the seas towards the shallow cove where, with
considerable difficulty, an officer in a thick coat and a
round hat managed to land on a strip of shingle.

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"It was my wish," writes Mr. Byrne, "a wish of which my
captain approved, to land secretly if possible. I did not want
to be seen either by my aggrieved friend in the yellow hat,
whose motives were not clear, or by the one-eyed wine-
seller, who may or may not have been affiliated to the devil,
or indeed by any other dweller in that primitive village. But
unfortunately the cove was the only possible landing place
for miles; and from the steepness of the ravine I couldn't
make a circuit to avoid the houses."

"Fortunately," he goes on, "all the people were yet in their

beds. It was barely daylight when I found myself walking
on the thick layer of sodden leaves filling the only street.
No soul was stirring abroad, no dog barked. The silence
was profound, and I had concluded with some wonder that
apparently no dogs were kept in the hamlet, when I heard a
low snarl, and from a noisome alley between two hovels
emerged a vile cur with its tail between its legs. He slunk
off silently showing me his teeth as he ran before me, and
he disappeared so suddenly that he might have been the
unclean incarnation of the Evil One. There was, too,
something so weird in the manner of its coming and
vanishing, that my spirits, already by no means very high,
became further depressed by the revolting sight of this
creature as if by an unlucky presage."

He got away from the coast unobserved, as far as he knew,

then struggled manfully to the west against wind and rain,
on a barren dark upland, under a sky of ashes. Far away the

19
harsh and desolate mountains raising their scarped and
denuded ridges seemed to wait for him menacingly. The
evening found him fairly near to them, but, in sailor
language, uncertain of his position, hungry, wet, and tired
out by a day of steady tramping over broken ground during
which he had seen very few people, and had been unable to
obtain the slightest intelligence of Tom Corbin's passage.
"On! on! I must push on," he had been saying to himself
through the hours of solitary effort, spurred more by
incertitude than by any definite fear or definite hope.

The lowering daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced

by a broken bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a
narrow stream by the last gleam of rapid water, and
clambering out on the other side was met by the night
which fen like a bandage over his eyes. The wind sweeping
in the darkness the broadside of the sierra worried his ears
by a continuous roaring noise as of a maddened sea. He
suspected that he had lost the road. Even in daylight, with
its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping stone, it
was difficult to distinguish from the dreary waste of the
moor interspersed with boulders and clumps of naked
bushes. But, as he says, "he steered his course by the feel of
the wind," his hat rammed low on his brow, his head down,
stopping now and again from mere weariness of mind rather
than of body--as if not his strength but his resolution were
being overtaxed by the strain of endeavour half suspected to
be vain, and by the unrest of his feelings.

20
In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from
very far away he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking
on wood. He noticed that the wind had lulled suddenly.

His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself

he carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been
traversing for the last six hours--the oppressive sense of an
uninhabited world. When he raised his head a gleam of
light, illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam
before his eyes. While he peered, the sound of feeble
knocking was repeated-- and suddenly he felt rather than
saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path. What
was it? The spur of a hill? Or was it a house! Yes. It was a
house right close, as though it had risen from the ground or
had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid; from some
dark recess of the night. It towered loftily. He had come up
under its lee; another three steps and he could have touched
the wall with his hand. It was no doubt a posada and some
other traveller was trying for admittance. He heard again
the sound of cautious knocking.

Next moment a broad band of light fell into the night

through the opened door. Byrne stepped eagerly into it,
whereupon the person outside leaped with a stifled cry
away into the night. An exclamation of surprise was heard
too, from within. Byrne, flinging himself against the half
closed door, forced his way in against some considerable
resistance.

21
A miserable candle, a mere rushlight, burned at the end of a
long deal table. And in its light Byrne saw, staggering yet,
the girl he had driven from the door. She had a short black
skirt, an orange shawl, a dark complexion--and the escaped
single hairs from the mass, sombre and thick like a forest
and held up by a comb, made a black mist about her low
forehead. A shrill lamentable howl of: "Misericordia!"
came in two voices from the further end of the long room,
where the fire-light of an open hearth played between heavy
shadows. The girl recovering herself drew a hissing breath
through her set teeth.

It is unnecessary to report the long process of questions and

answers by which he soothed the fears of two old women
who sat on each side of the fire, on which stood a large
earthenware pot. Byrne thought at once of two witches
watching the brewing of some deadly potion. But all the
same, when one of them raising forward painfully her
broken form lifted the cover of the pot, the escaping steam
had an appetising smell. The other did not budge, but sat
hunched up, her head trembling all the time.

They were horrible. There was something grotesque in their

decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the
meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow
cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled)
would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful
physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes,
had not gripped one's heart with poignant amazement at the

22
unspeakable misery of age, at the awful persistency of life
becoming at last an object of disgust and dread.

To get over it Byrne began to talk, saying that he was an

Englishman, and that he was in search of a countryman who
ought to have passed this way. Directly he had spoken the
recollection of his parting with Tom came up in his mind
with amazing vividness: the silent villagers, the angry
gnome, the one-eyed wine-seller, Bernardino. Why! These
two unspeakable frights must be that man's aunts--affiliated
to the devil.

Whatever they had been once it was impossible to imagine

what use such feeble creatures could be to the devil, now, in
the world of the living. Which was Lucilla and which was
Erminia? They were now things without a name. A moment
of suspended animation followed Byrne's words. The
sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron
pot, the very trembling of the other's head stopped for the
space of breath. In this infinitesimal fraction of a second
Byrne had the sense of being really on his quest, of having
reached the turn of the path, almost within hail of Tom.

"They have seen him," he thought with conviction. Here

was at last somebody who had seen him. He made sure they
would deny all knowledge of the Ingles; but on the contrary
they were eager to tell him that he had eaten and slept the
night in the house. They both started talking together,
describing his appearance and behaviour. An excitement

23
quite fierce in its feebleness possessed them. The doubled-
up sorceress flourished aloft her wooden spoon, the puffy
monster got off her stool and screeched, stepping from one
foot to the other, while the trembling of her head was
accelerated to positive vibration. Byrne was quite
disconcerted by their excited behaviour. . . Yes! The big,
fierce Ingles went away in the morning, after eating a piece
of bread and drinking some wine. And if the caballero
wished to follow the same path nothing could be easier--in
the morning.

"You will give me somebody to show me the way?" said

Byrne.

"Si, senor. A proper youth. The man the caballero saw

going out."

"But he was knocking at the door," protested Byrne. "He

only bolted when he saw me. He was coming in."

"No! No!" the two horrid witches screamed out together.

"Going out. Going out!"

After all it may have been true. The sound of knocking had
been faint, elusive, reflected Byrne. Perhaps only the effect
of his fancy. He asked -

"Who is that man?"

24
"Her novio." They screamed pointing to the girl. "He is
gone home to a village far away from here. But he will
return in the morning. Her novio! And she is an orphan--the
child of poor Christian people. She lives with us for the
love of God, for the love of God."

The orphan crouching on the corner of the hearth had been

looking at Byrne. He thought that she was more like a child
of Satan kept there by these two weird harridans for the
love of the Devil. Her eyes were a little oblique, her mouth
rather thick, but admirably formed; her dark face had a wild
beauty, voluptuous and untamed. As to the character of her
steadfast gaze attached upon him with a sensuously savage
attention, "to know what it was like," says Mr. Byrne, "you
have only to observe a hungry cat watching a bird in a cage
or a mouse inside a trap."

It was she who served him the food, of which he was glad;
though with those big slanting black eyes examining him at
close range, as if he had something curious written on his
face, she gave him an uncomfortable sensation. But
anything was better than being approached by these blear-
eyed nightmarish witches. His apprehensions somehow had
been soothed; perhaps by the sensation of warmth after
severe exposure and the ease of resting after the exertion of
fighting the gale inch by inch all the way. He had no doubt
of Tom's safety. He was now sleeping in the mountain camp
having been met by Gonzales' men.

25
Byrne rose, filled a tin goblet with wine out of a skin
hanging on the wall, and sat down again. The witch with the
mummy face began to talk to him, ramblingly of old times;
she boasted of the inn's fame in those better days. Great
people in their own coaches stopped there. An archbishop
slept once in the casa, a long, long time ago.

The witch with the puffy face seemed to be listening from

her stool, motionless, except for the trembling of her head.
The girl (Byrne was certain she was a casual gipsy admitted
there for some reason or other) sat on the hearth stone in the
glow of the embers. She hummed a tune to herself, rattling
a pair of castanets slightly now and then. At the mention of
the archbishop she chuckled impiously and turned her head
to look at Byrne, so that the red glow of the fire flashed in
her black eyes and on her white teeth under the dark cowl
of the enormous overmantel. And he smiled at her.

He rested now in the ease of security. His advent not having

been expected there could be no plot against him in
existence. Drowsiness stole upon his senses. He enjoyed it,
but keeping a hold, so he thought at least, on his wits; but
he must have been gone further than he thought because he
was startled beyond measure by a fiendish uproar. He had
never heard anything so pitilessly strident in his life. The
witches had started a fierce quarrel about something or
other. Whatever its origin they were now only abusing each
other violently, without arguments; their senile screams
expressed nothing but wicked anger and ferocious dismay.

26
The gipsy girl's black eyes flew from one to the other.
Never before had Byrne felt himself so removed from
fellowship with human beings. Before he had really time to
understand the subject of the quarrel, the girl jumped up
rattling her castanets loudly. A silence fell. She came up to
the table and bending over, her eyes in his -

"Senor," she said with decision, "You shall sleep in the

archbishop's room."

Neither of the witches objected. The dried-up one bent

double was propped on a stick. The puffy faced one had
now a crutch.

Byrne got up, walked to the door, and turning the key in the
enormous lock put it coolly in his pocket. This was clearly
the only entrance, and he did not mean to be taken
unawares by whatever danger there might have been
lurking outside.

When he turned from the door he saw the two witches

"affiliated to the Devil" and the Satanic girl looking at him
in silence. He wondered if Tom Corbin took the same
precaution last might. And thinking of him he had again
that queer impression of his nearness. The world was
perfectly dumb. And in this stillness he heard the blood
beating in his ears with a confused rushing noise, in which
there seemed to be a voice uttering the words: "Mr. Byrne,
look out, sir." Tom's voice. He shuddered; for the delusions

27
of the senses of hearing are the most vivid of all, and from
their nature have a compelling character.

It seemed impossible that Tom should not be there. Again a

slight chill as of stealthy draught penetrated through his
very clothes and passed over all his body. He shook off the
impression with an effort.

It was the girl who preceded him upstairs carrying an iron

lamp from the naked flame of which ascended a thin thread
of smoke. Her soiled white stockings were full of holes.

With the same quiet resolution with which he had locked

the door below, Byrne threw open one after another the
doors in the corridor. All the rooms were empty except for
some nondescript lumber in one or two. And the girl seeing
what he would be at stopped every time, raising the smoky
light in each doorway patiently. Meantime she observed
him with sustained attention. The last door of all she threw
open herself.

"You sleep here, senor," she murmured in a voice light like

a child's breath, offering him the lamp.

"Buenos noches, senorita," he said politely, taking it from

her.

She didn't return the wish audibly, though her lips did move
a little, while her gaze black like a starless night never for a
moment wavered before him. He stepped in, and as he
28
turned to close the door she was still there motionless and
disturbing, with her voluptuous mouth and slanting eyes,
with the expression of expectant sensual ferocity of a
baffled cat. He hesitated for a moment, and in the dumb
house he heard again the blood pulsating ponderously in his
ears, while once more the illusion of Tom's voice speaking
earnestly somewhere near by was specially terrifying,
because this time he could not make out the words.

He slammed the door in the girl's face at last, leaving her in

the dark; and he opened it again almost on the instant.
Nobody. She had vanished without the slightest sound. He
closed the door quickly and bolted it with two heavy bolts.

A profound mistrust possessed him suddenly. Why did the

witches quarrel about letting him sleep here? And what
meant that stare of the girl as if she wanted to impress his
features for ever in her mind? His own nervousness alarmed
him. He seemed to himself to be removed very far from
mankind.

He examined his room. It was not very high, just high

enough to take the bed which stood under an enormous
baldaquin-like canopy from which fell heavy curtains at
foot and head; a bed certainly worthy of an archbishop.
There was a heavy table carved all round the edges, some
arm-chairs of enormous weight like the spoils of a grandee's
palace; a tall shallow wardrobe placed against the wall and
with double doors. He tried them. Locked. A suspicion

29
came into his mind, and he snatched the lamp to make a
closer examination. No, it was not a disguised entrance.
That heavy, tall piece of furniture stood clear of the wall by
quite an inch. He glanced at the bolts of his room door. No!
No one could get at him treacherously while he slept. But
would he be able to sleep? he asked himself anxiously. If
only he had Tom there--the trusty seaman who had fought
at his right hand in a cutting out affair or two, and had
always preached to him the necessity to take care of
himself. "For it's no great trick," he used to say, "to get
yourself killed in a hot fight. Any fool can do that. The
proper pastime is to fight the Frenchies and then live to
fight another day."

Byrne found it a hard matter not to fall into listening to the

silence. Somehow he had the conviction that nothing would
break it unless he heard again the haunting sound of Tom's
voice. He had heard it twice before. Odd! And yet no
wonder, he argued with himself reasonably, since he had
been thinking of the man for over thirty hours continuously
and, what's more, inconclusively. For his anxiety for Tom
had never taken a definite shape. "Disappear," was the only
word connected with the idea of Tom's danger. It was very
vague and awful. "Disappear!" What did that mean?

Byrne shuddered, and then said to himself that he must be a

little feverish. But Tom had not disappeared. Byrne had just
heard of him. And again the young man felt the blood
beating in his ears. He sat still expecting every moment to

30
hear through the pulsating strokes the sound of Tom's voice.
He waited straining his ears, but nothing came. Suddenly
the thought occurred to him: "He has not disappeared, but
he cannot make himself heard."

He jumped up from the arm-chair. How absurd! Laying his

pistol and his hanger on the table he took off his boots and,
feeling suddenly too tired to stand, flung himself on the bed
which he found soft and comfortable beyond his hopes.

He had felt very wakeful, but he must have dozed off after
all, because the next thing he knew he was sitting up in bed
and trying to recollect what it was that Tom's voice had
said. Oh! He remembered it now. It had said: "Mr. Byrne!
Look out, sir!" A warning this. But against what?

He landed with one leap in the middle of the floor, gasped

once, then looked all round the room. The window was
shuttered and barred with an iron bar. Again he ran his eyes
slowly all round the bare walls, and even looked up at the
ceiling, which was rather high. Afterwards he went to the
door to examine the fastenings. They consisted of two
enormous iron bolts sliding into holes made in the wall; and
as the corridor outside was too narrow to admit of any
battering arrangement or even to permit an axe to be swung,
nothing could burst the door open--unless gunpowder. But
while he was still making sure that the lower bolt was
pushed well home, he received the impression of
somebody's presence in the room. It was so strong that he

31
spun round quicker than lightning. There was no one. Who
could there be? And yet . . .

It was then that he lost the decorum and restraint a man

keeps up for his own sake. He got down on his hands and
knees, with the lamp on the floor, to look under the bed,
like a silly girl. He saw a lot of dust and nothing else. He
got up, his cheeks burning, and walked about discontented
with his own behaviour and unreasonably angry with Tom
for not leaving him alone. The words: "Mr. Byrne! Look
out, sir," kept on repeating themselves in his head in a tone
of warning.

"Hadn't I better just throw myself on the bed and try to go

to sleep," he asked himself. But his eyes fell on the tall
wardrobe, and he went towards it feeling irritated with
himself and yet unable to desist. How he could explain to-
morrow the burglarious misdeed to the two odious witches
he had no idea. Nevertheless he inserted the point of his
hanger between the two halves of the door and tried to prize
them open. They resisted. He swore, sticking now hotly to
his purpose. His mutter: "I hope you will be satisfied,
confound you," was addressed to the absent Tom. Just then
the doors gave way and flew open.

He was there.

He--the trusty, sagacious, and courageous Tom was there,

drawn up shadowy and stiff, in a prudent silence, which his

32
wide-open eyes by their fixed gleam seemed to command
Byrne to respect. But Byrne was too startled to make a
sound. Amazed, he stepped back a little--and on the instant
the seaman flung himself forward headlong as if to clasp his
officer round the neck. Instinctively Byrne put out his
faltering arms; he felt the horrible rigidity of the body and
then the coldness of death as their heads knocked together
and their faces came into contact. They reeled, Byrne
hugging Tom close to his breast in order not to let him fall
with a crash. He had just strength enough to lower the awful
burden gently to the floor--then his head swam, his legs
gave way, and he sank on his knees, leaning over the body
with his hands resting on the breast of that man once full of
generous life, and now as insensible as a stone.

"Dead! my poor Tom, dead," he repeated mentally. The

light of the lamp standing near the edge of the table fell
from above straight on the stony empty stare of these eyes
which naturally had a mobile and merry expression.

Byrne turned his own away from them. Tom's black silk
neckerchief was not knotted on his breast. It was gone. The
murderers had also taken off his shoes and stockings. And
noticing this spoliation, the exposed throat, the bare up-
turned feet, Byrne felt his eyes run full of tears. In other
respects the seaman was fully dressed; neither was his
clothing disarranged as it must have been in a violent
struggle. Only his checked shirt had been pulled a little out
the waistband in one place, just enough to ascertain whether

33
he had a money belt fastened round his body. Byrne began
to sob into his handkerchief.

It was a nervous outburst which passed off quickly.

Remaining on his knees he contemplated sadly the athletic
body of as fine a seaman as ever had drawn a cutlass, laid a
gun, or passed the weather earring in a gale, lying stiff and
cold, his cheery, fearless spirit departed--perhaps turning to
him, his boy chum, to his ship out there rolling on the grey
seas off an iron-bound coast, at the very moment of its
flight.

He perceived that the six brass buttons of Tom's jacket had

been cut off. He shuddered at the notion of the two
miserable and repulsive witches busying themselves
ghoulishly about the defenceless body of his friend. Cut off.
Perhaps with the same knife which . . . The head of one
trembled; the other was bent double, and their eyes were red
and bleared, their infamous claws unsteady. . . It must have
been in this very room too, for Tom could not have been
killed in the open and brought in here afterwards. Of that
Byrne was certain. Yet those devilish crones could not have
killed him themselves even by taking him unawares-- and
Tom would be always on his guard of course. Tom was a
very wide awake wary man when engaged on any service. .
. And in fact how did they murder him? Who did? In what
way?

34
Byrne jumped up, snatched the lamp off the table, and
stooped swiftly over the body. The light revealed on the
clothing no stain, no trace, no spot of blood anywhere.
Byrne's hands began to shake so that he had to set the lamp
on the floor and turn away his head in order to recover from
this agitation.

Then he began to explore that cold, still, and rigid body for
a stab, a gunshot wound, for the trace of some killing blow.
He felt all over the skull anxiously. It was whole. He
slipped his hand under the neck. It was unbroken. With
terrified eyes he peered close under the chin and saw no
marks of strangulation on the throat.

There were no signs anywhere. He was just dead.

Impulsively Byrne got away from the body as if the

mystery of an incomprehensible death had changed his pity
into suspicion and dread. The lamp on the floor near the set,
still face of the seaman showed it staring at the ceiling as if
despairingly. In the circle of light Byrne saw by the
undisturbed patches of thick dust on the floor that there had
been no struggle in that room. "He has died outside," he
thought. Yes, outside in that narrow corridor, where there
was hardly room to turn, the mysterious death had come to
his poor dear Tom. The impulse of snatching up his pistols
and rushing out of the room abandoned Byrne suddenly. For
Tom, too, had been armed--with just such powerless
weapons as he himself possessed--pistols, a cutlass! And

35
Tom had died a nameless death, by incomprehensible
means.

A new thought came to Byrne. That stranger knocking at

the door and fleeing so swiftly at his appearance had come
there to remove the body. Aha! That was the guide the
withered witch had promised would show the English
officer the shortest way of rejoining his man. A promise, he
saw it now, of dreadful import. He who had knocked would
have two bodies to deal with. Man and officer would go
forth from the house together. For Byrne was certain now
that he would have to die before the morning--and in the
same mysterious manner, leaving behind him an unmarked
body.

The sight of a smashed head, of a throat cut, of a gaping

gunshot wound, would have been an inexpressible relief. It
would have soothed all his fears. His soul cried within him
to that dead man whom he had never found wanting in
danger. "Why don't you tell me what I am to look for, Tom?
Why don't you?" But in rigid immobility, extended on his
back, he seemed to preserve an austere silence, as if
disdaining in the finality of his awful knowledge to hold
converse with the living.

Suddenly Byrne flung himself on his knees by the side of

the body, and dry-eyed, fierce, opened the shirt wide on the
breast, as if to tear the secret forcibly from that cold heart
which had been so loyal to him in life! Nothing! Nothing!

36
He raised the lamp, and all the sign vouchsafed to him by
that face which used to be so kindly in expression was a
small bruise on the forehead--the least thing, a mere mark.
The skin even was not broken. He stared at it a long time as
if lost in a dreadful dream. Then he observed that Tom's
hands were clenched as though he had fallen facing
somebody in a fight with fists. His knuckles, on closer view,
appeared somewhat abraded. Both hands.

The discovery of these slight signs was more appalling to

Byrne than the absolute absence of every mark would have
been. So Tom had died striking against something which
could be hit, and yet could kill one without leaving a
wound--by a breath.

Terror, hot terror, began to play about Byrne's heart like a

tongue of flame that touches and withdraws before it turns a
thing to ashes. He backed away from the body as far as he
could, then came forward stealthily casting fearful glances
to steal another look at the bruised forehead. There would
perhaps be such a faint bruise on his own forehead--before
the morning.

"I can't bear it," he whispered to himself. Tom was for him
now an object of horror, a sight at once tempting and
revolting to his fear. He couldn't bear to look at him.

At last, desperation getting the better of his increasing

horror, he stepped forward from the wall against which he

37
had been leaning, seized the corpse under the armpits, and
began to lug it over to the bed. The bare heels of the seaman
trailed on the floor noiselessly. He was heavy with the dead
weight of inanimate objects. With a last effort Byrne landed
him face downwards on the edge of the bed, rolled him
over, snatched from under this stiff passive thing a sheet
with which he covered it over. Then he spread the curtains
at head and foot so that joining together as he shook their
folds they hid the bed altogether from his sight.

He stumbled towards a chair, and fell on it. The perspiration

poured from his face for a moment, and then his veins
seemed to carry for a while a thin stream of half, frozen
blood. Complete terror had possession of him now, a
nameless terror which had turned his heart to ashes.

He sat upright in the straight-backed chair, the lamp burning

at his feet, his pistols and his hanger at his left elbow on the
end of the table, his eyes turning incessantly in their sockets
round the walls, over the ceiling, over the floor, in the
expectation of a mysterious and appalling vision. The thing
which could deal death in a breath was outside that bolted
door. But Byrne believed neither in walls nor bolts now.
Unreasoning terror turning everything to account, his old
time boyish admiration of the athletic Tom, the undaunted
Tom (he had seemed to him invincible), helped to paralyse
his faculties, added to his despair.

38
He was no longer Edgar Byrne. He was a tortured soul
suffering more anguish than any sinner's body had ever
suffered from rack or boot. The depth of his torment may be
measured when I say that this young man, as brave at least
as the average of his kind, contemplated seizing a pistol and
firing into his own head. But a deadly, chilly, langour was
spreading over his limbs. It was as if his flesh had been wet
plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs. Presently, he
thought, the two witches will be coming in, with crutch and
stick--horrible, grotesque, monstrous--affiliated to the devil-
-to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise of death.
And he wouldn't be able to do anything. Tom had struck out
at something, but he was not like Tom. His limbs were dead
already. He sat still, dying the death over and over again;
and the only part of him which moved were his eyes,
turning round and round in their sockets, running over the
walls, the floor, the ceiling, again and again till suddenly
they became motionless and stony-starting out of his head
fixed in the direction of the bed.

He had seen the heavy curtains stir and shake as if the dead
body they concealed had turned over and sat up. Byrne,
who thought the world could hold no more terrors in store,
felt his hair stir at the roots. He gripped the arms of the
chair, his jaw fell, and the sweat broke out on his brow
while his dry tongue clove suddenly to the roof of his
mouth. Again the curtains stirred, but did not open. "Don't,
Tom!" Byrne made effort to shout, but all he heard was a
slight moan such as an uneasy sleeper may make. He felt
39
that his brain was going, for, now, it seemed to him that the
ceiling over the bed had moved, had slanted, and came level
again--and once more the closed curtains swayed gently as
if about to part.

Byrne closed his eyes not to see the awful apparition of the
seaman's corpse coming out animated by an evil spirit. In
the profound silence of the room he endured a moment of
frightful agony, then opened his eyes again. And he saw at
once that the curtains remained closed still, but that the
ceiling over the bed had risen quite a foot. With the last
gleam of reason left to him he understood that it was the
enormous baldaquin over the bed which was coming down,
while the curtains attached to it swayed softly, sinking
gradually to the floor. His drooping jaw snapped to--and
half rising in his chair he watched mutely the noiseless
descent of the monstrous canopy. It came down in short
smooth rushes till lowered half way or more, when it took a
run and settled swiftly its turtle-back shape with the deep
border piece fitting exactly the edge of the bedstead. A
slight crack or two of wood were heard, and the
overpowering stillness of the room resumed its sway.

Byrne stood up, gasped for breath, and let out a cry of rage
and dismay, the first sound which he is perfectly certain did
make its way past his lips on this night of terrors. This then
was the death he had escaped! This was the devilish artifice
of murder poor Tom's soul had perhaps tried from beyond
the border to warn him of. For this was how he had died.

40
Byrne was certain he had heard the voice of the seaman,
faintly distinct in his familiar phrase, "Mr. Byrne! Look out,
sir!" and again uttering words he could not make out. But
then the distance separating the living from the dead is so
great! Poor Tom had tried. Byrne ran to the bed and
attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering
the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable
like a tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist;
his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he
turned round the room as if he could find neither his
weapons nor the way out; and all the time he stammered
awful menaces. . .

A violent battering at the door of the inn recalled him to his

soberer senses. He flew to the window pulled the shutters
open, and looked out. In the faint dawn he saw below him a
mob of men. Ha! He would go and face at once this
murderous lot collected no doubt for his undoing. After his
struggle with nameless terrors he yearned for an open fray
with armed enemies. But he must have remained yet bereft
of his reason, because forgetting his weapons he rushed
downstairs with a wild cry, unbarred the door while blows
were raining on it outside, and flinging it open flew with his
bare hands at the throat of the first man he saw before him.
They rolled over together. Byrne's hazy intention was to
break through, to fly up the mountain path, and come back
presently with Gonzales' men to exact an exemplary
vengeance. He fought furiously till a tree, a house, a

41
mountain, seemed to crash down upon his head--and he
knew no more.

Here Mr. Byrne describes in detail the skilful manner in

which he found his broken head bandaged, informs us that
he had lost a great deal of blood, and ascribes the
preservation of his sanity to that circumstance. He sets
down Gonzales' profuse apologies in full too. For it was
Gonzales who, tired of waiting for news from the English,
had come down to the inn with half his band, on his way to
the sea. "His excellency," he explained, "rushed out with
fierce impetuosity, and, moreover, was not known to us for
a friend, and so we . . . etc., etc. When asked what had
become of the witches, he only pointed his finger silently to
the ground, then voiced calmly a moral reflection: "The
passion for gold is pitiless in the very old, senor," he said.
"No doubt in former days they have put many a solitary
traveller to sleep in the archbishop's bed."

"There was also a gipsy girl there," said Byrne feebly from
the improvised litter on which he was being carried to the
coast by a squad of guerilleros.

"It was she who winched up that infernal machine, and it

was she too who lowered it that night," was the answer.

"But why? Why?" exclaimed Byrne. "Why should she wish

for my death?"

42
"No doubt for the sake of your excellency's coat buttons,"
said politely the saturnine Gonzales. "We found those of the
dead mariner concealed on her person. But your excellency
may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been
done on this occasion."

Byrne asked no more questions. There was still another

death which was considered by Gonzales as "fitting to the
occasion." The one- eyed Bernardino stuck against the wall
of his wine-shop received the charge of six escopettas into
his breast. As the shots rang out the rough bier with Tom's
body on it went past carried by a bandit-like gang of
Spanish patriots down the ravine to the shore, where two
boats from the ship were waiting for what was left on earth
of her best seaman.

Mr. Byrne, very pale and weak, stepped into the boat which
carried the body of his humble friend. For it was decided
that Tom Corbin should rest far out in the bay of Biscay.
The officer took the tiller and, turning his head for the last
look at the shore, saw on the grey hillside something
moving, which he made out to be a little man in a yellow
hat mounted on a mule--that mule without which the fate of
Tom Corbin would have remained mysterious for ever.

43
This work is in the public domain in
the United States because it was
published before January 1, 1928.

The longest-living author of this work

died in 1924, so this work is in the
public domain in countries and areas
where the copyright term is the
author's life plus 98 years or less.
This work may be in the public
domain in countries and areas with
longer native copyright terms that
apply the rule of the shorter term to
foreign works.

44
45
About this digital edition
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