THE SCARECROW RIDES (4 page)

Then up—and right above the sea-wall line arose the waters, lifting
the ship into the sky and carrying it onwards, down the liquid hill
that swept towards the wall. Rent sails held by the entangled cordage
of the riotous rigging, streamed out their shreds of canvas, torn into
strips like giant ribbons, while the ship's bell, swinging to the
unnatural list, clanged out a dismal note of doom.

The sight of the brig racing helplessly in the jaws of the
white-fanged breakers struck instant terror to the hearts of the men at
the rope, and despite an encouraging shout from the squire to stand
firm, many deserted their posts and fled for shelter of the boat-house.

Out went the sky as the thunder cracked, but not even that, nor the
mighty roaring of the waters, could drown the great thud as the ship's
bows cut into the masonry of Dymchurch Wall like a battering ram. The
noise of rending wood splitting like a crashing forest, and the rush of
water pouring over the sea-wall and sweeping them off their feet into
the road below made them think that their valiant defence had been
broken at last, and that the sea was flooding the Marsh. The dread of
many generations had come true. The invincible wall was down. The skill
and labour of centuries, paid for by hard-wrung Scots on acreage in
order to keep the Marsh holdings in security, had at last been defeated
by the elements. The slogan of the Marsh men, good and bad, “Serve God,
honour the King; but first, maintain the Wall,” was now of no account.
Yet had these men but maintained their posts of danger on the rope,
they would not have lost their faith in that dark hour, for as the
squire and a few faithful ones braced themselves to keep their footing
and their hold on the rope while the sea water swirled for a few
ghastly seconds round their waists, they then knew the wall had not
failed its children, whose lives and homes depended on its strength and
holding power. Damaged, no doubt, it was; but at the first fall of the
tide, the squire's foreman would once again organise the Marsh men into
gangs for its repair.

Now although Meg, in a vain endeavour to catch sight of her husband,
had braved the flashes of lightning, the terror of the fireball as it
burst across the sky made her involuntarily clap her hands over her
eyes, and during the destructive seconds of the storm's ferocity that
followed, she felt the house shake violently, give a sickening tilt and
then shiver, as joists and beams groaned and creaked in their shifting.
Built as it was upon the lower level of the sea-wall, the foundations
slid with the soil as the waves, bursting through the cellarage
weakened it. The front door was torn from its hinges and blown bodily
against the staircase, as the sea water gushed through the passage,
silting up the floor with a loose deposit of gravel, sand and shell. At
the same time the diamond-paned casement through which Meg had been
looking, crashed inwards, its heavy leadwork striking her on the head
and bearing her to the floor beneath its weight. This was the last
wicked prank of the hurricane before departing. There followed what, in
contrast to the noise, seemed almost a silence, broken only by the
accustomed sound of waves against the Wall.

How long Meg lay there beneath that pile of twisted lead, glass
panes and broken plaster, she could not tell, for the injury to her
head had left her senseless, but when she recovered she still found
herself looking through the casement, and for some time it puzzled her
that she could only see the sky—a wild sky of fast-flying clouds lit
with the full radiance of the moon. Then she realised that she was
lying on the floor with the window resting upon her face. She
remembered the storm. Its violence had gone, but in her heart it had
left behind its terror, and it was not the thunder-bolt that had made
her cover her eyes, nor the noise, nor the rocking house which made
this terror so paralysing, but the thought of what it had brought, the
thing which she had seen between her fingers, in that awful moment. It
was the huge form of a giant, a devil of the storm, who with staring
eyes had rushed towards her at the window. She had seen its face
plainly, with its great eyes and black beard, for as it rushed, it
waved a great lantern above its head, and this swaying light had
revealed the horrid face. And its voice—for this thing had brought her
a message—was the most terrible of all. The volume of its speech
embraced the whole multitudinous din as vowels were formed by mighty
waters rolling into hollow places with howling winds to govern them and
consonants were framed by cracking timbers and the rasp of grinding
stones.

“Clouder is dead. Your house is destroyed. This comes of serving
God.” How could she doubt the owner of such a sentiment to be other
than the devil himself? He had made himself manifest in the shape of a
wooden giant. He had surrounded himself with hellish elements and
caused all this destruction because she, in her humble faith, served
God. And God, the omnipotent, had given him free license. He had robbed
her of husband and home, and God permitted it. She remembered that
recently she and Abel had listened to a sermon on Job, preached by the
parson, Master Bolden. On the way home from church, she had remarked to
Abel that it was a strange story which was hard to believe. Now it was
true. God had once more permitted just such an injustice.

Numbed in body and spirit, she gloried in her rebellion; and then
she heard a simple, sacred sound which gave the lie to her terror, and
which her simple faith was glad to welcome as a comforter. It was the
tinkle of the three church bells, rung as on the Sundays to call the
faithful to prayer. After all she had been through, she was in no frame
of mind to put two and two together, and did not remember that the
three bells were not only rung on Sundays to call the parish to 'serve
God' but on days and nights of sea danger to summon the Marsh men to
'maintain the Wall'. However, forgetting this, she made a miracle of a
mere coincidence.

As the inland farmers of the Marsh were being roused from their beds
by the bell's slogan, so did Meg rouse herself from that old oak floor,
which though never straight at the best of times was now canted at an
alarming angle. With all this calamity, no wonder she had imagined even
worse things. Of course, her husband was alive. If he were dead she
would have been told by the men, and not by her nightmare of a wooden
devil which was nothing more than a frightening dream. She could soon
dispel that by looking out of the open space where the window had been.
Comforting herself with these suggestions, she looked out.

Though her fears had been acute, they were as nothing to the
overwhelming horror that now possessed her. Could she have mastered her
physical attributes in order to let out one piercing scream, it might
have given her brain a chance of a speedier recovery later on. But what
she saw had paralysed her brain. All she knew was that in her attempt
to give the devil the lie, the devil had given her the truth, for
there, right opposite to her and leaning over the lip of the broken
sea-wall, his lantern still alight, was the enormous head and shoulders
of the wooden-looking giant. Its staring eyes regarded her with a fixed
expression of contempt and hatred, and as she gazed, she listened too
and heard a voice beneath her window saying: “Here's a shutter. Help me
wrench it off.” There followed a squeaking of iron and a bump of wood,
and then the slow, regular tramping of men's feet.

The malignant face told her to come and look at what was going on
beneath her window. He swung his lantern invitingly. She was powerless
to move, but she knew that they were carrying her Abel away on the
shutter, and she guessed he was dead, for she heard a voice which she
recognised as the squire's say: “Wait, while I break the news to his
wife.” She heard him enter the passage and wondered why his footfalls
sounded as though they trod on a beach. The she heard him say: “I'll
want a hand here. The stairs are all but gone under this door.” After
much whispering and mumbling, and the noise of wood clearance, followed
by the effort of someone climbing, she knew the squire was clinging to
the crooked doorpost of the bedroom. She was unable to turn round, for
the wooden man had her hypnotised, but she knew it was the squire
before he spoke, which he did with difficulty.

“My dear Mrs. Clouder,” he began, and then remembered that he had
first seen her as the prettiest baby lying in a bassinet before the
kitchen fire at the Long White Cottage where the Henley family lived.
He recalled how one of the Henley men said: “Well, Master Tony, what do
you think of our lobster catch?” He, as a little god fresh from Queen's
College, Oxford, had replied: “It's true most babies are as red as
boiled lobsters, but you wrong this one. She's pretty.” “Oh, but I was
meaning the cradle, Master Tony. Grandpa made it out of two old lobster
pots when we heard that little Meg was thinking of living in
Dymchurch.”

The squire loved the Henleys, and perhaps Mrs. Clouder best of them
all. So thinking of this, he paused and said with emotion: “My poor
Meg, I'm afraid you've got to be very brave. Of course, all the village
will help you, and you know that I'll always stand by you. You see, my
dear child, I've got the worst possible news to break to you. You and I
have lost our best friend. We'll have to comfort each other, Meg. You
know I had the greatest affection and admiration for the man you loved.
Look at me, please, Meg, won't you? It will help me to tell you.”

“But I have been told, Sir Tony,” she answered. “I've been told in a
cruel way, not kind like you would do. He told me. Look. He's staring
at me. He killed my husband and destroyed my home, and he's gloating on
me there, leaning over the sea-wall. Do you see nothing, sir? Or does
it only appear to me?”

“I see it very well, Meg,” replied the squire. “But I see nothing
malignant in it. You of all people should pity it, for it is a
fellow-sufferer—a victim of the storm.”

“It is the maker of the storm. It is the devil. He told me so. And
he sent that other brute to warn me. He looked at me with fixed eyes,
too. He stared at me like that, before he put out the light and seized
me. Don't let him get me, Squire, oh.”

The staring eyes, the monotonous, metallic tone of her voice
frightened the squire. He had imagined that he would have to deal with
a weeping, hysterical young woman whom he could have taken home to his
wife to be mothered. But the deathly still horror which possessed Meg
was a symptom altogether more alarming, and he feared that her reason
might be affected permanently.

He answered her calmly: “Why, Meg, I really marvel that you, whose
menfolk have been sailors since the days of Noah, should fall into such
an error. This devil on the sea-wall, as you speak of it is no devil at
all, but has, no doubt for years been the pride of every honest sailor
behind it, for it is nothing but the wooden figure-head of the
ill-fated broken brig,
City of London
. Your heroic husband and
our no less valiant vicar had almost reached it with a life-line, when
a great tidal sea wave lifted the ship above them. It is some comfort
to know that their death was quick. It is a great comfort to know that
their death was heroic. Now, Meg, I have come to take you to the Court
House.”

“And leave my home?” she asked, bewildered.

“It is unsafe to stay in it, Meg,” replied the squire. “I will
undertake to see that it is guarded by responsible men answerable to
myself, and to-morrow we will repair the damage.”

For the first time she cut the spell which the wooden figure held on
her, and turning to the squire, asked in a matter-of-fact tone: “Where
is—Abel?”

“They are carrying the—they are carrying him,” he corrected, to a
shelter for the night. It is customary to use the barn at Sycamore Farm
in cases like this. Come, Meg, it is something to know that you bear
the name of a man whom the whole of the Marsh will always be honouring.
Let me take you to her ladyship.”

Meg took two steps towards him and then turning suddenly looked once
more at the figure-head. Then with a pathetic moan she collapsed into
the squire's arms. He carried her through the door and lowered her
unconscious body to willing hands beneath the broken staircase.

And so in solemn procession were the Clouders carried towards the
rookery where the party divided, those bearing Abel's body turning into
the Farm Lane, and the squire's party, who carried Meg, going on to the
old Court House, where Lady Cobtree and her three daughters busied
themselves in preparing a guest-chamber and making ready such remedies
as Dr. Sennacharib Pepper prescribed for the unconscious young widow.

Meanwhile a messenger had followed from the sea-wall to say that
although a strict watch was being kept upon the abating waves around
the wreck, no sign of the vicar's body had appeared. The squire sent
back word that the Preventive Officer was to take what steps he thought
fit to guard not only the Clouder's tavern, but the wreck itself from
pilferage. Neither plank nor beam belonging to the broken brig was to
be touched till he invited on the morrow the Lords of the Level to view
it. He also enjoined a strict watch to be kept all night and although
he thought it likely that all the ship's company must have perished
either by fire or water, should any survivor by the grace of God reach
Dymchurch Wall in safety, such a person was to be carried to the Court
House immediately and information lodged with the doctor, who could
attend the said person in his presence. He also sent word to the
sexton, who had been roused to ring the tocsin bells, to continue the
practice till he received word that the foreman of the Wall was
satisfied that sufficient posses of men had assembled to insure safe
keeping of the Marsh.