"Godam!" cried the rascal addressed, and removed with expedition to a less storied piece of ground.
"Then they go away," continued Diccon in graveyard tones. "They all go away together,--Sir Thomas and Captain Argall, Captain West, Lieutenant George Percy and his cousin, my master, and Sir Thomas's men; they go out of the wood as though it were accursed, though indeed it was not half so gloomy then as it is now. The sun shone into it then, sometimes, and the birds sang. You would n't think it from the looks of things now, would you? As the dead man rotted in his grave, and the living man died by inches above him, they say the wood grew darker, and darker, and darker. How dark it's getting now, and cold,--cold as the dead!"
His auditors drew closer together, and shivered. Sparrow and I were so near that we could see the hands of the ingenious story-teller, bound behind his back, working as he talked. Now they strained this way, and now that, at the piece of rope that bound them.
"That was ten years ago," he said, his voice becoming more and more impressive. "Since that day nothing comes into this wood,--nothing human, that is. Neither white man nor Indian comes, that's certain. Then why are n't there chains around that tree, and why are there no bones beneath it, on the ground there? Because, Jackies all, the man that did that murder walks! It is not always deadly still here; sometimes there 's a clanking of chains! And a bodkin through the tongue can't keep the dead from wailing! And the murdered man walks, too; in his shroud he follows the other--Is n't that something white in the distance yonder?"
My lord's four knaves looked down the arcade of trees, and saw the something white as plainly as if it had been verily there. Each moment the wood grew darker,--a thing in nature, since the sun outside was swiftly sinking to the horizon. But to those to whom that tale had been told it was a darkening unearthly and portentous, bringing with it a colder air and a deepened silence.
"Oh, Sir Thomas Dale, Sir Thomas Dale!"
The voice seemed to come from the distance, and bore in its dismal cadence the melancholy of the damned. For a moment my heart stood still, and the hair of my head commenced to rise; the next, I knew that Diccon had found an ally, not in the dead, but in the living. The minister, standing beside me, opened his mouth again, and again that dismal voice rang through the wood, and again it seemed, by I know not what art, to come from any spot rather than from that particular tree behind whose trunk stood Master Jeremy Sparrow.