He nodded towards the body on the darkening sands. The sky had lost its warm flush and the sea had changed to amethyst. The man turned his head and looked at the dead man who had been washed ashore—and the wind seemed to blow more coldly.
“So, you will observe, sir, that I did not land on your island for a picnic. Also, I would suggest that I am an infected person, and that in throwing me into the sea, you might inbreathe the infection.”
He ended with a touch of fierceness, sarcasm. The man sat very still on his rock, his yellow hair and beard turning to a ghostly silver. Presently, he spoke.
“Is that a threat?”
“I should call it a warning.”
They eyed each other in the dusk and, somehow, Cumberledge felt that the other man had softened, that his inexplicable anger had entered a shadow of perplexity.
“By the way—it would interest me to know what sin I have committed in being washed ashore on this island?”
The man seemed to reflect.
“The sin of bringing death where no death is.”
“You mean——?”
“Man,” and his voice had a fierce solemnity, “you have blundered in upon a great experiment. That dead thing down there has spoilt the work of twenty years.”
Cumberledge’s pale face strained out of the dusk.
“Do you mean to say that nothing has ever died on this island?”
“Not since I have been here.”
“And your daughter——?”
“She does not know that there is such a thing as death. I have brought her up to believe that we go on living and living for a thousand years, and that then—the Great Messenger comes for us. I wanted to see whether the body would grow old, when the soul did not know that old age—as we know it—and death, existed.”
“But, good heavens, man,” said Cumberledge, “what about heredity, the habit of millions of years?”
“I am a mystic. The body is for the soul, not the soul for the body.”
He looked over the darkening sea, and then he turned to Cumberledge.
“How old do you think I am?”
“You look forty-five.”
“I am seventy, and my daughter is thirty.”
“She looks eighteen.”
“Exactly. I expect to live another thirty years, and I expected the girl to look just as she is now, thirty years hence. But you, and that body——”
“Look here,” said Cumberledge a little testily; “do you mean to tell me that nothing has died here, that she has never seen a dead bird or a dead animal?”
“There are no birds and no animals on the island.”
“Fish, then?”
“I have never seen a dead fish.”
“And there are just you two?”
“I have three servants.”
“And how would you explain, then, to your daughter, supposing——?”
“She believes that they are nearly a thousand years old.”
“And they pretend——?”
“Yes. There are reasons.”
“But how do you live?”
“On fruit and vegetables. Twice a year a ship calls, and we land stores in our boat, but the sailors never come ashore. Of course, I have had to pay, and pay heavily.”
It grew darker, and they could no longer see the body on the sands.
“It seems to me,” said Cumberledge, “that the solution of the difficulty is very simple, I mean, the explaining of that dead body. He was a thousand years old, and the Great Messenger had come for his soul.”
The man made a movement of the head.
“Then—there is me.”
“Yes, there is you.”
They looked at each other steadily in the dusk, this Englishman and this neo-Greek who once had been an Englishman. There was a sense of struggle and of perplexity; the present became penetrated by the past.
“Let us consider,” said Cumberledge, “the idea of your pitching me back into the sea. The trouble is that the girl has seen me—very much alive.”
The man sat with bowed head.
“Wait,” he said; “be patient—a moment. Something is speaking inside me——!”
He stood up; he seemed strangely agitated. Then, he clambered down the rocks and began to walk up and down on the sand. He was visible to Cumberledge as a dim, moving shape, a ghost, troubled, distracted. The stars were shining; the wind seemed to blow less keenly.
Presently, he came climbing back to where Cumberledge lay.
“Your father was at Trinity?”
“Yes.”
“He rowed in the Cambridge boat?”
“That’s true.”
“So did I.”
There was a pause, tense with significance.
“My name is Ringwood,” said the man; “you may have heard it.”
Cumberledge had heard it.
“Not the Ringwood, Lord Test——?”
“Yes, twenty years ago—I was that.”
Cumberledge sat silent. Young man that he was that name was known to him, a name that had drawn to itself a little world of mystery and tragic strangeness. He had heard old gossips at the “clubs” speak of the “Ringwood affair,” and of the tales that were told of its vague aftermath. No one had ended the tale in the same way. Ringwood was alive and he was dead; he had disappeared in Central Africa; he had been last heard of in Thibet; he had died of drink in Paris. Some men still remembered him as the scholar, the traveller, the collector of old books and of precious stones, the great gentleman, the maker of gardens, and the planter of trees.
“I see,” said Cumberledge in a hushed voice; “I see.”
Ringwood was standing and looking down at him.
“The easiest way would be for me to take you on my back,” he said.
Cumberledge gave a jerk of the chin.
“What! You mean——?”
“I have a garden-house on the edge of my wood of cypresses and pines. You could be isolated there; no one else need come near you.”
There was a short, tense silence. Then Cumberledge spoke.
“It can’t be done,” he said.
“It must be done,” said the other.
He came close, but Cumberledge put up a hand.
“No, stand off. If you could rig up a shelter or something in the sands, and bring food and water, and lash up this leg of mine, I could manage.”
A calm but stubborn voice answered him out of the darkness.
“Is that our tradition? No. You were ready to risk your life for the sake of a lot of strangers. What do you think your father would have done in my place? The moon will be up soon.”
“But, look here, sir, what about the others, your daughter?”
“That will be arranged. The servants will not come too near to the garden-house. They will leave us food.”
Cumberledge half rose on one knee.
“Us! You are not going to——?”
“That is just what I am going to do.”
“But your theory—the living-for-ever idea——?”
“Life is stronger than theories, Cumberledge, so is tradition, sometimes. I realized that—an hour ago when I was down there on the sands.”
* * *
The sun shone full on the garden-house, but Cumberledge lay in the shade. He looked out between pillars of white stone at the house standing in the valley below, surrounded by its gardens, and for its background the blue of the sea. It was not such a house as northern Europe knows, but a thing of the old Ægean life, and Cumberledge could see its white porticoes and colonnades shining behind the cypresses and pines. A tiny stream coming down from the hills was caught in great cisterns of white marble. Everywhere the water had been led into little murmuring channels among the orange groves, and between the vines Cumberledge could hear nothing but the trickle of the water, and the sighing of the wind in the cypresses and pines. A life that was thousands of years old, a life that seemed capable of going on for ever.
And yet this air of
permanency was an illusion, and Cumberledge knew it to be an illusion. He lay and wondered what Ringwood thought—the Zeus of this little island who had had rugs spread under the shade of a pine, and who sat and slept there, and talked. Two days had gone by, and it seemed to Cumberledge that Ringwood had grown suddenly and perceptibly older, that he had withered slightly in a night. Was it possible that Time, his seventy years, had suddenly overtaken him?
And the girl?
Daily, she came as far as the low stone wall that divided the wood and the wilderness from the garden. There was a stone seat here under the shade of the tree, and she would sit there and watch the two men as though she was trying to understand something, to fathom their secret. Cumberledge felt that she had begun to realize that there was a secret. He conceived an immense pity for her, and something more than pity. This father of hers had dreamed of giving her a sort of perennial youth, a beautiful, cold immaturity. Was such a youth desirable? Had he not withheld from her the real food of the immortals, love, pain, sacrifice?
Sometimes she sang to them, touching the strings of her zither; sometimes she talked; for the seat was less than thirty paces away, and in that serene stillness the voice carried far. Cumberledge understood that she had been forbidden to come nearer, and that she had accepted Ringwood’s orders as she had accepted life upon the island. Yet she, too, had changed. Her eyes had begun to question things. There were moments when they betrayed resentment, impatience; the impatience of a child who is learning to ask questions, the resentment of the woman who demands that they shall be answered.
Very often the eyes of these two met with questioning significance across that space of thyme and lavender.
“Oh, stranger, what art thou?”
“Ariadne, I am life and death.”
The servants brought food, wine and water, and left them half-way between the garden-house and the garden. They were quiet, softly-moving, sombre creatures dressed in some coarse white material, and looking like old Cistercian monks. Cumberledge never heard them speak. Their eyes regarded Ringwood as though he were no common man, but a clean god and a master.
Two more days slipped by, and Cumberledge had listened to all the mystical philosophy that had filled the life of this strange exile. On the fifth day he noticed a change in Ringwood’s voice, it seemed flatter and less vital, less full of confidence. He appeared restless; his blue eyes had lost their tranquility. In the cool of the evening he disappeared, and darkness was falling before he returned, walking slowly and with a suggestion of effort.
Cumberledge heard him cough. That most prosaic of sounds was the opening note of the tragedy.
He sat down a few yards from the door of the garden-house, and Cumberledge could hear him breathing, and it was the breathing of physical distress.
“Ringwood,” he said, “what is wrong?”
The doomed man remained very still.
“It has come,” he answered, “and it has come suddenly. I have been deciding what I ought to do.”
“Good God!” said Cumberledge, sitting up, “forgive me.”
Ringwood stretched out an expressive hand.
“It is fate—my message. Listen to what I have to say. Let us look at things calmly. This disease kills, and kills quickly. Yet—I should be lying there on those rugs, a thing sodden with fever, delirious, unconscious. What would happen? The child would come to me. Nothing, no persuasion would be able to keep her away. She would catch the disease and die.”
He spoke very calmly yet with tragic tenderness.
“That must not happen. You, you, when the thing has passed over, will have to tell her——”
“Man, what do you mean?”
“You will have to tell her the truth, for I shall not be here.”
And then, he stretched out his hands eloquently, pleadingly, with infinite meaning.
“Cumberledge, I have loved this child, and perhaps too well. Perhaps, I have been wrong; perhaps I have made her life too much that of a beautiful figure in a case of glass. I appeal to you, the son of my old friend. She will not lack anything of the grosser things of life, but you can give her what I can no longer give.”
He bowed his head, and seemed to struggle for breath.
“Love,” he said—and lost his voice in a spasm of coughing—“the most sacred of all things, the immortal fire.”
He covered his head with his arms and stood up.
“Promise——”
“I promise. But, Ringwood——”
“The truth, tell her——”
“I will try. But, man, what is in your mind——?”
“Explicit,” said Ringwood suddenly, and passed into the darkness out of Cumberledge’s view.
Cumberledge sat and trembled. He could hear a rustling sound as though a man were groping for something among the bushes.
“Ringwood,” he called. “Ringwood, where are you——?”
The shadowy figure reappeared; it had something dark, like a loose bundle on its shoulder.
“I shall burn these,” it said, “down by the shore—the rugs and blankets. Man—remember.”
He drew back and disappeared; but Cumberledge called after him in a voice of tragedy:
“Ringwood, come back. Where are you going?”
There was no answer. Cumberledge sat and listened, overwhelmed by a sense of his own helplessness. He knew Ringwood had gone to the sea.
* * *
It was the most perfect dawn that Cumberledge ever remembered, an enchanted, Homeric dawn of purple and gold. The motionless cypresses stood as black spires against the changing sapphire of the sea. There was no wind, no movement; nothing but a solemn ecstasy of silence, a beautiful sadness in the eyes of the day’s joy.
And Cumberledge waited. He had lain awake half the night, had watched the stars grow pale and night snatching her dark robe from off the sea. He was wondering what he would say to Ariadne, how he would tell her, what she would do.
Presently he saw one of the servants come up from the garden with the morning’s meal in two Samian bowls. Cumberledge called to him.
“Andrew——”
The man set the bowls down on a patch of grass, and stood staring. He saw that the rugs had gone, and that his master was not there.
“Andrew, did your master tell you why none of you were to come near us?”
“No, sir.”
“It was because I had come from a ship in which there had been a deadly disease. He wished no one else to face the danger of taking it. The disease has passed me over; but last night your master sickened.”
The man looked scared.
“He has taken his bed away, sir.”
Cumberledge was leaning forward, his face tense and lined.
“Andrew, I believe that your master has drowned himself; he did it so that your mistress shall be safe. Go, all three of you, and search the island; make sure. But say nothing to her.”
The man’s face was like a tragic mask.
“That was like him,” he said; “he was more of a god than a man.”
An hour passed, and Cumberledge lay back and waited, his eyes fixed on the two Samian bowls, one of which held the mortal food that Ringwood would taste no more. He had drunk the wine of self-sacrifice; he was with the immortals; the Samian bowl was for the living, not for the dead.
Presently Cumberledge heard a voice, the voice of a girl singing as she came up through the garden.
“Dear God!” he thought, “and I must tell her that it was I who brought death to this island!”
As she climbed the steps he saw her dark beauty rise against the green of the cypresses and the blue of the sea. She stood there, looking across the white portico of the garden-house, her hands clasped behind her head, a Greek girl, a woman, a child.
Cumberledge called to her, softly.
“Ariadne.”
She dropped her hands, smiled and came across to him through the knee-deep lavender and thyme, and when she saw the two Samian bowls with the food
in them untouched she paused, surprised.
“You have had no food, neither you nor my father.”
He saw her glance pass to the place where Ringwood’s bed had been.
“The bed has gone!”
Cumberledge was sitting up, watching her between the stone pillars.
“Ariadne,” he said, “I have something to say to you. Your father left a message for you.”
Her eyes were fixed on him, they seemed to grow larger, to fill themselves with darkness. Her body lost its flowing youthfulness and grew rigid.
“I do not understand.”
“The Great Messenger——” he said.
For one moment she remained very still, then she flung herself down on the scented maquis. Her arms were folded over her head, her face buried in the grey foliage; she did not move or utter a sound, but lay there like a mourner in a temple stretched at the feet of her god. And into the silence came the figure of the man Andrew. He looked at Cumberledge and made a sign, and Cumberledge understood.
The man vanished, but Ariadne did not move. Cumberledge sat and watched her, wondering whether it was time to speak. Yet, while he was hesitating, she raised herself a little; he could see her dark hair but not her face.
“He did not say good-bye to me,” she said.
The seal of a perplexed silence fell from the man’s lips.
“Ariadne, have you never heard of death?”
Her sombre eyes lifted to his.
“Death! What is death?”
“The Great Messenger. He called your father, and your father heard him. Death comes for us all. Listen, and I will tell you.”
She lay curled up like a wounded thing, listening, half-hidden in the scented bushes. Cumberledge spoke very simply, just as he would have spoken to a child. He told her the truth—that most difficult of all things to tell.
“It was I who brought death here—thinking to save other lives. Your father saved me, and when the Great Messenger came for him he went like the great man that he was. He did not stay to say good-bye to you, for if he had stayed death might have taken you also. He did not wish you to die.”
She stood up; she turned away and went slowly down towards the garden, her arms hanging limply. She disappeared down the steps and was lost in a grove of cypresses, but presently Cumberledge heard her voice utter one wailing bitter cry. Then there was silence, a silence that hurt his heart.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 12