Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  With the exception of Jenny Heger. As no woman he had ever wanted had rejected him, he felt that eventually Jenny would be "sensible" and accept him, too, in marriage and in a carefree and joyous future. She had hardly spoken to him since that ridiculous encounter in the grotto, but she was not angry with him. She seemed to be suffering and brooding. What an intense young lady! In time, he would laugh her out of her shyness and her moods and they would take, together, what they would be permitted to take. Once or twice it did occur to him that Jenny would never change, and then he would feel, as if it were a stronger echo of his gently neglected and painful childhood, a spasm of very real and intolerable pain. For a man who was not very resolute by nature, he felt a stiffening of resolution when it came to Jenny.

  The studio was lighted by oil lamps, as all the rooms were so lighted, and they flickered as gusts of wind found their way even around the locked and secure windows. Harald listened to the storm and it seemed to him that it was getting much worse, and he saw the lightning through the windows and shrank involuntarily at some of the more boisterous of the thunderclaps. He tried to take his mind off the storm, and looked with satisfaction at some of his canvases standing against the walls, and his easel, with a fresh canvas waiting. He would do another portrait of Jenny. He would sell this one, as he could have sold the first many times over. He thought of Jenny and stood up and slowly strolled about the studio. Jenny was in the library downstairs, where she always "lurked," and he hesitated. He wondered if she was frightened now, and then he decided she was not. She had not been frightened yesterday or last night. He had tried to talk with her at meals, but though she had answered him, she gave him the impression that she was hardly aware of him. Only once had she spoken voluntarily to him and that was to ask him when he would take her to their lawyers and conclude their contract.

  "Patience, Jenny," he had said. "Besides, it is my information that the lawyer most concerned is not in town just now."

  Suddenly he wanted to see Jenny, and it was an aching desire in him. He had the excuse of the storm, and so he lightly ran downstairs—he did everything lightly—and went to the library and pushed open the carved wooden door. There was Jenny, crouched under a lamp and reading, and she looked up at him blankly when he entered.

  "I thought perhaps you were afraid," he said with his genial smile.

  "Of what?"

  "Well, the storm. It does sound awful, doesn't it?"

  She frowned and listened, then nodded. She gazed at him with her great blue eyes, in which the lamplight danced, waiting for him to leave, and she pushed aside some of her fallen black hair impatiently. She was dressed in one of her least becoming frocks, a dull lilac cotton with a little collar of coarse lace at the neck, and it made her white throat whiter and took away the color of her beautiful lips.

  "You know there has been a lot of damage," said Harald, still standing.

  "I know. But it can be planted again." Jenny paused. "My father's rose beds have gone."

  "I'm sorry, Jenny."

  She smiled briefly. "I am, too."

  There was another pause, and then to their mutual amazement they heard a banging at the hall door, and a shout. They stared at each other, disbelieving. The servants had already retired to their rooms, and Harald said, "Who, in God's name, can that be?" He went to the hall and walked down its echoing marble floor, and pulled back the bolts on the doors. It swung in on him violently, and he cried out, and Jenny came into the hall also.

  If they had been incredulous before they were stunned into speechlessness now, as a battered, drenched, torn and muddy figure staggered into the hall, pouring with water, creating instant puddles on the shining floor. It was heaving and panting, and its hands were bleeding, and it was grasping a crop. Its black eyes were quite mad and staring, and all its hair was spiked and upright like a drowned bush.

  "For God's sake," said Harald, and stepped back. "Jon!"

  Jenny stood behind him, frowning and staring, throwing back her hair, her mouth opening in amazement. The light of the tall and flickering lamps, shaped like torches, which decorated the medieval hall along the walls, bent before the wind that roared through the open door. Jonathan looked at his brother and saw no one else, and he reached behind him and closed the door, and then leaned against it, breathing stertorously. Harald looked at him, still incredulous, and then when he saw Jonathan's face more clearly, he stepped back more and his ruddy brows drew together over his eyes and much of his high color disappeared.

  "What?" he murmured. He said, with a kind of desperate hurry, "Is there something wrong with Mother?"

  Jonathan did not answer. He lifted the hand that held the crop and wiped his face with the back of it. He was a ghastly color, and his chest rose and sank with his convulsed breathing. He still leaned against the door, and dark streams ran from his clothing. He had begun to tremble. The thunder detonated against the stone walls of the castle with a hollow roaring.

  Jenny stood, transfixed, looking at Jonathan, still hardly believing that it was he, still disbelieving. Then she too saw his face, and she gasped, and she saw the crop in his hand. She glanced swiftly at Harald, who was as paralyzed as herself.

  Then Jonathan said in a hoarse and unrecognizable voice, "While you were away, I found out the truth." His dark face was contorted and twisted and his eyes reflected the uncontrolled wrath in him. "About you and Mavis."

  Harald said something faintly, but dared not look away from his brother. He said to Jenny, "Jenny, go away, please."

  "No," said Jenny. She had come closer to Harald and stood almost beside him.

  Jonathan did not even see her. He was standing upright now, and he seemed to fill the hall with a dangerous presence, not human, but more like the storm outside.

  "You let her die all alone," said Jonathan. "You helped her die. You arranged the abortion with Brinkerman. It was your child she was carrying. You killed her."

  Jenny cried out and put her hands to her cheeks.

  "Jon," said Harald. His eyes left Jonathan for an instant, searching for some weapon in the hall. He had an impulse to run and lock a door behind him, but he knew that Jonathan, even in his present state, would be faster than he and he feared a blow on the back of his head.

  "Tell me," said Jonathan.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," said Harald, and now he was utterly terrified and water rushed into his mouth and he had to swallow quickly.

  "I'm talking about Mavis," said Jonathan. "My wife, Mavis. She died because of you. While she was still my wife. It must have been quite a joke to you, laughing all these months to my face and behind my back."

  "No," said Harald, feeling the greatest terror of his life. He had to fight to keep his shaking knees from bending and throwing him to the floor. "You must be out of your mind."

  Jonathan laughed, throwing back his head, and they saw the shine of his teeth in the wavering lamplight. "I am," he said. "You did that to me. You let me be accused of a crime, and you let me rot away in prison and you let me be tried— for something you did. When I was acquitted, that must have been the worst day of your cursed life!"

  "I don't," Harald began, and had to swallow again and he vaguely thought that what he had swallowed tasted like blood.

  "Don't lie," said Jonathan. "You've lied all your worthless, stupid, useless life, while you danced and sang and smeared canvases. Do you know why I'm here now? I've come to kill you."

  "Jon," said Jenny, and she stepped between the brothers and faced Jonathan.

  He reached out his dripping arm and swept her aside as if she were nothing, and she fell against the stone wall. But she recovered instantly and flew again between them.

  "Jon!" she shouted. "I'm here, Jon!"

  He looked at her. "Yes, Jenny, I see you. Jenny, did you know that he told those lies about you in town, the dirty lies that made you a byword?"

  "I don't care!" she still shouted. "Nothing matters at all except you and me, Jon!"

  "And noth
ing matters to me but what I came for," he said. He saw that Harald was backing softly away and he lunged upon him and slashed him across the face with his crop. Harald staggered back and fell on the stairway, and flung up his arms to protect himself. Jenny caught Jonathan's arm with all her young strength and clung to it, though he tried to throw her off. Her hair swung with her efforts. Her teeth were bared and her dress blew out

  "Help! Help!" Harald screamed from behind his protecting arms. "Help! Help!" He heard the struggle near him and dared not look. His cries echoed back from the depths of the dark staircase with a frenzied sound. He started to scramble up the stairs, backward, and then Jonathan was on him again and his left hand was at his throat and the crop, wrenched from Jenny, was raised over his head.

  "Don't kill me!" Harald cried, and he flung up his hand and caught the murderous wrist above him and fought to throw off the hand that was clutching his throat. "My God, don't kill me! They'll really hang you this time!"

  Jenny had again recovered herself. She managed to seize the hand with the crop once more, and now in her fear-magnified strength she brought it to her mouth and bit it She was like a young and panting tiger, and now Jonathan saw her again, in crazed wonder.

  "Let him alone, let him alone!" said Jenny. She tore at the hand that was strangling Harald, and Jonathan was so amazed that he released his brother and Harald scrambled up a few stairs. The crop had opened his left cheek and the deep cut was running with blood. He was weak with his terror. He had never encountered violence like this before and he knew that it was not sane and that he would surely die if someone did not help him.

  Jonathan was trying to throw Jenny aside, but she clung to him, facing him, her arms about his neck. They fought soundlessly and Jenny was strong as she had never been strong before. She knew that she must not release Jonathan, or he would be gone from her forever. She groaned over and over, trying to reach him, "Jon, Jon, my darling, my darling. Don't, for my sake, Jon. Jon, come back, Jon, look at me."

  He had caught a huge handful of her black hair and he pulled her face from his shoulder and her white throat stretched in the lamplight and her head arched back from him. She closed her eyes but still clung to his upper arms, and the lower part of her body was pressed strongly against his. She was crying hopelessly and repeating his name. She would not let him go, and now he could only look at that vulnerable throat and see her tears.

  "Jenny," he said, and he released her hair and her head fell on his shoulder again and she was sobbing and trembling against him.

  "For my sake," she said, and repeated, "for my sake."

  He was spent He felt as though he would fall and die right there at Jenny's feet. He looked at his quaking brother, bleeding freely, and crouched on the stairway in a huddle of absolute dread and horror, overpowered less by his fear of death than by the total violence he had seen and encountered.

  "All right, Jenny," Jonathan was saying in an exhausted voice. "Don't cry like that Jenny. It's all right my love, all right."

  "Oh, Jon," she said, and she raised her head and kissed him fiercely on the mouth, and he tasted her tears and the softness of her lips.

  Harald had pulled himself to his feet with the banister and was wiping his face with his handkerchief. The sight of blood had always frightened him, and he looked at his own blood and leaned against the banister in a half faint Jonathan stared up at him from behind Jenny's shoulder.

  "You deserve to die," Jonathan said. "You deserve to die like the dog you are."

  Harald's collapse had indeed been less from fear than from what he had seen in his brother's eyes. He had made his life as calm and as easy and as pleasant and as controlled as possible. He detested emotional and riotous people; he felt a loathing for them. A man who could not compel himself to

  be moderate and civilized at all times was not a man to him but a wild beast. So he looked at Jonathan and hatred flashed between the brothers as bare and deadly as a thrown knife.

  "I may deserve to die, as you say," said Harald, in a shaking voice, "but you are not far from that condition yourself. You must be insane." He straightened a little on the staircase, not caring any longer for his blood. "Listen to me, Jon, and if you do, it will probably be the first time in your life that you ever listened to anyone.

  "Mavis wasn't your wife. She told me mat you had rejected her only a year or so after you were married, and put her out of your life and out of your bed. Mavis was Mavis. You knew her as well as I did, and perhaps better. She was silly and greedy and stupid, but she was a woman. You had no right to marry her." Harald paused, to let a fresh thunderbolt die away, and as they waited they again looked at each other with that hatred.

  "You never cared about her," said Harald. He was very livid and all his handsomeness was gone. "You only had lust for her. If you'd loved her, you'd have been patient and kind. If she wasn't what you thought she was, whose fault was that? Not hers. She never tried to deceive you; she didn't have the brains for that, and if you hadn't been as stupid as she was, you'd have known it. The fault was all yours."

  "Go on," said Jonathan.

  Harald's face became grim for the first time in his life. "I didn't seek Mavis out. She sought me. I'd never have-touched—her if she had really been your wife. She told me about you. how you had threatened to kill her, the names you had called her, disgusting names. She was sincere then. There wasn't any real love between us. She never intended to divorce you and marry me, and I never wanted to marry her. It was a sort of—consolation—to Mavis." He wiped his face again and again sickened when he saw his blood. "I wasn't the only man."

  "I know," said Jonathan. Now his arm was about Jenny.

  "Then, what?" asked Harald, with a weary wave of his hand.

  "You let me rot in prison. You let me be tried and defamed. You let me live the miserable life I've led for nearly a year. And all you had to do was to speak." Jonathan's voice was rough with his exhaustion and his passionate rage.

  "My God," said Harald. "Do you honestly think I'd have let you be executed? If you think so, then you must really be insane."

  "Then, why didn't you speak in the beginning?"

  Harald smiled drearily. "Because I felt the great Jonathan Ferrier was a stronger man than I was, a less weak man, a man of more resistance. I felt you could bear what you had to bear, and it would mean very little to you. I was sure you wouldn't be convicted, and you were not. So, I let it all go, thinking it was a nine-days' wonder, and would all be forgotten. I hoped you would go away. You hated the town so much, and there were large fields for you. So what did it matter if I didn't tell anyone the truth? Who was hurt so much? Who was ruined?"

  "I was," said Jonathan.

  Now Harald regarded him with astonishment. "You!" he exclaimed. "It all meant nothing to you, or very little."

  Jonathan saw that he actually believed this.

  "It meant my whole life," he said. "I was never much of a brotherly-lover, but the town was everything to me. I gave it everything I had to give."

  "Then, you aren't the man I thought you were," said Harald. He leaned his head against the wall of the staircase and gulped for air. "You were always our parents' favorite. They lived only for you. I was nothing. So I came to believe that you were indeed superior to me, a stronger man than I was, a more able man, a more resolute and powerful man. But they were just as deceived as I was, and for the first time I'm sorry for them. You gave the town everything you had to give! That's the most maudlin thing I ever heard anyone say, and I'm glad our father is dead, for even he would have been ashamed to hear that."

  He looked at Jonathan below him with even more astonishment. "Why, you haven't any courage at all! You are only brave, and even an animal can be brave. For the past year I've suspected as much, watching you, but I told myself it was only my imagination. There were times when you were gloomy and looked desperate. I thought it was because your pride had been hurt, for God's sake. And all the time the damned town had broken your heart!" Harald laughe
d with faint weariness. "A town like Hambledon, which doesn't deserve to have even a horse doctor!"

  Jonathan was silent. He looked into Jenny's fearful eyes and he pressed her to him reassuringly. His exhaustion was growing. He felt utterly drained and broken.

  "I wanted you to go away," said Harald. "You won't believe me, but I thought it would be best for you, for you should have left years ago. Mavis was right, there. And then I wanted you to leave because I was afraid you'd find out the truth someday and you'd do exactly what you tried to do tonight. One of us had to go. I couldn't. I was bound to this damned island."

  Jenny spoke now. "But you can leave, as you said you would."

  Harald looked down at her and smiled. "Jenny, Jenny," he said. "I will go. With you."

  She widened her eyes at him like a child. "But I never said that. Jon is the only man for me, and he's the only one I've ever wanted."

  Harald's face darkened with pain. "Jenny, you've seen what he's like. Tonight. Do you think, when he's in a rage, that he'd spare you and not hate you? Your life with him would be a hell, and not a refined one at that. Thwart him, defy him, deny him, and hell be at your throat—as he was at mine."

  "It doesn't matter," said Jenny. "I can't help it."

  Harald said, "I won't let you go with him, Jenny, tonight or any other time. For your sake."