“Caught!” he cried, spitting the word at me.
I realized the folly of my action, and let go of the handle.
“I was this instant setting out to find you.”
The words sounded false to me, though I knew them to be true, and my voice took a trembling indecision from the foreknowledge that he would disbelieve them.
“No doubt,” said he. “Otherwise you would not be guarding the door.”
He spoke with a great effort to be calm, but his eyes were aflame, his limbs quivered with his wrath, and now and again his voice lost its steadiness and ran up and down in a fitful scale.
“I thought to find you in the garden,” he continued.
“In the garden?” I asked.
“But doubtless you point me out the way;” and he took a step towards me. With the movement his cloak slipped from his left shoulder, and I noticed that he was carrying a sword and a pistol in his belt. My hand went back to the handle.
“The few words I have to say to you,” said I, “had better be spoken here.”
“But it would be best of all,” he returned, “to defer them altogether. I have some business with you, it is true, but that business comes second, and I think we shall need no words for its discussion.” He took yet another step.
“Your business with me, Mr. Herbert, may come when it will,” said I, “but these words cannot be deferred. They are few.”
“However few, they are still too many,” he broke in. “Out of my way!”
“You must hear them before you pass this door.” I gripped the handle tighter.
“I’ll not listen to you,” he cried. “You overrate my credulity, Mr. Clavering. Out of the way!”
“I will not. This is my house.”
“But it shelters my wife.”
“It was she sent me to fetch you.”
I gathered all my strength into the utterance of the words, that I might enforce their truth upon him. But they only served to whet his fury and confirm him in disbelief.
“That’s a lie,” he shouted, and in a flash his sword was out of the scabbard and the point of it pricking my breast. “If she sent you to fetch me, why do you guard the door? Stand aside!”
But since I had made that mistake, I must go through with it.
“I will not,” I answered doggedly, and I set a hand upon each side of the doorway. “There is more to tell. I will not.”
“Will not,” says he grimly, “gives the wall to must,” and he leaned a little very gently on the sword.
I did not move, but behind me the handle of the door rattled. I tried to seize it, but the door was pulled open from within; I staggered back into the room. Herbert sprang through the opening after me, and stood, drawing in his breath, his eyes fixed upon his wife. She recoiled towards the hearth.
“It is the bare truth I told you,” I exclaimed passionately. “Oh, believe that! When I caught sight of you, I had taken the first step in pursuit of you; and it was Mrs. Herbert who set me on the task. Oh, believe that too! It was no doing of mine; it was she sent me. For myself, I gave little thought to you, I own it. It was she declared she could not return without you knew. I but obeyed her.”
For a moment it seemed to me that his anger lulled. I watched his eyes. They were fixed upon his wife, and I saw the conviction in them fade to doubt, the doubt waver and melt into — was it forgiveness? I do not know, for Mrs. Herbert shifted her position; his eyes wandered from her face and fell upon the table. The note which she had shown me was lying open beneath his gaze. He stooped his head towards it. I made a movement to hinder him. He remarked the movement, and on the instant snatched the paper up.
“You persuade me to read it,” said he, which accordingly he did. As he read, an idea occurred to me. For let him believe I wrote that note, and he would be the more likely to attribute the blame where it was due and exhaust his anger in the same quarter. So that when he asked, rapping the note with his knuckles —
“This is your hand?” I kept silence.
He repeated the question, and I positively relished the growing menace of his voice, and still kept silence. But he gave me credit for more subtlety than I possessed.
“Oh, I understand,” he burst out “You were going to fetch me, no doubt. This letter bears you out so well. And my wife sent you to fetch me — a cunning afterthought when the first excuse had missed its mark. A very likely story, to be sure, but enough to hoodwink a dull-witted fool of a husband, eh? Reconcile husband and wife, and Mr. Lawrence Clavering may laugh in his sleeve — damn him!”
“It is the truth,” I exclaimed in despair. “Believe it! Believe it!”
“The truth,” he retorted with bitterest sneer, “the truth, and you are speaking it God, I believe truth itself would become a lie if you had the uttering of it! Believe you! Why, every trickster keeps his excuses ready on his tongue against the time he’s caught. I would not believe you kneeling before the judgment-seat.”
He poured his abuse upon me with an indescribable fury and in a voice gusty with passion.
“But you shall answer for it,” he continued.
“When you will,” I answered quietly.
He was still carrying his sword in his hand, and he suddenly thrust it out at arm’s length before him, and turned it to and fro with his wrist, so that the light flashed on it and streaked up the blade to the hilt.
“Then I will now,” he replied “now — now!” and at each word he flashed the sword, and with each word his voice rose exultingly. “In your garden, now!”
He moved towards the window. His wife stepped forward with a cry, and laid a hand upon his arm. He stopped and looked at her, with eyes that told her nothing. It must have been a full minute, I should think, that he stood thus. He had as yet spoken no word to her, and he spoke no word now. I saw her head decline, her whole frame relapse and droop, and she slipped on to her knees. Herbert shook her hand from his arm, kicked open the window, and crossed the terrace. I went into the hall to fetch my sword. As I crossed the threshold of the room, I heard the iron gates clang at the top of the terrace steps as though he had flung them to behind him. While I picked up my sword I heard the sound repeated but more faintly from the second terrace. And as I entered the room again and drew the sword from its scabbard I heard it yet a third time. Through the open window I could see him descending the steps of the third terrace. But between myself and the window, the wife was kneeling on the floor. Said she:
“You will not harm him;” and she clasped her hands in her entreaty. “Say you will not! The payment must not fall to him.”
I almost laughed, so strange and needless did the entreaty sound.
“Madam,” I said, “this is the pommel of the sword and this the point. One holds the sword too by the pommel, I believe. In fact, I know so much, but there my knowledge ends.”
She spoke a little more, but I gave scant heed to what she said. For a sentence which she had spoken somewhile since, drummed in my ears to the exclusion of her present speech, and the import of it shone in my mind like a clear light. “Payment will have to be made for this,” she had said.
Over her shoulder I saw Mr. Herbert move further and further from the house. It was about six o’clock of the afternoon and very windless and still. A great strip of cloud, hung from Green Comb to High Knott, gloomed across the garden, thick as wool and bulging like a sail, so that even the scarlet flowers of the parterre took from it a tint of grey. And underneath this cloud, from end to end, from side to side, the garden seemed to me to be waiting — waiting consciously in a sinister quietude for this payment to be made. The fantastic figures into which the box-trees were shaped, bears, leopards, and I know not what strange mammoths, appeared patient and alert in the fixity of a sure expectation, while the oaks and larches in the Wilderness beyond seemed purposely to restrain the flutter of their leaves. I felt the garden beckon me by its immobility and call me by its silence.
Mr. Herbert had stripped his cloak from his shoulders, and d
ropped it upon the third flight of steps; so that he now moved, a brown figure, here showing plain against the grotto, or the grass, there confounded with the flowers. He held his sword in his hand — at that distance, and in that dull light it looked no more dangerous than a strip of lead, and ever and again he would cut at a bush as he passed.
“No harm can come to him,” I said, seeking to disengage myself, for the wife still clung to me in her misplaced fear. “I could not harm him if I would. For they do not teach one swordsmanship at the Jesuit Colleges.”
The words rose to my lips by chance and by chance were spoken. But I know that the moment after I heard them, I staggered forward with a groan, and stood leaning my forehead against the framework of the window. Mrs. Herbert rose to her feet.
I was looking down the terraces across the parterres to the brown figure moving away, but I did not see that. It was as though a black curtain had swung down between the garden and myself. What I saw was a very different scene — a little twilight room far away in Paris and a stern face that warned me. I heard a voice telling me of a supreme hour wherein God would put me to His touchstone, an hour for which I must stand sentinel. Well, the hour had passed me and I had not challenged it; and I might have foreseen its coming had I watched. I lifted my head; the garden again floated into view. Anthony Herbert was marching through the long grass of the Wilderness, with never a look backwards. In a moment he reached the fringe of trees. The trees were sparse at the border, and I knew that he would not stop there, but would rather advance until he arrived at some little dingle closely wooded about from view of the house. In and out amongst the boles of the trees I saw him wind. Then for a second he disappeared and came to sight again upon a little patch of unshadowed grass. I remember that the sun gleamed of a sudden through an interstice of the cloud as he stepped into the open. The patch of grass shone like an emerald and the dull strip of lead in his hand turned gold; and a larch upon the far rim where the trees grew dense, taking some stray breath of wind, rippled and shook the sunlight from its leaves. In some unaccountable way my spirits rose at the sight. I still was sensible of that saying, “Payment must be made for this,” but it took a colour from the sunlight. It became rather, “Payment can be made for this.”
I slipped out of the window. Mrs. Herbert started forward to detain me.
“A duel,” she exclaimed, in a tone as though the idea became yet more inconceivable to her. “Oh no! Not a duel.”
“No, not a duel,” I replied across my shoulder, “only the pretence of one;” and while my head was thus turned a pistol-shot rang from the Wilderness.
It sounded like the crack of a whip, and I might have counted it no more than that but I saw a wisp of blue smoke float upwards above a shrubbery and hang curling this way and that in the sunlight.
“God save us,” I cried, “but he carried a pistol!” and I made as though I would run across the terrace towards him. But or ever I could move, I felt a hand tighten and tighten upon my arm. I tried to shake it off.
“You do not understand,” I exclaimed. “He carried a pistol. It was a pistol that we heard. Maybe he was looking to the priming. Maybe he is wounded I must go to him;” and I seized Mrs. Herbert’s hand at the wrist and sought to drag it away from my sleeve. I felt her fingers only grip more closely. I dropped her wrist and began to unclasp them, one by one.
“It is you who do not understand,” she said, “and he is not wounded.”
She spoke in a dry, passionless voice, which daunted me more than the words she uttered. I turned and looked at her in perplexity. Her face was like paper, even her lips were white — and her eyes shone from it sunken and black; I was reminded of them afterwards by the sight of a black tarn set in a moor of snow, which I was destined to look upon one sad November afternoon in this same year. They seemed to have grown bigger, the better to express the horror which she felt.
“He is not wounded. Be sure — be very sure of that!” she continued, nodding her head at me in a queer, matter-of-fact way, which, joined with the contrast of her face, had something, to my thinking, awsomely grotesque.
“What do you mean?” I gasped, and in a momentary weakness staggered back against the framework of the window. I felt her clasp strengthen upon my arm, drawing me within the parlour.
“He carried a pistol — yes, but why should he look to the priming since you were to fight with swords?” she whispered, shaking my arm with a little impatient movement. “Did you not see? His walk grew slow, his head drooped — drooped. He was tired, you see, so tired;” and she uttered a low, mirthless laugh while her eyes burned into me. It was a sound which, I thank God, I have never heard but the once. It was as though a preternatural horror claimed a preternatural expression. “It was not worth while,” she resumed.
“Ah, no,” I cried, as her meaning broke in upon me. “I’ll not believe that. I’ll not believe it;” and once or twice I thrust out with my hands as if that way I could keep belief aloof.
“But you do,” she returned, and the whisper of her voice took on a certain eagerness. It seemed that she must have a partner in her thought. “You do believe it. Look, am I pale? Then I am your mirror. Do I tremble? It is an ague caught from you. You do believe it. We know, you and I — guilt binds us in knowledge. We heard this morning. He told us, he warned us. If his wife proved false, he would not count it worth his while to punish the betrayer. But he has — he has punished us, so perfectly that he himself would pity us, were he alive to do it. Would God we both were dead!” And again she laughed, and letting drop my arm she moved away into the room.
I had no doubt her words were true, and from the bottom of my heart I echoed her vain prayer. I remembered the conviction with which he had spoken — all the more assured for the very quietude of his voice. Yes, those trees, motionless under a leaden sky, in a leaden silence, were the watchers about his bed. I braced myself to descend, but as my first step crunched the gravel of the terrace, Mrs. Herbert was again as my side.
“No,” she cried. “Not yet, not without me, and I dare not go.”
“Nay, madam,” I replied, “do you stay here. There is no need for you to come.”
“But there is — there is,” she insisted, looking at me wildly, like one distraught “Step by step we must go together. And so it will be always. You will see, you and I are fettered each to each by sin, and there’s no breaking the locks.” She shook her hands piteously.
“Nay,” I said, “I will go alone.”
“I dare not be left alone,” she replied. “For what if he passed you while you searched for him!” and she gave a shuddering cry and recoiled into the room. “What if he came striding from the thicket across the grass to where I waited here! No! No! Wait, wait until it’s dark. I will go down with you. But now, in the daylight! His eyes will be open; I dare not.”
She stood with her hands clasped before her, toppling towards madness. I dared not leave her. There was no choice for me; between the dead man and the living woman there was no choice. I returned to the room.
“You will wait?” she asked.
“Until it is dark.”
She moved into the alcove of the fireplace and crouched down upon the seat, with her back against the wall nearest to the garden. I remained by the window, looking down the garden with the valley on my right. I saw the strip of cloud unfold across the valley and lower upon the hilltops like a solid roof, The hillsides darkened, the bed of the valley grew black — it seemed to me with the shadow of the wings of death. Here a tree shivered; from another there, the birds of a sudden chattered noisily. I turned and gazed across to Eagle Crag. The dale of Langstrath sloped upwards, facing me between the mountains; and as I gazed I saw the rain drive down from the Stake Pass to the mouth in a great slanting column. It deployed along the hillsides; — the mountains became unsubstantial behind it — it swept across the valley, lashing the house, bending the trees in the garden.
“And his eyes will be open,” said Mrs. Herbert behind my shoulder
.
I started round. Her white face was like a wax mask in the gloom of the chamber. But as I turned she moved back again to the fireplace. “It is cold,” she said with a shiver. I set fire to the wood upon the hearth, and as the logs crackled and blazed, she bent forward and spread out her hands to the flame.
I dropped into the seat opposite to her, and so we sat for a long while in silence. Once, it seemed to me, that I heard the hoofs of a horse upon the gravel of the drive — galloping up to the house, and in a little galloping away from it. But what with the beating of the rain and the turmoil of the wind I could not make sure — nor, indeed, did I feel any concern to know. Once Mrs. Herbert raised her head to me and said, as if answering some objection which I had urged:
“It was because he loved me that he told the steward. That was his way. God made him so;” and her voice as she spoke was very soft. Her face, too, softened, as I could see from the glow of the fire, and I knew that her husband in his death was drawing her more surely towards him than he had ever done in life.
“He was very good to me,” she said to herself. “It was I that plagued him. He was very good to me, and I — I love him.”
It was as though she had forgotten he was dead, and more than one remark of the kind she made while the room darkened behind as and the night fell upon the world without, and the raindrops hissed down the chimney into the fire. I dared not rouse her, though the forgetfulness struck me as horrible, but once, I know, I shifted restively upon my seat, and she looked at me suddenly as though she had forgotten that I was there, as though, indeed, she did not know me. But in a little, recognition gleamed in her eyes, and they hardened slowly to hatred. However, she said nothing, but turned her face again to the fire, and so stared into it with eyes like pebbles.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 225