Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Linda turned quickly, but before she could speak, Glynn made a sign to her. He went over to her side. A glance at Thresk showed him that he was lost in his thoughts.

  “If you want me to help you, you must leave us alone,” he said.

  She hesitated for a moment, and then swiftly crossed the room and went out at the door. Glynn, who had let his cigar go out, lit it again at the flame of one of the candles on the dining-table. Then he planted himself in front of Thresk.

  “You are terrifying your wife,” he said. “You are frightening her to death.”

  Thresk did not reply to the accusation directly. He smiled quietly at Glynn.

  “She sent for you.”

  Glynn looked uncomfortable, and Thresk went on:

  “You haven’t come from South Uist. You have come from London.”

  “No,” said Glynn.

  “From Melton, then. You came because Linda sent for you.”

  “If it were so,” stammered Glynn, “it would only be another proof that you are frightening her.”

  Thresk shook his head.

  “It wasn’t because Linda was afraid that she sent for you,” he said stubbornly. “I know Linda. I’ll tell you the truth,” and he fixed his burning eyes on Glynn’s face. “She sent for you because she hates being here with me.”

  “Hates being with you!” cried Glynn, and Thresk nodded his head. Glynn could hardly even so believe that he had heard aright. “Why, you must be mad!” he protested. “Mad or blind. There’s just one person of whom your wife is thinking, for whom she is caring, for whose health she is troubled. It has been evident to me ever since I have been in this house — in spite of her fears. Every time she looks at you her eyes are tender with solicitude. That one person is yourself.”

  “No,” said Thresk. “It’s Channing.”

  “But he’s dead, man!” cried Glynn in exasperation. “You told me so yourself not half an hour ago. He is dead.”

  “Yes,” answered Thresk. “He’s dead. That’s where he beat me. You don’t understand that?”

  “No, I don’t,” replied Glynn.

  He was speaking aggressively; he stood with his legs apart in an aggressive attitude. Thresk looked him over from head to foot and agreed.

  “No,” he said, “and I don’t see why you should. You are rather like me, comfortable and commonplace, and of the earth earthy. Before men of our gross stamp could believe and understand what I am going to tell you, they would have to reach — do you mind if I say a refinement? — by passing through the same fires which have tempered me.”

  Glynn made no reply. He shifted his position so that the firelight might fall upon Thresk’s face with its full strength. Thresk leaned forward with his hands upon his knees, and very quietly, though now and then a note of scorn rang in his voice, he told his story.

  “You tell me my wife cares for me. I reply that she would have cared, if Channing had not died. When I first met Linda she was engaged to him. You know that. She was devoted to him. You know that too. I knew it and I didn’t mind. I wasn’t afraid of Channing. A poor, feeble creature — heaps of opportunities, not one of them foreseen, not one of them grasped when it came his way. A grumbler, a bag of envy, a beggar for sympathy at any woman’s lap! Why should I have worried my head about Channing? And I didn’t. Linda’s people were all for breaking off their engagement. After all, I was some good. I had made my way. I had roughed it in South America; and I had come home a rich man — not such a very easy thing, as the superior people who haven’t the heart even to try to be rich men are inclined to think. Well, the engagement was broken off, Channing hadn’t a penny to marry on, and nobody would give him a job. Look here!” And he suddenly swung round upon Glynn.

  “I gave Channing his chance. I knew he couldn’t make any use of it. I wanted to prove he wasn’t any good. So I put a bit of a railway in Chili into his hands, and he brought the thing to the edge of bankruptcy within twelve months. So the engagement was broken off. Linda clung to the fellow. I knew it, and I didn’t mind. She didn’t want to marry me. I knew it, and I didn’t mind. Her parents broke her down to it. She sobbed through the night before we were married. I knew it, and I didn’t mind. You think me a beast, of course,” he added, with a look at Glynn. “But just consider the case from my point of view. Channing was no match for Linda. I was. I wanted time, that was all. Give me only time, and I knew that I could win her.”

  Boastful as the words sounded, there was nothing aggressive in Thresk’s voice. He was speaking with a quiet simplicity which robbed them quite of offence. He was unassumingly certain.

  “Why?” asked Glynn. “Why, given time, were you sure that you could win her?”

  “Because I wanted enough. That’s my creed, Glynn. If you want enough, want with every thought, and nerve, and pulse, the thing you want comes along all right. There was the difference between Channing and me. He hadn’t the heart to want enough. I wanted enough to go to school again. I set myself to learn the small attentions which mean so much to women. They weren’t in my line naturally. I pay so little heed to things of that kind myself that it did not easily occur to me that women might think differently. But I learnt my lesson, and I got my reward. Just simple little precautions, like having a cloak ready for her, almost before she was aware that she was cold. And I would see a look of surprise on her face, and the surprise flush into a smile of pleasure. Oh, I was holding her, Glynn, I can tell you. I went about it so very warily,” and Thresk laughed with a knowing air. “I didn’t shut my door on Channing either. Not I! I wasn’t going to make a martyr of him. I let him sidle in and out of the house, and I laughed. For I was holding her. Every day she came a step or two nearer to me.”

  He broke off suddenly, and his voice, which had taken on a tender and wistful note, incongruous in so big a creature, rose in a gust of anger.

  “But he died! He died and caught her back again.”

  Glynn raised his hands in despair.

  “That memory has long since faded,” he argued, and Thresk burst out in a bitter laugh.

  “Memory,” he cried, flinging himself into a chair. “You are one of the imaginative people after all, Glynn.” And Glynn stared in round-eyed surprise. Here to him was conclusive proof that there was something seriously wrong with Thresk’s mind. Never had Mr. Glynn been called imaginative before, and his soul revolted against the aspersion. “Yes,” said Thresk, pointing an accusing finger. “Imaginative! I am one of the practical people. I don’t worry about memories. Actual real things interest me — such as Channing’s presence now — in this house.” And he spoke suddenly, leaning forward with so burning a fire in his eyes and voice that Glynn, in spite of himself, looked nervously across his shoulder. He rose hastily from the sofa, and rather in order to speak than with any thought of what he was saying, he asked:

  “When did he die?”

  “Four months ago. I was ill at the time.”

  “Ah!”

  The exclamation sprang from Glynn’s lips before he could check it. Here to him was the explanation of Thresk’s illusions. But he was sorry that he had not kept silent. For he saw Thresk staring angrily at him.

  “What did you mean by your ‘Ah’?” Thresk asked roughly.

  “Merely that I had seen a line about your illness in a newspaper,” Glynn explained hastily.

  Thresk leaned back satisfied.

  “Yes,” he resumed. “I broke down. I had had a hard life, you see, and I was paying for it. I am right enough now, however,” and his voice rose in a challenge to Glynn to contradict him.

  Nothing was further from Glynn’s thoughts.

  “Of course,” he said quickly.

  “I saw Channing’s death in the obituary column whilst I was lying in bed, and, to tell you the truth, I was relieved by it.”

  “But I thought you said you didn’t mind about Channing?” Glynn interrupted, and Thresk laughed with a little discomfort.

  “Well, perhaps I did mind a little more than I ca
re to admit,” Thresk confessed. “At all events, I felt relieved at his death. What a fool I was!” And he stopped for a moment as though he wondered now that his mind was so clear, at the delusion which had beset him.

  “I thought that it was all over with Channing. Oh, what a fool I was! Even after he came back and would sidle up to my bedside in his old fawning style, I couldn’t bring myself to take him seriously, and I was only amused.”

  “He came to your bedside!” exclaimed Glynn.

  “Yes,” replied Thresk, and he laughed at the recollection. “He came with his humble smirk, and pottered about the room as if he were my nurse. I put out my tongue at him, and told him he was dead and done for, and that he had better not meddle with the bottles on my table. Yes, he amused me. What a fool I was! I thought no one else saw him. That was my first mistake. I thought he was helpless.... That was my second.”

  Thresk got up from his chair, and, standing over the fireplace, knocked the ash off his cigar.

  “Do you remember a great Danish boar-hound I used to have?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Glynn, puzzled by the sudden change of subject. “But what has the boar-hound to do with your story?”

  “A good deal,” said Thresk. “I was very fond of that dog.”

  “The dog was fond of you,” said Glynn.

  “Yes. Remember that!” Thresk cried suddenly. “For it’s true.” Then he relapsed again into a quiet, level voice.

  “It took me some time to get well. I was moved up here. It was the one place where I wanted to be. But I wasn’t used to sitting round and doing nothing. So the time of my convalescence hung pretty heavily, and, casting about for some way of amusing myself, I wondered whether I could teach the dog to see Channing as I saw him. I tried. Whenever I saw Channing come in at the door, I used to call the dog to my side and point Channing out to him with my finger as Channing moved about the room.”

  Thresk sat down in a chair opposite to Glynn, and with a singular alertness began to act over again the scenes which had taken place in his sick room upstairs.

  “I used to say, ‘Hst! Hst!’ ‘There! Do you see? By the window!’ or if Channing moved towards Linda I would turn the dog’s head and make his eyes follow him across the room. At first the dog saw nothing. Then he began to avoid me, to slink away with his tail between his legs, to growl. He was frightened. Yes, he was frightened!” And Thresk nodded his head in a quick, interested way.

  “He was frightened of you,” cried Glynn, “and I don’t wonder.”

  For even to him there was something uncanny and impish in Thresk’s quick movements and vivid gestures.

  “Wait a bit,” said Thresk. “He was frightened, but not of me. He saw Channing. His hair bristled under my fingers as I pointed the fellow out. I had to keep one hand on his neck, you see, to keep him by me. He began to yelp in a queer, panicky way, and tremble — a man in a fever couldn’t tremble and shake any more than that dog did. And then one day, when we were alone together, the dog and I and Channing — the dog sprang at my throat.”

  “That’s how you were wounded!” cried Glynn, leaping from his sofa. He stood staring in horror at Thresk. “I wonder the dog didn’t kill you.”

  “He very nearly did,” said Thresk. “Oh, very nearly.”

  “You had frightened him out of his wits.”

  Thresk laughed contemptuously.

  “That’s the obvious explanation, of course,” he said. “But it’s not the true one. I have been living amongst the subtleties of life. I know about things now. The dog sprang at me because—” He stopped and glanced uneasily about the room. When he raised his face again, there was a look upon it which Glynn had not seen there before — a look of sudden terror. He leaned forward that he might be the nearer to Glynn, and his voice sank to a whisper— “well, because Channing set him on to me.”

  It was no doubt less the statement itself than the crafty look which accompanied it, and the whisper which uttered it, that shocked Glynn. But he was shocked. There came upon him — yes, even upon him, the sane, prosaic Glynn — a sudden doubt whether, after all, Thresk was mad. It occurred to him as a possibility that Thresk was speaking the mere, bare truth. Suppose that it were the truth! Suppose that Channing were here! In this room! Glynn felt the flesh creep upon his bones.

  “Ah, you are beginning to understand,” said Thresk, watching his companion. “You are beginning to get frightened, too.” And he nodded his head in comprehension. “I used not to know what fear meant. But I knew the meaning well enough as soon as I had guessed why the dog sprang at my throat. For I realised my helplessness.”

  Throughout their conversation Glynn had been perpetually puzzled by something unexpected in Thresk’s conclusions. He followed his reasoning up to a point, and then came a word which left him at a loss. Thresk’s fear he understood. But why the sense of helplessness? And he asked for an explanation.

  “Because I had no weapons to fight Channing with,” Thresk replied. “I could cope with the living man and win every time. But against the dead man I was helpless. I couldn’t hurt him. I couldn’t even come to grips with him. I had just to sit by and make room. And that’s what I have been doing ever since. I have been sitting by and watching — without a single resource, without a single opportunity of a counterstroke. Oh, I had my time — when Channing was alive. But upon my word, he has the best of it. Here I sit without raising a hand while he recaptures Linda.”

  “There you are wrong,” cried Glynn, seizing gladly, in the midst of these subtleties, upon some fact of which he felt sure. “Your wife is yours. There has been no recapture. Besides, she doesn’t believe that Channing is here.”

  Thresk laughed.

  “Do you think she would tell me if she did?” he asked. “No.”

  He rose from his chair and, walking to the window, thrust back the curtains and looked out. So he stood for the space of a minute. Then he came back and, looking fixedly at Glynn, said with an air of extraordinary cunning:

  “But I have a plan. Yes, I have a plan. I shall get on level terms with Mr. Channing again one of these fine days, and then I’ll prove to him for a second time which of us two is the better man.”

  He made a sign to Glynn, and looked towards the door. It was already opening. He advanced to it as Linda came into the room.

  “You have come back, Linda! I have been talking to Glynn at such a rate that he hasn’t been able to get a word in edgeways,” he said, with a swift change to a gaiety of voice and manner. “However, I’ll show him a good day’s sport to-morrow, Linda. We will shoot the bog, and perhaps you’ll come out with the luncheon to the sand-hills?”

  Linda Thresk smiled.

  “Of course I will,” she said. She showed to Glynn a face of gratitude. “It has done you good, Jim, to have a man to talk to,” and she laid a hand upon her husband’s arm and laughed quite happily. Glynn turned his back upon them and walked up to the window, leaving them standing side by side in the firelight. Outside, the moon shone from a clear sky upon the pools and the reeds of the marsh and the low white sand-hills, chequered with their tufts of grass. But upon the sea beyond, a white mist lay thick and low.

  “There’s a sea-fog,” said Glynn; and Thresk, at the fire, suddenly lifted his head, and looked towards the window with a strange intensity. One might have thought that a sea-fog was a strange, unusual thing among the Outer Islands.

  “Watch it!” he said, and there was a vibration in his voice which matched the intensity of his look. “You will see it suddenly creep through the gaps in the sand-hills and pass over the marsh like an army that obeys a command. I have watched it by the hour, time and time again. It gathers on the level of the sea and waits and waits until it seems that the word is given. Then it comes swirling through the gaps of the sand-hills and eats up the marsh in a minute.”

  Even as he spoke Glynn cried out:

  “That’s extraordinary!”

  The fog had crept out through the gaps. Only the summits of the
sand-hills rose in the moonlight like little peaks above clouds; and over the marsh the fog burst like cannon smoke and lay curling and writhing up to the very reeds twenty yards from the house. The sapling alone stood high above it, like the mast of a wreck in the sea.

  “How high is it?” asked Thresk.

  “Breast high,” replied Glynn.

  “Only breast high,” said Thresk, and there seemed to be a note of disappointment in his voice. However, in the next moment he shook it off. “The fog will be gone before morning,” he said. “I’ll go and tell Donald to bring the dogs round at nine to-morrow, and have your guns ready. Nine is not too early for you, I suppose?”

  “Not a bit,” said Glynn; and Thresk, going up to the door which led from the house, opened it, went out, and closed it again behind him.

  Glynn turned at once towards Linda Thresk. But she held up a warning hand, and waited for the outer door to slam. No sound, however, broke the silence. Glynn went to the inner door and opened it. A bank of white fog, upon which he saw his own shadow most brightly limned by the light behind him, filled the outer passage and crept by him into the room. Glynn closed the latch quickly.

  “He has left the outer door open,” he said, and, coming back into the room he stood beside the fire looking down into Linda’s face.

  “He has been talking to me,” said Glynn.

  Linda looked at him curiously.

  “How much did he tell you?”

  “There can be little he left unsaid. He told me of the dog, of Channing’s death — —”

  “Yes?”

  “Of Channing’s return.”

  “Yes?”

  “And of you.”

  With each sentence Glynn’s embarrassment had increased. Linda, however, held him to his story.

  “What did he say of me?”

  “That but for Channing’s death he would have held you. That since Channing died — and came back — he had lost you.”

  Linda nodded her head. Nothing in Glynn’s words surprised her — that was clear. It was a story already familiar to her which he was repeating.