The room seemed very silent as we entered it, and the silence deepened She crossed over to this fireplace and stood with a foot raised towards the hearth, though there was no fire to warm it by. I tossed my hat and whip on to the table with more noise than was necessary and made a step as if to join her. She drew back instinctively. I stopped as though the step had been a liberty; and neither of us had a word to say. Once she untied the ribands of her hood, for she must be doing something; but the moment she was aware of what it was she did, she tied them again with hasty uncertain fingers, and then reddened and paled, of a sudden becoming, it seemed to me, sensible of the hastiness of her action. I sent my eyes wandering to every corner of the room, so that they should not rest upon her face; but none the less, after a little our glances crossed, and with one movement we averted our heads. After that one of us had to speak.
“You will be hungry,” I said lamely. “You have eaten nothing since the morning;” and I walked to a little sideboard on which a bell was standing.
“No, no!”she cried, but I had struck the bell or ever the words were past her lips. “Oh, what have you done?” she said with a shiver; “one of your servants will come;” and then she checked herself and added, with her fingers plucking at her gown in a pitiful helpless way, “Well, what does it matter? They had the story before it happened. This will but confirm and seal it.”
I went out into the hall to stop whosoever should be answering the summons. But no one came to answer it I crossed the hall and opened the door which led to the kitchens. As a rule, the noise of women’s voices was incessant in that quarter of the bouse, but to-day not a sound, not so much as the clatter of a dish-cover! I went back to the hall and listened. The house was as still as on that night when I crept down the stairs and discovered the marks of a picture-frame upon the wall.
Was the house empty? I wondered, and shouted to solve the doubt. My voice went echoing and diminishing along corridor and gallery, but that was all. I moved down the passage to the office, half thinking that I might find Aron there, but remembered that he would be away, and so returned reluctantly. Thereupon I mounted the stairs and walked from room to room, and maybe lingered over-long in each. I was not, indeed, concerned with their silence and vacancy so much as with the knowledge that each step brought me actually a step nearer to the parlour-door. But I came to the end of my search, and there was nothing for it but to descend again. The hall-door, however, stood open, and I saw my horse at the bottom of the steps tethered by the rein to a knob of the stone balustrade. I walked down the steps, loosed it, and led it round to the stables. There was a boy or two in the stable-yard, and I remember putting to them a number of aimless questions which I was at great pains to think of, but did not listen to the answers; until their fidgeting made me sensible of the cowardice of my delay and drove me back to the house. Then I remembered why I had left the parlour, and going to the pantry, I got together some food upon a tray and brought it with a decanter of Burgundy into the parlour. Mrs. Herbert was standing where I had last seen her. I set out the table saying, “My servants seem all to have taken holiday;” and more for something to do, you may be sure, than from any sense of hunger, she sat herself at the table and began to play with the food. I had brought but one plate and set a chair for but one person; and neither of us noticed that. The truth is, there was a shadow in the room; the shadow cast by sin, and we watched it as children in a fitful firelight will watch a strange shadow on the wall—neither drawing near to it nor fleeing from it, but crouched watching it. Once she said, “I have brought nothing with me;” and after a little, some thought seemed to strike her. For she lifted her head suddenly and said:
“There is no one in the house but you and I?”
“No one,” I said.
“That is strange,” she said absently.
Strange! The word was an arrow of light piercing through the mist of my senses. Strange! It was indeed strange! Aron had warned me not to ride to Keswick; that was strange too. For the first time I set this desertion of my servants together in my mind with my suspicions of Ashlock’s treachery. I started to my feet, invaded by a sudden fear; but I saw Mrs. Herbert at the table running her fingers along the hem of my fine tablecloth and her throat working as though she was swallowing her tears. I knew by some instinct of what she was thinking. She was thinking of her poor furniture in her lodging at Keswick. It was hers, you see, won by her husband’s toil, and maybe she had a passing thought, too, of Sir Godfrey Kneller*s estate at Witton earned, too, by a painter’s art. And such a pity for her, such a loathing of myself, flooded my mind as drove out all thought of Mr. Ashlock’s machinations. I recalled how I had deemed that slatternly apartment unfit for her. It needed that we two should be here with the shadow about us, for me to realize how contemptible was the thought.
Again she said:
“No one is in the house except yourself and me,” and in the same thoughtful tone. Then she rose from her chair with the air of one that has come upon an outlet when all outlets seemed barred. “It was kind of you,” she said, “to show me your house, I would gladly have seen the gardens too, but the day is clouding, and it will rain, I think, ere long.”
She dropped me a formal curtsey as she spoke. I did not want the urgent appeal of her eyes to take her meaning. My heart rose to it with a spring.
“I will have a carriage made ready for you,” I replied; and I turned me to the window. “Yes, I am afraid that it will rain.”
“Thank you!” she said.
And I, like the blundering fool I was, must needs, in my great joy, add:
“It is no long journey into Keswick, after all”
“Keswick!” says she with a start, and drops her eyes. “I had not thought of that I had not thought where I should go to.”
I stood before her dumb. I knew—yes, I knew that the only place for her was that little apartment in Keswick. Grant her but the sight of it, and the sight of her husband in it—for he loved her—and, well, it needed no magician to forecast the result. But there was one person in the world who could not use that argument—myself. However, she helped me out.
“I cannot go back,” she said, “without he knows. It would not be just. No! it is not possible;” and at that the tears came at last. The sound of her weeping pierced me like a sword.
“He shall know, then” I cried. “He shall know. I myself will ride to Keswick and tell him.”
“You will?” she asked, suddenly lifting her head.
“Maybe, too, I may find means to bring him back.”
“If that might be!” she whispered in a fervour of hope, her whole face lightening and a timorous smile dawning through her tears. “But no!” and the hope died out of her face. “Payment will have to be made for this. You’ll see, payment will be made.”
She spoke in a low tone of such perfect certainty, that it seemed to me it was not so much the woman who spoke, but that Providence chose her voice that moment for its mouthpiece.
“Heaven send the payment fall to me,” I said.
She glanced at me quickly.
“Oh,” she said, in a complete change of voice, “what will you tell him?”
“Why, the truth,” I answered. “That I found you by the lake, and brought you here.”
“No! “she exclaimed, “I will not have you say that. It must be the truth—that I came to you.”
She drew a note from her pocket as she spoke, and tossed it on to the table. I picked it up, wondering what she meant. It was a line scribbled in a hand which was familiar to me, and there was a word curiously misspelled—“wateing” for “waiting.” Somewhere I had seen that word misspelled precisely in that way before, and surely in this handwriting too. Then the truth flashed upon me. It was in the inn at Commercy, and the handwriting was Jervas Rookley’s. The line was this:
“I shall be wateing for you by the lake, on the road to Blackladies.”
But Jervas Rookley knew that I was journeying to Grasmere, that I was not returning to Blackladies until night The letter was a snare, then, to draw Mrs. Herbert from the house.
If so, all the more need for haste.
I opened the door and stepped into the hall. But the hall was no longer empty. The hall-door was still open; I had left it open, and a man stood in the centre of the hall. It was Anthony Herbert. His back was towards me, and from his manner I gathered that he was considering which of the passages giving upon the hall he should choose. It was for no more than a second that he stood thus, but that second gave me time enough to do the stupidest thing that ever a man out of his wits conceived; and yet in a way it was natural. For I slammed the door to behind my back, and stood barring it, with my hand upon the knob. Mr. Herbert twisted round upon his heel.
“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 yon 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 ap.
“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 dropped 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 dobelieve 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 ray 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 turmofl 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.
After a while the wind lulled, the rain-drops hissed less often down the chimney and finally ceased altogether. A line of moonlight shot into the room and lay upon the carpet like a silver rod. The room became mistily luminous and then pitilessly bright. Meanwhile no one seemed as yet to be astir within the house.
I rose unsteadily from my seat; she followed my example,
“Yes, let us go,” she said, and we went out on to the terrace.