Part 12

“You will rest an hour or two—yes?” asked the priest. But it was not a question, it was a dismissal. Without a word Berry followed her up a little laddery staircase into a sort of loft. When she wished him good-night, he answered absently in English. He wished to be alone, to think whether it had been fancy or reality that before Judic had taken him to the stairs, she had turned to the door of the other room; and that a voice had whispered with a fierce emphasis, “Non, non, pas là. . .”

Well, as soon as the door of the loft closed behind her, Berry had his wish; he found himself quite shudderingly alone, resting his arms on the sill of the one small window, and covering his hands over his ears. He swore at himself in pure astonishment, for the action had been involuntary. “You’re looney,” he told himself, “going looney like the lot downstairs. Sittin’ up all dressed at two in the mornin’ and listenin’!. . . Wot do they think they’re listenin’ for? You’ve no call to listen, any’ow.” He pocketed his hands resolutely and turned away from the window; but deep down in his soul something was crouching and crying that it didn’t want to know, it didn’t want to hear. . . Private Barry flung himself down on the straw mattress that lay under the window, rolled himself up in a couple of things that looked like tablecloths, pulled his coat over him, and determined to go to sleep.

Once he woke himself, saying, “But wot do they want to _stay_ ’ere for?” Again, he found himself awake and standing at the window, which he thrust open. It was very stiff and the hinges creaked; outside, the world lay still, shorn, desolate in the moonlight; a dead world lighting the dead. The priest was standing under the window, looking up at it; when he saw Berry, he lifted his arm in silence and made the sign of benediction. Berry closed the window. He had a file in his pocket; this he wedged under the door, so that it could not be opened from the outside. There was something else in another pocket, a small neat weapon, of a kind not supplied by government to the private soldier. This he placed ready to his hand, and lay down again. He intended to stay awake, but sleep took him irresistibly.

The third time he woke as if forcibly wrenched out of that sleep. The voice inside him seemed to be shouting “This is it! Now you’ll know, now you’ll hear!” And he heard—what? A voice in the room below, or the ghost of one, singing an old French version of “One, two, buckle my shoe.” But the voice was not French. And presently the song broke off and ended in a hurry of shouted orders that sent Berry to his feet and to the door in a single cat-like bound. For voice and words were German.

“Trapped, by Gord!” panted Berry. He crouched at the crack of the door, the revolver fidgeting in his hand. He was remotely sorry for himself; it seemed so stupidly unfair to have come through two years of war unhurt, only to be ‘done in’ at last by three traitorous old peasants in a deserted town. But he’d do the French a good turn and take half-a-dozen along with him. . . He waited. He was not a man; he was himself a weapon tense with death. And through the long-drawn minutes, nothing happened. All was still.

At last he could bear it no longer. His boots he had taken off. Silently he worked out the wedge and opened the door. He stole down the stairs and into the room below. It was dark now, but there was a white patch of moonlight on the far wall, like a square of paper stuck there. Across it was creeping the black figure of a man. In an instant, Berry had him pinned.

There was a certain satisfaction in gripping and holding and feeling the frightened heart pound under his arm. . . He wondered if the revolver would go off if he used the butt; and why the man made so little effort against him. . . He turned the face up in the square of light, and it was the meek Rogiet, apparently half-dead with fright. Berry gave an ugly little laugh under his breath. He was suddenly and savagely angry. “Where are the others, you Judas?” he whispered, forgetting the little man could not understand. He slid the revolver forward until it rested almost against Rogiet’s grizzled cheek.

Over his own shoulder an arm passed, and the revolver was strongly grasped and held. He wrenched it free and sprang back by one instinctive movement, covering both Rogiet and the priest, who stood quite still before him. Only Rogiet made a little scared movement to get in front of the curé. “Well?” gasped Berry hoarsely. “Well?” The priest raised his hand.

“My son,” he said gently, “you are mistaken. Go again and sleep.”

Berry began to laugh, silently, rocking a little on his feet. “I ’eard, I tell you, you dam liar,” he whispered, “I ’eard ’im,—singin’ and shoutin’ orders to his men. Tell ’em to come and take me! Tell ’em. . .” He wheeled to the door of the other room, for suddenly within it the voice rose again, shouting commands. With a sob, Berry backed away, but only as far as the wall, waiting for death when the door should open.

It opened. And there came out Mère Judic.

It was too late to stop the shot; not too late to jerk up the barrel in the very act. The bullet ripped into the ceiling, and old Judic’s face stared at him horrified in a cloud of dust. The place was full of dust, and furious talking and confusion; out of which the priest came, and stood in front of Berry, and laid a kind hand on his shoulder.

“You are mistaken. But you have not the blame. That is ours. We should have told you. . . But we thought he would be quiet.”

Berry simply waited.

“That is our prisoner you hear in there.”

“Your prisoner. . . ?”

“Yes. Do you understand? It is how you say it?—our prisoner. When they left the town—the last time—one, he remained.”

“Why?”

“He would not go,” said the priest gravely.

After some time, Berry passed his hand over his eyes. “O yes!” he agreed wearily, “I understand—just about as much as I understand what’d keep an ’Un ’ere on his own, and what’d keep you three, who are none of you as young as you was, ’ere to look after ’im; and what brought me into it at all. . . And you take it in turns to guard ’im, you and Mister Rogiet and the little old lady?”

He rubbed his eyes again with his knuckles.

“We do not guard him.”

“Not guard ’im . . . ?”

It seemed to Berry there was a certain chill, a certain stillness abroad. That the priest’s voice came from a distance when he said “There is no need. All the treasures of the whole earth, they would not call him from that poor room. . .” And he led Berry to the door, and opened it.

It was a very small room, with a slanted roof and a truckle-bed, and it was full of shadow. From the shadow sprang one clear and unforgettable face, with loosened mouth and eyes fastened on the doorway at about the level of Berry’s belt. And Berry knew that face; knew the arched nose, the singular long jaw, the hair black and close as sealskin; knew them, as did thousands of other men, from whispered stories in billets, from half-uttered tales under the stars, when voices broke into curses forgiven of God. . .

“My son, I said to you—is it not?—that there were but three living souls in St. Aubyn. And it is true. This is a dead one. Soon it’s body will die also, and then we shall go.”

When had the door been shut and that face hidden? Berry did not know. He was sitting at the table with his elbows on the blue checked cloth and his hands over his eyes.

“Why does ’e stay? . . .”

A silence. Then—“He will not pass the children in the doorway. He sees them there always, all about him—the little young children—so very small and young. When they went, and we came back, to see if there were any of the others, we found him in hiding in the crypt, you understand. He could not get away from those little children—our little children. . .”

“’E’s mad, of course.”

“Of course. Perhaps we are all a little mad.”

“And you stayed—Gord, you stayed!—with that mad devil!”

The priest cried in a terrible voice. “Do you think it was not good for us to stay? We of St. Aubyn—we three who are here and live—do you not think that we have need to believe in God? Do you not think we have need to keep under our eyes the beginning—the so very little beginning—of the judgment of God? Without the faith in that justice, we could not live, we could not save our souls. We were lost. . . lost. . . But ‘panem de coelo praestitisti eis, alleluia. Et tecum principium in die virtutis tuae, in splendoribus sanctorum. . .’”

“And—and the ole lady—the little toys in the basket?”

The priest’s voice changed. Berry knew that he was weeping. “Eh, what shall I say? I am an old man. I have no children of my flesh. . . _He_ is mad, and Judic is very mad too, and very old. . . She says they are there, the children. She says that she sees their faces between the light and the dark. Small happy faces under a whiteness like the veils of the First Communion. Eh, we are very old and we have seen too much. . . So she makes the little toys still, singing as she twists the paper. And she takes her basket to the steps of the school, and sits there as she did use to—and—sells them. What do I say? I know not what she does, or what is given her. . . Only that she returns, and sometimes her basket is. . . empty. . .”

“And the madman in there?”

“Is Kurt Von Eichensau. Yes.” Presently he added, “If you do not object, I will open the door. If the door is shut, it causes him to make an outcry. We do not want a noise. You need not fear, he will not come out. He will not cross that threshold where stand the little children he killed.”

When dawn, colourless and cold as the moonlight it replaced, drew a faint line along the rim of the ruined land, Berry slowly climbed the path that led him back to his world. Once he stopped and raised a hand to the curé, standing—though Berry could not see him—in the soot-black shadow of the church; where the one window still glowed dimly, like a watching eye whose light was soon to be quenched. Again he stopped, and looked at something that lay in his hand; it was a little paper windmill which Judic had given him out of her basket for a keepsake. But he stopped a third time by a little bush which grew on the slope, where a few green spires promised crocuses. He stuck the windmill-stick in the earth; the gaudy little toy began to twirl merrily in the wind.

“I won’t take it away,” said Berry jerkily to himself, “the kids—might miss it.”

The ridge rose behind him and hid St. Aubyn. Striding very quickly, he went on to meet the dawn.

TWO WAYS

“There’s another!” Charron rested his pick amongst the shale, and glanced across at the flanks of Mount Morin, where a new snow-field had broken loose from its moorings, and plunged into the tremendous valley in a spout of diamond dust, with a roar that jarred the rocks. There had been early snow in the hills, followed by warm weather; and the lordly heights of the Nicolum were stripping themselves of their frozen cloaks. Charron looked uneasily at the ranges, then glanced at his chum. “Jack,” he went on, with some hesitation, “I guess the time’s come to decide if both of us, or only one, can go out this year.”

Men don’t speak of leaving the Nicolum before the winter, or of going down from it, or away from it. They say “going out,” and it’s an expressive phrase.

Jack Rainger straightened slowly; a tall fellow, grave, and a little stiff in the back; stiff, you would have said, in the will, too. He smiled across at Charron’s fair-haired, sanguine youth, saying: “Then we’ll have to decide which one’s to go, for there isn’t enough dust to take us both out on a holiday, and bring us both back again in the spring!”

“_Sure_ only one can go, Jack?”

Rainger drew from his belt a little sealskin bag, and tossed it to the other. “Weigh that!” he said. “That’s all we’ve saved. And there’s just about enough dollars in it to pay one fellow’s expenses out and back. The other’ll have to stay behind and work. The question is, which of us two _needs_ to go out the most?”

Charron lowered his eyes, as if a little afraid of what his chum might read in them. Tapping with his pick among the loose stones, he muttered: “And whichever goes, it’ll be deadly hard on the one that stays behind.”

“Yes,” agreed Rainger, quietly. “Deadly hard.”

Charron glanced up, swiftly. “If—if it wasn’t for Maisie,” he said, awkwardly, “you should have every ounce of it, Jack, old man, and welcome. But—I have to think of her too. I—I want to see her . . . .” His voice broke; he turned away, staring at the hills which stand round about the Nicolum as they stood at the world’s birth. “Sometimes,” he went on, hurriedly, “I’ve felt as if I couldn’t stand it another minute, that I’d have to throw over everything—throw _you_ over!—and go out for good, without making my pile or anything, tear these cursed rocks down, kick ’em to powder, just to get a sight of her! I—I made a face in the snow last night, like I used to make of clay in the barn-loft a thousand years ago. _Her_ face. I kissed it when I’d made it. It was like kissing the dead . . . .”

The broken young voice trailed to silence. Rainger stepped across the flume, and lightly touched the shaken shoulder. “I know, Will,” he said, softly. “I know. It’s that way I feel about Laure.”

Charron, without turning, reached for his hand. “I know,” he said, again. “You’re—you’re the best of good chums, Jack. The _best_. I don’t forget about you and Laure. I don’t forget that it’s two years since you’ve seen her, too. But—you know Maisie!” He turned a flushed, stormy face. “You knew her. You were such friends. You must be able to guess what she’d be to a fellow who was more than a friend. That night I was at her house, saying good-bye, and you had to come to fetch me, for fear I’d miss the train. . . .”

He was silent again, and again Rainger touched his shoulder softly, saying: “You should have the dust without a thought, Will, if—if it wasn’t for Laure.”

“That’s it. It’s because of them. We’ll have to decide as justly as we can, keep the chances level, for their sakes. But I don’t know how.”

He turned, with an attempt at a laugh. Rainger did not echo it. He, in his turn, was staring at the granite barrier, beautiful and terrible, builded between them and their desires. He said: “It’d be only fair, only right, that the one to go out should be the one who needs to go most. But I don’t know which that is.” He moved with a sharp sigh, stooped, and picked from the ground two chips of quartz, shiny as stars. He balanced them in either hand. “Laure—Maisie. Maisie—Laure!” he said, grimly. “Which is it to be? For I take it we’re thinking more of them than of ourselves. Which needs the most to see her promised man?” He dropped the chips abruptly, and turned away. “Come, Will,” he finished, “we may as well quit work for to-day. It’s near sunset, and it’ll be a rough road home, without the darkness added to it.”

He took up his prospecting tools and walked a few yards along the ledge. Charron did not at first follow him, Rainger waited, and at last the other joined him. The younger man, still in a flushed dream, was gazing at something that lay in the palm of his hand. This, with a boyish impulse, he held out to Rainger.

“Look, Jack,” he said, softly. Rainger looked. It was a silver hairpin—a little prong of metal headed with a silver ball, carved like a fourfold flower.

“Maisie’s,” went on Charron, almost in a whisper. “D’you remember that last night when you’d been out to Weston to say good-bye to Laure, and you came on with the outfit in a cab to pick me up at the house in Cedar Street, where I’d been saying good-bye to my Maisie? I remember. You came in, and you found us all in the sitting-room, and Maisie’s mother was teasing her because I’d knocked her hair down. Such pretty hair! It came down because she’d given me this out of it. She had two in, and she gave me one,—warm from her hair, Jack. Later on the rest of it came down; she’d lost the other pin. I begged her to let it stay down, d’you remember? She made a face at me, and she said: ‘I can’t stick it up now the other hairpin’s lost. P’raps I’ve given _that_ to someone else, you old silly!’ And—and then the evening was gone, and there was nothing left of it all but this silver hairpin.” He slipped it back into his inner pocket. “Well, I’m a selfish fool, Jack, but I can’t stop thinking of her. Come on, and we’ll have flapjacks with rum in ’em, and perhaps the gods’ll decide for us.”

They turned in silence down the windy ledges towards the little log-built shanty, that for two years they had called home. And as they went, each saw a face drawn upon the lovely dusk. To those faces their hearts turned with the devouring longing born of uttermost solitude; no man knowing them, could have said which heart yearned the more strongly to its goal. Charron walked with a frowning face, his big fingers clenched upon the little silver pin. Rainger had his face raised; his eyes sought the first star, and rested there.

No human eyes saw them, none awaited them, none expected them; but on the high ridges ahead a watcher rose suddenly to his delicate hooves, shook his great curved horns to the wind, and fled away like a shadow. They had been seen of the mountain sheep; and as the leader wheeled, he loosened a broad stone, which slid, and rested, and slid a little farther. There it gathered to itself a shower of pebbles, bright as roving stars, quartz pebbles, and damp snow; and shifted again, and hung quivering.

Rainger was ten yards ahead when the roar came from the heights immediately above them. And Charron cried out and leapt forward; but if he had gone on wings he would have been too late. The mountain spouted death at them. He saw the snow-slide pouring fluid as foam, eddying like cloud, yet whirling the lesser boulders with it, and tearing the young spruce trees from their hold. Then the fringe of wind and stones and whirling snow-clots caught him and struck him aside, as if he had been a straw; he was bruised, blinded, beaten to his knees, to his face. He rolled instinctively to the inner side of the ledge, and lay huddled there, without feeling, without thought, almost without sense. Only when silence, save for a dying thunder of reverberant echoes, brought strength again to bruised mind and body, he struggled to his feet, his clothes in rags, as if he had been fighting a pack of dogs, and staggered forward, crying to Rainger.

He had no thought that he would find his friend. For the mountain-side was swept as if a vast broom had passed down it. He crawled to the lip of the ledge where it over-hung the sheer abyss. He was sobbing as he looked over; for the hardships and sacrifice of those two iron years had bound him to Rainger, and Rainger to him, in a more than brotherly love. And there, not twenty feet beneath him, he saw Rainger’s body resting against a shattered balsam, draggled as if a tide had swept it, and motionless.

“Jack! Jack! can you hear? I’m coming to you, chum!”

He thought the figure stirred faintly. He was not sure. He looked round desperately for help.

But,—shaken, battered as he was,—all help must come from him. He summoned his reeling will to govern that rebellious brute, the reeling body. He had a thin rope coiled round his waist, which they had used in some of their perilous short-cuts from the claim to the cabin below; he unwound it, the mountains spinning about him in wheels of blue and white and violet as he did so. He was almost afraid to draw breath lest he should start another slide, and the helpless man beneath him be dashed away; but in that event, they would both go . . . . He found a stump which would bear the rope. He was panting all the time: “Jack! Hold on, Jack. I’m coming to you.” There was no response. He wondered, as he lowered himself, scrambling down the steep beneath the ledge, if he would find his friend dead. He couldn’t realize life, somehow, with old Jack out of it . . . .

He brought up with his feet on the balsam roots; they were slippery, for the snow had peeled them of bark as you peel an orange. He turned with caution and stooped to his friend. He was trembling, the strong young man, like a girl. He scarcely dared touch that motionless head, raise the pale face streaked with scarlet, bind the rope about the body. It was long, and new, and unfrayed, and he thanked God for it. When he had adjusted it, and rested Jack once more against the roots, there was plenty of slack. He climbed again to the ledge and rested there a moment. Then, by sheer muscle, hauled the other up, drew him over, laid him on the planed and polished rocks, and went down beside him.

He could do no more for awhile. His strength was as water. He could not even stretch out a hand to find if Rainger still lived.

By and by he drew himself to his knees. He turned to Jack, and lifted his head to an easier position. How pale he was, dear old fellow . . . . He slipped a shaking hand under the torn shirt to feel if the heart beat at all; and sky and hills grew to an awful stillness in their places, as his fingers closed on and drew out a little canvas bag.

It had hung about Rainger’s neck. That same awful stillness of the heights was on Charron as he felt within it a little metal prong headed by a carved ball.

A silver hairpin . . . .

“I can’t stick it up now the other hairpin’s lost. P’raps I’ve given _that_ to someone else, you old silly!”

The remembered words beat upon him in hammer-blows, for all their music of laughter and speech. He looked about him half-stupidly, thinking to see beside him the elfish, teasing face in the cloud of loosened hair. He saw only the ice-veins in the rock, a single fan of golden lichen the avalanche had spared, and then that other face—Jack’s face—frowning now, flushed a little with returning life, trembling back to consciousness.

And all those long months Jack had worn against his heart that other silver hairpin from Maisie’s fair head. Traitor, that he was, to Charron—to Laure. Or was there another traitor! Had he taken it, or had Maisie given it to him?

Charron shrank and twisted as he had writhed away from the snow-slide. But no space could separate him from that doubt. It leapt full-armed to life. It came irresistibly as a tide, drowning every foothold of faith in a moment, washing away every barrier, laying waste the soul. He turned heavily in that aching stillness. He wanted to tear the bag from its cord, grind it into a little scrap of rubbish, and throw it into the deep—that was his first thought. He had let it fall again on Rainger’s breast; he laid a twitching, ice-cold hand on it; and Rainger lifted his own hand and laid it over Charron’s.

“Will!” he said, faintly. Then, in a stronger voice: “Did the slide catch me? I don’t remember. My head’s very bad. Did I go over with it?”

“Yes.”

“And you hauled me out again?”

“Yes.”

Rainger smiled. “Good old boy!” he whispered. “You’d never go back on a chum, would you, Will? I’ll be all right in a little while. I guess I was stunned. Might have been dead but for you, eh?”

“I—wish you had been . . . .”

“Will!”

“I—wish I’d left you to lie there,—you vile thief!”

An appalled wonder settled on Rainger’s face. He raised himself to his elbow, still staring at Charron; got to his knees, then to his feet. They faced each other, those two ragged, battered men, at a yard’s distance. For long minutes neither moved, neither spoke. Then Charron stretched out a shaking hand to the little bag Rainger had covered with his own.

“Tell me where you got it!” he said, thickly.

“What? What? Are you _mad_, Will?”

“The hairpin. Maisie’s silver hairpin. The other one,—in the bag round your neck!”

“You _are_ mad! There’s no hairpin there!”

“Show me! _Show_ me!”

Rainger’s face hardened. He answered, harshly enough: “No! You can take my word for it!”

“You—vile—liar!” said Charron, heavily, and came nearer.