Part 23

Mehalah's bosom was a prey to conflicting emotions. She pitied Elijah, and she pitied George. Her deep pity for George forced her to hate his torturer, and grudge him no suffering to expiate his offence. When she thought of what George de Witt must have endured in the vault, of his privations there, of the gradual darkening and disturbance of his faculties, and then of how Elijah had stepped between him and her, and spoiled their mutual dream of happiness, and ruined both their lives, the hot blood boiled in her heart, and she felt that she could deal Rebow the stroke again, deliberately, knowing what the result must be, as a retributive act. But when she heard him, as now, pacing the oak parlour, and in his blindness striking against the walls, her pity for him mounted and overlapped her wrath. Moreover, she was perplexed about the story of George's imprisonment. There was something in it she could not reconcile with what she knew. Elijah had confessed that on the night of George's disappearance he had enticed the young man to Red Hall, made him drunk or drugged him, and then chained him in the vault, in the place of his own brother who had died. It was Rebow and not De Witt who, that same night, had appeared at her window, driven in the glass and flung the medal at her feet. But was this possible? She knew at what hour George had left the Mussets' shop, and she knew about the time when the medal had been cast on the floor before her. It was almost incredible that so much had taken place in the interval. It was no easy row between Red Hall and the Ray, to be accomplished in half an hour.

Surely, also, had George De Witt been imprisoned below, he could have found some means to make himself heard, to communicate with the men about the farm, in the absence of Rebow. Would a few months in that dark damp cell derange the faculties of a sane man?

Mehalah lifted the trap and went down. The vault was a cellar not below the soil, but with floor level with the marsh outside, or only slightly beneath. It had a door fastened from within by a bolt, but also provided with a lock; and there was the circular window already described. The shutter had not been replaced, and the sunlight entered, and made the den less gloomy and horrible than Mehalah had conceived it to be. She found the staple to which the chain had been attached, away from the door and the window. It was obvious how the maniac had got loose. The chain had been attached to the staple by a padlock. Elijah sometimes unlocked this, when he was cleaning the straw from the cell and supplying fresh litter. He had carelessly turned the key in the lock, and left it unfastened. The madman had found this out after Rebow was gone, and had taken advantage of the circumstance to break out at the window. The chain and padlock, with the key in it, were now hung over the fireplace in the hall, mocking the inscription below, 'When I take hold, I hold fast.'

Mehalah seated herself in the window of the hall, and took up some needlework. Elijah was still pacing the parlour and beating against the opposite walls, muttering curses when he struck the oak panels. Presently she heard him groping along the walls for the door, and stumbling over chairs. He turned the handle and entered the hall.

He stood before her in the doorway of the darkened chamber, with extended quivering hands, his head bowed, his eyes covered with a thick bandage. He wore his red plush waistcoat and long brown coat. His dark hair was ruffled and stood up like rushes over a choked drain. He turned his head aside and listened. Mehalah held her breath.

'You are there,' he said. 'Although you try to hide from me, I know you are there and watching me. I am in the dark but I can see. I can see you always and everywhere, with your eyes--great angry brown eyes--on me, and your hand lifted to strike me into endless night.'

Mehalah did not speak. Why should she? She could say nothing that could do either any good.

'Have you put the hot fire to your tongue and scorched it out as you have put it to my eyes?' he asked. 'Can't you speak? Must I sit alone in darkness, or tramp alone up and down in black hell, feeling the flames dance in my eye-sockets, but not seeing them, and have no one to speak to, no one to touch, no one to kick, and beat, and curse? Go out and fetch me a dog that I may torture it to death and laugh over the sport. I must do something. I cannot tramp, tramp, and strike my head and shoulders against the walls till I am bruised and cut, with no one to speak to, or speak to me. By heaven! it is bad enough in Grimshoe with two in the shiphold mangling each other, but there is excitement and sport in that. It is worse in that wooden hold yonder, for there I am all alone.'

He stopped speaking, and began to feel round the room. He came to the chimney and put his fingers into the letters of the inscription. 'Ha!' he muttered, 'When I lay hold, I hold fast. I laid hold of you, Mehalah, but I have not let go yet, though I have burned my fingers.'

This was the first time he had called her by her Christian name. She was surprised.

'Mehalah!' he repeated, 'Mehalah!' and then laughed bitterly to himself. 'You are no more my Glory. There is no Glory here for me; unless, in pity for what a ruin you have made, you take me to your heart and love me. If you will do that I will pardon all, I will not give a thought to my eyes. I can still see you standing in the midst of the fire, unhurt like a daughter of God. I do not care. I shall always see you there, and when the fire goes out and only black ashes remain, I shall see you there shining like a lamp in the night, always the same. I do not care how many years may pass, how old you may wax, whether you may become bent and broken with infirmities, I shall always see my Glory with her rich black shining hair, her large brown eyes, and form as elastic and straight as a pine-tree. I shall see the blue jersey and the red cap and scarlet skirt.' He raised his hands and wrung them in the air above his head: 'What do I care for other sights? These long flat marshes have nothing beautiful in them. The sea is not here what it is on other coasts, foaming, colour-shifting like a peacock's neck; here it is of one tone and grey, and never tosses in waves, but creeps in like a thief over the shallow mud-flat, and babbles like a dotard over the mean shells and clots of weed on our strand. There is nothing worth seeing here. I do not heed being blinded, so long as I can see you, and that not you nor all your vitriol can extinguish. Heat skewers white hot in the fire, and drive them in at the eye-sockets through all obstruction into the brain, and then, perhaps, you will blind me to that vision. Nothing less can do it. Pity me and love me, and I forgive all.'

He crept past the chimney-piece and was close to the window. He touched Mehalah with one hand, and in a moment had her fast with both.

'I cannot love you,' she said, 'but I pity you from the depth of my soul, and I shall never forgive myself for what I have done.'

'Look here!' he snatched his bandages away and cast them down. 'This is what you have done. I have hold of you, but I cannot see you with my eyes. I am looking into a bed of wadding, of white fleeces with red ochre smears in them, rank dirty old fleeces unsecured--that is all I see. I suppose it is the window and the sunshine. I feel the heat of the rays; I cannot see them save as streaks of wool.'

'Elijah!' exclaimed the girl, 'let me bandage your eyes again. You were ordered to keep all light excluded.'

'Bah! I know well enough that my eyesight is gone. I know what you have done for me. Do you think that a few days in darkness can mend them? I know better. Vitriol will eat away iron, and the eyes are softer than iron. You knew that when you poured it on them.'

'I never intended to do you the harm,' said Mehalah passionately, and burst into tears. He listened to her sobbing with pleasure.

'You are sorry for me?'

'I am more than sorry. I am crushed with shame and grief for what I have done.'

'You will love me now, Mehalah.'

She shook her head and one of her tears fell on his hand; he raised his hand and put it to his eyes; then sighed. 'I thought one such drop would have restored them whole as before. It would, had there been sweetness in it, but it was all bitter. There was only anger with self and no love for me. I must bide on in blackness.' He put his hands on each side of her head, twisted his thumbs resting on her cheek-bones, and her unrestrained tears ran over them.

He stood quite still.

'This is the best medicine I could get,' he said; 'better nor all doctor's messes. To listen to your heart flowing over, to feel your warm tears trickle, does me good. In spite of everything, Glory! I must love you, and yet, Mehalah! I have every cause to hate you. I have made you, who were nothing, my wife, mistress of my house and estate, with a property and position above everyone else in Salcott and Virley, equal to any of the proud yeomen's wives on Mersea Isle. I have made a home for your mother, and in return you have plunged me in eternal night, and deny me your love.'

'Let us not recriminate,' said Mehalah through her tears, 'or I should have enough to charge you with. I never sought to be your wife. You drove me into the position in spite of my aversion to it; in spite of all my efforts to escape. You have wounded me in a cruel and cowardly manner past forgiveness. You have ruined my life and all my prospects of happiness. George----'

He shook her furiously.

'I will not listen to that name,' he said through his teeth.

'You could bear to hold him in chains there below,' she answered.

'You said, Let us not recriminate, and you pour a torrent of recriminations over me,' he gasped. 'If I have wronged you, you have redressed all with one vial of vitriol in the eyes, where man is most sensitive. With that firejuice you purged away all the past wrongs, I expiated in that liquid flame all the evil I had done you. You don't know what I have suffered. You have had no such experience of pain as to imagine the tortures I have undergone. If the anguish were all, it would be enough atonement; but it is not all. There is the future before me, a future of night. I shall have to trust to someone to do everything for me, to be eyes, and hands, and feet to me. Whom can I trust? How do I know that I shall not be deserted, and left to die in my darkness, a prey to ravenous men? If you loved me, then I could lean on you and be at peace. But you do not love me, and you will leave me when it suits your pleasure.'

'No, Elijah,' said Mehalah sadly; 'that I never will do. I have robbed you of your sight. I did it unwittingly, in self-defence, perhaps also in anger at knowing how cruelly, wickedly, cowardly you had behaved to me and to another whom I loved.'

'Whom you love still!' with a cry of rage.

'One whom I loved,' repeated Mehalah, sadly; 'and I must atone for my mad act as far as lies in my power. I will stay by you. I will never forsake you.'

'Listen to me, Mehalah,' said Elijah, with concentrated vehemence; 'you know what was said--that the person you loved went out in a boat and was lost. The body was never found. Should the man turn up again.'

'That is impossible.'

'I don't care for impossibilities. I live now in a dream-world where there is no line drawn between the possible and the impossible. Should he reappear, what then?'

'Still I would remain at my post of duty,' said the girl, humouring his fancy.

'The post of duty, not of love,' he muttered.

'I said duty,' she replied; 'I will never leave that.'

His thumbs twitched on her cheek-bones and worked their way to the corners of her eyes; she sharply withdrew her head.

He laughed. 'You thought I was going to gouge your eyes out with my thumbnails,' he said, 'that I was going to repay you in kind. No, I was not; but should the dead return to life and reclaim you, I may do it. You cannot, you shall not escape me. You and I, and I and you, must sink or swim together. Say again, Mehalah, that you will stand by me.'

'I promise it you, Elijah, I promise it you here solemnly, before God.' She sank on her knees. 'I have brought you unwittingly into darkness, and in that darkness I will hold to you and will cherish you.'

'Ha!' he shouted. 'At the altar you refused to swear that. To love, cherish, and obey is what the parson tried to make you say; but all you swore to was to obey, you denied the other, and now you take oath to cherish. The wheel of fate is turning, and you will come in time to love where you began to obey and went on to cherish.'

*CHAPTER XXVI.*

*THE FORGING OF THE RING.*

Mrs. Sharland was failing. The excitement of the marriage had roused her to activity, but when that was over she relapsed, her energy evaporated, and she took to her bed with the avowed intention of not leaving it again, except for a christening in the family, till carried to her grave. She did not understand Mehalah, she fretted because the arrangements after the eventful day remained the same as before; her daughter shared her room and kept as much away from Elijah as was possible, showed him none of the love of a wife to her husband, and was distressed when spoken to by her new name.

'You are either Mistress Rebow or you are not,' said the old woman peevishly to her daughter one night, in their room, 'and if you are not, then I don't understand what the ceremony in the church was for. You treat Elijah Rebow as coldly and indifferently as if he were naught to you but master, and you to him were still hired servant. I don't understand your goings on.'

'He and I understand each other, that is enough,' answered Mehalah. 'I have married him for his name and for nothing else. In no other light will I regard him than as a master: I told him when I agreed to go to church with him that I would be his no further than the promise to obey went; I take his name to save mine--that is all. He is not my husband, and never shall be, in any other way. I will serve him and serve him devotedly, but not give him my love. That I cannot give. I gave my heart away once for all, and it has not been restored to me.'

'That is all nonsense,' said Mrs. Sharland. 'Didn't I love Charles Pettican, and weren't we nigh coming to a declaration, only a fit of the ague shivers cut it short? I married your father, and loved him truly as a good wife and not as a hired servant, for all that.'

'Elijah and I understand each other,' answered Mehalah. 'I suppose there is something of truth in what he says over and over again, that he and I are different from others, and that there's none can understand us but our two selves.'

'Then you are made for one another.'

'So he says, but I will not believe it. No. That cannot be. Some have peace and happiness drop into their lap, others have to fight their way to it, and that is our fate. But that we shall find it in each other, that I never will admit. In George----' she covered her eyes, and left her sentence unfinished.

The charge of Mrs. Sharland was, to some extent, unjust. Mehalah did attend to Elijah with as much care and as assiduously as she was able, considering the amount of work which had devolved upon her. Her mother was ill and in bed, Elijah helpless. She had to see after and direct everything about the farm and house, beside ministering to the two invalids. Consequently she was unable to devote much time to Elijah, but whenever she had a few moments of relief from work she devoted them to him. She took her needlework either to him in the oak parlour, or brought him into the hall. She had now somewhat lightened her labours by engaging a charwoman, and was therefore more able than before to be with Rebow and her mother. Each complained if left long alone, and she had much difficulty in portioning her time between them. She tried, but tried in vain, to induce her mother to make an effort and come downstairs, so that she might sit with both at once; this would save her from distraction between two exacting and conflicting claims, and some restraint would be placed on the intercourse between Rebow and herself by the presence in the room of a third party.

Elijah was not entirely blinded, he was plunged not in darkness but in mist. He could see objects hazily, when near; he could distinguish figures, but not faces, when within a few yards of him, but nothing distant. The wall and a black cloud on the horizon were equally remote to his vision.

He wandered about, with a stick, and visited his cattle sheds and workmen; or sat under the south wall of his house in the sun. The pump was there, and to it Mehalah sometimes came. He listened for her step. He could distinguish her tread from that of the charwoman. He took no notice of this woman, though she came up to him occasionally and said a few commiserating words.

The men thought that he was gentler in his affliction than he had been before. He did not curse them, as had been his wont. He asked about the cattle, and the farm, and went his way. Mehalah also noticed that he was less fierce; she was able also to attribute this softening to its right cause, to her own influence. He was, to some extent, happy, because she was often with him, sought him instead of shunning him, spoke to him kindly, instead of rebuffing him when he addressed her, and let him know and feel that she thought of him, and was endeavouring to make him comfortable in his great deprivation.

As he sat in the sun and looked up at the bright orb, which he saw only as a nebulous mass of light, she was ever present before his inward eye, she in her pride and beauty. He did not think; he sat hour by hour, simply looking at her--at the image ever before him, and listening for her step or voice. An expression of almost content stole across his strongly marked features, but was occasionally blurred and broken by an uneasy, eager, enquiring look, as if he were peering and hearkening for something which he dreaded. In fact, he was not satisfied that George De Witt would never reappear. Had he been set at rest on this point, he could have been happy.

Mehalah was touched by his patience, his forgiveness of the irreparable wrong she had done him. He had said that if she loved him he would pardon all. He was ready to do this at a less price; though he craved for her love, he was contented, at least for the present, with her solicitude. He had been accustomed to open hostility and undisguised antipathy. Now that he met with consideration and tenderness from her, he became docile, and a transformation began to be operated in his nature. Love him, she could not, but she felt that but for what he had done to George, she could regard him without repugnance. Pity might ripen into friendship. Into a deeper and more rich feeling it never could, for he had barred the way to this possibility by his dealing with De Witt.

She ventured occasionally to approach the subject, but it always produced such agitation in the manner of Rebow that she was obliged to desist from seeking explanation of the particulars which perplexed her. The slightest allusion to George De Witt troubled the master of Red Hall, made his face darken, and brought on an access of his old violence, from which he did not recover for a day or two.

Mrs. De Witt came to see him.

'Lawk a day!' she said; 'what a job to find you in this predicament!'

He turned his whitened eyes on her, with a nervous twitch in the muscles and a tremour of the lips. 'Well! What news?'

'News!' echoed the lady; 'dear sackalive! who'd expect to find news in Mersea? you might as well drag for oysters in a horsepond.'

He was satisfied, and let her talk on without attending to her.

A few days later, he called the charwoman to him as she was going to the pump.

'What is your name?'

'Susan Underwood. I'm a married woman, with three small children, and another on its way.'

He fumbled in his pocket, and took out a crown.

'Any news?--from Mersea, I mean.'

'I don't come from Mersea. Thank your honour all the same.'

'But if there were news there it would get to Virley or Salcott, or wherever you live.'

'It would be sure. I did hear,' she said, 'that Farmer Pooley has been a-wisiting a little more nor he ought at widow Siggars' cottage, her as has a handsome daughter, and so, they do say, has Farmer Pudney; and the other day they met there, and was so mad each to find the other, that the one up with his hunting whip and the other with his bible and knocked each other down, and each had to be carried home on a shutter.'

'Go and tell those tales to the old woman upstairs. I have no patience to listen to them. That's the sort of garbage women feed on, as maggots on rotten meat.'

'But it is true.'

'Who cares whether true or not? It is all the same to me. Has anyone arrived at Mersea?'

'Not yet, sir, but they do say that the parson's wife has expectations.'

'Go back to the kitchen,' growled Elijah, and relapsed into his dream.

A few minutes after, Mehalah came out, and seated herself on the bench beside him. She was knitting. He put out his hand and felt her, and smiled. He raised his hand to her head.

'Glory! when you wear the red cap in the sun I know it, I see a scarlet light like a poppy, and it pleases me. Let me hold the ball, then I can feel every stitch you take with your fingers.'

She put the wool gently into his palm; and began to talk to Mm concerning the farm. He listened, and spoke in a tone and with a manner different from his habit formerly.

Presently his hand stole up the thread, and he caught her fingers and drew her hand down on her lap. Her first impulse was to snatch it away, but she conquered it, and let him feel over her hand without a movement of dislike.

'You have not yet a ring,' he said; 'you have no gold wedding circle like other married women.'

'Our union is unlike all others,' she said.

'That is true; but you must wear my ring. I shall not be happy till you do. I shall think you will cast me off unless I can feel the ring that has no ending round your finger. Where is the link with which I married you?'

'I have it here,' she said; 'I have not cast it off, and I shall not cast you off. I have fastened it by a string and carry it in my bosom.'

He seemed pleased. 'You wear it for my sake.'

'I wear it,' she replied, truthfully, 'because I took a solemn oath on that day, and I will not go from it. What I undertook that I will fulfil, neither more nor less. What I did not promise I will not do, what I did undertake that I will execute.'

'And you bear the ring in your bosom----'

'As a reminder to me of my promise. I will not be false to myself or to you. Do not press me further. You know what to expect and what not to expect. If I could love you I would; but I cannot. I did not promise that then and I will not promise it now, for I know the performance is out of my power.'

'You must wear the wedding ring on your finger.'

'I cannot wear this link, it is too large.'

'I will get you a gold ring, such as other women wear.'

'No. I cannot wear a lie; the gold ring belongs to the perfect marriage, to the union of hearts. It befits not ours.'

'You are right,' he said, and sighed. He still held her hand; she made a slight effort to withdraw it, but he clasped the hand the tighter.