Part 18

He recoiled, frightened, appalled at what he had said, but one thing involved another. There it was; it was his decision, his; he had announced it. Could he become a party to this conspiracy against this innocent boy, the son of his friend, and then could he go back and tell Wah-na-gi and John McCloud exactly what he had done, and then be happy? If not, then he must go the other way, and accept the consequences, and meet them. If they were to be met, it must be boldly. Cowardice encouraged the enemy.

"Yes, there is no other way," he said. "I'll give up all my own plans." And for one cruel moment he stopped to think what that meant to him. "I'll stand by you, give you my hand, and we'll beat it out together." Then he pulled himself together, put a torch to his bridges, and went on, his face lit up with the light of their burning.

"Come now," he said with a show of spirit, going to her as she held herself with supreme self-control in the big chair. "Be a sport, old girl! Chuck it all, this rotten, artificial life, and come with me out into the open. We'll leave this man-made world, and go out into God's world, and then when you have mastered this thing, when you are free----"

He was about to add that then she could marry the Duke of Uxminster or whomsoever she pleased, but Edith did not let him finish. What would become of this romantic boy in the meantime? and marriageable dukes were scarce. Besides, she had no intention of postponing indefinitely her happiness or her plans. Like all habit-victims, she refused to acknowledge even to herself her slavery. Even, supposing she had to admit it, she would reform herself! Indeed, she had made up her mind to it already and was about to begin. Her marriage to Lord Yester would help her, furnish her an irresistible motive for reformation. To keep him from eventually finding out, she would have to reform, and she had grown very fond of the boy. His romantic idealization of her was very beautiful. Hal could safely leave all this in her hands. In fact, he would have to leave it in her hands. She began to tear at her lace handkerchief in spasmodic jerks.

"I don't know whether to laugh or to scream," she said with a scared smile, "but you see I am calm, and I am listening to you."

"I used to be a drunkard," he said. "Look at me now. You shall choose. We'll go wherever you like. We'll hunt big game in Africa, or fish for tarpon in Florida, or go after the musk-ox in the Barren Grounds. You don't know what it means to sleep under the sky, to bathe your soul in the solitude, to rest in the friendly silences, and live face to face with the Infinite."

He spoke with the enthusiasm of the devotee, of what he knew and had felt. He had in his soul to be the priest, the Poet of the Open, and now, in the white heat of this tense moment, he found expression.

"Don't hang hack," he urged. "Don't despair, and don't discourage me."

The last was almost plaintive. He knew that he needed help.

She rose and looked at him through the slits of her eyes.

"You have never influenced one act of my life. What makes you think you can do so now?"

"Sir George says it's your only chance."

She backed away, on guard. She began to laugh, a little hollow, false laugh. She would admit nothing.

"My only chance? Sir George says that?"

She laughed again, the laugh of derision, of defiance. They have an expression in the courts, "the _burden_ of proof," and sometimes it's a heavy load to carry. Flagrant sin cries out: Prove it! The habitual criminal, caught, the stolen goods taken from his pocket, says: "I never saw it before. Some one put it there." Prove it, her laugh cried.

"Now, don't try that," he said gently. He did not love her, but it was piteous to see this gorgeous creature, with the world at her feet and destiny in her hand, with possibilities unlimited; it was piteous to see her throw it all away in her lust for something--God knows what--something she called "pleasure!" "life," in the mad race for sensation, for excitement, in the fatuous ambition for place in the shallow mob that called itself Society, sacrificing herself on the Altar of Self, pouring out her own blood before her own image. It was piteous! One can't stand idly by and see a maddened horse rush back into a burning stable. It was impossible not to feel sorry for her, not to want to help her.

"Sir George felt it was his duty to you, his duty to me," he added. She straightened up and her eyes blazed.

"It isn't true. I don't do it. It's a lie--a wicked, devilish lie! Who will believe him? Who will believe a man sworn not to betray his patient's secrets? He has no professional honor. Who will believe him? I don't do it. I don't do it!"

He hadn't mentioned it. She had forgotten that she was admitting that she knew what he had in mind, and that the admission was fatal.

"I've suffered, suffered horribly from headaches and insomnia, and sometimes I've taken it, sometimes for that, but I call God to witness----"

She was screaming in a fierce whisper.

"Hush," he said, trying to quiet her. "The doctor says you must get away from here. It's your only chance. Sir George says, if you will help me, if you will help yourself, you can win out. Come, you must let me help you. Let me try. Won't you let me try?"

What was the matter with the man?

"Can't you grasp it?" she said, regaining some poise by a great effort. "Don't you see that what you call silence and solitude would put me in a madhouse? Leave London? Why, London is my heaven!" And she sat down on the sofa, or rather crouched down, as if the statement was an argument and the argument unanswerable.

"London, Heaven, eh?"

Her words broke through the wall of his prejudices and the stored-up waters of bitterness gushed forth.

"London that is growing sterile in Mayfair and breeding monsters in Whitechapel! London, with one man in every four a pauper; with its thousands of starving school children! With its multitudes who have nothing trying to sell it to those who have everything! With its terrible women and its hopeless men; hollow-eyed vice cheek by jowl with hollow-eyed want; luxury, overdressed, sweeping past wretches who are dying standing up, without the decency of a bed on which to throw the rotten remnants of their tortured lives! London, Heaven, eh? My God!"

He had forgotten her, himself, in his indictment of the city, not London alone, but the city everywhere, the city that reversed the order and the law of nature!

How far removed they were! She had relaxed, and the curl and sag of her body, the sensuous somnolent droop of the eye-lid, the voluptuous lips apart, she might have posed for a statue of lazy luxury. "London is my soul," she said softly, dreamily. "I'd rather be a stray cat crawling among its chimneys than live in splendor anywhere else. The crowds, the excitement, the strife, I love it! People amuse me, their passions, their cruelty, even their meanness, yes, even their dulness, their satiety! It all fascinates me. I'm drunk with it. I wouldn't give it up, and I couldn't if I would." She rose and came to him, and scrutinized him narrowly with soft cunning.

"Don't be foolish! What's your object? Why do you want to play the hypocrite with me? You don't care for me any more than I care for you. And when I am Duchess of Uxminster----"

"I think you'd better give that up," he said coldly.

"Why give it up?" she said with fierce challenge.

"You and I must answer for our own mistakes and sins," he said. "We mustn't unload them onto others. Lord Yester doesn't know."

"Who will tell him? Who will tell him?" she cried with bravado.

"You will," he said.

"Never! Never! I wouldn't; I couldn't!"

Her voice rose to a hysterical scream, then she stopped, struggled for control of herself, and shook like one in a chill, reaching out her hands toward him in mute appeal, unable to speak, to form coherent words. Finally she said in a hoarse whisper:

"Wait a moment. Wait! Let us be calm. Let us be calm. You haven't spared me. I'm not going to spare you."

She crouched and advanced toward him like a tiger.

"I'll never leave London! That's as fixed as death. _You_ can't remain in London, and you know that too. You were forced out of the Army; that's enough. You're impossible! You always were impossible. You always will be. You're not a gentleman; you're a misfit, an outcast, a _half-breed_!"

His bronze sinewy hands looked very dark against the white, the dazzling white of her throat, as he lifted her in the air for one terrible instant, an instant when she was near to death and he to murder.

"Edith," he whispered, "if you were a man I'd kill you!"

Then he took his hands away, caught her when she would have fallen, and stammered out brokenly, almost in tears:

"No, no, I mustn't say that. You're not responsible. You're not responsible."

And he dragged himself away as though he might be tempted to put hands on her again, went over to the sofa, threw himself down in terror and abasement, and held his hands as though _they_ were the offenders, not his will. On her part the leash was slipped. There was no longer any effort or desire to control herself. She quivered in an infuriate passion of hate. All other considerations were swept away. She followed him like a wild animal that has tasted blood. She wanted to hurt, to tear and rend, and she had a vague insane idea that if she could induce him to violence, that if she could goad him to maim her, his will, his inflexible purpose would break down under pity and remorse. She crouched over him while she screamed:

"You're a half-breed, and everything you do, everything you don't do, shows it. My God, what I've had to endure as the wife of a half-caste who had to leave the Army. You, too. It hasn't been easy for you. You've suffered. This is our chance: our chance to escape from each other. You want your freedom. You want it--you want it--you want it. I've seen it in your face. That's why you've come back. You don't want to go through life chained to a woman who hates you, because if you drive me to desperation I'll make you wish you'd never been born. You'll buy your freedom."

It was to be war. He rose, white with passion. She moved away as if it were settled, as if the victory were already hers, repeating hysterically:

"You'll buy it. You'll buy it."

It was a mistake. It made him inflexible.

"But not at that price," he said fiercely. "You will tell Lord Yester or I must."

The noise of the colloquy had penetrated to the drawing-room.

Lord Yester, unseen to either of them, had quietly entered the library.

"Will you or shall I?" was Hal's relentless demand.

She turned and saw him--Lord Yester. The fierce mounting flames of her fury died down into ashes. She seemed to shrink and draw within herself, grow smaller and whiter. Hal followed her intense fixed look to its object. Yester, too, looked older and smaller and paler. It seemed a long time ago when they were agreed and each saw Happiness standing by an open door. Now the door was shut and hung with crape. Lord Yester knew that he had entered a death chamber. He gazed at her in silence. He saw the proud queenly woman cowed, looking haggard and wan with fear and despair. Love and tenderness shone from his eyes and begged her to tell him all, to trust to him--that years of devotion would make amends for all her suffering. He saw that it was not in her thought that he could help her. She looked to the other--to the man she had turned to stone. Her eyes swept him with a plea for mercy. She crept to him, kneeled to him, took his hand, abased herself, drew herself up to a level with his face, searched it for one ray of hope, one sign of relenting pity, then, with a low heart-rending moan such as neither man would ever forget, she crept like a piteous wounded thing out of the room.

Lord Yester did not attempt to help her or to follow her. He knew in some instinctive way that she was past help. He looked at Hal. He saw him stricken, spent, seared by suffering. It wasn't the same man he had talked to a few moments ago. Then he had been a splendid animal, lithe, vibrant, instinct with life and the joy of living. Here was a sad, disillusioned, heart-broken, middle-aged man without hope in the world. It had been a drawn battle--a duel in which both combatants had been wounded unto death.

Lord Yester came down slowly.

What was it this terrible man had said to her as he came in?--"Will you tell him or shall I?"

What was there to tell? What could he tell? Women, and men too, with a past generally tell it before any one else has the chance--their version of it. Edith had her history and she had been the first to tell him _her version_ in which she was always the injured and suffering heroine.

"If it is anything discreditable to her, to Lady Effington, I would not believe you," he said with quivering intensity.

"That is for you to decide," said Hal. What a game little chap it was! he thought, as he looked at his sensitive, delicate face, made for suffering. And he'll hate me to his dying day.

"Perhaps it won't make any difference," he added, and at the thought a gleam of hope came into his own life. Suppose it didn't make any difference? Suppose this reckless little Knight-errant threw all caution, all considerations to the winds; suppose that, knowing the truth, all the truth, he still held out his arms to Edith and demanded the right to assume her burdens? Ah, then Hal's hands were clean and would be free to--He glanced up to see Sir George Rundall. Oh, if Rundall hadn't known or had kept silent. It was too late for regret now.

"Sir George," he said to the doctor, "Edith has refused to leave London, to go with me. If Lord Yester would help us--perhaps----"

"Lord Effington," said the physician sternly, interrupting Hal, "I am not in the habit of discussing my patients before strangers."

"Lord Yester is not a stranger," said Hal without irony. "He enjoys my wife's confidence and friendship and if----"

"I am proud to believe that that is true," said Yester with equal sincerity. "And if it concerns the health or happiness of Lady Effington, you may rely on me, Sir George Rundall."

The polished man of the world restrained his irritation, his exasperation, with obvious difficulty.

"Lord Effington has placed me in a most embarrassing position," he said with increasing resentment. "I have expressed the opinion that Lady Effington,--that she should--that it was in fact her only chance----"

"Her only chance?" echoed Lord Yester. "What do you mean?"

"Perhaps that is too strong," said the doctor, floundering, sensitive, over-sensitive as to his professional _amour propre_.

"Perhaps that is too strong. Let me say her best chance. Other scenes, other countries, an out-door life? Unfortunately in cases like this, the will-force is enslaved. Unfortunately most victims of--let me say--" he broke off impatiently. "I cannot see what right Lord Yester----"

"I will relieve you of all doubt on that point, Sir George. I have quite as much right to hear what you have to say as Lord Effington, and I insist on your speaking plainly."

The physician looked to Hal, whose refusal to contradict this was an affirmation of it, and then, with undisguised amazement and under protest, he said: "Well, so be it. What I had in mind was that most victims of the morphine habit--"

Lord Yester leaned forward slightly as if he did not think he heard aright, then he half repeated the dread word, swayed slightly, put his hand across his forehead, like a man bewildered, and groped with his other hand until he found the back of a chair. Then very quietly he found his way into it. The expression on his face was tragic. If the boy had been his son or a brother Hal could not have felt more for him or suffered more with him.

"It's a great shock to Lord Yester, as it was to me," he said after a moment's pause. "My wife trusts him, and I am sure he will join us in our efforts to save her."

Lord Yester did not reply. He raised his head as if he had some difficulty in breathing.

Then there was a painful pause. Not one of the three men spoke.

Finally Yester said: "Sir George, if you are going home----"

"Certainly," said the physician, seeing his distress and anticipating his wish. "I will set you down at your door if you like."

"Thank you," the boy said, struggling to his feet. "This room suffocates me."

"The fresh air will put you quite all right," said the doctor, walking beside him but not offering him physical help. "Quite all right."

And they went out and Hal was alone.

"Poor boy," he said. "Poor boy!"

He put his two hands to his head, and pressed the temples. Was it real or was it a dream? He drifted into the chair at the writing-table, and put his elbows on the desk and rested his chin in his hands, looking into space, trying to understand. Some one had left a current magazine open on the table. His vacant gaze wandered across a dull level of meaningless words to a hill which stood up alone and seemed to call to him, to have a message for him:

"These are my people, and this my land, I hear the pulse of her secret soul; This is the life that I understand, Savage and simple, and sane and whole."[1]

[1] Lawrence Hope.

Yes, that was a long time ago. And they were a long way off--his people and his land. Why had he allowed John McCloud to drive him away from his people and his land? Could he have foreseen this never would he have come, never would he have had the courage to put aside that which was within his grasp. It was a dark, desperate moment. He regretted his lost happiness; he regretted that he had not sinned. What were these abstract things which people called "good" and "right"? Where did they lead one? Malicious shadows! What was his reward? For the rest of his life he was to be the custodian of a rancorous mad woman. His only release was death, his death or hers, and these neurasthenics live forever. His own? The only thing to his credit at this moment was that he pushed aside the thought of self-destruction. He was down in the ring, only semi-conscious, and he heard the referee counting the fatal seconds, but he had the instinct of the fighter and he knew that before ten was called he would try to get up. His land and his people! They were calling to him, in many voices, many ways. Never had they called to him as now. And it was too late. All that was past. Wah-na-gi called to him. Oh, she called to him. Again he saw her as he looked back to get a last glimpse of the Red Butte Ranch, standing outlined against the eternal sky, standing on the eternal rock that marked the lonely grave. How simple and elemental she seemed to him sitting in the roar and smash of this huge factory where they were turning out lives by machinery! She called to him, to all that was best in him. Her soul, how clear and clean it was, like a mountain stream. Yes, he was glad he had not soiled it. Yes, he must live up to her faith in him. Perhaps there was another life, another world, where all these crooked things were made straight. He took paper and pen and wrote briefly and simply:

WAH-NA-GI:

I cannot come back. Don't wait for me. Don't expect me. I can't ask you to forget me, because I love you, never so much as now when I am saying good-by. HAL.

He could only see dimly the address as he wrote it. Then he held it before him and whispered: "'I hear the pulse of her secret soul!'"

"I beg your lordship's pardon----"

"Lordship? Lordship?" Who was that? And who was speaking? He was out in the shadow of the Moquitch. Ah, no, he was in London, in his father's house.

"Come in, Andrews; what is it?"

It was his father's butler, a slender little old man, with a deferential face and a refined cultivated voice like the gentle-folk with whom he had always lived. Even Andrews felt that there was something unusual in the air.

"I hope I'm not intruding on your lordship."

"Not at all, Andrews."

"Is there anything I can do for you before you retire?"

"No; put out the lights and go to bed. Oh, and mail this letter for me, please."

He and the letter were a long time in parting. He looked at it, passed it from one hand to the other, held it out in view for a moment, then entrusted it to Andrews, his eye following it in the butler's hand and his body straining across the table as if he would go after it and bring it back. As the old man got over to the electric switch he turned and, with old-world deference, said: "Will your lordship permit me to say how glad your father's old servants are to see you at home once more, and we hope you are _home to stay_."

Hal caught his breath. The judge was putting on the black cap.

"Home to stay?--Yes, thank you, Andrews; thank you. Good night."

"Good night, my lord."

And the representative of that which was and would be turned out the lights, and left him to himself, left him in the shadows of the big room.

As soon as the door closed behind the form of Andrews, Hal clutched at his collar, tore it open, threw off his coat, rushed to the windows that formed one side of the room, threw them open, and stood for a moment with his breast and face bared to the sluggish, clammy breeze that was struggling with the burden of the fog. It was the act of a man used to the open.

The light from the street lamp outside struggled feebly through the precious stones that glowed in the windows on the stair. The fire light crept out timidly into the room with a sinister glint. Hal found his way back to the chair before the library table, and fell into it. The light from the jewelled lamp on the table threw a white nimbus about his face that made him look eerie and spectral, like a ghost that had stolen out of the night and the fog.

"Home to stay!" he gasped. "To stay!"

Unknown to him, another apparition evolved from the gloom of the stairs, floated in soft lacy clouds down into the room, stood for a moment looking off into the hall where Lord Yester had disappeared, then drifted noiselessly down and stood beside him. It was Edith.

"Well, he has gone," she said softly. "You have sent him away. You have locked the door and thrown away the key, and now we have the rest of our awful lives to spend with each other."

He did not move or seem to hear, and she slid serpent-like onto the table, and brought her mocking face close to his.

"We shall have many, many glorious years to look forward to, each day of each year a crucifixion. We shall hate each other over our coffee; we shall loathe each other over the luncheon; we shall despise each other through the long, long dinner. With murder in our thoughts and the itch to strangle each other in our fingers, we'll have to be polite and even affectionate," and she chuckled softly as she crossed to the fire, in whose red glow she looked like a satanic Lamia.

"From now on I shall take an active interest in what interests you and I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that I poison every minute of your life. It's a glorious prospect, isn't it? When I think that for a cheap bit of sentimental rubbish you ruined our lives, your own as well as mine, it seems like a joke--a huge, ghastly, ferocious joke. Why don't you laugh? Why don't you laugh? Why don't you laugh?" and she gave way to a burst of demoniac cachinnation as she threw herself into the big chair before the fire.

He did not reply or look at her or turn toward her, but kept his gaze fixed on that solemn rock so many thousand miles away. When she had exhausted herself, he said softly to himself: "Wah-na-gi! John McCloud! I've kept my promise. My heart is empty, but my hands are clean!"

And so they sat as far apart as two worlds in space until the morning of another day.

*CHAPTER XXI*