Part 7

His room was at the other end of the corridor from Tony's, opposite Miss Latimer's, and he had not closed his door on entering. She could not yet be sleeping, and while she waked he would not sleep. Tony's slumber must be guarded. Anything was possible with Miss Latimer. She might go in to Tony with baleful warnings, warping beforehand his account of the interview. He must prevent her seeing Miss Latimer alone. During the journey that would be easy; and once London was reached he had Thompson to reënforce his strategy. They would go to Tony's house, and there he would talk to her. It would be in Tony's captivating drawing-room, with its cushions and fire-screens, its scent of lemon-verbena and sandalwood. Thompson would help him in it all. She would see that he had Tony to himself.

He undressed and lay down with a book and reading-candle, keeping his door ajar. Then, in the stillness, he became aware that Miss Latimer was weeping. Passionately yet monotonously she was sobbing; a strange agony of grief, with none of the plaints and moans of self-pity. Was it remorse, he wondered; despair for her exposure, or baffled fury at finding her prey escape her, and Tony to be restored to life again? But Miss Latimer would never feel remorse; would never feel herself exposed. And Tony was not her prey; it had been for another that she had tracked her down. All, all had been done, as all with her had always been, for love of Malcolm. And, with a curious, unwilling pity, he knew, as he listened, that he did not believe of her that she felt herself to be a liar. Her simplicity had been unable to interpret truly the overwhelming experience that had befallen her. It had been as genuine, as immediate as that of a Jeanne d'Arc. She was an unsanctified saint; or, rather, a sibyl, who had found her magic inefficacious and who feared the menace to her beloved of a universe deaf to her incantations.

For hours she must have wept.

When, at last, for a long time, silence had fallen, and he had put out his light, he could not have slept had he wished it. It was his last night in the hateful house and the hours seemed heavy with significance. The wailing sobs, though silenced, still beat an undertone to his thoughts, thoughts of Malcolm, his dead friend, now, harmlessly, the immortal spirit; and thoughts of his dear Tony. Not till yesterday, when the waters had closed over them, had he known the depths of his love for Tony, and only through their anguish had the depths of her innocent, tragically gentle heart been revealed to him. Yet, while he thought of her, yearning over her, in her childlike sleep, with love unspeakable, the anguish seemed to hover like a cloud above him, and Miss Latimer's sobs still to beat:--Dead.--Dead.--Dead.

X

The first housemaids were already stirring when at last he fell into a heavy sleep. So heavy it was that it seemed long, yet only a few hours could have gone by before he was awakened by a rapping at his half-open door. Even as he drowsily struggled forth from slumber, he was aware that it was not the knock that announced hot water and the hour of rising.

He opened his eyes and saw Thompson standing in the doorway.

Her attitude as she stood there, dark and narrow, with her flawlessly neat outline, had still so much of professional decorum that, for a moment, it veiled from him the strangeness of her face.

"Oh, sir, could you come?" she said. And then he saw that her face was strange.

He sprang up while she stood outside. There was, he knew that, no time for his leg, though he seemed to know nothing else, and he threw on his dressing-gown and took up his crutches while Thompson waited for him. But when he went out to her she still stood there, looking at him.

"Is Mrs. Wellwood ill?" he asked.

"Oh, sir, she's dead," said Thompson.

Then, standing in the corridor, he felt himself trying to think. It was like the moment in France when his leg had been shattered and he had not known whether he were alive or dead. But this was worse. This was not like the moment in France. There was only, then, himself. He could not think. Thompson had put her arm under his. He was hanging forward heavily on his crutches.

"Perhaps you'd better go back to bed, till a little later, sir. Till the doctor comes," she said. "It was an overdose of the powder. She's sometimes taken them since Mr. Wellwood was killed. And she must have made a mistake. It must have been a mistake, mustn't it, sir? She had everything to live for." Thompson broke into sobs. "I've just found her. Miss Cicely is there. She sent a boy for the doctor. But it's too late. You'd only think her sleeping, so beautiful she is, sir."

"Help me," said Bevis. "I must come."

The curtains had been drawn in Tony's room and the morning sunlight fell across the bed where she lay. It was not as if sleeping; he saw that at the first sight of her. She lay on her back and her head was sunken down on her breast as though with a doggedness of oblivion. Still, she was beautiful; and he noted, his heart shattered by impotent tenderness, the dusky mark upon her eyelids, like the freaking on a lovely fruit.

Miss Latimer sat on the other side of the bed with her back to the light. Beside her stood the little tray of early morning tea that Thompson had brought in and set down on the table near her mistress before drawing the curtains.

Thompson helping him, he reached the bed and laid hold of the bedpost.

"Yes. I can manage. Thank you so much," he said to her.

So he was left, confronting Miss Latimer; and Tony was between them.

He did not look at Miss Latimer. His being was absorbed in contemplation of the dead woman. With sickening sorrow he reconstructed the moments that had led her to this act. It had not been unintentional. He remembered her still look, her ineffable gentleness of the day before. She had intended then; or, if not then, the grief that had come upon them both had fixed her in her design.

She had escaped. She had taken refuge from herself, knowing her longing heart must betray her did she linger. She had perhaps, in some overwhelming scepticism, taken refuge, in what she craved to be unending sleep, from the haunting figure of her husband. Or perhaps it had been in atonement to Malcolm and she had believed herself going to him. But no; but no; the dull hammer-stroke of conviction fell again and again upon his heart; it had been in despair that she had gone. In going she had turned her back upon her joy.

He had looked a long time when a consciousness of something unfitting pressed in upon his drugged absorption. Looking up from Tony's dear, strange face, he saw that Miss Latimer's eyes were on him and that she was not weeping. Shrivelled, shrunken as she appeared, sitting there, her hair dishevelled, a bright Chinese robe wrapped round her, there was in her gaze none of the fear or the bewilderment of the night before. It saw him, and its cruel radiance was for him; yet it passed beyond him. Free, exultant, it soared above him, above Tony, like a bird rising in crystal heights of air at daybreak. His mind fell back, blunted, from its attempt to penetrate her new significance. He only knew that she did not weep for Tony, that she rejoiced that Tony was dead, and an emotionless but calculating hatred rose in him.

"You see you've killed her," he said. "It wasn't too late last night. If you'd gone in to her last night, after you left me, you could have saved her."

And if he, last night, had gone in to Tony, he could have saved her. He thought of his long vigil. During all those hours that he had guarded her, she had been sinking, sinking away from him. He remembered his vision of her piteous, helpless hands lying on the table. She had stretched herself upon the darkness and it had sucked her down.

Miss Latimer's radiant gaze was upon him; but she made him no reply.

"Curse you!" said the young man. "Curse you!"

She saw him, but it was like the bird, gazing down from its height at the outsoared menace of a half-vanished earth. And her voice came to him now as if from those crystal distances.

"No," she said, "Antonia has saved herself. You drove her to it. You made it her only way."

"You drove her to it, you cursed liar! I could have made her happy. It was me she loved. Yes, take that in, more than she loved Malcolm. Nothing stood between us but your lies. You determined and plotted it, when the weapon was put into your hands by our folly. You've killed her, and you are glad that she is dead."

She did not pause for his revilement. Her mind was fixed in its exultation. "No; it was Malcolm she loved more dearly. She chose between you. She knew herself too weak to stay. He came for her and she has gone to him. He has forgiven her. The husband and the wife are together."

Bevis leaned his head against the bedpost and closed his eyes. The idle folly of his fury dropped from him. He felt only a sick loathing and exhaustion. "Leave me," he muttered. "You'll not grudge me what I have left. Leave me with her. Never let me see your face again."

Almost as if with a glad docility, drawing, in the spring sunlight, her brilliant robe about her, Miss Latimer rose, and her face kept the glitter of its supernatural triumph. She obeyed as if recognizing to the full his claim upon the distenanted form lying there. For a moment only she paused beside the bed and looked down at the dead woman, and he seemed then, dimly, and now indifferently, to see on her lips the pitiless smile of a priest above a sacrificial victim.

Then the rustle of her robe passed round the room. The door closed softly behind her, and he was alone with all that was left him of Tony.

THE END

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

U. S. A

End of Project Gutenberg's The Third Window, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick