CHAPTER XXVII

Very late, on a dark and moonless night in March, when the larches were stiff and silent under the frost that bound the hills, and the air was of an imprisoned stillness, Janet, sewing by lamplight, heard a dog's bark cut through the quiet, and then hurried footsteps that were Alec's.

Her fingers lost their steadiness for an instant, but as he opened the door she peered round the lamp and said sharply: "So you're here at last! You've not touched my doorstep for four weeks, and now you come at this time of night and expect a welcome! What made you think I would be up?"

"I didn't think," he said. "I just came."

He was within the circle of the lamplight, and she looked at him. He was frost-powdered from head to foot, from ruffled hair to heavy boots, and his eyes were dull in a face the whiter for the tan it had to conquer. She went on with her sewing:

"Where have you been?" she said.

"God knows."

"That'll be why I didn't go to bed," she said quietly.

"I've been walking since dark, nearly." He moved away into the gloom, and there he went back and forth, across the kitchen's width, with a restlessness like his father's.

"And I've had the devil for company."

"Well, you're here now," she said. The years had slipped away from her, and Alexander was the gloomy, passionate boy again, come to her for comfort, and she had a tremulous sensation of delight.

"Ay, but the devil's here, too."

"Had you not better tell me?" she said.

His language, also, was that of his youth. "Janet, d'you mind when I wanted to kill him? D'you mind me telling you to wish him over a cliff side? Well, you've got to pay for all your evil, and I'm paying for mine this day." His boots on the stone floor marked the hurry of his thoughts. "It comes back on you when you think you've strangled it. I hated him, I would have laughed to see him dead, and then I learnt a thing here and there, and I wouldn't hate him any more. Well, I couldn't hate him. He seemed too poor a thing. He'd just got to be cared for like a child. And things went well with me for a bit, and there's no doubt but what I was pleased with the state of my soul. It's a pity man was ever taught the name of it," he cried violently.

She sewed on. There was no sound but the rasp of her needle through the coarse stuff, for Alexander was standing still.

"I thought I'd killed him this afternoon," he said, and moved on again. He spoke through the noise of his walking. "I cannot get it off my mind," he said, "that there've been men hanged for less than I did to-day. It's something beyond me that's saved my neck. It was as good as murder. I know how men feel when they've killed. I'll never get my hands clean of it. And while I've been tramping over these white hills that should have spurned me, I've felt like a man hunted, with that grisly death behind him. And I didn't know the rage was in me. I thought it died ten years ago, but it came back like a flood, and blinded me, and felled him. God! I'm nothing but a savage. I that thought myself walking a little above the earth! Well," he said grimly, "I'm learning yet!"

"If you'll tell me----," she began. "But wait a bit. We'll have some broth. D'you know it's twelve o'clock? And you've school in the morning."

He frowned heavily and pushed his fingers through his hair.

"It smells good, and I'm hungry," he said.

They sat by the fire, each with a bowl of soup, and Janet watched him as he drank. There were lines in his face that had not come there in a day.

"These four weeks," she said, "I've waited for you every night. That's what women spend their time in doing. Your mother for James, and me for you. And you come running to us when you want us. And neither she nor I would have it different! But for all that, I'm not going to have you getting like your father, my man, running about the hills at night, and tumbling into a woman's lap!"

He flushed, and tried to cover shame with emphasis. "You'll have my blood to change, then. It's black, Janet--black."

"And that's like him, too! I'm this, and I'm that, and I'll never be anything else! Black blood! His isn't black--it's white! He's just a coward. He's never finished running away from himself, and crying out he cannot help it, and getting behind your mother's skirts. And all she should have done was to have skelped him well."

"I'm willing to take my skelping, if you'll cure me."

She laughed with a kind of girlishness that startled him.

"I've frightened you--that's enough. You're not much more like your father than I am, but when you've done wrong you've got to stand on the wrong and climb up."

"I'm trying to," he said. "If I talk like this to you it's because it's you, and there's only you that wants to hear. Only you and one other I'd tell it to."

Another listener might have heard her take a breath.

"Who's that?" she asked.

He faced her, troubled but unflinching. "You've seen her," he said, and his utterance of the words was like a song in praise of her.

"Yes," she said quietly, and covered her hands with her work.

He lay deeper in his chair, and watched the fire. His hands were thrust into his pockets, and his chin was dropped; his face had the lost look of one who has forgotten his bodily existence. He had forgotten Janet, but she, looking on him with a kind of hatred, loved every curve and line of him with a pure jealousy of passion. This was the son she had never had, yet felt she must have borne. She looked back, and believed she had held him naked to her breast. Yet it was with a sharp cruelty that she spoke. "Well, can you not get her?"

"No," he said, "not unless I stole her."

"You'd never be called thief. Could you not do it?" she tempted him, taking pleasure in her own pain.

"She's not a piece of goods," he said, and fell into a silence; but the muscles of his cheek were twitching, and at the sight of that her heart ached with a sickness of pity for him. She was all compassionate mother now, and she would have rent the world to get Theresa for him.

She broke the stillness with a laugh he did not like to hear.

"There's me," she said. "I'd get her for you." And her voice was venturesome, half afraid, ashamed of its own shame.

She saw the quick red leap to his eyes.

"Leave her alone!" he cried in anger. All the influences of his youth were strong on him. "But you'd never move her," he said, and his faith and his scorn stung her to a pang she hid from him.

"Eh, would I not?" she answered coolly. "This'll be why you've not been here, then?"

"I think it's why I nearly killed my father. It's easy blaming myself for nearly doing murder, but I see now that all these days I've been feeling murder towards that man she's going to marry. D'you know I've not seen the sky for weeks? I've been walking through a visible blackness. It's the truth I'm telling," he said simply. "And then to-day I came home, and found him drunk or mad, raving against my mother because she'd had a letter from old Webb, and one she'd read to him, as innocent and clean as Webb himself. And she stands there, smiling at him, stroking his hand, talking to him, as if he had a fever. If she'd had half a dozen children it would have been better for them both. Janet, it's pure self-indulgence in her, or was, and now it's just a habit. She's mothered him, and mothered him, because she has an endless power of giving, and he's gulped it all down, and will go on doing it till the end."

"But you didn't knock him down for that?"

"No; it was when he took Theresa's picture, and threw it on the fire, and said bad things about her. I saved it first, and then he went. I know he didn't mean it, I know he'd never think it--he's not that kind of beast--but he said it. And he was on the floor before I knew it, white, and with blood trickling. And I think my mother hated me that minute."

"She'll be wondering where you are."

"No; she'll be thinking of nothing in the world but him. She might have cared for half a dozen of us, but one seems to have been worse than useless!"

"That's because you gave help, instead of asking it."

He bent his lips into a wry smile. "But I feel I've been cheated, all the same. And I'm a nasty, evil-tempered brute, but I've had the grace to thank God for delivering Theresa from my hands."

"And the day may come when she reproaches Him for it. Is the lass blind or daft?"

"Now, Janet!"

"It's time you went to bed."

"I'm going. I think I'll have to tell old Webb he mustn't come here. I was going to stay with him this Easter, but--well, I've changed my mind! I'll have to let him know I can't leave home, and tell him not to come here. I hardly think it's safe for him. Heaven knows what he'll do next. Good-night."

"Good-night, Alec."

"I don't know what I'd do without you," he said awkwardly.

She waited until she could hear his footsteps no longer, and then she put out the light. In a little while the window-pane emerged from the darkness, square and grey, and on it the austere larches were chiselled blackly. She rocked herself in her seat. She saw Alexander's face, lined by a fierce craving and repression, and pitifully overlaid with patience. He seemed to have looked bitter disappointment in the eyes, and made a comrade of it. His own eyes were dulled that had been so bright. She saw the painful twitching of his cheeks, and how his hands, which he had thought were hidden, clenched themselves in his pockets. She felt a masterful indignation against Theresa, who could love another than this man, and a yearning over Alexander like a mother's over a hungry child whom she is powerless to help. But Janet was not powerless.

She sat immobile, and she had first a strange ecstasy of physical lightness, as though her mind had soared easily beyond her body, and was rejoicing in the freedom, and looked distantly on the numb husk it had left, and then, with a leap, it was back in its place again, grinding at all the memories it had stored, bringing them from the corners where she had covered them in the dark, forcing them into the light. And she saw them. They were put into her hands, and she turned them over and over, knowing them again, and the power she had resisted in her clean youth swooped on her like an evil, moulting bird, and under its spread and meagre wings she sat, rocking now in pitilessness, in place of pity, dead to everything but the one thing she meant to do.

The fire dropped in the grate, the flames that had illumined her clasped hands and played fitfully on the moving body lost their power to leap, and the coals were grey, when a dog outside howled at the night.

That sound of an inexpressible woe, challenging the peaceful hour of sleep, wrenched Janet from the dark place of her wandering. She started, crossed herself, and murmured words she did not understand. She stood up, shivering, and stretched out her hands. She passed them across her eyes.

"God keep my soul from sin!" she said aloud.

She went to the door, and let the frosty cold clean her of evil.

"He mustn't get her that way," she muttered as she lit her candle. "I was lost--lost. God guard me!" And again, unknowingly, she made the sign on breast and brow, for this was what her ancestors had done.