THE thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.
He stepped softly towards the shrine. A dozen paces brought him almost within touch of it—and of something else. A woman was crouched against the pedestal of the image, her hands clasped high on the stone, her face buried in the curve of her left arm. In the incessant throb and flash of the lightning through the little windows, he could see the soft heave of her shoulders, the shredded glints of light running up and down her hair as she drew quick breaths like one in terror. Something, in the same moment, convinced him that she was aware of his entrance; that, in the insane relief engendered of company, she was struggling to present as spiritual preoccupation the appearances of extreme fear. If this were so, she fought in vain to save her self-respect. Her collapse, it was evident, had been too abject; to rally from it on the mere prick of pride was an impossibility. Here to her, lost and foundered in hell, had come a first presence of human sympathy.
It was sympathy. In the dusk, in the endless flash and roll, and in the heavy roaring of the rain on the roof, Ned’s spirit, reaching across a reeling abyss, felt that this fellow-creature was in mortal terror. Too diffident, nevertheless, to make a first advance, he compromised with his pity by seizing a chair and dragging it towards him, that the very rough jar of its legs on the boards should be sound assurance to the other of a human neighbourhood. The little instinctive act, fraught with kindliness, touched off the nerve of endurance. As he dropped into the seat he had pulled forward, the prostrate figure, detaching itself from the pedestal, came suddenly writhing and crouching over the few yards of floor that separated them, and, throwing itself at his feet, put up a mad groping hand.
“I am dying of fear!” it whispered.
Ned caught the hand in a succouring grip. He could see only the glimmer of a white face raised to his. He was bending down to give it words of assurance, when to a hellish crash the whole building seemed to leap into liquid fire—to sink, weltering, into a black and humming void. The shock, the noise, had been thickly stunning rather than ear-splitting. Here, in the chapel, they were too close to the cause to suffer the sound perspective that shatters the brain. They might have been the stone, the kernel, from which the force itself had burst on all sides.
By slow degrees Ned’s eyes recovered their focus, until he could make out once more the ghostly blotch of a face looking up into his. Neither of these two, beyond an involuntary jerk of response to the enormous flame and detonation, had stirred from the attitude into which, it would almost appear, they had been stricken. The actual terror of the one, the sympathy of the other, seemed welded by the flash into a single expression of fatality. In the lonely chapel, amidst wrack and storm, to each the spectre of a memory had suddenly materialised, revealing itself amazingly significant.
“I must go,” muttered Ned, all in a moment. He spoke confusedly, trying to withdraw his hand. But the other soft clutch resisted: the other half-deafened ears could yet essay to catch the import of the murmur.
“You won’t leave me—here alone?” she said. “Oh, I shall die of the fear!”
She could waive before him all pretence of her possessing the divine favour or protection. It was her rapture that this man—who had again stepped across the years of darkness into her life—knew her soul; her rapture to woo him by the seduction of her surrender to his nobler understanding. His spirit darkened; yet, knowing her fearfulness of old, he could not in common humanity forsake her till the terror was past.
So they sat on in silence, she flung at his feet, holding his hand, while the flame and fury expended themselves overhead. Once or twice he was conscious that her lips were helping the office of her fingers; and he flushed shamefully in the darkness, yet would not seem to condone her offence—her terrible sacrilege, even, under the circumstances—by so much as noticing it. But he thought of the little flower-packet in his breast; and he cursed his bitter folly that, after such a warning as he had already had, he should have ventured himself wantonly within the charmed influence of this silken-skinned witch.
Suddenly, it might almost be said, the tempest fled by. It passed as rapidly as it had come, travelling westwards on a flooded current of wind. The noise, the glare, ceased; light grew on the dim-washed walls; the dark picture above the altar revealed itself a pious representation of the very subject that had founded the chapel. There the saint stood in effigy for all the world to worship: here she knelt self-confessed at the feet of the one man for whose hot reprobation she yearned, so long as it would kiss in pity where it had struck. Ned glanced down at the lifted face. It may have suggested in its expression some secret, half-unconscious triumph. He tore away his hand—sprang to his feet, as the clouds broke outside and sunshine came into the place.
“You must let me go,” he said. “Your saints will be enough to protect you now.”
She rose hurriedly, and stood beside him. There was something new and indescribable in her air and appearance—it might have been the mere maturity of self-love. Whatever her stress of mind during these three years, its effect had not been to warp and wither her physical beauty. Even the little angles of the past were rounded off. She was developed—a riper, more perilous Lamia.
“Hush!” she whispered, pointing to the altar, “the tabernacle!”
He gave a low little laugh.
“What!” he said, dropping his voice nevertheless, “is the presence more real to you than to me? Will you still pretend? We are alone, Nicette.”
Alone! the word was soft music to her.
“No,” she said, coming after him as he strode towards the door, “I will pretend to nothing—nothing, with you.”
She put out a hand and gently detained him.
“Oh!” she said, a very hunger in her voice and eyes, “to see you again—to see you again! Why are you here? You did not follow me? No one knew I was in the wood; and I was caught by the storm. My God, my God! to be near it all—in the midst—and the curse of heaven awake! It is folly, is it not, that talk of retribution—the folly of sinners and the opportunity of priests? Here was I alone, for all hell to torture; and, instead, you come upon me unawares!”
He stood dumfoundered that she could thus bare her soul to him. She had no shame, it seemed, but the sweet exalted shame of the seductress: her eyes dwelt upon him in ecstasy.
“Whence do you come?” she went on, in a soft panting voice. “But what does it matter, since you are here! I knew in the end you would return. This—this” (she put her hand upon her bosom)—“Oh, it is a fierce magnet that would have drawn you across the world!”
He pulled at the door—let in a lance of brilliant light that struck full upon his face. Something in its expression appeared to startle her. She leaned forward and uttered a sudden miserable cry.
“Where have you been—what have you done! My God, let me look!”
The next instant she backed from him a little, throwing her hands to her eyes as if she were blinded.
“It is there,” she cried, “what I have longed and prayed for; but it is not for me!”
He recovered his voice in a fury.
“Prayed!” he cried. “Are such prayers, from such a source, answered? Stand off, for shame! This meeting is all an accident. I have neither sought, nor desired, to see you. It is an accident—do you hear?”
He tore open the door, jumped the step, ran a few paces, and stopped, with an exclamation of sheer astonishment. A huge ruin of trunk and branch closed his vista. The old woodland monarch, the type of stately quincentennial growth and decline, was shattered where it stood. At the last, facing its thousandth tempest, it had been wounded to death in the forefront of the battle. The brand had struck its mightiest branch, tearing it from its socket; and the crashing limb in its downfall had wrenched apart the trunk, revealing a great hollow heart of decay.
The quiet drip and fall from loaded leaves; the faint rumble of the retreating storm; the steam from the hot-soaked grass—Ned was conscious of them all as he stood a moment in awe. Then he hurried forward again—up to the very scene of the disaster.
The ruin was complete; the silver hearts were fused or vanished; the sacred fence was whirled abroad, in twisted, fantastic shapes. So much for the immunity of beech-trees. He could hardly dare to face the moral of his escape.
But he must face another as terrible, if more impersonal. It presented itself to him on the instant—a little heart within the heart—a poor decayed fragment of humanity sunk deep in the vegetable decay of the exposed hollow. At first, mentally stunned, and confused, moreover, by this arabesque of ruin, he failed to realise that what he looked upon was other than some accident of rubbish. It rested down near the ground upon what had once been the bottom of a deep well of eaten timber. It had, strangely enough, the appearance of a sleeping child.
He took a quick step forward. His very heart seemed to gasp. God in heaven! it was a child—not sleeping, but dead and mummified!
A sound—something awful, like the breath-struggle of one who had been winded by a blow—fluttered in his ear. He leapt aside from it, staring behind him. Nicette was there, gazing—gazing, but at him no longer. Her eyes were like stones in a hewn grey mask; youth had shuddered from her cheeks.
Suddenly she turned upon him stiffly. Her soul instinctively recognised the whole that was implied by his scarce voluntarily expressed terror of her neighbourhood.
“I did not kill him,” she whispered.
“It is Baptiste, then?”
He was familiar at once with the stupendous horror of it all. That was such, and so appalling in the light or blackness of a construction that her immediate surrender of the situation made inevitable, that his brain reeled under the shock. He was an accessory to something namelessly hideous.
Then, in a moment, she was prostrate at his feet, clinging to him, imploring his mercy, his kindness; urging him by his pity, by her agony, to withdraw her from vision of the terror, to listen to and believe her.
“Take me away!” she screamed; “it was his own doing! I did not kill him!”
He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake—for his sake! Was he so vile as this, then—he who had dared in dreams to mate with a purity like an angel’s—that the incense of any noisome sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh.
“Did she—the mother—not promise,” he shrieked, “to restore the little brother to you—the poor little murdered wretch! She has kept to her word. And you—you? Don’t forget you are sworn under damnation to dedicate yourself, a maid, to her service! Can you do it? God in heaven, it is not your fault if you can!”
She fell before him, as he spurned her, writhing and moaning amongst the sodden grass.
“Won’t you listen to me—oh, won’t you listen? If you would only kill me, and not speak!”
He stood immediately rigid as justice’s own sentry.
“Yes, I will listen,” he said, “and you shall condemn yourself.”
She crept a thought nearer and, feeling him keep aloof, sat bowed upon the ground, her fingers locked together in her lap.
“I will tell you the truth,” she said, low and broken. “After that first time he, my brother, was changed. He became, when you were gone, a little devil, insulting and defying me. It was terrible—his precocity. He held over my head ever a threat—monsieur, it was that he would make exposure of the liaison between his sister and the Englishman.”
Ned uttered an exclamation. She entreated him with raised hands.
“Ah! it is not always the truth one fears. One day in the woods—oh, my God, monsieur, hide me!—in the woods—what was I saying! Mother of God! it was here—we quarrelled, and I was desperate. He ran to escape me, climbed the great branch that stooped to the grass. He stood high up, reviling me. I made as if to fling a stone: he threw up his arm, stumbled, and disappeared.”
She crept towards him again, yet another agonised appeal for the tiniest assurance that he had ceased to loathe her. At least this time he stood his ground.
“At first I was stunned,” she said. “He may have been killed at once, for no sound reached me. Then all at once the wicked spirit put it into my head that here, by doing nothing, was a sure way out of my difficulties—was safety from that impish slanderer, was the bar removed to my favour in the eyes of one who had confided to me his detestation of children.”
Ned sprang back, almost striking at the crouching figure.
“Not me!” he raged; “I will have no responsibility—not any, for the inhuman deed, thrust upon me! And so you left him to his fate, and went home and ate and drank, feeding your beastly lusts and desires, while he—oh, devil, devil!”
She scrambled to her feet and made as if she would run from this new terror of a hate more ghastly than all she had suffered hitherto.
“Don’t kill me!” she whimpered. “Did you not tell me you hated children? and you said they could not feel as we do.”
He glared at her like a maniac.
“You left him; what is the need to say more?”
“I did not,” she moaned, wringing her hands as if to cleanse them of blood; “I came again on the third day, and I called to him, I prayed to him, but he never cried back one word. Then I thought, Perhaps he has climbed out and fled away.”
“Liar! you are a liar! Why, then, did you seek to hide your crime by a blasphemous lie?”
“I have suffered,” she answered only, like one before the judgment-seat.
He mastered himself by a wrenching effort. He stood aside, peremptorily motioning her to pass on her way. Not a word would he speak. She went forward a few steps—a numb, haggard spectre of beauty, a soul paralysed under the immediate terror of its sentence. Suddenly she turned upon him, awful in the last expression of despair.
“They will tear me to pieces when they know!”
“Let your Virgin protect you,” he said.
Without another word she left him, going off amongst the trees. The sunbeams, peering through the leaves, touched and fled from contact with her; woodland things scurried from her path; the cleansing rain, even, stringing the branches, withheld itself from falling till she had gone. Something that he drove under forcibly struggled to rise and give voice from the watcher’s heart. She looked so small, so pitifully frail and small a vessel to carry that great load of sin. The next moment she disappeared from his sight.
He turned, with a groan, to scrutinise the horror. It was yet so far undecayed as that he was able, for all his little memory of the living child, to identify the poor remains. But, for a certain reason, he would compel himself to a nauseous task—even to touch the thing if necessary. It was not. There was actual evidence, to his unaccustomed eyes, that the boy’s neck had been dislocated by the fall.
He moved away, giving out a sigh of fearful relief. At least he would not be haunted by that anguish. And should he follow and tell her?
“No,” he thought sternly—for love makes men cruel; “as she meant, so shall she suffer the worst.”