Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Edward Joseph Capes - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVIII.

SNOW, soft, dazzling, bewildering, was again falling in the streets as Ned, a spectre of desperation, hurried along them. The city was all one strung movement of flakes—cloud materialising, phantoms blocking the widest and the least avenues of hope. The soulless persistency of them numbed his heart, blinded his eyes. He stumbled as he went, feeling like one who, in a nightmare, frantically strives forward without advancing.

Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette! The one on the way to her dressmaker’s; the one buried—naked, and buried alive; the third——!

He moaned as he struggled onward. People passing him looked back with eyes askew in butting heads, and grimaced, and went on their way with pharisaic self-congratulations.

At length, uttering a breathing sigh of relief, he stood before the door of his lodgings, paused a moment, mounted the steps, and entered. Instantly he knew, before a word had been spoken, that he was come upon the something, the real presence of the dread that had haunted him so long. It was in the atmosphere—behind him, overhead, to one side or the other—never confronting him—a ghost, sibilant with babble, diabolic with tickling laughter. He went up the stairs, swiftly, panic-stricken, and so, softly, into his sitting-room. It was quiet as death; yet a bodiless rustle, he could have thought, preceded him as he passed into the room beyond. All there was neat, formal, accustomed. Only a little heap of girl’s clothes lay on the bed—a neatly disposed small pile of stuffs and linen, with a pair of buckled shoes at the top.

He gasped, as if he had been struck over the heart. There was something here so intimate to the story of a pitifully misdirected life. The shoes seemed to have taken the shape of the feet that had pursued him so far and at last, it seemed, so despairingly. The linen—he bent and pressed his cheek to it. It was fragrant—as was everything personal to Nicette—but it was cold. How long had she been gone? He had his wish, then. She had taken the initiative. He was free to nurse his memories unvexed of a regard so misplaced. He could raise his head and stand acquitted before his ancient ideals.

He drooped his head, rather. He was weak and overwrought. The strain upon him during the last three days had been so extreme that perhaps his moral vision was impaired.

A sound coming from the adjoining room startled him. Was it she returned? He winked down fiercely something that had gathered unaccountably in his eyes, cleared his throat, and strode forth.

The landlord, Theophilus—that was all. But the little man’s face was smock-white, his curls hung limp, his eye-places were grey with fear.

He had closed the door behind him.

“Monsieur!” he whispered. “My God, where hast thou been?”

“What is the matter?”

“Monsieur’s young friend! Has he not heard of her?”

“Well; she is gone, I suppose?”

“Ay—mon Dieu Jésus!—to the guillotine.”

Ned fell back. There seemed to rise a roaring in his ears.

“Hush!” he said—“listen! They are shrieking for her. I must go!”

His face was ghastly. But the thundering voice sank and ceased, and he knew that he had been dreaming.

“What was that you said, my Théophile?” he asked, with a little insane chuckle over his own fancifulness.

“It was yesterday morning, monsieur. You had gone out the previous night, and had not returned. I heard her leave the house after breakfast. I looked forth. Pitiful Mother! she was clad in the rags of her arrival. Her feet were bare. They budded from the snow, the very frosted flowers of a too-trustful spring. She stood a moment, then went off. Hélas! it was not for me to speak, but——”

“Well?” said Ned, in a gripping voice of iron. He was himself again, but with death at his heart.

“I can speak only from the evidence. In the afternoon I looked into the Salle de la Liberté, as I sometimes will, to hear the cases that were on. There was a little excitement about a girl who had been seized that morning in one of the passages of the Palais de Justice with a long knife in her hand. She had made no secret of the fact that it was her intention to assassinate one or other of the judges as they came forth at mid-day. She was brought in for trial while I was there. I swear—my God, monsieur! I swear I had no shadowy thought of the truth. It was monsieur’s young friend. I shrank into an angle of the court, in agony lest she should see and endeavour to implicate me.”

“Thou needst not have feared, I think—thou needst not have feared.”

“Monsieur, she made no defence. ‘Vive la tyrannie!’ she cried, ‘I love the aristocrats!’ (Ah, praise to heaven, monsieur, that she put it in the plural!) ‘I would sooner be spurned by one,’ she said, ‘than exalted by an upstart chicaneur.’ That was a stroke at the Public Accuser. ‘Maybe thou shalt be exalted, nevertheless,’ said he, ‘to a prominent place. And which of us was it, lover of aristocrats, that thou design’dst to murder?’ ‘What needs to specify?’ she cried. ‘When one wants to die, any poisonous snake will serve for one to handle!’”

A little terrible groan broke from the listener.

“Monsieur—monsieur!” cried Théophile in emotion. “But they condemned her—they condemned her. Oh, the poor child! And she revealed nothing; refused to answer any questions as to her associates, her place of abode, her manner of life. To-day she was to be taken to the scaffold. If she has kept silence, we are safe.”

Ned looked upon the speaker with a shocking expression.

“If she has kept silence?” he muttered.

“Monsieur,” said the little man (the tears were trickling down his lean cheeks), “the carts passed but ten minutes ago. I hurried forth, and ran till I could get glimpse of them down a side-street. She was there. She sat with her arms bound, looking up and smiling; and the snow fell upon her blue eyes, like feathers from the wings of the angels that fluttered overhead awaiting her.”

He uttered a little cry, staggered, recovered himself, and clutched feebly at the figure that drove by him.

“Monsieur! It is too late—it is useless! In God’s name do nothing to compromise us!—monsieur!”

He followed, sobbing and piping, down the stairs. The rush passed from him; the door slammed back in his face.

“Mon Dieu!” he wailed to himself, “he will ruin all!”

Ned tore upon his way. To see—to gain speech with her, if only at the foot of the scaffold—“Oh, merciful Christ! not so to make this agony everlasting!”

He sobbed and panted as he ran: “You didn’t kill him! You didn’t kill him!” He kept crying it, as if he thought his hurrying voice might reach her before ever his feet could cover the distance. Once he pictured her—the soft sinning child that had whispered to him, kissing his hand that night in the hot still secrecy of the room—under the hands of the callous ruffian who had spoken with him from the guillotine, and his wild prayers swung into frightful blasphemies. Some of the few he met in his headlong rush shrunk from him, leaving him the road. Others, who appeared likely to obstruct his passage, he cursed as he fled by. They were all ghosts to him, glimmering, impalpable—flashing past in a white foam of flakes.

At length he broke into the place of the guillotine, and, without pausing in his mad race, beat the snow from his eyes—and saw.

Here at least, by reason of the bitter cold, was no gala-day, and the crowd stood not so thick about the scaffold but that he might charge into and penetrate it.

He had reached at last—so his whirling brain interpreted it—the very congress of all the spectres that had haunted him of late. The silent dull air was thick with silent threads—busy stitches in a shroud whose hem was the enceinte of the city. Here a silent white pack stood looking up at a white yoke. There was no terror in all the scene, save where, on the platform itself, the boots of the executioners slipped in a red thaw.

Then, in a moment, he was aware of her. She rose from the cloud of white shapes—herself a statue of whiteness—pure at last—and other white shapes stooped and lifted her.

He burst through the intervening whiteness—tore his way into the shroud.

“Nicette!” he screamed.

She struggled free for an instant—turned, looked down, and saw him. Through the rain of flakes the rapture of a deathless passion was revealed to him.

The next moment she was fallen prostrate. A whirring silvery wing swooped upon her. She seemed to break in half, like a woman of snow.

THE END.