Complete works of a e w.., p.186
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 186
“I am sorry,” Gordon apologised. “I know it must be unpleasant.”
The scarf was of thick white wool, and he twisted it round the arm just above the cut and tied it firmly; but a dark stain came through it at once and widened over the folds.
“The ice-axe,” gasped Hawke. “It is by your side.”
Gordon took it from where it was resting on the ground, and inserting the pick into the wool, used it as a tourniquet, and strained the bandage tight.
“Thanks! thanks!” murmured Hawke. “That will hold. Give me the pole of the axe. Now run down to the Inn and get help. I may be able to last out — if only I don’t freeze to death,” he added, with a moan.
“It is a pity the brandy’s spilt.”
“Never mind that! Hurry down to the Inn.”
“No! no! Austen,” Gordon replied, indulgently, much as one refuses a child an impossible request. “I don’t think I can do that.”
Hawke raised himself upon his right elbow and peered into the other’s face. Neither of them spoke, but the animation flickered out of Hawke’s features, and it seemed as if a veil were drawn across the pupils of his eyes.
“You have murdered me,” he said, sinking back and letting his head fall sideways on the ground.
“I have waked up. You said I was dreaming. I have waked up, that’s all. It is not the sleeper’s fault if he hits the man who wakes him.”
Gordon bent over as he spoke, and shot the words into Hawke’s ear with a savage intensity. In a moment, however, he resumed his former composure.
“But we are wasting time, and we have not much time to waste, have we? I want three letters.”
Hawke dropped the pole of the axe and instinctively moved his right hand to protect his breast-pocket.
“Thank you,” said Gordon. “I only wanted to know whether you had them with you. I felt sure you would have, but it was best to make certain. Don’t worry about them now. I will take them — afterwards.”
He laid the slightest possible stress upon the word, and continued —
“The shawl is safe enough, too. I am carrying it now. I thought you would like to know that. Is there anything more? Oh, yes! You have taught me a lesson — never to conduct interviews at night with the blind up and the window open.”
“Then you — you were outside?”
“Yes! I was outside,” cried Gordon, his savage fury boiling over its barriers and sweeping him away on a full flow.
“The fool was asleep, was he? The fool was on the outhouse staring into your face. Who was the fool, eh? Did you think I was blind? Did you think I didn’t see you were frightened when I met you yesterday! Did you think I didn’t see you watching my bedroom from the barn? What made you come back and turn my lamp out? Who was the fool, eh? Why, but for you I should never have known, never have suspected, never have killed you.”
His voice had risen to a scream, and he thrust his face into Hawke’s, livid with hate. A sudden access of passion stung the latter into life; he pushed the face away from him and gathering all his strength, half struggled to his feet. On the instant Gordon slipped the steel point of the axe from the bandage round his arm and Hawke fell back, fainting and sick.
“Damn you!” he whispered, “and the girl, too!”
Gordon uttered a cry, and dying though the man was, struck him on the mouth with his clenched fist.
Hawke took the blow without a moan, fixed one steady look upon the other, and then let his head fall back upon the rock.
After that neither spoke.
A feeling of horror at this last action swept over Gordon. He reproached himself for the blow, and sought to replace the axe in the scarf. His fingers, however, were now too numbed; so he clenched them tightly round the arm and knelt there watching the blanching face and feeling the blood soak about his knees. In a moment or two he saw Hawke’s eyeballs quiver under the half-closed lids and he leaned across the body and blew out the lanthorn-light. The darkness rushed down between them, and almost immediately the storm broke in a pitiless shower of hail.
After awhile it passed, and Gordon bethought him of the time, but he was now so starved by the cold that at first he was powerless to unclasp his hands. The feeling of utter helplessness threw him into an agony. He fancied that his hands were dead — dead hands frozen round the dead man’s wrist with blood. He looked forward in his mind through the black hours of the night and saw the morning pour down the mountain side and touch the grey face by his knees — nay, more, bring the dalesmen up to discover him riveted to the man he had killed. With this last thought he summoned all his strength to his aid, and making a final effort wrenched his hands free. The body was lying motionless at his side, and he felt along it until he reached the breast. To take the letters, however, he had to unbutton the coat, and he paused, shrinking from that. In the end he mustered courage for the task, rebuttoned the coat, and groped his way cautiously to the summit, the rest of the ascent being no more than a rock-strewn slope. From there his path was easy, and although a high wind was now blowing, he descended rapidly. Half-way down he struck a glissade which rare winters of great snow form along an old stone wall, and so slid out of the mist.
CHAPTER X
THE GLISSADE STRETCHED down towards a beck which flows between Lingmell and the flank of Scafell. So that when Gordon stopped at the end of the snow, a tinkling of water, as it splashed from stone to stone, rose to his ears, and there seemed to him something strangely sweet and peaceful in the sound. He advanced to its edge and washed carefully in the stream. Then he took his haversack from his shoulders and opened it. Kate Nugent’s shawl was the first thing which his fingers touched, and the feel of it sent a shiver through his frame. It reminded him too clearly of Hawke’s scarf and the black stain widening over it. He took it out, and after it, a parcel. For a moment he wondered what that was, and then remembered that he had forgotten to eat his lunch. He repaired the omission on the instant, and proceeded to change his clothes.
That done, he sat down upon a stone, and went over carefully all that had occurred. Reflection showed him no opening for suspicion to arise, either from the deed itself or its attendant circumstances. Against the latter he had already guarded, while the broken fragments of glass, the presence of Hawke’s own knife open by the side of the body, and even the scarf about his arm, which hung loose and clumsily after the ice-axe had been removed, would all point to the one conclusion — that the wound was an accident and self-inflicted. Satisfied upon the point, Gordon picked up the clothes which he had discarded, wrapped them in the shawl, and continued his descent. At the bottom of the valley, however, instead of turning to the right in the direction of Wastdale Head, he bent away towards the Lake.
The strong wind, blowing up from the sea, had cleared the mist above his head and was chasing the clouds along the sky. Here and there a star could be seen winking from a blue gap, and so Gordon was able to distinguish when he reached the shore, that no loiterer was near to spy upon his acts. He felt in the pockets of the coat he was carrying and drew out the letters which he had taken from Hawke. Then he fastened the bundle securely about the biggest stone he could find and hurled it far out into the Lake. It sank with a loud splash, and Gordon looked quickly round thinking that some one must have noticed it. The only sound that he heard, however, was the wash of the ripples on the bank, and he turned and made hastily up the valley, across the fields, until he had left the village some hundreds of yards behind. From there he crossed into the path which leads down from Styhead, and finally reached the farmhouse. It was close upon half-past eight, he noticed, when he entered the parlour. He explained his lateness to Mrs. Jackson by saying that he had taken refuge from the storm. She added, indulgently, that it was a long way to Rosthwaite.
“Oh I did not get as far after all,” said he. “Has not Mr. Hawke come yet?”
“Mr. Hawke?”
“Yes! I never told you. I asked him, or rather left a note to that effect, to come up to dinner this evening. I ought to have told you, but the fact is I never thought of inviting him until I had left the house.”
Mrs. Jackson disclaimed all responsibility for the dinner, and had not set eyes on Mr. Hawke.
“Then I won’t wait for him,” said Gordon. “Bring the dinner in! I will just go up and wash.”
“And change your clothes.”
“I haven’t any clothes to change into,” he said, with a laugh. “You might lay another plate,” he added. “Mr. Hawke may appear yet.”
So Gordon dined, and opposite to him a place was laid for the man who was lying dead on Scafell.
The one thing which troubled Gordon was the recollection of the blow he had struck with his fist. He despised himself for that; and besides, the look with which Hawke had returned it somehow remained fixed in his mind. Strive as he might, he could not banish it. Everything else he had intended, and justice had dictated. But that blow!
At ten o’clock the Inn people sent up to inquire for their lodger. They had not imagined anything amiss before, as they understood from Lawson that Hawke meant to stay late upon the fells.
“He said he was going to the Pillar,” Gordon said, “and he went up Mosedale in that direction.”
One dalesman, however, asserted that he passed Hawke not later than one in the afternoon by the church in the centre of the valley. He was then going towards Scafell.
Finally two search parties were organised — one to proceed to the Pillar Rock, the other to examine the cliffs of Scafell. Gordon elected to join the former, and they separately started off, with much narrating of past accidents to cheer them on their way.
“Ten men have I brought down from these mountains, stone dead,” said one, “and this will be the eleventh.”
He repeated his lugubrious statement so often, that Gordon found himself in the end humming the words to the cadence of his steps.
They reached the Rock at last, and this mockery of a search began and was kept up all through the freezing night. In the grey of the morning they came down the path again. A man was running towards them with the news that the body had been found, and he led them up to the cliffs on Scafell. Gordon stood by Hawke’s side for a moment, as he lay stretched out in a frozen pool of blood, and then turned away sick; for he had noticed about the corners of his mouth a faint blue mark, like a bruise.
“You will carry him down,” he said. “I will follow you.”
The men understood his feelings, or rather thought they did, and lifted the body gently and bore it down to the village. On the way they passed the glissade on the side of the mountain, and one of them stopped and pointed to the groove in the snow where Gordon had descended.
But he only said, “He will never come down that slide again, poor chap!”
Gordon watched them until they had disappeared round a headland, and then turned and looked down the crags.
“Not there!” he muttered to himself, with a shudder, and crossed over the mountain top down to the screes. He stopped in front of a steep, narrow gully, and far down he could see the quiet waters of the Lake lapping the base of it. He cast one look towards Wastdale. Eastwards the sun was rising over the Pass; “from Keswick,” he thought. He took out of his pocket the three letters and handled them, and his eyes fell upon the signature.
* * * * *
Two days afterwards he was found by a fisherman at the bottom of the gully, caught by a boulder on the water’s edge. One hand was trailing in the water and it clenched a torn scrap of sodden paper.
The Courtship of Morrice Buckler (1896)
A ROMANCE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII.
The first edition’s title page
CHAPTER I.
TELLS OF AN INTERRUPTED MESSAGE.
IT CHANCED THAT as I was shifting the volumes in my library this morning, more from sheer fatigue of idleness than with any set intention — for, alas! this long time since I have lost the savour of books — a little Elzevir copy of Horace fell from the back of a shelf between my hands. It lay in my palm, soiled and faded with the dust of twenty years; and as I swept clean its cover and the edges of the leaves, the look and feel of it unlocked my mind to such an inrush of glistening memories that I seemed to be sweeping those years and the overlay of their experience from off my consciousness. I lived again in that brief but eventful period which laid upon the unaccustomed shoulders of a bookish student a heavy burden of deeds, but gave him in compensation wherewith to reckon the burden light.
The book fell open of its own accord at the Palinodia at Tyndaridem. On the stained and fingered leaf facing the ode I could still decipher the plan of Lukstein Castle, and as I gazed, that blurred outline filled until it became a picture. I looked into the book as into a magician’s crystal. The great angle of the building, the level row of windows, the red roofs of the turrets, the terrace, and the little pinewood pavilion, all were clearly limned before my eyes, and were overswept by changing waves of colour. I saw the Castle as on the first occasion of my coming, hung disconsolately on a hillside in a far-away corner of the Tyrol, a black stain upon a sloping wilderness of snow; I saw it again under a waning moon in the stern silence of a frosty night, as each window grew angry with a tossing glare of links; but chiefly I saw it as when I rode thither on my last memorable visit, sleeping peacefully above the cornfields in the droning sabbath of a summer afternoon. I turned my eyes to the ode. The score of my pencil was visible against the last verse:
Nunc ego mitibus
Mutare quæro tristia dum mihi
Fias recantatis amica
Opprobriis animumque reddas.
On the margin beside the first line was the date, Sept. 14, 1685, and beneath the verse yet another date, Sept. 12, 1687. And as I looked, it came upon me that I would set down with what clearness I might the record of those two years, in the hope that my memories might warm and cheer these later days of loneliness, much as the afterglow lingers purple on yonder summit rocks when the sun has already sunk behind the Cumberland fells. For indeed that short interspace of time shines out in my remembrance like a thick thread of gold in a woof of homespun. I would not, however, be understood to therefore deprecate the quiet years of happiness which followed. The two years of which I speak in their actual passage occasioned me more anxiety and suffering than happiness. But they have a history of their own. They mark out a portion of my life whereof the two dates in my Horace were the beginning and the end, and the verse between the dates, strangely enough, its best epitome.
It was, then, the fourteenth day of September, 1685, and the time a few minutes past noon. Jack Larke, my fellow-student at the University of Leyden, and myself had but just returned to our lodging in that street of the town which they call the Pape-Graft. We were both fairly wearied, for the weather was drowsy and hot, and one had little stomach for the Magnificus Professor, the more particularly when he discoursed concerning the natural philosophy of Pliny.
“’Tis all lies, every jot of it!” cried Larke. “If I wrote such nonsense I should be whipped for a heretic. And yet I must sit there and listen and take notes until my brain reels.”
“You sit there but seldom, Jack,” said I, “and never played yourself so false as to listen; while as for the notes —— !”
I took up his book which he had flung upon the table. It contained naught but pictures of the Professor in divers humiliating attitudes, with John Larke ever towering above him, his honest features twisted into so heroical an expression of scorn as set me laughing till my sides ached.
He snatched the book from my hand, and flung it into a corner. “There!” said he. “It may go to the dust-hole and Pliny with it, to rot in company.” And the Latin volume followed the note-book. Whereupon, with a sigh of relief, he lifted a brace of pistols from a shelf, and began industriously to scour and polish them, though indeed their locks and barrels shone like silver as it was. For my part, I plumped myself down before this very ode of Horace; and so for a while, each in his own way, we worked silently. Ever and again, however, he would look up and towards me, and then, with an impatient shrug, settle to his task again. At last he could contain no longer.
“Lord!” he burst out, “what a sick world it is! Here am I, fitted for a roving life under open skies, and plucked out of God’s design by the want of a few pence.”
“You may yet sit on the bench,” said I, to console him.
“Ay, lad,” he answered, “I might if I had sufficient roguery to supply my lack of wits.” Then he suddenly turned on me. “And here are you,” he said, “who could journey east and west, and never sleep twice beneath the same roof, breaking your back mewed up over a copy of Horace!”
At that moment I was indeed stretched full-length upon a sofa, but I had no mind to set him right. The tirade was passing old to me, and replies were but fresh fuel to keep it flickering. However, he had not yet done.
“I believe,” he continued, “you would sooner solve a knot in Aristotle than lead out the finest lady in Europe to dance a pavan with you.”
“That is true,” I replied. “I should be no less afraid of her than you of Aristotle.”
