Complete works of a e w.., p.240
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 240
We sat for a while in silence — for the whistling of the storm was grown so loud, that we had need to shout, and even then the wind snatched up the words out of hearing almost before they had passed our lips.
In front of us the tempest roistered about the valley, twisting the sleet and snow this way and that, shrieking about the bases of the hills, whistling along the invisible ridges; now and again, however, there came a momentary lull, and during one of these intervals the clouds broke upon our left and disclosed the peak of Great Gable. Rising in that way, from the mists that still hid its flanks, the peak seemed so high that you thought it must be slung in mid-air; it stood out black against the grey clouds, barren, impregnable. Dorothy shuddered at the aspect of it.
“You were out upon those heights,” she shouted into my ear, “night and day, after you left Applegarth?”
“Yes!” I nodded. Doubtless I should have pointed out that I did not make my bed upon the pinnacles, and that there was all the difference in the world betwixt rain and snow. But, to tell the truth, her anxiety on my account was of that sweetness to me that I could not lightly bring myself to dispense with it. I was debating the matter in my mind, when a tile, loosened by the wind, slid from the roof of the church and smashed upon the ground, a couple of feet from Dorothy. It turned the current of my thoughts effectually. The door of the church I knew to be locked; I crept round to the east end of the building. There was a great window with the panes set in lead, which reached from the roof to within three feet of the ground. And in that window a second window was made by the lowest of these leaded panes. Inserting my knife, I was able to force up the latch which fastened this second window, and found that, with some squeezing and compression, a body might crawl through the opening. I went back to Dorothy. “It will be safer in the church,” said I. I climbed through the window by the side of the altar, and turned to help Dorothy in after me. But as I was in the act of helping her, I heard a clatter on the ground without. She was halfway through the window at the moment, and slipped back with a laugh.
“This time,” said she, as she appeared again, and set her hands upon the sill— “this time I did not drop it on purpose.” And I helped her in.
The church was barely furnished with perhaps a dozen of rough deal pews, and had not even a vestry, so that the parson’s surplice lay neatly folded upon a chair in the chancel. Into one of the pews we entered, and since Dorothy was warm within my coat, I took and wrapped the surplice about my shoulders. So we sat side by side, silent, in the gloom of the church, the whitewashed walls glimmering about us, the sleet whipping the windows and tearing at the door. Somehow the sound of the storm had now become very pleasant to me, since it seemed to shut us off, as upon an island, more securely from the world.
It is strange how a man may walk again and again along a quite familiar path with companions who have grown familiar in his thoughts, and then on some one day, in a twinkling, and for no reason that he can afterwards discern, let him think never so hard, the companions with whom he has fared will lose their familiarity, will become, as it were, transfigured, and the spot to which he has come will take on a magical aspect and a magical light He seems to have come thither for the first time on that day; and let him con over the landmarks to prove the fancy wrong, the fancy will none the less abide with him, solid as truth. He recognizes the spot as in some way intimately concerned with him; it seems to have been waiting for him, and for the conjunction of this one particular hour with him. And the picture which he has of it, thus suddenly revealed, becomes henceforth part and parcel of his being, imperishably treasured within the heart of recollection. So, at all events, it was with me.
A picture of this valley in which we were, of this church in which we sat, sprang up before my eyes, and I viewed it with a curious detachment. It was as though I stood upon the rim of the mountains and looked down into the hollow. I saw the desolate hills ringing it about, made yet more desolate by the blurring snow. I saw the little white church set within its stunted, beaten yews, apart in the mid-centre of the valley. It was, too, as though I saw, by some strange clairvoyancy, through the walls, and beheld the two fugitives securely sheltered, side by side, in the dusk of the pew. And the picture has remained clamped in my memory ever since, so that I have but to close my eyes, and not merely do I see it vividly as I did then, but I experience again that vague sense of a voice crying somewhere out of Nature’s heart, “This spot has been waiting for you twain, and for this one hour.”
It was a movement which Dorothy made, brought me to myself. For she suddenly clasped her hands together with a shudder.
“You are cold?” I cried.
“No,” she replied in a low voice. “I was thinking of that peak we saw and the horror of it by night,” and her voice trembled for an instant, “and of your watching from the darkness the lights of Applegarth. We were comfortably in our beds; and it rained that night I remember the patter of the rain against the windows.”
“Nay,” said I, “there was little harm done. I am no snow-man to be washed away by a capful of rain.”
She turned to me very quickly.
“Tell me,” she said, in a voice no less quick. “The evening that you went from us — you were talking for a long while at the gate with Mary Tyson, you will remember. I interrupted your talk.”
“Yes! I remember,” I answered, staring straight in front of me.
“Well,” she continued, “I have often wondered,” her voice sank yet lower, “whether that going of yours was not a flight — flight from — from us at Applegarth. For, after all, it was something Mary Tyson said to you that made you go.”
I turned towards her with a start.
“You know what Mary Tyson said?”
She looked at me in silence, her eyes shining out of the dusk. Then she lowered her head.
“I guessed it,” she said in a whisper. “I guessed it then, for I know Mary’s care for me. And the next morning when we sent her to warn you that the sheriff was at the door, I read it in her face. I mean,” said she, recovering herself hastily, “I read your departure in her face, and I knew it was what she had said to you had driven you out, and not your own necessities.”
She paused; I did not answer.
“The knowledge has troubled me sorely,” she said, “for you were our guest.”
“It made but the one night’s difference,” I urged, “for on the morrow came the officers.”
“Ah! but that was the accident,” she answered shrewdly. “They might not have come — they might never have come — and still you would have fled. I have said this much to you,” she went on with a change of tone, “because I would have you look on me just as a friend, who trusts you, who has great cause to trust and thank you, and who would count it a very real happiness if she could, in any small way, repay you. I told you when we met on your march that I knew there was some great trouble.”
“And the answer I gave to you then, I must give now. I am bound to face that trouble by myself. It was my sin brought it about.”
“Ah! but one never knows whence help may come,” she replied; and the gentle earnestness with which she spoke so tempted me to unbosom myself, that instinctively I drew away from her. “You think it is just a woman’s curiosity which prompts me,” she cried, mistaking my movement. “Ah! no. Acquit me of that fault! I am not sure, but it may be that I can help you.”
Did she know? I wondered. My thoughts went back to that last meeting near Penrith. I had spoken then of a prison-door which must close between us twain, and she had made an answer which seemed to hint a suspicion of the truth.
“And even if I cannot, the mere telling sometimes helps,” she continued, “so long as one tells it to a friend. I mean” — and here she began to speak very slowly, choosing her words, and with a certain difficulty in the utterance— “I mean I was afraid that something Mary might have said checks you. There are things one does not confide to an acquaintance, or, again, to one whom you think to look upon you as ever so much nearer than an acquaintance. But to a friend, yes! A friend is a halfway house between, where one can take one’s ease;” and she drew a breath, like one that has come to the end of a dangerous task.
As for me, I sat listening to that word “friend.” The walls seemed to retain it, and whisper it again to me after she had ceased, and in the changing tones which she had used. For now Dorothy had spoken it with an earnest insistence, as though anxious — almost over-anxious — I should just accept the phrase as the true definition of what she felt towards me; and now her voice had faltered and stumbled at the word. It may have been a lack of modesty — I cannot tell — but I think it would have been the falsest modesty in the world had I affected to neglect the manner of the speech, while considering the matter of it. But be it as it may, the one thought which rose in my mind, engrossing me, distinct, horrible in distinctness, was this: What if that word “friend” cloaked and concealed another — another which, but for those few weeks at Blackladies, I might — who knows! — perhaps have persuaded her to speak? Why then, if that was true, here was I implicating, in distress, the one woman who was chiefest in the front of my thoughts.
How that sin of mine reached out, making me a ban and a curse, bearing its evil fruit in unimaginable ways! And in the agony of my heart I cried —
“Would to God I had never come to Applegarth!”
The cry rang fierce and sharp through the little church. Silence succeeded it, and then —
“That is not very kind,” said Dorothy, with a tremulous reproach, “It pains me.”
“Ah! don’t mistake,” I went on. “For myself, I could not hope to make you understand what my visit there has meant to me. I came to Applegarth on an evening. The day I had passed waiting upon the hillside, and while I was waiting there, I made a resolve to repair, under God’s will, a great wrong. Well, when I first saw you, I had but one thought — a thought of very sincere gladness that I had come to that resolve or ever I had had speech with you. And during the weeks that followed, this resolve drew strength and vigour from your companionship. That vigour and that strength it keeps, so that my one fear now is, lest chance may bar me from the performance. That is your doing. For until I came to Applegarth, all my life behind me was littered with broken pledges.”
She laid her hand for an instant upon my sleeve.
“But what return have I made to you,” I continued, “except a pitiful hypocrisy? I came to Applegarth an outlaw — yes, my one fault my loyalty! So you believed; so I let you believe. I wore your brother’s clothes, and he died at Malplaquet. There was hypocrisy in the wearing of them!” And I turned suddenly towards her. “There was a picture I once saw — the picture of a dead man speaking. Even then it seemed to me an image of myself.”
“A dead man speaking!” interrupted Dorothy, with a start.
“Yes!” said I, and I told her of the picture which Lord Bolingbroke had shown to me at the monastery of the Chartreux in Paris, and of the thought which I had drawn from it.
“A dead man speaking,” she repeated, in a voice which seemed hushed with awe; “how strange!”
The storm had ceased to beat the window; the dusk was deepening to darkness; the silence was about us like a garment I sat wondering at Dorothy’s tone, wondering whether I should say what yet remained to say. But I had made use before of secrecy and deception. It would be best I should simply speak the truth.
“A dead man speaking,” again said Dorothy.
“I had warning enough, you see,” said I, “and I recognized the warning. The picture seized upon my thoughts. I knew it for an allegory, but made no profit of my knowledge. And so the allegory turns fact.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, catching her breath.
“Oh, don’t speak until I have done!” I cried “I find it hard enough to tell you as it is while you sit silent. But the sound of your voice cheats me of my strength, sets the duty beyond my reach. For it is a duty.” I paused for a moment to recover the mastery of my senses. “I spoke to you once of a prison-door which would close between you and me. But that was not the whole of the truth. That prison-door will close, but it will open again; I shall come out from it, but upon a hurdle.”
“Oh no!” cried Dorothy in such a voice of pain as I pray God I may never hear the like of again. I felt it rive my heart. She swayed forward; her forehead would have struck the rail of the pew in front. I put my arm around her shoulders and drew her towards me. I felt her face pressed against my bosom, her fingers twining tightly upon my coat.
“Yes, yes, it is true,” I went on. “The allegory turns fact. Even in Paris, those months agone, I came to look upon myself as the figure in the picture, as the dead man speaking, meaning thereby the hypocrite detected. But now the words take on a literal meaning. It is a dead man who is speaking to you — no more than that — in very truth a dead man. You must believe it; and believe this too, that since my cup of life this long while back has over-brimmed with shame, and since it was I who filled it why, I could go very lightly to my death, but for the fear lest it should cause my little friend to suffer pain.”
She disengaged herself gently from my clasp.
“I cannot take that fear away from you,” she said in a broken whisper.
“And indeed I would not lose it,” I replied. “In my heart of hearts I know that I would not lose it.”
“What is it, then, you mean to do?” she asked.
“To travel with my friend as far as Ravenglass, to set her safe on board the Swallow, and then — somewhere there is a man in prison whose place is mine.”
“You do not know where?” she exclaimed suddenly.
“No,” said I, “but — —”
She interrupted me with a cry.
“Look!” she said hurriedly, and pointed to a little window close beneath the roof. Through that window the moonlight was creeping like a finger down the wall, across the floor. “The storm has cleared; we can go.”
She rose abruptly from her seat, and moved out into the chancel Something — was it the hurry of her movement, the tension of her voice? — made me spring towards her. I remembered that, when I spoke to her on the hillside near Penrith, it had seemed to me then that she had some inkling of the truth.
“You know!” I exclaimed— “you know where the prisoner is?”
“No,” she cried, and her voice rose almost to a scream belying the word she spoke.
How she came by her knowledge I did not consider. She knew! I had no room for any other thought.
“Oh, you do know!” I implored, and dropping on my knee I seized the hem of her dress to detain her. I felt the dress drag from me; I held it the more firmly. “You do not know — oh, tell me! A man innocent of all wrongdoing, lies in prison — the charge, treason. Think you they will weigh his innocence after this rebellion? The fetters he wears are mine, his punishment is mine, and I must claim it. There’s no other way but this plain and simple one. I must needs claim it. Oh think, ever since I have known you, the necessity that I should do this thing has grown on me, day by day, as each day I saw you. I have felt that I owed it to you that I should succeed. Do not you prevent me!”
She stood stock still; I could hear the quick coming and going of her breath, but in the uncertain twilight I could not read her face; and she did not speak.
“Listen!” I continued “If you do not tell me, it will make no difference. I shall still give myself up. But to the other it may make all the difference in the world. For it may be that I shall fail to save him.”
Still she kept silence. So, seeing no other way, I stood up before her and told her the story from end to end, beginning with that day when I first rode over Coldbarrow Fell to Blackladies in company with Jervas Rookley, down to the morning when I fled from the garden where the soldiers searched for me.
I saw her head droop as she listened, and bow into her hands; yet I had to go on and finish it.
“But,” said she, “you were not all to blame. The woman — —”
“Nay,” said I, “it can serve no purpose to portion out the blame; for, portion it as you will, you cannot shred away my share.”
“Mr. Herbert,” she objected again, “would have been taken in your garden, whether you had returned or no that afternoon.”
“But my fault was the instrument used to ruin him. He was taken while he followed me. He was taken, too, because of me. For had I not ridden so often into Keswick, he would never have been suspected.”
“It was his jealousy that trapped him, and Jervas Rookley provoked the jealousy.”
“But I furnished him with the means.”
The arguments were all old and hackneyed to me. I had debated them before, so that I had the answers ready. There was, besides, one final argument, and without waiting for her to speak again, I used it.
“And what of the wife waiting in Keswick?”
She turned away with a little swift movement, and again stood silent Then she said —
“Yes! I too will face it bravely. Mr. Herbert lies in Carlisle Castle, waiting his trial. You know, after the message came to Applegarth, my father and I fled to Carlisle; we took refuge with friends — Whigs, but of my mother’s family, and for her sake they gave us shelter. They knew the Governor of the Castle. He told them of a prisoner newly brought thither upon a warrant — a Mr. Herbert, who solaced himself night and day with the painting of the strangest picture ever known. You showed to me a letter at Applegarth, wherein a painter was mentioned and named, and I knew you had some trouble to distress you. I grew curious to see the prisoner; no one suspected I was in Carlisle, and so my friends consented to take me. I saw him. It is true I had no speech with him, but I saw the picture. It was a portrait of yourself, I thought, but I could not be sure. I was sure before you told me. I was sure when you spoke to me of that picture you had seen in Paris. For this portrait, too, that Mr. Herbert painted, was a portrait of yourself, as a dead man speaking.”
