Читать книгу: «The Weird Sisters: A Romance. Volume 2 of 3», страница 3
With a radiant face and an elastic step he left the room, carrying a lighted candle in his hand.
He stalked back in a few minutes, holding the candle out at arm's length before him.
"The other key is at the other side of the door. The door is locked on the inner side, and my wife is there!"
CHAPTER XVI
THE PRESENT AS IT WAS
He put the candle on the dressing-table, and sat down in front of the glass. He placed one elbow on the table, bent his head low, and catching his hair, softly rested his head on the ball of his hand.
His brows were knit. His eyes, bent on the toilet-cover, were vacant, rayless; they carefully explored the pattern of the cloth. His mind was a blank. It showed nothing. It was as incapable of reflection as the waters of the middle sea battered by the winds beneath the tawny clouds. His reason was not with him, and the machinery of his mind had stopped. There were no ideas in his imagination. His mind floated free in unoccupied space.
For a while he sat thus. Then he raised his head and looked firmly into the glass.
"What has happened to me?" he thought, with his eyes fixed on the eyes in the glass. "A moment ago, when I discovered she still lived, I felt in despair; and now I am calm. What has happened to me?
"What has happened to me?
"Here is the situation:
"The servants think she went to that boat. She knew on such occasions I always took charge of whatever little luggage we required. They have not seen her since luncheon. They believe she was in the Rodwell. It is scarcely possible anyone can say she was not in the Rodwell; all the people and crew who were on the after-deck are dead. Any one who heard of my visit to Asherton's Quay, or met one of the servants, would regard me as a widower. I was a widower at Asherton's Quay. I was a widower while I drove up from Asherton's Quay to this. My servants assure me I am a widower.
"To-morrow all Daneford will regard me a widower.
"To-morrow morning Maud Midharst will think of me as a widower – Maud Midharst, who will one day own that chest, which, when opened, will be found to contain the bones of a thief and a suicide, not the fortune of a great heiress.
"To-morrow morning Maud Midharst will think of me as a widower; what will she think of me as – at night?"
Suddenly the fixed expression left his face. A thought that sent the blood tingling through his veins had rushed in upon him.
"Perhaps," he said, breathless, "I am a widower! She may be dead!"
He rose nimbly, and, taking up the candle, once more went into the passage leading to the first-floor room of the Tower of Silence.
He looked carefully round, and then going to the end of the passage further from the tower, closed the two doors and locked the inner one.
He proceeded cautiously back to the door leading into the tower. This was a single door. He held the candle in his left hand, knocked with his right, and bent his ear towards the door.
No reply.
He knocked again, this time more loudly.
Still no reply.
Holding the candle behind him, he bent low and looked into the keyhole.
Undoubtedly there was the end of the shaft of the key shining against his eye.
He paused a while in deep thought; then shaking himself up, knocked more loudly, battering with his clenched fist.
No answer.
He looked at the candle he carried. It was wax, and in his moving to and fro the wax had overflowed the flame-pan and run down the side, making a long thin ridge. He took a piece of pencil from his pocket, stripped off the ridge of wax, softened the wax at the flame, and stuck a lump the size of a pea on the end of the pencil.
Then he heated the free end of the wax, and when it had just begun to run thrust it cautiously into the keyhole, and pressed the wax against the shaft of the key in the lock. He held the pencil steadily thus for a few minutes. With great caution he tried it. All was well. The wax adhered firmly to the end of the pencil and the shaft of the key.
With elaborate care he twisted the pencil slightly one way, then the other. The key moved slowly in the lock. He tried it four or five times right and left, and holding the candle behind him and his eye on a level with the keyhole. At last the hole was completely blocked up by the body of the key. Forcing the pencil in firmly, the key slipped through the hole and fell on the floor within.
He straightened himself, leaned against the wall for a moment, and wiped his forehead. Then drawing his keys out of his pocket, he inserted one in the lock, turned the lock softly, and entered.
As he did so the head of a man disappeared below the window-sill. Grey did not see this head, nor did he at that time know of the man's presence.
The room was one of medium size, but it was dark in colour, and the one candle was almost lost in it, and revealed little or nothing.
Holding the light above his head Grey peered around.
He approached a couch, on which could be dimly seen the prostrate figure of a woman. The figure did not move as he drew near.
He stood over the couch and looked down upon his wife. She was lying on her back. Her mouth was slightly open, and her face very pale. Her eyes, too, were partly open.
He waved the candle across the eyes. No sign of consciousness. He called "Bee" softly two or three times. No answer.
Could it be she was really dead? Really dead after all?
He stooped down and put his ear over her mouth.
No, this was not death. This was – brandy.
He shook her slightly. He caught her by the shoulder and shook her more strongly, calling her name into her ear.
She responded by neither sound nor motion.
Then putting the candle down on the floor he stood up, folded his arms, and reflected intently with his eyes fixed on her.
Not death but brandy, and yet how like death, and how near death! How near death! And still in the interval between this and death lay his ruin, his destruction. A blanket thrown on that face would bridge over the interval between this state and death, and give him a golden road to happiness and glorious prosperity.
His wife! This his wife here, degraded thus! This woman whom he had loved with all the love he had ever given woman! This woman, whom he had married in defiance of his father's wish and all worldly wisdom! Great God, was this to be borne?
She had brought herself nigh death. She was nigh death now. It might be she would never awake. It was quite possible she might never awake. But then the hideous scandal! The coroner's jury found that Mrs. Grey, wife of Henry Walter Grey, Esq., died of excessive drink! Intolerable!
And yet this wretched woman lying here had made such a thing not only possible but probable. Suppose she should never wake, what an unendurable position for him! He could not live through that odious inquest, never survive that degrading verdict. He should throw himself into the Weeslade, or blow out his brains first.
Any time she might get into such a condition and never awake! Great God! this was a view of the case he had never taken until now. He had always had the dread of disclosure before his mind, but now he should have the infinitely more appalling horrors of a coroner's jury and a coroner's verdict. This was insupportable. Abominable!
Any time in the future she might die as she was now. Then no doubt he should be a widower, but a widower under what a terrible shadow! Suppose she should die now, and by any means it should come out that he had deliberately placed the brandy in her way, he had better leave Daneford at once. They would look on him as a murderer.
As a murderer!
They would know he had put a fatal temptation in his wife's path. The discovery was what he dreaded.
Suppose she never woke again – ah!
Suppose she never got up alive off that couch!
Never got up from where she lay!
That was a royal thought? Now to make all right, all secure. Now! What a royal thought! A thought worthy of the prince regnant of the Nether Depths.
He stooped, took up his candle, and crossed the room with rapid steps. He locked the door of the tower-room, and, having reached his own room, rang the bell.
James answered the bell.
"James," he said, "I cannot rest. I cannot believe this dreadful thing. I wish you and the other servants to search the house thoroughly from garret to cellars. Mind, a room is not to be omitted. When every room has been examined let me know. I have been in the tower."
James left, and for an hour the banker sat alone in his bedroom. At the end of the hour James came back with the report that every room had been examined and no trace found.
"We can do no more, James. I shall want no one to-night. You may all go to bed as soon as you like. Good-night."
Again he was alone. Alone for the night. Alone save for the proximity of his wife in the next room. Alone with his royal idea and the easy means of carrying it out.
He braced himself, and began walking up and down the room firmly.
Yes, this was a golden opportunity, which would have been utterly worthless but that in the mid-centre and at the right moment his great thought had burst in upon him.
It was most likely his wife would never wake. In fact, the chances were in favour of her not waking. It would be almost a miracle if ever she returned to consciousness.
Why should there ever be an inquest?
Supposing she had died in her sleep, it would have done no one any good to hold an inquest.
Then, if she did die in this sleep, what would Maud Midharst regard him as to-morrow night?
As a widower, of course.
And what should he regard himself as?
As a man doubly delivered from a wife who was the slave of an odious vice, and from ruin, disgrace, and suicide.
She was sleeping still, he supposed. He would go and try.
He stole cautiously out into the passage, and, opening the door into the tower-room, crept towards the couch. He did not carry a candle this time. He stumbled over something hard and metallic which he had seen when last in the room. He recovered himself rapidly. He paused, balanced himself on the balls of his feet, leaned forward, and listened intently.
The sound had not roused her.
It was as dark as a vault. A faint blue square, like the bloom under trees in summer, showed the situation of the one window. All the rest was as much out of view as if the solid earth intervened.
He crossed the room and approached the couch, with his head thrust forward, and all the faculties of his mind bent on his hearing; he stooped over the couch and listened, as though he would pierce remotest silence to reach what he sought.
Yes, there was a low, faint sound of breathing, but so low it seemed to come from a long distance.
He knelt down beside the couch, and called softly in her ear, "Bee."
No answer.
"Bee."
No answer.
"Bee."
No answer.
A long pause followed, during which no sound stirred in the intense darkness. The husband still leant over the wife, the wife still breathed faintly.
Then —
In ten minutes from that strange sound Grey was back in his bedroom, standing before the glass with set resolute lips and a rigid white face.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ASCENT OF THE TOWER OF SILENCE
"There need be no inquest," he thought. "There need be no inquest now. To-morrow morning every one in Daneford will believe that she is dead, and every one will be – right. Her name will be included in the list of the dead, there will be a reference to my broken-hearted behaviour at Asherton's Quay, and there will be expressions of sympathy with me.
"I shall wear mourning.
"What o'clock is it?" He looked at his watch. "Too soon yet. I must wait until all are asleep.
"I shall wear mourning and receive the condolences of my friends. I shall pass through avenues of faces cast in sorrow for my grief. They will hush their voice when I enter the Daneford Bank. They will unanimously vote resolutions of sympathy at most of the public bodies to which I belong. And I – I – how shall I receive their greetings?
"How shall I receive them? Shall I quail and tremble and jabber of to-night's work? Shall I become hysterical or gloomy? No, no, no. I shall be as bold at least as the thief whom they crucified on the Left Hand.
"The oath I took by that bedside this evening was my swearing into the army of the everlasting damned, and no one shall ever say I quailed or I faltered.
"What o'clock is it? Yet too soon. This is all I need be careful about. Once it is there, I shall be free and blithe – free and blithe!
"I shall meet them all and never show a sign. It is a pity I did not go on the stage. I feel quite confident I can play out this part to the end, and carry my audience with me so thoroughly that not one of them will know I am playing a part. No living man shall find out I do not speak my own words. It is only comrade Judas and his friends know who the real author of the play is."
He turned away from the glass and began pacing the room quickly. He was thinking with fierce pride of the brave front he should show to the world, and motion stimulated his mind and gave reality to his mental action.
Yes, he should never waver. In fact he felt stronger now than before. He had lived under the shadow of her fault; now he faced his own crime. All depended on himself, and he knew he was equal to the situation and its contingencies.
He could face them all. All the people of Daneford and Seacliff. Every one of —
He shivered, drew his body together, and leaned for a moment against the wall. The cold sweat oozed from his white forehead, and he gasped for breath. In a while he shook himself, threw up his arms, and wound them round his head, as if to protect himself against the blows of a merciless enemy, and moaned out, in a tone of craven misery:
"No, no! Not you? Go away! I cannot look at you; you must not come near me. I have ceased to be your son. I am not the child you suckled. I am not the son you taught to pray. I am not the man you inspired with respect and love. I am not the son you always tried to make do his duty. Mother, let me call you mother darling once again; to call you my angel, mother, seems to purge me of my crime. I am a strong man, mother, but I cannot look at you. Bee is dead, and I have killed her. Now, will you not fly from me? Think of your son as dead, and fly this murderer. What! you will not! You see the brand of Cain, and you will not go! Oh, invincible love! Intolerable devotion! Supreme disciple of Christ, you drive me mad. I am mad already. Go, woman; go, woman, or I may kill you too."
He dropped his arms from his head, and glared round the room with the fire of madness in his eyes. The neck-ribbon his wife had worn last night at dinner hung on the glass; a pair of her slippers, soft slippers for comfort, were under the dressing-table. His eyes lighted on the ribbon, then on the slippers.
With an idiotic laugh he staggered across the room, and, sitting down on the side of the bed, remained in a torpor for a long time. The last vision conjured up by him had stunned his imagination and baffled his intellect, and his mind, while he sat thus, was blank as the viewless wind.
It was a long time before he roused himself, and even then he had to employ considerable effort to bring himself up to the point of action. He knew he had yet something of the last importance to do. He looked at his watch.
"Eleven. All is quiet. I may safely go now."
He arose, and, taking the candle with him, walked heavily into the passage, and having opened the other door passed into the tower-room, and locked the door of that room, leaving his own key in the lock.
Remembering the second key, he lowered the candle and looked for it on the dark oak floor. He saw it and picked it up. As he did so his eyes caught another metallic glitter on the floor, and stepping towards it he took up something.
Holding the metallic object next the light, he seemed for a moment perplexed.
"What brings a burglar's jemmy here? How can it have come here?"
He looked very cautiously and slowly round the room.
"I did not notice until now," he thought, "those open drawers. Why, the place has been broken into."
His first impulse was to rush to the window. But he curbed that. It would be just as well not to be seen at that window now. Suppose by any chance the burglar happened to be lurking in the neighbourhood, in the Park. No part of the house or grounds commanded this room, and so long as he did not go near the window all would be well.
He had stumbled over that jemmy before – before he had added to the perfidy of Judas the sin of Cain.
He approached the couch. All was quiet there. Not a sound, not a breath.
He went still nearer. Now for the first time he noticed close by the couch an empty decanter, the one into which James had poured brandy, and by it a glass.
He noticed something else too; the left hand of the figure on the couch lay on the breast, and from the third finger all the rings were gone.
"All the rings gone!" he thought, in dismay. "The place broken into and all the rings gone! This room broken into and the rings taken off the finger! She never removed the wedding-ring, and scarcely ever the guard. She must have been asleep when he came in; and he, no doubt, seeing the decanter and the glass, and observing she took no notice of sounds, went about his work. A bold man, a very bold man."
When had that man been there? He had no means of determining the time at which the burglar had been in the room. It was clear, however, he had been there while she was alive.
Had he been there after the sailing of the steamboat Rodwell from Daneford that evening? If so, that burglar could hang him, Grey.
Out with the candle.
He extinguished it.
A profound quiet brooded abroad. Not a leaf stirred. The trees were as motionless and the air as mute as if the air was solid crystal. No sound from the city or the road intruded upon the voiceless darkness of that tower-room.
Grey stood a while looking at the square of dim blue bloom indicating where the window was. Then he stooped and touched what lay on the couch, and pulled himself upright with a jerk.
He stooped down his head once more, and listened intently. Last time he had so stooped he had heard a low faint breathing. Now nothing reached his ears, but beyond the reach of human ears he heard the deep roll of the Eternal Ocean on the shores of Everlasting Night.
The ocean of everlasting silence, where her voice had been, was more awful than the clangour of war, or the shouts of a burning town.
"It will not do to think now. I must make thought drunk with action. She is not heavy. I have often carri – No, no; that sort of thing would be the worst of all. Now for it!"
He stooped once again, rose more slowly than at any former time, and walked down the room with heavy footfall, carrying a burden.
The room had two doors – one between it and the passage leading to the bedroom; the other between it and the landing of the tower-stairs.
The staircase down from the landing was boarded off, so that egress from the tower-room by that staircase was impossible.
The upward way was unimpeded. The staircase had not been used once for years. There was nothing in either of the upper rooms, and no one had ever been in either of them since Grey himself, when he had gone over the house before buying it.
The staircase was as dark and silent as a grave. A thin carpet of dust deadened the footfalls, and, clinging to the boot-leather, muffled the feet. Now and then his foot crushed a small piece of plaster which had fallen from the ceiling. This made a sound like a wild beast crunching bones.
The paper had parted from the walls in many places, and hung in damp festoons from the ceiling here and there.
Now and then long slimy arms of paper stretched out to him from the walls and held him back. This made him stagger against the balustrade to steady himself. The balustrade upon which he laid his hand was rickety, and covered with a damp spongy dust, that clung to his hand and worked up between his moist fingers, and stuck his fingers together as with blood. When he had got clear of the paper that, hanging from the walls, had seized him, and had pushed himself away from the slimy balustrade, he toiled upward.
But the day had been a terribly exhausting one, and his progress was very slow.
He held his burden with his right arm on his right shoulder, and steadied himself against the wall with his right elbow, against the balustrade with his left hand.
Owing to the inviolate darkness and his small acquaintance with the way, he was obliged to feel carefully with his foot each step before advancing.
He gained the first landing. The darkness was so complete, it pressed with weight upon his eyeballs, and thickened the air in his lungs. He had already begun to breathe heavily, and he paused for breath. Only about a sixth of his upward way had been accomplished, and yet he felt fatigued. The stifling sultry air of the tower made him languid and drowsy.
The sooner this was done, the better.
He recommenced the ascent.
On reaching the next landing, that of the second-floor room, he paused again.
His breathing had by this time become more laboured, and he felt as if his chest would burst. No fresh air had entered that loathsome place for years. In winter the walls wept, the paper hung off, and fungus covered the walls and the woodwork.
In summer the walls dried up, and from the dead fungi rose the stifling vapours exhaled when decay feeds on decay. These odious vapours enriched the walls with new growing powers, and so the process went on. The tower rotted inwardly. Damp came first, and later mildew, and then fungus. The fungus lived its life and finally fell to pieces, yielding inodorous fibre and mephitic spirit. The spirit fed the later growth of fungus.
Here nitre clung in crystals to the walls, and there were incomplete stalagmites under the stone window-sills.
Huge spiders wove gigantic nets from balustrade to wall, from roof to wall, from window-sash to floor. But no flies ever came to these webs, and the spiders spread needless snares, and lived at ease on lesser game.
In summer all the dust upon the floor moved continually with worm and maggot of extraordinary size, and obscene ugliness of form and colour. Neither beetle nor cockroach, earwig nor cricket, found a home here. Nothing moved swiftly, not even the spider, for he found food without pursuit or strife. Here was no contention among individuals. As in all earliest forms of life, nearly everything was done for the individual by heat and moisture. The unseemly inside of that tower was fretting and rotting slowly away, being slowly devoured by the worm and the maggot and the fungus.
Through the warm vapours of that polluted tower the man staggered upward. His breathing had now become stertorous, and beat in the hollow staircase and against the sounding boards furnished by the empty rooms like the snorting of a hunted monster.
The air grew thicker in his lungs, and his heart tingled and throbbed as though it would burst. The arteries in his neck appeared at each beat of his pulse about to jump from their places. His gullet was dry, and the air rushing through his windpipe seemed burdened with sand that tore the skin of his parched throat. The arteries in his temple twanged against the bone with noises that made him giddy. The uproar of strangulation was in his head. His knees were sinking under him, and he felt he should faint or fall down in a fit if he did not do something.
He resolved to shift his burden from the right shoulder to the left.
How heavy! Ugh!
Cold already!
Oh, great God! the lips had touched his forehead, and they were cold! The lips he had a thousand times —
With a howl that made the hollow chambers and the invisible staircase shake, he clasped his burden to his left shoulder and dashed wildly up the stairs.
Now he ran against the wall in front, now against the balustrade. He took a step too many, and plunged headforemost against the wall. He took a step too few, and fell headlong upon a landing.
What was all that to him now? What was all that to him, who had loved her once, her whose cold lips – cold of his own chilling – had touched his forehead as he shifted his murdered darling from one shoulder to another?
Oh, God! the lips he had lingered on lovingly long ago! The lips he had sought with all his soul and won to his own exclusive use! How often had they told his name! How often had they told her love to him, when all else in the world sank into nothingness compared with the august privilege of knowing she loved him! How often when she slept had he heard those lips breathe his name with terms of endearment! And now, oh God!
On! On! There is a clamour of memories worse than demons at his back.
On! Out of this place! Away from these memories!
The roof at last!
The roof, with cool air and a wide view, and – This!
He placed his burden softly on the roof of the tower; then throwing himself down at full length, rolled over on his face, and, putting one forearm under the other, rested his forehead on the upper arm, and, excepting the heavy heaving of his chest, lay still.
