Wastralls: A Novel by C. A. Dawson Scott (100 books to read .TXT) 📕

leaving him the vessel but leaving it irreparably damaged, like an old bucket through the holes of which the grass may grow.

Byron's eye rose to the gun suspended over the door. The feel of it would be comforting. It was his only possession. Sabina's money was nothing to him, let it go with the rest but the old gun...

It seemed to him far away. Between him and it rose, like an insuperable obstacle, the faces of the relatives. He saw in these faces always the eyes, the eyes that had witnessed his humiliation. Behind them were the brains that knew him now for what he was, a poor thing, futile, impotent. If he could but reach the old gun he would take it and he would go.

What an intolerable burden were the eyes!

Mrs. Tom, seeing Byron glance at the gun, hanging in its thongs over the lintel, misread his mind. She had been anxiously on the watch but by degrees had lost her fear that he was dangerous. To himself, perhaps, but no longer to others. Gray's marriage, presented as an accomplished fact, had done its work. No longer a wild desire, she was only a loss among others; but the sum total of these had been sufficient, Mrs. Tom thought, to bring home to the unhappy man his sin. Conscious of guilt, he might be driven to a further recklessness, might feel that, for such as he, was only the one way out. Knowledge is responsibility and Mrs. Tom was moved by her sense of justice to intervene. Byron should know the truth, that truth which she had kept even from Tom, which she had hidden in a fold of her mind, wrapping it up and putting it out of sight.

"Leadville," she said, leaning forward between her husband and his cousin and speaking without any premonition of the event she was precipitating, "rest yer 'eart content. She never drinked that cocoa that you meant for 'er to."

For a moment the burden of those intent eyes was lifted from Byron. The people turned towards Mrs. Tom. What was she saying? What lay between Byron and the woman whom only that afternoon they had committed to the earth? "I took 'er life," the man had said, flinging their curiosity a bone of fact. They were learning now that the bone had had meat on it.

"Never drinked it?" Byron did not evince any surprise at Mrs. Tom's knowledge, did not feel any. He was only conscious of his overwhelming need to escape—to escape from the eyes. His mind seized on this new fact, examining it with an anxious care. What was it to him? Would it show him the way out?

"No, 'twas that 'eavy supper. Doctor said so and it was. I saved the cocoa and 'tis out there in the jug."

On finding the drink untouched when tidying the room on the morning of Sabina's death, she had set it aside. Cocoa can be warmed up. Putting it on the linhay shelf she had not thought of it again until Leadville, walking in his sleep, had revealed the nature of the draught. Even then she had not thrown it away. It was evidence which might be needed. "'Tis out there still," and with a slight movement of the head she indicated the linhay. If she could convince Byron that he was not guilty of his wife's death, she might lessen for him his sense of overwhelming disaster, wring the black drop out of his remorse.

To the broken man only the irony of it came home and it came home so overwhelmingly that, in the bitterness of his spirit, he laughed. He had had a vision of Sabina hanging the sword of fate over his head, hanging it on the thread of her life, a thread which he, in a moment of amazing folly, had cut. But nothing of the sort had happened. Her dying was no tragedy of stealthy murder but the scrapping by nature of a worn-out organism. The memory of past emotion, of grizzly fears, of things tremendous and dire and sinister, passed before him—a procession of wraiths! They had had no foundation in fact, they had risen out of his mind, preposterous things, as preposterous as he. For what had he done? Nothing! Like a puppet, a creature of wire and paste-board, he had pranced and waved his arms. Never—not at the beginning, not during the long years of his servitude, not even when he had tried to burst his bonds, had he been anything but impotent. He had loved Wastralls—to no purpose! He had loved Gray and, while he dreamed, another had been at the wooing; even the crime he would have committed was fallen like a spent arrow at his feet. He had set out to prove himself the man of blood and iron who would force his way, through demon hosts and the flaming swords of heaven, to gain his ends; he who was destined to fight with shadows for a dream.

Sabina's death from heart-weakness after hard work and a heavy supper, was fate's last jest at his expense. Life had justified his wife's light estimate of his powers and he, who had believed himself able to control circumstance, had been proved harmless as a tame ranter in a booth. Futile, impotent! The tides of darkness were rising in the wide low room, were rising about the people, hiding all but the watching eyes. Leadville was conscious of coldness. A dark world and cold. Had he ever thought that he was young, that he was strong, that there was no man in Trevorrick who could 'put it across him'? That must have been long ago.

What a thing was this impotence! Like a brown shrivel in place of a nut-kernel it was rottenness but not dissolution. To live day after day through interminable time and see the spread of the black mould, to long for that last mercy of the mould! Life, the pricking life of kisses, the ecstasy of the first-born, the content of ripening, can become leprous, a thing to escape from at any cost. Damnation? Ay, a threat, the threat of ignorance. No hell that any future life may hold can equal what we know and, if the gate be open...

Isolda Rosevear had said, "I saved the cocoa, 'tis out there still," and, in the chambers of the man's distraught mind, the words echoed helpfully.

"Sabina left the cocoa a-purpose," he said and saw the way clear. "She left it——" For him too, as for all living creatures was hope, the hope of deliverance. In sudden haste, he turned and went out. Delay had been his curse but the need he was about to satisfy was so imperative that he did not stay even to complete his sentence.

On the linhay shelf, apart from other cloam, stood the brown high-girdled jug. Though the place was in darkness Byron's hand went out to it as unerringly as when he sought the blue phial in the wall cupboard: and, as he lifted it down, he heard with an eager thankfulness the sound of liquid swishing against the earthenware.

Sabina, knowing how much he could stand, had made ready for him a way of escape. "She left it for me," he said and, with a sob of relief, lifted the brown jug to his lips.