THE LIGHT GOES OUT
The light of Scarthey had not been shining for quite an hour over the
wilderness, when Lady Landale, suddenly breaking the chain of her
restless tramp, ran to the door and called for Moggie.
There was so shrill a tone of anguish in the summons that the young
woman rushed into the room in trembling expectancy: yet it was to find
her mistress alone and the place undisturbed.
"Moggie," said Lady Landale, panting and pressing her hands upon her
side as if in the endeavour to control the beating of her heart,
"something is going to happen; I know it, I feel it! Tell Captain
Smith that I must speak to him, here, at once."
Infected by the terror upon her mistress's face, Madame Lapotre flew
upon her errand; a moment later, Captain Jack entered the room and
stood before Lady Landale with a look of impatient inquiry.
"Oh, it is wicked, it is mad!" cried she passionately; "it is tempting
God to remain here!"
"Of whom are you speaking?" he asked, with an involuntary glance of
contempt at the distracted figure. "If it is of yourself, I entirely
concur. How often these last days, and how earnestly have I not begged
of you to return to Pulwick? Was not the situation you placed me in
with regard to Adrian already odious enough that it needed this added
folly? Oh, I know--I know what you would say: spare it me. My safety?
You fear for me? Ah, Lady Landale, that you could have but left me in
peace!"
He had waxed hot with anger from his first would-be calmness, as he
spoke. This dismal life of close but inharmonious proximity, started
upon the seas and continued under his absent friend's own roof had
tried his impetuous temper to the utmost. Upon the morrow of their
return he had, indeed, exercised all his powers of persuasion to
induce Lady Landale to proceed to the Priory; but, impelled by her
frantic dread of the separation, and entrenching herself behind the
argument that her mysterious re-appearance would awaken suspicion
where people would otherwise believe the _Peregrine_ still in foreign
parts, she had declared her irrevocable determination not to quit the
island until she knew him to be safe. And he had remained, actuated by
the dual desire, first to exonerate himself personally in her
husband's eyes from any possible suspicion of complicity in Molly's
flight--the bare thought of which had become a horrible torment to
him--then to encompass through that good friend's means an interview
and full explanation with Madeleine, which not only the most ordinary
precaution for his life, but likewise every instinct of pride forbade
him now to seek himself.
Thus began a state of affairs which, as the days succeeded each other
without news of Sir Adrian, became every moment more intolerable to
his loyalty. The inaction, the solitary hours of reflection; the
maddening feeling of unavailing proximity to his heart's dearest, of
impotency against the involving meshes of the present false and
hateful position; all this had brought into the young man's soul a
fever of anger, which, as fevers will, consumed him the more fiercely
because of his vigour and strength.
It was with undisguised hatred and with scorn immeasurable that he now
surveyed the woman who had degraded him in his own eyes. At another
time Molly might have yielded before his resentment, but at this hour
her whole being was encompassed by a single thought.
"It is for you--for you!" she repeated with ashen lips; "you must go
before it is too late."
"And is it not too late?" stormed he. "Too late, indeed, do I see my
treachery to Adrian, my more than brother! Upon my ship I could not
avoid your company, but here--Oh, I should have thought of him and not
of myself, and done as my honour bade me! You are right; since you
would not go, I should have done so. It was weak; it was mad; worse,
worse--dishonourable!"
But she had no ears for his reproaches, no power to feel the wounds
he dealt her woman's heart with such relentless hand.
"Then you will go," she cried. "Tell Rene, the signal."
He started and looked at her with a different expression.
"Have you heard anything; has anything happened?" he asked, recovering
self-restraint at the thought of danger.
"Not yet," she replied, "not yet, but it is coming."
Her look and voice were so charged with tragic force that for the
moment he was impressed, and, brave man though he was, felt a little
cold thrill run down his spine. She continued, in accents of the most
piercing misery:
"And it will have been through me--it will have been through me! Oh,
in mercy let me make the signal! Say you will go to-night."
"I will go."
There followed a little pause of breathless silence between them. Then
as, without speaking, he would have turned away, a loud, peremptory
knock resounded upon the door of the keep and echoed and re-echoed
with lugubrious reverberation through the old stone passages around
them.
At first, terror-stricken, her tongue clave to her palate, her feet
were rooted to the ground; then with a scream she flung herself upon
him and would have dragged him towards the door.
"They have come--hide--hide!"
He threw up his head to listen, while he strove to disengage himself.
The blood had leaped to his cheek, and fire to his eye. "And if it be
Adrian?" he cried.
Another knock thundered through the still air.
"It is but one man," cried Rene from his tower down the stairs. "You
may open, Moggie."
"No--no," screamed Molly beside herself, and tighter clasped her arms
round Captain Jack's neck.
"Adrian, it is Adrian!" said he. "Hush, Madam, let me go! Would you
make the breach between me and my friend irreparable?"
Both his hands were on her wrists in the vain endeavour to disengage
himself from her frenzied grip; the door was flung open and Rupert
Landale stood in the opening, and looked in upon them.
"Damnation!" muttered Jack between his teeth and flung her from him,
stamping his foot.
Rupert gazed from one to the other; from the woman, who, haggard and
dishevelled, now turned like a fury upon him, to the sailor's fierce
erect figure. Then he closed the door with an air of grave
deliberation.
"What do you want?" demanded Molly--"you have come here for no good
purpose. What do you want?"
As she spoke she strove to place herself between the two men.
"I came, my dear sister-in-law," said Rupert in his coldest, most
incisive voice, "to learn why, since you have come back from your
little trip, you choose to remain in the ruins rather than return to
your own house and family. The reason is clear to see now. My poor
brother!"
The revulsion of disappointment had added to the wrath which the very
sight of Rupert Landale aroused in Jack Smith's blood; this
insinuation was the culminating injury. He took a step forward.
"Have a care, sir," he exclaimed, "how you outrage in my presence the
wife of my best friend! Have a care--I am not in such a hurry to leave
you as when last we met!"
Mr. Landale raised his eyebrows, and again sent a look from Molly back
to the sailor, the insolence of which lashed beyond all control the
devils in the sailor's soul.
"We have an account to settle, it seems to me, Mr. Landale," said he,
taking another step forward and slightly stooping his head to look the
other in the eye. Crimson fury was in his own. "I doubt much whether
it was quite wise of you, assuming that you expected to find me here,
to have come without that pistolling retinue with which you provided
yourself last time."
Rupert smiled and crossed his arms. Cowardice was no part of his
character. He had come in advance of his blood-hounds, in part to
assure himself of the correctness of his surmises, but also to feast
upon the discomfiture of this man and this woman whom he hated. To
have found them together, and thus, had been an unforeseen and
delicious addition to his dish of vengeance, and he would linger over
it while he could.
"Well, Captain Smith, and about this account? Lady Landale, I beg of
you, be silent. You have brought sufficient disgrace upon our name as
it is. Nay, sir," raising his voice, "it is useless to shake your head
at me in this furious style; nothing can alter facts. _I saw._ Who has
an account to demand then--you, whose life is already forfeit for an
accumulation of crimes; you, screened by a conspiracy of bribed
servants and ... your best friend's wife, as you dare call your
paramour; or I, in my brother's absence the natural guardian of his
family, of his honour? But I am too late. One sister I saved from the
ignominy you would have brought upon her. The other I could not save."
With a roar Jack Smith would have sprung at the speaker; but, once
more, his friend's wife rushed between.
"Let him speak," she cried, "what matter what he says? But
you--remember your promise. I will make the signal."
The signal! The mask of Rupert's face, sternly and sadly rebuking, was
not proof against the exquisite aptness of this proposal. His men
outside were waiting for the signal, surrounding the island from land
and seaward, (for the prey was not to be allowed to escape them
again); but how to make it without creating suspicion had not yet
suggested itself to his fertile brain. Now, while he held her lover in
play, Molly would herself deliver him to justice. Excellent,
excellent! Truly life held some delightful jokes for the man of
humour!
The light of triumph came and went upon his countenance like a flash,
but when the life hangs upon the decision of a moment the wits become
abnormally sharp. Jack Smith saw it, halted upon his second headlong
onslaught, and turned round.--Too late: Molly was gone. He brought his
gaze back upon his enemy and saw he had been trapped.
Their gleams met like duelling blades, divining each other's purpose
with the rapidity of thrust answering thrust. Both made a leap for the
door. But Rupert was nearest; he first had his hand on the key and
turned it, and, with newly-born genius of fight, suddenly begotten of
his hatred, quickly stooped, eluded the advancing grasp, was free for
one second, and sent the key crashing through the window into the
darkness of the night.
Baffled by the astounding swiftness of the act, the sailor, wheeling
round, had already raised his fist to crush his feebler foe, when, in
the midst of his fury, a glimmer of the all-importance of every second
of time stayed his hand. He threw himself upon the heavy ladder that
rested against Sir Adrian's rows of books, and, clasping it by the
middle, swung it above his head. The battering blow would, no doubt,
have burst panel, lock, and hinges the next instant, but again Rupert
forestalled him, and charged him before the door could be reached.
Overbalanced by the weight he held aloft, Captain Jack was hurled down
headlong beneath the ladder, and lay for a moment stunned by the
violence of the fall.
When the clouds cleared away it was to let him see Rupert's face
bending over him, his pale lips wreathed into a smile of malignant
exultation.
"Caught!" said Mr. Landale, slowly, pausing over each word as though
to prolong the savour of it in his mouth, "caught this time! And it is
your mistress's hand that puts the noose round your neck. That is what
I call poetical justice."
The prostrate man, collecting his scattered wits and his vast
strength, made a violent effort to spring to his feet. But Rupert's
whole weight was upon him, his long thin fingers were gripping him by
each shoulder, his face grinned at him, close, detested, infuriating.
The grasp that held him seemed to belong to no flesh and blood, it was
as the grasp of skeleton hands, the grinning face became like a
death's head.
"I shall come to your hanging, Captain Jack Smith, or rather, Mr.
Hubert Cochrane of the Shaws."
These were the last words of Rupert Landale. A red whirl passed
through the sailor's brain, his hands fell like lashes round the
other's neck and drew it down. _If Hubert Cochrane dies so does Rupert
Landale: that throat shall never give sound to that name again._
Over and over they roll like savage beasts, but yet in deathly
silence. For the pressure of the fingers on his gullet, fingers that
seem to gain fresh strength every moment and pierce into his very
flesh, will not allow even a sigh to pass Rupert's lips, and Jack can
spare no atom of his energy from the fury of fight: not one to spare
even for the hearing of the frantic knocks at the door, the calls,
the hammering at the lock, the desperate efforts without to prise it
open.
_But if Rupert Landale must die so shall Hubert Cochrane, and by the
hangman's hand, treble doomed by this._ The same thought fills both
these men's heads; the devil of murder has possession of both their
souls. But, true to himself to the last, it is with Rupert a
calculating devil. The officers must soon be here: he will hold the
scoundrel yet with the grasp of death, and his enemy shall be found
red-handed--red-handed!
His hatred, his determination of vengeance, the very agony of the
unequal struggle for life gave him a power that is almost a match for
the young athlete in his frenzy.
The dying efforts of his victim tax Jack's strength more than the
living fight; but his hands are still locked in their fatal clutch
when at last, with one fearful and spasmodic jerk, Rupert Landale
falls motionless. Then exhaustion enwraps the conqueror also, like a
mantle. He, too, lies motionless with his cheek on the floor, face to
face with the corpse, dimly conscious of the voluptuousness of
victory. But the dead grasp still holds him by the wrists, and it
grows cold now, and rigid upon them. It is as if they were fettered
with iron.
* * * * *
Lady Landale's dread of her once despised kinsman, now that she knew
what a powerful weapon he held in his hands, this night, was almost
fantastic.
As she darted from the room, she fell against Rene, who, with a white
face and bent ear, stood at the door, eavesdropping, ready to rush to
the help of Sir Adrian's friend upon the first hint of necessity. But
he had heard more than he bargained for.
The scared, well-nigh agonised look of inquiry with which he turned to
his mistress was lost upon her. In her whirlwind exit, she seized upon
him and dragged him with her to the ladder that led to the tower.
"Quick, Rene, the signal!"
And with the birdlike swiftness of a dream flight she was up the steps
before him.
Panting in her wake, ran the sturdy fellow, his brain seething in a
chaos of conflicting thought. Mr. the Captain must be helped, must be
saved: this one thing was clear at any rate. His honour would wish it
so--no matter what had happened. Yes, he would obey My Lady and make
the signal. But, what if Mr. Landale were right? Not indeed in his
accusation of Mr. the Captain, Rene knew, Rene had seen enough to
trust him: he was no false friend; but as regarded My Lady? Alas! My
Lady had indeed been strange in her manner these days; and even
Moggie, as he minded him now, even Moggie had noticed, had hinted, and
he had not understood.
The man's fingers fumbled over the catch of the great lantern, he
shook as if he had the palsy. Goodness divine, if his master were to
come home to this!
Impatiently Lady Landale pushed him upon one side. What ailed the
fellow, when every second was crucial, life or death bringing?
Medusa-like for one second her face hung, white-illumined, set into
terrible fixity, above the great flame, the next instant all was
blackness to their dazzled eyes. The light of Scarthey was out!
She groped for Rene; her hot fingers burnt upon his cold rough hand
for a second.
"I will go down to the sands," she said, whispering as if she feared,
even here, the keenness of Rupert's ear, "and you--hurry to him, stop
with him, defend him, your master's friend!"
She flitted from him like a shadow, the ladder creaked faintly beneath
her light footfall, and then louder beneath his weighty tread.
His master's friend!
Ay, he would stand by him, for his master's sake and for his own sake
too--the good gentleman!--And they would get him safe out of the way
before his honour's return.
* * * * *
Out upon the beach ran Molly.
It was a mild still night; through veils of light mist the moon shone
with a tranquil bride-like grace upon the heaving palpitating waters
and the mystery of the silent land.
A very night for lovers, it seemed; for sweet meetings and sweeter
partings; a night that mocked with its great passionless calm at the
wild anguish of this woman's impatience. Yet a night upon which sound
travelled far. She bent her ear--was there nothing to hear yet,
nothing but the lap of the restless waters? Were those men false?
She rushed to and fro, from one point to another along the sands in a
delirium of impotent desire.
Oh, hurry, hurry, hurry!
And as she turned again, there, upon the waters out in the offing,
glimmered a light, curtseying with the swell of the waves; the sails
of a ship caught the moonbeams. She could see the vessel plainly and
that it was bearing full for the island. Alas! This might scarcely be
the little Shearman boat manned by two fishermen only; even she,
unversed in sea knowledge could tell that. It was as large as the
_Peregrine_ itself--certainly as large as the cutter.
The _cutter_!
She caught her breath, and clapped her hands to her lips to choke down
the wild scream of fear that rose to them.
At the same instant, a dull thud of oars, a subdued murmur of a deep
voice rose from the other side of the island.
They were coming, coming from the landward, these rescuers of her
beloved. And yonder, with swelling canvas, came the hell ship from out
the open sea, sent by Rupert's infernal malice and cleverness, to make
their help of no avail; to seize him, in the very act of flight.
She ran in the direction of the sound, and with all her strength
called upon the new-comers to speed.
"Here--here, for God's sake! Hasten or it will be too late!"
Her voice seemed to her, in the midst of the endless space, weak as a
child's; but it was heard.
"Coming!" answered a gruff shout from afar. And the oar beat came
closer, and fell with swifter rhythm. Stumbling, catching in her
skirts, careless of pool or stone beneath her little slippered feet,
Lady Landale came flying round the ruins: a couple of boats crashed in
upon the shingle, and the whole night seemed suddenly to become alive
with dark figures--men in uniform, with gleams upon them of brass
badges and shining belts, and in their hands the gleam of arms.
For the moment she could not move. It was as if her knees were giving
way, and she must fall.
None of them saw her in the shadow; but as they passed, she heard them
talking to each other about the signal, the signal which they had been
told to look for, which had been brought to them ... the signal _she_
had made. Then with a wave of rage, the power of life returned to her.
This was Rupert's work! But all was not lost yet. The other boat was
coming, the other boat must be the rescue after all; the Shearman's
boat, or--who knows?--if there was mercy in Heaven, the _Peregrine_,
whose crew might have heard of their captain's risk.
Back she raced to the seaward beach, hurling--unknowing that she spoke
at all--invectives upon her husband's brother.
"Serpent, blood-hound, devil, devil, you shall not have him!"
As she reached the landing-place, breathless, a boat was landing in
very truth. Even as she came up a tall figure jumped out upon the
sand, and crunched towards her with great strides.
She made a leap forward, halted, and cried out shrilly:
"Adrian!"
"Molly--wife! Thank God!" His arms were stretched out to her, but he
saw her waver and shudder from him, and wring her hands. "My God, what
has happened? The light out, too! What is it?"
She fastened on him with a sudden fierceness, the spring of a wild
cat.
"Come," she said, drawing him towards the peel, "if you would save
him, lose not a second."
He hesitated a moment, still; she tugged at him like one demented,
panting her abjurations at him, though her voice was failing her.
Then, without a word, he fell to running with her towards the keep,
supporting her as they went.
The great door had swung back on its hinges, and the men were
pressing, in a dark body, into the dim-lit recesses, when Sir Adrian
and his wife reached the entrance.
The sight of the uniforms only confirmed the homecomer in his own
forebodings anent the first act of the drama that was being enacted
upon his peaceful island. He needed no further pushing from the
frantic woman at his side. Lost in bringing her back, perhaps, his
only friend! Lost by his loyalty and his true friendship!
They dashed up the stone stairs just as the locked door of the
living-room burst with a crash, under the efforts of many stalwart
shoulders; they saw the men crush forwards, and fall back, and herd on
again, with a hoarse murmur that leaped from mouth to mouth.
And Rene came running out from the throng with the face of one that
has seen Death. And he caught his mistress by the arm, and held her by
main force against the wall. He showed no surprise at the sight of his
master--there are moments in life that are beyond surprise--but cried
wildly:
"She must not see!"
She fought like a tigress against the faithful arms, but still they
held her, and Sir Adrian went in alone.
A couple of men were dragging Captain Jack to his feet, forcing his
hands from the dead man's throat; it seemed as if they had grown as
rigid and paralysed in their clasp like the corpse hands that had now,
likewise, to be wrenched from their clutch of him.
He glanced around, as though dazed, then down at the disfigured purple
face of his dead enemy, smiled and held out his hands stiffly for the
gyves that were snapped upon them.
And then one of the fellows, with some instinctive feeling of decency,
flung a coat over the slain man, and Captain Jack threw up his head
and met Adrian's horror-stricken, sorrowful eyes.
At the unexpected sight he grew scarlet; he waved his fettered hands
at him as they hustled him forth.
"I have killed your brother, Adrian," he called out in a loud voice,
"but I brought back your wife!"
Some of the men were speaking to Sir Adrian, but drew back
respectfully before the spectacle of his wordless agony.
But, as Molly, with a shriek, would have flung herself after the
prisoner, her husband awoke to action, and, pushing Rene aside, caught
her round the waist with an unyielding grip: his eyes sought her face.
And, as the light fell on it, he understood. Aye, she had been brought
back to him. But how?
And Rene, watching his master's countenance, suddenly burst out
blubbering, like a child.