When Vashti Bath was "led out" by the two most eligible young men in the
village, the other women spoke their minds pretty freely on the subject;
and when she progressed to that further stage known as "arm-a-crook,"
and still refrained from making the fateful choice, comment waxed
bitter. The privilege of proposal belongs in Cornwall to that sex
commonly called "the weaker"--a girl goes through the various stages of
courtship conducted out of doors, and if she decides to marry the young
man, asks him to "step in" one evening when he has seen her home, after
which the engagement is announced. Vashti, in the most brazen way, was
sampling two suitors at a time, and those two the most coveted men in
Perran-an-zenna, and therein lay the sting for the women-folk.
"What is there to her, I should like to knaw?" the lay-reader's wife
demanded of her friends at a somewhat informal prayer meeting. "She'm an
ontidy kind o' maid who don't knaw one end of needle from t'other. When
her stockin' heels go into holes she just pulls them further under her
foot, till sometimes she do have to garter half way down her leg!"
"She'm ontidy sure 'nough," agreed a widow woman of years and
experience, "but she'm a rare piece o' red and white, and menfolk are
feeble vessels. If a maid's a fine armful they never think on whether
she won't be a fine handful. And Vashti do have a way wi' her."
That was the whole secret--Vashti had a way with her. She was a splendid
slattern--showing the ancient Celtic strain in her coarse, abundant
black hair, level brows, and narrow, green-blue eyes, with a trace of
Jew in the hawk-like line of nose and the prominent chin curved a little
upwards from her throat. A few years, and she would be lean and haggard,
but now she was a fine, buoyant creature, swift and tumultuous, with a
mouth like a flower. For all the slovenliness of her clothes she had a
trick of putting them on which an Englishwoman never has as a
birthright, and rarely achieves. Vashti could tie a ribbon so that every
man she passed turned to look after her.
Perran-an-zenna is a mining village, and some of the menfolk work in the
tin mines close at hand, and some in the big silver mine four miles
away. James Glasson, the elder and harsher-featured of Vashti's lovers,
worked in the latter, and there was every prospect of his becoming a
captain, as he had a passion for mechanics and for chemistry, and was
supposed to be experimenting with a new process that would cheapen the
cost of extracting the silver. Willie Strick, the younger, handsomer,
more happy-go-lucky of the two men, went to "bal" in the tin mines, and
was disinclined to save, but then his aged grandmother, with whom he
lived, had been busy saving for twenty years. Strick was an eager lover,
quick to jealousy--Glasson was uncommunicative even to Vashti, and
careless of her opinions. Though the jealousy irked her it flattered her
too, but on the other hand, Glasson's carelessness, even while it piqued
her, made her covet him all the more.
This was how matters stood one evening in late March when Vashti had
gone up to the moors to fetch in the cows--not her own, no Bath had been
thrifty enough for that, but belonging to the farm where she worked. As
she walked along in the glowing light, the white road winking up at her
through a hole in her swinging skirt, and a heavy coil of hair jerking a
little lower on the nape of her neck with each vigorous stride, Vashti
faced the fact that matters could continue as they were no longer. At
bottom Vashti was as hard as granite, she meant to have what she wanted;
her only trouble was she had not quite settled what it was she did want.
Like all her race, she had a strain of fatalism in her, that prompted
her to choose whichever of the two men she should next chance to
meet--and the woman in her suggested that at least such a declaration on
the part of fate would give her the necessary impetus towards deciding
upon the other.
Lifting her eyes from the regular, pendulum-like swing of her skirt that
had almost mesmerized her lulled vision, she saw, dark against the
sunset, the figure of a man. She knew it to be either James or Willie
because of the peculiar square set of the shoulders and the small
head--for the two men were, like most people in that intermarrying
district, cousins, with a superficial trick of likeness, and an almost
exact similarity of voice. A prescience of impending fate weighed on
Vashti; the gaunt shaft of the disused Wheal Zenna mine, that stood up
between her and the approaching man, seemed like a menacing finger. The
man reached it first and stood leaning up against it, one foot on the
rubble of granite that was scattered around, his arm, with the miner's
bag slung over it, resting across his raised knee. Vashti half thought
of going back, even without the cows, but it was already time the poor
beasts were milked, and curiosity lured her on. She went across the
circle of greener grass surrounding the shaft, and found Glasson
awaiting her.
To every woman comes a time in life when she is ripe for the decisive
man; and it is often a barren hour when he fails to appear. For Vashti
the hour and the man had come together, and she knew it as she met
Glasson's look. Putting out his hands, ingrained with earth in the
finest seams of them, he laid them heavily on her shoulders, like a
yoke. His bag swung forward and hit her on the chest, but neither of
them noticed it.
"Vashti, you'm got to make'n end," he said. "One way or t'other. Which
es et to be?"
She shook under his gaze, her lids drooped, but she tried to pout out
her full underlip with a pretence of petulance. Suddenly his grip
tightened.
"So 'ee won't tell me? Then by God, I'll do the tellin'! You'm my woman,
do'ee hear? Mine, and neither Will Strick nor any other chap shall come
between us two."
Wheeling her round, he held her against the rough side of the shaft and
bent his face to hers; she felt his lips crush on her own till she could
have cried out with pain if she had been able to draw breath. When he
let her go her breast heaved, and she stood with lowered head holding
her hand across her mouth.
"Now we'll get the cows, my lass," said Glasson quietly, "and take'n
home, and then you shall ask me to step in."
* * * * *
During the short, fierce courtship that followed Vashti saw very little
of Willie Strick, though she heard he talked much of emigrating, vowing
he would disappear in the night and not come home until he had made a
fortune. All of Vashti's nature was in abeyance save for one emotion--a
stunned, yet pleasurable, submission. It was not until several months
after her marriage that she began to feel again the more ordinary and
yet more complex sensations of everyday life. If she had to the full a
primitive woman's joy in being possessed, she had also the instinctive
need for possessing her man utterly, and James Glasson was only partly
hers. It was borne in on her that by far the larger side of him was his
own, never to be given to any woman. Ambition and an uncanny
secretiveness made up the real man; he had set himself to winning his
wife chiefly because the want of her distracted him from his work and
fretted him.
He bent the whole of life to his purposes, without any parade of power,
but with a laborious care that gradually settled on Vashti like a
blight. When she realized that no matter how rightly she wore her little
bits of finery, he no longer noticed them, realized that she was merely
a necessity to him as his woman--something to be there when she was
wanted, she began to harden. He still had a fascination for her when he
chose to exert it--his very carelessness and sureness of her were what
made the fascination, but gradually it wore thinner and slacker, and a
sullen resentment began to burn through her seeming submission.
The Glasson's cottage was tucked away in a hollow of the moor, only the
chimney of it visible from Perran-an-zenna, and Vashti began to chafe
under the isolation, and to regret she had never been at more pains to
make friends among her own sex.
As summer drew to its full, Vashti watched the splendid pageant of it in
the sky and moor with unappreciative eyes. If anyone had told her that
her soul had been formed by the country of her birth and upbringing, she
would have thought it sheer lunacy, but her parents were not more
responsible for Vashti than the land itself. The hardness and bleakness,
the inexpressible charm of it, the soft, indolent airs, scented with
flowers, or pungent with salt; above all, that reticence that makes for
lonely thoughts, these things had, generation by generation, moulded her
forbears, and their influence was in her blood. Even the indifference
with which she saw arose from her oneness with her own country, and in
this she was like all true Cornish folk before and since--they belong to
Cornwall body and soul. The quality of reticence had become
secretiveness in James Glasson--he took a childish pleasure in keeping
any little happening from the world in general and Vashti in particular,
and the consequence was that, in her, strength was hardening into
relentlessness.
One market day she was returning from Penzance--a drive of some eight
miles, accomplished in the cart of their nearest neighbour--with a paper
parcel on her knee, which she kept on fingering under the rug as though
to make sure it was still there. At the neighbour's farm she got out,
thanked him, and started to walk the remaining mile over the moor, with
the precious parcel laid carefully on the top of the basket of household
goods. It had been one of those days when the air seems to have a misty
quality that makes it almost visible--a delicate effulgence that
envelops every object far and near, blurring harsh outlines and giving
an effect as though trees and plants stood up into an element too subtle
for water and too insistent for ether. The cloud shadows gave a
plum-like bloom to the miles of interfolding hills, and inset among the
grey-green of the moor the patches of young bracken showed vivid as
slabs of emerald. Lightly as balls of thistledown the larks hopped
swiftly over the heather on their thin legs, the self-heal and
bird's-foot trefoil made a carpet of purple and yellow; from the
heavy-scented gorse came the staccato notes of the crickets, while in a
distant copse a cuckoo called faintly on her changed, June note. As
Vashti rounded the corner of the rutted track and the cottage came into
view, she paused. The deeply sloping slate roof was iridescent as a
pigeon's breast, and the whitewashed walls were burnished with gold by
the late sunlight, while against the faded peacock blue of the fence the
evening primroses seemed luminous. Even to Vashti it all looked
different, transmuted. Her fingers pressed the shiny paper of the parcel
till it crackled and a smile tugged at her lips. After all, it was not
bad to be young and handsome on an evening in June, to be returning to a
home of her own, with, under her arm, a parcel that, to her, was an
event. Vashti had bought that thing dear to the heart of the
country-woman, a length of rich black dress silk; she meant to make it
up herself, and though her stitches were clumsy, she knew she could cut
and drape a gown better than many a conscientious sempstress. And
then--then she would take her place as wife to the most discussed man in
all that part of Penwith and hold up her head at Meeting. Even James
himself could not but treat her differently when she had black silk on
her back.
She went through to the outhouse, which James used as a workshop, and
tried the door. It was locked. "James!" she cried, rattling the latch,
"James!"
She heard him swear softly, then came the sound of something hastily put
down and a cupboard door being shut. Then Glasson opened the door a few
inches, and stood looking down at her.
"Get into kitchen," he said briefly, "can't 'ee see I'm busy?"
Already Vashti's pleasure in her purchase was beginning to fade, but she
stood her ground, though wrathfully.
"You needn' think you'm the only person with secrets," she flashed: "I'd
a fine thing to show 'ee here, if you'd a mind to see it--now I shall
keep'n to myself."
"Woman's gear!" gibed Glasson, "you'm been buying foolishness over to
market. Get the supper or I shan't have time for a bite before I go to
see t' captain."
"That's all you think on," she retorted; "you and your own business."
"That's all you should think on, either," he said, pulling her towards
him with a hand on the back of her neck, and kissing her on her
unresponsive mouth. She stood sullenly; then, when he dropped his hand,
went into the house. She heard him turn the key in the lock as she went.
That night she cried hot tears of anger on to the new dress length, and
next day she went across the moor and met Willie Strick on his way home
to Perran-an-zenna.
That was the first of many meetings, for Willie's resentment faded away
before the old charm of Vashti's presence. In spite of his handsome
face, he was oddly like James. The backs of their heads were similar
enough to give Vashti a little shock whenever she passed behind her
husband as he sat at table, or each time that Willie lay beside her on
the moor, his head on her lap. She would pull the curly rings of his
hair out over her fingers, and even while she admired the glint of it,
some little memory of a time when James' hair had glinted in the sun or
candlelight, pricked at her--not with any feeling for him except
resentment, but at first it rather spoiled her lover for her. They had
to meet by stealth, but that was easy enough, as James was now on an
afternoon core, and Willie on a morning one. To do the latter justice,
he had tried, at the beginning, a feeble resistance to the allure that
Vashti had for him, not from any scruple of conscience, but because his
pleasure-loving nature shrank from anything that might lead to
unpleasantness. And, careless as he seemed of his wife, James Glasson
would be an ugly man to deal with if he discovered the truth. So far
there had been nothing except the love-making of a limited though
expressive vocabulary, and Vashti curbed him and herself for three
whole weeks. She was set on possessing Willie's very soul--here, at
least, was a man whom she could so work upon that he would always be
hers even to the most reluctant outpost of his being. By the end of
those weeks, her elusiveness, the hint of passion in her, and the steady
force of her will, had enslaved Strick hopelessly: he was maddened,
reckless, and timid all at once.
"Vashti, it's got to end," he said desperately, as he walked with her
one evening as near to the cottage as he dared, and as he spoke he slid
an arm round her waist. To his surprise, she yielded and swayed towards
him so that her shoulder touched his; in the sunset light her upturned
face glimmered warm and bewilderingly full of colour.
"Wait a bit, lad," she breathed. "James goes up to London church town
to-morrow to see one of the managers--happen he'll be gone a week or
more. . . ."
He felt her soft mouth on his cheek for a moment and his arms went round
her--the next moment came a crash that seemed to split the sky, and from
the outhouse leapt a whistling column of flame.
Stricken with a superstitious terror, Willie screamed--loudly and
thinly, like a woman. Vashti recoiled, flung up her hands, then rushed
towards the burning outhouse.
"James is in there!" she cried. "Oh, get'en out, get'en out!"
The flame had been caused by an explosion, but there was not much
inflammatory stuff for it to feed on, and a thick smoke, reeking of
chemicals, hung above the outhouse. As Vashti, followed by the shaking
Strick, reached the door, it swung open and a Thing stood swaying a
moment on the step.
It seemed to the lovers' first horrified glimpse that all of Glasson's
face had been blown away. The whole of one side of it was covered by an
enormous blister, a nightmare thing, which, as the woman gazed at it,
burst and fell into blackness. The same moment Glasson dropped his
length across the threshold.
"The doctor, go for doctor," whispered Vashti with dry lips, "as quick
as you can--I--I dursn't turn 'en over."
So Glasson lay with what had been his face against a patch of grass,
while Willie ran, horror-ridden, to Perran-an-zenna for the doctor.
Dry-eyed, Vashti watched by her husband for three nights, and all
praised her wifely devotion. She sat by the gleam of a flickering
nightlight, her eyes on the bandaged face--the linen was only slit just
as much as was necessary for breathing.
"Well, Mrs. Glasson," said the doctor cheerily, as he finished his
inspection on the third night, "I can give you good news. Your husband
will live, and will keep the sight of one eye. But--though of course
wonders can be done with modern surgery--we can't build up what's gone.
He'll always have to wear a mask, Mrs. Glasson."
When he had gone Vashti went and stood by the bed, looking down on the
unconscious man, who lay breathing heavily--how easy it would be to lay
a hand over that slit in the linen--a few minutes, and this nightmare
would be over. She half put out her hand, then drew it back. She was
not yet capable of cold-blooded crime.
Lighting a candle, she took from a drawer a paper parcel, which she
unfolded on the little table. As the still untouched folds of the black
dress length, with a few little hard-edged blots on it that meant tears,
came into view, Vashti's self-control broke down. She wept stormily, her
head along her arms. Release had flaunted so near to her, and was
withdrawn, and her horror of the Thing on the bed was mingled with a
pity for it that ate into her mind. She dried her burning eyes, and
picking up the scissors, began to cut a mask out of the tear-stained
breadths; her invincible habit of considering herself forbade her, even
at that moment, to use the good yards for such a purpose.
The candle-flame was showing wan in the grey of the dawning when Vashti
put the last stitches to the mask--she had made it very deep, so that it
would hang to just below the jawbone, and she had laboriously
buttonhole-stitched round the one eye-hole, and sewn tape-strings firmly
to the sides, top and bottom. The mask was finished.
James Glasson's figure, a trifle stooped and groping, with that sinister
black curtain from cap to collar, soon ceased to be an object of fearful
curiosity in Perran-an-zenna; even the children became so used to it
that they left off calling out as he passed. He grew more silent and
morose than ever, and his secretiveness showed itself in all sorts of
ingenious petty ways.
Vashti had the imaginative streak of her race, and life in the lonely
cottage with this masked personality took on the quality of nightmare.
She felt his one eye watching her continually, and was tormented by the
thought, "How much does he know?" Who could tell? Had he seen anything
from the outhouse window when she had rashly let Willie come so near, or
did he know who it was who had fetched the doctor? Sometimes a meaning
word seemed to show that he knew everything, sometimes she argued that
he could only guess. The black mask filled the whole of her life, the
thought of it was never out of her mind, not even when she was working
on her old farm, for she had to be breadwinner now. She found herself
dwelling on what lay behind the mask, wondering whether it could be as
bad as that black expanse, and once she woke herself at night,
screaming: "Tear 'en down, Willie! Tear the black mask down!" and then
lay trembling, wondering whether her husband had heard. For days he said
nothing and she felt herself safe; then one night he turned to her.
"There's no air," he complained. "Can't 'ee take down t' curtains? If
'ee can't do anything else, why--tear 'en down, tear 'en down!"
He had mimicked her very voice, and silent with fear, she took down the
curtain, her fingers shaking so that the rings jingled together along
the rod. One day, when he was working in the garden, he turned to face
the wind. She saw him sideways against the sky, and the black mask, held
taut at brow and chin by the strings, was being blown inward. She never
forgot the horror of that concave line against the sky.
She came to regard the mask with superstitious awe; it seemed James
Glasson's character materialized--the outward expression of the inner
man. Nervous and cowed to abjectness as she was, she felt near the end
of her endurance. The perpetual scheming to meet Willie unknown to her
husband--a difficulty now the latter was nearly always about the
house-place, and the wearing uncertainty of "How much does he know?"
were fraying her nerves. Some two months after the accident the crash
came.
James had gone to Truro to see a surgeon there, and had announced his
intention of spending the night with cousins. The utter bliss of being
alone, and having the cottage free from the masked presence for even one
day acted like a balm on Vashti. She forbade Willie to come near her
till the evening, partly from motives of prudence, but chiefly because
she craved for solitude. By the afternoon she was more her old,
sufficient, well-poised self, and when evening drew on she busied
herself about her little preparations in the kitchen with a colour
burning in her cheeks and a softened light in her eyes. That evening
Vashti Glasson was touched with a grace of womanliness she had never
worn for her husband. Every harmless and tender instinct of the lover
was at work in her, making her choose her nicest tablecloth, arrange a
cluster of chrysanthemums in an ornate glass vase, put a long-discarded
ribbon of gaudy pink in her hair. Then she took off her working frock of
dirty, ill-mended serge, and shook out in triumph the folds of the black
silk, now made up in all its glory, and hideous with cheap jet. It
converted her from a goddess of the plough to a red-wristed, clumsy girl
of the people; and when her hair was dressed in the fashionable lumps,
with a fringe-net hardening the outlines, she looked like a shop-girl,
but she herself admired the effect intensely.
When three taps at the window told that Strick was outside, the colour
flew to her face, making her so beautiful that she triumphed even over
her costume; she had become a high priestess of Love, and was not to be
cheated of any of the ritual. She was decked out as for a bridal; no
more rough-and-ready wooing and winning for her. But Strick's passion
was somewhat daunted by all the preparations for his welcome; the
kitchen looked unusual, and so did she, and he hung back for a moment on
the threshold.
"What's come to 'ee?" he asked, foolishly agape.
"'Tes a weddin' gown made for you," said Vashti simply.
"But 'tes black!" he stammered. "'Tes ill luck on a black bridal,
Vassie."
"Ours is no white bridal, lad," she told him. "Come in and set
down--yes, take that chair," and she pushed Glasson's accustomed seat
forward for her lover.
Conversation languished during the meal--Willie Strick was bewildered by
the oddness of everything, Vashti included; his was no level head to
plan any details or set a scene--Vashti won by stealth, anywhere and
anyhow, was all he had thought of or wished for. Hers was the
master-mind and he was helpless before it, and while she inflamed him
she frightened him too.
A full moon swam up over the line of distant sea that showed in a dip of
the moorland, and the lamp began to smell and burn low. They had
finished supper, and Willie was drinking rather freely of the whisky
she had set before him. Vashti turned out the lamp, and as she did so a
sudden harsh noise sent the heart to her throat, while Willie sprang up
fearfully. It was only the poker, that, caught by the full skirt of the
black silk frock, had been sent clattering to the ground, but it made
them stare at each other in a stricken panic for a speechless minute.
The white light of the moon shone clearly into the room, throwing a
black pattern of window-shadow over the disordered supper table, where
the chrysanthemums, overturned by Willie's movement, lay across an empty
dish, and in the silence the two startled people could hear the rhythmic
sound of the water as it drip-drip-dripped on to the floor.
Vashti was the first to recover herself. "Us be plum foolish, Willie!"
she said, with an attempt at a laugh. "Do believe us both thought it was
James, and him safe to Truro."
"If 'tes," said Strick madly, "he shan't take 'ee from me now. I'll have
'ee, I swear it."
Vashti did not answer--with fascinated eyes she was watching the door
slowly open--she could see the strip of moonlit brightness, barred by
the darkness of an arm, grow wider and wider. She knew, before the
form--so terribly like Willie's, now its masked face was against the
light--appeared, that it was her husband.
Quite what happened next she could not have told. The little room seemed
full and dark with fear--blind, unreasoning fear, that beat even about
her head. The long-drawn-out crash of the overturned table added to her
confusion--then quite suddenly the sounds of struggling ceased and one
man rose to his feet. In the dimness of the room, seeing only the shape
of him, she could not tell whether it were James or Willie, until he
turned his face to the moonlight, and she saw, with a throb of relief,
Strick's face.
"Get a light, Vassie," he whispered. "I fear he's dead."
She lit a candle and they knelt down by Glasson. In falling his head had
hit the fender, and blood was trickling on to the floor. She ripped open
his shirt and felt for his heart as well as her trembling fingers would
allow. She lifted his arm and let it fall--it dropped a dead weight on
to the tiled floor. It seemed to her excited fancy that already he was
turning cold.
"Willie, you've killed 'en!" she whispered. They both spoke low, as
though they thought the dead man could overhear.
"I didn't hit 'en," babbled Willie. "He stumbled and fell and hit his
head--they'll make me swing for this--what shall us do, what shall us
do?"
"Wait--I must think," commended the woman. She pressed her hands to her
forehead, and sat very still.
"Have 'ee thought?" whispered Willie anxiously.
"Yes--I've thought. Willie, you'm rare and like--he--and that'll save
us."
"What do 'ee mean?" asked Willie, thinking the shock had turned her
brain.
"The mask!" replied Vashti, "the mask!"
Then, kneeling by the still body, they talked in whispers--she unfolding
her plan--he recoiling from it, weakly protesting, and then giving way.
They were to take the dead man between them to the disused mine shaft
and throw him down, then Willie was to wear the black mask, and take
Glasson's place, until they could sail for America together. Like all
simple plans, it had a touch of genius. Willie's constant talk of
emigrating, his oft-heard boasts of slipping away in the night and not
coming back till he had made a fortune, would all help to cover up his
disappearance. And who was to connect it with Vashti and her silent,
eccentric, black-masked husband--who would speak to him or her on the
subject? And if they did--she could always invent a plausible answer,
while he was safeguarded by the fact that the strongest point of
likeness between the two men was their voices. The most dissimilar thing
about them had been their faces.
"I won't wear his mask," said Willie shuddering; "I couldn't put 'en
against me. You must make me another."
"I'll make 'en now," said Vashti. She rose to her feet, and setting the
candle on the seat of a chair, looked about her.
"You must put the room to rights," she commanded. "Make 'en look as
though James and I had just had our bit o' supper. Mop up the water and
sweep all the broken cloam together--and--and take him to the
passage-way."
"You'm not going to lave me alone wi' he?" cried Willie aghast.
"Edn room for me to work here. I'l be up overstairs making the mask.
Keep t' curtain over the window."
Upstairs, she seized scissors and hacked a square out of the front of
her gown. Then she sat and sewed as she had sewed once before, when her
husband had lain motionless on the bed. Every now and then came small
sounds of things being moved from down below, then a heavy fall and the
sound of something being dragged.
"How's et goin', Willie?" she called out.
"'Tes all right," he called back. "I've put 'en in passage."
The moon was near setting when the mask was finished, and she went to
the top of the stairs with it in her hand.
"There 'tes," she whispered. "I'll drop it down. Put it in your pocket
and I'll change my gown. 'Tes time we were stirrin'."
The mask fluttered down in the darkness, and she went back to her room
and changed swiftly into the old serge.
It was a ghastly journey to the old mine shaft, the heavy form of the
dead man sagging between them. They dared have no light, and went
stumbling over tussocks and ruts; but as both would have known the way
blindfold, they found the shaft without difficulty. They scrambled up
the sloping rubble of stones and tipped the body over the jagged hole in
the side of the shaft, and after what seemed an interminable silence
there came a thud from several hundred feet below them, then another, as
though the body had rebounded, then all was stillness.
Vashti leant up against the side of the shaft, as she had leant when
James kissed her there, and shut her eyes; the sweat running down her
brow had matted her lashes together into thick points, and the drops
tickled her neck so that she put up her hand to it. Both she and the man
were drawing the deep, hoarse breaths of exhaustion, and for a few
minutes they rested in silence--then he spoke. "You must be comin' back
along o' me now," he told her, "the dawn'll be showin' soon."
"Yes, yes," cried Vashti, starting up, "us may meet some one going to
bal, sure 'nough."
"'Tes all right--I've got t'mask on. Come."
He closed his fingers over her arm so harshly that she winced, and
together they made their way back in the cold, bleak hush that preceded
the autumnal dawn. Gradually, as they went, some glimmerings of what her
life would be henceforth appeared to the woman. The fear of neighbours,
the efforts to appear neutral, the memory of that slowly opening door,
and the still thing by the fender, the consciousness of what lay at the
bottom of the disused shaft; and, above all, the terrible reminder of
her husband in the masked Willie--it would be like living with a
ghost. . . .
Once back at the cottage, he drew her within and let the door swing to
behind them. She moved away to find a light, but he caught her.
"Won't 'ee give me so much as a kiss, and me with red hands because of
you?" he asked.
She felt the mask brush her cheek, and broke away with a cry. She heard
him laugh as she lit a candle, and turned towards him.
"A black bridal!" he cried wildly; "did you think 'twas a black bridal?
'Tes a red one, do 'ee hear?"
"Willie," she begged him, "take off t'mask now we'm alone."
"Aren't 'ee afeared?" he asked.
"'Tes safe enough till mornin', and I do hate that mask more'n the
devil. Take 'en off."
"I'll take 'en off--to please you, lass."
He seized the mask violently by the hem and ripped it away--and she saw
it was her husband.
"You fool!" he said slowly, following her as she backed away from him,
her mouth slack with fear, her eyes staring, her whole being showing her
as almost bereft of her senses. "You fool to think to fool me! You was
quick enough to say I was dead; I'm not so easy killed, Vassie. No so
easy killed as your lover was--just the carven'-knife between his
shoulders when he was stoopin' down, that's all. He was fearful of
lookin' at the dead man; he never knew the dead man was lookin' at he.
You heard him fall, Vassie, and thought it was him movin' me----"
"Put t'mask on," wailed Vashti, pressing her fingers against her eyes;
"put t'mask on again, for the love o' God!"
"There's been enough o' masks," he retorted grimly. "You've got to bear
to see me now; me, not your lover that you've helped to tip over Wheal
Zenna shaft. Eh, you fool, did 'ee think I didn' knaw? I've knawed all
these months; I've seen 'ee meet 'en; I told 'ee I was going to stop the
night over to Truro so as to catch 'ee together; I listened outside the
house; I let 'ee think I was dead, and heard t' the plan you thought to
make. Only half a man am I, wi' no mouth left to kiss with? I've an eye
left to see with, and an ear to hear with, and a hand to strike with,
and a tongue to teach 'ee with."
"I'll tell on 'ee," said Vashti, "I'll tell the police on 'ee. Murderer,
that's what you are."
"I doan't think 'ee will, my dear. 'Tedn a tale as'll do you any good--a
woman who cheats her husband, and tries to kill 'en, and helps to carry
a body two miles over moor and tip 'en down shaft. And what have 'ee to
complain on, I should like to knaw? When I wear t'mask you can pretend
I'm Willie--handsome Willie. Willie who can kiss a maid and make a fine
upstandin' husband. Willie was goin' to be me, why shudn' you think I
was Willie? Do 'ee, my dear, if 'tes any comfort to 'ee."
He slipped on the mask as he spoke and knotted the strings. The door had
swung open, and the candle flame shook in the draught as though trying,
in fear, to strain away from the wick. The steel-cold light of dawn grew
in the sky and filtered into the room, showing all the sordid litter of
it; the frightened woman, with a pink ribbon awry in her disordered
hair, and the ominous figure of the masked man. He came towards her
round the table.
"'Tes our bridal night, lass!" he said. "Why do 'ee shrink away? Mind
you that 'tes Willie speakin'! Don't let us think on James Glasson dead
to the bottom 'o the shaft. I'm Willie--brave Willie who loves 'ee. . . ."
As his arms came out to catch her, she saw his purpose in his eye, and
remembered his words, "A red bridal, lass, a red bridal!"
At the last moment she woke out of her stupor, turned, and ran, he after
her. Across the little garden, down the moorland road, over heather and
slippery boulders and clinging bracken, startling the larks from their
nests, scattering the globes of dew. Once she tried to make for a
side-track that led to Perran-an-zenna, but he headed her off, and once
again she was running, heavily now, towards Wheal Zenna mineshaft. He
was gaining on her, and her breath was nearly spent. Both were going
slowly, hardly above a stumbling walk, as the shaft came in sight; the
drawing of their breath sounded harsh as the rasping of a file through
the still air. As she neared the shaft she turned her head and saw him
almost on her, and saw the gleam of something in his uplifted hand. She
gathered together all her will, concentrated in those few moments all
the strength of her nature, determined to cheat him at the last. Up the
rubble of stones she scrambled, one gave beneath her foot and sent her
down, and abandoning the effort, she lay prone, awaiting the end.
But Vashti's luck held--it was the man who was to lose. A couple of
miners who had been coming up the path from Perran-an-zenna had seen the
chase and followed hot foot, unnoticed by the two straining, frantic
creatures, who heard nothing but the roaring in their own ears. They
caught Glasson as he ran across the patch of grass to the shaft, and he
doubled up without a struggle in their arms. Physical and mental powers
had failed together, and from that day James Glasson was a hopeless
idiot--harmless and silent. Vashti had won indeed.
Admirable woman of affairs that she was, she took a good sleep before
confronting the situation; then she made up her story and stuck to it.
Willie's name was never mentioned, and his disappearance, so long
threatened, passed as a minor event, swamped in the greater stir of
Glasson's attempt to murder his wife. His madness had taken the one form
that made Vashti safe--he had gone mad on secretiveness. How much he
remembered not even she knew, but not a word could anyone drag from
him. He would lay his finger where his nose should have been against the
mask, and wag his head slyly. "Naw, naw, I was never one for tellin',"
he would say. "James Glasson's no such fool that he can't keep 'enself
to 'enself."
He lived on for several years in the asylum, and Vashti, after the free
and easy fashion of the remote West, took to herself another husband.
She went much to chapel, and there was no one more religious than she,
and no one harder on the sins and vanities of young women. One thing in
particular she held in what seemed an unreasoning abhorrence--and that
was a black silk gown.