THE judge pronounced sentence: three years' penal servitude. The
condemned woman, ashen-cheeked, thin-lipped, gave never a glance to right
or left, and disappeared from the dock like a ghost.
John Risca, the woman's husband, who had been sitting at the solicitor's
table, rose, watched her disappear, and then, the object of all curious
eyes, with black brow and square jaw strode out of the court. Walter
Herold, following him, joined him in the corridor, and took his arm in a
protective way and guided him down the great staircase into the
indifferent street. Then he hailed a cab.
“'May I come with you?”
Risca nodded assent. It was a comfort to feel by his side something
human in this pandemonium of a world.
“Eighty-four Fenton Square, Westminster.” Herold gave the address of
Risca's lodgings, and entered the cab. During the journey through the
wide thoroughfares hurrying with London's afternoon traffic neither
spoke. There are ghastly tragedies in life for which words, however
sympathetic and comprehending, are ludicrously inadequate. Now and then
Herold glanced at the heavy, set face of the man who was dear to him and
cursed below his breath. Of course nothing but morbid pig-headedness in
the first fatal instance had brought him to this disaster. But, after
all, is pig-headedness a crime meriting so overwhelming a punishment?
Why should fortune favour some, like himself, who just danced lightly
upon life, and take a diabolical delight in breaking others upon her
wheel? Was it because John Risca could dance no better than a bull, and,
like a bull, charged through life insensately, with lowered horns and
blundering hoofs? This lunatic marriage, six years ago, when Risca was
three and twenty, with a common landlady's commoner pretty vixen of a
daughter, he himself had done his best to prevent. He had pleaded with
the tongue of an angel and vituperated in the vocabulary of a bargee. He
might as well have played “Home, Sweet Home,” on the flute or recited
Bishop Ernulphus's curse to the charging bull. But still, however
unconsidered, honourable marriage ought not of itself to bring down from
heaven the doom of the house of Atreus. This particular union was bound
to be unhappy; but why should it have been Æschylean in its catastrophe?
As Risca uttered no word, Herold, with the ultimate wisdom of despair,
held his peace.
At last they arrived at the old-world, dilapidated square, where Risca
lodged. Children, mostly dirty-faced, those of the well-to-do being
distinguished at this post-tea hour of the afternoon by a circle of
treacle encrusting like gems the circumambient grime about their little
mouths, squabbled shrilly on the pavement. Torn oilcloth and the smell
of the sprats fried the night before last for the landlord's supper
greeted him who entered the house. Risca, the aristocrat of the
establishment, rented the drawing-room floor. Herold, sensitive artist,
successful actor, appreciated by dramatic authors and managers and the
public as a Meissonier of small parts, and therefore seldom out of an
engagement, who had created for himself a Queen Anne gem of a tiny house
in Kensington, could never enter Risca's home without a shiver. To him
it was horror incarnate, the last word of unpenurious squalor. There
were material shapes to sit down upon, to sit at, it is true, things
on the walls (_terribilia visu_) to look upon, such as “The Hunter's
Return,” and early portraits of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,
and the floor was covered with a red-and-green imitation Oriental
carpet; but there was no furniture, as Herold understood the word,
nothing to soothe or to please. One of the chairs was of moth-eaten
saddle-bag, another of rusty leather. A splotch of grease, the
trace left by a far-distant storm of gravy that had occurred on a
super-imposed white cloth, and a splotch of ink gave variety to a faded
old table-cover. A litter of books and papers and unemptied ash-trays
and pipes and slippers disfigured the room. The place suggested chaos
coated with mildew.
“Ugh!” said Herold, on entering, “it 's as cold as charity. Do you mind
if I light the fire?”
It was a raw day in March, and the draughts from the staircase and
windows played spitefully about the furniture. Risca nodded, threw his
hat on a leather couch against the wall, and flung himself into his
writing-chair. Hot or cold, what did it matter to him? What would
anything in the world matter to him in the future? He sat, elbows on
table, his hands clutching his coarse, black hair, his eyes set in a
great agony. And there he stayed for a long time, silent and motionless,
while Herold lit the fire, and, moving noiselessly about the room, gave
to its disarray some semblance of comfort. He was twenty-nine. It was
the end of his career, the end of his life. No mortal man could win
through such devastating shame. It was a bath of vitriol eating through
nerve and fibre to the heart itself. He was a dead man--dead to all
the vital things of life at nine-and-twenty. An added torture was his
powerlessness to feel pity for the woman. For the crime of which she had
been convicted, the satiating of the lust of cruelty, mankind finds
no extenuation. She had taken into her house, as a slut of all work, a
helpless child from an orphanage. Tales had been told in that court at
which men grew physically sick and women fainted. Her counsel's plea of
insanity had failed. She was as sane as any creature with such a lust
could be. She was condemned to three years' penal servitude.
It was his wife, the woman whom he, John Risca, had married six years
before, the woman whom, in his passionate, obstinate, growling way, he
had thought he loved. They had been parted for over four years, it is
true, for she had termagant qualities that would have driven away any
partner of her life who had not a morbid craving for Phlegethon as
a perpetual environment; but she bore his name, an honoured one (he
thanked God she had given him no child to bear it, too), and now that
name was held up to the execration of all humanity. For the name's sake,
when the unimagined horror had first broken over him, he had done his
utmost to shield her. He had met her in the prison, for the first time
since their parting, and she had regarded him with implacable hatred,
though she accepted the legal assistance he provided, as she had
accepted the home from which he had been driven and the half of his poor
earnings.
Murder, clean and final, would have been more easily borne than this,
the deliberate, systematically planned torture of a child. There is some
sort of tragic dignity in murder. It is generally preceded by conflict,
and the instinct of mankind recognizing in conflict, no matter how
squalid and sordid, the essence of drama, very often finds sympathy with
the protagonist of the tragedy, the slayer himself. How otherwise to
account for the petitions for the reprieve of a popular murderer, a
curious phenomenon not to be fully explained by the comforting word
hysteria? But in devilish cruelty, unpreceded by conflict; there is no
drama, there is nothing to touch the imagination; it is perhaps the only
wickedness with which men have no lingering sympathy. It transcends all
others in horror.
“Murder would have been better than this,” he said aloud, opening and
shutting his powerful fists. “My soul has been dragged through a sewer.”
He rose and flung the window open and breathed the raw air with full
lungs. A news-urchin's cry caused him to look down into the street. The
boy, expectant, held out a paper, and pointed with it to the yellow bill
which he carried apronwise in front of him. On the bill was printed in
large capitals: “The Risca Torture Case. Verdict and Sentence.” Risca
beckoned Herold to the window, and clutched him heavily on the shoulder.
“Look!” said he. “That is to be seen this afternoon in every street in
London. To-night the news will be flashed all round the world. To-morrow
the civilized press will reek with it. Come away!” He dragged Herold
back, and brought down the window with a crash. “It's blazing hell!” he
said.
“Every man has to pass through it at least once in his life,” said
Herold, glad that the relief of speech had come to his friend. “That is,
if he 's to be any good in the world.”
Risca uttered a grim sound in the nature of a mirthless laugh. “ 'As
gold is tried by the fire, so souls are tried by pain,' “ he quoted with
a sneer. Was ever a man consoled by such drivelling maxims? And they
are lies. No man can be better for having gone through hell. It blasts
everything that is good in one. Besides, what do you know? You've never
been through it.”
Herold, standing by the fire, broke a black mass of coal with the heel
of his boot. The flames sprang up, and in the gathering twilight threw
strange gleams over his thin, eager face.
“I shall, one of these days,” said he--“a very bad hell.”
“Good God! Wallie,” cried Risca, “are you in trouble, too?”
“Not yet,” Herold replied, with a smile, for he saw that the instinct of
friendship, at any rate, had not been consumed. “I 've walked on roses
all my life. That 's why I 've never done anything great. But my hell is
before me. How can I escape it?” The smile faded from his face, and he
looked far away into the gray sky. “Sometimes my mother's Celtic nature
seems to speak and prophesy within me. It tells me that my roses
shall turn into red-hot ploughshares and my soul shall be on fire. The
curtains of the future are opened for an elusive fraction of a second--”
He broke off suddenly. “I'm talking rot, John. At least it's not all
rot. I was only thinking that in my bad time I should have a great,
strong friend to stand by my side.”
“If you mean me,” said Risca, “you know I shall. But, in the meanwhile
I pray to God to spare you a hell like mine. Sometimes I wonder,” he
continued after a gloomy pause, “whether this would have happened if I
had stuck by her. I could have seen which way things were tending, and I
would have stepped in. After all, I am strong enough to have borne it.”
“You were talking about murder just now,” said Herold. “If you had
stayed with her, there would have been murder done or something precious
near it.”
Risca sighed. He was a big, burly man, with a heavy, intellectual face,
prematurely furrowed, and a sigh shook his loose frame somewhat oddly.
“I don't know,” said he, after a lumbering turn or so up and down the
room. “How can any man know? She was impossible enough, but I never
dreamed of such developments. And now that I reflect, I remember signs.
Once we had a little dog--no, I have no right to tell you. Damn it!
man,” he cried fiercely, “I have no right to keep you here in this
revolting atmosphere.” He picked up Herold's hat. “Go away, Wallie, and
leave me to myself. You 're good and kind and all that, but I 've no
right to make your life a burden to you.”
Herold rescued his hat and deliberately put it down. “Oh, yes, you
have,” said he, with smiling seriousness. “You have every right. Have
you ever considered the ethics of friendship? Few people do consider
them nowadays. Existence has grown so complicated that such a simple,
primitive thing as friendship is apt to be neglected in the practical
philosophy of life. Our friendship, John, is something I could no more
tear out of me than I could tear out my heart itself. It's one of the
few vital, real things--indeed, it's perhaps the only tremendous thing
in my damfool of a life. I believe in friendship. If a man hath not a
friend, let him quit the stage. Old Bacon had sense: a man has every
right over his friend, every claim upon him, except the right of
betrayal. My purse is yours, your purse is mine. My time is yours, and
yours mine. My joys and sorrows are yours, and yours mine. But a friend
may not supplant a friend either in material ambition or in the love of
a woman. That is the unforgivable sin, high treason against friendship.
Don't talk folly about having no right.”
He lit with nervous fingers the cigarette he was about to light when he
began his harangue. Risca gripped him by the arm.
“God knows I don't want you to go. I 'm pretty tough, and I 'm not going
to cave in, but it's God's comfort to have you here. If I'm not a merry
companion to you, what the devil do you think I am to myself?”
He walked up and down the dreary room, on which the dark of evening
had fallen. At last he paused by his writing-table, and then a sudden
thought flashing on him, he smote his temples with his hands.
“I must send you away, Wallie. It's necessary. I have my column to write
for The Herald. It must be in by eleven. I had forgotten all about it.
They won't want my name,--it would damn the paper,--but I suppose
they 're counting on the column, and I don't want to leave them in the
lurch.”
“They don't want your column this week, at any rate,” said Herold. “Oh,
don't begin to bellow. I went to see Ferguson yesterday. He's as kind as
can be, and of course wants you to go on as usual. But no one except a
raving idiot would expect stuff from you to-day. And as for your silly
old column, I've written it myself. I suggested it to Ferguson, and he
jumped at it.”
“You wrote my column?” said Risca, in a softened voice.
“Of course I did, and a devilish good column, too. Do you think I can
only paint my face and grin through a horse-collar?”
“What made you think of it? I did n't.”
“That's precisely why I did,” said Herold.
Risca sat down, calmer in mood, and lit a pipe. Herold, the sensitive,
accepted this action as an implication of thanks. Risca puffed his
tobacco for a few moments in silence, apparently absorbed in enjoyment
of the fragrant subtleties of the mixture of honeydew and birdseye and
latakia and the suspicion of soolook that gives mystery to a blend. At
last he spoke.
“I shall arrange to keep on that house in Smith Street, and put in a
caretaker, so that she shall have a home when she comes out. What will
happen then, God Almighty knows. Perhaps she will have changed. We need
n't discuss it. But, at any rate, while I 'm away, I want you to see
to it for me. It's a ghastly task, but some one must undertake it. Will
you?”
“Of course,” said Herold. “But what do you mean by being 'away'?”
“I am going to Australia,” said Risca.
“For how long?”
“For the rest of my life,” said Risca.
Herold leaped from his chair and threw his cigarette into the fire. It
was only John Risca who, without giving warning, would lower his head
and charge at life in that fashion.
“This is madness.”
“It's my only chance of sanity,” said Risca. “Here I am a dead man. The
flames are too much for me. Perhaps in another country, where I 'm not
known, some kind of a phoenix called John Smith or Robinson may rise out
of the ashes. Here it can't. Here the ashes would leave a stench that
would asphyxiate any bird, however fabulous. It's my one chance--to
begin again.”
“What will you do?”
“The same as here. If I can make a fair living in London, I ought n't to
starve in Melbourne.”
“It's monstrous!” cried Herold. “It's not to be thought of.”
“Just so,” replied Risca. “It's got to be done.”
Herold glanced at the gloomy face, and threw up his hands in despair.
When John Risca spoke in that stubborn way there was no moving him. He
had taken it into his head to go to Australia, and to Australia he would
go despite all arguments and beseechings. Yet Herold argued and
besought. It was monstrous that a man of John's brilliant attainments
and deeply rooted ambitions should surrender the position in London
which he had so hardly won. London was generous, London was just; in the
eyes of London he was pure and blameless. Not an editor would refuse him
work, not an acquaintance would refuse him the right hand of fellowship.
The heart of every friend was open to him. As for the agony of his soul,
he would carry that about with him wherever he went. He could not escape
from it by going to the antipodes. It was more likely to be conjured
away in England by the love of those about him.
“I 'm aware of all that, but I 'm going to Melbourne,” said Risca,
doggedly. “If I stay here, I'm dead.”
“When do you propose to start?”
“I shall take my ticket to-morrow on the first available boat.”
Herold laid his nervous hand on the other's burly shoulder.
“Is it fair in this reckless way to spring such a tremendous decision on
those who care for you?”
“Who on God's earth really cares for me except yourself? It will be a
wrench parting from you, but it has to be.”
“You've forgotten Stellamaris,” said Herold.
“I have n't,” replied Risca, morosely; “but she 's only a child. She
looks upon me as a creature out of a fairy-tale. Realities, thank God!
have no place in that room of hers. I 'll soon fade out of her mind.”
“Stella is fifteen, not five,” said Herold.
“Age makes no difference, I 'm not going to see her again,” said he.
“What explanation is to be given her?”
“I 'll write the necessary fairy-story.”
“You are not going to see her before you sail?”
“No,” said Risca.
“Then you 'll be doing a damnably cowardly thing,” cried Herold, with
flashing eyes.
Risca rose and glared at his friend.
“You fool! Do you suppose I don't care for her? Do you suppose I would
n't cut off my hand to save her pain?”
“Then cut off some of your infernal selfishness and save her the pain
she's going to feel if you don't bid her good-bye.”
Risca clenched his fists, and turned to the window, and stood with his
back to the room.
“Take care what you 're saying. It 's dangerous to quarrel with me
to-day.”
“Danger be hanged!” said Herold. “I tell you it will be selfish and
cowardly not to see her.”
There was a long silence. At last Risca wheeled round abruptly.
“I'm neither selfish nor cowardly. You don't seem to realize what I 've
gone through'. I 'm not fit to enter her presence. I 'm polluted. I 'm
a walking pestilence. I told you my soul had been dragged through a
sewer.”
“Then go and purify it in the sea-wind that blows through Stella's
window, John,” said Herold, seeing that he had subdued his anger. “I am
not such a fool as to ask you to give up your wretched idea of exile for
the sake of our friendship; but this trivial point, in the name of our
friendship, I ask you to concede to me. Just grant me this, and I 'll
let you go to Melbourne or Trincomalee or any other Hades you choose
without worrying you.”
“Why do you insist upon it? How can a sick child's fancies count to a
man in such a position?”
His dark eyes glowered at Herold from beneath lowering brows. Herold met
the gaze steadily, and with his unclouded vision he saw far deeper into
Risca than Risca saw into him. He did not answer the question, for he
penetrated, through the fuliginous vapours whence it proceeded, into the
crystal regions of the man's spirit. It was he, after a while, who held
Risca with his eyes, and it was all that was beautiful and spiritual
in Risca that was held. And then Herold reached out his hand slowly and
touched him.
“We go down to Southcliff together.”
Risca drew a deep breath.
“Let us go this evening,” said he.
A few hours afterward when the open cab taking them from the station
to the Channel House came by the sharp turn of the road abruptly to the
foot of the cliff, and the gusty southwest wind brought the haunting
smell of the seaweed into his nostrils, and he saw the beacon-light in
the high west window shining like a star, a gossamer feather from the
wings of Peace fell upon the man's tortured soul.