DARKNESS.
She had flung herself over the cliff. That rustling noise was the
sound of her gown as it brushed against the rushes and seedling firs
that clothed the precipice with verdure. He looked over the cliff, and
saw her lying among the rocks, a white motionless figure, mangled and
crushed, dumb and dead, his victim and his accuser.
His first impulse was to fling himself over the edge where she had cast
away her life a minute ago; but common sense overcame that movement of
despair. A few yards further towards the point the side of the cliff
was less precipitous. There were jutting ledges of rock and straggling
bushes by which a good climber might let himself down to the beach,
not without hazard, but with a fair chance of safety. As he scrambled
downward he saw a fisherman’s boat shooting across the bay, and he
thought that his wife’s fall had been seen from the narrow strip of
sandy shore yonder towards Beaulieu.
She was lying on her side among the low wet slabs of rock, the blue
water lapping round her. There was blood upon her face, and on one
mangled arm, from which the muslin sleeve was ripped. Her gown had
caught in the bushes, and was torn to shreds; and the water flowing so
gently in and out among her loosened hair was tinged with blood.
Her eyes were wide open, staring wildly, and they had a glassy look
already. He knew that she was dead.
“Did you see her fall?” he asked the men in the boat, as they came near.
“No,” said one. “I heard the gulls scream, and I knew there was
something. And then I looked about and saw something white lying there,
under the cliff.”
They lifted her gently into the boat, and laid her on a folded sail
at the bottom, as gently and as tenderly as if she were still capable
of feeling, as if she were not past cure. George Ransome asked no
question, invited no opinion. He sat in the stern of the boat, dumb
and quiet. The horror of this sudden doom had paralysed him. What had
he done that this thing should happen, this wild revenge of a woman’s
passionate heart which made him a murderer? What had he done? Had he
not been patient and forbearing, indulgent beyond the common indulgence
of husbands to fretful wives? Had he not blunted the edge of wrath
with soft answers? Had he not been affectionate and considerate even
when love was dead? And yet because of one hard speech, wrung from his
irritated nerves, this wild creature had slain herself.
The two fishermen looked at him curiously. He saw the dark southern
eyes watching him; saw gravity and restraint upon those fine olive
faces which had been wont to beam with friendly smiles. He knew that
they suspected evil, but he was in no mood to undeceive them. He sat in
an apathetic silence, motionless, stupefied almost, while the men rowed
slowly round the point in the golden light of sundown. He scarcely
looked at that white still figure lying at the bottom of the boat, the
face hidden under a scarlet kerchief which one of the men had taken
from his neck. He sat staring at the rocky shore, the white gleaming
lighthouse, the long ridge of heathy ground on the crest of the hill,
the villas, the gardens with their glow of light and colour, the dark
masses of foliage clustering here and there amidst the bright-hued
rocks. He looked at everything except his dead wife, lying almost at
his feet.
* * * * *
There was an inquiry that evening before the Juge d’Instruction at
Villefranche, and he was made to give an account of his wife’s death.
He proved a very bad witness. The minute and seemingly frivolous
questions addled his brain. He told the magistrate how he had looked
round and found the path empty: but he could not say how his wife
had fallen—whether she had flung herself over the edge or had fallen
accidentally, whether her foot had slipped unawares, whether she had
fallen face forward, or whether she had dropped backwards from the edge
of the cliff.
“I tell you again that I did not see her fall,” he protested
impatiently.
“Did you usually walk in advance of your wife?” asked the Frenchman.
“It was not very polite to turn your back upon a lady.”
“I was worried, and out of temper.”
“For what reason?”
“My wife’s unhappy jealousy created reasons where there were none. The
people who know me know that I was not habitually unkind to her.”
“Yet you gave her an answer which so maddened her that she flung
herself over the cliff in her despair?”
“I fear that it was so,” he answered, with the deepest distress
depicted in his haggard face. “She was in a nervous and irritable
condition. I had always borne that fact in mind until that moment.
She stung me past endurance by her groundless jealousies. I had been
a true and loyal husband to her from the hour of our marriage. I had
never wronged her by so much as a thought; and yet I could not talk
to a pretty peasant-girl, or confess my admiration for any woman I
met in society, without causing an outbreak of temper that was almost
madness. I bore with her long and patiently. I remembered that the
circumstances of her childhood and youth had been adverse, that her
nature had been warped and perverted; I forgave all faults of temper in
a wife who loved me; but this afternoon—almost for the first time since
our marriage—I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. I have no wish to avoid
interrogation, or to conceal any portion of the truth.”
“You did not push her over the cliff?”
“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or bear the character of a man
likely to commit murder?”
The examination went on, with cruel reiteration of almost the same
questions. The Juge d’Instruction was a hard-headed legal machine,
who believed that the truth might be wrung out of any criminal by
persistent questioning. He suspected Ransome, or deemed it his duty to
suspect him, and he ordered him to be arrested on leaving the court; so
George Ransome passed the night after his wife’s death in the lock-up
at Villefranche.
What a night that was for a man to live through! He sat on a stone
bench, listening to the level plish-plash of that tideless sea ever so
far beneath him. He heard the footsteps going up and down the steep
stony street of that wonderful old seaport; he heard the scream of the
gulls and the striking of the clock on the crest of the hill as he sat
motionless, with his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands,
brooding over that swift, sudden horror of yesterday.
Could it have been an accident? Did she step backwards unawares and
slip over the edge? No; he remembered where she was standing when he
last looked at her, some distance from the side of the cliff, standing
among the heather and wild thyme which grew down to the edge of the
little path. She must have made a rapid rush to the brink after that
fatal speech of his. She had flung her life away in a single impulse
of blind, mad anger—or despair. She had not paused for an instant to
take thought. Alas! he knew her so well; he had so often seen those
sudden gusts of passion; the rush of crimson to the pale small face;
the quivering lips striving impotently for speech; the fury in the
dark eyes, and the small nervous hands clenched convulsively. He had
seen her struggle with the demon of anger, and had seen the storm pass
swifter than a tempest-driven cloud across the moon. Another moment
and she would burst into tears, fling her arms round his neck, and
implore him to forgive her.
“I love you too well ever to know happiness,” she said.
That was her favourite apology.
“It is only people without passions who can be happy,” she told him
once. “I sometimes think that you belong to that family.”
And she was dead; she whose undisciplined love had so plagued and tried
him, she was dead; and he felt himself her murderer.
Alas! doubly a murderer, since she had perished just at that time when
her life should have been most precious to him, when he should have
made any sacrifice to secure her peace. He who had seen all the evils
of a fretful temper exhibited in her character had yet been weak enough
to yield to a moment of anger, and to insult the woman whom he ought to
have cherished.
A long-familiar line of Byron’s haunted his brain all through the
night, and mixed itself with that sound of footsteps on the street of
stairs, and the scream of the gulls, and the flapping of the waves
against the stone quay.
“She died, but not alone—”
She who was to have been the mother of his first-born child was lying
dead in the white-walled villa where they had once been happy.
Hush! In the soft clear light of an April morning he heard the tolling
of the church bell, solemn, slow, measured, at agonising intervals,
which left an age of expectancy between the heavy strokes of the
clapper.
_Vivos voco, mortuos plango._
They bury their dead at daybreak in that fair land of orange and
lemon groves. In the early morning of the first day after death, the
hastily-fashioned coffin was carried out into the sunshine, and the
funeral procession wound slowly up the hill towards the graveyard
near the church of Villefranche. George Ransome knew how brief is the
interval between death and burial on that southern shore, and he had
little doubt that the bell was tolling for her whose heart was beating
passionately when the sun began to sink.
So soon! Her grave would be filled in and trodden down before they let
him out of prison.
It had never seemed to him that he was to stay long in captivity, or
that there could be any difficulty in proving his innocence of any
part in the catastrophe, except that fatal part of having upset the
balance of a weak mind, and provoked a passionate woman to suicide. As
for the confinement of the past night, he had scarcely thought about
it. He had a curious semi-consciousness of time and place which was a
new experience to him. He found himself forgetting where he was and
what had happened. There were strange gaps in his mind—intervals of
oblivion—and then there were periods in which he sat looking at the
slanting shaft of sunlight between the window and the ground, and
trying to count the motes that danced in that golden haze.
The day passed strangely, too—sometimes at railroad pace, sometimes
with a ghastly slowness. Then came a night in which sleep never visited
his eyelids—a night of bodily and mental restlessness, the greater part
of which he spent in futile efforts to open the heavily-bolted door,
or to drag the window-bars from their stone sockets. His prison was a
relic of the Middle Ages, and Hercules himself could not have got out
of it.
In all those endeavours he was actuated by a blind impulse—a feverish
desire to be at large again. Not once during that night did he think
of his dead wife in her new-made grave on the side of the hill. He had
forgotten why they had shut him up in that stony chamber—or rather had
imagined another reason for his imprisonment.
He was a political offender—had been deeply concerned in a plot to
overthrow Victor Emanuel, and to create a Republic for Italy. He
himself was to be President of that Republic. He felt all the power to
rule and legislate for a great nation. He compared himself with Solon
and with Pericles, to the disadvantage of both. There was a greatness
in him which neither of those had ever attained.
“I should rule them as God Himself,” he thought. “It would be a golden
age of truth and justice—a millennium of peace and plenty. And while
the nations are waiting for me I am shut up here by the treachery of
France.”
Next morning he was taken before the Juge d’Instruction for the second
time. The two fishermen who picked up his wife’s corpse were present as
witnesses; also his wife’s maid, and the three other servants; also his
wife’s doctor.
He was again questioned severely, but this time nothing could induce
him to give a direct answer to any question. He raved about the Italian
Republic, of which he was to be chief. He told the French magistrate
that France had conspired with the Italian tyrant to imprison and
suppress him.
“Every other pretence is a subterfuge,” he said. “My popularity in
Italy is at the root of this monstrous charge. There will be a rising
of the whole nation if you do not instantly release me. For your own
sake, sir, I warn you to be prompt.”
“This man is pretending to be mad,” said the magistrate.
“I fear there is more reality than pretence about the business,” said
the doctor.
He took Ransome to the window, and looked at his eyes in the strong
white light of noon. Then he went over to the magistrate, and they
whispered together for some minutes, while the prisoner sat staring at
the floor and muttering to himself.
After that there came a long dark interval in George Ransome’s life—a
waking dream of intolerable length, but not unalloyed misery; for the
hallucinations which made his madness buoyed him up and sustained
him during some part of that dark period. He talked with princes
and statesmen; he was not alone in the madhouse chamber, or in the
madhouse garden, or in that great iron cage where even the most
desperate maniacs were allowed to disport themselves in the air and
the sunlight as in a gymnasium. He was surrounded by invisible friends
and flatterers, by public functionaries who quailed before his glance
and were eager to obey his commands. Sometimes he wrote letters and
telegrams all day long upon any scraps of paper which his keepers would
give him; sometimes he passed whole days in a dreamy silence with arms
folded, and abstracted gaze fixed on the distant hill-tops, like
Napoleon at St. Helena, brooding over the future of nations.
By and by there came a period of improvement, or what was called
improvement by the doctors, but which to the patient seemed a time of
strange blankness and disappointment. All those busy shadows which
had peopled his life, his senators and flatterers, had abandoned him;
he was alone in that strange place amidst a strange people, most of
whom seemed to be somewhat wrong in their heads. He was able to read
the newspapers now, and was vexed to find that his speeches were
unreported, his letters and manifestoes unpublished; disappointed to
find that Victor Emanuel was still King of Italy and the new Republic
still a web of dreams.
His temper was very fitful at this time, and he had intervals of
violence. One morning he found himself upon the hills, digging with
half-a-dozen other men, young and old, dressed pretty much like
himself. It was in the early summer morning, before the sun had made
the world too hot for labour. It was rapture to him to be there,
digging and running about on the dewy hillside, in an amphitheatre of
mountains, high above the stony bed of the Paillon. The air was full
of sweet odours, orange and lemon bloom, roses and lilies, from the
gardens and orchards below. He felt that earth and sky were rapturously
lovely, that life was a blessing and a privilege beyond all words. He
had not the consciousness of a single care, or even a troubled memory.
His quarrel with his father, his self-imposed exile, his marriage and
its bitter disillusions, his wife’s tragical fate: all were forgotten.
He felt as a sylph might feel—a creature without earthly obligations,
revelling in the glory of Nature.
This new phase of being lasted so long as the hills and the sky wore
their aspect of novelty. It was succeeded by a period of deepest
depression, a melancholy which weighed him down like a leaden burden.
He sat in the madhouse garden apart from the rest, brooding over the
darkness of life. He had no hopes, no desires.
Gradually memory began to return. He asked why his wife did not come to
see him. “She used to be so fond of me,” he said, “foolishly fond of
me; and now she deserts me.”
Then he talked of going home again. The image of his latest
dwelling-place had gradually shaped itself in his mind. He saw the
hedges of pale amber roses, the carouba-trees, dark against the
glittering blue of the sea, which shone through every opening in the
branches like a background of lapis lazuli, and the rugged mountains
rising above the low curving shore steeply towards the sky, with
patches of olive here and there on their stony flanks, but for the most
part bare and barren, reddish-yellow, steeped in sunlight.
Yes, he remembered every feature of that lovely and varied scene. The
village of Eza yonder on the mountain-road—a cluster of stony dwellings
perched upon rocky foundations, hardly to be distinguished from the
rough crags upon which they were built—and higher still, in a cleft
of those yellow hills, Turbia, and its cloven towers, the birthplace
of Roman Emperors. How lovely it all was, and how pleasant it had
been to lounge in his garden, where the light looked dazzling on beds
of white gilly-flowers, and where the blue summer sea smiled in the
far distance, with a faint purple cloud yonder on the horizon which
represented Corsica!
Why had he ever left that familiar home? Why could he not return to it?
“Get me a carriage,” he said to one of the attendants; “I want to go
home immediately. My wife is waiting for me.”
It is not customary to make explanations to patients even in the
best-regulated asylums. Nobody answered him; nobody explained anything
to him. He found himself confronted with a dogged silence. He wore
himself out in an agony of impatience, like a bird beating itself to
death against its bars. He languished in a miserable ignorance, piecing
his past life together bit by bit, with a strange interweaving of
fancies and realities, until by slow degrees the fancies dropped out of
the web and left him face to face with the truth.
At last the record of the past was complete. He knew that his wife
was dead, and remembered how she had died. He knew that he had been a
prisoner, first in gaol and then in a lunatic asylum; but he did not
acknowledge to himself that he had been mad. He remembered the bell
tolling in the saffron light of dawn; he remembered the magistrate’s
exasperating questions; he remembered everything.
After this he sank into a state of sullen despair, and silence and
apathy were accepted as the indications of cure. He was told by the
head physician that he could leave the institution whenever he pleased.
There was an account against him as a private patient, which had been
guaranteed by his landlord, who knew him to be a man of some means. His
German man-servant had been to the asylum many times to inquire about
him. The doctor recommended him to travel—in Switzerland—until the end
of the autumn, and to take his servant as his attendant and courier.
“Change of air and scene will be of inestimable advantage to you,” said
the doctor; “but it would not be wise for you to travel alone.”
“What month is it?”
“August—the twenty-second.”
“And my wife died early in April,” he said. “Only a few months; and I
feel as if I had been in this place a century.”
He took the doctor’s advice. He cared very little where he went or
what became of him. Life and the world, his own individuality, and the
beautiful earth around and about him were alike indifferent to him. He
went back to the villa at St. Jean, and to the garden he had loved so
well in the bright fresh spring-time. All things had an overgrown and
neglected look in the ripeness of expiring summer; too many flowers,
a rank luxuriance of large leaves and vivid blossoms—fruit rotting in
the long grass—an odour of decaying oranges, the waste of the last
harvest. He went up to the graveyard on the hill above the harbour. It
was not a picturesque burial-place. The cemetery at Cimies was far more
beautiful. The cemetery at Nice was in a grander position.
He felt sorry that she should lie here, amidst the graves of sailors
and fishermen—as even if after death she were slighted and hardly used.
He was summoned back to England early in the following year to his
mother’s death-bed. Neither she nor any of his family had known the
miserable end of his married life. They knew only that he had married,
and had lost his wife after a year of marriage. Hazard had not brought
any one belonging to him in contact with any of those few people who
knew the details of that tragical story.
His mother’s death made him rich and independent, but until the hour he
met Mildred Fausset his life was a blank.