Her baby had fallen asleep. I knew this by the faint, low sweetness of
her croon; and, shuddering with the horrors I had witnessed--horrors
which acquired a double force from the contrast presented by the peace
of this quiet spot and the hallowing influence of the sleeping infant--I
threw myself down in the darkness at her feet, gasping out:
"Oh, thank God and your uncle's seeming harshness that you have escaped
the doom which has overtaken those others! You and your babe are still
alive; while they----"
"What of them? What has happened to them? You are breathless, trembling;
you have brought no bread----"
"No, no. Food in this house means death. Your relatives gave food and
wine to your uncle at a supper; he, though now in his grave, has
returned the same to them. There was a bottle----"
I stopped, appalled. A shriek, muffled by distance but quivering with
the same note of death I had heard before, had gone up again from the
other side of the wall against which we were leaning.
"Oh!" she gasped, "and my father was at that supper! my father, who died
last night cursing the day he was born! We are an accursed race! I have
known it all my life. Perhaps that was why I mistook passion for love.
And my baby--O God, have mercy! God, have mercy!"
The plaintiveness of that cry, the awesomeness of what I had seen--of
what was going on at that moment almost within the reach of our
arms--the darkness, the desolation of our two souls, affected me as I
had never been affected in my whole life before. In the concentrated
experience of the last two hours I seemed to have lived years under this
woman's eyes; to know her as I did my own heart; to love her as I did my
own soul. No growth of feeling ever brought the ecstasy of that moment's
inspiration. With no sense of doing anything strange, with no fear of
being misunderstood, I reached out my hand, and, touching hers where it
lay clasped about her infant, I said:
"We are two poor wayfarers. A rough road loses half its difficulties
when trodden by two. Shall we, then, fare on together--you, I, and the
little child?"
She gave a sob; there was sorrow, longing, grief, hope in its thrilling,
low sound. As I recognised the latter emotion I drew her to my breast.
The child did not separate us.
"We shall be happy," I murmured, and her sigh seemed to answer a
delicious "Yes," when suddenly there came a shock to the partition
against which we leaned, and, starting from my clasp, she cried:
"Our duty is in there. Shall we think of ourselves, or even of each
other, while these men, all relatives of mine, are dying on the other
side of this wall?"
Seizing my hand, she dragged me to the trap; but here I took the lead
and helped her down the ladder. When I had her safely on the floor at
the foot she passed in front of me again; but once up the steps and in
front of the kitchen door I thrust her behind me, for one glance into
the room beyond had convinced me it was no place for her.
But she would not be held back. She crowded forward beside me, and
together we looked upon the wreck within. It was a never-to-be-forgotten
scene. The demon that was in those men had driven them to demolish
furniture, dishes, everything. In one heap lay what, an hour before, had
been an inviting board surrounded by rollicking and greedy guests. But
it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something
that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a
setting to awful death. Janet's face, in all its natural hideousness and
depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on,
lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more
than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy
temples. Two in this room! and on the threshold of the one beyond a
moaning third, who sank into eternal silence as we approached; and
before the fireplace in the great room a horrible crescent that had once
been aged Luke, upon whom we had no sooner turned our backs than we
caught glimpses here and there of other prostrate forms which moved
once under our eyes and then moved no more.
One only still stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure
and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no
colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose
false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and
burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small
slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss
something which neither of us had power to supply. It was a spectacle to
make devils rejoice and mortals fly aghast. But Eunice had a spirit like
an angel, and, drawing near him, she said:
"Is there anything I can do for you, Cousin John?"
He started, looked at her with the same blank gaze he had hitherto cast
at the wall, then some words formed on his working lips, and we heard:
"I cannot reckon; I was never good at figures. But if Luke is gone, and
William, and Hector, and Barbara's boy, and Janet, _how much does that
leave for me_?"
He was answered almost the moment he spoke, but it was by other tongues,
and in another world than this. As his body fell forward I tore open the
door before which he had been standing, and, lifting the almost fainting
Eunice in my arms, I carried her out into the night. As I did so I
caught a final glimpse of the pictured face I had found it so hard to
understand a couple of hours before. I understood it now.
A surprise awaited us as we turned toward the gate. The mist had lifted,
and a keen but not unpleasant wind was driving from the north. Borne on
it we heard voices. The village had emptied itself, probably at the
alarm given by the lawyer, and it was these good men and women whose
approach we heard. As we had nothing to fear from them we went forward
to meet them. As we did so three crouching figures rose from some bushes
we passed and ran scurrying before us through the gateway. They were the
late-comers who had shown such despair at being shut out from this fatal
house, and who probably were not yet acquainted with the doom they had
escaped.
* * * * *
There were lanterns in the hands of some of the men who now approached.
As we stopped before them these lanterns were held up, and by the light
they gave we saw, first, the lawyer's frightened face, then the visages
of two men who seemed to be persons of some authority.
"What news?" faltered the lawyer, seeing by our faces that we knew the
worst.
"Bad," I returned; "the poison had lost none of its virulence by being
mixed so long with the wine."
"How many?" asked the man on his right anxiously.
"Eight," was my solemn reply.
"There were but eight," faltered the lawyer; "that means, then, all?"
"All," I repeated.
A murmur of horror rose, swelled, then died out in tumult as the crowd
swept on past us.
For a moment we stood watching these people; saw them pause before the
door we had left open behind us, then rush in, leaving a wail of terror
on the shuddering midnight air. When all was quiet again, Eunice laid
her hand upon my arm.
"Where shall we go?" she asked despairingly. "I do not know of a house
that will open to me."
The answer to her question came from other lips than mine.
"I do not know one that will _not_," spoke up a voice behind our backs.
"Your withdrawal from the circle of heirs did not take from you your
rightful claim to an inheritance which, according to your uncle's will,
could be forfeited only by a failure to arrive at the place of
distribution within the hour set by the testator. As I see the matter
now, this appeal to the honesty of the persons so collected was a test
by which my unhappy client strove to save from the general fate such
members of his miserable family as fully recognised their sin and were
truly repentant."
It was Lawyer Smead. He had lingered behind the others to tell her this.
She was, then, no outcast, but rich, very rich; how rich I dared not
acknowledge to myself, lest a remembrance of the man who was the last to
perish in that house of death should return to make this calculation
hateful. It was a blow which struck deep--deeper than any either of us
had sustained that night. As we came to realise it, I stepped slowly
back, leaving her standing erect and tall in the middle of the roadway,
with her baby in her arms. But not for long; soon she was close at my
side murmuring softly:
"Two wayfarers still! Only, the road will be more difficult and the need
of companionship greater. Shall we fare on together, you, I--and the
little child?"