In which my Lord and I part Company
The door of the guest house stood wide, and within the lower room were
neither men that drank nor men that gave to drink. Host and drawers and
chance guests alike had left pipe and tankard for sword and musket, and
were gone to fort or palisade or river bank.
I crossed the empty room and went up the creaking stairway. No one met
me or withstood me; only a pigeon perched upon the sill of a sunny
window whirred off into the blue. I glanced out of the window as I
passed it, and saw the silver river and the _George_ and the
_Esperance_, with the gunners at the guns watching for Indian canoes,
and saw smoke rising from the forest on the southern shore. There had
been three houses there--John West's and Minifie's and Crashaw's. I
wondered if mine were burning, too, at Weyanoke, and cared not if 'twas
so.
The door of the upper room was shut. When I raised the latch and pushed
against it, it gave at the top and middle, but there was some pressure
from within at the bottom. I pushed again, more strongly, and the door
slowly opened, moving away whatever thing had lain before it. Another
moment, and I was in the room, and had closed and barred the door behind
me.
The weight that had opposed me was the body of the Italian, lying face
downwards, upon the floor. I stooped and turned it over, and saw that
the venomous spirit had flown. The face was purple and distorted; the
lips were drawn back from the teeth in a dreadful smile. There was in
the room a faint, peculiar, not unpleasant odour. It did not seem
strange to me to find that serpent, which had coiled in my path, dead
and harmless for evermore. Death had been busy of late; if he struck
down the flower, why should he spare the thing that I pushed out of my
way with my foot?
Ten feet from the door stood a great screen, hiding from view all that
might be beyond. It was very quiet in the room, with the sunshine coming
through the window, and a breeze that smelt of the sea. I had not cared
to walk lightly or to close the door softly, and yet no voice had
challenged my entrance. For a minute I feared to find the dead physician
the room's only occupant; then I passed the screen and came upon my
enemy.
He was sitting beside a table, with his arms outstretched and his head
bowed upon them. My footfall did not rouse him; he sat there in the
sunshine as still as the figure that lay before the threshold. I thought
with a dull fury that maybe he was dead already, and I walked hastily
and heavily across the floor to the table. He was a living man, for with
the fingers of one hand he was slowly striking against a sheet of paper
that lay beneath them. He knew not that I stood above him; he was
listening to other footsteps.
The paper was a letter, unfolded and written over with great black
characters. The few lines above those moving fingers stared me in the
face. They ran thus: "_I told you that you had as well cut your throat
as go upon that mad Virginia voyage. Now all's gone--wealth, honours,
favour. Buckingham is the sun in heaven, and cold are the shadows in
which we walk who hailed another luminary. There's a warrant out for the
Black Death; look to it that one meets not you too, when you come at
last. But come, in the name of all the fiends, and play your last card.
There's your cursed beauty still. Come, and let the King behold your
face once more----_" The rest was hidden.
I put out my hand and touched him upon the shoulder, and he raised his
head and stared at me as at one come from the grave.
Over one side of his face, from temple to chin, was drawn and fastened a
black cloth; the unharmed cheek was bloodless and shrunken, the lip
twisted. Only the eyes, dark, sinister, and splendid, were as they had
been. "I dig not my graves deep enough," he said. "Is she behind you
there in the shadow?"
Flung across a chair was a cloak of scarlet cloth. I took it and spread
it out upon the floor, then unsheathed a dagger which I had taken from
the rack of weapons in the Governor's hall. "Loosen thy poniard, thou
murderer," I cried, "and come stand with me upon the cloak."
"Art quick or dead?" he answered. "I will not fight the dead." He had
not moved in his seat, and there was a lethargy and a dullness in his
voice and eyes. "There is time enough," he said. "I too will soon be of
thy world, thou haggard, bloody shape. Wait until I come, and I will
fight thee, shadow to shadow."
"I am not dead," I said, "but there is one that is. Stand up, villain
and murderer, or I will kill you sitting there, with her blood upon your
hands!"
He rose at that, and drew his dagger from the sheath. I laid aside my
doublet, and he followed my example, but his hands moved listlessly and
his fingers bungled at the fastenings. I waited for him in some wonder,
it not being like him to come tardily to such pastime.
He came at length, slowly and with an uncertain step, and we stood
together on the scarlet cloak. I raised my left arm and he raised his,
and we locked hands. There was no strength in his clasp; his hand lay
within mine cold and languid. "Art ready?" I demanded.
"Yea," he answered in a strange voice, "but I would that she did not
stand there with her head upon your breast.... I too loved thee,
Jocelyn,--Jocelyn lying dead in the forest!"
I struck at him with the dagger in my right hand, and wounded him, but
not deeply, in the side. He gave blow for blow, but his poniard scarce
drew blood, so nerveless was the arm that would have driven it home. I
struck again, and he stabbed weakly at the air, then let his arm drop to
his side, as though the light and jewelled blade had weighed it down.
Loosening the clasp of our left hands, I fell back until the narrow
scarlet field was between us. "Hast no more strength than that?" I
cried. "I cannot murder you!"
He stood looking past me as into a great distance. He was bleeding, but
I had as yet been able to strike no mortal blow. "It is as you choose,"
he said. "I am as one bound before you. I am sick unto death."
Turning, he went back, swaying as he walked, to his chair, and sinking
into it sat there a minute with half-closed eyes; then raised his head
and looked at me, with a shadow of the old arrogance, pride, and disdain
upon his scarred face. "Not yet, captain?" he demanded. "To the heart,
man! So I would strike an you sat here and I stood there."
"I know you would," I said, and going to the window I flung the dagger
down into the empty street; then stood and watched the smoke across the
river, and thought it strange that the sun shone and the birds sang.
When I turned to the room again, he still sat there in the great chair,
a tragic, splendid figure, with his ruined face and the sullen woe of
his eyes. "I had sworn to kill you," I said. "It is not just that you
should live."
He gazed at me with something like a smile upon his bloodless lips.
"Fret not thyself, Ralph Percy," he said. "Within a week I shall be
gone. Did you see my servant, my Italian doctor, lying dead upon the
floor, there beyond the screen? He had poisons, had Nicolo whom men
called the Black Death,--poisons swift and strong, or subtle and slow.
Day and night, the earth and sunshine have become hateful to me. I will
go to the fires of hell, and see if they can make me forget,--can make
me forget the face of a woman." He was speaking half to me, half to
himself. "Her eyes are dark and large," he said, "and there are shadows
beneath them, and the mark of tears. She stands there day and night with
her eyes upon me. Her lips are parted, but she never speaks. There was a
way that she had with her hands, holding them one within the other,
thus----"
I stopped him with a cry for silence, and I leaned trembling against the
table. "Thou wretch!" I cried. "Thou art her murderer!"
He raised his head and looked beyond me with that strange, faint smile.
"I know," he replied, with the dignity which was his at times. "You may
play the headsman, if you choose. I dispute not your right. But it is
scarce worth while. I have taken poison."
The sunshine came into the room, and the wind from the river, and the
trumpet notes of swans flying to the north. "The _George_ is ready for
sailing," he said at last. "To--morrow or the next day she will be going
home with the tidings of this massacre. I shall go with her, and within
a week they will bury me at sea. There is a stealthy, slow, and secret
poison.... I would not die in a land where I have lost every throw of
the dice, and I would not die in England for Buckingham to come and look
upon my face, and so I took that poison. For the man upon the floor,
there,--prison and death awaited him at home. He chose to flee at
once."
He ceased to speak, and sat with his head bowed upon his breast. "If you
are content that it should be as it is," he said at length, "perhaps you
will leave me? I am not good company to-day."
His hand was busy again with the letter upon the table, and his gaze was
fixed beyond me. "I have lost," he muttered. "How I came to play my
cards so badly I do not know. The stake was heavy,--I have not
wherewithal to play again."
His head sank upon his outstretched arm. As for me, I stood a minute
with set lips and clenched hands, and then I turned and went out of the
room and down the stair and out into the street. In the dust beneath the
window lay my dagger. I picked it up, sheathed it, and went my way.
The street was very quiet. All windows and doors were closed and barred;
not a soul was there to trouble me with look or speech. The yelling from
the forest had ceased; only the keen wind blew, and brought from the
_Esperance_ upon the river a sound of singing. The sea was the home of
the men upon her decks, and their hearts dwelt not in this port; they
could sing while the smoke went up from our homes and the dead lay
across the thresholds.
I went on through the sunshine and the stillness to the minister's
house. The trees in the garden were bare, the flowers dead. The door was
not barred. I entered the house and went into the great room and flung
the heavy shutters wide, then stood and looked about me. Naught was
changed; it was as we had left it that wild November night. Even the
mirror which, one other night, had shown me Diccon still hung upon the
wall. Master Bucke had been seldom at home, perhaps, or was feeble and
careless of altering matters. All was as though we had been but an hour
gone, save that no fire burned upon the hearth.
I went to the table, and the books upon it were Jeremy Sparrow's: the
minister's house, then, had been his home once more. Beside the books
lay a packet, tied with silk, sealed, and addressed to me. Perhaps the
Governor had given it, the day before, into Master Bucke's care,--I do
not know; at any rate, there it lay. I looked at the "By the
_Esperance_" upon the cover, and wondered dully who at home would care
to write to me; then broke the seal and untied the silk. Within the
cover there was a letter with the super--scription, "To a Gentleman who
has served me well."
I read the letter through to the signature, which was that of his Grace
of Buckingham, and then I laughed, who had never thought to laugh again,
and threw the paper down. It mattered naught to me now that George
Villiers should be grateful, or that James Stewart could deny a
favourite nothing. "_The King graciously sanctions the marriage of his
sometime ward, the Lady Jocelyn Leigh, with Captain Ralph Percy; invites
them home----_"
She was gone home, and I her husband, I who loved her, was left behind.
How many years of pilgrimage ... how long, how long, O Lord?
The minister's great armchair was drawn before the cold and blackened
hearth. How often she had sat there within its dark clasp, the firelight
on her dress, her hands, her face! She had been fair to look upon; the
pride, the daring, the wilfulness, were but the thorns about the rose;
behind those defences was the flower, pure and lovely, with a heart of
gold. I flung myself down beside the chair, and putting my arms across
it, hid my face upon them, and could weep at last.
That passion spent itself, and I lay with my face against the wood and
well-nigh slept. The battle was done; the field was lost; the storm and
stress of life had sunk into this dull calm, as still as peace, as
hopeless as the charred log and white ash upon the hearth, cold, never
to be quickened again.
Time passed, and at length I raised my head, roused suddenly to the
consciousness that for a while there had been no stillness. The air was
full of sound, shouts, savage cries, the beating of a drum, the noise of
musketry. I sprang to my feet, and went to the door to meet Rolfe
crossing the threshold.
He put his arm within mine and drew me out into the sunshine upon the
doorstep. "I thought I should find you here," he said; "but it is only a
room with its memories, Ralph. Out here is more breadth, more height.
There is country yet, Ralph, and after a while, friends. The Indians are
beginning to attack in force. Humphry Boyse is killed, and Morris
Chaloner. There is smoke over the plantations up and down the river, as
far as we can see, and awhile ago the body of a child drifted down to
us."
"I am unarmed," I said. "I will but run to the fort for sword and
musket----"
"No need," he answered. "There are the dead whom you may rob." The noise
increasing as he spoke, we made no further tarrying, but, leaving behind
us house and garden, hurried to the palisade.