It was an intensely hot September night. Magdaléna, knowing that sleep
was impossible, had not gone to bed. She wandered restlessly about her
large room, striving to force a current of air. Not a vibration came
through the open windows, nor a sound. The very trees seemed to lean
forward with limp hanging arms. Across the stars was a dark veil, riven
at long intervals with the copper of sheet lightning. Her room, too, was
dark. A light would bring a pest of mosquitoes. The high remote falsetto
of several, as it was, proclaimed an impatient waiting for their ally,
sleep.
Last night, Tiny had given a party, and wrung from Magdaléna a promise
that she would go to it. Rose had called for her. At the last moment
Magdaléna's courage had shrunk to a final shuddering heap, and as she
heard the wheels of the Geary waggonette, she had run upstairs, and
flung herself between the bedclothes, sending down word that she had a
raging toothache. It was her first lie in many years, but it was better
than to dance with despair and agony written on her relaxed face behind
the windows of the garden in which Trennahan had asked her to marry him.
To-night she was seriously considering the proposition of going to her
aunt in Santa Barbara, with or without her father's consent. Her sense
of duty had not tumbled into the ruins of her will, but she argued that
in this most crucial period of her life, her duty was to herself. Helena
had not even asked her to be bridesmaid; she took her acquiescence for
granted. Magdaléna laughed aloud at the thought; but she could not leave
Helena in the lurch at the last moment. When she got to Santa Barbara,
she could plead her aunt's ill health as excuse for not returning in
time for the ceremony. She was in a mood to tell twenty lies if
necessary, but she would not stand at the altar with Trennahan and
Helena. Her passionate desire for change of associations was rising
rapidly to the dignity of a fixed idea. To-morrow there must be a change
of some sort, or her brain would be babbling its secrets. Already her
memory would not connect at times. She felt sure that the prolonged
strain had produced a certain congestion in her brain. And she was
beginning to wonder if she hated Helena. The fires in Magdaléna burned
slowly, but they burned exceeding hot.
She paused and thrust her head forward. For some seconds past her
sub-consciousness had grasped the sound of galloping hoofs. They were on
the estate, by the deer park; a horse was galloping furiously toward the
house.
She ran to the window and looked out. She could see nothing. Could it be
a runaway horse? Was somebody ill? The flying feet turned abruptly and
made for the rear of the house, then paused suddenly. There was a
furious knocking.
Magdaléna's knees shook with a swift presentiment. Something had
happened--was going to happen--to her. She stood holding her breath.
Someone ran softly but swiftly up the stair, and down the hall, to her
room. She knew then who it was, and ran forward and opened the door.
"Helena!" she exclaimed. "What is the matter? Something has--Mr.
Trennahan--"
Helena flung herself upon Magdaléna and burst into a passion of weeping.
Magdaléna stood rigid, ice in her veins. "Is he dead?" she managed to
ask.
"No! He isn't. I wish he were--No, I don't mean that--I'll tell you in a
minute--Let me get through first!"
Magdaléna dragged her shaking limbs across the room and felt for a
chair. Helena began pacing rapidly up and down, pushing the chairs out
of her way.
"Would you like a light?" asked Magdaléna.
"No, thanks; I don't want to be eaten alive with mosquitoes. Oh, how
shall I begin? I suppose you think we've had a commonplace quarrel. I
wish we had. I swear to you, 'Léna, that up to to-night I loved
him--yes, I know that I did! I was rather sorry I'd promised to marry so
soon, for I like being a girl, not really belonging to anyone but
myself, and I love being a great belle, and I think that I should have
begged for another year--but I loved him better than anyone, and I
really intended to marry him--"
"Aren't you going to marry him?"
"Don't be so stern, 'Léna! You don't know all yet. Lately I've been
alone with him a great deal, and you know how you talk about yourselves
in those circumstances. I had told him everything I had ever done and
thought--most; had turned myself inside out. Then I made him talk. Up to
a certain point he was fluent enough; then he shut up like a clam. I
never was very curious about men; but because he was all mine, or
perhaps because I didn't have anything else to think about, I made up my
mind he should come to confession. He fought me off, but you know I have
a way of getting what I want--if I don't there's trouble; and to-night I
pulled his past life out of him bit by bit. 'Léna! he's had _liaisons_
with married women; he's kept house with women; he's seen the worst life
of every city! For a few years--he confessed it in so many words--he was
one of the maddest men in Europe. The actual things he told me only in
part; but you know I have the instincts of the devil. 'Léna, _he's a
human slum_, and I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!"
"But that all belongs to his past. He loves you, and you can make him
better--make him forget--"
"I don't want to make any man better. I love everything to be clean and
new and bright,--not mildewed with a thousand vices that I would never
even discuss. Oh, he's a brute to ask me to marry him. I hate myself
that I've been engaged to him! I feel as if I'd tumbled off a pedestal!"
"Are you so much better and purer than I? I knew much of this; but it
did not horrify me. I knew too, what you may not know, that he came here
in a critical time in his--his--inner life, and I was glad to think
that--California had helped him to become quite another man." Her voice
was hoarse, almost inarticulate.
Helena flung herself at Magdaléna's feet. She was trembling with
excitement; but her feverish appeal for sympathy met with no response.
"That is another thing that nearly drove me wild,--that I had taken him
away from you for nothing. I know you don't care now; but you
did--perhaps you do now--sometimes I've suspected, only I wouldn't face
it--and to think that in my wretched selfishness I've separated you for
ever! For your pride wouldn't let you take him back now, and he's as
wild about me as ever: I never thought he could lose control over
himself as he did when I told him what I thought of him and beat him on
the shoulders with both my fists. He turned as white as a corpse and
shook like a leaf. Then he braced up and told me I was a little wild
cat, and that he should leave me and come back when I had come to my
senses, that he had no intention of giving me up. But he need not come
back. I'll never lay eyes on him again. While he was letting me get at
those things, I felt as if my love for him burst into a thousand pieces,
and that when they flew together again they made hate. He told me he was
used to girls of the world, who understood things; and that the girls of
California were so crude they either knew all there was to know by
experience, or else they were prudes--"
Helena paused abruptly and caught her breath. She had felt Magdaléna
extend her arm and stealthily open a drawer in the bureau beside her
chair. There was nothing remarkable in the fact, for in that drawer
Magdaléna kept her handkerchiefs. Nevertheless, Helena shook with the
palsy of terror; the cold sweat burst from her body. In the intense
darkness she could see nothing, only a vague patch where the face of
Magdaléna was. The silence was so strained that surely a shriek must
come tearing across it. The shriek came from her own throat. She leaped
to her feet like a panther, reached the door in a bound, fled down the
hall and the stair, her eyes glancing wildly over her shoulder, and so
out to her horse. It is many years since that night, but there are
silent moments when that ride through the woods flashes down her memory
and chills her skin,--that mad flight from an unimaginable horror,
through the black woods on a terrified horse, the shadow of her fear
racing just behind with outstretched arms and clutching fingers.
Helena's sudden flight left Magdaléna staring through the dark at the
Spanish dagger in her hand. Her arm was raised, her wrist curved; the
dagger pointed toward the space which Helena had filled a moment ago.
"I intended to kill her," she said aloud. "I intended to kill her."
The mental admission of the design and its frustration were almost
simultaneous. Her brain was still in a hideous tumult. Weakened by
suffering, the shock of Helena's fickleness and injustice, the sudden
perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had
disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the
mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness. Her love
for her old friend, long trembling in the balance, had flashed into
hate. Upon hate had followed the murderous impulse for vengeance; not
for her own sake, but for that of the man whose weakness had ruined her
life and his own. In the very height of her sudden madness she was still
capable of a curious misdirected feminine unselfishness.
When she came to herself, chagrin that she had failed to accomplish her
purpose possessed her mind for the moment, although she had made no
attempt to follow Helena, beyond springing to her feet. Then her
conscience asserted itself, and reminded her that she should be
appalled, overcome with horror, at the awful possibilities of her
nature. The picture of Helena in the death struggle, bleeding and
gasping, rose before her. Her knees gave way with horror and fright, and
she fell upon her chair, dropping the dagger from her wet fingers,
staring at the grim spectre of her friend. Then once more the sound of
galloping hoofs came to her ears. Both Helena and herself were safe.
In a few moments her thoughts grouped themselves into a regret deeper
and bitterer still. She was capable of the highest passion, and
Circumstance had diverted it from its natural climax and impelled it
toward murder. She sat there and thought until morning on the part to
which she had been born; the ego dully attempting to understand, to
realise that its imperious demands receive little consideration from the
great Law of Circumstance, and are usually ignored.