The rigour of the winter abated, and a rainy January was succeeded by a
long spell of warm caressing weather, borrowed from May-time, so mild
and sunny was it. The trees were bursting into early bud, the sallows
were hung with catkins, primroses were a-bloom, and all over the marsh
the ewes were with young. No shepherd there remembered so early a
lambing season, nor one more fruitful.
Colin had spent a month on his beloved island, recuperating, and that
very successfully, after his illness. Then one day, after a week of
London, that longing for Stanier overcame him, and he drove down alone,
with no plan but to stay there as long as he was content. He would find
there only his grandmother, and she now kept to her room entirely, and
no more preposterous rubbers of whist would be demanded in the evening.
“After all, she has played two rubbers every night for seventy years,”
thought Colin, and tried to work out the portentous sum of the total.
But on his arrival, her nurse came down to tell him that she was
mysteriously aware, it seemed, that he was coming, for she kept
restlessly muttering to herself, “Colin will be here soon”: perhaps she
would be quieted by the sight of him. So, rather grudgingly, for it must
surely be a sheer waste of time, he went up to see her. There she lay in
bed, pallid and immobile, with her pearls round her neck, and looked at
him with that disconcerting, unwinking gaze, behind which there seemed
to lie some frozen consciousness and knowledge. She was still repeating,
even while she gazed at him, “Colin will be here soon,” but suddenly she
stopped and gave that smile which looked as if it was the blurred
reflection of something very far away, and she muttered no more.
Surely the spell of Stanier, thought Colin as he left her, that nameless
magic of the legend and its gift, had so penetrated her, that now, when
the ultimate mists thickened about her, that was the last illumination,
dimly piercing the cold shadows, that shone on her. She still had some
consciousness of him as the inheritor of it all, and he remained the
last link, now wearing so thin, of her connection with the visible
world. He could imagine that; the spell of Stanier was strong, and it
would be so still, he thought, as he closed his dying eyes on its
splendour and his doom. A long way off that seemed, on this young
morning of spring.
He had started early from town, and the day was yet at noon when he
arrived, and, reserving himself for a long outing after lunch, he
wandered about the house, soaking himself in it, and inhaling its
associations. He went into Violet’s rooms, he went into the room where
Raymond’s dead body had lain, and thought of that fortunate morning
which brought him his inheritance. Dennis’s room he passed without
entering, and some twitch of exasperation took him at the thought of
Dennis.
He was forever checking that truancy of his mind, overhauling it and
bringing it back when it went on these illicit excursions. It would
belong anyhow before he saw the boy, for in the Easter holidays he would
be in Italy again, and assuredly Dennis should not accompany him.
He went down the broad staircase into the hall, with the portrait of old
Colin facing him, with the parchment of the legendary contract he had
made let into the frame. ‘_O bonum commercium_!’ he thought, and the
picture smiled back at him across the prosperous centuries. Near by was
the smoking-room: that too was a place where the dead had lain, and he
recalled how he and good unsuspecting Doctor Martin had moved the
remains of Vincenzo there. Then came the long gallery with the sunshine
pouring in, and outside the terrace and the yew-hedge, where, beneath
the summer night, Violet had said she loved him. There he had walked
with Pamela too.... That silly Pamela: she might have been alive to-day
and young still, if she had only not been so reckless as to love. You
never know into what dangerous places love might lead you, into depths
of unsubstantial air, or depths of icy water. And there, none too soon
for his appetite, the door of the dining-room was opened, and his new
valet whom he had brought from Italy told him that he was served. The
boy was rather like Nino....
* * * * *
He drove out after lunch in the little two-seater that went lightly over
the roads in the marsh rough with the scourings of the winter storms,
out past the golf-links and along the sandy road towards Lydd. He
intended to walk home across the marsh, and presently he got out for his
tramp. The dykes were full of water, but it was always possible to find
a way over footbridges and culverts. It might be devious and zig-zag,
but you could progress in the required direction, and how more
pleasantly, after the grime of London, could he pass a couple of hours
than by strolling through the pastures bright with the young growth of
spring, and populous with anxious ewes, and new-born lambs? There was
Rye on the edge of the plain, and above it the woods of Stanier, with a
glimpse of the house among them. That would be his general line, and
with half the afternoon before him he would strike the Romney road
before dusk and follow it along to the outskirts of the town, where his
car would be waiting for him.
He had been walking for an hour with the sunlight warm on him, and the
larks carolling in the lucent air, when the brightness began to grow
dim, and looking up he saw that the sky was veiled with mist, through
which the sun peered whitely. A little breeze had sprung up, and from
seaward there was drifting in a fog off the Channel, where already the
sirens were hooting. The warmth of the day had drawn up much moisture
from the marsh into the air, and now, in the chill of the veiled sun, it
was rapidly condensing into one of those thick white mists which, while
Stanier on its hill still basked in sunshine, enveloped the lower
ground. It was annoying, for he had still a mile to go before he struck
the road, and he hurried on, to cover the ground as quickly as he could.
But before he had gone half that distance the mist thickened to so dense
an opacity that it was impossible to see more than a yard or two ahead.
But, before it closed down on him, he had seen a gate some hundred yards
in front, which was clearly the outlet from this pasture in the
direction of Rye, and he walked, as he thought, straight towards it.
Presently he came to a stop. Instead of there being a gate in front of
him there was a broad dyke. He followed along this to the left, but it
seemed to run on indefinitely, and retracing his steps he tried the
other direction. This brought him to the gate, through which he passed,
and, orientating himself from it, he started off afresh. But now he had
no visible mark to guide him, for the encompassing mists had closed
their white walls impenetrably round him. Before long in this baffling
dimness he knew he had lost his bearings altogether: whether Rye was to
the left or right of him or straight ahead he had no idea: he must just
hope to find gates or footbridges across the dykes till he came to the
road, searching blindfold for them. And it was growing dark: the
daylight of the clear air above the fog was fading.
He had passed, ten minutes before, a shepherd’s hut put up for lambing,
and now he determined to retrace his steps to this, and see if there was
anyone there from whom he could get guidance, for at this season of the
year the farmer or his shepherd often sat up all night, as once old
Colin had done as a boy, for the needs of midwifery. But now he could
not find the hut, and, giving up the search as vain, he thought that he
would again retrace the steps of his fruitless exploration, and push on
as best he might. Then with a sudden springing up of hope he saw a gate
close ahead of him, but when he came to it he found it familiar in some
bewildering manner. The staple was stiff just as was that of the last
gate he had passed through, and on the lowest bar of it was caught a
piece of white sheep’s wool, which he had noticed before. He must have
come round in a circle to the point from which he had started when the
mist grew thick.
This was all very uncomfortable, and he paused, wondering what to do
next. If he could not find his way across a mile of pasture, it would be
mere folly to attempt to go back on the course he had come. It would
have been infinitely better to have gone into that shepherd’s hut when
he had the chance, and waited for the mist to lift; now the wisest thing
would be to try again to find his way back there, for it was somewhere
close to this gate to which he had inadvertently returned.
He set off, and now with a clearer recollection of his bearings he met
with better success, and presently he found the hut again. There was no
one there, and there was no door to it, but at any rate there was a roof
to cover him, and wooden walls for shelter, and inside there was a pile
of straw, dry and plentiful, into which he could burrow for warmth while
he waited.
The moisture of the mist was thick on his clothes, like dew on fleece,
and his face and hands were chilled and wet with it. His long walk had
tired him, and the relief of finding shelter and rest was great and he
sat down on the straw and made himself as comfortable as he could. What
time it was he had no idea, for he was without matches, and it was now
so dark that he could not see his watch. The doorless entrance was but a
glimmering greyness against the blackness of the interior, and he
wondered whether, even if the mist cleared, he could find his way home
before morning. Perhaps there was a moon, but time alone would show
that, and his thoughts began to stray in other directions.
It was an odd adventure: just so had old Colin, when a shepherd boy,
passed the night in some such hut as this, probably within a few hundred
yards of where he himself now sat, and that certainly had been no
unfortunate experience for him, for on that night the splendid fortunes
and prosperity of the house of which now he himself was head had been
founded. Health and wealth and honour and all that his heart desired had
been granted to his ancestor on that night of the legend, into the
inheritance of which he had entered by his love of evil, and his hate of
love.... And then the thought of Dennis came up like a bubble to the
surface of his mind, Dennis whom he hated and had tried to corrupt, and
who was the heir to all his splendours.
Colin was getting drowsy in the warmth of his straw-bed; for a moment,
as token of that, he thought he heard Dennis’s voice, and that roused
him again. But sleep was the most reasonable manner of passing these
hours of waiting, which might be long; and it was certainly better than
thinking about Dennis. Thicker and thicker, like the mists outside, the
dusk of sleep darkened round him.
He slept soundly and dreamlessly, and woke, after some interval of the
length of which he had no idea, into the full possession of his
faculties, so that he had no puzzled bewilderment as to where he was or
how he had come here: this waking consciousness dovetailed precisely
into that which had preceded his sleep. Probably he had slept long, for
he woke alert and refreshed, warm and comfortable under the straw that
he had pulled over him. But close on the heels of his waking there came
the conviction that he was not alone here. He had gone to sleep alone,
far away from the haunts of men in the isolation of the mist, but while
he slept someone had come.
He sat up, and turning looked towards the blank doorway. It was still
faintly visible, a dusky oblong in the blackness, but now it framed the
figure as of a man, which stood there in the entry. Some shepherd was
it, who, like himself, sought shelter?
“Hullo, who is that?” said Colin. “I have lost my way, and am sheltering
here till the mist clears. Lord Yardley from Stanier.”
There was silence, then very quietly a voice spoke:
“I know who you are,” it said.
Colin felt his breath catch in his throat, and a pulse beat there. This
was not the voice of a shepherd come here for the lambing or for
shelter, and a fantastic notion flashed into his head. Here was he,
sleeping in a remote hut in the marsh at lambing-time, even as old Colin
had done, and he asked himself whether some renewal or re-enactment of
the legend was at hand. The idea scarcely seemed strange, so intimately
did the belief in the legend beat in his blood. It was no shepherd who
spoke....
That shape in the doorway seemed to him rather larger than it had been
at first: perhaps it had moved a silent step nearer him. It had outlined
itself a little more clearly now: the shape of the shoulders and the
head was more sharply defined; round the head there was a faint
luminousness like the halo the moonlight casts round a man’s shadow on
the grass.
In the silence that followed Colin asked himself whether he was still
asleep, whether the whole adventure was a dream, whether he would
presently wake up and find himself in his bed at Stanier. And then the
voice spoke again, and he knew that, whether he dreamed, or whether
indeed he was awake, the substance of things unseen was in
manifestation.
“Why did you save Dennis?” asked the quiet voice.
The question was utterly unexpected. But whoever this was, he had no
claim to be answered. His Lord and Benefactor, if it was he, knew that
his soul was set on evil and hate. And what right had any other power in
heaven or earth or in the dark places to question him? Why he answered
at all, he did not know; his voice seemed to take it upon itself to do
so.
“I saved Dennis,” he said, “just simply because I chose to. It was my
own business, and my will is free.”
“You might easily have been drowned,” said the voice. “Did you consider
that?”
“I knew I was taking that risk,” said Colin.
“And did you consider what doom awaited you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you save Dennis?”
Colin began to catch a glimpse of the purport of the question. But
nothing, he determined, should make him give the answer that he felt was
required of him. Besides, such an answer, he told himself, was not true.
He had been guilty, at the most, of a momentary weakness.
“I saved him, I tell you,” he said, “because I chose to. He was my only
son. Was it not reasonable that I should wish him to live and continue
my line?”
He was definitely uneasy now. His uneasiness irritated him into
flippancy.
“Perhaps you are a bachelor,” he said, “and so you can’t be expected to
understand that. In any case I don’t know what right you have to ask me,
and I have no other answer for you.”
Once more there was silence. Then the quiet voice spoke again.
“Why did you save Dennis?” it asked.
The question was beginning to frighten him. He felt as if he was on the
rack, and that each time the question came some lever was pulled, some
cog clicked, and the ropes round his wrists and ankles were getting more
taut. He could just feel the strain of them which would presently
increase.
“Why did you save Dennis?” asked the voice again.
This time Colin clenched his teeth. Whatever torture might be in store,
he would never answer that. There was no actual pain yet, only the
anticipation of it. But surely years had passed since he found his way
through the mist into this shed. It could not only have been last
evening, as the dusk of this present night began to fall, that he had
come here and covered himself up in the straw.
“It was on that very spot that you let your brother Raymond drown,” said
the voice. “Why did you let Raymond drown without an effort to save
him?”
For a moment that relieved the tension.
“Because I hated Raymond,” said Colin. “Because he stood between me and
my inheritance.”
“But you hate Dennis too. Will he not inherit all that is yours?”
“Yes, I hate Dennis,” said Colin.
“Of course. You tried to corrupt him. You tried to make him miserable.
You tried to kill his love for you. We are agreed on that then. You hate
Dennis.”
The voice was silent again. The figure surely had moved closer, for now
it towered above him. The faint luminousness round its head was
brighter: he could see the boarding of the hut and the grey glimmer of
the straw where he sat. And then again the voice spoke: Colin knew what
it was about to say.
“Why did you save Dennis?” it asked.
At that the pain began, some hot shooting stab of agony. But he could
bear that and worse than that. Every moment now seemed to have a quality
it had never possessed before: the seconds which he could hear his watch
ticking out were not long exactly: they were eternal.
The tension relaxed again.
“You hated Nino,” said the voice, “when he turned his back on you and
your wickedness, and let him die. Did you not hate Nino?”
“Yes, I hated Nino then,” said Colin.
“And you hated Pamela. You mocked her, and drove her to her death. You
were never sorry. It amused you. Did you not hate Pamela?”
“Yes, I hated Pamela,” said he.
“And you hate Violet. You hate the whole world. You hate the love which
has been squandered on you. Do you not hate love?”
“Yes, I hate love.”
Again came the terrible pause, and he bit his lip, and tried to brace
his muscles against the wrench that was coming.
“Why did you save Dennis?” came the question.
The ropes were tight now, and the pull made him gasp and cry out.
“In God’s name, who are you that torture me?” he screamed.
“You will know presently, when I have broken you.”
Colin clenched his hands tight, still utterly steadfast and untamed.
“Don’t imagine you’ll do that,” he said. “If that’s what you expect,
you’re wasting your time.”
Again the silence of eternity fell.
“Do you believe in God, Colin Stanier?” said the voice.
“Yes,” said he. “You know that.”
“And do you hate God with all your heart?”
“Yes,” said Colin.
The figure receded a little. Perhaps, he thought, now that he had made
his final and complete repudiation, which surely included all else, the
torture was over, for the cruel wrench of that repeated question came no
more, and he sank back utterly exhausted on his straw-bed, and sleep, or
some such anodyne to sensation, came over him. Then once more he came to
himself, alert and wholly awake.
Outside the mist had cleared, and he could see through the empty
door-space the pasture covered with thick dew, and a few scattered sheep
with their lambs beside them. It must be close on dawn, for in the east
there was a long line of cloud, flushed red with the sun that had not
yet risen on the earth. For the moment, with a pang of exquisite relief,
he thought he was alone, and that the inquisition of the night was over.
But how terribly real a dream could be! Dennis had known that when he
woke from his nightmare, and threw himself into his father’s arms for
protection. And this dream, even though now he was awake, had still
that quality of eternity about it.
He sat up. And then he saw that the figure was by him once more, close
to him now. It was still a shadow, dark and undecipherable, in spite of
the flushed twilight of the coming day.
“Why did you save Dennis?” it asked.
The torture shot through him again, more poignant than ever to his
racked spirit. He bowed his head, and felt the drops of agony grow thick
on his forehead. But still he made no answer.
He raised his eyes, as if in obedience to a command, and saw the lines
of cloud red in the dawn. And the voice spoke:
“See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. One drop would save
your soul. But you would never call on Him, Colin, because you hate
Him.”
He could not answer, so rending was the torture. He waited, writhing and
stiffened against what was coming.
“Why did you save Dennis?” asked the voice.
At that the full fierceness of mortal agony was let loose on him, and
that agony was eternal: it had existed before ever time began. The evil
of all that he had done, the utter depravity of his soul, with its lust
for hate and its hate of love, was torn and wrenched by the inflexible
power of that which had made him so lightly vault over the parapet of
the sluice, and strike out across the icy water towards Dennis. With all
his force, with all his will he resisted, but his force faded, his will
faltered and collapsed, and with a wail of pain he surrendered.
“I saved him because I loved him,” he cried. “I give in, you devil from
the pit. For Christ’s sake don’t torture me any more!”
The rending agony in which he writhed ceased, the strain relaxed.
Blinded with sweat and tears he looked at the figure that stood close to
him now, but still it was no more than a shadow to him.
“Who are you?” he sobbed. “Why have you tortured me like this? Are you
my Lord whom I have served so well? Who are you?”
At that the shadow brightened into a beam that dimmed the lines of
morning, and filled the hut with a radiance on which he could not look.
And once more, for the last time, the quiet voice spoke.
“I am Love,” it said.
THE END
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