around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from
his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep
behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease
with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the
mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of
bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously,
his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the
Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most
men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from
towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven
by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of
finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the
sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was
the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He
was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St.
Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that
end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the
death that he had all his life feared.
He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the
panorama of the Chaine de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles,
from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full
sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue,
cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The
summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices
were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and
there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or
the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining
half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke
that was blue.
He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single
room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the
edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the
chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it
and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and
so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.
He saw below him--far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue
rock--the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of
the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the
parapet, the precipice continue to the primaeval forest, the trees of
which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him.
Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.
He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open.
He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father
after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body
below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed
in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman
thing....
Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped
down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around
the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.
He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed
unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one
argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried
to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful
was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that
thought his thoughts lost all order. He recalled how happy he had been
with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised
that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the
child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at
the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to
lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His
father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to
live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean
old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the
affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was
right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?
He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that
he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and
like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly
all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell--a foot, over a
stone.
He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.
Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again
to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he
gained the edge, looked over----
One little push would do it; one leap.
His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks before him until his
fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in
his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the
chapel and to safety.
He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure
was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined.
He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not
die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back
to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love,
to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a
woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine
that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she,
unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what
Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he
would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If
passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an
animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him
detest each other.
The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They
must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an
unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical
immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a
secret, a secret of which they might never rid themselves. He,
unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and
thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and
loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that
he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.
He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain
might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had
so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in
it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down
in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way
on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.
They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward
them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von
Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.
"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly
ridiculous."
Stainton was thinking:
"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I
must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."
What he said was:
"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I
had a little tumble."
They both started forward.
"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.
"No--no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You
can't fix it up?"
She shook her head.
He looked at von Klausen.
"You"--he wet his lips with his thick tongue--"you won't change your
prejudices?"
The Austrian flushed.
"I cannot change my religion," said he.
Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.
"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry,
Captain; but the bus leaves the Hotellerie in half an hour, and we've
got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."
THE END
The CROWN NOVELS
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[Transcriber's Notes: