THE KEY
Colonel John rose and walked unsteadily to the window. He rested a hand
on either jamb and looked through it, peering to right and left with
wistful eyes. He detected no one, nothing, no change, no movement, and,
with a groan, he straightened himself. But he still continued to look
out, gazing at the bare sward below the window, at the sparkling sheet
of water beyond and beneath it, at the pitiless blue sky above, in
which the sun was still high, though it had begun to decline.
Presently he grew weary, and went back to his chair. He sat down with
his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands. Again his ears
had deceived him! Again hope had told her flattering tale! How many
more times would he start to his feet, fancying he heard the footstep
that did not fall, calling aloud to those who were not there,
anticipating those who, more hard of heart than the stone walls about
him, more heedless than the pitiless face of nature without, would not
come before the appointed time! And that was hours away, hours of
thirst and hunger, almost intolerable; of patience and waiting, weary
waiting, broken only by such a fancy, born of his weakened senses, as
had just drawn him to the window.
The suffering which is inevitable is more easy to bear than that which
is caused by man. In the latter case the sense that the misery felt may
be ended by so small a thing as another's will; that another may, by
lifting a finger, cut it short, and will not; that to persuade him is
all that is needful--this becomes at the last maddening, intolerable, a
thing to upset the reason, if that other will not be persuaded.
Colonel John was a man sane and well-balanced, and assuredly not one to
despair lightly. But even he had succumbed more than once during the
last twelve hours to gusts of rage, provoked as much by the futility of
his suffering as by the cruelty of his persecutors. After each of these
storms he had laughed, in wonder at himself, had scolded himself and
grown calm. But they had made their mark upon him, they had left his
eyes wilder, his cheeks more hollow; his hand less firm.
He had burned, in fighting the cold of the past night, all that would
burn, except the chair on which he sat; and with the dawn the last
spark of his fire had died out. Notwithstanding those fits of rage he
was not light-headed. He could command his faculties at will, he could
still reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons
that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death
on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found
himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while,
that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to
address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in
Russian snows--alas! starting from it only to shiver with that
penetrating, heart-piercing, frightful cold, which was worse to bear
than the gnawing of hunger or the longing of thirst.
He had not eaten for more than seventy hours. But the long privation
which had weakened his limbs and blanched his cheeks, which had even
gone some way towards disordering his senses, had not availed to shake
his will. The possibility of surrender did not occur to him, partly
because he felt sure that James McMurrough would not be so foolish as
to let him die; but partly, also, by reason of a noble stubbornness in
the man, a fixedness that for no pain of death would leave a woman or a
child to perish. More than once Colonel Sullivan had had to make that
choice, amid the horrors of a retreat across famished lands, with
wolves and Cossacks on his skirts; and perhaps the choice then made had
become a habit of the mind. At any rate, whether that were the cause or
no, in this new phase he gave no thought to yielding.
He had sat for some minutes in the attitude of depression, or bodily
weakness, which has, been described, when once more a sound startled
him. He raised his head and turned his eyes, sharpened by hunger, on
the window. But this time, distrusting his senses, he did not rise
until the sound was repeated. Then he faltered to his feet, and once
again went unsteadily to the window, and, leaning a hand on each jamb,
looked out.
At the same moment Flavia looked in. Their eyes met. Their faces were
less than a yard apart.
The girl started back with a low cry, caused either by alarm on finding
him so near her or by horror at the change in his aspect. If the
latter, there was abundant cause. For she had left him hungry, she
found him starving; she had left him haggard, she found him with eyes
unnaturally large, his temples hollow, his lips dry, his chin unshaven.
It was indeed a mask rather than a face, a staring mask of famine, that
looked out of the dusky room at her, and looked not the less pitifully,
not the less wofully, because, as soon as its owner took in her
identity, the mask tried to smile.
"Mother of God!" she whispered. Her face had grown nearly as white as
his. "O Mother of God!" She had imagined nothing like this.
And Colonel John, believing--his throat was so dry that he could not
speak at once--that he read pity as well as horror in her face, felt a
sob rise in his breast. He tried to smile the more bravely for that,
and presently he found his voice, a queer, husky voice.
"You must not leave me--too long," he said. His smile was becoming
ghastly.
She drew in her breath, and averted her face, to hide, he hoped, the
effect of the sight upon her. Or perhaps--for he saw her shudder--she
was mutely calling the sunlit lake on which her eyes rested, the blue
sky, the smiling summer scene, to witness against this foul cruelty,
this dark wickedness.
But it seemed that he deceived himself. For when she turned her face to
him again, though it was still colourless, it was hard and set.
"You must sign," she said. "You must sign the paper."
His parched lips opened, but he did not answer. He was as one struck
dumb.
"You must sign!" she repeated insistently. "Do you hear? You must
sign!"
Still he did not answer; he only looked at her with eyes of infinite
reproach. The pity of it! The pity of it! She, a woman, a girl, whom
compassion should have constrained, whose tender heart should have bled
for him, could see him tortured, could aid in the work, and cry "Sign!"
She could indeed, for she repeated the word--fiercely, feverishly.
"Sign!" she cried. And then, "If you will," she said, "I will give
you--see! See! You shall have this. You shall eat and drink; only sign!
For God's sake, sign what they want, and eat and drink!"
And, with fingers that trembled with haste, she drew from a
hiding-place in her cloak, bread and milk and wine. "See what I have
brought," she continued, holding them before his starting eyes, his
cracking lips, "if you will sign."
He gazed at them, at her, with anguish of the mind as well as of the
body. How he had mistaken her! How he had misread her! Then, with a
groan, "God forgive you!" he cried, "I cannot! I cannot!"
"You will not sign?" she retorted.
"Cannot, and will not!" he said.
"And why? Why will you not?"
On that his patience, sorely tried, gave way; and, swept along by one
of those gusts of rage, he spoke. "Why?" he cried in hoarse accents.
"You ask me why? Because, ungrateful, unwomanly, miserable as you
are--I will not rob you or the dead! Because I will not be false to an
old man's trust! I will not give to the forsworn what was meant for the
innocent--nor sell my honour for a drink of water! Because,"--he
laughed a half-delirious laugh--"there is nothing to sign, nothing! I
have burned your parchments these two days, and if you tempt me two
more days, if you make me suffer twice as much as I have suffered, you
can do nothing! If your heart be as hard as--it is, you can do
nothing!" He held out hands which trembled with passion. "You can do
nothing!" he repeated. "Neither you, who--God forgive you, are no
woman, have no woman's heart, no woman's pity!--nor he who would have
killed me in the bog to gain that which he now starves me to get! But I
foiled him then, as I will foil him to-day, ingrate, perjured,
accursed, as he is, accursed----"
He faltered and was silent, steadying himself by resting one hand
against the wall. For a moment he covered his eyes with the other hand.
Then "God forgive me!" he resumed in a lower tone, "I know not what I
say! God forgive me! And you--Go! for you too--God forgive you--know
not what you do. You do not know what it is to hunger and thirst, or
you would not try me thus! Nor do you know what you were to me, or you
would not try me thus! Yet I ought to remember that--that it is not for
yourself you do it!"
He turned his back on her then, and on the window. He had taken three
steps towards the middle of the room, when she cried, "Wait!"
"Go!" he repeated with a backward gesture of the hand. "Go! and God
forgive you, as I do!"
"Wait!" she cried. "And take them! Oh, take them! Quick!" He turned
about slowly, almost with suspicion. She was holding the food and the
drink through the window, holding them out for him to take. But it
might be another deception. He was not sure, and for a moment a cunning
look gleamed in his eyes, and he took a step in a stealthy fashion
towards the window, as if, were she off her guard, he would snatch them
from her. But she cried again, "Take them! Take them!" with tears in
her voice. "I brought them for you. May God indeed forgive me!"
The craving was so strong upon him that he took them then without a
word, without answering her or thanking her. He turned his back on her,
as soon as he had possessed himself of them, as if he dared not let her
see the desire in his face; and standing thus, he drew the stopper from
the bottle of milk, and drank. He would fain have held the bottle to
his lips until he had drained the last drop: but he controlled himself,
and when he had swallowed a few mouthfuls, he removed it. Then, with
the solemnity of a sacrament, perhaps with the feeling that should
attend one, he broke off three or four small fragments of the bread,
and ate them one by one and slowly--the first with difficulty, the
second more easily, the third with an avidity which he checked only by
a firm effort of the will. "Presently!" he told himself. "Presently!
There is plenty, there is plenty." Yet he allowed himself two more
mouthfuls of bread and another sip of milk--milk that was nectar,
rather than any earthly drink his lips had ever encountered.
At length, with new life running in his veins, and not new life only,
but a pure thankfulness that she had proved herself very woman at the
last, he laid his treasures on the chair, and turned to her. She was
gone.
His face fell. For while he had eaten and drunk he had felt her
presence at his back, and once he was sure that he had heard her sob.
But she was gone. A chill fell upon his spirits. Yet she might not be
gone far. He staggered--for he was not yet steady on his feet--to the
window, and looked to right and left.
She had not gone far. She was lying prone on the sward, her face hidden
on her arms; and it was true that he had heard her sob, for she was
weeping without restraint. The change in him, the evidence of suffering
which she had read in his face, to say nothing of his reproaches, had
done something more than shock her. They had opened her eyes to the
true nature--already dimly seen--of the plan to which she had lent
herself. They had torn the last veil from the selfishness of those with
whom she had acted, their cupidity and their ruthlessness. And they had
shown the man himself in a light so new and startling, that even the
last twenty-four hours had not prepared her for it. The scales of
prejudice which had dimmed her sight fell at length, and wholly, from
her eyes; and, for the first time, she saw him as he was. For the first
time she perceived that, in pursuing the path he had followed, he might
have thought himself right; he might have been moved by a higher motive
than self-interest, he might have been standing for others rather than
for himself. Parts of the passionate rebuke which suffering and
indignation had forced from him remained branded upon her memory; and
she wept in shame, feeling her helplessness, her ignorance, her
inexperience, feeling that she had no longer any sure support or prop.
For how could she trust those who had drawn her into this hideous, this
cruel business? Who, taking advantage at once of her wounded vanity,
and her affection for her brother, had led her to this act, from which
she now shrank in abhorrence?
There was only, of all about her, Uncle Ulick to whom she could turn,
or on whom she could depend. And he, though he would not have stooped
to this, was little better, she knew, than a broken reed. The sense of
her loneliness, the knowledge that those about her used her for their
own ends--and those the most unworthy--overwhelmed her; and in
proportion as she had been proud and self-reliant, was her present
abasement.
When the first passion of self-reproach had spent itself, she heard him
calling her by name, and in a voice that stirred her heart-strings. She
rose, first to her knees and then to her feet, and, averting her face,
"I will open the door," she said, humbly and in a broken voice. "I have
brought the key."
He did not answer, and she did not unlock. For as, still keeping her
face averted that he might not see her tears, she turned the corner of
the Tower to gain the door, her brother's head and shoulders rose above
the level of the platform. As The McMurrough stepped on to the latter
from the path, he was in time to see her skirt vanishing. He saw no
more. But his suspicions were aroused. He strode across the face of the
Tower, turned the corner, and came on her in the act of putting the key
in the lock.
"What are you doing?" he cried, in a terrible voice. "Are you mad?"
She did not answer, but neither did he pause for her answer. The
imminence of the peril, the thought that the man whom he had so deeply
wronged, and who knew him for the perjured thing he was, might in
another minute be free--free to take what steps he pleased, free to
avenge himself and punish his foes, rose up before him, and he thrust
her roughly from the door. The key, not yet turned, came away in her
hand, and he tried to snatch it from her.
"Give it me!" he cried. "Do you hear? Give it me!"
"I will not!" she cried. "No!"
"Give it up, I say!" he retorted. And this time he made good his hold
on her wrist. He tried to force the key from her. "Let it go!" he
panted, "or I shall hurt you!"
But he made a great mistake if he thought that he could coerce Flavia
in that way. Her fingers only closed more tightly on the key. "Never!"
she cried, struggling with him. "Never! I am going to let him out!"
"You coward!" a voice cried through the door. "Coward! Coward!" There
was a sound of drumming on the door.
But Colonel John's voice and his blows were powerless to help, as
James, in a frenzy of rage and alarm, gripped the girl's wrist, and
twisted it. "Let it go! Let it go, you fool!" he cried brutally, "or I
will break your arm!"
Her face turned white with pain, but for a moment she endured in
silence. Then a shriek escaped her.
It was answered instantly. Neither he nor she had had eyes for aught
but one another; and the hand that fell, and fell heavily, on James's
shoulder was as unexpected as a thunderbolt.
"By Heaven, man," a voice cried in his ear. "Are you mad? Or is this
the way you treat women in Kerry? Let the lady go! Let her go, I say!"
The command was needless, for at the first sound of the voice James had
fallen back with a curse, and Flavia, grasping her bruised wrist with
her other hand, reeled for support against the Tower wall. For a moment
no one spoke. Then James, with scarcely a look at Payton--for he it
was--bade her come away with him. "If you are not mad," he growled,
"you'll have a care! You'll have a care, and come away, girl!"
"When I have let him out, I will," she answered, her eyes glowing
sombrely as she nursed her wrist. In her, too, the old Adam had been
raised.
"Give me the key!" he said for the last time.
"I will not," she said. "And if I did--" she continued, with a glance
at Payton that reminded the unhappy McMurrough that, with the secret
known, the key was no longer of use--"if I did, how would it serve
you?"
The McMurrough turned his rage upon the intruder. "Devil take you, what
business will it be of yours?" he cried. "Who are you to come between
us, eh?"
Payton bowed. "If I offend," he said airily, "I am entirely at your
service." He tapped the hilt of his sword. "You do not wear one, but I
have no doubt you can use one. I shall be happy to give you
satisfaction where and when you please. A time and place----"
But James did not stop to hear him out. He turned with an oath and a
snarl, and went off--went off in such a manner that Flavia could not
but see that the challenge was not to his taste. At another time she
would have blushed for him. But his brutal violence had done more
during the last ten minutes to depose his image from her heart than
years of neglect and rudeness.
Payton saw him go, and, blessing the good fortune which had put him in
a position to command the beauty's thanks, he turned to receive them.
But Flavia was not looking at him, was not thinking of him. She had put
the key in the lock and was trying to turn it. Her left wrist, however,
was too weak, and the right was so strained as to be useless. She
signed to him to turn the key, and he did so, and threw open the door,
wondering much who was there and what it was all about.
He did not at once recognise the man who, pale and haggard, a mere
ghost of himself, dragged himself up the three steps, and, exhausted by
the effort, leant against the doorpost. But when Colonel John spoke and
tried to thank the girl, he knew him.
He whistled. "You are Colonel Sullivan!" he said.
"The same, sir!" Colonel John murmured mechanically.
"Are you ill?"
"I am not well," the other replied with a sickly smile. The indignation
which he had felt during the contest between the girl and her brother
had been too much for his strength. "I shall be better presently," he
added. He closed his eyes.
"We should be getting him below," Flavia said in an undertone.
Payton looked from one to the other. He was in a fog. "Has he been here
long?" he asked.
"Nearly four days," she replied, with a shiver.
"And nothing to eat?"
"Nothing."
"The devil! And why?"
She did not stay to think how much it was wise to tell him. In her
repentant mood she was anxious to pour herself out in self-reproach.
"We wanted him to convey some property," she said, "as we wished."
"To your brother?"
"Ah, to him!" Then, seeing his astonishment, "It was mine," she added.
Payton knew that estates were much held in trust in that part, and he
began to understand. He looked at her; but no, he did not understand
now. For if the idea had been to constrain Colonel Sullivan to transfer
her property to her brother, how did her interest match with that? He
could only suppose that her brother had coerced her, and that she had
given him the slip and tried to release the man--with the result he had
witnessed.
One thing was clear. The property, large or small, was still hers. The
Major looked with a thoughtful face at the smiling valley, with its
cabins scattered over the slopes, at the lake and the fishing-boats,
and the rambling slate-roofed house with its sheds and peat-stacks. He
wondered.
No more was said at that moment, however, for Flavia saw that Colonel
Sullivan's strength was not to be revived in an hour. He must be
assisted to the house and cared for there. But in the meantime, and to
lend some strength, she was anxious to give him such wine and food as
he could safely take. To procure these she entered the room in which he
had been confined.
As she cast her eyes round its dismal interior, marked the poor handful
of embers that told of his long struggle with the cold, marked the one
chair which he had saved--for to lie on the floor had been
death--marked the beaten path that led from the chair to the window,
and spoke of many an hour of painful waiting and of hope deferred, she
saw the man in another, a more gentle, a more domestic aspect. She had
seen the heroism, she now saw the pathos of his conduct, and tears came
afresh to her eyes. "For me!" she murmured. "For me! And how had I
treated him!"
Her old grievance against him was forgotten, wiped out of remembrance
by his sufferings. She dwelt only on the treatment she had meted out to
him.
When they had given him to eat and drink he assured them, smiling, that
he could walk. But when he attempted to do so he staggered. "He will
need a stronger arm than yours," Payton said, with a grin. "May I offer
mine?"
For the first time she looked at him gratefully "Thank you," she said.
"I can walk," the Colonel repeated obstinately. "A little giddy, that
is all." But in the end he needed all the help that both could give
him. And so it happened that a few minutes later Luke Asgill, standing
at the entrance to the courtyard, a little anxious indeed, but aware of
no immediate danger, looked along the road, and saw the three
approaching, linked in apparent amity.
The shock was great, for James McMurrough had fled, cursing, into
solitude and the hills, taking no steps to warn his ally. The sight,
thus unforeseen, struck Asgill with the force of a bullet. Colonel John
released, and in the company of Flavia and Payton! All his craft, all
his coolness forsook him. He slunk out of sight by a back way, but not
before Payton had marked his retreat.