THE BURNING FIERY FURNACE
There was that in Stafford's tone which made Fellowes turn with a
start. It was to this room that Fellowes had begged Jasmine to come
this morning, in the letter which Krool had so carefully placed for his
master to find, after having read it himself with minute scrutiny. It
was in this room they had met so often in those days when Rudyard was
in South Africa, and where music had been the medium of an intimacy
which had nothing for its warrant save eternal vanity and curiosity,
the evil genius of the race of women. Here it was that Krool's
antipathy to Jasmine and fierce hatred of Fellowes had been nurtured.
Krool had haunted the room, desiring the end of it all; but he had been
disarmed by a smiling kindness on Jasmine's part, which shook his
purpose again and again.
It had all been a problem which Krool's furtive mind failed to master.
If he went to the Baas with his suspicions, the chance was that he
would be flayed with a sjambok and turned into the streets; if he
warned Jasmine, the same thing might happen, or worse. But fate had at
last played into his hands, on the very day that Oom Paul had
challenged destiny, when all things were ready for the ruin of the
hated English.
Fate had sent him through the hallway between Jasmine's and Rudyard's
rooms in the moment when Jasmine had dropped Fellowes' letter; and he
had seen it fall. He knew not what it was, but it might be of
importance, for he had seen Fellowes' handwriting on an envelope among
those waiting for Jasmine's return home. In a far dark corner he had
waited till he saw Lablanche enter her mistress' room hurriedly,
without observing the letter. Then he caught it up and stole away to
the library, where he read it with malevolent eyes.
He had left this fateful letter where Rudyard would see it when he rose
in the morning. All had worked out as he had planned, and now, with his
ear against the door which led from the music-room, he strained to hear
what passed between Stafford and Fellowes.
"Well, what is it?" asked Fellowes, with an attempt to be casual,
though there was that in Stafford's face which gave him anxiety, he
knew not why. He had expected Jasmine, and, instead, here was Stafford,
who had been so much with her of late; who, with Mennaval, had occupied
so much of her time that she had scarcely spoken to him, and, when she
did so, it was with a detachment which excluded him from intimate
consideration.
His face wore a mechanical smile, as his pale blue eyes met the dark
intensity of Stafford's. But slowly the peach-bloom of his cheeks faded
and his long, tapering fingers played nervously with the
leather-trimming of the piano-stool.
"Anything I can do for you, Stafford?" he added, with attempted
nonchalance.
"There is nothing you can do for me," was the meaning reply, "but there
is something you can do advantageously for yourself, if you will think
it worth while."
"Most of us are ready to do ourselves good turns. What am I to do?"
"You will wish to avoid it, and yet you will do yourself a good turn in
not avoiding it."
"Is that the way you talk in diplomatic circles--cryptic, they call it,
don't they?"
Stafford's chin hardened, and a look of repulsion and disdain crossed
over his face.
"It is more cryptic, I confess, than the letter which will cause you to
do yourself a good turn."
Now Fellowes' face turned white. "What letter?" he asked, in a sharp,
querulous voice.
"The letter you wrote Mrs. Byng from the Trafalgar Club yesterday."
Fellowes made a feint, an attempt at bravado. "What business is it of
yours, anyhow? What rights have you got in Mrs. Byng's letters?"
"Only what I get from a higher authority."
"Are you in sweet spiritual partnership with the Trinity?"
"The higher authority I mean is Mr. Byng. Let us have no tricks with
words, you fool."
Fellowes made an ineffective attempt at self-possession.
"What the devil ... why should I listen to you?" There was a peevish
stubbornness in the tone.
"Why should you listen to me? Well, because I have saved your life.
That should be sufficient reason for you to listen."
"Damnation--speak out, if you've got anything to say! I don't see what
you mean, and you are damned officious. Yes, that's it--damned
officious." The peevishness was becoming insolent recklessness.
Slowly Stafford drew from his pocket the revolver Rudyard had given
him. As Fellowes caught sight of the glittering steel he fell back
against the piano-stool, making a clatter, his face livid.
Stafford's lips curled with contempt. "Don't squirm so, Fellowes. I'm
not going to use it. But Mr. Byng had it, and he was going to use it.
He was on his way to do it when I appeared. I stopped him ... I will
tell you how. I endeavoured to make him believe that she was absolutely
innocent, that you had only been an insufferably insolent,
presumptuous, and lecherous cad--which is true. I said that, though you
deserved shooting, it would only bring scandal to Rudyard Byng's
honourable wife, who had been insulted by the lover of Al'mah and the
would-be betrayer of an honest girl--of Jigger's sister.... Yes, you
may well start. I know of what stuff you are, how you had the soul and
body of one of the most credulous and wonderful women in the world in
your hands, and you went scavenging. From Al'mah to the flower-girl!
... I think I should like to kill you myself for what you tried to do
to Jigger's sister; and if it wasn't here"--he handled the little steel
weapon with an eager fondness--"I think I'd do it. You are a pest."
Cowed, shivering, abject, Fellowes nervously fell back. His body
crashed upon the keys of the piano, producing a hideous discord.
Startled, he sprang aside and with trembling hands made gestures of
appeal.
"Don't--don't! Can't you see I'm willing! What is it you want me to do?
I'll do it. Put it away.... Oh, my God--Oh!" His bloodless lips were
drawn over his teeth in a grimace of terror.
With an exclamation of contempt Stafford put the weapon back into his
pocket again. "Pull yourself together," he said. "Your life is safe for
the moment; but I can say no more than that. After I had proved the
lady's innocence--you understand, after I had proved the lady's
innocence to him--"
"Yes, I understand," came the hoarse reply.
"After that, I said I would deal with you; that he could not be trusted
to do so. I said that you would leave England within twenty-four hours,
and that you would not return within three years. That was my pledge.
You are prepared to fulfil it?"
"To leave England! It is impossible--"
"Perhaps to leave it permanently, and not by the English Channel,
either, might be worse," was the cold, savage reply. "Mr. Byng made his
terms."
Fellowes shivered. "What am I to do out of England--but, yes, I'll go,
I'll go," he added, as he saw the look in Stafford's face and thought
of the revolver so near to Stafford's hand.
"Yes, of course you will go," was the stern retort. "You will go, just
as I say."
"What shall I do abroad?" wailed the weak voice.
"What you have always done here, I suppose--live on others," was the
crushing reply. "The venue will be changed, but you won't change, not
you. If I were you, I'd try and not meet Jigger before you go. He
doesn't know quite what it is, but he knows enough to make him
reckless."
Fellowes moved towards the door in a stumbling kind of way. "I have
some things up-stairs," he said.
"They will be sent after you to your chambers. Give me the keys to the
desk in the secretary's room."
"I'll go myself, and--"
"You will leave this house at once, and everything will be sent after
you--everything. Have no fear. I will send them myself, and your
letters and private papers will not be read.... You feel you can rely
on me for that--eh?"
"Yes ... I'll go now ... abroad ... where?"
"Where you please outside the United Kingdom."
Fellowes passed heavily out through the other room, where his letter
had been read by Stafford, where his fate had been decided. He put on
his overcoat nervously and went to the outer door.
Stafford came up to him again. "You understand, there must be no
attempt to communicate here.... You will observe this?"
Fellowes nodded. "Yes, I will.... Good-night," he added, absently.
"Good-day," answered Stafford, mechanically.
The outer door shut, and Stafford turned again to the little room where
so much had happened which must change so many lives, bring so many
tears, divert so many streams of life.
How still the house seemed now! It had lost all its charm and
homelikeness. He felt stifled. Yet there was the warm sun streaming
through the doorway of the music-room, making the beaded curtains shine
like gold.
As he stood in the doorway of the little morning-room, looking in with
bitter reflection and dreading beyond words what now must come--his
meeting with Jasmine, the story he must tell her, and the exposure of a
truth so naked that his nature revolted from it, he heard a footstep
behind him. It was Krool.
Stafford looked at the saturnine face and wondered how much he knew;
but there was no glimmer of revelation in Krool's impassive look. The
eyes were always painful in their deep animal-like glow, and they
seemed more than usually intense this morning; that was all.
"Will you present my compliments to Mrs. Byng, and say--"
Krool, with a gesture, stopped him.
"Mrs. Byng is come now," he said, making a gesture towards the
staircase. Then he stole away towards the servants' quarters of the
house. His work had been well done, of its kind, and he could now await
consequences.
Stafford turned to the staircase and saw--in blue, in the old
sentimental blue--Jasmine slowly descending, a strange look of
apprehension in her face.
Immediately after calling out for Rudyard a little while before, she
had discovered the loss of Adrian Fellowes' letter. Hours before this
she had read and re-read Ian's letter, that document of pain and
purpose, of tragical, inglorious, fatal purpose. She was suddenly
conscious of an air of impending catastrophe about her now. Or was it
that the catastrophe had come? She had not asked for Adrian Fellowes'
letter, for if any servant had found it, and had not returned it, it
was useless asking; and if Rudyard had found it--if Rudyard had found
it...!
Where was Rudyard? Why had he not come to her, Why had he not eaten the
breakfast which still lay untouched on the table of his study? Where
was Rudyard?
Ian's eyes looked straight into hers as she came down the staircase,
and there was that in them which paralyzed her. But she made an effort
to ignore the apprehension which filled her soul.
"Good-morning. Am I so very late?" she said, gaily, to him, though
there was a hollow note in her voice.
"You are just in time," he answered in an even tone which told nothing.
"Dear me, what a gloomy face! What has happened? What is it? There
seems to be a Cassandra atmosphere about the place--and so early in the
day, too."
"It is full noon--and past," he said, with acute meaning, as her
daintily shod feet met the floor of the hallway and glided towards him.
How often he had admired that pretty flitting of her feet!
As he looked at her he was conscious, with a new force, of the wonder
of that hair on a little head as queenly as ever was given to the
modern world. And her face, albeit pale, and with a strange
tremulousness in it now, was like that of some fairy dame painted by
Greuze. All last night's agony was gone from the rare blue eyes, whose
lashes drooped so ravishingly betimes, though that droop was not there
as she looked at Ian now.
She beat a foot nervously on the floor. "What is it--why this
Euripidean air in my simple home? There's something wrong, I see. What
is it? Come, what is it, Ian?"
Hesitatingly she laid a hand upon his arm, but there was no
loving-kindness in his look. The arms which yesterday--only
yesterday--had clasped her passionately and hungrily to his breast now
hung inert at his side. His eyes were strange and hard.
"Will you come in here," he said, in an arid voice, and held wide the
door of the room where he and Rudyard had settled the first chapter of
the future and closed the book of the past.
She entered with hesitating step. Then he shut the door with an
accentuated softness, and came to the table where he had sat with
Rudyard. Mechanically she took the seat which Rudyard had occupied, and
looked at him across the table with a dread conviction stealing over
her face, robbing it of every vestige of its heavenly colour, giving
her eyes a staring and solicitous look.
"Well, what is it? Can't you speak and have it over?" she asked, with
desperate impatience.
"Fellowes' letter to you--Rudyard found it," he said, abruptly.
She fell back as though she had been struck, then recovered herself.
"You read it?" she gasped.
"Rudyard made me read it. I came in when he was just about to kill
Fellowes."
She gave a short, sharp cry, which with a spasm of determination her
fingers stopped.
"Kill him--why?" she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her
trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.
"The letter--Fellowes' letter to you."
"I dropped it last night," she said, in a voice grown strangely
impersonal and colourless. "I dropped it in Rudyard's room, I suppose."
She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but to
be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital, though
her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed the
lifeblood.
Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged. "He read it--Rudyard read a
letter which was not addressed to him! He read a letter addressed to
me--he read my letter.... It gave me no chance."
"No chance--?"
A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her tones.
"Yes, I had a chance, a last chance--if he had not read the letter. But
now, there is no chance.... You read it, too. You read the letter which
was addressed to me. No matter what it was--my letter, you read it."
"Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, 'Read that letter, and
then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.' ... I thought it
was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last night. I
thought it was my letter to you."
Her eyes had a sudden absent look. It was as though she were speaking
in a trance. "I answered that letter--your letter. I answered it this
morning. Here is the answer ... here." She laid a letter on the table
before him, then drew it back again into her lap. "Now it does not
matter. But it gives me no chance...."
There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice. Her face was wan
and strained. "No chance, no chance," she whispered.
"Rudyard did not kill him?" she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a
moment, as though repeating a lesson. "Why?"
"I stopped him. I prevented him."
"You prevented him--why?" Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion
and trouble. "Why did you prevent it--you?"
"That would have hurt you--the scandal, the grimy press, the world."
Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous poignancy.
"It would have hurt me--yes. Why did you not want to hurt me?"
He did not answer. His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to
steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon of
steel which Rudyard had given him. It produced some strange, malignant
effect on his mind. Everything seemed to stop in him, and he was
suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same region
where Rudyard had been. It was the region of the abnormal. In it one
moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward things,
numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one's own agony, which seems
to neutralize the universe and reduce all life's problems to one
formula of solution.
"What did you say to him that stopped him?" she asked in a whisper of
awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would
speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.
"I said the one thing to say," he answered after a moment,
involuntarily laying the pistol on the table before him--doing it, as
it were, without conscious knowledge.
It fascinated Jasmine, the ugly, deadly little vehicle of oblivion. Her
eyes fastened on it, and for an instant stared at it transfixed; then
she recovered herself and spoke again.
"What was the one thing to say?" she whispered.
"That you were innocent--absolutely, that--"
Suddenly she burst into wild laughter--shrill, acrid, cheerless,
hysterical, her face turned upward, her hands clasped under her chin,
her body shaking with what was not laughter, but the terrifying
agitation of a broken organism.
He waited till she had recovered somewhat, and then he repeated his
words.
"I said that you were innocent absolutely; that Fellowes' letter was
the insolence and madness of a voluptuary, that you had only been
wilful and indiscreet, and that--"
In a low, mechanical tone from which was absent any agitation, he told
her all he had said to Rudyard, and what Rudyard had said to him. Every
word had been burned into his brain, and nearly every word was now
repeated, while she sat silent, looking at her hands clasped on the
table before her. When he came to the point where Rudyard went from the
house, leaving Stafford to deal with Fellowes, she burst again into
laughter, mocking, wilful, painful.
"You were left to set things right, to be the lord high
executioner--you, Ian!"
How strange his name sounded on her lips now--foreign, distant,
revealing the nature of the situation more vividly than all the words
which had been said, than all that had been done.
"Rudyard did not think of killing you, I suppose," she went on,
presently, with a bitter motion of the lips, and a sardonic note
creeping into the voice.
"No, I thought of that," he answered, quietly, "as you know." His eyes
sought the weapon on the table involuntarily. "That would have been
easy enough," he added. "I was not thinking of myself, or of Fellowes,
but only of you--and Rudyard."
"Only of me--and Rudyard," she repeated with drooping eyes, which
suddenly became alive again with feeling and passion and wildness.
"Wasn't it rather late for that?"
The words stung him beyond endurance. He rose and leaned across the
table towards her.
"At least I recognized what I had done, what you had done, and I tried
to face it. I did not disguise it. My letter to you proves that. But
nevertheless I was true to you. I did not deceive you--ever. I loved
you--ah, I loved you as few women have been loved! ... But you, you
might have made a mistake where Rudyard was concerned, made the mistake
once, but if you wronged him, you wronged me infinitely more. I was
ready to give up all, throw all my life, my career, to the winds, and
prove myself loyal to that which was more than all; or I was willing to
eliminate myself from the scene forever. I was willing to pay the
price--any price--just to stand by what was the biggest thing in my
life. But you were true to nothing--to nothing--to nobody."
"If one is untrue--once, why be true at all ever?" she said with an
aching laugh, through which tears ran, though none dropped from her
eyes. "If one is untrue to one, why not to a thousand?"
Again a mocking laugh burst from her. "Don't you see? One kiss, a
wrong? Why not, then, a thousand kisses! The wrong came in the moment
that the one kiss was given. It is the one that kills, not the thousand
after."
There came to her mind again--and now with what sardonic
force--Rudyard's words that day before they went to Glencader: "If you
had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers."
"And so it is all understood between you and Rudyard," she added,
mechanically. "That is what you have arranged for me--that I go on
living as before with Rudyard, while I am not to know from him anything
has happened; but to accept what has been arranged for me, and to be
repentant and good and live in sackcloth. It has been arranged, has it,
that Rudyard is to believe in me?"
"That has not been arranged."
"It has been arranged that I am to live with him as before, and that he
is to pretend to love me as before, and--"
"He does love you as before. He has never changed. He believed in you,
was so pitifully eager to believe in you even when the letter--"
"Where is the letter?"
He pointed to the fire.
"Who put it in the fire?" she asked. "You?"
He inclined his head.
"Ah yes, always so clever! A burst of indignation at his daring to
suspect me even for an instant, and with a flourish into the fire, the
evidence. Here is yours--your letter. Would you like to put it into the
fire also?" she asked, and drew his letter from the folds of her dress.
"But, no, no, no--" She suddenly sprang to her feet, and her eyes had a
look of agonized agitation. "When I have learned every word by heart, I
will burn it myself--for your sake." Her voice grew softer, something
less discordant came into it. "You will never understand. You could
never understand me, or that letter of Adrian Fellowes to me, and that
he could dare to write me such a letter. You could never understand it.
But I understand you. I understand your letter. It came while I
was--while I was broken. It healed me, Ian. Last night I wanted to kill
myself. Never mind why. You would not understand. You are too good to
understand. All night I was in torture, and then this letter of
yours--it was a revelation. I did not think that a man lived like you,
so true, so kind, so mad. And so I wrote you a letter, ah, a letter
from my soul! and then came down to this--the end of all. The end of
everything--forever."
"No, the beginning if you will have it so.... Rudyard loves you ..."
She gave a cry of agony. "For God's sake--oh, for God's sake, hush! ...
You think that now I could ..."
"Begin again with new purpose."
"Purpose! Oh, you fool! You fool! You fool--you who are so wise
sometimes! You want me to begin again with Rudyard: and you do not want
me to begin again--with you?"
He was silent, and he looked her in the eyes steadily.
"You do not want me to begin again with you, because you believe
me--because you believed the worst from that letter, from Adrian
Fellowes' letter.... You believed, yet you hypnotized Rudyard into not
believing. But did you, after all? Was it not that he loves me, and
that he wanted to be deceived, wanted to be forced to do what he has
done? I know him better than you. But you are right, he would have
spoken to me about it if you had not warned him."
"Then begin again--"
"You do not want me any more." The voice had an anguish like the cry of
the tragic music in "Elektra." "You do not want what you wanted
yesterday--for us together to face it all, Ian. You do not want it? You
hate me."
His face was disturbed by emotion, and he did not speak for a moment.
In that moment she became transformed. With a sudden tragic motion she
caught the pistol from the table and raised it, but he wrenched it from
her hand.
"Do you think that would mend anything?" he asked, with a new pity in
his heart for her. "That would only hurt those who have been hurt
enough already. Be a little magnanimous. Do not be selfish. Give others
a chance."
"You were going to do it as an act of unselfishness," she moaned. "You
were going to die in order to mend it all. Did you think of me in that?
Did you think I would or could consent to that? You believed in me, of
course, when you wrote it. But did you think that was magnanimous--when
you had got a woman's love, then to kill yourself in order to cure her?
Oh, how little you know! ... But you do not want me now. You do not
believe in me now. You abhor me. Yet if that letter had not fallen into
Rudyard's hands we might perhaps have now been on our way to begin life
again together. Does that look as though there was some one else that
mattered--that mattered?"
He held himself together with all his power and will. "There is one
way, and only one way," he said, firmly. "Rudyard loves you. Begin
again with him." His voice became lower. "You know the emptiness of
your home. There is a way to make some recompense to him. You can pay
your debt. Give him what he wants so much. It would be a link. It would
bind you. A child ..."
"Oh, how you loathe me!" she said, shudderingly. "Yesterday--and now...
No, no, no," she added, "I will not, cannot live with Rudyard. I cannot
wrench myself from one world into another like that. I will not live
with him any more.... There--listen."
Outside the newsboys were calling:
"Extra speshul! Extra speshul! All about the war! War declared! Extra
speshul!"
"War! That will separate many," she added. "It will separate Rudyard
and me.... No, no, there will be no more scandal.... But it is the way
of escape--the war."
"The way of escape for us all, perhaps," he answered, with a light of
determination in his eyes. "Good-bye," he added, after a slight pause.
"There is nothing more to say."
He turned to go, but he did not hold out his hand, nor even look at her.
"Tell me," she said, in a strange, cold tone, "tell me, did Adrian
Fellowes--did he protect me? Did he stand up for me? Did he defend me?"
"He was concerned only for himself," Ian answered, hesitatingly.
Her face hardened. Pitiful, haggard lines had come into it in the last
half-hour, and they deepened still more.
"He did not say one word to put me right?"
Ian shook his head in negation. "What did you expect?" he said.
She sank into a chair, and a strange cruelty came into her eyes,
something so hard that it looked grotesque in the beautiful setting of
her pain-worn, exquisite face.
So utter was her dejection that he came back from the door and bent
over her.
"Jasmine," he said, gently, "we have to start again, you and I--in
different paths. They will never meet. But at the end of the
road--peace. Peace the best thing of all. Let us try and find it,
Jasmine."
"He did not try to protect me. He did not defend me," she kept saying
to herself, and was only half conscious of what Ian said to her.
He touched her shoulder. "Nothing can set things right between you and
me, Jasmine," he added, unsteadily, "but there's Rudyard--you must help
him through. He heard scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy
Scovel's. He didn't believe it. It rests with you to give it all the
lie.... Good-bye."
In a moment he was gone. As the door closed she sprang to her feet.
"Ian--Ian--come back," she cried. "Ian, one word--one word."
But the door did not open again. For a moment she stood like one
transfixed, staring at the place whence he had vanished, then, with a
moan, she sank in a heap on the floor, and rocked to and fro like one
demented.
Once the door opened quietly, and Krool's face showed, sinister and
furtive, but she did not see it, and the door closed again softly.
At last the paroxysms passed, and a haggard face looked out into the
world of life and being with eyes which were drowned in misery.
"He did not defend me--the coward!" she murmured; then she rose with a
sudden effort, swayed, steadied herself, and arranged her hair in the
mirror over the mantelpiece. "The low coward!" she said again. "But
before he leaves ... before he leaves England..."
As she turned to go from the room, Rudyard's portrait on the wall met
her eyes. "I can't go on, Rudyard," she said to it. "I know that now."
Out in the streets, which Ian Stafford travelled with hasty steps, the
newsboys were calling:
"War declared! All about the war!"
"That is the way out for me," Stafford said, aloud, as he hastened on.
"That opens up the road.... I'm still an artillery officer."
He directed his swift steps toward Pall Mall and the War Office.