THE DARK MAID
The substance followed the shadow so quickly that Henrietta had not
time to consider her position before the latch rose. The door opened,
and a girl entered hurriedly. The surprise was common to both, for the
newcomer had closed the door behind her before she discerned Henrietta,
and then her action was eloquent. She turned the key in the lock, and
stood frowning, with her back to the door, and one shoulder advanced as
if to defend herself. The other hand remained on the fastening.
“You here?” she muttered.
“Yes,” Henrietta replied, returning her look, and speaking with a touch
of pride. For the feeling of dislike was instinctive; if Bess’s
insolent smile had not stamped itself on her memory—on that first
morning at the Low Wood, which seemed so very, very long ago—Henrietta
had still known that she was in the presence of an enemy. “Are you—his
daughter?” she continued.
“Yes,” Bess answered. She did not move from the door, and she
maintained her attitude, as if the surprise that had arrested her still
kept her hand on the key. “Yes,” she repeated, “I am. You don’t”—with a
glance from one to the other—“like him, I see!”
“That is no matter,” Henrietta answered with dignity. “I am not here
for him, nor to see him; I wish to see——”
“Your lover?”
Henrietta winced, and her face turned scarlet. And now there was no
question of the hostility between them. Bess’s dark, smiling face was
insolence itself.
“What? Wasn’t he that?” the gipsy girl continued. “If he was not”—with
a coarse look—“what do you want with him?”
Silenced for the moment by the other’s taunt, Henrietta now found her
voice.
“I wish to see him,” she said. “That is enough for you.”
“Oh, is it?” Bess replied. She had taken her hand from the key and
moved a pace or two into the room, so as to confront her rival at close
quarters. “That’s my affair! I fancy you will have to tell me a good
deal more before you do see him.”
“Why?”
“Oh, why?” mimicking her rudely. “Why? Because——”
“What are you to him?”
“What you were!” Bess answered.
Henrietta’s face flamed anew. But the insult no longer found her
unprepared. She saw that she was in the presence of a woman dangerous
and reckless; and one who considered her a rival. On the hearth
crouched and gibbered that fearful old man. The door was locked—the
action had not been lost on her; and no living being, no one outside
that door, knew that she was here.
“You are insolent!” was all she answered.
“But it is true!” Bess said. “Or, if it is not true——”
“It is not true!” with a glance of scorn. She knew even in her
innocence that this girl had been more to him.
“Then why do you ask for him?” with derision. “What do you want with
him? What right have you to ask for him?”
“I wish to see him,” Henrietta answered. She would not, if she could
avoid it, let her fears appear. After all, it was daylight, and she was
strong and young; a match, she thought, for the other if the old man
had not been there. “I wish to see him, that is all, and that is
enough,” she repeated, firmly.
Bess did not answer at once. Indeed, at this point there came over her
a change, as if either the other’s courage impressed her, or cooler
thoughts suggested a different course of action. Her eyes still brooded
malevolently on the other’s face, as if she would gladly have spoiled
her beauty, and her sharp, white teeth gleamed. But to Henrietta’s last
words she did not answer. She seemed to be wavering, to be uncertain.
And at last,
“Do you mean him fair?” she asked. “That is the question.”
“I mean no harm to him.”
“Upon your honour?”
“Upon my honour.”
“I’d tear you limb from limb if you did!” Bess cried in the old tone of
violence. And the look which accompanied the words matched them. But
the next moment, “If I could believe you,” she said more quietly, “it
would be well and good. But——”
“You may believe me. Why should I do him harm?”
Bess bit her nails in doubt; and for the first time since her entrance
she turned her eyes from her rival. Perhaps for this reason Henrietta’s
courage rose. She told herself that she had been foolish to feel fear a
few minutes before: that she had allowed herself to be scared by a few
rude words, such as women of this class used on the least provocation.
And the temptation to drop the matter if she could escape uninjured
gave way to a brave determination to do all that was possible. She
resolved to be firm, yet prudent; and to persevere. And when the
dialogue was resumed the tone on each side was more moderate.
“Well,” Bess said, with a grudging air, “perhaps you may not wish to do
him harm. I don’t know, my lass. But you may do it, all the same.”
“How?”
“If you think he is here you are mistaken.”
Henrietta had already come to this conclusion.
“Still,” she said, “I can go to him.”
“I don’t see how you are to go to him.”
“I will go anywhere.”
“Ay,” with contempt. “And so will a many more at your heels.”
“No one saw me come here,” Henrietta said.
“No. But it will be odd if no one sees you leave here. I met Bishop as
I came, and another with him, hot-foot after you, both, and raising the
country as fast as they could.”
Henrietta frowned. She gazed through the window. Then she looked again
at Bess.
“Is he far from here?” she asked.
“That’s telling, and I’m not going to tell. Far or near, I don’t see
how you are to go to him, unless——” She broke off, paused a moment, and
then, as if she put away a thought that had occurred to her, “No,” she
said with decision, “I see no way. There is no way.”
To Henrietta, the girl, the situation, the surroundings, and not least
her own rôle, were odious. Merely to negotiate with such an one as this
was a humiliation; but to endure her open scorn, to feel her cheeks
burn under the fire of her taunts, was hateful. Yet failure in the
enterprise from which she had let herself expect so much was still
worse—still worse; and the prospect of it overcame her pride. She could
not accept the defeat of all her hopes and expectations. She could not.
“You said ‘unless,’” she retorted.
Bess laughed.
“Ay, but it’s an ‘unless,’” she answered contemptuously, “that you are
not the one to fill up.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say,” Bess answered impudently. And vaulting sideways on the
table, she sat swinging her feet, and eyeing the other with a
triumphant smile.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you like to stay here until it is dark,—ay, dark, my pretty
peacock; and that won’t be for an hour or more. Then you may go to him
safely. Not before! But you fine ladies,” with a look that took in
Henrietta, from her high-piled hair and flushed face to the hem of her
skirt, “are afraid of your shadows, I’m told.”
“I am not afraid of my shadow,” Henrietta answered.
“You’re afraid of the dark, or why didn’t you come when he asked you?
And when you could have helped him? Why did you not come then and say
what you chose to him?”
“I did come,” Henrietta answered coldly. “It was he who failed to meet
me.”
“That’s a nice flim-flam!” Bess rejoined, with incredulity. “You’re not
one to venture yourself out after moonrise, I’ll be bound. And so I
told him! But any way,” sliding to her feet, and speaking with
decision, “he’s not here, and you can’t see him! And to tell the truth,
I’d as lief have your room as your company, that being so.”
She turned to the door as if to open it. But Henrietta did not move.
She was deep in thought. The sneering words, the dark handsome face,
filled her with distrust; and with something like loathing of herself
when she reflected that the man she sought had been this girl’s lover.
But they also aroused her spirit. They spurred her to the step which
the other dared her to take. Was she to show herself as a timid thing,
as poor a creature as this gipsy girl deemed her? She had come hither
with her heart set upon a prize; was she to relinquish that prize
because its pursuit demanded an ordinary amount of courage—such courage
as this village girl possessed and made naught of?
And yet—and yet she hesitated. She was not afraid of the girl; she was
not afraid—she told herself—of the man who had once professed to be her
lover: but there might be others, and it would be dark. If the boy were
there, there would be others. And she was not sure that she was—not
afraid. For the old man by the fireside, with his squalid clothes and
his horrible greediness, made her flesh creep. She hesitated, until
Bess, with a sneer, bade her to go if she was going.
“I’d as soon see your back,” she continued, “and ha’ done with it. I
know your sort! All fine feathers and as much spunk as a mouse!”
Henrietta made up her mind. She sat down on the nearest stool.
“I shall remain,” she said, “and go with you to see him.”
“Not you! So what’s the use of talking?”
“I shall go,” Henrietta replied firmly. “It will be dark in an hour. I
will remain and go with you.”
Bess shrugged her shoulders and answered nothing. But had Henrietta
caught sight of her smile, she had certainly changed her mind.
Even without that, and unwarned, the girl found, as they sat there in
silence, and the minutes passed and the light faded, much ground for
hesitation. The words which Clyne had used when he forbade her to risk
herself, the terms in which he had described the desperate plight of
the men whom she must beard, the fears that had assailed her when she
had gone after dark to meet a peril less serious—all these things
recurred to her memory, and scared her. By pressing her lips together
she maintained a show of unconcern; but only because the dusk hid her
loss of colour. She repented—gravely; but she had not the courage to
draw back. She shrank from meeting—as she must meet, if she rose to
go—the other’s smile of triumph; she shrank from the sense of
humiliation under which she would smart after she had escaped. She had
cast the die and must dare. She must see the enterprise through. And
she sat on. But she was sure that she could hardly suffer anything
worse than she suffered during those minutes, while her fate still lay
in her hands, while the power to withdraw was still hers, and
indecision plucked at her. The man who fights with his back to the wall
suffers less than when, before he drew his blade, imagination dealt him
a score of deaths.
The old man continued to grumble over the fire; and seldom, but
sometimes, he laid his chin on his shoulder and looked back at her.
Bess, on the contrary, gazed at her as the cat at the mouse; but with
her back to the light and her own face in shadow, so that whatever
thoughts or passions clouded her dark eyes, they passed unseen.
Presently, as the light failed, Bess’s head became no more than a dark
knob breaking the lower line of dusty panes; while through the upper a
patch of pale green sky, promising frost, held Henrietta’s eyes and
raised a still but solemn voice amid the tumult of her thoughts. That
morsel of sky was the only clean, pure thing within sight, and it faded
quickly, and became first grey and then a blur of darkness. By that
time the room, with its close, fetid odours and its hints at gruesome
secrets, had sunk into the blackness of night.
The fire gave out a dull glow, but it went no farther than the hearth.
Yet presently it was the cause of an illusion, if illusion it was,
which gave Henrietta a shock. Turning her eyes from the window—it
seemed to her that longer waiting would break her down—she saw the
outline of the old miser’s figure, but erect and much closer to her
than before—and, unless she was mistaken, with hands outstretched as if
to clutch her neck. She uttered a low cry, and rose, and stepped back.
On the instant he vanished. But whether he sank down, or retreated, or
had never stirred, she could not be sure; while her cry found an echo
in Bess’s mischievous laughter.
“Ha! ha! You’re not quite so bold!” Bess cried, with enjoyment, “as you
were an hour ago, I reckon!”
The jeer gave a fillip to Henrietta’s pride.
“I am ready,” she said, though her voice shook a little.
“And you’ll go?”
“Yes,” coldly; “I shall go.”
“Did you think he was going to twist your pretty neck?” Bess rejoined.
“Was that it? But come,” in a more sober tone, “we’ll go. Good-night,
old man!” And moving to the door with the ease of one who knew every
foot of the room, she unlocked it. A breath of fresh, cold air, blowing
on her cheek, informed Henrietta that the door was open. She groped her
way to it.
“Do you wait here,” Bess whispered, “while I see if the coast is clear.
You’ll hear an owl hoot; then come.”
But Henrietta was not going to be left with that old man. She crept
outside the door and, holding it behind her, waited. The night was dark
as well as cold, for the moon would not rise for some hours; and
Henrietta wondered, as she drew her hood about her neck, how they were
to go anywhere. Presently the owl hooted low, and she released the
door, and groped her way round the house and between the fir trunks to
the gate. A hand, rough but small, clutched her wrist and turned her
about; a voice whispered, “Come!” and the two, Bess acting as guide,
set off in silence along the road in the direction of Troutbeck.
“How far is it?” Henrietta muttered, when they had gone a distance,
that in the night seemed a good half mile.
“That’s telling,” Bess answered. “’Tain’t far. Turn here! Right!
right!” pushing her. “Now wait while I——”
“What are you doing?”
Bess did not explain that she was opening a gate. Instead, she impelled
the other forward and squeezed her arm to impress on her the need of
silence. Henrietta felt that the ground over which they were passing
was at once softer and more uneven, and she guessed that they had left
the road. A moment later the air met her cheek more coldly, and the
gloom seemed less opaque. She conjectured that she stood on the brow of
a hill—or a precipice—and involuntarily she recoiled. But Bess dragged
her on, down a slope so steep that, although the girl trod with
caution, she was scarcely able to keep her feet.
Feeling her still hang hack, the gipsy girl plucked at her.
“Hurry!” she whispered. “Hurry, can’t you? We are nearly there.”
“Where?”
“Why, there!”
But the cold and the darkness and the other’s hostile tone had shaken
Henrietta’s nerves. She jerked herself free.
“Where?” she repeated firmly. “Where are we going? I shall not go
farther unless you tell me.”
“Nonsense!”
“I shall not.”
“Let be! Let be!”
“Tell me this minute!”
“To Tyson the doctor’s, if you must know,” Bess replied grudgingly.
“Oh!”
She knew now. She stood half way down the smooth side of the hollow in
which Tyson’s farm nestled. She remembered the large kitchen, with the
shining oaken table and the woman with the pale plump face who had
crouched on the settle and gone in fear of nights. And though the place
still stood a trifle uncanny in her memory, and the uncomfortable
impression which the woman’s complaints had made on her, had not quite
passed from her, the knowledge relieved her.
She knew at least where she was, and that the place lay barely a
furlong from the road. She might count, too, on the aid of the doctor’s
wife, who was jealous of this very girl. And after all, in comparison
with the miser’s wretched abode, Tyson’s house, though lonely, seemed
an everyday dwelling, and safe.
The news reassured her. When Bess, in a tone of scorn that thinly
masked disappointment, flung at her the words, “Then you are not
coming?” she was ready.
“Yes, I am coming,” she said. And she yielded herself again to Bess’s
guidance. In less than a minute they were at the bottom of the hollow.
They skirted the fold-yard and the long, silent buildings that bulked
somewhat blacker than the night. They turned a corner, and a dog not
far from them stirred its chain and growled. But Bess stilled it by a
word, and the two halted in the gloom, where a thin line of light
escaped beneath a door,