ANOTHER EFFIGY
From the pandemonium of the mock burial Daniel Brendon took himself
unseen. The advice of Jarratt Weekes appeared to be reasonable, and
he decided to follow it. He was told to ask Prout, and he determined
to do so. He roamed through darkness, and the past turned back like
a scroll, and he read into the recent years far more than Prout could
tell him. It was not possible to reach Dawlish until the following
day, and long before the summer dawn returned Brendon had passed
beyond thought of Prout to that of his master.
Under deep and silent woods, by waste places and along lonely roads
he went. The voices of night whispered round him, and sleeping trees
sighed, shivered, and slept again as he passed them by. Nocturnal
creatures were his companions; the solitary hare limped along before
him; the owl and the night-jar cried from the wood; once he passed a
colony of glow-worms, where they twinkled in the dewy grass, like a
tiny constellation.
His mind suffered the gigantic convulsion proper to this blow.
Within one hour of leaving Lydford, he believed. His inherent
instincts, smothered through five years by kindness, hushed by gentle
words, lulled by immense generosity, tore their way through these
artifices and saw all that had been hidden, and far more. The
goodness of Woodrow rotted as Daniel thought of it; and even his
conversion stank. Brendon saw himself hoodwinked, laughed at,
deceived--seduced, like a child, with sugar-plums, rendered harmless
with gifts, muzzled and deluded with fields and beasts and great
possessions. He had worshipped and obeyed his God for this; he had
sung praises to the Almighty, and toiled in the ways of righteousness
for this. The Everlasting had watched it all, had listened to his
prayers, had marked his mighty efforts, had waited until the cup was
full before striking it from the lip of His servant. Brendon turned
from God to man, thought upon his enemy, and considered the plot that
had robbed him of his honour. Not until the light of dawn awoke upon
a world of young green and silver dew, did Sarah Jane enter into his
mind; and then he determined with himself that she must stand beside
her paramour. He could not remotely guess at the truth of the past
five years; it was natural that he should conceive a web of heartless
and cruel deception woven from their united cunning and daily wrapped
closer about himself. They knew him so well: his weak spots were so
familiar to them, that the rest was easy. They had laughed at his
complacent and devout trust in God a thousand times; doubtless they
had grown accustomed to their sin and finally become careless. It
was natural that all the world should know before it fell upon his
ears. He read the whole story; he saw Woodrow handing over the farm
in exchange for what he wanted more; he imagined Sarah Jane making
the bargain. Anon Woodrow pretended to Christianity and Sarah Jane
also affected an attitude of increased prayer and devotion. All was
dust--dust flung by cruel hands and hard hearts to blind him.
His life crashed down, like a tree thrown in March. So had he seen a
great elm fall. One moment it stood in full and glorious dignity of
adult growth, the sun upon its crown and rosy inflorescence of
flowers meshed within a grey mist of the young twigs; then the saw
gnawed to its heart, the axe rang, the mallet drove the wedge, and
the whole mighty edifice, falling in thunder, lay crushed fiat by its
own weight, maimed, wrecked, shattered, and utterly destroyed. Only
a raw disc in the hedge marked the place whence it had sprung upward,
to be a theatre for the loveliness of spring and autumn, a home for
the storm-thrush, a harp for the winter wind.
Now the fabric of his fortunes similarly collapsed, and he found all
that had looked so healthy was flourishing upon foundations of
putrescence and decay. No canker had eaten into his life and ruined
it; no sudden misfortune had grown and turned what was fair to what
was foul; but, in ignorance, with immense labour, he had built upon
stark fraud and filth and his own dishonour; he had founded his life
on falsehoods and sins; he had worshipped his God in unconsciousness
of the truth; he had been drawn to closer and deeper intercourse with
Christ through the cold-blooded villainy of a man. His ambitions,
aims and future schemes were all rooted and flourishing in his own
betrayal; and his God had suffered this appalling thing to come to
pass, and denied him one dim hint or whisper of the truth. At the
crucial moment, when Woodrow made him his heir, the Almighty had
blinded Daniel's native instinct and not permitted even a suspicion
of reality to be associated with the gift. All had combined against
him; all had cozened his understanding: his wife, his master, his
God. Man and Heaven had united to deceive him; and man, knowing the
truth, had watched his sustained devotion and faith; and Heaven,
knowing the truth, had accepted his worship and thanksgiving, had
suffered his delusion to continue, had planned the horror of the end.
Every wind of the night came to him with a new grief; every scent of
the night brought a new agony; every voice of the night drove home
the truth with an added torment. He looked up at the stars and asked
them what he should do. From force of habit he knelt and called upon
God. But he remembered that, in this matter, God was on the side of
the enemy. Therefore he rose and went forward without prayer.
By morning he had walked many miles along the foothills of the Moor;
and then, after five o'clock, he went down to a railway station,
waited for the first train, and travelled to Plymouth. He suffered
himself to rest there for a time; and he washed and ate. Henceforth
he was concerned with Hilary Woodrow and not with John Prout. He
perceived clearly that the old man, who would have sacrificed his
soul for Hilary, had helped his wife and Woodrow against him. He
retraced events of many journeys. He thought of the days that he had
been from home, and of the time spent by his wife at Dawlish. He
forged a long and dreadful chain of horrible deceits that had never
existed. He began to imagine an evil story which occupied a place in
time long after the actual treachery was over and done. Upon the
fact of his betrayal he built a mighty monument; yet this memorial
had itself scarcely any existence in fact. That, however, mattered
little. The truth without addition had been enough for Brendon.
Day was turned to night in his mind, and he longed for the real
night, that he might accomplish his purpose. About noon he took
train to Dawlish, and reached it before three o'clock.
He bought bread and ate it to support himself; then he went into the
woods above the town and lurked there until the dark. His decision
was come to, and he intended to destroy both Woodrow and Sarah Jane.
They should perish; and at that moment he would have killed his God
too if he had known how. For a short time, indeed, his fetich was
dead enough; because to find what he had believed a Creator's
sustained and benignant attention proved instead one cruel,
long-drawn trick and jest, shook the man to the roots of his faith.
Such action seemed not compatible with any conception of a loving, a
just, and an all-powerful father.
For an hour he cursed God like a fallen Titan; but only for an hour.
Then lifelong trust and faith conquered, and even at this crisis
atrophied reason proved too weak to grasp its opportunity. Faith
re-took the citadel. He reflected upon his Bible, and presently
perceived that nothing had happened to him which was contrary to the
common way of God with man. The Jehovah he adored; He who once
drowned every little child in the whole world; the Being who led
Israel into the desert of Sinai; who slew Uzzah for steadying His
ark; who killed seventy thousand innocent men because David numbered
his people; who commanded whole nations to be slaughtered and their
virgins only saved for the conquerors; who prescribed rules for
slavery; who destroyed the firstborn of all Egypt, and tore ten
thousand mothers' hearts; who loved the stench and smear of blood
upon His altars, and pursued His foes with the tenacity, cruelty and
craft of a Red Indian--this Everlasting Spirit might most reasonably
be expected to play the faithless savage and torture even the least
of those who worshipped His omnipotent name. But it was not for his
creature to question Him; it was not for a thinking being to spurn
this almighty pest with scorn and with loathing; it was not for a
smitten man to ask how any Prince of Devils could worse confound his
own creation.
Brendon offered the other cheek; and before he stole out from his
hiding-place in the forest and went down where Woodrow dwelt, he was
safe in the grip of his God once more. The fact, however, did not
alter his determination, because this revelation of his own ordained
ruin and destruction brought others in its train. Subsequent actions
were clearly indicated to him by the Being he still obeyed; for
Daniel was not wholly sane now. Streaks and flashes of madness
touched the tissue of his thoughts, as sparks fly in smoke. Barriers
fell, old orderly opinions perished, strangled by the horde of
ferocious ideas that hurtled through his mind. From the broken links
of dead principles a new thing was welded, and method and purpose
were restored. He believed in predestination, and through that
hypothesis he came back humbly to the footstool of his idol. He
perceived that the World-maker had chosen him to drive the knife into
these evil hearts. For that purpose, the infinitely wise, infinitely
just, infinitely loving God of his fathers had called him from the
womb; had suffered him to live and thrive; had ordered his life
prosperously; had taught him from his youth up to worship Heaven, and
walk uprightly before men. To this end his faith had been founded
upon adamant, and tempered to move mountains; to this end the Sun of
Righteousness had warmed his spirit; and now the fruit of his spirit
was about to ripen in murder.
For a time the natural rage that consumed him cooled a little before
these high mandates. The inversion of his intellect was complete;
and though there came to him a fear that he was about to do this
thing that he might gratify a personal lust and hunger for revenge,
he put that temptation away as of the Devil. He believed that the
powers of darkness urged him to spare his wife and his master; while
Jehovah ordered their instant death. To let them live now would be
to frustrate their Maker's plan--a thing unthinkable. He longed for
a Bible that he might wallow in the atrocities of the Pentateuch and
find wherewithal to strengthen his arm there.
He was very nearly insane at this crisis--madder than it happens to
most to be at any time. Yet few there are, capable of intense
feeling, who have not stood at the veil, looked behind it in dreams
or calentures, and seen the red-eyed spirit glare like a gorgon out.
She peers forth by night, and the dreaming brain knows her well; at
times of terrific joy or grief she is near; after physical excesses
she comes close; surfeit or starvation alike summon her; she is the
firstling of superstition, the familiar of the fanatic.
This man walked with madness that night for a little time, and not
until he had returned to the lamp-lit streets did the unholy thing
depart from him. Then he affirmed his spirit, prayed fervent
prayers, and tramped by the sea a while, before going upon his
business. He meant to kill Woodrow with his naked hands.
Before the row of dwellings wherein the sick man lay, Daniel became
puzzled, for he had forgotten the house. It was only by chance that
he rang at the right one.
Some time elapsed before any answer came; then the door opened upon
darkness, and Brendon did not know that it was Prout who stood before
him.
"Who bides here?" he asked, and his voice startled him, for the tone
was strange.
"Death, my son," answered the other.
Brendon pushed the old man aside, strode in, and then found that John
told the truth.
Hilary Woodrow lay in his bed. The room was lighted by a gas
chandelier, but only one jet burnt there. Brendon's mind leapt over
the abysses of the last four-and-twenty hours.
"This is not him," he said. "You've dragged that doll back again to
deceive me!"
"He died afore noon to-day, and yours was the last name on his lips
in this world. Maybe the first in the next."
"Let him scream it in hell--the blasted, faithless villain!
Dead--he's not dead--he knows what I'm here for--he's foxing now, as
he has foxed me all his life--foul, heartless, godless monster that
he was!"
"Daniel--Daniel--for God's sake--a dead man, Daniel!"
"Out on his death and out on you, you go-between! To hold my hand
and swear friends, and help them into each other's arms behind my
back--God of light and reason! why be such rank poison as you allowed
to----?"
He broke off and stared where the colourless clay of his master gazed
blankly up--just as the doll had gazed. Insolence seemed to sit on
the dust--the insolence of a mean spirit that had narrowly escaped
harm and now, in safety, turned to jeer. Brendon roared and cursed
the corpse, while Prout implored him to be sane.
"This happened five years ago and more," cried the old man; "'twas
all over then for ever."
"All over--for them it might have been. What of me? ... All over but
the payment.... What of me, I say? ... Blight his dim, damned
eyes--blight him lying there and telling the truth with his dumb lips
now he's safe from me.... What of me? 'All ended'! It's only begun
for me. The reaping's mine--the reaping of this devil's crop. Mine
to put in God's sickle now!"
"Nought but the whirlwind will you reap, poor man. Turn to your God,
and don't blaspheme Him. Call on Him, afore you do what can't be
undone. For pity, Daniel--for pity. He's gone to answer for what he
did. Leave her to God too."
The man grew calmer and reflected before answering.
"Mine's a difficult God, you must know," he said. "He's come between
again. Only vengeance be God's, but justice belongs to us seemingly.
This wasn't justice--to let that lying adulterer slip away in peace
like he has! I comed to strangle him, and God's stepped between
again--robbed me again. 'Tis almost more than a faithful soldier and
servant can endure, John Prout. Job's self wasn't called to face a
thing like this. I've been deserted, look you, for no fault of my
own. Robbed--robbed of all my earnings, and my honour, and my hopes."
He was silent a moment, then rage broke bounds again.
"Let Him take care--let Him that's reigning above Heaven take care,
else one more soul will be damned. He can steal everything from me
but hell; but that's in all men's reach. We can rob Him of our
immortal souls! That's in my power, and why not? What's Heaven to
me now? I'd rather follow this devil down--down--if 'tis only to
hunt and harry him through raging fire for evermore! ... Even that
I'll do ... when she's gone. Evil for evil will I pay my God, and
choose my portion with them that ruined me!"
"Man, man--I implore you by my grey hairs, Daniel!"
"Curse your grey hairs! who are you to squeak? You helped this man
to hell--you know it! Cold he be now--but he'll roast for it for
ever; and may it be mine to trample him into the hot eye of the fire,
till he's red through, and the marrow runs out of his damned bones!
Why is he dead--why is he dead now? I was his death--fashioned by
the Almighty's plan to be his death--born to be his death. Bring him
back! Bring him back! Be the God of Ages a fool to let all His
planning and plotting fall to nought? Who is Death to stand grinning
between me and this filthy clay? Be he stronger than the God that
conquered him? Curse him, and curse heaven and hell that's caught
this man away from me in his last hour."
Now he seemed to realize the other's absolute escape; and he lifted
his voice, howled horribly, turned upon the dead, and struck
Woodrow's forehead.
Thereupon Prout flung himself at Brendon with all his weak might, and
cried shame, and called upon him to be a man and not a beast. But
Daniel swept him off and went out.