THE POOL OF DEATH.
Morning brought a pitcher of comfort with it on its gossamer wings.
Who, at 17, can wake from restoring sleep to find the June sun on his
face and elect to breakfast on bitter wormwood, with the appetizing
fry of good country bacon caressing his nostrils through every chink
of the boards? Indeed, I was not born to hate, or to any decided vice
or virtue, but was of those who, taking a middle course, are kicked to
the wall or into the gutter as the Fates have a fancy.
I was friendly with myself, with Jason--almost with Zyp, who had so
bedeviled me. After all, I thought, the measure of her regard for me
might be more in a winning friendliness than in embraces such as she
had bestowed upon Modred.
Therefore I dressed in good heart, chatting amiably with Jason, who, I
could not help noticing, was at some pains to study me curiously.
Such reactionary spirits are the heritage of youth. They decline with
the day. My particular relapse happened, maybe, ungenerously early,
for it was at breakfast I noticed the first tremulous vibrations of
Zyp’s war trumpet. Clearly she had guessed the reason of the change in
my manner toward her yesterday evening and was bent upon disabusing my
mind of the presumptuous supposition that I held any monopoly
whatsoever of her better regard. To this end she showered exaggerated
attentions upon Modred and my father--even Jason coming in for his
share. She had little digs at my silence and boorishness that hugely
delighted the others. She slipped a corner of fat bacon into my tea
and spilled salt over my bread and jam, and all the time I had to bear
my suffering with a stoic heart and echo the merriment, which I did in
such sardonic fashion as to call down fresh banter for my confusion.
At our worst, it must be confessed, we were not a circle with a
refined sense of humor. But when we rose, and Zyp brushed rudely by me
with a pert toss of her head, I felt indeed as if life no longer held
anything worth the striving after.
I walked out into the yard to be alone, but Jason followed me. Some
tenderness for old comradeship sake stirred in him momentarily, I
think, for his blue eyes were good as they met mine.
“What an ass you are, Renny,” he said; “to make such a to-do about the
rubbish!”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, in miserable resentment. “I’m
making no to-do about anything.”
My chest felt like a stone, and I could have struck him or any one.
“Oh, I can see,” said he.
“See what you like,” I replied, furiously, “but don’t bother me with
it. I’ve nothing to do with your fancies.”
“Oh, very well,” he said, coolly; “I don’t want to interfere, I’m
sure.”
I bounced past him and strode out of the yard. My blood was humming in
my veins; the sunny street looked all glazed with a shining gray. I
walked on and on, scarcely knowing whither I went. Presently I climbed
St. Catherine’s hill and flung myself down on the summit. Below me, a
quarter of a mile away, the old city lay in the hollow cup of its
down. Who, of all its 17,000 souls, could ever stir my pulses as the
little stranger from the distant shadowy forest could? We had no
forests round Winton. Perhaps if we had the spirit of the trees would
have colored my life, too, so that I might have scorned “the blind
bow-god’s butt shaft.”
No doubt I was young to make such capital out of a little boyish
disappointment. Do you think so? Then to you I must not appeal. Oh, my
friend! We are not all jack-o’-lanterns at 17, and the fire of
unrequited affection may burn fiercer in the pure air of youth than in
the vitiated atmosphere of manhood. Anyhow believe me that to me my
misery was very real and dreadful. Think only, you who have plucked
the fruit and found it bitter--you whose disenchantment of life did
not begin till life itself was waning--what it must be to feel
hopeless at that tender age.
All day long I lay on the hill or wandered about the neighboring
downs, and it was not till the shadows of the trees were stretching
that I made up my mind to return and face out the inevitable.
I was parched and feverish, and the prospect of a plunge in the river
on my way home came to me with a little lonely thrill as of solace to
my unhappiness.
There was a deep pool at a bend of the stream, not far from where Zyp
and I had sat yesterday afternoon (was it only yesterday?) which we
three were much in the habit of frequenting on warm evenings; and
thither I bent my steps. This part of the water lay very private and
solitary, and was only to be reached by trespassing from the road
through a pretty thick-set blackthorn hedge--a necessity to its
enjoyment which, I need not say, was an attraction to us.
As I wriggled through our individual “run” in the hedge and, emerging
on the other side, raised my face, I saw that a naked figure was
already seated by the side of the running pool, which I was not long
in identifying as Modred’s.
I hesitated. What reason had I for hobnobbing with mine enemy, as, in
the bitterness of my heart, I called him? I could not as yet speak to
him naturally, I felt, or meet him without resentment. Where was the
object in complicating matters? I turned, on the thought, to go, and
again hesitated. Should he see me before I had made my escape, would
he not attribute it to embarrassment on my part and crow triumphant
over my discomfiture? Ah, why did I not act on my first impulse? Why,
why? The deeps of perdition must resound with that forlorn little
word.
When a second time the good resolve came to me, it was too late. He
rose and saw me and, under his shading hand, even at that distance, I
could mark the silent grin of mockery on his face. I walked
deliberately toward him, my hands in my pockets, my cap shading my
eyes.
“Aren’t you coming to bathe?” he said, when I drew near. “It’ll cool
your temper.”
I could have struck him, but I answered nothing and only began to
undress.
“Where have you been all day? We were wondering, Zyp and I, as we lay
in the meadow out there.”
Still I answered nothing, but I knew that my hands trembled as I
pulled off my coat and waistcoat.
He stood watching me a little while in silence, then said: “You seem
to have lost your tongue, old Renny. Has it followed your heart
because Zyp talks for two?”
I sprung up, but he eluded me and, with a hateful laugh, leaped on the
moment into the deep center of the pool. A horrible tightness came
round my throat. Half-undressed as I was I plunged after him all mad
with passion. He rose near me, and seeing the fury of my face, dived
again, and I followed. It took but an instant, and my life was
wrecked. We met among the weeds at the bottom, and he jumped from me.
As he rose I clutched him by one foot, and swiftly passed a great
sinew of weed three or four times around his ankle. It held like a
grapnel and would hold; for, though he was a fair swimmer, he was
always frighted and nervous in the face of little difficulties. Then
swerving away, I rose again, with laboring lungs, to the surface.
Barely had my drenched eyes found the daylight again, when the hideous
enormity of my crime broke into my brain like the toll of a death
bell. The water near me was heaving slightly and some welling bubbles
swayed to the surface. They were the drowning gasps of my brother--my
own brother, whom I was murdering.
I gave a thin, wretched scream and sunk again into the deep hole
beneath me. He was jerking convulsively, and his hands clutched vainly
at his feet and slipped away in a dying manner. I tore at the weed to
unwind it--only to twist it into new fetters. I pulled frantically at
its roots. I felt that I should go mad if it did not yield. In a
moment it came away in my hands and I shot upward, struggling. But the
other poor body followed me sluggishly, and I seized it by the hair,
with all my heart gone crazy, and towed it ashore.
His face, I thought, looked fallen away already and was no longer
loutish or malicious. It seemed just a white, pathetic thing freed
from suffering--and I would have given my life--ay, and my love--ten
times over to see the same expression come back to it it had worn as
it turned to me before he dived.
I fell on my knees beside him and broke into a passion of tears. I
kissed, with no shame but a murderer’s, the wet forehead, and beat and
pressed, in a futile agony too terrible for words, the limp
unresisting hand against my breast. It seemed that he must wake if I
implored him so frantically. But he lay quiet, with closed eyes, and
the water ran from his white skin in trickling jerks and pauses.
In the midst of my useless anguish some words of Jason’s recurred to
me, and, seizing my coat for a pillow to his forehead, I turned him,
with a shuddering horror of his limpness, upon his face. A great gush
of water came with a rumble from his mouth, but he did not stir; and
there I stood looking down upon him, my hand to my forehead, my mad
eyes staring as Cain’s must have stared when he wrought the deed of
terror.
And I was Cain--I who yesterday was a boy of loving impulses, I think;
whose blackest crime might be some petty rebellion against the lesser
proprieties; who had even hugged himself upon living on a loftier
plane than this poor silenced victim of his brutality.
As the deadly earnest of my deed came home to my stunned mind, I had
no thought of escape. I would face it out, confess and die. My
father’s agony--for he loved us in his way, I believe; Jason’s
condemnation; Zyp’s hatred; my own shame and torture--I put them all
on one side to get full view of that black crossbeam and rope that I
felt to be the only medicine for my sick and haunted soul.
As I stood, the sound of wheels on the road beyond woke me to some
necessity of action. Stumbling, as in a nightmare; not feeling my
feet, but only the mechanical spring of motion, I hurried to the hedge
side and looked over.
A carter with a tilt wagon was urging his tired team homeward.
“Help!” I cried. “Oh, come and help me!” And my voice seemed to me to
issue from under the tilt of the wagon.
He “woa’d” up his horses, raised his hat from his forehead, wrinkled
with hot weariness, and came toward me, his whip over his shoulder.
“What’s toward?” said he.
“My brother!” I gasped. “We were bathing together and he’s drowned.”
The man’s boorish face lighted up like a farthing rushlight. Here was
something horribly sordid enough for all the excitement he was worth.
It would sweeten many a pot of swipes for the week to come.
“Wheer be the body?” said he, eagerly.
“Over yonder, on the grass. Oh, won’t you help me to carry it home?”
He looked at the hedge critically.
“Go, you,” he said, “and drag ’en hither. We’ll gat ’en over hedge
together.”
I ran back to where it lay. It had collapsed a little to one side, and
for an instant my breath caught in a wild thrill of hope that he had
moved of himself. But the waxen hue of the face in the gathering dusk
killed my emotion on its very issuing.
A strange loathing of the thing, lying so unresponsive, had in my race
backward and forward sprung upon me, but before it could gain the
mastery I had seized it under the arm-pits and was half-dragging,
half-carrying it toward the road.
I was at the hedge before I knew it, and the red face of the carter
was peering curiously down at the white heap beneath.
“Harned ’en up,” he said. “My, but it’s cold. Easy, now. Take the toes
of ’en. Thart’s it--woa!” and he had it in his strong arms and
shuffling heavily to the rear of his wagon, jerked back the flap of
the tilt with his elbow and slid the body like a package into the
interior.
“Get your coat, man,” he cried, “and coom away.”
I had forgotten in the terror of it all my own half-dressed state, for
I had stripped only to my underclothes, and my boots were still on my
feet. Mechanically I returned to the riverside, and hastily donning my
coat and trousers, snatched up the other’s tumbled garments and ran
back to the road.