Dale's meditations had carried him backward and forward through the
past years, and left him against the blank wall of the present.
He was sitting on the fallen beech tree in the woodland glade. The sun
had set, and the night promised to be darker than recent nights; when
he looked at the grand gold watch given to him by his admirers, he
could only just see its hands. Nearly nine o'clock. He had been here a
long while. It was hours and hours since Norah went away. He sighed
wearily, got up, and walked back to his empty home.
Quite empty--that was the impression it made upon his mind both
to-night and all next day. He looked at it in the bright morning
sunshine, across the meadows, while the scythes laid down the first
long swathes of fragrant grass, and it seemed merely the shell of a
house. He looked at it in the midday glare, as he came up the field to
his dinner, and it seemed cold and black and cheerless. He looked at
it in the softer, kinder light of late afternoon, and it seemed to him
tragically sad--a monument of woe rather than a house, a fantastic
tomb built in the shape of a house in order to symbolize the homely
joy that had perished on this spot.
Yet smoke was rising from its chimneys, sound issuing from its
windows. All day long it had been full of active cheerful life. It and
the fields were happy in the animating harvest toil. Men with
harvesters' hats, women with sunbonnets, cracked their rustic jokes,
laughed, and sang at their labor; Mavis cooked food, filled the big
white bobs with beer, sent out bannocks and tin bottles of tea; Dale's
children had rakes and played at hay-making. Only the master, the
husband, the father, was unhappy.
No one knew it, of course. To other people he appeared to be just the
same as usual, naturally preoccupied with thoughts about the weather
as one always is at grass-cutting time, giving his orders firmly, and
seeing that they were obeyed promptly, smiling and nodding when you
showed yourself handy, frowning and looking rather black if you did
anything "okkard or feckless." Who could have guessed, as he looked at
his watch and then at the sky, that he was thinking: "It wants five
minutes of noon, and she is prob'ly out on what they term an
esplanade. There is a nice breeze down there, comin' to her over the
waater, blowin' her hair a bit loose, flappin' her skirts, sendin' out
her neck ribbon like a little flag behind her. It's all jolly, wi' the
mil'tary band, an' the smell o' the waves, an' crowds an' crowds o'
people--an' she won't have occasion to think o' me. P'raps they've bid
her wear her best--the white frock Mavis gave her, with the stockings
to match, and the new buckle-shoes--and likely young lads'll eye her
all over as they pass. Yes, she's seeing now the young uns--the mates
for her age--the proper article to make a photograph of a suitable
pair; and she'll soon stop thinking anything about me, if she hasn't
done it a'ready."
He was in his office still thinking of her, after the busy day, when
the postman brought the last delivery of letters.
"Good evening, sir. Only three to-night."
"Thank you. Good night, George," and Dale had a friendly smile for
this old acquaintance.
Postman George was growing fat and heavy, betraying signs of age. He
had been a sprightly telegraph boy when Dale was postmaster of
Rodchurch.
"Good night, sir. Fine weather for the hay."
"Yes, capital."
When the postman had gone Dale stood trembling. One of the letters was
from her. He felt unnerved by the mere sight of her handwriting on the
envelope--the hand that was so like his own, the hand that she had
taught herself by laborious study and imitation of his official
copper-plate; and he thought, "If I was wise I shouldn't open it. If I
was strong enough, I should just burn it, without reading. For,
whatever's inside, it's going to make me one bit more desp'rate than I
am now."
He snatched up his hat, went out of the house, and walked along the
road holding her letter pressed tight against his heart. There was a
gentle air that floated pleasantly over the fields, and in spite of
all the heavy rain that had fallen such a little while ago, the white
dust rose in high clouds when a motor-car came whizzing by. After the
car two timber wagons crept slowly, and then there were children
trailing a broken perambulator; but directly the road became vacant
again, he leaned against a gate and opened the envelope. He had felt
that he must be quite alone when he read what she said to him, and had
intended to go farther, but he could not wait any more.
"Sir, I beg to say"--That was how he had taught her to begin all
letters: she knew no other mode of address. "I beg to say this is a
very large place and you can see the sea from the bedrooms."
He read on; and his pleasure was so exquisite and his pain so
laceratingly sharp that the sky and the acids swam round and round.
... "There's nice girls here, one or two. Nellie Evans do all she can
to make me not so miserable She has a sweetheart at Rodchurch. They
all have their boys if you believe their talk.
"And all the marks at the end are the sweet kisses I give my boy. For
you are my boy now--my own secret one, and I am your loving girl
"Norah."
She was thinking only of him; she wanted no one younger and handsomer;
in her eyes and thoughts he was not old: he was her boy. Those words
had a terrible effect upon him. They entered his blood as if they had
been an injection of some sweetly narcotic drug; thy lanced deep into
his bowels as if they had been a surgeon's knife; they made him like a
half-anesthetized patient who at the same time dreams of paradise and
feels that he is bleeding to death.
"You are my boy ... and I am your loving girl."
He moved from the gate, hurried along the dusty road, and entered
Hadleigh Wood at the first footpath. As he got over the stile he was
saying to himself, "This letter finishes me. I can't go on with it
after this. I'm done for."
Then, as he walked in the cool silence beneath the dark firs, he held
her letter to his lips--kissed the inked crosses that she had set as
marks to represent her kisses--counted and kissed them and counted
them until his hot tears blinded him.
She wanted him; she longed for him; he was her boy.
He could get to her to-night. She was only twenty or twenty-two miles
away, as the crow flies--say half an hour's journey if one had the
wings of a heron. He could rush home, jump into his gig, and send the
horse at a gallop; he could get there by road or rail, somehow; he
could telegraph, telling her not to go to bed, telling her to go to
the station and wait for him there.
Then he would walk with her in the moonlight by the sea, on the wet
sand, close to the breaking waves. When they came back to the
Institution no light would be showing from any of the windows, and she
might say, "I'm shut out. When they come down to let me in, won't they
make a fuss?" But he would say, "You are not going in there again."
"What," she would say, "are you taking me back to Vine-Pits after only
two days? Don't you think Mrs. Dale will be angry?"
Then he would say, "I'm not taking you back. I'm going to take you
half across the world with me. I've tried hard, Norah, but I can't do
without you. I own up, I'm beat, I take the consequences. I'm not
good, I'm bad. I've done wicked things, and now I'm ripe for the
crowning wickedness. I'm going to break my wife's heart, dishonor my
children's name, and take you down to hell with me."
Or if he could not say and do all that, he might at least do this. He
could pick her up in his arms and wade out to sea with her; he could
whisper and kiss and wade until the ribbed sand went from under his
feet; and then he would swim, go on whispering, kissing, and swimming
until his strength failed him--yes, he could drown himself and her, so
that they died locked fast in each other's arms, taking in death the
embraces that had been denied them in life.
He was crying now as a child cries, abandoning himself to his tears,
not troubling to wipe them away, temporarily overcome by self-pity.
But soon he shook off this particular form of weakness, and thought,
"What nonsense comes into a man's head, when he's once off his right
balance--such wild nonsense, such mad nonsense. Drown _her_, poor
innocent. Make her pay _my_ bill. Think of it even--when I'd swim the
Atlantic to save her life, if it was in danger."
And then the thought that had been the impetus or origin of these
fantastic imaginations presented itself again, and more strongly than
before. He said to himself, "This letter is my death-warrant. I can't
go on. It is my death-warrant."
He had made straight for the main ride, and he walked straight along
it in the direction of Kibworth Rocks. As he drew toward them it was
as if the spirit of the dead man called him, seeming to say: "Come and
keep me company. Our old quarrel is over. You and I understand each
other _now_. We are two of a kind, just as like as two hogs from one
litter--you the sanctimonious psalm-singer and I the conscienceless
profligate--we are brothers at last in our beastliness."
Dale walked with his hands clasped behind his back, thoughtfully
looking at the trees, and trying to suppress his wild imaginations.
But he could not suppress them. The dead man seemed to say, "Don't be
a humbug, don't pretend. You know we are alike. Why, when you looked
in the glass the other day, you _saw_ the resemblance. You saw my
puffy eye-orbits and my pendulous lip in your own face."
Dale shrugged his shoulders, held his head high, and grunted fiercely.
But when he was abreast of the rocks, this imagined voice seemed to
speak to him again.
"You and I have drawn so near together that there's only one
difference now--that you are alive and I am dead. But even that
difference will be gone soon."
And Dale, walking on rather slower than before, made an odd gesture of
his left hand, a wave of hand and arm together, as of a dignified
well-to-do citizen waving off some impudent mendicant: seeming to say,
"Be damned to you. Just you lie quiet where I put you, and don't
worry. I decline to have anything to do with you, or to allow the
slightest communication between us. I simply don't recognize you--nor
will I ever admit again that I see the faintest resemblance. If I
wished, I could explain why. Only I shan't condescend to do
so--certainly not to _you_."
Out of the big ride he went into one of the narrower cuts, and
followed it until he came to the woodside boundary of the Barradine
Orphanage. This was where Mavis had stood looking at it years ago,
when the building was in course of construction. The wooden fence that
she had thought so stiff and ugly then was all weak and old, green and
moss-covered, completely broken down in many places. Inside, the
privet hedge had grown broad and thick; and this barrier, although
any one could easily thrust himself through it, was evidently
considered sufficient, since no trouble had been taken to repair the
outer fence. Indeed, what protective barriers could be needed for such
an enclosure? It contained no money or other kind of treasure; and
who, however base, would attack or in any way threaten a lot of
children?
Dale looked at the top of the belfry tower and the roof of the central
block, and thought of it as a temple of youth, a sacred place
dedicated to the worship of tender and innocent life. He moved through
the trees and found a point where, on higher ground, he could look
across into the garden and see a part of the terrace and verandas.
None of the girls was visible. They had been gathered into those
hospitable walls for the night.
Presently he thought he heard them singing. Yes, that was an evening
hymn. The girls were thanking God for the long daylight of a summer's
day, before they lay down to rest, to sleep, to forget they were alive
till God's sun rose again.
And Dale began once more to think of God. To-night he would not fly
from the sound of the girls' voices. All that reluctance and distaste
was over and done with; it belonged to the time when he was still
struggling against the inevitable drift of his inclinations. Now he
had passed to a state of mind that nothing external could really
affect.
"The finger of God"--Yes, those were unforgivable words. He stretched
himself at full length upon the ground, leaned his head on his elbow,
and lay musing.
He taxed his imagination in order to give himself a concept of what
such a tremendous figure of speech should in truth convey. One said
finger, of course, because one wished to imply that no effort was
used, scarcely any of the divine force drawn upon--just as one says of
a man, he did so-and-so with a turn of the wrist, that is, quite
easily, without putting his back into it. Yes, he thought, that's
about right. Then to make up something for an instance, just to spread
the idea as big as it ought properly to be, one might say that once
upon a time God gave our sun and all the other suns the slightest push
with His finger, _and they haven't done moving yet_.
And it seemed to him that, look where one pleased, one could see the
real work of the finger of God. It had been giving him, William Dale,
faint imperceptible pushes for fifteen years, and see now at the end
where it had pushed him. First it had pushed him upward, higher and
higher, to a position of conspicuous pride, to the topmost summit of a
fair mountain, where he could look round and say, "I have all that I
pined for. This is the world's castle, and I am the king of the
castle." Then it had begun to push him down the other side of this
mountain, the dark side, the side that was always in shadow, downward
and still downward to the miasmic unhealthy plain where all was
rankness, downward to the level of corruption and death. Yes, it had
brought him, the bold, proud law-maker, down and down till he stood no
higher than the victim of his law.
He remembered the common phrase--so often employed by
himself--comparing mice with men. Am I a man or a mouse? And it seemed
that no cat had ever played with a mouse as the Infinite Ruling Power
of the universe had been playing with the man William Dale. He had
been allowed to break loose, to frisk and jump, to fancy he was free
to run right round the earth if he wished to do so; and all the while
he had truly been a prisoner, the helpless prey of his captor, held
close to the place of ultimate doom.
If he had been promptly convicted and hanged, it would have been no
punishment at all compared with what was happening now. The long delay
was the essential part of the punishment, and of the lesson. The fact
that no one suspected his crime had given him the period of agonized
suspense, with all those dream-torments, the fear of death which was
worse than death itself.
He thought of all the things that had appeared to be blind chances but
were really stern decrees. The true function of the money that came
from the dead man's hand was to keep him always on the rack of memory.
And with the aid of the money he had been made to move a little nearer
to the site of his crime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so
that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day
from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was
not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of
Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new
country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered
associations of ideas, and been _able to forget_. He had made up his
mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start
there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of
means.
His thoughts returned to Norah, and here again--here more plainly
than anywhere else--he saw the work of God. It was wonderful and
awe-inspiring how God had selected the instrument that should destroy
him. He felt that he could have resisted the charms of any other girl
in the world except this one. In mysterious ways Norah's fascination
was potent over him, while it might have been quite feeble in its
effects with regard to other men. But for Dale she represented the
solid embodiment of imagined seductiveness, allurement, supreme
feminine charm; that flicker of wild blood in her was to him an
essential attraction, and it linked itself inexplicably with the
amorous reveries of far-off days when, young and free and wild
himself, he loved the woodland glades instead of hating them.
The selected instrument--Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could
have been safely employed to achieve God's double purpose of
overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him
simultaneously. No other girl that ever was born could have aroused
such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at
the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable.
Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him;
only the child who had frightened him in the wood could
instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire
out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke
of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its
confusion of the guilty.
He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child--the little
black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to
think of her--the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping
treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence.
A thousand times he had wondered about her--thinking: "She is growing
up. She belongs here;" looking in the faces of cottagers' children and
asking himself: "Are you she? Or you? Or you?" Then he had left off
thinking about her.
She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never
once asked himself: "Is Norah she?" No, because God would not allow
him to do so; it had suited God's purpose to paralyze the outlet of
all natural thought in that direction. So she grew tall and strong
under his eyes--the dreaded imp of the wood eating his food, squatting
at his own fireside; changing into the imagined nymph of the wood that
he had seen only in dreams; becoming the very spirit of the wood--yes,
the wood's avenging spirit.
He moved from his recumbent position, sat up, and drew out Norah's
letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He read her letter again,
and his sadness and despair deepened. There was no revolt now; he felt
nothing but black misery. He thought: "I used to fear that she would
be the means of my death, and now death is coming from her. This
letter is my death-warrant."
There was no other way out of his troubles. Life had become
unendurable; he could not go on with it. And this thought became now a
fixed determination. He must copy the example of other and better men;
he must do for himself, as old Bates and many others had done for
themselves when they found their lives too hard for them.
If he didn't--oh, the whole thing was hopeless. Suppose that he
rebelled against this cruel necessity. No, he saw too plainly the
torment that would lie before him--disgrace, grief of wife and
children, soon all the world wishing him dead. And no joy. The girl
would be taken from him. The world--or God--would never allow him to
hide and be happy with her.
Suppose he were to carry her off to the Colonies, and attempt to begin
the new life that he had planned fifteen years ago. Impossible--he was
too old; nearly all his strength had gone from him; the mere idea of
fighting his way uphill again filled him with a sick fatigue. And the
girl, when she saw him failing, physically and mentally, would desert
him. _Her_ love could not last--it was too unnatural; and when,
contrasting him with other men, she saw that he was feeble, exhausted,
utterly worn out, she would shake off the bondage of his
companionship. No, there was no possible hope for the future of such a
union.
He thought: "Other men at fifty are often hale and hearty, chock-full
of vigor. But that's not my case." He felt that, though his frame
remained stout enough, he had exhausted his whole supply of
nerve-force; and this was due not to length of years, but to the pace
at which he had lived them. He thought: "That is what has whacked me
out--the rate I've gone. If I'd been some rich swell treating himself
to a harem of women, horse-racing, gambling at cards; or if I'd been
one of these City gentlemen floating companies, speculating on the
Stock Exchange, and so on; or if I'd been a Parliament man spouting
all night, going round at elections all day, people would have said:
'Oh, what a mighty pity he doesn't give himself a proper chance, but
lives too fast.' Yet those men would all be reposing of themselves
compared with _me_. It stands to reason. It could not be otherwise.
And for why? Because a _murderer_ lives other men's years in one of
his minutes--and the wear and tear on him is more than the Derby
Race-Course, the Houses of Parliament, and the Stock Exchange all
rolled into one crowd would ever feel if they went on exciting
themselves from now to the Day of Judgment."
And again he felt self-pity, but of another kind than that which had
stirred him an hour ago. Now it was clear-sighted, analytical, almost
free from weakness. He thought: "It is a bit rough--it is rather hard,
rather cruel on me, all said and done. For I know that I might have
bin a good man. The good lay in me--it only wanted drawing out." He
remembered the elevating effect of his love for Mavis, how through all
the time of his belief in her purity he had tried to purify himself,
to purge away all the grossness and sensualness that, as he vainly
fancied, made him unworthy to be the mate of so immaculate a creature;
but he was not allowed to continue the purifying process; her horrible
revelation ended it--knocked the sense out of it, made it
preposterously absurd. "If Mavis had been in the beginning what she
has come to be at last, she would have kept me on the highroad to
Heaven." But all the chances had gone against him. "My father failed
me, my mother failed me, my wife failed me."
"The worst faults I had in my prime were conceit and uppishness, but
they only came from my ignorance. They'd have been wiped out of me at
the start, if I'd had the true advantages of education; regular
school training, such as gentlemen's sons enjoy, would have made all
the difference. It's all very well to talk about educating yourself
and rising in the world at the same time, but it can't be done.
There's a season for everything, and the best part of education must
be over before you begin to fight for a position. Otherwise the
handicap is too heavy."
His pity for himself became more poignant; yet still there was nothing
weakening in it, at least nothing that tended to alter his
determination. "No," he thought, "take me all round, I couldn't
originally have bin meant to turn out a wrong un. I've never bin mean
or sneaking or envious in my dealings with other people. I've never
spared myself to give a helping hand to those who treated me decently.
And no one will ever guess the kindly sentiments I entertained for
many other men, or the pleasure I derived the few times I could feel:
'This chap is one I respect, and he seems to like me.' I wanted to be
liked, but the gift o' making myself liked was denied me. Yet, except
for being cast down into sin, I should have got over _that_
difficulty. I was on the right road there too. By enlarging my mind
I'd become more sympathetic. Though always a shy man really and truly,
I was learning to smother the false effects of my shyness."
Thinking thus of his mind, and his long-continued efforts to improve
its powers, he felt: "To go and extinguish all this is an awful thing
to have to do."
Still his determination was not altered. The mystery of that great
pageant, the mental life of William Dale, could not be permitted to
unfold itself any further. It must cease with a snap and a jerk, much
as when the electric current becomes too strong for a small
incandescent lamp and the bulb bursts, the filaments fuse, and all
that the lamp was showing disappears in darkness.
Yes, darkness without a glimmer of hope.
The finger of God--one can't get away from it. If it pushes you toward
the light, then rejoice exceedingly and with a loud voice; if it
pushes you into the dark, then swallow your tongue and go silently. It
seemed to Dale that he comprehended the whole scope and purport of his
doom, and that God's tremendous logic made the justice of his doom
unanswerable. He understood that the law which he had himself set up
was to be binding now. He must execute himself, as he had executed
Everard Barradine. It is for this, the hour of hopelessness and
despair, that God has been waiting. Now it is God's good time. God has
slowly taught him his worthlessness and infamy, so that he may die
despairing.