THE ASCENT OF THE TOWER OF SILENCE.
"There need be no inquest," he thought. "There need be no inquest _now_.
To-morrow morning every one in Daneford will believe that she is dead,
and every one will be--right. Her name will be included in the list of
the dead, there will be a reference to my broken-hearted behaviour at
Asherton's Quay, and there will be expressions of sympathy with me.
"I shall wear mourning.
"What o'clock is it?" He looked at his watch. "Too soon yet. I must wait
until all are asleep.
"I shall wear mourning and receive the condolences of my friends. I
shall pass through avenues of faces cast in sorrow for my grief. They
will hush their voice when I enter the Daneford Bank. They will
unanimously vote resolutions of sympathy at most of the public bodies to
which I belong. And I--I--how shall I receive their greetings?
"How shall I receive them? Shall I quail and tremble and jabber of
to-night's work? Shall I become hysterical or gloomy? No, no, no. I
shall be as bold at least as the thief whom they crucified on the Left
Hand.
"The oath I took by that bedside this evening was my swearing into the
army of the everlasting damned, and no one shall ever say I quailed or I
faltered.
"What o'clock is it? Yet too soon. This is all I need be careful about.
Once it is there, I shall be free and blithe--free and blithe!
"I shall meet them all and never show a sign. It is a pity I did not go
on the stage. I feel quite confident I can play out this part to the
end, and carry my audience with me so thoroughly that not one of them
will know I am playing a part. No living man shall find out I do not
speak my own words. It is only comrade Judas and his friends know who
the real author of the play is."
He turned away from the glass and began pacing the room quickly. He was
thinking with fierce pride of the brave front he should show to the
world, and motion stimulated his mind and gave reality to his mental
action.
Yes, he should never waver. In fact he felt stronger now than before. He
had lived under the shadow of her fault; now he faced his own crime. All
depended on himself, and he knew he was equal to the situation and its
contingencies.
He could face them all. All the people of Daneford and Seacliff. Every
one of----
He shivered, drew his body together, and leaned for a moment against the
wall. The cold sweat oozed from his white forehead, and he gasped for
breath. In a while he shook himself, threw up his arms, and wound them
round his head, as if to protect himself against the blows of a
merciless enemy, and moaned out, in a tone of craven misery:
"No, no! Not you? Go away! I cannot look at you; you must not come near
me. I have ceased to be your son. I am not the child you suckled. I am
not the son you taught to pray. I am not the man you inspired with
respect and love. I am not the son you always tried to make do his duty.
Mother, let me call you mother darling once again; to call you my angel,
mother, seems to purge me of my crime. I am a strong man, mother, but I
cannot look at you. Bee is dead, and I have killed her. Now, will you
not fly from me? Think of your son as dead, and fly this murderer. What!
you will not! You see the brand of Cain, and you will not go! Oh,
invincible love! Intolerable devotion! Supreme disciple of Christ, you
drive me mad. I am mad already. Go, woman; go, woman, or I may kill you
too."
He dropped his arms from his head, and glared round the room with the
fire of madness in his eyes. The neck-ribbon his wife had worn last
night at dinner hung on the glass; a pair of her slippers, soft slippers
for comfort, were under the dressing-table. His eyes lighted on the
ribbon, then on the slippers.
With an idiotic laugh he staggered across the room, and, sitting down on
the side of the bed, remained in a torpor for a long time. The last
vision conjured up by him had stunned his imagination and baffled his
intellect, and his mind, while he sat thus, was blank as the viewless
wind.
It was a long time before he roused himself, and even then he had to
employ considerable effort to bring himself up to the point of action.
He knew he had yet something of the last importance to do. He looked at
his watch.
"Eleven. All is quiet. I may safely go now."
He arose, and, taking the candle with him, walked heavily into the
passage, and having opened the other door passed into the tower-room,
and locked the door of that room, leaving his own key in the lock.
Remembering the second key, he lowered the candle and looked for it on
the dark oak floor. He saw it and picked it up. As he did so his eyes
caught another metallic glitter on the floor, and stepping towards it he
took up something.
Holding the metallic object next the light, he seemed for a moment
perplexed.
"What brings a burglar's jemmy here? How can it have come here?"
He looked very cautiously and slowly round the room.
"I did not notice until now," he thought, "those open drawers. Why, the
place has been broken into."
His first impulse was to rush to the window. But he curbed that. It
would be just as well not to be seen at that window now. Suppose by any
chance the burglar happened to be lurking in the neighbourhood, in the
Park. No part of the house or grounds commanded this room, and so long
as he did not go near the window all would be well.
He had stumbled over that jemmy before--before he had added to the
perfidy of Judas the sin of Cain.
He approached the couch. All was quiet there. Not a sound, not a breath.
He went still nearer. Now for the first time he noticed close by the
couch an empty decanter, the one into which James had poured brandy, and
by it a glass.
He noticed something else too; the left hand of the figure on the couch
lay on the breast, and from the third finger all the rings were gone.
"All the rings gone!" he thought, in dismay. "The place broken into and
all the rings gone! This room broken into and the rings taken off the
finger! She never removed the wedding-ring, and scarcely ever the guard.
She must have been asleep when he came in; and he, no doubt, seeing the
decanter and the glass, and observing she took no notice of sounds,
went about his work. A bold man, a very bold man."
When had that man been there? He had no means of determining the time at
which the burglar had been in the room. It was clear, however, he had
been there while she was alive.
Had he been there after the sailing of the steamboat _Rodwell_ from
Daneford that evening? If so, that burglar could hang him, Grey.
Out with the candle.
He extinguished it.
A profound quiet brooded abroad. Not a leaf stirred. The trees were as
motionless and the air as mute as if the air was solid crystal. No sound
from the city or the road intruded upon the voiceless darkness of that
tower-room.
Grey stood a while looking at the square of dim blue bloom indicating
where the window was. Then he stooped and touched what lay on the
couch, and pulled himself upright with a jerk.
He stooped down his head once more, and listened intently. Last time he
had so stooped he had heard a low faint breathing. Now nothing reached
his ears, but beyond the reach of human ears he heard the deep roll of
the Eternal Ocean on the shores of Everlasting Night.
The ocean of everlasting silence, where her voice had been, was more
awful than the clangour of war, or the shouts of a burning town.
"It will not do to think now. I must make thought drunk with action. She
is not heavy. I have often carri----No, no; that sort of thing would be
the worst of all. Now for it!"
He stooped once again, rose more slowly than at any former time, and
walked down the room with heavy footfall, carrying a burden.
The room had two doors--one between it and the passage leading to the
bedroom; the other between it and the landing of the tower-stairs.
The staircase down from the landing was boarded off, so that egress from
the tower-room by that staircase was impossible.
The upward way was unimpeded. The staircase had not been used once for
years. There was nothing in either of the upper rooms, and no one had
ever been in either of them since Grey himself, when he had gone over
the house before buying it.
The staircase was as dark and silent as a grave. A thin carpet of dust
deadened the footfalls, and, clinging to the boot-leather, muffled the
feet. Now and then his foot crushed a small piece of plaster which had
fallen from the ceiling. This made a sound like a wild beast crunching
bones.
The paper had parted from the walls in many places, and hung in damp
festoons from the ceiling here and there.
Now and then long slimy arms of paper stretched out to him from the
walls and held him back. This made him stagger against the balustrade to
steady himself. The balustrade upon which he laid his hand was rickety,
and covered with a damp spongy dust, that clung to his hand and worked
up between his moist fingers, and stuck his fingers together as with
blood. When he had got clear of the paper that, hanging from the walls,
had seized him, and had pushed himself away from the slimy balustrade,
he toiled upward.
But the day had been a terribly exhausting one, and his progress was
very slow.
He held his burden with his right arm on his right shoulder, and
steadied himself against the wall with his right elbow, against the
balustrade with his left hand.
Owing to the inviolate darkness and his small acquaintance with the way,
he was obliged to feel carefully with his foot each step before
advancing.
He gained the first landing. The darkness was so complete, it pressed
with weight upon his eyeballs, and thickened the air in his lungs. He
had already begun to breathe heavily, and he paused for breath. Only
about a sixth of his upward way had been accomplished, and yet he felt
fatigued. The stifling sultry air of the tower made him languid and
drowsy.
The sooner this was done, the better.
He recommenced the ascent.
On reaching the next landing, that of the second-floor room, he paused
again.
His breathing had by this time become more laboured, and he felt as if
his chest would burst. No fresh air had entered that loathsome place for
years. In winter the walls wept, the paper hung off, and fungus covered
the walls and the woodwork.
In summer the walls dried up, and from the dead fungi rose the stifling
vapours exhaled when decay feeds on decay. These odious vapours enriched
the walls with new growing powers, and so the process went on. The tower
rotted inwardly. Damp came first, and later mildew, and then fungus. The
fungus lived its life and finally fell to pieces, yielding inodorous
fibre and mephitic spirit. The spirit fed the later growth of fungus.
Here nitre clung in crystals to the walls, and there were incomplete
stalagmites under the stone window-sills.
Huge spiders wove gigantic nets from balustrade to wall, from roof to
wall, from window-sash to floor. But no flies ever came to these webs,
and the spiders spread needless snares, and lived at ease on lesser
game.
In summer all the dust upon the floor moved continually with worm and
maggot of extraordinary size, and obscene ugliness of form and colour.
Neither beetle nor cockroach, earwig nor cricket, found a home here.
Nothing moved swiftly, not even the spider, for he found food without
pursuit or strife. Here was no contention among individuals. As in all
earliest forms of life, nearly everything was done for the individual by
heat and moisture. The unseemly inside of that tower was fretting and
rotting slowly away, being slowly devoured by the worm and the maggot
and the fungus.
Through the warm vapours of that polluted tower the man staggered
upward. His breathing had now become stertorous, and beat in the hollow
staircase and against the sounding boards furnished by the empty rooms
like the snorting of a hunted monster.
The air grew thicker in his lungs, and his heart tingled and throbbed as
though it would burst. The arteries in his neck appeared at each beat of
his pulse about to jump from their places. His gullet was dry, and the
air rushing through his windpipe seemed burdened with sand that tore the
skin of his parched throat. The arteries in his temple twanged against
the bone with noises that made him giddy. The uproar of strangulation
was in his head. His knees were sinking under him, and he felt he should
faint or fall down in a fit if he did not do something.
He resolved to shift his burden from the right shoulder to the left.
How heavy! Ugh!
Cold already!
Oh, great God! the lips had touched his forehead, and they were cold!
The lips he had a thousand times----
With a howl that made the hollow chambers and the invisible staircase
shake, he clasped his burden to his left shoulder and dashed wildly up
the stairs.
Now he ran against the wall in front, now against the balustrade. He
took a step too many, and plunged headforemost against the wall. He took
a step too few, and fell headlong upon a landing.
What was all that to him now? What was all that to him, who had loved
her once, her whose cold lips--cold of his own chilling--had touched his
forehead as he shifted his murdered darling from one shoulder to
another?
Oh, God! the lips he had lingered on lovingly long ago! The lips he had
sought with all his soul and won to his own exclusive use! How often had
they told his name! How often had they told her love to him, when all
else in the world sank into nothingness compared with the august
privilege of knowing she loved him! How often when she slept had he
heard those lips breathe his name with terms of endearment! And now, oh
God!
On! On! There is a clamour of memories worse than demons at his back.
On! Out of this place! Away from these memories!
The roof at last!
The roof, with cool air and a wide view, and--This!
He placed his burden softly on the roof of the tower; then throwing
himself down at full length, rolled over on his face, and, putting one
forearm under the other, rested his forehead on the upper arm, and,
excepting the heavy heaving of his chest, lay still.