THE REFUGE.
The night was very dusky, but Helen knew perfectly the way she was
going. A strange excitement possessed her, and lifted her above all
personal fear. The instant she found herself in the open air, her
faculties seemed to come preternaturally awake, and her judgment to
grow quite cool. She congratulated herself that there had been no
rain, and the ground would not betray their steps. There was enough
of light in the sky to see the trees against it, and partly by their
outlines she guided herself to the door in the park-paling, whence
she went as straight as she could for the deserted house.
Remembering well her brother's old dislike to the place, she said
nothing of their destination; but, when he suddenly stopped, she
knew that it had dawned upon him. For one moment he hung back, but a
stronger and more definite fear lay behind, and he went on.
Emerging from the trees on the edge of the hollow, they looked down,
but it was too dark to see the mass of the house, or the slightest
gleam from the surface of the lake. All was silent as a deserted
churchyard, and they went down the slope as if it had been the
descent to Hades. Arrived at the wall of the garden, they followed
its buttressed length until they came to a tall narrow gate of
wrought iron, almost consumed with rust, and standing half open. By
this they passed into the desolate garden, whose misery in the
daytime was like that of a ruined soul, but now hidden in the
night's black mantle. Through the straggling bushes with their arms
they forced and with their feet they felt their way to the front
door of the house, the steps to which, from the effects of various
floods, were all out of the level in different directions. The door
was unlocked as usual, needing only a strong push to open it, and
they entered. How awfully still it seemed!--much stiller than the
open air, though that had seemed noiseless. There was not a rat or a
black beetle in the place. They groped their way through the hall,
and up the wide staircase, which gave not one crack in answer to
their needlessly careful footsteps: not a soul was within a mile of
them. Helen had taken Leopold by the hand, and she now led him
straight to the closet whence the hidden room opened. He made no
resistance, for the covering wings of the darkness had protection in
them. How desolate must the soul be that welcomes such protection!
But when, knowing that thence no ray could reach the outside, she
struck a light, and the spot where he had so often shuddered was
laid bare to his soul, he gave a cry and turned and would have
rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead
him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came
gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a
bare chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten
mattress in a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a
sound that more resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat
down beside him, took his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him
with such tender loving words as had never before found birth in her
heart, not to say crossed her lips. She took from her pocket a
dainty morsel, and tried to make him eat, but in vain. Then she
poured him out a cupful of wine. He drank it eagerly, and asked for
more, which she would not give him. But instead of comforting him,
it seemed only to rouse him to fresh horror. He clung to his sister
as a child clings to the nurse who has just been telling him an evil
tale, and ever his face would keep turning from her to the door with
a look of frightful anticipation. She consoled him with all her
ingenuity, assured him that for the present he was perfectly safe,
and, thinking it would encourage a sense of concealment, reminded
him of the trap in the floor of the closet and the little chamber
underneath. But at that he started up with glaring eyes.
"Helen! I remember now," he cried. "I knew it at the time! Don't you
know I never could endure the place? I foresaw, as plainly as I see
you now, that one day I should be crouching here for safety with a
hideous crime on my conscience. I told you so, Helen, at the time.
Oh! how could you bring me here?"
He threw himself down again, and hid his face on her lap.
With a fresh inroad of dismay Helen thought he must be going mad,
for this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had
always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said
to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the
thought--for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination!
But whether real or not, she must have his story.
"Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!" she said, "you have not yet
told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I
daresay it's nothing so very bad after all!"
"There's the light coming!" he said, in a dull hollow voice, "--The
morning! always the morning coming again!"
"No, no, dear Poldie!" she returned. "There is no window here--at
least it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the
morning is a long way off."
"How far?" he asked, staring in her eyes--"twenty years? That was
just when I was bom! Oh that I could enter a second time into my
mother's womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed
world? I would God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn't he
have let well alone?"
He was silent. She must get him to sleep.
It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the
first, and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the
exorbitant demands now made upon her. With an effort of the will
such as she could never before have even imagined, she controlled
the anguish of her own spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the
poor lad, which had again sought her lap, compelled herself to sing
him for lullaby a song of which in his childhood he had been very
fond, and with which, in all the importance of imagined motherhood,
she had often sung him to sleep. And the old influence was potent
yet. In a few minutes the fingers which clutched her hand relaxed,
and she knew by his breathing that he slept. She sat still as a
stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe enough to keep her
alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed moments of
self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding ocean
of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom. She
sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she
must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which
went through her in all directions held her body together like ties
and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now
she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body
clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it
to a pitiful kind of repose. How long she sat thus she could not
tell--she had no means of knowing, but it seemed hours on hours, and
yet, though the nights were now short, the darkness had not begun to
thin. But when she thought how little access the light had to that
room, she began to grow uneasy lest she should be missed from her
own, or seen on her way back to it. At length some involuntary
movement woke him. He started to his feet with a look of wild
gladness. But there was scarcely time to recognise it before it
vanished.
"My God, it is true then!" he shrieked. "O Helen, I dreamed that I
was innocent--that I had but dreamed I had done it. Tell me that I'm
dreaming now. Tell me! tell me!--Tell me that I am no murderer!"
As he spoke, he seized her shoulder with a fierce grasp, and shook
her as if trying to wake her from the silence of a lethargy.
"I hope you are innocent, my darling. But in any case I will do all
I can to protect you," said Helen. "Only I shall never be able
unless you control yourself sufficiently to let me go home."
"No, Helen!" he cried; "you must not leave me. If you do, I shall go
mad. SHE will come instead."
Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.
"If I stay with you, just think, dearest, what will happen," she
said. "I shall be missed, and all the country will be raised to look
for me. They will think I have been--"--She checked herself.
"And so you might be--so might anyone," he cried, "so long as I am
loose--like the Rajah's man-eating horse. O God! It has come to
this!" And he hid his face in his hands.
"And then you see, my Poldie," Helen went on as calmly as she could,
"they would come here and find us; and I don't know what might come
next."
"Yes, yes, Helen! Go, go directly. Leave me this instant," he said,
hurriedly, and took her by the shoulders, as if he would push her
from the room, but went on talking. "It must be, I know; but when
the light comes I shall go mad. Would to God I might, for the day is
worse than the darkness; then I see my own black against the light.
Now go, Helen. But you WILL come back to me as soon as ever you can?
How shall I know when to begin to look for you? What o'clock is it?
My watch has never been--since--. Ugh! the light will be here soon.
Helen, I know now what hell is.--Ah! Yes."--As he spoke he had been
feeling in one of his pockets.--"I will not be taken alive.--Can you
whistle, Helen?"
"Yes, Poldie," answered Helen, trembling. "Don't you remember
teaching me?"
"Yes, yes.--Then, when you come near the house, whistle, and go on
whistling, for if I hear a step without any whistling, I shall kill
myself."
"What have you got there?" she asked in renewed terror, noticing
that he kept his hand in the breast pocket of his coat.
"Only the knife," he answered calmly.
"Give it to me," she said, calmly too.
He laughed, and the laugh was more terrible than any cry.
"No; I'm not so green as that," he said. "My knife is my only
friend! Who is to take care of me when you are away? Ha! ha!"
She saw that the comfort of the knife must not be denied him. Nor
did she fear any visit that might drive him to its use--except
indeed the police WERE to come upon him--and then--what better
could he do? she thought.
"Well, well, I will not plague you," she said. "Lie down and I will
cover you with my shawl, and you can fancy it my arms round you. I
will come to you as soon as ever I can."
He obeyed. She spread her shawl over him and kissed him.
"Thank you, Helen," he said quietly.
"Pray to God to deliver you, dear," she said.
"He can do that only by killing me," he returned. "I will pray for
that. But do you go, Helen. I will try to bear my misery for your
sake."
He followed her from the room with eyes out of which looked the very
demon of silent despair.
I will not further attempt to set forth his feelings. The
incredible, the impossible, had become a fact-AND HE WAS THE MAN. He
who knows the relief of waking from a dream of crime to the
jubilation of recovered innocence, to the sunlight that blots out
the thing as untrue, may by help of that conceive the misery of a
delicate nature suddenly filled with the clear assurance of horrible
guilt. Such a misery no waking but one that annihilated the past
could ever console. Yes, there is yet an awaking--if a man might but
attain unto it--an awaking into a region whose very fields are full
of the harmony sovereign to console, not merely for having
suffered--that needs little consoling, but for having inflicted the
deepest wrong.
The moment Helen was out of sight, Leopold drew a small silver box
from an inner pocket, eyed it with the eager look of a hungry
animal, took from it a portion of a certain something, put it in his
mouth, closed his eyes, and lay still.