The Weird Sisters: A Romance. Volume 2 of 3
"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.
CHAPTER XVIII
ON THE TOP
The top of the tower was flat. It was reached through a hooded doorway resembling a ship's companion. A parapet about two and a half feet high ran round the tower on all sides, and in the left-hand angle of the parapet, looking towards the grounds in front of the house, stood the tall, battered, dilapidated, rusted tank.
This tank had been of substantial make. Four upright bars of iron still stood showing where the four angles of the elevation of the tank had been. Binding the top of these four uprights together had been a substantial rail. The inner side of that rail had disappeared; the three other sides remained. Half-way down the uprights had been four girders binding the uprights together. Of these girders three were entire, the one on the outside having succumbed to violence of time. A few of the plates clung to the uprights in the upper section of the tank. In the lower section only one plate was missing, and that on the back of the tank. The base of the tank was eight feet square, the height of the uprights ten feet. Once in it had been stored the water-supply. More than fifty years ago it had been superseded by a tank put up in the main building. Since then not a dozen times had any one visited the top of the tower.
That night of the 17th of August was dark; there were neither stars nor moon. No wind had arisen to disturb the intense calm.
At length Grey rose from the ground somewhat refreshed and quieted. There was no use in being foolhardy, and although a person standing on the avenue below could not possibly see a human figure on the top of the tower, still all means caution could suggest ought to be employed. So he stepped into the dilapidated tank through the opening, and having, except on the inner side, a complete bulwark around him five feet high, there was no chance of any one seeing him. He did not care to face yet the descent through that stifling tower.
He would wait a while until he should be fully restored.
He had eaten nothing since luncheon, and the physical and mental ordeals through which he had since passed reduced the activity of his mind, and made his thoughts move slowly, and dimmed the ideas in his imagination. Still in a dull way he sought to review his position.
There to the right lay Daneford, his town, the city of which he was dictator, which would do anything, everything he asked. You could not see the city from this, but there it reposed under that red-yellow stain upon the sky.
The people of that town, if they had seen him take that old man's gold, would not have believed the evidence of their senses. They would have placed their opinion of him against the evidence of their eyes, and his reputation would turn the balance as though nothing was in the other scale. He was sure of that.
To the left was the Island. The old man probably still lived and would live for some time, but the will was now safe. Maud was still unmarried, and he – was free! Free in a double sense: free to marry again, and free from the clutches of the law – so far.
In front of him lay the Manor Park with its stifling groves and alleys, whose lush, rank vegetation and loathsome reptiles and insects kept curious boy and prying man at bay.
By his side stood the Manor House, upon which no green thing would grow, and which had an evil name.
Beneath him was that repulsive tower, up which no one would care to go except upon dire compulsion.
Behind him —
Yes, behind him lay – It.
The question was, Would his reputation in the town, the fact that by noon to-morrow everyone in Daneford would believe he had lost his wife in the Rodwell, the unpopular Park, the uncanny house, the foul tower, the parapet, the remains of this tank (perfect five feet from the roof, except for one eighteen-inch plate, which, owing to its position at the back, could not be even missed from any standpoint but the top of the tower itself), keep It from discovery? be an effectual and life-long barrier between detection and crime, so that he might marry and live once more in – ? Well, never mind in what. Anyway, might live?
It was a long question. He put it to himself many times, and could arrive at no answer. His reason answered Yes. His imagination answered No; and according as his reason or his imagination dominated he hoped or he despaired.
The hours advanced. It would be well to get this all over and go down. He had locked the door on the passage, and there was no need for fear or hurry. But staying here did no good, and he had now sufficiently recovered to go down.
He stepped out of the tank and approached the burden.
He raised it, and bending low carried it to the tank. There was difficulty in getting it through the narrow opening, but at last all was accomplished.
He stepped out of the tank, and stood on the open part of the top of the tower for a few moments to recover his breath.
"Hah! I am all right now. I shall grope my way down very well; it will not take half so long to go down as it did to come up."
He placed his hand on the hood of the doorway and stooped to descend; he paused and drew back, thinking:
"If I have killed her, that is no reason why I should add brutality to crime. I did not cover her face, and the birds might – "
He crept back to the tank, leaving the thought unfinished.
He entered it and stooped.
All at once something happened in his mind. Just as he stooped to cover the face of his dead wife, he fell upon his knees beside her, and cried out:
"Almighty God, I have killed her. Almighty God, be merciful if Thou wilt, and let me die."
Burying his face in his hands he burst into hysterical sobs that shook him and would not be uttered without racking pains. They were too big for his chest, too big for his throat, too big for his mouth. While a sob was bursting from his labouring chest he felt the weight of ten thousand atmospheres pressing down his throat. When the sob burst forth, he shuddered and shivered and winced as if a scourge wielded by a powerful arm had fallen on his naked shoulders.
The violence of this outburst had one alleviating effect: while it racked the physical it annihilated the mental man. He was sobbing because he knew he had most excellent cause for inarticulable sorrow. But the sorrow itself made no image in his mind. It was with him as with the player of an instrument, who, coming upon a well-known passage of great mechanical difficulty, finds when the passage is passed small memory of the music and strong memory of each flexion of the fingers, but can, when he needs it, hear all the passage again note for note as it had flown from beneath his fingers.
The wife of his middle life had been murdered by some one long ago. He thought nothing of that. But now he was kneeling by the corpse of the wife of his youth, the bride-sweetheart of his stronger years.
All the trouble, all the cark, all the memory of her faults, of her odd ways, were gone. He was not the middle-aged husband penitent by the body of the middle-aged wife he had murdered. He was the young enthusiastic husband-lover by the side of his dead young wife.
He had not killed the Beatrice he had married long ago. But, O woe, woe, incommunicable agony, he had slain all the faults of his middle-aged wife, he had slain all the years of his life during which his indifference had sprouted and blossomed, and was now by the side of the woman dead whose existence had been to him the sunshine and the rapture of his life.
In a moment of madness he had sought to kill a faulty wife, but by terrible decrees of Heaven he had killed, instead, all the faults of his faulty wife and the sweetheart of his youth. Almighty Maker, did his crime deserve this!
Gradually the physical agony left him, only to be followed by the mental anguish.
"Bee," he moaned, "Bee, won't you get up and walk with me? We shall not go far, for it is late. I want to tell you what we shall do with the back drawing-room in the summer. Don't you remember how I told you once, love, and you were pleased and kissed me, Bee? It is about building the little conservatory for you. You will get up and walk with me a little way. Do, Bee. Let me lift you up."
He stretched out his hand and caught something.
"Cold!
"Cold!"
Then he shuddered and drew back. A third and final change came with the touch of that dead woman's hand. All illusion left him, and, covering the face of the dead, he crawled out of the tank – the murderer of his wife.
Still overhead hung the black sky, still abroad brooded the unbroken stillness.
He looked deliberately around him. What had been done could not be undone, and he had now only to make the best of the situation. Already he felt one good result from his greater crime; it had dwarfed the other to insignificant proportions. The theft now seemed a trifle.
But what had happened to Daneford and the country round, and the grounds about his house, and the tower upon which he stood? Some strange change had come over the relations between him and them. What was it? Daneford, and the country round, and the ground at his feet had receded, gone back from him. He was farther from them than he had been that day. What a strange sensation!
The sensation was very peculiar. He had never felt anything like it before. What had that morning seemed most important to him had now sunk into insignificance. Nothing was of consequence – save One; namely, the chance of a stranger coming to the top of that tower while It remained there.
The feeling was new to Grey, for he was new to the situation he had that night created. The solitude of a vast desert of sand under the pale stars, the solitude of the topmost frozen peaks of the Himalaya, the solitude of an ice-locked Arctic sea, the solitude for a hunted man of an unknown city, is profound and awful; but all combined and intensified a hundred-fold are nothing compared with the appalling solitude upon which man enters when over one shoulder, he knows not which, peers for ever the face of a murdered victim.
That face had not yet come to Grey, but as he descended the muffled stairs of the Tower of Silence he felt her cold lips touch his forehead once again; and once again he plunged forward on his way, caring little for life.
PART II. THE TOWERS OF SILENCE
CHAPTER I
A STRANGER AT THE CASTLE
"Maud, darling," said Mrs. Grant, "a gentleman dressed in black, who will not give his name, and says he wants to see you most particularly, has arrived. What message do you wish to send him? Will you see him?"
"Oh, Mrs. Grant, I can't see any one. How can any one be so unreasonable as to think I can see him to-day! Such a day for a stranger to call!"
Both ladies were in the deepest new mourning.
"Mr. Grey has also come. He sends word that he could not think of intruding upon you, but that if you wish to see him he is at your service."
"Oh, no, Mrs. Grant! Dear Mrs. Grant, do save me! Tell them all that I am too wretched to see any one. Thank them all for me, dear Mrs. Grant, and save me from them. Pray, save me from them!" The girl threw her arm round the widow and sobbed helplessly.
"No, no, my child, they shall not come near you. I only brought you the messages. I do not ask you to see any one. You shall, my darling Maud, do just as you please. A number of other people have come too. Many of Sir Alexander's old friends. But you hardly know these. My only thought was, might you wish to see Mr. Grey, who is doing everything; and I wondered if you might not wish to say something to him. I wondered if you might not like to tell him some last wish, for they will start presently – in less than an hour."
