Beggars on Horseback Part 7

No one molested Sophie, but towards midday Hester put her head in at the bedroom door to inform her, with a hardly restrained gusto, that Dr.

Polwhele had come over from Penzance and was going to open the body.

Sick to the soul, Sophie put on her outdoor things once more and struck out over the moors, walking blindly to try and get away from the horror that was in her. As she went all the strength of her nature, inherited from the father who could keep up a pose and plan a revenge on an agonized death-bed; the strength, which had concentrated itself during her girlhood on her ambitions, that had then made her love for Crandon, now turned to a deep hatred and rage that seemed to settle, cold and hard, on the very muscles of her body. She knew the hatred, the fierce resentment, that the trapped thing feels against the trapper, and added to it was the shame of a woman whose love has been made a mockery. And if, unacknowledged even to herself, was the p.r.i.c.king feeling that, could she have been spared discovery, she would not deeply have minded being the innocent cause of her own release, who is there with heart so uncomplex as to be in a position to condemn her. . . .

She tramped on and on, and presently found herself out on the St. Annan high-road. The thought of Charles came to her as a point where she could turn for help, for he had been absent all night at a distant part of the parish, ministering to a dying man, but he would surely be back by now; if she were not quick he would already have set off for Troon on hearing the news. Battling against the rain-laden wind, she bent her head and made her way into the village. There little groups of people were standing about, intent, arguing. At sight of her a common feeling animated them, the various little centres of discussion broke, joined together, swept towards her. She had an impression of shaking fists, angry sounds, rude contacts, and the smell of many rain-wet bodies pressing in around her. The panic of crowds seized her, she screamed, and screamed again, not recognizing the voice of Charles Le Petyt answering her as he made his way through the press. He struck the faces away from him right and left, and his blazing pa.s.sage made men fall back. Putting an arm round Sophie he drew her up the steps of the inn and through the door, which he shut and barred.

"Take me away, Charles, take me away," she moaned, and he, his arms round her dear trembling body, answered:

"I will take you home. You are quite safe with me, Sophie. When we get back you must tell me everything and I will think of a way to help you.

Stay here a moment, dear."

He put her in a chair, sent the frightened host for a gla.s.s of wine, and ordered a chaise to be got ready at the back. Sophie drank the wine pa.s.sively, and pa.s.sively let Charles put her in the chaise. She lay silent against him all the way back to Troon, but once there, in the parlour, her brain cleared, and she told him everything. Charles Le Petyt listened, always keeping his hand tenderly over hers, though when she let him understand what for months she had been to Crandon, his free hand gripped hard on the edge of his chair.

"What am I to do?" she asked when she had made an end.

"Is there no way by which the guilt can be fastened where it belongs--on Crandon?" he asked pa.s.sionately, and in her distress Sophie sprang up and, walking to the window, hit the shut pane with her hand.

"I have destroyed everything that could have taken him," she said. "Take my key--here it is--search my press, my box, see if you can find anything. I will come with you."

Alas! Sophie had ravished her room too well, and search fell fruitless.

The two desisted at last and stared at each other with pallid faces.

"Oh--Sophie!" cried Mr. Le Petyt, and, breaking into tears, she flung herself into his arms. They were clinging together, wet cheek against wet cheek, when the town-sergeant came thundering at the door.

VI

ATTAINMENT

(_Account taken from a contemporary journal_)

"Sat.u.r.day, April 4. This morning Miss Bendigo was executed at Launceston, in the same black petelair she was dressed in at her trial, had on a pair of black gloves, and her hands and arms tied with black paduasoy ribbons. On the Friday night she sent to the sheriff, who, she was informed, was come to town to be present at her execution, and desired that he would give her till eight o'clock the next morning, and she would be ready as soon after as he pleased. On Friday, at about twelve o'clock, she took the Sacrament and signed a declaration concerning the crime for which she was to suffer; in which she denied knowing that the powders she had administered to her father had any poisonous quality in them; and also made therein a confession of her faith. Her behaviour at the gallows was becoming a person in her unhappy circ.u.mstances, and drew not only great compa.s.sion, but tears, from most of the spectators. When she got up about seven steps of the ladder, she turned herself upon it and had a little trembling, saying: 'I am afraid I shall fall.' After she had turned herself upon the ladder, the Rev. Mr. Le Petyt, who attended her, asked whether she had anything to say to the public. She said yes, and made a speech to the following purport: 'That, as she was then going to appear before a just G.o.d, she did not know that the powders, which were believed to be the death of her father, would have done him any harm, therefore she was innocently the cause of his death, but as she hoped for mercy, what she had done had been in innocence and love.' Then she stooped towards Mr.

Le Petyt and she was seen to be remarkably eager in taking the parting kiss from him, which she did. The hangman then desired her to pull the white kerchief, tied over her head for that purpose, over her eyes, which she failing to do, a person standing by stepped up the ladder and pulled it down. Then, giving the signal by holding out a little book she had in her hand, she was turned off. Before she went out of the gaol she gave the sheriff's man a guinea to drink, and took two guineas in her hands with her, which she gave to the executioner. Her body was placed in a coffin of maplewood, lined with white satin, on the lid only 'Sophia Bendigo, aged 18. April 4, 1752.' It is understood that Mr. Le Petyt carried the coffin to St. Annan and buried it, by Miss Bendigo's request, in the grave of her mother. At the execution, notwithstanding the early hour, there was the greatest concourse of people ever seen on such an occasion."

THE GREATEST GIFT

Edmond Bernardy was in that state of mind when everything joyous is an insult and everything sorrowful an added stab. When the horror had first settled on him he fought it wildly; then succeeded a numbed condition of the nerves, when will and reason lay dormant, and he surrendered himself to instinct--and instinct had brought him to the lonely pa.s.ses, the snow-enfolded peaks, and the dream-ridden little cities of Provence.

It was in the days before railways were thought of, when gentlemen still did the "grand tour," and did it by post-chaise. Bernardy, whose finances were of the uncertain kind usual with even a successful poet, and whose mood was for the leisurely, preferred, once he had attained the coast of Provence by ship, to strike up inland on foot. In spite of himself, his surroundings began to soothe him, justifying the instinct which led him, and that had its root deeper than he suspected.

Bernardy's mother had been a Provencale, and it was in one of the little mountain cities that his English father had met her, and she had only left her birthplace a few weeks before Edmond himself was born. It was owing to her that he possessed a deep love for little cities; though this was the first time that he had ever come to his mother's country.

As a boy he, like all right-minded children, possessed a little city of the imagination where he sat enthroned, king of the be-pennoned turrets and circling walls. With Bernardy the idea of the little city had become an obsession, entering even into his dreams at night, causing him to lead, even more than most children, that curious inner life of which waxing adolescence must so surely lose grip. His peculiar and vivid genius, though technically the joy of his fellow writers, never lost a quality of uncanny vision that sometimes disconcerted an age given over to the flamboyance of Byron, and this quality was the natural outcome of his withdrawal, as a child, into his secret life. That life was a complicated and delicate thing, no mere floating vagueness of dreams, but a fabric deliberately planned and reared, with a wealth of cunning detail to persuade him of reality. He could remember now how convinced he had been that the town his mind had made was as real as any city he and his mother visited in their precarious existence--sometimes he could recall, for a vivid flash, actual streets and houses of his imagination.

Hill cities share with islands the fascination that only aloofness can give, and the thought of the huddled towns cresting the Alpes-Maritimes had tugged at Bernardy's cord of memory, bringing back, not only his mother's stories of her own country, but also the recollections of his dream-city, so like these he was seeing now. They are towns of fluted roofs and mellow walls, of shutters flung wide like wings, of courtyards that are wells of blue shadow, and towers that stand up, golden-white, into the sunshine. Here Bernardy would come to a town perched, eagle-wise upon a crag, with a forest of irregular turrets piercing the sky; there to a little city which fitted over some rounded mountain-top like a cap, the arching outline of its roofs following faithfully the curve of the ground with a fruit-like suavity of contour. Everywhere, away from the cities, lay the olive-slopes, like a great sea, charmed, at the moment of most tumultuous movement, into stillness, the waves of it interfolding in vast hollows that never broke; only now and again a wind tossed the pale undersides of leaves to a semblance of spray.

These valleys, so mysterious at dawn and dusk, and in the day so oddly toy-like with their tiny, red-roofed oil-mills and the striped effect of the olive-terraces; these reticent, though seemingly candid, little townships above them; these mountains that at sunsetting were stained a burning copper filmed with amethyst--all seemed to Bernardy to be under a spell, caught in a web of magic as real, though not as visible, as the web of dappled shadow each olive-tree flung over the ground beside it.

Bernardy told himself that here he could pa.s.s a long life happily, instead of which he had to prepare for death, for the deliberate blotting out, for him, of all this beauty.

He had never been a gross liver or a gross thinker, yet many a sensualist would now have been in a better case than he--for he had always used his quality of spiritual vision--in him so strong as to be almost an added sense--merely to beat back upon and intensify material things. An unbeliever or a man of happy-go-lucky nature could have extracted all the savour possible out of what remained to him of life, and left what was to come on the knees of the G.o.ds--Bernardy was too ardent a devotee of life, and life, as he understood it, was a comprehensive term. It meant the training and enjoyment of every faculty, the critical appreciation of everything he met, the absorption of beauty and the production of it. Also he feared the physical act of death as an animal fears it, with a contraction of the muscles and a chilling of the blood--feared it so that sometimes the sweat would break out over his face and he would bite back a cry.

Looking back on his life Bernardy could say that it had been good, and he saw for how much more the little things had counted than the big. A sunny day, congenial companions, good wine and tobacco, and, above all, the joy of creation--how well worth while they were. Taken as a whole they outweighed the fondest woman in the world, and that though Bernardy had been a fine lover. Yet it was because of a woman that he was to kill himself three weeks from now, and the fantastic nature of the affair made him feel like a man in a dream. It amused him that it should have been the one conventional period of his life--a couple of months in an English rectory, which had hurled him into such an extravagant situation.

The Rector, an avowed eccentric, and strongly influenced by the Byronic wave then at the crest, decided it was his duty to brave society and take notice of his brother's son--especially as the said son was a figure in the literary worlds of Paris and London. The Rector's daughter, Lucy, was sweet and fresh and English, and not in the least clever, and Bernardy, who had never met anyone like her before, fell madly in love. The combination of his pa.s.sion; of a rival deeply bitten with romanticism and a sense of his own importance and of the high-flown ideas of the period, resulted in a violent quarrel and what was then a favoured species of duel. Bernardy and his rival, telling themselves that they were sparing Lucy the shock of an actual encounter, drew lots to decide which should take his own life. Bernardy had lost, and, leaving the bewildered Lucy to her fantastic roll-collared baronet, retired to spend his two months' grace in his own country of France.

Behold him, entered on his last three weeks, toiling up a mountain pa.s.s, his shirt open at the chest and his tightly strapped trousers somewhat the worst for dust--a fine figure of a man in a thin, fiery way, with singularly child-like eyes set in a network of wrinkles--the result of having spent his thirty odd years with a lavish though fastidious hand.

Sickened suddenly of the ordered olive slopes, he went on and up till he had left the sleek country behind him, and entered the region that looks like a burnt-out landscape of the moon. At last he came to the mouth of a gorge, one side of it rising up sheer into the sunlight, while the other seemed to hang to the earth like a dark curtain. Looking up, Bernardy saw, perched at the rim of the sunlit cliff, a little town. In some places its sloping flanks were built right over the edge, as though they had been poured out, while molten, from a giant spoon. It was so many hundred feet above him that he could only just distinguish it was a town, and not a mere huddle of pale-hued boulders; so high it gave the effect of being on the edge of the world. Bernardy knew, beyond a doubt, that he must attain this town, and he cast about to find a way.

Obviously there must be a track on the other side, as the cliff was bare of so much as a shrub, and yet no path was to be discerned on its scarred and abrupt surface. Eventually Bernardy made his way round a fold of gorge and up a steep, winding track to a gently sloping stretch of country that led up to the town from behind.

Throwing himself upon the short, thorn-entangled gra.s.s, he locked his hands behind his head and gazed under half-shut lids at the little town which he now saw dark against the sky. He lay, idly counting the towers of it, till his lids grew too heavy to stay open, and his fingers fell apart, and with his head pillowed on his arm, he slept.

When he awoke the day was at its brief height, and he scrambled to his feet with an odd feeling that was more than a mere sense of rest. It was as though a sponge had been deftly pa.s.sed over his mind, leaving it a clean, smooth surface, ready to receive new impressions, unbiased by anything that was past, the confiding, expectant att.i.tude of a young child. He had forgotten nothing, it was rather that all his old arrangement of values had been swept aside, leaving him free to a.s.sess things anew. And, although, for all he could remember, his sleep had been dreamless, yet he was haunted by half-recollections which p.r.i.c.ked at and eluded him. As he went towards the town something in the sweeping lines of the fortifications seemed vaguely familiar, and again fragments of a dream, at which he s.n.a.t.c.hed in vain, floated by him.

Pa.s.sing under the cool shadow of the gateway he stood wondering which way to go; then, saying to himself, "I'll go past the Mayor's house, I always liked it because of the painted walls," he turned to the right, and walked several paces before the strangeness of his own words struck him. "What can I have meant?" he asked himself, "and yet--I seem to remember a house, a white house, with a painted frieze of fruit and birds, and the Mayoress was a funny, fat old thing who made _echedets_. . . ."

With his heart beating fast, he turned the corner and found himself at the house he sought. The more he looked at it the more he remembered it, and details crowded on him. He walked down the alley at the side, and found a stone stairway he knew quite well, a stairway that led to a carved door. He stumbled into the street again like a man distraught.

"Has the horror turned my brain?" he thought. "Well, what matter, if it makes it easier to die?"

The whole street struck him as familiar, but not until he turned into the Square did knowledge flash upon him.

"It's my town!" he cried aloud, "it's my town!"

He felt no perplexity at the incredible nature of the thing, a calming influence, too gracious to be akin to his former stupor, stole over him; he moved as in a dream, with no responsibility, but full enjoyment. The naked plane-trees made a silvery network against the cold, pure blue of the winter sky; into a raised washhouse across the Square the sun shone obliquely, and the many-hued skirts of the stooping women made vivid blotches of colour that harmonized with the rhythmic splash of the water as only music of sight can with music of sound. Dark against the cream-washed wall of the church, that seemed almost lambent in the glare of the sun, sat a row of burnt-out old men with shrivelled throats, and on the steps of the fountain were two old women in black, one wearing a white cap of folded wings, the other the wide-brimmed black straw hat common to the peasantry. The lady of the hat plunged her brown old fingers into the thin arc of water, and Bernardy saw how the drops that clung to her hand glittered like diamonds before she shook them off to pit the dust with pock-marks. With that intense sympathy which had done much to make him an artist, Bernardy tried for a moment to think himself into the mind of the black-hatted old woman, and to imagine the Square and his own figure from her mental and physical point of view. It was a favourite trick of his, but one of which latterly the strain had been too much for him. Sometimes he would succeed so well for a flash that it only made the impalpable but stern barrier of personality more definite even while almost seeming to overleap it. "If I could only achieve the thing properly," thought Bernardy, "I suppose I should attain exchange of ident.i.ty, or at least be absorbed into that of the old lady. And then--no more of this black horror, and the sh.e.l.l of me would, I suppose, disfigure the gravel."

He lifted the heavy, leathern curtain over the church door and entered.

Within the air struck cool, though heavy with stale incense; gradually the gleam of gilding, then separate colours and degrees of dusk and pallor detached themselves from the darkness, and he saw he was in the typical little church of the neighbourhood--a rococo affair decked with rows of plaster saints on painted brackets, each with its little bunch of flowers in a china mug in front of it. Beneath all the superfluous decoration there was a pleasing austerity and st.u.r.diness of line; solid pillars and a low-groined roof made a square-set, beetle-browed little building, at once tawdry and stark. To Bernardy's receptive mind there was something peculiarly charming about these churches where everything spoke of religion being taken in the right way--as a mere matter of course. A lighted wick, floating in a jam-jar of oil, caught his eye and, moving forward, he saw it burned before a creche.

For a few minutes he stood before it in silence, then he laughed aloud in sheer enjoyment. All the other creches he had seen boasted figures of plaster or china; here, apparently, the expense had been too great, and the characters were represented by dolls, ordinary wooden dolls with shiny, painted, black hair and stuff clothes. The Mother herself was dressed in stiff, spangled muslin, with a veil like a _premiere communiante_, and a wreath of orange blossom--a confusion of ideas that had its humour. St. Joseph, in good broadcloth coat and the tightest of trousers, held the other post of honour, and nearer the spectators, though facing away from them to the little Christ-Child, were ranged the shepherds, with--surely an innovation--their wives. The shepherds themselves supplied the crowning touch, for they wore real knitted stockings of worsted, and shoes with st.i.tched leather soles, a fact admirably displayed by the kneeling position of their wearers. The wives held little baskets full of beads, meant to represent eggs; and woolly lambs with red-cotton tongues stood about at regular intervals. All the dolls looked old, and as though they had seen a less gentle service, and Bernardy wondered what child in that remote place was of sufficient wealth to own dolls. He was charmed into mirth, and as he thought how tenderly and kindly the real personages represented must laugh as they looked down at the little set-piece, he tried to trace, in some trick of light and shadow, a fleeting smile on the doll-faces. Without warning, his horror closed on him again, and turning he went heavily down the church.

As he neared the door the two old women of the market square came in; still laughing and chattering, they went past him, slowly and stiffly, with the uneven clumping of old feet. Some curious premonition--a feeling that something was about to happen--made Bernardy watch them.

Suddenly the old woman in the hat caught sight of the creche, and with the swift transition of the South, she stopped short in her chatter and clutched her companion's arm:

"Ah!" she said, "_c'est le bon Jesus, qui donne courage!_"

Every note of her harsh old voice thrilled Bernardy's nerves like a sudden clarion. It seemed to him the most luminous moment of his life.

There are brief seconds when a rent in the outer film of this world comes against a rent in what we are pleased to call the "next," though it is really co-existent with our own. Then it is that we can catch a glimpse of something that is at another angle, a differently tilted spiritual plane, so to speak, from our own, and for which our minds would, ordinarily, need a different focus. The old woman had torn a peephole for Edmond--perhaps, for all he knew, in that moment of sympathetic concentration in the Square, their personalities had mingled, and so made him sensitive to the premonition that gripped him as she pa.s.sed. He only knew that her phrase--and being a phrase-monger himself he had a pa.s.sion for them--struck him as magnificent. He would have thought less of it had she said it of the Christ on the Cross, but she spoke of the Christ-Child. Or if she had spoken of peace, but her words were "qui donne courage."

"_C'est le bon Jesus, qui donne courage!_"

Bernardy stood quite still, wondering what her life had been that "courage" should be the word that instinctively sprang to her lips. The two women were still peering in at the creche, but while White Cap was recognizing all her acquaintances, so to speak, and hailing them by name, the other old woman stared straight in front of her, repeating her phrase very fast, over and over again. Suddenly she turned, and coming down the church to where Bernardy stood, peered up into his face. For the last time she repeated it, but with a slight difference, her hand on his wrist:

"Tu sais, mon brave," she said, "tu sais, c'est l'Enfant qui donne courage!"

Bernardy went out into the sunlight feeling at once calmed and exhilarated, yet still with that odd sense of waiting, as of something holding its breath. All the afternoon he haunted the little wind-swept town, and towards evening he leant upon the parapet that hung over the sheer mountain-side. Hundreds of feet below him the valley was lapped in darkness and he watched the shadow thrown by the opposite range creep up towards him, the edge of it in deeply curved waves, like a purple tide.

The chill of sunset was in the air when he made his way to the inn, and he noted that, although the sight of a stranger must be of the utmost rarity, he excited no comment. Could it be, he wondered, that they instinctively knew him for one of themselves, these people of his dream-city, or were they dreams too? In how leisurely a manner they pa.s.sed along the streets--the Faun-like youths, brown-necked and bold-eyed; the firm-set women with their black hair so sleekly and heavily ma.s.sed about their heads that it seemed carved out of ebony, and the quiet-eyed old people with indrawn mouths!