Prisoners Part 48

His mind cleared gradually. His scattered faculties came sneaking back like defeated soldiers to camp. But they had all one tale of disaster and one only to tell. He must needs believe them.

_Michael had tried to kill him._ Whatever else shifted that remained true.

Wentworth bowed his stiffening head upon his hands, and the sweat ran down his face.

Michael had tried to kill him, and had all but succeeded. Oh! if only he had quite succeeded. If only his life had not come back to him! He had died and died hard in that little room. And yet here he was still alive and in agony.

Michael first. That thought was torture. Then Fay. That thought was torture. The woman he had so worshipped, on whom he had lavished a wealth of love, far greater than most men have it in them to bestow, had deceived him, had been willing to be his brother's mistress.

Why had he ever believed in Fay and Michael? Had he not tacitly distrusted men and women always from his youth up? Had he not gauged life and love and friendship at their true value years ago? Why had he made an exception of this particular man and woman? They were no worse than the rest.

What was any man or woman worth? They were all false to the core. What was Fay? A pretty piece of pink and white, a sensual lure like other women, not better and not worse. And what was Michael but a man like other men, ready to forget honour, morality, everything, if once his pa.s.sions were aroused. It was an old story, as old as the hills, that men and women betray each other. It was as old as the psalms of David.

Pah! what a fool he was to allow his heart to be wrung by what was only the ordinary vulgar experience of those who were so silly as to mix themselves up with their fellow creatures.

He had only himself to thank.

Well, at any rate, he was free now. He was awake now. He was not going to put his hand in the fire a second time.

He was going abroad immediately. He would start to-morrow morning. In the meanwhile, he would go and see somebody, call somewhere, be in high spirits somewhere with others. They (they were Fay and Michael) would hear of that afterwards, would see how little he cared.

He seized up his hat and went out. But when he had walked a few hundred yards he sank down exhausted on a wooden seat in the alder coppice overhanging the house, and remained there. The baby pheasants crept in and out, all round him. Their little houses, each with an anxious step-mother in it, were set at regular intervals along the gra.s.sy path.

Only yesterday he had walked along that path with the keeper, and had thought that in the autumn he and Michael would be shooting together once more.

They would never shoot together again.

As the dusk fell he heard a sound of wheels. His dog-cart returning from Lostford, no doubt. It did not turn into the court-yard, but came on up to the house. Wentworth peered down through the leaves.

It was the Bishop's dog-cart. He recognised the groom who drove it. To his amazement he saw Lord Lossiemouth get out. After some parley he went into the house.

Why should he have come?

Oh! of course, how dense he was. He had been sent over on an emba.s.sy by Magdalen and the Bishop. They wanted to hush up the fight, and bring about a reconciliation between him and Fay. He should be told Fay was making herself ill with crying. His magnanimity would be appealed to by that pompous prig. Well, he had had his journey for nothing. Wentworth saw his servants looking for him, and hid himself in the coppice.

A couple of hours later he left the wood, and went down the steep path to the gardens. It was nearly dark now. Lights twinkled in the house.

The lamp in the library laid a pale finger of light upon the lawn, through the open gla.s.s doors.

Wentworth went up to it, and then as he was about to enter, shrank back astonished.

Lord Lossiemouth was sitting there with his back to the window.

Wentworth stood a long time looking at him. He was evidently waiting for him to come in. He sat stolidly on as if he were glued to his chair, smoking one cigarette after another.

At last he got up. Surely he would go now. He walked to the bookshelves that lined the walls, inspected the books, selected one, and settled himself with a voluminous sigh in his arm-chair once more.

Wentworth stole away across the gra.s.s as noiselessly as he had come, and disappeared in the darkness.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

Age by age, The clay wars with His fingers and pleads hard For its old, heavy, dull, and shapeless ease.

--W. B. YEATS.

Wentworth never knew how he spent the night, if indeed that interminable tract in which time stopped could have been one night. It was longer than all the rest of his life put together. In later years, in peaceful later years, confused memories came to him of things that he must have seen then, but of which he took no heed at the time; of seeing the breath of animals like steam close to the ground; of stumbling suddenly under a hedgerow on a huddled, sleeping figure with a white face, which struggled up unclean in the clean moonlight, and menaced him in a foul atmosphere of rags.

And once, many years later, when he was taking an unfamiliar short cut across the downs, he came upon a little pool in an old chalk pit, and recognised it. He had never seen it by day, but he knew it. He had wandered to it on a night of moon and mist, and had seen a fox bring down her cubs to drink just where that twisted alder branch made an arch over the water.

Wentworth sat by that chalk pit on the down utterly spent in body and mind hour after hour, till the moon, which had been tangled in the alder stooped to the violet west with one great star to bear her company. Who shall say through what interminable labyrinths, through what sloughs, across what deserts, his tortured mind had dragged itself all night? The sun had gone down upon his wrath. The moon had gone down upon his wrath.

The land was grey. The spectral horses moving slowly in the misty fields were grey. A streak of palest saffron light showed where the dim earth and dim sky met.

A remembrance came to him of a summer dawn such as this, years and years ago, when Michael had been dangerously ill, and how his whole soul had spent itself in one pa.s.sionate supplication that he might not be taken from him.

A tender green transparent as the light seen through a leaf in May was welling up the sky. Two tiny clouds floated in it like rafts of rose colour upon a sea of gla.s.s.

A deep and bitter sense of injustice was growing within him with the growing light.

A hundred times during the night he had recalled in cold anger every word of that final scene in the library, his own speech, his own actions, his great wrongs, his unendurable pain.

And yet again it returned upon him, always with Fay's convulsed face, and clinging hands, always with the Bishop's scathing words of dismissal. Their horrible injustice rankled in his mind, their abominable cruelty to himself revolted him. Hideous crimes had been committed against him, but _he_ had done no evil, unless to love and to trust were evil. Why then was he to be thus thrust into the wrong, thus condemned unheard, cast forth with scorn because he had not obediently fallen in with the Bishop's preposterous demand on him to condone everything? _It was not to be expected of him._

Suddenly the faces of the others watching him after Fay's confession rose before him, the Bishop's, Magdalen's, Michael's. He saw that they had not expected it of him either--not even Michael. Only in Fay's up-raised eyes as she held him by the knees had there been one instant's anguished hope. Only in hers. And that had been quickly extinguished.

_He had extinguished it himself._

The little clouds turned to trembling flame. The whole sky flushed and then paled. A thread of fire showed upon the horizon. It widened. It drew into an arch. The sun rose swiftly, a sudden ball of living fire; and in a moment the smallest shrub upon the down, the grazing horses, the huddled sheep, were casting gigantic shadows across the whole world.

A faint sound of wheels was growing clearer and nearer.

Wentworth saw a dog-cart coming towards him along the great white road.

As he looked it pulled up and then stopped. A man got out and came towards him. The raw sunlight caught only his face and shoulders. He seemed to wade towards him waist deep through a grey sea.

Lord Lossiemouth again!

Lord Lossiemouth's heavy tired face showed sharp and white in the garish light.

"I have been looking everywhere for you," he said, not ungently. "I waited half the night at Barford, and then went on to Saundersfoot station, and then to Wrigley. Your servants thought you might possibly have gone there. But you had not been seen there. Magdalen sent me to tell you you must go back to the Palace. Your brother is very ill. He had an attack of haemorrhage apparently just after you and he parted in the hall. I promised her not to go back without you. Shall we drive on?"