Running Sands Part 63

Muriel's face quivered.

"So that I--that we----" she started.

"So that you and von Klausen may marry."

"But we can't anyhow! Oh--that's the horror of it! That's why the thing can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."

Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of pain.

"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superst.i.tion, and now----"

"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage----"

"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am only wondering----"

His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases of the colloquial.

"Look there!" he broke off.

Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was bounding: fevered, lithe, young.

Muriel clutched the parapet.

"It's Franz!" she said.

"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the Hotellerie. He must have left the car there and come right on."

"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what shall I do?"

"See him, of course."

"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it all over again? I'm tired--I'm so tired!"

Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward translate into a good-bye.

"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."

"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life--you've said so yourself."

Stainton smiled.

"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to Ma.r.s.eilles--Try it, Muriel--for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never say die!"

He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer.

He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down the steps.

She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young head and shoulders came above the steps.

"Franz!" she cried.

The Austrian hurried to her.

Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from his cla.s.sroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the mountainside. When he pa.s.sed the timber line and came to the walls of bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously, his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St.

Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the death that he had all his life feared.

He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the panorama of the Chaine de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Ma.r.s.eilles, from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue, cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke that was blue.

He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.

He saw below him--far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue rock--the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the parapet, the precipice continue to the primaeval forest, the trees of which presented a blurred ma.s.s of lancelike points to receive him.

Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.

He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open.

He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman thing....

Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.

He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that thought his thoughts lost all order. He recalled how happy he had been with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fort.i.tude. His father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?

He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell--a foot, over a stone.

He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.

Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he gained the edge, looked over----

One little push would do it; one leap.

His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks before him until his fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the chapel and to safety.

He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined.

He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love, to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she, unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If pa.s.sion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an animal pa.s.sion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him detest each other.

The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a secret, a secret of which they might never rid themselves. He, unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.

He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pa.s.s. He came down in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.

They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.

"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly ridiculous."

Stainton was thinking:

"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."

What he said was:

"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I had a little tumble."

They both started forward.