The Judgment House Part 27

He glanced at the cables in silence, while Krool watched him narrowly, covertly, with a depth of purpose which made his face uncanny.

"That will do, Krool; wake me at seven," he said, quietly, but with suppressed malice in his tone.

Why was it that at that moment he could, with joy, have taken Krool by the neck and throttled him? All the bitterness, anger and rage that he had felt an hour ago concentrated themselves upon Krool--without reason, without cause. Or was it that his deeper Other Self had whispered something to his mind about Krool--something terrible and malign?

In this new mood he made up his mind that he would not see Jasmine till the morning. How late she was! It was one o'clock, and yet this was not the season. She had not gone to a ball, nor were these the months of late parties.

As he tossed in his bed and his head turned restlessly on his pillow, Krool's face kept coming before him, and it was the last thing he saw, ominous and strange, before he fell into a heavy but troubled sleep.

Perhaps the most troubled moment of the night came an hour after he went to bed.

Then it was that a face bent over him for a minute, a fair face, with little lines contracting the ripe lips, which were redder than usual, with eyes full of a fevered brightness. But how harmonious and sweetly ordered was the golden hair above! Nothing was gone from its l.u.s.tre, nothing robbed it of its splendour. It lay upon her forehead like a crown. In its richness it seemed a little too heavy for the tired face beneath, almost too imperial for so slight and delicate a figure.

Rudyard stirred in his sleep, murmuring as she leaned over him; and his head fell away from her hand as she stretched out her fingers with a sudden air of pity--of hopelessness, as it might seem from her look.

His face restlessly turned to the wall--a vexed, stormy, anxious face and head, scarred by the whip of that overlord more cruel and tyrannous than Time, the Miserable Mind.

She drew back with a little shudder. "Poor Ruddy!" she said, as she had said that evening when Ian Stafford came to her after the estranging and scornful years, and she had watched Rudyard leave her--to her fate and to her folly.

"Poor Ruddy!"

With a sudden frenzied motion of her hands she caught her breath, as though some pain had seized her. Her eyes almost closed with the shame that reached out from her heart, as though to draw the veil of her eyelids over the murdered thing before her--murdered hope, slaughtered peace: the peace of that home they had watched burn slowly before their eyes in the years which the locust had eaten.

Which the locust had eaten--yes, it was that. More than once she had heard Rudyard tell of a day on the veld when the farmer surveyed his abundant fields with joy, with the gay sun flaunting it above; and suddenly there came a white cloud out of the west, which made a weird humming, a sinister sound. It came with shining scales glistening in the light and settled on the land acre upon acre, morgen upon morgen; and when it rose again the fields, ready for the harvest, were like a desert--the fields which the locust had eaten. So had the years been, in which Fortune had poured gold and opportunity and unlimited choice into her lap. She had used them all; but she had forgotten to look for the Single Secret, which, like a key, unlocks all doors in the House of Happiness.

"Poor Ruddy!" she said, but even as she said it for the second time a kind of anger seemed to seize her.

"Oh, you fool--you fool!" she whispered, fiercely. "What did you know of women! Why didn't you make me be good? Why didn't you master me--the steel on the wrist--the steel on the wrist!"

With a little burst of misery and futile rage she went from the room, her footsteps uneven, her head bent. One of the open letters she carried dropped from her hand onto the floor of the hall outside. She did not notice it. But as she pa.s.sed inside her door a shadowy figure at the end of the hall watched her, saw the letter drop, and moved stealthily forward towards it. It was Krool.

How heavy her head was! Her worshipping maid, near dead with fatigue, watched her furtively, but avoided the eyes in the mirror which had a half-angry look, a look at once disturbed and elated, reckless and pitiful. Lablanche was no reader of souls, but there was something here beyond the usual, and she moved and worked with unusual circ.u.mspection and lightness of touch. Presently she began to unloose the coils of golden hair; but Jasmine stopped her with a gesture of weariness.

"No, don't," she said. "I can't stand your touch tonight, Lablanche.

I'll do the rest myself. My head aches so. Good-night."

"I will be so light with it, madame," Lablanche said, protestingly.

"No, no. Please go. But the morning, quite early."

"The hour, madame?"

"When the letters come, as soon as the letters come, Lablanche--the first post. Wake me then."

She watched the door close, then turned to the mirror in front of her and looked at herself with eyes in which brooded a hundred thoughts and feelings: thoughts contradictory, feelings opposed, imaginings conflicting, reflections that changed with each moment; and all under the spell of a pa.s.sion which had become in the last few hours the most powerful influence her life had ever known. Right or wrong, and it was wrong, horribly wrong; wise or unwise, and how could the wrong be wise!

she knew she was under a spell more tyrannous than death, demanding more sacrifices than the G.o.ds of h.e.l.las.

Self-indulgent she had been, reckless and wilful and terribly modern, taking sweets where she found them. She had tried to squeeze the orange dry, in the vain belief that Wealth and Beauty can take what they want, when they want it, and that happiness will come by purchase; only to find one day that the thing you have bought, like a slave that revolts, stabs you in your sleep, and you wake with wide-eyed agony only to die, or to live--with the light gone from the evening sky.

Suddenly, with the letters in her hand with which she had entered the room, she saw the white rose on her pillow. Slowly she got up from the dressing-table and went over to the bed in a hushed kind of way. With a strange, inquiring, half-shrinking look she regarded the flower. One white rose. It was not there when she left. It had been brought from the hall below, from the great bunch on the Spanish table. Those white roses, this white rose, had come from one who, selfish as he was, knew how to flatter a woman's vanity. From that delicate tribute of flattery and knowledge Rudyard had taken this flowering stem and brought it to her pillow.

It was all too malevolently cynical. Her face contracted in pain and shame. She had a soul to which she had never given its chance. It had never bloomed. Her abnormal wilfulness, her insane love of pleasure, her hereditary impulses, had been exercised at the expense of the great thing in her, the soul so capable of memorable and beautiful deeds.

As she looked at the flower, a sense of the path by which she had come, of what she had left behind, of what was yet to chance, shuddered into her heart.

That a flower given by Adrian Fellowes should be laid upon her pillow by her husband, by Rudyard Byng, was too ghastly or too devilishly humorous for words; and both aspects of the thing came to her. Her face became white, and almost mechanically she put the letters she held on a writing-table near; then coming to the bed again she looked at the rose with a kind of horror. Suddenly, however, she caught it up, and bursting into a laugh which was shrill and bitter she threw it across the room. Still laughing hysterically, with her golden hair streaming about her head, folding her round like a veil which reached almost to her ankles, she came back to the chair at the dressing-table and sat down.

Slowly drawing the wonderful soft web of hair over her shoulders, she began to weave it into one wide strand, which grew and grew in length till it was like a great rope of spun gold. Inch by inch, foot by foot it grew, until at last it lay coiled in her lap like a golden serpent, with a kind of tension which gave it life, such as Medusa's hair must have known as the serpent-life entered into it. There is--or was--in Florence a statue of Medusa, seated, in her fingers a strand of her hair, which is beginning to coil and bend and twist before her horror-stricken eyes; and this statue flashed before Jasmine's eyes as she looked at the loose ends of gold falling beyond the blue ribbon with which she had tied the shining rope.

With the mad laughter of a few moments before still upon her lips, she held the flying threads in her hand, and so strained was her mind that it would not have caused her surprise if they had wound round her fingers or given forth forked tongues. She laughed again--a low and discordant laugh it was now.

"Such imaginings--I think I must be mad," she murmured.

Then she leaned her elbows on the dressing-table and looked at herself in the gla.s.s.

"Am I not mad?" she asked herself again. Then there stole across her face a strange, far-away look, bringing a fresh touch of beauty to it, and flooding it for a moment with that imaginative look which had been her charm as a girl, a look of far-seeing and wonder and strange light.

"I wonder--if I had had a mother!" she said, wistfully, her chin in her hand. "If my mother had lived, what would I have been?"

She reached out to a small table near, and took from it a miniature at which she looked with painful longing. "My dear, my very dear, you were so sweet, so good," she said. "Am I your daughter, your own daughter--me? Ah, sweetheart mother, come back to me! For G.o.d's sake come--now. Speak to me if you can. Are you so very far away?

Whisper--only whisper, and I shall hear.

"Oh, she would, she would, if she could!" her voice wailed, softly.

"She would if she could, I know. I was her youngest child, her only little girl. But there is no coming back. And maybe there is no going forth; only a blackness at the last, when all stops--all stops, for ever and ever and ever, amen! ...Amen--so be it. Ah, I even can't believe in that! I can't even believe in G.o.d and Heaven and the hereafter. I am a pagan, with a pagan's heart and a pagan's ways."

She shuddered again and closed her eyes for a moment. "Ruddy had a glimpse, one glimpse, that day, the day that Ian came back. Ruddy said to me that day, 'If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers.' ... And it is true--by all the G.o.ds of all the worlds, it is true. Pleasure, beauty, is all I ever cared for--pleasure, beauty, and the Jasmine-flower. And Ian--and Ian, yes, Ian! I think I had soul enough for one true thing, even if I was not true."

She buried her face in her hands for a moment, as though to hide a great burning.

"But, oh, I wonder if I did ever love Ian, even! I wonder.... Not then, not then when I deserted him and married Rudyard, but now--now? Do--do I love him even now, as we were to-day with his arms round me, or is it only beauty and pleasure and--me? ... Are they really happy who believe in G.o.d and live like--like her?" She gazed at her mother's portrait again. "Yes, she was happy, but only for a moment, and then she was gone--so soon. And I shall never see her, I who never saw her with eyes that recall.... And if I could see her, would I? I am a pagan--would I try to be like her, if I could? I never really prayed, because I never truly felt there was a G.o.d that was not all s.p.a.ce, and that was all soul and understanding. And what is to come of it, or what will become of me? ... I can't go back, and going on is madness. Yes, yes, it is madness, I know--madness and badness--and dust at the end of it all.

Beauty gone, pleasure gone.... I do not even love pleasure now as I did. It has lost its flavour; and I do not even love beauty as I did.

How well I know it! I used to climb hills to see a sunset; I used to walk miles to find the wood anemones and the wild violets; I used to worship a pretty child ... a pretty child!"

She shrank back in her chair and pondered darkly. "A pretty child....

Other people's pretty children, and music and art and trees and the sea, and the colours of the hills, and the eyes of wild animals ... and a pretty child. I wonder, I wonder if--"

But she got no farther with that thought. "I shall hate everything on earth if it goes from me, the beauty of things; and I feel that it is going. The freshness of sense has gone, somehow. I am not stirred as I used to be, not by the same things. If I lose that sense I shall kill myself. Perhaps that would be the easiest way now. Just the overdose of--"

She took a little phial from the drawer of the dressing-table. "Just the tiny overdose and 'good-bye, my lover, good-bye.'" Again that hard little laugh of bitterness broke from her. "Or that needle Mr. Mappin had at Glencader. A thrust of the point, and in an instant gone, and no one to know, no one to discover, no one to add blame to blame, to pile shame upon shame. Just blackness--blackness all at once, and no light or anything any more. The fruit all gone from the trees, the garden all withered, the bower all ruined, the children all dead--the pretty children all dead forever, the pretty children that never were born, that never lived in Jasmine's garden."

As there had come to Rudyard premonition of evil, so to-night, in the hour of triumph, when, beyond peradventure, she had got for Ian Stafford what would make his career great, what through him gave England security in her hour of truth, there came now to her something of the real significance of it all.

She had got what she wanted. Her pride had been appeased, her vanity satisfied, her intellect flattered, her skill approved, and Ian was hers. But the cost?

Words from Swinburne's threnody on Baudelaire came to her mind. How often she had quoted them for their sheer pagan beauty! It was the kind of beauty which most appealed to her, which responded to the element of fatalism in her, the sense of doom always with her since she was a child, in spite of her gaiety, her wit, and her native eloquence. She had never been happy, she had never had a real illusion, never aught save the pa.s.sion of living, the desire to conquer unrest:

"And now, no sacred staff shall break in blossom, No choral salutation lure to light The spirit sick with perfume and sweet night, And Love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom.

There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make Death clear or make Life durable But still with rose and ivy and wild vine, And with wild song about this dust of thine, At least I fill a place where white dreams dwell, And wreathe an unseen shrine."