The Light of Scarthey Part 45

"Ah, Madeleine! here in the sanctuary I had prepared for you, where I thought you would be so safe, so guarded, tell me that you forgive me for having brought this injury to you. Wounded, torn, bleeding.... I who would give all my blood, my life, if life were not so precious to me now that you have come into it, to save you from the slightest pain! At least here you are secure, here you can rest, but--but there is no one to wait on you, Madeleine." He fell on his knees beside her.

"Madeleine, my wife, you must let me tend you." Then, as she shivered slightly, but did not turn to him, he went on in tones of the most restrained tenderness mingled with humblest pleading:

"Had it not been for your accident, I had not ventured even to cross the threshold of this room. But your wound must be dressed; darling, darling, allow me, forgive me; the risk is too great."

Rising to his feet again he gently pulled at her cloak. Molly spoke not a word, but untied it at the neck and let it fall away from her fair young body; and keeping her hooded face still rigidly averted, she surrendered her wounded arm.

He muttered words of distress at the sight of the broad blood stains; stepped hurriedly to a little cupboard where such surgical stores as might be required on board were h.o.a.rded, and having selected scissors, lint, and bandages, came back and again knelt down by her side to cut off, with eager, compa.s.sionate hands, the torn and maculated sleeve.

The wound was but a surface laceration, and a man would not have given a thought to it in the circ.u.mstances. But to see this soft, white woman's skin, bruised black in parts, torn with a horrid red gap in others; to see the beauty of this round arm thus brutally marred, thus twitching with pain--it was monstrous, hideously unnatural in the lover's eyes!

With tenderness, but unflinchingly, he laved the mangled skin with cool, fresh water; pulled out, with far greater torture to himself than to her, some remaining splinters embedded in the flesh; covered the wound with lint, and finished the operation by a bandage as neat as his neat sailor's touch, coupled with some knowledge of surgery, gained in the experiences of his privateering days, could accomplish it. He spoke little: only a word of encouragement, of admiration for her fort.i.tude now and then; and she spoke not at all during the ministration. She had raised her other hand to her eyes, with a gesture natural to one bracing herself to endurance, and had kept it there until, his task completed, her silence, the manner in which she hid her face from him awoke in him all that was best and loftiest in his generous heart.

As he rose to his feet and stood before her, he too dared not speak for fear of bruising what he deemed an exquisite maidenliness, before which his manhood was abashed at itself. For some moments there was no sound in the cabin save that of the swift rushing waters behind the wooden walls and of the labour and life of the ship under full sail; then he saw the tumultuous rising of her bosom, and thought she was weeping.

"Madeleine," he cried with pa.s.sionate anxiety, "speak! Let me see your face--are you faint? Lie upon this couch. Let me get you wine--oh that these days were pa.s.sed and I could call you wife and never leave you!

Madeleine, my love, speak!"

Molly rose to her feet, and with a gesture of anger threw off her hood and turned round upon him. And there in the light of the lamp, he glared like one distraught at the raven locks, the burning eyes of a strange woman.

She was very pale.

"No," said Molly, defiantly, when twice or thrice his laboured breath had marked the pa.s.sing of the horrible moment, "I am not Madeleine."

Then she tried to smile; but unconsciously she was frightened, and the smile died unformed as she pursued at random:

"You know me--perhaps by hearsay--as I know you, Captain Smith."

But he, shivering under the coldness of his disappointment, answered in a kind of weary whisper:

"Who are you--you who speak with her voice, who stand at her height and move and walk as she does? I have seen you surely--Ah, I know....

Madam, what a cruel mockery! And she, where is she?"

Still staring at her with widely dilated eyes, he seized his forehead between his hands. The gesture was one of utter despair. Before this weakness Molly promptly resumed the superiority of self-possession.

"Yes," she said, and this time the smile came back to her face, "I am Lady Landale, and my sister Madeleine--I grieve to have to say so--has not had that courage for which you gave her credit to-night."

Little was required at a moment like this to trans.m.u.te such thoughts as seethed in the man's head to a burst of fury. Fury is action, and action a relief to the strained heart. There was a half-concealed, unintended mockery in her tones which brought a sudden fire of anger to his eyes. He raised both hands and shook them fiercely above his head:

"But why--why in the name of heaven--has such a trick been played on me ... at such a time?"

He paused, and trembling with the effort, restrained himself to a more decent bearing before the woman, the lady, the friend's wife. His arms fell by his side, and he repeated in lower tones, though the flame of his gaze could not be subdued:

"Why this deception, this playing with the blindness of my love? Why this comedy, which has already had one act so tragic?--Yes, think of it, madam, think of the tragedy this is now in my life, since she is left behind and I never now, with these men's lives to account for, may go back and claim her who has given me her troth! Already I staked the fortune of my trust, on the bare chance that she would come. What though her heart failed her at the eleventh hour?--G.o.d forgive her for it!--surely she never sanctioned this masquerade?... Oh no! she would not stoop to such an act, and human life is not a thing to jest upon.

She never played this trick, the thought is too odious. What have you done! Had I known, had I had word sooner--but half an hour sooner--those corpses now rolling under the wave with their sunken ship would still be live men and warm.... And I--I should not be the hopeless outlaw, the actual murderer that this night's work has made of me!"

His voice by degrees rose once more to the utmost ring of bitterness and anger. Molly, who had restored her cloak to her shoulders and sat down, ensconced in it as closely as her swaddled arm would allow her, contemplated him with a curious mixture of delight and terror; delight in his vigour, his beauty, above everything in his mastery and strength; and delight again at the new thrill of the fear it imposed upon her daring soul. Then she flared into rage at the thought of the coward of her blood who had broken faith with such a man as this, and she melted all into sympathy with his anger--A right proper man most cruelly used and most justifiably wrathful!

And she, being a woman whose face was at most times as a book on which to read the working of her soul, there was something in her look, as in silence she listened and gazed upon him, which struck him suddenly dumb. Such a look on a face so like, yet so unlike, that of his love was startling in the extreme--horrible.

He stepped back, and made as if he would have rushed from the room.

Then bethinking himself that he was a madman, he drew a chair near her in a contrary mood, sat down, and fixed his eyes upon her very steadily.

She dropped her long lids, and demurely composed her features by some instinct that women have, rather than from any sense of the impression she had produced.

A little while they sat thus again in silence. In the silence, the rolling of the ship and the manner in which, as she raced on her way, she seemed to breathe and strain, worked in with the mood of each; in his, with the storm and stress of his soul; in hers, as the very expression of her new freedom and reckless pleasure.

Then he spoke; the strong emotion that had warmed her had now left his voice. It was cold and scornful.

"Madam, I await your explanation. So far, I find myself only the victim of a trick as unworthy and cruel as it is purposeless."

She had delayed carrying out her mission with the most definite perverseness. She could not but acknowledge the justice of his reproof, realise the sorry part she must play in his eyes, the inexcusable folly of the whole proceeding, and yet she was strung to a very lively indignation by the tone he had a.s.sumed, and suddenly saw herself in the light of a most disinterested and injured virtue.

"Captain Smith," she exclaimed, flashing a hot glance at him, "you a.s.sume strangely the right to be angry with me! Be angry if you will with things as they are; rail against fate if you will, but be grateful to me.--I have risked much to serve you."

The whole expression of his face changed abruptly to one of eager, almost entreating, inquiry.

"Do me the favour," she continued, "to look into the pocket of my cloak--my arm hurts me if I move--you will find there a letter addressed to you. I was adjured to see that it should reach you in safety. I promised to place it in your own hands. This could hardly have been done sooner, as you know."

The words all at once seemed to alter the whole situation. He sprang up and came to her quickly.

"Oh, forgive me, make allowances for me, Lady Landale, I am quite distracted!" There had returned a tinge of hope into his voice. "Where is it?" he eagerly asked, seeking, as directed, for the pocket. "Ah!"

and mechanically repeating, "Forgive me!" he drew out the letter at last and retreated, feverishly opening it under the light of the lamp.

Molly had turned round to watch. Up to this she had felt no regret for his disillusion, only an irritable heat of temper that he should waste so much love upon so poor an object. But now all her heart went to him as she saw the sudden greyness that fell on his face from the reading of the very first line; there was no indignation, no blood-stirring emotion; it was as if a cold pall had fallen upon his generous spirit.

The very room looked darker when the fire within the brave soul was thus all of a sudden extinguished.

He read on slowly, with a kind of dull obstinacy, and when he came to the miserable end continued looking at the paper for the moment. Then his hand fell; slowly the letter fluttered to the floor, and he let his eyes rest unseeingly, wonderingly upon the messenger.

After a little while words broke from him, toneless, the mere echo of dazed thoughts: "It is over, all over. She has lost her trust. She does not love me any more."

He picked up the letter again, and sitting down placed it in front of him on the table. "'Tis a cruel letter, madam, that you have brought me," he said then, looking up at Molly with the most extraordinary pain in his eyes. "A cruel letter! Yet I am the same man now that I was this morning when she swore she would trust me to the end--and she could not trust me a few hours longer! Why did you not speak? One word from you as you stepped upon the ship would have saved my soul from the guilt of these men's death!" Then with a sharper uplifting of his voice, as a new aspect of his misfortune struck him: "And you--you, too! What have I to do with you, Adrian's wife? He does not know?"

She did not reply, and he cried out, clapping his hands together:

"It only wanted this. My G.o.d, it is I--I, his friend, who owes him so much, who am to cause him such fear, such misery! Do you know, madam, that it is impossible that I should restore you to him for days yet.

And then when, and where, and how? G.o.d knows! Nothing must now come between me and my trust. I have already dishonourably endangered it.

To attempt to return with you to-night, as perhaps you fancy I will--as, of course, I would instantly do had I alone myself and you to consider, would be little short of madness. It would mean utter ruin to many whom I have pledged myself to serve. And yet Adrian--my honour pulls me two ways--poor Adrian! What dumb devil possessed you that you did not speak before. Had you no thought for your woman's good name? Ill-fated venture, ill-fated venture, indeed! Would G.o.d that shot had met me in its way--had only my task been accomplished!"

He buried his head in his hands.

Lady Landale flushed and paled alternately, parted her lips to speak, and closed them once more. What could she say, and how excuse herself?

She did not repent what she had done, though it had been sin all round; she had little reck of her woman's good name, as he called it; the death of the excise men weighed but lightly, if at all, upon her conscience; the thought of Adrian was only then a distasteful memory to be thrust away; nay--even this man's grief could not temper the wild joy that was in her soul to-night. Fevered with fatigue, with excitement, by her wound, her blood ran burning in her veins, and beat faster in every pulse.

And as she felt the ship rise and fall, and knew that each motion was an onward leap that separated her further and ever further from dull home and dull husband, and isolated her ever more completely with her sister's lover, she exulted in her heart.

Presently he lifted his head.

"Forgive me," he said, "I believe that you meant most kindly, and as you say, I should be grateful. Your service is ill-requited by my reproaches, and you have run risk indeed--merciful Heaven, had my old friend's wife been killed upon my ship through my doings! But you see I cannot command myself; you see how I am situated. You must forgive me. All that can be done to restore you to your home as soon as possible shall be done, and all, meanwhile, to mitigate the discomfort you must suffer here--And for your good intention to her and me, I thank you."

He had risen, and now bowed with a dignity that sat on his sailor freedom in no wise awkwardly. She, too, with an effort, stood up as if to arrest his imminent departure. A tall woman, and he but of average height, their eyes were nearly on a level. For a second or two her dark gaze sought his with a strange hesitation, and then, as if the truth in him awoke all the truth in her, the natural daring of her spirit rose proudly to meet this kindred soul. She would let no falsehood, no craven feminine subterfuge intervene between them.