The Shadow of a Crime Part 24

CHAPTER XV. RALPH'S SACRIFICE.

When he reached the old house, Ralph was prepared for the results of any further disaster, for disaster had few further results for which it was needful to prepare. A light burned in the kitchen, and another in that room above it where lately his father had lain. When Ralph entered, w.i.l.l.y Ray was seated before the fire, his hand in the hand of Rotha, who sat by his side. On every feature of his pallid face were traces of suffering.

"What of mother?" said Ralph huskily, his eyes traversing the kitchen.

w.i.l.l.y rose and put his hand on Ralph's shoulder. "We will go together," he said, and they walked towards the stair that led to the floor above.

There she lay, the mother of these stricken sons, unconscious of their sufferings, unconscious of her own. Yet she lived. Since the terrible intelligence had reached her of what had happened on the pa.s.s she had remained in this state of insensibility, being stricken into such torpidity by the shock of the occurrence. w.i.l.l.y's tears fell fast as he stood by the bed, and his anguish was subdued thereby to a quieter mood. Ralph's sufferings were not so easily fathomable. He stooped and kissed the unconscious face without relaxing a muscle in the settled fixity of his own face. Leaving his brother in the room, he returned to the kitchen. How strange the old place looked to him now! Had everything grown strange? There were the tall clock in the corner, the big black worm-eaten oak cabinet, half-cupboard, half-drawers; there was the long table like a rock of granite; there was the spinning wheel in the neuk window; and there were the whips and the horns on the rafters overhead--yet how unfamiliar it all seemed to be!

Rotha was hastily preparing supper for him. He sat on the settle that was drawn up before the fire, and threw off his heavy and sodden shoes. His clothes, which had been saturated by the rain of the preceding night, had dried upon his back. He was hungry; he had hot eaten since yesterday at midday; and when food was put upon the table he ate with the voracious appet.i.te that so often follows upon a long period of mental distress.

As he sat at his supper, his eyes followed constantly the movements of the girl, who was busied about him in the duties of the household. It were not easy to say with what pa.s.sion or sentiment his heart was struggling with respect to her. He saw her as a hope gone from him, a joy not to be grasped, a possible fulfilment of that part of his nature which was never to be fulfilled. And she? Was she conscious of any sentiment peculiar to herself respecting this brave rude man, whose heart was tender enough to be drawn towards her and yet strong enough to be held apart at the awful bidding of an iron fate? Perhaps not. She in turn felt drawn towards him; she knew the force of a feeling that made him a centre of her thoughts, a point round which her deeper emotions insensibly radiated. But this was a.s.sociated in her mind with no idea of love. If affection touched her at all, perhaps at this moment it went out where her pity--rather, her pride--first found play. Perhaps Ralph seemed too high above her to inspire her love. His brother's weaker, more womanly nature came closer within her range.

There was now a long silence between them.

"Rotha," said Ralph at length, "this will be my last night at the Moss; the last for a long time, at least--I didn't expect to be here to-night. Can you promise one thing, my girl? It won't be hard for you now--not very hard _now_." He paused.

"What is it, Ralph?" said Rotha, in a voice of apprehension.

"Only that you won't leave the old house while my mother lives."

Rotha dropped her head. She thought of the lonely cottage at Fornside, and of him who should live there. Ralph divined the thought that was written in her face.

"Get him to come here if you can," he said. "He could help w.i.l.l.y with the farm."

"He would not come," she said. "I'm afraid he would not."

"Then neither will he return to Fornside. Promise me that while she lives--it can't be long, Rotha, it may be but too short--promise me that you'll make this house your home."

"My first duty is to him," said Rotha with her hand to her eyes.

"True--that's true," said Ralph; and the sense that two homes were made desolate silenced him with something that stole upon him like stifling shame. There was only one way out of the difficulty, and that was to make two homes one. If she loved his brother, as he knew that his brother loved her, then--

"Rotha," said Ralph, with a perceptible tremulousness of voice, "I will ask you another question, and, perhaps--who knows rightly?--perhaps it is harder for me to ask than for you to answer; but you will answer me--will you not?--for I ask you solemnly and with the light of Heaven on my words--on the most earnest words, I think, that ever came out of my heart."

He paused again. Rotha sat on the end of the settle, and with fingers intertwined, with eyelids quivering and lips trembling, she gazed in silence into the fire.

"This is no time for idle vanities," he said; "it's no time to indulge unreal modesties; and you have none of either if it were. G.o.d has laid His hand on us all, Rotha; yes, and our hearts are open without disguise before Him--and before each other, too, I think."

"Yes," said Rotha. She scarcely knew what to say, or whither Ralph's words tended. She only knew that he was speaking as she had never heard him speak before. "Yes, Ralph," she repeated.

"Perhaps, as I say, it's harder for me to ask than for you to answer, Rotha," he continued, and the strong man looked into the girl's eyes with a world of tenderness. "Do you think you have any feeling for w.i.l.l.y--that is, more than the common? I saw how you sat together as I came in to you. I've marked you before, when he has been by. I've marked him, too. You've been strength and solace to him in this trouble. Do you think if he loved you, Rotha--do you think, then, you could love him? Wait," he added, as she raised her eyes, and with parted lips seemed prepared to speak. "It is not for him I ask. G.o.d knows it is as much for you as for him, and perhaps--perhaps, I say, most of all--for myself."

With a frank voice and face, with luminous eyes in which there was neither fear nor shame, Rotha answered,--

"Yes, I could love him; I think I do so now."

She spoke to Ralph as she might have spoken to a father whom she reverenced, and from whom no secret of her soul should be hid. He heard her in silence. Not until now, not until he had heard her last word, had he realized what it would cost him to hear it. The agony of a lifetime seemed crushed into that short moment. But he had made it for himself, and now at length it was over. To yield her up--perhaps it was a link in the chain of retribution. To say nothing of his own love--perhaps it would be accepted as a dumb atonement. To see her win the love and be won by the love of his brother--perhaps it would soften his exile with thoughts of recompense for a wrong that it had been his fate to do to her and hers, though she knew it not. There was something like the white heat of subdued pa.s.sion in his voice when he spoke again.

"He _does_ love you, Rotha," he said quietly, "and he will ask you to be his wife. But he cannot do so yet, and, meantime, while my mother lives--while I am gone--G.o.d knows where--while I am away from the old home--I ask you now once more to stay."

The great clock in the corner ticked out loud in the silence of the next minute; only that and the slow breathing of the dog sleeping on the hearth fell on the ear.

"Yes, I will stay," said the girl; and while she spoke w.i.l.l.y Ray walked into the kitchen.

Then they talked together long and earnestly, these three, under the shadow of the terrible mystery that hung above them all, of life and death. Ralph spoke as one overawed by a sense of fatality. The world and its vicissitudes had left behind engraven on his heart a message and lesson, and it was not altogether a hopeful one. He saw that fate hung by a thread; that our lives are turned on the pivot of some mere chance; that, traced back to their source, all our joys and all our sorrows appear to come of some accident no more momentous than a word or a look. In solemn tones he seemed to say that there is a plague-spot of evil at the core of this world and this life, and that it infects everything. We may do our best--we should do our best--but we are not therefore to expect reward. Perhaps that reward will come to us while we live. More likely it will be the crown laid on our grave. Happy are we if our loves find fulfilment--if no curse rests upon them. Should we hope on? He hardly knew. Destiny works her own way!

Thus they talked in that solitary house among the mountains. They sat far into the night, these rude sons and this daughter of the hills, groping in their own uncertain, unlearned way after solutions of life's problems that wiser heads than theirs ages on ages before and since have never compa.s.sed, shouting for echoes into the voiceless caverns of the world's great and awful mysteries.

CHAPTER XVI. AT SUNRISE ON THE RAISE.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel.

At sunrise the following morning two men walked through Wythburn towards the hillock known as the Raise, down the long road that led to the south. The younger man had attained to the maturity of full manhood. Brawny and stalwart, with limbs that strode firmly over the ground; with an air of quiet and reposeful power; with a steadily poised head; with a full ba.s.s voice, soft, yet deep; with a face that had for its utmost beauty the beauty of virile strength and resolution, softened, perhaps, into tenderness of expression by washing in the waters of sorrow,--such, now, was Ralph Ray. Over a jerkin he wore the long sack coat, belted and buckled, of the dalesmen of his country. Beneath a close-fitting goatskin cap his short, wavy hair lay thick and black. A pack was strapped about him from shoulder to waist. He carried the long staff of a mountaineer.

Were there in the wide world of varying forms and faces a form and a face so much unlike his own as were those of the man who walked, nay, jerked along, in short, fitful paces, by his side? Little and slight, with long thin gray hair and dishevelled beard, with the startled eyes of a frighted fawn, and with its short, fearful glances, with a sharp face, worn into deep ridges that changed their shape with every step and every word, with nervous, twitching fingers, with a shrill voice and quick speech,--it was Simeon Stagg, the outcast, the castaway.

These two were to part company soon. Not more devoted to its master was the dog that ran about them than was Sim to Ralph. He was now to lose the only friend who had the will and the strength to shield him against the cruel world that was all the world to him.

They were walking along the pack-horse road on the breast of the fell, and they walked long in silence. Each was busy with his thoughts--the one too weak, the other too strong, to give them utterance.

"There," said Ralph as they reached the top of the Raise, "we must part now, old friend." He tried to give a cheery tone to his voice.

"You'll go on to the fell every day and look around--an idle task, I fear, but still you'll go, as I would have gone if I might have stayed in the old country."

Sim nodded a.s.sent.

"And now you'll go back to the Mess, as I told you. Rotha will want you there, and w.i.l.l.y too. You'll fill my place till I return, you know."

Sim shook his head.

"I'd be nothing but an ache and a stound to the la.s.s, as I've olas been--nothing but an ache and a stound to them all."

"No, not that; a comfort, if only you will try to have it so. Be a man, Sim--look men in the face--things will mend with you now. Go back and live with them at the old home; they'll want you there."

"Since you will not let me come with you, Ralph, tell me when will you come back? I'm afeart--I don't know why--but some'at tells me you'll not come back--tell me, Ralph, that you _will_."

"These troublous times will soon be past," said Ralph. "There'll be a great reckoning day soon, I fear. Then we'll meet again--never doubt it. And now good bye--good bye once more, old friend, and G.o.d be with you."

Ralph turned about and walked a few paces southward. The dog followed him.

"Go back, Laddie," said Ralph. Laddie stood and looked into his face with something of the supplicatory appeal that was on the countenance of the man he had just left. The faithful creature had followed Ralph throughout life; he had been to his master a companion more constant than his shadow; he had never before been driven away.