The Undying Past Part 89

She noticed his action, and saw the blue gleam of steel flash towards her. In deadly terror she shrieked for help. Before he had time to c.o.c.k the pistol she had fled into the dressing-room, crying in a shrill, piercing voice--

"Help! Murder! Help!"

"Beast!" he muttered, and put the weapon down on the writing-table.

For a moment he stood irresolute, not sure whether to attempt escape or let himself be found where he was. Then he raised his eyes and saw standing on the dark threshold a tall, ghost-like form. It was Ulrich, and the woman was grovelling at his feet. Leo felt no shock of surprise.

"Now he knows!" was his first thought--"knows." And he wondered coolly how he would take it.

"Speak," said Ulrich, in a voice that was strange to Leo. "What are you doing here?" It seemed as if he grew taller and taller.

"Speak," said the strange voice, a second time.

"He was going to murder me!" sobbed Felicitas, kneeling before him in her nakedness. "Because--I--wouldn't do--what he wanted, he was going to murder me----"

Leo came a step nearer. His hands itched to strangle her before she could lie further. But Ulrich's eyes petrified him.

"Don't listen to her," he stammered. "But shoot me down; here I am."

The figure in the door began to reel, and a long bony hand was stretched out to the wall for support.

"Can he survive it?" thought Leo, in readiness to catch him if he fell.

But Ulrich, with an effort, pulled himself together.

"Not here," he said; "we will meet at daylight!"

"Where?"

"On the Isle of Friendship, Leo."

"Very well, on the Isle of Friendship." And he turned to the door.

Outside old Minna was waiting in the darkness.

"Make haste, sir," he heard her say; "there are people moving about already down below."

x.x.xIX

A pale, snowy twilight came through the window. Leo sprang up in bed where he had slept for four hours, in his clothes, like a dead man.

He extinguished the lamp which smoked, still burning near him on the table. Now it seemed to be almost night again. It was a quarter-past seven by his watch. "At eight it will be daylight," he thought. "If I start then, I shall be early enough."

Then slowly, as one recalls a wild dream, he went over again the events of the past night. Why had she not turned him back at the garden gate, when she knew Ulrich was in the house? For a moment he entertained the mad suspicion that she had laid a trap for him, but the next, he rejected it as unlikely.

He had not quite regained clear consciousness. His forehead ached, his eyes burned. A confused medley of thoughts and images pa.s.sed through his brain; and then there leapt up within him an illuminating flame of certainty--

"Now he knows!"

Now he knows--he knows. It was all over with hypocrisy, lying, and evasion, nervous anxiety, and enervating desire. The long corrupting process to which his inner man had been subjected had reached its finality. Once more he might draw a deep free breath from his sorely weighted lungs.

He thrust open the window, and breathed in long draughts of the snow-laden air, which braced and refreshed him. His mood was now so clear and calm, that he felt as if body and soul had been purified and hallowed in that white mantle of snow.

The flakes descended in whirling columns. They seemed to push and struggle with each other as to which should first reach the earth.

They hid the yard in impenetrable clouds. Only here and there a gable or a stable window peeped out on the battle-field of snowflakes.

He had taken farewell already of his belongings; had consigned to ruin with rage and scorn the heritage that had come down to him from his forefathers.

But to-day it was with calm resignation that he relinquished everything that his heart had so long held dear. A supreme indifference to all that had happened, and was yet to happen, overcame him. Even the wrong that he had done Ulrich no longer deeply affected him.

He would let him shoot him dead, and then _basta_! But suppose he should miss! What if his hand trembled. It could not, it must not. To outlive this day was unthinkable. He would receive the sanctifying bullet in silence, in grateful silence that he had been allowed to die an honourable death.

He drew down his case of pistols, oiled and tested the triggers, and put his eye to their mouths. On the b.u.t.t end of one he found the little cross, scratched with a knife, the mark which he had made years ago to distinguish the pistol which had killed Rhaden from the others.

Then he loaded it, and before doing so he held the bullets in his palm and pa.s.sed his other hand almost affectionately over the leaden pellets.

Slowly the day advanced. One thing he had to do which would be more difficult than it had been yesterday, and that was to take a mute farewell of his loved ones. The day before he had slunk into the house like a thief in the night, to-day he could scarcely resist the longing to press openly a parting kiss on his mother's brow. But she was still asleep, and as he went by her door he stroked the latch with his hand.

That was his good-bye.

The only person he met face to face was Hertha. He found her in the dining-room as he came into it, to get a drink of something warming.

She wore a white smock over her dark house-dress, and the lamplight which struggled with the dawn shone on her smooth hair.

She started at the sound of his morning greeting, for it was a long time since such a thing had happened as his appearing at breakfast.

"Up already, Hertha?"

"Yes, of course," she gasped. "I have been going to the milking again lately."

And then she pressed her elbows nervously against her sides, as if she was afraid that she had said too much, and cast her eyes shyly along the table.

"That is capital," he said; "will you pour me out a cup of coffee?"

"When the water boils," she answered, and busied herself with the flame of the spirit-lamp.

He sat down opposite her, and as he looked at her he thought, "There sits one who should have been my housewife."

And he held a silent burial. All the hopes of his youth, his dreams of happiness, his unspoken wish for wife and children, and the small dear comforts of a home, all that was best and purest within him, that he had imagined dead long ago, at this moment, when he was conscious it still lived, he laid in a solemn grave.

She brewed the coffee, and the porcelain filter trembled in her hand.

Then she handed him a steaming cup.

He drank it, and she began to move towards the door.

"Don't go, my child," he said, eager to enjoy to the full these few minutes. "Stay with me."