Witness for the Defence Part 41

"You came back to the tent," she began, "and ever since then you have misunderstood what you saw. For this is the truth: I was going to kill myself."

Thresk was startled as he had not expected to be; and a great wave of relief swept over him and uplifted his soul. Here was the simplest explanation, yet it had never occurred to him. Always he had been besieged by the vision of Stella standing quietly by the table, deliberately preparing her rifle for use, always he had linked up that vision with the death of Stephen Ballantyne in a dreadful connection. He did not doubt that she spoke the truth now. Looking at her and noticing the anguish of her face, he could not doubt it. So definite a premeditation as he had imagined there had not been, and relief carried him to pity.

"So it had come to that?" he said.

"Yes," replied Stella. "And you had your share in bringing it to that--you who sit in judgment."

"I!" Thresk exclaimed.

"Yes, you who sit in judgment. I am not alone. No, I am not alone. A crime was committed? Then you must shoulder your portion of the blame."

Thresk asked himself in vain what was his share. He had done a cowardly thing years ago a few miles from this spot. He had never ceased to reproach himself for the cowardice. But that it had lived and worked like some secret malady until in the end it had made him an all-unconscious accomplice in that midnight tragedy, a sharer in its guilt, if guilt there were--here again was news for him. But the knowledge which her first words had given to him, that all these years he had never got the truth of her, kept him humble now. He ceased to be judge. He became pupil and as pupil he answered her.

"I am ready to shoulder it."

He was seated on a cushioned bench which stood behind the writing-table and Stella sat down at his side.

"When we parted--that morning--it was in the drawing-room over there in my cottage. We parted, you to your work of getting on, Henry, I to think of you getting on without me at your side. There was a letter lying on the table, a letter from India. Jane Repton had written it and she asked me to go out to her for the cold weather. I went. I was a young girl, lonely and very unhappy, and as young girls often do who are lonely and very unhappy I drifted into marriage."

"I see," said Thresk in a hushed voice. The terrible conviction grew upon him now, lurid as the breaking of a day of storm, that the cowardice he had shown on Bignor Hill ruined her altogether and hurt him not at all.

"Yes, I see. There my share begins."

"Oh no. Not yet," she answered. "Then I spoke when I should have kept silence. I let my heart go out when I should have guarded it. No, I cannot blame you."

"You have the right none the less."

But Stella would not excuse herself now and to him by any subtlety or artifice.

"No: I married. That was my affair. I was beaten--despised--ridiculed--terrified by a husband who drank secretly and kept all his drunkenness for me. That, too, was my affair. But I might have gone on. For seven years it had lasted. I was settling into a dull habit of misery. I might have gone on being bullied and tortured had not one little thing happened to push me over the precipice."

"And what was that?" asked Thresk.

"Your visit to me at Chitipur," she replied, and the words took his breath away. Why, he had travelled to Chitipur merely to save her. He leaned forward eagerly but she antic.i.p.ated him. She smiled at him with an indulgent forgiveness. "Oh, why did you come? But I know."

"Do you?" Thresk asked. Here at all events she was wrong.

"Yes. You came because of that one weak soft spot of sentimentalism there is in all of you, the strongest, the hardest. You are strong for years.

You live alone for years. Then comes the sentimental moment and it's we who suffer, not you."

And deep in Thresk's mind was the terror of the mistakes people make in ignorance of each other, and of the mortal hurt the mistakes inflict. He had misread Stella. Here was she misreading him and misreading him in some strange way to her peril and ruin.

"You are sure of that?" he asked. She had no doubt--no more doubt than he had had of the reason why she stood preparing her rifle.

"Quite," she answered. "You had heard of me in Bombay and it came over you that you would like to see how the woman you had loved looked after all these years: whether she retained her pretty way, whether she missed you--ah, above all, whether she missed you. You wanted to fan up into a mild harmless flame the ashes of an old romance, warm your hands at it for half an hour, recapture a savour of dim and pleasant memories and then go back to your own place and your own work, untouched and unhurt."

Thresk laughed aloud with bitterness at the mistake she had made. Yet he could not blame her. There was a certain shrewd insight which though it had led her astray in this case might well have been true in any other case, might well have been true of him. He remembered her disbelief in all that he had said to her in that tent at Chitipur; and he was appalled by the irony of things and the blind and feeble helplessness of men to combat it.

"So that's why I came to Chitipur?" he cried.

"Yes," Stella answered without a second of hesitation. "But I couldn't be left untouched and unhurt. You came and all that I had lost came with you, came in a vivid rush of bright intolerable memories." She clasped her hands over her eyes and Thresk lived over again that evening in the tent upon the desert, but with a new understanding. His mind was illumined. He saw the world as a prison in which each living being is shut off from his neighbour by the impenetrable wall of an inability to understand.

"Memories of summers here," she resumed, "of women friends, of dainty and comfortable things, and days of great happiness when it was good--oh so very good!--to be alive and young. And you were going back to it all, straight by the night-mail to Bombay, straight from the station on board your ship. Oh, how it hurt to hear you speak of it, with a casual pleasant word about exile and next-door neighbours!" She clasped her hands together in front of her, her fingers worked and twisted. "No, I couldn't endure it," she whispered. "The blows, the ridicule, the contempt, I determined, should come to an end that night, and when you saw me with the rifle in my hand I was going to end it."

"Yes?"

"And then the stupidest thing happened. I couldn't find the little box of cartridges."

Stella described to him how she had run hither and thither about the tent, opening drawers, looking into bags and growing more nervous and more flurried with every second that pa.s.sed. She had so little time.

Ballantyne was not going as far as the station with Thresk. He merely intended to see his visitor off beyond the edge of the camp. And it must all be over and done with before he came back. She heard Ballantyne call to Thresk to sit firm while the camel rose; and still she had not found them. She heard Thresk's voice saying good-night.

"The last words, Henry, I wanted to hear in the world. I thought that I would wait for them and the moment they had died away--then. But I hadn't found the cartridges and so the search began again."

Thresk, watching her as she lived through again those desperate minutes, was carried back to Chitipur and seemed to be looking into that tent. He had a dreadful picture before his eyes of a hunted woman rushing wildly from table to table, with a white, quivering face and lips which babbled incoherently and feverish hands which darted out nervously, over-setting books and ornaments--in a vain search for a box of cartridges wherewith to kill herself. She found them at last behind the whisky bottle, and clutched at them with a great sigh of relief. She carried them over to the table on which she had laid her rifle, and as she pushed one into the breech, Stephen Ballantyne stood in the doorway of the tent.

"He swore at me," Stella continued. "I had taken the necklace off. I had shown you the bruises on my throat. He cursed me for it, and he asked me roughly why I didn't shoot myself and rid him of a fool. I stood without answering him. That always maddened him. I didn't do it on purpose. I had become dull and slow. I just stood and looked at him stupidly, and in a fury he ran at me with his fist raised. I recoiled, he frightened me, and then before he reached me--yes." Her voice died away in a whisper. Thresk did not interrupt. There was more for her to tell and one dreadful incident to explain. Stella went on in a moment, looking straight in front of her and with all the pa.s.sion of fear gone from her voice.

"I remember that he stood and stared at me foolishly for a little while.

I had time to believe that nothing had happened, and to be glad that nothing had happened and to be terrified of what he would do to me. And then he fell and lay quite still."

It seemed that she had no more to say, that she meant to leave unexplained the inexplicable thing; and even Thresk put it out of his thoughts.

"It was an accident then," he cried. "After all, Stella, it was an accident."

But Stella sat mutely at his side. Some struggle was taking place in her and was reflected in her countenance. Thresk's eager joy was damped.

"No, my friend," she said at length, slowly and very deliberately. "It was not an accident."

"But you fired in fear." Thresk caught now at that alternative. "You shot in self-defence. Stella, I blundered at Bombay." He moved away from her in his agitation. "I am sorry. Oh, I am very sorry. I should never have come forward at all. I should have lain quiet and let your counsel develop his case, as he was doing, on the line of self-defence. You would have been acquitted--and rightly acquitted. You would have had the sympathy of every one. But I didn't know your story. I was afraid that the discovery of Ballantyne outside the tent would ruin you. I knew that my story could not fail to save you. So I told it. But I was wrong, Stella. I blundered. I did you a great harm."

He was standing before her now and so poignant an anguish rang in his voice that Stella was moved by it to discard her plans. Thus she had meant to tell the story if ever she was driven to it. Thus she had told it. But now she put out a timid hand and took him by the arm.

"I said I would tell you the truth. But I have not told it all. It's so hard not to keep one little last thing back. Listen to me"; and with a bowed head and her hand still clinging desperately to his arm she made the final revelation.

"It's true I was crazy with fear. But there was just one little moment when I knew what I was going to do, when it came upon me that the way I had chosen before was the wrong one, and this new way the right one. No, no," she cried as Thresk moved. "Even that's not all. That moment--you could hardly measure it in time, yet to me it was distinct enough and is marked distinctly in my memories, for during it _he_ drew back."

"What?" cried Thresk. "Don't say it, Stella!"

"Yes," she answered. "During it he drew back, knowing what I was going to do just as I suddenly knew it. It was a moment when he seemed to me to bleat--yes, that's the word--to bleat for mercy."

She had told the truth now and she dropped her hand from his sleeve.

"And you? What did you do?" asked Thresk.

"I? Oh, I went mad, I think. When I saw him lying there I lost my head.

The tent was flecked with great spots of fire which whirled in front of my eyes and hurt. A strength far greater than mine possessed me. I was crazy. I dragged him out of the tent for no reason--that's the truth--for no reason at all. Can you believe that?"

"Yes," replied Thresk readily enough. "I can well believe that."