Читать книгу Supernatural Mysteries - Ultimate Collection - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 60

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The young man, alone in the empty house, brooded over what he was about to do. An extraordinary change had fallen over the empty apartments, the garden, and the landscape. He could not blame himself for his wickedness, for he was involved in a miasma of evil which penetrated into his veins with every breath he drew.

All fresh fragrancy had gone from the trees, and all perfumed beauty from the flowers. Everything was of a rancid yellow or a withered brown—rotting, corrupting, and rank.

As he had wandered by the quidnunc he had found a dead dove in his path and swarms of poisonous flies glimmered round the unwholesome seeds of exotic plants. The sky was a dull, sulphurous colour and there was not the slightest stir of wind.

The phantoms that he had noticed with such terror in the Dower House accompanied him to the Grange. They all, he thought, seemed aware of his diabolic purpose; he half believed them to be but the projections of his own delirium, and half feared they were the attendants of Julia Roseingrave sent to encompass him with demoniacal promptings until he had done her bidding.

He felt utterly exhausted and the exasperation of his disappointed desire put him out of harmony with everything, as suddenly as, a short while before, he had felt at one with the universe. Then, all had been smooth, now all was ajar. His misery was acute.

He wandered away to gaze in the chapel, where all was now complete for his accursed marriage. He realised that she would be his wife in very truth, not that mock bride that he had desired her to be. He could not peer into the future at all nor speculate on how long they would stay together, nor what their joint actions would be nor where they would go.

He shuddered at the thought of what she had bid him do, and, on the verge of delirium as he was, he saw his wife’s eyes looking at him meekly, with an inexpressible tenderness and lustrous with tears.

Yet he knew that he could neither disobey nor forgo Julia Roseingrave.

The future was to him so dark and full of menace, yet it was shot with a hope of dreadful joy. Surely, in the possession of that woman he would know some such ecstasy as he had hitherto only touched in the phantasmagoria of dreams.

Yet as he waited under this strain and terror for the dark to fall, which would be the signal for him to go again to the Dower House, he thought of Miss Roseingrave almost with repugnance, and his mind, on the verge of complete overthrow, began to dwell on the question as to how long he should support her company.

She had largely won him by withholding herself so completely. Once she was completely his he might quickly tire, and he resolved with half-insane cunning that he would obtain from her the secret of Mother Cloke’s potion, and take one with him on his wedding journey, and as soon as he had tired of her perverse and poisonous beauty, administer to her the same quictus for life’s fever that she proposed to give his wife.

His wife!

His broken and distracted thoughts hung about that word, and he thought of Blanche as she had been when he had first married her five years ago. So gay and charming and unsuspecting of evil, so fond and gracious! How soon he had tired of her tender affections, of her insipid talk, and shallow mind!

He began to consider the lily pond where he had first seen Julia Roseingrave bathing. Now, another tress of hair, this time pale, would float upon what was left of the stagnant water, and another face more deadly white even than that of Miss Roseingrave would show for a while between the lily roots.

It was all very cleverly contrived; never would he be suspected. Those who had missed his wife from the city might think a thousand times before they would fall upon the truth. Probably they would consider that the fond wretch must have drowned herself because she had loved and been forsaken.

Dimly there came to him the thought of his two little children, but this moved him not at all.

At sunset the spell on him deepened, and when Mrs Barlow came to set his last meal before him, she was frightened at his face, so scowling was he with his head thrust forward from his hunched-up shoulders.

How changed, she thought, from the man she had seen unmasked for the first time when she had brought Mr Morley of Griffinshaws into his presence some weeks ago! Yet even then she had thought his aspect dreadful.

In silence she laid out his food and wine. She was rather glad that he did not speak to her, yet his dumbness frightened her, too. And she wished that the Vicar lived nearer, that she might send one of the servant girls for him and bid him come over and keep her master company that night.

She thought to herself as she hurried from the Grange to the servants’ quarters:

‘This is an accursed marriage. Surely it is bringing a disaster with it.’

Sir William could not touch any of his food. Indeed, he scarcely saw it was there, but he rose up from the undisturbed table and went into the little parlour where he had first seen Mother Cloke with her basket of herbs and tried to play on the various instruments. But he found those that were stringed had all the cords snapped and those that were keyed were out of tune and jarred horribly when he touched them. And as he stood among all this ruined music, he realised that the day was darkening down and that soon it would be time for him to go to the Dower House. And all the phantoms seemed to crowd up close about him, pressing on his lips and bosom until he could scarcely breathe.

And he thought: ‘This is the doom of all my evil life. It is now useless to think of escape.’