Читать книгу A Question of Faith - Lily Dougall - Страница 4

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That same afternoon, an hour later, Alice Bolitho came downstairs in the old house which had lately come into her possession, and showed herself at the door of a lower sitting-room, equipped for walking. Inside the sitting-room sat a lady who might still properly be described as a young lady, except that the wearing of a wedding-ring and tokens of widowhood in the black dress prevented the conventional use of that term.

“Alice!” (in great surprise) “are you going out? Oh, I don’t think I would if I were you; you know you might meet—Do you think it would seem quite ladylike, dear, to go out to meet him? He would be sure to think that, you know.”

“If he did, I should think him a duffer, and which would be the worse? You are always alarmed, my pretty Amy, about what other people will think; but you never get up any very great alarms about what you and I may think of them, which is quite as important.”

“Oh, if I were you, Alice, I wouldn’t begin by thinking that he is this or that. I would just try to make him think me as nice as I could.”

“Yes” (good-naturedly), “I am sure that is just what you would do if you were I; and I suppose it is what you will do, not being I.”

The other, not being very quick of mind, did not take in the point of the retort; a smiling manner was more to her than the precise meaning of words.

“I don’t think you had better go out until he has called; it would seem, you know, as if you were in a hurry to see him.”

“On the contrary, it is because he will probably call that I am going out to avoid him. That is ladylike enough, surely, even to please you. And if, when he arrives, my motives do not strike him in the true light, you can readjust his thoughts to suit yourself.”

Miss Bolitho went out, and walked down the drive that led to the village street. The house that she left was of white rough-cast, large and low. To one side of it rose the mossy thatch roof of an enormous stone barn, and into the court of which this barn formed one side, an old oak gateway gave entrance. The gateway had about it some rude carving, which was almost falling to pieces with age. On the other side of the house was a high brick wall and the roofs of smaller cottages; a little babbling stream ran all the way across the small park through which the drive made way. The grass was rich under leafless elm trees, and lusty daffodil clumps, among all the grass, were gorgeous with yellow flowers.

It did not take more than ten minutes to walk through the village,—a village of rough-cast cottages and thatched roofs. A quarter of a mile beyond the road bridged the stream from the combe, which here passed onward into level meadows. On one side, the hill rose high, and the way to the moor was either over it or through the combe. Alice Bolitho, restless and eager for a laborious walk, turned into the latter, because she argued that if Mr. Knighton had taken Harvey to his own house for luncheon,—which appeared to her the probable course,—they would after that walk back to Norcombe House on a road where the hillpath would be very visible.

The combe stream in the course of ages had made a deep cutting, and on one side the precipice was steep. To the top of this precipice the path ascended and ran on halfway below the hilltop; the scrubby trees, even the old gnarled roots, overhung the path, and made it a concealed and secret sort of place. The length of this secluded way was not so great as to make it an unusual country walk to any one accustomed to such rambles; but when Alice had advanced a certain distance and left the opening almost halfway behind, she was surprised to find that to-day the loneliness of the place struck her with a dismal impression which she had never derived from it before. She remembered, too, that Knighton had told her that he doubted the safety of the path, but that was no sufficient reason for going back; being warned, she could watch for a broken place, and the bank above was not so steep but that she could climb and pass among the outgrowing trees. Why, then, she asked herself, annoyed, did the recollection of this, warning and the seclusion depress her? She was in the habit of walking in this place and enjoying its gloom.

It is probable that when what is called a presentiment is anything more than a curious coincidence, the law that governs it is that of mind acting upon mind without the ordinary medium of the senses. Alice Bolitho did not know of any danger that men-aced, but some one else was at that moment thinking upon it intently.

Alice had her dog with her—a golden collie, in whose companionship she took the greatest delight. He was smiling now, as collies can smile, and bounding in front and bounding behind, barking with preposterous delight at the echo of his own voice. He was not depressed by any loneliness in the scene or fear of the narrow path; why should she be? She watched the path carefully to see that it was firm; she set the heel of her will, as it were, upon her unaccountable and unreasonable fear.

Quite unaccountable and unreasonable this fear—and yet where the precipice was high it suddenly sprang up before her, visible. A man crouching behind a wild holly-shrub rose with a cat-like spring. She swerved at the sight of him, but he had laid hold of her arm with an iron grasp.

She screamed. Her scream almost died on her lips, piercing only a little way into the air of the solitude around, falling again into a nervous moan, horrible to her own ears, so weak and hopeless was the sound. She screamed again, and again she knew that her voice had not carried beyond the trees of the lonely place. With all the strength that she possessed she tried without avail to wrench her arm from the grasp that held it. The stick in her hand was taken from her, and tossed like a child’s plaything over the rocks into the stream below.

She called to her dog in breathless haste; she had enough voice, hoarse and unnatural as it sounded, to bid him spring upon her assailant. The dog, alas! had received no special training for the one accident of a lifetime. The man who had sprung from the trees wore no rags, nor did he smell like a beggar; the dog, eager to help his mistress in her obvious distress, decided that it was his most pleasing duty to seek the missing stick, and dashed away by a long detour to reach the foot of the precipice. Alice, unable at the moment to realize whither he had gone, only had this weird feeling added to her horrid plight, that the villain in whose violent hold she was had exercised some mysterious repellent force by which the dog had been terror-stricken.

The aspect of her enemy lent force to the thought. He was not strong or brutal, as one commonly thinks of brutal strength; he was an old man, thin, white-haired, a face and form in which it seemed as if mildness, by some awful chemistry, had been changed into a wolf-like ferocity.

“You are mad!” she exclaimed fiercely.

“Yes, young lady; mad—mad enough for any extremity!”

“What do you want?”

For answer he began with sinewy strength to press her forward to the edge of the precipice.

It was only, perhaps, a hundred seconds since he had first touched her, and now she felt little hope, and believed that he would cast her down upon the rocks beneath. The shock, acting on a woman’s weakness of nerve, which until then she had never suspected in herself, deprived her of physical strength, almost of breath; and that her mind did not fail, but grasped with steady clearness her whole situation, did not aid her—a delirium of fear or anger might have given back her strength.

“Listen, girl!” The man’s eyes glared at her; she felt his hot breath with his words. “My son and I are hunted to death. We have taken refuge in a cellar of a mud hut on the heath yonder. My son is dying; he will never walk again in the light. Dying! Do you know what that means? No matter what he has done; they would catch him and drag him, dying as he is, into courts and prisons if they could. We are starving, starving! Do you know what that means?”

Quickly as the strenuous words were poured into her ear she began to understand. “I will give you money.”

“Money, girl! I could give you more.”

“I will give you food.”

He began to speak again; his voice was slightly changed; his words did not come so terribly fast. At first she did not understand at all: his subject seemed to have changed; his words to be the utterance of the wildest lunacy. Then, again, a light came to her as to his meaning; he was repeating an oath which he demanded that she should repeat after him.

She was silent a minute longer, listening to the words he poured upon her, her mind terribly alive, her breath and pulses still almost failing her. A promise extorted by force need not, ought not, to be binding! He would have her swear that she would not convey to any human being the knowledge of himself or his hiding, that she would bring to him food such as a sick man might live upon, that she would conceal what she did as if her own life depended upon the concealment. The interests of law and justice, the merest humanity to her neighbors, demanded that such a promise should be broken. The man was mad, and therefore the threat of a horrible death which his looks and actions pressed hard upon her would, without this promise, be fulfilled. The man was mad, and therefore words said to pacify him were as nothing.

“I swear to God”—whispered the man.

“I swear to God”—she repeated faintly.

“By His Son who loved us”—he continued.

And she went on repeating the words of the oath as he whispered them, like a child that lisped its first prayer.

Near the path the roots of bygone oaks held out queer arms and heads like gargoyles, and from these grew the young trees that held the canopy of dead leaves. Above was the quiet sky, around the silent hills, beneath the rocks and foaming stream. On the narrow ledge under the trees the old man and young woman stood almost quiet, the desperate antagonism of mind and will that was between them only showing in the fierce, nervous grasp by which he held her so perilously near the verge, and her pallid face and shrinking gesture.

“You think to break your oath,” said the old man. He seemed to read, but without certainty, the thoughts in her mind. “You will say I compelled you; that you will not regard it!”

“I will keep the oath,” she said, with white lips.

“Listen! Do you know what a soul is? The life that is you, that will live somewhere—think, act, live somehow, somewhere, for ever and ever and ever?” The fevered words sighed out over the rocky steep, and their whisper seemed to be echoed not by the rocks, but by the hissing movement of the sere leaves, “for ever and ever.” “Can you think what it is to be a father, and have given such life to a son? to stand by and see that life hurled out of this mortal state, hurled on the downward track to a hell of evil deeds?” His mind dominated hers: she saw the vision he saw; it might be only a mad vision, not a reality, but she saw it. “Listen! You keep this word you have said, and I shall keep my son long enough to teach him a thing he needs to know,—a thing that will redeem his soul. I will teach him what love and mercy mean, and he will understand God’s justice, and it will redeem his soul. You break these words you have spoken, and”—His tones, now threatening, stopped; he looked wildly towards heaven.

Was he so mad, even now, when she had given the promise, as to think that her own soul would be more safe if hurried to instant death than if she had the chance to profane the vow?

His grasp upon her relaxed; he motioned her to the path with a gesture that told of gentle breeding, but it told also of trust reposed in her. It was just one moment more of his presence, but that moment of trust, too quickly gone to be arrested, appalled her more than the words she had said. Her mind, made up as to action, did not pause to know that this trust was appalling. She darted from her tormentor because she was free.

The dog, who, some forty feet below, had spent the time in excited movements upon the last accessible rock, trying to decide whether or not he would risk his life for the stick, now conveniently solved the problem by forgetting its existence, and incontinently raced back by the way he had come, making much scuffling with the earth and the dead bracken. When he came past the spot of the encounter, the old man was going up the bank under the holly trees, and his mistress had gone on by the accustomed path; but so little notice did she take of him that he felt reproached in his mind, and remembered the stick, and went back once more to look at the whirling pool in which it lay.

Alice Bolitho ran upon the upward path. Her one thought was to find some one who would avenge her suffering and secure the enemy who was so mad and dangerous.