Wastralls: A Novel, C. A. Dawson Scott [i love reading books TXT] 📗

put another log on the sinking fire. He had been waiting, for what he hardly knew; but the dream, the old secret dream to which his clumsy hands had given form and substance, was rising through the blackness and the silence, changing into a fact. As he leaned back in the Windsor chair, he was being shown a picture, a picture from which, if he could, he would have turned his eyes. He was looking into the big shadowy justice-room at the end of the passage, the room in which Sabina lay.

He saw the grey walls, the little old windows curtained with white dimity and the four-poster which, for so long, had been the bed of bridal and of birth, the death-bed of a family. In it Old Squire had lain him down to sleep and then to die. In it his childless descendant was drawing her last breaths. Her last breaths! Byron saw them coming slowly, a mist on the cold air, more slowly and then no mist. Sabina was about to die. Die? He said the word softly to himself. His wife, the woman at whose side he had lived for so many years, was about to die. He shook his head over the word as something of which the meaning escaped him, which was portentous, which stirred him in a dim elemental way, but which he could not grasp. Sleep he could understand. Sabina asleep was something he had often seen. A healthy creature, once she had shut her eyes, she did not stir till morning. He was different, found it difficult to lose himself, slept lightly as a cat and dreamed. Day-dreams and night-dreams, he had lived in dreams; but Sabina...

She was asleep now. She was sleeping dreamlessly and from this empty sleep she would not rouse. Daylight would broaden in the east, the farmyard stir with life, and feet would come and go in the house. Do what they might, however, she would not waken. He frowned, knitting his brows over the to-morrow which was about to dawn, the to-morrow in which Sabina had no part. That she who was so vigorously alive should thus have been wiped out, that she should have gone, not for a little time but for ever, was unthinkable and yet...

A nerve vibrated with relief, with a slow thick satisfaction. Gone was she? In their long struggle then, he was the victor? He had come into the open, fought for the woman that he loved, the bit of land that was his 'by rights.' He had always had it in him to fight but not until driven to extremities had he shown his mettle. At long last he had proved that he and not Sabina was the one who counted, that fundamentally he was the stronger.

And yet...

The shallows of his mind were alive with darting thoughts. The long long contest had been declared in his favour, the adversary was not so much beaten as destroyed and yet, on the heels of his rejoicing, crept little yapping doubts.

The vision of the justice-room, of that quiet figure in the quiet chamber, was for him repellently interesting. As long as he could imagine the fine mist of her breath, the rising and falling of her breast, he was only conscious of his approaching triumph. Time, however, brought a change, for now Sabina was more than quiet, she was still. Her blue eyes were frozen, she rested in a peace deeper than that of sleep and, whereas the sleeper is harmless...

Though he did not yet understand, his satisfaction began to dwindle. He drew nearer to the hearth, to the warm living fire. The wind still shrieked a warning overhead but on the house, especially the part beyond the kitchen, a hush had fallen. Byron found the silence oppressive. If a mouse had come out of the wainscot and flitted bright-eyed about the floor, he would have welcomed it, but the place was empty even of minute and furtive life. The thick walls leaned together, brooding over stagnant space, over the dust of dead hopes, the smell and the suspicion of mould, of more than mould. They shut the man in with his dry husk of satisfaction, bade him observe it shrivelling before a new growth, a growth at which he dared not look, it seemed so closely to resemble fear.

Yet—fear?

In the unhappy past he had borne himself stoutly on the assumption that he was the stronger, that he had only to rise and assert himself. That very day he had put this contention to the proof and now Sabina, in her new stillness, was threatening—what was she threatening?

If he were to smoke a pipe he would be more at ease! Pipes were associated in his mind with long dreams of Gray, when he had wandered over the springy turf of the headland, seen her hair in the brown weed of the pools, the curve of her brow in the gull's wing; when he had sat by the fire and his vision had been broken, like water, by the light passing of her feet. Smoking, he might be able to banish the stark figure in the great four-poster and the crowding thoughts connected with it, might be able to replace them with Gray. He rose to fetch the tobacco-jar. It stood among the bottles on the cupboard shelf and to get it he must turn his back upon the door into the passage, upon that door behind which lay a something against which, though he could put no name to it, he must be on his guard. For a moment he hung irresolute on one foot, then sank back in the chair. He could not go. Though such a brave fellow and so strong, he did not dare.

During his intermittent labours he had slaughtered, as part of his work, every sort of farm creature. Sheep, pigs, bullocks, old and diseased animals, the wild-fowl that came over Trevorrick in the winter, the seals that haunted Morwen Cove. He had slaughtered as a duty. The creatures were, to him, food or refuse and he had killed them. He had also killed Sabina.

He tried to think of her as so much dead flesh, an old animal, maimed, useless, and perverse; but though the distorted trunk of Sabina might be dead, the dominant spirit with which he had been for so many years in conflict, that he had not killed. The vision of Sabina's dead body and frozen eyes began to fade. Worse things were about than bodies and glazed sightless eyes.

His wife had shown her affection for him by a cheery liking for his society, by an occasional shy caress. Although she used round terms she had been easy-tempered and if it had not been for Wastralls, that bone of contention, he would have had a good life with her. Sharp with the hinds, direct of speech, he had never seen her roused to wrath. She had told him once "It was not worth while being angry."

"I don't believe as you could, not to say, lose yer temper."

"Oh couldn't I, there's them that know; but it would be fulish to lose it for a trifle."

From the respect with which the labourers treated her, Byron had realized that her cheeriness must cover depths. She had impressed the men with a sense of power that had been limited, comfortably, by the flesh.

He found that he was trembling, that it needed all his strength to prevent his teeth from chattering. The fire had sunk to a heap of glowing ash and the December night was cold. With wary eye upon the door, he piled the grate high with logs, the last logs in the box.

In the past he had often taken sly and secret advantage of Sabina's trust. With a word here, a gesture there, he had tried to undermine her authority, turn local feeling in his favour. He had not dared an open break for that would have meant, or he believed it would, the severance of their relations. At last, however, his furtive tentatives had been laid aside and the accumulated unhappiness of the years had found vent in one soul-satisfying dastard blow.

In her blithe confidence Sabina had shut her eyes to the small disloyalties of the past. If she were aware of them she had, in her large-hearted way, forgiven. Now, in that grey and white room at the end of the passage, the parting of spirit from body must unroll before her the sordid past. She must learn that, after eating and drinking in domestic trust the food she had prepared, he had dropped poison in her cup.

Once more he found that he was trembling. He glanced at the fire but blue and purple flames were licking round the logs; the dank air was shot with an increasing warmth and, in the centre of each little window-pane, was a star of gold light. He had shivered, not because he was cold, not because the wind out of the north was mourning as it fleeted with cloud and moonshine overhead; but because he realized that having slain the body he was afraid of the spirit he had released.

Byron had not lived in the West without absorbing the beliefs of the countryside. He knew who in the hamlet had been 'piskie-led'n,' whose best horse had been inexplicably found dead, which bit of woodland was haunted. He had listened to the little feet that patter behind the wayfarer yet leave no prints on the soft sand and he had watched for the white rabbit that leaps and gambols on the bit of clear road by the graveyard, the rabbit that can be neither shot nor snared. With other of his neighbours, he did not care to pass sombre low-lying Treglyn after dark. The little ghost of an inconvenient child was said to rise out of the garden earth and Byron, at least, never caught sight of the house—a lurking house, set round with tamarisks—without remembering what of crime and horror had happened there, what still happened when the moon was at the full.

Such a man was at the mercy of superstitious fear. The quietude in which at first he had waited had been due to weariness, to a reaction from the intense emotion which had preceded his act. This expectant calm, however, had gradually become shot with doubt. His mind had wakened to a new aspect of the matter. Attempting to wrest Wastralls from a hand of flesh and blood, he found in its place the clasp of spectral fingers.

Byron, looking into the future saw a ghostly presence in the ancient house, saw it gliding on the old errands, pervading the rooms and passages. Would others see it too; would they, perhaps, perceive without seeing? He wondered whether Gray...?

Would that dim ghost avenge itself on him by trying to come between him and Gray, by intruding on their tender tête-à-tête, by filling the maid's mind with foul suspicion?

No tie is so close as that of blood and the women were of one family. Would Gray be sensitive to that flitting shadow? Behind the veils of the flesh, would spirit be able to communicate with spirit? Would the truth, whispered in every corner of the house, grow into a following fate? In time, when the maid had come to love him, she would glory in his having stopped at nothing to win her. But a first flicker is easily extinguished.

The hour was late and, in his growing discomfort, his growing fear, Byron thought of his chill room at the top of the house. He went there for sleep and sleep meant the laying by of dread, it meant escape. He glanced at the door which hung, quivering now and again under the uncertain onslaught of the wind, between his lighted shelter and the dark. He was thinking of another door, the one that shut Sabina into the justice-room. If ne tried to make for his burrow, for that safe place he knew of, he must pass it. Could he? His mind answered the challenge with a quick defiance. Could he? Of course he could..

He put his hands on the arms of the chair and sought to rise. He swayed his body forward, big head and broad deep-chested bulk; but under him his limbs failed. They hung leaden, lifeless. Not only had it become impossible for him to pass that farther door which stood sentinel by the foot of the stairs, but even to move. Escape through the gates of