The Wild Geese, Stanley John Weyman [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

/> She did not answer. And outwardly she was not much moved. But inwardly, the horror of herself and her part in the matter, which she had felt as she lay upstairs in the darkness, thinking of the starving man, whelmed up and choked her. They were using her for this! They were using her because the man--loved her! Because hard words, cruel treatment, brutality from her would be ten times more hard, more cruel, more brutal than from others! Because such treatment at her hands would be more likely to break his spirit and crush his heart! To what viler use, to what lower end could a woman be used, or human feeling be prostituted?

Nor was this all. On the tide of this loathing of herself rose another, a newer and a stranger feeling. The man loved her. She did not doubt the statement. Its truth came home to her at once, although, occupied with other views of him, she had never suspected the fact. And because it placed him in a different light, because it placed him in a light in which she had never viewed him before, because it recalled a hundred things, acts, words on his part which she had barely noted at the time, but which now took on another aspect, it showed him, too, as one whom she had never seen. Had he been free at this moment, prosperous, triumphant, the knowledge that he loved her, that he, her enemy, loved her, might have revolted her--she might have hated him the more for it. But now that he lay a prisoner, famished, starving, the fact that he loved her touched her heart, transfixed her with an almost poignant feeling, choked her with a rising flood of pity and self-reproach.

"So there you have it, Flavvy!" James cried complacently. "And sure, you'll not be making a fool of yourself at this time of day!"

She stood as one stunned; looking at him with strange eyes, thinking, not answering. Asgill, and Asgill only, saw a burning blush dye for an instant the whiteness of her face. He, and he only, discovered, with the subtle insight of one who loved, a part of what she was thinking. He wished James McMurrough in the depth of hell. But it was too late, or he feared so.

Great was his relief, therefore, when she spoke. "Then you'll not--be going now?" she said.

"Now?" James retorted contemptuously. "Haven't I told you, you'll go to-morrow?"

"If I must," she said slowly, "I will--if I must."

"Then what's the good of talking, I'm thinking?" The McMurrough answered. And he was going on--being in a bullying mood--to say more in the same strain, when the opportunity was taken from him. One of the O'Beirnes, who happened to avert his eyes from the girl, discovered Payton standing at the foot of the stairs. Phelim's exclamation apprised the others that something was amiss, and they turned.

"I left my snuff-box on the table," Payton said, with a sly grin. How much he had heard they could not tell. "Ha! there it is! Thank you. Sorry! Sorry, I am sure! Hope I don't trespass. Will you present me to your sister, Mr. McMurrough?"

James McMurrough had no option but to do so--looking foolish; while Luke Asgill stood by with rage in his heart, cursing the evil chance which had brought Flavia downstairs.

"I assure you," Payton said, bowing low before her, but not so low that the insolence of his smile was hidden from all, "I think myself happy. My friend Asgill's picture of you, warmly as he painted it, fell infinitely--infinitely below the reality!"


CHAPTER XXI

THE KEY

Colonel John rose and walked unsteadily to the window. He rested a hand on either jamb and looked through it, peering to right and left with wistful eyes. He detected no one, nothing, no change, no movement, and, with a groan, he straightened himself. But he still continued to look out, gazing at the bare sward below the window, at the sparkling sheet of water beyond and beneath it, at the pitiless blue sky above, in which the sun was still high, though it had begun to decline.

Presently he grew weary, and went back to his chair. He sat down with his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands. Again his ears had deceived him! Again hope had told her flattering tale! How many more times would he start to his feet, fancying he heard the footstep that did not fall, calling aloud to those who were not there, anticipating those who, more hard of heart than the stone walls about him, more heedless than the pitiless face of nature without, would not come before the appointed time! And that was hours away, hours of thirst and hunger, almost intolerable; of patience and waiting, weary waiting, broken only by such a fancy, born of his weakened senses, as had just drawn him to the window.

The suffering which is inevitable is more easy to bear than that which is caused by man. In the latter case the sense that the misery felt may be ended by so small a thing as another's will; that another may, by lifting a finger, cut it short, and will not; that to persuade him is all that is needful--this becomes at the last maddening, intolerable, a thing to upset the reason, if that other will not be persuaded.

Colonel John was a man sane and well-balanced, and assuredly not one to despair lightly. But even he had succumbed more than once during the last twelve hours to gusts of rage, provoked as much by the futility of his suffering as by the cruelty of his persecutors. After each of these storms he had laughed, in wonder at himself, had scolded himself and grown calm. But they had made their mark upon him, they had left his eyes wilder, his cheeks more hollow; his hand less firm.

He had burned, in fighting the cold of the past night, all that would burn, except the chair on which he sat; and with the dawn the last spark of his fire had died out. Notwithstanding those fits of rage he was not light-headed. He could command his faculties at will, he could still reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while, that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in Russian snows--alas! starting from it only to shiver with that penetrating, heart-piercing, frightful cold, which was worse to bear than the gnawing of hunger or the longing of thirst.

He had not eaten for more than seventy hours. But the long privation which had weakened his limbs and blanched his cheeks, which had even gone some way towards disordering his senses, had not availed to shake his will. The possibility of surrender did not occur to him, partly because he felt sure that James McMurrough would not be so foolish as to let him die; but partly, also, by reason of a noble stubbornness in the man, a fixedness that for no pain of death would leave a woman or a child to perish. More than once Colonel Sullivan had had to make that choice, amid the horrors of a retreat across famished lands, with wolves and Cossacks on his skirts; and perhaps the choice then made had become a habit of the mind. At any rate, whether that were the cause or no, in this new phase he gave no thought to yielding.

He had sat for some minutes in the attitude of depression, or bodily weakness, which has, been described, when once more a sound startled him. He raised his head and turned his eyes, sharpened by hunger, on the window. But this time, distrusting his senses, he did not rise until the sound was repeated. Then he faltered to his feet, and once again went unsteadily to the window, and, leaning a hand on each jamb, looked out.

At the same moment Flavia looked in. Their eyes met. Their faces were less than a yard apart.

The girl started back with a low cry, caused either by alarm on finding him so near her or by horror at the change in his aspect. If the latter, there was abundant cause. For she had left him hungry, she found him starving; she had left him haggard, she found him with eyes unnaturally large, his temples hollow, his lips dry, his chin unshaven. It was indeed a mask rather than a face, a staring mask of famine, that looked out of the dusky room at her, and looked not the less pitifully, not the less wofully, because, as soon as its owner took in her identity, the mask tried to smile.

"Mother of God!" she whispered. Her face had grown nearly as white as his. "O Mother of God!" She had imagined nothing like this.

And Colonel John, believing--his throat was so dry that he could not speak at once--that he read pity as well as horror in her face, felt a sob rise in his breast. He tried to smile the more bravely for that, and presently he found his voice, a queer, husky voice.

"You must not leave me--too long," he said. His smile was becoming ghastly.

She drew in her breath, and averted her face, to hide, he hoped, the effect of the sight upon her. Or perhaps--for he saw her shudder--she was mutely calling the sunlit lake on which her eyes rested, the blue sky, the smiling summer scene, to witness against this foul cruelty, this dark wickedness.

But it seemed that he deceived himself. For when she turned her face to him again, though it was still colourless, it was hard and set.

"You must sign," she said. "You must sign the paper."

His parched lips opened, but he did not answer. He was as one struck dumb.

"You must sign!" she repeated insistently. "Do you hear? You must sign!"

Still he did not answer; he only looked at her with eyes of infinite reproach. The pity of it! The pity of it! She, a woman, a girl, whom compassion should have constrained, whose tender heart should have bled for him, could see him tortured, could aid in the work, and cry "Sign!"

She could indeed, for she repeated the word--fiercely, feverishly. "Sign!" she cried. And then, "If you will," she said, "I will give you--see! See! You shall have this. You shall eat and drink; only sign! For God's sake, sign what they want, and eat and drink!"

And, with fingers that trembled with haste, she drew from a hiding-place in her cloak, bread and milk and wine. "See what I have brought," she continued, holding them before his starting eyes, his cracking lips, "if you will sign."

He gazed at them, at her, with anguish of the mind as well as of the body. How he had mistaken her! How he had misread her! Then, with a groan, "God forgive you!" he cried, "I cannot! I cannot!"

"You will not sign?" she retorted.

"Cannot, and will not!" he said.

"And why? Why will you not?"

On that his patience, sorely tried, gave way; and, swept along by one of those gusts of rage, he spoke. "Why?" he cried in hoarse accents. "You ask me why? Because, ungrateful, unwomanly, miserable as you are--I will not rob you