The Zeit-Geist, Lily Dougall [best electronic book reader txt] 📗

a while Toyner retreated with noiseless steps, standing still when he had moved away about fifty paces, looking at the house again with careful, suspicious eyes; then, as if satisfied, he slid back the iron shade that covered his lantern and, lighting his own steps, he walked away.

He had moved so quietly that the girl who lay upon the bed did not hear him. She did not, in fact, know for certain whether he had been there or not, much less that he had gone, so that she toilsomely kept up the pretence of that gentle snore for half an hour or more. It was very tiresome. Her bright black eyes were wide open as she lay performing this exercise. Her face never lost its look of strong resolution. At length, true to her acting, she moved her head sleepily, sighed heavily, and relapsed into silent breathing as a sleeper might. It was the acting of a true artist.

Half an hour more of silence upon her bed, and she crept off noiselessly; she lifted the corner of the window-curtain and looked out. There was not a light to be seen in any of the houses within sight, there was not a sound to be heard except the foam at the foot of the falls, the lapping of the nearer river, and the voice of a myriad crickets in the grass. She opened the window silently.

"Bart," she whispered. Then a little louder, "Bart--Bart Toyner."

The one thing that she wanted just then was to be alone, and of all people in the world Toyner was the man whom she least wanted to meet. Yet she called him. She got out of the window and took a few paces on one side and on the other in the darkness, still calling his name in a voice of soft entreaty. In his old drunken days she had scorned him. She scorned him now more than ever, but she still believed that her call would never reach his ear in vain. In this hour of her extremity she must make sure of his absence by running the risk of having to endure his nearer presence. When she knew that he was not there, she took a bundle from inside the room, shut down the window through which she had escaped, and wrapping her head and hands in a thin black shawl such as Indian women drape themselves with, she sped off over the dark grass to the river.

Overhead, the stars sparkled in a sky that seemed almost black. The houses and trees, the thick scrubby bushes and long grass, were just visible in all the shades of monochrome that night produces.

In a few minutes she was beyond all the houses, gliding through a wood by the river. The trees were high and black, and there was a faint musical sound of wind in them. She heard it as she heard everything. More than once she stopped, not fearful, but watching. She must have looked like the spirit of primeval silence as she stood at such moments, lifting her shawl from her head to listen; then she went on. She knew where a boat had by chance been left that day; it was a small rough boat, lying close under the roots of a pine tree, and tied to its trunk. In this she bestowed her bundle, and untying the string, pushed from the shore. She could hardly see the opposite side of the little Ahwewee in the darkness; she rowed at once into the midst of its rapid current; once there, she dipped her oars to steer rather than to propel. She travelled swiftly with the black stream.

For half an hour or more she was only intent upon steering her boat. Then, when she had come about three miles from the falls, she was in still water, and began rowing with all her strength to make the boat shoot forward as rapidly as before.

The water was as still now as if the river had widened and deepened into an inland sea; yet in the darkness to all appearance the river was as narrow, the outline of the trees on either side appearing black and high just within sight. When the moon rose this mystery of nature was revealed, for the river was a lake, spreading far and wide on either side. The lake was caused by dams built farther down the stream, and the forest that had covered the ground before still reared itself above the water, the bare dead trees standing thick, except in the narrow, winding passage of the original stream.

The moon rose large, very large indeed, and very yellow. There was smoke of distant forest fires in the dry hot air, which turned the moon as golden as a pane of amber glass. There was no fear of fire in the forest through which the boat was passing other than that cold pretence of yellow flames, the broken reflections of the moon on the wet mirror in which the trees were growing. These trees would not burn; they had been drowned long ago! They stood up now like corpses or ghosts, rising from the deathly flood, lifeless and smooth; ghastly, in that they retained the naked shape that they had had when alive. To the east the reflection of the moon was seen for a mile or more under their grey outstretched branches, and on all sides its light penetrated, showing through what a strange dead wilderness the one small fragile boat was travelling.

Very little of the feeling of the place entered the mind of the girl who was working at her oars with such strong, swift strokes. Every day through the ten or fifteen miles of the dead forest a little snorting steamboat passed, bearing market produce and passengers. The smoke of its funnel had blasted all sense of the weird picturesqueness of the place in the minds of the inhabitants, that is, they were accustomed to it, and sentiment in most hearts is slowly killed by use and wont, as this forest had been killed by the encroaching water. Ann Markham's was not a mind which harboured very much sentiment at that period of her life; it was a keen, quick-witted, practical mind. She was not afraid of the solitude of the night, or of the strange shapes and lights and shadows about her. Now that she knew for certain that she was alone and unpursued, she was for the time quite satisfied.

A mile more down the windings of the lake, and Ann began counting the trees between certain landmarks. Then into an opening between the trees which could not have been observed by a casual glance she steered her boat, and worked it on into a little open passage-way among their trunks. The way widened as she followed it, and then closed again. Where the passage ended, one great tree had fallen, and its trunk with upturned branches was lying, wedged between two standing trunks, in an almost horizontal position. On it a man was sitting, a wild, miserable figure of a man, who looked as if he might have been some savage being who was at home there, but who spoke in a language too vicious and profane for any savage.

He leaned out from his branch as far as he dared, and welcomed the girl with curses because she had not come sooner, because it was now the small hours of the night and he had expected her in the evening.

"Be quiet, father," said the girl; "what's the use of talking like that!" Then she held the boat under the tree and helped him to slip down into it, where, in spite of his rage, he stretched his legs with an evident animal satisfaction. He wallowed in the straitened liberty that the boat gave, lying down in the bottom and gently kicking out his cramped limbs, while the girl held tight to the trees, steadying the boat with her feet.

It was this power of taking an evident sensual satisfaction in such small luxuries as he was able to obtain that had alone attached Markham to his daughter. His character belonged to a type found both among men and women; it was a nature entirely selfish and endowed with an instinctive art in working upon the unselfish sentiments of others--an art which even creates unselfishness in other selfish beings.

"I came as soon as I could," she said. "I suppose you did not want me to put Toyner on your track."

"Yee owe," said the wretched man, stretching himself luxuriously. "I've been a-standin' up and a-sittin' down and a-standin' up since last night, an'----" Here he suddenly remembered something. He sat up and looked round fearfully.

"When it got dark before the moon came I saw the devil! One! I think there was half a dozen of them! I saw them comin' at me in the air. I'd have gone mad if they hadn't gone off when the moon rose."

"Lie still, father, until I give you something to eat," she said.

While she was unfastening her bundle, she looked about her, and saw how the spaces of shadow between the grey branches might easily seem to take solid form and weird shape to a brain that was fevered with excitement of crime and of flight and enforced vigil. She had a painful thing to tell this man--that she could not, as she had hoped, release him from his desperate prison that night; but she did not tell him until she had fed him first and given him drink too. She insisted upon his taking the food first. It was highly seasoned, beef with mustard upon it, and pickles. All the while he watched her hand with thirsty eye. When he had gulped his food to please her, she produced a small bottle. He cursed her when he saw its size, but all the same he held out his hand for it eagerly and drank its contents, shutting his eyes with satisfaction and licking his lips.

All this time she was steadying the boat by holding on to a tree with a strong arm.

"Now it's hard on you, father, but you'll have to stay here another night. Down at The Mills they're watching for you, and it would be sure death for you to try and get through the swamp, even if I could take you in the boat to the edge anywhere."

The man, who had been entirely absorbed with eating and drinking and stretching himself, now gave a low howl of anguish; then he struggled to his knees and shook his fist in her face. "By ---- I'll throw you out of this 'ere boat, I will; what do yer come tellin' me such a thing as that for? Don't yer know I'd liefer die--don't yer know that?" He brought his fist nearer and nearer to her eyes. "Don't yer know that?"

It appeared that he would have struck her, but by a dexterous twist of her body and a pull upon the tree she jerked the boat so that he lost his balance, not entirely, but enough to make him right himself with care and sit down again, realising for the time being that it was she who was mistress of this question--who should be thrown out of the boat and drowned.

"Of course I'll row you to The Mills, if it's to jail you want to go; but Walker is pretty bad, they say. I think it'll be murder they'll bring you up for; and it ain't no sort of use trying to prove that you didn't do it!"

The miserable man put his dirty knotted hands before his face and howled again. But even