The Long Night - Stanley Weyman (free novel 24 .txt) 📗

fell from the lock.

The Syndic, utterly unmanned, leant sweating against the wall. He called upon the name of his Maker. "My God!" he muttered. "My God!"

"_There is no God!_"

The words, each syllable of them clear, though spoken in a voice shrill and cracked and strange, and such as neither of them had ever heard before, were beyond doubt. Close on them followed a shriek of weird laughter, and then the blasphemy repeated in the same tone of mockery. The hair crept on Claude's head, the blood withdrew to his heart. The key which he had drawn out of the lock fell from the hand it seemed to freeze.

With distended eyes he glared down the passage. The words were still in the air, the laughter echoed in his brain, the shadows cast by the shaking rushlight danced and took weird shapes. A rustling as of black wings gathered about him, unseen shapes hovered closer and closer--was it his fancy or did he hear them?

He tried to disbelieve, he strove to withstand his terror; and a moment his fortitude held. Then, as the Syndic, shaking as with the palsy, tottered, with a hand on either wall down the stairs, and moaning aloud in his terror, felt his way across the room below, Claude's courage, too, gave way; not in face of that he saw, but of that which he fancied. He turned too, and with a greater show of composure, and still carrying the light, he stumbled down the stairs and into the room below.

There, for an instant sense and nerve returned, and he stood. He turned even, and made as if he would re-ascend the staircase. But he had no sooner thrust his head into it, and paused an instant to listen ere he ventured, than a faint echo of the same mirthless laughter reached him, and he turned shuddering, and fled--fled out of the room, out of the house, out of the light, to the same spot under the trees whence he had started with so bold a heart a few minutes earlier.

The Syndic was there before him--or no, not the Syndic, but a stricken man, clinging to a tree; seized now and again with a fresh fit of trembling. "Take me home," he babbled. "There is no hope! There is no hope. Take me home!"

His house was not far off, and Claude, when he had a little recovered himself, assented, gave the tottering man his arm and supported him--he needed support--until they reached the dwelling in the Bourg du Four. Still a wreck Blondel was by this time a little more coherent. He foresaw solitude, and dreaded it; and would have had the other enter and pass the night with him. But the young man, already ashamed of his weakness, already doubting and questioning, refused, and would say no more than that he would return on the morrow. With an aspect apparently composed, he insisted on taking his leave, turned from the door and retraced his steps to the Corraterie. But when he came to the house, he lacked, brave as he was, the heart to enter; and passing it, he spent the time until daybreak, in walking up and down the rampart within hearing of the sentries.

His mind grown somewhat calmer, he set himself to recall, precisely and exactly, the thing that had happened. But recall it as he might, he could not account for it. The words of blasphemy that had scorched his ears as the key entered the lock, had been uttered, he was sure, in no voice known to him; nay more, in no voice of human intonation. How could he explain them? How account for them save in one way? How defend his cowardice save on one ground? He shuddered, gazing at the house, and murmuring now a prayer, and now a word of exorcism. But the day had come, the sky was red, and the sun was near its rising before he took courage and dared to cross the threshold.


CHAPTER IX.

MELUSINA.

Even then, with the daylight about him, he crept into the house under a weight of awe and dread. He left the door ajar that the daylight might enter with him and dispel the shadows: and when he had crossed the threshold it was with a pale and frowning face that he advanced to the middle of the floor, and stood peering round the deserted living-room. No one was stirring above or below, the house and all within it slept: the rushlight stand, its wick long extinguished, remained where he had set it down in the panic of his flight.

With that exception--he eyed it darkly--no trace of the mysterious event of the night was visible. The room wore, or minute by minute assumed, its daylight aspect. Nor had he stood long gazing upon it before he breathed more freely and felt his heart lightened. What was to be thought, what could be thought in the circumstances, he was not prepared to say. But the panic of the night was gone with the darkness; and with it all thought--if in the depths he had really sunk so low--of relinquishing the woman he loved to the powers of evil.

To the powers of evil! To a fate as much worse than death as the soul and the mind are higher than the body! Was he really face to face with that? Was this house, so quiet, so peaceful, so commonplace, in reality the theatre of one of those manifestations of Satan's power which were the horror of the age? His senses affirmed it, and yet he doubted. Such things were, he did not deny it. Few men of the time denied it. But presented to him, brought within his experience, they shocked him to the point of disbelief. He found that from the thing which he was prepared to admit in the general, he dissented fiercely and instinctively in the particular.

What, the woman he loved! Was he to believe her delivered, soul and body, to the power of Satan? Never! All that was sane and wholesome and courageous in the man rebelled against the thought. He would not believe it. The pots and pans on the hearth, the simple implements of work and life, on which his eyes alighted wherever he turned them, and to none of which her hand was stranger, his memory of the love that was between her and her mother, his picture of the sacred life led by those two above stairs, all gave the lie to it! Her subjection to Basterga, her submission to contumely and to insult--there must be a reason for these, a natural and innocent reason could he hit on it. The strange occurrences of the night, the blasphemous words, the mocking laughter, at the worst they might not import a mastery over her. He shuddered as he recalled them, they rang in his ears and brain, the vividness of his memory of them was remarkable. But they might not have relation to her.

He stood long in moody thought, but his ears never for an instant relaxed their vigil, their hearkening for he knew not what. At length he passed into his bedcloset, and cooled his hot face with water and repaired his dress. Coming out again, he found the house still quiet, the door as he had left it, the daylight pouring in through the aperture. No one was moving, he was still safe from interruption; and a curiosity to visit the passage above and learn if aught abnormal was to be seen, took possession of him. It was just possible that Basterga had not returned; that the key still lay where he had dropped it!

He opened the door of the staircase and listened. He heard nothing, and he stole half-way up the flight and again stood. Still all was silent. He mounted more boldly then, and he was within four steps of the top--whence, turning his head a little, he could command the passage--when a sound arrested him. It was a sound easily explicable though it startled him; for a moment later Anne Royaume appeared at the foot of the upper flight of stairs, and moved along the passage towards him.

She did not see him, and he could have escaped unnoticed, had he retired at once. But he stood fixed to the spot by something in her appearance; a something that, as she moved slowly towards him, fancying herself alone, filled him with dread, and with something worse than dread--suspicion.

For if ever woman looked as if she had come from a witch's Sabbath, if ever girl, scarce more than child, walked as if she had plucked the fruit of the Tree and savoured it bitter, it was the girl before him. Despair--it seemed to him--rode her like a hag. Dejection, fear, misery, were in her whole bearing. Her eyes looked out from black hollows, her cheeks were pallid, her mouth was nerveless. Three sleepless nights, he thought, could not have changed a woman thus--no, nor thrice three; and he who had seen her last night and saw her now, gazed fascinated and bewildered, asking himself what had happened, what it meant.

Alas, for answer there rose the spectre which he had been striving to lay; the spectre that had for the men of that day so appalling, so shocking a reality. Witchcraft! The word rang in his brain. Witchcraft would account for this, ay, for all; for her long submission to vile behests and viler men; for that which he had heard in this house at midnight; for that which the Syndic had whispered of Basterga; for that which he noted in her now! Would account for it; ay, but by fixing her with a guilt, not of this world, terrible, abnormal: by fixing her with a love of things vile, unspeakable, monstrous, a love that must deprive her life of all joy, all sweetness, all truth, all purity! A guilt and a love that showed her thus!

But thus, for a moment only. The next she espied his face above the landing-edge, perceived that he watched her, detected, perhaps, something of his feeling. With startling abruptness her features underwent a change. Her cheeks flamed high, her eyes sparkled with resentment. "You!" she cried--and her causeless anger, her impatience of his presence, confirmed the dreadful idea he had conceived. "You!" she repeated. "How dare you come here? How dare you? What are you doing here? Your room is below. Go down, sir!"

He did not move, but he met her eyes; he tried to read her soul, his own quaking. And his look, sombre and stern--for he saw a gulf opening at his feet--should have given her pause. Instead, her anger faced him down and mastered him. "Do you hear me?" she flung at him. "Do you hear me? If you have aught to say, if you are not as those others, go down! Go down, and I will hear you there!"

He went down then, giving way to her, and she followed him. She closed the staircase door behind them; and that done, in the living-room with her he would have spoken. But with a glance at Gentilis' door, she silenced him, and led the way through the outer door to the open air. The hour was still early, the sun was barely risen. Save for a sentry sleeping at his post on the ramparts, there was no one within sight, and she crossed the open space to the low wall that looked down upon the Rhone. There, in a spot where the partly stripped branches which shaded the rampart hid them from the windows, she turned to him. "Now," she said--there was a smouldering fire in her eyes--"if you