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

have aught to say to me, say it. Say it now!"

He hesitated. He had had time to think, and he found the burden laid upon him heavy. "I do not know," he answered, "that I have any right to speak to you."

"Right!" she cried; and let her bitterness have way in that word. "Right! Does any stay for that where I am concerned? Or ask my leave, or crave my will, sir? Right? You have the same right to flout and jeer and scorn me, the same right to watch and play the spy on me, to hearken at my door, and follow me, that they have! Ay, and the same right to bid me come and go, and answer at your will, that others have! Do you scruple a little at beginning?" she continued mockingly. "It will wear off. It will come easy by-and-by! For you are like the others!"

"No!"

"You are as the others! You begin as they began!" she repeated, giving the reins to her indignation. "The day you came, last night even, I thought you different. I deemed you"--she pressed her hand to her bosom as if she stilled a pain--"other than you are! I confess it. But you are their fellow. You begin as they began, by listening on stairs and at doors, by dogging me and playing eavesdropper, by hearkening to what I say and do. Right?" she repeated the word bitterly, mockingly, with fierce unhappiness. "You have the right that they have! The same right!"

"Have I?" he asked slowly. His face was sombre and strangely old.

"Yes!"

"Then how did I gain it?" he retorted with a dark look. "How"--his tone was as gloomy as his face--"did they gain it? Or--he?"

"He?" The flame was gone from her face. She trembled a little.

"Yes, he--Basterga," he replied, his eyes losing no whit of the change in her. "How did he gain the right which he has handed on to others, the right to shame you, to lay hand on you, to treat you as he does? This is a free city. Women are no slaves here. What then is the secret between you and him?" Claude continued grimly. "What is your secret?"

"My secret!" Her passion dwindled under his eyes, under his words.

"Ay," Claude answered, "and his! His secret and yours. What is the thing between you and him?" he continued, his eyes fixed on her, "so dark, so weighty, so dangerous, you must needs for it suffer his touch, bear his look, be smooth to him though you loathe him? What is it?"

"Perhaps--love," she muttered, with a forced smile. But it did not deceive him.

"You loathe him!" he said.

"I may have loved him--once," she faltered.

"You never loved him," he retorted. All the shyness of youth, all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him this power over you?"

"Nothing," she stammered, pale to the lips.

"Nothing! And was it for nothing that you were startled when you found me upstairs? When you found me watching you five minutes ago, was it for nothing that you flamed with rage----"

"You had no right to be there."

"No? Yet it was an innocent thing enough--to be there," he answered. "To be there, this morning." And then, giving the words all the meaning of which his voice was capable, "To have been there last night," he continued, "were a different thing perhaps."

"Were you there?" Her voice was barely audible.

"I was."

It was dreadful to see how she sank under that, how she cringed before him, her anger gone, her colour gone, the light fled from her eyes--eyes grown suddenly secretive. It was a minute, it seemed a minute at least, before she could frame a word, a single word. Then, "What do you know?" she whispered. But for the wall against which she leant, she must have fallen.

"What do I know?"

She nodded, unable to repeat the words.

"I was at the door of Basterga's room last night."

"Last night!"

"Yes. I had the key of his room in my hand. I was putting it into the lock when I heard----"

"Hush!" She stepped forward, she would have put her hand over his mouth. "Hush! Hush!"

The terror of her eyes, the glance she cast behind her, echoed the word more clearly than her lips. "Hush! Hush!"

He could not bear to look at her. Her voice, her terror, the very defence she had striven to make confirmed him in his worst suspicions. The thing was too certain, too apparent; in mercy to himself as well as to her, he averted his eyes.

They fell on the hills on which he had gazed that morning barely a fortnight earlier, when the autumn haze had mirrored her face; and all his thoughts, his heart, his fancy had been hers, her prize, her easy capture. And now he dared not look on her face. He could not bear to see it distorted by the terrors of an evil conscience. Even her words when she spoke again jarred on him.

"You knew the voice?" she whispered.

"I did not know it," he answered brokenly. "I knew--whose it was."

"Mine?"

"Yes." He scarcely breathed the word.

She did not cry "Hush!" this time, but she caught her breath; and after a moment's pause, "Still--you did not recognise it?" she murmured. "You did not know that it was my voice?" Could it be that after all she hoped to blind him?

"I did not."

"Thank God!"

"Thank God?" He stared at her, echoing the words in his astonishment. How dared she name the sacred name?

She read his thoughts. "Yes," she said hardily, "why not?"

He turned on her. "Why not?" he cried. "Why not? You dare to thank Him, who last night denied Him? You dare to name His name in the light, who in the darkness----You! And you are not afraid?"

"Afraid?" she repeated. There was a strange light, almost a smile he would have deemed it had he thought that possible, in her face, "Nay, perhaps; perhaps. For even the devils, we are told, believe and tremble."

His jaw fell; for a moment he gazed at her in sheer bewilderment. Then, as the full import of her words and her look overwhelmed him, he turned to the wall and bowed his face on his arms. His whole being shook, his soul was sick. What was he to say to her? What was he to do? Flee from her presence as from the presence of Antichrist? Avoid her henceforth as he valued his soul? Pluck even the memory of her from his mind? Or wrestle with her, argue with her, snatch her from the foul spells and enchantments that now held her, the tool and chosen instrument of the evil one, in their fiendish grip?

He felt a Churchman's horror--Protestant as he was--at the thought of a woman possessed. But for that reason, and because he was in the way of becoming a minister, was it not his duty to measure his strength with the Adversary? Alas! he could conceive of no words, no thoughts, no arguments adequate to that strife. Had he been a Papist he might have turned with hope, even with pious confidence, to the Holy Stoup, the Bell and Book and Candle, to the Relics, and hundred Exorcisms of his Church. But the colder and more abstract faith of Calvin, while it admitted the possibility of such possessions, supplied no weapons of a material kind.

He groaned in his impotence, stifled by the unwholesome atmosphere of his thoughts. He dared not even ponder too long on what she was who stood beside him; nor peer too closely through the murky veil that hid her being. To do so might be to risk his soul, to become a partner in her guilt. He might conjecture what dark thoughts and dreadful aptitudes lurked behind the girl's gentle mask, he might strive to learn by what black arts she had been seduced, what power over visible things had been the price of her apostasy, what Sabbath-mark, seal and pledge of that apostasy she bore--but at what peril! At what risk of soul and body! His brain reeled, his blood raced at the thought.

Such things had lately been, he knew. Had there not been a dreadful outbreak in Alsace--Alsace, the neighbour almost of Geneva--within the last few years. In Thann and Turckheim, places within a couple of days' journey of Geneva, scores had suffered for such practices; and some of these not old and ugly, but young and handsome, girls and pages of the Court and young wives! Had not the most unlikely persons confessed to practices the most dreadful? The most innocent in appearance to things unspeakable!

But--with a sudden revulsion of feeling--that was in Alsace, he told himself. That was in Alsace! Such things did not happen here at men's elbows! He must have been mad to think it or dream it. And, lifting his head, he looked about him. The sun had risen higher, the rich vale of the Rhone, extended at his feet, lay bathed in air and light and brightness. The burnished hills, the brown, tilled slopes, the gleaming river, the fairness of that rare landscape clad in morning freshness, gave the lie to the suspicions he had been indulging, gave the lie, there and then, to possibilities he dared not have denied in school or pulpit. Nature spoke to his heart, and with smiling face denied the unnatural. In Bamberg and Wurzburg and Alsace, but not here! In Magdeburg, but not here! In Edinburgh, but not here! The world of beauty and light and growth on which he looked would have none of the dark devil's world of which he had been dreaming: the dark devil's world which the sophists and churchmen and the weak-witted of twoscore generations had built up!

He turned and looked at her, the scales fallen from his eyes. Though she was still pale, she had recovered her composure and she met his gaze without blenching. But now, behind the passive defiance, grave rather than sullen, which she presented to his attack, the weakness, the helplessness, the heart pain of the woman were plain.

He discerned them, and while he hungered for a more explicit denial, for a cry of indignant protest, for a passionate repudiation, he found some comfort in that look. And his heart spoke. "I do not believe it!" he cried impetuously, in perfect forgetfulness of the fact that he had not put his charge into words. "I do not--I will not! Only say that it is false! And I will say no more."

Her answer was as cold water thrown upon him. "I will tell you nothing," she answered.

"Why not? Why not?" he cried.

"You ask why not," she answered slowly. "Are you so short of memory? Is it so long since, against my will and prayers, you came into yonder house--that you forget what I said and what I did? And what you promised?"

"My God!" he cried in excitement. "You do not know where you stand! You do not know what perils threaten you. This is no time," he continued, holding out his hands