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

supporting with a man's fortitude the trials of her position, trials of the bitterness of which she had given him proof--it was impossible, in a word, to watch her in her daily life, without perceiving the wickedness as well as the folly of the thought which had possessed him.

True, the more he saw of her the graver seemed the mystery; and the more deeply he wondered. But he no longer dreaded the answer to the riddle; nor did he fear to meet at some turn or corner a Megaera head that should freeze his soul. Wickedness there might be, cruelty there might be, and shame; but the blood ran too briskly in his veins and he had looked too often into the girl's candid eyes--reading something there which had not been there formerly--to fear to find either at her door.

He had taken to coming to the living-room a little before nightfall; there he would seat himself beside the hearth while she prepared the evening meal. The glow of the wood-fire, reflected in rows of burnished pewters, or given back by the night-backed casements, the savour of the coming meal, the bubbling of the black pot between which and the table her nimble feet carried her a dozen times in as many minutes, the pleasant, homely room with its touches of refinement and its winter comfort, these were excuses enough had he not brought the book which lay unheeded on his knee.

But in truth he offered her no excuse. With scarce a word an understanding had grown up between them that not a million words could have made more clear. Each played the appropriated part. He looked and she bore the look, and if she blushed the fire was warrant, and if he stared it was the blind man's hour between day and night, and why should he not sit idle as well as another? Soon there was not a turn of her head or a line of her figure that he did not know; not a trick of her walk, not a pose of her hand as she waited for a pot to boil that he could not see in the dark; not a gleam from her hair as she stooped to the blaze, nor a turn of her wrist as she shielded her face that was not as familiar to him as if he had known her from childhood.

In these hours she let the mask fall. The apathy, which had been the least natural as it had been the most common garb of her young face, and which had grown to be the cover and veil of her feelings, dropped from her. Seated in the shadow, while she moved, now in the glow of the burning embers, now obscured, he read her mind without disguise--save in one dark nook--watched unrebuked the eye fall and the lip tremble, or in rarer moments saw the shy smile dimple the corner of her cheek. Not seldom she stood before him sad: sad without disguise, her bowed head and drooping shoulders the proof of gloomy thoughts, that strayed, he fancied, far from her work or her companion. And sometimes a tear fell and she wiped it away, making no attempt to hide it; and sometimes she would shiver and sigh as if in pain or fear.

At these times he longed for Basterga's throat; and the blood of old Enguerrande de Beauvais, his ancestor, dust these four hundred years at "Damietta of the South," raced in him, and he choked with rage and grief, and for the time could scarcely see. Yet with this pulse of wrath were mingled delicious thrills. The tear which she did not hide from him was his gage of love. The brooding eye, the infrequent smile, the start, the reverie were for him only, and for no other. They were the gift to him of her secret life, her inmost heart.

It was an odd love-making, and bizarre. To Grio, even to men more delicate and more finely wrought, it might have seemed no love-making at all. But the wood-smoke that perfumed the air, sweetened it, the firelight wrapped it about, the pots and pans and simple things of life, amid which it passed, hallowed it. His eyes attending her hither and thither without reserve, without concealment, unabashed, laid his heart at her feet, not once, but a hundred times in the evening; and as often, her endurance of the look, more rarely her sudden blush or smile, accepted the offering.

And scarce a word said: for though they had the room to themselves, they knew that they were never alone or unheeded. Basterga, indeed, sat above stairs and only descended to his meals; and Grio also was above when he was not at the tavern. But Louis sulked in his closet beside them, divided from them only by a door, whence he might emerge at any minute. As a fact he would have emerged many times, but for two things. The first was his marked face, which he was chary of showing; the second, the notion which he had got that the balance of things in the house was changing, and the reign of petty bullying, in which he had so much delighted, approaching its end. With Basterga exposed to arrest, and the girl's help become of value to the authorities, it needed little acumen to discern this. He still feared Basterga; nay, he lived in such terror, lest the part he had played should come to the scholar's ears, that he prayed for his arrest night and morning, and whenever during the day an especial fit of dread seized him. But he feared Anne also, for she might betray him to Basterga; and of young Mercier's quality--that he was no Tissot to be brow-beaten, or thrust aside--he had had proof on the night of the fracas at supper. Essentially a coward, Louis' aim was to be on the stronger side; and once persuaded that this was the side on which they stood, he let them be.

On several consecutive evenings the two passed an hour or more in this silent communion. On the last the door of Louis' room stood open, the young man had not come in, and for the first time they were really alone. But the fact did not at once loosen Claude's tongue; and if the girl noticed it, or expected aught to come of it, more than had come of their companionship on other evenings, she hid her feelings with a woman's ease. He remarked, however, that she was more thoughtful and downcast than usual, and several times he saw her break off in the middle of a task and listen nervously as for something she expected. Presently:--

"Are you listening for Louis?" he asked.

She turned on him, her eyes less kind than usual. "No," she said, almost defiantly. "Was I listening?"

"I thought so," he said.

She turned away again, and went on with her work. But by-and-by as she stooped over the fire a tear fell and pattered audibly in the wood-ash on the hearth; and another. With an impatient gesture she wiped away a third. He saw all--she made no attempt to hide them--and he bit his lip and drove his finger-ends into his palms in the effort to be silent. Presently he had his reward.

"I am sorry," she said in a low tone. "I was listening, and I knew I was. I do not know why I deceived you."

"Why will you not tell me all?" he cried.

"I cannot!" she answered, her breast heaving passionately. "I cannot!" For the first time in his knowledge of her, she broke down completely, and sinking on a bench with her back to the table she sobbed bitterly, her face in her hands. For some minutes she rocked herself to and fro in a paroxysm of trouble.

He had risen and stood watching her awkwardly, longing to comfort her, but ignorant how to go about it, and feeling acutely his helplessness and his _gaucherie_. Sad she had always been, and at her best despondent, with gleams of cheerfulness as fitful as brief. But this evening her abandonment to her grief convinced him that something more than ordinary was amiss, that some danger more serious than ordinary threatened. He felt no surprise therefore when, a little later, she arrested her sobbing, raised her head, and with suspended breath and tear-stained face listened with that scared intentness which had impressed him before.

She feared! He could not be mistaken. Fear looked out of her strained eyes, fear hung breathless on her parted lips. He was sure of it. And "Is it Basterga?" he cried. "Is it of him that you are afraid? If you are----"

"Hush!" she cried, raising her hand in warning. "Hush!" And then, "You did not--hear anything?" she asked. For an instant her eyes met his.

"No." He met her look, puzzled; and, obeying her gesture, he listened afresh. "No, I heard nothing. But----"

He heard nothing even now, nothing; but whatever it was sharpened her hearing to an abnormal pitch, it was clear that she did. She was on her feet; with a startled cry she was round the table and half-way across the room, while he stared, the word suspended on his lips. A second, and her hand was on the latch of the staircase door. Then as she opened it, he sprang forward to accompany her, to help her, to protect her if necessary. "Let me come!" he said. "Let me help you. Whatever it is, I can do something."

She turned on him fiercely. "Go back!" she said. All the confidence, the gentleness, the docility of the last three days were gone; and in their place suspicion glared at him from eyes grown spiteful as a cat's. "Go back!" she repeated. "I do not want you! I do not want any one, or any help! Or any protection! Go, do you hear, and let me be!"

As she ceased to speak, a sound from above stairs--a sound which this time, the door being open, did reach his ears, froze the words on his lips. It was the sound of a voice, yet no common voice, Heaven be thanked! A moment she continued to confront him, her face one mute, despairing denial! Then she slammed the door in his teeth, and he heard her panting breath and fleeing footsteps speed up the stairs and along the passage, and--more faintly now--he heard her ascend the upper flight. Then--silence.

Silence! But he had heard enough. He paused a moment irresolute, uncertain, his hand raised to the latch. Then the hand fell to his side, he turned, and went softly--very softly back to the hearth. The firelight playing on his face showed it much moved; moved and softened almost to the semblance of a woman's. For there were tears in his eyes--eyes singularly bright; and his features worked, as if he had some ado to repress a sob. In truth he had. In a breath, in the time it takes to utter a single sound, he had hit on the secret, he had come to the bottom of the mystery, he had learnt that which Basterga, favoured by the position of his room on the upper floor, had learned two months before, that which Grio might have learned, had he been anything but the dull gross toper he was! He had learned, or in a moment of intuition guessed--all. The power of Basterga, that power over the girl which had so much puzzled and perplexed him, was his also now, to use or misuse, hold or resign.

Yet his first feeling was not one of joy; nor for that matter his second. The impression went deeper, went to the