The Bars of Iron - Ethel May Dell (top novels .txt) 📗

rebellion. "But I'm damned if I'm going to tell anybody! It's hell enough without that!"
Crowther's hand closed slowly and very steadily on his shoulder. "It's just hell that I want to save you from, sonny," he said. "It may seem the hardest part to you now, but if you shirk it you'll go further in still. I know very well what I'm saying. And it's just because you're man enough to feel this thing and not a brute beast to forget it, that it's hurt you so infernally all these years. But it'll hurt you worse, lad, it'll wring your very soul, if you keep it a secret between you and the woman you love. It's a big temptation, but--if I know you--you're going to stand up to it. She'll think the better of you for it in the end. But it'll be a shadow over both your lives if you don't. And there are some things that even a woman might find it hard to forgive."
He stopped. Piers' eyes were hard and fixed. He scarcely looked as if he heard. From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea. Close at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved in their sleep. But Piers made neither sound nor movement. He stood like an image of stone.
Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with unswerving patience for the result.
Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his voice,--humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I? Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me, Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back."
"You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision. "It's the only way out. Take it like a man, and you'll win through! Shirk it and--well, sonny, no shirker ever yet got anything worth having out of life. You know that as well as I do."
Piers straightened himself with a brief laugh. "Yes, I know that much. But--I sometimes ask myself if I'm any better than a shirker. Life is such a beastly farce so far as I am concerned. I never do anything. There's never anything to do."
"Oh, rats!" said Crowther, and smiled. "There are not many fellows who do half as much. If to-day is a fair sample of your life, I'm damned if it's an easy one."
"I'm used to it," said Piers quickly. "You know, I'm awfully fond of my grandfather--always have been. We suit each other marvellously well--in some ways." He paused a moment, then, with an effort, "I never told him either, Crowther. I never told a soul."
"No," Crowther said. "I don't see any reason that you should. But the woman you marry--she is different. If you take her into your inner life at all, she is bound to come upon it sooner or later. You must see it, lad. You know it in your heart."
"And you think she will marry me when she knows I'm a--murderer?" Piers uttered the word through clenched teeth. He had the haggard look of a man who has endured long suffering.
There was deep compassion in Crowther's eyes as he watched him. "I don't think--being a woman--she will put it in that way," he said, "not, that is, if she loves you."
"How else could she put it?" demanded Piers harshly. "Is there any other way of putting it? I killed the man intentionally. I told you so at the time. The fellow who taught me the trick warned me that it would almost certainly be fatal to a heavy man taken unawares. Why, he himself is now doing five years' penal servitude for the very same thing. Oh, I'm not a humbug, Crowther. I bolted from the consequences. You made me bolt. But I've often wished to heaven since that I'd stayed and faced it out. It would have been easier in the end, God knows."
"My dear fellow," Crowther said, "you will never convince me of that as long as you live. There was nothing to gain by your staying and all to lose. Consequences there were bound to be--and always are. But there was no good purpose to be served by wrecking your life. You were only a boy, and the luck was against you. I couldn't have stood by and seen you dragged under."
Piers groaned. "I sometimes wish I was dead!" he said.
"My dear chap, what's the good of that?" Crowther slipped his hand from his shoulder to his arm, and drew him quietly forward. "You've suffered infernally, but it's made a man of you. Don't forget that! It's the Sculptor and the Clay, lad. He knows how best to fashion a good thing. It isn't for the clay to cry out."
"Is that your point of view?" Piers spoke with reckless bitterness. "It isn't mine."
"You'll come to it," said Crowther gently.
They walked on for a space in silence, till turning they began to ascend the winding path that led up to the hotel,--the path which Piers had watched Crowther ascend that morning.
Side by side they mounted, till half-way up Crowther checked their progress. "Piers," he said, "I'm grateful to you for enduring my interference in this matter."
"Pshaw!" said Piers, "I owe you that much anyhow."
"You owe me nothing," said Crowther emphatically. "What I did for you, I did for myself. I've rather a weakness--it's a very ordinary one too--for trying to manage other people's concerns. And there's something so fine about you that I can't bear to stand aside and see you mess up your own. So, sonny,--for my satisfaction,--will you promise me not to take a wrong turning over this?"
He spoke very earnestly, with a pleading that could not give offence. Piers' face softened almost in spite of him. "You're an awfully good chap," he said.
"Promise me, lad!" pleaded Crowther, still holding his arm in a friendly grasp; then as Piers hesitated: "You know, I'm an older man than you are. I can see further. You'll be making your own hell if you don't."
"But why should I promise?" said Piers uneasily.
"Because I know you will keep a promise--even against your own judgment." Simply, with absolute conviction, Crowther made reply. "I shan't feel happy about you--unless you promise."
Piers smiled a little, but the lines about his mouth were grim. "Oh, all right," he said, after a moment, "I promise;--for I think you are right, Crowther. I think too that I should probably have to tell her--whether I wanted to or not. She's that sort--the sort that none but a skunk could deceive. But--" his voice altered suddenly; he turned brooding eyes upon the sleeping sea--"I wonder if she will forgive me," he said. "I--wonder."
"Does she love you?" said Crowther.
Piers' eyes flashed round at him. "I can make her love me," he said.
"You are sure?"
"I am sure."
"Then, my son, she'll forgive you. And if you want to play a straight game, tell her soon!" said Crowther.
And Piers, with all the light gone out of his eyes, answered soberly, "I will."


CHAPTER XXV
DROSS

In the morning they hired horses and went towards the mountains. The day was cloudless, but Sir Beverley would not be persuaded to accompany them.
"I'm not in the mood for exertion," he said to Piers. "Besides, I detest hired animals, always did. I shall spend an intellectual morning listening to the band."
"Hope you won't be bored, sir," said Piers.
"Your going or coming wouldn't affect that one way or another," responded Sir Beverley.
Whereat Piers laughed and went his way.
He was curiously light-hearted again that morning. The soft Southern air with its many perfumes exhilarated him like wine. The scent of the orange-groves rose as incense to the sun.
The animal he rode danced a skittish side-step from time to time. It was impossible to go with sober mien.
"It's a good land," said Crowther.
"Flowing with milk and honey," laughed Piers, with his eyes on the olive-clothed slopes. "But there's no country like one's own, what?"
"No country like England, you mean," said Crowther.
"Of course I do, but I was too polite to say so."
"You needn't be polite to me," said Crowther with his slow smile. "And England happens to be my country. I am as British--" he glanced at Piers' dark face--"perhaps even a little more so--than you are."
"I plead guilty to an Italian grandmother," said Piers. "But you--I thought you were Colonial."
"I am British born and bred," said Crowther.
"You?" Piers looked at him in surprise. "You don't belong to Australia then?"
"Only by adoption. I was the son of an English parson. I was destined for the Church myself for the first twenty years of my life." Crowther was still smiling, but his eyes had left Piers; they scanned the horizon contemplatively.
"Great Scott!" said Piers. "Lucky escape for you, what?"
"I didn't think so at the time," Crowther spoke thoughtfully, sitting motionless in his saddle and gazing straight before him. "You see, I was keen on the religious life. I was narrow in my views--I was astonishingly narrow; but I was keen."
"Ye gods!" said Piers.
He looked at the square, strong figure incredulously. Somehow he could not associate Crowther with any but a vigorous, outdoor existence.
"You would never have stuck to it," he said, after a moment. "You'd have loathed the life."
"I don't think so," said Crowther, in his deliberate way, "though I admit I probably shouldn't have expanded much. It wasn't easy to give it up at the time."
"What made you do it?" asked Piers.
"Necessity. When my father died, my mother was left with a large family and quite destitute. I was the eldest, and a sheep-farming uncle--a brother of hers--offered me a wage sufficient to keep her going if I would give up the Church and join him. I was already studying. I could have pushed through on my own; but I couldn't have supported her. So I had to go. That was the beginning of my Colonial life. It was five-and-twenty years ago, and I've never been Home since."
He turned his horse quietly round to continue the ascent. The road was steep. They went slowly side by side.
Crowther went on in a grave, detached way, as though he were telling the story of another man's life. "I kicked hard at going, but I've lived to be thankful that I went. I had to rough it, and it did me good. It was just that I wanted. There's never much fun for a stranger in a strange land, sonny, and it took me some time to shake down. In fact just for a while I thought I couldn't stand it. The loneliness out there on those acres and acres of grass-land was so awful; for I was city-bred. I'd never been in the desert, never been out of the sound of church-bells." He began to smile again. "I'd even got a sort of feeling that God wasn't to be found outside civilization," he said. "I think we get ultra-civilized in our ideas sometimes. And the emptiness was almost overpowering. It was like being shut down behind bars of iron with occasional glimpses of hell to enliven the monotony. That was when one went to the townships, and saw life. They didn't tempt me at first. I was too narrow even for that. But the loneliness went on eating and eating into me till I got so desperate in the end I was ready to snatch at any diversion." He paused a moment, and into his steady