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

out protesting hands to him. "And my mother? My mother, who never injured any one or harmed a hair of any one's head! That she--that they should say that of her! That they should set that to her! But I will go this instant," impetuously, "to the child's mother. She will hear me. She will know and believe me. A mother? Yes, I will go to her!"

"Not now," he said. "Not now, Anne!"

"Yes, now," she persisted, deaf to his voice. She snatched up her hood from the ground on which it had fallen, and began to put it on.

He seized her arm. "No, not now," he said firmly. "You shall not go now. Wait until daylight. She will listen to you more coolly then."

She resisted him. "Why?" she said. "Why?"

"People fancy things at night," he urged. "I know it is so. If she saw you enter out of the darkness"--the girl with her burning eyes, her wet cheeks, her disordered hair looked wild enough--"she might refuse to believe you. Besides----"

"What?"

"I will not have you go now," he said firmly. That instant it had flashed upon him that one of the faces he had seen outside was the face of the dead child's mother. "I will not let you go," he repeated. "Go in the daylight. Go to-morrow morning. Go then, if you will!" He did not choose to tell her that he feared for her instant safety if she went now; that, if he had his will, the streets would see her no more for many a day.

She gave way. She took off her hood, and laid it on the table. But for several minutes she stood, brooding darkly and stormily, her hands fingering the strings. To foresee is not always to be forearmed. She had lived for months in daily and hourly expectation of the blow which had fallen; but not the more easily for that could she brook the concrete charge. Her heart burned, her soul was on fire. Justice, give us justice though the heavens fall, is an instinct planted deep in man's nature! Of the Mysterious Passion of our Lord our finite minds find no part worse than the anguish of innocence condemned. A child? She to hurt a child? And her mother? Her mother, so harmless, so ignorant, so tormented! She to hurt a child?

After a time, nevertheless, the storm began to subside. But with it died the hope which is inherent in revolt; in proportion as she grew more calm the forlornness of her situation rose more clearly before her. At last that had happened which she had so long expected to happen. The thing was known. Soon the full consequences would be upon her, the consequences on which she dared not dwell. Shudderingly she tried to close her eyes to the things that might lie before her, to the things at which Grio had hinted, the things of which she had lain thinking--even while they were distant and uncertain--through many a night of bitter fear and fevered anticipation.

They were at hand now, and though she averted her thoughts, she knew it. But the wind is tempered to the shorn. Even as the prospect of future ill can dominate the present, embitter the sweetest cup, and render thorny the softest bed, so, sometimes, present good has the power to obscure the future evil. As Anne sank back on the settle, her trembling limbs almost declining to bear her, her eyes fell on her companion. Failing to rouse her, he had seated himself on the other side of the hearth, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his hands, in an attitude of deep thought. And little by little, as she looked at him, her cheeks grew, if not red, less pale, her eyes lost their tense and hopeless gaze. She heaved a quivering sigh, and slowly carried her look round the room.

Its homely comfort, augmented by the hour and the firelight, seemed to lap them round. The door was locked, the shutters were closed, the lamp burned cheerfully. And he sat opposite--sat as if they had been long married. The colour grew deeper in her face as she gazed; she breathed more quickly; her eyes shone. What evil cannot be softened, what misfortune cannot be lightened to a woman by the knowledge that she is loved by the man she loves? That where all have fled, he remains, and that neither fear of death nor word of man can keep him from her side?

He looked up in the end, and caught the look on her face, the look that a woman bestows on one man only in her life. In a moment he was on his knees beside her, holding her hands, covering them with kisses, vowing to save her, to save her--or to die with her!


CHAPTER XX.

IN THE DARKENED ROOM.

Claude flung the cloak from his head and shoulders, and sat up. It was morning--morning, after that long, dear sitting together--and he stared confusedly about him. He had been dreaming; all night he had slept uneasily. But the cry that had roused him, the cry that had started that quick beating of the heart, the cry that still rang in his waking ears and frightened him, was no dream.

As he rose to his feet, his senses began to take in the scene; he remembered what had happened and where he was. The shutters were lowered and open. The cold grey light of the early morning at this deadest season of the year fell cheerlessly on the living-room; in which for the greater safety of the house he had insisted on passing the night. Anne, whose daily task it was to open the shutters, had been down then: she must have been down, or whence the pile of fresh cones and splinters that crackled, and spirted flame about the turned log. Perhaps it was her mother's cry that had roused him; and she had re-ascended to her room.

He strode to the staircase door, opened it softly and listened. No, all was silent above; and then a new notion struck him, and he glanced round. Her hood was gone. It was not on the table on which he had seen it last night.

It was so unlikely, however, that she had gone out without telling him, that he dismissed the notion; and, something recovered from the strange agitation into which the cry had cast him, he yawned. He returned to the hearth and knelt and re-arranged the sticks so that the air might have freer access to the fire. Presently he would draw the water for her, and fill the great kettle, and sweep the floor. The future might be gloomy, the prospect might lower, but the present was not without its pleasures.

All his life his slowness to guess the truth on this occasion was a puzzle to him. For the materials were his. Slowly, gradually, as he crouched sleepily before the fire, it grew upon him that there was a noise in the air; a confused sound, not of one cry, but of many, that came from the street, from the rampart. A noise, now swelling a little, now sinking a little, that seemed as he listened not so distant as it had sounded a while ago. Not distant at all, indeed; quite close--now! A sound of rushing water, rather soothing; or, as it swelled, a sound of a crowd, a gibing, mocking crowd. Yes, a crowd. And then in one instant the change was wrought.

He was on his feet; he was at the door. He, who a moment before had nodded over the fire, watching the flames grow, was transformed in five seconds into a furious man, tugging at the door, wrestling madly with the unyielding oak. Wrestling, and still the noise rose! And still he strained in vain, back and sinew, strained until with a cry of despair he found that he could not win. The door was locked, the key was gone! He was a prisoner!

And still the noise that maddened him, rose. He sprang to the right-hand window, the window nearest the commotion. He tore open a panel of the small leaded panes, and thrust his head between the bars. He saw a crowd; for an instant, in the heart of the crowd and raised above it, he saw an uplifted arm and a white woman's face from which blood was flowing. He drew in his head, and laid his hands to one of the bars and flung his weight this way and that, flung it desperately, heedless of injury. But in vain. The lead that soldered the bar into the strong stone mullion held, and would have held against the strength of four. With heaving breast, and hands from which the blood was starting, he stood back, glared round him, then with a cry flung himself upon the other window, tore it open and seized a bar--the middle one of the three. It was loose he remembered. God! why had he not thought of it before? Why had he wasted time?

He wasted no more, with those shouts of cruel glee in his ears. The bar came out in his hands. He thrust himself feet first through the aperture. Slight as he was, it was small for him, and he stuck fast at the hips, and had to turn on his side. The rough edges of the bars scraped the skin, but he was through, and had dropped to his feet, the bar which he had plucked out still in his hands. For a fraction of a second, as he alighted, his eyes took in the crowd, and the girl at bay against the wall. She was raised a little above her tormentors by the steps on which she had taken refuge.

On one side her hair hung loose, and the cheek beneath it was cut and bleeding, giving her a piteous and tragic aspect. Four out of five of her assailants were women; one of these had torn her face with her nails. Streaks of mud were mingled with the blood which ran down her neck; and even as Claude recovered himself after the drop from the window, a missile, eluding the bent arm with which she strove to shield her face, struck and bespattered her throat where the collar of her frock had been torn open--perhaps by the same rough clutch which had dragged down her hair. The ring about her--like all crowds in the beginning--were strangely silent; but a yell of derision greeted this success, and a stone flew, narrowly missing her, and another, and another. A woman, holding a heavy Bible after the fashion of a shield, was stooping and striking at her knees with a stick, striving to bring her to the ground; and with the cruel laughter that hailed the hag's ungainly efforts were mingled other and more ugly sounds, low curses, execrations, and always one fatal word, "Witch! Witch!"--fatal word spat at her by writhing mouths, hissed at her by pale lips, tossed broadcast on the cold morning wind, to breed wherever it flew fear and hate and suspicion. For, even while they mocked her they feared her, and shielded themselves against her power with signs and crossings and the Holy Book.

To all, curse and blow and threat, she had only one word. Striving patiently to shield her face, "Let me go!" she wailed pitifully. "Let me go! Let me go!" Strange to say, she cried even that but softly; as who should say, "If you will not, kill me quietly, kill me without noise!" Ay, even then, with the blood running down her face, and with those eyes more cruel than men's eyes