The Spinners

by Eden Phillpotts

CHAPTER XXII

THE HIDING-PLACE

No doubt existed as to the murderer of Raymond Ironsyde, for on the night of his death, Abel Dinnett did not return home. He had left work at the usual time, but had not taken his bicycle; and from that day he was seen no more.

It appeared impossible that he could evade the hue and cry, but twenty-four hours passed and there came no report of his capture. Little mystery marked the matter, save that of Abel's disappearance. His animosity towards his father was known and it had culminated thus. None imagined that capture would be long delayed; but forty-eight hours passed and still there came no news of him.

Estelle Waldron fled from all thought of him at first; then she reflected upon him—driven to do so by a conviction concerning him that commanded action from her.

On the day after the coroner's inquest, for the first time she sought Sabina. The meeting was of an affecting character, for each very fully realised the situation from the standpoint of the other. Sabina was the more distressed, yet she entertained definite convictions and declared herself positive concerning certain facts. Estelle questioned her conclusions and, indeed, refused to believe them.

"I hope you'll understand my coming, Sabina," she said.

She was clad, as usual, in a grey Harris tweed, and the elder wondered why she did not wear black. Estelle's face was haggard and worn, with much suffering. But it seemed that the last dregs of her own cup were not yet drunk, for an excruciating problem faced her. There was none to help her solve it, yet she took it to Sabina.

"I thought you'd come, sooner or later. This is a thing beyond any human power to make better. God knows I mourn for you far more than I mourn for myself. I don't mourn for myself. Long ago I saw that the living can't be happy, though the dead may be. The dead may be—we'll hope it for them."

"It's death to me as well as to him," said Estelle simply. "As far as I'm concerned, I feel that I'm dead from now and shall live on as somebody different—somebody I don't know yet. All that we were and had and hoped—everything is gone with him. The future was to be spent in trying to do good things. We shared the same ideas about it. But that's all over. I'm left—single-handed, Sabina."

"Yes, I know how you feel."

"I can't bear to think of it yet. I didn't come to talk about him, or myself. I came to talk about Abel."

"I can't tell you anything about him."

"I know you know nothing. I think I know more than you do."

"Know more of him than I do?" asked the mother. There was almost a flash of jealousy in her voice. But it faded and she sighed.

"No, no. You needn't fret for him. They may find him, or they may not; but they'll not find him alive."

Estelle started. She believed most steadfastly that Abel was alive, and felt very certain that she knew his hiding-place.

"Why do you think that?" she asked. "You might hope it; but why do you think it? Have you any good reason for thinking it?"

"There are some things you know," answered the mother. "You know them without being told and without any reason. You neither hope nor fear—you know. I might ask you how you know where he is. But I don't want to ask you. I've taken my good-bye of him, poor, wasted life. How had God got the heart to let him live for this? People will say it was fitting, and happened by the plan of his Maker. No man's child—not even God's. It's all hidden, all dark to me. It's worked itself out to the bitter end. Men would have been too kind to work it out like this. Only God could. I can't say much to you. I'm very sorry for you. You were caught up into the thing and didn't know, or guess, what you were thrusting yourself into. But now it's your turn, and you'll have to wait long years, as I did, before you can look at life again without passion or sorrow."

"It doesn't matter about me. But, if you feel Abel is dead, I feel just as strongly that he is alive, and that this isn't the end of him."

Sabina considered.

"I know him better than you, and I know Providence better than you do," she answered. "It's like the wonder you are—to think on him without hate. But you're wasting your time and showing pity for nothing. He's beyond pity. Why, I don't pity him—his mother."

"I'm only doing what Raymond tried to do so often and failed—what he would have me do now if he'd lived. And if I know something that nobody else does, I must use that knowledge. I'm sorry I do know, Sabina, but I do."

"You waste your time, I expect. If the hunt that's going on doesn't find him, how shall you do it? He's at the bottom of the sea, I hope."

They parted and the same night Estelle set out to satisfy her will. She told nobody of her purpose, for she knew that her father would not have allowed her to pursue it. Waldron was utterly crushed by the death of his friend and could not as yet realise the loss.

Nor did Estelle realise it, save in fitful and fleeting agonies. As yet the full significance of the event was by no means weighed by her. It meant far more than she could measure and receive and accept in so brief a space of time. Seen from the standpoint of this death, every plan of her life, every undertaking for the future, was dislocated. She left that complete ruin for the present. There was no hurry to restore, or set about rebuilding the fabric of her future. She would have all her life to do it in.

The thought of Abel came as a demand to her justice. Her knowledge, amounting to a conviction, required action. The nature of the action she did not know, but something urged her to reach him if she could. For she believed him mad. Great torture of spirit had overtaken her under her loss; but upon this extreme grief, ugly and incessant, obtruded the thought of Abel, the secret of his present refuge and the impulse to approach him. Her personal suffering established rather than shook her own high standards. She had promised the boy never to tell anybody of the haunt he had shown her under the roof in the old store at West Haven; and if most women might now have forgotten such a promise, Estelle did not. But she very strenuously argued against the spiritual impulse to seek him, for every physical instinct rose against doing so. To do this was surely not required of her, for whereunto would it lead? What must be the result of any such meeting? It might be dreadful; it could not fail to be futile. Yet all mental effort to escape the task proved vain. Her very grief edged her old, austere, chivalrous acceptance of duty. She felt that justice called her to this ordeal, and she went—with no fixed purpose save to see him and urge him to surrender himself for his own peace if he could understand. No personal fear touched her reflections. She might have welcomed fear in these unspeakable moments of her life, for she was little enamoured of living after Raymond Ironsyde died. The thought of death for herself had not been distasteful at that time.

She went fearlessly, when all slept and her going and coming would not be observed. She left her home at a moonless midnight, took candle and matches, dressed in her stoutest clothes and walked over North Hill towards Bridport. But at the eastern shoulder of the downs she descended through a field and struck the road again just at the fork where Raymond had perished.

Then she struck into the West Haven way and soon slipped under the black mass of the old store. The night was cloudy and still. No wind blew and the sigh of the sea beneath the shelving beaches close at hand, had sunk to a murmur. West Haven lay lost in darkness. The old store had been searched, as many other empty buildings, for the fugitive; but he was not specially associated with this place, save in the mind of Estelle. The police had hunted it carefully, no more, and she guessed that his eerie under the roof, only reached by a somewhat perilous climb through a broken window, would not be discovered.

She remembered also that there were some students of Raymond's murder who did not associate Abel with it. Such held that only accident and coincidence had made him run away on the night of Ironsyde's end. They argued that in these cases the obvious always proved erroneous, and the theory most transparently rational seldom led the way to the truth.

But she had never doubted about that. It seemed already a commonplace of knowledge, a lifetime old, that Abel had destroyed his father, and that he must be insane to have ruined his own life in this manner.

She ascended cautiously through the darkness, reached a gap—once a window—from which her ascent must be made, and listened for a few moments to hear if anything stirred above her.

It seemed as though the old store was full of noises, for the fingers of decay never cease from picking and, in the silence of night, one can best hear their stealthy activities. Little falls of fragments sounded loudly, even echoed, in this great silence. There was almost a perpetual rustle and whisper; and once a thud and skurry, when a rat displaced a piece of mortar which fell from the rotting plaster. Dark though the heaven was and black the outer night, it had the quality that air never loses and she saw the sky as possessed of illumination in contrast with its setting of the broken window. Within all was blankly black; from above there came no sound.

She climbed to the window ledge, felt for the nails that Abel had hammered in to hold his feet and soon ascended through a large gap under the eaves of the store. Some shock had thrown out a piece of brickwork here. Seen from the ground the aperture looked trifling and had indeed challenged no attention; but it was large enough to admit a man.

For a moment Estelle stood in this aperture before entering the den within. She raised her voice, which fluttered after her climb, and called to him.

"Abel! Abel! It's Estelle."

There came the thought, even as she spoke, that he might answer with a bullet; but he answered not at all. She felt thankful for the silence and hoped that he might have deserted his retreat. Perhaps, indeed, he had never come to it; and yet it seemed impossible that he had for two days escaped capture unless here concealed. It occurred to her that he might wander out by night and return before day. He might even now be behind her, to intercept her return. Still no shadow of fear shook her mind or body. She felt not a tremor. All that concerned her conscience was now completed and she hoped that it would be possible to dismiss from her thoughts the fellow creature who had destroyed her joy of life and worked evil so far reaching. She could leave him now to his destiny and feel under no compulsion to relate the incidents of her nocturnal search. Had he been there, she would have risked the meeting, urged him to surrender and then left him if he allowed her to do so. She would never have given him up, or broken her promise to keep his secret.

But the chamber under the roof was large and she did not leave it without making sure that he was neither hiding nor sleeping within it. She entered, lighted her candle and examined a triangular recess formed by the converging beams of the roof above her and the joists under her feet.

The boy had been busy here. There were evidences of him—evidences of a child rather than a man. Boyish forethought stared her in the face and staggered her by its ghastly incongruities with the things this premeditating youth had done. Here were provisions, not such as a man would have selected to stand a siege, but the taste of a schoolboy. She looked at the supplies spread here—tins of preserved food, packets of chocolate, bottles of ginger beer, bananas, biscuits. But it seemed that the hoard had not been touched. One tin of potted salmon had been opened, but no part of the contents was consumed. Either accident had changed his purpose and frightened him elsewhere at the last moment, or the energies and activities that had gone to pile this accumulation were all spent in the process and now he did not need them.

Then she looked further, to the extremity of the den he had made, and there, lying comfortably on a pile of shavings, Estelle found him.

She guessed that the storm and stress of his crime had exhausted him and thrown him into heaviest possible physical slumber after great mental tribulation. She shuddered as she looked down on him and a revulsion, a loathing tempted her to creep away again before he awakened. She did not think of him as a patricide, nor did her own loss entirely inspire the emotion; she never associated him with that, but kept him outside it, as she would have kept some insensible or inanimate object had such been responsible for Ironsyde's end. It was the sudden thought of all Raymond's death might mean—not to her but the world—that turned her heart to stone for a fearful second as she looked down upon the unconscious figure. Her own sorrow was sealed at its fountains for the time. But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt then, it grew softer.

But there was more to learn before she left him and the truth can be recorded.

Abel had killed his father and hastened to his lair exultant. He had provided for what should follow and vaguely hoped that presently, before his stores were spent, the way would be clearer for escape. He assured himself safe from discovery and guessed that when a fortnight was passed, he might safely creep out, reach a port, find work in a ship and turn his back upon England for ever.

That was his general plan before the deed. Afterwards all changed for him. He then found himself a being racked and over-mastered by new sensations. The desirable thing that he had done changed its features, even as death changes the features of life; the ideal, so noble and seemly before, when attained assumed such a shape as, in one of Abel's heredity, it was bound to assume. Not at once did the change appear, but as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the clear, triumphant sky of his achievement. Even so an apple, that once he had stolen and hidden, was bruised unknown to him and thus contained the seed of death, that made it rot before it was ripe. The decay spread and the fruit turned to filth before he could win any enjoyment from it.

He shook off the beginnings of doubt impatiently. He retraced his grievances and dwelt on the glory of his revenge as he reached his secret place after the crime. But the stain darkened in the heart of his mind; and before dawn crept through cracks in the roof above his lair, dissolution had begun.

Through the hours of that first day he lay there with his thoughts for company and a process, deepening, as dusk deepened, into remorse began to horrify him. He fought with all his might against it. He resented it with indignation. His gorge rose against it; he would have strangled it, had it been a ponderable thing within his power to destroy; but as time passed he began to know it was stronger than he. It gripped his spirit with unconquerable fingers and slowly stifled him. Time crept on interminable. When the second night came, he was faint and turned to his food. He struggled with himself and opened a tin of salmon. But he could not eat. He believed that he would never eat again. He slept for an hour, then woke from terrifying dreams. His mind wandered and he longed to be gone and tear off his clothes and dip into the sea.

At dawn of the second day men were hunting the old stores, from its cellars to the attics below him. He heard them speaking under his feet and listened to two men who cursed him. They speculated whether he was too young to hang and hoped he might not be. Yet he could take pride in their failure to find him. There was, as he remembered, only one person in the world who knew of his eerie; but terror did not accompany this recollection. His exultation at the defeat of the searchers soon vanished, and he found himself indifferent to the thought that Estelle might remember.

He knew that his plans could not be fulfilled now: it was impossible for him to live a fortnight here. And then he began stealthily, fearfully, to doubt of life itself. It had changed in its aspect and invitation. Its promises were dead. It could hold nothing for him as he had been told by Levi Baggs. The emotions now threatening his mind were such that he believed no length of days would ever dim them; from what he suffered now, it seemed that time's self could promise no escape. Life would be hell and not worth living. At this point in his struggles his mind failed him and became disordered. It worked fitfully, and its processes were broken with blanks and breaks. Chaos marked his mental steps from this point; his feet were caught and he fell down and down, yet tried hard for a while to stay his fall. His consciousness began to decide, while his natural instincts struggled against the decision. Not one, but rival spirits tore him. Reason formed no part in the encounter; no arbiter arose between the conflicting forces, between a gathering will to die and escape further torment, and the brute will to live, that must belong to every young creature, happy or wretched.

The trial was long drawn out; but it had ended some hours before Estelle stood beside him.

She considered whether she should waken Abel and determined that she must do so, since to speak with him, if possible, she held her duty now. He was safe if he wished to be, for she would never tell his secret. So she bent down with her light—to find him dead. He had shot himself through the right temple after sunset time of the second day.

Estelle stood and looked at him for a little while, then climbed back to earth and went away through the darkness to tell his mother that she was right.