THE FIGHT FOR THE OPEN
As o'er the grass, beneath the larches there
We gaily stepped, the high noon overhead,
Then Love was born—was born so strong and fair.
Knowest thou! Love is dead.
Gipsy Song.
At last he was free. He had wrested his bride and the treasure trusted to his honour from the snares so unexpectedly laid on his path; whatever troubles might remain stored against him in the dim distance of time, he would not reck them now. The present and the immediate future were full of splendour and triumph.
All those golden schemes worked out under yonder light of Scarthey—God bless it—now receding in the gloom behind his swift running ship, whether in the long watches of the night, or in the recent fevered resolves of imminent danger, they had come to pass after all! And she, the light of his life, was with him. She had trusted her happiness, her honour, herself, to his love. The thought illumined his brain with glory as he rushed back to the silent muffled figure that still stood awaiting his coming.
"At last!" he said, panting in the excess of his joy; "At last, Madeleine ... I can hardly believe it! But selfish brute that I am, you must be crushed with fatigue. My brave darling, you would make me forget your tender woman's frame, and you are wounded!"
Supporting her—for the ship, reaching the open sea, had begun to roll more wildly—he led her back into the little room now lighted by the fitful rays of a swinging lamp. With head averted, she suffered herself to be seated on a kind of sofa couch.
When he had closed the door, he seized her hand, on which ran streaks of half-dried blood, and covered it with kisses.
"Ah, Madeleine! here in the sanctuary I had prepared for you, where I thought you would be so safe, so guarded, tell me that you forgive me for having brought this injury to you. Wounded, torn, bleeding.... I who would give all my blood, my life, if life were not so precious to me now that you have come into it, to save you from the slightest pain! At least here you are secure, here you can rest, but—but there is no one to wait on you, Madeleine." He fell on his knees beside her. "Madeleine, my wife, you must let me tend you." Then, as she shivered slightly, but did not turn to him, he went on in tones of the most restrained tenderness mingled with humblest pleading:
"Had it not been for your accident, I had not ventured even to cross the threshold of this room. But your wound must be dressed; darling, darling, allow me, forgive me; the risk is too great."
Rising to his feet again he gently pulled at her cloak. Molly spoke not a word, but untied it at the neck and let it fall away from her fair young body; and keeping her hooded face still rigidly averted, she surrendered her wounded arm.
He muttered words of distress at the sight of the broad blood stains; stepped hurriedly to a little cupboard where such surgical stores as might be required on board were hoarded, and having selected scissors, lint, and bandages, came back and again knelt down by her side to cut off, with eager, compassionate hands, the torn and maculated sleeve.
The wound was but a surface laceration, and a man would not have given a thought to it in the circumstances. But to see this soft, white woman's skin, bruised black in parts, torn with a horrid red gap in others; to see the beauty of this round arm thus brutally marred, thus twitching with pain—it was monstrous, hideously unnatural in the lover's eyes!
With tenderness, but unflinchingly, he laved the mangled skin with cool, fresh water; pulled out, with far greater torture to himself than to her, some remaining splinters embedded in the flesh; covered the wound with lint, and finished the operation by a bandage as neat as his neat sailor's touch, coupled with some knowledge of surgery, gained in the experiences of his privateering days, could accomplish it. He spoke little: only a word of encouragement, of admiration for her fortitude now and then; and she spoke not at all during the ministration. She had raised her other hand to her eyes, with a gesture natural to one bracing herself to endurance, and had kept it there until, his task completed, her silence, the manner in which she hid her face from him awoke in him all that was best and loftiest in his generous heart.
As he rose to his feet and stood before her, he too dared not speak for fear of bruising what he deemed an exquisite maidenliness, before which his manhood was abashed at itself. For some moments there was no sound in the cabin save that of the swift rushing waters behind the wooden walls and of the labour and life of the ship under full sail; then he saw the tumultuous rising of her bosom, and thought she was weeping.
"Madeleine," he cried with passionate anxiety, "speak! Let me see your face—are you faint? Lie upon this couch. Let me get you wine—oh that these days were passed and I could call you wife and never leave you! Madeleine, my love, speak!"
Molly rose to her feet, and with a gesture of anger threw off her hood and turned round upon him. And there in the light of the lamp, he glared like one distraught at the raven locks, the burning eyes of a strange woman.
She was very pale.
"No," said Molly, defiantly, when twice or thrice his laboured breath had marked the passing of the horrible moment, "I am not Madeleine." Then she tried to smile; but unconsciously she was frightened, and the smile died unformed as she pursued at random:
"You know me—perhaps by hearsay—as I know you, Captain Smith."
But he, shivering under the coldness of his disappointment, answered in a kind of weary whisper:
"Who are you—you who speak with her voice, who stand at her height and move and walk as she does? I have seen you surely—Ah, I know.... Madam, what a cruel mockery! And she, where is she?"
Still staring at her with widely dilated eyes, he seized his forehead between his hands. The gesture was one of utter despair. Before this weakness Molly promptly resumed the superiority of self-possession.
"Yes," she said, and this time the smile came back to her face, "I am Lady Landale, and my sister Madeleine—I grieve to have to say so—has not had that courage for which you gave her credit to-night."
Little was required at a moment like this to transmute such thoughts as seethed in the man's head to a burst of fury. Fury is action, and action a relief to the strained heart. There was a half-concealed, unintended mockery in her tones which brought a sudden fire of anger to his eyes. He raised both hands and shook them fiercely above his head:
"But why—why in the name of heaven—has such a trick been played on me ... at such a time?"
He paused, and trembling with the effort, restrained himself to a more decent bearing before the woman, the lady, the friend's wife. His arms fell by his side, and he repeated in lower tones, though the flame of his gaze could not be subdued:
"Why this deception, this playing with the blindness of my love? Why this comedy, which has already had one act so tragic?—Yes, think of it, madam, think of the tragedy this is now in my life, since she is left behind and I never now, with these men's lives to account for, may go back and claim her who has given me her troth! Already I staked the fortune of my trust, on the bare chance that she would come. What though her heart failed her at the eleventh hour?—God forgive her for it!—surely she never sanctioned this masquerade?... Oh no! she would not stoop to such an act, and human life is not a thing to jest upon. She never played this trick, the thought is too odious. What have you done! Had I known, had I had word sooner—but half an hour sooner—those corpses now rolling under the wave with their sunken ship would still be live men and warm.... And I—I should not be the hopeless outlaw, the actual murderer that this night's work has made of me!"
His voice by degrees rose once more to the utmost ring of bitterness and anger. Molly, who had restored her cloak to her shoulders and sat down, ensconced in it as closely as her swaddled arm would allow her, contemplated him with a curious mixture of delight and terror; delight in his vigour, his beauty, above everything in his mastery and strength; and delight again at the new thrill of the fear it imposed upon her daring soul. Then she flared into rage at the thought of the coward of her blood who had broken faith with such a man as this, and she melted all into sympathy with his anger—A right proper man most cruelly used and most justifiably wrathful!
And she, being a woman whose face was at most times as a book on which to read the working of her soul, there was something in her look, as in silence she listened and gazed upon him, which struck him suddenly dumb. Such a look on a face so like, yet so unlike, that of his love was startling in the extreme—horrible.
He stepped back, and made as if he would have rushed from the room. Then bethinking himself that he was a madman, he drew a chair near her in a contrary mood, sat down, and fixed his eyes upon her very steadily.
She dropped her long lids, and demurely composed her features by some instinct that women have, rather than from any sense of the impression she had produced.
A little while they sat thus again in silence. In the silence, the rolling of the ship and the manner in which, as she raced on her way, she seemed to breathe and strain, worked in with the mood of each; in his, with the storm and stress of his soul; in hers, as the very expression of her new freedom and reckless pleasure.
Then he spoke; the strong emotion that had warmed her had now left his voice. It was cold and scornful.
"Madam, I await your explanation. So far, I find myself only the victim of a trick as unworthy and cruel as it is purposeless."
She had delayed carrying out her mission with the most definite perverseness. She could not but acknowledge the justice of his reproof, realise the sorry part she must play in his eyes, the inexcusable folly of the whole proceeding, and yet she was strung to a very lively indignation by the tone he had assumed, and suddenly saw herself in the light of a most disinterested and injured virtue.
"Captain Smith," she exclaimed, flashing a hot glance at him, "you assume strangely the right to be angry with me! Be angry if you will with things as they are; rail against fate if you will, but be grateful to me.—I have risked much to serve you."
The whole expression of his face changed abruptly to one of eager, almost entreating, inquiry.
"Do me the favour," she continued, "to look into the pocket of my cloak—my arm hurts me if I move—you will find there a letter addressed to you. I was adjured to see that it should reach you in safety. I promised to place it in your own hands. This could hardly have been done sooner, as you know."
The words all at once seemed to alter the whole situation. He sprang up and came to her quickly.
"Oh, forgive me, make allowances for me, Lady Landale, I am quite distracted!" There had returned a tinge of hope into his voice. "Where is it?" he eagerly asked, seeking, as directed, for the pocket. "Ah!" and mechanically repeating, "Forgive me!" he drew out the letter at last and retreated, feverishly opening it under the light of the lamp.
Molly had turned round to watch. Up to this she had felt no regret for his disillusion, only an irritable heat of temper that he should waste so much love upon so poor an object. But now all her heart went to him as she saw the sudden greyness that fell on his face from the reading of the very first line; there was no indignation, no blood-stirring emotion; it was as if a cold pall had fallen upon his generous spirit. The very room looked darker when the fire within the brave soul was thus all of a sudden extinguished.
He read on slowly, with a kind of dull obstinacy, and when he came to the miserable end continued looking at the paper for the moment. Then his hand fell; slowly the letter fluttered to the floor, and he let his eyes rest unseeingly, wonderingly upon the messenger.
After a little while words broke from him, toneless, the mere echo of dazed thoughts: "It is over, all over. She has lost her trust. She does not love me any more."
He picked up the letter again, and sitting down placed it in front of him on the table. "'Tis a cruel letter, madam, that you have brought me," he said then, looking up at Molly with the most extraordinary pain in his eyes. "A cruel letter! Yet I am the same man now that I was this morning when she swore she would trust me to the end—and she could not trust me a few hours longer! Why did you not speak? One word from you as you stepped upon the ship would have saved my soul from the guilt of these men's death!" Then with a sharper uplifting of his voice, as a new aspect of his misfortune struck him: "And you—you, too! What have I to do with you, Adrian's wife? He does not know?"
She did not reply, and he cried out, clapping his hands together:
"It only wanted this. My God, it is I—I, his friend, who owes him so much, who am to cause him such fear, such misery! Do you know, madam, that it is impossible that I should restore you to him for days yet. And then when, and where, and how? God knows! Nothing must now come between me and my trust. I have already dishonourably endangered it. To attempt to return with you to-night, as perhaps you fancy I will—as, of course, I would instantly do had I alone myself and you to consider, would be little short of madness. It would mean utter ruin to many whom I have pledged myself to serve. And yet Adrian—my honour pulls me two ways—poor Adrian! What dumb devil possessed you that you did not speak before. Had you no thought for your woman's good name? Ill-fated venture, ill-fated venture, indeed! Would God that shot had met me in its way—had only my task been accomplished!"
He buried his head in his hands.
Lady Landale flushed and paled alternately, parted her lips to speak, and closed them once more. What could she say, and how excuse herself? She did not repent what she had done, though it had been sin all round; she had little reck of her woman's good name, as he called it; the death of the excise men weighed but lightly, if at all, upon her conscience; the thought of Adrian was only then a distasteful memory to be thrust away; nay—even this man's grief could not temper the wild joy that was in her soul to-night. Fevered with fatigue, with excitement, by her wound, her blood ran burning in her veins, and beat faster in every pulse.
And as she felt the ship rise and fall, and knew that each motion was an onward leap that separated her further and ever further from dull home and dull husband, and isolated her ever more completely with her sister's lover, she exulted in her heart.
Presently he lifted his head.
"Forgive me," he said, "I believe that you meant most kindly, and as you say, I should be grateful. Your service is ill-requited by my reproaches, and you have run risk indeed—merciful Heaven, had my old friend's wife been killed upon my ship through my doings! But you see I cannot command myself; you see how I am situated. You must forgive me. All that can be done to restore you to your home as soon as possible shall be done, and all, meanwhile, to mitigate the discomfort you must suffer here—And for your good intention to her and me, I thank you."
He had risen, and now bowed with a dignity that sat on his sailor freedom in no wise awkwardly. She, too, with an effort, stood up as if to arrest his imminent departure. A tall woman, and he but of average height, their eyes were nearly on a level. For a second or two her dark gaze sought his with a strange hesitation, and then, as if the truth in him awoke all the truth in her, the natural daring of her spirit rose proudly to meet this kindred soul. She would let no falsehood, no craven feminine subterfuge intervene between them.
"Do not thank me," she exclaimed, glowing with a brilliant scorn in which the greatness of her beauty, all worn as she was, struck him into surprise, yet evoked no spark of admiration. "What I did I did, to gratify myself. Oh, aye, if I were as other women I should smile and take your compliments, and pose as the martyr and as the self-sacrificing devoted sister. But I will not. It was nothing to me how Madeleine got in or out of her love scrapes. I would not have gone one step to help her break her promise to you, or even to save your life, but that it pleased me so to do. Madeleine has never chosen to make me her confidant. I would have let her manage her own affairs gaily, had I had better things to occupy my mind—but I had not, Captain Smith. Life at Pulwick is monotonous. I have roaming blood in my veins: the adventure tempted, amused me, fascinated me—and there you have the truth! Of course I could have given the letter to the men and sent them back to you with it—it was not because of my promise that I did not do it. Of course I could have spoken the instant I got on board, perhaps——" here a flood of colour dyed her face with a gorgeous conscious crimson, and a dimple faintly came and went at the corner of her mouth, "perhaps I would have spoken. But then, you must remember, you closed my lips!"
"My God!" said Captain Jack, and looked at her with a sort of horror.
But this she could not see for her eyes were downcast. "And now that I have come," she went on, and would have added, "I am glad I did," but that all of a sudden a new bashfulness came upon her, and she stammered instead, incoherently: "As for Adrian—René knew I had a message for you, and René will tell him—he is not stupid—you know—René, I mean."
"I am glad," answered the man gravely, after a pause, "if you have reasonable grounds for believing that your husband knows you to be on my ship. He will then be the less anxious at your disappearance: for he knows too, madam, that his wife will be as honoured and as guarded in my charge as she would be in her mother's house."
He bowed again in a stately way and then immediately left her.
Molly sank back upon her couch, and she could not have said why, burst into tears. She felt cold now, and broken, and her stiffening wound pained her. But nevertheless, as she lay upon the little velvet pillow, and wept her rare tears were strangling sobs, the very ache of her wound had a strange savour that she would not have exchanged for any past content.
René, having obeyed his mistress's orders, and left her alone with the sailors on the beach, withdrew within the shelter of the door, but remained waiting, near enough to be at hand in case he should be called.
It was still pitch dark and the rollers growled under a rough wind; he could catch the sound of a man's voice, now and again, between the clamour of the sea and the wuthering of the air, but could not distinguish a word. Presently, however, this ceased, and there came to him the unmistakable regular beat of oars retreating. The interview was over, and breathing a sigh of relief at the thought that, at last, his master's friend would soon be setting on his way to safety, the servant emerged to seek her ladyship.
A few minutes later he dashed into Sir Adrian's room with a livid face, and poured forth a confused tale:
Milady had landed without Mademoiselle; had stopped to speak to two of the Peregrine, whilst he waited apart. The men had departed in their boat.
"The Peregrine men! But the ship has been out of sight these eight hours!" ejaculated Sir Adrian, bewildered. Then, catching fear from his servant's distraught countenance:
"My wife," he exclaimed, bounding up; and added, "you left her, Renny?"
The man struck his breast: he had searched and called.... My Lady was nowhere to be found. "As God is my witness," he repeated, "I was within call. My Lady ordered me to leave her. Your honour knows My Lady has to be obeyed."
"Get lanterns!" said Sir Adrian, the anguish of a greater dread driving the blood to his heart. Even to one who knew the ground well, the isle of Scarthey, on a black, stormy night, with the tide high, was no safe wandering ground. For a moment, the two—comrades of so many miserable hours—faced each other with white and haggard faces. Then with the same deadly fear in their hearts, they hurried out into the soughing wind, down to the beach, baited on all sides by the swift-darting hissing surf. Running their lanterns close to the ground, they soon found, by the trampled marks upon the sand, where the conclave had been held. From thence a double row of heavy footprints led to the shelving bit of beach where it was the custom for boats to land from seawards.
"See, your honour, see," cried René, in deepest agitation, "the print of this little shoe, here—and there, and here again, right down to the water's edge. Thank God—thank God! My Lady has had no accident. She has gone with the sailors to the boat. Ah! here the tide has come—we can see no farther."
"But why should she have gone with them?" came, after a moment, Sir Adrian's voice out of the darkness. "Surely that is strange—and yet ... Yes, that is indeed her foot-print in the sand."
"And if your honour will look to sea, he will perceive the ship's lights yonder, upon the water. That is the captain's ship.... Your honour, I must avow to you that I have concealed something from you—it was wrong, indeed, and now I am punished—but that poor Monsieur the Captain, I was so sorry for him, and he so enamoured. He had made a plan to lift off Mademoiselle Madeleine with him to-night, marry her in France; and that was why he came back again, at the risk of his life. He supplicated me not to tell you, for fear you would wish to prevent it, or think it your duty to. Mademoiselle had promised, it seemed, and he was mad with her joy, the poor gentleman! and as sure of her faith as if she had been a saint in Heaven. But My Lady came alone, your honour, as I said. The courage had failed to Mademoiselle, I suppose, at the last moment, and Madame bore a message to the captain. But the captain was not able to leave his ship, it seems; and, my faith," cried Mr. Potter; his spirits rising, as the first ghastly dread left him, "the mystery explains itself! It is quite simple, your honour will see. As the captain did not come to the island, according to his promise to Mademoiselle—he had good reasons, no doubt—Madame went herself to his ship with her message. She had the spirit for it—Ah! if Mademoiselle had had but a little of it to-night, we should not be where we are!"
Sir Adrian caught at the suggestion out of the depths of his despair. "You are right, Renny, you must be right. Yet, on this rough sea, in this black night—what madness! The boat, instantly; and let us row for those lights as we never rowed before!"
Even as the words were uttered the treble glimmer vanished. In vain they strained their eyes: save for the luminous streak cast by their own beacon lamp, the gloom was unbroken.
"His honour will see, a boat will be landing instantly with My Lady safe and sound," said René at last. But his voice lacked confidence, and Sir Adrian groaned aloud.
And so they stood alone in silence, forced into inaction, that most cruel addition to suspense, by the darkness and the waters which hemmed them in upon every side. The vision of twenty dangerous places where one impetuous footfall might have hurled his darling into the cruel beating waves painted themselves—a hideous phantasmagory—upon Sir Adrian's brain. Had the merciless waters of the earth that had murdered the mother, grasped at the child's life also? He raised his voice in a wild cry, it seemed as if the wind caught it from him and tore it into shreds.
"Hark!" whispered René, and clasped his master's icy hand. Like an echo of Sir Adrian's cry, the far-off ring of a human voice had risen from the sea.
Again it came.
"C'est de la mer, Monseigneur!" panted the man; even as he spoke the darkness began to lift. Above their heads, unnoticed, the clouds had been rifted apart beneath the breath of the north wind; the horizon widened, a misty wing-like shape was suddenly visible against the receding gloom.
The captain's ship! The Peregrine!
As master and man peered outward as if awaiting unconsciously some imminent solution from the gliding spectre, it seemed as if the night suddenly opened on the left to shoot forth a burst of red fire. A few seconds later, the hollow boom of cannon shook the air around them. Sir Adrian's nails were driven into René's hands.
The flaming messenger had carried to both minds an instant knowledge of the new danger.
"Great Heavens!" muttered Adrian. "He will surrender; he must surrender! He could not be so base, so wicked, as to fight and endanger her!"
But the servant's keener sight, trained by long stormy nights of watching, was following in its dwindling, mysterious course that misty vision in which he thought to recognize the Peregrine.
"Elle file, elle file joliment la goëlette! Mother of Heaven, there goes the gun again! I never thought my blood would turn to water only to hear the sound of one like this. But your honour must not be discouraged; he can surely trust the captain. Ah, the clouds—I can see no more."
The wild blast gathering fresh droves of vapour from the huddled masses on the horizon was now, in truth, herding them fiercely across the spaces it had cleared a few moments before. Confused shouts, strange clamour seemed to ring out across the waves to the listeners: or it might have been only the triumphant howlings of the rising storm.
"Will not your honour come in? The rain is falling."
"No, Renny, no, give me my lantern again, friend, and let us examine anew."
Both knew it to be of no avail, but physically and mentally to move about was, at least, better than to stand still. Step by step they scanned afresh the sand, the shingle, the rocks, the walls, to return once more to the trace of the slender feet, leading beside the great double track of heavy sea boots to the water's edge.
Sir Adrian knelt down and gazed at the last little imprint that seemed to mock him with the same elusive daintiness as Molly herself, as if he could draw from it the answer to the riddle.
René endeavouring to stand between his master and the driving blast laid down his lantern too, and strove by thumping his breast vigorously to infuse a little warmth into his numbed limbs and at the same time to relieve his overcharged feelings.
As he paused at length, out of breath, the noise of a methodical thud and splash of oars arose, above the tumult of the elements, very near to them, upon their left.
Sir Adrian sprang to his feet.
"She returns, she returns," shouted René, capering, in the excess of the sudden joy, and waving his lantern; then he sent forth a vigorous hail which was instantly answered close by the shore.
"Hold up your light, your honour—ah, your honour, did I not say it?—while I go to help Madame. Now then, you others down there," running to the landing spot, "make for the light!"
The keel ground upon the shingle.
"My Lady first," shouted René.
Some one leaped up in the boat and flung him a rope with a curse.
"The lady, ay, ay, my lad, you'd better go and catch her yourself. There she goes," pointing enigmatically behind him with his thumb.
Sir Adrian, unable to restrain his impatience, ran forward too, and threw the light of his lantern upon the dark figures now rising one by one and pressing forward. Five or six men, drenched from head to foot, swearing and grumbling; with faces pinched with cold, all lowering with the same expression of anger and resentment and shining whitely at him out of the confusion. He saw the emptying seats, the shipped oars, the name Peregrine in black letters upon the white paint of the dingey; and she?... she was not there!
The revulsion of feeling was so cruel that for a while he seemed turned to stone, even his mind becoming blank. The waves lashed in up to his knees; he never felt them.
René's strong hands came at last to drag him away, and then René's voice, in a hot whisper close to his ear, aroused him:
"It is good news, your honour, after all, good news. My Lady is on board the Peregrine. I made these men speak. They are the revenue men—that God may damn them! and they were after the captain; but he ran down their cutter, that brave captain. And these are all that were saved from her, for she sank like a stone. The Peregrine is as sound as a bell, they say—ah, she is a good ship! And the captain, out of his kind heart, sent these villains ashore in his own boat, instead of braining them or throwing them overboard. But they saw a lady beside him the whole time, tall, in a great black cloak. My Lady in her black cloak, just as she landed here. Of course Monsieur the Captain could not have sent her back home with these brigands then—not even a message—that would have compromised his honour. But his honour can see now how it is. And though My Lady has been carried out to sea, he knows now that she is safe."