He moved towards the window. His wife stepped forward with a cry, and laid a hand upon his arm. He stopped and looked at her, with eyes that told her nothing. It must have been a full minute, I should think, that he stood thus. He had as yet spoken no word to her, and he spoke no word now. I saw her head decline, her whole frame relapse and droop, and she slipped on to her knees. Herbert shook her hand from his arm, kicked open the window, and crossed the terrace. I went into the hall to fetch my sword. As I crossed the threshold of the room, I heard the iron gates clang at the top of the terrace steps as though he had flung them to behind him. While I picked up my sword I heard the sound repeated but more faintly from the second terrace. And as I entered the room again and drew the sword from its scabbard I heard it yet a third time. Through the open window I could see him descending the steps of the third terrace. But between myself and the window, the wife was kneeling on the floor. Said she:
"You will not harm him;" and she clasped her hands in her entreaty. "Say you will not! The payment must not fall to him."
I almost laughed, so strange and needless did the entreaty sound.
"Madam," I said, "this is the pommel of the sword and this the point. One holds the sword too by the pommel, I believe. In fact, I know so much, but there my knowledge ends."
She spoke a little more, but I gave scant heed to what she said. For a sentence which she had spoken somewhile since, drummed in my ears to the exclusion of her present speech, and the import of it shone in my mind like a clear light. "Payment will have to be made for this," she had said.
Over her shoulder I saw Mr. Herbert move further and further from the house. It was about six o'clock of the afternoon and very windless and still. A great strip of cloud, hung from Green Comb to High Knott, gloomed across the garden, thick as wool and bulging like a sail, so that even the scarlet flowers of the parterre took from it a tint of grey. And underneath this cloud, from end to end, from side to side, the garden seemed to me to be waiting—waiting consciously in a sinister quietude for this payment to be made. The fantastic figures into which the box-trees were shaped, bears, leopards, and I know not what strange mammoths, appeared patient and alert in the fixity of a sure expectation, while the oaks and larches in the Wilderness beyond seemed purposely to restrain the flutter of their leaves. I felt the garden beckon me by its immobility and call me by its silence.
Mr. Herbert had stripped his cloak from his shoulders, and dropped it upon the third flight of steps; so that he now moved, a brown figure, here showing plain against the grotto, or the grass, there confounded with the flowers. He held his sword in his hand—at that distance, and in that dull light it looked no more dangerous than a strip of lead, and ever and again he would cut at a bush as he passed.
"No harm can come to him," I said, seeking to disengage myself, for the wife still clung to me in her misplaced fear. "I could not harm him if I would. For they do not teach one swordsmanship at the Jesuit Colleges."
The words rose to my lips by chance and by chance were spoken. But I know that the moment after I heard them, I staggered forward with a groan, and stood leaning my forehead against the framework of the window. Mrs. Herbert rose to her feet.
I was looking down the terraces across the parterres to the brown figure moving away, but I did not see that. It was as though a black curtain had swung down between the garden and myself. What I saw was a very different scene—a little twilight room far away in Paris and a stern face that warned me. I heard a voice telling me of a supreme hour wherein God would put me to His touchstone, an hour for which I must stand sentinel. Well, the hour had passed me and I had not challenged it; and I might have foreseen its coming had I watched. I lifted my head; the garden again floated into view. Anthony Herbert was marching through the long grass of the Wilderness, with never a look backwards. In a moment he reached the fringe of trees. The trees were sparse at the border, and I knew that he would not stop there, but would rather advance until he arrived at some little dingle closely wooded about from view of the house. In and out amongst the boles of the trees I saw him wind. Then for a second he disappeared and came to sight again upon a little patch of unshadowed grass. I remember that the sun gleamed of a sudden through an interstice of the cloud as he stepped into the open. The patch of grass shone like an emerald and the dull strip of lead in his hand turned gold; and a larch upon the far rim where the trees grew dense, taking some stray breath of wind, rippled and shook the sunlight from its leaves. In some unaccountable way my spirits rose at the sight. I still was sensible of that saying, "Payment must be made for this," but it took a colour from the sunlight. It became rather, "Payment can be made for this."