The Moon Rock

by Arthur J. Rees

“It was his own fault that he ever heard those footsteps in the way he feared. He did not play the game, according to our poor conception of what the game is. If he had done so he would have been quite safe from me. But there are some things too shocking to be contemplated, even in the worst of our kind. A man does not give away a woman—that is one of the rules. Robert Turold put a woman to shame in her coffin.

“I had kept out of her way, never going to Flint House because I feared her feminine eyes might be too sharp for me. But she fell ill, and Robert Turold asked me to attend her. Refusal was impossible, as there was no other doctor nearer than Penzance.

“She did not recognize me—at first, but the shock I received when I saw her left me almost stunned. I had carried her memory through the years—the image of a pretty slim girl, with brown hair and eyes, and kind of soft vivacity which was her greatest charm. In her place I found, lying there, a withered grey woman with dim eyes and broken spirit. God knows what she had gone through at his hands, but it had destroyed her.

“It was her death-bed. She was worn out in body and spirit, and had no strength to rally. She was weeks dying, but her life was steadily ebbing all that time. It was a kind of slow fever. She was delirious when I first saw her, and delirious or unconscious, with few lucid intervals, until she died. And the jargon of her wandering mind was in reality the outpouring of a tortured soul. It was the title and the family name—always that, and nothing else. She wasn’t well-born enough or sufficiently educated to bear the title as his wife—it seemed that that fact had been impressed on her again and again in the long lean years of the search for the family tree. Let her go away … go away somewhere quietly with Sisily, and she would never bother him any more. That was the unceasing burden of her cry, a cry to which I was compelled to listen with a torn heart.

“The reserve, the frame of mind, which I wore like armour in Robert Turold’s company I dropped altogether at her bedside. Her lucid intervals were few, but I was not afraid of her recognizing the old Cornish doctor with his muffler, his glasses, his shaggy white hair and beard. The daily sight of her shrunken ageing features reminded me that I had nothing to fear—that Time had effectually disguised us from each other’s recognition. We were old, we two. Life had receded from us—what had we to do with its fever, its regrets, its passions and futile joys? The clock had ticked the time away, the fire was dying out, the hearth desolate and cold. I was resigned before, I was resigned then. I did what I could for her, which was little enough. Human progress, such as it is, has been acquired through the spirit. The body defies us—we have no control over it. So she died—mercifully unconscious most of the time—and died, as I had hoped, without the least suspicion of the truth.

“You cannot faintly imagine the shock of Turold’s announcement on the day of her burial, to me, who had been so arrogantly certain that the secret was safe. If you remember what took place at Flint House on that occasion you will recall that it was a question from me which brought the truth to light. Your brother’s answer awakened my suspicions, and made me determined to find out what he actually knew. He brought out the truth then, as I’ve no doubt now he intended to do in any case.

“The puzzle to me was the exact extent of his knowledge. He knew two things for certain. One was that I had married Alice before leaving England, and the other was that I was still alive. But he obviously did not know that I was Remington. How had he found out the two facts? I guessed that the woman he believed to be his wife had revealed the secret of her earlier marriage on her death-bed, but the other was a problem which I could not solve. Nor did I try to. When I reached home I went mad. The calmness, the self-repression of thirty years, vanished in an instant in the monstrous infamy of that disclosure. There was something too horribly sinister in the character of a man who could be driven by ambition to make such a disclosure without regret, almost without hesitation. He sacrificed and put to shame two gentle creatures at the beck of his implacable mania. For the title he had forfeited tenderness, pity, decency—all the human attributes—with a brazen and unashamed face. That man walked the earth alone. By that act he set himself apart, defying all laws, all feeling—everything.

“As I grew calmer I reflected that he could not defy me. I could bring him tumbling from his lofty perch with a few words. He might brazen out his attitude to the whole world, but not to me. What was more, I could dictate to him—could keep his mouth shut with a threat of reviving the past, of putting him on his trial for robbery and attempted murder thirty years before.

“I determined to do it—to see him and reveal myself, and let him know that my own course of action would be decided by his. If he chose to keep silent, he would have nothing to fear from me.

“I set out across the moors in the darkness. It was raining, and I walked fast until Flint House loomed out of the blackness before me. Then I paused to consider my course of action. I was about to thwart a madman with a fixed idea, in a lonely house where he had in his service another man who could be depended on to make common cause against me when he knew the truth. I was not afraid of Robert Turold, but I was of Thalassa. I knew he was strong enough to hurl me through the window into the sea. These elements in the situation called for caution. I crept across the rocks towards the kitchen window. As I did so I thought I saw a figure move among the rocks, and I ran quickly to the narrow lip of cliff which overhangs the sea at the back of the house. There I stood for awhile, but could hear nothing but the sea raging far down beneath me. I came to the conclusion that I had been mistaken. Who was likely to be prowling round Flint House in a storm—except myself? I crept round the side of the house and looked through the kitchen window.