How could I have known, or guessed? I could not even then. Only I recognised the urgency of some tragic call, and stepped aside to let her pass. For one instant her wild haunted eyes were turned on mine.
“O! God forgive me!” she whispered; but I think it was I who ought to have uttered that broken prayer.
CHAPTER XX.
ANTONIO GEOLETTI
So she believed me to be her son and his! The deadlier mystery was none of her sharing. For that, at least, I could breathe one heartfelt prayer of thanksgiving. She was innocent of any but that one deceit, and that one, even, in the relief of my soul, I could have found trivial to insignificance.
The memory of our interview held me sleepless and agitated through most of the bitter night. I had denounced bravely, and promised bravely, and now through what new development of the situation was I purposing to redeem my promise? My course, I felt, would have been an easier if a darker one, had she betrayed her guilty partnership in that secret. Her ignorance there was but a new rock in my path. All doors seemed to open but to shut in my face; all jack-o’-lantern lights to lead me on but to plunge me in confusion. What impulse, interest, frenzy had so driven that mad woman to betray her husband to me? None, perhaps; but some inexplicable craft calculating to mislead me. Yet had I not proved the genuineness of her strange confidence? No, it was impossible not to believe that for some hidden reason he had earned her revengeful hatred. But for what reason? And how was it to be associated with the paramount mystery?
I had promised much, and I meant much—desperately, if cunning would not serve. Yet I doubt my performance might have fallen far short of my intention, had not circumstance, at this crisis, given into my hands the very witness I could most need. That mocking altar still stood to attest my confidence in my tutelary god; yet not of Luck, I think, was this fortuity, but rather of the relentless processes of Fate. There was even hardly a coincidence in it, when one came to examine.
I fell asleep at last, and woke to that sense of wan chill light on the ceiling which is the reflected ghastliness of snow. I rose shivering, and looked out of my window. The wood was all a whirling rush of flakes ground to powder between the teeth of a ravenous wind. It tore and spat them so, that the trees on their north sides were all glued with white foam a foot deep; and here and there ominous drifts were already forming.
It was a strange enough sight to a southerner, inured to winter fogs and dripping skies; and the uncommonness of it—the shriek and sting and the mad dance—awoke a responsive frenzy in my blood. This was the right challenge to my mood—something that I could close and wrestle with and battle through to an end. I rejoiced, as if my formless visions of retribution had actually at last assumed a definite shape and substance.
It was Spartan work, nevertheless, dressing, and washing in a pool of slushy ice, and fetching wood and coal, and preparing the house generally against the siege of frost which threatened it. An advance picket of the enemy already occupied the lower rooms, and had to be driven out under a hot fire from the grate. I must keep an eye to my provisioning too, in case I should come to be cut off from my base—snowed up, and prevented from reaching the house, in short. Of ordinary fare I had always made a point of storing a plentiful supply, in order to avoid the worry of a daily commissariat, and of this supply I found to my relief there was ample remainder. Biscuits; jolly great potatoes for roasting in their winter jackets, and good to be eaten, crumbling hot, with salt and pepper and perhaps a little yellow flake of butter in their middles; rashers from a half-side of bacon, which hung, like an old rusty coat, in the chimney-corner of my tiny kitchen; eggs, when I could get them, and at whose endless manipulations in a chafing dish I had become expert; dates, figs, a canvas bag of chestnuts, and, for drink, coffee and hot whisky grog with sugar and lemon peel—these made the staple of my diet, and, with tobacco, were sufficient to the needs of any proper woodland hermit. But there were perishable goods in addition not to be despised—bread, milk, and butter, to wit; and for my daily supply of these I was accustomed to look to the good offices of my old friend Comely the steward, who had never yet failed me in his service of them. Well, I must, if needs must, come to drink my coffee black, and lard my toasted biscuits with pig’s fat. It would be no such terrible deprivation after all.
I spent the morning putting my fortress in order, for the wildness of the weather precluded any thought of outdoor exercise. But, after lunch, the fury of the storm having abated somewhat, I began to cast about for some means to discipline the restless spirit of adventure which was awake in me. The prospect, in my then state of excitement, of a long afternoon of enforced apathy and inaction in my lonely quarters was intolerable. I decided that I would take the road to Market Grazing, and pay a visit to the steward himself, with whom I would still occasionally foregather of an evening in his little band-box of a villa in the High Street. For Comely had married of late years, and had a house of his own and, incidentally, a smiling baggy little wife, who had sat for so long under Mr Pugsley that she had come to have no particular shape or opinions of her own.