It was a monstrous tale that he unfolded to me, scarce credible for the guile, the inhuman persecution, the infernal callousness which it revealed. And yet I could not but accept it as consistent and convincing. There are men born, one knows, without the moral bias—brutes “thrown back” on the primordial instincts for lust and blood. But that learning and culture could be acquired merely to the exploiting of such primitive passions was a stupendous enlightening. There is a horrible tale of Hawthorne’s, which depicts the agony of a clean and sensitive soul upon discovering accidentally that all the brother and sister souls of his familiar intercourse are on secret midnight terms with the powers of darkness. I think I experienced something of that ghastly disillusionment now. Where was the good of refining and refining on our natures, if at the end such bestiality remained possible to them? Better the snake and the lion, hunting their prey on the plain issues of hunger.
My blood became water as I listened; the knees of my soul grew sick under me. What had this man not suffered of unspeakable persecution, if his story were to be believed! And I saw no reason to doubt it. The perspective it appeared to open out to me of revelations affecting my own interests was obscured for the moment in the contemplation of his wilder wrongs. And yet I could not but admit he had deserved badly of Fate. If his spirit of vengeance was justified, the spirit which had involved him in it was vile. Yet assuredly, sinner as he was, he had atoned a hundredfold. His back (he showed it me) was scored with ineffaceable marks of that discipline. His soul (and he showed me that too) was still deeper scored. He was delivered, had delivered himself, a fearful brand of retribution into my hand.
I talked with him till late that night, and far into the following morning. I had made him up a bed on the sofa, and there had become no question but that he was to remain with me until this riddle of our common destiny was resolved. I found in him, or believed I had found, a minister, a witness, a testifier to things potential but unspeakable. They will be touched upon in due time. In the meanwhile he dwelt suspended between a mortal hatred on the one side and a blind devotion on the other.
“What,” I said once to him, “if I were to tell you, Geoletti, that this man Dalston is my friend?”
He rose to his feet, and begged me, in great emotion, to unsay my question; to reassure him; not to drive him mad.
“Very well,” I said; “but you must consider that revenge is nothing if it involves the avenger in the ruin of his victim. We have enough evidence and over to put the noose about this fellow’s neck; but the law doesn’t hang on moral testimony; and until we have the material, sifted and compact, it behoves us to move with caution. He isn’t one, I gather, to overlook a false step made by an enemy. And there’s to be no knifing, mind.”
He assured me earnestly that he would be secret, circumspect, always entirely at my disposal and commands. And with that I had to rest content.
After lunch on that second day, restless beyond endurance, I left him to an hour’s siesta while I went for a walk in the bitter weather. I wanted to think my thoughts alone, to decide upon a plan of campaign, to clear my mind for battle. It was snowing again, and the wind was wilder than ever—a furious stimulant to action. I went down first of all into the road, and saw it swept as clean as a curling rink, though the drifts on the wood side were piled six feet deep against the bank. But, bethinking myself that Dalston, or even his uncanny lady, might chance to come that way, I altered my mind, and, turning again into the Caddle, went off northward towards Hags Lane.
It was stiff enough work while the trees protected me; but once out in the open, lungs, muscle, and resolution had to make a common cause of it. There was no thinking of anything here but just how to set one foot before the other and hold on. The wind was like a chaff cutter, whirling off ends of snow that stung one’s skin like straw points; the fields went up and down in tossed billows of white, with the ground frozen deep green in the troughs of them; leaden sky and spinning flakes and the dim tracery of trees were all wrought together in one’s view, as if life had got into that inextricable tangle which must mean the end of things. A wild enough day for a constitutional, one might have thought; and yet, it seemed, I was not the only, nor the weakest vessel, which had been driven to venture abroad in it. For, beating at length into the comparative harbourage of Hags Lane, I saw, come there before me in pursuit of shelter, the figure of a solitary young lady.
She stood under a white-streaked hawthorn which, protruding from the bank, afforded her a certain cover. In her hand was a broken umbrella, which dangled like a shot rook with its pinions flopping. Her face looked very white and her eyes preternaturally large.