Wastralls: A Novel

by C. A. Dawson Scott

No tie is so close as that of blood and the women were of one family. Would Gray be sensitive to that flitting shadow? Behind the veils of the flesh, would spirit be able to communicate with spirit? Would the truth, whispered in every corner of the house, grow into a following fate? In time, when the maid had come to love him, she would glory in his having stopped at nothing to win her. But a first flicker is easily extinguished.

The hour was late and, in his growing discomfort, his growing fear, Byron thought of his chill room at the top of the house. He went there for sleep and sleep meant the laying by of dread, it meant escape. He glanced at the door which hung, quivering now and again under the uncertain onslaught of the wind, between his lighted shelter and the dark. He was thinking of another door, the one that shut Sabina into the justice-room. If ne tried to make for his burrow, for that safe place he knew of, he must pass it. Could he? His mind answered the challenge with a quick defiance. Could he? Of course he could..

He put his hands on the arms of the chair and sought to rise. He swayed his body forward, big head and broad deep-chested bulk; but under him his limbs failed. They hung leaden, lifeless. Not only had it become impossible for him to pass that farther door which stood sentinel by the foot of the stairs, but even to move. Escape through the gates of sleep? No, not by any gate.

She, to whom the injury had been done, was become his judge. She knew, at last, that she had been married for her inheritance; endured as a man endures the mole on his face and finally, for the sake of another woman, pushed into the grave. Events, stripped of life's concealing leafage, would be bare to her informed considering eye. Sabina had been wronged from the first day of their meeting to the last. Always a swift clear creature, he thought of her as running through the midnight passage, intent on vengeance, merciless.

The latch rattled suddenly, increasing the man's dread. He forgot the fitful wind, the faulty lock. His vivid imagination showed him, instead, a hand upon the door-knob, outlined for him in the night of the passage, a dim and bodiless greyness, told him the frail barrier of wood was all that stood between him and a just but awful vengeance. No wonder that mere flesh and blood shrank cowering, that to the guilty creature it was as if his parts were falling away from him, as if he were sinking into the thin unprotected shell of himself.

A gust of wind tore across the wide peace of the sky; and a loose tile slipped to fall crashing on the roof of the porch. The sharp smash of glass let in the night, let in the wind and the heavy roar of the sea. Byron, drowning in superstitious terror strained his ears to catch, among the many sounds, that which should fulfil his dread anticipation; and as he waited, as he listened, the latch of the door slipped over the catch.

Slowly the green door swayed to an impulse from the farther side. Cold air poured into the room from all the unwarmed chambers beyond the kitchen, from that great room at the end. The narrow strip of black began to widen ominously and, in Byron's guilty breast, it was as if his heart had ceased to beat. Between his lips, his dry tongue made a hoarse feeble sound, neither a cry nor a groan, but the utterance of a man in his extremity. The door swung creaking on its hinges and the flame in the ill-fed lamp leapt up and died. Above the other sounds, above that distant roar and the creaks and murmurs of an old draughty house, rose a heavy stumbling, the crash of a fall. The outer edge of fear, the limit of endurance had been passed and Byron had fallen in a swoon across the hearth.

CHAPTER XV

Behind the hurrying clouds the moon had risen into a clear space of sky and now hung low, her chill yet faithful breast towards her mate. The light fell on the yard of Wastralls, on the still pond in the corner and the geese sleeping beside it, on the irregular outline of the houses and courts, and on the windows of the farmstead.

At one corner a little casement, that looked towards the morning sun, was swinging open, its white curtain flowing in the stream of air; and on the porch, through the black aperture of a broken pane, the light poured over winter-nipped geraniums. It poured too, through the diamonds of the kitchen window and lay in bright squares on table and floor. The ill-fed lamp, expiring in the sudden draught from the porch, had tainted the air and time had drawn over the face of the fire a veil of ash.