The Spinners

by Eden Phillpotts

There came the thought, even as she spoke, that he might answer with a bullet; but he answered not at all. She felt thankful for the silence and hoped that he might have deserted his retreat. Perhaps, indeed, he had never come to it; and yet it seemed impossible that he had for two days escaped capture unless here concealed. It occurred to her that he might wander out by night and return before day. He might even now be behind her, to intercept her return. Still no shadow of fear shook her mind or body. She felt not a tremor. All that concerned her conscience was now completed and she hoped that it would be possible to dismiss from her thoughts the fellow creature who had destroyed her joy of life and worked evil so far reaching. She could leave him now to his destiny and feel under no compulsion to relate the incidents of her nocturnal search. Had he been there, she would have risked the meeting, urged him to surrender and then left him if he allowed her to do so. She would never have given him up, or broken her promise to keep his secret.

But the chamber under the roof was large and she did not leave it without making sure that he was neither hiding nor sleeping within it. She entered, lighted her candle and examined a triangular recess formed by the converging beams of the roof above her and the joists under her feet.

The boy had been busy here. There were evidences of him—evidences of a child rather than a man. Boyish forethought stared her in the face and staggered her by its ghastly incongruities with the things this premeditating youth had done. Here were provisions, not such as a man would have selected to stand a siege, but the taste of a schoolboy. She looked at the supplies spread here—tins of preserved food, packets of chocolate, bottles of ginger beer, bananas, biscuits. But it seemed that the hoard had not been touched. One tin of potted salmon had been opened, but no part of the contents was consumed. Either accident had changed his purpose and frightened him elsewhere at the last moment, or the energies and activities that had gone to pile this accumulation were all spent in the process and now he did not need them.

Then she looked further, to the extremity of the den he had made, and there, lying comfortably on a pile of shavings, Estelle found him.

She guessed that the storm and stress of his crime had exhausted him and thrown him into heaviest possible physical slumber after great mental tribulation. She shuddered as she looked down on him and a revulsion, a loathing tempted her to creep away again before he awakened. She did not think of him as a patricide, nor did her own loss entirely inspire the emotion; she never associated him with that, but kept him outside it, as she would have kept some insensible or inanimate object had such been responsible for Ironsyde's end. It was the sudden thought of all Raymond's death might mean—not to her but the world—that turned her heart to stone for a fearful second as she looked down upon the unconscious figure. Her own sorrow was sealed at its fountains for the time. But her sorrow for the world could not be sealed. And then came the thought that the insensible boy at her feet, escaping for a little while through sleep's primeval sanctity, was part of the robbed world also. Who had lost more than he by his unreason? If her heart did not melt then, it grew softer.

But there was more to learn before she left him and the truth can be recorded.

Abel had killed his father and hastened to his lair exultant. He had provided for what should follow and vaguely hoped that presently, before his stores were spent, the way would be clearer for escape. He assured himself safe from discovery and guessed that when a fortnight was passed, he might safely creep out, reach a port, find work in a ship and turn his back upon England for ever.

That was his general plan before the deed. Afterwards all changed for him. He then found himself a being racked and over-mastered by new sensations. The desirable thing that he had done changed its features, even as death changes the features of life; the ideal, so noble and seemly before, when attained assumed such a shape as, in one of Abel's heredity, it was bound to assume. Not at once did the change appear, but as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand in the clear, triumphant sky of his achievement. Even so an apple, that once he had stolen and hidden, was bruised unknown to him and thus contained the seed of death, that made it rot before it was ripe. The decay spread and the fruit turned to filth before he could win any enjoyment from it.

He shook off the beginnings of doubt impatiently. He retraced his grievances and dwelt on the glory of his revenge as he reached his secret place after the crime. But the stain darkened in the heart of his mind; and before dawn crept through cracks in the roof above his lair, dissolution had begun.

Through the hours of that first day he lay there with his thoughts for company and a process, deepening, as dusk deepened, into remorse began to horrify him. He fought with all his might against it. He resented it with indignation. His gorge rose against it; he would have strangled it, had it been a ponderable thing within his power to destroy; but as time passed he began to know it was stronger than he. It gripped his spirit with unconquerable fingers and slowly stifled him. Time crept on interminable. When the second night came, he was faint and turned to his food. He struggled with himself and opened a tin of salmon. But he could not eat. He believed that he would never eat again. He slept for an hour, then woke from terrifying dreams. His mind wandered and he longed to be gone and tear off his clothes and dip into the sea.